Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times

The people of Poland step up

WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES

Footage from a war and the effects on your brain

View from the Mesa

A scientist and pacifist looks back at what Los Alamos has wrought

Kerouac at 100

He led readers to bohemian rhapsodies, then Buddhism

Putin’s Gambit

What if Russia’s motives in Ukraine are even more insidious than we think?

Wartime Echoes

Shakespeare and the news from Ukraine

The Plot to Kill de Gaulle

Fred Zinnemann’s “clock management” in The Day of the Jackal

A Ukrainian Story

Displacement is sadly nothing new for my family’s homeland

The Prophecy of an Assassination

John Frankenheimer’s prescient 1962 film, The Manchurian Candidate

A Matter of Emphasis

Not and its many permutations

Fractured Odysseus

The psychiatrist Jonathan Shay’s books on Homer are the key to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey

Gratitude Isn’t Everything

The revolutionary Patriots owed much to their forefathers, but their fight for universal rights embraced a wider mission

It All Comes Down to This

As the recent World Cup showed, the drama of a penalty shootout can at times be Shakespearean

What He Stood For

How Angus Cameron, one of the most significant editors in the history of American publishing, responded to being targeted by the McCarthy blacklist

Who Is Blake Whiting?

The most astonishingly productive historian in recent times is someone you’ll never meet

The Importance of Being Idle

What Paul Lafargue taught us about work

Gilded Guilt

On Taylor Swift, Julian Fellowes, and the class conflicts that never die

The Popper Principle

Did Plato really espouse ideas that led eventually to totalitarianism?

It’s a Wonderful (Falling Apart) Life

In the disrepair of our everyday world are suggestions of life’s burdens and consolations

The Conspiracist Cotton Mather

The zealot who oversaw the Salem Witch Trials initially voiced restraint—what changed?

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