Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
On a humid afternoon this past November, I pulled off Interstate 75 into a stretch of Florida pine forest tangled with runaway vines. My GPS was homing in on the house of a man I thought might hold the master key to one of the strangest scholarly mysteries in recent decades: a 1,300-year-old scrap of…
In the mid ‘90s, the O.J. Simpson murder trial dominated the news and our cultural consciousness. The obsession for all things O.J. has returned in recent months, thanks to FX’s “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson” and ESPN’s epic five-part documentary “O.J.: Made in America.” There’s so much to say about Simpson that it’s…
On Monday evening, charged crowds of New Yorkers made their way to Sheridan Square in the West Village to mourn the victims of the terrorist attack at the Orlando nightclub Pulse. Before celebrities and politicians got up to the mic, and smartphones were held high to create constellations of light behind the podium, the crowd…
Singer Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page of the British rock band Led Zeppelin perform at the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia on July 13, 1985. (Rusty Kennedy/AP) Ask any die-hard Led Zeppelin fan about “Stairway to Heaven,” and eventually Bron-Yr-Aur will come up. It’s the name of the remote cottage in Wales where the…
This entry posed an artistic conundrum. You see, it’s basically two stories. One of Lyudmila’s time in the war, and one of her time in the US, and later reconnection with Eleanor Roosevelt. When I first put the two back-to-back, they didn’t mesh well at all. In one, you had Lyudmila as bloodthirsty killer, in the other, you had a middle-aged woman…
Photos by John Filo (Getty Images) It is a photograph all young journalists should pin to their cubicle walls: the iconic image of the 1970 Kent State shootings, in which a teenage girl grieves over the body of a slain student. Forget for a moment that the picture is among the most famous in US…
The army came up against “an elaborate system of blockades”, described in a cable from May 21, 1989, which allowed students to “control much of central Beijing”. Diplomats observed that “there were buses turned sideways to form roadblocks” and students had vowed the army would not be able to cross. “But we doubt it”, one…
Just past midnight on Saturday, Jimmy Glenn slumped into a small wooden chair in the back room of his bar in Times Square, his face aglow before a cable broadcast. The bar, a 45-year-old sanctum of boxing ephemera called Jimmy’s Corner, was packed with dozens of patrons in various stages of inebriation and celebration, but…
Commentators have ranged far and wide looking for historical precedents in their efforts to describe the rise of Donald Trump. Some rifle through the American experience, citing the cases of Andrew Jackson or Barry Goldwater; others rummage through the European experience, turning up the instances of Benito Mussolini or Silvio Berlusconi, Jean-Marie Le Pen…
In “The Wearing and Shedding of Enchanted Shoes,” Isabel Cardigos, Director of the Research Centre at the Centro de Estudos Ataíde Oliveira in Portugal, wrote, “Shoes are paradoxical objects in that they constrict feet and yet free them to cover greater distances in space.” Indeed, fictional shoes enable “positive” transformation in women’s lives, but the…