I would argue that we are still under the mythos of populism, whether it be the relatively mild form promulgated by an aging William Jennings Bryan, who crossed verbal swords in the mid-1920s with Clarence Darrow over teaching Darwin in...
Late May, 1754: George Washington watches as one of his confederates, the Iroquois warrior Half-King, reaches down to the corpse of a freshly slain French ensign,
In post-9/11 America there has come to be what I think of as the Ministry of False Alarms. The Ministry of False Alarms constantly raises the level of fear inside the United States. I’m not sure what these various rainbow-colored alerts are...
I stood with Bella in the sunny piazza in Livorno, one noon in May. My wife had gone to buy French francs; the era of the euro had not yet arrived. I noted to the collie that this was a city full of pretty girls … but what were we getting...
Brioche. Barouche. And one of them you can still buy, by the dozen, at the sweets stall in the weekend farmers market; the other hasn’t been seen in a century (although they tend to blend, to be conjoined twins, in my mind).
Everyone around the world with access to a television set saw the cataclysmic destruction of the World Trade Center towers, saw it in constant replay, burning—and burning itself into our collective retina. I saw it that way too, but first...
