CategoryHISTORY

Over the blue‑steel waves off Wedgeport, Nova Scotia, in 1935, the sun rose slowly and then all at once, first overtaking the morning stars, then teasing pink on the clouds, before finally splitting the horizon in two. Michael Lerner, a 44‑year‑old heir to a New York City clothing‑store fortune, sat near the boat’s bow, gazing at the ocean, as his guides Tommy Gifford and Lansdell “Bounce”...

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the worlds leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode Andrew talks to Samuel G. Freedman, author of Into the Bright Sunshine, about a young Hubert Humphrey and the fight for civil rights within the Democratic party. Find more Keen On...

Several months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I was feeling listless, isolated and bored. Confined in a Brooklyn apartment with my roommate, I spent my time working at my computer and taking the occasional walk around our neighborhood. But one day, I received an unusual message. The environmental writer Terry Tempest Williams had heard my podcast, Constellation Prize, and she was inspired to do a...

July 19, 2023, 2:37pm All hail the best new bard of the Middle Ages, one Richard Heege (or possibly Heeg), whose long-overlooked 15th century manuscript captures on paper the stories told by a bawdy minstrel at some drunken revelry hundreds of years ago in Olde England. A real cracker of a night, by the looks. Scholar James Wade, PhD, a professor at Cambridge University, came across the...

I was raised in the shadow of a Yakov Smirnoff billboard. It’s on State Highway 248, a half hour from my parents’ place near the Missouri-Arkansas border. Glance up and you’ll see the Ukrainian comic’s grinning face, thirty feet in the air and partially camouflaged by a Cossack fur hat. Below him lies a stick of dynamite. Danger! The billboard reads. EXPLOSIVE LAUGHTER! WITH YAKOV. Drive a few...

Picture the magic trick that features a man, a woman, a long box, and blades. Shes inside, but the audience can only see the crown of her head, hair cascading down. The magician inserts the blades through the box at her chest and stomach. Then he pushes the boxes apart. This is how LaToya Jordan describes the birth of her daughter in the spring of 2012. Lying in the box, chopped into thirds, her...

The first VCR my family ever owned came to us with a Betamax tape of a film recorded from television, commercials and all. The film was Michael Curtizs 1941 feature Casablanca. My parents assured my nine-year-old self that I would enjoy the movie about one of the greatest love stories ever told. I indeed ended up loving the film and understanding very little of it. Over the years I have watched...

You dont need me to tell you what happened in New York City on September 11, 2001. If you were alive and conscious at the time, the moment you found out about it is probably seared into your brain forever. 9/11s impact on the city is a book unto itself, and much of it is beyond the scope of this one. But there were a few key aspects of the fallout that had both immediate and long-term impacts on...

Marianne Faithfull met the Rolling Stones at a Decca party for Adrienne Posta in March 1964—a time when she was, admittedly, “very pretentious about pop music.” Instead of poring over copies of Jackie and swooning over Cliff Richard like a normal seventeen-year-old, she worshipped Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, and obscure cabaret artists of the Weimar Republic. That was Marianne—not just precocious...

(Note: this piece contains minor spoilers for the first episode of Queen Charlotte.) When I was a teenager, I found a battered copy of Georgette Heyers The Talisman Ring in a bookstall in the Himalayas. Step aside Austen and the Bronte sisters! Heyer was not only witty and passionate and plain good old fun, but her heroines were just as likely to dance the cotillion as throw a rope down the...