From the Echoes of History Dept: Around the turn of the last century, Nikola Tesla went to JP Morgan, hat in hand. He needed money to fund this idea he had for wireless technology. Depending on the source you consult, he wanted to communicate wirelessly, or he wanted to actually transmit energy wirelessly. Morgan and [...]
Behold. “Steamboat Willie” was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon. [First distributed in theaters, not first produced —Ed.] It premiered November 18, 1928, at the Colony Theater in New York City. It was also the first cartoon to have synchronized sound. If you watch the whole thing, which I had never done until last year, you’ll [...]
Apologies to Joao Silva/New York Times for using their photo. But look: American soldiers walking past a spray-painted blast wall in Al Awad, Iraq, yesterday. The first time I voted in a presidential election was in the 2000 election. I was a senior in college in New Hampshire. I voted absentee in Alaska. Before election [...]
The news these days is the sort that inspires a lot of confusion, and when there’s confusion, there is no shortage of arm-waving, all-of-a-sudden experts buzzing around. You know what I mean: the street-corner authority: the pedestrian who sees a house on fire or a car accident, and then when anyone asks, “Hey, what’s going [...]
Kaplan has a worthy review of Donald Rumsfeld’s strategic legacy in the Atlantic. I’ll comment more on it later. But for now, a provocative point that Kaplan introduces in the piece’s lede: In 1962, a Harvard economics professor named Thomas C. Schelling wrote an introduction to Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. In a [...]
Before the fall of Saigon, there was the loss of Da Nang, a major port city and host to American military forces during the Vietnam War. As North Vietnamese forces approached the city, residents tried to evacuate. For a little more information that covers some of the technical details–fuel loss, passenger load, etc.–click on the [...]
I’ve been throwing ideas around lately to all kinds of people. They haven’t stuck, which is too bad. But one of them was to look at the history of the torch relay after reports that the IOC and Britain may forgo the tradition in the runup to the 2012 games. I kind of knew the [...]
Photo by Tony Cenicola A long-lost cache of original negatives shot by Robert Capa (as well, possibly, as Gerda Taro and others) recently turned up in Mexico City. According to the Times: The suitcase — actually three flimsy cardboard valises — contained thousands of negatives of pictures that Robert Capa, one of the pioneers of [...]
Grace Paley died two days ago. She was a sweet and humane poet and short story writer, one of those individuals for whom many will admit a familiarity with the name if not a specific knowledge of the work because some high school English teacher somewhere along the line (but a fan, truly) assigned a [...]
Tom Holland doesn’t explicitly compare the old republic to these United States in his book Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic. He leaves that to the reader–at least, inthe first third that I’ve gone through. What is the Rome he describes? A nominal democracy with wide gaps between rich and poor; high-rise slums [...]
In 2001, not long after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that people “need to watch what they say, watch what they do…” It was an unfortunate comment that was rightly criticized for its implicit threat against anyone who did not say the “right” things. It was also a [...]
A North Carolinian correspondent of a colleague of mine recently noted that the outhouse is “quintessentially southern.” This aroused a peculiar response, and, possessed of some form of outhouse inspiration, I felt compelled to share the following (in a germinal form) with my entire department, and now (in a sort of sprouted form), with you: [...]
No problem. Let me know if you have any questions. 
