The Catcher in the Rye has done strange things to people. In late 1980, Mark David Chapman stuck a copy of J.D. Salinger’s book in his pocket as he stalked and then murdered John Lennon. Before the New York police arrived, the assassin...
There were a dozen of them in the tiny, crowded space, loud with talk and typewriters, and they were busy getting out the little eight-page daily that gave them their chance to live in Paris in the Nineteen Twenties.
The warriors of Xi’an stood in darkness for 2,000 years, watching over their dead emperor. He was Qin, pronounced Chin, whose successors built the Great Wall and gave a name to China. The warriors are ranked in battalions, archers, cavalry...
“What are we doing about guerilla warfare?” asked President John F. Kennedy in January 1961, shortly alter he took office. The answer—at that time—not very much.
What a bad time it has been for the nation’s best-known historians—that is, for the small number of historical writers, some affiliated with academic institutions and some not, whose books regularly inhabit the bestseller lists, whose faces...
What I do want to talk about is the packaging and marketing of the Civil War as part of a larger commodification of cultural desire in which the making of Turner’s film and his participation in it become exemplary. I wish to speak, that is...
In the heart of downtown Aberdeen, the tea room is the Tastie Tattie Shop. Today’s menu features tatties and chili, and the girl I give my order to is wearing a stud in her nose. Aberdeen, the Granite City, looks built to last, but the...
