“It’s just a rumor that was spread around town,” opens the chorus of Elvis Costello’s elegiac 1982 song “Shipbuilding,” best known in its rendition by Robert Wyatt: The shipyard will soon reopen, for a war is starting, and British boys will...
The ancient Oxus River, today called the Amu Darya, is one of the longest rivers in central Asia, traversing the region as it flows more than 1,500 miles from the Pamir Mountains in the east to its terminus in the Aral Sea.
In July 1908, a twenty-five-year-old Franz Kafka quit his post at the Assicurazioni Generali with a medical note claiming he was suffering from “nervousness” and something potentially complicated having to do with his heart.
A prominent theme of Donald Trump’s presidency has been a well-known adage turned upside down: Everyone is entitled to their own facts, but not their own opinions. With the help of the various state apparatuses at his disposal, the...
