2011-06-17
Date:
Friday, June 17, 2011
Feeling the Chill
The festivities were over and life in Esfahan, Iran’s third largest city several hundred miles south of Tehran, had returned to normal. The metal scaffolding in...
History & Mystery
“Avoiding Lessing’s Ditch”—the title of an excellent, still-unpublished dissertation by Kathryn Johnson on the biblical exegesis of nineteenth-century Anglican...
The Theater of Desire
Gillian Rose was born into a secular Jewish family in England in 1947, and died there in 1995 from complications of ovarian cancer—baptized, it is said, on her...
Mother Knew Best
After my mother died three years ago (see “Spare Every Expense, Except One,” October 10, 2008), my sister Lucy kept discovering interesting things she had left...
195 Outs
I grew up hearing Jim Murray, the inimitable Los Angeles Times sports columnist, being read aloud by my father at the breakfast table. On principle, my dad...
How to count deaths in Iraq; adjunct faculty
Bad Information Ronald Osborn’s article “Still Counting: How Many Iraqis Have Died?” (February 11) was informative, but recirculated a number of errors and myths...
A Special Species
Most discussions of important moral and political issues, along with our everyday reflections on how others should be treated, occur against a background assumption...
Three Poems
The Peacock What does he feed on, this stalking festival, with a gaze perpetually startled, and a bearing so assertively free of nest or boundary that he is either...
The Cold War on Ice
Twenty-one years after German reunification, Communist East Germany—or the German Democratic Republic, as it officially and inaccurately called itself—has receded...
They Dreamt
In 1994 three spelunkers in the south of France stumbled upon a huge find. Exploring a fissure in a limestone formation, they discovered a cave whose chambers...
Hazardous Means
When Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi is finally deposed, the world may agree that “all’s well that ends well.” But first, some questions: Why did France and Britain lead...
Myth-busters
From the beginning, armchair social-scientists have floated any number of explanations for the Catholic Church’s sexual-abuse crisis. Conservatives blamed gay men....
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