July 20, 2025
May 12, 2014
I spent much of my freshman year of college on the verge of becoming a card-carrying socialist but somehow always knew I would not. This was late 2003, George W. Bush had recently unleashed shock and awe upon Iraq, and in Burlington, Vermont, where I was attending my state’s university, there was a small and active cell of the International Socialist Organization.
Read MoreMay 01, 2014
The Marie Antoinette cliché is easy to not just summon, but accessorize: there is the pouf, the diamond necklace, the dressmaker’s bills, and the toy farm. There is the fat husband, the overbearing mother, and the dashing Swedish count. And then there are the turns of phrase both too flippant and too penitent to really be believed: “let them eat cake,” as she presumably nibbled her own, and “forgive me, sir, I did not mean to do it,” as she stepped on her executioner’s foot.
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April 28, 2014
It was a brief internment in Nova Scotia that lay the groundwork for the Soviet gulag.
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April 15, 2014
It’s a popular dismissal of revolutions to say that they always end in the tyranny they sought to overthrow. What use is the whole bloody mess if the oppressed becomes the oppressor?
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March 21, 2014
Sometime during the 1990s, when big-screen adaptations of Regency novels became a near-annual tradition, a strange thing happened: Jane Austen stopped being funny.
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March 15, 2014
Is it any wonder that we secretly view laughter as black magic, unpredictably hazardous? Only when you hear the common evolutionary explanation for laughter: it serves to express relief. Not just from the urge to laugh, but from some awful danger, a cosmic threat imagined by and for the self.
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March 10, 2014
Never were politics, power, and punch lines more intertwined than in the strange case of John Wilmot. The second Earl of Rochester was a poet and playwright whose mischief-making lifestyle and caustic satirical writing got him banished from court (and invited back) on what seems to have been a routine basis. This was a man who lived as he wrote.
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March 05, 2014
Whenever a newspaper story came up short, editors reached for the squibs.
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February 22, 2014
At first glance, Ambrose Bierce didn’t look like a coldblooded verbal killer. He was tall and handsome and scrupulously groomed, with a cherubic mop of golden hair. He excelled as a conversationalist and womanizer. He was also was nineteenth-century America’s greatest insult artist.
Read More2023:
Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
c. 1850:
Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.
2023:
Writers on strike search for romance at the picket line.
c. 1945:
Young communists engage in party matchmaking.