![]() ![]() ![]() Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky on the new $45 billion aid package enacted at the end of last year. Unless the United States intervenes on behalf of democracy and peace in Europe, Europe is a mess and will drag us in sooner or later anyway. We saw it in the First World War and we saw it in the Second World War. I'm gonna take a moment or two to set this up and then just step back. A lesson of history, as this layman understands it, and then a few quotations. It's great to be back and it's great to be here full-time. Last year, Stephen Kotkin left Princeton to become a full-time fellow here at the Hoover Institution, which among its many other benefits for your friends and admirers is that it should make scheduling these interviews much easier. Professor Kotkin is now completing his third and final volume, "Stalin: Totalitarian Superpower". Professor Kotkin is the author of nine works of history, including the first two volumes of his biography of Joseph Stalin, "Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928" and "Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941". Stephen Kotkin grew up in New York City, received his undergraduate degree from the University of Rochester and his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, and then taught history for more than three decades at Princeton. Peter Robinson: The study of history may be fascinating, it may even be ennobling, but does it do any good? Can history tell us how we need to conduct ourselves today? Five more questions for historian Stephen Kotkin "Uncommon Knowledge" now. ![]() To view the full transcript of this episode, read below: ![]()
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![]() ![]() Though some residents are happy to be identified as trans, Anjum prefers to be called a hijra. The residents of Khwabgah differ greatly in their origins, experiences and self-identity, but have one thing in common, they are outcasts of society. At the age of fourteen, she runs away from home and moves to Khwabgah, the house of dreams. The discordance between her surroundings and her body builds as we learn about her early years lived as a boy. Soon after, in Arundhati Roy’s trademark lyrical prose, we are introduced to the enigma that is Anjum. ![]() The opening chapter of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness asks us to consider where old birds go to die. ![]() The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – Book Review ![]() ![]() ![]() I took fluids through one IV, and antibiotics came through another. No one could isolate any bacteria or figure out what had gone wrong. ![]() After two days they gave me food, but I couldn’t keep it down. ![]() To begin with, it was a simple story: I had gone into the hospital to have my appendix out. I thought how when I got out of the hospital I would never again walk down the sidewalk without giving thanks for being one of those people, and for many years I did that - I would remember the view from the hospital window and be glad for the sidewalk I was walking on. It was May, and then June, and I remember how I would stand and look out the window at the sidewalk below and watch the young women - my age - in their spring clothes, out on their lunch breaks I could see their heads moving in conversation, their blouses rippling in the breeze. During the day, the building’s beauty receded, and gradually it became simply one more large structure against a blue sky, and all the city’s buildings seemed remote, silent, far away. This was in New York City, and at night a view of the Chrysler Building, with its geometric brilliance of lights, was directly visible from my bed. There was a time, and it was many years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks. ![]() ![]() Superman was so popular that he became the first superhero to receive his own comic book with the publication of Superman #1 in June 1939.Īn amalgam of Clark Gable, Flash Gordon, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, and Harold Lloyd, among others, the world’s first superhero was born Kal-El on the planet Krypton. Making his first appearance in Action Comics #1 (June 1938), Superman was an immediate hit with the American public. Finally in 1938, after some revisions and a bit of luck, DC Comics agreed to publish the exploits of Superman in their new comic book, Action Comics. ![]() When they first met in 1930, Shuster and Siegel were two shy, unpopular Jewish teens from Cleveland who shared an affection for science-fiction pulp magazines. Immediate friends, they began collaborating on comic book projects. Through the mid-1930s, they were unsuccessful in selling their original superhero story to publishers. Joe Shuster (1914-1992) is best known for creating the world’s first superhero, Superman, in collaboration with writer Jerry Siegel. Home > Artists > Joe Shuster Joe Shuster Born: J| Died: JBiography ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ‘The story that he told me was about this man who would go onto the subway during rush hour,’ says Joseph. There could surely be no sharper practical lesson in softening the bedside manner of natural scientists. In a lecture theatre, they would hear the story of a surviving AIDS patient from the height of the pandemic. In their first year, medical students are given an acute empathy lesson. His date relayed a tale that stuck with Joseph. Cassara grew up an hour out of the city, in New Jersey, the son of a Sicilian father and Puerto Rican mother. In his final year as an undergraduate at Columbia University, New York, the writer Joseph Cassara went on a date with a medical student. His first book, Good As You, a personal and pop-cultural mapping of the thirty years preceding British legal gay equality in the UK came out in 2017, published by Ebury. He is Senior Contributing Editor at Love magazine and a columnist at Grazia and Attitude. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He would go on to sell detective, jungle, western, and horror stories to a variety of markets (including Weird Tales), even selling romance stories under the pen name of Louisa Carter Lee. Mencken’s literary magazine The Smart Set. But for those who may not recognize the name, here are but a few items of background to help familiarize yourselves with this most remarkable man.īorn in Virginia in June of 1896, Jenkins sold his first story “The Foreigner” while still 19. Longtime readers and SF aficionados know the name Murray Leinster and much of his illustrious history within the genre. As you might surmise, complications arise, some being those SF readers might expect from the paradoxes involved, but one ramification in particular surprises good old Sam–one he wishes he had never learned. One thing leads to another and before long old Sam has accidentally concocted a device, a strange new telephone which allows him to call himself from the future, and vice versa. Sam takes her advice and begins to study electronics. It tells the story of your average, good-natured fellow–a war vet now telephone lineman in an average job with an average life, whose girlfriend, Rosie, urges him to better himself. Galaxy magazine published “Sam, This Is You” in its May 1955 issue (cover at right). ![]() Murray Leinster was the pseudonym of Will F. ![]() ![]() Yet, this memory reminds me that faith traditions are rich with guidance on honoring the visitor and the neighbor, for good reason.The early Jews’ experience as slaves in Egypt provides a fount of lessons in morality and compassion, evident in this passage from Leviticus: “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Perhaps most famous is the foundational commandment, “Love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18).In the New Testament of the Bible, Jesus tells the story of a Samaritan who cares for an injured traveler left for dead on the roadside – and ignored by two other passersby. Today, door-knocking is viewed with suspicion, and tragically, occasionally met with violence. ![]() Now, I treasure the openness, curiosity, and sincerity of both those visitors and my dad. The visit lasted close to an hour, and soon became a regular occurrence anytime Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked. As a child, I would roll my eyes at the intrusions. They shared their faith then my dad shared his, Islam. My dad opened the door wide, smiled, and welcomed them into the living room, offering them cups of tea. ![]() ![]() I peeked out the window to find a pair of suit-clad Jehovah’s Witnesses, and promptly retreated – from what I’d heard, most people avoided them. Ding-dong! It was the mid-’90s, in my childhood home in rural central New York, where we didn’t frequently get visitors. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The steampunk aspect of this book was severely downplayed by the jacket summary - steampunk technology is sprinkled throughout the world in various ways and is central to creating the atmosphere of the setting. Our heroine is dark, driven by revenge far more than altruism, and downright relatable, which is interesting given how different her aristocratic problems are from the present day. That last bit is what made me buy the book, having absolutely adored the Clockwork Angel series by Cassandra Clare, which could be boiled down to a similar premise but of course brought so much more to the table. My first impression was that this would be another story in the long line of “she’s special, she’s the chosen one, watch her save the world” but in Victorian times and with a faerie twist. In my personal opinion, the jacket description, while not at all untrue, did not convey a true sense of this book. ![]() The jacket description had intrigued me, which is why it was on the shelf in the first place, but it hadn’t captured me yet. I had just finished Firstlife and was awaiting my Amazon shipment of the sequel when I took the plunge. I’ll admit it, this book sat on my shelf for quite a while before I finally picked it up. ![]() ![]() ![]() The series is not exactly unsung-a Booky film was made starring Meaghan Follows about ten years ago, titles are still in print-but there were no copies for sale in the bookstore I was in the other day. Hunter’s Booky series and her Margaret books had been huge for me growing up, as both a reader and a writer, although until I picked the novel up again and realized how much the stories were now built into my literary DNA, I hadn’t given them that much credit. And then we came home and picked up another chapter of That Scatterbrain Booky, by Bernice Thurman Hunter, a novel we’d been reading together over the past few weeks. Though of course it was the baby’s table everyone wanted to serve at, but even the people who weren’t babies were really nice and everyone was friendly and polite. None of the girls could quite get over that-that there had been a baby. ![]() Harriet and her Brownie group served dinner to a group of homeless and impoverished young people at a local church a few weeks ago, which taught us an essential truth about the face of poverty, which is that it has many faces, people with all kinds of different stories, and people with children and babies. ![]() ![]() ![]() Critics charged that his empire was built on unscrupulous tactics: grand-scale collusion with the railroads, predatory pricing, industrial espionage, and wholesale bribery of political officials. Rockefeller was likely the most controversial businessman in our nation’s history. Branded “the Octopus” by legions of muckrakers, the trust refined and marketed nearly 90 percent of the oil produced in America. A landmark publication full of startling revelations, the book will indelibly alter our image of this most enigmatic capitalist.īorn the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world’s richest man by creating America’s most powerful and feared monopoly, Standard Oil. ![]() Titan is the first full-length biography based on unrestricted access to Rockefeller’s exceptionally rich trove of papers. as detailed, balanced, and psychologically insightful a portrait of the tycoon as we may ever have” (Kirkus Reviews). ![]() Now Ron Chernow, the National Book Award-winning biographer of the Morgan and Warburg banking families, gives us a history of the mogul “etched with uncommon objectivity and literary grace. ![]() Rockefeller, Sr.–history’s first billionaire and the patriarch of America’s most famous dynasty–is an icon whose true nature has eluded three generations of historians. ![]() |