It’s Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee this year, and the Cambridge’s first wedding anniversary, and everyone has Royalmania. Good enough excuse to have a look at a few of the places the royals live. With a few ghosts thrown in, for interest. Continue reading
History
95 posts
My mom was a tough lady. Born to genocide survivors from Turkey in pre-war Palestine and raised in the post-war West Bank she grew up with loss always on the brink, and a sense garnered out of necessity that one can make lemonade out of even the tartest, dirtiest lemons. She was also very, very ill from a young age, one of the first in her generation to be formally diagnosed with SLE (as opposed to “rheumatism”), but regardless of her life’s seemingly endless challenges, she went to school in the states, graduated Magna cum Laude, and was a highly respected linguist and speech pathologist. Along the way she married my dad- a schlubby, sweet Mormon guy (I know), and had me. So it goes.
She was also a bitch of the first order. A woman who inspired fear and respect. She ruled the household with an iron fist clad in a velvet Chanel glove, and made it a point of pride to stand any man down who got in the way of her or her husband’s success. Continue reading
In Haruki Murakami’s surrealist fantasy The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Lolita-esque spitfire May Kasahara recalls a house on the block where she used to live that carried a distinct air of malice. It was later known that an unspeakable act occurred there in the Miyawaki family, dubbing the outcast property the “Hanging House.” But it wasn’t just the act of what happened that had the town thoroughly spooked. It was the aftermath. Continue reading
Another installment in our series on abandoned places in the world. Continue reading
Another installment in our series on abandoned places in the world. Continue reading
Another installment in our series on abandoned places in the world. Continue reading
Another installment in our series on abandoned places in the world. Continue reading
When Rick Santorum said last week that “any kind of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military” he gravely offended not only gay service members, but also straight ones who happen to be in relationships, and people who have watched Full Metal Jacket. But did you know that he was also contradicting one of the great founders of Western civilization?
One may be tempted to read Santorum’s statement as merely a deceptive facade of evenhandedness, where the gay-hating audience will get the intended target while everyone else ignores the implications for hetero service members because, really, who would be ridiculous enough to actually believe that? Presumably, the guy who uttered this gem on CNN: Continue reading
Another installment in our series on abandoned places in the world. Continue reading
Nancy Hicks Maynard (1946-2008) was the first black woman reporter for the New York Times, to cover hard news. Together with her husband Robert Maynard they were the first and only black publishers of a daily metropolitan newspaper, the Oakland Tribune. Along with seven other journalists, they also founded the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, currently based in Oakland.
Maynard, born and raised in Harlem, paid her dues at the New York Post before she was hired by the Times at the age of 21. While not the first black woman reporter at the Times (that honor goes to society reporter Bernadette Carey), she did up the ante by covering some of the most important news stories of the day. Continue reading