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Soon after the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four became a bestseller again. Shooting to the top of the American charts, the novel that inspired the term “Orwellian” passed Danielle Steel’s latest opus, the poetry of Rupi Kaur, the eleventh Diary of a Wimpy Kid […]
On social media, the Talking Heads teased a major announcement on June 5th, leading fans to wonder if a reunion—41 years after their last tour—might finally be in the offing. As one fan put it, “If this is a tour announcement, I am going to freak out!” Alas, we didn’t quite get that. (Maybe next […]
It’s been said that the United States won the Cold War without firing a shot — a statement, as P. J. O’Rourke once wrote, that doubtless surprised veterans of Korea and Vietnam. But it wouldn’t be entirely incorrect to call the long stare-down between the U.S. and the Soviet Union a battle of ideas. Dwight […]
Working a dull civil service job ill-suited to your talents does not make you a writer, but plenty of famous writers have worked such jobs. Nathaniel Hawthorne worked at a Boston customhouse for a year. His friend Herman Melville put in considerably more time—19 years—as a customs inspector in New York, following in the footsteps of […]
It would be a worthwhile exercise for any of us to sit down and attempt to draw up a list of our 100 favorite paintings of all time. Naturally, those not professionally involved with art history may have some trouble quite hitting that number. Still, however many titles we can write down, each of us […]
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“I like the timelessness of the photos. Of course, I am a bit of a dreamer and somewhat poetic. Distance and proximity are also what my photos are about” – Mark van den Brink Walter Zapp [O.S. 22 August] 1905 – 17 July 2003) produced the lightweight, aluminium Minox pocket camera in 1936 … Continue reading "The Minox Files: The Spy Camera Photos" The post The Minox Files: The Spy Camera Photos appeared first on Flashbak.
It is your Weekly Reader for this week of November 6, 1961. Here is the space flight news of this week.
After Commodore Matthew Perry visited Japan and cajoled the Tokugawa Shogunate to establish commercial and diplomatic relations, Japanese society was riven by divisions between modernizers and traditionalists. The modernizers eventually triumphed in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, after which Japan sought to create its own empire in Asia. Commodore Perry’s Visit to Japan […]
The figure of Aeneas of Troy first appears in the Homeric epics of Greek mythology, but he emerges as a central figure in Roman mythology, described most thoroughly in Virgil’s Aeneid. In Roman legends, Aeneas is involved in the founding of Rome. He is said to have become a king of the Latins early […]
