 The big ideas on the small, the not-so-small, and the everyday.
By Stefany Anne Golberg |
The King's Two Bodies They recently dug up Nicolae Ceausescu's corpse. A dictator never really dies.
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Washed Up You'd expect a beachcombing museum to have an air of melancholy. But the Juttersmuseum is a place of redemption.
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It's Your Birthday How great is it that the single shared experience across the English-speaking world involves bad craft and humiliation?
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Battle Scars In 1913, the Great Reunion celebrated the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg. Today, it reminds us that freedom is a negotiated value, always in flux.
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Strike a Pose It's insulting to call a punk a poser, but punk is a pose. Enter American Idiot the musical...
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The Explorer On the centennial of Jacques Cousteau, we consider the last explorer and the surprising focus of his curiosity.
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Land of the Rising Sunshine Boca Raton is quintessentially American today, but 100 years ago it was a hotbed of Japanese know-how.
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Puzzled The Rubik's Cube is 30. Happy birthday to the colorful, 3x3x3 battle between order and chaos.
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| American Bling The New York Times jabbed the Hartland Mansion in Vegas, but I don't find the core American aesthetic funny. I think it's kind of beautiful.
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| Gas Problem Steampunk: the 21st-century answer to 20th-century loss via a nostalgic 19th-century sensibility.
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| Stamped Out The post office is dying. The sooner the better, I say.
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| Turducken, Meet Your Match Being vegetarian doesn't mean you have to give up the historic decadence of meat stuffed in meat stuffed in more meat.
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| A Modest Proposal I am a vegetarian, so of course I read Eating Animals, which is a hot new book exploring ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
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| Ghost Story The only known film of Anne Frank is now on YouTube. Appropriately, the 12-year-old looks out from a window...
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| Life After Death Gourmet may be done, but it was only ever one soldier in a larger food army.
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| Groundskeeping Mexico has Día de los Muertos. Nepal has Gai Jatra. But America, being America, has no cohesive culture of death.
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| We Are the Martians Forty years after the moon landing, the sirens' call of space travel remains. What better time to revisit Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles?
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| The Dying of the Light Guiding Light's cancellation marks the beginning of the end for soap operas. But while the doctors, divorces, and deaths may disappear, the soap's format will survive.
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| Summer Holliday Happy birthday, Judy Holliday. We hardly knew ye. Your descendants, on the other hand...
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| Deus ex Machina The Pope wants kids to tweet. Reading the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran, I can see why.
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| Swan Song Watching the 2009 Tonys and wondering, Whither the Broadway musical?
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| A Red-Checkered Blanket Everyone remembers the Wall coming down in '89, but few know of the surprising picnic that helped destroy it.
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| Vegetable Stand For change you can believe in, go vegetarian. Thoreau and the Kings did.
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