The Sheepherder’s Ball
Basque sheepherders in the American west. Basques were recruited from Spain and France during the 1930s to tend sheep throughout the western states. Within days of arriving in America these…
New Orleans Visions – King’s Candy & Living with Water
Robert King Wilkerson was imprisoned at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for 31 years, twenty-nine of those years in solitary confinement. During that time he created a clandestine kitchen in…
Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Clem Albers & Francis Stewart’s Censored Photographs of a WWII Japanese Internment Camp
In places where atrocities or widespread human rights violations occur, we sometimes hear ordinary citizens later claim they didn’t know what was going on. In the case of the internment…
Neil deGrasse Tyson Selects the Eight Books Every Intelligent Person on the Planet Should Read
How to “glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world.”
The Athletic Brassiere
Among the most important advances in sports technology, few can compete with the invention of the sports bra. Following the passage of Title IX in 1972, women’s interest in athletics…
The Great Communicator, Vietnam Syndrome and Another Mass Atrocity
Empire equals militarism. In order to maintain an empire, a nation must make either threats of violence or violence to bear to bring outliers into the fold. Both forms of…
Grandma Turned Me into a Ghost
Who were the very first people who helped solidify your identity? The people who really influenced the way you see yourself and how you interact with the world? For most of us,…
Christianity and the classical world
Classicist and journalist Catherine Nixey talks about her new book The Darkening Age with Professor Edith Hall. Their discussion explores the momentous changes that occurred when Christianity became the dominant…
Homage to Catalonia – George Orwell
Though the POUM were socialists, he wrote “as far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked to join the Anarchists."His vivid descriptions of classless anarchist Barcelona following…
Noam Chomsky on the terror state that is the united states
the terror states of the west