The Progressive Magazine

Henry Kissinger: The Back Story

On May 27, 2023, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger will have lived one hundred years. For half of those years, he’s haunted my life. On a Tuesday lunchtime in 1979, my third day as the New York Times’s op-ed art director, Sydney Schanberg and I had just settled down on the burgundy benches of Sardi’s, READ MORE

American Chordata

Disappearing In Argentina

Buenos Aires, 1992: it’s a sultry February here below the Equator, where Nazis are harbored, where machismo reigns. Where Argentina’s middleweight boxing champion, Carlos Monzón, flung his wife out the window to her death. “My dinner was late for the second night in a row,” Monzón explained. READ MORE

 The New York Times Magazine

On Language: Fancifying

'The Americans,'' Walt Whitman predicted, will be ''the most fluent and melodious-voiced people in the world — and the most perfect users of words.'' While wincing as Tony Soprano wields a single Chaucerian vulgarity as noun, verb, adjective and adverb, it is easy to wonder over the poet's wisdom. READ MORE

The New Yorker

Many Muses

The Parisian artist Roland Topor, who died on April 16th, at the age of 59, applied his demonic wit to just about every visual and literary form: he painted, drew (the dozen or so goddesses here were done for the magic-lantern sequence in Fellini's 'Casanova'), wrote, designed, acted, and directed READ MORE

The New York Times Magazine

Endpaper: Roland Topor; A Graphic Wit

Best known for his drawings, this Parisian enfant terrible born of Jewish refugees from Warsaw applied his macabre vision with equal ease to novels, theater, opera, television and film. The night before he suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage, Roland Topor didn't sleep. READ MORE

The New York Times

Charmed By Morocco In a Wink

Tidy Europe, 1998, had left me restless. So I fled south to Morocco, land of voluptuous anarchy. Emerging from the Agdal Hotel onto a wide Marrakesh thoroughfare, I melt into a thick throng. Mustachioed men, enigmas in their dark, hooded djellabas, wield barrows swollen with writhing turtles READ MORE

The New York Times

Museum Mammoth Is a Metamorph

The most startling creature at the American Museum of Natural History has no fur, feather, hair, scales, or even bones. Nor will it be preserved for posterity. It is a lifesize replica of a Stegosaurus, an Early Cretaceous dinosaur sculptured entirely of snow. READ MORE

USA Today

Take 'Four Voyages' to Explore Columbus as a Hero and a Man 

Something always seemed fishy about Columbus. Why would an Italian seek Spanish sponsorship? Why celebrate a man who enslaved and beheaded the people whose homelands he claimed? If Leif Erickson landed in North America 500 years earlier, why does Columbus get the credit? READ MORE

USA Today

Tolstoy: A Russian Life

Rosamund Bartlett, a British expert on Russia and Chekhov, distinguishes her biography of the great author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina with material unfrozen after the U.S.S.R.'s dissolution. Titanic Tolstoy (1828-1910) becomes, in her telling, human. READ MORE

The Huffington Post

The 25 Best People's Climate March Signs

1. Mother Earth Can't Yell Rape

2. Deny & Die

3. Boobs Not Bombs [on young woman's tee-shirt]

4. There is no Planet B

5. I Am Full of Greenhouse Gas. Do You Have a Steak in it? [on humongous cow balloon] READ MORE

City Magazine

Clothes Make The Museum

The exhibition of African Arts at the Palace of Legion of Honor in San Francisco is a significant departure from previous African exhibits in both the works themselves and the multi-media in which they are presented. In an effort to involve more than the eye, the curators have installed the sound of drums, bold images of African life READ MORE