On 'Stalingrad' and Stalin, The Boston Sunday Globe
May 29, 2022 Repressive states tend to like their authors best when they are safely dead. Joseph Stalin admired Nikolai Gogol but...
May 29, 2022 Repressive states tend to like their authors best when they are safely dead. Joseph Stalin admired Nikolai Gogol but...
April 24, 2022 One day in 2007, Russian hackers took down key online services in Estonia. This action, now generally recognized as the...
March 27, 2022 Fifty years ago, Shirley Chisholm announced her candidacy for president of the United States. The response was widely,...
February 27, 2022 Who should speak for or about rural Americans is perennially up for grabs. For a while, it was J.D. Vance, whose...
January 30, 2022 Lucas Bessire suffers from what Elizabeth Hardwick has called the stain of place. He tried running away from home to...
December 26, 2021 Show of hands: who’s up for another sheet-pan recipe? Just as I thought. In the roughly two years since the pandemic...
November 21, 2021 Since its creation in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has proven an elusive symbol of the nation’s identity: by...
October 24, 2021 After days of immersing myself in the state of US college admissions, the story I could not shake was this: In 2015,...
September 27, 2021 Sometimes the impulse to seek our own image in nature runs aground. Consider the anglerfish. The female — beady-eyed,...
July 25, 2021 In July, the summer people fan out to homes in Maine. For those who can only fantasize, books set in the state offer a fine...
June 27, 2021 Fifty years ago, on June 27, Daniel Ellsberg distributed his last remaining copies of what are now known as the Pentagon...
May 23, 2021 In the 1830s, curious Americans paid 25 cents apiece to see Joice Heth, an elderly Black woman reputed to have been George...
April 25, 2021 Even among apartment dwellers, spring can prompt longings to connect with the soil. Perhaps for that reason, the Boston...
March 28, 2021 Some years ago, when I lived in Providence, I learned to avoid a busy intersection where five streets converged. A...
February 21, 2021 In this winter of discontent, the pandemic has claimed even the things we love to hate. The Oscars, traditionally aired...
January 30, 2021 The other day, a bank officer told me she is dying to travel. Imagine: She has always hated travel. I resisted saying...
December 20, 2020 Books about artists place their authors, at best, in a draw with their subjects. After all, the art is what drives our...
November 15, 2020 On the train that is literature, the short story is often relegated to second-class, while the novel travels in luxury....
October 25, 2020 A few months into his presidency, Donald Trump wooed Chinese president Xi Jinping with cake. “We had the most beautiful...
September 20, 2020 Earlier this month, the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration on Women passed with little notice. Produced by...