“You’ll enter a pitch black corridor and meet your guide. Introduce yourselves coherently and speak up during the tour. Tell your guide if you don’t feel well and you’ll be accompanied to the exit,” instructed an elderly gentleman. This is all I knew before I entered the “Dialogue in the Dark,” a unique interactive museum … Read more
Hanne Blanke’s Straight – The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, promised to be innovative and refreshing. While there are many books that attempt to explain the historical and societal perspectives of homosexuality, there have hardly been any works that try to map the development of the concept of heterosexuality and the prevalence of the heteronormative standard … Read more
Back in the rickety old days of the original YouTube, nary a legal song could be found on the video-sharing website. (At least, that sounds about right – I don’t even remember the original YouTube.) However, over time, the music industry and its good friends at Vevo pulled together a legitimate way to bring music … Read more
Attention history buffs and political junkies: TIME Magizine’s Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy have released a new book, The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity, and as Joe Scarborough proclaims, “This is…the historical version of crack.” The enthusiastic praise is warranted. I have devoured presidential biographies since elementary school, and The Presidents Club … Read more
From a cursory empirical analysis it seems as if in most of the world, with the exceptions of North Africa and the Middle East, secularism has firmly taken root. The Western world and developing nations have been moving away from God and more towards science and reason. Religion is on its way out—secularism is here … Read more
She opens a bottle of ink and pours it on the man’s face. It traces a black finger down his forehead, splitting like the two prongs of a Manchu mustache and dribbling like baby food onto his suit. She laughs. He does not. His arms are jet-planed behind him, his wife kneels on a floor … Read more
Joshua Rubenstein is the Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA and a Fellow of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. His most recent book, Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life, is a concise biography of the figure. As part of Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, Rubenstein gives special emphasis on how Trotsky … Read more
It’s an election year, and, as we’ve come to expect, political controversy abounds. In the world of investigative journalism and the 24-hour news cycle, candidates’ personal lives are more than fair game. The many mistresses of Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich’s request for an open marriage, and Karen Santorum’s pre-Rick relationship with a much older abortion doctor … Read more
For anyone who has ever said “I listened to that band before they got big,” a personal tale of music snobbery and a reminder of the purpose of music. I remember being wholly disappointed when Death Cab for Cutie’s fourth studio album Transatlanticism received very positive reviews from critics. I had been a Death Cab … Read more
Due to some unfortunate scheduling conflicts, I was unable to hit up any wild beach parties this spring break. I was forced to trade a week of hedonism and bikini-ogling for one of sequestered paper-writing, and was not at all happy about it. But determined to not let the break be a complete bust, I … Read more