The story of poison is the story of power. For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended … Read the article
The hegemony of tikkun olam in American Judaism may be a linguistic success story, but from the point of view of religion it is nothing to cheer about. Philologos went on to protest the political appropriation of the … Read the article
It would only take one person to slip a little something into a king’s food. Henry VIII had two hundred people employed in his kitchens at Hampton Court: cooks, scullery maids, stewards, carvers, porters, bakers, butchers, gardeners, … Read the article
When George Stevens picked Rock Hudson to play rancher Bick Benedict in the big new film that everybody in Hollywood was buzzing about, the actor couldn’t have been happier. He was “walking in clouds,” he wrote Stevens … Read the article
In the 1880s, Suzanne Valadon was considered the Impressionists’ most beautiful model. But behind her captivating façade lay a closely-guarded secret. Suzanne was born into poverty in rural France, before her mother fled the provinces, taking her to … Read the article
It was November 30, 1955, and the Cold War was raging. The U.S. had stockpiled 2,422 atomic bombs while the Soviets had only about 200, though more than ample to annihilate the United States. With the Soviet … Read the article
Instead of deriving from folklore, or quaint colonial customs, or religion, the American emergence of Santa Claus was rooted in late-eighteenth-century politics, in the formation of clubs and societies based around ethnic or cultural groups, which came … Read the article
Bill Goldstein looks back at the intersecting lives and works of the esteemed authors who wrote during the 1920s—Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence—in his new book The World Broke in Two.
In the early 1950s Albert Lamorisse, who would later win an Academy Award for his 1956 film The Red Balloon, devised a war game called La Conquête du Monde, or the Conquest of the … Read the article
In December 1917, Amy Lowell’s local newspaper, The Brookline Chronicle, ran a notice that caught her eye. U.S. Army training camps were in need of books for their libraries. Amy called up Miss Louisa M. Hooper of the … Read the article