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I want every morning to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself. No day set aside for rest. I choose my pauses myself, when I feel drunk with the intensity of life and I want to plunge into animality to […] Antonio Gramsci Writes a Column, “I Hate New...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9v7NGe968M Discordian writer and prankster Robert Anton Wilson celebrated conspiracy theories as decentralized power incarnate. “Conspiracy is just another name for coalition,” he has a character say in The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles. According to Wilson, any sufficiently imaginative group of people can make a fiction real. Another statement of his sounds more ominous, read in […] Constantly Wrong: Filmmaker Kirby Ferguson Makes the Case...

So much classic black and white footage has been digitally colorized recently, it’s hard to remember that the Eastman Kodak Company's Kodachrome film debuted way back in 1935. The above footage of New York City was shot by an unknown enthusiast in and around 1937. Dick Hoefsloot, the Netherlands-based videographer who posted it to YouTube after tweaking it a […] A Long, Guided Tour of New York City...

From Rick Steves comes a thought-provoking documentary that revisits the rise of fascism in Europe, reminding us of how charismatic figures like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler came to power by promising to create a better future for their frustrated, economically-depressed countries--a future that recaptured the glory of some mythologized past. Once in power, these […] <i>The Story of Fascism</i>: Rick Steve’s Documentary Helps...

Medical professionals have had a particularly difficult time getting people in the United States to act in unison for the public good during the pandemic. This has been the case with every step that experts urge to curb the spread of COVID-19, from closing schools, churches, and other meeting places, to enforcing social distancing and […] What Happened When Americans Had to Wear Masks...

When James Baldwin took the stage to debate William F. Buckley at Cambridge in 1965, it was to have “a debate we shouldn’t need,” writes Gabrielle Bellot at Literary Hub, and yet it’s one that is still “as important as ever.” The proposition before the two men—famed prophetic novelist of the black experience in America […] Watch the Famous James Baldwin-William F. Buckley Debate...

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…  —Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States of America He was a brilliant man who preached equality, but he […] Shannon LaNier Poses as His Sixth Great-Grandfather Thomas...

Getting history across to young students is challenging enough, but what should a teacher do when actual history-making events happen on their watch? They have to be acknowledged, but to what extent do they have to be explained, even "taught"? Of the teachers who have turned history-in-the-making into a lesson, perhaps the most famous is Jane […] After MLK’s Assassination, a Schoolteacher Conducted a Famous...

Some of last week's major headlines: Police forcibly remove a large number of peaceable protestors from the area in front of a Washington DC church, so a 73-year-old white man can be photographed standing there alone, holding a prop bible. An unarmed 75-year-old white man approaches a Buffalo police officer at a protest and is shoved so […] David Lynch Recounts His Surreal Dream of Being...

Ava DuVernay made her award-winning documentary 13th free to stream online. Now comes her film Selma. The 2014 film chronicles Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s campaign to secure equal voting rights with an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. Ava DuVernay writes on Twitter: "Paramount Pictures is offering SELMA for free rental on all […] Ava DuVernay’s <i>Selma</i> Is Now Free to Stream...

There is a level of avarice and depravity in defrauding victims of an epidemic that should shock even the most jaded. But a look into the archives of history confirms that venal mountebanks and con artists have always followed disaster when it strikes. In 1665, the Black Death reappeared in London, a disease that had […] A 1665 Advertisement Promises a “Famous and Effectual”...

Americans have long been accused of growing socially distant, bowling alone, as Robert Putnam wrote in 2000, or worse becoming radicalized as "lone wolves" and isolated trolls. But we are seeing how much we depend on each other as social distancing becomes the painful normal. Not quite quarantine, social distancing involves a semi-voluntary restriction of […] What Happened to U.S. Cities That Practiced–and Didn’t...