June 2021

Improvisation was part of the technological expedition: a mule was responsible for the Danjon telescope while the astronomer lit a fire to make some smoke...

If the Premier League was to market itself as a slick global brand, it needed a product that looked good on television. Muddy, bobbly, patchy pitches would not do...

Tonight I walked under the stars through the snow & stopped & looked at my far sparklers & heard the voice of the wind so slight & pure & deep as if it were the sound of the stars themselves revolving...

They say that people at the last moment experience a bright light as they enter into a realm of brilliance. You see it represented in paintings of the Resurrection. Everything I was on the verge of losing flew through my imagination...

Before writing off animal trials as irrational acts of an ignorant and superstitious past, consider some recent examples...

Now that the Americans have also shown themselves capable of committing to a Maoist-like species of cultural revolution, how much more intensely might we expect their French counterparts to get wrapped up in this new frenzy?

Esbjerg is a seaport town in Denmark. In the story, it’s presented as an obscure place...

Chan is among a growing number of young people speaking out about gender identity and fighting for inclusion in Hong Kong, where LGBTQ+ issues remain largely taboo...

Those in the African colonies, had created a new national identity for themselves as German Africans (Deutsch Afrikaners), rejecting the label of Germans abroad (Auslandsdeutsche) that the metropole used...

If your apartment is too small and familiar to have people over, and your parks and commons are threadbare and inhospitable by incompetence or intent, you go out to restaurants. Here you find public privacy and urbane intimacy...

It was not just in liberal consumer societies that families recorded vacations and rites of passage. Home cameras and projectors were also available in socialist societies like the German Democratic Republic...

Does the universe have a beginning in time? If so, is it an argument for theism?

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness...

In the bigger picture, the economic history of Britain since the mid 19th century is, inevitably, a history of relative economic decline...

How will the ousting of Benjamin Netanyahu affect the future of Israeli politics?

New Zealand has an innovative legacy of concrete construction dating back to the 1850s...

Although it continued to live on in the memories of its former victims or enemies, in Japan itself memories of empire were excised from the public imagination through selective commemoration and emphasis on the victimhood of ordinary people...

Well I grew up in the New Zealand of country pubs and sheep and macrocarpas; and beyond it, we were told, was a planet structured around the British Empire turning into the Commonwealth turning into... something else...