In the 1930s, the Nazi party began issuing propaganda featuring the image of a "perfect Aryan" child. If you were looking to build a master race of adorable white people, you could do a lot worse: Hessy Taft, the model, had round eyes, a charmingly surprised expression, and a perfectly tousled tuft of dark hair on her head. She was also Jewish.
On June 1, this past Sunday, police came to the Beijing home of the artist Guo Jian—an Australian citizen, living in Beijing with an Australian passport—and took him away. Two days before, the Financial Times had published an interview with Guo. In it, he talked about how he'd privately made an installation of a diorama of Tian'anmen Square, buried in a layer of ground pork, till the meat had rotted. Guo went on to tell the reporter about his own experience at Tianan'men in 1989: a hunger strike, tear gas, bullets, blood, "the emergency room packed with bodies."
Today is the 235th birthday of William Hazlitt, the combative English essayist and journalist, who once wrote an entire essay on the pleasures of hating things. We have a sense you might like it.
Jim DeMint, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation and latest spiritual guru of the tea party, told a Christian radio host last week completely un-ironically that "the conscience of the American people" freed the slaves in the 1860's, not "big government."
The London Underground network's new Crossrail line, under construction since 2009, is the most expensive infrastructure project in Europe. Twenty-four billion dollars worth of high-speed rail spanning 73 miles and 37 stations across the city. Lots of spending and digging, obviously. An excavation crew even managed to dig up a mass grave filled with pottery and human rib cages.
Richard Nixon was a secretive paranoid bigoted sonofabitch. But we never knew the half of it: It turns out his administration waded neck-deep into efforts to sink a war-crimes investigation against U.S. soldiers who notoriously butchered an entire village in Vietnam.
No, this isn't a Bloomberg joke.
To reach the Federation of Black Cowboys headquarters at Cedar Lane Stables, you take the A train for about an hour out of Manhattan to the Grant Avenue station in Howard Beach, walk a mile past park-and-ride lots and construction sites and a truck selling Polish sausage, then look for the wooden rail fencing around a long and narrow stretch of trees and trailers alongside Linden Boulevard. For two decades, until the city closed the stables this year, these 26 acres of pasture, trees, and western-themed corrals provided a place for city kids to learn to ride a horse or see a rodeo.
A state plan to honor Union soldiers at Florida's largest Civil War battlefield fell apart this week after "furious" pro-Confederate locals commandeered a town hall meeting, including an African-American activist who called Northern troops rapists and led the crowd in a round of Dixie.
Authorities say a blaze that destroyed a historic Louisiana plantation was deliberately set by seven "ghost hunters" who became frustrated at finding no ghosts inside the house.
