Aside from espionage in research, the PRC seeks to influence campus discussions about China through student organizations at our universities | Continue reading
Out of Our Minds: A History of What We Think and How We Think by Felipe Fernández-Armesto reviewed. For centuries, the imagination has held sway | Continue reading
Motels like the Starlite, Desert Moon or Star View typically consisted of two stories but in the larger story or narrative of Vegas the sky’s the limit | Continue reading
Pro wrestling has always lived by the tradition of ‘kayfabe’, according to which wrestlers act as if their conflicts are real | Continue reading
Einstein’s Wife, Einstein’s War, Gravity’s Century and No Shadow of a Doubt reviewed. Four books focusing on Albert Einstein | Continue reading
If you believe that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but the Earl of Oxford, or even Emilia Bassano Lanier, then you have succumbed to a conspiracy theory | Continue reading
Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s tragedy of star-crossed lovers, has been adapted in at least six Bollywood films in the last seven years | Continue reading
How Tupac’s stepfather wowed African American socialist Judith Alice Clark into being a getaway driver in an armed robbery | Continue reading
Frank Harris was a weightlifting, stomach-pumping man of Transatlantic letters, and a contemporay of Wilde and Bernard Shaw: A Slightly Foxed Books Essay | Continue reading
The New Statesman’s interview with Sir Roger Scruton is a masterclass in journalistic dishonesty. Now the government have sacked him for it | Continue reading
Life had cast the half-pint hedonist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec for the circus, but he had family money as well as artistic talent | Continue reading
An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews reviewed. The author assesses the colorful life of a Stalin-era secret agent | Continue reading
Tolkien, Maker of Middle-Earth at the Morgan Library reviewed. A new showcase gives us the real Tolkien – not his awful legacy | Continue reading
The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World by Paul Morland reviewed. An excellent book about how demography changes civilization | Continue reading
Theres nothing absurd about the idea that Huawei engages in espionage on behalf of China, as Polish counterintelligence indicates | Continue reading
To smoke was a truly egalitarian practice that bound the country together as much as compulsory civics education ever did | Continue reading
How we unpicked a Der Spiegel reporter’s demonstrably false story about Fergus Falls, Minn. It’s staggering just how much he made up | Continue reading
Dictionary of Gestures: Expressive Comportments and Movements in Use Around the World by François Caradec, translated by Chris Clarke, reviewed | Continue reading
The Souls of Yellow Folk: Essays by Wesley Yang reviewed. The author’s first collection of essays dwells upon the role of the Asian American man | Continue reading
Exquisite palaces built of coral may now be buried forever in the desert. But their legends suggest that medieval Africa was far from being a dark continent | Continue reading
Classical mythology is full of robots, automata and technology. Think not only Pandora, but self-opening gates and libation-pouring statues | Continue reading
Beto O’Rourke’s wife Amy is the only daughter of billionaire property magnate William D. Sanders, whose wealth is an estimated $20 billion | Continue reading
Oscar Wilde’s search for fame and himself. Wilde was an enigmatic character, both appealing and appalling, Irish and English, womanly and manly | Continue reading
We’ve grown increasingly obsessed with dystopian narratives since 2016. But why do we look to Orwell’s 1984 when Huxley’s Brave New World rings truer? | Continue reading
Saudi Arabia and the rise of the mobster state. Where is the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi? And what does Mohammmad bin Salman know? | Continue reading
Erebus: The Story of a Ship by Michael Palin reviewed. He describes thrilling Antarctic adventures with a wry enthusiasm, bolstered by his own experiences | Continue reading