Month: March 2019

Although he is most remembered for his novels The Poseidon Adventure and The Snow Goose, Paul Gallico began his career as a sportswriter for the New York Daily News. Gallico was published in the Post continually throughout the 1940s and ‘50s. His story “The Monster and the Infant,” (1942) about a high-stakes golf championship, showcases…

Understandably, most of the attention being paid to Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate has focused on allegations of sexual misconduct. But before those stories made headlines, a far more inspiring moment took place during an otherwise routine day of questioning. “It’s predictable that every confirmation hearing now is going to…

Repression in Rio de Janeiro on June 21, 1968, which became known as "Bloody Friday". "I am going to turn this country into a democracy and if someone is against it, I'll stop them and crush them." – General João Baptista Figueiredo Manuel Serrano: Jair Bolsonaro has been elected president of Brazil. What does his…

Published on November 26, 1938 I will tell you this about September. You can have it. September, I give you. While I’m giving things away, I might as well give you Sam Worthman, and if you get Sam Worthman you also get Magno Studios, thirty-one weeks of mother — at two grand a week —…

Since 1971 millions of people have visited Walt Disney World in Central Florida. With 40 square miles of theme parks, resort hotels, and shops, a lot has changed at the “Vacation Kingdom.” Many loyal Disney fans will tell you that’s just the way Walt Disney wanted it. Walt never intended for his theme parks to…

As the national debate on mental health continues after the suicides of fashion designer Kate Spade and television host and chef Anthony Bourdain in June, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently announced the adoption of a cutting-edge program for those struggling with a history of suicide attempts. Rates of death by suicide have been rising in…

Rania Abouzeid. Picture by Dalia Khamissy. All rights reserved. Rania Abouzeid, the Lebanese-Australian reporter based in Beirut, has covered the uprising and subsequent conflict in Syria since the very beginning. Branded a foreign spy by the government of Bashar al-Assad in 2011, she has largely been confined to rebel-held areas.  Over the past seven years…

Some deaths are such cultural touchstones that they become imprinted on our own memories too, like a personal tragedy. That, at least, is the case with Vincent van Gogh. Our collective image of the artist’s last morning, slashing away at a canvas in that Provençal wheat field, the angry crows wheeling above like a beaky…

Bernard Malamud won a National Book Award in 1959 for his volume of short stories, “The Magic Barrel.” “There seems to be no writer of his background,” comments critic Alfred Kazin, “who makes one feel so keenly the enigmatic quality of life.” Read “The Refugee,” by Bernard Malamud. [PDF]

What does it mean to love one’s country?  I found myself asking this question upon reading an article in the New York Times last week: Trump’s America: Aggrieved and Adoring Voices From Inside the Presidential Bubble. I was taken in by the accompanying photograph: two women decked out in head-to-toe USA paraphernalia. They look like…