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…

Image: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain. While Mexican authorities pretend to be complying with the international treaty promoted by the World Health Organization, very little has actually been done to meet two fundamental principles of the agreement: the reduction of tobacco consumption and exposure to smoke.  The most recent example of this inaction is the system…

Alaska is big and beautiful — loaded with glaciers, animal life, and snow-capped mountains — and visitors coming in droves to see it all. Sailing with Windstar Cruises, long summer days presented once-in-a-lifetime opportunities over and over again, from kayaking around icebergs in Tracy Arm Fjord, to watching harbor seals lounge nearby Aialik Glacier, to…