2010
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Suez
Guilt-ridden and terrified… Ilearned my mycins early. Bacterial infection remedies once fit on a flash card, with penicillin lording over…
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Bieliecz
This is what a spy does: he makes friends. He is a detective. Bieliecz was scarecrow Slav with a top…
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The shakes
I like the quiet I cause… Why Haiti? Ha! Diversity. We were global long before anyone thought to call it that.…
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Vultures
Andrea Doria, early morning, July 26, 1956. After World War II, the underground market’s fiercest pornography wasn’t sexual. It was…
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Craxi
Craxi under siege: 1992. In late 1991 I got an idea for a free English-language magazine in Rome that I…
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The king and I
Priam wants to reveal himself as “stripped of all glittering distractions and disguises.” King Priam of Troy has a problem.…
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Burned sons
The rotary phone of the 1960s and 70s. The problem, explained the friend of my mother’s friend, was a burned…
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Buzz
Out of World War II’s bag of tricks. Question: When does ingenuity contract cancer? When does it inadvertently begin devouring…
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Blade runner
Via Giolitti: No rule by prime minister… Via Giovanni Giolitti flanks Rome’s central station north-to-south. It’s named after an early…
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Dunes
Hundreds of years of guns alone… Recent Middle and Near East history has known little but armies. While the postwar…
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Fuckin’ Criminal
Parioli in the 1950s. Life is Cool Subdued. That’s the full name of the clothing store at the corner of…
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See all about it!
Back pains and arthritis… The core’s ulcers, its back pains and arthritis, its coughs and hiccups, magma unhinged: The all…
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Piling on
30 pages on sleep… No way, Marcel. Agood friend just had his new book savaged by a major newspaper. The…
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Son of gas
The tunnel-fearer grieved his dead mother. My early Rome years contained a caravan of eccentrics; people whose affectations straddled superstition…
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‘You lie!’
Mathew Brady, 1863. Hyperbole is as old as Washington. So are polemics and rhetoric. Style, introduced more recently, hitched self-respect…
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Her tuffet
One tough Muffet. Just before my 12th birthday I decided my second grade teacher was a witch. Every few days…
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Graviora
Thomas Nast’s 1876 anti-Catholic cartoon from “Harper’s Weekly.” Based on North America’s global grimace, the pedophilia-tormented Roman Catholic Church is…
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Thibault
Hi Def or low, it’s still (not) a pipe… French eccentric Philothee O’Neddy got a leg up on High Definition.…
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State of play
Balotelli: Italian by way of Ghana. In Europe, matters of ethnicity and race overlap with sports. Italy is emblematic. It…
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Foreplay
Italian Partisan pornography to discredit Mussolini and Hitler. War has always been the world’s greatest aphrodisiac. Remove it and what…
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Secrets
Stalinist propanganda: “Blabbing helps the enemy.” Here are a few of my oldest and most treasured secrets, each of which…
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The corrections
Rome’s last English-language daily, the “International Courier,” closed in 1987. You could tell the demeanor of the devourer of political…
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Varie ed imprevisiti
Palazzos and their sidekicks. On and off in recent years the under-renovation façades of a number of historic buildings in…
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Why can’t we?
Once-upon-a-nation. Europe has for centuries faced grievances over territory and ethnic identity, with the voice of estranged minorities or colonial…
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Nobody’s fool
Less removed from nothing than most admit… As the spotted Greek sun sets in the east, euro-skeptics stoke their mortuary…
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Half-empty Cup
Italy won the first two World Cups. The World Cup is not the United States’ event. It can’t be. It…
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On the rocks
Obama: Fatalism between the lines. The first term lives of Democratic presidents do not come with guardian angels. Franklin Roosevelt,…
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Poisoned fruit
Believe or not, the story isn’t Berlusconi. Italy is a nation of gossipy eavesdroppers whose judiciary thrives on trafficking in…
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Kill the bastards
Picasso’s 1937 mural “Guernica” — worse was to come. The esteemed American general who once said was war was hell…
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Annuit cœptis
HAL9000: Servile until aroused. Choice was for a long time associated with wisdom. Wise choices reflected critical thinking; unwise ones…
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Slups
Personalized entertainment. August in the city was hot. I didn’t need The Lovin’ Spoonful to offer up perplexing analogies between…
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51 summers
Nixon and Khrushchev in 1959. Picture it. A dapper vice president and a squat Soviet leader arguing over the role…
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Herr
Short and specific… Once upon a time, Many lived in a castle it shared with its eccentric friend Several. Though…
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Woeful
Seeing past bad tidings. With ominous tidings inflicted hourly on an already nervous population, the obvious needs restating: The new…
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Three-legged dog
Italians say Minichiello as an anti-Vietnam hero. Late summer indolence is quirky. News makes waves from humid nothings. Magazines write…
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Marcel Albert
Albert, center, with Soviet air force mechanics in 1941. The death of French air ace Marcel Albert provides backdoor insight…
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Dante’s winds
Celebrities in motion. Storms called Harold. Storms called Maude. South Atlantic hackles the Caribbean has known to fear for millennia.…
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Satanic verses
Poster on the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979. Commemorative anniversary as it involves September 11 is a rite of…
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France
Kennedy and de Gaulle in 1962. Outsized Charles de Gaulle chafed at the hint of orders. From the United States.…
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Pipes
I just do small jobs… My plumber is demoralized, disinvogliato is the word he uses. Imagine water forced to flow in reverse…
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Gettone
But do you have enough? Mobile phones are like brunettes and text messages. There’s no before them. The quaint frustration…
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China
It’s still easy to slap China… The outcome of Norway’s annual milk bone-fest has temporarily enraged a rather large and…
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No más
You couldn’t have scripted it better… From a damp dungeon come unearthed Chilean miners. Some thank God. Others prepare to…
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Bards in a box
Media: Peter Finch as mad newscaster Howard Beale. The crosshairs of partisan artillery changes over decades. In Italy, union rallies,…
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Avvelenatori
Montanelli in Milan’s “Corriere della Sera” building, mid-1950s. In early autumn 1977 I traveled to Milan to interview Indro Montanelli,…
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A long bad day
What next? “Yet for all of its general unhappiness, the electorate does not seem to be offering any clear guidance…
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Zac
Benigno Zaccagnini was among the founders of the Democrazia Cristiana, the Italian Christian Democracy party In 1975, a reedy pediatrician…
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Pulang kampung, nih
Indonesia bagian dari diri saya… In Cold War 1963, a youthful John Kennedy brought out goose bumps in West Berlin…
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Happy face
Camorra boss Antonio Iovine. Anglo-Saxon detentions are a celebration of the punitive. Arrested men and women stand pokerfaced beside similarly…
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Zounds
The orbital commanders always said hello. Well before social networks — which would have been far too limiting — Byrne…
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Telos, gone
A society marked by emptiness… So many fumbling plumbers nattering about a leak — not Wiki’s; a leak whose source…
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Roses
A love of small things… The memorial ceremony will be held in the family apartment in New York City that…
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Big lug
Snowtires and chains, anyone? Italy comes in many shapes and sizes. When outside attention isn’t focused on the lurid carnival…
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Alcove
No salvation. At the core of American civics is good behavior. At the core of all good behavior is Christmas.…
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How deep the leak?
Neil Sheehan’s first, and understated, “Pentagon Papers” story, 1971. For a decade, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been compared…
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Notes from Oz
Emerald City is hardly seen as emerald by those who live in it. Among the world’s old-school industrialized nations, Italy…
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Retrodeath
The Rome Fiumicino attack in December 1985 claimed 18 dead. Since September 11, 2001, Western Europe has witnessed two spectacularly…
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