2013
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Master class
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and Putin: Game 1 to the Russian master. Russia’s Vladimir Putin is the last major-state autocrat,…
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Missoni
Gino Severini: “Le Nord Sud,” 1912: Energy, movement, travel. Well-off Italians can’t do without their adventures. Not the middle class,…
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Frenchman’s burden
For now, France has limited its attacks to air strikes. The macabre puppet theater called Mali has three characters, at…
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Motherhood
A mother’s “do not disturb” signs sometimes needs extra emphasis. Ipulled the tail of the cat and it replied with…
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The horror
Facebook Ads alert: Your ad wasn’t approved… Internet decency — and how it applies to Facebook is particular — is…
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Dear Mr. Rossellini
Rossellini and Bergman in 1951. Afriend of mine who is a beautiful woman makes me wonder what happened to beautiful…
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Pajamas
Herman Kahn, 1922-1983, the Overkill Man. My Cold War life was a three-part harmony. First came fallout shelter drills at…
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Rasputin, smiling
For Monti, a world of trouble; for Berlusconi, little to lose. Italy is two worlds, the first an all-ages, working…
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The vision
A visionary choice for a man falling from grace, and relevance. There are times when the only way for a…
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Aviary
In “Roma,” Federico Fellini imaged a Vatican fashion show. How popes became popes sounded to me like the stuff of…
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Poets anonymous
The Rex in ’34, a poem to impress a girl. We came of age before easy self-promotion. My would-be girlfriend,…
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Grilled
Irene Pivetti: speaker of the house at age 31 in 1992. In giro, which in Italian roughly means “around,” national…
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Talk the walk
The result of this vote means Matteo Renzi is lurking. Welcome to student council Europe as junior high. First, Beppe…
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Louis must die!
In truth, Italy has been lost for a long time now … There’s not much left to save. It is…
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Posterior Yurt
Dinosaurs can be extremely demanding. My most memorable boyhood art was crayon drawings of toothy dinosaurs and giant sinking ships.…
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Paper lions
The defenseless HMS Repulse was gone in a few hours after Japanese air attacks. Few in the American military liked…
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See Dick run!
Dick and Jane come to Italy: “Run Dick Run. Run and see!” Freedom is not democracy. Democracy is a framework…
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Dining with Kim
Kim and his iMac: the end of the world as we know it. We may yet get around to mocking…
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Robin’s audition
A tomboyish redhead with short-cropped hair. Ionce got a complimentary subscription to Playboy magazine courtesy of an unknown prankster. I had just…
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Of doors and men
A city’s whose beauty sometimes simply won’t quit. Watch Mr. Proietti work on the door. Or watch him watch. He’s…
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Port Huron
Russian novelist Alexandr Solzhenitsyn: “Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities have to be determined by material expansion?”…
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May
If only the “Princess May” had run aground in May, not August. Dislike of poetry can lead grumpier months to…
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Osmosis in the dark
If the simple is hard, imagine the hard. Amajor magazine once sent me to Milan to interview Nobel Prize-winning poet…
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Deus in machina
Worry, which leads to alarm, which yields two loud words: “Do something!” Choice is unhinging. Give web-addicts the chance to…
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Fudging the hurt
March 2013: Figures show the worst but most refuse not to show their best side. France, Spain, Greece and Italy…
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Rome doctor
Emotional intelligence is what doctoring is all about. Socrates, feeling unwell, chased mice. A distraction. Rousseau, feeling pain, wrote about…
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The lives of others
Bush signing the Patriot Act in 2001, later extended by Barack Obama. Second-term presidencies have long been susceptible to righteous…
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Sexistentialis
Hiroshima: etched cinders of an incinerated self. When people once asked me what I believed in I’d say I was…
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Franco al-Assad
Franco asked for, and got, help from Nazi Germany. When Western Europe looks to Syria its historical conscience remembers the…
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Catting
She approaches me for attention, gets it, revels in its drawn-out moments. Ihave no children by the cat. I prefer…
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Men in brown
From the start, the presidency of Mohammed Morsi was seen as precarious. If you believe in the rigor of semantics,…
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Once were boys
Once they were boys, in a classroom. When hormones came due, the verb of us was roughhousing. Push came to…
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74, 66, 89
Death has long been portrayed as a beckoning. Ihave overseen three family deaths in three separate decades, my father in…
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Honor among thieves
Daniel Ellsberg on trial in Los Angeles in 1973. The behavior of conscience-driven whistleblowers can explain the way responsibility is…
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Is true!
We truck? No. We car? No. We computer? No. The Croatian National Truckers Union, the acclaimed English-language watchdog body, recently…
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Incidentally racist
Race played little role in the interaction between black World War II troops and their allies, and adversaries. In World…
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Venus and Mars
Obama and Putin at the G8 meeting in June 2013: Little joy. No two major power leaders, the merits and…
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Them’ again
Egypt’s escalating violence is in part the product of a long-held belief in conspiracies. Egypt’s deepening turmoil is based on…
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Ground zeroed
Cathedral Commons: The familiar shape of things to come. Where I once ate beef-burgers with my father is now a…
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Old ghosts
The number of civilian casualties caused by NATO’s 1999 Kosovo bombing led to worldwide second-guessing. Knee-jerk intervention in the civil…
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Game of bones
North Vietnam frequently accused the United States of criminal acts for its use of napalm, but the UN disagreed. Foreign…
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Screwing with parrots
What does this look like? Ireturned home to discover I’d misplaced the parrot. I went to my nearby but he…
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Curiosity killed
Why can’t there just be… Martians? And why won’t they just… attack? Scientists are increasingly sure there’s no methane gas…
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Acting out
So long misbehavior… it hurts too much. Language is a locomotive on manmade tracks that can take culture on a…
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Fortess Italy
Since 1988, more than 19,000 people have died trying to reach Europe’s borders. Let’s be clear: Italy is not a…
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Oh beautiful
You have to understand the impact these kinds of things have seen from the vantage point of those who grew…
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Wolf!
Shout first, then apologize… maybe. Social anthropology is the study of people and what they do when they band together.…
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How cool is that?
Listening in because the technology exists to do so. Last summer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel unwittingly got to the heart…
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Lotus-eaters
Author Luigi Barzini Jr. with his model and actress daughter Benedetta in garden of their country home in 1965. In…
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命運
The image of a protestor halting tanks near Tiananmen Square in 1989 remains famous, but dissent is no longer “fashionable.”…
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Café society
The twins insisted on sleeping in the same room — wife included. Forty years ago, my November visits to Rome…
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Ash Friday
The first static bulletin, and CBS’ Walter Cronkite. AFriday in November 50 years ago my world went haywire. Everyone’s in…
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Pope John-Francis 1/2
Pope John Paul II and Andy Warhol in St. Peter’s Square in 1980. Pope Francis I recently issued his first…
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Unfettered
The Monkees: Not your average critics of “unfettered capitalism.” Pope Francis wasn’t listening to AM radio in the mid-1960s, when…
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Beasts and their burden
The muckraking era was relentlessly emotional, and partisan. Ionce wanted to be erudite for the sake of the word, which…
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Heavy water
Rome water is rich in calcium and can clog pipes. Nasone, or “fat nose,” fountains are manna for the thirsty.…
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After the fall
No way to hang on: the end of a man who took a famous photo. Destiny can take the shape…
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Sex and the fibber
Cold, I said. Hot, she smiled. Boys will go to great length to impress girls. They will charm and cheat;…
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Big top blues
Welcome to the politics of noise, and above to entertainment at all costs. I was a Boy Scout in Washington,…
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For whom the bell tolls
Berlusconi with his party chief, Angelino Alfano. Something furiously unpopular deserves saying about the decision of Silvio Berlusconi’s lieutenants to…
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Playing it safe — again
Francis I of Argentina: A wise but cautious choice. The Roman Catholic Church has suddenly transformed itself into a likeness…
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Red alert
Kadyrov: Nothing like showing off. A word of warning, better late than never: ignore Chechnya at your own risk. Not…
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The Japanese pope
Jordan Bonfante of Time Magazine, left, and the author waiting for smoke in August 1978, radios and walkies-talkies in hand.…
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