2015
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Moons past HAL
In Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey, ” the intelligent computer had sinister motives. Half-a-century ago the American Yellow Pages…
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Charlie Hebdo’s blood
Two armed terrorists, above and below, attacked the Paris office of “Charlie Hebdo.” There’s an inadvertent dollop of old school…
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At peace with terror
For the West, after 1945: so far, so good. In 2015 the West marks 70 years of peace. Not Asia.…
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Human warming
Animal wiring has its limits. One place brings news that 2014 was the hottest year in human history, calamity in…
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Multiple moons
The word “unique,” powerful and singular. My eighth-grade English teacher was a man named Mr. Grossman who sported a natty…
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Blame the insurgents
A blizzard’s failure to blizzard can seem unmanly. Factions of weather still have spunk, agents of its insurgent wing. These…
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Brian Williams
Myths can land you in the dark. Decades ago I was sent to Iraq to cover a major earthquake as…
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Giver & Mass
Newly elected President Sergio Mattarella, an ex-Christian Democrat, above, and former Christian Democratic President Giovanni Leone, with honor guard, in…
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Après nous
ISIS is only one of many armed militias in collapsing Libya. The Prague Spring of 1968 is not remembered as…
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Blurt
Whatever you think, say… and send. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are tricky concepts. In absolute terms…
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The vanishing
Once, even urban stones grew lizards. There is global warming and lizard vanishing. The first monopolizes news and polemics. The…
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Completely still
Rome is swollen with empty apartments. The shrubbery trimmers always appear toward the end of winter. I hear buzzing noises…
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Banshees
Icarus: suddenly in peril’s way. Myth and legend have always hinged on peril. Life itself was peril, lorded over by…
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Katagiri’s folly
JAL Flight 350 crashed into Tokyo Bay and the pilot boarded a rescue boat, calling himself an office worker. More…
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Brooch
The man in the attic. She called him a Hussar, and the foreignness of the word immediately attached itself to…
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Wooly mammoth
Many memories, even if embroidered, should be left alone. The father of one-time neighborhood playmates I treasure in the hallucinatory…
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Pulling the Tigger
Beware the nuclear trigger, and honey. Ionce worried about the nuclear Tigger. The Serbian colonel with the unpronounceable name called…
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Siding with the sea
Europe’s worry seems somehow dishonest. Something rings false about Europe’s response to the Mediterranean tribulations of African migrants trying to…
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All thumbs
Heartwarming relevance. These are heady days for the human thumb, though the thumb might object to being mentioned in the…
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BFF
Talking is good for the soul. Matteo Renzi can’t stop talking. He Tweets and yammers and mugs for camera and…
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Whatever Eva wants
Party hats can be a one-off when relationships snap. Not so long ago I ended a brief relationship with a…
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Morata’s choice
Alvaro Morata’s goals against Real Madrid in Madrid, above, and in Turin, below, were not cause for excess joy —…
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Stella and Giusy
Many Italian women had a private seamstress until the 1970s. Rome is not eternal. Some scenarios lose all plausibility when…
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See no evil
In 1999, a Dutch newspaper alleged that FIFA President João Havelange, who served from 1974 to 1998, accepted diamonds, porcelain…
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Footfalls
Poet W.H. Auden. Skin turns reptilian in middle age. Auden-like wrinkles collect around drainpipe elbows. Once-lusted after nooks hang memories…
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Cup half-full
Being able to host the World Cup meant a great deal to Nelson Mandela. In 1994, two years before Sepp…
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Mrs. Townsend
Marjorie Rhodes Townsend (1930-2015) was a NASA rocket scientist and a Washington, D.C. mother to “five.” In the Baptist faith…
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Sexual combat
Gay rights illumination… Societies removed from theaters of confrontation and carnage once represented by world war are doomed to seek…
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Greece
Greece: Too much noise and too much credit. About the time the United States began its latest nation-building enterprise in…
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Café anti-society
You never know where the bad germs might nest. Iam having coffee in an American café, a poor imitation of…
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Hey there!
Virgin America’s safety video is a musical, nun included. The incoming plane is late. The delay is conveyed on the…
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Flying Cloud
Johnny “Flying Cloud,” fighter ace and beacon of the Jurassic. One summer I was almost 12. I had no phone…
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Voice in the night
Bogart and Bacall in “To Have and To Have Not.” You hear a voice on the phone, a woman’s voice,…
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Erectile function
Hiroshima Aug. 6, 1945: 90,000-to-160,000 dead Understanding nuclear arms control in psychological terms means remembering who got there first, the…
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Mr. Smith
The cat that vanished… Mr. Smith is waiting for his wife to come home. He’s lonely sleeping alone. He tires…
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Pasture
Welcome to the world of the jaded and damaged nerve. When eye’s cameras wither the world turns to butter and…
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Duck and run
Dozens died Tehran on Sept. 8, 1978, when violence erupted suddenly. Here it was, two popes later, one dead and…
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Drink the water
Rome is part sauna, part thermal bath, part swamp, a two-millennia-old troika. Heat in late summer Rome has the oppressive…
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Misprison of modern relief
Hope for a soft European landing has little grounding in immediate fact. When chaotically unhappy people risk everything to leave…
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Flavia and Maurizio
Intimations of civic mortality. Almost every year toward the end of summer bucolic tales of Italy slip into American newspapers…
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A tougher pilgrim
Pope Francis in Cuba, before traveling to the United States. In a non-Catholic majority country, a pope is best seen…
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Whatcheeria
During Romer’s Gap, only creatures like Whatcheeria wiggled through. Once, the words I treasured most reeked of syllables: Cambrian, Silurian,…
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The enemy of my enemy
Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and Hafez al-Assad in 1977. Memory is a curse that hexes and vexes the would-be…
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116
The ides of Jupiter. It was about this time in the 1970s that many began to call him my grandfather.…
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Jacky Sutton
Jacky Sutton, center, goat in arms, in her 1990s Eritrea days. Six years ago a massively gifted former girlfriend sent…
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The brave
Charles Whitman was an Eagle Scout at age 12. After Charles Whitman shot and killed 14 people from a tower…
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Number one
Tales of Napoleon can make your wait more endurable. Forget guidebook platitudes: visitors to Italy need to know the country…
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Dear Amazon
Thanks but no thanks. Dear Amazon: You asked me a fair question the other day. I know you ask it…
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Paris
No war or intervention in war exists in a vacuum. The 21st-century West is a largely affluent and safeguarded place.…
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Paris, II
Getting on with things might be better than emotionally-driven solidarity efforts. In the 36 months after the Sept. 11, 2001…
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Paris, III
Police agents don masks to seek out suspects and suddenly come to look like suspects themselves. The phrase “preemptive alarmism”…
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After-burger
Hours of half-indolent ideological hectoring. Imiss the long-defunct Columbia Anti-Imperialist League, a rag-tag bunch of loquacious if often dazed college…
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Skywalker’s intell
Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, who helped create the Islamic State, was killed by the U.S. in 2006. Publishers are busy releasing…
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“Very, very real”
Attachment to the news sometimes makes detachment impossible. “The attacks have left American Muslims feeling defensive and vulnerable just as…
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The insolence of demagogues
George Wallace (1919-1998): “I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again.” The insolence of demagogues —…
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Airy-Man
Once the angels were up, they cavorted. As did others. In December 1963 came the great Christmas tree crisis. It…
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Between the lines
Between-the-lines? Unlikely. Audio books are booming, ostensibly a shot in the arm for both books and the publishing industry. The…
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Memex to the present
Now, the machine is part of the man that holds it. Soon after youthful Matteo Renzi bullied himself into the…
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