Latest work
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How deep the leak?
Read more: 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 to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Both are vain and covet media control. Both imagine themselves as personality-cult icons. Their resemblance is not new, nor is it news. For decades, China has…
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Hornets
Read more: HornetsMy first stones missed… About the same time I was subjected to my parents’ lectures about the difference between right and wrong I noticed we had a hornet’s nest in the back yard. Sometime in early spring a humming came to a stubby elm above the forsythia bushes. One by…
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History matters
Read more: History mattersThe Russian Black Sea Fleet was once a point of pride for Russian influence. Imperial Russia’s most significant early shortcoming was the lack of a major saltwater port. What great European power had arisen and flourished without one? None. Even the ancients, Phoenicia and Greece, Constantinople and Venice, depended on…
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Fred and Barney
Read more: Fred and BarneyBokassa’s 1976 coronation. When Muammar Qaddafi is toppled, and it’s only a matter of time, who will stand larger-than-life on a planet of increasingly homogeneous leadership? Which despots will assert eccentric primacy? Who will be left to call bizarre? Maybe Hugo Chavez, the lambent Venezuelan who grins when he rants…
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Franco sarebbe morto
Read more: Franco sarebbe mortoThe Rome Daily American in 1974. The problem, Chantal Dubois declared, was one of stubbornness. Testardo, she said. Obstinate. Defiant. Why, she demanded to know, would he not die? He’d been nearly dead for a week, then four. Why procrastinate? Who were these cunning doctors to encourage the clinging? The effrontery. The…
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Forbidden foreboding
Read more: Forbidden forebodingThe 1908 Messina quake, Europe’s worst-ever, claimed some 200,000 dead. Close encounters with earthquakes leave hangovers. Following Monday morning’s fierce L’Aquila tremors, Rome picture frames bore the brunt of not-so-distant bad news. Landscapes hung quirkily ajar, their portrayed trees, houses and sunsets angled improbably toward the floor. It was the…
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