Latest work
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Buon lavoro
Read more: Buon lavoroGeneral strike in Turin, 1969: Major labor reforms followed a year later. European economic modernism puts Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti on the practical side of history. If approved, his labor reforms will make it easier for employers to fire workers, a first step in changing an otherwise cast-iron landscape.…
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Talk to me
Read more: Talk to meTV shows increasingly depend on interrupted characters. I’m on the phone with a friend discussing the end of the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, whose Italy World Book entry I’ve compiled for the last six years. She wants to know what I think. Before I can answer, her mobile…
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Terrible T’s
Read more: Terrible T’sTriceratops was forever seen as T-Rex’s adversary. The two Ts, Triceratops and Titanic ruled my early teenaged life. One was a Cretaceous dinosaur with three horns, the other an ocean liner whose spectacular sinking obsessed me. To Triceratops I owe my memory of pre-human periods. I knew all about Cambrian,…
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Jesterville
Read more: JestervilleSuddenly, it’s 1955 again. But for how long? Rarely has political Italy endured such a nuclear winter. Talk shows have lost their bite. Political debate percolates but lacks snarl. Optimism and fatalism stand to joint attention but neither has a convincing spokesman. Since opposites were swapped, Mario Monti for Silvio…
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Mente meccanica
Read more: Mente meccanicaUntil the postwar, most urban Italian households lacked refrigeration. Forty years ago the butler replaced the gnome. I know because I saw it. The gnome had been around since Suez, which is what my father called it. “What’s in Suez?” he’d ask. Usually the answer was something small and cold.…
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Wired for sex
Read more: Wired for sexA world blown apart. In 1964, Berlin-born Barbara “Babette” March posed on a Mexican beach for Sports Illustrated magazine wearing perhaps the least revealing bikini in history. Until about 1970, the winter months lacked substantive sports news, with football ending December and baseball beginning only in April. Between these poles lay a…
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