Around 1300 an English poet put Richard the Lionheart on crusade in rhyming couplets. In Richard Coer de Lyon the king’s army raises a siege tower, and the poem says of it: “A tour ful strong, That queyntyly engynours made.” […]
Schisms Within ended on a question: whether a primary-season fracture costs a coalition the general election, or whether November simply reassembles what August split apart. The Great Lakes states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, vote on November 3, and […]
On the night of 27 March 1943 a group of men in borrowed police uniforms talked their way into the Amsterdam population registry on the Plantage Kerklaan, a former concert hall across from the zoo. They overpowered the guards, moved […]
Sometime in the late 1860s, at Eastwood on the edge of Sydney, Maria Ann Smith threw the cores of some French crab apples onto a heap near the creek at the bottom of her farm. Apples don't grow true from […]
In the autumn of 1818 the parish of Dedham, Massachusetts, chose a new minister. The parish was every taxpayer in town, and the taxpayers wanted Alvan Lamson, a young Harvard man of the liberal, Unitarian kind. The church was the […]
On October 16, 1834, a pair of workmen were told to get rid of two cartloads of old wooden sticks stored in the Palace of Westminster. The sticks were Exchequer tallies, notched hazel rods that had recorded payments to the […]
On almost any Saturday in the spring of 2021, an open house in Sunnyvale went something like this. The house was a three-bedroom ranch on a cul-de-sac, one of thousands put up in the late 1950s for the engineers and […]
A bricklayer in 1890 laying a course of common brick stooped to the pile at his feet, picked up a brick, turned it over to find the better face, tapped it to knock off loose mortar, and carried it up […]
Early, before work, a woman walks her dog to the field at the end of the street. The field is empty. Halfway across she unclips the leash and the dog runs, nose down, in long loops through the wet grass. […]
On high ground above tree line, trails are often marked by cairns: small stacks of stones, one in sight of next, trails leading across rock where no path wears into the ground. Nobody knows who are their builders. A hiker […]
In 1492 the abbot of Sponheim, Johannes Trithemius, wrote a treatise called In Praise of Scribes. Monks, he argued, should keep copying books by hand even though the new presses could produce them faster. Copying was devotion. A scribe meditated […]
There is a habit of treating liberty and democracy as one thing with two names. Hold elections and freedom follows; where freedom is missing, elections are the cure. The last thirty-five years have been hard on that habit. […]
On Saturday a Houthi missile hit Riyadh's international airport for the third time in a week. Saudi Arabia says at least twelve people were killed and about three hundred wounded, the deadliest attack on the kingdom in more than a […]
Social Liberty