PolyArchive

Excerpt from Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin “[The area of modern-day Russia and Ukraine] seemed to be a dangerous, exotic place, where fortunes waited for adventurers. Human slaves were one source of profit, for while Muslims and Christians were forbidden to enslave each other, the pagan Slavs were fair game. The appetite […]

Links of the Week, vol. 13: Link Cadillac, Crushed Velvet Seats Jonas Fredwall Karlsson’s Portraits of Rock Climbers and Adventurer Click through to see Karlsson’s portraits of the extreme climbers, bikers, hikers, adventurers, and explorers, from the pages of Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/photos/2015/03/jonas-fredwall-karlsson-extreme-sports-photography —– The Enduring Mystery of the Amber Room, Coveted by Tsars, Nazis, and […]

Declassified Soviet joke courtesy the CIA: A train bearing Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev stops suddenly when the tracks run out. Each leader applies his own, unique solution. Lenin gathers workers and peasants from miles around and exhorts them to build more track. Stalin shoots the train crew when the train still doesn’t move. […]

Clementine Churchill: A Life in Pictures Sonia Purnell From the publisher: Clementine Churchill: A Life in Pictures is a fully illustrated and abridged edition of Sonia Purnell’s acclaimed biography, First Lady, including over 100 stunning and rarely seen photographs. Without Winston Churchill’s inspiring leadership Britain could not have survived its darkest hour. Without his wife Clementine, however, he might […]

South Dakota’s may plausibly be considered the most genuinely innovative, most inspirationally forward-looking professional orchestra in the United States. It is also the happiest professional orchestra I know, and the most engaged. Fulfilling Theodore Thomas’s credo, it “shows the culture of the community.” Link: The American Scholar | Shostakovich in South Dakota A manifesto for […]

About 18 months ago (in the summer of 1996) I went to see Four Weddings and a Funeral at a North London cineplex. Very soon I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else (for example, standing at a bus stop in the rain); and under normal circumstances I would have walked out […]

Yes, volume 8 was posted before volume 7. Want your money back? The girl who grew up in Pasadena, took the bus, loved her mom, and wrote herself into the world. Vulture | The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler — With its sweet and loving disposition, combined with silky fur and elegantly droopy ears, the Cavalier […]

Tom Vanderbilt | Slate: The Single Most Important Object in the Global Economy. The pallet. Cindy Lamothe | The Atlantic: When Kids Have to Act Like Parents, It Affects Them for Life. Some people who have to be responsible for their siblings or parents as children grow up to be compulsive caretakers. Christer Petley | […]

Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant Ann Gardiner Perkins Sourcebooks, 2019 Writing for an academic audience (such as in a dissertation) is totally different from how stories are told in popular non-fiction, so it is rare when an author can turn academic research into […]

I like these kinds of lists on other sites and newsletters, so why not give it a go? Judith Humphrey | Fast Company: Six Verbs That Make You Sound Weak (No Matter Your Job Title). I’m guilty of oh, 5 of out the 6. Olivia B. Waxman | Time: What Caused the Stock Market Crash […]

In our Global Archive series, we get to know the world a little better, one country (or territory) at a time. Today’s installment: Russia! So let’s start at the very beginning. Modern Russia has origins in about the 8th century CE. Vikings (called Varangians by the Greeks) came to rule over the people known as […]

HENRY V, ACT 3, SCENE I. France. Before Harfleur. Alarum. Enter KING HENRY, EXETER, BEDFORD, GLOUCESTER, and Soldiers, with scaling-ladders KING HENRY V Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But […]

The J.L. Hudson Company, known more commonly as Hudson’s, was a chain of department stores based in Detroit. Founded in 1881 by Joseph Lowthian Hudson (yes, that Hudson), the company grew in the city’s boom years, and by 1961, the flagship store on Woodward Avenue occupied an entire city block.  By the 1980s, the downtown […]

Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations — that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be […]

  The last manned moon landing took place on December 11, 1972– nigh on 40 years ago. Whether or not you believe it was real, in the end, that wasn’t the point. The “Space Race” was the capstone of decades of a shared imagination of a future of unlimited promise and wholly unfamiliar, something that […]