history


How James Dean crashed: his death site [WATCH]

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Despite the fact this road is in the middle of a mule’s ass, miles from any town, it positively pounds with speeding, heedless traffic criss-crossing the junction. I have rarely felt less secure on a rural highway. When you pull over, the passing cars are going so blazingly fast your whole vehicle shudders. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.




Revisiting Rosewood, Florida, today [WATCH]

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We pass desultory intersections like Rosewood’s every day. And we will never know how many of them were once the settings for brutal events, in which Americans, believing they were right and on the side of God, were in fact the instruments of something sinister and evil.


Who is this Paul McCartney guy?

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I think there may be a cultural reason for the self-enforced stupidity we’re seeing in American youth, and moreover, for a stubborn failure to perceive that mouth-breathing ignorance as a failing.




Ago: The 9/11 account I wrote then, there

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I wrote this post on September 18, 2001. I haven’t changed a word. I titled it “Ago.” + + + + + + That morning, I was awakened by the silence. I don’t recall what woke me up early, at 8:45 a.m., but it must have been something. Probably something I heard in my sleep,… Read more »


Mount Rushmore souvenirs that don’t look like Mount Rushmore

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Girl, you know it’s true. Mount Rushmore is empty-calorie patriotism, but it’s pretty. Local concerns overbuilt the amenities so much in the 1990s so that they’re still paying them off. Merely parking a car costs $11. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum took extreme care in rendering his four subjects accurately, but the piles of tourist junk hawked… Read more »


You are being erased

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Your biographer is screwed. You are leaving nearly nothing behind. While you pour your energies and thoughts into the machine sitting in front of you, you are leaving nearly nothing about you that your descendants will be able to find. You know it’s true. Compared to your parents, or your grandparents, what are you handing… Read more »