Tag: previous year
DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest
When Steve Edsel was a boy, his adoptive parents kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings in their bedroom closet. He would ask for it sometimes, poring over the headlines about his birth. Headlines like this: “Mother Deserts Son, Flees From Hospital,” Winston-Salem Journal, December 30, 1973.
The mother in question was 14 years old, “5 feet 6 with reddish brown hair,” and she had come to the hospital early one morning with her own parents. They gave names that all
America’s Immigration Reckoning Has Arrived
In the summer of 2014, I joined a group of journalists in an organized visit to a Border Patrol warehouse in Nogales, Arizona. My daughter had just turned 5 the day before. As I walked out the door, I remember using my hands to smooth out the wrinkles on her school uniform as tenderly as if I were waking her up from sleep. I remember writing my daily note to her in our shared language—Eu te amo—with
The Reinvention of the Catholic Church
In May 2021, a time when public gatherings in England were strictly limited because of the coronavirus pandemic, the British tabloids were caught off guard by a stealth celebrity wedding in London. Westminster Cathedral—the “mother church” of Roman Catholics in England and Wales—was abruptly closed on a Saturday afternoon. Soon the groom and bride arrived: Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds, a Catholic and a former Conservative Party press officer with whom he had fathered a child the
The Unexpected Backstory of Guernica
When it comes to art against tyranny, no work is more seared into our consciousness than Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s dark, howling mural against fascist terror. Created in 1937 at the height of the Spanish Civil War, it has in the 85 years since become a universal statement about human suffering in the face of political violence. Throughout World War II, it stood for resistance to Nazi aggression; during Vietnam controversies such as the My Lai massacre, protesters invoked
The Pope’s Back Channel to Hitler
In August 1939, as he was finalizing plans for the invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler was also engaged in negotiations with Pope Pius XII so delicate that not even the German ambassador to the Holy See knew about them. The existence of these talks was a secret the Vatican was eager to maintain long after Pius XII’s death—as it did for eight decades. The 12-volume compilation of the Holy See’s documents on the Second World War, completed in 1981,
Where Did the Internet Challenge Go?
Ten years ago this month, the Harvard men’s baseball team put a video on YouTube in which they danced and lip-synched to Carly Rae Jepsen’s No. 1 hit, “Call Me Maybe.” It was funny because, well, you know: They were muscle-y boys with serious jawlines, and they were doing choreography that involved punching the ceiling of a van; this was back when a lot of people thought that pop songs were really stupid and for girls. So the video got
The LBJ Aide Who Learned Where Gay People Stood
On November 23, 1963, the morning after he swore the oath of office in an impromptu ceremony aboard Air Force One, President Lyndon B. Johnson called Bob Waldron to commiserate about the colossal burden that had just been placed upon his shoulders.
A native of Arp, Texas, a town of fewer than 1,000 inhabitants some 125 miles east of the city where Johnson’s predecessor, John F. Kennedy, had just been assassinated, Waldron, 36, was an administrative assistant for
Why the Crime Wave Is a Disaster for Progressives
In early April, Mahmood Ansari was working at his souvenir store in Atlantic City, New Jersey, when a pair of minors, one armed with a knife, robbed him. After a brief altercation, he collapsed. He was rushed to a hospital, where he was soon pronounced dead.
After Ansari’s death, I spoke with Rizwan Malik, one of his friends. Malik said that he and other business owners had unsuccessfully begged the city for additional police protection in the weeks leading up