Mary Ann Duignan

The Most Dangerous Woman in the World

“Chicago May” was a classic swindler who conned her way around the world in the early twentieth century. She was also a sign of hard times.
Academy Award statue

A Night at the Oscars

All (or at least a lot) of what you need to know before going to this year’s Academy Awards watch party.
Alvin, the Navy research submarine

A Cold War Baby: Happy Birthday, Alvin!

The submersible Alvin is sixty years old this year. Numerous overhauls and upgrades have kept the craft going down (and coming back up!).
J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Annotated Oppenheimer

Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.
Police find bog body dated over 2,000 years in Bellaghy. Police Service of Northern Ireland

A Body in the Bog

The bog is where forensics and archaeology meet to solve “cold cases.”
The cover of the Chinese edition of Three Body Problem

Chinese Science Fiction Before The Three Body Problem

Viewing the genre as a means to spread modern knowledge, Chinese novelists have been writing science-fiction stories since at least 1902.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, 1964

Using False Claims to Justify War

Hardly the recent innovation it’s frequently mistakened to be, deception as a path to war has been used by American presidents since the 1800s.
José Garcia Villa

José Garcia Villa, an American Poet Ahead of His Time

While Villa’s otherness created an opening for his work in the US, American critics ultimately held both his modernism and his nationality against him.
Burt Lancaster in a scene from the film Birdman Of Alcatraz, 1962

Freeing Birdman of Alcatraz

Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Production Code Administration could stop the production of a movie about murderer and ornithologist Robert Stroud.
Jamia Mosque in Nairobi

A Mughal Mosque in Kenya

Built for Punjabi migrants brought to Africa by the British and modeled on Mughal architecture, the Jamia Masjid in Nairobi serves Kenya’s Muslim minority.