The New York Times
Did Knives and Forks Cut Murders?; Counting Backward, Historians Resurrect Crime Statistics And Find the Middle Ages More Violent Than Now
In 1939, at one of civilization’s lowest points, a little-known Swiss sociologist, Norbert Elias, published a book called ”Über den Prozess der Zivilisation” (”On the Civilizing Process”) with a strange and unlikely thesis: that the gradual introduction of courtly manners — from eating with a knife and fork and using a handkerchief to not spitting…
Continue readingHow the Press Saw the 2000 Election
THE PRESS EFFECT Politicians, Journalists and the Stories That Shape the Political World By Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman 220 pages. Oxford University Press. $26. ”The press both covers events and, in choosing what to report and how to report it, shapes their outcome,” write Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman in their book…
Continue readingA Fight to Preserve A Literary Legacy
Looking at collections of rare books on the Internet, Edgardo Cozarinsky, an Argentine writer and filmmaker, was shocked to find two for sale that he recognized from the library of a deceased friend. They were first editions of Jorge Luis Borges’s first two collections of short stories, ”A Universal History of Infamy” (1935) and ”The…
Continue readingA Life Divided: Italy’s Quixote Of Terrorism
On the night of March 14, 1972, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a leading European publisher who was one of Italy’s richest men, was blown up trying to ignite a terrorist bomb on an electric pylon outside Milan. It was a strange and yet emblematic end to the complex career of a man who was a major figure…
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