Few New York public spaces have seen such monumental turn-arounds quite like Bryant Park. What was once a Midtown Manhattan wasteland given over to derelicts and drug addicts has become one of the city’s most desirable commercial and entertainment destinations. In the early aughts, bi-annual fashion weeks helped lure the cultural crowd — and newer … Read more
Christians celebrate Easter Sunday to commemorate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, the miracle that started a global movement with 2.4 billion adherents. But what if Jesus’ family connections were as influential as ecclesiastic fervor in setting the course for a new religion? Joan Taylor, an emerita history professor at King’s College London, offers this argument … Read more
One hundred miles north of Manhattan in the heart of the Hudson Valley lies the grand Hitchcock Estate, a property currently listed for a record-breaking $65 million. The Hitchcock Estate’s 2,000 acres are known less for its tony accommodations — a bowling alley, two main houses, a tennis pavilion — than for its far-out history … Read more
On Sept. 29, 1982, Mary Kellerman woke up feeling sick. The 12-year-old girl from Elk Grove Village, a suburb of Chicago, asked her parents to stay home from school, and they gave her one extra-strength Tylenol capsule. She was dead a few hours later. The doctors assumed she’d died from a congenital heart condition or … Read more
In May 1845, one of England’s most storied naval officers, Sir John Franklin, launched an expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. Once thought to be ice-free, the legendary North Pole journey had been mythically described — without any real evidence — as an earthly paradise with palm trees, dragons, and 4-foot-tall pygmies. Forget about blizzards, … Read more
“Never in our history,” declared a TV anchor, “has there been such an avalanche of information, so little believed or believable.” This was no anguished lament over AI or social media. This was 1967, the era of the Vietnam War, racial tension, and urban blight, when a group of liberal satirists launched a prank so … Read more
If you were going to sum up the post-war American Jewish experience, who would you pick as the age’s great exemplars? The choices would clearly be dizzying. In film there’s everyone from Woody Allen to Steven Spielberg to Stanley Kubrick. In literature, there’s Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. In music, there was Bob … Read more
Bob Friedland’s home in Little Falls, NJ, is filled with Lego. Lego flowers adorn his dining room table. A Lego reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” hangs in his office. He has 10 Lego city skylines scattered throughout his abode (one for every town he’s visited). On Halloween, he strings lights on his Lego “Nightmare … Read more
The weather is warming up and hot new books — from fiction to memoir — are in the forecast. Here are 30 new books not to miss this spring. Fiction Meghan Sullivan Stephen Graham Jones (S&S/Saga Press)Jones mixes historical fiction with vampire horror in this gripping tale of an American Indian vampire looking to avenge … Read more
I recently landed in Santa Fe, looking forward to meeting the stones. Not the aging but somehow still performing “Rolling Stones,” but the rare gray and robin’s egg blue stones that were once the cremains of Mark Cessarich, a 6’1, 64-year-old 2nd grade teacher-turned-economist, who passed away in July from a heart attack and diabetes … Read more
“We all have an idea of what constitutes a cult,” writes author Jane Borden in “Cults Like Us – Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America” (One Signal Publishers). “The word cult conjures a mental picture: a group of beautiful young people dancing trancelike in the sun, probably aspiring actors in Los Angeles who took a wrong … Read more
Pick up a book titled “The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire — Why Our Species is on the Edge of Extinction” (St. Martin’s Press), and it’s safe to assume its pages won’t be full of sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. But while the author, British paleontologist Henry Gee, delivers an occasionally apocalyptic vision of … Read more
In 2015, Iqbal Khan was on top of the world. The 34-year-old finance wunderkind, who had moved from Pakistan to Switzerland when he was just a teenager, was promoted to head of international wealth management at Credit Suisse, the global investment bank. “Even Khan was shocked” by his fast ascension, writes Duncan Mavin in his … Read more
All through the 1950s and 1960s, as I grew up in Fair Lawn, my beloved hometown in northern New Jersey, almost every one of our immediate neighbors, the dozens of families around our block and those nearby, was, like us, Jewish. Over here, likewise housed in split-level colonials on quarter-acre plots, lived the Fishmans, the … Read more
Muriel White did not set out to be a hero. She was an American heiress who — like many other US debutantes at the turn of the 20th century — married a European aristocrat. Then the Nazis came. American heiress Muriel White on her wedding day in 1909 to Count Hermann “Manni” Seherr-Thoss. Paul Church … Read more
On May 2, 1945, just a few days before World War II ended and two days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide, Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun and his team of engineers surrendered to American soldiers. “The grizzled GIs who received von Braun’s surrender were skeptical of the urbane, self-assured German’s claims,” write Emily Carney and … Read more
Of course, the one time Vivien Leigh played someone “normal,” she went insane. Leigh specialized in portraying mad women: Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and the deranged and damaged Blanche du Bois from “A Streetcar Named Desire.” But in 1953 she agreed to star in the movie “Elephant Walk,” about a young bride who follows her husband … Read more
Evolution is a process that can take many millennia, if not longer. For a scholarly organization like the Yiddish archive and cultural institution YIVO, the process only took a century. YIVO (the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or Yiddish Scientific Institute) marks its 100th anniversary in 2025 and one would be forgiven for thinking that the birthday … Read more
Why are some people happier than others? And how can we improve our quality of life? Those are the two main questions I have been trying to answer for more than a decade. I run the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen — and, no, we don’t have unicorns or chocolate fountains in the office. We … Read more
Jimmy Lai could have fled Hong Kong when the Communists arrived in 1997. Hundreds of thousands of his fellow Hong Kongers did, making for the friendlier shores of Canada, Australia, and the United States. But the billionaire entrepreneur, publisher of the former British colony’s leading newspaper, the Apple Daily, decided to stay behind instead and fight … Read more