What makes a father? Most every living thing has parents, but only a small minority of animals exhibit any degree of paternal care. Almost none approach the amount of male investment in children that characterizes human societies, and some of our closest primate relatives appear to be especially unlike us in this regard. Fatherhood remains … Read more
Christina Hillsberg joined the CIA as an eager 21-year-old in 2006. She spent more than a decade there: traveling undercover to CIA stations across the globe, meeting with clandestine sources in cafes and hotel rooms and recruiting “assets” who would provide secrets and information to the US government. It was thrilling, dangerous, sometimes scary work. … Read more
Her death inspired the cult 1990s TV show “Twin Peaks.” Her ghost is said to haunt the woods where her body was found more than 100 years ago. And yet Hazel I. Drew remains a mystery. Drew was a pretty, vivacious 19-year-old blonde living in Troy, NY, when she disappeared near her uncle’s farm on … Read more
As a sales rep for drug manufacturers Questcor, Lisa Pratta always suspected the company’s business practices weren’t just immoral but illegal, too, as she explains in “False Claims — One Insider’s Impossible Battle Against Big Pharma Corruption” (William Morrow). But this was the final straw. Lisa Pratta at her home In New Jersey. In 2011, … Read more
In 1857, an 18-year-old female slave, Lear Green, who had been repeatedly raped and forced into prostitution by her white owner, one James Noble, was surreptitiously placed in a wooden seaman’s chest wearing a dress, bonnet and cape and delivered as simple freight on a steamship bound to Philadelphia from the port of Baltimore. To … Read more
She was a blend of P.T. Barnum, the colorful showman credited with declaring, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and the infamous flamboyant televangelist couple Tammy Faye and Jim Baker who built a scandal-riddled evangelical empire — all rolled into one. Back in the early years of the Roaring Twenties it was a charismatic lady … Read more
It was June 6th, 1968, and Robert F. Kennedy, the leading contender to become the Democratic presidential nominee, had just been assassinated in Los Angeles. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the city’s chief medical examiner and coroner, stood over RFK’s body and said just two words to the senator’s grieving widow: “Trust me.” He knew how much … Read more
Ann Foley, a part-time real estate agent, lived a middle-class, all-American lifestyle with her husband, Don, and their two sons, in Cambridge, Mass., home of many of America’s most prestigious universities and think tanks. But the likeable, friendly couple had a very secret life. Ann was, in fact, Elena Vavilova, a deep-cover spy trained by … Read more
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