History & Headlines

Don revisits the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege, the Panama Canal and a hidden history inside a Picasso.

From Alexander the Great to Elsie Harrington: quotations collected across a lifetime of journals.

A tiny headline with an enormous afterlife: ‘Dewey Defeats Truman.’

Two entries about Y2K anxiety and the language used to describe how weather feels.

A general rule, one famous assassination and a mirror left on the moon.

Four journal entries about the Bible, the King James edition, Mormon teaching and married priests.

Two stories about rules, unexpected uses and people finding a different answer than the one they started with.

If the wheel is evidence of a culture’s intelligence, what does its distribution really tell us?