Beware the Ides of March
Beware the Ides of March
Timeless stories from our 173-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
The Oscars: Bombs and Bombshells
[ J U N E • 1 9 3 2 ]
“The Movies cannot be ultimately saved by bankers. They can be saved only by the people to whom they rightly belong–by writers, artists, and the best forces of the legitimate theater.”
Read “Gone Hollywood” by I. A. R. Wylie
[ J U L Y • 2 0 1 1 ]
David Thomson surveys the perils of medium and magic.
[ D E C E M B E R • 1 9 8 9 ]
At the Academy Awards: voices, vanity, vertigo.
Read “In Darkest Hollywood” by Stanley Elkin
COVID-19: 4 Years Later
[ M A R C H • 1 9 2 0 ]
“There will still be living in the year 2000 those who were orphaned by the Great War. Perhaps not even they will see a world in which the war’s aid to disease has been overcome.The forces fighting the age-long struggle for comfort and for a normal lifetime have been thoroughly disorganized.”
Read “War, Best Friend of Disease”
[ J U L Y • 2 0 0 4 ]
Ronald J. Glasser, M.D.’s warnings of “influenza, SARS, and the collapse of public health.”
[ A U G U S T • 2 0 2 3 ]
Unmasking science vs. scientism.
Read “Doctor’s Orders” by Jason Blakely
The Princess and the Photoshop
[ A P R I L • 1 8 8 5 ]
“Nearly all the eminent or remarkable personages in the kingdom have submitted to visits from literary inquisitors, who have noted their peculiarities and their surroundings, and have printed their portraits pro bono publico with photographic fidelity…”
Read “The Prince of Wales at Sandringham” by Sir William Howard Russell
[ M A R C H • 2 0 1 6 ]
Can a staged photograph tell the truth?
Read “Undeceiving the World” by Stuart Franklin
[ N O V E M B E R • 1 9 8 1 ]
“Nothing rouses British hopes for the future like another royal extravaganza, but in the end all the ceremony and all the optimism were followed by the failure of those hopes, then further degeneration often commingled with scandal and, finally, yet more pageantry.”
Read “Pomp and Desperation” by T. D. Allman
[ F E B R U A R Y • 2 0 1 6 ]
Tanya Gold on the awful seduction of the British monarchy.
Et tu, Brute?
[ F E B R U A R Y • 1 9 0 6 ]
“To write another word on Julius Caesar, whether the man be the subject or Shakespeare’s play, is almost to make oneself one of those who scratch their miserable names on antique statues…”
Read “Julius Caesar” by Harold Hodge
[ J A N U A R Y • 2 0 2 4 ]
Christopher Tayler on Mary Beard’s lives of the Caesars.
Read “Sex and Grue in Ancient Rome”
[ S E P T E M B E R • 1 9 0 7 ]
Novel ideas on the ides.