Michael Kaplan's Blog, page 2

Facing Up to the Other

Why you are right to hate the Pirese.

Facing Up to the Other

On this day in 1943, Heinrich Himmler declared that Europe's Gypsies were "to be put on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps." The order simply recognized a fait accompli: Nazis had been treating Romani people just as badly as they had the Jews since the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. As the Holocaust closed in, both communities shared the same fate at the same times. The chronicler of the destruction of Warsaw's Jewry, Emmanuel Ringelblum, saw in this a visceral rejection of t...

Signs and Portents: the Miracle of the Sun

70,000 people (and the Pope) saw it; so must it be true?

Signs and Portents: the Miracle of the Sun

"When Lucia cried, 'Look at the sun!' the people responded. ... the sun was strangely spinning. It began to revolve more rapidly, more frighteningly. It began to cast off beams of many-colored lights in all directions. .... It is a story of wonder and of terror, too, as the great star challenges the discipline of all the ages it has known." On this day in 1917, at least seventy thousand people gathered for what would be the final miraculous event at Fatíma: another visit of the Lady of the R...

Goggling at the Box

Why there is no such thing as "educational television."

Goggling at the Box

On this day in 1925, the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird successfully transmitted the first television picture of a face - not a living human face, but that of a ventriloquist's dummy named "Stooky Bill." Bill had been chosen as a performer for his uncomplaining character, even when the powerful lights that Baird's system needed set fire to his hair. Thanks to Bill's sacrifice, more than 3 billion people around the world now spend whole evenings staring into a corner of the room.

I have...

Secret Conspiracy Revealed!

The man on the grassy knoll: what makes us suckers for conspiracy?

Secret Conspiracy Revealed!

This week in 1964, the Warren Commission made public its report into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It did so with many misgivings. Some members worried that issuing any judgement would merely reopen speculation about a deeply painful moment in American history; others feared that by announcing a conclusion without releasing the mountain of evidence on which it was based, the commission was inviting charges of a cover-up. In both apprehensions they were entirely correct.

Pilgrim's Progress: One Man's Lost Battle with Authority

One man's battle with City Hall shows how human nature itself leads to an oppressive State.

Pilgrim's Progress: One Man's Lost Battle with Authority

One man's battle with City Hall shows how human nature itself leads to an oppressive State.