Group items tagged

Adopting physical or cultural characteristics of those with higher status/more power is fine. Adopting the same characteristics of those lower in status or power is risky. For example, virtually nobody would be offended if someone dressed up in full preppy regalia, complete with lacrosse stick, Dartmouth ring, and golden retriever. Many people would be upset if someone dressed up with a huge hooked nose, greasy cheek curls, and fur hat. Both costumes would be based on ridiculous stereotypes, but one would be funny and the other offensive

Students at various schools said in interviews that they viewed racial tension as the driving force behind many of the warnings, especially in the last few weeks, since stories about a fraternity party gone wrong at the University of California, Los Angeles, raised concerns at many schools. Some white students at the party dressed as Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, with smudged faces and exaggerated, padded body parts.

And at the University of Michigan, the dean of students has a webpage titled “Cultural Appropriation — what is the big deal?” It urges students to ask themselves why they are wearing a particular costume, and then to consider how accurate it is in depicting a culture or identity.

I'm gay and there are lots of men dressing in drag at the local college. A woman dressed as a football player. So what? I laughed because some of them looked so ridiculous. I would look ridiculous dressed as a Samarai warrior. Isn't that the point? To be silly and ridiculous on Halloween. Maybe everyone should just wear black t shirts and grey trousers which is about the only thing left that seems to be safe to wear.

Mocking someone's culture is a cheap shot and often leads to worse. Also, if it's such a heinous imposition on you to respect other people's benign wishes regarding how you treat their culture, then maybe the problem isn't their sensitivity but your own.

There is a difference between dressing up as Kim and Kanye, both of whom have made a career of being campy exaggerations of themselves, and being culturally insensitive. Kim and Kanye, as willing celebrities, are legitimate subjects for parody.

One right our constitution does NOT bestow is the right to NOT be offended. Quite the opposit, the First Amendment, the right of freedom of speech, bestows the right TO offend.The harsh realities of being alive in an insane world ARE offensive. Being offended is a GOOD thing. It builds resilience, and character. It provides for personal growth. It toughens you.

It is somewhat different if you want to go as a celebrity. Suppose you want to go as Lebron James. The #23 jersey, and the baggy shorts, and the ball all make a great costume. If you are short like me, the joke is even funnier. If like me you are white, however, don't go in blackface. People who go in blackface (or something similar) know it offends and intend to offend. You might as well wear a sign that says, "I'm supposed to be Labron James, but in real life I'm am just a jerk."

Halloween, Ms. Garcia said, is now often about ridicule. “Dressing up as Pocahontas (or Sexy Pocahontas, let’s get real), is offensive because it takes the whitewashed version of a whole group of people that have been victimized and abused in their own land,” and presents it as “a thing one can just try for a night,” she said.

I find it quite sad that so many commenters here have such an odd interpretation of what's going on. What these Universities are so boldly doing is teaching our children how to navigate the increasingly diverse world we live in, and that mutual respect and understanding are more important than being able to act stupidly without regard for how it affects others. Do we expect everyone to be perfect? Of course not. All that is being asked is that we THINK before we act (or dress up), and use good judgement -- anyone that thinks that isn't a worthy aim by dismissing this all as "hypersensitivity" is seriously missing the point.

Dressing up in ways that mock POC cultures isn't harmless -- it perpetuates stereotypes that result in actual harm. To you, it's only a Halloween costume that you get to take off at the end of the night -- for them, it's their LIVES. To me, protecting POC and dismantling dangerous stereotypes is more important than your desire to dress up for Halloween without thinking about the impact of your costume.

There are stereotypes and stereotypes. Surely we can all agree that a Halloween party isn't an appropriate place to don blackface and pretend to be a negro minstrel. And there are tasteless jokes that offend us no matter how friendly the person telling them or the lack of intent to offend. I understand the desire to promote a sense of decency at a time and place where good judgment often goes out the window. But at the same time, if we lose all perspective and the ability to laugh at our own stupidity, then what we embrace is a culture of outrage. Those of us with unique and interesting backgrounds ought not to be so precious.

Some schools advise that borrowing from any culture is demeaning and insulting unless the wearer is a part of that culture. In other words, do not put on a karate outfit with a black belt, the University of Washington advised in the video it sent to students, unless you actually earned that belt.

Are you serious? Halloween costumes aside, what many universities are doing is shielding students from divergent points of view.

I'm not sure if donning a sombrero, a false mustache, and clothes suitable to a mariachi band is offensive. But I don't think that dressing as a geisha or a judoka is offensive in the same way that dressing as "a suicide bomber" is. But is dressing as Osama Bin Laden offensive, because it means wearing typical Arabic clothing? Would the clothing itself be offensive without racial stereotypes? Are Viking costumes offensive to people of Scandinavian descent? Are leprechaun costumes offensive to the Irish? Are Tyrolean costumes offensive to Austrians, Germans, and Swiss?

"When I looked at this weirdo who was dressed as a Viking, I was like, 'Does he know what he's doing?'" Frantz tells NBC THINK about Angeli. "Is he aware of this tradition, or is it a coincidence? Or is it not just a coincidence and he's not aware, but it's something which travels through our culture in the background? Maybe he doesn't even know what he's doing, but he's doing exactly what he would have done in the 19th century."

"Comic frames are very helpful, because it gave people a way to deny what was really happening," she says. She cites using Pepe the Frog as an example of how that tactic is still used today. "The comic deniability of populist movements,"

Abe Rutchick, a professor of psychology at California State University, Northridge, explains that dressing in costume can affect how we act. "If we're dressing in costume, we're clearly trying to evoke a role or a character. It can influence people's self-perception and behavior,"

The fact that many of the outfits from the Capitol look comical is, historically, also not a coincidence. "Adopting this carnivalesque posture, they can actually say: 'We're not really hurting them. They're just afraid because they're fearful,'"

But whether or not the "Q Shaman" knew exactly whom he was channeling when he put on his horns and fur, putting on the outfit is likely to have influenced his behavior.

Take, for instance, the lunacy of a man waving for the camera as he walks off with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's lectern. How could he be doing something wrong — he looks so emboldened and silly? Or the brazenness of wearing your employee ID badge to the revolution.

Rutchick explains that the purpose of wearing uniforms, insignias, tattoos or symbols that show allegiance is twofold; they create a sense of in-group camaraderie and a sense of out-group distance.

Members of the far-right Proud Boys — whom Trump famously told to "stand back, and stand by" during his 2020 campaign — were at the Capitol in large numbers, and they were characteristically organized. The group, which usually dresses in yellow and black — often in the form of a Fred Perry polo shirt — told members to dress all in black this time, as if they were part of the anti-fascist movement known as antifa.

Notice that the student position allows no room for civil disagreement.

In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argued that too many college students engage in “catastrophizing,” which is to say, turning common events into nightmarish trials or claiming that easily bearable events are too awful to bear. After citing examples, they concluded, “smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.”

As students saw it, their pain ought to have been the decisive factor in determining the acceptability of the Halloween email. They thought their request for an apology ought to have been sufficient to secure one. Who taught them that it is righteous to pillory faculty for failing to validate their feelings, as if disagreement is tantamount to disrespect? Their mindset is anti-diversity, anti-pluralism, and anti-tolerance, a seeming data-point in favor of April Kelly-Woessner’s provocative argument that “young people today are less politically tolerant than their parents’ generation.”

This notion that one’s existence can be invalidated by a fellow 18-year-old donning an offensive costume is perhaps the most disempowering notion aired at Yale.

It ought to be disputed rather than indulged for the sake of these students, who need someone to teach them how empowered they are by virtue of their mere enrollment; that no one is capable of invalidating their existence, full stop; that their worth is inherent, not contingent; that everyone is offended by things around them; that they are capable of tremendous resilience; and that most possess it now despite the disempowering ideology foisted on them by well-intentioned, wrongheaded ideologues encouraging them to imagine that they are not privileged.

Here’s one of the ways that white men at Yale are most privileged of all: When a white male student at an elite college says that he feels disempowered, the first impulse of the campus left is to show him the extent of his power and privilege. When any other students say they feel disempowered, the campus left’s impulse is to validate their statements. This does a huge disservice to everyone except white male students.

That isn’t to dismiss all complaints by Yale students. If contested claims that black students were turned away from a party due to their skin color are true, for example, that is outrageous. If any discrete group of students is ever discriminated against, or disproportionately victimized by campus crime, or graded more harshly by professors, then of course students should protest and remedies should be implemented.

Poor people would visit the houses of wealthier families and receive pastries called soul cakes in exchange for a promise to pray for the souls

homeowners

Modern-day trick-or-treating also has elements akin to annual celebrations of Guy Fawkes Night (also known as Bonfire Night). On this night, which commemorates the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, British children wore masks and carry effigies while begging for pennies.

One theory suggests that excessive pranks on Halloween led to the widespread adoption of an organized, community-based trick-or-treating tradition in the 1930s.

“True” is a word heard often at Williamsburg, where interpreters — including one portraying Oconostota, an 18th-century Cherokee diplomat who came to Williamsburg in 1777 — regularly break character to explain the evidence behind their stories.

Thomas Jefferson, she said, is “still here.” But now, “you’re going to hear more of the story,” she said. “And you’re going to hear more of the story because it’s true.”

The current direction also has strong board support, according to Carly Fiorina, the business executive and former Republican presidential candidate, who became the chair in December 2020. A few donors, Fiorina said, were initially “a little concerned” about the L.G.B.T.Q. history programs, which were announced in 2019. But they are grounded in evidence, Fiorina emphasized.

The foundation’s audience research, Fleet said, indicates that showing your work helps built trust.“One of the most important things to do, particularly in this age of polarization, is to let them know how you know,” he said.

The Bray School project, a collaboration with William & Mary, is similarly community-driven. Over the decades, Coleman said, Black interpreters regularly talked about the school and its students. But no one knew for sure what had happened to the building.

In 2021, a hunch that it had been moved to the William & Mary campus and incorporated into another building was confirmed. The structure was extracted, and in February it was moved to a site next to the church, in a grand ceremonial occasion.

police have yet to identify him. The mystery man slipped away into the darkness while police arrested the suspected criminal, who was later charged with fraud-related offenses and handling stolen goods.

A partial list of people who have appeared in blackface on screen and stage in the 186 years since Rice’s performance on the Bowery includes: Desi Arnaz, Fred Astaire, Dan Aykroyd, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll (from “Amos ‘n’ Andy”), Ethel Barrymore, Milton Berle, Jimmy Cagney, Joan Crawford, Bing Crosby, Billy Crystal, Ted Danson, Marion Davies, Robert Downey Jr., Judy Garland, Alec Guinness, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Benny Hill, Bob Hope, Boris Karloff, Buster Keaton, Hedy Lamarr, Janet Leigh, Harold Lloyd, Sophia Loren, Myrna Loy, the Marx Brothers, David Niven, Laurence Olivier, Will Rogers, Mickey Rooney, Frank Sinatra, Grace Slick, Spencer Tracy, Shirley Temple, John Wayne, Mae West, Gene Wilder and the Three Stooges.

For showbusiness impresarios, there was money to be made in perpetuating such stereotypes.

blackface was such an ingrained part of popular American culture — enacted so widely across entertainment media — that it had passed from the stage and screen to everyday life for many. A joke that could be made, a costume that could be worn.

If one were looking for a historical case study in celebrating blackface, well, one could proceed straight to the White House of Woodrow Wilson

President Wilson showed the movie at the White House; it may have been the first movie ever screened there. “It is like writing history with lightning,” Wilson was quoted as saying about the film. “And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

The popularity of blackface was at its height in the early 20th century and has waned sharply since the ’50s, but it certainly hasn’t disappeared. Rather, it has taken on different forms, perhaps more palatable to modern audiences.

As the 19th century wore on, the country swooned over minstrel and vaudeville productions, which often used burnt cork or shoe polish to darken performers’ faces. And over Al Jolson, in particular. It was around 1904 when Jolson, a Jewish man born in what is now Lithuania, began performing in blackface.

the trouble with that argument is that—like culture—power also ebbs and flows. Customs we may think of as immemorially inherent in one culture very often originated in that culture’s own history of empire and domination

All cultures have histories. Young people born in North America may imagine that their grandmother’s recipes or wardrobe emerged autochthonously in a timeless ancestral homeland. But that only reflects how thoroughly they have Americanized themselves, reducing other countries’ complexities to folklores to be fetishized rather than understood and evaluated on their own terms.

They took something foreign and made it something domestic, in a pattern that has repeated itself in endless variations since the Neolithic period.

For whatever reason it happened, the idea that clothing styles should change regularly and often for no very compelling reason is one of Europe’s most distinctive contributions to world culture. Before their encounter with European culture, nobody else saw the point of it.

With the cheongsam, fashion in the European sense came to China. In the decades from 1915 to 1950, the cheongsam changed more than women’s costume did in the previous 250 years.

Like the idea that audiences should refrain from talking while music is performed, the idea that women should be able to move about as freely and easily as men is a cultural product—popularized by the North Atlantic world in the period after the First World War.

If it’s wrong for one culture to borrow from another, then it was wrong to invent the cheongsam in the first place—because not only did the garment’s shape originate outside China, but so, too, did the garment’s purposes. It was precisely because they appreciated that they were importing Western ideas about women that the inventors of the cheongsam adapted a Western shape.

The Chinese dress young Kezia Daum wanted to wear to prom originated in a brutal act of imperialism, but not by any western people

The policemen of cultural appropriation do not think that way. They have a morality tale to tell, one of Western victimization of non-Western peoples—a victimization so extreme that it is triggered by a Western girl’s purchase of a Chinese dress designed precisely so that Chinese girls could live more like Western girls.

How to draw the line between that and America’s ugly tradition of minstrelsy, in which subordinated peoples are both mimicked and mocked—as Al Jolson mimicked and mocked black music in his notorious blackface career? There is no clear rule, but there is an open way: the values of respect and tolerance that draw precisely on the rationalist Enlightenment traditions both rejected and relied upon by the cultural-appropriation police

The would-be culture police build their whole philosophy on a single assumption of extreme chauvinism: that Western culture is universal—indeed the only universal culture.

Western technology, the Western emphasis on individual autonomy and equal human dignity, and even such oddly specific Western practices as death-metal music—the cultural police take all this for granted as thoroughly as a fish takes for granted the water in its fishbowl.

It’s a free society, do what you like! But please remember, as you do so, that this “freedom” you use is itself a cultural product, with its own origins in precisely the culture you traduce.

The Western culture of personal autonomy and equal dignity is a precious thing precisely because it is not universal. Those who participate in that culture and enjoy its benefits may hope—do hope—that it may someday become universal

If anything, that culture is at present in retreat, challenged and assailed both at home and abroad. It needs defending, and to be defended effectively it is vital to understand precisely how non-universal it is.

To the extent that the cultural-appropriation police are urging their targets to respect others who are different, they are saying something that everyone needs to hear

beyond that, they can plunge into doomed tangles.

In order to tell that story, the policemen of cultural appropriation must crush and deform much of the truth of cultural history—and in the process demean and infantilize the people they supposedly champion.

Those traditions are the spiritual core of American culture at its highest. And those values we should all hope to see appropriated by all this planet’s peoples and cultures.

When the Manchu dynasty was finally overthrown in 1911, Chinese people found themselves free for the first time in 250 years to dress as they pleased. In the decade afterward, creative personalities in the great commercial metropolis of Shanghai devised a new kind of garment for women. They called it the cheongsam.

The new garment was a fusion of old and new, east and west. Manchurian-style fabrics were tailored to a European-style pattern

The cheongsam was equally available to women from a wide range of statuses—and enabled Chinese women to move as their western counterparts did.

the New York Times wants to do more than that. So it insists that the very ideals were false from the get-go — and tells us this before anything else.

America was not founded in defense of liberty and equality against monarchy, while hypocritically ignoring the massive question of slavery. It was founded in defense of slavery and white supremacy, which was masked by highfalutin’ rhetoric about universal freedom. That’s the subtext of the entire project, and often, also, the actual text.

Hence the replacing of 1776 (or even 1620 when the pilgrims first showed up) with 1619 as the “true” founding. “True” is a strong word. 1776, the authors imply, is a smoke-screen to distract you from the overwhelming reality of white supremacy as America’s “true” identity

some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy,” Hannah-Jones writes. That’s a nice little displacement there: “some might argue.” In fact, Nikole Hannah-Jones is arguing it, almost every essay in the project assumes it — and the New York Times is emphatically and institutionally endorsing it.

Hence the insistence that everything about America today is related to that same slavocracy — biased medicine, brutal economics, confounding traffic, destructive financial crises, the 2016 election, and even our expanding waistlines!

The NYT editorializes: “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed … it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.” Finally! All previous accounts of American history have essentially been white lies, the NYT tells us, literally and figuratively.

A special issue dedicated to exposing the racial terror-state in America before and after Reconstruction is extremely worthwhile

In a NYT town hall recently leaked to the press, a reporter asked the executive editor, Dean Baquet, why the Times doesn’t integrate the message of the 1619 Project into every single subject the paper covers:

I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting … I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.”

It’s a good point, isn’t it? If you don’t believe in a liberal view of the world, if you hold the doctrines of critical race theory, and believe that “all of the systems in the country” whatever they may be, are defined by a belief in the sub-humanity of black Americans, why isn’t every issue covered that way?

“One reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that.” In other words, the objective was to get liberal readers to think a little bit more like neo-Marxists.

The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms.

It’s as much activism as journalism. And that’s the reason I’m dwelling on this a few weeks later. I’m constantly told that critical race theory is secluded on college campuses, and has no impact outside of them … and yet the newspaper of record, in a dizzyingly short space of time, is now captive to it

Its magazine covers the legacy of slavery not with a variety of scholars, or a diversity of views, but with critical race theory, espoused almost exclusively by black writers, as its sole interpretative mechanism.

I think that view deserves to be heard. The idea that the core truth of human society is that it is composed of invisible systems of oppression based on race (sex, gender, etc.), and that liberal democracy is merely a mask to conceal this core truth, and that a liberal society must therefore be dismantled in order to secure racial/social justice is a legitimate worldview.

This is therefore, in its over-reach, ideology masquerading as neutral scholarship

Take a simple claim: no aspect of our society is unaffected by the legacy of slavery. Sure. Absolutely. Of course. But, when you consider this statement a little more, you realize this is either banal or meaningless. The complexity of history in a country of such size and diversity means that everything we do now has roots in many, many things that came before us.

hat would be to engage in a liberal inquiry into our past, teasing out the nuances, and the balance of various forces throughout history, weighing each against each other along with the thoughts and actions of remarkable individuals — in the manner of, say, the excellent new history of the U.S., These Truths by Jill Lepore.

the NYT chose a neo-Marxist rather than liberal path to make a very specific claim: that slavery is not one of many things that describe America’s founding and culture, it is the definitive one.

Arguing that the “true founding” was the arrival of African slaves on the continent, period, is a bitter rebuke to the actual founders and Lincoln. America is not a messy, evolving, multicultural, religiously infused, Enlightenment-based, racist, liberating, wealth-generating kaleidoscope of a society. It’s white supremacy, which started in 1619, and that’s the key to understand all of it.

it is extremely telling that this is not merely aired in the paper of record (as it should be), but that it is aggressively presented as objective reality. That’s propaganda, directed, as we now know, from the very top — and now being marched through the entire educational system to achieve a specific end

between Sohrab Ahmari, representing the Trumpy post-liberals, and David French, a Reagan-style fusionist, it was a rare moment of agreement. They both took it as a premise that Drag Queen Story Hour — a relatively new trend in which drag queens read kids stories in local libraries — was a problem they both wish didn’t exist

both French and Ahmari have no idea what they are talking about.

drag queens are clowns. They are not transgender (or haven’t been until very, very recently). They are men, mainly gay, who make no attempt to pass as actual women, and don’t necessarily want to be women, but dress up as a caricature of a woman. Sure, some have bawdy names, and in the context of a late night gay bar, they can say some bawdy things. But they’re not really about sex at all. They’re about costume and play

Children love drag queens the way they love clowns or circuses or Halloween or live Disney characters in Disney World. It’s dress-up fun.

I think the cost-benefit analysis still favors being a member of the E.U. But it is not crazy to come to the opposite conclusion.

o how on Earth is this a sign of the cultural apocalypse? These clowns read children’s stories to kids and their parents, and encourage young children to read books. This is the work of the devil?

allow me to suggest a parallel version of Britain’s situation — but with the U.S. The U.S. negotiated with Canada and Mexico to create a free trade zone called NAFTA, just as the U.K. negotiated entry to what was then a free trade zone called the “European Economic Community” in 1973

Now imagine further that NAFTA required complete freedom of movement for people across all three countries. Any Mexican or Canadian citizen would have the automatic right to live and work in the U.S., including access to public assistance, and every American could live and work in Mexico and Canada on the same grounds. This three-country grouping then establishes its own Supreme Court, which has a veto over the U.S. Supreme Court. And then there’s a new currency to replace the dollar, governed by a new central bank, located in Ottawa.

How many Americans would support this

The questions answer themselves. It would be unimaginable for the U.S. to allow itself to be governed by an entity more authoritative than its own government

It would signify the end of the American experiment, because it would effectively be the end of the American nation-state. But this is precisely the position the U.K. has been in for most of my lifetim

It’s not a strip show, for Pete’s sake. It’s a laugh, designed for the entire family. And yes, Dave Chappelle, the sanest man in America at the moment, is right. Men dressed obviously as women are first and foremost funny.

It is requiring the surrender and pooling of more and more national sovereignty from its members. And in this series of surrenders, Britain is unique in its history and identity. In the last century, every other European country has experienced the most severe loss of sovereignty a nation can experience: the occupation of a foreign army on its soil. Britain hasn’t

this very resistance has come to define the character of the country, idealized by Churchill in the country’s darkest hour. Britain was always going to have more trouble pooling sovereignty than others. And the more ambitious the E.U. became, the more trouble the U.K. had.

that is Boris Johnson’s core case: the people decided, the parliament revoked Article 50, and so it is vital for democracy that the U.K. exit without any continuing hassle or delay. If parliament is seen as dismissing the result of the referendum, then the parliament will effectively be at war with the people as a whole, and he will rally the people against them. It’s near perfect populism. His job is to get what the people voted for done, despite the elites. And if that is the central message of the coming election campaign he will not only win, but handily.

New customers include families traveling for spring break and corporate clients restricted from flying commercially who are able to spend up to $7,000 an hour for a charter flight. And this isn’t just about the plane: Many clients have expressed fear of traveling through large airports, especially after seeing news reports of crowds crammed into Chicago’s O’Hare and New York’s JFK. Most private planes fly out of small terminals reserved for VIP customers.

doctors with concierge service are suddenly in high demand. The idea is simple. Clients pay an annual fee, which allows the doctors to spend more time with fewer patients. It’s the modern version of the small-town general physician who’s been taking care of families for decades.

Long’s practice isn’t just for the rich, but his clients — about 60 percent are older than 60 — pay about $2,000 a year for the personal attention and access a concierge physician can provide.

Clients with MD2, which has practices in New York, Beverly Hills, McLean and other high-income locations, pay $15,000-$25,000 annually for doctors who serve only 50 families

“We have seen a substantial increase in the desire to fly private,” says Stephanie Chung, president of JetSuite, a top luxury rental company. “In the past few weeks and particularly this past week, we have seen an uptick of about 5 to 10 percent in new inquiries from travelers that have not flown private in the past.”

Historians believe the disease killed about 75 million people, a third of Europe’s population overall, and most of the victims were poor. “Plague is primarily an urban phenomenon,” says Keller. As with most pandemics, the disease spread quickly among those living in close quarters

Mortality demographics are hard to pinpoint before the 19th century, but it is believed that the wealthy fared far better because they were better fed and healthier to begin with.

Cholera is the “health and wealth story of the 19th century,” explains Keller. The first pandemic began in Jessore, India, in 1817 — where hundreds of thousands died — and reached Europe by 1831, killing 6,500 in London and 18,000 in Paris. Almost all of these deaths occurred in the poorest, most crowded sections of the cities, the product of contaminated food or water.

In 1842, Edgar Allan Poe wrote "Masque of the Red Death." The short story, one of Poe's best, is set in a fictional country where a gruesome disease called the Red Death has ravaged the land.

The ruler, Prince Prospero, is not afraid. He closes his palace to all except a thousand of his favorite knights and ladies, then welds the doors shut. “With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion,” writes Poe. “The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure.

One night, the prince decides to host a masquerade ball for his friends. At midnight, a guest arrives wearing a mask of a corpse and a costume like a funeral shroud. Prospero is furious at the tasteless display; his guests shrink away. The prince confronts the figure and immediately dies.

You can guess what happens next: Everyone else in the castle dies. “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all,” concludes Poe.

All of this is explored in If I Forget, a poignant, powerful drama by Steven Levenson that explores the erosion of Jewish identity in America since World War II in the middle of a scorching family drama in which everybody threatens to tear everybody else to pieces.

The U.S. attorney's office in Arizona filed the memorandum Thursday as part of its argument against releasing Chansley while his case proceeds.

Chansley is charged with two felonies: obstructing the conduct of a law enforcement officer and obstructing an official proceeding. Prosecutors say that as he committed those actions, Chansley was also carrying a dangerous weapon – specifically, "a six-foot spear."

Prosecutors say Chansley should remain in custody for a variety of reasons, including his part in the riot and his avowed intent to return to Washington to protest Biden's upcoming inauguration.

The U.S. attorney's office also says that Chansley would not likely conform to court-imposed conditions on his release, noting that while in custody, he has refused to eat anything other than organic food. Prosecutors also note that Chansley has shown he can travel without being traced. And because he is widely associated with the horns-and-fur costume and face paint he wore at the Capitol, prosecutors say, Chansley "is virtually unidentifiable when not wearing it."

The memorandum, like other documents prosecutors have filed in Chansley's case, notes he refers to himself and other rioters as "patriots."

Chansley wore horns, face paint and fur as he stood on the Senate dais – where he left a threatening note for Vice President Pence, prosecutors say."It's only a matter of time, justice is coming,"

"Strong evidence, including Chansley's own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States Government. "

Prosecutors also note that Chansley sought to mislead officials about his drug use. While he allegedly claimed to be a weekly user of marijuana, they note, he has described using peyote and mushrooms in his podcast (on which he uses the name "Jake Angeli"),

"Chansley has spoken openly about his belief that he is an alien, a higher being, and he is here on Earth to ascend to another reality."

Chansley and dozens of others who breached security at the Capitol have been arrested in the past week. In many cases, they have been identified by citizens and authorities from photos and videos taken inside lawmakers' offices and other areas in the congressional complex.

The attack on the Capitol has been linked to five deaths, including U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick and a woman whom police shot as she climbed up a barricaded door.

"Media and FBI reports have detailed carefully-planned insurrection attempts scheduled throughout the country in the coming weeks at every state capital, including the [Arizona] capitol."

Arguing that Chansley poses a flight risk, the court filing says he does not have a stable job that would require him to remain in Arizona.

Marie Antoinette, the 15th child of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and the powerful Habsburg empress Maria Theresa

More than 5,000 guests watched as the two teenagers were married. It was the beginning of Marie Antoinette’s life in the public eye.

Eighteenth-century colonial wars–particularly the American Revolution, in which the French had intervened on behalf of the colonists–had created a tremendous debt for the French state

Life as a public figure was not easy for Marie Antoinette.

she spent most of her time socializing and indulging her extravagant tastes. (For example, she had a model farm built on the palace grounds so that she and her ladies-in-waiting could dress in elaborate costumes and pretend to be milkmaids and shepherdesses.

There is no evidence that Marie Antoinette ever said that starving peasants should “eat cake” if they had no bread. In fact, the story of a fatuous noblewoman who said “Let them eat cake!” appears in the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, which was written around 1766 (when Marie Antoinette was just 11 years old).

Before long, it had become fashionable to blame Marie Antoinette for all of France’s problems.

ordinary people, on the other hand, felt squeezed by high taxes and resentful of the royal family’s conspicuous spending.

Louis XVI and his advisers tried to impose a more representative system of taxation, but the nobility resisted.

Marie Antoinette continued to be a convenient target for their rage. Cartoonists and pamphleteers depicted her as an “Austrian whore” doing everything she could to undermine the French nation.

One of Marie Antoinette’s best friends, the Princesse de Lamballe, was dismembered in the street, and revolutionaries paraded her head and body parts through Paris.

In July 1793, she lost custody of her young son, who was forced to accuse her of sexual abuse and incest before a Revolutionary tribunal. In October, she was convicted of treason and sent to the guillotine. She was 37 years old.

She and the people around her seemed to represent everything that was wrong with the monarchy and the Second Estate: They appeared to be tone-deaf, out of touch, disloyal (along with her allegedly treasonous behavior, writers and pamphleteers frequently accused the queen of adultery) and self-interested. What Marie Antoinette was actually like was beside the point; the image of the queen was far more influential than the woman herself.

Nobody knew exactly how that belief would manifest itself; I certainly never expected to see platoons of insurrectionists scaling the walls of the U.S. Capitol and sacking the place in broad daylight. Still, shocking as this was, it wasn’t a bit surprising. The attempted coup d'état had been unfolding in slow motion over the previous nine weeks. Anyone who couldn’t see this coming chose not to see it coming. And that goes for much of the Republican Party.

there’s one conclusion of which I’m certain: The “fringe” of our politics no longer exists. Between the democratization of information and the diminished confidence in establishment politicians and institutions ranging from the media to corporate America, particularly on the right, there is no longer any buffer between mainstream thought and the extreme elements of our politics.

The first time I heard someone casually suggest an “imminent civil war,” on a reporting trip in January 2020, I shrugged it off. But then I heard it again. And again. Before long, it was perfectly routine. Everywhere I went, I heard people talk about stocking up on artillery. I heard people talk about hunting down cabals of politically connected pedophiles. I heard people talk about the irreconcilable differences that now divide this country. I heard people talk about the president, their president, being sabotaged by a “deep state” of evil Beltway bureaucrats who want to end their way of life. I heard people talk about a time approaching when they would need to take matters into their own hands.

All of that was before the president alleged the greatest conspiracy in American history.

More than a few told me I was being “hysterical,” at which point things got heated, as I would plead with them to consider the consequences if even a fractional number of the president’s most fervent supporters took his allegations, and his calls to action, at face value. When I submitted that violence was a real possibility, they would snicker. Riots? Looting? That’s what Democrats do!

So convinced were the president’s allies that his rhetoric was harmless that many not only rationalized it, but actually dialed it up. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who once skewered Trump’s dishonesty, promised “earth-shattering” evidence to support his former rival’s claims of a rigged election. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy insisted that “President Trump won this election,” told of a plot to cheat him and alerted the viewers watching him on Fox News, “We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.” Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who famously called Trump “a pathological liar,” himself lied so frequently and so shamelessly it became difficult to keep up. Dozens of other congressional Republicans leveled sweeping, unsubstantiated allegations of mass voter fraud, some of them promoting the #stopthesteal campaign online.

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich floated the arrest of election workers. Mark Levin, the right-wing radio host, urged Republican-controlled legislatures to ignore the results of their state elections and send pro-Trump slates to the Electoral College. Right-wing propaganda outlets like The Federalist and One America News churned out deceptive content framing the election as inherently and obviously corrupt. The RNC hosted disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell for a sanctioned news conference that bordered on clinically insane, parts of which were tweeted by the @GOP account. The president’s lawyers and surrogates screamed about hacked voting machines and international treachery and Biden-logoed vans full of ballots. One conservative group paid a former police captain a quarter-million dollars to investigate voter fraud; he performed an armed hijacking of an air-conditioning repair truck, only to discover there were no fake ballots inside.

As the Electoral College meeting drew closer, hundreds of Republican members of Congress signed on to a publicity-stunt lawsuit aimed at invalidating tens of millions of votes for Biden. When it failed, the legislatures in several states closed public proceedings in response to actionable threats

The president’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, urged him to invoke martial law. The Texas Republican Party suggested seceding from the union. The Arizona Republican Party endorsed martyrdom. Eric Metaxas, the pseudo-evangelical leader with a devoted following on the right, followed suit. “I’d be happy to die in this fight,” he told the president during a radio interview. “This is a fight for everything. God is with us.”

Despite all of these arrows pointing toward disaster — and despite Trump encouraging his followers to descend on Washington come January 6, to agitate against certification of Biden’s victory — not a single Republican I’d spoken with in recent weeks sounded anxious

The notion of real troublemaking simply didn’t compute. Many of these Republicans have kept so blissfully ensconced in the MAGA embrace that they’ve chosen not to see its ugly side.

it has long been canon on the right that leftists — and only leftists — cause mayhem and destruction. Democrats are the party of charred cities and Defund the Police; Republicans are the party of law and order and Back the Blue. As Republicans have reminded us a million times, the Tea Party never held a rally without picking up its trash and leaving the area cleaner than they found it.

And yet, the right has changed dramatically over the past decade. It has radicalized from the ground up, in substance and in style. It has grown noticeably militant.

Trump once told me, “The Tea Party still exists — except now it’s called Make America Great Again.” But that’s not quite accurate. The core of the Tea Party was senior citizens in lawn chairs waving miniature flags and handing out literature; the only people in costumes wore ruffled shirts and tri-corner hats. The core of the MAGA movement is edgier, more aggressive and less friendly; its adherents would rather cosplay the Sons of Anarchy than the Sons of Liberty.

There is one thing that connects these movements: Both were born out of deception

Republican leaders convinced the grassroots of 2009 and 2010 that they could freeze government spending and reform entitlement programs and repeal Obamacare

Trump convinced the grassroots of 2015 and 2016 that he, too, could repeal Obamacare, while also making Mexico pay for a border wall and overhauling the nation’s infrastructure

The key difference is that the Tea Party slowly faded into obscurity as voters realized these promises politicians made were a scam, whereas the MAGA movement has only grown more intensely committed with each new con dangled in front of them.

Make no mistake: Plenty of the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol complex on Wednesday really, truly believed that Trump had been cheated out of four more years; that Vice President Mike Pence had unilateral power to revise the election results; that their takeover of the building could change the course of history

the point remains: They were conned into coming to D.C. in the first place, not just by Trump with his compulsive lying, but by the legions of Republicans who refused to counter those lies, believing it couldn’t hurt to humor the president and stoke the fires of his base.

For the past nine weeks, I’ve had a lot of highly unusual conversations with administration officials, Republican lawmakers and conservative media figures.

Based on my reporting, it seemed obvious the president was leading the country down a dangerous and uncharted road. I hoped they could see that. I hoped they would do something — anything.

From party headquarters, the Republican National Committee’s chairwoman flung reckless insinuations left and right as her top staffers peddled a catalogue of factually inaccurate claims. The two Republican senators from Georgia, desperate to keep in Trump’s good graces ahead of their runoff elections, demanded the resignation of the Republican secretary of state for no reason other than the president’s broad assertions of corruption, none of which stood up to multiple recounts and investigations by GOP officials statewide

Local lawmakers in states like Michigan and Wisconsin told Republicans they’d been cheated, citing the suspicious late-night counting of mail ballots, when they were the ones who had refused to allow those ballots to be counted earlier,

the tradition served “as a kind of safety valve that contained class resentments within clearly defined limits,” and thus, ultimately reinforced the hierarchy.

Christmas misrule was largely tolerated. After all, the birth of Jesus had been tacked onto pagan traditions that had existed for centuries.

December meant three things in early Europe: The work of harvesting the year’s crops was done, the beer and wine they’d been brewing was ready to drink, and it was cold enough to slaughter animals without the meat going immediately bad. December was often the only time of year when people got to eat fresh meat.

So a period of gorging and resting was almost written into the stars, and most pagan European cultures had a holiday for this. In fact, Romans had been celebrating Saturnalia — a similar celebration of social inversion and orgiastic gluttony — for much longer before that.

Puritans were fully aware of the non-Christian roots of Christmas, and unlike the Anglican church, they were having none of it

During Puritan rule of England in the mid-1600s, they attempted to make it illegal, scheduling Parliament to meet on Dec. 25 and ordering a day of fasting and repentance. They were met with riots and insurrection.

The Puritan ban on Christmas lasted much longer in New England, on paper from 1659 to 1681. But even after English authorities overturned the ban, it was still culturally taboo for well over a century afterward.

he supported a lawsuit from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (under indictment since 2015 for securities fraud) in an attempt to overturn election results in critical states (it was supported by other Texan miscreants like Representative Louie Gohmert).

t happened, for instance, after he supported a lawsuit from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (under indictment since 2015 for securities fraud) in an attempt to overturn election results in critical states (it was supported by other Texan miscreants like Representative Louie Gohmert).

But maybe, just maybe, Mr. Cruz has finally overreached with this latest power grab, which is correctly seen as an attempt to corral Mr. Trump’s base for his own 2024 presidential ambitions. This time, however, Mr. Cruz was spinning, obfuscating and demagoguing to assist in efforts to overturn the will of the voters for his own ends.

I’m curious to see what happens with Mr. Cruz’s check-writing enablers in Texas’ wealthier Republican-leaning suburbs. Historically, they’ve stood by him. But will they want to ally themselves with the mob that vandalized our nation’s Capitol and embarrassed the United States before the world? Will they realize that Mr. Cruz, like President Trump and the mini-Cruz, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, would risk destroying the country in the hope of someday leading it?

In Rochester, N.Y. the Safety Commissioner told police to keep the noise levels down, out of consideration for the high number of people sick with flu or pneumonia who need “rest and quiet” to get better.

In Maryland, concerned that warm weather would bring people out and too close together, the Baltimore Health Commissioner banned “frolics” such as street celebrations, arguing that “while the epidemic’s sweep was becoming milder, it was still dangerous to permit large assemblages of persons.”

“ticklers and brushes are particularly forbidden, and confetti throwing will not be allowed because in contact with the hands clothes and the persons of the people throwing enhances the danger of spreading influenza,” reported the Oct. 30 Pittsburgh Gazette Times.

Indoor Halloween parties were banned as well. “Halloween parties are taboo, as are all other indoor gatherings, as the danger of spreading the influenza is still great,” declared Denver Mayor W.F.R. Mills, according to the Denver Post.

In Indianapolis, the top health official lifted the ban on public gatherings just for Halloween, allowing residents to “go ahead and have all the Halloween parties they wanted to,”

On the other hand, even where cities tried to target large gatherings, local newspaper coverage of scattered incidents of individual mischief-making suggests that the tricks part of trick-or-treating was especially pronounced.

It’s unclear what kind of effect these rowdy Halloweens had on case counts more than a century ago, especially given that it wasn’t the only event drawing people into crowds around that time: Election Day was just a week later, and people flocked to the streets again to celebrate the end of World War I just days after that.

Regardless of Halloween’s role, a long winter was ahead, and the flu did continue to spread at pandemic levels well into 1919, spiking in the following winter and in early 1920 as well. In the end, about 675,000 Americans and 50 million people died, and about 500 million people were infected globally.