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During the four years that Caligula occupied the Roman throne, his favorite hideaway was an imperial pleasure garden called Horti Lamiani, the Mar-a-Lago of its day. The vast residential compound spread out on the Esquiline Hill, one of the seven hills on which the city was originally built, in the area around the current Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II.

There, just on the edge of the city, villas, shrines and banquet halls were set in carefully constructed “natural” landscapes. An early version of a wildlife park, the Horti Lamiani featured orchards, fountains, terraces, a bath house adorned with precious colored marble from all over the Mediterranean, and exotic animals, some of which were used, as in the Colosseum, for private circus games.

Historians have long believed that the remains of the lavish houses and parkland would never be recovered. But this spring, Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism will open the Nymphaeum Museum of Piazza Vittorio, a subterranean gallery that will showcase a section of the imperial garden that was unearthed during an excavation from 2006 to 2015. The dig, carried out beneath the rubble of a condemned 19th-century apartment complex, yielded gems, coins, ceramics, jewelry, pottery, cameo glass, a theater mask, seeds of plants such as citron, apricot and acacia that had been imported from Asia, and bones of peacocks, deer, lions, bears and ostriches.

he 1776 Report can be understood as the other side of the coin to Anton’s rage. It’s the positive vision that justifies Trumpian cruelty. By conjuring an idealized and imaginary past, West Coast Straussians—and too many on the right—transform current conflicts into a satanic fall from an American Eden.

The American past is rich, complicated, beautiful, and powerful, but also wicked and painful. It needs to be reckoned with. The 1776 Report is the Trumpian and West Coast Straussian response to a prominent recent attempt to reckon with part of that history, the New York Times’s hotly debated 1619 Project.

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, a prominent critic of the 1619 Project, dismissed the 1776 Report as “the flip side of those polemics, presented as history, that charge the nation was founded as a slavocracy, and that slavery and white supremacy are the essential themes of American history. It’s basically a political document, not history.”

the infamous Tower of London has also been home to many ordinary people since it was built in 1066.

But the recent discovery of the remains of a woman and a girl have managed to shed even more light on what life was like in the fortress during the late Medieval and early Tudor period. The Tower of London is a famous landmark located in the center of London and is most renowned for housing the U.K. crown jewels as well as being the final resting place of three executed English queens, including two of King Henry VIII’s six wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. It’s the burial site for many of the people condemned as ‘traitors’ to the crown and beheaded on nearby Tower Hill.

For centuries the Tower was the most important military fortress in the United Kingdom, but over its almost 1000-year history, plenty of ordinary people lived there too. “During the late medieval and early Tudor period the Tower would have been a thriving mini village,” said the Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity that look after a number of royal landmarks around London, in a press statement. “It would have served as not only a royal residence, but it operated daily functions as the Office of Ordnance and Royal Mint with its own chapels and pubs, with hundreds of people working and living amongst its walls.”

Well before smartphones, new inventions shaped our culture and our emotions, and changed how we feel about vanity, loneliness and boredom. Today, Silicon Valley is the latest to exploit these feelings in an effort to keep us harnessed to our screens.

For centuries, moralists preached that pride and vanity were deadly sins. Humans shouldn’t boast or think too much of themselves because they were fallible. Likewise, Americans were taught to regard their accomplishments as hollow and fleeting because life was short.

popular technologies of the 19th century challenged these mores and helped inculcate new ones.

there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him.

Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.

We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation.

originally coined in reference to the physical seating arrangements of politicians during the French Revolution. 

The split dates to the summer of 1789, when members of the French National Assembly met to begin drafting a constitution.

The anti-royalist revolutionaries seated themselves to the presiding officer’s left, while the more conservative, aristocratic supporters of the monarchy gathered to the right. 

Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise and fall are one of the most spectacular in recorded history. The French general and statesman turned self-appointed emperor revolutionized the nation’s military, legal and educational institutions. But after some of his most audacious expansionist campaigns failed, he was forced to abdicate and was ultimately exiled in disgrace.

A close look behind the heroic portraits and beneath the gorgeous uniforms reveals some surprising things about the great little man. (He was small.) Perhaps most striking? The number of complexes he suffered from, including class inferiority, money insecurity, intellectual envy, sexual anxiety, social awkwardness and, not surprisingly, a persistent hypersensitivity to criticism. Taken in whole, these traits drove his stark ambition, undermined his grandiose endeavors—and ultimately crippled his historic legacy.

He became brutally aware of social barriers when, at the age of nine, he left home and entered the military academy at Brienne in northern France. His foreign origins, atrocious French (he had grown up speaking a Corsican Italian patois) and dubious noble status laid him open to the taunts of his schoolmates.

after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed. “We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,”

With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture, but they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects: Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.

defines culture as the way “individuals in a community develop an understanding of how the world works and make decisions based on that understanding.”

The invading army reached the outskirts of Rome, which had been left totally undefended. In 410 C.E., the Visigoths, led by Alaric, breached the walls of Rome and sacked the capital of the Roman Empire.

The plundering continued for three days. For the first time in nearly a millennium, the city of Rome was in the hands of someone other than the Romans. This was the first time that the city of Rome was sacked, but by no means the last

One of the many factors that contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire was the rise of a new religion, Christianity

"He told them to 'fight like hell,' and they brought us hell that day," Rep. Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, said as he kicked off the House's presentation.

"The evidence will show you that ex-President Trump was no innocent bystander. The evidence will show that he clearly incited the January 6 insurrection. It will show that Donald Trump surrendered his role as commander-in-chief and became the inciter-in-chief of a dangerous insurrection."

One security video played by the House impeachment managers showed Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman running as the mob begins to enter the Capitol. Goodman passes Romney and redirects him from the rioters' path before continuing to the first floor to respond to the breach and divert the mob from lawmakers.

“It’s lonely being a European today,” Delattre mused. Russia is hostile. China is hostile. Emerging powers view the postwar multilateral organizations which Europe prizes as relics of a world made by and for Western powers — and want to change them. As for the United States, it’s absent.

Increasingly, Europeans speak of the need for “containment” of the United States if Trump is re-elected, the term coined by the U.S. diplomat George Kennan to define America’s Cold War policy toward the Communist Soviet Union. That would be a shocking development, except that nothing is shocking any longer.

Not after Trump set the scene for a demolition of American democracy by saying on the convention’s opening day that “the only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.”

there is one lesson I learned early and then relearned over and over: Trust is the coin of the realm.

When trust was in the room, whatever room that was — the family room, the schoolroom, the locker room, the office room, the government room or the military room — good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details.

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

Our highest court is facing a legitimacy crisis and is in desperate need of reform. And yet, due to the deadlock that seems to be Congress these days, I too often hear the rebuke to US supreme court reform, “None of these reforms will happen, so what is the point of talking about them?”

We need only look to the number of justices who have felt the need recently to speak up on behalf of the court, in an attempt to justify its egregious abuse of judicial norms and processes, to know the justices are listening.

Nobody is forcing this conservative supermajority to use the shadow docket to rewrite American jurisprudence. Pregnant people in Texas no longer have a constitutional right to abortion because five justices on the supreme court opted to nullify Roe v Wade by way of the shadow docket.

That was why the Russian republic was one of the first three polities in the world to recognise it as an independent state.

if a world in which Ukraine, Russia and indeed Belarus were completely independent from the Soviet Union was attractive, one in which they were not tied to each other in some other way was very troubling to a Russian like Yeltsin.

As inflation soars and the value of Turkey’s currency plummets, one couple described how working families can’t make ends meet and have had to cut back on basic necessities as well as life’s smaller pleasures.

The Turkish economy has been in trouble for several years now, but in the last three months, its currency has lost nearly half its value against the dollar. Turks have been shaken by almost daily price increases in staples from flour and cooking oil to necessities such as electricity and gas. They are finding that their salaries and pensions can no longer pay for even the basics.

for fear of repercussions in a country where criticizing the government can land a person in jail.

Consumer prices across the 19 countries that use the euro currency are rising at a record rate as a result of a huge spike in energy costs this year, official figures showed Tuesday.

Consumer prices across the 19 countries that use the euro currency are rising at a record rate as a result of a huge spike in energy costs this year, official figures showed Tuesday.

Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, said the eurozone’s annual inflation rate hit 4.9% in November, the highest since recordkeeping began in 1997 and up from 4.1% in October, the previous high mark.

On her third day out with a metal detector, Milly Hardwick, 13, found a hoard of items from more than 3,000 years ago. “We were just laughing our heads off,” she said.

In Britain, the biggest successes often involve discoveries of treasures from ancient eras — like the 3,000-year-old ax that a teenager unearthed in eastern England in September.

Milly, her father and her grandfather started dancing out of excitement, she said. They kept digging and found a hoard of other artifacts, including socketed ax heads, winged ax heads, cake ingots and blade fragments made of bronze. Milly’s findings were reported last month by The Searcher, a magazine about metal detecting.

Desmond M. Tutu, the cleric who used his pulpit and spirited oratory to help bring down apartheid in South Africa and then became the leading advocate of peaceful reconciliation under Black majority rule, died on Sunday in Cape Town. He was 90.

“a leader of principle and pragmatism who gave meaning to the biblical insight that faith without works is dead.”

the archbishop remained unhappy about the state of affairs in his country under its next president, Jacob G. Zuma, who had denied Mr. Mbeki another term despite being embroiled in scandal.

Europe’s largest invasion since World War II is a logical outcome of Vladimir Putin’s dominance of Russian politics in the 21st century, a reminder that grievance-based ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism lead inexorably to conflict.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that at precisely the time when living memory of World War II is fading away, humanity has failed to heed the lessons of our worst history.

The corruption that enriched kleptocrats isolated them from accountability, engendering cynicism and apathy within societies.