The Measures of Man

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• Mary Ziegler, author of Beyond Abortion: Roe v. Wade and the Battle for Privacy, explained to NPR’s All Things Considered the Reagan-era history behind the Trump administration’s Title X, a “domestic gag rule” designed to undercut Planned Parenthood.
• Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home, spoke with the New York Times newsletter “Race/Related” about the secret history of white power.
• PopMatters chatted with Vera Tobin, author of Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot, about unreliable narrators, showing versus telling, and the well-made surprise.
• Randall Stephens, author of The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll, wrote at History Today about the influence of Pentecostal Christianity on rock ’n’ roll during its formative years.

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May 21: Alcibiades in the Shadow of Achilles

I want to take you back just over 2,400 years to the high Anatolian plain of central Turkey. It’s the year 404 BC; it’s Autumn; and it’s the dark hours of the night. Alcibiades, perhaps the most controversial Greek of his generation, is living in exile in a compound at Melissa—probably modern Afyonkarahisar—where strange rock formations erupt out of the rolling plain, near the fabled Royal Road that runs from Sardis in the west to Susa, capital of Persia’s Empire, in the east. For now, everyone inside is sleeping, but then something awakens them. Perhaps the barking of a dog. Or perhaps the acrid smell of burning creeping through the rooms, or the ever-louder crackling of fire as brown smoke pours in beneath the door, and through the cracks beside the doorposts. Here, from my b…