Sublime

With the help of dictionaries which some professors lent me, I became acquainted with Longfellow, Walt Whitman, and American history. I memorized the whole of the Declaration of Independence, and my heart swelled at the words “We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal,” and those about men’s “unalienable Rights,” among

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Angela Davis (1943–present) spent the next four decades opposing the racial discriminators who learned to hide their intent, denouncing those who promoted end-of-racism fairytales while advocating bipartisan tough-on-crime policies and a prison-industrial complex that engineered the mass incarceration, beatings, and killings of Black people by law

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The most famous is the site of “Peking Man,” who lived between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago. In 1921, a group of Austrian and Chinese scholars discovered a fossilized tooth at Dragon Bone Hill in Zhoukoudian, a western suburb of Beijing. In 1929, Pei Wenzhong (1904–1982) supervised the excavation of the first complete skull of Peking Man, followed... See more

No people had a more profound attachment to the past than the Chinese. In the face of this enormous obstacle to reform, Mao’s strategy was simple: Instead of struggling against the past, he turned it to his advantage, associating his radical Communists with the romantic figures of Chinese history. Weaving the story of the War of the Three Kingdoms

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In the days after Mao’s death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his “philosophy” really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need—or the desire?—for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history, and

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