Originally published in Esquire nearly three decades ago, Broyles’ essay is an American classic. Drawing from the author’s own experience in Vietnam, “Why Men Love War” is a meditation on the intense, complicated, and at times near-erotic relationship between men and battle. War is beautiful. There is something about a firefight at night, something about […]
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Posted inQuotes
The Last Living Recipient of VA Benefits from the Civil War
Ms. Triplett’s pension, small as it is, stands as a reminder that war’s bills don’t stop coming when the guns fall silent. The VA is still paying benefits to 16 widows and children of veterans from the 1898 Spanish-American War. The last U.S. World War I veteran died in 2011. But 4,038 widows, sons and […]
Posted inUncategorized
'The Power of a Name': Maya Lin on Making the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
“I made a conscious decision not to do any specific research on the Vietnam War and the political turmoil surrounding it. I felt that the politics had eclipsed the veterans, their service, and their lives. I wanted to create a memorial that everyone would be able to respond to, regardless of whether one thought our […]
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction
The Skies Belong to Us: How Hijackers Created an Airline Crisis in the 1970s
Brendan I. Koerner | The Skies Belong to Us | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,186 words) ‘There Is No Way to Tell a Hijacker by Looking At Him’ When the FAA’s antihijacking task force first convened in February 1969, its ten members knew they faced a daunting challenge—not only because of the severity of the […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Interview with a Torturer
Documentary filmmaker and Khmer Rouge survivor Rithy Panh spent hundreds of hours interviewing Duch, the commandant of the Cambodia “killing fields” and one of the most notorious torturers of the 20th century. This is his haunting memoir of those interviews.
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The Skies Belong to Us: How Hijackers Created an Airline Crisis in the 1970s
Brendan I. Koerner | The Skies Belong to Us | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,186 words) ‘There Is No Way to Tell a Hijacker by Looking At Him’ When the FAA’s antihijacking task force first convened in February 1969, its ten members knew they faced a daunting challenge—not only because of the severity of the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
From the Garden of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll to the Yale English Department
You couldn’t see Skull and Bones from the seminar room in Linsly-Chittenden Hall, though it was directly across the street. But the building was much on my mind the afternoon of the reception and had been from the day I got to New Haven. To my 26-year-old self, it seemed nearly impossible that literature—Keats, Shelley, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Rumsfeld’s War
A political history of Donald Rumsfeld, from the Nixon years to a war in Iraq that he promised would be over in months: Rumsfeld would offer the “creative” plan for the Iraq invasion that his president had requested that tearful evening in September 2001, one that envisioned a relative handful of troops—150,000, fewer than half […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Lap Dogs of the Press
A 2006 essay by White House reporter Helen Thomas, who died Saturday at 92, on how the press failed to do its job in the run-up to the Iraq war. She recalls one exchange with former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan: “‘Did we invade those countries?’ “At that point McClellan called on another reporter. […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
The House of Mondavi: How an American Wine Empire Was Born
The story of a family’s winery that changed Napa Valley forever.
