This ain’t Sesame Street, but the letter of the day is “R”. Research, romance, revisionism, racism and one reckless journalist. Boston is the only place that cares about John Henry, so naturally he made the Globe’s quiz on letters of love. ESPN has enough channels to show poker at any given time, but do you know why only a few of those players are women? Fair and balanced history is in the eye of the beholder. Kevin’s new home brought us grunge, Starbucks and Nike, but the Pacific Northwest is also home to the Northwest Republic, a would-be white supremacist country. In his early days, Hunter S. Thompson asked William Faulkner for a weekly stipend. In case you missed it, he was also in the Rose Garden when Nixon left office. Carry on. — Andrew Geer
– New research shows men under stress are more likely to indulge in risky behaviour than their chilled out counterparts. Women, on the other hand, react in the opposite way becoming more cautious the more pressure they have on them. — Women and Men in The Telegraph
– If you can forget for a second that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is an adulterer, it’s hard not to be smitten with the guy after reading those e-mails to his mistress Maria Belen Chapur. They’re over the top, but they’re supposed to be. That’s what love letters are for. Absolutes. Exaggeration. Nonsensical promises. Mentions of eternity. – The Great Romantics in The Boston Globe
– “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “but not to his own facts.” Samuel Butler, the nineteenth-century English author, wrote that “though God cannot alter the past, historians can.” Whether modifying facts or opinions, historians have been fiddling with history since Herodotus proclaimed his goal of “preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory.” — Historiography in The National Interest
– Blood and Politics, Leonard Zeskind’s history of the modern white-nationalist movement, took 15 years to write, but it couldn’t have been published at a more relevant moment. This spring, at tax protests around the country, conservative groups feigned outrage when a leaked Department of Homeland Security memo claimed that right-wing nationalist movements would be a threat to the United States in the coming months. Many demonstrators at nationwide “tea party” protests on April 15 took offense, flashed signs proclaiming their new terrorist status, and announced that the DHS memo was the first step in a power-mad Democratic Party plot to silence Republicans. The tea-party angst turned out to be another Fox News manipulation: The memo mainly focused on white supremacists who, angered by the idea of an African-American man becoming president, would take extreme action against Americans out of sheer rage. — Blood and Politics in The Stranger
– What would you do? You’re sitting in Hunter S. Thompson’s kitchen conducting an interview and he wants you to drink. So you drink. I’d been directed to read aloud Thompson’s farewell to Richard M. Nixon, “He Was a Crook” (Rolling Stone, June 16, 1994), an obituary fired off in a burst of rage. The author insisted it be read aloud to capture the right effect, and apparently I hadn’t been reading with proper and resounding emphasis. — Hunter S. Thompson in The Atlantic
