An elderly man shoves two packages out of a fourth floor window, and then he crawls out and sits on the ledge, staring down at the ground below. Then slowly, carefully, he turns himself around, lowers himself from the ledge, and lets go, plunging down four stories,...
Sky Andrecheck's field of dreams is more like a field of data. His specialty is known as "sabermetrics"--the study of baseball using data popularized by the best-selling book, Moneyball, and the movie by the same name starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. In Moneyball,...
Happy Henry Day! This week marks the 166th anniversary of Henry Brown's amazing escape from slavery. On March 23, 1849, Henry Brown was sealed inside a wooden box, 3 feet by 2 feet by 2-1/2 feet in size. Then he was shipped from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia--a...
Abraham Lincoln had two "life masks"Â created--one in 1860 before the Civil War began and the other in 1865, when the war was ending. The masks were made to preserve what he really looked like in life, but the difference between the two masks was shocking. The 1860...
Who would have thought that a supermarket company's commercial could capture one of the most poignant moments in a bloody war--World War I? The Christmas season is behind us, but I have to mention the commercial that the Sainsbury Company produced this past Christmas,...
Ellen's teeth chattered, and she pulled the thin blanket around her shoulders. She was cold, and she was terrified. In the dim glow of a single candle, she sat on a stool and watched her husband William emerge from the darkness with a pair of scissors in his right...
I did an interview on my Berlin novel, "The Puzzle People," this past week in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Wall came down on November 9, 1989, when an East German bureaucrat accidentally announced the immediate opening of...
This week, as the world observed the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the forgotten stories from the amazing year of 1989 was what took place in Leipzig, East Germany, just one month before the Wall came down on November 9. A Monday prayer...
It seems hard to imagine today, but the Nazis rose to power because they were considered a populist movement at one time, working for the common good. But how could people come to believe such a thing? I recently interviewed University of Illinois professor Peter...
