A C. T U. A L. L Y

Last year a friend referred me to Heather Cox Richardson (below), who writes "Letters from an American," a newsletter that pops up in my inbox daily and which chronicles American current political events from her perspective as a professor of American history at Boston College.    I read her every day and find her analysis non-polemical and refreshing.   The latter I mean figuratively, as I seem to have either forgotten most of the American history I learned, or maybe that history was presented as happy talk glossing over actual events that contradicted American aspirations. You can read Richardson’s profile in Wiki here.   She specializes in the history of the Republican Party and has written six books on this wide-ranging subject:   The Greatest Nation of the Earth (1997), which discusses Republican economic policies during the Civil War; The Death of Reconstruction (2001), which explores the North’s abandonment of Reconstruction; West from Appoma...

This afternoon, my husband handed me an envelope and said, “Here’s your vaccine invitation.”   And it was!   I opened the envelope and removed a 4-page letter printed on both sides, plus a map.  I was shaking as I went online to the indicated website, clicked on the “make an appointment button,” chose the vaccination center that offered the earliest appointments for the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine (local pride thing), entered my booking code from the letter, and chose my dates.   Super easy, super efficient, super German—despite all the German bashing going on in the last few weeks, including by this household. My first appointment date is 10:00 a.m. on April 13 and the second is at 10:45 a.m. on May 23.   I’m going to the Velodrom, an indoor track racing arena that holds 12,000 people and used to be Berlin's largest concert venue (above) until the O2 opened in 2008.   According to the Wiki article below, Janet Jackson performed there in 1998, Britney Spears ...