Checkpoint

A stranger passing strangely through a strange land: that was how it felt the first time I experienced a real international travel corridor – across Cold War Europe. I have written (and you, poor reader, may have read) a vast amount about the worst quarantine policy in history: Britain’s bizarre…

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.Gastritis Broke My CalculatorHot Air and Ill Informed BanterSaul Alinsky is my co-pilotShallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.Our job is not to persuade Republicans but to defeat them.I thought we were promised Infrastructure WeekYes we did.‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.We can agree…

WASHINGTON — (AP) — In vowing to pull thousands of American troops from Germany, President Donald Trump is following a pattern of disruptive, sometimes punitive, moves against allies that have dismayed his fellow Republicans and cast doubt across the globe about the future of partnering with the United States. Trump…

BERLIN — As authorities in the German capital put the brakes on public life in March, I decided to try and aggregate my daily walks into the entire 160-kilometer route of the former Berlin Wall. Social isolation and Cold War history rolled into a monthlong mix of stroll and slog…

Even today, with an abundance of information, we struggle with the ‘who and what and why’ questions about the darkest time in Berlin’s history. Why was the Berlin Wall built? What political events lead to that point? How did peoples’ lives differ in the East and West? And ultimately, what…

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts will now be micro-managing everything in your life, including your health and your job, and what could possibly go wrong, comrade? After all, this is the same state government that has done such an incredible job regulating the state’s nursing homes that only 3,574 of MA’s…

Alongside its alternative scene, many visitors to Berlin want to know the best place to see the Berlin Wall or, more precisely, where to see what still remains of it. For 28 years a concrete wall over 100km long divided Berlin, and the entire country. Now it’s one of the…

Almost from the beginning, the fractious alliance that defeated Nazi Germany was in peril. The United States and Great Britain had long distrusted the communist regime of the Soviet Union, and the feeling was strongly mutual. As early as 1943, the Big Three—President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill,…

Dead drops, code names, double agents, daring escapes: the stuff of great spy novels. Somehow, the eight-chapter docuseries Spy Wars (Amazon Prime, TV-PG) manages to pull off all the intrigue and complexities of a riveting espionage tale in each 45-minute episode. With British actor Damian Lewis narrating, each true story…

As images of America’s overwhelmed hospital wards and snaking jobless lines have flickered across the world, people on the European side of the Atlantic are looking at the richest and most powerful nation in the world with disbelief. “When people see these pictures of New York City they say, ‘How…