Recent Back Issues

The Real Rasputin?

The Real Rasputin?

Richard SmoleyAug 1, 202312 min read

The story of Gregory Rasputin—the Siberian “mad monk,” healer, profligate, unwitting destroyer of the Romanov dynasty—is well known. He has been the subject of innumerable books and several films. Yet none of them seem to have fathomed him fully. His…

A Higher Power

A Higher Power

Dawn Eden GoldsteinAug 1, 202316 min read

In 1940, Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, a man who knew sin and failure like he knew the back of his hand, was living with his wife, Lois, in a tiny room at the Alcoholics Anonymous “clubhouse” in downtown…

Rated “Condemned”

Rated “Condemned”

Jean IversenAug 1, 202312 min read

We sat, unmoving, in the darkness of the movie theater as the first notes of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s overture played—a foreboding orchestra followed by sinister electric guitar. It was the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, and we had been forbidden…

Journey of the Rainbow Serpent

Journey of the Rainbow Serpent

Nartana PremachandraAug 1, 202311 min read

Oceans of time support the earth; and deep within this space-filled sea, in a moment as incredulous as one’s own birth, the universe began cooling. The genesis of everything had just begun, three-hundred-and-eighty-thousand years previously, in a feverish instant, and…

La Llorona

La Llorona

Edward W. Wood, Jr.Aug 1, 202312 min read

In the fall of 1988, I was given a second grant for two months at the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. The foundation owns several acres at the center of Taos, a few blocks from the Plaza. A dozen…