Humans can move through time in only one way: forward, second by second, even when we set the clocks ahead an hour. But literature isn’t bound by the same rules. When narratives take place in the past or future, transporting the reader to the scene of events that already occurred or are expected to happen, that’s a kind of time travel exclusive to storytelling. For example, a Nomi Stone poem about cleaning mussels begins in the present, as the speaker prepares a meal.

About 18 years ago, while delivering a talk at a CDC conference, Gregory Poland punked 2,000 of his fellow scientists. Ten minutes into his lecture, a member of the audience, under Poland’s instruction, raced up to the podium with a slip of paper. Poland skimmed the note and looked up, stony-faced. “Colleagues, I am unsure of what to say,” he said. “We have just been notified of a virus that’s been detected in the U.S.

I have a message for my Russian friends, and for the Russian soldiers serving in Ukraine: There are things going on in the world that have been kept from you, terrible things that you should know about. But before I tell you about the harsh realities, let me tell you about the Russian who became my hero.In 1964, when I was 14 years old, I had the chance to attend the World Weightlifting Championships in Vienna.

About three weeks ago, COVID case rates in the United Kingdom made an abrupt about-face, spurred on by a more transmissible Omicron subvariant called BA.2. (So far, there is no reason to believe the new subvariant causes more severe disease.) Case rates are rising, too, in Switzerland and Greece and Monaco and Italy and France. Given that BA.

This article has been adapted from the introduction to The Folio Society’s new edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.So much of what we imagine to be new is old; so many of the seemingly novel illnesses that afflict modern society are really just resurgent cancers, diagnosed and described long ago. Autocrats have risen before; they have used mass violence before; they have broken the laws of war before.

Sign up for Tom’s newsletter, Peacefield, here.Russian President Vladimir Putin is in trouble. Despite his limited gains on the ground in Ukraine, he is facing strategic defeat in a war that no one (including me) would have expected him to lose. The vaunted Russian army has turned out to be a hollow force whose major skill sets seem to be bullying its own conscripts and killing foreign civilians.