Christopher Caldwell

Anyone who lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 will remember the pitiable figure cut by the Eastern Bloc residents interviewed back then. They looked stunned, tongue-tied, disoriented, like rescuees emerging into the sunlight after days in a collapsed mine. Whether they were . . . . Continue Reading »

For Americans, the 1990s are both the most sharply defined and the most fuzzily understood of modern decades. The nineties began on 11/9/1989, with the breaching of the Berlin Wall by East Germans—a symbolic repudiation of communism and a glorious American victory in the Cold War. They ended . . . . Continue Reading »

The Watergate ­scandal began in 1972 with a burglary of the Democratic Party’s headquarters and ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon two years later. Almost as soon as Nixon had left Washington, the politicians, lawyers, and journalists who had rallied to oust him began recording for . . . . Continue Reading »

Looking back on his time as a Cuban-trained communist revolutionary, the French writer Régis Debray recalled that Chile’s Marxist president used to display on his desk a photo of guerrilla leader Che Guevara, inscribed: “To Salvador Allende, who is headed to the same place by a different . . . . Continue Reading »

With just over 120,000 people, Bergamo, northeast of Milan, is not a particularly populous city, and it is short of priests, like almost every other city in the Catholic West. Yet in the second week of March alone, six priests died of coronavirus in Bergamo, and five more died the week after. By . . . . Continue Reading »

There have always been drug addicts in need of help, but the scale of the present wave of heroin and opioid abuse is . . . . Continue Reading »

It is fanaticism, America’s fanaticism, that the historian Walter McDougall blames when he considers the strategic advantages America has squandered since . . . . Continue Reading »