On an unseasonably warm June day in Santiago, nearly 1,500 Chileans gathered behind the presidential palace to pay homage to Salvador Allende on the centennial of his birth. The police had erected a fence-like barrier to separate the assembled politicians and dignitaries—all dressed in elegant suits and ties or stylish winter dresses with colorful shawls wrapped around their shoulders—from the public, which was composed primarily of scruffy students, aging revolutionaries, blue-collar workers, reporters, and a few stray businesspeople out on their lunch break. Every five minutes or so, a portly man wearing a hard hat raised a bullhorn to his mouth and yelled, "Comrade Salvador Allende!" Immediately the crowd answered, "Present!"
Read More

In the once anonymous town of Petersberg, Kentucky, seven miles west of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, and "within a day's drive of almost 2/3 of the U.S. population," the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum makes a 27-million-dollar, 65,000-square-foot attempt to prove the Bible's creation story is "the true history book of the universe." The facility, "constructed debt-free," opened in May 2007, attracting 250,000 visitors in its first five months of operation. National news coverage has been plentiful, and as a Kentuckian who believes evolution is the true history book of the universe, I worry that the Creation Museum is drawing unsavory attention to my home state, fueling stereotypes. But I also can't wait to visit.
Read More

I once met an older Polish woman in New York who was writing her first novel. It was semi-autobiographical, she explained, and as such concerned the Holocaust. Having recently read several terrific novels on that subject—The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, Anya by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer—I of course asked if she knew them. "No," she replied. "But I doubt any convey the full horror of this event." I then timidly asked if any single work of fiction could do such a thing. "Well," she pondered, "if I can't do it in one, I'll have to write two."