Twenty five years separates us from the worst nuclear disaster in the history of mankind. I recently wrote about the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight and realized that a mere 25 years also separated April 1986 from Gagarin’s first human spaceflight in April 1961. On an early Saturday morning in April of 1986 at 1:23 […]
It was 25 years ago today that the Number 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic exploded. The first the world learned of it was the following day when radiation detectors in Sweden went berserk. The heroics of the “liquidators,” many of whom died from radiation sickness in […]
That, of course, is the title of James Baldwin’s famous two-essay collection. Baldwin took it from the old spiritual, “Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep.” “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!” Well, I don’t like to get all biblical, but I bet a lot of folks in Russia and […]
First of all, I have to apologize for not being so much in evidence here over the past couple of weeks. It’s been busy: Last weekend had three – count ’em – three birthday parties, including a big (successful) surprise for my wife with many old friends, followed the next day by a museum extravaganza […]