Category: Feature

In recent decades Anthony Bukoski has emerged as one of the best writers of short fiction, not just in America but in the English language.  He has turned the ugly streets of his native Superior, Wisconsin,  into a literary landscape as mythical as Faulkner’s Mississippi and Tolkiens Middle Earth and populated it with unforgettable characters whose failures and follies are redeemed by their self-respect and their capacity for love.   Of his earlier collections, I wrote previously:   Anthony Bukoski is one of the finest fiction writers in America. Stolidly remaining in the grim ruins of Superior, Wisconsin, he has...

The empire of the Babylonians was not fated to last, and Cyrus the Persian, after entering the city in triumph in 539, promulgated an edict authorizing the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem.  It has been conjectured that the Persians were rewarding Babylonian Jews for their covert assistance in the defeat of Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, but, there is no need to posit such a special relationship.   Cyrus’s general policy was to reverse the forced resettlement of inflicted on subject nations by Babylonian and Assyrian rulers, whose strategy of divide et impera would be emulated by later tyrants.

Few details of the story of Exodus have been securely confirmed by archeologists.  Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to suppose that nomadic Hebrews made their way out of Egypt back to southern Canaan, where some of their people appear to have been living already.

Ilhan Omar’s campaign slogan was “Send Her Back”–to Congress, of course. There is no doubt that the Congress of the United States  deserves a member as loose in her financial dealings as in her intimate life,  but it is not to Washington but to Mogadishu that she should be sent.