danny
Dutch

Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” still stands as the ultimate outlaw song. With the infamous line “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” he proclaims himself a killer badass, the kind of guy most people wouldn’t want to see released from prison. But Cash’s sympathy for the outlaw went much further than playing an exaggerated version onstage, even on the stages of famous prisons like Folsom. In “San Quentin,” he articulates the problem of prisons: No matter how badly

Victor Hugo wrote poetry, novels, and drama—more than enough for any mortal—but he also made some four thousand drawings over the course of his life. He was an adept draftsman, even an experimental one: he sometimes drew with his nondominant hand or when looking away from the page. If pen and ink were not available, he had recourse to soot, coal dust, and coffee grounds. He didn’t publish his drawings for fear they would distract from his projects as a writer; instead, he dre

On 23 February 1820, a new sort of terrorism was foiled when police raided a backstreet stable loft in central London and caught men preparing to assassinate the current Prime Minister and the entire British cabinet. The so-called Cato Street conspiracy has echoes in more modern outrages. At the time it terrified ministers in Lord Liverpool’s Tory cabinet. But the overwhelming likelihood is that the real conspiracy was provoked and inspired by a spy in the pay of the governme

February 17, 1904 Madama Butterfly had its premiere at La Scala in Milan—“a date that marks one of the worst fiascos in the history of opera,” Mary Jane Phillips-Matz writes in The Puccini Companion. “The premiere was greeted by ‘roars, howls, laughter, bellowing, and guffaws.’ Almost none of his music could be heard, and any applause was answered with shouts of protest and jeers. Puccini described the experience as ‘a real lynching.’ According to The New York Times the opera

Perhaps better than anyone else, Fidel Castro was keenly aware of the fact that the histories and destinies of Cuba and the United States were profoundly intertwined. A fascinating and virtually unknown document housed in the US National Archives and Records Administration demonstrates that Castro was aware of this from an early age. ‘My good friend Roosvelt’, opens a letter a young Castro sent to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, written on 6 November 1940, the day after

In her 2014 memoir, Ginger Alden revealed then-fiancé Elvis Presley's final words before his death in 1977. During a night of sleeplessness, Presley told Alden, "I'm going to the bathroom to read." The rest, as they say, is history. Poignant, funny, sad, weird or mean—last words can make quite the impact as we shuffle off the stage of life. Here are 64 notable examples. 1. JOSEPH WRIGHT Wright, a linguist, edited the English Dialect Dictionary. His last word? “Dictionary.” 2.

Photographer Angélica Dass’ Humanae project is cataloguing every human skin tone to reveal the complexity of colour and race. When Brazilian artist and photographer Angélica Dass became pregnant with her first child, she was presented with a mystery. Angélica is brown-skinned, with mixed ancestry. Her Spanish husband has “the colour of a lobster when he gets sunburnt.” So what colour would her child be? Angélica grew up in a technicolour family, with relatives black, white an

Even the smartest people who ever lived, have days when they feel dumb — really, really dumb. Oct. 1, 1861, was that kind of day for Charles Darwin. In a letter to his friend Charles Lyell, Darwin says, "I am very poorly today," and then — and I want you to see this exactly as he wrote it, so you know this isn't a fake; it comes from the library of the American Philosophical Society, courtesy of their librarian Charles Greifenstein. Can you read it? It says: But this is Charl

An exemplar of the tradition of 'concerned photography', Sebastião Salgado is one of the most widely-respected of contemporary photojournalists. His in-depth bodies of work document the lives of people the world over, finding beauty, strength and hope even in those in the bleakest of circumstances. He has spent his life taking epic, mind-swarming photographs of gold mines, oil fields and genocide. But now Salgado is turning his lens on the planet’s last undamaged places. Salg

Few talents dominated Victorian England like William Morris (1834 -1896). Known primarily today as a designer and creator of wall coverings, fabrics, books, stained glass, and furniture, he is also revered as an early and ardent Socialist, deeply concerned with the appalling conditions facing most 19th century working men, women, and children. A rejection of cheap, machine-made gimcrackery drove young Morris, along with his close friend, the slightly older Dante Gabriel Rosse