A Healthy Haunting in the San Gabriel Valley

Our Resident Ghost Was a Long-Lived Legend Who Gifted Us an Amazing Garden and a Sense of the Good Life

Ten Octobers ago, my family moved into our San Gabriel Valley home, and people started knocking on the door. Some knockers were neighbors. Some were trick-or-treaters.

And some were looking for Steve.

I had no idea who they were talking about. I certainly didn’t know that Steve was dead. I didn’t even know that Steve wasn’t his real name.

But I would learn, slowly, the story of the gentleman who used to live in my house. His family left no forwarding address for the mail that still arrives for him, and my attempts …

by Joe Mathews | October 26, 2021

A Letter From Greece, Where a Photo of a Sheep Is Going Viral | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

A Letter From Greece, Where Quarantined Sheep Go for Walks

A Daily Debate About Safety and Freedom Has Kept Greeks Safe From Sickness

by Eugenia Triantafyllou | May 1, 2020

For Athens, I am in the middle of nowhere. It’s early morning, and I have walked up the hill that overlooks our apartment building with my dog, Skeletor, a young, …

Why Is the British Museum Still Fighting to Keep the Parthenon’s Marble Sculptures?

Removed from Greece More Than 200 Years Ago, They Now Fuel a Post-Brexit Fight Over Who Is Civilized and Who Is a Barbarian

by Gabrielle Bruney | March 18, 2020

Two-and-a-half millennia ago, Athenian artist Phidias depicted the Greek myth of the Centauromachy in his sculptures for Athens’ Parthenon. Athens, the wealthy and powerful democratic nation-state, was of course analogous …

How the EU’s Greek Tragedy Became a British Farce

Out-of-Touch Elites Have Themselves to Blame for Losing Voters to "Populism"

By James Galbraith | October 18, 2016

British citizens took to the polls to cast their “Leave” ballots—and their grievances—in the now-infamous Brexit vote last June, seeking to escape the overarching power of the European Union. Their …

Ancient Greek Demagogues Might Sound Familiar in 2016

June 25, 2016

At “How Does Democracy Survive Demagoguery?”, a Zócalo/Getty Villa “Open Art” event at the Getty Villa in Malibu, Eric Robinson, an Indiana University historian of ancient Greece and Rome, describes …

Almost Any Politician in a Democracy Is a Bit of a Demagogue

A Classicist, a Historian, and a Rhetorician Talk Trump, Clinton, and Cleon

By Joe Mathews | June 22, 2016

There’s plenty of nastiness in our democracy. But is there anything new?

For all the fear and consternation about the lies, insults, conspiracy theories, and rhetorical excesses of the 2016 presidential …

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