The fall

20 years ago
today

the joke's (still) on you
Uncle Joe!

(Stalin is captured in this photograph by Lt. Gen. Nikolai Vlasik, the Soviet dictator's bodyguard. Vlasik's off-the-record photos of Stalin caused a sensation in the early 1960s when an enterprising Soviet journalist spirited some out, selling them to newspapers and magazines worldwide.)

and our piece of the wall
in Lincoln Square

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive,
but to be young was very heaven.

William Wordsworth
on the French Revolution