The Chain Bridge; Budapest, Hungary; March 21, 2010.

– Kings of War unearths a 1940 BBC recording that provides proof of the British stiff upper lip.

– Christopher Hitchens re-reads Animal Farm and realizes what Orwell left out (via The Arabist):

There is, however, one very salient omission. There is a Stalin pig and a Trotsky pig, but no Lenin pig. Similarly, in Nineteen Eighty-Four we find only a Big Brother Stalin and an Emmanuel Goldstein Trotsky. Nobody appears to have pointed this out at the time (and if I may say so, nobody but myself has done so since; it took me years to notice what was staring me in the face).

– Daniel Gross explains why the U.S. will have a bigger, better recovery from the Great Recession than a) everyone assumes and b) everyone else.

– Obama v. Roberts: the struggle to come.

– John Robb on societal collapse:

…Complex societies, over time, develop a yawning mismatch between the local and the general.  More formally:

The need for evolutionary advances at the local level will always outstrip the pace of evolutionary change at the center.  When the mismatch grows too large, the entire system collapses [emphasis in original].

– Al Sahwa considers the ‘active shooter scenario‘ (think Columbine, the Fort Hood shooter, etc.) as part of their series on emerging threats.

– A great new photoblog out of Tokyo (and other destinations across Japan).

– Richard Archer offers a new take on the Boston Massacre: