Andy Gibb, born Andrew Roy Gibb on March 5, 1958, entered a world already touched by music. His family moved from Lancashire, England, to Australia when he was six months old, and by 1967, the rising fame of his older brothers—Barry, Robin, and Maurice, the Bee Gees—pulled them back to England. There, in a London … Read more

Sometimes the easiest-looking ground is the most dangerous, and no one learned that harder than the six men who rode into a basin in the Mojave in the summer of 1882. The ground looked flat and open, nothing on it taller than a man’s boot, the kind of country you could see across for a … Read more

It was 3:47 in the morning on December 25th, and the B-29 Superfortresses were already being hoisted to the hangar deck for their bombing runs. Navy film crews captured the pale false dawn shimmering across the Formosa Strait, the planes swaying on cables against a black sky. Far below those preparations, another kind of weapon … Read more

In the mid-1930s, a woman in a Manhattan apartment flipped a switch, and her kitchen came alive. The electric refrigerator kept her milk cold. The radio played jazz from a nightclub downtown. An electric iron heated in seconds. Outside, the city burned with streetlights and neon. Three hundred miles away, a farmer’s wife in rural … Read more

On April 14, 1943, a prisoner at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin ran toward the electrified perimeter fence and died. The man was Yakov Dzhugashvili, a senior lieutenant in the Red Army who had been captured by the Germans in the chaotic summer of 1941. He was also the eldest son of Joseph Stalin. … Read more

You sit down with the pile of forms in front of you—adjusted gross income, itemized deductions, standard withholding—and you realize, as an adult who spent thirteen years in formal education, that you have no idea what any of it means. The government expects every working person in the country to understand this document, and nobody … Read more

The consent came as a formal declaration read before the Privy Council, and when the Lord Chancellor spoke the words on the twentieth of April 2004, the last barrier fell away. Her Majesty the Queen had given her permission for Lady Davina Elizabeth Alice Benedikte Windsor to marry Gary Christy Lewis. The lady and the … Read more

The two identical faces appeared in the doorway of the forge, and Isaiah, who had been a blacksmith at Blackwood Plantation for twenty-six years, set down his hammer. It was February 3rd, 1856, and the girl who stepped forward carried a basket of bread from the kitchen, a delivery ordinary enough that no one would … Read more

On the morning of October 17, 1910, Silas Buchanan rode his dun mare up the steep trail that switchbacked through stands of oak and hickory on Harkness Ridge. He carried eleven envelopes in his coat pocket, bundled with twine by Postmaster Jeremiah Collier of Milston, a small coal-mining settlement in Windham County. The letters were … Read more