I recently went down the rabbit hole on the history of American bullfighters in Mexico, thanks in large part to this incredibly niche book. One of the characters who jumped out at me was New York native Diego O’Bolger (née James Bolger), who was affectionately profiled in Tucson Weekly some 19 years ago. The story […]
For those of us who lack law degrees, reading judicial opinions can often be a major slog. Those who occupy the bench favor a prose style that is, to be charitable, a bit on the dry side; yarn-spinning is not their forte. Yet every once in a while, I stumble upon a ruling that crackles […]
Continuing on with our promised examination of DDT’s usefulness in the War on Malaria, we’re gonna turn our gaze southward this morning. As carefully detailed here, Mexico was a longtime heavy user of DDT, sloshing out 70,000 tons of the controversial chemical between 1959 and 1999. Then the nation resolved to phase out DDT entirely, […]
Tags:DDT·malaria·Mexico·public health
Last night, we got in a brief discussion with a pal regarding the Hollywood history of bearer bonds. These arcane financial instruments played a key role in at least two cinematic classics from our younger years: Beverly Hills Cop, in which Eddie Murphy’s pal foolishly steals some “German bearer bonds” from a drug dealer, and […]
Tags:bearer bonds·Beverly Hills Cop·crime·Die Hard·drugs·Hans Gruber·Mexico·money·movies·Texas
Since the writing game puts food on our table, we currently have a somewhat complicated relationship with Google Books. Try as we might, we’ve yet to figure out a way we’ll be able to avoid starvation in a world where the sweat of our brow gets given away for free. Yet those concerns fall by […]
Tags:California·Emperor Norton·Mexico·San Francisco·Sandman·U.S. history
Though the practice of seppuku is virtually synonmous with ritual suicide, it’s worth noting that feudal Japan hardly had a monopoly on ceremonial self-slaughter. The Mayans were also enthusiasts, though the details of their process obviously differed from those of their peers across the Pacific. As this fascinating paper makes clear, the Mayan method involved […]
The peaceful resolution of a Mexican kidnapping saga brings to mind a strange bit of American religious history: The Mormons’ 19th-century trek south of the border to establish a series of colonies. Those colonies were far more numerous before Pancho Villa came on the scene, but some hardy souls stuck out the conflict (PDF). Among […]
Tags:crime·kidnapping·Mexico·Mitt Romney·Mormons·Pancho Villa
Our ongoing First Contact series continues with a look at the initial encounter between the Aztecs and the Spanish. Rather than rehashing the conquistadors’ standard accounts of Tenochtitlan‘s grandeur and the horrors of human sacrifice, we thought we’d focus on the Aztecs’ point of view—specifically their mistaken belief that Hernando Cortes and his soldiers were […]
Tags:Aztecs·First Contact·Hernando Cortes·Mexico·religion·Spain
In sorting through the detritus of Depression v2.0, it’s gobsmacking to realize how much money the financial Masters of the Universe wasted on baubles and trifles. As this recent New York confession makes clear, bankers earning millions were stunningly unimaginative when it came to disposing of their lucre. Cars! Single malts! Vacation homes! Yawn… When […]
Tags:Aztecs·Depression v2.0·ethnobotany·Harvard·Mexico·R. Gordon Wasson
