Jim Withers J.D. Salinger had a knack for coming up with arresting titles: The Catcher in the Rye; Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; A Perfect Day for Bananafish; For Esmé – with Love and Squalor. All intriguing. So, too, is Just Before the War with the Eskimos, a Salinger short story which appeared in the New Yorker in 1948 and as part of his Nine Stories collection. That title always intrigued me. Why would anyone want to fight the Inuit? It wasn’t really a thing – unti

White people, we are told by the current master of Mar-a-Lago North, have been “ very badly treated” by the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement, which he considers a form of “ reverse discrimination.” The movement led by such titans as Martin Luther King Jr., whose memory was marked Monday with parades and services across the U.S. on the national holiday in his honour, made it possible for white and Black people to play sports together, to eat together in restaurants

Human memory, it turns out, is less like a meticulous archival librarian and more like a distracted squirrel with access to a filing cabinet and cocaine. Which is why you can recall with crystalline precision the exact pattern of wallpaper in a dentist’s office you visited once in 2009, yet cannot for the life of you clearly remember a single coherent moment from your own wedding, graduation or the birth of a child you love very much. Cognitive scientists will tell you this i