Heather Cox Richardson writes a valuable and informative history of the politics of guns in America. She makes clear that the current Republican interpretation of the Second Amendment is not rooted in American history.

Please open the link to see the footnotes.

She writes:

Today, a gunman murdered at least 19 children and 2 adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

For years now, after one massacre or another, I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority. The idea that massacres are “the price of freedom,” as right-wing personality Bill O’Reilly said in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 others, is new, and it is about politics, not our…

“A Rainbow in Curved Air is the third album by American composerTerry Riley, released in 1969 on CBS Records. The title track consists of Riley’s overdubbed improvisations on several keyboard and percussion instruments, including electric organ, electric harpsichord, dumbec, and tambourine. The B-side ‘Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band’ is a saxophone-based drone piece featuring tape loops and edits, drawing on Riley’s all-night improvisatory performances in the 1960s. Riley’s record deal with CBS was part of ‘Music of Our Time,’ a short-lived album series on American experimental music helmed by CBS employee David Behrman, who also facilitated the release of Riley’s 1968 album In C; these two were the most successful LPs in the series. The album subsequently influenced a number of rock and electronic productions. … In 1967, Behrman had received permission from CBS to curate a series…

“At the end of World War II, as Europe lay in ruins, so too did its ‘intellectual landscape,’ notes the Living Philosophy video above. In the midst of this ‘intellectual crater’ a number of great thinkers debated ‘the blueprint for the future.’ Feminist philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir put it bluntly: ‘We were to provide the postwar era with its ideology.’ Two names — De Beauvoir’s partner Jean-Paul Sartre and his friend Albert Camus — came to define that ideology in the philosophy broadly known as Existentialism. … Their fame would continue into the postwar years, despite Camus’ retreat from philosophical writing after the publication of The Rebel. While we’ve previously brought you stories of their friendship, and its bitter end, the video above digs deeper into the Sartre-Camus rivalry, with critical historical context for their thinking. Their initial falling out took place over The Rebel…