I am pleased though not surprised when I learn how closely the movie parallels an enthralling, mind-boggling theory posited more than a century ago by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is the bad boy of Western philosophy. The delinquent too smart and prescient to ignore. He was, and is, the most seductive, the most inevitable, of philosophers. I arrive in Sils-Maria, Switzerland, years after Nietzsche.
I see why he liked it. The gingerbread houses, authentic as they are adorable; the air, sharp and clear; and, everywhere I look, the Alps, stretching skyward.
If there is such a thing as Swiss dirt, I see no evidence of it. Even the rubbish bins are spotless. I walk the few yards from my hotel to the small house where Nietzsche lived. At the time, a shop selling tea and spices and other staples occupied the ground floor. Nietzsche rented a room on the second floor. Nietzsche craved routine. He woke early, took a cold bath, and then sat down for a monkish breakfast: raw eggs, tea, an aniseed biscuit. During the day, he wrote and walked. In the evening, between seven and nine, he sat still in the dark.
An admirably rigid routine, but hardly heroic. Where, I wonder, is the philosophical daredevil, the aeronaut of the spirit? Physically, Nietzsche was no superhero, as the black-and-white photos on display here attest.
They portray a wisp of a person, more moustache than man. It tricked people into thinking he was someone he was not. One of the few philosophers to celebrate health as a virtue, Nietzsche enjoyed precious little himself. From age 13, Nietzsche suffered from migraine headaches that, along with a panoply of other ailments, plagued him throughout life. His terrible eyesight worsened over the years. He suffered fits of vomiting that lasted hours.
He tried many medical interventions and, for someone otherwise so sceptical, was remarkably susceptible to quackery. His father died at age Cancer, most likely. Nietzsche feared a similar fate awaited him. References to impending doom pepper his correspondence. His books are written in the urgent prose of a man who knew his days were numbered. He was almost superhumanly prolific, publishing 14 books from to Without exception, the books sold poorly.
Nietzsche paid the printing costs of some himself. Personally, I would have quit after the third flop. Not Nietzsche. He persisted, not even slowing down, despite the rejection and the physical ailments.
He enjoyed playing good guys, too, of course, and did so, even in his dotage, with similar verve. Many would suspect that Conan Doyle, a trained physician who was often beseeched by the public to apply his skills to real-life cases , might have been as inflexibly rational as Holmes. But by the end of his life, on July 7, , Conan Doyle was a fervent believer in spiritualism , having spent decades researching ghosts, fairies and the paranormal.
His fascination with the supernatural grew after his son Kingsley and his younger brother, Innes, battle-weary from service in World War I, died amid the worldwide influenza pandemic shortly after returning home.
Conan Doyle attended seances and wrote and lectured on spiritualism. He befriended Harry Houdini , the escape artist and magician, maintaining that Houdini had psychic powers even though Houdini himself denied it. Leckie produced several pages of automatic writing, in fluent English and signed with a cross.
By the time he died, Conan Doyle — after killing off Holmes in , only to be forced by popular demand to revive him 10 years later — had forsaken Holmes for good. To jazz aficionados, he was also something more: the trumpet virtuoso with the boundless musical imagination who almost singlehandedly shifted the focus of jazz from collective improvisation to individual expression — the man whose playing on the remarkable Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions , recorded when he was in his 20s, virtually defined the art of the jazz solo.
He learned fast. Before he was out of his teens, he was a fixture on the New Orleans music scene; a few years later he moved to Chicago, where he made the records that changed jazz history. In due time he became the first jazz superstar, embraced by the world for his bravura playing, his ebullient singing and his larger-than-life personality.
Louis Armstrong died at his home in Queens on July 6, That this quintessential American success story was born on July 4, , always seemed too perfect to be true. Call it poetic license. The date he and everyone else celebrated was, as the old saying goes, close enough for jazz. Being born on Feb. Celebrating your birthday every Dec. We culled our obituary files for people born that day to explore what, if anything, they had in common.
Were they more patriotic? Their ranks include Calvin Coolidge , the laconic 30th president; Stephen Foster , whose songs celebrated Americana; and Stephen Mather , the first director of the National Park Service. They do not, however, include George M. Cohan , the Yankee Doodle Dandy who, contrary to popular wisdom, was actually born on July 3.
Mayer born in what is now Belarus. For all the celebrities who were born on the Fourth of July, the holiday may be more famous for two adversaries who died on that date. A star athlete in high school, he participated in the Allied invasion of Europe, rising to the rank of sergeant before his honorable discharge in But for Evers, who was born on this day in to an African-American farming family in Decatur, Miss.
The racial injustice there rankled so much that he resolved to fight it, becoming the first field officer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Mississippi.
He recruited new members, championed school integration, encouraged blacks to vote and staged daring protests against racial inequality in the South. He also called for a new investigation of the murder of Emmett Till , a year-old African-American who was lynched in Mississippi in , supposedly for flirting with a white woman. People called his home threatening to shoot his family, and his house was firebombed. He did not back down. The battlefields of Europe did not stop Evers; those of Mississippi did.
Early in the morning of June 12, , a bullet from a rifle ripped through his back, the gunfire awakening his neighborhood and reverberating through the civil rights movement for decades. He was shot returning home from an N.
Kennedy delivered a televised address calling for equal rights for all American citizens , regardless of race. Evers managed to drag himself to his doorstep, where his wife, Myrlie , an activist who later became chairman of the N. At the emergency room he was initially refused admittance because he was black, until his family explained who he was. He was 37 when he died less than an hour later.
His murderer was Byron De La Beckwith , an avowed white supremacist. In two all-white, all-male juries deadlocked and refused to convict Beckwith. A second trial that year ended in a hung jury, and he spent most of his days as a free man.
In documents surfaced that indicated that jurors had been illegally screened, and Beckwith was brought to trial and convicted in He died in prison in Two months later, in August , the protests culminated with the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a pivotal, galvanizing moment for the civil rights movement.
As a war veteran Evers was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, with full military honors, achieving in death what he had been denied in life — equality with his brothers-in-arms and his fellow citizens. President Theodore Roosevelt signed two historic bills aimed at regulating the food and drug industries into law on June 30, With decisive strokes of his pen on that oppressively hot day , Roosevelt also provided Upton Sinclair with the greatest validation for which any muckraker could hope.
It remains an inspiration to journalists investigating the food industry and food health scares, workplace conditions and the environmental impact of industry. Sinclair later said that his readers had missed the point by focusing on the health risks created by unsanitary stockyards and meatpacking facilities rather than on the dehumanization of workers and the brutal treatment of animals.
Still, Sinclair was quick to harness the reaction. He died on Nov. Roosevelt invited Sinclair to the White House, then ordered a federal investigation.
Sinclair took every opportunity to harangue the Beef Trust, as the meatpacking industry was known, and sent a stream of telegrams to the White House demanding reform. Sinclair did no such thing. He was invited to the White House again in , the year before his death, to witness the signing of a new food safety law by President Lyndon B. On June 28, , an year-old student named Gavrilo Princip fired a pistol in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and changed the world. Ferdinand was aware of the danger — earlier that day he had deflected a bomb hurled at him by another would-be assassin, The Times reported.
Many contemporary accounts say the bomb actually bounced off the car. He was traveling to visit people injured in that blast when he was killed. Such courage, or perhaps obstinacy, was typical for Ferdinand. After the assassination Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.
Soon Europe, and much of the world, spiraled into war as one country after another, enmeshed in a web of previously established alliances, took sides — either with the Central Powers Germany, Austria-Hungary and their allies or the Allies France, Britain, Russia and others, including, eventually, the United States.
What became known as the Great War, or later World War I, would prove to be more devastating than any that had come before. Those two shots brought the world to arms, and the war that followed has brought devastation upon three continents and profoundly affected two others, and the tocsin has sounded in the remotest islands of the sea.
Towns have been bombarbed in the Society Islands and battles have been fought in all the oceans, from the extremity of South America to the Malay Peninsula, from the heart of Africa to the coast of China.
Nation after nation has been drawn into the whirlpool, and more are drawing toward it, and the end is far off. What face the world will wear when it is all over no man can predict, but it will be greatly changed, and not geographically alone. During the four years that followed, millions of young men died as they scrambled between trenches or were killed by disease and chemical weapons like mustard gas.
There were more than 30 million servicemen killed or wounded. By the time an armistice was declared in , a generation had lost its innocence, and writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald were inspired by the malaise of their contemporaries. The war formally ended when the Germans signed the Treaty of Versailles , agreeing reluctantly to terms dictated by the Allied forces.
The date was June 28, , exactly five years after Ferdinand was killed. In 20 years the world would be at war again, the wounds of World War I never having fully healed. An earlier version of this article misidentified the country that Austria-Hungary declared war on after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.
It was Serbia, not Bosnia. They were both fighters. They had both devoted themselves to defending what was right. And they were both nearing 50 on June 27, , as a summer night fell over Greenwich Village. By the time the sun came up, however, Mr. Pine, a deputy police inspector, and Ms. DeLarverie, a cross-dressing lesbian singer, were standing together at an intersection of history — even if they were on opposite sides of what appeared at first to be an old-fashioned donnybrook outside a mobbed-up bar.
It was Deputy Inspector Pine who led the police raid on the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street that night; the night that queer patrons fought back. And it was Ms. No one dared cross her, Ms. DeLarvarie said. For the police, a raid on a joint like the Stonewall had been, until June , a no-brainer. Gay bars were often controlled by organized crime. Corraling homosexuals was a good way for officers to boost their arrest records.
Pine said when discussing the Stonewall uprising at the New-York Historical Society on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. Until they did. Pine apologized for the raid in , six years before his death on Sept.
Not Forgotten is asking that of influential people this summer in a series of posts called Breaking Bread. A raconteur who loved good food, a fine cigar and a stiff drink, he would also be a convivial table guest. Brokaw wrote. And in his imagination he put himself there, with some specific questions in mind:. Sir Winston, I am limited to three questions, which is the interview equivalent of a teaspoon of domestic champagne.
Were there any moments after one of your famous speeches that you privately thought Great Britain was in greater peril than you let on? Was that a humbling sign that the best days of the British Empire were in the past?
You had a lifetime of cigars, brandy, wine and very little exercise. You were a prisoner of war and escaped. Your political career seemed to be over in the s, but your glory days were yet to come. You lived to Was it your indomitable will, or was it a higher being looking out for you? Sir, your country has been an empire, a leading member of a western alliance and now has voted to go it alone.
Is this wise? Scientists racing to develop a vaccine against Zika virus disease this summer may be hoping for results like those of Dr. Jonas Salk, creator of the first successful vaccine against poliomyelitis. Salk died on this day in at the age of 80, decades after the polio vaccine he developed helped vanquish the deadly, paralyzing disease throughout much of the world. Schmeck Jr. The discovery made Dr.
Salk a hero. Schmeck wrote. In recent years, however, fears of rare, vaccine-preventable diseases have subsided. Albert B. Sabin, who developed a live polio virus vaccine that ultimately replaced the use of Dr.
The live vaccine, given orally, is easier and cheaper to administer, and is particularly useful during epidemics because a vaccinated person temporarily sheds the vaccine virus and can passively immunize others. It was precisely because of this risk that, five years after Dr. Children in America now exclusively receive the inactivated poliovirus vaccine , known as IPV, that resulted from Dr. Worldwide eradication of the disease has remained an elusive goal.
This year and last, polio cases unrelated to the vaccine have occurred in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Earlier in the decade, children in Somalia, Nigeria, Syria and more than a dozen other countries were infected by wild polio virus. Vaccination campaigns have sometimes been thwarted by war and distrust of medical teams. Even after she ascended to worldwide stardom, she constantly sought the love, adulation and acceptance that she felt had eluded her since childhood.
The seeds of her discontent were sown when she was very young. She had a strained relationship with her mother, a fierce stage parent, and was devastated when her beloved father died of meningitis in Garland said she was on a lifelong quest for love. She was married five times and was quoted as saying she longed for the sincere love of one man, rather than the applause of thousands of fans.
Garland turned to drugs and alcohol to fill the void. She died from an apparently accidental barbiturate overdose. She was At least I hope she has. Her rosy complexion as a toddler gave her the nickname Pinky. She returned to the United States 16 years later, in , not as Pinky but as Benazir Bhutto, the new prime minister of Pakistan — the first woman elected to lead an Islamic country. Her time in office would be as tumultuous as her childhood had been idyllic, ending in her assassination by the Pakistani Taliban on Dec.
Bhutto was born on this day in to a wealthy family whose lands were once so extensive it took days to appraise them. In a country where families dominated business and politics in an almost feudal manner, the Bhuttos seemed destined to rule.
As Ms. He imparted lessons to her along the way. But her political education went into overdrive when a top army general, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, overthrew her father and imprisoned him.
Bhutto visited him often, absorbing one-on-one political seminars in the grimmest of settings. Her father encouraged her to study other female leaders, including Indira Gandhi and Joan of Arc. Bhutto was hanged in , charged with orchestrating the murder of a political rival. Bhutto was forbidden to attend his funeral. But as the opposition to a military regime, Ms. Bhutto spent half her time in prison or under house arrest, sometimes in solitary confinement. She was elected twice, serving from December to August and again from October to November Bhutto could be imperial in bearing, charming and also ruthless.
After accusing her government of corruption, her younger brother Murtaza, a member of the provincial legislature, was gunned down outside his home in a police ambush. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, whom she had named minister of investment, was indicted in the murder but exonerated. Witnesses were either arrested, intimidated or killed.
Each of her terms as prime minister ended when she was dismissed by the president on graft charges. When she and her husband left office in , they were worth hundreds of millions of dollars, though the source of their wealth was unclear. Bhutto spent most of the last nine years of her life in self-imposed exile, much of it in a palatial estate in Dubai.
After receiving amnesty on the pending charges, she returned in late to seek a third term. A close ally of the Afghan Taliban — which her government supported in its infancy in — killed her at a rally outside the capital. Pakistan still waits today for a real democracy to emerge, and an elected leader from outside the few feudal families that have ruled the country, alternating with the military, since its birth. In New York City, Siegel was a core member of the infamous hit squad Murder Incorporated and implicated in many high-profile killings.
But Siegel, who died in a hail of bullets 69 years ago today , was also something of a visionary. He eventually moved west and pioneered the development of Las Vegas as a casino capital, investing in it when it was little more than a sleepy desert town with a pliant City Council and lax gambling regulations.
In New York, Siegel, a product of the tough streets of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, was, like his associate Meyer Lansky, a kingpin in what was known as the Jewish mob. Seeking to expand his empire, he left New York City in the s to set up bootlegging and gambling operations on the West Coast. But Siegel wanted more. When the casino struggled at first, Siegel used millions of dollars from mob investors to prop it up.
Without him, the Flamingo would have folded. On June 20, , he was shot through the living room window of Ms.
The casino he built in her name endured until , when the last of the original buildings were razed and replaced by Hilton. He wrote about his father, Wyatt Cooper, a screenwriter and actor from Mississippi. The paper was lying on the kitchen counter, and I was startled to see his face staring up at me as I passed by. It was two days after his death. The article was short. What would happen to my family and me now?
As a teenager I used to imagine that he had written me a letter, and every birthday I secretly hoped it would arrive. After a while, no matter how much you love someone, no matter how hard you try to remember, you start to forget little details — the sound of their voice, the way they smell, the look in their eyes when they smile and laugh.
If I could see my father just once more, sit down and talk with him, look into his crystal blue eyes, feel the safety of his arms around me, I would give anything for that. Is he proud of me? What would he have done if he were me? I just turned 49, and my doctor assures me I have many years yet to live.
What path forward should I take? How should I live out these years I never expected to have, these years he never lived to see? For his confirmation gift, his parents gave him a telescope. His imagination was piqued as a student in Berlin when he read about a phantasmagorical journey to the moon. When he died on June 16, , Wernher von Braun , the son of East Prussian aristocrats, had left an indelible, if ambiguous, legacy as a visionary space-travel pioneer.
They were scooped up in Operation Paperclip and transplanted in Alabama, where they formed the vanguard of an American space program that built the Saturn V rocket, which sent nine crews toward the moon. He would say later that his chief goal was always space travel — eventually a permanent moon base and a mission to Mars — and that his V-2 rockets had worked perfectly, except that they landed on the wrong planet. As the satirist Tom Lehrer sang:. Unlike many of her jazz world contemporaries — the list is practically endless — she was abstemious.
When she was not onstage or on tour, where she spent most of her life, she preferred tranquil days at her Beverly Hills home and a placid social life with friends like Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan and Peggy Lee.
Yet her quiet, abstemious side probably contributed to her longevity; her career lasted six decades. Fitzgerald had a protean voice. She sang show tunes, swing, bebop, novelties, bossa nova and opera. An inscrutable point in space, which contains all other points simultaneously, inspires a poet, and revenge. Despairing curators wander in a labyrinthine library stocked with innumerable, unintelligible books.
A mild-mannered reader dreams of gauchos, knife fights and death. These and all other manner of the mystical, enigmatic and paradoxical imbued the writing of Jorge Luis Borges , an Argentine author whose concise, intricate work overflowed with wonder.
He penned densely philosophical short stories and poems of his own and literary hoaxes that intentionally blurred the line between reality and fiction. Borges was widely considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature, but he never received it. Some speculated that the Nobel committee overlooked Mr. Borges because of his reluctance to engage with the political violence that engulfed Argentina in the 20th Century.
But Mr. Borges, an otherworldly figure himself, preferred the printed page to our unruly and unwelcoming reality. That reality grew more distant when he went blind in the s and was forced to rely on others to transcribe his words and read to him. He departed this world for good when he died of liver cancer on June 14, Toward the end of his life, however, Mr.
Borges said he recognized himself in his most fantastical writing. Borges said. Clinton replied. In he asked president George W. Bush replied. A war of choice or a war of necessity? For almost 17 years as moderator Mr. The show regularly reached an audience of almost four million people. And he was working until the end. Below is a tribute episode that aired after his death. Russert covered elections through the s and early s.
In one memorable instance he brought comprehensible analysis to the confusing ballot tumult in Florida in the presidential election that ended with a Supreme Court decision and victory for Mr. Russert was an unlikely candidate for broadcast stardom. The son of a garbage collector from Buffalo, N. Mario M. Cuomo of New York. He was meaty and sometimes cross-looking with his dramatically knitted eyebrows; he could be prosecutorial one moment and jovial the next. He joined NBC in as an executive.
The show still draws a comparable number of viewers with Chuck Todd occupying Mr. Today we have David H.
Petraeus, a former C. Besides celebrating writers and those in the arts, the club, in Midtown Manhattan, has also recognized military and government leaders including the former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and me at its annual state dinners. Hosting Grant — a great writer as well as a great leader — at the Lotos Club would thus be very fitting.
It was then adopted as fact by intellectuals who were keen to demolish the reputation of Nietzsche, whose idea of a "superman" was used to underpin Nazism.
Dr Sax studied accounts of Nietzsche's collapse with dementia in , when he was admitted to an asylum in Switzerland and initially diagnosed as being in the advanced stages of syphilis. According to Dr Sax, however, Nietzsche's notes show no signs of the symptoms now regarded as evidence of this disease, such as an expressionless face and slurred speech.
In the current issue of the Journal of Medical Biography , Dr Sax argues that the philosopher was suffering from a slowly developing brain tumour. Frontotemporal Dementia. Acta Psychiatr Scand ; 6 Miranda M, Navarrete L. The neurological illness of Friedrich Nietzsche. Acta neurol belg ; La Gaya Dementia: Nietzsche als Patient. Friedrich Nietzsche and his illness: a neurophilosophical approach to instrospection. J Hist Neurosci ; 22 2 Koszka C. Friedrich Nietzsche : a classical case of mitochondrial encephalomyopathy with lactic acidosis and stroke-like episodes MELAS syndrome?
Selling sickness: the pharmaceutical industry and disease mongering. BMJ ; Fukuyama F. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco; Henriques RP. Chart 1 systematizes the main diagnostic hypotheses recently attributed to Nietzsche, accompanied by a glossary of technical medical terms. Some authors assume the existence of comorbidities and, therefore, propose several diagnostic hypotheses for Nietzsche. Thus, for example, Cybulska 11 Thumbnail Chart 1 Major recent diagnostic hypotheses DH , published since , alternatives to syphilis, attributed to Nietzsche as a causal explanation for his collapse suffered in Turin.
Fleck L. Madrid: Alianza Editorial; Syphilis has been perceived and conceived in various ways throughout history, according to the styles of thought then in force, that is, according to the different a priori socio-historical ones that determine in the speaking beings corresponding ways of thinking, feeling and acting.
Most authors assume that the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter on November 25, , under the sign of Scorpio and in the House of Mars, was the cause of venereal evil Lustseuche. The good Jupiter succumbed to evil planets Saturn and Mars. The sign of Scorpio, to which the sex parts are subjected, explains why the genitals were the first point affected by the new diseases 32 It would then be associated with the syphilitic blood whose determinant was the Hippocratic-Galenic theory of bodily humor.
Schain 14 Finally, at the close of the 19 th century, syphilis would be conceived as a biomedical nosological entity linked to bacteriological science, whose specific condition was determined by the Treponema pallidum and whose natural history would become known. Neisser and Ducrey, who isolated the causative agent of gonorrhea in and chancroid in , and Wassermann, who established the serological test for syphilis in provided their inputs on this subject.
It should be noted that the scientific diagnosis of syphilis based on the Wassermann test did not correspond to a scientific treatment of syphilis, which would only occur after the introduction of penicillin as a drug in Therefore, at the time of diagnosis of progressive general paralysis PGP neurosyphilis to Nietzsche at the Basel and Iena clinics in , when bacteriology was incipient, there was some correlation for the nineteenth-century medical reason between syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid around the style of thought linked to venereal evil and mercury.
Carrara S, Carvalho M. Recent biographers and pathographers 11 Astor D. Contrary to what Podack 2 2. This thesis was indeed confirmed in when researchers at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research announced that they had found the Treponema pallidum in the brain of paralytics 33 Moreover, as we have seen, gonorrhea — which Nietzsche would have contracted — and syphilis belonged to the same discursive semantic complex around the venereal disease, which in itself could justify its diagnosis of syphilis in the nineteenth-century medical view, given the indistinction between the two nosological categories.
Nietzsche was, in fact, hospitalized in the second class on account of his meager resources as a retired teacher in Basel for the funding of his expenses with the asylum treatment 1 1. It is a very seductive argument, since in line with that of anti-psychiatry, which currently gains a politically correct contour. Such authors have argued that the symbolic and financial irrelevance of Nietzsche — deposited in an asylum wing for the poor — would have provided the supposed misunderstanding the hasty diagnosis of syphilis that they seek to mend.
Safranski 35 Safranski R. Consistent with nineteenth-century medical reasoning, one of the recent critics 14 Theodor Zieher. In the nineteenth century, syphilis was a cultural fact matched by medical reason, and not a scientific fact, yet to be invented by the style of thought attached to the Wassermann test.
Ginzburg C. In: Ginzburg C. Nordenstrom J. Seguindo os passos de Sherlock Holmes. Porto Alegre: Artmed; Let us have a look at that.
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