Asta Nielsen, International Film Sensation

Here’s the deal about “women’s history”: once you’re sensitive to the subject you stumble across references to notable women all the time.* Take the case of Asta Nielsen: I first met her in this sentence: “Asta Nielsen, newly arrived in Berlin from Denmark, described her horror when a skeletal horse collapsed in the street.”** For…

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The Fabric of Civilization

  Two sentences early in Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World caught my imagination: “What we usually call the Stone Age could just as easily be called the String Age. The two prehistoric technologies were literally intertwined.” I was predisposed to enjoy the book, which combines two of my favorite…

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