Apartment Choice

In a recent friendly telephone conversation , Russian President Vladimir Putin may well have exclaimed to U.S. President Donald Trump , "Darn that dream I dream each night, but it haunts me and it won't come true." It would be a timely commentary on present day Russia . On this 100th anniversary of the October 1917 Russian Revolution , it is  useful to assess the existence and the failure of the dreams of 20th century Russian Bolsheviks with their aspirations for a new society and a world Communist revolution , and the consequent disillusionment of the faithful, and their sad fate, resulting from the disastrous reality of the Soviet regime led by Josef Stalin. Compelling narratives have been related concerning the drama and tragedy of the Old Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union in powerful and compelling works by Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Victor Kravchenko, among others. Now, the narrative is recounted in a massive 1,100 page, brilli...

Jim Pantaleo’s phone winked out sometime after 6:00 a.m. on Aug. 1, 2012. The last message he sent before it died was to his wife, Allison. “Love you forever,” it said. And then, nothing. Jim had spent the day before writing and drinking, slowly. From his perch at the corner of an L-shaped bar at a pub in Toronto’s east end, he tapped away at his laptop. He sipped beer and he did shots of “liquid cocaine,” a mix of Jagermeister and Goldschlager schnapps. Jim had arrived at the pub, Rails and Ales, at about 3 p.m. “He seemed very normal,” says Len Grammenopoulos, the bar’s owner. He ate some food. He joked around. Sometime after midnight, he sent his mother an email with seven letters inside. At about 2:30 a.m., he paid his tab — maybe $60, $70. He high-fived Len and he walked out. “I remember him saying ‘I’m gone,’” Len says. “And that was it.” Jim was gone. When Jim and Allison Pantaleo first met — as coworkers at a pub called Gabby ’s on the Danforth — it was something close to ...

August 13, 2017 Cat and dog owners alike adore their pets. And though it’s not always obvious from their behavior and body language, dogs and cats do love their owners back. Sometimes, our pets show extreme bravery to save us from danger or avert tragedy. Want to meet a cat who helped stop a man from committing suicide? How about a dog who fought off coyotes to save his owner? Or a cat who alerted his family to a deadly house fire ? Read on to meet some of the most heroic pets who have made the news for saving people’s lives. ")}; 20. The ‘Hero Cat’ who rescued a child from an attacking dog A brave cat stopped a dog from attacking a child. | iStock.com/Steevy84 Sometimes, an animal attacks a child. And every once in a while, another animal comes to the rescue. That’s exactly what happened when a heroic cat saved a child from a dog attack in Bakersfield, California. The dog, which belonged to a neighbor, dragged the boy off his bicycle with his teeth. But the attack was cut sh...

As Carmel’s one- time mayor Clint Eastwood began building a legendary film career celebrating models of American male rectitude , he often presented himself as the stalwart family man . But in recent years, even Eastwood admitted that this image didn’t always match reality. Biographies and other accounts portray him as a serial philander who conducted numerous affairs during his 31-year first marriage and in his subsequent relationships. He also fathered at least seven children with five different women. As the now 87-year-old Eastwood prepares to direct his latest film, “The 15:17 to Paris,” one of his affairs has popped up as a new storyline in the popular Hollywood history podcast “You Must Remember This.” The podcast currently focuses on the life and times of one of the women Eastwood reportedly bedded : actress Jean Seberg . If you don’t know Seberg, she’s a screen icon in her own right — but one who died tragically by suicide at age 40 in 1979. She’s most famous as the blonde...

At the heart of the novel is a less sensational yet still unconventional story: that of two girls learning to make their way in the world, told with all the complication and unruliness of life, and also with an unspoken argument about what it means to tell a story like this. As children we experience the raw brute force of our feelings, but in the formative adolescent years , Messud told me, we learn how to be a person — ‘‘what it is to be a daughter, what it is to be a friend, what home means, what love means.’’ We learn these things by observing other people, but also from the stories that we hear: the books we read, the films we watch, the myths our culture teaches us. Yet the narratives for girls tend to be ‘‘dire,’’ she said, with violence at the forefront. With ‘‘The Burning Girl,’’ she hoped to write what she calls ‘‘a children’s book for grown-ups,’’ a book that acknowledges the inarticulable, even irrational power of emotion — an ‘‘animal thing’’ beyond understanding. It trea...