Horror movies are beset with misconceptions, the greatest being: "How can you watch those things!? They're all fatuous violence and gratuitous boobs!" Which is kindof like saying, "How can you read those feminist blogs?! They're all alluvial deposits of man-hating penis envy!" READ MORE

Even among music fans the name Ronnie Lane doesn't come up much. I'm not sure why. He was an original—"the East End urchin with the pastoral vision," as Mojo put it —and about as unlikely a rock figure as you're likely to find. The bassist and songwriter for British bands the Small Faces and the Faces, Lane gave it all up for a curious (to put it mildly) solo career: he ran away and formed a circus. But then he never had been a good fit for heady 1970s rock stardom: consider the fact that while the other members of the Faces were buying mansions and Rolls Royces, Lane remained in his £7 a week apartment in the uber-British-sounding town of Twickenham. And while the Faces toured America in private jets, Lane drove with his family from city to city in a Land Rover. READ MORE

In October of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was about to give a speech in Milwaukee in support of his reelection campaign under the newly created Progressive “Bull Moose” Party when a bartender named John Flammang Schrank walked up and shot him in the chest. Roosevelt of course was not killed, but neither his survival nor Schrank’s claim that he was instructed by the ghost of William McKinley to prevent a third term for the two-term former president were the most extraordinary parts of the whole affair. It was the fact that Roosevelt decided to deliver his speech in the Milwaukee Auditorium anyway, for an hour and a half, with blood seeping through his clothes. “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible,” he began, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” READ MORE

In the long summer vacation of 1971, I "worked" on a construction site in the English countryside where they were proposing to build a new hangar for the U.S. Air Force, and used the proceeds to take a holiday in Greece with my friend Charles. Originally, the idea had been to hitchhike, having crossed the channel on the boat and made our way from Calais to Paris by bus. We soon found out what I had been warned of, that the French can't abide hitchhikers. After sleeping in the Bois de Boulogne we fluked a short ride to a small town by the name of Auxerre, and there our luck ran out. We stood by the side of the road and for the rest of the day stuck out our thumbs in vain. There was a storm that night, the worst they had suffered for many years, and, abandoning the woods, we laid down our dampened sleeping bags on a narrow strip of shelter by the pumps under a gas station canopy which rang all night with the fusillade of golf-ball sized hailstones. Having stood by the side of the same road for most of the next day, we got tired of looking up Gallic nostrils and spent some precious money on train tickets to Dijon (in the south, named after the mustard). Amazingly, even after dark, we got a lift from the eastern outskirts with some clergymen—they were Belgian, not French—stayed the night for free at their monastery in the mountains, and arrived in Lausanne the next day full of warm feelings for les Belges. The Swiss, too, were much less snooty than the French, and it took no more than a couple of hours to get to the border town of Brig, where we were picked up from the Shell station at the foot of the nearby Alp by a truculent Italian workman in a Fiat, who drove us to Bologna without a word. And that's when Richard Nixon stepped in. He decided to take the U.S. dollar off the gold standard, and as a result, for a couple of days, nobody would change any money. All you could get in the cambio for your travellers' cheques or your leftover francs were Italian shrugs. READ MORE

Wherever you went in 2011, you could hear Adele’s 21 catapulted at you from every open car window, open apartment window, and open mouth. That album has its charms, but I see a much more long-lasting and powerful influence in Rufus Wainwright’s Poses, and its tenth anniversary has passed without appropriate fanfare. READ MORE

The story of the Occupy Wall Street Archive starts with Jeremy Bold, so we might as well too. When Hollywood decides to cash in and make its OWS movie, central casting could do worse than work off a picture of Bold—he has a dark goatee and black plastic-rimmed glasses. He has a “protest name”—Jez. He's in dark, long-sleeved t-shirts and jeans whenever I see him, hair askew, a well-worn nylon backpack slung over one shoulder and a scarf not infrequently tied around his neck. In other words, he looks like any number of people you might have seen at Zuccotti Park. Jez is 27 and originally from North Dakota. READ MORE

Part of a series on collaborations that we now take for granted but initially made little sense. READ MORE

In response to this fascinatingly worded claim came a link to a brief Times editorial of December 7, 1951. We already know that there was no coverage of Pearl Harbor on the front pages in 1951, ten years later: Japan was already a staging center for the Korean War, and so the Washington Post editorialized that "the Japanese American alliance ought to be maintained in harmony."

But that Times editorial!

When the American people woke up on Dec. 7, 1941, they were living in an age in which there still lingered some of the easy-going optimism of the nineteenth century. They still believed that without too much effort and too much pain things might be made to turn out all right. They knew about Hitler but many of them didn’t quite believe that he existed.

This is a particularly incredible view. (Although it sounds familiar now, too.)

Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933; six months later, all other political parties were outlawed. Dachau opened in 1933. Three months after that, Germany left the League of Nations. In 1935, Jews were made non-citizens and "inter-marriage" was outlawed; forced abortions began. Kristallnacht was in 1938. Polish Jews were forced into labor in 1939. Shortly thereafter, Germany was going broke because of its preparations for war, yet invaded Poland in 1939, and Norway, France, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium and France in 1940. The Battle of the Atlantic had begun in 1939, with the U.S. officially joining in 1941, well before Pearl Harbor, and Hitler's invasion of Russia began in summer of 1941.

But did "many" Americans not "quite believe" that Hitler existed when they "woke up" on December 7, 1941?

In November of 1938, the Times carried this: "Nazism was denounced in vigorous terms by spokesmen for organized labor tonight, who called for vigorous measures to meet the conditions existing in Germany." Ah, the head of the American Federation of Labor!

Two months prior, nearly 20,000 people, "many of them obviously of Central European origin," gathered in New York City, in Madison Square Garden no less, to call for help for Czechoslovakia, according to the Times.

And the Times printed part of Rabbi Joseph Konvitz's Rosh Hashanah message of 5699 in 1938.

And what was this round-up of newspaper editorials from Idaho to Minneapolis to Maine, "aggregated" (!!!) in the Times, saying of Hitler and Jews in 1938?

The brutality of Berlin mobs in last week's anti-Jewish demonstrations, reinforced by new and still harsher decrees from the Nazi government, constitute a chapter in modern history which a short time ago no one would have believed possible. Persistent exaltation of might, however, with the fostering of nationalistic bigotry and the throttling of free speech and press, have done their work.

So this 1951 Pearl Harbor editorial was a bit of nonsensical hand-wringing. It was patently not true; it was the sort of revisionist history that takes place when one can't or won't face the truth of one's own very recent history.

And as for Matt Cooper's claim—this is the Matt Cooper that was the politics editor for Time.com and the former Washington bureau chief of Newsweek—that Americans ten years later faced the facts of Pearl Harbor with a "telling" lack "self-doubt," unlike our current approach to 9/11—well, it's 100% hallucination. (Not least because 1951 was the year in which anomie was reinvented with the publication of Catcher in the Rye.)

There was, in fact, "self-doubt" as the Korean War began. (W.E.B. DuBois, then 82, was arrested for circulating petitions against the war; the Stockholm Peace Petition received between 1 and 2.5 million signatures circa 1950.) There was self-doubt in those ten intervening years, even as the "internment" camps opened and then were closed, in 1944, by the Supreme Court. There was, despite the approving opinion polls and media triumphalism afterward, even doubt and hand-wringing about the fire-bombing of Japan and then the use of atomic bombs in 1945. And surely there was some self-doubt after 1953 as well, when more than 40,000 Americans didn't come home.

We cordially invite you to turn off the Internet until Monday morning at 9 a.m. Or, fine, if you insist: READ MORE

You know, what if the Black Eyed Peas were a really good band? They are, after all, immensely popular! What if it's just you? What if you're just a stuck-up and joyless snob? READ MORE