"Prohibition never works," except as a subject for the latest features on Identity Theory. We have an extensive interview with Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition:
"It's not about prohibition—it's about suffrage, the income tax movement. It’s about racism. It's about xenophobia. It's about religion, distribution of income... It was very hard for me to get my arms around it. Juggling a lot of balls at once to bring it together."
Read more of Daniel Okrent's conversation with Robert Birnbaum.
Serendipitously enough, our first published work of fiction since the relaunch is set in approximately the same era, a historical piece about Vachel Lindsay:
"Sometimes as he was walking he'd see the ghosts among the living. The ghosts were like the others—just more transparent. If the ghost was a pretty woman, he would touch his hat. He tried not to give himself away, to show the living who he saw, but politeness was such a habit. If he was one of the ghostly dead, he would be able to speak with these spirits, free to wander with them among the trees of laughing bells. Such free places would never be created on earth, he had finally come to understand."