"The Revolution That Almost Was"

"Much about our modern times can be traced back to a single summer and what changed--or more accurately, what didn't."

Julia Alekseyeva at The Nib provides a cartoon history of May 1968.

"Burning Conviction, Solidarity, Euphoria"

"Since 1968, America has gone off in a different direction than I had hoped: Reagan, Nixon, and Trump are not the kind of leaders we had in mind back then. In 1968, I would have settled for nothing less than socialism. Twenty-five years after that, something like a European welfare state would have made me happy. Today, just having a reliable subway system appears utopian. The French Revolution, however violent, uprooted the monarchy. The Russian Revolution, however perverse, produced an experiment, albeit a failed one, in economic planning. 1968 not only failed to achieve most of its goals, it set politics off in the wrong direction."

Alan Wolfe at The New Republic looks back fifty years.

"Go There, All This Is Waiting for You"

"For 15 years Šašek wandered the globe on the mission of making his This Is books, turning out a volume, and sometimes two, almost annually. (How a stateless man managed such an ambitious program of travel—he chose not to apply for citizenship anywhere after leaving Czechoslovakia—is yet another mystery.) By the time he published his final book, This Is Historic Britain, in 1974, the international consciousness he sought to cultivate among his young readers was becoming ever more prevalent. That development was a product of increasing travel (Frommer's Europe on 5 Dollars a Day debuted in 1957), the influence of photojournalism and television, and enterprises such as his own. 'Children today know everything—the world is so much smaller,' he told an interviewer in the late '60s. At the same time, the homogenizing forces of global capitalism were rubbing away the everyday differences among Hong Kong, Greece, and San Francisco, diminishing the distinctiveness he had so ardently chronicled."

Deborah Cohen at The Atlantic reviews Olga Černá, Pavel Ryška, and Martin Salisbury's This Is M. Šašek: The Extraordinary Life and Travels of the Beloved Children's Book Illustrator.

The Velvet Revolutionary

"A shy yet resilient, unfailingly polite but dogged man who articulated the power of the powerless, Mr. Havel spent five years in and out of Communist prisons, lived for two decades under close secret-police surveillance and endured the suppression of his plays and essays. He served 14 years as president, wrote 19 plays, inspired a film and a rap song and remained one of his generation’s most seductively nonconformist writers."

Dan Bilefsky and Jane Perlez in The New York Times write an obit for Vaclav Havel.