Holidays from History in the Sun

"We all love a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an ending—preferably a happy ending but, above all, some clearly demarcated final page with a lesson. The lesson of 1989 is that there is no grand march, no dialectic of thesis versus antithesis resolving in some synthesis, no moral arc bending toward justice—or toward any particular thing. History is an unending whirlwind, and we're caught in it."

Fred Kaplan at Slate reflects on the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And Larry Elliott at The Guardian describes what was lost with the end of the Cold War.