Moments of crisis dissolve our ordinary comforts and reveal our true nature. The Greek historian Thucydides documented how the 5th century BC plague of Athens led the Athenians to licentiousness and a hubristic disregard for all law. Pavlos Papadopoulos, writing in Law and Liberty, suggests that like the Athenians, we are forced by our own pandemic to confront our culture’s less savoury aspects.

Toppling a Communist Empire for $2.7 Million
Though widely thought of as focused on waterboarding terrorists or poisoning foreign potentates, it was by smuggling paper that the CIA achieved its most monumental triumph. R.M. Gerecht in a book review for The Washington Free Beacon charts how the late Cold War-era operation to flood Poland with Western books, magazines, printing supplies and audio recordings fatally weakened the country’s Communist dictatorship, setting the stage for the downfall of the entire Soviet empire. Total cost: US$2.7 million.


