Unredacted, the National Security Archive’s blog, has posted Lee Harvey Oswald’s request to the Soviet Union for citizenship. “I want citizenship,” Oswald wrote, “because I am a communist and a worker; I have lived in a decadent capitalist society where the workers are slaves.”
| A Shanghai theater company has announced that it will produce and stage a musical adaptation of Karl Marx‘s Das Kapital next year. Its creators say their project was inspired by a recent Japanese manga adaptation of Marx’s anti-capitalist tome. Does this mean we’ll have to sit through an operatic adaptation of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money . . .
August 30 is the day in 1963 when a direct phone line was established between Washington D.C. and the Kremlin, so that President Kennedy could communicate easily with the Soviet premier. Presumably it wasn’t to discuss chess collusion.