So the 1984 Summer Olympic Games were in Los Angeles. The Soviets thought the CIA was going to drug Russian athletes and “trick” them into defecting so the Soviet Union and its allies refused to compete. The Americans were upset because we thought this meant no one would watch the Olympics; ABC felt ripped off, and the Olympic committee nearly refunded ABC more than $90 million in fees. (Repeat: $90 million in 1984.) But then Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet boycott and competed, endearing itself to the United States and setting the stage for the American debut of the “simple,…

Point of view is the big challenge for the historian. After years of research, travel, interviews; years of note-taking, transcribing, sorting-out, arranging, using the floor of one’s study to map out chapters; years of consultation with trusted colleagues willing to read drafts and offer suggestions – the writing begins, and you have to decide: Where do I stand vis a vis my subject?

Even if the facts at hand are as real as today’s headlines, history is not journalism. You regard situations sui generis at some distance: an arm’s length, a decade’s, or a century’s. You may…

A couple shares a studio apartment in Brooklyn. They have a joint bank account, perhaps a cat, too. His parents keep a Christmas stocking with her name on it. “Boyfriend and girlfriend” seems a bit glib when couches have been communally purchased; “partner” is too easily mistaken for a business associate.

Hannah Seligson’s term for this amorphous period of courtship is “a little bit married.” Her new book, “A Little Bit Married: How to Know When It’s Time to Walk Down the Aisle or Out the Door,” is about couples who have postponed marriage for a year or ten and decided to just play house…