OPERATION FORTITUDE
The greatest military deception campaign in history helped save humanity 80 years ago this month on the beaches of Normandy
Don’t pretend like you know this story already; you don’t
We tip our hats to the mysterious Agent Garbo
In the early hours of June 6th, 1944, a Nazi secret agent, hidden away in a small suburban house in North London, wired a message to his handlers. The agent usually sent long rambling communications, but this one was more succinct than usual — and its implication was clear. The Allies had launched their invasion — D-Day had arrived. Before the largest armada in history had been spotted by the German defenders, this super-spy was warning of its approach.
Astonishingly, however, the spy’s handlers weren’t listening. His message was not picked up for hours — by which time the Normandy landings were already underway. One of the most important warnings in history had been ignored.
Not surprisingly, the spy was furious when he learned of his handlers’ failure. It felt like contempt. “I am very disgusted,” he transmitted. “I cannot accept excuses or negligence.” He warned them that they must listen in the …
Nobody Knows
Take it from me, Mr. Doesn’t-Know-Anything
Indeterminacy rules, to hell with what the statistics and the rule books say
If you believe half of what you read, and a quarter of what you see, you’re being deceived
How far is it from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio? Nobody knows. Some people will tell you it is a specific number. A satellite measured the New York–Cleveland distance as 465.03 miles, or 739.01 kilometers, but that was before the pandemic — in other words, today nobody really knows.
How long is the Lincoln Tunnel? As it happens, we do know the answer to that. The Lincoln Tunnel is about fifteen hundred miles long — or 1,498 miles, to be exact. But if the Lincoln Tunnel is that long, as we have discovered for ourselves by driving through it many times, how can the entire distance to Cleveland, in a completely different, Midwestern state, be shorter? And how can the width of the Hudson River, which the Lincoln Tunnel goes under, be less than half a mile? The answer to that is: Nobody knows.
One thing that nobody knows is the trouble I’ve seen. It’s my own trouble, and even …
The Order of Zion
Welcome to Orderville
The Book of Jonah, unscrolled
Don’t tell me the hand of God isn’t visible
It’s said that real communism has never been tried (an old joke), but those who say so likely have never visited the tiny Mormon town of Orderville, Utah, set in a long, broad valley of red-rock buttes along the Virgin River. Cut off from the interstate highways of America by the Grand Canyon to the south, Zion National Park to the west, and, to the east, an expanse of cliffs and fissures of devilish geological complexity, it’s a decidedly out-of-the way village with a fascinating utopian past. I approached it that spring morning from the north, on a lonesome two-lane road which passed the log-cabin boyhood home of Butch Cassidy, the frontier outlaw. The scraggly farmstead was just the sort of place that might cause a lively child to want to someday rob banks — every bank he could.
My notion that day was to poke around the town and see what remained of its idealistic history. In the 1870s an impoverished …
