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kept well apart, as the rules of modesty required.
    One had to dress up to go to the beach. On shores that today are a geography of nudity, the he’s went in covered to below the knees, and the pallid she’s swaddled head to foot for fear the sun would turn them into mulattas.

July 20
T HE I NTERLOPER
    In 1950 a photograph published in Life magazine caused a stir in New York’s artistic circles.
    The top painters of the city’s avant-garde appeared together for the first time: Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and eleven other masters of abstract expressionism.
    All men, except for an unknown woman in a black coat and a little hat, with a bag on her arm, standing in the back row.
    The men could not hide their disgust at her outrageous presence.
    One tried, in vain, to excuse the interloper. He praised her saying, “She paints like a man.”
    Her name was Hedda Sterne.

July 21
T HE O THER A STRONAUT
    On this day in 1969, every newspaper in the world had the photo of the century on the front page: astronauts, lumbering like bears, had walked on the moon and left behind the first human footprints.
    But the principal protagonist of the feat did not receive the congratulations he deserved.
    Werner von Braun had designed and launched their spaceship.
    Before taking up the conquest of space on behalf of the United States, von Braun had worked on Germany’s behalf for the conquest of Europe.
    Engineer, officer of the SS, he was Hitler’s favorite scientist.
    The day after the war ended, he used his smarts to make a prodigious leap and land on his feet on the other side of the sea.
    He became an instant patriot of his new homeland, began worshipping at a Texas evangelical church and got busy in the space lab.

July 22
T HE O THER M OON
    The astronauts weren’t the first.
    Eighteen hundred years before, Lucian of Samosata visited the moon.
    No one saw him, no one believed him, but he wrote about it in Greek.
    Back around the year 150, Lucian and his sailors set off from the Pillars of Hercules, where the Strait of Gibraltar now lies, and a storm caught the ship, whirled it up into the sky and dumped it on the moon.
    On the moon, no one died. The oldest of the old lunatics dissolved into thin air. They ate smoke and sweated milk. The rich ones wore glass clothing, the poor no clothing at all. The rich had many eyes and the poor, one or none.
    In a mirror the lunatics watched all the terrestrial comings and goings. For the duration of their visit, Luciano and his sailors kept tabs on the daily news from Athens.

July 23
T WINS
    In 1944, in the tourist resort of Bretton Woods, it was confirmed that the twin brothers humanity needed were in gestation.
    One was to be called International Monetary Fund and the other World Bank.
    Like Romulus and Remus, the twins were nursed by a she-wolf until they took up residence in the city of Washington, cheek by jowl with the White House.
    Ever since, these two govern the governments of the world. In countries where no one elected them, the twins impose obeisance as if it were destiny: they keep watch, they threaten, they punish, they quiz: “Have you behaved yourself? Have you done your homework?”

July 26
I T’S R AINING C ATS
    On the big island of Borneo, cats used to eat the lizards that ate the cockroaches, and the cockroaches ate the wasps that ate the mosquitoes.
    DDT was not on the menu.
    In the middle of the twentieth century, the World Health Organization bombarded the island with massive doses of DDT to fight malaria, and they annihilated the mosquitoes and everything else.
    When the rats found out that the cats had been poisoned, they invaded the island, devoured the fruit of the fields and spread typhus and other calamities.
    Faced with the unforeseen rat attack, the experts of the World Health Organization convened a crisis committee and decided to parachute in cats.
    Around this time in 1960, felines by the dozen descended