She said, “I do not believe much in sociologies It is the triumph of these private people over their public ‘sociology’ that me.” She became the New Yorker ’s European correspondent (1981), contributing the “Letter from Europe” column. Kramer’s oeuvre varies: she can write evocatively about food, the American militia, and European politics with the same apparent ease.
Her work caught the eye of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn and she became a staff writer for that magazine in 1964. Those early essays became her first book, Off Washington Square: A reporter looks at Greenwich Village, N.Y.
In the early sixties, she began writing on culture for The Village Voice. It’s the birthday of American journalist Jane Kramer (1938), whom Newsweek magazine once called “a writer who combines the skills of a social historian with those of a novelist.” Kramer was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and educated at Vassar and Columbia University. One of her prosecutors later admitted, “There wasn’t enough evidence to flog a cat.” The French became suspicious that she was a double agent, and she never was able to provide much useful information, so she was tried, convicted, and executed by firing squad in 1917. She had apparently sold some outdated information about France to the Germans in 1916, and then later made a deal with the head of French intelligence to spy on the Germans in exchange for a pass to visit her Russian lover in the eastern war zone. She was well known by sight all over Europe.
The exact nature of her spy activities is not clear, but she probably didn’t engage in much actual espionage. In order to make some money, she began dancing professionally in Paris in 1905, and occasionally worked in a high-class brothel. They returned to Holland and divorced, and MacLeod took out an ad in the local paper telling shopkeepers not to give his ex-wife any credit, because he would not be supporting her any longer. After their son died, the parents began to hate each other. He gave her syphilis, which was in turn inherited by their two children. “Mata Hari” is a Malay term for the sunrise, and means “the eye of the day.” The MacLeod marriage was marked by infidelity on both sides. They lived in Java and Sumatra for a few years, and that’s where she picked up her eventual byname. She attended a teachers college and then married an army officer, Captain Rudolph MacLeod, in 1895. It’s the birthday of the Dutch dancer and spy Mata Hari, born Margaretha Zelle in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands (1876). It was the oldest skull of a close human relative ever found at that point, and it helped persuade other anthropologists that Africa was indeed the place where human beings had evolved. Then, in 1959, they turned up another hominid skull, which was 1.75 million years old. It is now believed to be the skull of the ancestor of all large primates, including humans. In 1948, Leakey and his wife found one of the earliest fossil ape skulls ever discovered it was between 25 and 40 million years old. As soon as he graduated from Cambridge, he moved back to Africa to prove Darwin right. But Leakey had read Darwin’s theory that human beings might have originated in Africa, because Africa is the home of our closest relatives: chimpanzees and gorillas. He studied anthropology at Cambridge at a time when most anthropologists believed that human beings had originated in Asia. His parents were Anglican missionaries to Africa, and he lived in Kenya until he was 16. Today is the birthday of anthropologist and archeologist Louis Leakey, born in Kabete, Kenya (1903). “ Tomatoes on Interstate 5” by Albert Garcia from A Meal Like That.
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