theatlantic:

Scenes from World War II Photoshopped Onto Today’s Streets

“It is a bit like painting with history,” Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse says of her project “Ghosts of History.”

She got the idea a few years ago when she found some old negatives at a flea market in Amsterdam, where she lives. “I was very curious about these mysterious photos and wanted to find out who took them and where. So I started to walk around Amsterdam and made photos in the same spot where the old photos were made and combined them on the computer.”

See more. [Images: Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, Unknown, Tom Timmermans]

In the countdown to Halloween, here’s another spooky installment.

It’s a GI’s word most often used for officers, and in particular, officers who are full of themselves. The first military leader to have been called with the A-word — both by his men and his superiors by the way — is George Patton, and that makes perfect sense, particularly if you read the unexpurgated Patton, not the Patton of the movie. … It’s a word that looks up. And the A-word always does. It’s a critique from below, from ground level, of somebody who’s gotten above himself.

— Geoff Nunberg on the origins of the A-word among griping WWII officers

World War two was fought on its soil. There was the blockade. Every single person was touched by the war in some way. Everybody had a lot of people in their family that fought that died. It’s very different having war on your soil rather than sending troops to some remote place where the people don’t really feel it. There are people walking around with an arm missing a leg missing. It was just real visible wounds and stories of survival, stories of heroism, stories of destruction – that all the kids grew up with it all the time.

— Regina Spektor, On Growing Up in Russia, Feeling Like WWII Just Happened