How come the Soviet people never rose up against the communist regime that governed them for so long? Anne Applebaum will be speaking on the subject of her new book, Iron Curtain (Doubleday, October 2012), at Politics and Prose on tonight at 7 p.m.

At the close of last night’s concert at the 2007 Duke Ellington Jazz Festival, Executive Producer Charlie Fishman said his friend and mentor, the great Dizzy Gillespie (pictured), who was the focus of this year’s proceedings, chose to name his last big band the United Nation (in the singular) Jazz Orchestra to show the oneness of humanity. Fishman went on to say that Dizzy often told his colleagues that human beings all share two characteristics:…

This just sounds too weird to ignore. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the Goethe-Institut Washington will screen “East Side Story (Sozialistische Musicals)”, a German documentary about movie musicals done during the height of the Cold War that have Europeans singing and dancing about socialism. Sounds like some retro-fun! From the website:As a whole, the Iron Curtain countries were not known for their gaiety or joie de vivre, but between the cracks of stark Socialist…