This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (4,204) on Friday, Dec. 15, 2017. The state of Alabama plays a prominent role in this week’s newsletter. So does Edgar Allan Poe (again), James Whistler, and the Washington Post. The newsletters this week and next week are a bit shorter than usual because of the Christmas season. Next week I […]

Jeannie Rousseau, a diminutive spy and an extraordinary tale of courage
She was small, too small to be a danger to anyone. And she was attractive, a good-time girl, maybe even a little flighty. Plus, she had a talent for getting people, particularly men, to talk to her. Those traits hid her steely courage, creativity, resourcefulness — and, maybe most importantly, a photographic memory. Jeannie Rousseau […]

Revelations by scholastic journalists come by just ‘looking it up’
“You can look it up.” If you remember anything about baseball in the 1950s (and fewer and fewer of us do), you would remember Casey Stengel’s famous conclusion to almost all of his long soliloquies to surrounding newsmen. Stengel was the manager of the New York Yankees, and his teams won pennant after pennant in […]

Seeing Suffrage: Advertising the parade
At the beginning of 1913, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns had a little more than two months to plan an eye-popping suffrage parade that would set the suffrage movement onto a different course. They not only needed participants; they needed spectators.

Katie Couric, David Pogue, Yahoo and the inexorable march to online
Katie Couric is the latest media star to catch a glimpse of the future. That future is online.

JFK assassination: TV news grows up in a hurry
To those who lived through it (including me), nothing is comparable to those four days in 1963 beginning on Nov. 22 when we heard the news that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. Televisions all over America went on and stayed on through Monday night. We had never seen anything like it […]

Two major league sports journalists question the NFL’s existence
Times are tough for the National Football League. Concussions, racism, criminality, strokes and heart attacks, harassment — the problems keep piling up. This weekend, things got a little worse.
The story the journalists held
The Washington Post has an interesting op-ed article by Michael Berlin, a professor emeritus at Boston University and former United Nation correspondent for the New York Post and Washington Post, about a story that he and several others had that was important and of universal interest. But neither he nor his journalistic colleagues reported the […]
Voting for love, money or what?
We like to think that our voting decisions are at some distance from our personal well being, but that’s not always the case. Accepting money for voting one way when we might have voted the other is abhorrent to many of us, and it’s not the way democracy should work.
Parker’s column concerns documentary about women
One of the stories that should be told — and probably will be if this documentary is any good — is that of Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who in one afternoon, changed the tenor and trajectory of the women’s suffrage debate that eventually led to the 19th Amendment that allowed women to vote.
Heads and Tales on Amazon
Vietnam Voices
Previously
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