This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2, 491) on Friday, November 25, 2022. We are in the midst of my favorite holiday, and I’ve found I am far from unique in feeling that way. Thanksgiving means cooler weather, lots of leaves, lots of sports on television (if you are into that), • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2, 491) on Friday, November 18, 2022. Our nation once again demonstrated its normal tendency to social and political schizophrenia, something the Republic has been experiencing for more than 200 years. On Tuesday, we showed that we are still sharply divided politically between Republicans and • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2, 491) on Friday, November 11, 2022. This newsletter is being sent out initially on Veterans Day, November 11th. This day tends to get lost among the plethora of holidays between Halloween and New Year’s Day. Most veterans I know (and I am one of • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2, 491) on Friday, October 28, 2022. My various readings and searches during the last few weeks have included a number of items about the concept of the “Sabbath.” The idea of the Sabbath, whether you consider yourself religious, spiritual, or “none of the above” • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2, 491) on Friday, October 21, 2022. My local library, the Blount County Public Library, is having a special event honoring local authors on Saturday, October 22 (the day after this newsletter originally appears), and I have been privileged to be part of the planning • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2, 491) on Friday, October 14, 2022. My frustration at not being able to enter the recent Quick Draw Festival held by the Friends of the Smokies became an item for last week’s newsletter, and I included four of the watercolor-and-pen sketches that I had • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2, 491) on Friday, September 23, 2022. For many decades now, we have heard the term “artificial intelligence.” As I understand it, artificial intelligence means that somewhere someone (or is it a group of people?) is hard at work creating a device that will think • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2, 491) on Friday, September 16, 2022. It’s the month of September, and while much of sports fandom turns its attention to football, both collegiate and professional, this baseball fan and many others have plenty to pay attention to ourselves. The end of the full • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2, 491) on Friday, September 9, 2022. What is it that makes a book a bestseller? Take a book that has an excellent and engaging plot and that is well and perceptibly written. Combine that with an author who is well-known. Give the book a • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2, 491) on Friday, September 2, 2022. All of us, no matter how many birthdays we have acquired, forget things. We forget names. We forget the items that are on our calendars. We forget where we put our keys and even, occasionally, where we park • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2, 491) on Friday, August 19, 2022. Not long ago, as I was driving around my semi-rural, very partisanly-red county in Tennessee, a car (maybe it was a truck) passed me with a bumper sticker I had never noticed before. It read, simply, “SOCIALISM SUCKS.” • Read More »
When author P.D. James began writing her first novel in the mid-1950s, she wrote later, “it never occurred to me to make a start with anything other than a detective story.” James had been reading mystery novels for many years, and she believed that she could write one that would be good enough to find • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2, 491) on Friday, August 12, 2022. The idea of young adults doing some kind of national service has been around for decades. When I was growing up, it was the Selective Service, what we commonly termed “the draft.” It was military service, and it • Read More »
Quick, Sherlock Holmes experts: what was the only case that Dr. Watson brought to the famous detective’s attention? Got it yet? The answer, of course, is “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb.“ If you like Holmesian trivia such as this, you will probably enjoy it Olivia Rutigliano’s series on Crimereads.com where she does it close • Read More »
Despite Covid, despite Amazon, despite a general downturn in retailing over the last decade, independently-owned local bookstores seem to be making a comeback. When Covid hit in 2020, it looked as though the health crisis would push independent bookstores over the cliff. That did happen in some cases, and the numbers of such businesses declined. • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,234) on Friday, July 29, 2022. How do you feel about your public library? Writer and poet Michele Herman, who lives in New York City, thinks of the two branches of the New York Public Library close to where she lives like she thinks of • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,234) on Friday, July 22, 2022. When I joined the U.S. Navy in the fall of 1970, I had already completed a bachelor’s degree in journalism and had worked professionally as a reporter and editor. I signed up for four years in the Navy because • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,234) on Friday, July 8, 2022. The headline in the New York Times read “Columbia won’t participate in the next U.S. News ranking.” My heart leapt up, as the poet has said. It’s time we did away with all of these bogus numbers that essentially • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,470) on Friday, June 17, 2022. Now that America is in the midst of its first major heat wave of the season, it’s probably a good idea to consider heat itself and its effect on human beings. In terms of actual deaths of humans, • Read More »
In 1983, David Simon had finished at the University of Maryland and was trying to make it onto the metro staff of a big city newspaper. He was stringing—writing as a freelancer—for the Baltimore Sun, covering stories around College Park and the UM campus. Simon had cut his teeth as a student journalist on The • Read More »