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 »
A University of California-Berkeley sociologist contends that work is replacing religion as the thing that gives structure to our thinking and meaning to our lives. This is especially true, she contends, in a place like Silicon Valley where work takes up almost every waking hour and provides a pseudo-religious context—such as, “We’re going to change • Read More »
Most people encounter honeybees through pictures of bees buzzing around flower blooms or possibly driving through the countryside and seeing hives in the middle of a field. More and more, people can see bees in urban areas, often atop tall buildings. But bees on tractor-trailer trucks rolling down an interstate highway? That is exactly where • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,241) on Friday, June 10, 2022. What if Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare? Seriously, what if there was evidence that William Shakespeare was not the author of Hamlet or MacBeth or Richard III or Henry V or any of the other plays that we attribute to • Read More »
By any measure, Belle de Costa Greene lived an extraordinary life for a librarian. During the first two decades of the 20th century, she reigned as an undisputed leader and expert in the area of art and antiquities. She was instrumental in acquiring, organizing, and cataloguing what became the world’s finest private collection of rare • Read More »
Word games have been with us since the advent of words themselves, but one of the most popular of all word games, the crossword puzzle, is a relatively recent invention. We have only had crossword puzzles for about 100 years. We owe the modern crossword puzzle to a man named Arthur Wynne, who was an • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,421) on Friday, May 27, 2022. What do you think a librarian does? The answer to that question undoubtedly depends on your point of view, but I think most of us would believe a librarian is someone who keeps books and documents in a particular • Read More »
When Roger Angell wrote about baseball, which he did frequently but not often enough, he could put you in the seat next to him in the ballpark. It would be a good seat, not in the press box with all of the sportswriting swells and television hotshots, but right down there in the stands among • Read More »
The contrast between Walter Duranty and Gareth Jones is stark and ultimately tragic. Duranty was the correspondent for the New York Times and covered the Soviet Union and the rise of Joseph Stalin for more than a dozen years in the 1920s and 1930s. He interviewed Stalin a number of times and always wrote favorable • Read More »
If you are like me—a person who loves to walk—you won’t want to miss Chris Arnade’s website,Walking the World. The author brilliantly describes his love for walking just about anywhere in the world he happens to be. He talks about how much he sees, how much he experiences, and how much he learns by simply • Read More »
A professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has taken on the notion, depicted in article after article in major media outlets, that there is a “free speech” crisis and ensuing turmoil roiling American college campuses. In a recent article on Slate.com, Lucas Mann, a professor of English and journalism, points out that most of • Read More »
The identity of the person who “invented” motion pictures, in the sense that we know them today, has always been a matter of dispute—even though Thomas Edison has made the claim and owned the patent. Like many modern inventions (the airplane, the radio, etc.), cinema has many founders. In reality, Edison may be the least • Read More »
Many authors, if not most, have a second or third job that produces income and helps support themselves and their families while they are writing. Few authors, however, can claim as many different jobs and professions over as long a period of time as Manly Wade Wellman. During his 83-year life, Wellman was a harvest • Read More »
Gregorio Allegri’s (1582-1652) setting of Psalm 51, Miserere Mei, is a choral work of unsurpassed beauty and delicacy that the Catholic Church commissioned in the 1630s for exclusive use in the Sistine Chapel. It was played only once a year sometime during the Easter season. Writing it down or performing it without authorization could get • Read More »
We naturally associate the name of Black Hawk with war and fighting (think: Black Hawk helicopter), but the real history of Chief Black Hawk, a leader of the Sauk Nation of Native Americans, encompasses not only war but a literary tradition: Black Hawk was the first Native American to have an autobiography published in the • Read More »
The following is the editors’ introduction and the first few paragraphs to the case “The Ghost of Sergeant Davies” in volume 1 of Murder Most Criminous. Editors’ introduction Witnesses at criminal trials provide a most powerful presence. But what if the witness doesn’t really exist, and yet the court accepts that witness’s testimony? It is • Read More »
The following is the editors’ introduction and the first few paragraphs to the case “Mackcoull and the Begbie Mystery” in volume 1 of Murder Most Criminous. Editors’ introduction: The murder of William Begbie is one of the most famous in the long history of crime in the city of Edinburgh. Like today, the name of • Read More »
One of the oddest stories to emerge from the 1960s, a period of many odd tales, is that of Edgar H. Smith, a convicted killer, and William F. Buckley, scion of conservative thought in America. Smith had been convicted of killing Victoria Zielinski, a 15-year-old high school student, in 1957 in Bergen County, New Jersey. • Read More »
This month of March marks the 50th anniversary of the premier of Francis Ford Coppola’s great movie The Godfather. Many critics and many just plain movie-goers (like me) consider that film the greatest piece of cinema that Hollywood has ever produced. In the American Film Institute’s periodic list of the top 100 films, it usually • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, March 18, 2022. This month of March marks the 50th anniversary of the premier of Francis Ford Coppola’s great movie The Godfather. Many critics and many just plain movie-goers (like me) consider that film the greatest piece of cinema that Hollywood has • Read More »