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 »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,404) on Friday, May 20, 2022. About a century ago, eugenics was all the rage. The basic idea of eugenics was that you could identify the “better” parts of society by race, geographic origin, or social class. If we could do that, then we could • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,234) on Friday, May 13, 2022. Like millions of others in the 1990s and beyond, I was caught up in the television depictions of “crime scene investigation” and the way in which “forensic science” is used to convict people accused of crimes. Calling something a • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,234) on Friday, May 6, 2022. While I am no expert on government secrecy, particularly the laws that govern countries other than the United States, that in no way stops me from having opinions. My considered, possibly uninformed, opinion is that one of the worst • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,234) on Friday, April 29, 2022. A popular myth that animates much of our political life is that the U.S. Supreme Court decides an issue. The justices, in their collective wisdom or ignorance, may make a ruling, but they rarely if ever decide an issue. • Read More »
When August Wilson was 15 years old, he decided to drop out of school. Several stories about why he made this decision are part of his legend. One is that he had written a 20-page paper on Napoleon Bonaparte, and his teacher—not believing that he could compose so well—accused him of plagiarism. Another is that • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,324) on Friday, April 22, 2022. “I like someone who speaks his mind—you know, someone who says what he thinks.” Undoubtedly, you have heard this sentiment expressed in some form or another. Speaking one’s mind is thought to be an admirable quality. I’m not so • 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 »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,234) on Friday, April 15, 2022. One of my personal rites of April—in addition to observing Opening Day and National Poetry Month (see below)—is having to restart my beehives, which for the past several years have died out during the fall. Fortunately, this task is • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,234) on Friday, April 8, 2022. Part of the power of the English language lies in its ability to reform, revise, and regenerate itself on almost a daily basis. English is not a static entity, as some people might wish. It is vibrant and dynamic. • Read More »
When she was 19 years old in 1912, Edna St. Vincent Millay had few prospects. She had just graduated from high school in Maine, but her family did not have enough money to send her to college. Her sister, Norma, worked as a waitress at a local inn that summer, and Edna stayed with her • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,234) on Friday, April 1, 2022. You newsletter readers are carrying much of the load for this week’s newsletter. I have received several substantial and interesting comments on articles I have included during the past couple of weeks, and I want to share them with • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,234) on Friday, March 25, 2022. This week I have been working in the library, not in my normal capacity, but as a librarian—or maybe as a pseudo-librarian. My local library has begun the process of “radio-frequency tagging.” This involves putting a radio-frequency sticker on • 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 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 »
The father of modern true crime writing is back. William Roughead, the Scottish barrister who attended and reported on every major British murder trial for nearly six decades and wrote about each of them in detailed and yet interesting accounts, is returning from obscurity. Roughead died in 1952 but not before he built a huge • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, March 11, 2022. Many years ago when I taught at the University of Alabama, I would attend the Crimson Tide baseball games on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The wooden bleachers at the stadium had a friendly and informal feel. The crowds were • Read More »
History remembers the name of Catherine Parr as the sixth wife of Henry VIII’s six wives, the one who survived. In truth, however, she should be remembered for much more than that. Her accomplishments were many and widespread. Catherine Parr was the first female to have a book published in English with her name as • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,199) on Friday, March 4, 2022. Spring, the calendar tells us, is still a few weeks away, but in my part of the world, it has begun early—and not a moment too soon. The grass and trees are turning a bit greener, and the early • Read More »
When Colin Dexter went on vacation with his family to Wales in 1970, he got bored, seriously bored. Dexter had been a Classics teacher for most of his career, and of course, he was a reader. He had been reading a detective novel, but he put it down, dissatisfied. He also had another hobby. He • Read More »