This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, February 11, 2022. A glitch in my email reception system—entirely my fault—prevented me from seeing the emails that many of you newsletter readers sent during late December and January. I have recovered them and am working my way through all of them. • Read More »
Chris Wohlwend Chris Wohlwend is a magazine writer and editor and author of the memoir Ridge Running: A Memoir of Appalachia. The article below is about one of his experiences pursuing the worldwide field of auto racing. +++ The glass of champagne wasn’t something I had planned, or even cared much about. But I was • Read More »
The Gilded Age, HBO’s lavishly produced and extensively advertised, series takes its title from a book published in 1873, but it is at that point that the connection ends. The book was written co-authored by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner.. Twain and Warner were friends and neighbors who lived close to one another in • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, February 4, 2022. As happens each year at this time when voting for the baseball Hall of Fame is complete, a fierce debate is set off, not about the people who may have been voted into the Hall of Fame but about • Read More »
The editors of Esquire Magazine in 1966 had an article that was destined to become one of the most famous pieces of riding in the 1960s era of the new journalism. It was Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” which chronicled Talese’s efforts, unsuccessful, to interview Frank Sinatra and instead focused on the people • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, January 28, 2022. Score a small but, I hope, important victory for the First Amendment and free speech. With Corporate America and Government America – it’s getting harder to tell the difference between the two — making consistent efforts to cut back • Read More »
With the publication of the stories of the murders in the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allan Poe is deservedly labeled as the “father of modern detective fiction.” Unfortunately, he died too soon to develop that genre. That became the task of others. One of those authors, now long forgotten, was Anna Katharine Green. She is credited • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, January 21, 2022. To simply know how something happens, or that it will happen, is not to understand it. That’s the case whenever I walk into the very generous garden that I have been blessed with. Come spring, something will happen, and • Read More »
Some years ago, the BBC produced a 90-minute documentary on the parallel lives and careers of Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone titled Gladstone and Disraeli: Clash of the Titans. (You can watch it on YouTube, irritatingly divided into six 15-minute segments with the first here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4CHsWMV3Es) When it comes to 19th-century British politics, the title is • Read More »
Rarely does a historical novel, written for children, generate such controversy between archaeologists and historians, but that is what The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff, did when it was published in 1954. It continues to be the source of controversy today. The novel concerns the Ninth Roman legion, a legion which was mysteriously • Read More »
As the baby of the family, Anne Brontë never got beyond the shadows of her more famous sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Everyone in the family doted on her, and when she died early, at the age of only 29, in 1849, her reputation and her place in English literature faded even further. Anne deserved a • Read More »
How’s this for a plot? A number of people (eight or ten) with dark secrets are lured to a place where they can’t escape (a locked room or a deserted island). They are greeted by a host they cannot see and told that in a short time, they will all be dead. Then, they start • Read More »
Chances are, you have given a copy of Goodnight Moon to expectant parents to make sure it was in their child’s library when the time came for them to understand it. Or maybe somebody gave you a copy when you were young. If so, it would have been one of the more than 50 million • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, January 14, 2022. Trees, we are told by a recent New York Times article, are superheroes when it comes to fighting climate change, especially in urban areas. They can lower the temperature as much as 10 degrees, reducing the demand for air • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,232) on Friday, January 7, 2022. Happy New Year. With regard to Covid, it seems that as we turn the calendar to this new year, we are little better off than a year ago. Covid cases are surging, and our faith in the vaccines to • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,237) on Friday, December 31, 2021. Happy New Year. Janus is the two-headed god who looks both backward and forward. For a couple of weeks, we will be looking back through the weekly newsletter and picking some of my favorite item because of their stories • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, December 24, 2021. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone. This era of Covid has discombobulated (I love that word) everyone, and I have no easy answers or sage advice. I still wear a mask whenever I go into a public but • Read More »
Arthur Ashe we remember as a tennis star whose quickness and grace on the court masked a concentration and preparation that few athletes have matched. Ashe’s tennis career was cut short by health problems and his life ended tragically early by a medical accident. Ashe was many things besides a tennis champion. Among them, he • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, December 17, 2021. The recent flutter of publicity about the fact that trial defendant Ghislaine Maxwell sketched the artist who was sketching her in court (see this New York Magazine article if you want to know more about that) reminded me about • Read More »
Rarely, if ever, has an art, music, and theater critic held such sway over American public opinion as did James Gibbons Huneker at the beginning of the 20th century. Huneker accomplished this feat using a depth of knowledge about his subjects and a writing style that would-be scribblers such as H.L. Mencken sought to emulate. • Read More »