Here are the first two sentences of Charles Van Doren’s biography in Wikipedia: Charles Lincoln Van Doren (February 12, 1926 – April 9, 2019), was an American writer and editor who was involved in a television quiz show scandal in the 1950s. In 1959 he testified before the United States Congress that he had been given the correct answers by the producers of the NBC quiz show Twenty-One. After the third sentence describing his subsequent career as a writer of multiple books and an editor for the “Encyclopedia Britannica,” the fourth sentence under the heading of Background reads: Charles Van Doren was born in New York City, the…
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The photo above is of my father, standing before Mount Suribachi during World War II. If you don’t recognize the name of this mountain, then you may not fully grasp the weight of history—or the immense cost of freedom. Take note: there is no flag on the peak, yet. James Thill enlisted in the Marine Corps at age 20 when the United States entered World War II in 1941. He became one of the youngest first sergeants of his time before eventually retiring as a major in 1965. He never spoke to me about the horrors he endured. Later, I…
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The assaults, the responses, the anguish, the questions, the cruelty, the concern, the reprisals, the relentless tsunami of invective and resultant anxiety. The anger and exhaustion, which is largely the intent. The despair which creeps in quietly underneath, simmering… And still, with Maya Angelou, we must rise. But not today. Not this moment. We must protect ourselves, too, by tending regularly to our zones of joy. Today, beauty, for beauty’s sake. (And our own.) Though with a loop back into history near the end. *** *** Leoš Janáček (pronounced “Lowsh Yun-ahh-check”) was a Czech classical composer who made abundant use…
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“So many things had a way of looking finer, when they were not so close,” muses coal merchant Bill Furlong, the protagonist in Claire Keegan’s finely sculpted 2021 novella, “Small Things Like These.” Furlong had been admiring the river that passes through his small Irish town, but upon approaching it, finds himself wondering “which he rathered: the sight of town or its reflection on the water.” (Side note right off the top: “…he rathered…” Please don’t ever listen to anyone who suggests language, “mere” words, aren’t beautiful and endlessly pliable things.) The same basic questions—distanced or closeup? gauzy appearance or…
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“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” So begins the influential (and eerily prescient) 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which first appeared in “Harper’s” magazine (available here) and a year later led off historian Richard Hofstadter’s collection of the same name. In it, Hofstadter takes readers on a condensed but powerful tour (just over 16 book pages) through the landscape of an America roiling just beneath its veneer of civility and constitutional order. Irrational, extremist fears and delusions have always darkened those caverns of the nation’s psyche, most often (but not always) emanating from…