Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Most of my friends who grew up in the South have a story about the time their mothers sent them out to the yard to pick their own switch for a whipping. I do not. My mom summoned me for a spanking once and declared that I had to go outside and pick a switch,…
Happily, her work on the application had required that she meet with Mr. Sturtevant. When he asked her out for drinks at the Barclay Hotel bar in Midtown Manhattan, she wore a little navy dress from Ohrbach’s, with her hair in a bun. After a few martinis, she walked him back to her apartment. A…
As a critical reader, it is important to analyze every word in a slogan, such as Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” This essay riffs off that last word: Again. That adverb suggests there was a time — somewhere in the past — when America was really great. So was America great in the 1820s,…
On the second night of the 2016 Republican Convention, primetime speaker Ben Carson warned attendees and viewers of the worst thing about Hillary Clinton: her ties to famed community organizer Saul Alinsky. “One of the things that I have learned about Hillary Clinton is that one of her heroes, her mentors, was Saul Alinsky,” Carson…
“What a memorable day!” wrote a middle-class Hamburg housewife in her diary on Jan. 30, 1933. She had just watched the parade of torch-bearing storm troopers celebrate Adolf Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany. Frau Solmitz did not, however, extol only Hitler. She waxed melodic about Hitler’s cabinet, in which there were just three…
In fact, it has been a constant source of delight for me over the past year to get to continually tell hordes (literally) of people who want to – strap yourselves in, here it comes – control what their documents look like in ways that would be trivial in TeX, Microsoft Word, and every other…
Photo A protest against the so-called Brexit in Parliament Square in London on Saturday. Credit Adam Ferguson The New York Times LONDON — Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union is already threatening to unravel a democratic bloc of nations that has coexisted peacefully together for decades. But it is also generating uncertainty about…
Photo In a photo in Jack Daniel’s old office, Daniel, with mustache and white hat, is shown at his distillery in Tennessee in the late 1800s. The man to his right could be a son of Nearis Green, a slave who helped teach Daniel how to make whiskey. LYNCHBURG, Tenn. — Every year, about 275,000…
Warning! Spoilers for Game of Thrones Season 6 follow. ‘The Battle of the Bastards’ was many things. It was Game of Thrones‘ most expensive episode, costing around $10 million, and it took 25 days to shoot — another record for the show. And judging by how much of it my wife spent with her eyes squeezed nearly…
START “MORE FROM” Custom END “MORE FROM” Custom Breakfast is often lauded as “the most important meal of the day.” What is less commonly mentioned is the origin of this ode to breakfast: a 1944 marketing campaign launched by General Foods, the manufacturer of Grape Nuts, to sell more cereal. During the campaign, which marketers…