Quote of the Day (John Green, on Seeing ‘The Beauty of the World As Young People Do’)

“We need to put down our armor of cynicism and irony and thinking that we know about everything that matters. We need to try to grapple with the beauty of the world as young people do: in an open, vulnerable way. It’s cheesy as all get out, but… when you’re lying down with your friends under a big sky at night and you’re looking at the stars and you’re conscious of how large the universe is, that’s a borderline sacred experience. If you lose that in adulthood, you’ve lost something really important.”— Young-adult novelist, vlogger, philanthropist, and philanthropist John Green quoted by David Marchese, “The Interview: John Green Knows That No One Really Loves You on the Internet,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Nov. 30, 2025

(The image of John Green that accompanies this post, which was taken on Nov. 19, 2024, comes from “Let's Talk about Money” on YouTube.)

Quote of the Day (Laurence Rees, on a Prior Use of Political Deflection)

“[D]eflection [was] akin to modern ‘whataboutism.’ When confronted with the Holocaust they [leading former Nazis] voiced a series of blatantly false equivalences, such as the firebombing of Hamburg or colonial injustices, dismissing the charges as 'victor's justice.' This allowed them to label the Allies as hypocrites, reinforcing a belief in their victimhood.”— English historian and documentary filmmaker Laurence Rees interviewed by Danny Bird, “The Idea That There’s a Widespread Movement to Learn From History or to Understand It Meaningfully is False,” BBC History, February 2025

For the contemporary resort to “whataboutism” or “deflection,” please see Mona Charen’s June 2025 article in The Bulwark.

(The image accompanying this post shows former Nazi high officials who were defendants in the postwar Nuremberg trials.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘SNL,’ on Why Santa Might Have Been Watching the Show)

Michael Che [pictured]: “Now, you told me you wanted to share your Christmas wish list.”

Michael’s “12-year-old nephew,” Tyson [played by Kam Patterson]: “I sure do, but Uncle Che, do you think Santa is watching SNL?”

Michael: “I mean, I think Santa’s watching. He’s over 100 and white, so probably.”—Saturday Night Live, Season 50, Episode 9, original air date Dec. 20, 2025, “Weekend Update: Michael Che’s Nephew Threatens Santa” 

Quote of the Day (Caroline Crenshaw, on the SEC and Markets That ‘Start to Look Like Casinos’)

“It has been unsettling to see how precipitously one Commission [the current U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission] is willing to undo the work of the Commission that came before it—all without a single notice-and-comment rulemaking to date.  I’m concerned that the fundamental precepts upon which our markets have been built—tenets that have, by and large, kept our markets safe for both issuers and investors alike—are being eroded.  I fear that the very core of our intricate market structure is under attack.  And instead of safeguarding our markets for investors to fund their retirements in safe and sustainable ways, we are moving in a direction where markets start to look like casinos.  The problem with casinos, of course, is that in the long run the house always wins.”—American attorney and current SEC member Caroline Crenshaw, “Speech by Commissioner Crenshaw on Investor Protection and Market Transparency,” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, speech delivered Dec. 13, 2025

The image of Caroline Crenshaw that accompanies this post, taken Nov. 9, 2020, comes from the SEC.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Pope Leo XIV, Calling for ‘Hearts Attentive and Vigilant As We Await Jesus’)

“Let us be careful not to get caught up in frenetic activity in preparing for the feast, which would lead us to experience it in a superficial way and leave room for disappointment. Instead, let us take the time to make our hearts attentive and vigilant as we await Jesus, so that His loving presence may become the treasure of our lives and hearts forever.”— Pope Leo XIV quoted by Isabella H. de Carvalho, “Pope on Advent: Prepare for Christ's Coming, Don’t Get Lost in Frenetic Activity,” Vatican News, Dec. 17, 2025

Song Lyric of the Day (Elvis Costello, on ‘Lovers Laughing in Their Amateur Hour’)

“Lovers laughing in their amateur hour
Holding hands in the corridors of power.” —British singer-songwriter and Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame member Elvis Costello, “High Fidelity,” performed by Elvis Costello and the Attractions on their Get Happy! LP (1980) 

If recent rumors are true, this is one current example.

Quote of the Day (Rob Reiner, on How He’d Like To Be Remembered)

“Complete this sentence (fact or fiction are both acceptable): ‘I was born in THE BRONX, N.Y. and I studied MY FATHER AND MOTHER at HOME. I became world famous in SHOW BUSINESS and I hope I'll be remembered as MORE THAN JUST A MEATHEAD.”—American film director (and actor on TV’s All in the Family) Rob Reiner (1947-2025), completing “The Mel Brooks Questionnaire,” T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Sept. 28, 2025

I never thought, when I first spotted this quote, that I would be using it so soon on this blog. It’s a tribute to Rob Reiner that he had such an ability to laugh at himself—and to help others do the same in the often insane world in which we live.

I’m not going to talk—at least not right now—about the President’s graceless social media post about the tragic murder of Reiner and his wife Michele at the hands of their son Nick, following their unrelenting but unsuccessful efforts to save him from drug addiction and depression. I’d rather discuss what Reiner’s TV and film work meant to me.

As a tween, I came to know Reiner through his role as Mike Stivic, the liberal "Meathead" foil to bigoted father-in-law Archie Bunker on Norman Lear’s taboo-breaking Seventies TV satire All in the Family. 

Nowadays, some on the right might tag him as a “nepo baby” as the son of The Dick Van Dyke creator Carl Reiner. What I did know was that he was brilliant, richly deserving of the Best Supporting Actor Emmy he won before departing the show.

I have so many favorite episodes involving him (and, indeed, as far as I’m concerned, it never recovered after he and Sally Struthers left), but I urge you to view two in particular: “Gloria Poses in the Nude” (Season 4), when Reiner uses a twitch in the eye to signal his jealousy of his being painted by a friend of his, and “Gloria Suspects Mike” (Season 6), in which Mike nervously tries to fend off an attractive economics student (played by Bernadette Peters) who is coming on to him.

Even while appearing in All in the Family, Reiner was looking to write and direct. He did so on several episodes in the show’s first few seasons, and helped conceive the short-lived summer replacement comedy The Super, starring Richard Castellano.

A decade later, he had become a force in film, pushing from strength to strength with The Sure Thing, This Is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…, Misery, and A Few Good Men.

Dustin Hoffman joked that every actor has at least one Ishtar on his resume. The same applies to directors. I’m afraid that I was peripherally involved in what may well have been Reiner’s. 

In the early 1990s, while working in research at a nonprofit trade association, I was contacted by a staffer at Rob Reiner’s production company, Castle Rock Entertainment, for the names of some area enclosed malls that could be used for a scene in his next film, North. I provided a few names, and couldn’t wait to see the results.

In 1994, North finally appeared. It not only underperformed at the box office, but in the years since, it’s been listed among the worst movies ever made. Well, every decent film director is entitled to at least one misfire, I guess.

From what I can tell, however, no movie in Reiner’s considerable filmography as a director, producer, and writer was in bad taste. Quite simply, he respected the intelligence of audiences, like his father and Lear.

Rob Reiner grew up and flourished in a better time than the current moment. His life and work deserve celebration, not trolling by a barbarian and his all-too-easily-influenced horde.

Nearly 40 years after working with Reiner on Stand by Me, one of its child actors, Will Wheaton, now established in the industry, told CNN, upon hearing the news of the director’s death:

“The world knows Rob as a generational talent, a storyteller and humanitarian activist who made a difference with his art, his voice, and his influence. I knew that man, but I also knew a man who treated me with more kindness, care, and love than my own father ever did. And it is the loss of that man that is piercing my heart right now.”

(The image accompanying this post, of Rob Reiner at the German premiere of The Bucket List, was taken in Berlin on Jan. 21, 2008, by Franz Richter)

Quote of the Day (Robert A. Heinlein, on Rudeness and ‘A Dying Culture’)

“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”—American science-fiction writer, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988), Friday (1982)

Well, in at least one case, large-scale public rudeness can precipitate a riot.

Quote of the Day (Keith McNally, on a Feeling Increasingly Common in the Holidays)

“There are few feelings of relief that compare to the first gulp of night air after leaving a dinner party prematurely.”— British-born New York restaurateur Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir (2025)

The image accompanying this post comes from the 2005 dramedy The Family Stone, which features a dinner party that can’t end soon enough for its attendees.

This Day in Literary History (V.S. Pritchett, Wildly Versatile British Man of Letters, Born)

Dec. 16, 1900--Victor Sawdon Pritchett—or, as readers came to know him across multiple genres across the 20th century, V.S. Pritchett—was born in a lower-middle-class household in Ipswich, Suffolk, England.

Though Great Britain has had at least several examples of the term applied to Pritchett, “man of letters” (see: Samuel Johnson, G.K. Chesterton, Matthew Arnold) I’m not sure there are (outside of, say, Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling) many Americans who fit the bill.

Perhaps, reflected Ronald Gottesman in a June 1987 review of Pritchett’s essays in The Los Angeles Times, “These men of letters--all of them fictionists or poets as well as critics—were independent, flexible, liberal, morally serious in the practice of discrimination and judgment—the chief marks of criticism before Literary Theory banished authors, vaporized texts, and called readership into doubt.

Over 75 of his 97 years, Pritchett’s output was enormous: five novels, two memoirs; approximately 100 short stories; travel books; major studies on several European writers; and thousands book reviews. Writing as much as he did in any one of these genres would have challenged other authors; producing all of it combined was mind-boggling.

And that’s just what he published: there were also thousands of letters sent to lucky recipients.

Though the author attributed the impetus for all this activity to a spendthrift father who endangered the family’s financial security, his anxiety about not having enough funds lasted well into adulthood, according to biographer Jeremy Treglown. “Even in his most celebrated years,” observed British literary critic Frank Kermode in a February 2005 article for The New Republic, “he could not live by his books alone, and remained dependent on journalism.”

In Brian John Spencer’s “The New Irishman” blog, I was especially interested to discover one of Pritchett’s formative journalistic experiences: covering the Irish War of Independence for the Christian Science Monitor and how the writers in Dublin’s literary circle at the time influenced his own short-story writing.

Quote of the Day (Anne Tyler, on Biting One’s Tongue)

“Someday I'd like to get credit for not saying all the things I could have said.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Anne Tyler, Three Days in June (2025)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Barney Miller,’ As Fish Receives a Stupefying Retirement Gift)

Det. Phil Fish [played by Abe Vigoda] [opens his present]: “What is it?”

Det. Stan “Wojo” Wojciehowicz [played by Max Gail]: “It's a New York City municipal bond.”

[All the cops in the precinct stand silently aghast, until…]

Det. Sgt. Nick Yemana [played by Jack Soo] [horrified]: “Oh, my God.”

Fish [still trying to comprehend this]: “A New York City municipal bond?”

“Wojo”: “Yeah. Hey, it's worth a thousand dollars when it matures.”

Fish: “If it matures... in 1997... I would have been 83.”—Barney Miller, Season 4, Episode 2, “Good-Bye, Mr. Fish: Part 2,” original air date Sept. 22, 1977, teleplay by Reinhold Weege, directed by Danny Arnold
 
For reasons related to my school workload and the series’ prime-time schedule, I seldom saw Barney Miller during its eight-year run. With (somewhat) more leisure time now to catch its syndicated reruns, I finally caught up with this two-part episode on the retirement of Det. Fish.
 
Many baby boomers like myself are now facing the future confronting the lovable grouch of the NYPD 12^th Precinct. I was fully prepared for the poignancy of his goodbye (necessitated by Vigoda’s departure for a short-lived spinoff series involving Fish and his wife).
 
What I didn’t expect was Wojo’s going-away present for his comrade and friend. That inappropriate gift provoked a roar of laughter from the studio audience at the time, too.
 
No wonder: Less than two years before, New York’s plunge toward a bankruptcy filing—and the notorious New York Daily News headline it inspired (“Ford to City: Drop Dead”)—put Gotham on a brink from which it only narrowly stepped back from, though not without massive cuts in services and a sharp falloff in quality of life.
 
Nor did it help that only two months before this episode premiered, New York received another black eye: a nearly 24-hour blackout that led to a massive outbreak of looting.
 
The very survival of the city, then, was at stake when Wojo presented Fish with this gift—which meant, of course, that with no city, no maturity on that bond.
 
Barney Miller lasted nearly my whole time in high school and college, a period when New York struggled to climb out of its deep hole. The crazies that came like an unstoppable tide into the 12^th Precinct were just a sample of the collective insanity gripping the city.
 
At various points, it seemed like Barney and his staff were the only bulwarks against what Fish called “the trouble this city is in." In this retirement episode, the pressures of that fight seemed to get to Fish at last, as he came perilously close to abusing a suspect until Barney stepped in.
 
Three years after the sitcom went off the air, showrunner Danny Arnold was honored with the Writer’s Guild of America’s Paddy Chayefsky Award for his lifetime achievement in TV. 

While his sitcom was usually more genial than Chayefsky’s dyspeptic screen satires, the daily dilemmas of this stationhouse reminded me of a line from the latter’s Oscar-winning screenplay for The Hospital: “Among us middle class, love doesn't triumph over all—responsibility does.”

Photo of the Day: Carrie Tower, Brown University

In late October 10 years ago, I visited Brown University while vacationing in Providence, R.I. I was impressed with the architecture of the Ivy League campus, but, with so much happening in my world and my life the last decade, I had little reason to think back on it.

Until late yesterday, that is, when I saw the first awful news of yesterday’s campus shooting that left two students dead and nine others injured.

Among the photos I took 10 years ago was this one of the 95-foot-tall campanile clocktower on the Quiet Green adjacent to the Van Wickle Gates, Hope College and University Hall.

Carrie Tower was named for Carrie Mathilde Brown, granddaughter of Brown University namesake Nicholas Brown Jr., whose death in 1892 after 16 years of marriage devastated her husband, Count Paul Bajnotti of Turin, Italy. The widower left this tangible reminder of his wife in the city where they first met.

Preeminently, then, Carrie Tower stands for the enduring power of love—a force so strong, according to the monument's inscription, that "Love is Strong as Death." The truth of that statement will be tested in the days ahead, not just at Brown but in gun-maddened America. 

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Sholom Aleichem, on Not Being ‘Worried About God So Much’)

“I wasn’t worried about God so much. I could come to terms with Him one way or another. What bothered me was people. Why should human beings bring suffering to others and to themselves, when they could all live together in peace and goodwill?”—Yiddish fiction writer and playwright Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, a.k.a. Sholom Aleichem (1859-1916), “Schprintze,” in Favorite Tales of Sholom Aleichem, translated by Julius and Frances Butwin (1983)

Photo of the Day: Toni Morrison ‘Bench by the Road’ Project, Nyack, NY

Besides Carson McCullers, the Nyack area’s other major literary luminary was Toni Morrison. While walking in the village’s Memorial Park a couple of weekends ago, I came across and took a photo of this commemoration of African-American history that the Nobel Literature laureate (who resided a few miles away, in Grandview-on-Hudson) highlighted.

Ten years ago this past May, as part of the Toni Morrison Society’s “Bench on the Road” project, the novelist attended a public ceremony commemorating an individual who was part of the vast diaspora resulting from the forced “Middle Passage” from African freedom to American slavery.

The project took its name from Morrison’s 1989 observation about the lack of public places “to think about…to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves.”

This roadside monument honors Cynthia Hesdra, a former slave who became a successful businesswoman and property owner in Nyack. As a conductor on the Underground Railroad, she aided others from the South in achieving the liberty and opportunity she had come to enjoy.

The Underground Railroad involved the transfer of an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people to freedom—a mass movement in which countless ordinary citizens performed extraordinary deeds. They changed America forever by defying legally sanctioned, government-sponsored, shameful racism.

Visitors passing through Nyack would do well to ponder how Cynthia Hesdra did her part, and how each of us could do ours now.

Quote of the Day (Chaim Grade, on an Annoying Son-In-Law)

“It vexed him that his son-in-law replied to every question, ‘What do I know?’”— Lithuanian-born Yiddish novelist and poet Chaim Grade (1910-1982), Sons and Daughters, translated by Rose Waldman (2025)

TV Quote of the Day (Norm Macdonald, on 20th-Century German Militarism)

“The entire earth, there’s only one country that frightens me – that’s the country of Germany. I don’t know if you guys are students of history or not, but… For those of you who aren’t, Germany, in the previous century – in the early part… they decided to go to war. And who did they choose to go to war with? The world. So you think that would last about five seconds and the world would f------g win, and that would be that. But it was actually close!”—Canadian stand-up comic, actor, and writer Norm Macdonald (1959-2021), “Hitler’s Dog, Gossip and Trickery” (special), Sept. 18, 2017

Well, there are a whole bunch of people right now who are not “students of history,” and that would be those American voters who put back in office a President who complained relentlessly about the cost of paying for the defense of Europe.

Now, as Isaac Stanley-Becker’s story in the new January 2026 issue of The Atlantic notes, Germany, which turned away from its militaristic tradition in atonement for World War II, is re-starting its war machine in earnest. 

It’s not just Vladimir Putin’s threat to Ukraine that has scared it, but the harsh rhetoric of Donald Trump (given unforgettable form by his chief attack dog, Vice President J.D. Vance, at the Munich security conference earlier this year).

And all of that was before the release late last week of the administration’s new national security strategy.

By overwhelmingly shifting blame for the rise in tensions in Europe from Russia to European democracies (which, the document helpfully informs us, is risking “civilizational erasure”), the reactionary regime in Washington is laying out nothing less than “a clear plan for subversion in Europe,” aptly notes Tara Varma’s summary for the Brookings Institution. 

Europe’s only alternative, she concludes, is clear: “prepare, invest in its own security and resilience, and resist these intimidation and influence operations coming from its closest ally.”

It might take a while, but MAGA will rue the consequences of what it has wrought in a rearming Germany. As Macdonald noted, this principal power in Central Europe was awfully good at making war in the first half of the 20^th century. The United States learned, to its regret, that isolationism only allowed that war machine to run amok.

Who is to say, in a country where the far right is rearing its head again, that history won’t repeat itself?

The image accompanying this post, of German troops parading through Warsaw, Poland, in September 1939, comes from the National Archives at College Park, Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S).

Quote of the Day (Joseph Conrad, on Judging a Man)

“You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.”— Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Lord Jim (1900)

Quote of the Day (Megan Nolan, on Going Home to Ireland for the Holidays)

“I go home for the holidays in Ireland, and whether you like it or not, going back to the place you were raised and known best in the world only once a year tends to invite focused reflection on what is actually taking place in your life. People keep asking you about it, for one thing: what you’re up to, how the boyfriend is, what you’ve got planned for next year. There were only so many times I could respond to those questions by saying I was fairly desperate to move to New York, actually, and the boyfriend is fine but we hadn’t discussed the prospect of me moving, funnily enough, but no doubt things would resolve in some way without me having to take any action. The encroaching reality of another year was too much to ignore. The general melancholy I always feel around Christmas—a time that compels me helplessly to contemplate how many more I will get to share with my family—was joined by another, more specific, sadness: the relationship I was in had come to an end.”— Irish novelist and essayist Megan Nolan, “Merry Ex-Mas,” The Financial Times (“How To Spend It” supplement), November 2025 

The image accompanying this post, showing mid-morning crowds on Grafton Street in Dublin, Ireland, was taken Dec. 19, 2005, by Irish typepad.

Quote of the Day (Quinn Slobodian, on the Current ‘Libertarian Eugenics’)

“All told, the picture is one of a consistent, if unacknowledged, libertarian eugenics. The high-tech fertility market privileges those able to pay for genetic advantage. The retreat of public health abandons the social minimum needed to ensure that all children can survive and thrive. And immigration policy redraws the body politic along racial lines, achieving by exclusion what mid-century welfare states once sought through inclusion. What emerges is not a paradox but a 21st-century return of social Darwinism, wrapped in a language of choice, freedom and national greatness.”— Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian, “Libertarian Eugenics Is on the Rise,” The Financial Times, Nov. 15-16, 2025

The image of Quinn Slobodian accompanying this post was taken at the book presentation of the German edition of "Crack-Up Capitalism" (Kapitalismus ohne Demokratie), at the University of Frankfurt, on Nov. 21, 2023, by Toter Alter Mann.

Verse of the Day (A.M. Juster, on an Ambitious Government Bureaucrat)

“Your uphill climb will never stop;
   scum always rises to the top.” —Poet, translator, and essayist A.M. Juster (pseudonym for Michael J. Astrue, former head of the Social Security Administration), “To My Ambitious Colleague,” in Sleaze and Slander: New and Selected Comic Verse, 1995-2015 (2016)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Gregory of Nazianzus, on God’s Appearance to Humanity)

“He whom presently you scorn was once transcendent, over even you. He who is presently human was incomposite. He remained what he was; what he was not, he assumed. No ‘because’ is required for his existence in the beginning, for what could account for the existence of God? But later he came into being because of something, namely for your salvation, yours, who insulted him and despised his Godhead for that very reason, because he took on your thick corporeality. Through the medium of the mind he had dealings with the flesh, being made that God on earth….He was carried in the womb, but acknowledged by a prophet yet unborn himself, who leaped for joy at the presence of the Word for whose sake he had been created. He was wrapped in swaddling bands, but at the Resurrection he unloosed the swaddling bands of the grave. He was laid in a manger, but was extolled by angels, disclosed by a star and adored by Magi. Why do you take offense at what you see, instead of attending to its spiritual significance?”— St. Gregory of Nazianzus, bishop of Constantinople and “Doctor of the Church” (c. 330-390), On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

Photo of the Day: Late Fall, Hackensack River, Bergen County NJ

I took this image a week ago today, while walking through Johnson Park in Hackensack, NJ. With temperatures dropping, the number of walkers like myself weren’t as numerous as they were earlier in the year—and I expect that to be even more the case through the holiday season.

Quote of the Day (Arthur Schopenhauer, on Why ‘It Is a Stupid Thing To Be Rude’)

“It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter—an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy.” — German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims, translated by T. Bailey Saunders (1851)

TV Quote of the Day (‘To Catch a Thief,’ With a Reformed Jewel Thief Professing No Interest in His Old Profession)

John Robie [played by Cary Grant]: “You know, I have about the same interest in jewelry that I have in politics, horseracing, modern painting or women who need weird excitement. None!”—To Catch a Thief (1955), screenplay by John Michael Hayes, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Quote of the Day (Nick Pinkerton, on ‘Dodgy’ Investing in Films)

“The [movie] business is, and has always been, a dodgy boondoggle; not for nothing were the old-money WASPs at the East Coast banks reticent to put capital behind fledgling Hollywood. When [American film director Abel] Ferrara was starting out, private investment in low-budget films was spurred by tax loopholes, a way for doctors, dentists, and racketeers to get rid of extra cash that would otherwise wind up in Uncle Sam’s grubby mitts. Fortunes could be made, even if they rarely wound up in the hands of the ‘talent,’ and were made just often enough to keep alive financiers’ delusions of having money down on what could be the next sleeper hit…a situation that can’t be said to persist today, when persuading someone to back an independent film is essentially a matter of finding a credulous dupe to give you a pile of cash to set fire to. In terms of its risk-to-reward ratio, investing in an independent film ranks somewhere in the neighborhood of accepting the hand of a Nigerian prince who has introduced himself to you via cold email. To be a successful independent filmmaker—that is, one who is even sporadically employed—is, in essence, to be a bit of a con man.”— American film critics, screenwriter, and editor Nick Pinkerton, “A Rake’s Progress” (review of Abel Ferrara’s memoir Scene), Harper’s Magazine, November 2025

Quote of the Day (Susan Sontag, on ‘The Writer’s First Job’)

“The writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth…and refuse to be an accomplice of lies or misinformation. Literature is the expression of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to help make us see the world as it is, which is to say, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.”— American critic, novelist, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist Susan Sontag (1933-2004), “In Jerusalem,” The New York Review of Books, June 21, 2001

TV Quote of the Day (‘Veep,’ on Executive Branch Overspending)

Selina Meyer [played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus] [berating aide Gary for overspending on a state dinner on her behalf]: “Who do you think you are? Gary Antoinette?!” —Veep, Season 4, Episode 2, “East Wing,” original air date Apr. 19, 2015, teleplay by Kevin Cecil, Roger Drew, and Andy Riley, directed by Stephanie Laing

Quote of the Day (Tom Stoppard, on Life, ‘A Gamble’)

“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.” —Czech-born English playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Sir Tom Stoppard (1937-2025), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)

Flashback, November 1900: Dreiser’s ‘Sister Carrie’ Released by Half-Hearted Publisher

When the publishing firm Doubleday, Page released Sister Carrie in November 1900, it was without publicity, reflecting the company’s growing doubts and lack of enthusiasm. 

Though an-house reader, novelist Frank Norris, enthusiastically recommended it, one executive or another must have had second doubts after taking it on, as Doubleday tried to offload it on another firm, until author Theodore Dreiser insisted that they were contractually obliged to put it out.

Praise on both sides of the Atlantic didn’t help the reception of the fictional debut of journalist Dreiser. Only a third of its first printing of 1,000 copies were sold, and Doubleday turned over what was left to a remainder house.

Little did anyone know that Sister Carrie would become a landmark in American literature, highlighting the rise of naturalism—a movement that viewed human beings as animalistic, subject to environmental and heredity forces, usually beyond their control. Free will played little to no role in characters’ actions.

If this sounds like a vision colored by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, you would be right. In depicting situations with the exactitude and objectivity of a scientist, Dreiser found a writing mode in which he could use to best advantage his skill as a fact-gathering journalist. 

(One key scene in Sister Carrie was based on a five-week Brooklyn trolley strike he had covered in 1895 for the New York World, when he actually rode the rails and observed clashes between union workers and scan drivers.)

Along with his champion Norris and Stephen Crane (another reporter-turned-fiction writer), Dreiser was one of the primary exponents of naturalism, revealing life among the lower classes to a degree most readers had never experienced.

As critical acceptance of this novel grew, it found its way into academe. Its relatively moderate length (roughly 500 pages) has facilitated its listing in many college American literature survey courses, and despite its massive size (900-plus pages), Dreiser’s later An American Tragedy also continues to be regarded as a classic.

Still, it is doubtful that any reader has enjoyed Sister Carrie. It’s not just that Dreiser lacked a sense of humor that could occasionally brighten his unrelentingly grim subject matter and worldview.

No, unlike Crane, Jack London, or European practitioners of naturalism like Emile Zola or Guy de Maupassant, Dreiser could not resist a hopelessly verbose, ham-fisted style, with clotted, cliched sentences.

When he mounted a rhetorical soapbox, not only do his chapter titles induce cringes (e.g., “When Waters Engulf Us We Reach for a Star”), but longer passages can strain credulity, as in this one introducing the title character, inexperienced teenager Carrie Meeber, traveling to the big city:

“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.”

In tone, that was out of sync with a quiet mastery of detail that lent his narrative believability.

No stranger to temptations of the flesh, Dreiser recorded, with a candor unusual for the time, his characters’ sexual desire. Even before publication, he had only reluctantly yielded to the urging of his wife Sara and friend Arthur Henry to tone down some passages.

Originally, for instance, he wrote of Carrie, “Her dresses draped her becomingly, for she wore excellent corsets and laced herself with care….She had always been of cleanly instincts and now that opportunity afforded, she kept her body sweet."

Sara revised it to read, “Her dresses draped her becomingly. . . . She had always been of cleanly instincts. Her teeth were white, her nails rosy."

(Readers would not know what Dreiser originally intended his book to convey until 1981, when the University of Pennsylvania Press published an edition based on the author's uncut holograph version, containing 36,000 words more than what Doubleday released.)

Indeed, Dreiser made no moral comment on Carrie (or most of his characters, for that matter). He outraged self-professed guardians of public morality especially by not punishing her for living out of wedlock.

As time went on, Dreiser pushed harder against such censors, observing in one 1940 letter, “Any writer, artist, painter or sculptor, or thinker of any breadth of mind who wants to present reality is now being presented by a kept Press."

Readers should not be left with the impression that the sense of authority Dreiser displayed derived solely from his skill as a reporter. He also understood all too well, through his own situation and that of family members, the quandaries that Carrie and her lovers faced as they reached for opportunities for love and money in a big metropolis:

*Like Carrie, Dreiser left home as a teenager for life in a large city;

*His sister Emma, like Carrie, caused a scandal by eloping with a married man;

*Like Carrie’s lover George Hurstwood, Lorenzo A. Hopkins, the man whom Emma ran off to Montreal with, absconded with his employer’s money, before dying, broken and alcoholic, in New York.

*Like Hurstwood, Dreiser himself loved possessions and fancy restaurants.

Sister Carrie concluded in tragedy, with Carrie triumphant as a Broadway actress but unable to shake the emptiness inside, while Hurstwood killed himself in a flophouse. Real life mirrored fiction for the author: A year consumed by bitter quarrels with Doubleday ended even more bleakly, as Dreiser’s often improvident father died on Christmas Day.

With a plot and style unrelieved by humor, even of the dark variety, Sister Carrie is about as lighthearted as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

While this flaw can frustrate readers, it doesn’t negate what a milestone and achievement the book represented in American literature. As Dreiser’s biographer Richard Lingeman noted, the novelist exhibited "sympathy with the outsiders looking in, those who didn't belong, who desire the light and warmth inside the walled city."

(The image accompanying this post comes from William Wyler’s 1952 adaptation of Dreiser’snovel, with the title shortened to Carrie. Jennifer Jones, as the title character, sits between her current lover, Charles Drouet, played by Eddie Albert, on the right, and her future one, George Hurstwood, played by Laurence Olivier.)

TV Quote of the Day (Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, on How ‘The Higher Life of Man is God’)

“The higher life of man is God. And if man is ever to be lifted up, God in some way must come down to man.”—Venerable Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979), Life Is Worth Living, Season 4, Episode 112, “The True Meaning of Christmas,” original air date 1956

Quote of the Day (Geoffrey Parker, on the Importance of French Historian Fernand Braudel)

“The Mediterranean refashioned the entire framework of history. It showed that geography, climate, and distance—what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie would later call ‘l’histoire immobile’—formed the essential context without which history makes no sense. The book also emphasised that the true task of the historian is to distinguish the dynamic from the static, the aberration from the trend. It is impossible to convey the excitement of that approach back in 1964. I had never considered those self-evident truths.”— Geoffrey Parker, Professor of European History at the Ohio State University, “The Transformations of Fernand Braudel,” History Today, November 2025

Forty years ago this week, French historian Fernand Braudel died at age 83. He is associated with the Annales School, an influential movement in historical writing that moved beyond the “great man” school of narrative writing to consider how material factors like water, famine, wildlife, diets, disease, trade, and violence affected ordinary people—including those he grew up with.

Braudel began working on the history that made his reputation, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, under the most extraordinary circumstances: as a prisoner of war during World War II, without access to libraries or any written records, relying initially on his great memory. In old age he produced a three-volume survey of the 15^th through 18^th centuries, Civilization and Capitalism, the capstone of his effort to create a sweeping “history from below.”

(For an excellent overview of Braudel and the Annales School, please see Daniel Halverson’s February 2016 post on the blog “The Partially Examined Life.”)

Quote of the Day (A. S. Hamrah, on ‘Wicked’ and Its Parts)

“Wicked has dropped Part One from its title in its promotional campaign, part of a trend of trying to hide that new films are merely the first part of a series that will decline in quality as it goes on.”— Film critic A. S. Hamrah, Last Week in End Times Cinema (2025)

With the premiere of Part Two of Wicked, there hasn’t been anything so disquieting since Norman Mailer concluded his 1,200-page novel Harlot’s Ghost with the words “To be concluded.” (Fortunately, he never came up with the promised sequel.)

Consider this: the original Wizard of Oz was a blessedly concise 1 hour and 42 minutes. Part One alone of Wicked was a full hour longer. And the only song I can recall is “Defying Gravity.”

If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m sitting out Part Two.