May 17, 2018
“I’ve simply always lacked even the slightest religious impulse—when people talk about their faith, I can’t connect with what they’re talking about. This isn’t a decision I came to, or a deep belief or principle; I’m just religion-deaf, the way tone-deaf people hear sounds but not music. I suppose my religion is reading.”
AVID READER
By Robert Gottlieb
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Posted by Jim
November 18, 2017
A client of mine, the writer Bob Hale, recently sent this email:
Hi. Jim,
Have a great Thanksgiving!
I especially enjoy this holiday because my great-great-grandmother, in the midst of the Civil War, persuaded President Lincoln to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. Before that it was celebrated at different times in different states.
She was also editor of the first national women’s magazine.
Bob
Note: The following is my edited version of a post from Biography.com
On October 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation setting aside the last Thursday in November as a national day of thanks, setting the precedent for the modern holiday we celebrate today.
Much of the credit for the proclamation should go to a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale. A prominent writer and editor, Hale had written the children’s poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in 1830, and helped found the American Ladies Magazine, which she used as a platform to promote women’s issues. In addition to her publishing work, Hale was a committed advocate for women’s education (including the creation of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York).
She had grown up regularly celebrating an annual Thanksgiving holiday, and in 1827 published a novel, “Northwood: A Tale of New England,” that included an entire chapter about the fall tradition, already popular in parts of the nation. Hale often wrote editorials and articles about the holiday and she lobbied state and federal officials to pass legislation creating a fixed, national day of thanks on the last Thursday of November—a unifying measure, she believed that could help ease growing tensions between North and South. Her efforts paid off: By 1854, more than 30 states and U.S. territories had a Thanksgiving celebration.
She continued to write editorials on the subject, urging Americans to “put aside sectional feelings and local incidents” and rally around the unifying cause of Thanksgiving. Abraham Lincoln himself called for a day of thanks in April 1862, following Union victories at Fort Donelson, Fort Henry and at Shiloh, and again in the summer of 1863 after the Battle of Gettysburg.
Shortly after Lincoln’s summer proclamation, Hale wrote to both the president and Secretary of State William Seward, urging them to declare a national Thanksgiving, stating that only the chief executive had the power to make the holiday, “permanently, an American custom and institution.” Within a week, Seward had drafted Lincoln’s official proclamation fixing the national observation of Thanksgiving on the final Thursday in November, a move the two men hoped would help “heal the wounds of the nation.”
After more than three decades of lobbying, Sarah Josepha Hale (and the United States) had a new national holiday.
Footnote: In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt briefly moved Thanksgiving up a week, in an effort to extend the already important shopping period before Christmas and spur economic activity during the Great Depression. Several states followed FDR’s lead, others balked, with 16 states refusing to honor the calendar shift. Just two years later, in the fall of 1941, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution returning the holiday to the fourth Thursday of November.
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Posted by Jim
June 12, 2017
“Orwell would have despised Trump as a kind of fat, dumb, uneducated oligarch,” Ricks said last month in a podcast produced by the magazine Foreign Policy. “Churchill would see America as somewhat childish. We occasionally stumble and elect a childish president, and that’s what we’ve done here, but Churchill would also appreciate how robust the American government is. Basically, we’ve had a decapitation strike that we executed ourselves. We no longer have a working presidency. There’s nobody at home, mentally, running the U.S. government. And guess what? It runs pretty well by itself. Probably better. If President Trump were competent, he’d be much more dangerous.”
Thomas E. Ricks, N.Y.T. Book Review, June 11, 2017
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Posted by Jim
April 13, 2017

“Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting. We have to begin, then, with the first refusal to face reality: most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy. The generation of 1776 certainly underplayed that fact. And all subsequent generations took their cue from the nation’s founders.”
Quote from page 5 of the Introduction to White Trash.
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Posted by Jim
January 11, 2017
“The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Between the World and Me
Spiegel & Grau, New York
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Posted by Jim
March 9, 2016
“Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.”
Ken Murray, How Doctors Die, The Best American Essays, 2012
Originally published in Zocalo Public Square
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Posted by Jim
February 3, 2016
“Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.”
Anton Chekhov (Click image to enlarge.)
Short-story writer and dramatist, 1860-1904.
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Posted by Jim
January 5, 2016
“The title of the book fits my sense of things nicely. Writing an essay is a form of loitering—a lingering, a skulking, a meandering—and I like the sinister undertone—loitering with intent . . .”
LOITERING, New & Collected Essays
By Charles D’Ambrosio
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Posted by Jim
October 5, 2015
From note 16, Chapter III: American Scripture, Making the Declaration of Independence, by Pauline Maier
“With regard to the values and educational methods of the eighteenth century, note that Jefferson himself kept a ‘Commonplace Book.’ Its pedagogical purpose was suggested by Jefferson’s teacher, the Rev. James Maury, who instructed his own son to ‘reflect, and remark on, and digest what you read,’ and to dwell on any remarkable beauties of diction, justness or sublimity of sentiment, or masterly strokes of true wit which may occur in the course of your reading.”
From note 97, Chapter IV: American Scripture, Making the Declaration of Independence, by Pauline Maier
“At Chicago, Lincoln . . . said that the argument that the principles of the Declaration of Independence do not apply to blacks was identical to ‘the
arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class.’ Douglas’s argument was like that of ‘the same old serpent’ who says ‘you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn it whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it all the same old serpent . . . .”
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Posted by Jim
July 3, 2015
“For any writer who has known early loss and dislocation, the task is to find metaphors, to work out ways of dealing with experience that are indirect to begin with, and then slowly move toward the original wound by something lurking in the prose. Writing becomes a skin-tight camouflage; the camouflage then carries with it traces of the original impulse to write and to make the writing matter to the reader, traces that gradually become more right with truth and dense with feeling than the original impulse itself.”
From the essay The Hard-Won Truth of the North
The New York Review, July 9, 2015 issue.
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Posted by Jim
Today’s Quote
June 12, 2017Thomas E. Ricks, N.Y.T. Book Review, June 11, 2017