"Have you gotten to the part where Beth dies?" my wife innocently asked her younger sister, who, many years ago, was eagerly reading "Little Women." Her sister, of course, hadn't and the knowledge of what was coming detracted (to say the least) from her experience of the book. To be clear, my wife didn't do …
All Essays
In December 1941, a few days after the United States declared war, Winston Churchill secretly boarded a British battleship, which made a dangerous 10-day journey to the United States. The journey was so secret that Eleanor Roosevelt later wrote that while President Franklin Roosevelt told her "that we would be having some guests visit us," in …
Could today's #stampoftheday be the unmade sequel to "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" I ask because the plot of that delightfully goofy 1988 film turns (spoiler alert) on the villainous Judge Doom's plan to have Cloverleaf Industries purchase and demolish the Red Car Trolley Line, which, in turn, would force people to drive on the freeway he …
I'm a longtime member of the intramural softball team fielded by Tufts University's Art History Department. But, as anyone who knows me can attest, I do not have a strong sense of design. This is salient because today's #stampoftheday was the first US stamp to feature an abstract piece of art. A 5-cent stamp honoring "the …
Although I hadn't heard of Ephriam McDowell before today, in turns out that I might owe my life to him. It also turns out that I can learn a lot from him as well. For others who also had never heard of him, McDowell was a surgeon in the late 1700s and early 1800s who was …
About 15 years ago, while driving on a highway just north of Palm Beach, I asked Ed Glaeser, the noted urban economist, if we were in that mythical place economists call "the featureless plane." I thought it was funny; I don't recall if Ed was amused, annoyed, or indifferent. That story came to mind as I …
When you are travelling in Ecuador, there's no good reason to read Carl Hiaasen's "Stormy Weather," a dark and humorous novel that, like all his books partially takes place in the Everglades, which are the subject of today's #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp issued on December 5, 1947. But that's what I did in 2011 (back in …
WWJFDD? That is, what would John Foster Dulles do? That question occurred to me as I thought about today's #stampoftheday (number 232 if you're counting) - a 4-cent stamp picturing Dulles that was issued on December 6, 1960. In many ways, Dulles now is a largely forgotten figure. But in the mid-20th century, he was seminal figure, …
"Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years." This striking observation comes from "Oh Pioneers," a 1913 novel by …