Year: 2021
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Down from Basswood: Voices from the Boundary Waters
A friend of mine recently moved to northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. He said he’d been looking online for information about the region when he stumbled upon mention of an obscure book that was supposed to really capture the area well. It was the short story collection Down from Basswood: Voices from the Boundary Waters by…
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Winston Churchill’s memo on brevity
I’m reading Erik Larson’s latest book The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz and appreciated his spotlighting a memo Churchill sent out to his cabinet with the title “Brevity.” Highlights: To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them…
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Ideas as kin
In a recent newsletter about the movement to dismantle the classics, Andrew Sullivan wrote about Martin Luther King Jr.’s syllabus for a seminar he was teaching at Morehouse College in 1962, which included Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s City of God—a glimpse of what King believed an educated black man at that time should…
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At the age you are
“I love you at the age you are, and every year you grow / into more the special someone I forever want to know.” — I Love You All Ways by Marianne Richmond I love that line (from a board book that’s in his regular rotation) because it reminds me not to focus on hitting…
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Final lines on second chances
(Spoilers for the films Soul and Driveways, two of my favorites of 2020.) At the very end of Driveways, Brian Dennehy’s elderly Del finds himself recounting a story. He concludes: You know what I wish? I wish me and Eddie were just leaving Joplin this morning. I wish we could do that whole trip all…
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Recent Views
More photography here and on my Instagram. A dusting on the pier at our local park: Just following in Little Man’s footsteps: This is either a failed photo or the perfect encapsulation of Christmas morning with a toddler: Liked the colors and light in our front bushes (which still have Christmas lights on them) while…
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Hernando Columbus at the Sistine Chapel
Edward Wilson-Lee’s The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library is a fascinating book for many reasons. It covers an era of history I’ve rarely visited, so that in itself felt like an adventure. By following the life of Hernando Columbus, the bastard son of…
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4 lessons from the Trump years
It’s been a tradition on this blog since its inception to do a kind of presidential postmortem for the outgoing commander-in-chief (see Bush and Obama), assessing both the political takeaways and my personal life during their administration. (I planned to publish this on Inauguration Day, but as the actual end date of the Trump administration…
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Free typewriter paper? OK
Sometimes it pays for people to know your hobby. Last week, when I was actually working in the office for once, I arrived to find this on my desk: No note, no idea who left it there. Maybe they found it in the library’s supply closest and remembered I was a typewriter guy. Regardless, I’m…
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Memories make us rich
Former Packers columnist Vic Ketchman likes to say “memories make us rich.” I think about this a lot, but I gave it special consideration during this year’s annual viewing of It’s A Wonderful Life when, at the very end—in arguably the film’s best moment—Harry says, “A toast to my big brother, George, the richest man…