There was no privacy between the 1860s and 1880s; one learned from the newspaper exactly what ailed one’s neighbors.
What was not reported about anyone Black? Social events, trophies and feats, business news, births, deaths, marriages… Pretty much any news except crime.
Fairness was demanded, compassion urged. No one worried about HIPPA. Nor did the news need to be momentous.
Marriage in 1870s-era Missouri was a competitive but disorganized sport, each ceremony removing a potential rival from the fray.
Rise of the Black Quarterback is a fascinating book, with tales of hope and heartbreak, and men determined to give it their all to achieve their dream and, for many years, not being given a fair chance even to try.
In “Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living,” John Kaag and Jonathan Van Belle note that Thoreau was hardly a slacker. “What is leisure but opportunity for more complete and entire action?” he asked. By walking four or six hours and thinking as he went, he managed to write several thousand words a day.
The book I am reading at the moment is due back. Do I bother to renew it electronically? And if I have no more renewals, do I keep it and finish or bring it back anyway? It seems that only money, not respect for other readers, has driven my actions all these years, a terrible realization on which I prefer not to linger. Money is the yardstick for value, right? And what has more value than books?
“Einstein’s Dreams” is one of those elegant, deceptively simple books you know you need to reread a couple thousand times to fully grasp. Not that the book contains answers; what it contains are possibilities that act like crowbars, wedging your mind open. Now Alan Lightman has a new three-part documentary, “Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science,” that acts the same way.
Ethel Waters did not initially have any grand ambitions for herself, certainly not to be in show business. Her first forays into the world of formal employment were hotel and kitchen work, typical for a lower-class Black woman with a spotty education.
Depression, emptiness, anomie, acedia—we have all sorts of words for this soulsickness. A midlife crisis is simply the announcement of a need for a different, more compelling purpose. Quiet quitting says the job was not worth doing.