Tomorrow is Fathers Day. It’s a younger observance than Mothers Day, and it started in 1910 in Spokane, Washington. And it started because a daughter was determined that fathers would not be forgotten.
Psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles died June 4 at age 97. He also taught literature at Harvard and wrote more than 60 books. His Pulitzer Prize work was about race, and he went to New Orleans with a notebook and tape recording to understand how federally mandated school integration had affected the children themselves. Kenneth Woodward at Commonweal has a remembrance of Coles and his writing.
Way back in my junior year of high school, I did a massive research paper for my American Literature class on three Realist writers – Jack London, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather. I had to read at least two works by each author, and for Cather I chose two of her later works – Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock (we’d already read My Antonia and O Pioneers in class, and the research paper had to be on unread works). I liked them both, but I knew that critics had disliked Shadows on the Rock; it was apparently too religious. Maria Grace Birzer Papez at The Imaginative Conservative considers the book and writes that the critics at the time missed the point entirely.
More Good Reads
America 250
America at 250: The Greatest Compounding Machine in History – Meg Faber at Real Clear History.
John Hancock and the Battle for Newport – Kely Holt at Just Enough History.
America’s Thomas Jefferson Problem – Rick Lowry at The Coolidge Review.
The Plot Against Washington – Jonathan Horn at The Free Press.
Anatomy of a Republic – Bradley Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative.
The Gaspee Affair (1772): When Rhode Island Colonists Burned a British Warship – Anglotopia.
George Washington and the Battle for America’s Frontier – Keli Holt at Just Enough History.
Faith
Dear Dementia – Katie Laitkep.
Loaves, Fish, and Un-Self-Conscious Little Boys – Michael Kelley at Forward Progress.
Writing and Literature
Great Americans: The Wizard Who Created Oz – Ann Bauer at The Free Press.
Candance Millard and the Revival of History as Literature – Conor Broll at Miller’s Book Review.
Drastic Unalikes: Flannery O’Connor and Her Mother – Ralph Wood at Mere Orthodoxy.
Poetry
You’re a Popsicle – Seth Lewis.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”, Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.
Keats’s Melancholy Ode – Adam Roberts at Ships on Fire, Off the Shoulder of Orion.
“Poppies on the Wheat,” poem by Helen Hunt Jackson and “When I Have Fears,” poem by John Keats – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.
News Media
10 Insights from the Truter’s Institute Digital News Report 2026 – Chris Martin at FYI.
Brookhaven Trailer – TS Poetry Press
Painting: Storytime, oil on canvas (1897) by Carlton Alfred Smith (1853-1946).
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