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.
I don’t select my “favorite story of the week,” but if I did, this one would be it. If you read nothing else here today, or anywhere else, read this. Bring tissues. And feel gratitude, and perhaps some wonder: Judson’s Last Ride by Sean Trende.
You have a book idea. You start researching and perhaps even writing. You’re excited about it. And then, in a bookstore or an online column or post, you see it. Someone has already published a book that sounds like what you’re working on. Your response is something like feeling all four of your car tires deflate at once. What do you do? Writing coach Ann Kroker has some suggestions.
The controversy over writing and artificial intelligence continues to rage. A prizewinning article in a literary magazine that may actually have been written by AI. Books in which quotations of other works turn out to be invented by AI, Books written partially or more than partially by AI programs. Writing using what suspiciously looks like AI-pirated plagiarism. But with all this, not unusual when a new technology is developed, Joel Miller suggests that perhaps writers are focused on the wrong AI battle.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were political enemies, and often bitter ones at times. After Jefferson left the presidency in early 1809, he and Adams began a correspondence that, while it didn’t heal all the old political wounds, it did create a mutual respect. But as Marianne Holdzkom at the Conversation points out, they still disagreed about the American Revolution’s meaning even as they lay dying. And they both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which is usually connected to Jefferson, but which Adams played a hidden hand in.
Charles Dickens was famous for his “night walks,” in which he roamed the streets of London when he couldn’t sleep. He discovered that his own restlessness was mirrored in the restlessness of London, and he came upon scenes and people which inspired some of his stories. In 1860, in his magazine All the Year Round, he published an account of his might walks. It was later included in his collection The Uncommercial Traveler.
Speaking of Dickens, Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review – not the biggest fan of Dickens – gave another of the man’s works a go. He read A Tale of Two Cities, and he discovered a hidden architecture within the story.
Many of us grew up reciting “Listen, my children, and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Those opening lines of the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and what followed became our understanding of the famous and mythic ride. But as the Smithsonian Magazine points out, Paul Revere had another race, now forgotten, to secure government documents, of all things.
King Charles III will not issue an Easter message this year, according to Buckingham Palace. He did, however, issue one for Ramadan. A sign of the times? In The Wall Steet Journal, Brit Louise Perry writes that Christendom is no more, and not just in Britain (article unlocked). Canada, for example, has a new hate crime bill which seems to target Christians. Some in Britain have noted that, while the Anglican church seems close to collapse, there is a revival underway. Rhys Laverty at The Critic Magazine says the reports of revival in Britain are not premature, but it’s a phenomenon mostly associated with evangelical and Catholic churches.
We are assaulted with so much news these days that the temptation is to turn it off. All of it. And yet so much if it is accepted narrative masquerading as news. We slip into our respective siloes to make sense of it all. Joe Duke at Front Porch Republic argues that there’s a better way then listening only to echo chambers.
On Easter, Christians around the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Michael Kruger at Canon Fodder went looking for the best evidence of the resurrection.
I’m not a big hockey fan, but I cheered along with (most of) the rest of America when the USA team defeated Canada and won the gold medal in the Olympics in Milan. The algorithms at Facebook and Instagram noted my interest and filled my feeds with reels, posts, photos and news reports. And then came the Huffington Post and its coverage. I suppose there will always be one Ebenezer Scrooge shouting “Bah! Humbug!”
When the American Revolution began, colonists had a choice – join, resist, or stay out of it. Quakers usually avoided participation, but one, Abraham Carlile of Philadelphia, chose active support of the British when they occupied the city. When the British army abandoned the city the following year, Carlile remained, believing he’d doing nothing wrong. And that decision turned out to be a mistake.
If you’re interested in Medieval history, you might be interested in what Andrew Roycroft is starting at New Grub Street. He’s beginning a series on the Medieval period, starting with a discussion of Piers Plowman by William Langland. I haven’t read the poem since taking English literature in college some 50 years ago, and I think I’ll revisit it.
