America In 1963
Culturally, on the evening before President John F. Kennedy's assassination, America was an astonishingly monolithic country when compared to today, writes Charles Murray.
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February 22, 2012
February 19, 2012
Side By Side Toilets For Better Conversation
In the Middle Ages English houses had no privacy, writes Bill Bryson.
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February 15, 2012
Christopher Robin And His Father
When Alan (A.A.) Milne died at age 74, his only child Christopher Robin was estranged from him, writes Ann Thwaite.
February 12, 2012
The Brain In Love
Where do we find enduring love? Answer: Oxytocin. Infidelity? Testosterone. Heartbreak? Low serotonin and endorphins. In fact, our loved ones are actually present in our brains - neurochemically - and when we lose them, it results in chemical trauma for the brain. writes Daniel G. Amen.
February 08, 2012
Keith Richards Meets Mick Jagger
The letter below was written by eighteen-year-old Keith Richards to his Aunt Patty. It came to light in 2009 and had not been read by anyone outside the family prior to the recent release of his autobiography. In it, he describes meeting Mick Jagger in 1961. Almost immediately, they were regularly hanging out and "trying to learn how to do it." They went on to worldwide fame as the founding members of The Rolling Stones
February 05, 2012
Money Made Of Wood
Money has been made from strange things - wood, leather, tobacco leaves, salt, ceramic tiles and a wide variety of other materials. This reflects money's origin as a token of debt, an agreement to pay based on trust in the issuer of the coin - as opposed to the inherent worth of the coin. Even coins made of gold or silver would usually trade at a premium to the value of the metal - reflecting trust in the strength of the king/money-redeemer who issued the coin, writes David Graeber.
February 01, 2012
Rat Pack Girls
"The young women of the early 1960s who wanted to gain the attention and favors of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and the other members and attendants of the Rat Pack. In spite of the hopes of these women, they rarely gained the attention of the Rat Pack, and when they did, it was usually only for a short, sexual moment in the whirl that accompanied the Rat Pack celebrity.
"Like the food at a party, flashy girls come in a variety of shades and sizes, but it's always the same variety. They are presented as 'actresses,' that's the standard line whether they are starlets or hookers. In New York, the term is model." - Judith Campbell Exner, as reported in a book by Shawn Levy.
January 29, 2012
Comedy Without A Laugh
The 1970s were highly fertile years for comedy in America. That period yielded a who's who of future stars bursting forth from places like the Second City Comedy Club. For most though, it was a painful rite of passage, appearing at clubs that did not pay, taking menial jobs to pay rent, and dreaming of that one appearance on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show that would send them to stardom. Two such comedians were Al Franken (now a U.S. Senator) and Tom Davis - Franken and Davis - who later gained fame as writers and performers on Saturday Night Live, writes Tom Davis.
January 25, 2012
The Wonders Of Vaudeville
Vaudeville, the circuit of variety acts went from town to town from the early 1880s until the early 1930s was America's preeminent form of entertainment - until it was swept aside by the ascendance of cinema and radio. In the 1920s, Louise Hovick, later world famous as the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, was hustled from one theater to the next, overshadowed by her baby sister June, dominated by her mother Rose, deprived of teachers and dental care, but exposed to the assortment of oddities and wonders only the world of vaudeville could provide, writes Karen Abbott.
January 22, 2012
Increase Your Standing With A Book
The Kennedy family was ruled with an iron hand by John and Bobby Kennedy's father - reputed bootlegger and multi-millionaire Ambassador Joe Kennedy. It was Joe's ambitions that pushed John to run for President, and Joe's money and acumen that guided the campaign. And it was Joe's idea that his sons should try and increase their own stature by having books ghostwritten for them and then published under their own names - a practice then radical but now commonplace.
Although Ted Sorenson was the primary author of John Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage, and John Seigenthaler was the primary author of Bobby Kennedy's The Enemy Within, Joe was not pleased when anyone suspected that someone other than his boys were the authors. Still, the boys were able to assert their independence from the father in subtle ways, writes Burton Hersch.
January 18, 2012
The Cure For A Recession
In a recession, it is the widespread assumption of politicians, citizens and economists that government intervention is required to return the economy to prosperity. There is an different line of thought, however, that states that recessions are an inevitable result of excesses (e.g., the overbuilding and related overlending that brought about our current crisis), and that government intervention simply prolongs the period required to "write-down" or otherwise absorb these excesses.
One such alternative theory is the Austrian school of economic thought, espoused by such authors as Ludwig von Mises and his economic disciple Murray Rothbard.
January 15, 2012
Boston Bans Beethoven
Once America entered the First World War in 1917, anti-German passions began to rage against even those Germans living in America. As with the Irish, Italians and Chinese before, and Mexicans, Arabs and many other ethnic groups since, vilifying an ethnic group has long been part of our political fabric. In this case, for those who had been laboring to pass a prohibition amendment to the constitution, this anti-German sentiment could be used to sway votes since most of America's brewers were German. And, as Purley Baker, president of the powerful Anti-Saloon League put it, Germans were "a race of people who eat like gluttons and drink like swine" writes Daniel Okrent.
January 11, 2012
Kids Are Cruel
The Mickey Mouse Club television show was cancelled in 1958 after three seasons, and almost all the Mouseketeers, who were pre-teens and teenagers, found themselves out of work and trying to reenter normal life. Very few received help from Disney or were able to sustain careers in the entertainment world, and most went on to lives filled with disappointment. Even returning to their former schools proved daunting, writes author Jennifer Armstrong.
January 08, 2012
Fragile Steve McQueen
Steve McQueen, once the highest-paid actor in the world, whose talents seared the screen in such movies as Bullitt, The Great Escape, The Sand Pebbles, The Magnificent Seven, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Getaway, Papillon, and The Towering Inferno, had a fragile, needy psyche, writes author Marc Eliot.
January 01, 2012
If I Save You I Owe You
In our society, we assume that if someone saves another person's life, then the person saved owes the person who saved them. However, in some societies, the opposite is true, the person who is saved is owed by the person who saved them. In fact, in some societies, if someone saves another's life, he is considered responsible for taking care of that person forever. Perhaps that is the deeper truth, writes David Graeber.
December 28, 2011
The Last Gunfight
Wyatt Earp, the legendary lawman most famous for the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Arizona, grew up in the mid-1800s in places as diverse as Illinois, Missouri and California. His father, like so many others, unsuccessfully sought fortune and esteem in the new American West. As a young man, Wyatt alternately served as a lawman and ran afoul of the law for crimes such as theft and working in a bordello, writes Jeff Guinn.
December 21, 2011
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow
between 1959 and 1964, the most prolific incubator for new teenage music in America was the Brill Building in New York City, which launched the careers of such legendary songwriters (and later performers) as Carole King, Neil Diamond and Bobby Darin, writes Greg Shaw.
December 18, 2011
A European Bank Brings Down The World
Just as Europe is struggling in 2011 to contain a banking crisis, it struggled in 1930 - unsuccessfully - to contain another banking crisis. The results was a key element in turning the slump of 1929 into a worldwide Great Depression. In 1930, a year before the more renowned failure of the Bank of United States sent Americans into a panic, a series of major banking crises had created a worldwide recession which John Maynard Keynes referred to as "The Great Slump of 1930" writes Liaquat Ahamed.
December 14, 2011
Young George Harrison
The relentless Nazi bombing of Liverpool left it scarred and resource starved. Out of this deprivation, its citizens - including young George Harrison and his friends - developed a sense of humor, a work ethic, and the hope of escape.
December 11, 2011
The Most Successful Lobbyist
Decades before today's religious right began its well-organized political efforts, the Christian-based Anti-Saloon League (ASL) waged the most successful single issue lobbying effort in American history which culminated in Prohibition - the Eighteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, says author Daniel Okrent.
December 07, 2011
Writing Jokes
Stand-up comedian Jay Sankey offers his advice on writing and editing jokes to aspiring stand-up comedians. His advice has application to all forms of communication:
"'Never use a long word where a short one will do.'
-George Orwell
November 30, 2011
A School Full Of Love
Alan (A.A.) Milne, the author and playwright who later became world famous for Winnie the Pooh, grew up in the 1880s with his older brothers in the small British schoolhouse where his father, John (J.V.) Milne, was the headmaster. Because John came from poverty, he lacked qualifications and was only able to become headmaster at rougher schools. Yet he led these with affection and good humor, writes author Ann Thwaite.
November 27, 2011
The Reunification Of Germany
Author Manjit Kumar tells of the reunification of Germany in the 19th Century.
November 23, 2011
Many Early Americans Were Not Free
Most early Americans, if you exclude the important category of Native Americans, were African slaves, convicts from Britain who were forcibly shipped to America, and indentured servants, writes Anthony Vaver.
November 20, 2011
Eunuchs
Eunuchs, castrated servants, performed a wide variety of functions for kings in ancient and more recent times, writes James J O'Donnell.
November 16, 2011
Icelandic Melt-Down
In the darkest days of our current financial crisis (which seems to be entering its second act in Europe), no country suffered a more spectacular collapse than tiny Iceland with its 300,000 citizens, writes Michael Lewis.
November 13, 2011
Superior Investing
Legendary investor Howard Marks contends that superior investment results can only come from going against the consensus. However, just because an investment is contrarian does not make it a good investment, it has to be the right contrarian investment - and contrarian investing is by definition a highly risky and lonely pursuit,
November 09, 2011
The Way You Wear Your Hat
Throughout his life Frank Sinatra dreaded being alone and so spent most nights surrounded by friends, insisting that they stay and often greeting the dawn with them, says author Bill Zehme.
November 06, 2011
Violence Decreasing
In his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, author Stephen Pinker discusses the reasons for the decline in societal violence.
November 02, 2011
Can We Live For Ever?
Author Ray Kurzwell points out that some researchers now believe we will soon be able to reverse the aging process.
October 30, 2011
The Creator Of Peanuts
Charles Schulz, creator, author and illustrator of the cartoon strip Peanuts for nearly fifty years, which at its peak was read by over 300 million people. His most powerful memory - and his most powerful motivator - was the death of his mother, writes David Michaelis.
October 26, 2011
Ancient Kings Cancelleed Debts
In ancient city-states such as Babylon, Sumeria and Judaea, rulers found it necessary to cancel all consumer debt from time to time to keep peasants from becoming permanent debt-peons and thus to keep society from being torn apart - a phenomenon all the more interesting from the perspective of our debt-laden 21st century. writes David Graeber.
October 23, 2011
Sexual Norms
Sexual norms have varied widely throughout history, writes Anna Clark.
October 19, 2011
Churchill And Gandfhi
"In the centuries leading up to 1900, Britain built an empire of countries around the globe to increase its wealth, in part by granting monopolies to its own citizens and the expense of the citizens of the colony. Chief among these British colonies was India, and chief among those trying to cast off the colonial yoke was Mohandas Gandhi. One of his first broad efforts in this regard was leading a boycott of the British monopoly of India's salt. To Winston Churchill, this made Gandhi an enemy,'' writes Nicholson Baker.
October 16, 2011
Sex On Six Legs
"Ten million kinds of insects provide an incomparable variety of behaviors - including some whose genitals explode after sex and others who can exercise mind control over other insect species,'' writes Marlene Zuk.
October 12, 2011
Little More Than Slaves
In Confucian China, women were little more than slaves, a status that remained true through the turn of the twentieth century, writes Sterling Seagrave,
October 09, 2011
The Beatles' First Album
Jody Rosen tells how, in 1963, a young band called The Beatles, forged in the nightclubs of Liverpool, England and Hamburg, Germany, had become the hottest act in British music after performing the song "Please Please Me" on the nationally televised pop showcase Thank Your Lucky Stars. Long play (LP) albums were first introduced in 1948 but still infrequently used by rock groups, and soon after Lucky Stars they recorded their first.
October 05, 2011
James Bond's Work Ethic
"At the age of twenty-four, Sean Connery had his first exposure to acting - a minor part in a touring company of South Pacific - as well as an offer to play soccer for Manchester United. Still trying to escape the poverty of Scotland and reasoning that his athletic career could only last a few years, Connery plunged into a program of self-improvement,'' writes Christopher Bray.
October 02, 2011
Teach Like A Champion
In Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov's brilliant distillation of forty-nine techniques for teachers to use to improve student performance, he writes that teachers should normalize error and avoid chastening students for getting things wrong. (Lemov's book has application far beyond the classroom).:
September 28, 2011
Hitler Begs
Author John Toland recalls that Hitler, at the age of twenty, in Vienna, with both parents dead and his meager inheritance dwindling, resorted to begging for money.
September 25, 2011
Andre Ag assi's Last Match
In this excerpt from his autobiography tennis champion Andre Agassi writes about the final tournament of his life and the preparation for a match that may be last of his career - and about the loneliness of tennis.
September 21, 2011
George Orwell v Aldous Huxley
Two competing visions of the future came from British authors George Orwell (1903-1950) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). Though it came 17 years later, Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 is better known; however, Huxley's Brave New World has proven more relevant, suggests author Neil Postman.
September 18, 2011
Chinese Converts To Christianity
Efforts by Christian missionaries in the 1800s to convert the largely rural Chinese to their faith stumbled badly, amid cultural dissonance, social and political maneuvering, and libelous claims and counterclaims. But British economic and military superiority soon made it advantageous to for Chinese to convert, says author Sterling Seagrave.
September 14, 2011
Making Stuff Funnier
Here in an interview with authors Peter Desberg and Jeffrey David the star producer, director, playwright and comedy writer Walter Bennett, reflects on writing comedy.
September 11, 2011
Only 2.5 Per Cent Of Earth's Water Is Fresh
Only the tiniest fraction of all the earth's water is available to us as fresh liquid water, and control of rivers, more than oceans or lakes, has been the key to the advance of civilization, writes Steven Solomon.
Continue reading "Only 2.5 Per Cent Of Earth's Water Is Fresh" »
September 07, 2011
An Active Hatred Of The British
"In the 1890s, Americans still had an active hate for the British,'' writes Walter Karp.
September 04, 2011
Bonds v. Stocks
As told in The Big Short, Michael Lewis's chronicle of the sub-prime mortgage debacle, Steve Eisman and Vincent Daniel were two brilliant investment managers who were among the very few to figure out the problem early on. Along the way, they discovered that the stock market (also called the equity market) was small and relatively well regulated compared to the bond market (also called the fixed income market) - which was huge, sprawling and had eluded serious regulation.
August 31, 2011
One Of The Greatest Tragedies In Human History
During Chairman Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, which was an effort to use centralized Communist planning to vault China's economy past those of the Western European powers, China endured one of the greatest tragedies in human history - the death of over 45 million people, writes Frank Dikotter.
Continue reading "One Of The Greatest Tragedies In Human History" »
August 28, 2011
Children Who Tell Lies
"Researchers have found that the ability to tell fibs at the age of two is a sign of a fast developing brain and means they are more likely to have successful lives. They found that the more plausible the lie, the more quick witted they will be in later years and the better their ability to think on their feet. It also means that they have developed 'executive function' - the ability to invent a convincing lie by keeping the truth at the back of their mind,'' writes Richard Alleyne.
August 24, 2011
Financial Turmoil
Given the turmoil in financial markets it is interesting to note the not-so-subtle beginnings of the still-current financial crisis - namely subprime real estate. With all that has transpired since 2007, it is a problem that remains only partially addressed, say the authors of the book Guaranteed To Fail.
August 21, 2011
Barbaric Rituals And Degrading Superstitions
"In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church sent more pilgrims to Jerusalem than any other branch of the Christian faith,'' writes Orlando Figes.
Continue reading "Barbaric Rituals And Degrading Superstitions" »
August 17, 2011
Connery's Bond
After World War II, movies about spies and war were taken seriously - a movie told a story and the audience was expected to believe it. Ian Fleming's wildly popular books about James Bond continued that tradition - Fleming's Bond was a humorless, high-born, and unquestioningly patriotic creature. (In fact, Fleming dismissed the idea of Alfred Hitchcock directing his films because he he felt he would not treat them seriously enough). Sean Connery - who was relatively unknown, was climbing up from a working class background, and was paid a relative pittance for the role - knew intuitively to imbue his Bond with insolence and an amoral humor. Thus 1962's Dr. No, the first of the Bond movies, marks the beginning of decadence in post-war cinema - the first time the audience is in on the joke, writes Christopher Bray.
August 14, 2011
The Noble Gases
the Noble Gases, also known as inert gases, are located in column eighteen on the far right side of the Periodic Table of Elements and consist of: Helium (He), Neon (Ne), Argon (Ar), Krypton (Kr), Xenon (Xe), and Radon (Rn). Each of these gases, under standard conditions, are odorless, colorless, monatomic gases, with very low chemical reactivity, writes Sam Kean.
August 10, 2011
Hitler Decides To Enter Politics
In 1918, after one final military assault that failed, Germany was defeated. Young Adolf Hitler, blind after a mustard gas attack, and humiliated after the Fatherland's defeat, vowed to enter politics, writes John Toland.
August 07, 2011
Wonder Girl
At the turn of the twentieth century, a time of the greatest inward migration in American history, Ole and Hannah Didriksen and their small, destitute Norwegian family migrated to bleak, oil-drenched East Texas to seek riches from the new oil boom. Their as-yet-unborn daughter, later known to the world as Babe Didrikson, was to become one of the most acclaimed athletes in America history. But not before the Didriksens endured more poverty in America, and suffered the same mixture of hope and heartbreak suffered by millions of immigrants before and since, writes Don Van Natta Jr.
August 03, 2011
The Making Of Sports Illustrated
"Time Magazine founder Henry Luce launched the new magazine Sports Illustrated in 1954, a time in which the biggest change in American life was the rapid growth of leisure and entertainment. The writing was superb - William Faulkner wrote an account of the 1955 Kentucky Derby - but it did not produce a profit until its tenth year,'' writes Alan Brinkley.
July 31, 2011
Russia Colonizes America
"The expeditions of Vitus Bering, after whom the Bering Strait is named, were part of a successful Russian effort to colonize America in the early 1700s. Russia's dominion iver a vast portion of North America ended over a century later with the U.S. purchase of 'Alaska' from Russia under the administration of President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward - a transaction known as Seward's Folly''' writes Stephen R Bown.
July 27, 2011
Europe's Beautiful Bridges
Some of Europe's most beautiful bridges - the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, the Old London Bridge, the Rialto Bridge in Venice - were evidence of the trade and wealth that was pulling Europe out of its feudal past and toward a market economy, a transition known as the Commercial Revolution. Trade was most pronounced on rivers, especially where those rivers were near the sea, and new bridges were built throughout the continent. Houses, shops, and marketplaces were built on top of these bridges, and the lenders who set up their shops on the river banks adjacent to these bridges - the "banchieri" in Italian - gave us the modern word "bank", writes Steven Solomon.
July 24, 2011
Studying Sex
Alfred Kinsey, and later William Masters and Virginia Johnson, endured rejection and ridicule to publish what ultimately became recognized as groundbreaking studies on human sexuality, says Mary Roach.
July 20, 2011
Marlon Brando - The Godfather
In today's excerpt - legendary movie critic Pauline Kael wrote the following passage about Marlon Brando in The New Yorker as part of her 1972 review of the then newly-released movie, The Godfather:
July 17, 2011
No Point In Trying To Hide From Your Bacteria
"Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and bacteriologist, became so preoccupied with them that he took to peering critically at every dish placed before him with a magnifying glass, a habit that presumably did not win him many repeat invitations to dinner,'' writes Bill Bryson.
Continue reading "No Point In Trying To Hide From Your Bacteria" »
July 13, 2011
America's Great Advantage
The United States has recently developed a key strategic advantage versus most other countries in the world: the U.S. population is growing, especially in the key working age groups, while a significant number of other large countries have declining populations and have a comparatively higher percent of their population in the "retired" age range - which will create a higher burden in social security and healthcare costs, writes Joel Kotkin.
July 10, 2011
The New Madrid Earthquakes
"In 1811-1812, a series of earthquakes known as the New Madrid Earthquakes rocked the Mississippi Valley, reaching a level some estimate as 7.5 to 8.0 on the Richter Scale. These earthquakes remain the most powerful earthquakes ever to hit the eastern United States,'' writes Michael Wallis.
July 06, 2011
Most Soldiers Are Reluctant To Kill
Most soldiers are reluctant to fire their weapons when confronted by the enemy, writes Lt. Col. David Grossman.
July 03, 2011
How To Fire Someone
Michael Freedland recalls that Judy Garland was fired by MGM during the early days of filming Annie Get Your Gun while coming off the set in full Indian costume.
Garland was perhaps the most popular entertainer of her era - dazzling audiences on film, radio, television and records - but had become increasingly unreliable. MGM was the grandest studio of Hollywood's golden era. Annie Get Your Gun was one of the most popular Broadway shows of its day - and was viewed as a sure-fire Hollywood box office smash.
June 29, 2011
Rip Van Winkle
"Rip Van Winkle, who was author Washington Irving's vehicle for conveying the lightning pace of change in early post-Revolutionary America. During this period, Americans became the first people to expect and to prize change, and business and profit became more honored than in any other country in the Western world,'' says author Gordon Wood.
June 26, 2011
The Dangerous Economics Prize
"Academic orthodoxy can be a dangerous thing. In fact, any kind of orthodoxy can too easily segue into herd mentality. And in economics, academic orthodoxy coupled with advanced quantitative techniques can easily become uncoupled from sound reasoning and common sense,'' says author Ho-Joon Chang.
June 22, 2011
The Triumph Of The Cities
"In 2007, the urban population of the world surpassed the rural population for the first time, due to both the increased mechanization of agriculture and the economic and social lure of the city. It had happened in the U.S. in the late 1910's. Now, two hundred forty-three million Americans crowd together in the 3 percent of the country that is urban, and the other 97 percent of the land in the country houses the remaining sixty million. And China's urban population is expected to surpass its rural population in 2015. The city has triumphed,'' writes Edward Glaeser.
June 19, 2011
Too Much Success
Alan Jay Lerner comments on the unhappy ending of his long-term Broadway collaboration with Fritz Loewe, a relationship through which they had both achieved stratospheric success, yet one that came to an unclimactic end during the production of their last smash musical hit - Camelot
June 15, 2011
American Aid For Pakistan
"The United States routinely gives billions of dollars to foreign governments to influence the progress and policies of those governments. Yet the outcomes of those investments are unpredictable, and often the opposite of what we intended. During the Cold War, India was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and so we shunned it, while Pakistan was willing to assume our anti-Communist rhetoric and so we rewarded it,'' says Lawrence Wright.
June 12, 2011
Americans Love To Be Humbugged
"The Cardiff Man, P.T. Barnum, and the Wizard of Oz. The Cardiff Man, a twelve-foot petrified giant "discovered" outside of Syracuse, New York, was perhaps the greatest hoax of the nineteenth century. New Yorker Phineas T. Barnum was one of the greatest businessmen of the age, the empresario of an era that saw the U.S. economy on the verge of becoming the largest in the world. L. Frank Baum, later the author of The Wizard of Oz, was then a Syracuse castorine-oil merchant who, along with all other citizens of the town, watched the hoax unfold,'' writes Evan I. Schwartz.
June 08, 2011
Chess Grand Masters Have Average Cognitive Skills
"Chess grandmasters have average cognitive skills and average memories for matters outside of chess, and only show their extraordinary skills within the discipline of chess. This suggests that expertise in chess (and most other areas) has less to do with analytical skills - the ability to project and weigh the relative merits of hundreds of options - and more to do with long-term immersion and pattern recognition - having experienced and "stored" thousands of game situations and thus having the ability to pluck an optimal answer from among those stored memories. It also suggests that expertise may be less a result of analytical prowess and more a result of passion, love or obsession for a given subject area - enough passion to have spent the hours necessary to accumulate a robust set of experiences and memories in that area,'' writes Joshua Foer.
Continue reading "Chess Grand Masters Have Average Cognitive Skills" »
June 05, 2011
The Naming Of America
"In 1507, a German scholar named Matthias Ringmann gave the New World a name - America,'' records author Toby Lester.
June 01, 2011
Five Rules For Better Writing
George Orwell, in his famous 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," lamented the demise of the English language, in particular the lack of clarity in the expression of ideas. In it, he gave five brief examples of bad writing and five rules for better writing.
May 29, 2011
My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life
Hal Needham, whose extraordinary Hollywood career encompassed 4,500 television episodes and 310 feature films as a stuntman, and then ten movies as director - including the iconic 70s movies Smoky and the Bandit and Hooper reveals that he was not yet ten years old and the child of a single mother when his life in rural Arkansas was saved by the Salvation Army. His experience was not untypical of rural America in the 1940s
Continue reading "My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life" »
May 25, 2011
Sex O'Clock In America
"For those who thought America's rebellious music and dance started with rock and roll in the 1950s, it was instead 50 years earlier, the music was ragtime, and as in 1950, the "Negro" was wrongly vilified,'' says author Jon Savage.
May 22, 2011
Do Women Talk More Than Men?
"There are some ideas that people are so ready to believe that they become widely held with little or no basis in data. One such item was the 2006 assertion by Louann Brizendine that women speak 20,000 words a day and men speak only 7,000,'' says author Robert Lane Green.
May 18, 2011
Led Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven
Authors Richard Cole and Richard Trubo tell of the making of Led Zeppelin's iconic rock album Stairway To Heaven.
May 15, 2011
My Fair Lady
After years of planning and months of agonizing preparation, Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe had the smash hit of 1956 on their hands - My Fair Lady - the biggest hit in the history of Broadway up to that point. As the curtain fell, Lerner, who had written the book and lyrics for the show, had something unexpected to deal with - enormous success.
May 11, 2011
The Mansions Of Kings And Queens
"Traditionally, the great house builders (and house accumulators) in Britain were monarchs. At the time of his death Henry VIII had no fewer than forty-two palaces. But his daughter Elizabeth cannily saw that it was much cheaper to visit others and let them absorb the costs of her travels, so she resurrected in a big way the venerable practice of making annual royal "progresses" (lengthy visits to the houses of nobles). The queen was not in truth a great traveler - she never left England or even ventured very far within it - but she was a terrific visitor. Her annual progresses lasted eight to twelve weeks and took in about two dozen houses,'' Bill Bryson informs us.
May 08, 2011
How We Got Do Re Mi
Peter D'Epiro tells of the invention of a method of learning notes we now refer to as "do, re, mi''.
May 04, 2011
Steve Martin Quits Stand-Up
"In his peak years of 1978 and '79, Martin played outdoor amphitheaters and twenty-thousand-seat coliseums, sometimes two shows a night. He was outdrawing even the top rock groups of the era.''
But Steve Martin was about to be overwhelmed by his own popularity, as Richard Zoglin reveals in his book Comedy at the Edge.
May 01, 2011
The Unwritten Rules Of Baseball
"With the baseball season in full swing, astute fans will want to brush up on the unwritten rules of baseball - those rules which are not in the official major league rulebook but are nevertheless stringently observed. Here are the unwritten rules that cover "basebrawls" - the fights that break out during games,'' writes Paul Dickson.
April 27, 2011
The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz
Writing about one of the most famous childrens's books of all timne, L Fran Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Jon Savage says "Despite Baum's avowed intent to leave out the musty nightmares of European folktales, Oz was full of trickery, dismemberment, and pervasive fear.''
April 24, 2011
Undemocratic Chinese Leaders
Richard C Koo presents sobering thoughts on decisions confronting China's undemocratic leadership.
April 20, 2011
I Would Rather Die Than Hate You
"In 1630, John Winthrop, leader of the religious colonists who would establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered to them a sermon that is now considered one of the most important documents in setting forth a vision of America, "A Model of Christian Charity". Anticipating the hardships they will encounter during the coming months and years, it centers on the impossible idea that we should love our neighbors as ourselves,'' writes Sarah Vowell in her book The Wordy Shipmates.
April 17, 2011
Computers Which Read And Learn
...It would read twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It would be a perpetual reading machine, and by extracting information, it would slowly cobble together a network of knowledge: every president, continent, baseball team, volcano, endangered species, crime. Its curriculum was the World Wide Web...
Author Stephen Baker tells of machines which are building a "big picture'' of the world.
April 10, 2011
The United States Constitution
Jill LePore reminds us that Anti-Federalists charged that the United States Constitution was so difficult to read that it amounted to a conspiracy against the understanding of a plain man.
April 06, 2011
Waves Of Revolution
...Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of large states were ruled by autocrats, and virtually all the people in those states lived in poverty. Since then, however, international waves of revolution have been common, as the decentralization of economic power brought by the Industrial Revolution has created an imperative for the decentralization of political power...
Today's words, courtesy of Delanceyplace, tell of the revolutionary waves which down the centuries have swept around the world.
April 03, 2011
The Truth Wears Off
Delauncey Place, a not-for-profit organisation based in the USA, offers regular, interesting and noteworthy quotes from articles and books.
That name Delanceyplace comes from the name of a Street in downtown Philadelphia. The Web site's founder Richard Vague is a voracious reader and he would occasionally (which became frequently) send out quotes from whatever he was reading at the time to his circle of friends that he thought they would find meaningful.
Clarissa F. Griebel, Publisher of Delauncey Place, has given Open Writing permission to reproduce some of the articles which appear on a fascinating Web site.
Today we begin what will be a regular series of Delauncey Place extracts.
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- A Clutch Of Pearlies
- A Court Of Fowls
- A Diary of Innocence
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- The Fourth Wish
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