Widower Woodrow Wilson fell in love with Edith Galt in 1915. The President’s doorkeeper summarized the situation tersely:
“She’s a looker; he’s a goner.”
In the New Yorker this July, Jon Lee Anderson wrote a fascinating article about Timbuktu, where Al Qaeda is working to become a legitimate political power. A scary story. But a beautifully written one. Take this paragraph when he introduces readers to the city in question: Timbuktu is a small, unlovely city in shades of…
I recently read Margalit Fox’s wonderful book, “The Riddle of the Labyrinth,” which tells the extraordinary tale of how three people, working in parallel, figured out the meaning of what, to me, look like random scribbles on ancient tablets – the language known as Linear B. In trying to deduce the riddle of these scribbles,…
I am not going to be posting any new blogs for a while, because I will be traveling – a nice mixture of vacation and writing, mostly out of reach of desktop computers and laptops. I expect to return in August, refreshed and reinvigorated. I hope all of you find some summer relaxation time too….
When New Jersey decided to hike its minimum wage by some 20 percent in 1991, David Card and Alan Krueger recognized a tremendous opportunity to test how the minimum wage affects employment.
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Andrew Solomon wrote a wonderful article in the New Yorker recently about Adam Lanza’s father and his search for answers to his son’s awful behavior. The piece included a quote I thought I would share with you today: All parenting involves choosing between the day (why have another argument at dinner?) and the years (the…
I read for lots of reasons, of course. For entertainment. For information. For intellectual stimulation. To fill up a rainy day, since I can’t play piano for eight hours at a time. But another reason to read is to make me a better writer. In a wonderful essay in the Atlantic monthly, Richard Bausch makes…