Viewing profile — cafard

Trollope eventually got quite responsible work at the post office. Some writers found consular and diplomatic posts: among the Americans, Hawthorne, Howell, and (James Russell) Low…

I am not in that market, but this seems implausible. My neighborhood is pretty prosperous, but I doubt that $400k/year is the standard. Yet kids do go off to daycare.

That was the story that was current back then, at least the tying to a tree part. It may have been invented, but not by the New Yorker writer.

This is in the US? I have rarely heard political homilies.

What does this have to do with the post?

An acquaintance made some money as cantor to a synagogue around here. He was not Jewish, but I gather that the combination of singing and getting paid felt just fine.

In 1982 the Secretary of the Interior, James Watts, announced that Wayne Newton would perform at the National Mall on Independence Day, at least implying that the Beach Boys, who h…

Jaroslav Pelikan's history of Christian doctrine runs to five volumes. I haven't read the last, but the first four are very readable. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-6…

Elite distance runners are likely to be running farther than a half marathon every day. There used to be a notion that your weekly mileage ought to be triple the distance you are t…

Kids today miss the chagrin of damaging a protruding door handle, and the entertainment of one of their elders entirely removing one against some obstacle.

The most important Latin scholar in the world at that time? That is quite a claim. My recollection from Bernard Knox's essay "Closet Modern", collected in Essays Ancient and Modern…

The FBI used to like to hire the young from southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina, and such places: generally the kids wouldn't have traveled at all far from their birthpla…

I don't use TikTok, but I can think of more than one Epstein who is not Jeffrey but whom I can imagine somebody sending a message about, for example Joseph Epstein.

This seems to be the week for retrenchment in Bezos World. The Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores are closing, The Washington Post is laying off half of its foreign correspondents, …

Something to do with being located between Germany and Russia? Or, if you will, Prussia, the Hapsburg Empire, and Russia?

I don't quite get your point about the blurring of church and state. What a government employee does with his own time can hardly be considered an act of the government. Having sai…

As far as I know, all branches of the US military write up a "fitness report" for each officer once a year. "Above Average" is a certain career killer. But somebody who was a dean …

Americans don't celebrate failure? Well, there's the Alamo. There's Custer's Last Stand. There's Douglas MacArthur getting a Medal of Honor for being chased out of Luzon. And I urg…

History: about halfway through The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis. (About halfway through 918 pages, not counting notes etc., so you will see that it…

There were point-shaving scandals in the 1950s and 1960s. (And, I see, 1970s and 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_shaving ).

Didn't Dykstra say that what one needed was mathematical maturity and the ability to express oneself well in one's native language? Shouldn't a decent education in the liberal arts…

Don't lead off your question with a capsule autobiography (unless relevant), and do not frame your question to let the rest of the audience know how much you know.

My fiftieth college reunion (if I were to attend--I'm not planning to) is not far away, so a lot of things have changed. But yes, it was worth it. It would have been more worth it …