I’m a longtime fan of E.B. White. Intellectual Takeout readers likely know he wrote a lot more than just Charlotte’s Web. His short story The Door is one of my favorite short stories. (We’ll deconstruct that one another other day; as you can see, it’s quite mad.) I bring up White because an old friend
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The security lines at the Atlanta airport had grown progressively worse. The lines grew longer, the crowds ever more unruly, the invasiveness of the process ever more intense, the mood of the TSA more crabby and scary. Customers were miserable. It had been getting more terrible all the time, unsustainably so. Those of us who
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In Jean-Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit,” the character Joseph Garcin concludes that torture and other forms of physical punishment pale in comparison to the torment of poor company. So he pronounces that “Hell is other people.” The same cynical view overcomes me when intelligent people theorize about the harm caused by offensive speech. Lynne Tirrell,
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Late last summer, Texas teacher Brandy Young made internet waves when she sent a note about homework to the parents of her students. Instead of the normal spend-30-minutes-a-day-on-homework command that parents normally hear, Mrs. Young’s note informed them that she would not be giving homework at all. Instead, she asked families to spend more time
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A mom in New York tells me she’s in a fight with her kid’s preschool. You might think she’s unhappy with the zero-tolerance policy for Kombucha? Too much enrichment? Not enough? In fact, it’s none of the above. Her fight is over the children playing outside. The mother wants her kid to be outside more
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The depths of Abraham Lincoln’s misery following the death of fiancée Ann Rutledge is well known. (Lincoln’s close friend Josh Speed provided a detailed and captivating recollection of the Lincoln-Rutledge courtship, an unlikely romance that was nothing short of Shakespearean in both beauty and tragedy.) Lincoln was remarkably frank and open about his persistent “melancholy”, which
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