Writing advice from Hoffer

 If I could pass on only one bit of advice to young people who want to write, it would be this: 

That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes. If we do not know how to catch and savor the flashes we are without growth and without exhilaration.

 

That’s No. 80 in Eric Hoffer’s Reflections on the Human Condition. Hoffer was talking about all creative work, but I thought about writing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once took the time to convince a young Henry David Thoreau to keep a journal. It wasn’t apparent to anyone but Emerson, but Henry had a talent for catching those flashes.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition; New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. 51.

How the country is changing

 An old neighbor went to a sandwich shop for lunch. The fellow ahead of him ordered a foot-long. The counter guy cut a roll in two and put four slices of cheese on the sandwich, two for each half of the roll.

When my friend ordered, the counter guy got one slice of cheese, tore it in two, and spread it across the pieces of the roll.

The first guy in line was white. My friend is not.

My friend protested to another employee at the register. He was told nothing could be done, so he left the food on the counter and looked for another place to eat.

Great social forces are at work in this country. The evidence at the neighborhood café says they’re poisonous.

The instinctually challenged species

 Looking at the literature on the genetic basis of instinct has convinced me that I don’t understand what instinct is.

Eric Hoffer called humankind “nature’s mistake.” Here’s part of the explanation:

 

The source of man’s creativeness is in his deficiencies; he creates to compensate himself for what he lacks. … He became a thinker to compensate for the ineffectualness of his instincts.

 

Yesterday’s note on bird nests made me think about the survival skills we learn, as opposed to those we have by instinct. Few of us live in a shelter we devised by instinct. That’s obvious — but I’d never thought of it, as Hoffer did, as evidence of the ineffectualness of instincts.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition; New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. 4.

The bird-nest problem

 I can see how a gene can express itself in a physical trait. But I have trouble understanding instinct — how patterns of behavior can be transmitted genetically.

I did some reading on “fixed-action patterns.” The cloud of unknowing did not lift for me.

Identity isn’t just a matter of physical expressions of genes. The identity of being a bird involves having feathers, but it also involves building nests.

Within the identity of nest-building creatures there are architects (hummingbirds and orioles) and those that barely bother (yellow-billed cuckoos and mourning doves).

The way birds behave in building nests is consistent by species. This is not learned behavior. Birds raised in captivity by humans build nests that are true to species.

I have no problem imagining that a mad biologist with access to a gene-editing lab could change the color of an oriole’s feathers. That’s just a change in the physical expression of a gene. But I can’t imagine the mad scientist changing its nest-building behavior with some genetic editing. That seems to me to be more of a change of the bird’s history, its evolution.

It seems like a claim that we have a technology that could change the past.

A marker species

 The wheel bug is a marker species for organic gardens and farms.

Arilus cristatus is the apex predator among the insects in our garden, the lion on our little Serengeti. If you use pesticides, you kill too many insects to support a population of these predators. If you are in a garden and see wheel bugs, that’s strong evidence that you are in a place where poisons aren’t allowed.

I’m no entomologist, but the wheel bug is unmistakable. It has an appendage that looks like someone buried a toothed wheel or cog about halfway into its back.

We have enough of them to require occasional evictions from the greenhouse. I am called upon to do the evicting. The Wise Woman is the gardener, and she knows they are beneficial insects. She wants them moved, not killed.

She’s right to be cautious.

Wheel bugs don’t bite — they stab. Their proboscis is part spear, part hypodermic needle. The bug injects a toxin into its prey that dissolves animal tissue. Wheel bugs don’t attack humans, but they’ll stab you if you try to catch them. People who have been stabbed say it’s worse than getting stung by a hornet. I couldn’t say. I’ve been lucky so far.

    • Note: If you don’t know this bug, there are some photographs and a short video clip at Professor Michael J. Raupp’s blog:

https://bugoftheweek.com/blog/2025/7/2/7zjt0gwtr40ro10qo8meibvhmuhhhz

Philosophy, while reading the news

 Imagine this: You tell your wife that the important financial papers are in an envelope. She’s worried until you explain that the envelope is in the safe deposit box. If you know the usual language game that involves the word in, you know the papers are safe in the bank.

But that’s not the only way we use the word in. Imagine that you are in pain. Your wife asks where it hurts, and you explain the pain is in your foot. If you put your foot in your shoe, is the pain now in the shoe? Do we need to run the shoe to the emergency room?

That’s an old story, the kind told by ordinary language philosophers in 1950s.

I thought of it because I read yet another baffling article on this strange and wonderful thing we unfortunately call “artificial intelligence.” I would love to know exactly what this technology is and how it can and can’t be used. But I don’t think “intelligence” is going to be a useful way to talk about it.

I don’t think the intelligence is in the machine. But I don’t think the pain is in the shoe either.

Marking the day: Eric Hoffer

July 25 is marked on my calendar. Eric Hoffer claimed it was his birthday. But almost everything he said about his own life was a myth or teaching story, rather than literal truth. He said:

 

 We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.  

 

Hoffer helped me understand what a life that included some thinking and writing could be. Although I know him only through his writing, he was one of my teachers.

If you’d like a sense of his voice, here’s a sample:

 

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations — past and present — are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual’s hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia. Thus, we are up against the paradox that the individual who is more complex, unpredictable, and mysterious than any communal entity is the one nearest to our understanding; so near that even the interval of millennia cannot weaken our feeling of kinship. If in some manner the voice of the individual reaches us from the remotest distance of time, it is a timeless voice speaking about ourselves.

 

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition; New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, pp. 96 and 97.

Elections in Georgia

 Georgia is a swing state. Friends keep asking about the election, and particularly about U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, who faces Republican challenger Mike Collins.

Generic Democrats have an 8-point advantage, 51-43, in the latest poll, but that figure has an asterisk. Polls in Georgia tend to have a blue bias, and this one has a bias estimated at 8 points. The usual explanation is that pollsters have trouble finding people in the rural parts of the state, which are heavily Republican.

People argue Trump’s influence both ways. His approval rating is 41 percent — a figure that’s been solid for a decade. It’s solid but not a majority: 56 percent disapprove.

The Georgia economy has been hurt by the war and by tariffs. It’s part of the Make America Great America doctrine that you have to say that the economy is better under Trump. But while four in 10 Georgians support Trump, only 28 percent say that the economy is better this year.

Ossoff v. Collins is not a contest between Democratic and Republican bases. Jewish groups that traditionally supported Democrats worked hard to elect Ossoff, the first Jewish senator from Georgia. Some of the people who supported him were so hurt by his criticism of Israel that they vowed to support anyone but Ossoff. Progressive groups are so angry about Ossoff’s vote to continue support for Israel despite the genocide that they vowed to support anyone but Ossoff.

Republicans are criticizing Ossoff too. But in terms of venom, I’d place them a distant third.

Collins is not distinguishable from other Trump supporters, at least not to me. Some Democrats have criticized him for prejudice against minorities. Typically, the complaints involve social media posts. One is that he posted a photograph of a Black man on the ground at a protest being hit by a law enforcement officer armed with a Taser. Collins’s comment suggested that’s the way to handle protesters.

The greater concern is about Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, who has 1.5 million followers on several platforms. His messaging is white supremacist, white nationalist and antisemitic. A recent poll asked followers why Gen-Z doesn’t hate Hitler.

News reports say Collins has “distanced himself” from his son-in-law. The Collins campaign uses the same language — “distance.”

Collins and his wife live in one house on the family property, while their daughter and son-in-law live in another house on the same property. I’m not sure that kind of distance means anything.

That kind of deity

 It was just a line in a Mexican newspaper about a festival in Oaxaca: Centéotl was not just the deity of maize but also of resistance.

It struck me as something we might need in this country.

The case of the missing caterpillars

 I hear yellow-billed cuckoos more than I see them. They like the edge of the forest — where the undergrowth is thickest. They are often hard to see in the dense brush, though their call is unmistakable and loud.

I stop working in the garden to listen to that crazy call.

It’s finally dawning on me that I haven’t seen any tent caterpillars since the cuckoos moved into the neighborhood.

The larval stages of moths in genus Malcosoma build silk tents in trees in the spring. They eat a lot of foliage, and an infested tree looks battered.

It was a mystery to me why songbirds don’t eat the caterpillars. Songbirds need protein when they are producing eggs and feeding babies. Insects are full of protein. But most birds leave tent caterpillars alone.

The problem is that tent caterpillars are hairy — and the spiky hairs interfere with a bird’s digestive system. Eating a tent caterpillar must be like eating a handful of cactus spines.

The yellow-billed cuckoo, Coccyzus americanus, has adapted. The hairs or spikes of the caterpillar stick in the bird’s stomach lining. But the bird occasionally casts off the lining — a bit like an owl regurgitating a pellet.

The yellow-billed cuckoo can eat tent caterpillars like popcorn.

• For a recording of the yellow-billed cuckoo:
https://www.google.com/search?q=yellow+billed+cuckoo+call&client=safari&hs=WIHq&sca_esv=b754fa5c8f084eb3&hl=en-us&ei=hddaasKmIsG1wN4P4-XXqAY&biw=312&bih=516&oq=yellow+billed+cuckoo%C2%A0&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIhZ5ZWxsb3cgYmlsbGVkIGN1Y2tvb8KgKgIIADIFEAAYgAQyBRAAGIAEMgUQABiABDIKEAAYgAQYQxiKBTIFEC4YgAQyBRAAGIAEMgUQABiABDIFEAAYgARI_yZQsxRYsxRwA3gBkAEAmAFeoAFeqgEBMbgBAcgBAPgBAZgCBKACb8ICChAAGLADGNYEGEfCAg0QABiABBiwAxhDGIoFwgIXEC4YsAMYuAYY2AIYyAMY2gYY3AbYAQHCAhcQLhiwAxjYAhi4BhjIAxjaBhjcBtgBAZgDAIgGAZAGD7oGBAgBGBmSBwMzLjGgB4IHsgcDMC4xuAdlwgcFMC4yLjLIBw6ACAA&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:4d2d34dc,vid:UqZ43a-Wrxo,st:0

A craving to glimpse

 One of the parables in the gospels is so simple it’s easy to miss. Jesus was telling ordinary people what the Kingdom of God was like. Here’s his metaphor: 

It’s like a man who scatters seed on the land. While he goes about his business and even when he sleeps at night, the seed sprouts and grows. He doesn’t know how.

 

The parable came to mind when I was reading Scott Russell Sanders’s essay “Wayland,” which suggests that if you get to know a place, you learn to see details. But you also begin to see relationships among the details, and they suggest something more. We just catch glimpses. Here’s Sanders’s apology for wanting to glimpse:

 

I had moved too long in circles where to confess an interest in religious things marked one as a charlatan, a sentimentalist, or a fool. No doubt I have all three qualities in my character. But I also have another quality, and that is an unshakable hunger to know who I am, where I am, and into what sort of cosmos I have been so briefly and astonishingly sprung. Whatever combination of shady motives might have led me here, the impulse that shook me right then was a craving to glimpse the very source of things.

 

An earlier version of me was fascinated by geometry. A toddler sees lines on a page. A child learns to see triangles. A student of geometry catches glimpses of something more. The growth of a kid interested in math is as natural as the growth of a seed into a tree.

 I like the parable and Sanders’s essay. It seems to me that one stands as commentary on the other.

    • Sources: The parable is in St. Mark: 4:26-29. The free translation is of verse 28. 

Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 190.

Things that endure

 Ernest Hemingway’s “The End of Something” doesn’t say exactly what the something was. This is a Nick Adams story, and Nick and Marjorie were going out. We’d probably say this is about the end of their relationship, although that word is vague. Nick was a war-damaged veteran, and it’s to say what was in his heart.

I’d read the story without seeing another relationship. The story begins:

 

In the old days Hortons Bay was a lumbering town. No one who lived in it was out of sound of the big saws in the mill by the lake. Then one year there were no more logs to make lumber. 

 

When the loggers cut all the trees, workers came and carried off the machinery that made the mill, and without the mill Horton’s Bay ceased to be a town.

It takes something to have something that endures. You can’t have a long-lasting mill town if your idea of a relationship with the forest is exploitive. You could say something similar about relationships with other people.

• Source: “The End of Something” is in Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918–1926; Library of America, 2020, pp. 173–76. It’s here:

https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Hemingway-End-of-Somethingl.pdf

I’m thinking about it because it was The Library of America’s “Story of the Week.”

Robotic tanks and campaign ads

 Georgia is a swing state, so my neighbors and I are bombarded by political ads. The ads are rehashing the culture wars. I’m baffled that anyone would think I might care.

Instead, I’d like to see ads — pro and con — about the Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle Program.

The Army’s main battle tank, the Abrams, was introduced in 1980. Its main armored infantry carrier, the Bradley, followed three years later. Both vehicles have been upgraded. But putting new gear into ancient designs is a bit like putting a new sound system in an ’58 Edsel and expecting consumers to be enchanted. The Army has said bluntly that its equipment is outdated.

After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Army changed the way it was organized. It shifted to smaller, more mobile units that could respond quickly threats from guerrilla forces fielded by quasi-governments. The threat was ISIS, not China, not Russia, not states that might have the capacity to wage a world war.

Rhe world has changed. As China, especially, came to be seen as greater threat, the U.S. Army started to reorganize to regain the capacity to fight against an economic peer. The Robotic Combat Vehicle Program was part of that shift in thinking. Instead of armored vehicles dating from the Cold War, the Army wanted a manned armored vehicle that could command a herd of drone tanks and missile launchers.

The Army went through a competitive process for defense contractors. Textron won. You can see videos on the Internet of the company’s prototypes running around the testing grounds.

The technology was developed and tested. Then, a few months into the new administration, the program was canceled.

I am not an expert on weapons systems. Perhaps drone tanks are not the way of the future. Perhaps the military analysts who think we ought to be prepared for a war against China are so far off base they should be fired. Maybe the Army just has a better idea.

But it’s also possible that the program was canceled because it didn’t benefit the right companies, owned by the right stockholders and the right donors. Whatever else this administration stands for, it’s unapologetically for personal enrichment.

I’ve watched the news to get a sense of how this administration is addressing the threats that military analysts are talking about, and I’ve come to this: I don’t trust it.

I don’t think this administration is capable of developing anything as complex as a weapons system.

But there are two sides to most stories and I would like to hear what the opposing candidates have to say about the canceled program and similar contracts. I’d like to hear whether candidates think that we face the same threats we did in 2001 or whether we ought to be preparing for something else.

I also want to know if anyone thinks that the people we have in power are competent and should be trusted to ensure the nation’s defense.

Those are the kinds of things I’d like to hear about. I’m told that millions in ads are coming my way. With that kind of money, you’d think someone might go out on a limb and talk about something interesting.

Old forgeries

 Forgeries are despised today. In 1800, they were common in journalism. You might have been disappointed if your newspaper or magazine didn’t produce one occasionally.

Some of Charles Lamb’s earliest journalism was in the forgery genre. 

Lamb turned to journalism when he was young and needed cash. He was working as a junior bookkeeper in a great trading house by day and was supporting a family of elderly invalids and a sister with mental health problems.

Forgeries were a different thing when Lamb, 26, got his first freelance job at a newspaper in 1801.

A friend had made some money with a sample of the alleged letters of Falstaff, Shakespeare’s character. The objection to forgeries is the deception, of course, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being deceived. A forgery was like TV wrestling today. Of course it’s fake. Everyone knows that. It’s just entertainment — and not exactly high-brow.

When Lamb tried it, he imitated the letters of Robert Burton, whose Anatomy of Melancholy he admired. Lamb’s efforts didn’t set the publishing world on fire, but he found that he liked writing in the voice of another person. He liked pretending to be someone else.

Lamb wrote his great essays in the voice of another character, Elia. “Elia” is pronounced “a liar,” with the Runpronounced, as is the way of people who live in quaint places like England and Georgia.

A scholar could point out that literature designed to deceive people is a bit like literature designed to scare people. Scaring readers might be nice, but horror is still a viable genre.

But I’m not the person to write a defense of forgeries. Deception is such a destructive part of American life, especially political and economic life, that I became an unlikable puritan railing against it.

I do see the value of teaching students to write in a different voice. In an earlier day, children were taught to write in the voices of other people. Schoolboys had to write in the voices of mature women. Children had to imagine what it was like to be a person of another sex, another culture, another income bracket.

Some of the results might be appalling. Some might be funny. But I don’t know how else anyone might teach empathy — or give a student a glimpse of it.

• Sources and notes: Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022. Several posts mention Wilson’s book. The first was “A new biography of Charles Lamb,” Aug. 20, 2022.

Scott Newstok  argues that requiring students to write in other voices was once common and the practice helped playwrights develop characters. His book How to Think like Shakespeare; Princeton University Press, 2020, is excellent. For more, see “Thinking about The Progymnasmata,” June 24, 2024. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/06/thinking-about-progymnasmata.html

60,000 surveillance cameras

 Atlanta has 60,000 surveillance cameras linked to the police department’s network.

That’s 124 cameras per 1,000 people — more than any city in the country.

It’s not close. In second place is Washington, D.C., with 55. In third is Philadelphia with 31.

To find a city that could match Atlanta’s numbers, you’d have to go to China.

People here are waking up to the reality that they are the most surveilled people in what was once called the free world.

How did this place — diverse, liberal, relatively affluent — get to that place?

Part of it is trust. When the police department asked institutions, businesses and property owners to link their cameras to its network, a lot said yes.

But people have begun to worry that the system could be misused. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that some companies that manufacture these systems offer auditing features. The software allows supervisors to tell, for example, whether a police officer is using the system for legitimate reasons or to stalk acquaintances, such as former romantic partners.

When the city of Albany ran the audit, it fired five officers. I wasn’t clear on whether other officers were disciplined for lesser infractions.

In Atlanta, the police department, which apparently had been enjoying the public’s trust, undercut itself by fighting requests for information about the system. The requests were filed under Georgia’s open records laws.

The best light on the problem comes from a source in academia. Dr. Taylor Shelton, an associate professor in the Geosciences Department at Georgia State University, has found some interesting things while simply trying to map the city.

• Sources: Taylor Shelton, “Mapping Atlanta’s camera network and surveillance strategy”; Atlanta Community Press Collective, June 10, 2025. It’s here:
https://atlpresscollective.com/2025/06/10/atlanta-surveillance-camera-network/

Dr. Shelton’s website his here:

https://mappingatlanta.org

The farm report

 A line from Scott Russell Sanders, on a person’s attachment to place: 

Most of us do not have forty acres to care for, but that should not keep us from sowing and tending local crops.

 

We’re enjoying cucumbers this week from the Wise Woman’s garden. We’ve got so many chilis that I’m going to have to make hot sauce.

• Source: Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 118.

Science and discipline

 People, if they think of biology at all, usually think of it as a science. It’s interesting if you look at biology as a discipline — meaning that you consider how biology is to be taken as a science and what kinds of questions count as scientifically worthwhile.

The discipline underwent revolutions in our lifetime. Edward O. Wilson tells about one of the revolutions that occurred after Francis Crick and James Watson were credited with discovering the structure of DNA in 1953. The discovery changed our understanding of the universe — but it also ignited a debate about what biology — the discipline — should be about.

Traditionally, biology departments taught a lot of courses organized around groups of animals and plants. Students took entomology for an introduction to insects, ichthyology for fish and ornithology for birds.

But there is another way of looking at living beings. You can look at them through different levels of organization. You can study life at the molecular level or cellular level, for example. At the other end of the scale, you can look at population levels.

You can look at the discipline of biology in different ways.

Crick and Watson’s work was so sensational all the research money went into molecular biology for a while. It seemed to be an investment in an enormous field that had hardly been touched. This emphasis showed up in the kinds of biologists universities hired and in the kinds of research that was funded. It showed up in the kinds of prizes offered.

The chemical and physical properties of living beings should be studied, of course. But those are not the only properties that living beings have.

If you get outside of the laboratory and into the field, you come across different kinds of properties that raise different questions. Wilson was interested in ants. Some ants live in small colonies with perhaps 100 workers. Other ants build nests that might include 15 million workers. The megacolonies, networks of connected nests, are so big it’s hard to fathom.

Why such differences among ants? And why do some kinds of ants live in some places and not others?

An analysis of proteins and enzymes is unlikely to tell you why certain kinds of animals are solitary creatures while others are highly social. If you are the kind of scientist that thinks real science limits itself to chemistry and physics, you’re going to ignore questions about how different plants and animals adapt to different habitats. You’re going to miss at least some of the questions about environmental damage.

Biology as a science seeks to find answers to questions about life. But biology as a discipline gets into a question of which questions are more important.

The scientists who try to answer the questions almost live different kinds of lives. Molecular biologists live in labs with increasingly sophisticated imaging technology. Wilson did most of his work with a hand lens.

If you are studying ecological relationships, you have to be able to identify plants and animals and at least have a basic understanding of the geology. If you’re studying the growth rates of cancer cells you need a different set of skills.

It sometimes seems miraculous to me that biologists try to talk to each other.

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994.

Research and support for it

 Edward O. Wilson was lucky. Institutions with money supported his research. He got to study the questions that fascinated him.

The questions about support seem secondary to me. The important thing was that Wilson found his interests — he found the questions that absorbed him when he was a teenager.

Wilson, backed by Harvard University, studied ants in Mexico and the South Pacific. That kind of travel was possible only because of generous funding. The travel was essential to the work that Wilson wanted to do. But other scientists and naturalists have done interesting work while staying at home. The Rev. Gilbert White, author of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, is an example of what a naturalist can do without a research budget.

Without Harvard’s support, Wilson would have had to settle for less. But I think he would have done interesting work if his scientific expeditions had been walks through the neighborhood.

Incidentally, while Wilson needed money for travel, his budget for scientific equipment was modest. He used a hand lens and collecting jars. Scientists in elementary school might be familiar with the gear.

I am no educational reformer. But if I have an ambition for our public schools, it would be that they were  focused on helping each student to find his or her interests.

The question of support for research and researchers is important. I live a few miles from the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The word “disrupted” doesn’t cover what’s happened to the research and researchers.

Questions about who gets what in terms of public support often have nothing to do with fairness or the importance of the work.

If I were young again, I would want to find the questions that interested me. Then I’d take my chances, with or without support.

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994.

Any topic, any research

 When he was 23, Edward O. Wilson was named a Junior Fellow in Harvard University’s Society of Fellows. 

The Society, patterned after the prize Fellows of Trinity College in Cambridge University, gave three years of unrestricted financial support to young men (and, in later years, young women) who demonstrated exceptional scholarship potential. Junior Fellows were encouraged to study any subject, conduct any form of research, go anywhere in the world their world their interests directed them.

 

The Society had 24 Junior Fellows. Eight new ones were appointed each year to replace those departing. The Society had nine Senior Fellows — professors who were mentors.

The appointment was a watershed, and Wilson said two things about it. First, it was a gift, an opportunity of a lifetime. Second, the effect on him was that it raised expectations. What he had expected to be able to do with his life changed.

I don’t think that our public schools can compete with Harvard. But I do wish we could encourage children to think about what they would do if they could choose any subject and do any form of research.

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994, p. 144.

'The Country Newspaper'

 I read William Allen White’s essay “The Country Newspaper” to remind myself that the way we Americans look at news has changed. It’s not just my imagination.

What we consider news has changed. The ways we think about news has changed. The reasons we subscribe — or don’t — to the local paper have changed. And the biggest changes occurred before the Internet.

White, the editor of The Emporia Gazette, was writing before the United States entered World War I. Metropolitan dailies had a combined circulation of 11 million. Weekly papers, creatures of small towns, had 22 million.

White pointed out that people read the papers differently. The readers of a weekly paper knew the man in jail. They knew he’d been in jail before. They’d ridden in his hack. 

If a weekly ran a story of a wedding, it would include a list of the guests because readers would want to know which poor relations were remembered and which were not.

Readers of those papers brought something with them when they opened the paper. I suppose we’d call it a sense of community. White called it “the neighborly feeling that breeds the real democracy.” 

• Source: William Allen White’s essay “The Country Newspaper” appeared in Harper’s in May 1916. It was collected in Harper Essays, edited by Henry Seidel Canby; New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1927, pp. 235-45. I’ve mentioned this essay before: “The choices that news organizations make,” Sept. 13, 2022, and “What newspapers are like,” Sept. 14, 2022.

E.B. White and the other stories

 E.B. White helped The New Yorker remember the other stories. If you work in print, you are tempted to think that the story is about politics, economics or perhaps high society. This is particularly true if you think that you live in the center of the world and that the people you are writing about are the most important people in the world.

And then there was White, who insisted on covering the dog show or writing a piece about a waiter who was celebrating a perfect spring day while grieving that the forecast called for snow.

It seems to me that American journalism could use a few more characters like White, especially now, when we are tempted to see every facet of American life in terms of what the Current Occupant of the White House is doing. It’s possible to think that the news of the Current Occupant and his disastrous influence on the democracy is vital while still thinking he’s overexposed.

The problem with linking every aspect of American life to any personality is that it inflates the significance of that personality.

The United States and its neighbors are hosts of the World Cup. We would be watching soccer with or without the Current Occupant.

Citizens would be reflecting over the country’s 250^th anniversary, with or without the Current Occupant staging celebratory cage fights on the White House lawn.

White was the kind of fellow who kept up with the big news but never lost sight of the other stories.

His granddaughter Martha White pointed out that he covered the doings at the Bronx Zoo and the “fabulous ice extravaganza at the Garden,” but never spent much time with the Algonquin Round Table. He noticed the juncos that live in the great city in winter.

If you haven’t guessed, I’m marking a birthday. E.B. White was born July 7, 1899. His granddaughter said he considered it to be a lucky day.

• Source: Martha White: “‘Small But Unforgettable Moments.’ What E.B. White Loved About New York City”; Lit Hub, Nov. 25, 2024. It’s here:

https://lithub.com/small-but-unforgettable-moments-what-e-b-white-loved-about-new-york-city/

Bound to the earth by stories

 I think this is right about our sense of place: Some people believe that wisdom comes from above, from an authoritative voice in the heavens. Others believe that there is an order within the cosmos, and that wisdom is living wisely within that order, right now, right here, on the Earth.

And if you take that view from the level of humanity to the individual that is me, wisdom means finding a way to live within the order of the place I live.

We humans carry that wisdom in stories.

In his essay “Telling the Holy,” Scott Russell Sanders argues that we catch glimpses of the way to live in ways that better reflect the natural order and capture those insights in sacred stories, or myths. We humans tell all kinds of stories — stories that convey information and statistics and news about everything from politics to baseball. But it’s those stories about how to live that hold us.

I think a sense of place is essential. I think these lines from Sanders’s essay are wonderful:

 

I am bound to the earth by a web of stories, just as I am bound to creation by the very substance and rhythms of my flesh. By keeping the stories fresh, I keep the places themselves alive in my imagination. Living in me, borne in mind, these places make up the landscape on which I stand with familiarity and pleasure, the landscape over which I walk even when my feet are still.

 

• Source: Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 150.

A voice of nature

 If you are of a certain disposition, you think that plants and animals speak to you in a certain way, telling you about the place you call home. I thought the big scarab beetle was telling me that there were plenty of muscadines in the woodlot.

Experts say Pelidnota punctata is called the grapevine beetle, although I’ve never heard that common name. These beetles love grapevines, wild and cultivated. They eat foliage and grapes.

The one that accosted me was light tan and about an inch long. He had four dark spots down each side, as if its top and bottom had been fastened together with tiny rivets.

The beetle spent its larval period in the woodlot, eating decaying vegetation. Adults emerge in July.

I’d love to tell you that the beetle spoke to me because it recognized my remarkable powers of observations. But it crashed into me while flying across the garden.

Places and stories

 Colm Tóibín says that minor impressions sometimes stay in notebooks for decades until he understands what he’s seen. Often, the story gets energy from the memories of a place where he stayed, a room he lived in. That place becomes part of the story.

Tóibín, who teaches at Columbia University, said it would take a while for him to be able to write about the room he was living and working in when Trump was elected to a second term. When he does write, the room will be framed in a way — part of a completed story.

 

This is the room where I learned first‑hand not only what evil is like but how evil is tolerated. What is strange about being in America in the time of Trump is how ordinary it is, how what was unimaginable just over a year ago is suddenly, shockingly no longer a surprise.

 

I like that idea. You could say, as people do, that a place is just where a story is set. But I think that place is where a story is understood.

• Source: Colm Tóibín, “‘I’ve learned first-hand how evil is tolerated’: Colm Tóibín on living in the US under Trump”; The Guardian, March 21, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/21/ive-learned-first-hand-how-evil-is-tolerated-colm-toibin-on-living-in-the-us-under-trump

Tóibín wrote this when his new collection of short stories, The News from Dublin, was published. I’m late to the party.

A craftsman and his ways

 This weekend, I watched a craftsman work. He didn’t mind the company. 

His way of working struck me as careful, precise and unhurried.

As if he’d read my mind, he said: “I can work rapidly, quickly. But I don’t hurry.”

My Texas grandmother spoke of people and their ways — the idea being that the way people approach things is important.

I’m interested in the way people work and usually notice their habits, routines and schedules. But that’s just a part of it. Before some people pick up a tool, they bring an approach to their work — perhaps it’s something you sense in their demeanor or presence — that’s subtle but noticeable. 

The poet William Stafford gets at that quality with these lines:

 

Wisdom is having things right in your life

and knowing why.

If you do not have things right in your life

you will be overwhelmed:

you may be heroic, but you will not be wise.

 

• Source: William Stafford’s poem “The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune” is in The Way It Is; Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1998, p. 141. 

Not yet

Salmon P. Chase, who is probably best known as President Lincoln’s treasury secretary, was prone to brooding over the American experiment. Here’s a sample:

 

The Democracy is not democratic enough yet.

 

That was written in 1868, when Chase was chief justice of the United States. What was true in 1868 is still true today. Can you imagine what it would be like if the ranking officer in the federal judicial system believed that?

• Source: The original source is the Salmon Portland Chase Papers in the Library of Congress, but I found the remark in William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, p. 134.

Greats and commoners

 To think you can persuade people strikes many reasonable people as a quaint idea. Haven’t we all read about how polarized the country is? How no one in a political camp can be persuaded by evidence?

Some people don’t change their minds. The Make America Great Again movement is evidence that about four in 10 American voters are not persuaded by anything.

And yet public opinion does change.

I grew up in places that had separate drinking fountains and segregated schools.

When I was a kid, the level of raw sewage that could be released into the watersheds around New York City was roughly one quart in a bathtub-full.

Things that we once accepted disgust us today.

Human beings do change. Although it takes too long, we eventually see the light of better ways.

Trying to persuade others is slow, tedious and frustrating. But when people change their minds, the change is real in a way that what we call a political victory isn’t. One party wins an election and gets the upper hand on the other. But political parties can’t win elections indefinitely supporting policies that the majority opposes.

The slow, frustrating work of trying to persuade your neighbors can be discouraging. It helps me to take a long view and think of Montaigne, who lived through horrific times. When he started publishing his Essays in 1580, Europeans were exterminating each other in wars of religion.

Montaigne loved his place in the world but could appraise it objectively. He thought of himself as a Gascon rather than a Frenchman, a man of the region rather than a man of the country. He was loyal to the government of his day.

He was interested in the people, the institutions and the customs of the people, although he thought of the people, institutions and customs of his region, rather than of the country. He was not interested in the Great Men and Great Women of his day. As he put it:

 

I feel, by the way, no driving passion about the great of the land, neither love nor hatred. …

 

I find it hard to govern my own feelings about our country’s leaders. But I think Montaigne’s counsel is sound. There’s wisdom in paying attention to the health, education, welfare and prosperity of the ordinary people and their institutions. If you want better representative government, start with the people. The commoners, not the greats.

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 893. The quotation is from “On the useful and the honourable,” the opening essay in Book III.

Writers, check your spontaneous thought

 I would love to better understand how some creative people — Darwin and Beethoven, for example — worked “a relatively short day (four to five hours) followed by lots of long walks, afternoon naps, loads of unstructured time, and long vacations.”

That description is from Michael Pollan’s piece in Latham’s Quarterly. Pollan says that The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought has details on the routines of people who seem to catch inspiration while keeping their noses far from any grindstones. I plan to take notes.

Pollan’s article had a couple of interesting claims:

• Spontaneous thought — I’m more familiar with the term “stream of consciousness” — was known to the Victorians. But they were uncomfortable because they thought that our thoughts should be controlled. They thought that a constant inner monolog was a sign of madness.

• Around World War I, something changed in the way people viewed spontaneous thought. The stream of consciousness technique used by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf went from the fringe to mainstream. What does that say about inspiration? Does it come from without or within? From the Muses or from somewhere inside, a deep place we aren’t always aware of? Are fiction writers — especially those like Woolf and Joyce — just better at tapping into the thoughts that escape the attention of us ordinary mortals?

• Source: Michael Pollan, “An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day”; Lapham’s Quarterly, June 29, 2026. The article, adapted from Pollan’s new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, is here:

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ordinary-mind-ordinary-day

When to be an American

 I’ve already had enough of the 250^th anniversary. I’m pretty sure that if Henry David Thoreau were still with us, he’d have had his fill too. I’ve quoted this line before:

I would remind my countrymen, that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.

 

• Source: The Quotable Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 389. It’s a line from the essay “Slavery in Massachusetts.”

Can you imagine the 300th?

 I’m marking the 250th anniversary of the country by wondering what the 300^th will look like.

I won’t be around for it, but I suspect that our descendants will wonder how the people living now could have acquiesced in it all.

I think they’ll say that we, the generations living today, failed to stop the destruction of the natural world. We can’t keep a farm from being paved over to make a strip mall, much less stop the logging of the rainforests.

They’ll also say that we failed to stop the destruction of the poorest in our society by an economic system that was designed to prey on them. The design was just too obvious. Why else would we have the prison system we have? Why would we have debates in our legislatures about whether 600 percent is an acceptable annual rate for payday loans? I know the political arguments in defense these practices. I think our descendants won’t care to try to understand them. They’ll just despise them.

I could go on with this list of failures, but it would be longer than the Declaration of Independence. 

I don’t think the great people of our day, including the Current Occupant of the White House, will be much remembered by people marking the 300th. I think our descendants will remember the abuses and the failure to stop them. They’ll put the blame, rightly, on us, the ordinary citizens, who should have done better.

I’m expecting a bad review in 2076, but I’m going to go down swinging. I’m going to try to persuade other ordinary citizens that life is not only worth living, it’s worth thinking about. And if we really put our thinking caps on, we can find ways of living that are less destructive to the earth and to each other.

We can do better.

Listening to crows

 American crows caw year-round in our neighborhood. I’ve been trying to distinguish one call from another. One that’s easy to identify is the begging call made by juveniles.

I started hearing the youngsters in May. Some were still in the nest and are clamoring for food. Some were on the ground but couldn’t fly yet and called on the adults for help.

The begging call sounds more like a “wah” than a “caw.” If you don’t know it, there are links to recordings below.

Some of the fledglings will go off on their own, while others will stick around and help their parents. Biologists talk about “helpers,” adult birds that help the breeding pair.

Crows eat just about anything, and there’s a lot of calling among the adults. When someone discovers a bonanza, everyone in the family is called in, while members of other families are warned off.

Research suggests some gender roles among the helpers. Females tend to act as sentinels, allowing the other adults to forage. Males tend to act as enforcers, driving off crows from other families and joining in mobbing predators.

One call is unmistakable: the scream.

On a trip to Walker’s Pond, we saw six crows mobbing a red-tailed hawk. I think the hawk had discovered a young crow on the ground and had hoped for lunch. It left disappointed.

• Sources: Recordings of juvenile crows begging are here:
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hs=MtVV&sca_esv=05ee508a17931f71&hl=en-us&q=Begging+call+juvenile+crow+youtube&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiY_ICkqLKVAxWP4ckDHb7gDzQQ1QJ6BAhXEAE&biw=312&bih=516&dpr=3#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:1f9f8c5a,vid:JtrVloeFzFQ,st:0
and here:

https://youtu.be/OnBD9As92fE?is=gvj6sroDK0m29nRQ

Dr. Robin Tarter’s master’s thesis, “The Vocal Behavior of the American Crow, Corvus Brachyrhynchos”; The Ohio State University, 2008, is available here:

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=osu1204876597&disposition=inline

‘250 to 250’

 Historian Heather Cox Richardson is producing a series of 250 one-minute videos to mark the country’s 250^thanniversary. Each is about a person, place or event that is part of our collective story. It’s a reminder that all kinds of people make history.

I’m interested in the series as whole because I’m a fan of Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy, which seeks to tell the story of the Americas in a series of vignettes. 

I love stories told in this way. The first and hardest trick, it seems to me, is to decide which short stories to tell.

If I were telling the story, I’d include the Lead Plate Expedition led by Capt. Pierre-Joseph Céleron de Blainville in 1749. The French and English were quarreling over much of the continent, and the expedition went down the Ohio River, putting lead plates at the major tributaries, claiming the watershed for Louis XV. 

I like the story because it’s barmy, baffling and tragic at the same time. We — meaning the people who belong to this place — have understood so little what a watershed means that it’s hard to grasp. We’ve made great claims about ownership and rights while understanding little about the land and its natural history. We’ve done great damage and are still at it, pausing only occasionally to look around and think.

I think that’s part of our story.

• Sources: The introduction to the “250 to 250” project is here:

https://youtu.be/xrzQjU560Gs?is=_JGPDtwvNDp_nxWv

Some episodes are better than others. I belatedly tuned in to the series when I read Michael Leddy’s criticism of the episode on Willa Cather. His post “Willa Cather in 250 to 250” is here:

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2026/06/willa-cather-in-250-to-250.html

A note on notes, marks and boundaries

 Liddell & Scott say that the ancient Greek verb τεκμαίρομαι means “to fix by a mark or boundary, to ordain, decree … “

You could argue that the idea began with this notion: The gods tried to educate humans by marking boundaries. But marks and markers aren’t really marks unless they are recognized as such by others — a mark has to mean something to someone else.

The Greeks loved stories about some hapless man failing to recognize a divine boundary. They also noted the importance of being able to perceive something as a mark or sign and to make inferences, conclusions and judgments.

By Epicurus’s time, the idea had shifted a bit further. He said that our senses — not the gods — are the boundary markers we should use in making inferences.

I got stopped by a passage in Diogenes Laertius for a couple of reasons.

First, if you have read British philosophers of the last century, you might have been led to believe that British thinkers invented empiricism. 

Second, I’m interested in what a note is — what it means to mark something in a way that others can notice it too. If you can mark something in this way, you can return to it, perhaps remark on it. You can find your place again. The idea that you’re observing some kind of boundary when you’re doing this is interesting.

• Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; translated by R.D. Hicks; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, Vol. II, p. 568.