Everybody knows the story of the Three Little Pigs. Or at least they think they do. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. Nobody knows the real story, because nobody has ever heard my side of the story. So narrates A. Wolf in The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. In this […]
Category Archives: Beyond Books
“Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?” Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth 1. Musical Accompaniment Not long ago I went to a silent-reading event at the Colonial-era Loring-Greenough House in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Apart from the whisper of turning pages (I saw no e-readers), attendees sat and read their books […]
To be in a room with dozens of fourth through eighth graders who are about to compete in a state-wide reading quiz bowl is to experience a level of energy and suspense too high to measure. To witness whole teams of bright-eyed kids on the edge of their seats, buzzers in hand, eager to display […]
In the early days of December, in a fit of indignation , I joined two political groups. This is surprising because although I’m political, I’m also a disillusioned introvert. Basically no system in America is left enough for me, and I wouldn’t attend your rally unless it had fewer than ten people. But I can […]
Some cities have a unique way of relating to the world around them. They have a hum, a certain lifeblood, a raison d’etre, if you will. Washington, D.C. runs on politics. In Los Angeles, that hum is the entertainment industry, referred to simply as “the industry.” Even ordinary folks know what’s playing at the NuArt, […]
Throughout my adolescent years, I was ‘forced’ to make weekly trips to visit my grandparents just like so many other close-knit families of that day. The adults would talk, laugh and bicker, and then we would all eat dinner around the small kitchen table. As I grew older, and more insolent I’ll admit, I became […]
Last week, I speculated about possible tension between Louisa May Alcott and Harriett Lothrop (“Margaret Sidney”), who, along with Nathaniel Hawthorne, lived in The Wayside in Concord, Massachusetts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the week between that first post and this, I was delighted to discover a book by Patricia West, Domesticating […]
The trouble with oral cultures is they leave so little behind. Apart from ruins and religious art there isn’t much we can use to get inside their minds. Take the Minoans, whose entire civilization rose and fell nearly 1500 years before the birth of Jesus. What remains suggests a culture that prized women and may […]
There are two strains in American print journalism. One is persuasive and opinion-based (like blogs); the other is sourced in fact and offers multiple perspectives (like metropolitan newspapers). In Part One of this series I traced the history of each, then promised to describe the current changes: opinion-based reporting is on the rise, while so-called […]
Five years ago, when I taught Journalism, my syllabus was set. We began with a brief discussion of colonial gazettes, then focused on objective news. Until recently I hadn’t connected those two dots – how American news writing evolved from opinionated essays to what is now considered fair and accurate reporting. This connection turns out […]
Readers Unbound 