Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on What ‘All Men Want’)

“All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be."— American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Frasier,’ As Niles Lists His Wife Maris’s Food Restrictions)

Niles Crane [played by David Hyde Pierce]: “Just remember that she can't have shellfish... poultry, red meat, saturated fats, nitrates, wheat, starch, sulfites, MSG, or dairy. Did I say nuts?”

Frasier Crane [played by Kelsey Grammer] [smirking]: “Oh, I think that's implied.” —Frasier, Season 1, Episode 17, “A Mid-Winter Night's Dream,” original air date Feb. 10, 1994, teleplay by Chuck Ranberg and Anne Flett-Giordano, directed by David Lee

Quote of the Day (Adam Garfinkle, on How American Politics Became Dysfunctional)

“Changes in the underlying ratio of labor and capital inputs in the American political economy, thanks to globalization and automation, have advantaged the political power of capital—especially finance capital even as they have disrupted the foundation of our politics and made all but obsolete our inherited ideological/explanatory templates.  This has happened at the same time that our political institutions have ossified from within, especially on the bureaucratic/administrative level, a development abetted in no small part by the accumulated distortions of interest-group, rentier politics in an increasingly top-heavy, unbalanced Federal system. That dysfunction, mightily exacerbated by the organized lobbying power of corporate interests, has given shape to the present wave of plutocracy washing over us. The depredations of plutocracy, in turn, double back in such a way as to render us unable to properly understand or deal with the structural economic changes we face, or to repair our political institutions. In a nutshell, that—all that together—is what’s wrong.”—American historian, political scientist, and editor Adam Garfinkle, “Broken: A Primer on American Political Disorder,” The American Interest, Winter (January/February) 2013

Quote of the Day (Anne Applebaum, on How a Good History Book ‘Defeats Expectations’)

"As a historian, you're often at war with clichés, which are something similar to expectations. People have stereotyped images of the past; I seek to make them more complicated. In that sense, any good history book defeats expectations because it offers a richer tapestry, a more complicated version of what most people think happened. History can also alter how we think about the future. Although history does not provide a road map of what to expect in the future, it does tell you what kinds of situations should cause concern.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum quoted in “Soapbox: The Columnists; WSJ. Asks Six Luminaries To Weigh in on Single Topic; This Month: Expectations,” WSJ. Magazine, Nov. 27, 2017

The image of Anne Applebaum that accompanies this post was taken on Oct. 15, 2024, by Mateusz Skwarczek.

Quote of the Day (Michael Kinsley, on Washington-Style ‘Branding’ and ‘Rebranding’)

“ ‘Branding’ as a general term for the way you present yourself to the world has become a popular usage. It implies that, if people see you for what you really are, that’s a failure on your part. Success is when people see you as what you wish you were. Or as what you need to be, or seem to be, or need to seem to be, to suit the exigencies of the moment. Of course Washington and the media didn't invent branding or rebranding. The term is imported from the commercial world. [In Washington], rebranding itself is widely tolerated, but the word ‘rebranding’ is still something a politician would not choose to have attached to his name. Bad for the brand.”— American political commentator and editor Michael Kinsley, “How Top Politicians Rebrand Themselves,” Vanity Fair, June 2014

Kinsley was correct: The notion of branding did indeed derive from the commercial world, and there were portions even there where it took a while to take root. (It was considered quite novel three decades ago when I worked for a not-for-profit organization that served the real estate industry when several developers who had just gone public began to brand their properties in an effort to increase their value.)

In mid-2014, Kinsley's peg to consider this idea was Eric Cantor, a House Majority Whip running into turbulence in his campaign to retain his Congressional seat. The Republican congressman’s attempts to brand his primary challenger a liberal—and to soften the views of constituents who felt he himself had become arrogant and was taking them for granted—both failed, in what was called one of the most stunning electoral upsets in memory.

Wouldn’t you know that it took someone from the “commercial world" to show Capitol Hill grandees the right way to “brand.” A journalist friend of mine recounted how, during an interview with Donald Trump, the then-New York developer, asked for how he had become so successful, responded, “It’s the Trump brand.” That phrase ended up repeated so often in the interview, my friend said, that he was sick of it by the time the talk was over.

Much to the astonishment of local journalists who had been following Trump’s career from its early days, he followed the path to the White House through the creation of a spurious “brand” on his “reality” show The Apprentice: a businessman so phenomenally rich that he would never be tempted to steal or grift.

Little could these non-New York voters have imagined that, once re-elected to the White House, Trump would try to rebrand several capital institutions after himself. This renaming and construction phase is so manic that he is beginning to resemble some of the more debauched, egocentric Roman emperors.

Simultaneously, Trump began to target GOP candidates, large and small, as part of his brand. What voters face now, like it or not, is an organization committed not to conservative principles as such, but to Trump.

The question that scares the GOP now, a couple of weeks before the midterm elections, is whether the President has pushed his branding campaign too aggressively: too fast, and on too many fronts.

They wonder if too many of these races have become unnecessary toss-ups, with voters resembling a work colleague of mine who said he was delighted that a property of one developer had added that company’s moniker to its own: “Great! Now I’ll know to avoid it from now on.”

Now eighty years old, Trump should not by rights be able to “rebrand” himself to skeptical voters. But like some combination of Rasputin and Count Dracula, he’s come back from the dead (or undead) too many times before to be counted out now. Democrats would be making a colossal mistake if they become overconfident of their chances.

Quote of the Day (Mike Ditka, on God, Human Anatomy, and Sports)

“If God had wanted man to play soccer, he wouldn't have given us arms.”—National Football League Hall of Fame player, coach, commercial pitchman, and Chicago hero Mike Ditka (1939-2026), quoted by Jason Gay, “Mike Ditka: Da Farewell to Da Coach,” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 10-11, 2026

(The image accompanying this post, of Ditka catching a pass as an end for the University of Pittsburgh football team in 1960, was originally printed in The Owl, the 1961 student yearbook of the University of Pittsburgh.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Dr. Michael Chan, on Our ‘Strange and Dangerous Age’)

“We are in a strange and dangerous age. It is an age of certainty, and we have two myths we have to choose from — triumph or transgression, glory or shame, a grand tree or a weed to be plucked out. We are told we have to pledge to one side or the other or this election will be a Flight 93 election — the plane will go down.”—Dr. Michael Chan, executive director for faith and learning at Concordia College, address at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, July 12, 2026, quoted by Mary Lee Talbot, “Quality of Our Future Depends on the Quality of Our Memory, Says Michael Chan,” The Chautauquan Daily, July 13, 2026

Quote of the Day (Benjamin Franklin, on ‘The Discontented Man’)

“The discontented Man finds no easy Chair.” —Founding Father Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), “Poor Richard Improved, 1753,” Founders Online, National Archives. [Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4, July 1, 1750, through June 30, 1753, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, 1961.]

This Day in Film History (Death of Andrzej Wajda, Influential Polish Director)

Oct. 9, 2016— Andrzej Wajda, a director, writer, and producer who electrified international audiences with poetic, complex treatments of life under totalitarian rule, died at age 90 in Poland from respiratory complications.

Through October 22, New York’s nonprofit cinema Film Forum is commemorating the centennial of his birth with “Andrzej Wajda 100,” co-presented by the Polish Cultural Institute New York and DI Factory and co-financed by the Polish Film Institute. 

It’s a testament to the filmmaker’s tireless productivity that the 25 movies shown during these three weeks represent less than half of his career output of full-length pictures, documentaries, shorts, and television projects.

Like Oliver Stone, Wajda was a political provocateur who examined onscreen the collective traumas his nation experienced in the 20^th century.

Several were linked by theme, if not plot: his “Three War Films” of the 1950s (A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds) treated ethical dilemmas of during the Nazi occupation of Poland, while two movies from a couple of decades later, Man of Marble and Man of Iron, turned to Communist domination of the nation in the postwar period.

This subject matter could be challenging in its grimness. The prologue of Kanal, for example, tells viewers immediately that none of the heroes of the Warsaw uprising in the city’s sewer system that they are about to see make it out alive.

Communist atrocities affected Wajda and his family personally. His father was among the captured officers executed in 1940 by the Russian KGB in the Katyn Forest, a massacre denied by the USSR until 1990. In the 1950s, Communist censors began to interfere with his work—notably during A Generation, when they deleted one scene that became lost forever.

Even in exile from Poland in the early 1980s, Wajda continued to comment on how Soviet-style revolutionary fervor could devolve into terror, albeit through the prism of history rather than current events. Danton (1983), financed with aid from the French government, raised hackles in that nation’s left wing.

At a time when the Socialist government of Francois Mitterrand included Communists as coalition partners, an intellectual firestorm developed over the implied comparison to the USSR drawn by its title character, a onetime firebrand of the French Revolution who became one of the most prominent victims of the Reign of Terror. Warning of the excesses of his former ally, radical Maximilien Robespierre, Danton (played by Gerard Depardieu) says, “Revolutionaries, like Saturn, devour their own children.”

The daily exigencies of filmmaking led Wajda to make many critical production decisions on the fly. Sometimes this could drive his associates crazy. In a short documentary, Wajda’s “Danton,” one crew member observed the unusual demands made during that 1983 biopic:

“As one scene or a new idea occurs to him, it’s a disaster for us, because he’ll say, ‘It’s not 20 extras anymore. Tomorrow we need 70, 80, 90.’ And that’s the hardest work for us, quickly to find the people he wants, almost from one minute to the next. That’s because he always has an idea and he wants this idea immediately. He just told us that tomorrow we need 12 men who will be naked and will be thrown in a mass grave, a pit where they bury the dead. We will need 12 men who will agree to be naked and be thrown on top of each other.”

On the other hand, Wajda’s openness to spontaneity from other sources resulted in some of the most resonant performances in international cinema.

Case in point: Zbigniew Cybulski, cast in Ashes and Diamonds as Maciek, a young anti-Communist Home Army resistance fighter assigned to assassinate an incoming commissar, Stefan Szczuka.

Initially dubious about having the actor play what he conceived as a dashing romantic hero, Wajda was even more nonplussed when Cybulski wore clothes more in keeping with the current generation—notably tight-fitting jeans, a green jacket, and pepegi (Polish slang for casual canvas shoes or sneakers).

But, as recounted by Polish screenwriter and film critic Bartosz Staszczyszyn, Wajda reflected: “I let him act as he wished, and that saved me.” The actor’s combination of restless energy, humor and vulnerability led him to be regarded as “the Polish James Dean.”

(In fact, in the 1982 analysis, Running Time: Films of the Cold War, journalist and movie critic Nora Sayre preferred the European to the American, contrasting his raw, authentic portrayal of an ordinary young man caught in a life-or-death political struggle with Dean’s much lower-stakes anguish in Rebel Without a Cause.) 

The film is set at a watershed moment in Poland’s history: the last day of the war, but the first of a very uncertain peace (which, it turned out, was dominated by another foreign power, the Soviets, rather than the Nazis). “The end of the war isn't the end of our fight,” Szczuka says. “The fight for Poland and what kind of country it's to become has only just begun. Today or tomorrow or the day after, any one of us could die.”

Or, as Maciek, in more down-to-earth fashion, says, “The main thing is to find a way through this mess without being tricked or getting bored. What else is there?”

From the opening scene to the fated conclusion, that “mess” is depicted with the kind of visual brilliance that Wajda, who had studied after the war at a Krakow arts academy, brought to all his films. 

Shot through with shadows, smoke, and fog, the cinematography underscores the existential dilemma that Maciek—with his eyesight already severely damaged from too much time in Warsaw’s sewers during the Resistance—now regards as pointless. “In many ways,” according to a "Self-Styled Siren" blog post from eight years ago, the film’s atmosphere of dark cynicism made it “a gangster film, with Poland’s future on the line instead of loot.”

Wajda and Cybulski actor collaborated on three more films and on the Polish theater scene before Cybulski died in 1967 in a tragic train accident.

The director immediately influenced by Wajda was Roman Polanski, who acted in two of his films. But Wajda also had an impact on the work of the film school whiz kids who entered Hollywood in the late Sixties: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg.

Certainly, Wajda’s technical mastery repays frame-by-frame viewing. But his maturity, his ability to look past divisive ideologies to the complex humanity that unites all his characters, is something to be embraced but incapable of being taught.

Quote of the Day (Ring Lardner, With a Father and Child on an Early 20th-Century Road Trip)

“Are you lost daddy? I arsked tenderly.
 
"Shut up he explained.” —American sportswriter, short-story writer, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), “The Young Immigrunts,” Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 31, 1920, reprinted in Ring Lardner: Stories and Other Writings, edited by Ian Frazier (2013)
 
I don’t know if, as an American, you’ve heard of, let alone read, The Young Visiters, a 1919 novella written by an Englishwoman, Daisy Ashford, when she reportedly was only nine years old.
 
One writer who looked at it dubiously was Ring Lardner, who parodied it in The Young Immigrunts—first as a long magazine article, then as a stand-alone book.
 
I suspect, even if you’re unaware of the targets of Lardner’s satire, that you will laugh like mad at his consistently surprising and hilarious use of American slang.

Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on ‘A Sick Country’)

“In a sick country every step to health is an insult to those who live on its sickness.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), The Fixer (1966)

Quote of the Day (Oliver Goldsmith, on Absurdity)

“Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.”—Anglo-Irish playwright-poet Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1744), The Traveller: Or, a Prospect of Society (1764)

I can think of at least one shameless supporter of absurdity. I’m sure you can come up with multiple examples.

Photo of the Day: Halloween Display, Central School, Glen Rock NJ

This morning, while in this Bergen County town on other business, I noticed in the distance what looked like a mass of white sheets. Coming closer, I saw a couple of long rows of ghouls, spooks, and additional otherworldly creatures associated with the end of this month.

I chuckled as I took the photo accompanying this post of these apparitions, whose diminutive size put them in the same physical category as many of the youngsters in the school—and whose expressions suggested Caspar the Friendly Ghost much more than the malevolent Poltergeist. 

But, come to think of it, kids these days are probably exposed to so much on TV and in the movies that these Hollywood depictions don’t have the power to scare them like before. No, it’s just real life that they have to be concerned with.

Quote of the Day (Michael Dobbs, on Politicians’ ‘Dangerous Phase’)

“Politicians are much like aging authors and older women. The dangerous phase in their lives is when they are no longer content with the respect of friends but demand the adulation of an audience.” —British novelist and Conservative politician Michael Dobbs, House of Cards (1989)

(The image accompanying this post shows Ian Richardson as Machiavellian politician Francis Urquhart in BBC's adaptation of Dobbs’ House of Cards: To Play the King. More than two decades later, Kevin Spacey played his American counterpart in the Netflix adaptation.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Wife,’ With Lines to Recall As We Await This Week’s Nobel Literature Announcement)

[After attending a party preceding Joe Castleman’s reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature, he and wife Joan Castleman have just entered an opulent Stockholm hotel suite.]
 
Joan Castleman [played by Glenn Close, pictured]: “Brush your teeth. Your breath is bad.”
 
Joe Castleman [played by Jonathan Pryce]: “Do you think they noticed?”
 
Joan: “No, they were too busy being awed.”—The Wife (2018), screenplay by Jane Anderson, based on the novel by Meg Wolitzer, directed by Bjorn Runge

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Karen Armstrong, on Being ‘Twinned With an Enemy’)

“Remember that we can become twinned with an enemy and come to resemble him. Our hatred may become an alter ego, a part of our identity.” — British religion scholar Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

Quote of the Day (Lewis Carroll, on ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’)

“The Walrus and the Carpenter
   Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
   Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
   And waited in a row.
 
"‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
   ‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
   Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
   And whether pigs have wings.’"—English children’s book author, poet, mathematician, and photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
 
By now, you’d think I’d know better than to listen to sports radio. I keep tuning, for instance, to my local version of the form, WFAN-FM, hoping for news or insights into my favorite sports teams—the Yankees, the Knicks, the Giants.
 
But as often as not I have to put up with idiotic ravings that fill up the airspace featuring the hosts’ hobbies, family lives, or, God help me, political leanings.
 
Even so, I was a little surprised the other day when, on WFAN’s afternoon show, Craig Carton and on-air partner Chris McMonigle, in a not particularly inspired bit of free association, came up with “the carpenter and the walrus.”
 
These two figures, the pair thought, were from a “fable.” If that was the case, Carton believed, maybe it was from Aesop’s Fables, as he was “an Aesop man.”
 
By now, their producers perhaps have told them this is not the case. Not that this would matter, because next week the pair could come up with an equally wrongheaded misattribution and make their schoolteachers roll over in their graves.
 
Even so, maybe someone can tell them that the Walrus and the Carpenter don’t appear in a fable but in a narrative poem enclosed in the fantasy novel Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? Better yet, could someone please send them a copy of these verses?

By the way, the image accompanying this post, of the Walrus and the Carpenters speaking to the oysters, was created by English illustrator Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914) for the original edition of Through the Looking-Glass.

Quote of the Day (Andy Rooney, on Designing a Chair)

“Last summer I made a chair. The wood was maple and cherry, and I invented what kind of a chair it was as I went along. When I finished, the chair looked great, but it has one shortcoming. It tips over backwards when anyone sits in it. My design was better than my engineering.” — CBS journalist and humorist Andy Rooney (1919-2011), “Design,” originally published in The Huntington (KS) News, Apr. 2, 1980, reprinted in And More by Andy Rooney (1982)

Fifteen years ago today, Andy Rooney delivered his last of 1,097 short, 60 Minutes segments. “I wish I could do this forever. I can’t, though,” he said, acknowledging that, at age 92, his career had come to an end. He died less than five weeks later, after developing postoperative complications from an undisclosed surgical procedure.

He served as a WWII correspondent for Stars and Stripes, but made his most significant mark at CBS—first as writing and producing partner of Harry Reasoner, then as a familiar droll on-screen commentator in his own right in 33 years on 60 Minutes. 

His presence became so vivid that he was parodied by SNL’s Joe Piscopo (see this hilarious YouTube clip on “Shoes”) and Norm Macdonald, as well as Frank Caliendo (on MAD TV).

When you google Rooney’s name, there’s a good chance you will come up with some low-lights from his career, too, such as insensitive remarks on Kurt Cobain’s death or “homosexual unions.” After his death, Time Magazine weighed in on his “most ridiculous complaints” in “Top 10 Grumpiest Andy Rooney Segments.”  (One sample: “What’s a Lady Gaga?”)

Still, for someone appearing on camera every week for so long, it’s surprising that more embarrassing examples don’t turn up. (Commentators on at least one “news” channel I can think of come up with that many in just five minutes, let alone three decades.) In any case, Rooney could be rightly proud for picking up Peabody and Emmy Awards for his work.

At the height of a 1986 corporate bloodletting at his longtime network, Rooney bluntly observed, in his syndicated news column, “CBS . . . no longer stands for anything. They’re just corporate initials now.” It’s easy to imagine what he would have thought of the recent turmoil at the news division and Sunday evening institution where he labored for so long.

In fact, one person who has done so is his grandson, Ben Fishel, in a Los Angeles Times piece from June:

“Sometimes I miss the era when my grandfather could devote an entire television segment to the mysteries of his junk drawer. Those trivial subjects only seemed trivial because the foundations of democracy felt secure enough to take for granted.

“Rooney rarely made himself the story, and he was not known as a particularly political commentator. But he believed deeply in journalism and in the responsibility that comes with informing the public.

“On that issue, I do not think he would be silent today.”

Photo of the Day: Water Fountain and Pond, Pascack Brook County Park, Westwood, NJ

Seeking to enjoy a brisk walk and a brief respite of bright sunshine two days ago, I drove a few towns away from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, to Pascack Brook County Park.

I don’t get there often, but I always enjoy the change of scenery, including a fountain in the middle of its pond. It appealed to me so much that I felt compelled to take the photo accompanying this post.

Quote of the Day (Garry Wills, on Students’ Declining Knowledge of History)

“Every professor says that what surprises them is how little the new students remember about anything more than two or three years ago. It was very revealing the first time I realized that a student had no memory of the civil-rights movement or Vietnam. They live intensely in the now, and there’s practically no ‘then’ that they have a workable knowledge of.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning historian-journalist Garry Wills interviewed by Cal Fussman for “The Men of Our Time,” Esquire, October 2015

(Photo of Garry Wills by Lauren Gerson, taken on March 10, 2015 at the LBJ Presidential Library, where he was joining the Friends of the LBJ Library to discuss his book, The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis.)