Movie Quote of the Day (‘The American President,’ on an Institution No Longer Around)

[Walking with each other before delivering his State of the Union address]

Sydney Ellen Wade [played by Annette Bening]: “How'd you finally do it?”

President Andrew Shepherd [played by Michael Douglas]: “Do what?”

Sydney: “Manage to give a woman flowers and be president at the same time?”

Andrew: “Well, it turns out I've got a rose garden.”— The American President (1995), screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Rob Reiner

It’s funny how seeing a movie decades apart can make you look at it in completely different ways. Case in point: The American President, which I viewed shortly after it came out in November 1995 and again yesterday afternoon, at a special Presidents’ Day presentation at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ. (It featured an excellent introduction by Fairleigh Dickinson University Professor Pat Schuber on the evolving nature of the Presidency.)

When I heard the above exchange three decades ago, for instance, I groaned at lines so corny that even Frank Capra (such an obvious inspiration for the movie’s creators that he’s even referenced at one point) wouldn’t have served them up.

Yesterday, I groaned for a different reason: the Rose Garden that President Shepherd makes use of no longer exists, in the beloved form that Americans of both major political parties cherished. And all because of one man.

Years ago, I had decidedly mixed feelings about Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, as I did in my few attempts to watch the TV show for which this film was, in effect, a dry run: The West Wing. It raised valid concerns about America’s polarized environment, the microscope under which modern Presidents exist, and the precious lack of personal privacy they enjoy.

But with its bad guys—all Republicans without a single redeeming ideological or social value—it created straw men that his heroes (liberal Democrats) could easily swat away. At least George Bernard Shaw, also given to long speeches in his plays, gave his devils their due, which made rebutting them all the more convincing.

Moreover, Sorkin's heroes possessed few complications, with their real-life inspirations bleached of their flaws when depicted in fictional form. In this film, as a centrist liberal facing a sex scandal promoted by the opposition, Shepherd had clear affinities with the President at the time, Bill Clinton.

Except for this fact: Clinton not only had to issue a false denial that only the most gullible believed about a past affair (with trashy entertainer Gennifer Flowers), but his campaign labored mightily to stamp out entire “bimbo eruptions,” while Shepherd was a lonely widower enchanted by a single intelligent, lovely environmental lobbyist.

Despite these shortcomings, time had raised my opinion of The American President from decidedly mixed to good, if not great. It was even better cast than I had recalled, with Samantha Mathis, John Mahoney and Wendie Malick in interesting supporting roles, and several lines and situations rang with unexpected prescience.

In his climactic speech, for example, Shepherd not only identified the divisive electoral strategy of his rival (an obvious Newt Gingrich stand-in), but the same one employed by the current Oval Office occupant for the last decade: “Whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it.”

And, when Martin Sheen’s chief of staff A. J. MacInerney tells Michael J. Fox’s idealistic aide, “The President doesn't answer to you,” Fox could answer for today’s citizenry outraged by daily lies and civil liberty violations: “Oh, yes he does.…I'm a citizen, this is my President. And in this country it is not only permissible to question our leaders, it's our responsibility!”

Photo of the Day: Honest Abe’s Stovepipe Hat

Few objects are so associated with a single person as the stovepipe hat with Abraham Lincoln. This form of headgear was quite popular in the 19^th century, but, if you’re like me, you’re hard pressed to think of another wearer than America’s 16^th President.

I photographed the one you see here back in June 2021, while in Manchester, VT, for a beloved relative’s wedding. It’s part of the items on display in Hildene, the summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln, the President’s oldest son.

Abe Lincoln wore several such hats in his lifetime, as soon as he was old enough to afford one in adulthood. It certainly afforded convenience (he took to carrying his paperwork in it as a young attorney), but I think it also made him look more imposing. 

Typically seven to eight inches tall, these hats, when topping his 6 ft.-4 in. frame, brought his total height to nearly seven feet tall, making him stand out as much as modern pro basketball centers.

Believe it or not, this hat—black and narrow-brimmed, made from glossy black pile textile that covers a paper card support—is only three of Lincoln’s still in existence. Evidently he bought it at Siger and Nichols, a firm then based on Maiden Lane in New York City.

There are plenty of reasons to visit Vermont, but if you find yourself in the southwestern corner of the state, you should make it a point to visit Hildene.

Robert Todd Lincoln was one of the more consequential offspring of American Presidents, serving variously as Secretary of War, U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, and president of the Pullman railroad company.

But there is no doubt that all visitors to this 24-room Georgian revival mansion will want to view its historic exhibit associated with Robert’s father, which not only includes this hat but also an oval dressing mirror from the White House and a Bible owned by the President.

Abraham Lincoln’s words and actions still matter to America. But artifacts like this hat at Hildene also have their function: sort of like relics of a man who’s become known, in effect (and probably to his ironic amusement, could he see it), as America’s great secular saint.

Quote of the Day (Ron Chernow, on George Washington’s ‘One Major Blunder As President’)

“Washington committed only one major blunder as president: He failed to put his name on Mount Vernon and thereby bungled an early opportunity at branding. Clearly deficient in the art of the deal, the poor man had to settle for the lowly title of father of his country.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow, “Ron Chernow Stands for Press Freedom at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” www.pen.org, April 30, 2019

This Day in British History (Birth of Brendan Bracken, Diehard Churchill Ally)

Feb. 15, 1901— Brendan Bracken—a mysterious figure who, despite being three decades younger than Winston Churchill, became his closest friend and Minister for Information in his wartime Cabinet—was born in Templemore, County Tipperary, Ireland.

A lanky, bespectacled redhead with charm and energy to spare, Bracken was hard to miss in any assembly. But, if people had no trouble picking him out, they had plenty in figuring him out. 

Who was he? Where did he come from? How had he become so indispensable to Churchill? Why was there a break in their relationship for five years before Bracken re-committed himself to his mentor in the latter’s darkest political hours?

For a long time during his rise in business and politics, even the last part of that first sentence above—about Bracken’s date and place of birth—would have been murky. 

The truth was that Bracken’s father, a well-to-do builder and member of the Fenian brotherhood that sought Irish independence, died when Brendan was three and that his stepfather years later was likewise of republican sympathy.

But by his teens, Bracken was acting so wildly that his mother packed him off to a Jesuit boarding school in Dublin and, when that effort to curb him failed, even further, to a similar institution in Australia.

At age 18, with Ireland plunged into its war of independence from Britain, Bracken was back in Dublin. He embraced his mother’s Unionist sympathies but not her Catholic faith. In the next several years, he not only rejected his Irish identity but bewildered former and newfound acquaintances by denying he had one, passing himself off as Australian. 

At various times, he also changed his age when the circumstances were advantageous and claimed that a brother had died when actually, like all family members except his mother, Bracken was estranged from him.

In 1923, the most important event in his life occurred when he met Winston Churchill. That December he organized Churchill’s unsuccessful General Election race as a Liberal in Leicester West, then another, four months later, as an independent. Finally by the end of 2024, Churchill won a safe seat in a return to the Conservative Party he had abandoned 20 years before.

An astonishing rumor, fed as much by the pair’s close relationship as by the red hair they shared, was that Bracken was his chief’s illegitimate child. The aide not only didn’t deny it but, some suspect, may have even spread the gossip. 

Churchill’s wife Clementine, already fuming that her husband's newfound friend was sleeping in the house with his feet up on the sofa, demanded answers, only to be blithely assured by the great man, “I looked it up, but the dates don’t coincide.”  

Though the rumor was untrue, it's hard not to think of the two men as surrogate family members. Bracken was more responsible, even-tempered and helpful than Churchill's choleric and alcoholic son Randolph. And in Churchill, Bracken found something of a father figure, an affectionate presence who fully shared his Unionist, even imperial, sympathies.

With Churchill’s return to the House of Commons, their paths diverged for a time, with Bracken displaying a talent for finance and business management. He became a publishing mogul, becoming chairman of the Financial News in 1928 and, 17 years later, merging it into The Financial Times, making that paper with its distinct paper color the institution it remains.

This business acumen and journalistic influence became indispensable to Churchill by the end of the decade, when this lifelong politician struggled through the decade known as his “Wilderness Years,” the period when, his relentless ambitions stymied, he was without a Cabinet post, a mere back-bencher.

In 1929, having won election as a Conservative in the North Paddington seat, Bracken allied himself again with Churchill, becoming for the next 10 years a foul-weather friend who stood by him in his lowest political and financial moments.

It was bad enough that Churchill found himself out of step with Conservative leadership on Indian policy, King Edward VIII’s abdication crisis, and appeasement towards Nazi Germany. But his spendthrift habits put him continually in financial danger.

In 1938, press baron Max Beaverbook, disapproving of Churchill’s increasingly dire warnings about Adolf Hitler’s rearmament campaign, terminated his contract for writing an Evening Standard column. 

Without this desperately needed source of funds, a despondent Churchill made plans to sell Chartwell, the home into which he had poured so much of his money.

It was Bracken who came to his rescue by having his associate Sir Henry Strakosch buy Churchill’s American stocks at their original purchase price and pay him interest to boot.

Strakosch performed similar financial magic in 1940, as Churchill moved to the forefront of the movement to fight the Nazi war machine no matter the cost.

Had these arrangements been revealed at the time, they might have opened Churchill up to attempts to discredit his wartime efforts—as indeed has happened now from the American far right, with Darryl Cooper labeling Churchill “the “chief villain of the Second World War” in an interview conducted by Tucker Carlson.

Bracken was as instrumental in ensuring that Churchill finally became Prime Minister as he had been in keeping him from declaring bankruptcy. 

With Neville Chamberlain’s leadership fatally undermined by a closer-than-expected no-confidence vote in the House of Commons, Churchill told Bracken he was willing to serve under Chamberlain’s desired successor, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. 

Bracken got his friend to remain silent in the high-level meetings if Halifax were proposed to lead the new government. In the end, Halifax, saying it would be difficult to lead the war effort as a House of Lords member, left the field effectively open to Churchill.

In 1941, Churchill named Bracken his Minister of Information—in effect, in charge of wartime propaganda. Two authors distinctly unimpressed by what they learned about Bracken at close range in the war obliquely targeted him in their novels.

Evelyn Waugh told future biographer Christopher Sykes that Brideshead Revisited’s Rex Mottram was his only character fully drawn from life. Though he tried to disguise the source by making Mottram a Canadian, other details—notably, the character’s colonial origins, opportunism, overwhelming business success, and lack of devotion or even interest in Catholicism—pointed towards Bracken. 

And George Orwell was so incensed by the restrictions under which he labored in Bracken’s Ministry of Information, it was said, that he was inspired to create Big Brother in 1984, with the character’s kinship with the politico hinted at in their initials: B.B.

Churchill’s landslide defeat in the 1945 General Election—in a campaign not helped by Bracken’s advocacy of an overly negative, partisan tone—left the two men out of power.

When Churchill returned to Downing Street six years later, Bracken announced that ill health precluded his continuation in politics. But he was not done serving his mentor and hero.

In June 1953, Bracken joined the Prime Minister’s inner circle in covering up the news of Churchill’s massive stroke, claiming only that the leader required “complete rest” for a while, ensuring that there would be no accurate UK coverage of the problem. 

It wasn’t until a year passed that Churchill, having made a great recovery in the meantime, gave even a hint of his health crisis.

By this time, the health of Bracken himself, a lifelong chain smoker, was in more serious danger. Upon hearing the news of the death of his stalwart friend in 1958 from lung cancer, Churchill lamented the loss of “poor, dear Brendan.”

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Henri Nouwen, on Why Jesus Calls for ‘No Ideologies To Be Imposed’)

“For Jesus, there are no countries to be conquered, no ideologies to be imposed, no people to be dominated. There are only children, women and men to be loved." — Dutch-born Catholic priest, theologian, psychologist and writer Henri Nouwen (1932-1996), Peacework: Prayer, Resistance, Community (2005)

Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, With a Thought for Valentine’s Day)

“How the world gives and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which makes the world a garden; and ‘hope, which comes to all,’ outwears the accidents of life.”— Scottish man of letters Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879)

Song Lyric of the Day (World Party, on ‘Avarice and Greed’)

“Avarice and greed are gonna drive you over the endless sea
They will leave you drifting in the shallows
Or drowning in the oceans of history.”—“Ship of Fools,” written by Welsh singer-songwriter Karl Wallinger (1957-2024) and performed by World Party on their Private Revolution CD (1987)

I have to tell you that when it came to this song, I was late to the party—World Party, that is. Since I didn’t have access to MTV in the Eighties, I didn’t see the video for this tune, and the local rock station that I had listened to for more than a decade had become less experimental and more frozen in a classic rock format that downplayed more experimental newer music.

But once in a blue moon in recent years I would hear this on my car radio, and the other day I listened to it again, only this time it struck me with full force. Nearly four decades after its release, Karl Wallinger’s dystopian vision feels more relevant than ever.

“The world is in such a state,” he said in a 2018 interview with Billboard upon release of a new video. “The situation is getting crazy, isn’t it? It’s so ridiculous, this whole situation, mind-blowingly unintelligible.”

Any rational observer could only admit that it’s gotten worse. The “avarice and greed” that Wallinger scored, along with sexual corruption (“Sodom”), lie at the heart of the mushrooming Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

And above all there is the specter of environmental catastrophe. Even the bipartisan agreement that once held sway on the necessity of saving outdoor spaces has vanished. As Stephen Lezac noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, with the rise of the MAGA movement, Donald Trump’s “inner circle consists almost exclusively of hyperonline MAGA ideologues, whose passion for American landscapes generally begins and ends at the golf course. The [Theodore] Roosevelt Republicans are in retreat. The indoor Republicans have arrived.”

Last year he worst of the tech tycoons, Elon Musk, severely hobbled the Environmental Protection Agency through his work at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Just as predictably, his cuts to the Forest Service left it about 38 percent behind its recent pace for forest-thinning, prescribed fire and other work to remove potential wildfire fuel, according to Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy group.

“You will pay tomorrow,” Wallinger (who, sadly, died two years ago) promised the oblivious officers of the “Ship of Fools” of the Eighties. Sadly, today’s equivalent seems likely to capsize all of us in their tech Armageddon.

(The image accompanying this post, of World Party performing at The Basement in Columbus, Ohio, was taken on May 26, 2015, by Bob Mateljan.)

Joke of the Day (Fred Allen, on One Man’s Object of Affection)

“The last time I saw him, he was walking down Lover’s Lane, holding his own hand.”—Irish-American radio comedian Fred Allen (1894-1956), quoted by Ivan G. Shreve Jr., “ ‘If Frank Fay Were Acid, He Would Have Consumed Himself’ – Fred Allen,” Thrilling Days of Yesteryear blog, May 2, 2017

It’s said that when the Irish deliver an insult to someone they know well, it’s often a form of endearment. But such was not the case stateside when Fred Allen lobbed this verbal grenade at fellow Irish-American comic Frank Fay.

Fay certainly has a place in entertainment history as the actor who played gentle tippler Elwood P. Dowd in the original 1944 Broadway production of Harvey, and before that as the prototypical stand-up monologuist.

But even in show business, an industry with no shortage of egotists, Fay’s self-regard was thought far beyond the norm. And he was especially scorned as a philanderer and alcoholic who abused his first wife, the rising and highly admired Hollywood star Barbara Stanwyck.

I try to source any quote used here on this blog, but I had a tougher time than usual doing so with this one. (There is a variation on it, by the way: the title of the post that Shreve wrote for his blog.) But I did see the quote used in the Madison State Journal back in October 1960, a year before Fay’s death at age 69, and from all that I have read there seems little doubt that Allen loathed Fay.

I thought of this quote as a rather cynical prelude to Valentine’s Day. No doubt there are many who, as Allen said, are more than happy to stroll down Lover’s Lane by themselves. I’m sure you can think of one such person. So can I. A hint: the right hand that fellow will be holding is probably smeared with heavy beige makeup meant to camouflage questions about why it looks so bruised all the time.

Quote of the Day (Lars-Erik Cederman, on Economics and Ethnic Nationalism)

“[E]thnic nationalism tends to attract the most support from those who have been disadvantaged by globalization and laissez-faire capitalism. Populist demagogues have an easy time exploiting growing socioeconomic inequalities, especially those between states’ geographic centers and their peripheries, and they blame ethnically distinct immigrants or resident minorities. Part of the answer is to retool immigration policies so as to better integrate newcomers. Yet without policies that reduce inequality, populist appeals that depict out-groups as welfare sponges will only gain traction. So governments hoping to amp down ethnic nationalism should set up programs that offer job training to the unemployed in depressed regions, and they should prevent the further hallowing out of welfare programs.”— Swiss-Swedish political scientist Lars-Erik Cederman, “Blood for Soil: The Fatal Temptations of Ethnic Politics,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019

The image of Lars-Erik Cederman that accompanies this post was taken on Nov. 1, 2018, by AliceRuth11.

Quote of the Day (Ginia Bellafante, on the Long-Term Decline of the Department Store)

“If you are in your 20s, department stores have been dying ostensibly for the whole of the time you have been conscious. ‘Lackluster upon lackluster,’ an analyst at Piper Jaffray described the sector in a New Yorker article in 2003 — seven years before Instagram ignited our scrolling addictions, 16 years before the closure of Henri Bendel, 17 before the end of Lord & Taylor and Barneys. The decline might be traced further back, sometime around 1989, when B. Altman shut down on Fifth Avenue. By then, Bloomingdale’s had been abandoned as an urbane meeting ground in romantic comedy (see ‘Manhattan’), replaced by The Sharper Image (see ‘When Harry Met Sally’).”— Fashion critic Ginia Bellafante, “Out of Step With Their Shoppers,” The New York Times, Feb. 8, 2026

The image accompanying this post, looking north across 60th Street at Barneys New York on a cloudy afternoon, was taken on Apr. 17, 2010, by Jim.henderson.

In the mid-1990s, as part of a larger retail tour of New York, I visited Barneys, along with other members of my company and industry marketing researchers. Somebody noticed that my jacket, bought at a more downscale department store, looked an awful lot like one on the racks. It turned out that the merchandise we saw cost seven times more than what I had paid.

In his 2025 memoir, They All Came to Barneys, Gene Pressman depicts the company he managed with his brother Bob as the height of Nineties glamour. Maybe so.

But from that day nearly three decades ago, I became convinced that the store’s merchandise was overpriced. It was a far cry from the discount men’s suit shop his grandfather had founded. When I read the reports of its demise, I figured that pride goeth before a fall.

I was glad that, unlike many casual observers (and even some retail analysts who should have known better), Ginia Bellafonte’s article didn’t attribute the decline of the entire department store sector solely to the Internet.

A single cause is a convenient explanation for everything, but the department store has withered for several reasons, much like the enclosed malls they anchored for decades. I look forward to an entire book that will trace this devolution with the care it deserves.

Quote of the Day (Christopher Morley, on the Explosive Power of Books)

"Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.”— American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley (1890-1957), The Haunted Bookshop (1919)

This Day in Film History (Birth of Ronald Colman, Sterling Star of Silent and Sound Eras)

Feb. 9, 1891— Ronald Colman, an Oscar-winning actor who personified courtliness from Hollywood’s silent to sound eras, was born in Richmond, England.

Probably because I was annoyed by what seemed like an unduly stiff performance as an amnesiac war casualty in Random Harvest (1942), I was put off for years by Colman. I changed my opinion after watching his world-weary diplomat in Frank Capra’s adaptation of the James Hilton novel Lost Horizon (1937).

But it was his depiction of brilliant, alcoholic, self-sacrificing lawyer Sydney Carton in the 1935 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities that finally convinced me that Colman was a sterling talent, well-deserving of his reputation as one of Hollywood’s best leading men of the 1930s and 1940s.

Understandably, the actor saw this as one of the best roles of his career. Not only did he agree to shave off his trademark mustache to play the part, but, with great good humor, he recited his climactic speech from the film whenever Jack Benny visited him on the comedian’s radio and TV shows.

After a half-century, I think I really should re-watch Random Harvest, which enjoys a reputation as one of the finest romantic melodramas of Hollywood’s golden age. 

Colman himself had been badly wounded in the Great War while serving in the London Scottish Regiment (a legendary unit in which actors Basil Rathbone, Herbert Marshall, and Claude Rains had their own harrowing experiences, as related in this 2015 post on the “Sister Celluloid” blog).

The war was as psychologically as physically devastating, as Colman recalled later:

“I won’t go into the war and all that it did to all of us. We went out. Strangers came back. It was the war that made an actor out of me. When I came back that was all I was good for: acting. I wasn’t my own man anymore.”

Undoubtedly, it was Colman’s identification with the traumatized veteran in Random Harvest that helped him overcome an often far-fetched script—and win an Oscar nomination.

The war did not end Colman’s travails. Determined to appear on the New York stage, he initially encountered a long period of unemployment, to such an extent that he was reduced to scrounging for food. (“Figuring out the best way to spend five cents in an automat was an art at which I became adept. Doughnuts were the main standby.”) At last he broke through.

Colman found film to be the real where he would make his mark, however, when director Henry King cast him opposite Lillian Gish in the 1923 silent film The White Sister. The film was so successful that the trio reunited for Romola the following year.

Unlike many silent-film idols, Colman had no trouble adapting to sound. In fact, the new technology enhanced his career because he could take advantage of his distinctive voice: rich, cultured, mellifluous, enhancing his image as an English gentleman.

“Colman only really hit one note with it, a sort of wistful oboe note, but that note was enough if the writing of the picture suited his restrained lyricism,” wrote Dan Callahan in an October 2025 post on his “Stolen Holiday” blog.

No matter what genre he tried—western, melodrama, detective film, romantic comedy—Colman’s gentlemanly persona was tinged with melancholy, a trait of his off-screen temperament. That sense was reinforced early in his career because of a disastrous first marriage.

Colman wed Thelma Raye in haste in 1920, a union he came to rue as, stricken with jealousy at his increasing success, the actress took to stalking him. Increasingly withdrawn under this pressure, Colman was relieved when she sued him for divorce 14 years later. Fortunately his second marriage, to Benita Hume, was longer (20 years, until his death) and far happier.

To the greatest extent possible, Colman tried to live with discretion, so the public knew little of his private circumstances. What it saw onscreen, it loved. In addition to the films I mentioned previously, I also enjoyed him in The Talk of the Town (1942), a comedy in which his straitlaced lawyer risks his nomination to the Supreme Court by aiding an escaped convict whose innocence he comes to believe in.

With his fourth Oscar nomination in 1947 for A Double Life, Colman finally won formal recognition from his peers by winning the coveted statuette, as a Shakespearean actor whose latest role—the jealousy-maddened Othello—begins to mirror his own life.

(A recent biographer of Colman, the prolific Carl Rollyson, has a astute analysis of the actor’s “graceful, literate masculinity” in this Spring 2024 article for Humanities, a journal of the National Endowment for the Humanities.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Lady Eve,’ As a Conversation Takes an Unusual Turn)

Charles [played by Henry Fonda] [speaking of card playing]: “Now you, on the other hand, with a little coaching you could be terrific."

Jean [played by Barbara Stanwyck]: “Do you really think so?”

Charles: “Yes, you have a definite nose.”

Jean: “Well, I'm glad you like it. Do you like any of the rest of me?”— The Lady Eve (1941), screenplay by Monckton Hoffe and Preston Sturges, directed by Preston Sturges

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on Authenticity and Originality)

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”— English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), "Writing," in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (1963)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Archbishop Ronald Hicks, on Being a ‘Missionary Church’)

“We are called to be a missionary Church that takes care of the poor and the vulnerable, upholds life from conception to natural death, cares for creation, builds bridges, listens synodally, protects children, promotes healing for survivors and for all those wounded by the Church, and shows respect for all, building unity across cultures and generations.”—New York Roman Catholic Archbishop Ronald Hicks, Homily at Installation, Feb. 6, 2026

Quote of the Day (Lorraine Hansberry, on Stillness and Thinking)

“Don’t get up. Just sit a while and think. Never be afraid to sit a while and think.”— African-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), A Raisin in the Sun (1959)

Excellent advice, to which I would add just one corollary: Never be afraid to sit a while, think—and write.

Quote of the Day (Baseball’s Mickey Lolich, on Perceptions of His Weight)

“Throughout my 16 years in the major leagues, whenever things weren't going right, people always looked for reasons. For some, it was 'Maybe they're staying out too late at night,' 'Maybe too many outside interests,' 'Maybe their head's not screwed on right.' For me, it was 'He's too fat.' 'But when I was pitching good, they'd say, 'He's strong as a bull.' ''—Burly southpaw pitcher—and 1968 World Series MVP—Mickey Lolich (1940-2026), quoted by Ira Berkow, “When Fat Is Beautiful,” The New York Times, Aug. 7, 1989

First, all honor to Mickey Lolich, who died two days ago and is fondly remembered—especially by Detroit Tigers fans—for his three gutsy complete-game victories in the 1968 Fall Classic against the formidable St. Louis Cardinals.

The lefthander’s wry comment on how uncharitable—heck, merciless—some fans could be about his weight reminded me of an incident I witnessed with another baseball player.  In 15 seasons in the big leagues, John Mayberry clubbed 255 homers and drove in 879 RBIs, reaching a peak of 34 HRs in 1975 and another 30 as late as 1980.

By 1982, however, the slugging first baseman’s glory days were behind him. Midway through the season, the Toronto Blue Jays shipped him off to the New York Yankees. 

Any hope that the short right-field fence at Yankee Stadium would revive his power proved short-lived, as he hit only eight HRs and, worse, recorded a miserable .209 batting average with the Bronx Bombers.

Why did his numbers decline? Was it the natural consequence of nagging injuries over the years, the slower bat speed that players often encounter with age, or something elsw?

Some had a simple, nasty explanation: his weight. Lolich claimed that during his career, he carried 220 pounds on a 6-ft.-1-in. frame, though some believe that weight was an underestimate.

As for Mayberry: the Baseball Almanac lists his measurements as 6-ft.-3-in., 215 pounds. Other sources note that he’d added five pounds by the time he got to the Yankees, and Blue Jays fan Tom Dakers in a 2016 post on the “Blue Birds Banter” blog claimed that he’d reached 230 pounds north of the border.

That summer with the Yankees—Mayberry’s last in professional baseball—I attended a Yankee game in the mezzanine section with a close relative. Mayberry was in the middle of his prolonged offensive struggle. Each time he flailed and floundered at the plate, we could hear a voice behind us raining down insults, each a variation on “You stink!”

At last, late in the game, with Mayberry striking out again, that voice reached a crescendo in vituperation: “HEY MAYBERRY, IF YOU COULD ONLY BAT YOUR WEIGHT, YOU’D BE THE BIGGEST THING SINCE TY COBB!” (Ty Cobb, be it noted, had a lifetime batting average of .367.)

“I’ve got to see who this guy is!” my relative said. Turning around, we  were surprised to see, several rows behind us, a fellow graduate of our high school. 

He laughed when he noticed us, and we agreed that it was lucky for him that he was so high up in the stands, rather than closer to the field where Mayberry might have taken serious exception to the abuse.

An ideal “five-tool” player is blessed with a consistent ability to hit for average, bang home runs, run the bases with speed, play elite defense, and possess a strong, accurate arm. Notice that “rabbit ears” is not part of this skill set, particularly when it comes to weight.

I have no idea how Mayberry felt about such taunts, but fortunately, Lolich took it all in stride. I hope that he is enjoying as many delicious donuts as he likes in Heaven now—and not gaining an ounce.

TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ As Archie Addresses His Bar’s Customers on Super Bowl Sunday)

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O’Connor]: “Before the second half starts here, I just want to take the opportunity to express my, whaddyacallit, gratitude and depreciation to all my loyal friends and customers here who are here with me today to share with me in watching this magnificent sportin' event.” —All in the Family, Season 8, Episode 16, “Super Bowl Sunday,” original air date Jan. 15, 1978, 78, teleplay by Bob Weiskopf, Bob Schiller, and Johnny Speight, directed by Paul Bogart

One difference between this Super Bowl and the one 48 years ago: “this magnificent sportin' event” concludes the NFL season three weeks later. Way too long, as far as I’m concerned.

Quote of the Day (Ursula Le Guin, on Her Imagination)

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.”— American science-fiction author Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018), "The Creatures on My Mind" in Unlocking the Air and Other Stories (1996)

Quote of the Day (Alice Hoffman, on ‘The Weather and Love’)

"When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure."—American novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth (1997)

These matters are, if possible, even more unpredictable this wild winter.

(The image accompanying this post, showing Alice Hoffman at BookExpo in New York City, was taken May 30, 2019 by Rhododendrites.)

Quote of the Day (Annie Sullivan, on ‘Beginning and Failing’)

“No matter what happens, keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you find that you have accomplished a purpose—not the one you began with, perhaps, but one that you will be glad to remember.”—Irish-American teacher and disabilities advocate Annie Sullivan (1866-1936), quoted by student Helen Keller, Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy (1955)

Quote of the Day (Siri Hustvedt, on Wisdom)

“Wisdom really never develops in isolation but only in relation to other people, parents, teachers, family members and, of course, in relation to the broader culture that has hierarchies and values of its own. It's fundamentally rooted in an openness to dialogue. Martin Buber called it the 'between,' the area between people where something new is created. In our neoliberal culture where the 'me' is supreme, thinking about wisdom as something formed between people is really important. Truly wise people are always walking on some form of moral ground that recognizes the other person.  That means having humility, both intellectual and moral.”—American novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt quoted in “Soapbox: The Columnists—WSJ. Asks Six Luminaries to Weigh in on Single Topic; This Month: Wisdom,” WSJ. Magazine, January 2022

The image of Siri Hustvedt that accompanies this post, made during "The Writer's Life" panel at the 2014 Brooklyn Book Festival, was taken Sept. 21, 2014, by Luigi Novi.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Yes, Minister,’ on a Government Aide’s Job Function)

[A British Cabinet member is annoyed at an aide’s long-winded rambling.]

James Hacker, Minister [played by Paul Eddington, left]: “You're blathering, Bernard.”

Bernard Woolley, Principal Private Secretary [played by Derek Fowlds, right]: “Yes, Minister.”

Hacker: “Why are you blathering, Bernard?”

Bernard: “It's my job, Minister.”—Yes, Minister, Season 1, Episode 7, “Jobs for the Boys,” original air date Apr. 7, 1980, teleplay by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, directed by Sydney Lotterby

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Dr. Jordan Grumet, on Tyrants Vs. Saints)

“The tyrant seeks to bend the world to their will. They apply power externally to remake the environment, people, or culture around them, often in the belief that if they can just change enough out there, they will finally feel whole inside. Saints, on the other hand, reverse this equation. They focus their power inward—working on themselves, healing their wounds, mastering their habits, refining their values. Ironically, it’s through this inward mastery that they end up changing the world more deeply than any tyrant ever could.”— Dr. Jordan Grumet, “Tyrants vs. Saints: The Power That Changes Everything” (“The Regret-Free Life” blog), Psychology Today, Apr. 15, 2025

The image accompanying this post shows perhaps the epitome of a saint in conflict with a tyrant: left to right, a pensive St. Thomas More and a browbeating King Henry VIII (played by, respectively, Paul Scofield and Robert Shaw) in the 1966 Best Picture Oscar winner, A Man for All Seasons.

The crisis that Henry forced on More is a reminder not only of the heavy burden that public officials face in drawing a moral line that arbitrary rulers cannot cross, but also the responsibility that ordinary individuals must maintain in upholding the primacy of conscience.

Quote of the Day (Lewis Mumford, on Life)

“Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner.” — American urban planner, sociologist and historian Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), The Conduct of Life: Ethical and Religious Issues Confronting Modern Civilization (1951)

This Day in Theater History (Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ Premieres)

Jan. 31, 1901— When the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) prepared its third production of an Anton Chekhov play, its actors were baffled, complaining that the script was “not a play, but only a scheme; there are no roles but only hints.” At its premiere on this date, audience reaction was bifurcated, with 12 curtain-calls after Act I “but only a half-hearted one after Act IV.”

In the century and a quarter since, Three Sisters has taken its place in the world’s theater canon, though directors and actors still sometimes struggle, as they do with Chekhov’s other plays, with the delicate balance between rueful comedy and drama.

I myself have witnessed the divergent results from the Russian doctor-turned-writer’s “hints.” Though critical reaction was divided at the time, a 1997 Roundabout Theatre production looks better in retrospect, with a starry cast featuring Amy Irving, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Lily Taylor as the titular siblings and, in supporting roles, Billy Crudup, Calista Flockhart, Paul Giamatti, Jerry Stiller, Eric Stoltz, David Strathairn, and Justin Theroux.

On the other hand, a smaller-scale 2011 production at the Chautauqua Institution, as I noted in my review, was fundamentally misconceived, filled with “directorial encrustations [that] covered and practically suffocated” it.

This dramedy did not—does not—need such embellishments. Simmering in the playwright’s consciousness for nearly the prior 20 years before the show premiered, it limned the decline of three Russian sisters as they dealt with financial pressures, professional dissatisfaction, and cultural enervation amid an isolated provincial town.

And, as University College London Professor Neil Stoker noted in this May 2019 blog post, the play is suffused with Chekhov’s awareness, for half his life, of the tuberculosis slowly destroying him, heightening a sense that “people were not just struggling with the imperfections of their own and others’ natures, but with arbitrary, relentless and invisible killers that made any apparent worldly success futile.”

In the summer of 1883, while staying at a dacha in south Russia, Chekhov had become fascinated with the Lintvarev sisters, three women of intellect and warmth who stimulated his imagination.

Eventually, he sketched a scenario in which he differentiated their fictional counterparts: the oldest, Olga, a schoolteacher burdened with financial responsibility; Masha, the bitter middle sister, who finds refuge from an increasingly loveless marriage through an affair with a Russian colonel passing through; and Irina, the youngest, whose innocence is lost under the weight of circumstance.

Moscow, their childhood home, looms as a symbol of the sisters’ perceived loss of cosmopolitan enlightenment, entertainment and vivacity.

Chekhov wrote Masha with the MAT actress Olga Knipper—who became his wife later that year—in mind. She ended up outliving her husband by half a century, and on her 90^th birthday—now under a Communist regime that had upended the way of life she and Anton had known so well—she could still recite lines from the play that had been molded around her.

The third of Chekhov’s four full-length plays, Three Sisters was, like the others, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, who used it as a template for his ideas on naturalistic acting, psychological realism, atmosphere, and indirect action.

Even though MAT was well on its way to becoming “The House of Chekhov,” the playwright and director often clashed on how to stage the play, with Stanislavski stressing a harsher realism, leading Chekhov at one point to depart from rehearsals in a huff for Nice, France, convinced as late as three days before the premiere that the show would fail.

What united the collaborators, despite their differences in tone, was a sense that their characters and subject matter—ordinary Russians of different classes and occupations, unsure and paralyzed over how to act in a time of shifting socioeconomic change—required a changed treatment of plot and atmosphere.

The large, melodramatic gestures of royalty, for instance, would be replaced by smaller moments that might precede or follow major events. So, as in Three Sisters, audiences see not a duel onstage but its build-up and shattering aftermath.

British actor Ian McKellen, who, according to The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, has “played more Chekhov roles than any other actor of his generation,” has underscored an aspect of these plays he began to absorb nearly 70 years ago: “more than any other dramatist, Chekhov brings actors close together on and off the stage. If they fail to respond as a company, the plays don't work.”

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1970 British film adaptation of Three Sisters, directed by Sir Laurence Olivier and starring, left to right, Louise Pernell, Joan Plowright, and Jeanne Watts.)