This Day in Film History (‘Virginia Woolf’ Erodes Censorship Barriers)

June 21, 1966—Mike Nichols was so worried about the reaction to his film directing debut, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that he left the Pantages Theater early with the movie’s editor, Sam O'Steen.

Nichols need not have been concerned about the popular or critical reception to his adaptation of one of the most acclaimed yet controversial plays of the postwar period. 

With the draw of real-life couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, this scalding marital drama may have been, at $7.5 million, the most expensive black-and-white movie ever produced, but its $10.3 million box-office take ensured profits for Warner Bros.

Over the winter, Hollywood poured more honors on the film, with 13 Academy Award nominations, including for every category in which it was eligible—the first time this had occurred since Cimarron in 1931. Subsequently, wins went to Taylor (her second Best Actress win), Sandy Dennis for Best Supporting Actress, and Haskell Wexler for Best Cinematography.

From the moment Edward Albee’s play opened on Broadway in 1962, it was considered a hot property—but also, in some quarters, too hot to handle. Its frequently profane language and sexual explicitness unnerved the trustees of Columbia University enough that they overruled the recommendation of its Pulitzer Prize panel that the award go to the playwright.

Acquiring the property was unusual for Jack L. Warner, an aging mogul with conservative tastes that increasingly veered towards prestige musical blockbusters like My Fair Lady and Camelot.

At least sone among the studio hierarchy felt qualms about the finished product, which retained much of Albee’s incendiary dialogue. At one early screening, Life Magazine reported, one Warner executive groaned when the lights came up, "My God! We have a $7 million dirty movie on our hands!"

They were right to be concerned. Though the Production Code that had restricted profanity and sex onscreen for the prior three decades was coming under increasing fire from filmmakers and critics, it still presented roadblocks.

The Catholic Legion of Decency, which aimed to identify and boycott any movie it deemed morally objectionable, represented an especially significant roadblock to widespread distribution and popular acceptance of the film. Archbishops and priests promoted pledges by the faithful to avoid any cinema that the organization condemned.

Nichols had fought constantly with screenwriter Ernest Lehman to stick as closely as possible to Albee’s original dialogue and plot. He had survived being removed when generous starting hours for Taylor and Burton left the production 30 days behind schedule and with double the budget. He was not about to let the picture sink before it had a good chance of being seen by the public.

When the 80 judges for the Catholic Legion panel met, Nichols promised Warner execs, he would have his good friend Jacqueline Kennedy—practically a venerated figure after her husband’s assassination—sit behind prominent clerics like “Monsignor What’s-His-Face” and pronounce at the picture’s conclusion, “How Jack would have loved it."

The plot worked, as the Legion assigned Virginia Woolf a new rating—A-IV (“morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations")—which took into account the work’s moral seriousness while signifying that its often scabrous language and subject matter were not for the squeamish.

After haggling with Warner Bros. over its content, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) used a similar strategy as the Legion, designating the film as the first to bear the notice, "No one under 18 will be admitted unless accompanied by his parent." Its first attempt at a rating system followed two years later.

While the censorship walls crumbled rapidly on the nation’s cinemas in the late 1960s, it took a bit longer for the old restrictions to fade on television. I well remember the first time the film aired on CBS in February 1973.

Then 13 years old, I wondered exactly what was being signaled when the “Tiffany Network” issued its pre-viewing disclaimer urging parents and “sensitive viewers” to use “judgment and discretion.” I soon received what The New York Times’ Howard Thompson termed “an adult earful.”

Nowadays, in whatever medium it appears, it is seldom that such editorial handwringing occurs. Although CBS aired the show starting at 9 pm, when many kiddies would be fast asleep, Turner Classic Movies, for instance, has been known to show it during daytime. 

(A waggish filmmaking friend of mine once noted that TCM never had to worry about children watching their movies, as the cable channel’s average viewing age was 65!)

Viewers who couldn’t get beyond the blistering language that caused so much sturm und drang were likely to miss the symbolism of the names given the feuding, sadistic middle-aged academic couple at the heart of the play and film: George and Martha.

Like the first American President and his wife, Albee’s couple were unable to conceive—certainly not a baby, perhaps only drink-induced disorder and destruction among fellow academics ostensibly oriented towards reason.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Anselm of Canterbury, on Justice and Angels)

“The angels are separated between those who adhering to justice enjoy all the goods they wish and those who having abandoned justice lack any good they desire.”—“Doctor of the Church” and “Father of Scholasticism” St. Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033–1109), Three Philosophical Dialogues: On Truth/On Freedom of Choice/On the Fall of the Devil, translated by Thomas Williams (2002)

Quote of the Day (James Burrows, on His Classic Character-Driven Sitcoms)

“The concept is never what attracts me; it’s the execution. There are lots of shows about bars, news and radio stations, cabdrivers, and shrinks. I want to see what the characters that are put into these situations do. I’m concerned about believability and the economy of the comedy, the shortest distance between the character and the laughter, and the best way to get there. When I direct an episode, I have a lot of notes. I am apt to tell writers, ‘Fifty percent of what I say is gold and fifty percent is garbage. It’s your job to figure out which is which.’”— James Burrows (1940-2016), the “Steven Spielberg of TV Sitcoms,” with Eddy Friedfeld, Directed by James Burrows: Five Decades of Stories from the Legendary Director of Taxi, Cheers, Frasier, Friends, Will & Grace, and More (2022)

The subtitle of the memoir by James Burrows, who died yesterday, says it all: more than 1,000 episodes of the best-loved sitcoms of our time. The son of Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer-director Abe Burrows, he sharpened his considerable comic instincts in association with sitcom stars and showrunners Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Glen and Les Charles, Chuck Lorre, Marta Kaufman and David Crane.

Oscar-winning film director Christopher Nolan put it more succinctly—the way Burrows would have liked it—by terming him “the modern master of the sophisticated comedy.” In employing four cameras on sets, he recorded each actor constantly and selected among their reactions for the final cuts.

No wonder he told those he filmed, “always be ready, always be funny.” And no wonder the likes of Jennifer Aniston (pictured, from Friends), Tony Danza, Ted Danson, Woody Harrison, and Sean Hayes, among many others, shot to stardom under his careful guidance.

Theater Review: ‘David Copperfield,’ at 59E59 Theaters, NYC

Contemporary readers recognize Charles Dickens as a novelist of astonishing productivity, but Victorians also knew him as an enthusiastic theater amateur—writing and directing his own productions among friends, and acting the roles of his major characters in hugely profitable author readings.

He would surely have been delighted in the dramatic possibilities realized of the most autobiographical of his fictions, David Copperfield, in this Guildford Shakespeare Company import for the current “Brits Off Broadway” series.

Abigail Pickard Price, who directed the show and wrote it with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches, has magically compressed the novelist’s sprawling doorstopper into two hours and 15 minutes of nonstop action in 59E59 Theaters’ Upper East Side venue, sidelining subsidiary figures to focus on Copperfield’s growth from fatherless child to husband and famous writer.

Even so, 19 characters appear onstage, brought to life by a talented trio of actors who won Best Ensemble Performance Award at the London Fringe Theatre Awards 25/26. Eddy Payne ably anchors the show as David, skillfully evoking his boy-to-man transition.

Even more extraordinary are Luke Barton and Louise Beresford, handle nine roles each, including both sexes. The transformations are always startling and sometimes hilarious.

As David’s devoted childhood nurse Peggotty, the rangy, long-faced Barton suggests John Lithgow in drag from The World According to Garp, and he’s not afraid to burlesque Mr. Micawber’s melodramatic denunciation of Uriah Heep.

Beresford, having proven her comic skills in Britain in plays like Noises Off and Bedroom Farce, wrings every laugh possible here as Miss Betsey Trottwood and David’s annoyingly childlike first wife Dora.

The actors accomplish this feat of invention and endurance through a whirlwind of quick-change costumes, puppets, and accents, supported by set/costume designer Neil Irish and movement/associate director Amy Lawrence. Props do double duty, including:

*a set of trunks morph into a stagecoach and a portable bar;
* a tall hat and long coat on a coatrack represent the unbending Murdstone;
*a baby blanket unwraps in a later scene to become David’s jacket;
*Emily’s dress unfurls to suggest the sea just off the coast of Great Yarmouth.

At the matinee I attended, another theatergoer told me she wanted to see this clever show because she had caught the Guildford troupe’s similarly delightful adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice last year. Now, with this affectionate adaptation of Dickens (running through June 28), this immensely talented British theater company has built an eager audience for its next stateside visit.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Gilmore Girls,’ on a Surprise at a Graduation Party)

[At her college graduation party, Rory Gilmore is stunned by a marriage proposal from longtime boyfriend Logan Huntzberger. Her rich grandmother Emily and nonconformist mother Lorelai discuss this surprising turn of events.]

Emily Gilmore [played by Kelly Bishop]: “Why didn't she just say 'yes'?”

Lorelai Gilmore [played by Lauren Graham]: “I think she's not sure if she wants to marry him, Mom.”

Emily: “That's ridiculous! He's a Huntzberger! An offer like this doesn't come around every day.”

Lorelai: “It's a marriage proposal, not a sale on linens!” — Gilmore Girls, Season 7, Episode 21, “Unto the Breach,” original air date May 8, 2007, teleplay by David Babcock and Jennie Snyder Urman, directed by Lee Shallat Chemel

This Day in Literary History (Death of Scottie Fitzgerald, Dutiful Daughter of Jazz Age Dazzlers)

June 18, 1986— Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, who was instrumental in reviving the tattered reputation of her father, Jazz Age author F. Scott Fitzgerald, died of cancer in Montgomery, AL, at age 64.

“Scottie,” as everyone called her, was a talented writer in her own right, as readers of her contributions to The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other publications could attest. 

Perceptive and self-aware from an early age, she also served as the model for Cecilia Brady, the teenaged narrator of Scott’s unfinished Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon.

But as the only child of Scott and his wife Zelda, and the executrix of his estate, she became the indispensable source for scholars and editors of his posthumous works, through her recollections and the massive artifacts she had saved: correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts, revised proofs, scrapbooks, photographs, clippings, and recordings.

In the aftermath of her father’s death by heart attack at age 44 in 1940, males advising Scottie on the estate pressured her to dispose quickly of his collection of papers, even if it involved accepting a price that she regarded as too low. When Princeton University’s library offered her $700 for the whole thing and no provision to keep it intact, she balked.

In 1950, she got what she wanted: triple their original price, along with the crucial stipulation that the collection be retained in its entirety, so scholars could consult one source and weigh everything about Scott and Zelda’s lives in context. 

(The arrangement ended up beneficial to the university, too: as the first personal author archive, it served notice that the institution would be a leading literary scholarly repository, as noted in a 2007 exhibit at the University of South Carolina, "Scottie Fitzgerald: The Stewardship of Literary Memory.")

All of this happened at the right time: Zelda’s death in a fire in a mental institution only a few years before Scottie’s agreement with Princeton meant that, for the first time, biographers could write with greater understanding about the biggest emotional upheaval in the last decade of Fitzgerald’s life.

Those papers, along with friends’ reminiscences, created a whole cottage industry of Fitzgerald studies. The level of interest was so extraordinary that, by the end of the Seventies, the Fitzgerald papers were being used more often at Princeton than the university’s collection of the papers of Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal—two people with far more influence on 20th century history than Scott and Zelda.

As the guardian of her parents’ legacy, Scottie had to balance access and exposure of their work for a new generation against what she viewed as violation of their literary intentions or invasions of their privacy.

As I mentioned in this post from a dozen years ago, when Paramount Pictures set about on a big-budget remake of The Great Gatsby in 1974, Scottie was chary about overemphasizing the gangster elements of her father’s classic. 

It was also probably just as well that the studio and director Jack Clayton dispensed with Truman Capote’s draft, which would have annoyed Scottie with its depiction of narrator Nick Carraway as gay and Jordan Baker as lesbian.

Zelda’s mental health aroused Scottie’s protective instincts even more than willful screenwriters and directors. Nancy Milford’s pioneering feminist biography, Zelda—the first full-length treatment of Scott’s wife—so distressed Scottie with its details about its subject’s psychiatric sessions and sexual orientation that she even threatened suicide, Milford noted in a 1980 essay.

At Scottie’s urging, the biographer toned down these references, though it provided grist for later scholars who portrayed Zelda as medically misdiagnosed and frustrated in her artistic ambitions by her husband.

Throughout the rest of the 1950s, film and TV adaptations of Fitzgerald’s works—and biographies—exponentially increased attention to his life and work, bringing a steady string of royalties and subsidiary right revenues.

It was an unexpected source of financial security for Scottie, who lived at the Scarsdale, NY home of his literary agent, Harold Ober, while Scott tried to earn enough money to pay for her prep-school and Vassar education and Zelda’s ongoing psychiatric care.

Though more emotionally stable than her parents, Scottie couldn’t entirely avoid their heartaches, including her own affairs and those of the two husbands she divorced, as well as substance abuse (she had a fondness for alcohol, like her father and paternal grandfather, and her younger son was arrested for smuggling 325 pounds of marijuana into Arizona) and insanity (elder son Tim first horrified his mother by declaring his Nazi inclinations, then killed himself in 1973).

(Much of her story is related in the 1995 biography by daughter Eleanor Lanahan, Scottie the Daughter Of...)

Surrounding this dutiful daughter was a protective cocoon, an instinct not to unload her troubles on her family nor for them to do the same to her. Caught up in the Washington social circle and her tireless activism for liberal Democratic candidates, she, like Zelda, displayed little of the nurturing gene.

At the same time, she stayed silent on painful memories (e.g., dodging an inkwell hurled by her drunken father) and, as her health began to decline, the cancer that finally claimed her. At best an imperfective emotional defense mechanism, it may have been the only one that enabled her to live two decades longer than her more fragile parents.

Again like her father, any “partly self-inflicted torments” were outweighed by other virtues: “I knew that he was kind, generous, honorable and loyal, and I admired and loved him.” Many felt likewise about her.

Though she had moved to Montgomery in 1979 at least partly to look after her mother’s ailing elder sister Rosalind, she chose to be buried at the foot of the gravesite of Scott and Zelda in Rockville, MD.

It was a final act of family devotion, as she succeeded 10 years before in persuading the Archdiocese of Baltimore to rescind its denial of Scott’s wish to be buried in the same cemetery as his father.

Quote of the Day (Tom Wicker, on Exploiting Unhappiness for ‘The Amusement or Titillation of Others’)

“When I dragged myself into the [Sandhill] Citizen office about noon the next day, I had a visitor — a worn-out looking woman with a ZaSu Pitts voice, but whose once-haggard eyes were blazing, whose fluttering hands were clenched into fists, and whose graying hair…was that of a woman not too many years older than I, who not too long before probably had been considered a peach by the boys in her high-school class. ‘Mr. Wicker,’ she said without preamble, ‘why did you think you had the right to make fun out of me in your paper?’ I have never forgotten that question — and I still can't answer it…. I remember thinking I had not bargained for such awful moments when I had landed my first reporter’s job a few months before. Accurate though my story had been, and based on a public record, it nevertheless exploited human unhappiness for the amusement or titillation of others. I had made the woman in my office something less than what she was — a human being possessed, despite her misfortunes, of real dignity. Seeing that, I saw too that I had not only done her an injury but missed the story I should have written. This is one of the besetting sins of journalism—sensationalism at the expense of the dignity and truth of the common human experience. I have been fortunate to have worked mostly for publishers and editors who sought to avoid that sin — not always successfully. And reading some of the more lurid journals, I've often thought that sensationalism and gossip columns tend to be techniques employed mostly by big-circulation publications for an anonymous audience. Not many editors and reporters would be callous or unseeing enough to engage in them if they had to face the victims the next morning over a battered desk in an office not much bigger than a closet. On the other hand, in small cities and towns, where the overwhelming majority of American newspapers are published, circulating to millions more readers than The New York Times or The Washington Post ever reach, newspaper publishers and editors have difficulty looking at their communities objectively and serving them dispassionately.”—American journalist and novelist Tom Wicker (1926-2011), On Press (1978)

When I read On Press, it was halfway through the quarter century stint as a liberal New York Times columnist by Tom Wicker, born a century ago today in Hamlet, N.C. It also came during the heroic period of American journalism, flush with its newly extended freedoms from the 1971 Pentagon Papers decision by the Supreme Court and muckraking coverage of Watergate that brought down Richard Nixon.

Wicker’s sharp criticisms led to a long-secret FBI investigation under J. Edgar Hoover (exposed not long after the columnist’s death in 2011 in this Politico piece) and placement on Nixon’s “enemies list” that was revealed during the latter’s Presidency.

How quaint that list seems now! That “master list” totaled some 220 people or organizations—a number probably exceeded in only two or three overnight tweet storms by Donald Trump against press “enemies of the people” and “traitors.”

Predictability constitutes an occupational hazard for anyone presenting their opinions to the public several times a week. For the longest time, in Wicker’s case, I thought that a reader could almost unerringly anticipate his conclusions even before starting one of his articles.

To his credit, Wicker acknowledged such dangers, telling attendees at a 1978 American Enterprise Institute Public Policy Forum, “I felt, almost from the beginning, that I was preaching to the converted. If people agree with me, they read my articles with enormous enjoyment. If not, they sit there and fume. I do not think it has much effect on what people do.”

I don’t think I was the only reader how, long after Wicker clashed with Nixon over Watergate and Vietnam, he gave the ex-President a more respectful assessment in One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream, going so far as to praise a number of his domestic initiatives (including, surprisingly, for this candidate who implemented a “southern strategy” for wooing conservative Democrats, desegregation of the South). 

In fact, by barely considering Watergate, I felt that this analysis was a bit too respectful, losing sight of abuses of power that contributed to what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger called “the imperial Presidency.”

The humility that Wicker exhibited in my opening quote was kept in a delicate balance with a professional detachment that the journalist found necessary for press independence.

“Questions and criticism, though often inconvenient and sometimes embarrassing, are necessary in a democracy and part of the responsibility of a free press,” he wrote in a March 1985 column that took Senator Jesse Helms and Reagan Administration officials for questioning the patriotism of the media.

Such “questions and criticism” of Presidents, increasingly undermined within the federal bureaucracy and abdicated by Congress and the Supreme Court, have become even more the province of the media. They won’t make reporters more popular but will make them more crucial for the maintenance of the American republic.

Quote of the Day (Studs Terkel, on the ‘Tonic’ of Community Action)

“I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It’s like a tonic. When you become part of something, in some way you count. It could be a march; it could be a rally, even a brief one. You’re part of something, and you suddenly realize you count. To count is very important. People say, ‘I’m helpless.’ Of course, if you’re alone. There are so many groups — environmental groups, other groups — but there is no one umbrella.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American oral historian, actor, and broadcaster Studs Terkel (1912-2008) interviewed for PBS “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly,” Dec. 19, 2003

Review: NT Theatre Live’s ‘Playboy of the Western World,’ by John Millington Synge

Part of the foundation of the Irish theater movement in the early 20^th century, the dark comedy The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge was staged over the winter in London’s Lyttelton Theatre. 

With a filmed record of that production available worldwide through National Theatre Live, I was curious to see how well the raucous but poetic speech of the playwright’s Western Ireland characters translated from the printed page to the stage.

Under the direction of Caitríona McLaughlin of Dublin’s famed Abbey Theatre, this performance was certainly faithful to its Celtic origins—in one sense, perhaps too much so. 

Even as the son of an immigrant from this same area of rural Ireland, I sometimes found it difficult to make out the words emitted from these brogues. I could only imagine how puzzled some listeners unused to these accents would feel.

With that said, the show—which I saw last week, four months after its run ended, onscreen at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ—exhibited its same sprightly subversiveness, though not in the same pious and nationalistic environment that caused riots with a reference to female undergarments (“shifts”) at its Dublin premiere in 1907.

While the Protestant Synge threw some darts at the conservative Roman Catholic Church that held sway at the time over the countryside, he might be surprised to see that a different object of his ironic eye has struck an even louder chord with modern audiences: the lionization of bad boys, even one like his Christy Mahon who is believed to be a patricide.

Under the rapt gaze of his County Mayo listeners, the terrified young runaway Christy (played with elan by Éanna Hardwicke) magnifies his deed with each retelling, until he becomes what local barmaid Pegeen Mike calls “a fine, handsome young fellow with a noble brow."

Nicola Coughlan, who has attracted quite a following here in the US with her roles in Derry Girls and Bridgerton, infused Pegeen with an appropriate fire and spirit made restless by her milquetoast fiancé Shawn Keogh and other layabout local males. 

Siobhán McSweeney made her rival for Christy’s affections, the Widow Quin, a formidable competitor with her own distinct style, forthright and flirtatious.    

The actresses playing other local girls making a play for Christy—especially Marty Breen as Sara Tansey—were equally delightful. And Declan Conlon as Christy’s father, making an unexpected (and, for the newly idolized Christy, unwelcome) return in search of his son, was appropriately fierce and thunderstruck by the scene he beholds.

The acting was vigorous and Katie Davenport’s scene design vivid. But if you want to experience the full tart flavor of Synge’s dialogue, it’s better to have read it before on the page—or to watch the 1962 film adaptation starring Gary Raymond and Siobhan McKenna (now available on DVD).        

Quote of the Day (James Joyce, on ‘Insult and Hatred’ Vs. Love)

“Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life. What? says Alf. Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.” —Irish novelist and short-story writer James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses (1922)

All hail James Joyce today, on “Bloomsday”—the worldwide celebration of the 24 hours (June 16, 1904) that constitute the “plot” of his novel Ulysses—and, not coincidentally, the same day that he began to see Nora Barnacle, his future muse and wife.

The above somehow feels an especially appropriate quote in an age in where “insult and hatred” reign supreme. And, as the novelist writes, “That’s not life for men and women.”

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Crazy Rich Asians,’ on a June Surprise)

Rachel Chu [played by Constance Wu]: “I thought I was here to meet your family, go to your best friend's wedding, eat some good food. Instead, I feel like I'm a villain in a soap opera who's plotting to steal your family fortune.”— Crazy Rich Asians (2018), screenplay by Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim, adapted from the novel by Kevin Kwan, directed by Jon M. Chu

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Pope Leo XIV, on ‘Standards for Discernment’ in Evaluating AI)

“We cannot condone naive enthusiasms, nor fuel unfounded fears. Instead, let us establish standards for discernment — the dignity of the human person, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, care for our common home and peace — and let us translate these standards into practices.”—Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), https://www.vatican.va/, released May 15, 2026

In my post two weeks ago on Pope Leo’s apology for the Church’s stand on slavery over the centuries, I promised to discuss his much-anticipated encyclical, or formal papal pastoral letter, on artificial intelligence. That time has arrived.

When you consider the upcoming stakes for AI (one analyst I heard this past said it had greater potential to affect humanity than space exploration), there has been precious little time devoted to how to ensure it serves rather than degrades humanity.

By reminding tech lords, legislators, and ordinary citizens of that basic principle, Leo’s examination of this new force in our lives can potentially kick-start and even frame the debates that should be taking place now in the public square.

Fully cognizant of AI’s potential benefits, Leo is anything but a technological Cassandra. (Though predictably, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has turned up its nose at the pope’s urging to install brakes on the runaway technology, with op-ed contributor Louise Perry snidely asking, “Does the Pope Use Air Conditioning”?)

At the other end of the political spectrum, some have written that Leo has not gone far enough in denouncing the ills now becoming apparent in AI.

But his caution only enhances his case that this new technology cannot develop without safeguards that rest on human morality, and in particular on the Catholic Church’s notions on the market economy, technology, and social justice dating back to the groundbreaking encyclical of his predecessor and namesake Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891).

Leo XIV has called for measures ensure the dignity of work in the face of AI, including regulating private companies’ AI development and retraining workers whose jobs are threatened. He has also advocated for critical thinking education about the technology.

It’s not just the danger to livelihoods that concerns the Vatican, however, but also AI’s potential misuse for modern warfare:

“The growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed makes war more ‘feasible’ and less subject to human control. This violates the principle that armed force should be used only as a last resort in cases of legitimate self-defense. For this reason, the development and use of AI in warfare must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints, to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life and to avoid a race to develop such arms.”

In addition, the encyclical raises the alarm about transhumanism, or enhancing human beings through technologies, and posthumanism, which, imagines “a hybrid of human beings, machines and the environment.”

The ultimate impact of these two forces, according to the encyclical, could be to make it “easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy…placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species.”

As Fordham Univ. papal expert David Gibson’s op-ed last month in The New York Times observed, Magnifica Humanitas has arrived at a “propitious moment,” when “The disruptions of the post-liberal world and the threats posed by A.I. have led many cultural conservatives to make economic justice a priority.”

Even President Trump, who early in his second term likened placing limits on high tech to restricting the growth of a baby, felt compelled to sign an executive order early this month calling for AI companies to voluntarily provide the federal government access to “covered frontier models” for a cybersecurity review up to 30 days before their planned release to “other trusted partners.” It came amid sudden alarm that some powerful AI models autonomously identify and exploit hidden vulnerabilities in real-world software.

It will be up to the tech barons whether they will enter into dialogue with the pope and other advocates for a more deliberate, regulated AI pace or if they will continue to proceed with no guardrails. But Leo has spelled out the moral stakes in no uncertain terms.

Quote of the Day (Philip Roth, on Loneliness)

“There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness—not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. The most lethal of manmade explosives can't touch it.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Philip Roth (1933-2018), American Pastoral (1997)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Bewitched,’ Milking the Mother-In-Law-As-Witch Bit for All It’s Worth)

Endora [played by Agnes Moorehead]: [casting a spell over humorless son-in-law Darrin Stephens]: “To avoid the shock of sudden wit,/ we'll start from scratch—bit by bit!/ A chime will cause your brain to whirl,/ your jokes will cause their hair to curl!”— Bewitched, Season 5, Episode 27, “Laugh, Clown, Laugh,” original air date Apr. 15, 1971, teleplay by Ed Jurist, directed by William Asher

It’s true that Bewitched got tons of comic mileage at out of recurring characters like Doctor Bombay, Uncle Arthur, Samantha’s father Maurice, Mrs. Kravitz, and Aunt Clara.

But the old reliable standby, as far as I’m concerned, was Samantha’s mom Endora. 

The show’s writers (including future Same Time, Next Year playwright Bernard Slade) must have had a great deal of fun not only concocting her bon mots at the expense of what she regarded as her witless, antagonistic mortal son-in-law, but also rhyming spells like the above that she would continually use to torture him.

Agnes Moorehead received six Emmy nominations, along with a reliable paycheck for the eight seasons that Bewitched was on the air. She made no bones to interviewers that she had an accomplished career before she signed up for the sitcom, including Oscar nominations for The Magnificent Ambersons, Mrs. Parkington, Johnny Belinda, and Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. The impression left was that this role as the acid-tongued witch mother was beneath her.

Was Bewitched formulaic? You bet. But Ms. Moorehead furnished much joy over the years to its fans. I wish she could have enjoyed that aspect of her job a bit more.

This Day in Art History (John Constable, Masterful English Landscape Painter, Born)

June 11, 1776— John Constable, who labored for more than a quarter-century before the British art establishment and buyers recognized the uncommon sensitivity and beauty of his landscape paintings, was born at East Bergholt in Suffolk, England.

The contrast with the other great English landscape painter, J.M.W. Turner (only a year older), could hardly be starker:

* Constable, not elected to the Royal Academy till age 52, found considerable favor in his last decade; Turner, the youngest Academician when elected 25 years earlier, polarized the public with his late works.

*Constable was deeply devoted to his sickly wife Maria Bickness and their seven children; Turner was a perfectionist who often shunted aside those closest to him.

*Constable held traditional beliefs in the Anglican Church; Turner was a thoroughgoing iconoclast.

*Constable, according to art critic John Ruskin, was “an industrious and innocent amateur blundering his way to a superficial expression of one or two popular aspects of common nature,” while this influential Victorian not only bought works from Turner but watched him create in his studio.

(To understand how Constable and Turner became bitter rivals—including a pivotal 1831 incident involving placement of their paintings in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition—see this fine 2018 blog post by art historian and an independent lecturer Cindy Polemis.)

For the longest time, though several documentaries were made about him, Constable didn’t possess the kind of cantankerous, eccentric personality that attracted feature film creators, as his contemporary and rival did when Mike Leigh made his 2014 biographical drama Mr. Turner. He still hasn’t had an extended cinema treatment.

But in 2024, “The Painters,” a segment of the regionally distributed movie Once Upon a Time in Suffolk, dealt with Constable’s friendship with John Dunthorne, with whom he competed to impress a young lady in need of a new portrait.

In one sense, the personalities of Constable and Turner were expressed through their subject matter. The turbulent Turner was fascinated by stormy weather, as in his 1824 watercolor Brighthelmston, Sussex. Constable looked to the tranquil, lush English countryside, reflecting his belief, as noted in Robert Cumming’s Art: A Visual History, that “nature, with its freshness, sunlight, trees, shadows, streams, and so forth, was full of moral and spiritual goodness.”

For a nation plunging in earnest into the Industrial Revolution, such Constable paintings as The Hay Wain and Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree (1821), as well as The Leaping Horse (1825) depicted an exquisite but fragile natural landscape in danger of being lost.

Quote of the Day (Lord Bertrand Russell, on the Three Great Passions of His Life)

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” — British philosopher, mathematician, social critic, and Nobel Literature laureate Lord Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1956)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ on a Looming Financial Scandal)

[The investment bank Phillips Berenson has collapsed, and rumors circulate in “The City,” London’s central business district and financial center, that it’s due to financial chicanery. Another bank, the more venerable Bartlett's, is also in trouble, having lent it so much money. Its chair, Sir Desmond Glazebrook, confers with Prime Minister James Hacker about a government bailout for his institution.]

James Hacker [played by Paul Eddington]: “What do you know about Phillips Berenson?”

Sir Desmond Glazebrook [played by Richard Vernon]: “What do you know about Phillips Berenson?”

Hacker: “Well, uh... only what I read in the papers.”

Glazebrook: “Oh, good. Yes, well, they're in a bit of trouble, that's all. They lent a bit of money to the wrong chaps. Could happen to anyone.”

Dorothy Wainwright [Hacker’s political adviser] [[played by Deborah Norton]: “So you haven't heard any rumors?”

Glazebrook: “Oh well, there are always rumors.”

Dorothy: “Of bribery, embezzlement, misappropriation, insider dealing?”

Glazebrook: “Oh, come, come, dear lady, those are strong words.”

Dorothy: “So they're not true?”

Glazebrook: “Well, there's... there are different uh, different ways of looking at things.”

Dorothy: “What's a different way of looking at embezzlement?”

Glazebrook: “Oh, well, of course, if a chap embezzles, you have to do something about it.”

Hacker: “Have a serious word with him?”

Glazebrook: “Absolutely. Usually it's just a chap who's advanced himself a short-term, unauthorised, unsecured, temporary loan from the company's account, and, uh, invested it unluckily. You know, horse falls at the first fence, that sort of thing.”— Yes, Prime Minister, Season 2, Episode 4, “A Conflict of Interest,” original air date Dec. 31, 1987, teleplay by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, directed by Sydney Lotterby

You can keep your Benny Hills. When it comes to British TV humor, Yes, Minister, and its equally waggish follow-up, Yes, Prime Minister, are the shows for me. These UK political satires aired in the Eighties, and the closest we’ve had stateside has been the more potty-mouthed Veep. I wish they would be broadcast as often this side of the Atlantic as The Honeymooners.

The government bailouts of risk-happy financial institutions at the heart of the above dialogue is something that has rightly enraged American taxpayers, with the Bush I-era savings and loan scandal and the Global Financial Crisis of the “oughts.” But something else intrigued me about this episode: that title, “A Conflict of Interest.”

That concept has been a part of American life since the founding of the republic, including the establishment of the First National Bank and, more starkly, slaveowning lawmakers who passed legislation benefiting themselves at the expense of other human beings.

But these ethically questionable interactions of government and business have ramped up, to an unprecedented degree, under the current administration.

President Trump, his family, and his Cabinet have profited so abundantly and shamelessly from such transactions—and following their trail has been so complex—that many, if not most, Americans have given up trying to keep track of it all. It’s much easier to follow the Epstein files (though, truth be told, financial interests are an often-overlooked part of this still unresolved scandal).

The outcome is what you might expect. None of the departments in the executive branch make even a pretense now at the relatively gentle coaxing of the truth from Sir Desmond employed by PM Hacker and his aide Dorothy. The regulatory agencies that could have raised alarms were emasculated by Trump and Elon Musk’s Orwellian-titled Department of Government Efficiency.

The path was paved for this through three Supreme Court decisions that gave the Trump Administration virtual carte blanche to transform the government into an endless slot machine for themselves and their allies:

*In Trump v. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Trump v. District of Columbia) (2021), the justice vacated lower courts’ rulings involving allegations that, as president, Trump benefited from the hotels and restaurants that he owns, violating two anti-corruption provisions of the Constitution known as the emoluments clauses.  

* In Trump v. United States (2024), the GOP-appointed majority ruled that former presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within their core constitutional powers, and at least presumptive immunity for all other official acts—a decision opening the door to Trump lawlessness in his return to power.

* In Murphy V. NCAA (2018), the court invalidated a federal ban on states legalizing sports gambling—opening the way to, as Drew Hutchinson’s May Bloomberg Law article noted, is opening companies to “questions about insider trading, reputational and legal risk, and whether internal policies address this new environment.” And what do you know—Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to Kalshi, one of the two major prediction market platforms, and a major investor in another, Polymarket.

As Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett noted, “If Trump dictates how prediction markets develop, while his family profits, it will make Washington look (even more) like a corrupt casino. So, too, if insider trading goes unchecked.”

Over the last 560 days, the Trump family has taken in an estimated $2.7 billion, according to “Trump’s Take,” a real-time financial tracker documenting the cash and gifts that the President and his family have received by selling the presidency.

All the money-making schemes—ventures that would have been certainly regarded as undignified under all his predecessors, and even unconstitutional—have just kept coming: Trump Bibles, fragrances, gold cell phones; the $TRUMP Meme Coin; "America's 250th Anniversary" hats; and a luxury resort proposal by son-in-law Jared Kushner in Albania that has drawn more than a week’s worth of protest in that nation over the potential environmental damage it may cause.

Then there is the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) scheduled for the White House South Lawn on June 14—not so coincidentally, Trump’s birthday.

Leave aside whether this tacky $60 million spectacle would have been better staged in the Roman Coliseum under an ancient emperor’s gaze, or even whether the event offers Trump ally and UFC chief executive Dana White direct access to the White House for a prime marketing opportunity.

Lost in all of this is that Trump bought between $15,000 and $50,000 of stock in the parent company of UFC, TKO Holding Group—a little more than two weeks after he began promoting the event.

Conflict of interest, anyone? Well, as Sir Desmond might say, there are “different ways of looking at things.”

Though they will never be able to overtake their lord and master when it comes to quantity and audacity, the Trump Cabinet is doing its best to do well financially at the country’s expense. This online resource from the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) itemizes all the ways that each Trump Cabinet member has engaged in conflicts of interest. They are worth exploring in depth, but I’ll just highlight some of the more egregious ones:

*Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (who, after his evasive talk about his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, should change his surname to “No-Good-Nick”) is now coming under scrutiny for his relationship with Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer.

* Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earned around $2.5 million in referral fees from 2022 through September 2025 from Wisner Baum, a law firm suing Merck, the maker of the HPV vaccine Gardasil—putting RFK Jr.’s vaccine skepticism in an ever worse light, if that’s possible.

* Education Secretary Linda McMahon was required to divest from financial holdings that posed possible conflicts of interest, but does not appear to have done so as of July of last year, according to a complaint filed with the Office of Government Ethics by the CLC.

In keeping with PM Hacker’s question—“Have a serious word with him?”—if the “him” in question is Trump, I say “Yes.” And let that word, as soon as mathematically and electorally possible, be “impeachment.”

Quote of the Day (Jayne Anne Phillips, on How ‘Writers Defy Time’)

“Do writers hate to write? I don’t think so. The sense of difficulty arises from the fact that writers defy time, writing words against the erasure of things and lives. We stand in an avalanche of forgetfulness, resisting the sway of disappearance. Faced with mortality, we mourn what we might have understood and communicated, not in opinion or advice but in the delivery of an invented world we might have saved. Writing, we cross the divide between self and others word by word. In the very act of completing the work, we are separated from it. One way or another, the writer loses writing: the writer loses the book. Opposing oblivion, we begin to understand: language is the way in and the way out.”—American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer Jayne Anne Phillips, Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir (2026)

The image accompanying this post, of Jayne Anne Phillips reading at the 2024 Gaithersburg Book Festival, was taken May 18, 2024, by Frypie.