Quote of the Day (George Santayana, on the Foolishness of the Simple and the Wise)

“The foolishness of the simple is delightful; only the foolishness of the wise is exasperating.”— Spanish-born American philosopher, essayist, and poet George Santayana (1863-1952) “Masks,” in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on Good and Evil)

“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.” —American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968), East of Eden (1952)

Four years ago, I wrote this post on Steinbeck’s flawed but compulsively compelling saga of good and evil. Now comes a Netflix adaptation penned by Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of the director of the 1955 film version, Elia Kazan).

Network TV mini-series of the Seventies and Eighties tend to plunge down a rabbit hole of popular memory, and unfortunately the 1981 adaptation of the novel is no exception. I have not seen the new version starring Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames, but it is hard to think of her topping Jane Seymour (pictured) in the role.

I understand that Zoe Kazan has added a scene (not in Steinbeck’s novel) to explain Cathy’s villainy. I’m not against such changes if employed logically and sparingly. But in some cases, evil is so radical that it may be beyond the ability of a “science” like psychiatry to explain it.

 It’s what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in remarks about Shakespeare’s villain Iago from Othello, termed “motiveless malignity”—the most chilling kind of evil.

Quote of the Day (Ellen Glasgow, on ‘The Change From Baseball to Football’)

“I mean, he notices. He can see the color in the sky, and he knows that the change from baseball to football isn’t the only way to tell when it is autumn. Some men don’t know any more than that about seasons.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and feminist Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945), In This Our Life (1941)

As I write this, fans of the Tampa Bay Rays may be finally about to realize that sports transition, following a third straight loss to the Milwaukee Brewers that leaves them just one game short of elimination from the World Series. Very soon, they’ll have to start watching Tampa Bay Buccaneer contests. (With that squad at 2-5, let’s see how long they can stand watching those.)

Otherwise, the change in the seasons is not as apparent in Florida as it is up here in the Northeast. In fact, a late dear friend told me once that what she missed in her move to the Sunshine State was the turning of the leaves this time of year.

Quote of the Day (Sam Mendes, Differentiating Melodrama and Tragedy)

“I think to make a good tragedy you have to constantly threaten melodrama. You could say melodrama is badly written tragedy, and tragedy is well-written melodrama. It’s a very, very thin line. The difference between melodrama and tragedy is in detail and insight.”—English filmmaker and stage director Sir Sam Mendes, quoted by Heidi Julavits, “An Interview With Sam Mendes,” Believer Magazine, Issue Sixty-One, 2009

The image accompanying this post, showing Sam Mendes at during the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Musical opening night at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London UK, was taken on June 25, 2013, by Richard Goldschmidt.

Quote of the Day (Helen Hunt Jackson, on October, ‘Lavish’ and ‘Scornful’)

“The spring-time holds her white and purple dear;
October, lavish, flaunts them far and near;
The summer charily her reds doth lay
Like jewels on her costliest array;
October, scornful, burns them on a bier.”—American poet, fiction, and travel writer Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885), “October,” in Verses (1888), reprinted in The Pioneer Valley Reader, edited by James C. O’Connell (1995)

Quote of the Day (Stephen King, on How His Wife Saved 'Carrie'—And His Writing Career)

“[Carrie, his first book] started as a short story. It was going to be one of these stories I sold to Cavalier or Swank or one of those magazines — I had not stepped up to Penthouse at that point. I started it and saw it was going to be longer than a short story, and I threw it away. My wife [Tabitha] picked it out of the trash, smoothed out the pages that I'd written, and she said: ‘This is good. You should go on with this.’ I said, ‘I don't know anything about girls' locker rooms.’ She said, ‘I will tell you everything you need to know.’”—American horror-fiction author Stephen King quoted by Jeremy Egner, “He Is the King,” The New York Times, Oct. 18, 2026

(The image accompanying this post shows Sissy Spacek in the iconic locker-room scene in the 1976 film adaptation of Carrie.)

Quote of the Day (Patricia Highsmith, on Efforts to Solve the Mystery of the Mind)

“The eternal, unanswerable questions, the efforts to solve the mystery and the intent repeat themselves through the centuries….Psychology and psychiatry, the new sciences, are peculiar in that dealing with the mind ... they have not brought us closer to the solving of this mystery.” —American novelist and short-story writer Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), 1961 journal entry, in Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995, edited by Anna von Planta (2021)

Later this week, the psychological thriller A Talent for Murder, starring Dame Helen Mirren as Highsmith, will go into limited release here in the U.S. 

The Oscar-winning actress will be playing one of the most fiendishly complex roles of her legendary career in tackling the brilliant but racist, anti-semitic, and altogether misanthropic author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and other crime thrillers.

Quote of the Day (Jon Cryer, on the Awful Cost of Working With Charlie Sheen for So Long)

"I worked with Charlie Sheen for eight years. And if you wonder what it's like to work with Charlie Sheen for eight years, when I started, I had hair."—American Emmy-winning actor Jon Cryer, on working with Sheen on the sitcom Two and a Half Men, in the Netflix documentary aka Charlie Sheen, directed by Andrew Renzi (2025)

Maybe that wouldn’t have happened if ol’ Charlie had shared a little of that “tiger blood” he talked about in one of the manic interviews that “facilitated” his departure from the long-running sitcom.

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)

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.)

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.]

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.

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.)

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.”