Educational malpractice

The most recent episode of This American Life , “An Argument,” is devoted to one story: the decision two affluent, Black Brooklyn parents made to send their daughter to a low-income, mostly Black public school, and the years of education (or miseducation) that followed. A 2016 New York Times article (gift link) told the beginning of the story. A Times article (gift link) published earlier this month brings the story up to date. The TAL episode adds details.

Reading the Times articles and listening to the podcast reminded me of what I used to tell my students: whatever form educational malpractice takes, it’s always the student who’s left holding the bag. I think of the daughter in this story, Najya Hannah-Jones, crushed when she fails a statewide eighth-grade algebra exam. It turned out that despite her great grades and the confidence they inspired, she knew very little algebra. What’s more, she had great deficits in her knowledge of fractions and long division.

And I think back to the last freshman composition class I taught, many of whose students had taken AP English in high school. Granted, they hadn’t received test scores that would have exempted them from a college course, but still — I thought it’d be a great class. I began to think differently when I assigned some reading — Betty S. Flowers’s “Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process” and an excerpt from William Zinsser’s “Writing English as a Second Language” — and some short writing.¹ So many of these students were lost. During conferences (that inflated word), I asked, Did you do much reading last year? Did you do much writing last year? No, and no. So many students disappeared from that class. The work, at least at that time, was beyond them.

Whatever form malpractice takes — and I assign far greater blame to teachers and principals and the shitstem in which they’re embedded, not to the Hannah-Joneses, who thought that they were doing the right thing and worked mightily to improve education for everyone in their daughter’s school — it’s always the student who’s left holding the bag. And who, sometimes, is able to trudge their way to real improvement and set the bag down.
_____

¹ The class was not for second-language learners. I omitted Zinsser’s opening paragraphs about languages and began with “So what is good English — the language we’re here today to wrestle with?” Written English is in many ways a second language for anyone.

Forty-two

Elaine and I were married forty-two years ago today. It hardly seems possible. Happy anniversary, Elaine, in all the seasons and all the years.

Q: Who knows where the time goes? Anyone?

I went down St. James rabbit holes

Robert W. Harwood’s I Went Down to St. James Infirmary (Genius Music Books) explores the origins and history of a song. The book is now in a fourth (2024) edition. I have the third (2022) via interlibrary loan. It’s one rabbit hole after another. (I like rabbit holes.) Here are some items I collected from my reading:

Wax cylinders:

Unlike the discs that achieved popularity early in the twentieth century, these cylinders could not be mass-produced. However, as many as five records could be made at a time by pointing the recording horn of each machine toward the singer’s mouth.

Bessie Smith and industry practices:

If a musician did not have the education or savvy to know better, record executives would pay them twenty-five or a hundred dollars to record a song. Even if the song became a hit, the artist received no further money.

Bessie Smith, the “Empress of the Blues,” for example, never saw a penny beyond her cash-per-recording deal with Columbia, despite having authored many of the songs she recorded. Frank Walker, who signed Bessie to Columbia Records, struck out the royalty clause in her contract.

I knew that many early recording artists were paid by the side, with no royalties to follow. I didn’t know that even Bessie Smith recorded under those terms. In 1979, the son of Smith’s estranged husband took the matter to court.

Syphilis and mercury:

Mercury is known as quicksilver — or, in German, Quacksalber. Doctors who over-treated their patients with mercury came to be referred to as quacks.

But the Oxford English Dictionary has quack derived from the early modern Dutch quacksalver. The etymology is uncertain, but zalver denotes a “person who cures by using ointments,” salves.

Radio:

Chicago’s first radio station began broadcasting in 1921, but in its initial season it aired only opera. The first American radio advertisement reputedly took place in 1922 — it cost the advertiser hundred dollars and lasted ten minutes: “Visit our new apartment homes in Hawthorne Courts, Jackson Heights, where you may enjoy community life in a friendly environment.”

That Queens apartment complex still stands.

Novelties:

“Piccolo Pete,” recorded by Ted Weems and his orchestra in 1929, was possibly the first novelty record to sell a million copies.

Here it is. Years later, Elaine’s flute teacher Julius Baker played it on a children’s television show. Elaine has a story about that.

Buell Kazee’s first banjo:

The neck of the instrument was a whittled piece of walnut, the hoop was made from split white oak, and a home-tanned cat skin hide was stretched over the hoop and fashioned with carpet tacks.

Kazee makes three appearances in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music : “The Butcher’s Boy” “The Wagoner’s Lad” (both 1928) and “East Virginia” (1929). He became a minister and returned to musical performance in the 1960s.

Irving Mills (Duke Ellington’s manager from 1926 to 1939):

At nineteen, while demonstrating songs in a store in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Irving met his future wife and proposed after one-week courtship. He and Bessie remained together for the next sixty years and had seven children.

Sophie Tucker:

She was born Sophia Kalish in 1884 to Jewish parents who were fleeing Russia. As a young girl she learned to sing and perform vaudeville songs from patrons in her parents’ Connecticut restaurant. She was married at sixteen to Louis Tuck, who left a year later following the birth of her son. Changing her name to Tucker, Sophie broke into vaudeville in 1906, where she performed in blackface. She stopped using the burnt cork when, prior to a 1908 concert, her makeup case was stolen. She appeared on stage without makeup and was startled to discover that she was a bigger hit with the audience that she had been when in blackface.

Here’s her last appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show .

Irving Mills again:

He managed as many as thirty-six bands concurrently.

Cab Calloway:

Before “Minnie, [the Moocher],” Cab Calloway’s signature tune had been “St. James Infirmary.” He first recorded it on December 23, 1930, about a month before signing a contract with Irving Mills. The song remained in his repertoire throughout his long career, and Calloway recorded at least three times. Millions watched him perform on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 23, 1964 — the date of the Beatles’ third appearance on the show.

Here’s that performance. And here, from the same show, the Beatles.

It’s the journey, not the arrival, that matters:

We shall never know the original author of “St. James Infirmary.” There was none. We are unlikely to discover when it was first performed, or how it sounded at the time. Regardless of where a musician first heard the song, we can be recently certain it came to that place from elsewhere, assembled from fragments of other songs, from snippets of other people’s experiences. It was a song written by Everybody (E.V. Body), and until 1929 it was owned by nobody.

In the second decade of the 21st century “St. James Infirmary ”is once again on my nobody. The present bracket Irving bracket Mills copyright refers only to a specific arrangement of traditional song, not in the original song itself. It seems that sometime, probably fairly recently, music publishers seated ownership of the song back to E. V. Body, where it has always belonged.

Related reading
I Went Down to St. James Infirmary (Harwood’s blog, with further exploration)

Dream app pun

It came to me: ’Just the Pages, a third-party app to adjust settings in the Mac app Pages. But why, I wondered, would Apple permit a third-party app to tinker with Pages?

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951). A possible source for this slight dream: seeing Harry Morgan and Jack “Just the facts, ma’am” Webb as bad guys in Appointment with Danger (dir. Lewis Allen, 1950).]

“Hopelessly analog”

[“Four Panels in Search of an Algorithm.” Zippy , September 28, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s strip insists on the analog life.

Venn reading
All OCA analog posts : analog and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[As a youth, my dad set pins in a bowling alley. You can see how the work went, or still goes, at YouTube.]

Western Electric 500

From the 99% Invisible podcast series A History of the United States in 100 Objects, an episode about the Western Electric 500, the telephone that was once ubiquitous in United States households.

I still have a thrift-store 500, a gift from my kids, which I used in my office, where its loud ring would sometimes startle students. I sometimes invited curious students to call when they came in to talk, just so they could hear the ring if they’d never heard it. I had it turned up to eleven. Several years before I retired, we lost our office phones — a cost-cutting measure. Now the 500 sits in a closet, sometimes taken out to entertain grandkids.

Given the discussion in this episode of telephony past, with room-length extension cords and young people talking away for hours at a time, I would have liked to have heard something about Tin Can, the faux-landline telephone for kids that helps foster the skills of person-to-person communication across a distance. It’s a nifty device. As durable as the Western Electric 500? We’ll have to wait and see.

Related reading
All OCA telephone posts (Pinboard)

Paper sizes

JetPens explains paper sizes.

Related reading
All OCA paper posts (Pinboard)

Elaine Dress Shop

[40 John Street, Financial District, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

There are a number of Elaine enterprises in the 1940 Manhattan directory:

[As seen via stevemorse.org.]

But only one has a tax photograph with a legible sign: Elaine Dress Shop.

Elaine Dress Shop appears to have been a fairly swank operation. Notice how few items of apparel appear in its windows. The New York Times shows a shop with the same name — the same shop? — taking a lease at 3½ Church Street in 1931. New York Times classified ads show the John Street shop looking for a slswoman [sic ] and an alteration hand in 1946. The shop later appears in a frankly insane advertising spread encouraging charge-account use.

[The New York Times, November 7, 1962. The listings for Lower Manhattan take up roughly half a column of a two-page six-column spread. Click for a larger view if you dare — the shop is in there, honest.]

At no. 42, Farrish’s Chop House. A short New Yorker item tells something of its history. At no. 44, not seen in this photograph, John Street United Methodist Church, the oldest United Methodist church in the United States.

And that’s all I’ve got.

This post is a slightly early anniversary present for my Elaine, though I think she’d rather have gotten the frock company.

*

September 28: I just realized that I posted a John Street tax photograph with a Chock full o’Nuts last year: Chock full o’Signs.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, constructing as Lester Ruff. Sometimes I find Lester Ruff puzzles less rough; sometimes I find them as difficult as the average Stumper, as I did today. I sometimes have issues with what Stan calls “tough factual clues,” or what I would call arcane trivia. I started with 35-D, eight letters, “Bard’s ‘I love your Majesty’ speaker,” not arcane, and most helpful.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, six letters, “King, birthwise.” Which one?

5-D, three letters, “Dieter’s complaint.” I was not fooled.

7-D, letters, “Hunt’s dad on Mad About You.” Here’s what I mean by arcane trivia. He appeared in this role in four of the original show’s 164 episodes, in 1996, 1997, and 1999. The name can be had by way of crosses, but still. There must be a better way to clue this name. I’ll suggest one in the comments.

9-D, three letters, “Senate salutation.” See 5-D.

14-A, five letters, “One-author first name on books in nine Dewey Decimal categories (1950-1992).” Less arcane than 7-D, if you think of someone known for cranking out books.

27-A, ten letters, “Cellphone part.” How about “one-time cellphone part”?

37-A, three letters, “Short-notice flight.”

42-A, four letters, “I think, therefore       ” (’90s hardware slogan).” Predates my awareness of such hardware.

43-A, ten letters, “Daily's text + images + graphics.” Ugly word.

44-D, six letters, “‘The supreme master,’ per Christie.” If you say so.

55-A, five letters, “Canaries’ keeper.” I wondered if AVIAN is a word for a birdlover.

My favorite in this puzzle: 11-D, eight letters, “Toon with a niece Deezil.” Another tough factual clue, but it’s about a cartoon, and I learned something that I liked learning.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Zippy in the sun

[“Rabbit Hole.” Zippy, September 26, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s strip channels Edward Hopper — Zippy and Bugs have found their way into Hopper’s painting People in the Sun . The strip’s first oanel also echoes this panting, and the middle panel has a strong Hopper vibe.

Hopper’s work appears a number of times in Zippy. You can do a strip search to see them all.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Crossplay

Playing Crossplay (The New York Times ) with our son Ben has turned Elaine and me into hardened criminals of this Scrabble-like board.

The beauty (?) of Crossplay is that you can try improbable combinations of letters, and if they don’t spell a real word, the app lets you know, and you can try something else. So you might as well try.

We will not be STOPT. Even if Ben is TALAR than we are.

*

I realized after writing the sentences above that playing this game is like walking down a street testing car doors to find one that’s unlocked.

Word Matters is back

The Merriam-Webster podcast Word Matters disappeared in 2022 after 100 episodes. I just discovered that it’s back, or sort of back, with four episodes in 2025 and 2026. I’ve listened to just one, “The Making of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary , Twelfth Edition.” Highly recommended. And, yes, I have the twelfth on a nearby shelf.

Related reading
Word Matters on Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (They’re wrong) : A handful of other OCA Word Matters posts

Owner’s manuals, free

A great website, though it makes no claim to be complete: Car Owner’s Manuals.

No surprise to see the 2026 Toyota RAV4 manual among the most popular — the vehicle is like an operating system with a car attached. And besides, the manual is missing from the Toyota website. Having a searchable PDF as an alternative to the poorly indexed print manual is hugely helpful.

See also ManualsLib.

[Should that be owners’ manuals ? You’re welcome to overthink it for me.]

The Heidi Overton window

I’m losing a good ninety minutes this morning watching what I put on for a minute before reading: a Senate confirmation hearing on C-SPAN 3 for Dr. Heidi Overton, the nominee to head the Food and Drug administration. She dodges question after question: Was the current occupant wrong when he said that acetaminophen causes autism? Was he wrong when he said that the MMR vaccine is lethal? Can he ever be wrong about something? (All real questions.)

She dodges and dodges, and dodges some more, and follows up every dodge with a thin smile.

I vote no.

A grudge against clocks

When Lucio Bordenave was fired from his job at a bank, his wife Diana, aka the missus, wanted him to work at a used-car showroom. He refused, and as it turned out, the place was being run by “a famous gang.” Lucio now supports his household, which includes doña Ceferina, an aged relative on his mother’s side, by repairing clocks and watches. But Diana isn’t crazy about that work.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Asleep in the Sun, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: New York Review Books, 2004).

Lucio is a very patient man.

Related posts
Two passages from The Invention of Morel

EXchange name sighting

[Sheila Cabot (Lana Turner) takes a cab. From Portrait in Black (dir. Michael Gordon, 1960). Click for a larger view.]

TUxedo 5-1234 was indeed the number for San Francisco’s Yellow Cab Company. See also this post, with a 1951 movie appearance.

Related reading
All OCA Exchange name posts (Pinboard)

Le code, c’est lui

”I am the code,“ he said.

We are all living inside the theater of a madman’s mind.

Deciding that things are too hard

Michael Gorra, a recently retired Smith English professor. From The Chronicle of Higher Education :

I was teaching a Victorian novel class when “The End of the English Major,” that infamous article Nathan Heller wrote for The New Yorker, came out a few years ago. And I put the question to my students, “Is it too much to ask you to read Middlemarch ? Is it too hard?” I was really encouraged by their response, because they said, Yes, it’s hard, but we’re proud to be able to do it. They had a real sense of achievement, of having done something they hadn’t been certain they could do before they got to college.

Reading is like exercise. You have to go a little bit beyond what you’re comfortable with, a little bit more than you can really do, in order to get the benefit and to be able to do it easily later. You do get better, and it does get easier, but you have to set yourself an ambitious task. Deciding that things are too hard for students, I think, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I once told students that when a job interviewer asked about a challenge they took on in college, they could say, “I once had this professor, and he assigned this huge novel, and it was over a thousand pages,” &c.

See also Natalie Wexler: “Lower Academic Standards Can Perpetuate Unfairness,” especially the section “Fish Can’t Climb Trees.”

Two related posts
On “meeting them where they are” : Parts and wholes (On reading entire books) : Teaching Bleak House

[The thousand-plus novel would have been Infinite Jest. It took a long time.]

School pictures

AI in the news: “Stanford Used A.I. to Swap Black Student for Hispanic Student in a Photo” (The New York Times, gift link).

What a typo can reveal

Women scientist is the wicker furniture of typos.

A related post
x is the y of z s (Fetterman edition)

Falling into a piano

[From Blues in the Night (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1941). Click for a larger view.]

Kay Grant (Betty Field), who’s been struggling to become a decent singer, falls through the keys of a dream piano. From one of several striking montage sequences in this movie.

Portrait in Black Blackwing

[From Portrait in Black (dir. Michael Gordon, 1960). Click for a much larger view.]

Shipping magnate Matthew S. Cabot (Lloyd Nolan) and his secretary, Miss Lee (Virgina Grey), in an opening scene. I expected Miss Lee to reappear later in the movie — she didn’t. And she took her Blackwing with her.

Related reading
All OCA Blackwing pencil posts (Pinboard)

Ten best TV shows?

The New York Times (gift links) is counting down what television people consider the 100 best shows of the twenty-first century. And readers are invited to pick their own ten best. My list would have to include Route 66 , Naked City , and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, but the Times is asking about shows released after January 1, 2000. Which of course wasn’t really the start of the twenty-first century. But anyway.

If you vote, the Times puts your picks in a tidy list. These are mine, in no particular order. But if I had to put them in order, Breaking Bad would be first, as it is here.

They also serve who hang around and wait

Brad (Wallace Ford), in Blues in the Night (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1941):

“Wonder if you’d do me a favor. Would you mind playing for me? Funny, a guy like me, how I go for music, yet I can’t play well. But then I never could do anything very well except hang around and wait.”

[See John Milton.]

Domestic comedy

“I hear thunder.”

“It was thundering downstairs too.”

“Thunder is general all over the house.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[See James Joyce.]

Got grapes?

[528 Sheepshead Bay Road, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Just a short walk in from the beach, and you could get all the grapes you want. My first guess was that A. Cafiero supplied grapes to grocery stores. But then why have a sign touting low prices, and boxes of grapes on the sidewalk? Maybe these grapes went to home vintners. (My Brooklyn grandfather made his own wine during Prohibition.)

I found one trace of the grapes in Google Books, which holds a volume of a trade journal listing seven shipments of grapes to an A. Cafiero, all from Buenos Aires. For example:

[Fruit Trade Journal and Produce Record (1927). Why was a bank getting a shipment of grapes?]

I wish they all could be California grapes.

Bonus points for the laundry, the possible lurker at the second-floor window, the hatted pedestrians, and whatever is in the WPA man’s hand. Paperwork related to the work of photography, or a receipt for grapes? It must be paperwork, with a printed form similar to those used by census takers. I suspect that the WPA men are filling in address numbers and block and lot codes as they go.

And (I forgot to add it) the sign: ROOMS.

Today the Grapes address is part of a parking lot.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

A Kennedy complex

Real news (Reuters): the current occupant now plans to refashion his proposed arch into “a complex to house and deploy drones and sniper ammunition.” And: it will sport “an eternal flame” on top so as not to endanger aircraft.

An eternal flame? Like the one in Arlington National Cemetery? This new detail, together with the destruction of the White House Rose Garden and the not yet complete destruction of the Kennedy Center, makes me think that in addition to his other maladies, cognitive and physical, the current occupant has a bad case of Kennedy complex.

Thanks to the reader who caught a bad typo in this post.

[The New York Times (gift link) has a long article today about how the occupant’s administration has gone about breaking the Kennedy Center.]

No more wicker furniture, ever!

At ProPublica, Alex Mierjeski tells the story behind the story: “‘Our Dear Friend Umar’: How We Uncovered That a Russian Oligarch Bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.’s Wedding.” A great example of online sleuthing.

Three scoops

“Trump’s anger at the press was probably fed today by three scoops”: in the most recent installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson suggests three reasons for the current occupant’s banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from his house.

[Yesterday I watched him almost say “my house” before catching himself and saying “the people’s house”: “Now, if they want to write them, that’s fine, but I don’t have to let them into my — into the people’s house” (The New York Times , gift link).]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by David P. Williams, is, to my mind, the best Stumper in many weeks. Difficult as #@&! and hugely satisfying to solve. I began with a gimme, 41-A, nine letters, “‘Break me off a piece’ snack.” The clue that began to break things open: 26-D, seven letters, “Among the top-five fastest production cars (270+ mph.)” I don’t know how the answer popped into my head.

There’s a convention of crossword construction that a word used as an answer should not appear in a clue for another answer. This puzzle breaks with that convention. But it’s okay by me.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, eight letters, “Surname like Newhouse.” Starting off with a bang.

5-D, ten letters, “It’s ‘between theology and science,’ per Bertrand Russell.” The obvious answer, PHILOSOPHY, won’t work.

7-D, seven letters, “Escape route.” I’ve used it, often.

9-D, five letters, “French English affectation.” Clever.

12-D, eight letters, “Don’t hold back.” Williams’s Stumpers seem to always include a dowdy colloquialism. I like that.

23-A, five letters, “Mark on the curve.” Takes me back, but not to a classroom.

33-A, six letters, “Turkey topper.” GRAVY doesn’t fit.

35-D, eight letters, “Loudspeaker’s moving part.” A word I haven’t thought of in years.

39-D, seven letters, “Start to chase.” Crosses needed.

50-A, seven letters, “Subject of the Masakela song ‘Bring Him Back Home’ (1987).” No crosses needed.

56-D, three letters, “      Things Considered (bird blog).” Smiles.

My favorite in this puzzle: 30-A, four letters, “Personal space.” True that.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

x is the y of z s (Fetterman edition)

John Fetterman, offering a garbled echo of a Republican talking point about AI (i.e., there’s nothing Congress can do to regulate it):

“Now, you hear the word guardrails and a lot of those things, that’s just, then, that’s just a statement, you know, what does it really mean? You know, I don’t think, no one really knows exactly what a guardrail is because we’re talking about super intelligence, you know, and now we’re talking about even if we ever achieve the singularity, the singularity that becomes something that is even self-aware. And now, no one knows exactly why that’s gonna happen.”

John Fetterman is the Herschel Walker of Joe Manchins.

[You read it here first.]

Now that’s what I call pre-Code

An exchange between Blondie Johnson (Joan Blondell), a rising criminal, and Danny (Chester Morris), an accomplished criminal. From Blondie Johnson (dir. Ray Enright, 1933):

“I hope you notice I don’t take a back seat when it comes to boiling coffee.”

“You don't take a back seat when it comes to makin’ anything boil.”

Title case

In the library:

“There’s an interlibrary loan book for me, I Went Down to St. James Infirmary .”

And the librarian (whom I know) was baffled. She thought I was reporting that I had gone down to St. James Infirmary. She didn’t know the song title and thought that I was making, in a weird way, conversation.

The book, by Robert W. Harwood, investigates the origins and subsequent history of the song. The book is now in a fourth edition. I have the third (2022).

AI slop flag

[Click for a larger view.]

Fifteen stripes, at least sixty-one stars: it’s AI slop. Or as my son said, it’s USAI. And the prose is sloppy too: “issued a called on.” I’d expect better from a department of education led by a former professional-wrestling executive. Note the hyphen.

And yes, it’s a real post.

Thanks, kiddos.

*

I missed the most glaring problem with the picture, but a reader caught it: the students aren’t facing the flag. Thanks, Kevin.

[In most United States schools, the Pledge of Allegiance is already recited every day, though a student’s participation cannot be required.]

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Amazon Prime, Criterion Channel, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

Blondie Johnson (dir. Ray Enright, 1933). Talk about a grim beginning: Blondie (Joan Blondell) and her ailing mother are evicted from their apartment; social services are naught; and after her mother dies, Blondie resolves to make some dough for herself. A simple scam gets her into cahoots with accomplished criminal Danny (Chester Morris), and she soon becomes a crime boss with a posse of her own (Mae Busch and Toshia Mori). Blondell is delightful, mixing comedy and toughness. I think the ending must be tongue in cheek: perhaps the studios could already hear the Code coming for them. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Portrait in Black (dir. Michael Gordon, 1960). “Oh my God, if anyone had ever told me that I’d be praying for the death of one of my own patients”: that line gives an idea of the high camp melodrama of this movie, which mixes Double Indemnity , a touch of the original The Man Who Knew Too Much, red-flocked wallpaper, and garish furnishings and ornaments. Lana Turner and Anthony Quinn star as lovers conspiring to murder; Richard Basehart, Sandra Dee, Lloyd Nolan, John Saxon, Ray Walston, and Anna May Wong are the supporting players. My other favorite line, as Turner’s character leaves the mansion to go “shopping” (i.e., to see her lover): “Enjoy yourself, Sheila.” ★★/★★★★ (CC)

[As a movie, two stars. As high camp, four.]

*

Blues in the Night (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1941). Elaine, who likes this movie more than I do, calls it a mix of the lightest lights and the darkest darks: it’s a musical with noir, and for me the elements do not meld, as we shift from silly antics to moments of fierce hatred and point-blank gunfire. With Michael Whorf (Benjamin Lee Whorf’s brother), Jack Oakie, Elia Kazan, Peter Whitney, and Billy Halop as members of a die-hard blues band that (nevertheless) plays pop tunes and adds a girl singer (Priscilla Lane), Lloyd Nolan as a gangster, Wallace Ford as an outcast from life’s feast, and Betty Field as a woman who will not be wronged. One redeeming element in this film: a jailhouse version of “Blues in the Night,” with Black cellmates singing a tune that the movie’s white musicians blithely take as their own. Another: montage sequences of Black agriculture, life on the road, and Field struggling to learn a song and falling through the keys of a dream piano. ★★ (A)

*

Night World (dir. Hobart Henley, 1932). A night at Happy’s Club, with proprietor Happy MacDonald (Boris Karloff), chorus girl Ruth Taylor (Mae Clarke), son of familial tragedy Michael Rand (Lew Ayres), and too many more characters to name, all of whom figure in interlocking stories of fidelity, infidelity, and predation. Karloff is a surprise here: his Happy is brutal, but also strangely charming (after all, he runs a nightclub). Unexpected: Clarence Muse as a philosophizing doorman of extraordinary dignity. Two Busby Berkeley numbers are a bonus. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Rabbit Trap (dir. Philip Leacock, 1959). Ernest Borgnine as Ever Ready, Steady Eddie Colt, underpaid (no college degree) and overworked, a draftsman and family man whose boss sees human resources as endlessly exploitable. Like The Apartment , this film is about standing up to executive power, or not. My favorite line: “The company doesn’t own you.” With Bethel Leslie as Abby Colt, David Brian as the boss, and June Blair as a secretary who has eyes for the boss (and should see a good optometrist). ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Sullivan’s Travels (dir. Preston Sturges, 1941). Social realism and its discontents. Joel McCrea is John L. Sullivan, a director who leaves dopey comedies behind and sets out to explore Depression America and make a movie of Sinclair Beckstein’s novel O Brother, Where Art Thou? But comedy will out, though the movie’s idea of the joys of comedy — maniacal laughter over a Mickey Mouse short — is too over the top for my taste. Much better: the snappy patter between Sullivan and “The Girl” (Veronica Lake). ★★★★ (CC)

*

What’s the Story, Wishbone? (dir. Joey Stewart, 2026). This affectionate documentary traces the PBS children’s series Wishbone’s improbable success — first a trailer, then a contract for five episodes, then a contract for thirty-five, and, finally, a fifty-episode run. One problem with the documentary: the interviews with countless people who worked on the show are repetitive, with the main points — we didn’t know what we were doing; we loved working on the show — repeated again and again. A second problem: though the actors who played Ellen Talbot (Mary Chris Wall) and Wanda Gilmore (Angee Hughes) appear here as themselves, the actors who played the kids — Jordan Wall (Joe Talbot), Christie Abbott (Sam Kepler), and Adam Springfield (David Barnes) — are nowhere to be found, and there’s no explanation why (as Ghostwriter once asked, “Where are the children?”). A third problem: there’s very little of the show itself onscreen, which might have something to do with the fine print that identifies the character of Wishbone (played by the late Jack Russell terrier Soccer) as the property of Mattel. ★★★ (A)

[Only three stars, though ours is a Wishbone-friendly household. I still remember my children, then six and eight, screaming to me from the living room, “Dad! The Odyssey !” And now we have grandchildren as old as our kids were then.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Limited funds only allowed for a two-day shoot to bank all the interviews. “If some people couldn’t make the day, we couldn’t include them. But we feel like we covered pretty much every aspect,” says [director Joey] Stewart. Notably absent from the doc are the child actors who were a part of the main cast.]

*

A Private Life (dir. Rebecca Zlotowski, 2025). Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster), an American psychoanalyst in Paris, is determined to uncover the truth about a patient’s unexpected death: suicide, or murder? The doctor enlists her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil) as a second amateur investigator (yes, a Hitchcock trope) in a search for answers that endangers them both, with Lilian becoming increasingly lost in delusions and dreams (recall Spellbound ) about past lives. The truth, when it’s finally discovered, is not especially interesting or satisfying. The movie is stylish but without much substance. ★★★ (N)

*

I Heard It Through the Grapevine (dir. Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley, 1982). James Baldwin revisits the American south, with a sidetrip to Newark, New Jersey, for conversations with veterans of the fight for human rights. Some extraordinary scenes here: Baldwin with the poet Sterling Brown, Baldwin with David Dennis, the former CORE member who hired Michael Schwerner. And some chilling archival footage of Bull Connor and Jim Clark and anonymous white people brutalizing protestors. The sad refrain that runs through the movie: everything has changed, and nothing has changed. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (dir. Terence Dixon, 1970). A white Brit sets out to make a short film about James Baldwin as a writer in Paris, and nothing goes according to plan. Baldwin resists the premise: “You know, I’m not so much a writer as I’m a citizen, and I’ve got to bear witness to something which I know.” Things become more relaxed when we see Baldwin talking with his mentor and friend Beauford Delaney and a group of Black students who have left the States. But when Baldwin addresses the filmmaker — well, if looks could kill. ★★★ (CC)

*

A Toxic Love Story (dir. Alexandra Lacey, 2026). Another Netflix documentary about a dysfunctional relationship? I’m there! The premise: a man meets the woman of his dreams, and she soon begins to receive threatening e-mails, but nothing here is what it appears to be, and the plot twists keep coming. There’s a bit of trickery early on as some careful editing gives the viewer a false impression — thus I’m dropping a star. ★★★ (N)

*

Nowhere Boy (dir. Sam Taylor-Johnson, 2009). The childhood (in flashbacks) and adolescence of John Lennon (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), based on his half-sister Julia Baird’s memoir. It’s a story of deep trauma: family separation, the absence of one parent, the death of another. Taylor-Johnson is an eerily evocative Lennon; as Lennon’s mother Julia, Anne-Marie Duff is a vivacious (or manic) figure who seems to regard her son as something of a boyfriend; as Aunt Mimi, Kristin Scott Thomas is alternately severe and generous, trying to preserve some element of order and safety in her nephew’s life: “Don’t forget your glasses.” The (great) soundtrack includes Jackie Brenston, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Wanda Jackson, Big Mama Thornton, a note-perfect cover of the Quarrymen’s “In Spite of All the Danger,” and a bit of Lennon’s “Mother,” from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, the 1970 album in which Lennon revisited childhood trauma. ★★★★ (CC)

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All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

“I’m gonna wear shoes.”

“Wow.”

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All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[I usually choose my Merrell Moab 3s.]

Letters from an American turns seven

The most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American marks seven years of daily letter writing:

Seven years later, we are approaching the midpoint of Trump’s second term, and the patterns I saw seven years ago are slicing to the heart of both the mechanics and the soul of the United States.

Attacking Aaron Rupar

“‘The White House has a taxpayer-funded team that tries to incite harassment and threats against their political foes,’ Rupar told Salon. ‘They seem to be especially triggered about my posts about Natalie Harp and how she accompanies the president everywhere’”: “White House doesn’t want voters to see the real Trump” (Salon ).

Note the expression on the current occupant’s face in the photograph that accompanies the article. I think it’s the face of dementia.

Another arch

“When I told him that to celebrate the day, I had set up a thirteen-foot model of the triumphal arch in one of the salons, he immediately left the party and hurried to the room”: from Read, Seen, Heard.

Him: who?

A new stationery store

“Nyack’s new spot for fine stationery”: Busman’s Holiday. It’s the work of Sam Potts, who many years ago made a spectacular poster mapping character connections in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest .

The store offers a pencil exchange, a cloud registry, and other surprises. And a fun Instagram account.

Moleskine print fail

The paper in my 2026 Moleskine datebook is an improvement over that of years past: ink does not bleed through. A problem that I didn’t notice until I wrote with a thicker nib and found the ink slightly ghosting: the print on the recto and verso doesn’t always line up. It happens only on a few pages, but it shouldn’t happen at all, should it? (No, Michael, you’re absolutely right. It shouldn’t.)

[A crude photograph, taken with a flashlight shining through the page, and with the white point adjusted to make the paper look more like paper.]

I have issues with Moleskine quality control. In 2024 I wrote three posts telling the story of getting a defective Moleskine planner (sixteen days missing!) and attempting to get a refund: 1, 2, 3. I wondered then and wonder now if my e-mail correspondence with “Donne” at Moleskine Customer Care was really just correspondence with a bot. I wrote a letter too to Moleskine’s New York headquarters. No reply. Moleskine, sono pazzi.

Related reading
All OCA Moleskine posts (Pinboard)

[I am a prisoner of Moleskine. I prefer the design of their daily planner to that of Leuchtturm.]

Revenge of analog

Sales of pens, puzzle books, Moleskines, and Fujifilm Instax cameras are all up: “The anti-AI portfolio” (Financial Times ).

The indefatigable Aaron Rupar

The story has now made it to Newsweek : the White House’s Rapid Response 47 account has called the indefatigable Aaron Rupar “a sick, deluded freak” for calling attention to the current occupant’s travels with Natalie Harp.

Aaron Rupar’s Bluesky posts are a great public service. They show again and again what “the news” doesn’t: a president declining in real time. If you value the time and effort Rupar puts into collecting video clips, you can buy him a coffee or subscribe to Public Notice.

Adjectives to excess

Brown bourbon, a neon red maraschino cherry, the crisp pages of a letter, a thick piece of cream-colored stationery someone is about to write on.

But bourbon just is brown, and maraschino cherries are bright red, at least if they come from a jar, as this one did. “Crisp” rightly describes potato chips and other delights, but the pages of a letter aren’t crisp, and it’s difficult to think of recognizing a piece of paper that’s not in one’s own hands as thick. Cream-colored? That’s good; it suggests an upscale product.

Elaine and I are reading a memoir — not our usual stuff, but someone recommended it, and we bit. It’s a good story, sometimes funny, often moving, at times terrifying, but the writer lards its sentences with intrusive adjectives. They become tiresome. Here is William Zinsser in On Writing Well , suggesting that most (I’d say many ) adjectives are unnecessary:

Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don’t stop to think that the concept is already in the noun. This kind of prose is littered with precipitous cliffs and lacy spiderwebs, or with adjectives denoting the color of an object whose color is well known: yellow daffodils and brownish dirt. If you want to make a value judgment about daffodils, choose an adjective like “garish.” If you're in a part of the country where the dirt is red, feel free to mention the red dirt. Those adjectives would do a job that the noun alone wouldn’t be doing.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons. This is adjective-by-habit — a habit you should get rid of. Not every oak has to be gnarled.

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[The book is Meredith May’s The Honey Bus . Where was an editor to strike brown , &c.?]

The Ivy League and AI

In The Chronicle of Higher Education , Anastasia Berg suggests that “The Ivy League’s Surrender to AI Is Insane”:

How will encouraging students to use AI when writing papers in political theory, philosophy, literature, or history deepen learning? I have taught in UChicago’s social sciences core sequence, I have studied the linguistic and analytic capacities of LLMs, and I can say with confidence that there is no use of AI that can “deepen” students’ learning of Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Marx, and Du Bois over and above an unmediated engagement with the original works. If one wants to deepen students’ understanding of human beings’ most difficult, elevated and important intellectual and artistic achievements, one needs to give instructors the means of demanding that students spend time with the works, alone. Allow professors to require students to spend the time they are nominally already required to dedicate to the course outside the classroom in tech-free reading rooms; shut down the WiFi; scramble the cell signal; send them to weeklong retreats in the deep, dark woods. Whatever.

Failure to do so will mean giving up on mastery in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, and with it, the liberal-arts model of college education itself.

Amen, and amen.

Something smells fishy, or meaty

In The New York Times (gift link), Eric Schlosser writes about the current occupant’s large order of mystery meat:

If American consumers knew where that beef was coming from, they might not want to eat it.

The cuts of meat covered by Mr. Trump’s proclamation aren’t fresh sirloins, rib-eyes and filets. They’re lean beef trimmings that will be added to fattier American cuts to make ground beef. They’re small chunks of frozen meat that could have been kept in cold storage overseas for years. They are the quintessence of generic industrial meat, imported here to be subsequently processed in massive grinders that combine pieces of tens of thousands of cattle from multiple countries, mainly into fast food hamburgers.

The details that follow are, well, disgusting. Our household has been off ground beef for some time now.

Three in a row

[1116 Remsen Avenue, Canarsie, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

[1124 Remsen Avenue, Canarsie, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

[8913 Glenview Road, Canarsie, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Candy Stationery Cigars, Stationery Candy Soda Cigars, Cigars Stationery Candy: these establishments indeed stood in a row, across the street from an elementary school (P.S. 114, built and expanded between 1907 and 1912) and the Remsen Playground. The name Remsen in Brooklyn goes back to the seventeenth century. Canarsie takes its name from the Canarsee people. My brother Brian found the third store, which he identified as Mike’s Stationery. I’m sure that the kids in Canarsie found their way to all three stores. The store with all the kids outside is the one closest to the school.

There are two unusual items atop the middle building. The one on the left is likely an elaborate weathervane. Can anyone suggest what the one below is? Google Image Search says that it’s an antenna atop the Empire State Building. My guess is that it’s a weather station of some sort.

[Click for a larger view.]

The school, the playground, and these three (now repurposed) buildings still stand, with different doodads atop Mike’s.

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More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

“A dire warning”

“On Thursday, in The New Republic, conservative judge J. Michael Luttig published a dire warning to the Republican Party ... and to all Americans”: that’s the subject of the most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American.

Writing and AI at Harvard (again)

David Deming, the dean of Harvard College, says there should be “acceptance or even encouragement” of AI in student writing. Some Harvard faculty and students disagree.

If you read the Chronicle article behind that first link, you’ll see that Deming is already sorta, kinda walking it back: “I actually do think it’s good for students to do the writing on their own.” Wow.

A related post
Writing and AI at Harvard

Mutts , mostly New Jersey

[Mutts , September 13, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Mutts , Doozy’s “Bobbie Doll” car was there for the taking.

The title (throwaway) panel pays homage to Ed “Big Daddy” Roth.

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Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, started out so easily: 1-A, four letters, “Hula hoops, for instance.” I was not fooled. But I soon found this puzzle presenting obstacle after obstacle: 19-A, six letters, “Very sharp in D&D, from Carroll.” 43-A, six letters, “Portmanteau for fortissimo singing.” And let us not forget 35-D, four letters, “Code sharer with Uzbekistan Airways.” Whose wheelhouse is this puzzle in? Not mine. But I did get it, all but one letter. (See 19-A.)

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, three letters, “First string.” This one gave me fits. RNA?

4-D, fifteen letters, “Overtime alert.” Seems a bit blah for a fifteen-letter answer.

10-D, fifteen letters, “Where split decisions are made.” I thought of stocks and boxing rings.

13-D, four letters, “He ‘put chic into chips,’ per Times (1977).” Forty-nine years ago. Ah, yes, of course. (Cough.)

14-A, ten letters, “Japanese belt.” I couldn’t make SUNTORY fit.

26-A, four letters, “Major in ’90s news.” A pretty tortured way to clue this answer.

20-D, six letters, “Father of Agamemnon.” I’d hate to be known as Agamemnon’s father. I’d also hate to be known as Agamemnon.

30-D, five letters, “Goddess associated with olive trees.” Not TEENA. (Short for ATHENA).

38-A, eight letters, “Word from Greek for ‘scatter.’” I learned something.

49-A, ten letter, “Wipe clean to reuse.” Oddly anachronistic.

My favorite in this puzzle: 42-D, five letters, “Ancient character with no followers.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

More than $5000

The current occupant has promised $5000 to every adult American if Republicans retain control of Congress. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, There ain’t any $5000, there ain’t going to be any $5000, there never has been any $5000, that’s the $5000.

But I think there’s more to this faux-promise than dollar signs. I think that the occupant made this faux-promise knowing that he will never have to make good on it, and that the failure to make good on it will then be something he can hang on Democrats. If, say, Republicans became a minority in the House, any new Democratic representative who flipped a seat will have a target on their back for having deprived Americans of the money the occupant promised them.

Does the occupant have the cognitive ability to scheme thusly? Who knows. Perhaps someone suggested the idea to him.

On the 81st floor

“On the 81st floor, there were no Republicans or Democrats, no Black or white. We were just brothers trying to find the way out”: “25 years ago, two strangers met in the twin towers and escaped on 9/11. What happened next?” (The Guardian ).

This story is new to me, and I think it’s worth sharing.

A visit to Ground Zero and St. Paul’s Chapel

A post I wrote in 2008.

And I’ll update a sentence I wrote in 2022:

It’s now twenty-five years after the fact, and I still can’t see a cloudless sky without thinking of September 11, 2001.

A captive audience

We watched just a few minutes of last night’s hatefest in Dallas, enough to hear the current occupant boast that no one was leaving as he spoke. Elaine wondered if everyone was bused in and couldn’t leave.

And that was pretty much the case: attending the event was only possible by taking a bus (the “GOP Express”) from Lone Star Park to the American Airlines Center, a 13.5-mile trip, and return trips were to begin only after the night’s proceedings ended. A DART station was closed, and no Lyft or Uber vehicles were permitted within the event’s “secure zone.” No wonder no one was leaving early.

Which means, by the way, that all the empty seats we saw must have been empty from much earlier in the day.

Ghost in the Machine

From a PBS e-mail:

Ghost in the Machine is an investigative documentary exposing the buried history of artificial intelligence as a technology shaped by racism, misogyny, eugenics, and entrenched structures of power long before it entered everyday life.

Rejecting the notion of AI as inevitable or objective, the film traces how myths of progress and efficiency have obscured deeper political and cultural agendas, revealing the ideological foundations beneath the systems now reshaping modern society. Who built these systems, whose values do they encode, and who do they benefit?

The documentary, by filmmaker Valerie Veatch, airs on Independent Lens this coming Monday.

Which prompts me to paste here a comment that I left on an episode of the Mac Power Users podcast, “Harvard Professor Teddy Svoronos on AI in the Classroom”:

I found this a remarkably cheerful and uncritical discussion of generative AI, which has made the work of evaluating student writing a hellscape for many instructors. It’s telling that the University of Chicago has banned gen AI in first-year law courses and some undergrad courses. UC Berkeley has banned gen AI in all law courses. Harvard, though, is all in, encouraging faculty to use gen AI and offering a $699 course in entrepreneurship taught by AI clones of business faculty. At the same time, Harvard has closed its Writing Center, where a student could work one-to-one with another human. Arizona State is repackaging course materials in bits and pieces for use in online course offerings. At SUNY Buffalo, the Chief AI Officer has advanced the idea of having a chatbot give students oral exams. And Texas Tech is using AI to comb through syllabi for suspect texts (anything foregrounding sexual orientation or gender identity).

There are many, many questions to ask here, and a need for a much more critical perspective.

[A habitual OCA reader will recognize that most of my examples come from recent posts.]

Dylan and others

My son Ben let me know something I didn’t: that Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” borrows from Paul Clayton’s “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone),” which itself borrows from “Who Gon Bring You Chickens,” published in a 1927 compilation, Eight Negro Songs (From Bedford Co. Virginia). Much more about these three songs at Bring You Chickens.

The traditional-to-Clayton-to-Dylan story is widely known. I gave Ben one back, which I’m not sure anyone else knows: Dylan’s “Moonlight” borrows from Eubie Blake and Andy Razaf’s “Memories of You.” The lyrics and melody are Dylan’s. But listen to the chord changes: they’re Blake’s.

Nothing wrong about that: countless tunes have been written over the chord changes of American standards. And Dylan knows standards.

A joke in the traditional manner

What did the thirsty lizard say?

Three ratings from beta testers, eight, six, and six: “It’s funny,” “Pretty good,” and straight-out laughter.

The punchline is in the comments.

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[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad, who was making such jokes long before anyone called them “dad jokes.” Merriam-Webster’s first citation: 1987. I continue in the traditional manner.]

Font patter

Elle Cordova, “Modern Day Typographer.”

Recently updated

Slipping the surly bonds: Now with a link to a more expansive account of the current occupant’s 9/11 fantasies.

Slipping the surly bonds

The current occupant is telling a new and improved version of his ever-shifting 9/11 saga. Aaron Rupar has the video. The occupant now claims that he went to the site of the World Trade Center with a construction crew on September 11, 2001, and that as the U.S. Steel Building creaked and seemed ready to come down, two firefighters lifted him up and ran with him from the danger.

There is, of course, no evidence for any of this. Is the occupant blurring events of 9/11 and his exit stage left in Butler, Pennsylvania? Is he blurring events of 9/11 and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where he was shuffled off the dais? Is his story unrelated to either of those events? There are so many ways to slip the surly bonds of reality.

In a sane country, this sick, shameful story would be front and center at every news outlet.

*

September 9: from Judd Legum’s Popular Information, a more expansive account of the occupant’s 9/11 fantasies.

A six-year-old on reading

“I feel like reading has changed my life. There were so many things I couldn’t do before. But now that I can read, it’s like, everything changed!”

Act of faith, or trick of grammar?

A striking sentence from “An Approach to Style,” the E.B. White-authored final chapter of The Elements of Style :

Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, “Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.”

I long suspected that the elderly practitioner might have been White himself. Heber Taylor’s post quoting the practitioner’s sentence prompted me to find out. Yes, it was White, in “Calculating Machine,” a short piece in The New Yorker (February 24, 1951). The subject: Rudolph Flesch’s Reading-Ease Calculator (“a celluloid card with a dial,” White calls it, developed by General Motors), a device to score readability by counting words and syllables:

Communication by the written word is a subtler (and more beautiful) thing than Dr. Flesch and General Motors imagine. They contend that the “average reader” is capable of reading only what tests Easy, and that the writer should write at or below this level. This is a presumptuous and degrading idea. There is no average reader, and to reach down toward this mythical character is to deny that each of us is on the way up, is ascending. (“Ascending,” by the way, is a word Dr. Flesch advises writers to stay away from. Too unusual.)

It is my belief that no writer can improve his work until he discards the dulcet notion that the reader is feebleminded, for writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar. Ascent is at the heart of the matter. A country whose writers are following a calculating machine downstairs is not ascending — if you will pardon the expression — and a writer who questions the capacity of the person at the other end of the line is not a writer at all, merely a schemer.

I have sometimes thought that a good way to salvage The Elements of Style would be to package its final chapter as a short, beautifully designed book, omitting all the prohibitions (e.g., flammable for inflammable ) and outdated guidelines (margins, hyphenation, citations). But the book as is continues to sell, and sell, and sell. Maybe someday.

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[Flesch’s invention lives on in the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests. Try an online version. I found “Calculating Machine” in White’s Poems and Sketches (New York: Harper & Row, 1981). And yes, I shared my discovery with Heber several weeks ago.]

QR1777

“We put the Q in QR1777”: “Fake AI ads in the West 4th Street subway station unite commuters in hatred of AI ads” (Gothamist ).

Here’s a short video of ads going up.

Farther and further

My brother Brian called attention to the Bobby Bland song “Farther Up the Road,” sometimes mistakenly titled “Further Up the Road.” And sometimes performed thusly.

There’s also Bruce Springsteen’s “Further On (Up the Road).”

Taj Mahal has it both ways, with a song titled “Farther on Down the Road (You Will Accompany Me).” But he sings “further.”

[Context: the comments on this post. Composer credit for “Farther Up the Road” is uncertain. “Farther on Down the Road” is credited to Taj Mahal, Jesse Ed Davis, Gary Gilmore, and Chuck Blackwell.]

Labor Day

[Nancy, September 7, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Nancy borrows from Ricardo Levins Morales’s original, which itself borrows an old labor slogan.

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[I can’t say that I’m a fan of Caroline Cash’s Nancy. But I like today’s strip.]

“The Moon Is Ours”

Anyone who doubts that the current occupant has slipped the surly bonds of reality should take a look at his afternoon efforts in his TЯuth Social account. Thirty-six posts in two hours, nutty and nuttier.

One restaurant, three names

Okay, if you’ve skipped the Yankee Diner and you’re not in the mood for Pure Food, take a walk on the wild side — in other words, a little farther down Avenue U. Where are we going for lunch? Is it to the Airport Oyster & Chop House? Or is it to Pete’s Airport Clam Bar? Or both?

[4200 Avenue U, Marine Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The 1940 directory keeps it simple.


The airport would be Floyd Bennett Field, used by the United States Coast Guard and Navy.

Notice the sign for Love Nest candy, much smaller than the one atop this Manhattan diner.

And notice this guy, looking pretty rough.

[Click for a larger view.]

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“How Do You Talk?”

“How Do You Talk?” is an American accent quiz. I took the full quiz (122 questions).

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman, constructing as Lester Ruff. Indeed, today’s puzzle was Les than Ruff. It’d be a good one for someone who wants to sample the Stumper.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, nine letters, “Sicilian kin.” My first thought was SARDINIAN.

6-D, six letters, “Collect, as condensation.” New to me.

15-A, six letters, “Paid, in a phrase.” I wonder where it comes from.

17-A, six letters, “Not quite perfect.” Heh.

18-A, eight letters, “Greyhounds’ home.” Territory I know only from the black-and-white world.

26-D, four letters, “Diamond Head’s surroundings.” “Diamond Head” is the name of a beautiful instrumental by Brian Wilson. But that has nothing to do with the answer.

28-D, seven letters, “Pioneer of the ‘howcatchem’ drama.” When you know from the start whodunit.

37-A, fifteen letters, “Walt’s early name for Disneyland.” Eww.

43-A, seven letters, “His songs are seen by many musicians as a badge of honor.” Meaning that they’re so complex that it’s a test of one’s ability to perform them? No.

43-D, three letters, “Poacher, at times.” I caught on.

My favorite in this puzzle: 48-D, five letters, “Scroll successor.” Just because I like the word.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A Mutts anniversary dinner

[Mutts , September 5, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Mutts premiered on September 5, 1994. For today’s strip , Millie has prepared a very special meal.

Venn reading
All OCA comics posts : comics and sardines posts : sardine posts (Pinboard)

Word of the day: matriculate

Matriculate is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day:

Anybody who has had basic Latin knows that alma mater , a fancy term for the school you attended, comes from a phrase that means “fostering mother.” If mater means “mother,” then matriculate probably has something to do with a school nurturing you just like good old mom, right? Not exactly. If you go back far enough, matriculate is distantly related to the Latin mater , but its maternal associations were lost long ago — even in terms of Latin history. It is more closely related to the Late Latin word matricula, which means “public roll or register.” Matricula has more to do with being enrolled than being mothered, but it is the diminutive form of the Latin noun matrix, which in Late Latin was used in the sense of “list” or “register” and earlier referred to female animals kept for the purposes of breeding.

As M-W explains, “to matriculate is to enroll or be enrolled as a student, especially at a college or university.” When I was in college, I never knew what to check on the registration form asking if I was matriculated. Sometimes Yes, sometimes No. I never thought to ask, never thought to look up the word, and the answer never seemed to make a difference.

In life and in the theatre

Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (New York: New York Review Books, 2003).

Also from this novella
Suspicion

“It's hard to know what to do with all this”

Daniele Del Giudice, A Fictional Inquiry, trans. from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel (New York: New Vessel Press, 2025).

This novel, first published as Lo stadio di Wimbledon (1983) recounts an unnamed narrator’s travels in Trieste and London to puzzle out the life of an Italian writer who chose not to publish a word in his lifetime. The novel reminds me of both Leonardo Sciascia and W.G. Sebald, especially Sebald. If you are attuned to either of those writers, you might like A Fictional Inquiry .

Credit this reading choice to the folks who display the books at the Seminary Co-op. I saw a copy of the novel on one of the banded ledges that adjoin the bookshelves. I bought that copy, started looking at it more closely, told Elaine about it, and bought a second copy from the shelves. And so it became an official pick of the Four Seasons Reading Club (Elaine and me, reading).

[Banded ledges? Think of a shallow version of a supermarket endcap, with bands holding the merchandise on little ledges.]

Selling a goldbrick

From The Man I Married (dir. Irving Pichel, 1941). Carol Hoffman (Joan Bennett), an American vacationer in Berlin, asks a question. Kenneth Delane (Lloyd Nolan), an American foreign correspondent, answers:

“What I can’t get through my head is why these people listen to Hitler, when they know in the end it’ll only mean bloodshed and chaos.”

“Well, Schickie sold them a goldbrick, probably the greatest goldbrick that’s ever been sold any peoples in the whole history of time. He’s actually made them believe that the only culture in the world is the Nazi culture, that the only form of life worth living is the Nazi form. He’s a mathemagician. Fanatical egomaniac with the greatest appetite ever since on this earth since the days of Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun. He won't be satisfied until he makes an effort to wipe the democracies right off the map, and I don’t mean just England and France either. Yeah, I know, I know. A lot of us Americans laugh it off when they hear things like this, but not me. I’ve seen too much. I’ve seen the war machine he’s constructed. Nobody can tell me he has the slightest intention of letting that machine go to rust. In the long run, of course, he won’t win. But before he’s through, Schickie’s gonna spill an awful lot of blood.”

Eerie viewing in 2026.

[Schickie: Schicklgruber, the original family name of Hitler’s father Alois. Goldbrick : “a confidence game in which the victim buys a ’gold’ (actually gold-painted lead) brick.” Mathemagician : a portmanteau that suggests a mastermind and trickster.]