The Many Lives of Larry McMurtry
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Pulitzer prizewinning author Larry McMurtry grew up in a remote west Texas ranch house that was bookless. An occasional copy of The Cattleman, a trade journal for beef producers, was the only written material available to him. “There had to have been a Bible around, but I never saw it,” he said. “I don’t think my parents ever […]
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The Denial of Death: Why we run from the inevitable
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The chief embalmer of a busy funeral home recently remarked, “No matter how often I do this procedure, I am always struck by how we end up here on the table by ourselves. We are in a single file line, we all die alone.” The cornerstone of human existence is its temporal nature. “None of […]
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Nostalgia: The Powerful Taste of Long Ago
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The Madeleine Tea Cake is the most renowned pastry in world literature. When Marcel Proust’s narrator in Remembrance of Things Past began eating the sponge cake after it had been dipped into warm tea, a flood of memories was released—a watershed of seven volumes, 1.5 million words. Here is that celebrated moment: “As soon as I […]
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The Morning Sound of Clark Weber from Chicago
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When Clark Weber and Ron Riley, two of the most popular personalities on Chicago’s hottest radio station, WLS, introduced The Beatles to a sold-out crowd at cavernous Comiskey Park on August 20, 1965, the reaction was tumultuous. “As we brought The Beatles on, you could put your hands out and actually feel the sound from […]
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Mank on Netflix explores the mysteries of Citizen Kane
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After Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz shared the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for 1941’s Citizen Kane, the wunderkind Welles sent this letter to his collaborator: “Dear Mankie, Here’s what I wanted to wire you after the Academy Dinner: ‘You can kiss my half.’ I dare to send it through the mails only now that I find it […]
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