“A dance to art”, Sunday, Sept. 1, 1974.

“Jules Ralph Feiffer (born January 26, 1929) is an American cartoonist and author, who was considered the most widely read satirist in the country. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 as North-America’s leading editorial cartoonist, and in 2004 he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame. He wrote the animated short Munro, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1961. … There he helped Eisner write and illustrate his comic strips, including The Spirit. In 1956 he became a staff cartoonist at The Village Voice, where he produced the weekly comic strip titled Feiffer until 1997. His cartoons became nationally syndicated in 1959 and then appeared regularly in publications including the Los Angeles Times, the London Observer, The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, and The Nation

Heather Cox Richardson’s post includes a story that has been under-reported about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that released massive toxic fumes. The Trump administration repealed an Obama regulation that imposed braking rules on trains carrying toxic materials. The trail industry lobbied to kill the regulation.

She writes:

President Joe Biden hit the road today to continue the push to highlight the successes of his administration’s investment in the economy. In Lanham, Maryland, at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 26, he celebrated the economic plan that “grows the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down.”

He praised union labor and said that the nation’s investment in green energy would mean “good-paying jobs for electricians, plumbers, pipefitters, laborers, carpenters, cement masons, ironworkers, and so much more. And these good jobs you can raise a family on.” “It’s a stark contrast…

“Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties is a book by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener about Los Angeles in the 1960s. The authors combine archival research and personal interviews with their own experiences in the civil rights and anti-war movements to tell the social history or, as the authors term it, ‘movement history’ of this transformative decade. The book’s purpose is not to present a comprehensive history of 1960s Los Angeles but to dispel the mythology surrounding this era and replace it with the neglected history of the populist social and cultural movements that shifted power away from an entrenched elite and opened up opportunities for radical egalitarian change. … The book covers a period of more than ten years beginning at the start of the decade with a description of the Los Angeles of the 1950s and ending with the defeat of Sam Yorty…

Heather Cox Richardson wrote a wonderful post about Theodore Roosevelt and the tragedies that changed his life.

On Valentine’s Day in 1884, Theodore Roosevelt lost both his wife and his mother.

Four years before, Roosevelt could not have imagined the tragedy that would stun him in 1884. February 14, 1880, marked one of the happiest days of his life. He and the woman he had courted for more than a year, Alice Hathaway Lee, had just announced their engagement. Roosevelt was over the moon: “I can scarcely realize that I can hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose,” he recorded in his diary. What followed were, according to Roosevelt, “three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others.”

After they married in fall 1880, the Roosevelts moved into…

“Shindig! is an American musical variety series which aired on ABC from September 16, 1964 to January 8, 1966. The show was hosted by Jimmy O’Neill, a disc jockey in Los Angeles, who also created the show along with his wife Sharon Sheeley, British producer Jack Good, and production executive Art Stolnitz. The original pilot was rejected by ABC and David Sontag, then executive producer of ABC, redeveloped and completely redesigned the show. A new pilot with a new cast of artists was shot starring Sam Cooke. That pilot aired as the premiere episode. Shindig! was conceived as a short-notice replacement for Hootenanny, a series that had specialized in folk revival music. The folk revival had fizzled in 1964 as the result of the British Invasion, which damaged the ratings for Hootenanny and prompted that show’s cancellation. Shindig! focused on a broader variety…

“A Critique of Pure Tolerance is a 1965 book by the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, the sociologist Barrington Moore Jr., and the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in which the authors discuss the political role of tolerance. … The authors explain that the book’s title refers to the philosopher Immanuel Kant‘s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), and suggest that their ideas may resemble those of Kant. They note that they have different perspectives on philosophy, with Wolff accepting, and Marcuse opposing, the approach of analytic philosophy, and Moore being critical of philosophy in general. They write that the purpose of the book is to discuss the political role of tolerance and that despite their disagreements with each other they believe that ‘the prevailing theory and practice of tolerance’ is hypocritical and conceals ‘appalling political realities.’ Wolff argues that tolerance should be studied ‘by means…

Good Morning!

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Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

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“I wonder how many people don’t get the one they want,
but end up with the one they’re supposed to be with.”
― Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café

“Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life
with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down;
perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through
quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose,
until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart
its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music …”
– L. M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables

There’s so much to say about revising. Even though I’ve just published a book on revising – shameless plug – I still have things I want to say about it.

The key message in the book is that revising effectively requires you to need to read through your text with purpose, have something in mind. A focus. Rather than just pick up the text and read, waiting to see what jumps out at you, it’s very helpful to approach your draft with a question in mind. In fact, I suggest that it can be pretty useful to read your text through several times, looking for different things each time. Looking for one thing at a time means you caconcentrate on that thing alone and not get distracted by other issues. 

One of the very first things to look for – and you’ll see I have written a little chapter about…

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

“The history of programming languages spans from documentation of early mechanical computers to modern tools for software development. Early programming languages were highly specialized, relying on mathematical notation and similarly obscure syntax. Throughout the 20th century, research in compiler theory led to the creation of high-level programming languages, which use a more accessible syntax to communicate instructions. The first high-level programming language was Plankalkül, created by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. … The period from the late 1960s to the late 1970s brought a major flowering of programming languages. Most of the major language paradigms now in use were invented in this period: Speakeasy, developed in 1964 at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) by Stanley Cohen, is an OOPS (object-oriented programming system, much like the later MATLAB, IDL and Mathematica) numerical package. …