On Saturday morning Max and I rented a car with some friends for the express purpose of visiting Mark Twain’s Hartford home. There was a surprising — to four non-drivers, anyway — amount of traffic headed out of New York City and into Connecticut that morning. When we arrived around 3:45, we were informed that all tours for the day . . .
One of my favorite law school classes was a legal history seminar that explored the influence of Methodism and other early Evangelical sects on the development of our legal system. Although I grew up in a whacked-out fundamentalist household, I didn’t fully understand the roots of Evangelical Christianity until I took that class. Good thing, I thought then, that we . . .
Scott Rudin and Miramax Films have acquired feature rights to Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. (Thanks, Fateh.)
The first chapter of Shalom Auslander’s Foreskin’s Lament ran in the weekend’s New York Times Book Review alongside an admiring piece by Charles McGrath. If you’re interested — as I am — in the lifelong neuroses a severe religious upbringing can bestow, be sure to read the book, which is considerably funnier than (but just as dark as) Beatrice de . . .
I’m coming down with a cold or something, so in lieu of the great-grandfather story I’d planned to tell, here’s a shot of Grandpa, my dad’s father, standing with the rest of the committee to welcome Mary Ann Mobley, Miss America 1959, home to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. (Larger version here.) Grandpa stands to Ms. Mobley’s right, wearing sunglasses.