Out of class

Posted on by albrooke

Most Americans are proud of not being class conscious like we think the British are.

David Brooks, ever perceptive, ever irenic, warns about the dangers of (largely) voluntary class segregation, noting that in the United States we tend to stay in our own groups:

  • Last year a group of researchers published a study in the journal Nature in which they surveyed leaders in 30 fields, including law, media, politics and so on. They found that not only had nearly all of society’s power brokers gone to college, 54 percent of them went to the same 34 elite schools. That’s segregation on steroids. . . . In his 2019 book, “The Meritocracy Trap,” Daniel Markovits writes that the academic gap between the affluent and less affluent is greater today than the achievement gap between white Americans and Black Americans in the final days of Jim Crow. I’d like to let that sink in. Nearly all of us were raised on the conviction that Jim Crow was rancid. We’ve effectively recreated it on class lines.

David Brooks, “America’s New Segregation” The New York Times (Aug. 14, 2025) [link].

I think there are at least three places where the “classes” still mix — churches,* ballparks,** and concert venues. If you live and work in one setting, maybe your best bet to get out of your group is to listen to music with a crowd, cheer on your team, or worship God.

Not a bad way to do your civic duty.

*Also synagogues and mosques, but I didn’t want to write the insufferably bland “houses of worship.” **Yeah, yeah, arenas, stadiums, pitches, too.

Juxtaposition

Posted on by albrooke

Having just finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s masterful An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s (2024), I came across an article by Lisa Russ Spaar. “Maximalisma,” The American Scholar (May 16, 2025) [link].

Start with the book. The late Dick Goodwin and Doris Kearns Goodwin were each important people in the lives of JFK, LBJ and RFK before they married. They were Zelig-like in their ability to be in the background of truly important events. The premise/impetus for the book was that Dick Goodwin saved everything from drafts of presidential speeches to the shattered nightstick he picked up in a Chicago hotel (after Eugene McCarthy talked the police out of punishing the college students they had incorrectly thought had pelted them with debris). He kept every kind of paper and memento in 100s of banker’s boxes. With the Goodwins’ recollections of events and DKG’s historical research, they went box-by-box through the Sixties. After his death in 2018, DKG wrote this amazing book about the time, their times, and their day-by-day journey through the boxes. This book was wonderful.

Then today Austin Kleon Alan Jacobs Lore Wilbert Sarah Rowell Nate Silver Neil Paine Joe Posnanski Andrew Sullivan Robin Sloan, no, Cherie Harder [link] sent out a link to the article. It was an excellent insight in to the mind and attic of the person who saves just a little too much. Spaar says:

  • I have to admit, at 68, that all of these “things” comfort and inspire me no less than my college dorm room décor helped me, 50 years ago, feel like the person I wanted to be. At the same time, however—perhaps because I’m closer to Erikson’s stage eight now—I do worry about those who will have to make their way through all of this meaningful-to-me matter if I don’t do it first. It’s not so much that I don’t want my grown children (or worse, my grandchildren) to come upon that small batch of youthful Polaroids (where are they?). Or to plumb the histrionic depths of my teenage journals. Or to dig out, with disbelief, that long-unused bit of lingerie from the bottom of a drawer. It’s that I feel a responsibility, after a lifetime of gathering, to cull those personal treasures.

Or, hey, maybe she should write a book! Yes, THAT’s why I am saving all this stuff!

Then

Posted on by albrooke

From Joe Poz (Joe Posnanski, “Chasing 3,000 Ks,” Joe Blogs (May 19, 2025) [link]):

  • When I was a kid, the big ballpark promotion was Bat Day. There were other cool giveaways — ball day, jacket day, cap day, T-shirt day, I think we did all of them because my father has always believed in getting value for his dollar — but bat day was the big one. I mean, they really used to give full-size (well, Little League-size) baseball bats to thousands and thousands of people. Were we a better society then? I mean, that obvious answer is: No. We were definitely NOT a better society then — for about 10,000 reasons. But it was a time when they could give bats to, say, 10,000 or 20,000 people and be confident that people would not use them to beat each other. That’s something.

Yeah, actually it is something.

Read, Feel, Think

Posted on by albrooke

Three great reads:

A very well-written piece on the value of (well-written) children’s literature by Lindsey Cornett, “The Gospel According to Charlotte’s Web” The Conversational Life (May 9, 2025) [link].

I particularly like:

  • But I love Charlotte’s Web most of all because it paints such a beautiful picture of the kingdom of God. When children’s literature is discussed in Christian circles, books like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe often dominate the conversation, perhaps because we know so much about the faith of the author. I don’t know if E.B. White was a person of faith, but I do know that Charlotte’s Web portrays a counter-cultural way of living and honoring one another, of making our world more whole. On Zuckerman’s farm, it is the despised, the lowly, the feared—the rat, the pig, the spider—who are best able to see each creature for the gift they are and to create a home where all are seen and cared for. 

You will probably come out of this with a list of books to reread that you haven’t picked up in some time (or ever).

The great sportswriter, Joe Posnanski (joeblogs.com), is so prolific he cannot “stay in his lane.”

It is often quite magical when he veers off into other topics. This week he and his wife have a daughter graduating from college. His stories about taking Elizabeth to Harry Potter World (“Katie the Prefect” [link]) or taking her to Hamilton (“The Story of Tonight” [link]) will make you mist up. Today’s offering was about taking her to see Bruce Springsteen (“No Retreat, Baby” [link]). (If you don’t care for the sports, just scroll down.)

The baseball writing is pretty great, too (even though Joe is no fan of the Yankees).

Here’s something that will make you think! Mary Harrington, “The Female Gaze” Reactionary Feminist (May 2, 2025) [link]. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to agree with everything — that’s the thinking part.)

Fascinating!

Posted on by albrooke

I had heard this story in short, but the people at Veritasium tell it brilliantly with interviews, archival film and graphics. The best 33 minutes you will waste on the web today. Check it out:

Want more information? Look out for Michael Greenburg, The Great Miscalculation: The Race to Save New York City’s Citicorp Tower (June 2025) [link]. Also, the original New Yorker article is available online: Joseph Morgenstern, The Fifty-Nine Story Crisis (May 21, 1995). [link] Wikipedia has an article, too: “Citicorp Center Engineering Crisis” [link].

Ruth and Esther?

Posted on by albrooke

One of my adult daughters is in a study that combines the books of Ruth and Esther, despite the fact that the two women who lend their names to the books lived about 600 years apart. The two short books share an important message:

Even when human circumstances are most bleak—famine, death, persecution—God does not for a moment fail to act in hidden ways to bring about what he has assured: first the line of a king he has chosen, and later the unlikely survival of his people in exile.

Dorothy Sayers

Posted on by albrooke

June 13, 1893 –December 17, 1957

  • Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man – there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything “funny” about woman’s nature.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human?

Election musings

Posted on by albrooke

Via Lore Ferguson Wilbert (sayable.com) [link], Henri J.M. Nouwen’s thoughts seem relevant:

  • “Hope is not dependent on peace in the land, justice in the world, and success in the business. Hope is willing to leave unanswered questions unanswered and unknown futures unknown. Hope makes you see God’s guiding hand not only in the gentle and pleasant moments but also in the shadows of disappointment and darkness. No one can truly say with certainty where he or she will be ten or twenty years from now. You do not know if you will be free or in captivity, if you will be honored or despised, if you will have many friends or few, if you will be liked or rejected. But when you hold lightly these dreams and fears, you can be open to receive every day as a new day and to live your life as a unique expression of God’s love for humankind. There is an old expression that says, “As long as there is life there is hope.” As Christians we also say, “As long as there is hope there is life.”

Via Alan Jacobs and The Hedgehog Review, Joan Didion’s words “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” might be applicable, but probably not the way we thought when first we read them:

  • That is, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” because there is no story outside of our minds: “We live entirely . . . by the imposition of a narrative line on disparate images” (emphasis mine). Our endless telling of stories is, then, the product not of delight but of despair: of our inability to face the chaos of what is. If people knew the context of the sentence, they wouldn’t be putting it on T-shirts. Instead, they’d be driven to therapy, to alcohol, or to church.

Alan Jacobs, “Stories to Live By,” The Hedgehog Review (Nov. 4, 2024) [link].

But there is hope and God is still on his throne, though (like Job), we often aren’t aware of what is going on behind the scenes.

The Internal Chronology of The Goldfinch

Posted on by albrooke

We start with the tentative premise that the novel’s internal timeline makes sense. The premise may be proven wrong, but there’s no point in fussing over a novel’s chronology if you begin by assuming it doesn’t work. You can skip directly to the point where you excoriate the sloppy author and editors without trying to see whether the author might have been careful.

The first good clue to the chronology comes on p. 8, where we read that the explosion in the Met:

  • [It] happened in New York, April 10th, fourteen years ago. (Even my hand balks at the date; I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.)

Theo is writing in Amsterdam just prior to Christmas fourteen years after the explosion. Since April to December is eight months, we can hold open the possibilities that he is recollecting this thirteen years and eight months or fourteen years and eight months later.

The next good clue is that the Met explosion happens after 2001, based on the references to “Osama bin Laden” (p. 58) and the “shoe bomber” (p. 246). While some people knew of Osama before 2001, the shoe bomber’s attempt happened in December 2001.

But that is actually way too early, because by the time Theo arrives at the Barbours’ later that week after the explosion, there is a reference to “Andy’s iPhone” (p. 139). The iPhone was introduced in January 2007 and first sold in June of that year. Even a wealthy child in New York might not have gotten his first iPhone until months later. The first April that Andy could have an iPhone would be April 2008.

We also know that the day of the week that the explosion happened was Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, since Theo laments

  • If only I could go back and change what had happened, keep it from happening somehow. Why hadn’t I insisted we get breakfast instead of going to the museum? Why hadn’t Mr. Beeman asked us to come in on Tuesday, or Thursday?

p. 87. We need a year in which April 10 was a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, so the explosion happened in 2002, 2006, 2009, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, or 2020.

We get another important clue to the timeline on p. 713:

  • “We close early today. Christmas Eve, you know? And we’re gone tomorrow, and the weekend. But we’ll be open again at eight-thirty a.m. on the Monday after Christmas.” “Monday?”  . . .  “That’s right. You get it all together by Monday the twenty-eighth. And then, yes, once the application is in we’ll process it for you as quickly as we can—sorry, will you excuse me a second?” Click.

From 2015 to 2030, there are only three December 28s that fall on a Monday – 2015, 2020 and 2026.

That means we should be looking at

  • Wednesday, 04/10/2002 + 13 years, 8 months, 18 days  = Monday, 12/28/2015
  • Monday, 04/10/2006 + 14 years, 8 months, 18 days = Monday, 12/28/2020
  • Wednesday, 04/10/2013 + 13 years, 8 months, 18 days = Monday, 12/28/2026

We know that the first two are too early, because of the iPhone issue. If Tartt considered such things carefully, only December 2026 works for her chronology.

So, tentatively, the Met explosion occurred on Wednesday, April 10, 2013 and Theo’s trip to Amsterdam must have occurred right before Christmas 2026.

That fits the reference to Osama, the shoe bomber, and the iPhone. What about the many other cultural references that Tartt works in? [1] Are there any true inconsistencies?

It is worth remembering that the book was published in 2013, with a release date of October 22, 2013. See https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/donna-tartt/the-goldfinch/ We can’t fault Tartt for failures of prognostication – she could only have known of events prior to publication. Complaints about the prevalence of newspapers and Blackberries during the novel’s later chapters aren’t her mistakes, any more than Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick should have been held responsible for proposing that Pan Am would be a thriving space tourism business in 2001.

[1] One difficult piece of evidence is on page 743, Boris’ reference to “Everyone loves him—like that man who landed the plane in the river a few years back and saved everyone, remember him?” which is a clear reference to Jan. 15, 2009, when Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger makes an emergency landing in the Hudson River after his airliner strikes a flock of birds. That might be a few years ago from the perspective of Tartt, but it is 18 years ago from Boris’ viewpoint.