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Trollope eventually got quite responsible work at the post office.

Some writers found consular and diplomatic posts: among the Americans, Hawthorne, Howell, and (James Russell) Lowell; among the French, Chateaubriand and Stendhal.

Louis Auchincloss was a lawyer.

I am not in that market, but this seems implausible. My neighborhood is pretty prosperous, but I doubt that $400k/year is the standard. Yet kids do go off to daycare.

That was the story that was current back then, at least the tying to a tree part. It may have been invented, but not by the New Yorker writer.

This is in the US? I have rarely heard political homilies.

What does this have to do with the post?

An acquaintance made some money as cantor to a synagogue around here. He was not Jewish, but I gather that the combination of singing and getting paid felt just fine.

In 1982 the Secretary of the Interior, James Watts, announced that Wayne Newton would perform at the National Mall on Independence Day, at least implying that the Beach Boys, who had been there the year before, really didn't reflect good American values. He was mocked for his, and the next year the Beach Boys came back. I did not go to the Mall, but heard some of their performance on the radio. They were terrible, and a musician I knew said that this was because men's voices deepen with age but the Beach Boys were still trying to sing in the original keys.

Jaroslav Pelikan's history of Christian doctrine runs to five volumes. I haven't read the last, but the first four are very readable. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) runs to something under 400 pages. Given the word "Catholic", I will add that Pelikan started off Lutheran and ended in one of the Orthodox churches.

Elite distance runners are likely to be running farther than a half marathon every day. There used to be a notion that your weekly mileage ought to be triple the distance you are training for, which for a marathon is about 79 miles per week, eleven-plus miles per day. My body would not tolerate much more than 60 miles per week, and honestly I don't know what most other recreational runners did.

Kids today miss the chagrin of damaging a protruding door handle, and the entertainment of one of their elders entirely removing one against some obstacle.

The most important Latin scholar in the world at that time? That is quite a claim. My recollection from Bernard Knox's essay "Closet Modern", collected in Essays Ancient and Modern is that Houseman's work, whatever its quality, was primarily on an author of limited interest.

But good for Houseman recovering from bilged examinations. Jonathan Swift did terribly on his examinations, but then made up for it.

[added}

> Virgil and the Greeks would have made Shakespeare not merely a great genius, which he was already, but, like Milton, a great artist, which he is not.

Really?

Housema praises Matthew Arnold's essay "On Translating Homer*. When I read it, I found its premise odd: "My one object is to give practical advice to a translator." If this is to say "a translator of Homer", then there are few in any generation who attempt the task. If to translators in general, then an essay of Hilaire Belloc's strikes me as much more to the point. Then "or what he has in common with Milton--the noble and profound application of ideas to life--is the most essential part of poetic greatness." seems to me to offer cover for some pretty bad poetry.

The FBI used to like to hire the young from southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina, and such places: generally the kids wouldn't have traveled at all far from their birthplaces, and so security checks were that much easier.

I don't use TikTok, but I can think of more than one Epstein who is not Jeffrey but whom I can imagine somebody sending a message about, for example Joseph Epstein.

This seems to be the week for retrenchment in Bezos World. The Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores are closing, The Washington Post is laying off half of its foreign correspondents, and the Post was planning to send nobody to the Winter Olympics but reversed that decision.

Something to do with being located between Germany and Russia? Or, if you will, Prussia, the Hapsburg Empire, and Russia?

I don't quite get your point about the blurring of church and state. What a government employee does with his own time can hardly be considered an act of the government.

Having said that, I otherwise agree with you, though I don't know about the flagging.

- said tweet parrots Trump's own tweet style

Haven't you noticed that grownups in the presence of a baby will speak baby talk?

As far as I know, all branches of the US military write up a "fitness report" for each officer once a year. "Above Average" is a certain career killer.

But somebody who was a dean at (I think) Virginia Tech wrote that the British "His work is quite sound, actually" could be higher praise than the American "His work sets the standard we all aspire to."

Americans don't celebrate failure?

Well, there's the Alamo. There's Custer's Last Stand. There's Douglas MacArthur getting a Medal of Honor for being chased out of Luzon.

And I urge American HNers to walk or drive around, and see how long it takes to see a Stars and Bars.

History: about halfway through The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis. (About halfway through 918 pages, not counting notes etc., so you will see that it holds the interest.)

Philosophy: about halfway through A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit by Quentin Lauer.

Memoir: last year read Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History by Peter Brown, The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustofsky.

There were point-shaving scandals in the 1950s and 1960s. (And, I see, 1970s and 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_shaving).

Didn't Dykstra say that what one needed was mathematical maturity and the ability to express oneself well in one's native language? Shouldn't a decent education in the liberal arts provide or at least help with the latter?

Don't lead off your question with a capsule autobiography (unless relevant), and do not frame your question to let the rest of the audience know how much you know.

My fiftieth college reunion (if I were to attend--I'm not planning to) is not far away, so a lot of things have changed.

But yes, it was worth it. It would have been more worth it had I taken more mathematics and foreign lannguages.

I look and form unfavorable judgments on new construction here and there in my neighborhood. Do I count?

Also, I think that "sidewalk superintendent" deserves a mention. That one I heard from a contractor who worked on our house.

I don't think there's a substitute for listening to your body. I came to this conclusion after trying to run through a sore knee 45 years go. Somehow the memory faded, and about seven years ago I ran myself into a painful case of plantar fascitis. Runners tend to be that way.

A friend has a watch that seems curiously judgmental, and has rated runs of his as sub-par or the equivalent. I told him that I'd put such a watch on the driveway and run it over.

A family friend was a Discalced Carmelite nun, ergo a member of a cloistered community. She later, we heard, became a hermit. I imagine that she had quarters of her own on the convent property, but I don't know.

Do you live in a metropolitan area, and if so, which? I know a number of places one can volunteer where I live, but if you are on the other side of the country, that wouldn't be much help.

Given that you have an anxiety disorder, you might look into volunteering with animal shelters--dogs are said to be calming.

Or, just walk into the vestibule of a church. In many cases there will be a bulletin board with a notice of volunteer opportunities, or a Sunday bulletin with the same. Note that this does not imply any religious commitment. Nobody's going to ask for your baptismal certificate if you're volunteering to sling hash for a dinner program.

My recollection--from Ohio, Colorado, Maryland, and Washington, DC--is that in the US the property owner is generally responsible for the sidewalk.

We are wary of salt, having damaged a stretch of sidewalk in a rowhouse development by heavily salting it one winter. Others, and the city of Washington, will put down salt at the least probability of snow.

I found out that, as I thought, I'd probably rather have read Frederick Law Olmsted on his travels in the antebellum South than Tony Horwitz (Spying on the South) on Olmsted on etc.

I found out that falling out of bed is not just for children, and that bringing an adult's body mass is not an improvement. I don't suppose that I'd fallen out of bed since LBJ was president.

I found out that YouTube has some interesting notions about me: the opening ad on a rather bland video was anything but bland, astonishing even a jaded old man.

I offer an upvote for a plausible interpretation of

"I feel like I am tap dancing ..."