20 Favorites of 2021
After this turbulent, difficult but ultimately enlightening year, I’m sending you my favorite posts.
This is my New Year’s gift to you, my devoted readers. — Sallie
Groundhog Pâté
I might have forgotten Groundhog Day entirely except for a box that’s just arrived from my dear friend, Wren Smith, in Kentucky.
Vindication
The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s grant of 1.6 million dollars to pay for the digitalization of thousands of tape-recorded oral histories of indigenous people has a special meaning for me.
Goodbye and Hello
The degree of change that has transpired since the long overdue advent of Black Lives Matter and the murder of Breonna Taylor in Louisville last spring is summed up for me in a Community Forum essay by columnist Quintez Brown.
Huck and The Daughters
Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, easily his masterpiece, was published eighteen years earlier and would have given the ladies palpitations if they had dared to read it.
Saving Wolf Pen Mill
Wake up, you well-off widows! We are all part of a world that is threatened by our individual decisions.
Smashing the Canon
We are still engaged—and will probably always be engaged—in smashing the canon.
Murder in Mississippi
I know what to expect of Rockwell’s art, or I thought I did: homey sentimental depictions of an America that no longer exists and perhaps never did.
Guilty Until Proved Innocent…
Does fearlessness on the part of girls and young women cancel judgement and common sense?
No Phone No Gun
The Danes are a practical people living within the limits of a limited world.
Her Pact With the Devil
The habit of forming pacts to shape her chosen life began when Karen Blixen was standing on a granite boulder at Folehave with her younger brother Thomas, then fourteen.