"With more than 10,000,000 copies sold since it first appeared in 1960, "To Kill a Mockingbird" exists as one of the best-selling novels of all time. For decades, Ms. Lee has remained fiercely mindful of her privacy, politely but resolutely refusing to talk to the press and making only rare public appearances, in which she always declines to speak."
"Ms. Lee said she was struck by the perspective young people bring to the book. 'They always see new things in it,' she added. 'And the way they relate it to their lives now is really quite incredible.'"
"Just permit us to believe in you. You must."What a Christmas gift, eh? Thanks, Hornblower.
"A museum visitor shattered three Qing dynasty Chinese vases when he tripped on his shoelace, stumbled down a stairway and brought the vases crashing to the floor, officials said Monday."
"By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes. High-school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests. The number of boys who said they didn't like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a University of Michigan study. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body. Now they're a minority at 44 percent. This widening achievement gap, says Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of Education, 'has profound implications for the economy, society, families and democracy.'"
"According to the National Sleep Foundation, the average adult sleeps six hours and 58 minutes per night during the work week. One hundred years ago - before Mr. Edison's marvelous invention - people slept about nine hours a night....Now we are a nation of the chronically sleep-deprived."
"Last year the Washington Post reported that naptime is increasingly 'a luxury that 4-year-olds no longer can afford.' Many Washington-area schools are eliminating naps from the kindergarten curriculum, so that 45 more minutes can be devoted to instruction."
"Sleep more: this may seem a curious answer to the question of what Christians can do for the common good. Surely one could come up with something more other-directed, more sacrificial, less self-serving."
"We are creatures, with bodies that are finite and contingent. For much of Western history, the poets celebrated sleep as a welcome memento mori, a reminder that one day we will die...Is it any surprise that in a society where we try to deny our mortality in countless ways, we also deny our need to sleep?"
"I've said something pleasant to every member of my family, almost, so now I can ignore them for a while in favor of literature. And it is Leo Tolstoy who is giving me the eye. No, not War and Peace. I'm not that brave this early. But I do think I have enough courage for Anna Karenina.
Great books rarely make their way into daily conversation (or at least my daily conversation), but I remember my father saying once that he disagreed with the first sentence of Anna Karenina. Unlike Tolstoy, Dad thinks all unhappy families are alike, and every happy family is happy in its own way. I hate to disagree with Tolstoy so early in our relationship, and yet I do trust Dad. But to put them both in their place, I can't imagine finding a family that could manage to be always happy or always unhappy, hard though they may try."
COVID:2 Collage Four years ago today we all came home for the lock down. Middle school classes conducted by zoom on the deck, college cours...
