Posts by Pamela
Damon Runyon is Not Ring Lardner
This post has its roots in one simple fact: Damon Runyon is not Ring Lardner. Or perhaps I should say that Ring Lardner is not Damon Runyon. As I mentioned in my last blog post: I mixed the two men up in my head. My fingers typed Ring Lardner in my original notes but my…
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Adventures in Journalism: The Chicago Tribune’s Army Edition
These days I’m deep in the history of American journalism, particularly America’s foreign correspondents and war correspondents. (FYI, not all foreign correspondents were war correspondents, and vice-versa.) It is a fascinating world of colorful characters, competition, camaraderie, and occasional back-stabbing. Newspaper owners, particularly those who maintained reporters overseas, were engaged in a constant balancing act…
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The Fabric of Civilization
Two sentences early in Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World caught my imagination: “What we usually call the Stone Age could just as easily be called the String Age. The two prehistoric technologies were literally intertwined.” I was predisposed to enjoy the book, which combines two of my favorite…
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