Let's write about "How to read a book!"

 This Is the Solution to America’s Literacy Crisis, and It’s a Lot of Fun by Peter Schmidt.

If you’ve read the news lately — or, more likely, heard it, watched it or spied half a headline on your friend’s Instagram feed — you’ve been told that literacy is doomed. High school seniors are reading at the lowest levels in over 20 years, and college students don’t know how to read a book cover to cover. There is plenty to mourn in these developments, but as an English syllabus fixture of yore might have said, reports of literacy’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Having come of age amid Covid-19 lockdowns and the proliferation of social media, young people crave the forms of human connection that teach us to live in the world we actually inhabit, not the one we see onscreen — asking questions, thinking together and beholding the strangeness of the reality passed down to us. 

As it happens, books are uniquely powerful objects around which to organize these sorts of activities.

That’s why the act of engaging with written texts — the basis of our cultural, political and intellectual life for over 500 years — is not coming to an end. It’s changing to meet new needs by offering the kinds of experiences digital technologies can’t provide: synchronous, IRL encounters with other human beings.

In other words, the future of reading is a party.
Books are bringing people together. Gen Z reading groups are popping up across the United States and the Silent Book Club, a community that gathers for silent reading, now has over 2,000 chapters across 68 countries. 

Reading retreats and summer camps hosted by the Bad Bitch Book Club regularly convene between 15 and 90 enthusiasts for weekend-long getaways, giving new meaning to the term “escapist literature.” 

Sally Mercedes, the events coordinator at Magic City Books in Tulsa, Okla., sees bookstores playing an increasingly social function for their customers. “A lot of bookish people tend to be introverts,” she told me. “We need a space where we know that we’re on common ground with others.”
Other experiments are remixing the traditional book club format or breaking out of it entirely. The Consumption Book Club, a “literary and culinary event series” organized by the Gen Z artists Colette Estelle and Kyle Barnes, brings to life works such as Jeff VanderMeer’s “Annihilation” via meticulously themed dinner parties and facilitated conversations. 

A recent public reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” organized by 20-somethings drew hundreds of people to Washington Square Park in New York City. 

The Strother School of Radical Attention, where I work, helps to gather groups over a dozen times a month in six states for Sidewalk Study, a practice of reading and enacting long-form texts while moving through public space.
These gatherings vary in location, duration and subject matter, but their unifying spirit is simple: that reading can be as much a mode of vibrant sociality as it is of secluded interiority.
Easy as it is to forget, sitting alone and reading in silence — the activity that professors tend to worry about — was once a novelty. 

In his “Confessions,” Saint Augustine of Hippo relates stumbling upon Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, in a moment of perplexing absorption: “While reading, his eyes glanced over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.” That Augustine bothered to describe this scene tells us something about the way reading commonly took place in the ancient world: as a public practice, recited before groups of lettered and unlettered listeners alike. Herodotus is thought to have read portions of his histories aloud, and performative “recitationes” of written texts were a favored form of entertainment and debate in Imperial Rome.
The practice of reading in and for groups endured in modern times in spaces of religious worship, workers’ study groups and avant-garde literary performances. 

But the spread of the printed word and the subsequent democratization of literacy cemented solitary, silent absorption as the dominant image of the reading person. This is the kind of reading we are taught to do in school. It is also the kind of reading that students are now failing to do in ever greater numbers.
Why? There’s no denying that young people are suffering from the harms of smartphone use and cognitive outsourcing to artificial intelligence. 

These are serious problems, but they are only half the story. Students understand as well as anyone else that long-form text is no longer the exclusive, or even the most effective, tool for distributing knowledge, connecting people across time and space and coordinating complex decisions. We’re in a moment of eclipse: The informational function of books is declining, and their experiential function is coming to the fore. This shift can bring new vitality not only to the lives of readers but also to long-form texts themselves.
Engaging with books as instruments for group experience is not the sort of reading that we encounter in classrooms, but it has plenty to teach us about the complexities of inhabiting the world together — and the ways that our literary inheritance can prepare us for the challenge. While educators may never abandon traditional instruction in solitary reading, right now they face an enormous opportunity to impart a new vision for the role of literacy in public life.

Last month, I helped to organize one of these gatherings in Dumbo, on the Brooklyn waterfront: an all-night group recitation of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” on the eve of the poet’s 207th birthday. We had 25 RSVPs, but, swelled by plus-ones and walk-ins, ended up with closer to 50 people in attendance. Two or three older Whitman enthusiasts joined us, but nearly all of the other people seemed to be in their 20s.
After four hours of recitation, singing, repetition, call and response and countless other experimental reading methods, we decamped to the shore of the East River, where around 2 a.m. we let out a full-throated collective yawp. 

In the breathless quiet that followed, a recent college graduate standing beside me admitted that she had never even read Whitman before. Several nodding heads assured her she wasn’t the only one. Then, emboldened by the company, she proposed: “Let’s do it again📙📘📗❓”

P.S. From Maine Writer:  I recently reviewed on Amazon a very short story read on my Kindle, written by Heather Graham, titled "Mercy Knows No Color".  For those with an Amazon Prime account, this read is probably free if you have an iCloud or e-reader. It is only 13 pages long.

Those who follow Heather Graham will be a little surprised by her creation of a short history lesson couched in the roots of the Civil War.  I recommended this short essay/story for community read aloud programs, even before reading this essay in The New York Times❗ Also, I put the short review on my Facebook page link here.

Let's write about teaching profane literature! OMG next comes book burning

Echo report published in The New York Times by David Ovalle

Florida Professor Fired for Assigning a Profane Story, Lawsuit Says

South Florida State College fired an English professor after she assigned a story about a teacher who talks about sex with her students. Now the professor is suing.

Vinita Prabhakar, who taught English at South Florida State College, said in an interview that she assigned the story to challenge her students.

An English professor is suing the president of a Florida college that she says fired her for assigning a story that he called “political,” according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday.

The story, Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Bettering Myself,” is an award-winning story narrated by a fictional teacher who drinks to excess, uses cocaine and discusses sex with her students.
The instructor, Vinita Prabhakar, said in an interview that she had taught the story in her classes for nearly a decade without incident. But in February, according to her lawsuit, the president of South Florida State College, Fred Hawkins, objected to the assignment after a student expressed “mild discomfort.” The president told Ms. Prabhakar that he would not want his college-age daughter to read the story, the lawsuit says.

In a move that is highly unusual for a college president, Hawkins immediately ordered that Ms. Prabhakar be suspended and her contract not renewed, the suit says. The suit asks that she be restored to her teaching position.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a group that advocates free speech, is representing Ms. Prabhakar.
Some courts have ruled that universities can restrict certain speech of university professors in classrooms. 

But, they have also ruled that the First Amendment offers greater protection if the speech is part of professors’ official duties, which can include teaching approved material, and is not disruptive.

Ms. Prabhakar’s attorneys also assert she is protected by a Florida law governing campus free speech. 

Public officials such as Hawkins “may not suppress speech because they dislike the ideas it conveys or fear a reaction to it,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit is the latest legal battle over the boundaries of protected free speech in schools in Florida, where Republicans have for years sought to restrict teachings they believe are inappropriate or too left-leaning.

Hawkins and school officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has championed efforts to quash what he has deemed liberal indoctrination in education. For instance, he pushed a parental freedom law that limited instruction on gender and sexuality in elementary and middle schools, prompting some districts to remove books featuring L.G.B.T.Q. characters.

In 2022, DeSantis also signed into law the Stop WOKE Act, which restricts concepts related to sexism and racism that can be taught in K-12 schools. The law sought to do the same in higher education, allowing the state to limit the teaching of ideas related to race, sexism and unconscious bias by tying it to teacher salaries.

A federal appeals court, however, struck down that portion of the law this month. The majority wrote that the provision was a “breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse” in classrooms where students are “trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard.”

Ms. Prabhakar, who has worked full time at South Florida State College since 2023, said the point of assigning “Bettering Myself” was to challenge students in her introductory reading and writing course. As part of the assignment, students had to read first-person stories told by other unlikable narrators — like “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver — to contrast narrative voice, perspective, vocabulary and style, according to the lawsuit.

In colleges, such materials “take students out of their comfort zone, expose them to new ideas and provide opportunities for growth and intellectual maturation,” the suit said.

Ms. Prabhakar said in the interview that she had taught the assignment in previous years at South Florida State College with approval of supervisors.

The student who had emailed to say the story “made me a bit uncomfortable” ultimately completed the assignment and participated in class discussions without any incident, the suit said.
It is unclear who complained about the assignment to the school administration, according to the lawsuit. It accuses Hawkins of terminating Ms. Prabhakar without a formal complaint or attempt at lesser discipline.

The lawsuit is the latest legal battle over the boundaries of protected free speech in schools in Florida, where Republicans have for years sought to restrict teachings they believe are inappropriate or too left-leaning.

Hawkins, a former state representative and a DeSantis ally, was named president of the public community college in 2023. The school’s main campus is in Avon Park, Fla., southeast of Tampa.

The selection process drew scrutiny because Hawkins held no advanced college degrees and became eligible only after the board of trustees lowered the position’s educational requirements. 

At the time, one trustee acknowledged to The Tampa Bay Times that the board was expected to appoint a Republican and that he had concerns about a potential left-leaning president’s adherence to “woke” ideology.

In the suit, Ms. Prabhakar said she had apologized to the president and agreed to teach only material that appeared in a textbook. But Mr. Hawkins told her he had “been in contact with Tallahassee” and the board of trustees. The suit also names the board of trustees.

Ms. Prabhakar, 51, said that she hoped her lawsuit would help protect fellow professors. “I’m also doing this for my students,” Ms. Prabhakar said. “They were robbed — they were excited to come to class.”

Let's Write about protecting the rights of trees! Who speaks for the trees?

Who Speaks for the Trees❓ 🌲🌳A Tiny Quebec Town.

Echo report by Ephrat Livni published in The New York Times.

QUEBEC- Terrasse-Vaudreuil has adopted a resolution to protect trees, which its mayor called “indispensable allies,” as living beings.

The small town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil, Quebec, was carved out of the forest about 75 years ago. But until recently, the trees had no rights.

A few countries and local jurisdictions around the world have recognized the rights of nature to varying degrees. This town of about 2,000, just west of Montreal, is the first governing body to adopt the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Trees, according to the global environmental law tracker, Eco Jurisprudence Monitor. The resolution recognizes that trees, as living beings, have the right to exist, thrive and receive protections in the law.

“If we live in Terrasse-Vaudreuil, it’s because we love trees,” said Sylvie Trépanier, a member of the town’s environmental committee, which drove the resolution. “We want to keep what we have.”
Trees, Please

Last spring, about 60 residents attended a screening of “Des Arbres et Des Arts,” or “The Trees and the Arts,” a documentary by the Quebec filmmaker André Desrochers that proposes trees should receive legal rights. “We decided we really need to do something,” Ms. Trépanier said

The town’s environmental committee wrote a proposal to prioritize tree protection for the health of the canopy and the broader community, and it gained widespread support.

When councilors adopted the resolution unanimously, Mayor Michel Bourdeau declared, “Today, we affirm that trees are not merely a backdrop in our community. They are indispensable allies for our health, our climate resilience, and our quality of life.”

The Universal Declaration on the Rights of Trees was drafted in France in 2018, and 2019, by lawyers, ecologists and lawmakers. It mandates that humanity “act with the Tree in a spirit of fraternity and solidarity” and has been presented as a petition to the United Nations and the European Parliament, among others.

Adopting the resolution was not merely symbolic, Mr. Bourdeau said in an interview. In Terrasse-Vaudreuil, practically, the resolution requires the town to prioritize canopy protection across all municipal planning. The next step is to review existing regulations and strengthen tree protections, the mayor said, followed by plans to plant and distribute trees to schools, businesses and residents in an ongoing effort to protect and diversify what has now been deemed a collective asset.

This month, a bill was introduced in the British Parliament to recognize the rights of nature. More than three dozen communities in the United States, and a handful in Canada, Mexico, Peru, Australia, Ireland, and Northern Ireland have adopted laws or nonbinding resolutions recognizing such rights, according to Mari Margil, who heads the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights. And Ecuador enshrined rights of nature in its Constitution in 2008.

Nature has long been considered property in legal systems around the world and treated as a resource. The rights of nature movement advances laws recognizing nature’s independent right to exist, thrive and regenerate.

In 2008, the organization Ms. Margil leads worked with delegates to Ecuador’s constitutional convention to develop rights of nature provisions. Since then, laws and court rulings in Panama, Colombia, Bolivia, Uganda, Bangladesh, and Spain “have recognized that nature possesses legally enforceable rights — including the most basic of rights, the right to exist,” she wrote. “This is a movement that has grown quickly,” she added.
But it took decades to gain traction.

Once Unthinkable:  “Throughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been, theretofore, a bit unthinkable,” wrote Christopher D. Stone in a 1972, Southern California Law Review article proposing legal rights for “natural objects” like trees.

He argued that “the rightlessness of rightless ‘things’” seems inherent or fundamentally true, rather than “a legal convention acting in support of some status quo.” Just as laws denying rights to women, children and people of various abilities, races, ethnicities, nationalities and religions were once considered just before becoming unacceptable, views on nature could similarly change, Mr. Stone suggested.

“It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak,” he wrote. “Corporations cannot speak either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities or universities. Lawyers speak for them.”

That same year, United States Supreme Court Justice William Douglas echoed this view, dissenting in a case that ruled the Sierra Club lacked standing to challenge development in California’s Sequoia National Forest. Justice Douglas argued people should be able to sue on behalf of “environmental objects” for their preservation, and that if inanimate objects, like ships, can be parties in litigation, “so it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life.”

The justice’s stance more than a half century ago is “still pretty far out,” said Carl R. Gold, a Maryland lawyer and naturalist who has written about tree rights. But, he praised Terrasse-Vaudreuil for taking “a terrific first step.”

“Trees need someone to speak up for them,” he said.

Ephrat Livni is a Times reporter covering news around the world. 

Let's write about a special Veterans Museum in Vermont- Luke's Military Museum

 Published in The New York Times By Jasper Craven who reports on the military and veterans. He is the author of “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood.” Visuals by Amina Gingold

The 15-Year-Old Keeping War Memories Alive

On the edge of a goat farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom sits Luke’s Military Museum, an aluminum trailer that serves as a loving testament to the nation’s veterans.

The museum’s 15-year-old founder, Luke Morrison, has amassed an impressive collection of military artifacts and collected war stories through hundreds of conversations with veterans.

He is always on the lookout for new subjects to interview. The most obvious tell is a service cap, though Luke will often venture a guess. “If I’m in the grocery store and I see an old guy, I’ll be like, ‘Were you in the military?’ And usually it’ll be, ‘Yes,’” he said.
Exhibits include the uniform of Tim Bedor, an Iraq war veteran; the jump boots of Vinny Matteis, a Vietnam airman; and a Marine pin from Pete Racine, a dare-devilish World War II veteran who, at 92, was said to be the oldest man to stunt flip a car. The antique camper holding these artifacts was purchased by Luke’s great-granduncle, Dwight Cooley, a World War II veteran whose photo sits on a shelf.
Luke may be the youngest person keeping alive an age-old tradition: to process war through the memories and mementos of those who experienced it.

This work is invaluable, occasioned by two federal holidays — Veterans Day and Memorial Day — with additional reminders immortalized in monuments and etched on gravestones. Veterans’ memories inform how this country understands its past conflicts — and ought to influence whether we embark on new ones.
On a recent tour, Luke told me that before his death, a local Vietnam veteran, Harry Swett, donated shoulder patches to Luke’s museum. He also hosted Luke a few times in his living room, where, over hours of war stories, Mr. Swett shared the highs and lows of his military service.

“There’s nights that he’s sleeping in a foxhole that was full of water — I mean, completely submerged,” Luke told me. “And then there’s other times where he’s telling me about having fun with friends.”
Mr. Swett criticized draft dodgers, but after his son, Joseph, was born, he said he would shuttle him north to Canada to avoid the draft if another war broke out — only to lose him in a snowmobile accident at 19. Luke understood Mr. Swett’s wishes. While he relishes the noble stories of military bravery and camaraderie, he understands the perilous stakes for those who serve.
Military technology is promising to reduce human danger in warfare by sharply curtailing our participation in it. The Pentagon will become an “A.I. first” institution, integrating artificial intelligence wherever possible from “campaign planning to kill chain execution.” There is a clean logic to this technological drive, but also a danger of sanitizing conflict. (Makes killings and wars look too much like a "video game".)

War memories like the ones Luke’s museum is dedicated to preserving yield lessons, instincts and wisdom that cannot be computed by A.I.

World War II’s staggering human toll forever haunted Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe. Days after returning to the United States, Mr. Eisenhower told a joint session of Congress that the best way to honor those killed in battle was to ensure “this will not happen again.” As president, Mr. Eisenhower staunchly supported diplomacy and the United Nations, ended combat in the Korean War and, in his famous farewell address, warned about the dangers of the growing influence of the “military-industrial complex.”

Proponents of military technology argue that automation is simply the latest innovation in a long chain of advances that have moved combatants farther away from one another. While the saber required intimate violence, a plane can now deliver mass casualties from thousands of feet in the sky. But humans have always been solidly in charge, able to override a bad order, provide mercy or even defect entirely. It’s hard to picture A.I. doing any of these things.
During my visit to Luke’s museum, I was moved by the experiences of veterans like Mr. Swett, who was hard-working, patriotic and, according to Luke, very funny. His service in Vietnam was an expression of his belief in this country — and Luke loved him for it.
Mr. Swett died in October 2023, a few months before Luke’s museum opened. In the weeks that followed, Luke routinely called his widow, Claudette Swett, to check in, and invited her to his family’s log cabin for Christmas Eve. 

Luke was still in the process of renovating the trailer, so his bedroom served as a temporary exhibit, cramped with mannequins, uniforms and black-and-white war photos.

“He had a table just for Harry,” Mrs. Swett recalled. She was sad that her husband couldn’t see the fruits of Luke’s labor, but she knew how much Luke’s earnest curiosity about Harry’s service in Vietnam had nurtured him in his final days. It is remarkable, Mrs. Swett concluded, that someone of Luke’s age has worked so hard to imagine what it meant to be there.

Julie's P.S. my husband Richard wears one of his veterans hats to the grocery story. He is always stopped by at least one person who says, "Thank you for your service" or by another veteran who just wants to talk. Our local Hannaford grocery has special parking spots for veterans.

Humans looking for space aliens? Who knew? Let's write about how aliens might see human beings!

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Give Us the Aliens

Echo essay published in The New York Times

Ever since childhood I’ve wanted to be abducted by aliens. 

Now, as a professional astrophysicist armed with the knowledge of the size, age and composition of the cosmos, I know that nothing prevents any of us from imagining a universe teeming with life.

So the impending release of U.S. government files on aliens and U.F.O.s is a good thing, even if it feels like a distraction from other important files we’ve all been waiting to be disclosed. I expect the alien files will be anticlimactic. After a parade of alien insiders and whistle-blowers testified under oath to Congress in 2023, 2024 and 2025, what’s left to learn?

Personally, I’d be delighted if the files were accompanied by an actual alien. Alive or dead or undead. Preferably alive. Is that too much to ask for?

The whistle-blowers have already told us about the crashed flying saucers, extraterrestrial bodies and alien technology in our possession — hidden in undisclosed places. Not only that, but secret files have been declassified before. A 2017 headline in this newspaper was unambiguous: “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” And who could forget the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which studied more than 12,000 U.F.O. sightings from 1952, until the project was terminated in 1969, with the goal of assessing threats to national security.

What’s clear, however, is that if an authentic alien walked out of the halls of Congress, nobody would ever again have to ask if you “believe” in aliens, just as nobody questions the existence of elephants. An alien of the alien files could become the literal elephant in the room.

Without good evidence of what actual aliens look like, we’re stuck imagining them. And imagine them we do. IMDb, an online database about entertainment, lists hundreds upon hundreds of films, TV shows, video games and documentaries about aliens — both friendly and evil. Mostly evil.

Disappointingly, in nearly all these portrayals, these aliens look a lot like us. They’re humanoid, with a head, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, a neck, shoulders, a torso, arms, fingers and legs. Remember that most life on Earth, with which we have DNA in common, looks nothing like us or any vertebrate animal. So we should expect aliens with no DNA in common — or no DNA at all — to look at least as different from humans as humans and other life-forms on Earth (like jellyfish or termites) look different from each other.

The only thing that would shock me about a living, declassified alien is if most Hollywood depictions ended up being right, violating everything we know about biodiversity on Earth and across the universe.

We care a lot about what aliens look like, but we don’t pay nearly enough attention to what we might look like to them. If an alien emissary landed in Los Angeles, for example, its first impression might be that Earth’s dominant life-form is the automobile. 🚗

Indeed, the congested city is heavily crisscrossed by major freeways, many of them 12 lanes wide. People line up in their cars on slow lines to obtain fast food handed through a window. They consume the food while still seated, never exiting their vehicles. Some of the larger life-forms on the freeway carry multiple automobiles within them. To the aliens, these car haulers are surely pregnant.

Assuming on arrival that the alien knew we were human, it would probably want to meet the person in charge. Who exactly would that be? The president? The prime minister? The pope? Or would it be a multibillionaire or captain of industry? Not knowing anything in advance about human civilization, but picking up clues from our cultural norms before arrival from leaked radio waves, an alien might instead expect to meet Ryan Gosling, Taylor Swift or Oprah Winfrey.

If we look more deeply into our own alien stories, there’s a persistent plotline that aliens are evil and want to kill us all. I suspect those fears are based not on what we believe about aliens but on what we know about humans.

In the history of our species, there’s no shortage of technologically advanced cultures that commit rampant violence against less-advanced ones. Within what we call civilization, humans oppress — or kill — one another over which creator of the universe they worship, or who they sleep with, or what side of an arbitrary line on Earth’s land masses they’re born, or how absorptive their skin is to sunlight, or what set of sounds comes out of their mouths.

Upon bearing witness to our irrational ways, any visiting alien that might have accompanied the release of the alien files surely long ago escaped back home to report, “There’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth!”

Let's write about how oligarchs are consuming publishing companies just because they can

 Opinion Guest Essay published in The New York Times

French Literature Is in an Uproar May 6, 2026

By Olivier Guez, a French writer who published five books at Grasset. His most recent book in translation is “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele.”

If you have never picked up a book in French, you might not ever have even heard of Grasset, and what it might mean to have its longtime chief executive Olivier Nora effectively guillotined by the rapacious right-wing industrialist Vincent Bolloré. 

And yet, in France, the news of Mr. Nora’s sudden departure from his post quickly flew beyond the borders of Parisian publishing and cultural elite circles. In the aftermath, over 200 writers — myself included — walked away from Grasset❗

This is not just a story about the French publishing industry. The evident struggle between Mr. Bolloré and Mr. Nora is a microcosm of the battle for cultural control that is taking place globally between the wealthy new right and the cultural old guard. Think Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post, Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. The abrupt change in leadership at Grasset, too, is a case study in the way members of the increasingly powerful ultra wealthy treat those who don’t think or see the world as they do.

A publishing house is not meant to be a propaganda machine. It is a place where conflict, doubt and nuance can, and should, coexist. Publishing houses are a hallmark of free and open societies: the nurturing and production of literature that explores the follies and the potential of the human condition.

Under the leadership of Mr. Nora, Grasset was the best of this ideal. The works of unapologetic feminist writers were placed on the shelf next to old-guard chauvinists, pro-Palestinian authors next to Zionists, male priests next to women rabbis, up-and-comers next to baby boomers, powerful people next to anti-establishment protesters. Grasset’s authors rarely agreed on much, but as the letter of protest we signed said, we have had — and still have — a common enemy: authoritarianism.

Grasset was just a tiny corner of the Bolloré financial empire. Nevertheless, losing Mr. Nora’s leadership is a sign of disdain among the powerful for a world of the recent past, one in which the public still accepted and cultivated contradictions, political complications, even conflict. It was not necessarily an enormously profitable world, but one where political opposites respected those who did not think alike, where knowledge itself garnered respect.

Mr. Nora, like the institution he led, was open and attentive to other people’s ideas. His weakness, if there was one, was immutable: his pedigree, which made him an easy target for the far right. 

Indeed, Mr. Nora is almost a caricature of the Parisian intellectual elite — his father was a political adviser to several major figures in French politics, and his uncle, Pierre Nora, was a longtime editor at another publishing house, Gallimard. Under Mr. Nora, Grasset maintained a pluralistic editorial policy.

Mr. Bolloré, by contrast, is the owner of a vast industrial conglomerate that has interests ranging from oil pipelines and energy storage to electric buses. 

Over the past several years, Mr. Bolloré has also been building a cultural empire, buying newspapers, radio stations, television channels and publishing houses. He acquired Grasset three years ago. 

As he picked up these levers of cultural power, he became editor, producer and distributor all at once. He is also, not incidentally, an extremely conservative Catholic. He has not only repeatedly brought outlets he has bought to heel by pushing the departure of people in important positions, replacing them with leaders apparently more loyal to him and his values. He has also leveraged his outlets to propagate fear and disseminate conspiracy theories about a decayed and decadent West, a Europe under threat from foreigners and egocentric old elites.

But Mr. Bolloré is, above all, a businessman: His cultural crusade is a very efficient moneymaker. His 24-hour news channel CNews — a kind of French Fox News — is the most popular news channel in France. Over the last two years, Mr. Bolloré also transformed Fayard, another historic French publishing house, into a largely far-right propaganda machine. 

Some of the most prominent figures of the French far right are now published by Fayard, including Jordan Bardella, the leader of the Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National. The party is leading the polls for next year’s presidential elections.

We are opening our eyes rather late in France to the efforts of the right to assume cultural control, to determine the words we consume, the discourse in which we partake. The message of authoritarians everywhere is the same: Whoever isn’t with me is against me, and whoever won’t follow me will get the boot. The boss is always right, so he steamrolls his way through and imposes his worldview. He exerts his power. He demands absolute loyalty from his subordinates. The plutocrats have become oligarchs.

We are opening our eyes rather late in France to the efforts of the right to assume cultural control, to determine the words we consume, the discourse in which we partake. The message of authoritarians everywhere is the same: Whoever isn’t with me is against me, and whoever won’t follow me will get the boot. The boss is always right, so he steamrolls his way through and imposes his worldview. He exerts his power. He demands absolute loyalty from his subordinates. The plutocrats have become oligarchs.

Mr. Nora’s departure was not enough. Mr. Bolloré also went on to smear the authors of Grasset who signed the letter. To do so he wrote an essay in his own newspaper — Le Journal du Dimanche — where he disdainfully referred to them as the “small caste that believes itself above everything and everyone, and that co-opts and supports itself.” He claimed to differ on the publication schedule for a book by the French-Algerian author Boualem Sansal set by Mr. Nora, and on the scale of the longtime C.E.O.’s salary. And then he fashioned himself, a billionaire, as the defender of the millions of French who struggle to make ends meet.

Most writers in France are barely eking out a living; people here spend less and less time reading, same as everywhere else. Few authors live off their writing income and, apart from rare exceptions, they do not belong to the global elite.

Not so very long ago, men like Mr. Bolloré paid to achieve a veneer of culture and cultivated a certain notion of beauty: The barons of the Gilded Age endowed America with incredible cultural institutions. Recently, business tycoons François Pinault and Bernard Arnault built in Paris magnificent art collections now open to the public.

Now these pretenses are all but obsolete: The wolf no longer has to disguise himself as the grandmother to get his way. Oligarchs are no longer staying hidden. They are flaunting their power, destroying, exploiting, intimidating and getting richer than any group of people in human history. They show utter disregard for the world, and complete impunity. They believe they are invincible.

The Grasset affair is a French story, and Mr. Nora is just one man. But it is a warning to us all, to the democratic peoples of every country. It shows the threats that are in motion in our societies. 

Although our democracies are still open, for now. But for how much longer❓🔹

Let's write about inspired religious art- Fra Angelico (born1395- died 1455)

Can a Painting Make a Skeptic Believe? By Cody Delistraty

Following the death of his mother, the artist Mark Rothko set off on a five-month trip across Europe in 1950, visiting the continent’s great museums. Echo opinion art review published in The New York Times.

The Annunciation- Archangel Gabriel with the Virgin Mary by Fra Angelico

But, it wasn’t until he visited a former Dominican convent in Florence, Italy, that he found what he was looking for.✝️👼😇 👼🏽🙏Each “cell” — where the convent’s friars lived — was adorned with a fresco painted by the 15th-century friar Fra Angelico that captured, Rothko said, what no other art he’d seen could.

“I traveled all over Europe and looked at hundreds of Madonnas,” Rothko wrote to a friend, “but all I saw was the symbol, never the concrete expression of motherhood.” 

With Angelico, though, Rothko recognized an artist of the highest order: Angelico’s paintings transcended representation to transmit deep emotional, spiritual experience.

A major influence on Abstract Expressionists like Rothko, wherein emotional evocation trumped figuration, Angelico’s great gift was his ability to convey a sense of the divine. 

Centuries later, his work invites a skeptic to belief. Angelico’s art has pushed me to find within myself a desire for belief I’d thought had been extinguished long ago.

So strong is Angelico’s own vision, so capable is he of showing it that while his foreign, 15th-century world of asceticism, magic and unconditional faith is at first discombobulating, it is a testament to his artistic ability that even more than half a millennium later, I find myself transported into his way of seeing the world, as though I were a friar in one of his cells.

Angelico began as an illustrator of illuminated manuscripts and had sold a few paintings by the time he joined the convent of San Domenico near Florence, where he took the name Fra Giovanni. (He posthumously gained the “angelic” moniker.) He was a man of deep faith, said to have wept every time he painted Jesus on the cross.

The Dominican friars of Angelico’s order were a particularly disciplined breed, following a 13th-century credo that encouraged extreme austerity. There was no search for meaning in that convent; it was a given. When Cosimo de’ Medici commissioned him to paint many of the frescoes in Angelico’s new convent of San Marco, it’s very likely Angelico didn’t even consider what he was doing to be “art.” His painting was, more than anything, an act of devotion — “visions,” as the art critic John Ruskin would later write.

This fall, I visited a major exhibit — running through January — at the Museo Nazionale di San Marco (where Rothko visited) and the nearby Palazzo Strozzi that brings one into Angelico’s world and faith.

There, you’ll find Angelico’s most stunning work, “The Annunciation,” outside the friars’ cells, up the stairs in the convent, which became a museum in 1869. A large-scale fresco painted in the 1440s, it depicts Mary and the Archangel Gabriel. 

Look first at Gabriel’s wings. Though the light and shadow of the scene are otherwise realistic, Angelico omits the shadows that would otherwise emanate from the angel’s wings, lending Gabriel an other worldliness.

Look next at both Gabriel and Mary’s eyes. Angelico has given the angel a feminized face — neat lashes, reddened cheeks, golden and curly hair. He looks ever so slightly upward at Mary. He is here to deliver impossible news. His eyes pretend toward authority, but mostly he appears puzzled. Mary meets his gaze with a look of her own weighted shock, her lips pursed, her neck arched downward so that she has quietly become the one in control of the conversation, as though, with the exchange of this revelation, she now embodies a divinity greater even than an angel.

Look then at the architecture around them. The ornate, Corinthian columns, the mathematically precise Roman arches. How classical and ordered. What a contrast these exacting, human creations are to the cosmic information being delivered and received by these startlingly modern, expressive faces. It is as though the word of the Virgin birth has slashed its way through art history itself, so that we can practically see the Classical giving way to the early Renaissance.

And though it would have mattered a great deal to Angelico, it matters not to contemporary eyes whether the viewer believes this scene to have ever occurred. It will capture you regardless.

“You may be as little of a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one,” the novelist Henry James wrote after visiting the former convent, “you yet feel admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the Christian story work its utmost will on you.”

It is this ability to emotionally spellbind the viewer that most sets Angelico apart — imparting belief through art. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the philosopher, described Angelico’s key artistic invention as interiority: “that indwelling significance of human features.” Angelico did not just depict; he evoked. Before Angelico, one largely found ideas in art, but not necessarily feeling.

Consider, as Hegel does, an ancient Egyptian sculpture of Isis embracing her son, Horus. In this, there is no warmth, no “soul,” writes Hegel. The artist expects the viewer to know that there exists love between these two by the nature of their relationship. The viewer must generate within himself the associated feelings and apply it to the art.

Angelico, by contrast, elicits these emotions — through his depictions of eyes, hands, the use of light and so much else — so that upon looking at his art one is immediately struck by the love and intimacy flowing between his depictions of Virgin and Child or the awe and befuddlement between her and Gabriel in “The Annunciation.” 

Angelico broke through art history by subtracting a crucial step. One does not regard his art, then create feeling, then look again to see that feeling manifest; rather, the seeing and the feeling are simultaneous, as Rothko saw in Angelico’s work. The artwork has become the emotion.

Let's Write about "The Night Before Christmas" back in the days before copyright!

 a copy of “A Visit From St. Nicholas” that only recently turned up

A Famous Christmas Poem Could Sell for $500,000

Report published in The New York Times by James Barron.

“There it is, the beginning of the modern Christmas,” Peter Klarnet said, as I picked up a faded handwritten copy of a poem and squinted at the lines most of us know, starting with “’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house.”

Klarnet is a senior specialist in Americana, books and manuscripts at Christie’s, which was preparing to sell the paper I was holding — for around $500,000. No wonder he was concerned about what else was in my hand. “Let’s watch that pen,” he said as his eyes locked on my ballpoint.

I put it down and went back to the ornate little loops and curls that formed Clement Clarke Moore’s familiar words.

The main character was “a right jolly old elf.” The R and the E start as far below the rest of the line as the J.

St. Nicholas’s supporting cast, the “eight tiny reindeer,” was introduced three lines from the bottom of the first page. Their names, all underlined, appeared on the second page. The last line — “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!” — was also underlined.

“A Visit From St. Nicholas,” as Moore titled the poem, clinched the transformation of a Dutch saint into an American icon. Washington Irving, who created Rip Van Winkle and the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, wrote a satire poking fun at the Dutch who originally controlled New York. One of his characters, Peter the Headstrong, was a fairly obvious caricature of the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant, who had to hand over New Amsterdam to the British — who, in turn, renamed the city New York.

Moore’s readers might not have recognized Irving’s St. Nicholas: He had a broad-brimmed hat. Moore made him more likable and more relatable. And, still later in the 19th century, the cartoonist Thomas Nast drew the portly image that stuck in people’s minds.

Klarnet said he had found the copy of “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” the fifth in Moore’s handwriting, among manuscripts that belonged to relatives of Adrian Van Sinderen, a prominent collector who died in 1963. It’s probably not surprising that Moore’s poem would have appealed to Van Sinderen: He wrote 25 books that had to do with Christmas, according to his obituary in The New York Times.

There is no known original manuscript of “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” Perhaps that is because Moore did not want his reputation as a serious academic brought down by something so frivolous. He taught Hebrew and Greek literature at the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea.  (Maine Writer- Ahhhh, 💕💕😍 , back in the days before copyright and royalties....so, in the history of publishing, this adorable story is truly a Christmas gift to the world.)

The original may have been what was sent to a friend in Troy, N.Y., who passed along the poem to a local newspaper that published it — anonymously — in 1823. Moore finally acknowledged authorship when he published a book of poems in 1844. (The family of Henry Livingston Jr. later claimed that Livingston had written it. Klarnet said the evidence pointed to Moore, because the editor of the Troy paper described the author of the poem as a resident of New York City. Livingston lived upstate.)

No one seems to know how Van Sinderen obtained the copy now at Christie’s, which has a discoloration on the first page, probably from where it had been pressed against a smaller piece of paper, Klarnet said.

The copy first showed up in a magazine called St. Nicholas in the early 1870s. Someone had apparently photographed the first page of the copy, and the magazine made an engraving from the photo, Klarnet said. 

That tripped him up. At first, he suspected that the copy was merely a facsimile engraving. Only later, when he took a closer look and noticed changes in the tone of the ink from word to word, did he conclude that it was an actual handwritten copy.

“You see how much darker the exclamation point is?” he asked, pointing to the one after Vixen’s name. In an engraving, he said, the punctuation would not have looked like that.

Let's write about the history of performing magic

Echo essay by Richard Segal* published in The New York Times:

Richard Hatch was searching the card catalog of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, hunting for intriguing titles under the subject heading “Magic.”

It was 1979, and Hatch was a young graduate student in physics, but he’d long nurtured an amateur’s passion for the conjuring arts and, on this day at least, he preferred to read about sleight of hand than quantum mechanics.

His rummaging stopped when he spotted a title called “Die Juden in der Zauberkunst.” Hatch had spent four years of his youth in Germany so he translated it instantly: “Jews in Magic.” The card said the book was written by someone named Guenther Dammannand published in Berlin in 1933.

He paused. A book about Jews in magic, from Germany, in the very year that the Nazis assumed power and started burning “un-German” books in bonfires across the country. It seemed obvious. This was an antisemitic tract, identifying Jews to make it easier for the government to persecute them and the public to shun them.

Awful, Hatch thought. He then looked for a magic book he actually wanted to read.

Hatch would go on to earn two graduate degrees in physics but left the field in 1983, after realizing that his ardor for magic had completely overwhelmed his interest in science. 

He became a full-time “deceptionist,” as he calls it. While he honed his craft and looked for gigs, he translated a 1942 German book about the famed Austrian magician J.N. Hofzinser. That brought him to the attention of a collector of Judaica and magic books who urged him to translate a fascinating rarity he’d acquired: “Die Juden in der Zauberkunst.”

“That’s when I realized that the book was about the great contributions that Jews have made to magic,” Hatch said in an interview.

Dammann, it turns out, was a 23-year-old Jew and amateur magician, the son of a well-off banker, who lived with his parents and brothers in Berlin when he self-published his book. It was 100 pages long and, historians say, the first attempt to inventory the great Jewish magicians, both living and dead.

Most of “Jews in Magic” is devoted to brief biographical essays inunadorned prose of more than 50 renowned professionals. One entry told the story of the Frenchman Alexander Herrmann, who, in decades of touring, dazzled Abraham Lincoln, Czar Alexander, and the prisoners of Sing Sing and who pioneered the suave devil look — goatee, tuxedo — that became the industry standard. Another profiled Harry Houdini, the Hungarian-born son of a rabbi, who escaped from handcuffs, jails and straitjackets and became one of the most famous showmen of his age.

The book was an oddly timed exercise in ethnic pride and a singular artifact of a life cut short. In 1942, Dammann and nearly 800 others were transported on rail cars to Riga, Latvia, where, Nazi records show, they were shot upon arrival.

Hatch, who lives in semiretirement in a small town in northern Utah, finished his translation of “Jews in Magic” four years ago and is strategizing about how to get it published, with annotations and photographs. At 68, he is a kind of one-man historical preservation society dedicated to Dammann.

Everyone Has a Theory

Since Dammann’s death, the ranks of Jewish conjurers has only grown. Among the notable: David Copperfield, David Blaine, Ricky Jay, Teller — who is the silent half of Penn & Teller — and Uri Geller, who, for the record, has long denied that his spoon bending is a trick. Gloria Dea, born Gloria Metzner, was the first magician to play Las Vegas. Max Maven, born Philip Goldstein, was one of the world’s most admired mentalists.

Why have Jews been so prominent in magic? In his book, Dammann does not speculate. So in January, I visited MagiFest, one of the country’s largest conventions of magicians, held annually in Columbus, Ohio. I went to hear Hatch give a lecture about Dammann, but the convention proved the ideal setting for an informal survey on the question.

MagiFest was three days of lectures and performance
“There’s a saying that we all die three times,” Hatch said. “The first death is the physical one, when your heart stops beating. 

Moreover, the second is when your body is consigned to fire or the grave. And the third is the last time someone utters your name. Life was so cruel and unfair to him, I just thought, it’s a worthy cause to keep Dammann’s name alive for as long as I can.”

One of the attendees was Joshua Jay, who co-founded Vanishing Inc., the company that owns MagiFest, and who had just finished a three-week run at the Midnight Theater in Manhattan. He sat near the round tables one evening and shared a theory.

“In the U.S., part of it is that the explosion of Jews in magic happens at the same time that Jews are flooding into this country as immigrants at the turn of the century and many of the jobs with the government, with corporations were not open to Jews,” he said. “Being a magician was like being a tailor. You were self-employed, so it was safe.”

Others believe that magic, with its emphasis on books and learning, holds an inherent appeal to Jews. Asi Wind, an Israeli-born New Yorker whose Off Broadway show of card magic ran for 16 months, sees a link between his encounters with religion while growing up and his fascination with magic.

“I remember going to classes to hear rabbis talk and you’d hear a lot about mystery,” he said. “They would say, ‘Look, the Bible predicted this or that before science, before anybody else knew.’ It almost felt like I was reading a magic book. The Bible is a book about supernatural powers and a specific kind of knowledge — secret knowledge, the kind that reveals things we don’t yet know.”

On a more pedestrian level, there is the Supportive Jewish Parents school of thought. Many Jewish performers say their moms and dads encouraged them at a young age and today are their most devoted fans.

One of the attendees was Joshua Jay, who co-founded Vanishing Inc., the company that owns MagiFest, and who had just finished a three-week run at the Midnight Theater in Manhattan. He sat near the round tables one evening and shared a theory.

“In the U.S., part of it is that the explosion of Jews in magic happens at the same time that Jews are flooding into this country as immigrants at the turn of the century and many of the jobs with the government, with corporations were not open to Jews,” he said. “Being a magician was like being a tailor. You were self-employed, so it was safe.”

Others believe that magic, with its emphasis on books and learning, holds an inherent appeal to Jews. Asi Wind, an Israeli-born New Yorker whose Off Broadway show of card magic ran for 16 months, sees a link between his encounters with religion while growing up and his fascination with magic.

“I remember going to classes to hear rabbis talk and you’d hear a lot about mystery,” he said. “They would say, ‘Look, the Bible predicted this or that before science, before anybody else knew.’ It almost felt like I was reading a magic book. The Bible is a book about supernatural powers and a specific kind of knowledge — secret knowledge, the kind that reveals things we don’t yet know.”

On a more pedestrian level, there is the Supportive Jewish Parents school of thought. Many Jewish performers say their moms and dads encouraged them at a young age and today are their most devoted fans.

“I played a week at Mystique Dining which is about a mile from my parents’ house in San Diego and they basically sold out the whole run,” said Michael Feldman, who at MagiFest demonstrated tricks from his book “The Pages Are Blank.” (Note: The pages are not blank.) “They called all of their friends and they were like, ‘You have to come see our son perform, he’s doing this run.’ And it was great.”

Egg Bag Redux

Richard Hatch spent part of his adolescence in Frankfurt because his father, a nuclear physicist, served as a civilian working for Naval intelligence in the late 1950s, debriefing scientists who had defected from East Germany. The younger Hatch initially gravitated to physics because he found his father’s work intriguing, but after four years of graduate studies at Yale, he ditched it all for magic. He loved nothing more, he explained, and by the late ’70s, breakout stars like Doug Henning and David Copperfield had proven that careers in the field were financially viable.

“I thought I’d married a theoretical particle physicist,” said his wife, Rosemary Kimura Hatch, a professional musician. “But one day he came up to me and said, ‘I really want to try magic.’ And I said, ‘Well, if that’s your passion, give it a try.’ I was the bread winner the following year.”

Richard Hatch was raised as a Mormon but left the church years ago. Asked why he’s spent so much time studying a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, he first offered a go-to quip.

“My grandfather was a polygamist (Morman❓😯) and his first wife was Jewish,” he said. “But my grandmother was the second wife. So I like to say I was nearly Jewish.”

More seriously, he said he was fascinated by the reaction to Nazism in Germany’s magic community, which quickly divided into Nazi sympathizers and Jews. And he found the story of Dammann’s life an irresistible mystery: Who was this guy? And why did he write a book about Jews and magic at one of the darkest moments in history?

Hatch answered those and other questions during a Friday afternoon at his presentation about Dammann at MagiFest. He was dressed in a blue suit and sported a gray beard, looking like a chief executive who’d come to rev up the sales team.

He explained that Dammann’s interest in magic started when he was 12 or 13 and that a retired illusionist and family friend named Ernest Thorn, who would later turn up as an entry in “Jews in Magic,” became a mentor. At 21, Dammann joined the Magic Circle of Germany, a hybrid of professional society and fraternal organization, though there were women members, too. Inspired by the Who’s Who’s books he read, Dammann decided to assemble “Jews in Magic.”

He clearly understood the dangers of the project. As Hatch told the crowd of about 700, Dammann asked living professionals for permission to include them in the book, usually through the mail. 

Apparently, some said "no". Among the names omitted from the work is Arnold de Biere, dubbed the “Prince of Entertainers, entertainer of Princes,” who frequently toured Germany.

Among his best known pieces was the egg bag trick, a parlor magic staple in which an egg keeps appearing and disappearing in a black bag that has been turned inside out, slapped against a hand and inspected by the audience. Versions of the trick have been performed for centuries. David Leendert Bamberg, born in the late 18th century and part of the six-generation Bamberg dynasty from the Netherlands — Page 25 of Dammann’s book — had a version that ended with a live hen.

Hatch estimates that Dammann printed 500 copies of his book and that it sold poorly. The few contemporaneous magic publications that mentioned “Jews in Magic” — the copies were sent by Dammann, who handled publicity, too — were startled by its very existence. In 1933, Germany was becoming a dictatorship. By September, Jews were not allowed to perform onstage for non-Jewish audiences and the number of Jews in German universities had already been sharply curtailed. The notorious Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of civil rights and citizenship, were two years away.

Dammann’s parents were both dead by 1937 — the causes are not known — and the family’s house had been emptied and seized by the following year. Gunther and his two brothers attempted to flee to Palestine.

“They tried to convert their assets, which were obviously less considerable than they had been,” Hatch told the audience at the MagiFest lecture, which he gave with a series of slides projected on a huge screen. “They were caught doing so. This is his younger brother’s mug shot.”

Gunther became a slave laborer at a Siemens factory in Berlin, where he put rubber coating on cables. None of the Dammann brothers survived the war.

More than a few of those featured in “Jews in Magic” were murdered by the Nazis. One was Hermann Kurtz, who performed under the name Mahatma, and who gained fame with the “inexhaustible hat,” an illusion in which a menagerie of items — plates, flowers, flags, livestock — pour out of a borrowed top hat.

Others fled Europe and continued their careers in the United States. Fred Roner, born Alfred Rosner in Vienna, lived in Manhattan and toured with a pickpocket act, which he performed as after-dinner entertainment in the ’50s in what were called Knife and Fork Clubs. Most memorably, he snagged the wristwatch of the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover. (He gave it back.)

Roner is the only performer from “Jews in Magic” whom Hatch actually met. The two had lunch in Roner’s apartment in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan in 1986, and Roner talked with pride about his version of card to wallet — an effect in which a card chosen by a spectator vanishes from the deck and appears in the magician’s wallet.

“He was really proud that in his version, the wallet belonged to the spectator,” Hatch said. “He told me that getting the wallet wasn’t difficult. The real challenge was putting it back in the spectator’s pocket.”

Today, Hatch sustains the memory of those memorialized by Dammann with more than just historical research and lectures. About once a month, he performs at private homes, country club banquets or night clubs, typically near his home or in Salt Lake City.

When scheduling allows, he appears with his wife and adult son, a violinist and pianist. Wearing white tie and tails, Hatch performs tricks that were sensations a century or two ago in an hourlong act that would have worked in any Victorian-age parlor.

One highlight is a version of the egg bag popularized by Max Malini, who billed himself as “The Conjurer of the Century” — see page 78 of “Jews in Magic.”

“The classics are classics,” Hatch said. “They’re a good place to start, and not a bad place to get stuck.”

David Segal is a business reporter for The New York Times, based in New York, a reporter in the Business section, who has written several stories about magic, including a feature about the world’s most baffling card trick.