Let's write about the late and great feminist Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem: Gloria Steinem, the American feminist and journalist whose activism helped push through greater rights for women around the world has died, aged 92. Ms. Steinem passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her. Born in Ohio in 1934, Steinem grew up in a trailer home. Her mother’s mental illness left her struggling to hold on to work and in and out of sanatoriums. When she was 10, her parents separated and, while growing up in a rundown home in Toledo with her mother, Steinem began to notice the hostility her mother endured as a working woman.  After graduating from a women’s liberal arts college in 1956, Steinem travelled to India for two years, where she worked as a legal clerk in the country’s supreme court. Returning to the US, she worked as the director of the Independent Research Service, a CIA front that recruited American students to disrupt the Soviet-controlled World Youth Festivals in Vienna and Helsinki. Steinem later revealed she had always known who was bankrolling the operation: “If I had a choice I would do it again.” (The Guardian)

Eulogy by Dora Anne Mills, MD, MPH, FAAP:  The View from Maine September 4, 2026
Not Ideology — Epidemiology:  Published on Facebook

Women's standing and women's survival rise and fall together.

Gloria Steinem died this week at 92, and I have been thinking about how to explain to my children's generation what the world looked like when I was a girl growing up in rural Maine, and how much of the distance between that world and theirs runs through her life's work.

When I was born, a woman in Maine (or the U.S.) could not reliably get a credit card or a loan without a husband's or father's signature. She could be fired for becoming pregnant, and often was. If her husband beat her, there was no shelter to go to, no protection order to seek, and little language even to name what was happening. The term "domestic violence" had not yet entered public life. Contraception was not yet a settled legal right. Medical school classes were more than ninety percent men, and the few women admitted were routinely asked why they were taking a seat from a man. None of this was ancient history. All of it was within my lifetime.
Steinem did not change these things single-handedly. No one does. But she was, for half a century, the movement's most tireless organizer and its clearest voice. 

Ms. Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine and the National Women's Political Caucus, testified for the Equal Rights Amendment, and insisted that the things happening privately to women - in their marriages, their doctors' offices, their workplaces - were public questions deserving public answers. That insistence is, at its core, a public health idea. It is the same idea that built our field: that patterns of suffering are not fate, and that naming them is the first step to changing them.

The public health consequences have been profound. The CDC counts family planning among the ten great public health achievements of the twentieth century, because when women can decide whether and when to have children, mothers and babies live. Domestic violence moved from a private shame to a recognized cause of injury and death that our hospitals now screen for and many communities now shelter against. And the professions changed: women today make up more than half of American medical students. My own career - medical school, country doctoring, fifteen years as Maine's state health officer - was built on doors that were pried open in the 1960s and 70s, most of them by women I never met. So was my sister's: Maine, which had never elected a woman governor in its first two centuries, has now done so. And so, I hope, will my daughter's, as she trains for medicine in rural Maine.
If you want to know what the world looks like without those changes, you do not have to imagine it. You can read the data. Around the world, a woman still dies about every two minutes from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, deaths that are overwhelmingly preventable, and overwhelmingly concentrated in places where girls leave school early, marry as children, and cannot decide the timing of their own pregnancies. In the countries where women's rights are weakest, a woman's lifetime risk of dying in childbirth is more than a hundred times higher than in countries where those rights are strong. The correlation is not a coincidence. Women's standing and women's survival rise and fall together. That is not ideology; it is epidemiology.

The lesson of her century is that these gains were made, not given, and they are kept the same way. Gloria Steinem liked to say that she planned to live to 100, and she nearly did. The best way I know to honor the years she gave us is to spend our own the same way: paying attention, telling the truth about what the data show, and refusing to accept that any mother's death is simply the way things are.

Let's Write about the lovely Dolly Parton

An essay from my friend Dr. Dora Ann Mills an expert public health advocate.

Dora Anne Mills, MD, MPH, FAAP on her Facebook
The View from Maine
August 26. 2026
The Light of a Clear Blue Morning
The news arrived yesterday the way hard news often does now - a push alert between meetings. 

Dolly Parton died at age 80, (a much loved icon of music and public health), at Vanderbilt in Nashville, after a brief battle with cancer. 

Within hours, tributes poured in from country stars and rock stars, presidents and preachers, drag queens and deacons. In a nation that cannot seem to agree on anything, we have apparently agreed on one thing: we loved Dolly.
She would have deflected all this solemnity, of course. This was the woman who famously quipped, "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap", who disarmed every critic and every dumb-blonde joke by getting there first, laughing hardest, and then quietly outsmarting everyone in the room.
I found myself reflecting on why we loved her so. 

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Dolly Parton's life was, among many other things, a masterclass in public health — even though she never used the term.
Consider where she began. She was the fourth of twelve children, born in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. The country doctor who delivered her was paid with a bag of cornmeal. She grew up without electricity or running water, in a region where poverty, isolation, and lack of access to care shaped nearly every family's story. We in public health call these the social drivers of health. Dolly simply called them her childhood, and then spent sixty years doing something about them.
Think about what she actually built. In 1995, in honor of her father, who never learned to read, she started mailing a free book every month to young children in her home county. That program, the Imagination Library, now spans five countries and has put well over 250 million books into the hands of children from birth to age five. We know from decades of research that early literacy is one of the most powerful predictors of lifelong health: of school readiness, of health literacy, of economic opportunity, of longevity itself. Dolly understood, perhaps better than many health officials, that a book mailed to a cabin at the end of a dirt road is a health intervention.
When wildfires tore through Gatlinburg in 2016, she didn't just hold a telethon. She put $1,000 a month, for six months, directly into the hands of families who had lost their homes, trusting people to know their own needs. That is dignity-centered disaster relief, years before that phrase became fashionable.
And in the spring of 2020, in those frightening early weeks of the pandemic, she quietly donated $1 million to Vanderbilt's vaccine research program - money that helped support the early trials of the Moderna mRNA vaccine. A year later, at age 75, she rolled up her sleeve on camera, turned one of her most famous songs into a playful plea for her fans to get vaccinated (“Vaccine, vaccine” to the tune of “Jolene”) and teased those who were hesitating to stop being scared. It's hard to measure how many people got vaccinated because Dolly told them it was safe. But I would wager it was more than any official press briefing persuaded (including some of mine).
And here is what makes her hold on our hearts all the more remarkable: she did not earn it by staying silent. Dolly took public stands - repeatedly, cheerfully, unmistakably. She embraced her LGBTQ fans for decades and defended transgender people when doing so carried real risk with some of her audience, insisting they were simply human beings deserving of love. Asked about gay marriage, she answered with vintage Dolly: "Sure, why can't they get married? They should suffer like the rest of us do." In the summer of 2020, when so many public figures hedged, she said plainly, "Of course Black lives matter," adding, with characteristic bluntness, that she didn't think "our little white asses are the only ones that matter." She renamed her own Dixie Stampede attraction because she understood what the word “Dixie” evoked with its association with the Confederacy.
Any one of those positions should have lost her fans. But they didn’t. Fans who disagreed with her on every one of those issues kept filling her concerts, kept mailing their children's names to the Imagination Library, kept loving her. Why? Because she never wielded her convictions as a weapon. She stated them with warmth, wrapped them in humor, and extended to those who differed the same grace she asked for her own people. She drew circles that pulled people in rather than lines that shut people out. In an era when we are constantly told that taking a stand means making enemies, Dolly proved that it is possible to be unambiguous and still be beloved, that conviction and contempt are not the same thing, and only one of them is required.
But here is what I keep returning to on this sad day: her superpower was not just her voice, her songwriting, or even her generosity. It was trust. Dolly was trusted, and across every line that currently divides us. Red states and blue states. Rural hollows and city high-rises. She earned that trust the old-fashioned way: by never pretending to be anything other than what she was, by loving people before asking anything of them, and by showing up, decade after decade, for the community that raised her. The trust came first, built over a lifetime, and it proved strong enough to carry every truth she later asked it to hold.
We are living through a time when that kind of trust has become our scarcest public health resource. Measles, declared eliminated in this country a quarter century ago, is back. Vaccine policy has been thrown into turmoil. Public health agencies and the dedicated people in them have endured deep cuts. Many of us feel unmoored and overwhelmed by division, worried about the future, unsure what to hold onto.
Dolly's life suggests an answer, and it is not a complicated one. Meet people where they are. Honor where they come from. Lead with generosity rather than judgment. Make the good thing - the book, the vaccine, the helping hand - easy to say yes to, and wrap it in joy rather than fear. She reached people that public health cannot reach, not because she had better data, but because she had better relationships.
She often spoke of one of her own favorite songs, written in a dark season of her life, about the light of a clear blue morning, about how, after the hardest nights, everything is going to be all right. On a day of chaos and uncertainty, in a summer full of both, I choose to hear that as her parting instruction to all of us: grieve, yes. Then get up, look after one another, and get back to work.
Tonight, the moon rises nearly full, the same moon climbing over the Smoky Mountains of her childhood and over the coast of Maine, over red counties and blue ones, over every hollow and high-rise where someone is playing her songs and grieving. It seems fitting. The moon makes no light of its own; it simply catches the sun and gives it back to the dark side of the earth, asking nothing in return. That was Dolly's kind of light.
And a nearly full moon holds its own quiet promise: not yet complete, still becoming, like the work she leaves to the rest of us.
“Vaccine” song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjbSWebA3Ko

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 the history of human language development

 When Did Ancient Humans Start Talking?

Language makes us human, but exactly when humans began speaking remains a mystery
By Dave Roos
https://www.history.com/articles/early-humans-language


Language, more than any other ability or physical trait, is what makes us human. Babies instinctively start to babble at around six months and speak their first words between 12 and 15 months. Yet even the brightest chimpanzee—our closest living genetic relative—if raised by human parents, will never utter a word.
Whether Neanderthals possessed complex language remains debated, making Homo sapiens appear truly unique in the sophistication of our ability to convey detailed ideas, information and meaning through sound. Language, more than any evolutionary leap, is likely what propelled modern humans to become the dominant species on the planet.
“Language is our secret weapon,” says evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel. "If you put 30, 50 or 150 people together, all of our ideas can be shared. And that means we're innovative, we're creative and we can work together as a team in ways that no other animal can.”
The first Homo sapiens evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago, but it's unlikely that they had fully developed language at first. 

By at least 50,000 years ago, however, humans were making symbolic art that reflected advanced cognitive abilities and almost certainly a spoken language.

When exactly humans first acquired language between 300,000 and 50,000 years ago remains a mystery, but there are plenty of theories.
Animals Communicate, But Don’t ‘Talk’: Dogs bark. Dolphins click. Parrots mimic human speech. Vervet monkeys can even produce three distinct alarm calls to warn neighbors about leopard, eagle and snake attacks. Clearly, many animal species use vocalizations to communicate, but is that the same thing as language?

Pagel says no. Human language is “compositional,” meaning it’s made up of discrete words that are formed into sentences. Adult humans have a vocabulary of around 20,000 words that can be assembled in nearly endless combinations of subjects, verbs and objects.
“All of a sudden, we have this huge set of permutations,” says Pagel. “We can create an infinite number of sentences, and they all have different meanings based on the individual meaning of the words.”
Although the underlying mechanisms aren’t fully understood, humans are biologically hardwired to use language, while other animals aren't. A chimp can be trained to use sign language and even seals can be taught to repeat human words, but it’s always in exchange for a reward, usually food.
"You don't have to train humans to speak for a reward,” says Pagel. “They just start babbling as babies and never stop.”

As evidence that humans are born with an innate drive and gift to communicate, researchers point to a remarkable experiment from the 1980s. The Nicaraguan government opened a school for deaf children who primarily communicated through rudimentary gestures like pointing. When the children got together, however, they immediately created their own sign language complete with syntax and grammar. It was the first time researchers had documented the birth of a language.
Did Neanderthals Have Language? Neanderthals are the closest extinct relative of modern humans, sharing 99 percent of our DNA. Neanderthals had big brains, controlled fire and used tools, but there’s no strong evidence that Neanderthals had the capacity for language.

Neanderthals lived between 400,000 and 40,000 years ago, and they coexisted for thousands of years with Homo sapiens who migrated from Africa to Europe and Asia. Yet unlike Homo sapiens, whose ancient art, sculpture and jewelry are found in the archaeological record, Neanderthals didn't leave behind any conclusive evidence of what Pagel calls “symbolic thinking.”
“One of the defining features of language is that it’s the ultimate symbolic activity,” says Pagel. “You and I are conversing at a really sophisticated level just using sounds. That's symbolism at its highest level. And when you look for symbolic behavior in the Neanderthals, you just don't see it.”
A remarkable example of early Homo sapiens symbolic art is the Lion Man, a sculpture carved from mammoth ivory with the head of a lion and the body of a man. The Lion Man dates from 40,000 years ago and was part of a flowering of human culture that included the first musical instruments.
As for Neanderthals, researchers have argued that two cave paintings in Spain were produced by Neanderthals more than 65,000 years ago, but that claim remains controversial because some researchers have questioned the dating methods.

What Evolutionary Leap Produced Language? What was it that enabled Homo sapiens to develop symbolic language while even close genetic relatives like Neanderthals likely never got past the grunting stage? Was it some kind of physical adaptation or purely a cognitive leap?
One theory is that prehistoric humans couldn’t use spoken language until they developed the right anatomy to produce speech. When researchers examined human remains dating back hundreds of thousands of years, they found that only humans 50,000 years old or younger had larynxes and vocal chords large enough to produce the wide range of frequencies necessary for spoken language. That might explain why Homo sapiens symbolic art only took off around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.
Pagel and other scholars are doubtful, however, that the anatomy of the vocal tract evolved expressly for language. They point to the fact that birds and other animals can mimic human speech without human vocal chords or a larynx.
If it wasn’t an anatomical adaptation that enabled speech, then it must have been a neurological upgrade. One potential candidate is a gene called FOXP2, better known as the “speech gene.” All mammals have the FOXP2 gene, but a small mutation in the human version of FOXP2—just two amino acid replacements—is thought to contribute to the fine-motor control of the facial muscles that’s lacking in chimps.
FOXP2 is a transcription factor, meaning that it works by turning at least 100 other genes on and off. “There’s this incredibly complex network of genetic interactions in the brain,” says Pagel, “and FOXP2 is just one piece of the puzzle.”

An Intelligence Tipping Point? Another theory is that no single gene or mutation was responsible for language, but rather that human intelligence reached a tipping point after which language naturally emerged.
“The idea is that once your general information-processing capacity gets big enough, there’s more of a need to communicate in a structured way, so eventually you get language,” says Richard Futrell, who teaches language science at the University of California, Irvine.
Once language starts to emerge, there are natural constraints that shape it. The human lifespan isn’t long enough to learn and pass on millions of unique words, for example, nor is human memory good enough to remember them. These constraints create what Futrell calls a “transmission bottleneck.”
“There's a limit to the number of words you can have in the language, and that means to express complex thoughts, you have to string the words together,” says Futrell. “That gives you structure and grammar and syntax and all the things that make language unique.”
How Language Supercharged Human Evolution. Since all modern humans have language, it’s possible that our distant Homo sapiens ancestors were speaking some kind of protolanguage as far back as 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, but we’ll never know for sure. What’s clear, however, is that language played a key role in unlocking human potential.

Pagel, an evolutionary biologist, says that language has been even more central to human evolution over the past 200,000 years than our genes. In the animal kingdom, cooperation is usually confined to close kin. Animals will often only help each other if it increases the chances of passing on their own genes.
With the advent of language, humans could expand their circles of cooperation to include larger, unrelated groups. Not only could they share information and ideas more easily, but they could use language to “police” the behavior of others.
“If you don’t cooperate, I'm going to go around our community telling everyone and you're going to be ostracized,” says Pagel. “Language becomes this conduit for exchanging information and at the same time this regulator of cooperation.”
It was this ability to cooperate and collaborate and innovate that enabled Homo sapiens to migrate out of Africa roughly 70,000 years ago and spread around the world. Humans didn’t need to acquire the same kinds of genetic adaptations as other species to survive in Arctic cold or desert heat. They had language.
“It's our culture and the exchange of ideas that enables us to move into these new environments, and make the clothing and shelters and other technologies that allow us to live there,” says Pagel.

Let's write about the history of the ubiquitous "pickle"

 (Julie's note: Remembering how much I enjoyed eating the pickles at the Broadway Market in East Baltimore.  Of course, they came right out of a big barrel and they were huge!)

New York Is a Pickle Kind of Town by Emma Allen
The Dutch authors of a new book, “The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles,” stop by the brined-delicacy staple Russ & Daughters. By Emma Allen
Not all foods endure—ortolan, aspic, candy cigarettes—but the pickle may be as close to immortal as a snack can get. The world’s oldest known cookbook, from around 1700 B.C.E. Mesopotamia, includes a recipe for a pickled-fish-and-grasshopper sauce. 

Shakespeare wrote, in “The Tempest,” about being “in a pickle”; pickles were served aboard the Titanic. Carlos Alcaraz and Frances Tiafoe have both been known to drink pickle juice in lieu of Gatorade—no unfair advantage there. The U.S. pickle industry has an estimated revenue of three billion dollars per year.
Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder, two principals at Mattmo Creative, a branding agency in Amsterdam, have become surprising experts in the preserved-cucumber field. 

In 2022, they published “De Zure Stad” (“The Sour City”), a history of Dutch pickles, then shifted focus across the Atlantic for “The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles.”

“It’s an obsession, basically,” van Ravestein said the other day, in the hundred-and-twelve-year-old Russ & Daughters appetizing shop, on East Houston. During their New York pickle research, Mulder and van Ravestein had come upon a trove of tax-archive photographs from the early twentieth century, featuring a man posing with numbered placards in front of thousands of Lower East Side storefronts, nearly a hundred of which were pickle purveyors.
“For us, suddenly, it became alive,” Mulder said. “A guy is waking up early in the morning and saying to his wife, ‘I go to my work.’ ”
The pair showed the photos to Niki Russ Federman, a fourth-generation owner of Russ & Daughters, who was wearing the shop’s traditional white lab coat and doling out pickled herring in cream sauce. Her Polish-émigré great-grandfather got his start selling schmaltz herring wrapped in day-old Yiddish newspapers from a barrel, then upgraded to a pushcart, then to a horse-drawn cart, then to the original store, around the corner.

“I’ve never seen it zoomed in like this!” Russ Federman said, peering at an image. “This was the J. Russ National Appetizing Store—there was nothing national about what he did. It was taking care of Jews within four square blocks.” Joel savvily rebranded as Russ’s Cut Rate Appetizing. 

Now Russ & Daughters has a nationwide shipping operation and a restaurant that serves eighteen-dollar Break-Fast Martinis.
“Why are you still here?” van Ravestein asked. “Is it resilience or flexibility?”

“Luckily, whether it was by choice or by obligation, in each generation there’s been someone in the family who made this their life,” Russ Federman replied. In 1935, the store became the first in the country to have “& Daughters” in its name. “Joel needed cheap labor,” Russ Federman said. “But also, who better to sell pickles than three cute girls with their hands in herring barrels?”

“It’s a matter of communication, branding,” van Ravestein posited.
“You tell the story,” Mulder added. “The food is an interface that is also your legacy.”
Van Ravestein munched on a half-sour and recalled an article, from 1890, that likened pickles to alcohol or coffee: “So kids couldn’t eat them, because it gives you a kick.”
Russ Federman mentioned a contemporary listicle of ten “superfoods,” most of which were sold at her store: “It’s herring, sardines, salmon, sauerkraut, liver—caviar was on the list!”
“You know what we had yesterday evening?” Mulder asked, as she sipped a shrub (pickled-beet juice and vinegar, popular with the marathon-runner set). “A vermouth with pickle juice.”
The Dutch visitors headed south to Sweet Pickle Books, on Orchard Street, a hip used bookstore with a pickle side hustle that was opened, in 2020, by a millennial named Leigh Altshuler, who previously served as marketing director for the Strand. Shoved in a corner was an adult-size pickle costume by the designer who made Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime-show sharks.
Before opening her store, Altshuler had prepared three hundred and sixty jars of pickles to sell, and eventually started giving them away to people who donated books. “I was, like, ‘This for sure will last me forever. It’ll be a gimmick,’ ” she told the Dutch duo. A year later, her shop was bursting at the seams, and she kept selling out of pickles. “People had been putting it on TikTok,” she said. Altshuler had to outsource pickle production upstate, and began cranking out pickle merch. “All of a sudden, Harry Styles was wearing it,” she said. “It was a whole drama.”
Mulder and van Ravestein mentioned the frenzy surrounding the Heinz pickle pin, a coveted souvenir at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
“People are obsessed with pickles!” Altshuler said. “People come in and say, ‘Oh, look at my pickle tattoo,’ or, ‘My dog’s name is Pickle.’ ”
“In Holland, a lot of young people, they’ve started fermenting at home,” Mulder added.

The Sweet Pickle Books building—near where “Lower East Side cool girlies” (per Altshuler) had dumpster-dived for Timothée Chalamet’s old “Marty Supreme” costumes—has been in its landlady’s family for a century and a half. 

Altshuler said, “Her grandfather sold melons from a pushcart outside.” ♦

Published in the print edition of the July 20, 2026, issue, with the headline “Pickle People.”

Let's write about John Grisham's inspiration as a writer

From Mr. John Grisham:  (Maine Writer:  I am anxious to read his novel as described in Mr. Grisham's letter.)  

Author John Grisham and his wife Renee in Paris

As I write this letter,  I am finishing the last edits of The French Illusion, my next novel, to be published in the Fall. I usually spend about six months writing a novel, and when I'm finished I quietly pat myself on the back for another job well done, then try to forget about it, and start thinking about the next story.

But, not so fast❗ Although writing is often enjoyable and challenging, the editing is not. It takes weeks, even months, to slog through the manuscript again and again, tossing out sections here and there, tightening up the plot, adding and discarding characters, tweaking sentences, and trying to remember what I was thinking when I wrote such dreadful dialogue only four months ago. The editing process is a drag, but it is crucial to the completion of a novel. Editors are professionals who can spot small weaknesses that are easily fixable, as well as major problems that require overhauls. Good writers never stop listening to their editors.

Outlining the story beforehand and editing it after the first draft are two exercises most writers prefer to avoid. But both are important to the success of the book, and often fatal if ignored.

Anyway, back to The French Illusion. So, when A Time To Kill was published in 1989, its reception was rather low-key, to put it mildly. There was no second printing, no paperback, no mention of foreign translations. Hollywood never called. However, when The Firm arrived 18 months later, things were far different. After selling the U.S. and U.K. rights, my agent took the book to Europe where it was well received. Renee and I watched in disbelief as the Germans, French, Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese lined up to buy the translation rights. Then Scandinavia, then Asia. By the end of 1990, we had contracts to publish the book in 30 languages.

We had never been to Europe and couldn't wait to see Paris. We've always read a lot - Renee has a degree in English literature - and we knew the legend of the "Lost Generation," a collection of disillusioned and struggling American writers and artists who gravitated to Paris in the early 1900's. They included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound, and they hung out with the likes of T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and James Joyce. We found their old haunts, had coffee and drinks in their favorite bars, enjoyed long meals in the same timeless bistros, and spent hours on the sidewalk cafes of Boulevard St. Germain. We also visited the famous sights, poked around galleries and museums, and roamed the streets for hours. Like millions before us, and after, we fell in love with Paris and have returned many times.

My French publisher is JC Lattes, one of many imprints of Hachette, the Paris giant that owns Little, Brown and Grand Central in the U.S. The Lattes office is on Rue Jacob, a busy, narrow side street with the usual assortment of shops and small hotels. The building is centuries old (aren't they all?). It is tall and narrow with four or five levels connected by a baffling configuration of stairways. ADA would not approve. It's a throwback to the old days of publishing with small offices, sagging shelves stuffed with manuscripts, unsteady air conditioning, and walls covered with artwork and book jackets. Though thoroughly tech-wired and modern, the offices, like many in Paris, seem timeless, as if little has changed since the dark ages before the internet. The Lattes team is young, enthusiastic, and eager to publish books that will satisfy and entertain their audiences.

I adore the Lattes offices and visit as often as possible.

Anyway, back to The French Illusion. One day I was at Lattes being interviewed by a radio journalist, a Parisian, and we were talking about his beloved city. He asked why I had never used it as the backdrop for a novel❓ I had set books in Italy, Brazil and the Caribbean, among other places, so why not Paris❓ 

I tried to explain that I can't simply "create" a story. It takes inspiration, an idea captured from somewhere, and once I have the beginnings of a plot I can start to think about the characters and the setting.

Finally, the inspiration arrived with The French Illusion, a suspenseful story that begins and ends in Paris.

So, what am I reading❓👀📗📘🕮

I just finished two good books, both non-fiction. The first is Redemption, by Lawrence Wright, a longtime journalist for New Yorker: The story takes place in the author's native Texas and is about a group of nuns in a convent outside of Waco. Through the efforts of a Catholic deacon, they visit the eight women on death row at the prison in Gatesville, Texas. At first, the nuns are afraid of the women, all convicted killers, and the inmates are suspicious of the nuns. Before long, though, they realize they have more in common than they could imagine. Friendships flourish as the women begin to understand one another.

Redemption will be published by Knopf in October.

The second is Up On Cove Mountain by Earl Swift. As a young man, Swift hiked all 2200 miles of the Appalachian Trail, an experience that not only changed his life but gave it direction. However, his trip was haunted by tragedy. Along the way, he met and befriended a young couple. They hiked together for three days before he picked up his pace and left them behind. Two weeks later, he heard the news that they had been murdered at a campsite he had used. The killer was arrested, tried, and given the death penalty. Thirty-three years later, Swift returned to the trail - older, wiser, and somewhat slower, but still haunted by its memories.

Up On Cove Mountain will be published by Mariner Books in August.

So, what am I writing❓

Finishing The French Illusion, and in a holding pattern, waiting for inspiration.