As part of their This Means War series, which marks the centenary of World War I, The Irish Times published a short story by Belinda McKeon. Sample quote: “Strange the way the mundane memories are the ones to push through most forcefully.”
War Games
“A hustler wrote this?”
“The book documents its time, a time when homosexuality was illegal, and still described in medical books as a mental illness. It is one of the best firsthand accounts of what it was like to be gay in the mid-20th century — ostracized — separate from the mainstream world. It reveals, through its characters, how young men couldn’t admit, even to themselves, that they were what society deemed perverted.” On the novel City of Night by John Rechy.
Feeding Minds and Mouths
“For kids to be well-read, they need to be well-fed.” The New York Times reports on the trend of U.S. libraries providing summer meals to children.
Lots of Chutzpah
Recommended Reading: Here’s some helpful advice we all could use — how to raise a mensch: “Less obvious but equally central values that Marjorie Ingall highlights include having a healthy distrust of authority. Jews come from a vertiginously long tradition of ‘questioning, yammering, challenging and disputing,’ she writes. ‘The Talmud, the compendium of Jewish law, is pretty much a bunch of dudes contradicting one another. Each page is a big box of text in the middle, and wrapped around it like a frame is lots of ‘Wait, you think what?’ '”
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A Crook By Any Other Name
William Shakespeare: playwright, poet, and…potential tax evader. Turns out the Bard might not have been the nicest businessman.