Here is a Wiki short bio of , one of the earliest American muckrakers. By "muckrakers" I refer to that group of writers from about 1890 to 1914. I'd love to learn more about him.

The muckrakers were the inventors of investigative journalism as we have come to know. They were social reformers, and many (most) were Socialists. The best known were Ida Tarbell who wrote The History of Standard Oil, and Upton Sinclair whose muckraking novel The Jungle...

My mother called this morning. She sounded well and in good spirits. She's 94 and slowing down a little, but last year while visiting I repaved her fifty yard driveway, and now that the nice weather has come she can get out and walk up and down it without stumbling, without getting her walker hung up in the cracks. She is so pleased by that. But mainly she called to reminisce about what she did seventy years ago today.

I don't remember the event, of course; I was kind of young....

In the 1890's, a new journalistic movement took root. It was called investigative journalism. The journalists in this movement threw much of their support to Teddy Roosevelt, and he benefitted from their writing. But in a speech in 1906 he compared them to a character in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress saying "“... you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hands; Who was offered a celestial crown for...

“Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying. “
Albert Camus,

In 1942, Albert Camus published the immediately popular novel The Stranger. In the same year he published his best known philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus. Jean-Paul Sartre also published one of his better critical essays On Albert Camus’s The Stranger. The Myth of Sisyphus contained the quote I have used here as a leader.

After Sartre’s essay, Camus and...

About the hardest thing in living with my wife is that she believes everything I say is the gospel truth. Literally!

Just for example, I went with my grandson to buy him a birthday present. We returned home. I sat down to read and he sat down to gift wrap his present so he could unwrap it. He was happily doing that and chattering about men shaving when he asked his Grandma

"How do you grow a beard?"

She was left speechless. So I got up and...