Sublime

At one point he told Cowley that the man he would most like to resemble was Major General John Aaron Rawlins. According to the Dictionary of American Biography, Rawlins was “the most nearly indispensable” officer of General Grant’s staff. It was his job to keep Grant sober; edit his important papers and put them in final form; apply tact and persis

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We will ship any Windsor Organ or Piano on trial to any railroad shipping point in the United States, subject to the following conditions: Upon receipt of order we will ship the instrument to our own address, send a sight draft with bill of lading attached to your banker’s. When the shipment arrives at destination, the purchaser will be required to

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He married Irene Jackson of Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1898 but he and his wife had no children. He had few, if any, hobbies, didn’t enjoy sports (though he owned a yacht once), didn’t smoke, rarely drank, and was content to simply watch television after dinner. His sole passion was the General Motors Corporation, and since he believed that his com

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By the seventeenth century the Japanese had brought this “wordless” poetry to perfection in the haiku, the poem of just seventeen syllables which drops the subject almost as it takes it up. To non-Japanese people haiku are apt to seem no more than beginnings or even titles for poems, and in translation it is impossible to convey the effect of their

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of outlandish facts and quotes—he is a tenacious reporter—and a style that barely suppresses his own amusement. It works particularly well on the buccaneers who continue to try the patience of the citizenry, as proved by his profile in The New Yorker of the developer Donald Trump. Noting that Trump “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury,

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