The Saturday Evening Post July/August 2018

In the early ’70s, enamored of the back-to-the-land movement that was popular at the time, I moved with my then-girlfriend (and future wife) and her young son from New York City to a tiny town in New Mexico called Madrid (pronounced MAD-rid). Once a thriving coal town, it had been deserted for years until an ambitious young realtor decided to put the whole place back on the market. The sales pitch was that you could escape the noise, conflicts, wasteful extravagances, and soul-killing hustle and bustle of modern life — and you could do this cheaply. Dotting the hillside were clusters of one-room miners’ shacks with no electricity or running water. These went for $3,000, and all that was required was 10 percent down. The nicer homes (two bedrooms and a…

America’s Prisoners of War As I read “Preserving Our WWII POW Camps” (May/June) about the good treatment of German soldiers in our POW camps, I reflected on my experience on Guam with Japanese POWs during 1945-46. Those young men were just as happy as I was to see the end of the war. Like us, most were just doing their duty to their country. Many realized they would return home in disgrace for surrendering, but expressed gratitude for their treatment — good food, health, and housing. The kindness and respect by Americans certainly paid off for those POWs. Donald Jones, Scottsdale, Arizona My dad was a German POW at Camp Richfield near Germantown, Wisconsin, where he was well treated. In 1944, he was invited to a Thanksgiving dinner with a family in Germantown.…

WWW.AEON.CO The good life is the simple life. Among philosophical ideas about how we should live, this one is a hardy perennial; from Socrates to Thoreau, from the Buddha to Wendell Berry, thinkers have been peddling it for more than two millennia. And it still has plenty of adherents. Magazines such as Real Simple call out to us from the supermarket checkout; Oprah Winfrey regularly interviews fans of simple living, such as Jack Kornfield, a teacher of Buddhist mindfulness; the Slow Movement, which advocates a return to pre-industrial basics, attracts followers across continents. In societies such as the United States, we are currently witnessing a tendency for capitalism to stretch the distance between the “have lots” and the “have nots.” Through much of human history, frugal simplicity was not a choice but a…

If it’s been like forever since you paid any attention to sun signs, let me be the first to share some news: Astrology is back in a big way. It has changed, however. Less woo-woo, more whoa. The horoscopes, zodiac charts, and tarot cards aren’t materially different from what you may remember of them. What’s happened is that the planets have aligned for sellers and buyers to rediscover — and merge — astrology’s long-advertised life-coaching powers and its commercial potency. Respectfully, its moon is currently in the house of moolah. As if to affirm what I’ve observed, a big-time TV producer recently mentioned to me, “I notice that our ratings spike every time we use a zodiac piece as our show’s lead.” I grew up with horoscopes in newspapers and magazines advising…

Several years ago, my home state, Indiana, joined 47 other states and went on daylight saving time. Letters flooded our local newspaper predicting the end of the world, which didn’t come to pass but nevertheless gave the whole enterprise an edgy, if not apocalyptic, excitement. Instead, we reset our bedside clocks and gained an extra hour of sunlight, allowing more time to sit on our porches and visit with our neighbors in July and August. Now that we are well into the experiment, the letters prophesying doom have dwindled from a torrent to a trickle, written by the same people who believe the Russians are listening to us through the fillings in our teeth. I am in favor of any manipulation of time that expands my opportunities for leisure and would…

Following revelations that Facebook sold private data to third-party app developers earlier this year, #deletefacebook became a thing and, for the first time ever, more daily U.S. users were quitting than joining. I found this amusing, since I had quit over a year ago. I didn’t quit because I objected to Mark Zuckerberg’s siphoning off personal data. That didn’t surprise me in the least. How else did people think Facebook became a $500 billion company? I quit for entirely personal reasons. I had become addicted. I was getting a lot more rejections than acceptances. Then even the rejections stopped. I like to think of myself as a successful humor columnist. And I used to earn a modest living selling my work to name-brand magazines. Then the editors I had cultivated over the years…