The Saturday Evening Post November/December 2019

Twenty-one years ago, Carol Gardner, then 52, was in the midst of a messy divorce that left her depressed, broke, and unemployed. To pry her out of her shell, her friends encouraged her to enter a Christmas card competition at a local pet store. She snapped a picture of her chubby English bulldog Zelda sitting in a bubble bath, wearing a Santa hat and sporting a foamy bubble beard. The caption read: “For Christmas I got a dog for my husband … good trade, huh?” Gardner’s photo won, and she sent it out to all her friends as a Christmas card. The overwhelming response led to the launch of Zelda Wisdom, a line of greeting cards. Within a year, she had sold a million cards and had licensing deals with Hallmark…

Tom Hallman Jr. “I stumbled over this story,” says Hallman, author of “Della’s Lost Letter” (page 40) about a handwritten letter by a 16-year-old girl that should have been mailed decades ago, but it wasn’t. “The best stories are mysterious and have a life of their own,” says the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The Oregonian who helped track down the letter’s author. “This story did not need to be written. There is no news, no politics, nothing investigative. No, it is about life. The best stories remind us of our shared humanity. This is such a story.” Brian Jay Jones In “How Dr. Seuss Stole Christmas!” (page 34), Jones shares a behind-the-scenes look at how legendary animator Chuck Jones and children’s writer Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) brought the grumpy Grinch to the…

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What Our Kids Need to Know Your Editor’s Letter (“Teach Your Children Well,” Sept/Oct) got me wondering not just about history, but about whose stories will we teach and how? What would a modern curriculum teach about the 12 U.S. presidents who owned slaves, Jefferson’s relationship with slave Sally Hemings, or how Andrew Jackson thought the “Trail of Tears” was a good idea? If the country is to become one nation, your closing paragraph rings true: “It’s both in our interest and in our power to make history come alive for the next generation.” Robert J. Gill, The Villages, Florida “Sharing the Lamp of Experience” (Sept/Oct) is an eye-opener. As a retiring National Park Service ranger, I have struggled to rekindle a passion for history, especially among our children. Kevin Hanley, email Faster Than a…

No moral intuition is more hardwired into Americ a n s ’ c o n c e p t i o n o f econom ic justice than equality of opportunity. While some of us may be rich and others poor, we are willing to accept such outcomes as long as everyone has an equal shot at success. The moral legitimacy of the market’s distribution of income rests on a presumption that our system rewards ingenuity, hard work, talent, and risk-taking rather than race, class, family connections, or some other advantage we consider unearned, illegitimate, or unfair. “In every wise struggle for human betterment, one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity,” declared President Theodore Roosevelt in a speech…

Here’s a worthy challenge: Try escaping the daily din of American life. It’s not easy. Maybe, for instance, you don’t actually want to hear Wolf Blitzer’s voice blaring from every TV planted in a public space. Who’d blame you? Unfortunately, most of us are constantly assaulted by a never-ending bleating, clanging, whirring, and buzzing — the raucous background music of 21st-century civilization. It’s more than merely annoying, which would be plenty bad enough. It also undermines our ability to work productively. Worse, it may be doing harm to our brains. While the cacophony is not an entirely new phenomenon — except for the chirps of our omnipresent tech devices — it nevertheless constitutes a palpable torture for many of us. You know that androgynous figure who expresses universally understood “agony” in Edvard Munch’s…