“What Was Your Most Memorable Halloween?”

More than a century ago, an unnamed journalist was tasked with running around Washington, D.C. and asking notable politicians the burning questions of the day. No, not those about national politics, the burgeoning movement for women’s suffrage or even the war on the tango: Instead, this no-doubt future Pulitzer Prize winner asked U.S. cabinet secretaries Read More

World’s Worst Gym Teacher

Nobody tell U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt how few pushups I can do: I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere Read More

Roaming around Rotterdam

When the American tourist of former summers, whose mind was filled with a preconceived notion of Europe made up of a wealth of statistical and historical information, approached the port of Rotterdam on his maiden voyage, he usually suffered his first great European disappointment. The most reliable of reference books had prepared him for the Read More