Mark Twain’s 43rd Thanksgiving

In 1905, Thanksgiving Day fell on the 30th of November, which also happened to be Sam Clemens’s 70th birthday. In his autobiography, he claims an effort was made “to get the President to select another day for the national Thanksgiving, and I furnished him with arguments to use which I thought persuasive and convincing.” Among these was that “the original reason for a Thanksgiving Day has long ago ceased to […]

The Nastiest Things Mark Twain Said About Teddy Roosevelt

Yesterday, Los Angeles Review of Books published a piece I’ve been working on intermittently since the Amazon-Whole Foods merger was announced in mid-June. Please check it out. One of the implicit theses of the essay is that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is to President Trump what Standard Oil’s John D. Rockefeller was to President Roosevelt. Vice President Pence endorsed at least one half of the analogy, as he explicitly compared his running […]