John Dickerson

I like this line from Emerson about friendship: “There is a power in love to divine another’s destiny better than that other can, and, by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task.” It’s from the essay “Uses of Great Men.” I’ve always liked the idea that friends are there to remind us of ourselves– to […]

….and women, obviously. I’ve been on a bit of an Emerson jag recently. (It’s all Walt Whitman’s fault.) It sent me back to my Emerson reader. In it I found my notes from Emerson’s essay “Uses of Great Men.” It is a meditation on the role those we admire play in our personal and national life. […]

Emerson wrote Walt Whitman a letter about Leaves of Grass when the young poet was feeling glum. In it, the established writer worries that “too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our Western wits fat and mean.” I think I’m going to embrace the idea that we have “too much […]

We interviewed explorer Louis Rudd on the show yesterday. He dragged himself and a sled across the snow, wind, despair, and oh-come-on-why-are-you-doing-this of Antarctica. When Rudd wanted to stop at the end of long days– including days when he had to walk backwards to find his supplies that had become hidden in the driving snow– […]

Peter Hamby’s analysis after the 2012 campaign is worth re-reading as people think about how to cover campaigns. I spoke to Peter at length and feel the same way about Twitter now as I did back then. Certainly more so:

Faulkner said it was the writer’s job to help man “endure by lifting his heart.” This is from his speech to the Nobel dinner in 1950:  

Welcome to those on my mailing list. (If you’re not on the mailing list you can sign up on this page). In 2018 I said goodbye to my dear colleagues at Face the Nation and moved to New York, the city of my early career. I started as a co-host of CBS This Morning with Norah […]

I like this poem because it is about limits and the benefits of constraints in shaping our creativity and our lives. It is a sonnet, so form follows function!