John Dickerson

I was fascinated, like everyone else, by the findings that Americans have trouble passing the citizenship test: Woodrow Wilson Foundation Finds Only One State Can Pass U.S. Citizenship Exam I’m curious about the questions people missed. It’s harder for me to understand why it is important that people know there are 27 amendments to the […]

Letter from Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori [I don’t know why I find this so fascinating, but I do. It feels patient and controlled, even though his life is in total turmoil. Also, I wish I could carry a book in my pocket instead of an iPhone.] 10 December 1513 Magnificent Ambassador: I am living on […]

The founders would have been even more productive if they wrote clear sentences. George Washington recommending aide de camp David Humphreys wrote this:“I persuade myself you will find no confidence which you may think proper to repose in him, misplaced.” Can you imagine how a fellow who wrote a backwards-running sentence like this called out “charge” […]

I am a devotee of Clinton Rossiter’s enthusiastic view that the Constitutional Convention is one of the greatest deliberative moments in world history. “There has been no greater happening in American history,” he writes, “there have not been many greater, certainly of a political nature in the history of the world.” President John Adams thought […]

Creativity comes from building something entirely new, but also from combining two previous things in a new way. We know this from Emerson, West Side Story and, of course, Hamilton. Emerson: June 18, 1838: “The art of writing consists in putting two things together that are unlike and that belong together, like a horse and […]

With an assist from Pantz: I spent years driving my son to baseball and hurrying him out the door. Now I find him in the kitchen making bacon and eggs better than I do before. He makes his own way there.

Has this ever happened to you? You read something and it really moves you. When you search for the sparking passage again, though, it eludes you. Emerson writes about this frustration: “I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could […]

“You get into a sort of nest. You get really comfortable, and then you’re away.”         My hut today 2/9/2019:  

Here I am on my favorite topic (which I’ve written about here and here) with Noma Dumezweni and Jamie Parker from “Harry Potter an the Cursed Child.”   JD: Noma tell me then– both of you weigh in on this. Where does a play take place? Is it you all creating this moment of revelation […]

“The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it – what it costs us.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche From The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene:

From the Republic: “the last thing anyone will accept is being deceived in his soul about how things really are. To have been deceived, and be ignorant, with the falsehood lodged there in the soul, is when people hate it the most.”

Here’s a meditation on where the joy comes from in music: The original piece that aired can be found here.

Khrushchev to Kennedy, 1961:  

Thomas the Train videocassette: Narrated by Alec Baldwin Him, age 3: Did you hear him say Aled Baldwin? Me: That’s Alec Baldwin Him: Is he good or no? Me: He’s a fine narrator Him: Will he eat someone and chew their bones? Me: No, I don’t think so. Him: I wouldn’t like him if he […]

Dave Matthews flashes impish in this great picture taken by CBS This Morning Senior Producer Adam Verdugo. It’s just one of the emotions in the stew-pot we stirred when we talked to Matthews in Charlottesville at the end of his last tour. We talked about that city– where I went to school and first saw him […]

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. […]