Quick comment with regard to the South and “menace” from Mary Kathryn Christiansen, my 10th and 11th grade English teacher, a native Southerner, and a resident of Mississippi:
I have a probably crazy feeling about what you describe as the sense of menace in that area of Georgia. I feel it in many parts of the South. I think a location, and the culture in it, retains the emotions of its past for generations. And some parts of the South tolerated horrific violence/cruelty during slavery for many years, and then added the crushing violence of Civil War battles on top of that. I don't think that leaves a place. Maybe I read too much Faulkner. He certainly felt that was true — blood in the soil, so to speak. I never feel that when I'm in the North or Midwest.
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Larger-than-life North Georgia defense attorney dead at 94 — AJC
Mara Wilson on being a child star in Hollywood — NYT
Interview with Bob Dole on his meeting with Biden — WSJ
⅕ of Democrat ads make people vote for Republicans — David Shor
Southern Baptist leaders take heat for being “liberal” — Religion News
Mike Pesca suspended at Slate over discussion of racial slur — NYT
Quotes
“We should mourn when closet racists and neo-Confederates feel more at home in our churches than do many of our people of color. The reality is that if we in the SBC had shown as much sorrow for the painful legacy that racism and discrimination has left in our country as we have passion to decry CRT (critical race theory), we probably wouldn’t be in this mess...Do we want to be a gospel people, or a Southern culture people? Which is the more important part of our name — Southern or Baptist?” — J.D. Greear, president of the Southern Baptist Convention
About: I was a newspaper reporter for 14 years, most recently at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I explained why my family left Minneapolis here. Now we live just outside Chattanooga and I work on Scuffed News, a project that either succeeds by July or will have to be abandoned. This is my newsletter. Please share it with anyone you think might enjoy it. I also periodically add people to the distribution list myself. You can support all of this work with your money on Patreon.