Stories by Stephen Miller
A Modest Proposal
In the Trump economy, everything old can be new again.
May 22, 2017
In his address to Congress, President Trump promised that "dying industries will come roaring back to life." I think the president should be even more ambitious: He should seriously consider bringing back industries and services that have already died. And I can think of two "dead" products that would create thousands of jobs and also improve the environment if they were resurrected: spittoons and sedan chairs. Spittoons—aka cuspidors—were once mainstays at hotels, offices, train stations, and Read more
Word Inflation
The iconic overuse of two venerable terms.
May 15, 2017
Driving past an office building under construction in Reston, Virginia, where I live, I noticed posters on the building that said: "Iconic Offices." While reading a newspaper online, a pop-up ad came up that said, "Make Your Escape Iconic!" It was promoting a hotel in Miami Beach. I was puzzled. Doesn't iconic mean something venerable that is admired for being distinctive in some way? How can offices that are still being built, or a vacation in Miami Beach, be called iconic? "Iconic" and "icon Read more
Survival of the Pithiest
How Charles Darwin got New England talking.
Apr 10, 2017
In early 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species— published in Britain in November 1859 — became a topic of conversation among a number of New England intellectuals. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau read the Origin. So did Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa Alcott, and Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children's Aid Society. Two leading scientists also read the Origin : the botanist Asa Gray, who defended Darwin, and the zoologist L Read more
Invisible Handler
What did Adam Smith really believe?
Feb 20, 2017
Adam Smith (1723-1790) may be the most misunderstood British thinker of the last 500 years—misunderstood not by intellectual historians but by journalists and the educated public. A case in point: Steven Pearlstein, a well-regarded business journalist, asserts that Smith argued that the " 'invisible hand' of the market . . . miraculously transforms individual greed into collective prosperity." Smith said no such thing. There is one sentence in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the We Read more
Getting and Spending
Two cheers for materialism&-and a new stove.
Feb 06, 2017
William Wordsworth is a great English poet, but one poem he wrote irritates me. It’s the sonnet that begins: The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers . I beg to differ. There's nothing wrong with getting and spending so long as you don't do it 24/7. I'm retired, so my getting days are over except for the money I make from writing. I am not much of a spender, but recently my wife and I had a spending bash: We renovated our kitchen to the Read more
The Spirit of ’45
How Scotland's defeat made Great Britain a world power.
Dec 12, 2016
In its Great Battles series, Oxford University Press has published studies of Waterloo, Gallipoli, Alamein, Agincourt, and Hattin—the battle Saladin won that enabled him to recapture Jerusalem from the Crusaders. The latest entry in this series focuses on the Battle of Culloden, which took place on April 16, 1746, on a moor near Inverness. The battle lasted about an hour and engaged only 15,000 troops, but Murray Pittock persuasively argues that Culloden was "one of the decisive battles of the w Read more
Sociable Skeptic
David Hume, philosophical man of letters.
May 23, 2016
In his early twenties, David Hume (1711-1776), who is regarded by many observers as Britain’s greatest philosopher, studied law and worked briefly for a Bristol merchant, but he soon decided he wanted to be a man of letters. Instead of moving to London and becoming a journalist—the usual path for most would-be men of letters in the 18th century—Hume moved to France where, supported by his family, he spent three years writing A Treatise of Human Nature . This "astonishingly ambitious" work, as J Read more
Muddle Kingdom
Simon Leys, the skeptical Sinologist.
10:55 AM, Sep 09, 2016
What do Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes have in common? These French writers admired Mao Zedong, the tyrant responsible for a famine in which 40-50 million people died. He was responsible, as well, for the Cultural Revolution, which had a death toll of around two million (some observers put the figure much higher) and cost untold suffering and destruction. "When it comes to Maoism," the late China scholar Simon Leys once said, "some members of the French inte Read more
Life of a Salesman
Willy Loman: rule or exception?
Dec 21, 2015
When I first read Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman , which many critics consider to be one of the greatest American plays, I was puzzled. "What's Willy Loman's problem?" I said to myself. He was not like any salesman I knew—and I knew many because my father was a salesman, and so were most of his friends. My high school English teacher, who had assigned the play, said it was a profound commentary on American life. I thought it was corny. Salesmen get fired if they don't make their sales quot Read more
Senior Services
The best is yet to be, especially if you take a course.
Sep 07, 2015
In recent years, I’ve begun to worry that I should think more about aging. (I know, I know — everyone is aging, but the term only seems to be used for people over 60.) The Beatles wrote “When I’m Sixty-four,” but I am 74—older than a baby boomer—so it’s irresponsible of me to know so little about aging. I should read some books on the subject, or take a course. I was happy to learn recently that Washington D.C.’s Office on Aging offers seven courses on aging, including “Take Charge of Your Aging Read more
Miller’s Lament
When misattributions reach critical mass.
Jun 08, 2015
When I sit down with old friends who, like me, are in their 70s, I sometimes ask: “If you could live your life again, would you do anything differently?” Most just scratch their heads and say, “I dunno.” Recently, I told three old friends that I would do one thing differently: I would get a middle initial—either Q or X—to distinguish myself from the many Stephen Millers who write books. Or I would give myself a full middle name—say, Xavier or Quentin. In my youth and middle age, my very commo Read more
Commerce and Art
The disdain is largely one-sided.
Jul 01, 2013
John Kinsella, a highly regarded Australian poet who teaches at Cambridge, was quoted not long ago in the Times Literary Supplement as saying that he has “not sold his soul to market fetishization.” Kinsella means that he doesn’t want even to think about making a profit from his writing. But Kinsella is also doing what comes naturally for most poets and many literary essayists: He is expressing a disdain for the commercial world. To think about selling books is tantamount to worshipping Mammon Read more
Manners in Disguise
What seems like familiarity just might be deference.
Nov 14, 2011
My wife and I—we are in our early seventies—sit down in a local restaurant. After handing us menus, the waitress returns a few minutes later: “Are you guys ready to order?” she asks. The waitress, who is probably in her early twenties, could be my granddaughter, yet she calls us “guys.” A day later a young man selling apples at a local farm market says to my wife and me: “Thanks, guys.” Guys, a collective noun, is now a common form of address that young people often use when talking to a grou Read more