This Week’s Selections

The Future of World War II –– How will younger generations regard the conflict? (link)

Battling All the Way Home (link) –– “We need to avoid either of two errors. The first is to treat Homer’s Greeks as early, if primitive versions of ourselves... The second is to treat them… as though they were creatures from a distant planet rather than men from the European coast.”

Dolly Parton, RIP (link)

(A more extensive roundup of Dolly Parton’s life and times appears at the bottom of the newsletter.)

Read more

This Week’s Selections

Seduced by a Pink Dolphin in the Amazon (link)

The Wrong Kind of American (link)

I Like ‘Em Thick

Read more

This Week’s Selections

Why I Quit the Tenure Track (link)

Ordinary Abundance (link)

Why Haven’t We Found Any Aliens Yet? (link)

Our Versatile, Durable Pickup Truck (link)

Why Are Rivers So Mathematical? (link)

FLASHBACK:

A Woman of 90 Looks at Her World

Read more

This Week’s Selections

In Search of the Consolations of Age (link)

The Cult of Anthony Bourdain (link)

Icarus in the Faculty Lounge (link)

Pedro Sánchez’s Kingdom (link)

A cutting-edge gene-editing trial in China went disastrously wrong (link)

The Costs of a Military-First Foreign Policy (link)

FLASHBACK:

James Baldwin’s

Read more

This Week’s Selections

The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs (link)

Protected by Ghost Town (free registration required) –– “A private company has cleared dozens of homeless encampments in Venice, with persistence, cash payments, and a team that includes former gang members. Clients love them. The people they move do not.” (link)

How to survive boiling water (link)

Why Is It So Hard to Prepare for Disaster? (link)

Resist the Technocrats (link)

Flashbacks:

The Death of the Moth and other essays (link)

On Self Respect (link)

Other Items of Note

• “I’m a refugee who reports on America’s ills. I still believe in its promise.”

Read more

This Week’s Selections

Beyond Greece and Rome –– “A dramatic shift in perspective is producing a much bigger, broader and more exciting view of ‘the ancient world.’” (link)

On Tomatoes (link)

A.I. Drones Are Coming. We Are Not Ready. (link)

A History of the World Cup (link)

Flashback: Coach Fitz’s Management Theory (link)

Other Items of Note

• The culture of the East Bay (link)

• On subtitles (link)

• The rise of the corporate rave (link)

• He fleeced the Navy for millions, then fled the country. Now he wants a pardon. (link)

• Bernie’s bad bet on OpenAI (link)

• Intelligence is not the main bottleneck (link)

• A pioneer of frozen foods (link)

Read more

This Week’s Selections

Why Do Some Dementia Patients ‘Return’ Just Before They Die? (link)

Why American ambulance rides are so expensive (link)

Why Am I left-handed? –– “Scientists (and I) long assumed that handedness must originate in the brain. In fact, remarkably, it seems to be just the opposite. Our hands sculpt asymmetry in our brains.” (link)

Transit of Wonder–– “Every 122 years, Venus crosses the Sun as a black and fleeting teardrop, kindling the awe of all those who dare to know.” (link)

Lessons from a high-fertility subculture (link)

What Lionel Messi Sees (link)

Other Items of Note

• Me, Explaining Sex to an Anthropologist (link)

• What made The Sopranos great

Read more

This Week’s Selections

The End of Reading Is Here (link)

Too Many Books? (link)

The Prom Went On in Kyiv, but Masha’s Date Danced Alone (link)

Read more

A postcard from the 1904 World’s Fair.

This Week’s Selections

What Darwin Saw in the Galapagos (link)

Bob Dylan’s Second Act (link)

How a Nation of Immigrants Traces Its Roots (link)

Picturing Pyrotechnics (link)

A Theory of American Democracy –– and a warning (link)

Will Changes in War Change the Social Contract? (link)

A.I. and the Crisis of Classical Liberalism (link)

Illegible benefits –– The costs of transformative innovations are immediately clear: it’s the longterm gains that are hardest to understand (link)

The World Cup, Consumed in Highlights (link)

FLASHBACKS:

Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776 (link)

Equality and Liberty –– A review of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, by Danielle Allen. (link)

What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July? (link)

Calvin Coolidge on America’s 150 anniversary (link)

Other Items of Note

• America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Report Says About Who We Are (link)

• Tyler Austin Harper: The Surefire Way to Elicit Squeals of Delight From a Grown Man (link)

• Noah Millman: Pointe du Hoc Four Score and Two Years On (link)

• Flowers of Fire: Illustrations from Japanese Fireworks Catalogues circa1880 (link)

• The philosopher of the firework (link)

• Men who eat too many hot dogs (link)

• The best rendition of The Star Spangled Banner (link)

• Nick Gillespie: “As the United States celebrates its semiquincentennial, all age groups are less likely to love America than in the past.” (link)

Subscribe now

• How Amsterdam invented the fire department

Read more

This Week’s Selections

John Quincy Adams and the Fourth of July (link)

Our Amish Language (link)

A Terrible Thing Happened to My Family (link)

The Definitive Account of Jeffrey Epstein’s Death (link)

Why the West Stopped Making Land (link)

The Rolling Coup –– Unless we begin to act, our democracy will likely be destroyed. (link)

FLASHBACK:

The Panopticon Is Already Here (link)

Other Items of Note

• On coincidences

Read more

This Week’s Selections

The Mars Delusion (link)

The University As We Know It Is Finished (link)

Alberta’s War on Rats (link)

The Case for Vaccinating Wild Animals (link)

The Cult of the Enhanced Self (link)

We Should Probably Stop Murdering People (link)

Father’s Day Flashbacks:

What Kind of Father Am I? (link)

Memories of My Father (link)

Other Items of Note

• Noah Millman on the SpaceX IPO (link)

• Paul Graham: How to become a billionaire

Read more

This Week’s Selections

A Father and Son in New Orleans (link)

The challenge of determining the true shape of Earth reveals the deep value of measurement to scientific progress (link)

The Whimsy and Heartbreak of America’s Garage Sales (link)

Inside the White House Freak Out Over the Epstein Files (link)

The Demise of Real Neighborhoods Is a Story of Finance (link)

Humans Killed Millions of Vultures. Now People Are Paying the Price (link)

Give a gift subscription

Other Items of Note

• Me: Why 60 Minutes Should Take Critiques of Its Work Seriously (link)

• How avocados stopped being seasonal

Read more

This Week’s Selections

A Teenage Symphony to God (link)

You Must Remember This (link)

How Japan Stopped Civil War (link)

Anti-Woke, or Just Wounded? A Typology of Two Types of Anti-Woke Intellectuals (link)

Ben Sasse Is Teaching Us How to Die—And Live—Well (link)

How Dana White Took the UFC From the Fringes to the White House (link)

Other Items of Note

• Me: Why Trump wants to celebrate his birthday with a cage fight (link)

• Why drugs are here to stay (link)

• Rhubarb: more than you wanted to know

Read more

This Week’s Selections

Chris Jones: The Night My Marriage Fell Apart (link)

Mozart: Artist of sympathy and cruelty (link)

Sam Kriss Threatens Violence Against Writers Who Use A.I. (link)

A broken economy and an emboldened regime: Iranians abandoned to endure fallout from war (link)

How Lonely Planet stopped serving the people it was created for (link)

Other Items of Note

• Aaron Renn: Mass Culture Got Cancelled (link)

• “Even though the decade isn’t over yet, the 2020s already have their definitive piece of art. And we got it in 2021.”

Read more

I did not expect to find a story about racial segregation. But once I stumbled on this old New York Times article, published Sunday, May 15, 1921, I knew I wanted to reproduce it here, to complicate the neighborhood’s past and because it is so interesting in its own right. The article concerns 4 black professionals denied service at a coffee house. They sued under an anti-segregation law and won. The article takes pains to present the perspectives of the defendant and the plaintiffs.

Plucking choice articles from the out-of-copyright archives of American periodicals is something of an experiment for The Best of Journalism, offered as an “extra” to our flagship weekly edition. If you appreciate the antidote to presentism and want more, or dislike it and don’t, let me know. And if you’re looking for a father’s day gift, do remember that dads tend to love us.

Give a gift subscription

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Refusing Negro Diners

Both Sides of the Greenwich Village Coffee House Case

May 15, 1921

Grace Godwin Sperry of “Grace’s Garret” in Washington Square, known to Greenwich Village as the place where no one who is lonesome ever fails to find a welcome, has been found guilty of breaking the statute which forbids the refusal to serve negroes in a restaurant. The judgment was that she pay the minimum damages of $100 each to the four plaintiffs in the case. These plaintiffs were Catharino Lealtad, one of the secretaries for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Chicago University; Vashti Maxwell, graduate of Brown; Howard Gregg, a Yale man, now industrial secretary of the New York Urban League; and Eva Deaver, a probation officer.

Vicarious Travel is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“I realize, of course, that since there is a law compelling service to colored people in public restaurants it should be enforced and obeyed,” said Grace Godwin, who recently became Mrs. William Sperry, but is still called by her old name, after the fashion of the Village. “My contention at the trial, however, was that it had never occured to me that I was running a public restaurant. If the Garret comes under that head it is by a technical application only, for few besides my own friends have ever come there. It is practically my own home; I often invite people to lunch and breakfast with me there, without any charge, and if generally there is a charge, it is because a woman who until recently has had four children to take care of single-handed has to find some means of doing it.

“The Garret is a place where I combine the necessity for making money with the necessity for having friends and seeing them sometimes. I doubt where there ever was any one as lonely as I was when I first came to New York several years ago, and it has pleased me very much to feel that others who are lonely have found companionship as well as chocolate cake and coffee in the Garret!

Friendliness First

“It was for this reason, because the Garret is a place where friendliness comes first, and mere food second, that I asked the colored people when they came in to not insist on being served. Two-thirds of the people who come here are from the South, perhaps because Southerners are the loneliness people in New York, and whatever we may say or feel about it, there still is among Southern people a feeling that they would prefer not to mingle with colored people socially. If I made a practice of serving Southern people, I think many of my customers would never come again, and I can’t afford to lose them from the financial point of view, to say nothing of being unwilling to embarrass them as friends.

“You see, practically everyone has come to the Garret with an introduction! I’ve turned away dozens of white people who I thought would not fit in––young thugs who were out for a lark after a theater party and might seem a little frisky to the more sober, middle-aged people people whom I find congenial and who enjoy each other.

The four colored people who came in were young, and they weren’t lonely or poor, and they knew just what they were doing when they came and made a point of being served. I had no wish to embarrass them, so I asked my husband to go in quietly and ask the man in the party to come out in the hall so that we might speak to him. I tried to make him understand that there was nothing personal in my asking them to leave, and that it would be real persecution on their part if they insisted on their legal rights. I even offered to let them get what they pleased and eat it as my guests.

Disclaims Prejudice

“If colored people want equality, why don’t they grant it to others? They did not ask me for equality, but for privileges which I extend to no one, white or colored. I simply treated them as I would treat any one who seemed not to be congenial to the little group that comes to the Garret. If I had been less friendly and sincere I could have done what other restaurant people do: it’s permitted to charge what one pleases where there is no menu, and I could have asked them ten or twenty dollars for a cup of coffee. I thought that would be unfair, so I tried to get out of the difficulty by making a courteous request.

“I was raised with colored people, and they have always been my friends. I did not expect this sort of thing from them, and it makes me feel very resentful to be forced to spend most of the $1,000 I have been able to save by four years’ of working fifteen hours a day in order to let them prove a point. Theymust realize that all they can accomplish by bringing and even winning such lawsuits as these is to prove a technical point; certainly it is no way to gain social equality, for it simply creates antagonisms. I have no prejudice against black, white, or yellow, and the only thing I insist upon is the privilege of choosing my friends. I choose them on the basis of good sportsmanship, and certainly I feel that the colored people who sued me have not qualified in this respect.”

Catherine Lealtad, at her desk in the offices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People the other day, took exception to the implication that a desire to force social equality for her race had anything to do with the action of the four negroes who brought the suit against the proprietor of the Garret.

“We are not seeking social companionship with white people,” she said, “and we have no desire to force ourselves upon them. All we ask is the plain rights of citizenship in the country where we were born. The bringing of lawsuits against restaurants which disregard the law forbidding discrimination on account of color is a sheer necessity, and nothing else. People must eat, no matter what the color of their skin, just as they must be transported from place to place in public conveyances. It is just as essential that negroes should be served in restaurants as it is that they should travel on the cars.

“There are many districts in New York, as well as in other cities, that do not contain enough colored people to support a restaurant for the use of negro patrons alone, and if we are not allowed to eat in the eating places of white people we simply must go hungry. But, do you know, I have been in New York three years and I never have been refused service before. I frequently lunch at the various restaurants in Greenwich Village, since my work brings me here all day; and, far from having gone to the Garret to make a test case, we went there utterly oblivious to the possibility of any trouble.

“The four of us had been to Greenwich House to consult with Mrs. Simkhovitch, the head worker about settlement work among the colored people of that neighborhood. Before taking the bus to go uptown I suggested that we stop for something hot to drink. The Garret is on the corner where one takes the bus in Washington Square, and there was a sign hanging out that said, ‘Coffee House,’ which stamped it as a public restaurant; so we went in without a second thought, and seated ourselves at a long table near the door. The place was not crowded, but several people were sitting at other tables, and, far from noticing any disturbances which would have shown us that we weren’t welcome, I remember that they never even looked up when we came in. More than that, a young man and a girl came in after we did and sat down next to us, although there was room at the other table for them to sit down if they had objected to negroes.

“Presently, Mr. Sperry came in and touched Mr. Gregg on the shoulder, and they went out together. While they were gone a waitress brought an order for the white people sitting at our table.

“Then I was called out into the hall and Mrs. Sperry told me that she wanted to explain the situation to me because she felt it would be easier to reason with a woman. She told me then that she had never eaten in the same place with a negro and wouldn’t ask any of her patrons to do it, that she couldn’t afford to antagonize them. I replied that I had eaten in other restaurants and had not noticed their patronage was falling off as a result.

“Mr. Gregg then said that the young women with him were ladies and he wanted to spare us the embarrassment of walking out, of being put out, and wouldn’t Mrs. Sperry let us be served with some simple thing on the condition that we finished quickly as we could and went out? Mrs. Sperry’s reply was that we were welcome to go to the kitchen and get anything we pleased without charge, or she would find out whether the waitress was willing to serve us in the restaurant, but that she would not take any money for it.

“I told her that we had not asked for charity and would not accept it. I felt her attitude was extremely unjust, and I said that if we could not settle the matter amicably then there were ways of settling it elsewhere.

“We brought suit then, not for the sake of the money, and not in order to persecute anyone, but simply in the interest of self-preservation, if we are to live in a civilized world.

“There are two elements at the bottom of the white race’s unwillingness to share their civilization with the negro. One is the wholly unfounded bugaboo of intermarriage and the other is the failure to realize that there are class distinctions among negroes. It seems as if white people never realize that there are educated negroes and refined negroes and clean negroes, just as there are ignorant and slovenly negroes––and just as there are educated and refined Italians, French, Poles, Americans and Chinese, as well as dirty and ignorant ones. All types and kinds of negroes are treated as if they were ignorant and unfit to mingle with. In the words of the song, ‘All coons look alike’ to white folks.

“This is especially true, of course, in the South, where I traveled for two years for the National Board of the YWCA.”

Defines “Social Recognition”

“I was born in the Middle West, and there I never encountered real prejudice, never was refused service in a restaurant, never was forced to live in a segregated district. In New York, during the three years I have lived here, I have been “put out” of a public house only once, at the Garret. But in the South––it is because I am so bitter at the treatment negroes receive there that I am giving all my time to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

“There education is practically denied to my people. Negroes are taxed the same as whites, yet for a colored child $1 is spent on schooling to $22 that is spent for a white child. We pay full fare on the railroads and are forced to travel in a special section, more often than not in the rear half of the baggage car, with wooden seats, no sleeping or eating accommodations, and so little room that people are forced to stand five and six hours at a time.

“The South, I think, resents the presence of decent, clean, educated negroes, and therefore makes sure that its own colored population shall remain ignorant and slovenly. But I feel that in keeping the negro down the white South is keeping itself down too.

“To go back to the suit against Mrs. Sperry and the Garret, I want only to make it quite clear that it was brought simply as a matter of necessity, to insure to negroes the privilege of buying food when they need it and not to force any kind of social recognition. That is an individual and not a race matter. I personally have friends among white girls I knew at college who I like to think are my friends because we like one another as folks, with no thought of black or white.”

“But,” protests Mrs. Sperry, “the Garret has no ‘necessities’ in the line of food! The only food we serve is frills, chocolate cake and coffee and grape juice. No one needs that sort of thing to live on! The only necessity I deal in is friendship, and I reserve my right to choose my friends. I’ve taken down the sign which made the Garret a public eating place in the eyes of the law, and it will be in the future just a club. If I have to fight in the courts to establish my right to run the place as I please, the last right I reserve is that of walking out. I will simply close the Garret and go away.”

The photograph above is by Jessie Tarbox Beals, who photographed Greenwich Village in the 1920s. See more examples here.

This Week’s Selections

Mathematics Is Out There (link)

The Monastery That Helped Build Victor Wembanyama (link)

China’s Experience of Economic Transformation (link)

Soon, access to frontier AI will be scarce and selective (link)

The Testosterone Moment (link)

Flashback:

Andrew Sullivan on “The He Hormone” (link)

On Memorial Day…

The Death of Captain Waskow (link)

Oliver Wendell Holmes: “In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched with Fire” (link)

Read more

This Week’s Selections

In Northern Ukraine, a Boy vs. A Russian Drone (link)

Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth (link)

The $375,000 Drinking Fountains (link)

The Doomsday Organism

Read more

Note: today’s newsletter is free, so that all the world’s mothers can enjoy it. If you would like to purchase a gift subscription so that your mother gets reading recommendations all year, click below:

Give a gift subscription

This Week’s Selections

All My Dad’s Sons (link)

Colleges, Maybe Try Teaching! (link)

Before Leviathan Wakes (link)

The Savanah Bananas Bring Back a Negro League Team (link)

The Lamps Are Going Out (link)

I Want to Live Like Costco People (link)

A Mother’s Day Extravaganza

Amy Tan: Mother Tongue (link)

Katie Roiphe: My newborn is like a narcotic (link)

Megan McArdle: Why I’ve spent the days after my mother’s death polishing copper pots (link)

Vanity Fair: Demi’s Big Moment (link)

Mary H.K. Choi: My Mom (link)

Subscribe now

Cris Beam: Mother, Stranger (link)

Olga Khazan: Want to Change Your Personality? Have a Baby (link)

E.J. Levy: Mastering the Art of French Cooking (link)

Alice Walker: In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (link)

Cheryl Strayed: The Love of My Life (link)

Zadie Smith: Joy (link)

Matt Yglesias: This mother’s day, let moms have Waymo (link)

Mary Gordon: My Mother’s Body (link)

Miriam Wasser: Breastfeeding grief (link)

Caitlin Flanagan:

• How Serfdom Saved the Woman’s Movement (link)

• Housewife Confidential (link)

Ruyi Wen: A Parent’s Typical Day As Envisioned by My Child’s Preschool (link)

Poems about mothers from Carrie Fountain, Alice B. Fogel, Nikki Giovanni, and Kate Buckley

Bruce Springsteen’s song for his mother (link)

Other Items of Note

• Yesteryear: A Chilling Satire of the Empty Self (link)

• A cartoonist on cartooning (link)

• The origins of Indians (link)

• A 1,578-foot tsunami struck a popular Alaskan cruise destination. Now we know why. (link)

• Bruce Bawer: Cult to cult to cult (link)

• Ross Douthat: The Atheist and the Machine God (link)

• Also Ross: Trump’s Ukraine Policy Is Succeeding As His Iran Policy Fails (link)

• Toward a theory of post-partisan storytelling (link)

• Hollis Robbins: Red, white and psychedelic (link)

• The trouble with narrative history (link)

• Andrew Sullivan: Why the New York Times is post-liberal (link)

• Kevin Williamson: “Debt held by the public now exceeds 100 percent of GDP.” (link)

• Christopher Coome: How occultists remade the world (link)

• William Voegeli: The Democratic center cannot hold (link)

• Articles that Works Progress would like to commission (link)

• On the imperfection of elegies (link)

• “Lavinia and Michelle are twins who grew together in the same womb, were born from the same mother, and delivered within minutes of each other – but have different fathers.” (link)

• Mike Solana on assassination culture (link)

• Meghan Daum: “Am I saying that the producer-crafted ‘villain’ from The Hills who later blew his fortune on Birkin bags and moldavite crystals is the best person to be the mayor of the second largest city in America? Uh, no. Am I saying that given the options currently before us, I believe Spencer Pratt is L.A.’s best hope for reversing course on a path towards a crisis that, in my view, grows more heartbreaking by the day? Yes, to my astonishment, I am saying this.” (link)

• Adeline Dimond: The case for Spencer Pratt (link)

• Is the California Coastal Commission Finally Losing Some of Its Regulatory Powers? (link)

• Noah Millman: what is consciousness for? (link)

• People gave Trump a lot of money without anticipating that he may spend it selfishly or ineffectively (link)

This Week’s Selections

Their family members vanished near Mass. Ave. They won’t stop searching. (link)

What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity? (link)

The Smelly Baby Problem (link)

A Job Watching the Horizon for Smoke (link)

Liebling at War (link)

On Growing Up Gay and Mormon and Loved (link)

Flashback: Here Comes the Groom (link)

Audio: Strange Bedfellows Part I––When LGB met T (YouTube) (ApplePodcast)

Other Items of Note

• How to hack the bachelor’s degree

Read more

This Week’s Selections

Creating Baby Geniuses to Thwart the AI Threat (link)

The Many Roots of Our Suffering: Reflections on Robert Trivers (1943–2026) (link)

Saving a Lost Generation of Young Men—With Chop Saws (link)

Fuel for Thought (link)

I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America (link)

The Disappearance of the Public Bench (link)

Other Items of Note

• The Irony of Slavery (link)

• George Will on the demographic challenges ahead (link)

• Me: The U.K. smoking ban is illiberal (link)

• “What will be scarce? The economics of structural change and the post-commodity future of work” (link)

• On cooking with a microwave

Read more