Originally conceived in 1958 and sponsored by the American Library Association, the weeklong celebration is a full seven days set aside to highlight “the valuable role libraries, librarians and library workers play in transforming lives and strengthening our communities.” There are yearly themes, and in 2015, an illustrated history was published, and now there’s a hashtag (#NationalLibraryWeek) along with downloads for tools and resources.

The focus on the connection between libraries (and librarians and library workers) and their communities is well deserved, but also (I think), a particular spotlight is helpful because the subject of libraries as a whole can be overwhelming.

The Wikipedia page, “Library” starts with a straightforward definition; “a library is a collection of books, and possibly other media and materials that is accessible for use by its members and allied member institutions.”

The Wikipedia page, “History of Libraries,” is much fuller, beginning with the earliest libraries, which were collections of clay tablets—artifacts eventually excavated in what is now present-day Syria and Iraq. What began as a form of aggregated record keeping transformed over the years to the first public libraries established under the Roman Empire, and these were showcases to demonstrate wealth and power.

There’s no shortage of information on the history of libraries, but it’s not the full story of how we appreciate reading and books and our personal collections. More tactile than a Wikipedia page, Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (2000) includes the essay “Marrying Libraries” (her musings on the intimacy of merging book collections with her husband). And then, of course, there are the buildings themselves—the public spaces vary widely; sometimes a multi-level reference library that centers a university, or maybe a borough’s one-story building where there are reading groups and story time.

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Here’s a listicle of fun facts and favorite quotes:

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world. Its creation was the first action by a joint committee of Congress.

“If a book is well written, I always find it too short.”

~ Jane Austen

The Franklin Public Library in Franklin, Massachusetts (named after Ben) was established in 1778 with a donation of books from the aforementioned Benjamin Franklin and is considered America’s first public library. The original collection of Franklin’s donated books can be found in the library’s Reading Gallery.

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

~ Groucho Marx

Flanking the stairs leading to the main entrance of the New York Public Library’s branch on Fifth Avenue are a pair of lions, dubbed Patience and Fortitude during the Great Depression by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (the virtues New Yorkers most needed to get through hard times). Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic, calls the two “New York’s most lovable public sculpture.”

The NYPL itself is on the register of historic landmarks, and became the subject of an award-winning documentary, Ex Libris by the late filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman.

“Once you’ve read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.”

~ Louis L’Amour

Not as imposing as the NYPL, but no less loved, the first little free library was built in Hudson, Wisconsin, by Todd Bol in 2009. Bol filled a wooden container with books and set it on his lawn as a tribute to his late mother, a book lover and former schoolteacher. Now a 501(c) (3) nonprofit, Little Free Libraries are a presence in 115 countries.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things —that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

~ Alan Bennett, The History Boys

On Instagram, “1000 Libraries” is the creation of bookseller Vincent Phan, celebrating books as “magical portals” and book places as the “cornerstone of our society.”

Thanks to Jolene Handy, I learned that the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University contains Georgia O’Keeffe’s recipe box — it’s green cardboard and contains her handwritten note cards.

Time Travel Kitchen

On Waldorf Astoria Stationery, a Handwritten Brownie Recipe

Part Two: More on Georgia O’Keeffe, Cook, because there’s just so much to talk about. JH…

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2 years ago · 87 likes · 67 comments · Jolene Handy

Here are two of my favorite libraries:

The Shandaken Morton Memorial Library in the hamlet of Pine Hill, NY (current population: 275). Created by Dr. Henry Morton and built in the Georgian Revival style, the library was added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 21, 1997.

Still an active community library, they’re celebrating this year’s National Library Day (per their Instagram).

The Danforth Library, also known as the Paterson Free Public Library, is located at 250 Broadway, Paterson, NJ

Designed by Henry Bacon, who also designed the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Completed in 1905, the building is an example of Classical Revival architecture and was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 1, 1984.

Here are more thoughts:

In 2019, architectural photographer Candida Höfer published an oversized hardcover dedicated to the singular beauty of libraries. https://www.amazon.com/Libraries-Candida-Höfer-Umberto-Eco/dp/3791385615. Höfer is typically associated with ornate public spaces—churches and museums and opera houses—and the collection’s focus is on the famed libraries of Europe and the United States: a wide-angle shot of the Long Room in Trinity College Library (a 65-meter-long hall containing 200,000 of the library’s oldest books); the column-lined Playfair Library Hall at the University of Edinburgh (once a working library, the space now hosts dinners, receptions and important conferences); several angles featuring the interior of Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar (an architecturally stunning research library with the world’s largest Faust collection); midtown Manhattan’ Pierpont Morgan Library; and a cluttered, homey, personal library within the Villa Medici in Rome.

Libraries opens with a personal essay by Umberto Eco, written years earlier, on his love of libraries. Seemingly in contrast, the 137 full-color, large-format photographs capture an array of diverse spaces, but the unifying theme, beyond the word “library,” is the absence of a single person. Candida Höfer was seeking the stillness of libraries—that detached perspective is the stylization she’s known for.

Perhaps the opposite of Candida Höfer’s signature vision dedicated to serene and unpeopled structures is a vision of the library as dynamic and vital. Perhaps the opposite of Candida Höfer’s Libraries, dedicated to the physical space containing books, are the books, the stories, themselves. Perhaps the opposite of Candida Höfer is Richard Scarry, a staple of children’s literature whose most famous books take place in Busytown. The whole point of Scarry’s work is a narrative visual energy.

Höfer and Scarry are both gifted artists; one captured the architectural beauty and dignity of those special places that honor and house literature, the other created imagery-rich, high-energy books and invited the youngest of toddlers to become readers. The space between Höfer and Scarry may not be a vast gulf at all, but an acknowledgment of the expansiveness of all that reading and collecting books and collecting knowledge and sharing stories encompasses.

[T]ransforming lives and strengthening our communities.

The essence of National Library Week is the celebration’s focus on culture and civic life. The public library, as the representation of the Jeffersonian principle of democracy, may sound imposing, but that’s not how it plays out.

Last year, the guitarist and longtime Connecticut resident, Keith Richards, was honored as the inaugural recipient of the Governor’s Award of Excellence. Richards was recognized for the very thing that National Library Week celebrates: his contributions to enriching Connecticut’s cultural and civic life.

As part of the ceremony, Westport Library Executive Director Bill Harmer shared his thoughts on the location:

“As we celebrate Keith today, we are reminded that libraries are not just places to borrow books; they are agencies for equality, opportunity, creativity, and empowerment. At The Westport Library, we are proud to be an institution that provides free access to knowledge, culture, and creativity for all, just as Keith described. His recognition today is a celebration not only of his music but of the values we hold dear: creativity, authenticity, and the belief that art and culture have the power to change lives.”

Richards, an avid reader with a vast library in his home, is known for his own thoughts on that communal space where readers are born.

“When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equalizer.”

~ Keith Richards

Episode Notes:

This Week’s Recommended Reading

As part of its 125^th Anniversary, the New York Public Library revealed its 10 most checked out books of all time.

Photo Credit: bookriot, Instagram

This Week’s Recommended Music

“Lady Writer“ by Dire Straits on Amazon Music

The game that Mr. Zachrich sat through and cried through was the legendary medal round in men’s ice hockey played at Lake Placid’s Olympic Field House on February 22, 1980, when a raucous crowd cheered on the American team as they faced off against the Soviets (the four-time defending gold medalists). The surprising upset, with the United States defeating the Soviet Union by a single point, was a feat so stunning that over forty years later, it’s still universally known as “Miracle on Ice.” Though their win over the Soviets didn’t earn the Americans their gold medal — that came days later after they’d played their final game in the Lake Placid Olympics and bested Finland — it was their victory that Sports Illustrated labeled, “the greatest moment in 20^th century sports.”

The February 22^nd game has been likened to a group of Canadian high school players taking on the New York Yankees and winning the World Series.1 No wonder there were immediate documentaries and books written following the win. Disney’s Miracle (2004), starring Kurt Russell as Herb Brooks (coach for Team USA), was released 25 years later.

But the ice hockey victory was more than a classic unlikely-underdog-wins-the-major-competition story. There was significant cultural resonance. The recent Netflix documentary, Miracle: The Boys of ‘80, opens with the mood of the country as the team began to form in 1979. America during the 1970s had it all — a political crisis that led to the resignation of a sitting president, rampant inflation, the Three-Mile Island nuclear meltdown, the Iranian hostage crisis and gas lines, widespread factory closures and urban decay becoming commonplace in cities throughout the Northeast.

New words had entered the country’s vocabulary: The Rust Belt. The Ayotollah. Watergate. And of course, the United States was still in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviets. Ice hockey was nothing if not the sport the Soviets had all but made their own. The win by the scrappy college team was quite the sports phenomenon, but more than that, it was shooting life into a country weighted down by so much.

This was a cultural touchstone perfectly timed with the start of the new decade. Though Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory (heralding “Morning in America”) was many months away, the tumult of the 1970s — the political unrest, economic and cultural dislocation — all of it suddenly seemed poised to fade. “Miracle on Ice” had all the energy and confidence to launch the nation forward.

Four and a half decades later, to commemorate the historic win, the “Miracle on Ice Congressional Gold Medal Act” was signed into law in December 2025 to honor the game’s 45^th anniversary. The bi-partisan legislation awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the 1980 Olympic hockey team — the highest civilian honor given by the U.S. Congress, which honors “individuals or groups who have made a ‘long-standing impact on American history and culture.’”

The 1980 U.S. Olympic Men’s Ice Hockey Team was cited as “lifting the nation [and] inspiring generations.”

Without question, the win hit back on all the big upheavals of the 1970s — the economic malaise, America’s declining place on the world stage, waning patriotism and general mistrust in the government in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate. And though not a specific focus of the Netflix documentary, the win’s impact might well have served as lessons learned for the women’s movement.

The idea that sportsmanship — that any ideal taken from “male culture” could have any benefit to anyone at all — was beyond the comprehension of the then-dominant wing of the women’s movement. Despite the passage of Title IX and the triumphs of women like Billie Jean King (and the lesser-publicized gains of women like Shirley Muldowney), Gloria Steinem was then the leading voice for feminists, and hers was a wholesale disdain for sports. To Ms. Steinem, sports were nothing more than another venue designed by men showcasing their misguided goals of vainglory and hollow achievement, and were basically emblematic of what second-wave feminism perceived as negative male traits. The pejorative “jockocracy” had been coined.

This was true even with Title IX having passed in 1972 as part of landmark legislation designed to uplift women and girls. Billie Jean King had prevailed over Bobby Riggs in 1973’s “Battle of the Sexes,” and she personally urged Gloria Steinem to reconsider her stance, making clear it was a mistake to keep sports on the outskirts of feminism. But the dominant voices of the women’s movement failed to see the benefit, and in fact, many athletes, the women actually challenging gender norms, in turn, opposed feminism.

Ignoring the power of athletic achievement is to ignore historic achievement — and all the talent and courage and gains of true path setters. With her win in 1957, Althea Gibson became the first Black player ever to win the tournament. Also with her win, Ms. Gibson, the daughter of sharecroppers, was personally congratulated by Queen Elizabeth II upon her victory.

History well remembers Althea Gibson. She “wasn’t merely a Black athlete in the era before the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act, playing at a time when there were restaurants and hotels that she couldn’t enter. She was a female athlete before Billie Jean King and Title IX came along, let alone Gloria Steinem.”2

Even with feminists ignoring athletics as a vital source to inspire social change, was there enough within the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” to impact the women’s movement? Was the perspective shifted, even by a slight margin, by a win deemed to have influenced so many other aspects of the culture?

Sports and sports psychology are complex. You can hold it up to the light like a prism. Mental toughness. Athleticism. Teamwork. Physical health. Cherished memories. Shared experience. Social connection. Pushing toward a personal best.

Watching the interviews in Miracle: The Boys of ’80, the biggest takeaway for the team members, all these years later and what the win meant to them comes down to the bonds they made. The camaraderie. The enduring friendships. Their Olympic moment was never about the individual. That the Congressional Gold Medal was awarded to the team, and not any one player, coach or staff member, was in recognition of the collective legacy of twenty young men.

The Netflix documentary also offers a look at what wasn’t obvious so many years back — what lay beneath the joy and youthful exuberance and sheer exhilaration in the victory celebrations that the country shared in vicariously. These were young men shaped by family and community. Ken Morrow (defenseman, Team USA), learned hockey on the home-made ice ponds that he’d made with his brother as a youth in Flint, Michigan. He learned civic value from his father, an auto industry worker dying of cancer who urged his college-age son (with whom he had precious little time), to leave home and “play for his country.” The new documentary sets out detail after detail on the effort that it took to play for the US Team, and the personal gains that resulted. To work hard for a tough coach. To make a personal sacrifice. Of the bonds made through rigorous training. The honor to represent their country. These were values that led to enormous achievement, and why wouldn’t that be a model to anyone who’d been watching?

By the time the Lake Placid Winter Olympics were played, women were already avid ice hockey fans. And women were seeing something granular within the game. “In no other team sport is the power and grace of movement so pure…an elegance of line and motion infused with speed and strength…Hockey is primordial natural motion in the form of awesome human power. Also, it’s a damned exciting game to watch.”3

Still, even supposing a decent-sized fan base of women, the US Team was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for “lifting the nation [and] inspiring generations.” There was majesty in the moment when the clock finally wound down, and the buzzer rang, and a group of college students embraced as a team with their adrenaline highs and an ebullience that seems to be unmatched in human history. Perhaps 1980’s “Miracle on Ice” in some small way had played a role in banishing the word “jockocracy.” Perhaps the young men of Team USA showed everyone in the country that sportsmanship and team play, which were then primarily male traditions, had something of deep value within them.

Addendum.

As I write this, on February 22, 2026, forty-six years to the day after that still famous event, the US men’s ice hockey team won the gold medal (the first gold since the Lake Placid Olympics), beating the heavily favored Canadian team. Mike Eruzione, “Miracle on Ice” captain, had stopped by to visit before the final game, and offered up some advice: “Just leave it all out there.”

Three days earlier, the US women’s ice hockey team had also reached the final round. They too had faced Canada. And they too “[left] it all out there.”

And they too won gold.

This Week’s Recommended Reading

“From A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti”

by A. Bartlett Giamatti, et al

This Week’s Recommended Viewing

The absolutely peerless Surya Bonaly, routinely penalized (well into the 1990s) for not being “feminine” enough in the world of figure skating.

This Week’s Recommended Music

“Skateaway” by Dire Straits on Amazon Music.

Though the calendar page turned over a week ago, it seems all of January has been set aside for goal-setting and resolutions. There’s no shortage of advice for better health (stay hydrated, floss daily, opt for doctor-recommended amounts of sleep). Keeping with all the wellness aspirations, here’s a bit of New Jersey-themed motivation.

Does it get any better than Natalie Grabow, the triathlete from New Jersey who completed a history-making run in the Ironman World Championships last year?

At the age of 80, Ms. Grabow became the first ever woman in that age group to complete the Ironman Kona, crossing the finish line with a time of 16 hours, 45 minutes and 26 seconds. The course, that demands a 2.4-mile ocean swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run, allows competitors 17 hours to finish at the world championship.

A native of Mountain Lakes, Ms. Grabow noted there were no girls’ sports when she attended high school, so she became a cheerleader. It was in her later years that she began triathlon training, beginning with swim lessons at age 59.

She’s received tons of well-deserved media attention and is a shining light of motivation for the new year and beyond.

Along with exercise, there’s always a little voice that comes out after January 1^st, reminding us to “eat healthy/eat well.” A great place to start is the website, Edible Jersey.

Not only recipes, this site is multi-faceted, with full sections on eating local, food banks, and clean waterways. There’s also more off-the-beaten-path topics — farming in the garden state (“Faces of our Farmers”), NJ history (“The Bluffs of Bay Head”), things to do (“Coastal Beach Towns in the Off Season”), and cooking as heritage (“In my Grandmother’s Kitchen – Merchantville”). Edible Jersey is a great source for recipes, of course, and food writing from a host of contributors, including Substack creatives, Hank Zona and Valerie Stivers.

It will inspire you to eat well. It will give you endless topics to think about and engage with.

Happy 2026!!!

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Returning from an (unexpectedly) extended hiatus to weigh in on performative men.

Sometime in late summer, two articles showed up in my email. The first to appear, “How Do You Spot a ‘Performative’ Male? Look for a Tote Bag,” came from The New York Times and was followed a week or so later by Air Mail’s “Dude, Where’s My Tote?” Intrigued by the references to “men” and “totes,” I read both and learned about the new phenomenon of “performative men.”

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What it means to be a performative man is pretty much as the name describes — these are poseurs who adopt female tropes as a ploy to seem vulnerable and, in turn, attract women. Both articles detail the Y-chromosome charade of listening to Lana Del Rey and reading Sally Rooney and carrying tote bags. Whether the phenomenon is good for women overall was left up for debate. It was thought that slipping into the guise of femininity, regardless of motive, might be an illuminating experience for men. It was also thought the efforts were hollow and belied a lack of real caring.

One stark question the performances raise is what’s beneath the façade?

In the many decades since second-wave feminism stormed the country and rendered masculinity a coded word, men have sought to say and do the right things. This has been particularly true of men in the public eye — men who are journalists. As it happens, in researching the long-form essay on Playboy and the media and feminism, I’d come across a few articles written by male journalists that struck me as curious. The sort of posing I encountered differed from young men clutching tote bags in hopes of a date. These were men who’d been given the keys to influential platforms (the media), and while spouting feminist rhetoric, they also, within the very same article (in one case podcast), revealed their personal participation on what might be called the wrong side of the male gaze. While not an exhaustively researched analysis, here are a few snapshots of male journalists with their inner thoughts and their outward posturing (as feminist-adjacent) side-by-side.

Playboy’s 1979 Silver Anniversary issue, the subject of my long-form essay, featured Candy Loving as the chosen Playmate. Given the massive media blitz surrounding the magazine’s twenty-five-year celebration, Ms. Loving was interviewed extensively from the start. She continued with her publicity tours on behalf of Playboy for several years, and in January 1980, Ms. Loving met with journalist Tom Shroder, who was then a reporter in Florida. (“Candy Loving,” News-Press, January 12, 1980.)

While the reporter was not intentionally disrespectful, the substance of their discussion is a blueprint of the male double standards that persisted and of the adage “old habits die hard.” Throughout the interview, the cultural norm — holding the men who were reading Playboy and the models who posed for the magazine to different moral standards — was in plain sight.

He began the write-up describing his reaction upon meeting Ms. Loving.. He found her “strikingly attractive” and was taken aback on discovering how very real she was.

“There’s something magical about this centerfold-come-to-life. As often as I had contemplated that glossy tri-fold in the center of the magazine, it was a little unnerving to have such an image come to life before me.”

They talked about the publicity and media promotions she was doing for the magazine. Then, skipping over her studies at the University of Oklahoma, where she was in her junior year, majoring in public relations, Shroder reminded Ms. Loving that she’d posed “in a garter belt” and confronted her: wasn’t Playboy essentially a sexual come-on? Well, he introduced the article by talking about how much time he’d spent not just reading the magazine but having “contemplated that glossy tri-fold in the center of the magazine.” He’s an admitted member of Playboy’s “viewership,” yet criticizes the content of the magazine.

There were more questions, many intended as provoking.

“How do you reconcile a religious conviction with your having posed nude for Playboy?”

“Does women as background scenery offend you?”

“Don’t you ever feel guilty that you’re helping contribute to the emphasis on a certain kind of female beauty?”

Shroder pushed the prescribed feminist rhetoric against Playboy, ignoring his status as a reader, which made him equally culpable in everything he was challenging as a journalist. Perhaps this double standard was to be expected in the early days of men adjusting to the influence of second-wave feminism and women’s rights. This was forty-five years ago, and I do want to be fair.

But…

Decades later, Hampton Stevens penned an article for The Atlantic about the logistics and the emotions and everything else swirling around a Playboy casting call in Missouri. The subtitle laid out the article’s premise: Every year, hundreds of women audition to pose naked in Hugh Hefner’s magazine. Why? “Scenes From a Playboy Playmate Casting Call,” The Atlantic (June 27, 2011).

As to why, there was money. There was having their photographs taken by a “top-notch photographer.” There were hopes it would be a Hollywood springboard. There were a variety of different motives. But the article didn’t just ask questions about the women’s interest in auditioning for the magazine. Attending a Playmate casting call led Mr. Stevens to think of the fissure between Playboy and the women’s movement, and “feminist watchwords like ‘exploit’ and ‘objectify.’” Here’s what’s so interesting. Prior to exploring those feminist issues, Mr. Stevens took in both the atmosphere at the casting call and the women, and after strolling through the venue and looking around, he rated the women on their hotness.

Yes, he rated them. Except for a few, who in Mr. Stevens’ opinion, had “overestimated their charms,” he found most attractive. He used the word “smoking.” The women ranged from “prom queen pretty to nightclub sultry, to eyeball-popping, make-cartoon-steam-come-out-of-your-ears, die-a-little-inside sexy.”

There’s so much to be said (or possibly nothing that can be said) about an article published in The Atlantic where a man objectifies women based on his personal judgment of their physical desirability, then interviews the women and asks whether posing in Playboy exploits and objectifies them.

Most recently, the kind of disparate treatment of women was on full display during an episode of The Rewatchables. The podcast is an offshoot of the Ringer Podcast Network, featuring high-level editors and contributors for discussions of favorite movies. In November 2022, they highlighted Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981).

Here’s a brief summary of the film (no spoilers, if you haven’t seen Blow Out, I highly recommend). John Travolta stars as Jack, a sound technician who works on low-budget films and the movie begins with a film within the film, namely the airing of Coed Frenzy, the slasher pic that’s being edited. It’s revealed that the actress being slashed in the shower scene is unable to fake a decent scream, and that sends Jack in search of new sound effects, a search that starts off the action in the actual film (out at night, Jack stumbles on a fatal car crash that might have been a political assassination, a mystery that he then tries to unspool).

Episodes of The Rewatchables follow a general pattern where key questions are posited after the film’s discussion. Favorite line. Most rewatchable moment. What has aged poorly.

On what has aged poorly, one of The Rewatchable hosts held John Travolta to task for a scene early in the film where he cajoles the young woman involved in the accident to have a drink with him. This, as the host ranted, crossed the #MeToo line! Here’s what actually happens in the film: Travolta’s character wants to speak with the young woman because he thinks she has information about the crash that he’d witnessed. When she does have a drink with him, he tries to draw out what she knows. At no time does he make the slightest inappropriate “move” on her. Still, the host found a man convincing a young woman to have a drink, regardless of relevance to the film’s plot, so objectionable that he was compelled to call it out. Even the other hosts found this odd.

But listen to the rest of the podcast. The hosts are all over Coed Frenzy, wishing it were available as a film they could watch in its entirety. Wishing that Brian De Palma had filmed it with more sex. Commenting that a sexist remark in the film about why the young actress with the pathetic scream was hired in the first place (the word rhymes with “bits”) is a “favorite line.” No discussion whatsoever on the tropes of slasher films, which exploit young actresses and depict extreme violence against women — arguments that have been studied and documented.

Coed Frenzy opens Blow Out without a specific introduction, so that the audience initially thinks the sequence is the main film and that sleight of hand is a study of manipulation in film. As it turns out, the “low budget film” is also a study in film technique. For the production of Coed Frenzy, Brian De Palma brought in Garrett Brown, inventor of the Steadicam, who’d just finished filming the iconic scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (the tricycle in the empty corridor, the chase in the hedge maze). Brown confirmed that every aspect of Coed Frenzy had been planned and choreographed. The faux-slasher pic was jampacked with cliches but also populated by actors well-rehearsed to create a bad film and clearly in on the joke. That included the memorably endearing performance of Missy Cleveland playing an actress so inept that, for a simple scream, her voice had to be dubbed. The only comment on any of the performers was this:

“The actress who screams in the shower was Missy Cleveland, who was Playmate of the Month, April 1979. I know Sean has that issue.”

“Wasn’t alive but you were.”

Of Nancy Allen, the female lead in the actual film and admittedly a more experienced actress than Ms. Cleveland (but still), there is a long discourse on the professionalism she draws on in order to play “ditzy.” The same podcast episode where John Travolta cajoling a young woman out for a drink (to get information!) was deemed worthy of rebuke, ignores what real sexism looks like: men setting up different standards for women they deem different.

Lurking about as an undercurrent in the three pieces is the treatment of women connected to Playboy, taking us back to the social norms of the 1950s, where women were divided into categories — the nice girls and the “other girls.” It’s okay to comment on the women in Playboy while spouting out feminist rhetoric because sexualized women are in a different category, and there are completely different rules about commenting on those women, even in public. The good-girls-and-other-girls distinction was a dogma that Hugh Hefner specifically sought to eliminate. It could be argued that Playboy as a lens on the way that women are categorized is passé, that the relevance of the magazine is gone with the dark ages (it’s true that Hugh Hefner was once called the “human bellbottom”). But Playboy left lasting imprints on the culture, including the way derisive comments about Playmates serve as a kind of shorthand to negatively label women who defy mainstream feminists. Even feminists who despise Hugh Hefner don’t deny the stranglehold the 1950s held over women who crossed the line sexually, along with the threat that tagging women into acceptable categories still holds today.

Without doubt, the women’s movement achieved a great deal since the 1970s. There are now concerns that women have come to dominate significant swaths of the culture. The Unspeakeasy with Meghan Daum, “Have Women Ruined the World? Helen Andrews on The Great Feminization.” There are ongoing and very serious discussions about growing issues impacting men and how feminists have actually turned the tables. Modern Wisdom, “Episode #1013 - Scott Galloway - How to Fix a Culture of Emasculated Men”

This isn’t taking away from those very real concerns. This also isn’t pressing an agenda from the 1970s, where feminists expected men to give up the male gaze. That was always a pretty big ask, and just getting better rules about what’s okay “in polite company” has been a huge win. You know, keep your thoughts to yourself. Don’t make me stare at the pinup calendar on the wall of the gas station when I’m paying to have my tires rotated. Don’t make cheap sexist jokes in the office. Be appropriate in public. But when the curtain’s pulled back on commentary that’s supposed to be journalism, revealing it as merely a performance of what one ought to say “in polite company,” it’s a telling reminder of the 1950s and a gender imbalance where the stakes are always authority and power. It’s a telling reminder that perceptions of class endure as a way to sort women.

One thing that’s particularly haunting in the three examples is how none were off-the-cuff remarks, but commentary done under the watchful eye of editors. Tom Shroder’s piece was a front-page article in the weekend Lifestyle, Culture and Entertainment Section. Hampton Stevens wrote his article for The Atlantic. The Rewatchables is hosted by the editor of The Ringer. That these are all pieces of traditional journalism heightens the weight of the commentary and tells us it’s something to watch for. That it slid past the editors’ notice, and maybe ours, tells us that performative commentary is often subtle, but also that it’s so accepted it can pass unnoticed. Once it’s pointed out, the words and imagery convey something instantly recognizable, and it’s a message that isn’t so subtle, nor is it easy to unsee.

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It seems rather techy, scrolling on Amazon and finding an audiobook and then the tab sitting just beneath its square-shaped cover art with an arrow and the word preview.

At first glance, “another button to click” looks like an innovation from Amazon (the brain trust behind all of our current reading/listening consumption) meant to replace some of the bookstore experience of days past. Reading and listening and online shopping in the digital age means flipping through a book, scanning the jacket flap or a few pages (going straight to the end?) is a practice that’s waning. What was once an essential of the bookshop experience has been lost because on Amazon, physical books aren’t in our hands. * Hence, if you’re a reader, you’re directed to download an eBook sample.

And for listeners, there’s that audiobook preview.

But audio samples are not new.

In the 1950s, with an eye to selling more vinyl records, music stores installed sound-isolating booths for customers to sample 45s and LPs – booths equipped with turntables and often headphones.

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The shift in radio, from an AM top 40 format to FM progressive rock, led to a marked increase in the popularity of albums over 45s. The reality that albums were quite expensive to replace (once scratched from over-sampling) and the move from Mom-and-Pop record stores to larger retail chains saw the demise of the popular cubicles, and by the 1960s, they’d become outdated.

Still, there were other forms of audio samples.

In April 1975, taking a cue from an established Harlem/Jazz tradition of live music promos, a flatbed truck carrying the Rolling Stones – playing “Brown Sugar” – made its way down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to announce the band’s upcoming American tour.

Circling back to the digital age and audiobook previews, here’s the first 4.48 minutes of Nightswimming!

Listen here

A big thank you to everyone at Deyan Audio, especially to production manager, Blake Honeycutt, and to Zachary Johnson, a SAG actor and the narrator, who both did amazing work on the audiobook — bringing Jamie Palmieri and the cast of Nightswimming to life beyond what I ever thought possible!

Available on Audible, Apple, Libro.fm, Chirp, Spotify, and more

Here’s what’s going on with Nightswimming this week:

Note: Not just the audiobook — the eBook version is now on all platforms! As always, Nightswimming (in paperback, audiobook and eBook) is available to order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, or directly from my publisher, High Frequency Press (paperback only).

My upcoming Podcast appearances:

“Cover to Cover” with Mary Elizabeth Jackson (part of the Brushwood Media Network)

“Uncorking A Story” with Mike Carlon

Many thanks to all my readers for your continuing support!

* Here’s the founder of Audible arguing for digital literacy as a key factor in library reform.

Our Episode Notes (Just One More Thing)

This Week’s Recommended Reading

“The truth behind Rolling Stones’ famous NYC truck stunt 50 years ago: ‘Complete shock’”

This Week’s Recommended Music

"Girl From the Record Shop" by Frank Turner feat. Teenage Joans on Amazon Music.

Like everyone, I’m taking it slow in the Dog Days of Summer. In today’s short post, I’m sharing some recent good news received from Candace Jordan. Now a longstanding (and award-winning) presence in Chicago media, Candace began her career as a Playboy Bunny, cover model for several issues and Ms. December 1979. We crossed paths when I began my research on the longform essay that began this Substack, and she recently reached out to share this update: the Chicago History Museum will be featuring her Playboy memorabilia as part of its permanent collection — a historic acquisition!

It's a “celebration of Jordan’s influential role within the Playboy empire and her lasting connection to Chicago’s cultural history.”

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Read more about Candace Jordan below:

When I started this Substack, rooting around for names and also looking to set the contours of what my essays might focus on, the idea of women who’d been unfairly defined (by the culture, by the media) emerged. I’d also be doing some writing related to my crime fiction, and Cherchez La Femme seemed to capture both ideas. The phrase is a standard of hardboiled detective novels. The actual translation of cherchez la femme is look for the woman — while the meaning is this: whenever there’s a problem, look for the woman.

The phrase is quite literally all about difficult women.

Writing about pop culture and the media and difficult female narratives (usually circa the 1970s) meant that at some point, I’d be faced with the legacy of Gia Carangi — a huge, but brief presence in the era; she was the model who drove the fashion industry’s pivot away from fresh-faced, blue-eyed blondes.

“Her meteoric rise and fall … was fueled by an era untethered to societal norms.”

WWD “Gia Carangi: Remembering Fashion’s First Supermodel” January 25, 2025

Pegged a difficult young woman. Pegged the emblem of every excess that came together at the end of the 1970s. Even while I was thinking of writing about Gia, I always put it off. So much has been written, and honestly, I had no idea what I would say that wasn’t already covered. Then I walked into the Vero Beach Art Museum and the featured exhibit: “Robert Farber’s Fashion Photography.” An entire wall was papered with an enlarged contact sheet focused on just one model. Gia.

How do you ignore something like that?

She was born Gia Marie Carangi on January 29, 1960, in Philadelphia, where she lived until being “discovered” at the age of 17. Then, she moved the roughly 95 miles north to New York, signed with the renowned Wilhemina Models and within a year was “well-established” in the industry. It was a rise that Vogue describes as “meteoric.”

Preceding her modeling career was a chaotic childhood, and to say she walked out of that world erratic and emotional and with a wild streak doesn’t quite describe her. Condensed, hers was a seemingly familiar story of fame, money, and drugs, all leading to a downward spiral, as fast as her quick rise. By the age of 26, broke and no longer modeling, she succumbed to AIDS. That’s the briefest description of a life that contained much more, laid out in the 528-page Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia by Stephen Fried.

She’s often remembered, often attached to a particular storyline:

In Philadelphia, she was remembered for Pride Month.

She was one of the first women to die of AIDS.

According to WWD, she represented the 1970s.

She was the career boost for a then almost unknown Angelina Jolie, who starred as the young model in a biopic.

Whatever the lens, she had that certain something not easily forgotten. Her language seemed to be defiance, a journey that wasn’t unusual for anyone in their late teens. That her journey was played out in public by a young woman who wasn’t just beautiful, but visually compelling, somehow demanded a deeper story. To this day, she remains vital, and hence, she’s the central figure in a retrospective of Richard Farber’s five-decade career with timeless as its theme.

Describing his work with Gia, Farber says he went for “a different angle than most of his contemporaries, looking to defy her status as sex symbol by portraying the soft, fun-loving sides of her…” He meant to show something beyond what photographer Francesco Scavullo called her perfect “I don’t give a damn” attitude. Gia would have been captivating in any era, but landing in the fashion industry in the late 1970s, she became part of the decade’s collage — the perfect fit for the image of female danger going mainstream.

To her family and friends, the ones who perhaps knew her best, she was the 26-year-old young woman who died too young.

Here’s what’s going on with Nightswimming this week:

The audiobook of Nightswimming will be released this month (with a preview coming to my Substack). The new version will be available on all audio platforms. As always, Nightswimming (in paperback) is available to order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, or directly from my publisher High Frequency Press. Note: the ebook version will be available on Amazon shortly after the audiobook release date.

Many thanks to all my readers for your continuing support!

Our Episode Notes (Just One More Thing)

This Week’s Recommended Reading

The Selects Gallery presents “Gia Marie Carangi: Known as Gia”

This Week’s Recommended Music

"Who Knows Where The Time Goes" by Susan Cowsill on Amazon Music.

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Somewhat keyed into this past weekend (the 4^th of July) is a small history of Paterson as an “American World War II Heritage City.”

Run by the National Parks Service, the American World War II Heritage City Program links global history with local experience by recognizing the country’s industrial centers and their contributions to the war efforts. Young men (and teenage boys) from small towns and large cities all over America selflessly volunteered for service, but in urban areas like Paterson, having a manufacturing base meant special contributions by its citizens to the war effort. To emphasize the merit, only a single city per state may receive the designation.

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A scroll through the website shows Paterson having had over 300 Allied defense industries during World War II, with silk and aircraft manufacturing absolutely critical to the war effort (producing parachutes and over 142,000 engines for planes like the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and the Mitchell B-25, used in the famed Doolittle Raids). Paterson’s role was so extensive that civil defense preparations were required under the direction of the military, along with the establishment of military observation and defense posts within the city limits (with complex drills and simulated air attacks).

Nightswimming, which is a mystery novel, has me seriously restrained in what I can share to prevent any spoilers. But I think it’s fine to tip my hand and say the novel takes place in 1979, when the war years were just a few decades past, and that some home front stories of Paterson made their way into my book. I was first made aware of the city’s role in the war effort by Bessie Bartzos, who’d grown up in Paterson. We’ve often chatted over the years, and I recently sat down for an interview with Bessie on her Paterson memories.

I began with the simple question, asking for her full name and learned the intent had been to name her Vasiliki. It’s a beautiful name, thought to be derived from the Greek word basileus, which means “king” or “ruler.” (Thank you, Google search!) Though Bessie’s parents were from Greece, she was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and the delivering doctor took it upon himself to anglicize Vasiliki to Bessie – that was the name entered on her birth certificate and how she has been known for ninety-five years (as of this September).

After spending time in Massachusetts and then moving to New York City, Bessie and her family moved to Paterson, NJ, as her father was seeking “a place where he could park his car.” The family owned the American Restaurant (formerly Hudson’s) on lower Broadway, and they’d lived in a few locations, at one point right next to the Armory.

Bessie was attending Eastside High School soon after the war broke out. As part of the city’s active defense effort, young men from Fort Bragg, N.C., lived in tents on the high school lawn before being deployed to Northern Africa, and Bessie recalled hearing details of their combat experiences when they returned and visited her father’s restaurant. Bessie also recalled civil defense efforts, which included air raid wardens who ensured that her family (along with the rest of the city) had their shades down at night to prevent any light seepage — warding off stealth attacks from the Axis powers (it was confirmed post-war that such plans did exist). Keeping the city dark was an imperative, and streetlamps and car lights were also strictly controlled. There were rations, limiting everyday purchases like sugar, along with shoes (Bessie recalled three pair per year) and other consumer goods using coupons.

Oral histories are a rare opportunity of discovery; what would otherwise feel like recorded events are transformed once the details are voiced by the people who lived it. One of Bessie’s most charming memories – something you won’t find on the National Park Service website – is how silk stockings were cared for, with repairs (for these irreplaceable luxury items) being made at a “little booth” inside Woolworth’s.

“From manufacturing to manpower and civil defense to civilian support, Paterson, NJ, threw its full energy into the effort to win World War II.” NPS website, Ibid. As a majorette in parades fueling bond drives (see photo above), and as a young girl experiencing personal sacrifice – living with both rationing and the constant specter of enemy air raids – Bessie was part of Paterson’s monumental energy and a witness to history.

I’m so fortunate that Bessie has been sharing her memories with me and allowed me to give texture to Paterson as I tried to bring the city to life for my readers. And I’m also so fortunate that Bessie is still a great baker!

Here’s what’s going on with Nightswimming this week:

On the shelves at Jersey’s best! Find Nightswimming and support an independent bookseller at:

The Cloak and Dagger – the storied mystery bookshop in Princeton (also a feature in their summer newsletter) – WORD, Jersey City – Little City Books in Hoboken – Booktowne in Manasquan.

I’ll also be in conversation with Kate Hergott and Halley Sutton on Bookwild (podcast release date to be announced soon).

As always, Nightswimming is available to order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, or directly from my publisher High Frequency Press. Note: the ebook version will be available on Amazon shortly after the paperback release date.

Many thanks to all my readers for the incredible support and making my book launch a success!

Episode Notes

This Week’s Recommended Watching

Georgia Tech’s Annabel McAtee Twirling Fire Batons

This Week’s Recommended Music

"America" by First Aid Kit on Amazon Music.

Just One More Thing

Do you have a favorite memory/piece of family history that’s been passed down?

Leave a comment

One would think, given all the years—years!—I’ve spent working up to this big day—my debut novel—that I would have long ago written up the smart, salty, heartfelt text to go with the release day photo. Or that at the very least, having soaked in some really hard-won knowledge over the years—years!—I’ve spent working up to this big day, I would have jotted down a paragraph or two, or three or four, and have those at the ready, waiting to be cut and pasted into this post.

What I do have is the enormous gratitude (and hopefully the right words) for all who have shown such incredible support along the way. I’m thankful for my friends and family. I’m honored to be part of the mystery writing community.

On the eve of the release date, I had an in-depth interview with Thriller Magazine and spoke about my research into gender and media in the 1970s for my new novel.

What seems so long ago—the start of my Substack—began with an idea for a longform essay that needed a home. I’d been doing light research while writing Nightswimming, looking for late 1970s background color, and somehow stumbled onto the curious media treatment of two issues of Playboy that were both published in 1979—one issue celebrating the magazine’s 25^th anniversary and the other featuring models from Ivy League schools. The fact that feminist protest was almost solely aimed at the Ivy League issue was unmistakable and exposed how much social class was driving conventions on female behavior.

Writing a police procedural about a young officer steeped within a traditionally male environment really aligned with the writing I’d been doing on the era’s media and pop culture.

I also recently spoke to The Towncast podcast on my writing process and how I pivoted to crime fiction after spending so much time on a quieter novel.

And finally, here are the usual suspects:

Nightswimming comes out today, and is available to order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, or directly from my publisher High Frequency Press. Note: the ebook version will be available on Amazon shortly after the paperback release date.

A “New and Noteworthy” selection from The New York Times:

I was absolutely stunned when I found out that my debut novel, Nightswimming, was reviewed in the New York Times and listed in “New and Noteworthy.” So honored (Sarah Weinman is one of my absolute writing heroes).

Nightswimming comes out one week from today, and is available to order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, or directly from my publisher High Frequency Press.

Hello and welcome to my new subscribers who found me in the Times! I’m so happy you’re here.

Have you ever explored a new city by taking a literary (or cinema) themed walking tour? In Dublin, it’s James Joyce. In Sicily, The Godfather tour will take you to the hill towns of Savoca and Forza d’Agrò. To facilitate visits in the states, the American Library Association has published a list of literary landmarks. New York has (by far) the most sites and that includes a plaque on the brick exterior of the building housing Bank Street College which is dedicated to Margaret Wise Brown, author of both Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny.

What would a literary walking tour of Paterson, New Jersey, the setting of my debut novel, look like? It’s true that 1970s Paterson was a city known for its grit and grime, but it’s also a city with great history, great architecture, and great hiking trails (yes!)

Here are a few must-see locations from the pages of Nightswimming:

The Great Falls of the Passaic River

You may want to begin your Paterson walking tour at the Great Falls of the Passaic River, possibly in autumn, when the maple and oak and hickory trees are shedding orange and gold leaves. The Falls are a 77-foot drop of rushing water, the largest on the East Coast after Niagara, and offer views of Garret Mountain – recognized as a significant flyover area during spring and fall bird migrations. Then again, touring in January is also a possibility. Subfreezing temperatures have been known to transform New Jersey’s largest waterfall into a wintry spectacle.

Because of their natural beauty and historic significance—Alexander Hamilton noticed them while on a picnic with George Washington and was then inspired to create America’s first planned industrial city—the Great Falls were made a National Historic Park in 2009. Though they are not featured in my novel, aside from the prologue, they’re well worth a look.

The National Park Service offers a self-guided Mill Mile walking tour of the Great Falls.

I wrote about Philippe Petit’s skywalk across the Great Falls here.

111 Washington Street

Once the townhouse of Peter Colt (of the famous Colt family that included gun-manufacturer, Samuel Colt, who’s sidearm was known as “the gun that won the west”) 111 Washington Street housed the Paterson Police Department from 1902 until the building was gutted by fire in 1980. The structure has recently been lovingly restored.

I love the building’s time-stands-still exterior (designed in the Beaux-Arts style, with arched doorways and signature green lanterns flanking the entrance).

Barnert Hospital

Nathan Barnert left Belarus at age 11 to escape mandatory conscription into the Russian Army (reportedly smuggled out of the country in a pickle barrel – although this is difficult to confirm) and arrived in the United States penniless at age 12.

He would become "the largest holder of silk mill property in the City of Paterson" and the mayor of the city in 1883. A generous philanthropist, he gifted Barnert Hospital, which opened in 1914 (and where yours truly was born).

Lou Costello’s Gym

Boxing’s the sport that Jamie Palmieri (my protagonist) trained in, starting in his teens when he signed up at Lou Costello’s Gym, which for many years was located in downtown Paterson. Boxing was always big in Paterson and there were many prominent figures including Lou Duva (trainer, manager and promoter who was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame); Joe Gootter, a longtime editor for the Paterson Evening News, who wrote hundreds of columns about boxing and boxers, along with several books (and was the father of my mother’s best friend); and Lou Costello: Paterson, NJ’s favorite son and legendary comedian. Though known for baseball (“Who’s on First?”), he opened the Lou Costello Jr. Sportsmen Club in 1971, with the mission to develop good fellowship and self-discipline through the sport of boxing (traits that became important for Jamie).

Garett Mountain/Lambert’s Castle

I have to be honest here, and let you know I’m not sure if Garret Mountain is the name of an actual mountain (it might be called First Watchung Mountain) or the name of park called Garret Mountain Reservation that’s often shorted as “Garret Mountain”—but it’s partly in Paterson and a beautiful, wooded area, with hiking trails (from which you can see the NYC skyline).

Lambert Castle is on the mountain’s eastern slope. It was built in the 1800s by Catholina Lambert as a house, but since he owned a silk mill, it was made of sandstone and granite (with marble lions at the entrance) and looks like a castle. It was recently restored and open to visitors, and like Hinchcliffe Stadium (also recently restored), it’s a beautiful reminder of the city’s history.

Eastside Park

Eastside Park is a neighborhood in Paterson dotted with silk baron mansions (though not quite castles) that’s officially the Eastside Park Historic District. The actual park in the center was designed by an assistant of Frederick Law Olmsted with bridle paths, stables for horses and a band pavilion which have all been maintained. There are also statues by Gaetano Federici (whose works, scattered around Paterson, serve as part of the city’s public art). Every few years, the neighborhood association sets up an actual walking tour.

Lost to History

Today brings news that a historic smokestack from a mill within Great Falls National Park has become unstable and will be demolished. Another reminder (it’s my plea) to take in all that Paterson has to offer.

One Last Thing

Thank you to everyone who’s been a subscriber or follower or reader. Having you here means the world to me.

Summer means down time (on a lounge chair or in an airplane seat) and that means summer reading. The lists are popping up.

Several years back, when Slate was putting together a roundup of authors and their favorite beach reads, Michael Chabon gave a tidy answer, “I don’t change what I read when I go to the beach or on a vacation. I just read more.” But because of marketing, beach reads are usually thought of as books that focus on easy engagement and avoid weighty themes. This is writing, we’re told, meant to match the mood of warm weather and leisure days. Something slim with a tight plot fits the ideal.

My own idea of a beach read is whatever takes you away and gets you lost for the better part of an afternoon. But thinking of writing that’s meant to be lightweight reminds me of pleasures that might be called small and humble. A tight plot sits in good company with anything under the umbrella of the nine Muses that’s condensed or stripped down, and chock full of energy. Garage Rock. Haiku. The Texas Two-Step. A classic baking soda and vinegar volcano. The iPhone commercial that aired over Christmas in 2013 and made everyone cry.

The concise—the small, the miniature—often draw us in, not in spite of their size, but because of their pared down dimensions. What’s been left is the very opposite of diluted. Lia Purpura (also pondering “shortness in prose”) has set down the best list of objects that deftly “transcend their size” in her essay “On Miniatures.” Dense chunks of fudge and espresso and dollhouses and snow globes and bonsai trees. I do love charm bracelets (especially ones with vintage pieces that have moving parts, like 14K baby grand pianos that open like real ones, impossibly small scissors that are operational, and wishing wells with handles that turn), and a Faberge exhibit I saw at NYC’s Metropolitan Museum has me forever obsessed with the tiny landscapes folded within the Imperial Danish Palaces Egg.

In writing, compression demands that no word, no side plot, nothing is unneeded. Good, crisp storytelling can pop up in many forms. In six words, Hemingway made flash fiction famous: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” A country ballad (preserved in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry) melds fragments of a dinnertime conversation with a heightening mystery about a local boy’s jump from a bridge. Laura Hillenbrand’s obituary for Dick Cole, the 103-year-old veteran of the famed World War II bombing attack of Japan, is just about a page long and jam-packed with heroism and adventure:

Lt. Dick Cole stood over the open escape hatch of a B-25 bomber, gripping his parachute cord and looking down into 9,000 feet of seamless black. It was the night of April 18, 1942, and the plane, bucking in a roiling storm, had just led one of the most audacious and unlikely missions of World War II—the first Allied bombing of Japan. Now, out of fuel over China, the bomber was doomed. Cole dived out headfirst and vanished.

Summer reading, perhaps, is not about one category of book, its size, or its heft, but about the compression of time in those precious weeks that interrupt our nine-to five-lives, a whiff of privacy at a lake or on a beach when we’re finally alone with our TBR pile.

Speaking of those months without “r” (when it’s unsafe to eat oysters), here's a catalog of summer reads complied by and , all written by authors on Substack, including a new thriller from Andrea, a historical novel from set on Martha’s Vineyard during World War II, a romance about a former child actress by , a gothic mystery by , and a crime novel by yours truly. It’s a mini library of genre. So honored to be included.

click here to browse the catalog

My first review of Nightswimming

Nightswimming received in coverage in the trade publication Kirkus this week and I’m happy to share this with you:

“Debut novelist Anagnos sweats so many procedural details of Jamie’s painstaking investigation that you’ll sweat along with him. The real star of this show is Paterson, which feels as menacing, vivid, and multilayered as Walter Mosley’s Watts."

For your beach read consideration: Nightswimming is available to preorder from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, or directly from my publisher High Frequency Press.

This Week’s Recommended Reading

“‘We'll Make it Short Nonfiction.’" A Chat with Dinty W. Moore, Editor-in-Chief of Brevity”

This Week’s Recommended Listening

"I Fought the Law" by Bobby Fuller (on Amazon Music and Spotify)

Just One More Thing

What’s your go-to book recommendation? Or the best book you’ve read on a recommendation?

Because you’ll want to know, here’s mine—Hey, Kiddo: A Graphic Novel by Jarrett J. Krosoczka (recommended to me by Lori, who’s pretty close to infallible).

The year was 1901. Newspapers of the day carried photographs and artist renderings showing the defendants in impeccable dress. Tailored suits and white, starched collars. All wore silk ties. Bowler hats, courteously removed when they’d entered the courthouse, could be seen in their hands. A diamond stick pin owned by one of the men had been entered into evidence. Their ages ranged from mid-twenties to early forties and the papers described them as prominent Paterson men. Walter McAlister was the son of an influential mill owner. George Kerr was both the brother of a former judge, and the brother-in-law of the city’s sitting mayor. Andrew Campbell and William Death (pronounced “Deeth”) did not come from wealth, but were rising socially and employed in managerial roles. Their fine clothing suggested financial crimes. Embezzlement. Fraud. Bribery and corruption. But those were not the indictments. Three of the men were on trial for first degree murder. A murder that spun from a scheme of drugging and gang rape. On that charge, all four men stood accused.

Seventeen-year-old Jennie Bosschieter was their victim.

Martijntje (Jennie) Bosschieter was born in Holland in 1883 and emigrated to the United States with her family, settling in Paterson, NJ. Since the age of thirteen, she’d worked as a doubler (twisting threads to improve the quality) at the Paterson Ribbon Company.1

On October 18, 1900, which was a Thursday, she came home from work and changed into her nicer clothes, intending to go out for the evening. First, she ran an errand for her mother, going to Kent’s Drugstore on Main Street to purchase baby powder for an infant niece who was living with her family. Outside of the drugstore, Jennie ran into Andrew Campbell, who she knew reasonably well, along with William Death, a former boyfriend who’d recently broken up with Jennie to marry a woman from a wealthy family.

Before entering the drugstore, Jennie had been spotted by Walter McAlister (the wealthy son of a mill owner—widely regarded in town as extremely entitled and arrogant). While Jennie was making her purchase, McAlister engaged Death to bring Jennie to Saal’s Saloon, as he intended to have some “fun” with her. Death was able to persuade Jennie to join them for a drink, but because he was then married and could not be seen with her, he, in turn, engaged Andrew Campbell to walk Jennie to the tavern. Once there, McAlister purchased rounds of drinks and, as had been his intent from the start, poured choral hydrate (known as “knock out” drops, the era’s date rape drug) into Jennie’s absinthe frappe.2

When Jennie fell unconscious, McAlister called his friend George Kerr (the brother-in-law of the Paterson mayor—Kerr was married and the father of a daughter older than Jennie), who’d been waiting at a stand to hire a cab to pick up the group. Jennie, remaining unconscious, was hoisted into the horse-drawn vehicle and they drove to a secluded area, where she was removed from the cab and sexually assaulted. Accounts differ, but at least two of the men raped Jennie, potentially more. Notably, the men who claimed innocence of the assault did nothing to prevent the crime. And, as the prosecution argued at trial, “every person present there aiding and abetting was likewise guilty.” If they had lifted her out of the carriage, or obtained the blanket, or otherwise enabled the assailants, then it was “as if they had personally ravished her.”3

When they brought Jennie back to the cab, the men noticed she wasn’t rousing. Panicking, not for Jennie, but for their potential culpability, they rushed to a doctor’s home and awakened him in the early hours of October 19^th, bringing him outside to examine the teenage girl. Almost immediately, the doctor pronounced Jennie dead, his time estimate suggesting that she had died from the effects of the drug during the assault.

The men then brought Jennie to another wooded area and abandoned her body there, dropping her so carelessly that her head hit a sharp rock, causing a large post-mortem wound. McAlister sought to purchase the cab driver’s silence with an extravagant tip. Later in the morning, McAlister returned to the saloon to threaten the owner into silence as well.

Jennie was found a few hours after her body had been left by her attackers, prompting an inquiry into the crime. By Monday, the doctor who’d been called to the carriage contacted the police. The doctor had names, and the four men were taken in for questioning and then arrested.

The men remained in the Passaic County Jail, not because they were flight risks but because the police could not assure their safety from the mob that wanted to lynch them. An anonymous gesture on the eve of the trial conveyed all the anger that was brewing—someone had covered Jennie’s grave in white hyacinth and laid a placard that could be seen from the roadside: “Vengeance is Mine, So Saith the Lord.”4

News coverage of the one-week trial of McAlister, Campbell, and Death5 was massive—running in The San Francisco Call and Post, The Des Moines Register, The Evansville Journal, The New York Times, The Topeka State Journal, The Boston Globe, Omaha Daily Bee, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Butte Miner, Der Deutsche Correspondent (Baltimore’s German-language paper), and The Hamilton Spectator (Hamilton, Ontario)—and almost always on the front page. In New York City, wax likenesses of the four defendants went on display.

It was not only the scandalous nature of her death that drove interest in the story. The case touched on third-rail issues of class, gender, and immigration. Jennie was called the pretty mill girl; the men who attacked came from wealth, they wielded power and until the end of their trial, they were convinced they’d evade conviction. Their chief defense was to again attack Jennie.

Though medical testimony confirmed the presence of choral hydrate in Jennie’s system, her own behavior remained an issue hovering over the trial.

The defendants blamed Jennie's parents for letting her go out. They blamed Jennie for accepting the men's invitation. They suggested she had victimized the men who stood accused of her murder by enticing them. That Jennie had gone to a bar willingly with three men had been something the defense was guaranteed to make hay out of. Her mother had been called to the witness stand, not only to defend her daughter’s propriety, but to defend her own behavior in allowing her to go out. It had been a delicate dance for the prosecution. In rape cases, female behavior was always on trial.

The closing argument held “that Jennie Bosschieter was not quite eighteen years old. She is entitled to [the] presumption that she was a virtuous, honest and upright girl. There is no physical evidence to the contrary.”

The defense countered, claiming that “Jennie Bosschieter… was under no control, who was in the habit of being out late at night, though only sixteen years old. On the evening of October 18… she willingly went with two men, one of them married, to Saal’s saloon to carouse.”6 At least one juror, having heard all the testimony, having seen the bereaved family of Jennie Bosschieter in the courtroom, still expressed sympathy for the defendants.7

There was no reason to expect in American society circa 1900, where sexual harassment wasn’t thought of as a problem, where women who drank were “asking for it,” within a system that was routinely unfair to women, particularly women of a certain class, that a guardrail would emerge protecting the victim and seeking to vindicate her.

But, it turned out, behavior so vile proved there was a line that could not be crossed and the police held to it. Listening to the utterly remorseless confession of William Death had appalled the investigators. According to Officer Henry Titus, “When the disclosure was made that the girl ‘had the dope thrown in her’ we sat as if transfixed and stopped writing.”8

During Campbell’s interrogation which followed Death’s, Officer Titus simply encouraged the younger man, “It is always best to tell the truth.” The focus was on gathering evidence and obtaining the necessary confessions, there’d been no effort at all to protect the privileged.9 Her death was a tragedy, but it was the manner—grown men drugging a teenage girl in order to render her helpless, then successful in their planned attack—that was cast as “the blackest” charge.10

In the end, the accused managed to escape death by hanging, the sole punishment for first degree murder. Instead, they were convicted of second degree murder and given the harshest sentence, thirty years of hard labor. Following the trial of his three friends, George Kerr changed his plea to “no contest” on the charge of rape and was sentenced to the maximum as well, fifteen years of hard labor. The court, like the press, had sided with Jennie.11

What struck me when I first learned of the crime, what resonates with me still, is that the men were actually convicted.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, authors of the Martin Beck mysteries and standard bearers for the exploration of crime within a particular society at a particular time, used the police procedural as their lens. Not only laws, but their enforcement illustrate, in their way, the politics and the culture of the times. There was the open judging of Jennie and her family in the courtroom, and there was also the social status (and political connections) of the defendants. An editorial in The Daily People (the imprint of the Socialist Labor Party of America) argued the four men were of the “kid glove class” and would therefore pay no price for their crimes.

The vindication of “a mill girl” in spite of crass whispers about her behavior—and in spite of the privilege of the defendants and the pressure from Paterson’s elite to protect the accused—was not the expectation then. Looking back at what’s regarded as a less-evolved time, it wouldn’t seem that the police and the prosecution would have fought so strenuously for Jennie, or that the presiding judge would give out the harshest possible sentences. But to the police, the prosecution and the judge, the values required of a decent society could not have been clearer. And it was imperative to remember Jennie Bosschieter as the young victim “who did not deserve her fate,” as Judge Dixon put it at sentencing.12

It was a crime that was not soon forgotten in Paterson and those third-rail issues remained. Even proposed reforms were laws specifically aimed to protect “mill girls.”13 When George Kerr, having served twelve years of his fifteen-year sentence, became the first of the quartet to be paroled, the news was covered in The Call (a New York paper “devoted to the interests of the working people”) under the headline “Wealthy Murderer Released.” Issues of gender were revealed more subtly. When a petition circulated on behalf of Andrew Campbell, who was generally believed to have been with the group and not a participant, women refused to sign.14

As a resolution, the case was likely a draw. The men had been convicted but saved from hanging (the sentence Judge Dixon openly stated he wished was available). By 1914, after ceaseless pressure from both family and friends as well as the influential, all four had been granted parole.

Jennie had been a lively teenage girl who mattered enormously to her family, facts that were too often overshadowed. The startling account of her murder became a prism onto layers of social unrest and was seized on as scandal. The headlines called her murder the crime of the century. Then the twentieth century unfolded. In Paterson, there was the 1913 silk strike, a milestone in the worker’s rights movement. The very next year, the First World War broke out. Another world war followed. The automobile was invented. Men landed on the moon. Women were granted the right to vote. In the many decades after the murder trial that riveted the country, America was often in upheaval, and class and gender would be reckoned with again and again. The assault and poisoning death of Jennie Bosschieter, and the unlikely convictions of men who saw themselves as above the law, was more than spectacular newsfeed. In an era already simmering and restless for change, the crime was a herald into the new century.

Nightswimming is my favorite kind of crime novel—rich, character-driven crime that drops me right into the action. Melanie Anagnos beautifully conjures a 1970s Paterson, New Jersey that feels so lived in, I practically teleported. This is just the best kind of noir—a crime as complex and relevant today as it ever was, a world where one good man can still make a difference. I cannot wait to dive back into the world of Jamie Palmieri!

— Halley Sutton, USA Today bestselling author of The Hurricane Blonde

My novel Nightswimming, set in Paterson, NJ in 1979, comes out from High Frequency Press on June 26. The novel follows a rookie cop, Jamie Palmieri, as he investigates a double homicide at a local bar that leaves the owner and a young woman dead. Nightswimming is available to preorder from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, or directly from my publisher High Frequency Press.

This Week’s Recommended Reading

The Poisoned Glass (2019) by Kimberly Tilley is an excellent telling of Jennie Bosschieter’s murder, the investigation, the trial and its aftermath. You can listen to her discuss her work on episode 125 of Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast

This Week’s Recommended Music

"Only A Memory" by The Smithereens (on Spotify and Amazon Music)

Just One More Thing

Is there an event from history that’s been too little told?

Leave a comment

Several years ago, I was writing a novel that never really came to life the way I’d wanted. It was a quiet (“literary”) novel. Too quiet. That novel had a minor character—a rookie cop—named Jamie.

To develop Jamie, I researched police work, and there was just one of those moments where I had the thought I could do something interesting by writing a procedural. And then the thought that immediately followed was that it would be a bad idea, it was so far out of my comfort zone. But I didn’t quite let go of the possibility.

Pushing myself out of my comfort zone had been kind of haunting me for a while. There’s the great David Bowie quote:

Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.

I’d always wanted to push myself further but never saw an opportunity. I’d always thought that going beyond my comfort zone meant branching into poetry or speculative fiction. I never expected it would mean writing genre.

Ultimately, I stayed with Jamie as a character because I wanted to expand my writing with crime fiction. And today I’m thrilled to announced that my debut novel Nightswimming, will be published this year on June 26.

Crime fiction has always been a vehicle to explore society’s views on women. Whether it’s the femme fatale in noir or the first girl in a slasher film, women who cross the line sexually are punished. These are the accepted tropes, and they persisted into the 1970s. Even in the wake of the sexual revolution and the women’s movement and all those promises of freedom, female identity was still defined by the culture.

Writing genre, what has always been most important to me is staying true to its history and traditions and staying true to the basics of storytelling, but to also understand the tropes.

What I wanted to know—as a woman—was how the 1970s impacted men, and I found that crime fiction gave me a way to explore that question. How did a young man, a rookie police officer, rising within the ranks of an “old boys” institution absorb the message of the women’s movement? Did the demand that women be seen and treated differently in the culture change what it meant to be a “stand up guy?” Was it no longer enough to be loyal to the men you worked with, did respect for women play into the definition? How much respect? In what ways?

Those questions related to the themes that came out in my research on Playboy. There were seemingly many identities offered up to young women as well as young men in the 1970s, but the reality is there were strict binaries. You were a feminist, or you enjoyed being married and a stay-at-home mom. You were a misogynist, or you were a Phil Donahue-style ally of the women’s movement. I wanted to explore the outliers. The feminists who Gloria Steinem didn’t approve of because they posed for Playboy. A young police officer who grows to understand the subtleties in crimes against women, and the ways that culture was actively reassessing those crimes.

Nightswimming is available to preorder from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, or directly from my publisher High Frequency Press.

About the novel:

Paterson, New Jersey, 1979: Jamie Palmieri is an up-and-coming patrol officer, three years out of the academy and frustrated with his slow rise to detective. That all changes one frigid night in January, when a double homicide at a local bar leaves the owner and a young woman dead. In the wake of the Rubin “Hurricane” Carter proceedings and the city’s lingering distrust for the police, Jamie is told to expect a “no one saw a thing” investigation. But as Jamie traces a series of small leads, he’s sent on a path where the tables turn suddenly—with the still-unknown killer now stalking Jamie and the people he’s closest to.

A classic police procedural charged with the social turbulence of the 1970s.

Upcoming event:

I’ll be reading, along with my cohort from High Frequency Press, on April 26^th, in the Red Room at the KGB Bar (NYC)

This Week’s Recommended Readings

Never thought I’d get the generous following I’ve been blessed with. For my newest subscribers and followers, it all started here with Playmate Perfect.

This Week’s Recommended Music

It had to be “Nightswimming” by REM (on Spotify and Amazon Music)

The all-female Blue Origin NS-13 Mission sparked some thoughts on American women and aeronautics and role models (here’s just the briefest history).

Women who wanted the glamour and adventure of flying once became flight attendants (then called stewardesses). For a generation of young women, the experience opened doors and opportunities beyond their hometowns. These were college graduates, who often spoke several languages and received rigorous training. Flight attendants played a crucial role in the evacuation of Saigon (operation Babylift). But they were also hired on the basis of their looks, and it was a career tinged with sexism. Here’s a helpful ad from Eastern Airlines (circa 1966) running through their process of choosing among many seemingly quality applicants. The ad, showing the 19 attractive young women who didn’t get the job, is entitled “Presenting the Losers.”

As the ad (proudly) proclaims, “Sure we want her to be pretty…don’t you? That’s why we look at her face, her make-up, her complexion, her figure, her weight, her legs, her grooming, her nails and her hair.” Of course, progressive corporation that Eastern was, they didn’t stop there. They talked to each applicant and “judge[d] her personality, her maturity, her intelligence…”

Even while second wave feminism was gaining steam (ensuring ads like “Presenting the Losers” ceased to be social norms), the fact that women weren’t regularly flying planes, commercial or military, was no surprise. It’s not that woman hadn’t made news as accomplished aviators. Helen Richey and Frances Harrell Marsalis flew a monoplane and set endurance records in the 1930s, but those achievements were rare. There just wasn’t enough representation out there.

Representation. It’s how little kids learn who they can be. And how could there ever have been women astronauts when there was no representation? Watching The Right Stuff (1983), we learned the space program’s applicant pool drew from the field of test pilots, and they were all men.

Perhaps riffing on Barbie (who added astronaut to her resume in 1965—well before Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon), Smirnoff featured a “female astronaut” in the mid-1960s, in an ad that was hardly aspirational for girls and young women looking for role models.

And yet this was exactly the time when Sally Ride found her mentor in Dr. Elizabeth Monmaerts, a researcher with a doctorate in human physiology who’d left UCLA (job discrimination) and took a classroom position at the all-girls school where the future astronaut was a student. Sally (I should refer to Ms. Ride, but she was often just Sally) was captivated both by her instructor and the field of astrophysics (earning multiple degrees from Stanford). In time, Sally Ride saw an ad from NASA recruiting females and became for the first American woman (the third internationally) in space.

With her flight, a symbol of breaking down barriers, Sally became the inspiration for countless young girls and young women, who’d never before seen a daredevil who looked anything like them.

As the daughter of career naval officer and legendary navy diver, James Joseph Coleman, Cady Coleman had grown up craving the adventure and exploration that was her father’s terrain. She’d also grown up in the 1960s and ’70s, understanding that adventure and exploration were the exclusive terrain of men. All that changed one day in 1982 when Sally Ride appeared at MIT where Ms. Coleman was studying, inspiring the college student who would go on to become a NASA astronaut and U.S. Air Force colonel (and author of Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change).

“In her quiet way, Sally Ride shattered assumptions I didn’t know I had. As I listened to her speak that day, I felt moved by a thought that would shape the rest of my life: Maybe I, too, could have that job.” – Cady Coleman

These days, there’s active messaging for girls and young women. About flying. About possibilities.

Just One More Thing

This Week’s Recommended Reading

Barbie: An Astronaut for the Ages

This Week’s Recommended Music

"Space Cowboy (Remastered)" by The Steve Miller Band (on Amazon Music and Spotify)

Just One More Thing

Growing up, who was your inspiration? Who made you dream bigger?

Disco fries, a variation of Quebec’s loaded potatoes (known as “poutine” in the Canadian province), have been called “New Jersey’s greatest contribution to the snack food pantheon.” These French fries, topped with cheese and gravy, originated in the late 1970s in the era of dance clubs, when local discos were in open competition with “Manhattan’s best” and coming into their own.1 Since there were no after-hours clubs on the western side of the Hudson River, extending a night out after closing time meant a trip to the diner—ubiquitous throughout the state and open 24/7. It was on one of those nights at one of those diners (some claim the Tick Tock on Route 3 in Clifton) that someone ordered cheese fries and gravy.

I first heard the term “disco fries” in a writing workshop at Sarah Lawrence; the campus is located in Bronxville, NY, a suburb with a diner in the heart of its downtown, but not the New Jersey kind. I don’t remember the particulars of my classmate’s short story, but I remember the fries. Given that I’d been a waitress in New Jersey (specifically in a diner), from 1975 to 1982, it’s a surprise I hadn’t known of the phrase earlier, but I suspect it took time to cement itself into the culture. Still, I served enough plates of French fries with gravy—though rarely with cheese—and (trigger warning to my family members) consumed enough to have some thoughts about the name that was new to me. A menu item that screams greasy food feels like another pile on of Jersey kitsch.

In the way that Saturday Night Fever was more than a dance movie (telling a story of social class and complex masculinity and what it means to leave home), disco fries, as a sitting-in-the-diner-late-at-night snack tell a story beyond the New Jersey club scene. A bar is where we sit side by side. The red vinyl booths of the Tick Tock, the Summit, the White Mana, the Bendix (and legions of others), tricked out with their Formica table tops, are where we sit across from each other.

In the 1982 film, Diner, Barry Levinson was recreating his own coming-of-age experiences and where he’d hung out with his friends. The place where young men spoke (or didn’t speak) with each other, and achieved their own version of intimacy, was the diner, the central location (and heart) of his film. Barry Levinson reflects the diner is “where all the guys gather” and compares it to a campfire; it was there that they huddled and shared “their romantic failures, their hopes for the future, their fears, and just generally shoot the s---.”

Fittingly, the actual diner in the film (shot in Levinson’s Baltimore) was taken from a “diner graveyard” in New Jersey and transported down the East coast by flatbed. Jersey diners have a way of creeping into film. The White Mana in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.

The Bendix has its own documentary. Holstein’s Ice Cream was the setting for the final scene of The Sopranos, and like John Travolta’s white three-piece suit (purchased by the film critic Gene Siskel), the booth from Holstein’s went up for auction, and sold for $82,000.

In real life, writers, again, and again let us know that these are the places we call home.

“Diners aren't just spots to grab a meal, they're nostalgic symbols of American culture, open 24/7 and serving up comfort food along with a welcome sense of belonging.”

“For the last 130 years, diners (and lunch wagons before them) have been sanctuaries for New Jersey memories. They hold the ‘ordinary’ chapters of daily life that are far from ordinary. There’s nothing ordinary about having a cup of coffee with a friend you haven’t seen in 30 years.”

The 2017 closing of the Egg Platter in Paterson, after seventy years, spurred a former resident to drive seven hours each way from Virginia for a last meal. Several of these classic, stainless steel designs, including The Egg Platter, were made right in the city at the Paterson Wagon Company (trade name, Silk City Diners), and quite a few—the Miss Albany Diner and the Park Diner—are on the National Register of Historic Places. The Egg Platter was so beloved, it found a new home within the Paterson Museum.

Disco fries have their 1970s origin story, and perhaps the name will always be linked to the vibrant club scene of the day. Like all good stories, all good food stories, there’s a hint of something lurking beneath. Disco fries went from late night snacks to classic diner fare as “…former party-goers and club kids from the '70s, no longer dancing all night … [returned] with their families to seek a nostalgic taste of their youth,” recalled Niko Hatzigianakis, a long-time Tick Tock diner employee.

“And suddenly the memory revealed itself.”

— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

This Week’s Recommended Reading

“Breakfast on the Mother Road” from

This Week’s Recommended Music

“Tom's Diner” by Suzanne Vega (on Spotify and Amazon Music)

Just One More Thing

Do you have a favorite diner? Favorite food memory?

Had George Tice been an essayist instead of a photographer, his work would be the kind kept on bedside tables. His paragraphs and sentences, both beautifully constructed and with a keen eye on the small moments that make up a lifetime, would be read and re-read as if they were poems. Or had his craft been regional cuisine, he’d be the chef finding inspiration in the comfort food specialties of Passaic County, even those hot dogs that are deep fried and known as “rippers.”

Tice, a tenth-generation native of New Jersey, began his artistic career as twenty-year-old Navy’s photographer mate third class. When an explosion he captured on film made the front page of The New York Times, he decided that he “must be an artist,” although once he returned to his home state, he concerned himself with imagery that was far less dramatic. With his camera Tice found “beauty in the prosaic: bars, phone booths, hamburger joints, barber shops—first in a downtrodden Paterson, then throughout the state and beyond.”

To other photographers, museum curators, and gallery owners, his black-and-white prints (silver gelatin and platinum) are standouts of “impeccable quality.” Each one is a masterclass in framing. To the New Jersey crowd, he’s adored on another level, owing to the attention he paid to local settings that were instantly known. Tice’s first major portfolio and museum exhibit, Paterson, illuminated the garden state’s third most-populous city. Though the subjects might be called humble, the collection began his ascent as a major contributor to his craft. It’s quite something to come across the photographs “Joe’s Barbershop” and “Car for Sale” on the website Galerie Gadcollection (its brick and mortar “in the center of Paris”). Both prints are listed under the thème “street photography,” suggesting the still-lifes have some connection to a rue dotted with left bank cafes and not the pocked sidewalks of the same Paterson where my grandmother rooted herself after leaving Belarus (making me a third-generation native of the city).

I learned that George Tice passed away on January 16^th when my editor sent me an email with The New York Times article titled, “George Tice, ‘Bard of New Jersey’ With a Camera, Dies at 86.” As the cliché describes, seeing the headline took my breath away. Searching Substack for kindred spirits (was he known by anyone else on my only social media platform?), I found the piece had written, which is an excellent resource and entry for anyone not yet familiar with Tice. It’s true, as Adams subtitled his piece, that Tice was a “photography legend.” His work is held in the permanent collections of several museums (that includes the J. Getty Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and his limited-edition prints are represented by galleries in San Francisco and London and (as mentioned) Paris. Everything in Lifework, photographs from 1953 to 2013 and his last publication, is extraordinary. But for me, it’s always been the aching familiarity of his New Jersey landscapes and cityscapes.

George Tice was a kind of muse for my work, the artist who first gave me permission to appreciate all the tiny, overlooked corners of New Jersey. He was drawn to Paterson, which he saw as uniquely American, given its place as the country’s first industrial city (the brainchild of Alexander Hamilton). But he also saw the city as what it had become: a collection of many neighborhoods, each of them containing the run-of-the-mill and the seemingly unremarkable.

His black-and-white images took the viewer straight into Paterson, with all the abrasions the rust belt economy of the 1970s had meted out, and more abrasions clearly on the horizon, and with them, Tice told the story of a particular American culture in its decline. That portfolio wasn’t only the story of a rust belt city. Streetscapes and residents that could be called ordinary were made compelling—and they along with their tired city were seen. Tice has described the “sad beauty” of his urban scenes, and how the scenes have a “different weight, the weight of history, not moments, but stories evolving.”

George Tice’s early-career focus on small, overlooked cities overlapped with a trend in crime fiction in the 1970s, when settings for detective novels were moving out of LA and New York and becoming increasingly regional. With an expansion into less cosmopolitan locales across the country, the stories were close-to-the-ground snapshots of “that moment in the early 1970s when the troops were coming home and the country was going to seed.”

The overlap between Tice and crime fiction wasn’t confined to the timing—not a 1970s thing. As cities reveal themselves in photographs, “[i]n detective novels, cities are evolving, multifaceted entities as compelling as any human character.” To write historical fiction, historical crime fiction, is to be tasked with creating everyday details and bringing a world of specificity to the reader.

Crime novels are snow globes of time and place. Alongside the protagonist—the private eye, the cop—the reader is taken on a search for details. Settling in with a crime novel, a reader can expect to be brought into a small town or a decaying city. There will be drives along local roads or the interstate just on the outskirts, and by the end, the reader will know that place and all of its problems, big and small and full of consequence.

It’s no surprise that when I turned to writing a police procedural and set out to have my readers travel back to 1970s Paterson, I instinctively went to George Tice’s prints. With his recent passing, there’s been a sadness (I never had the chance to meet him) and also the weight of responsibility. More than ever, I want to feel that I’ve captured the sense of place that the city deserves—and that in the smallest possible way, my fictional world stays true to the “impeccable quality” of a George Tice photograph.

George Tice and his work will always hold a special place in my heart—for me, he was the first artist who said yes to the quotidian and yes to small moments and yes to Paterson.

Godspeed.

Author’s Note

In my publishing journey, leading to the upcoming release of my debut novel Nightswimming, set in Paterson in the 1970s, I’ve been absolutely blessed to have found a bonus of artists who share my passion for Silk City. Their beautiful photographs further inspired my writing and became much welcome visual support for the world-building of a bygone era of Paterson: Michael R. Sporzarsky, whose streetscape of downtown Paterson is the cover art for my novel (courtesy of the Paterson Museum) and Rich Green, whose collection of black-and-white photographs invigorate my website.

This Week’s Recommended Readings

“Uncommon Views of the Everyday”

“1970s Crime Fiction and the Incredible Rise of ‘Regional’ Noir”

This Week’s Recommended Music

“Racing in the Street” [Acoustic Cover Version] by Serena Ryder (on Amazon Music and Spotify)

Just One More Thing

Do you have a muse? A North Star?

Dirty Harry is one of those names that evokes an immediate reaction. Even if you’ve never seen a Dirty Harry film (there are four), you likely know the eponymous main character, played by Clint Eastwood. You likely know the cold-hard-stare persona and you almost certainly know the most famous line from the rule-bending detective (spoken as he stares down a suspect, Smith & Wesson in hand), “Go ahead, make my day.”

While researching Second Wave Feminism, I came across a YouTube clip, “Dirty Harry on Feminism and Women’s Quotas.”

Given the general perception of Harry Callahan (aka Dirty Harry), the title alone had me thinking this would be a diatribe on the ills of feminism. Sweeping intolerance. That’s long been the take on both the character and the films.

Dirty Harry (1971) was a shockwave of intense police violence. An assault against both authority and crime, the film ushered in a new era. Harry Callahan became a recognizable character in the American story that was taking shape in the 1970s. The zeitgeist captured on screen was seen as the middle-American response and unapologetic pushback to the freedoms unleashed in the prior decade. Civil rights and the sexual revolution and women’s liberation.1 Given the extent of the violence (the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups attacked the film for glorifying police brutality) it’s no surprise the word “fascist” is often thrown about as a descriptor. Misogyny also creeps in.

But the four-and-a-half minute YouTube clip I viewed was a little different than expected. Taken from The Enforcer (1976), which is third in the Dirty Harry series, the scene is early in the film, after Harry has been called to task for his most recent use of excessive force. The rogue detective has been taken off homicide and assigned to personnel. He’s shown sitting in on a committee interview of Kate Moore, played by Tyne Daly, for the position of inspector. Moore has been on the police force for nine years, mostly in clerical positions, but she’s been pushed to the front of the line under a new “quota” system seeking inclusivity in hiring. Familiar territory? It’s as if the past forty-nine years were just a blur.

The plain takeaway from the committee scene isn’t that Harry had a knee-jerk reaction to the female recruit; one that belied a low opinion of women. Harry was asking a simple question: is it wise to prioritize quotas over skill? What I saw was Harry not willing to virtue signal. He pressed an issue he deemed significant (should police assignments be merit based) and was confrontational with Moore, posing a tough (perhaps bullying) question. The fact pattern in Harry’s hypothetical was salacious, it might well have been mere bullying, but Moore chose to ignore any hints that it was a direct insult to her, parsed through the scenario he’s set up, and gave him an answer displaying her impressive knowledge of the law. So ultimately, it’s Harry’s question that lets her distinguish herself as more than a token hire. More to the point, it’s the scene, as written, that lets her distinguish herself as more than a token hire.

Yet that scene, where he is freely thinking out loud on the issue of technical competence and saying what was actually in his mind led to reviews finding The Enforcer “the most misogynistic and violent of the series...which is saying something.”

The jabs at Dirty Harry went beyond the scene and its critics. On its release, the press was more than eager to shred Tyne Daly as just another “invisible woman” in a Clint Eastwood film.

Decades later, Eastwood and Dirty Harry often remain linked in one, not particularly favorable, persona, whose iconic status “is attributed to a conservative longing for national confidence, power, and social order, all seemingly eroded by foreign military defeats and domestic civil rights and protest movements.” It’s a view that keeps Dirty Harry—and The Enforcer—in an anti-feminist light (“Hollywood’s post-Vietnam tendency to reclaim the unexamined masculinity of the damaged hero, who finds redemption not through introspection but only through ‘cathartic’ acts of violence.”)

With his swaggering violence, the character was without doubt displaying a full-on contempt of something. He’s as complex as you want him to be. A response to the corruption of government exposed in Vietnam (and soon to be on full display via Watergate) and that made him “the seminal ‘70s antihero.” Perhaps? There’s a discourse to be had on Dirty Harry and masculinity and the back-and-forth waves of progress versus a return to conservatism that roiled the 1970s. He wasn’t benign by any definition. But as I focused more on the YouTube clip, what became more and more interesting was the mistaken critique of The Enforcer as proof of Harry as a toxic male with “a low opinion of women in the work force.”

Because in the film, Kate Moore more than held her own with Dirty Harry.

Rewatching The Enforcer, I found Kate Moore to be smart and capable. She is also a complete rookie, so she makes rookie mistakes (she positions herself behind a handheld rocket launcher and only avoids being incinerated by backfire when Harry pulls her away; she retrieves a briefcase that’s been thrown by a suspect into a dumpster, never realizing it contains a bomb as she runs through the city, clutching it to her chest). Her inexperience, her flaws, made her multi-dimensional and real.

I wasn’t alone in finding her the standout. Even in 1976, she was the highlight for more than one reviewer. A “heroine of steel.” What made the portrayal so powerful to me was that Kate Moore was anything but spunky.

This was a thing in the 1970s. Women were facing down men who did hold a low opinion of them in society, and particularly in the work force. Many times, women had to be more competent to be taken seriously.

That reality became an unfortunate trope. The very real need for women to excel somehow morphed into the need to portray women as flawless and that in itself made the portrayals almost cartoonish.

Crime novelist Karin Slaughter laid it out in her 2014 thriller, Criminal. A dual time-line police procedural that alternates the present with 1975 when a pair of female patrol officers are hunting down a serial killer, their first actual case. They’re physically harassed by the men they work with. They interview witnesses in tenements strewn with drugs and garbage and vomit. They get their asses kicked by the suspect. And ticking in the back of their minds is the keen awareness their work is nothing like “the plot of a television sitcom where two plucky gals stick their noses where they don’t belong and end up escaping through wit and humor.”

This is why Kate Moore is awesome, other than pointing her own Colt Diamondback (2” barrel, snub-nosed version) and looking every bit as badass as Clint Eastwood. Kate Moore is not plucky.

While I was pondering the question of what Dirty Harry had to do with women’s lib, I came across a quote in the memoir No Angel, where ATF special agent Jay Dobyns recounts an undercover assignment that led to his being fully patched (voted in as a full club member) by the Hells Angels. While trying to recruit a female officer to work with him on the case, she’s cautioned that the motorcycle gang was misogynist. Her answer was direct.

“At least the Angels wore their sexism on their sleeves."

I often find things I wished I said. This went a little bit further. It was a clean assessment that knit together a few thoughts that had been floating around in my mind untethered. The quote made me think about virtue signaling and female agency and the fake feminism in the 1970s that was spreading spunky, cartoonish heroines in film and on TV (see Karin Slaughter, above). Compare that with the real thing in Kate Moore.

As he’s paired with Kate Moore, Harry grows to respect her, not because she was the plucky caricature of female competence that was the staple of Hollywood, but because her character was written as a good cop—smart and determined to make up for her lack of experience in the field—and because Harry was written as a man who was willing to open his mind.

Kate Moore might have been the quota hire for the San Francisco Police Department, but her character wasn’t a quota hire for Malpaso (Clint Eastwood’s production company). Kudos to Tyne Daly, who turned down the role three times and, once she ultimately accepted, had sway on the development of her character. Kudos to the men in charge who wanted an actress of her caliber and went with the character she was creating.

Kate Moore was a revelation for me, overtaking the question of whether Dirty Harry was a misogynist, which seems like a less compelling exploration when placed side by side with the woman Tyne Daly brought to life.

There’s something in her defying the usual Hollywood roles, like my hero, Emma Peel.

There’s something in the transgression.

Episode Notes

This Week’s Recommended Readings

“The Storytelling of Clint Eastwood” by

“Men and Guns, Part Two: ‘Dirty Harry’” by

This Week’s Recommended Viewing

The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s first episode; Lou Grant tells us what he thinks of spunk

This Week’s Recommended Music

“Just A Girl” (on Spotify and Amazon Music)

Just One More Thing

Thoughts on Dirty Harry?

The biggest thank you to all of my readers for being on board with me this past year; for your likes and comments and restacks—for being so generous with your time. Have the happiest holidays! ❄️❄️❄️

This Week’s Recommended Reading

This Week’s Recommended Music

"Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" by The Carpenters (on Spotify and Amazon Music)

Breaking Away (1979) is the very charming story of Dave Stohler, a working-class teen in Bloomington, Indiana, who’s obsessed with competitive cycling (and the Italian cycling team, Cinzano), yet otherwise muddling through his summer with his three best friends while trying to figure out life after high school. Though squarely a lighthearted coming-of-age, Breaking Away enjoys a stellar reputation in the sports film genre—number eight in the American Film Institute’s top ten. The film had a low budget but a (surprisingly) distinct lineage with its director, Peter Yates, known for the greatest chase scene in all of cinema—Steve McQueen behind the wheel of a Mustang GT 390 Fastback careening through the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt (1968).

There’s so much action in this cycling film, you almost don’t notice the themes simmering beneath the surface: the industrial decline of the 1970s, the loss of breadwinner status for men, and thorny issues of class fluidity—themes as relevant today as when the film was released 45 years ago.

This year’s Republican National Convention presented both billionaire Donald Trump and his selection for Vice President, JD Vance, a man so blue-collar the crowd at times chanted “Memaw” to honor Vance’s gun-owning grandmother while the junior senator from Ohio recounted his improbable rise as a native of the economically depressed Butler County. Vance’s family was well-known to the audience from his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which detailed the impact of industrial decline as told through the story of working-class Americans and the struggles of their Rust Belt communities.

Vance’s personal story epitomizes the American Dream and its promise of social and economic mobility and sits atop the current wave in the culture where there’s an open discussion of class itself. The word, the subject, can mean many things. Financial. Social. Perceptions. Psychologist Rob Henderson, whose own memoir Troubled includes “social class” in the subtitle, writes extensively on his experience in the Ivy League and the near insurmountable barricade a student of less means will encounter based on one’s standing. According to Henderson, “there's more to class than just credentials; it's connections, it's mannerisms, habits of mind, who you know, how to conduct yourself and carry yourself in different social contexts.”

This open discourse wasn’t always so. Until recently, there was perhaps no topic more sensitive, more off-limits, than the umbrella term “class.”1 And yet today, class isn’t just a permitted talking point, this is the hot topic and the cultural touchstone of the election cycle.

Trying to understand the forces underlying the 2024 election and the dynamics of the American working-class voter, The New York Times turned to The Real Majority, a book written in 1970.

I’d argue that if you don’t want facts and statistics heaped on you but still seek an understanding of the economic and social forces within blue-collar communities, nowhere is this explored better than in the film, Breaking Away, with its 95% favorable rating on Rotten Tomatoes. When we meet Dave, he’s already distinct from the others in his tight-knit group of high school friends as he pursues his aspirations of training for a professional bicycling team. The film reveals what makes Dave truly distinct, as he mulls over the possibility of attending college.

While the 1970s saw a great deal of disruption from the social movements of the 1960s (civil rights, the sexual revolution, second wave feminism), there was a specific upheaval that was economic and the sudden “decline of the American Dream.” Blue-collar jobs had flourished in the post-war economy and promised financial stability but that changed as entire industries moved out of the country. The decade embodied “the tense, political, working-class rejection of an increasingly unequal society.” Breaking Away deftly skirts tackling the era’s evaporating hope head-on. Outwardly, the film embraces all the hallmarks of the typical “us vs. them” class dynamics, playing out as the scrappy underdog “cutters” (sons of men who worked in local rock quarries) brush up against the upper-class college kids again and again (swimming at the quarry, fighting in the bowling alley). But that isn’t really where class is fully explored in the film.

The film opens with Dave bicycling through the streets and highways of Bloomington, then returning home where he speaks his version of Italian to his parents, an affectation that lands hard on his bewildered dad. There’s more comic interaction—his father happens upon Dave in the bathroom shaving his legs—but this is really a story laser focused on what happens when you move through the social classes. What you gain and what you lose and how you are lost to others, and how deeply Dave’s father is aware of his son’s potential and the cost that could mean to him.

As Rob Henderson observed, class is more than just credentials; it sets up two separate worlds. Those worlds are vividly present even at the University of Indiana, where frat boys drive Mercedes convertibles. There’s the pretty coed Dave pursues who casually announces her planned trip to Europe, in sharp contrast to Dave’s mother who carries her unstamped (and never to be used) passport in her purse, for the sheer pleasure of having it with her.

The possibility of straddling two worlds should he push himself too far, eventually losing a part of himself and distancing himself from the ones he loves most, is the internal conflict for Dave. That was certainly true for Richard Rodriguez, who detailed that struggle in his ground-breaking assessment of his own education as the portal that took him from social disadvantage to full assimilation in mainstream American culture.2 For Rodriguez, who eventually turned his back on academia, that transformation came at too high a cost.

To avoid a similar reality (though one he’ll eventually have to confront), Dave contents himself with his Italian façade, pretending to have an identity that’s both exciting and far removed from Bloomington, Indiana, while never challenging himself with more tangible action that could threaten to distance him from his friends and his parents.

Dave’s dad, however, is clear-eyed on Dave’s potential. The heart of the film is the relationship between Dave and his dad. The breaking away of the title is a traditional rite of passage for young men and their fathers. Sven Birkerts, The Art of Time in Memoir (2007). What is gained and what is lost and how one is lost to others is well known to Dave’s father. Even his own small move years earlier from working in the quarry to owning a used car lot moved him up a notch. What would college mean? The film explores the tension between his fear of losing his son to the next class and his hopes for Dave’s future.

When he takes Dave to visit the quarry where he once worked and describes the blocks of finished stone that went into Bloomington’s downtown office towers, he tells Dave how he learned that not only the buildings, but the very limestone he’d quarried were “too good for us.” He’s talking about the loss of something he’d been intimate with; a rock that he’d cut and molded with his own hands that went on to create a fine building and in the process left him behind. He’s relating his deepest fear about own son.

Class and social standing are multi-faceted and within the film, the themes unfold like nesting dolls. Laced in with the very real challenge Dave faces in taking those first steps away from his family, is another story of how the financial downturn in the 1970s impacted men. The economic pressures coming out of the Rust Belt were felt by both men and women, but the impact to identity was unique to male breadwinners. Today, we talk about the plight of “non-college-educated” men in relation to the male crisis.3

Breaking Away sets it out in the side story of Dave’s friend, Moocher, whose father has moved to Chicago in hopes of finding work. Moocher is also unemployed and at the courthouse for a marriage license, he and his girlfriend can barely scrape together the needed five dollars. That she’s the high earner between them, with a steady job as a cashier, is the slightest nod to the shifting dynamics that arose in the 1970s.

The film leaves the fate of its four young, working-class protagonists open-ended. There’s no clear resolution for the group and that’s part of the film’s realism.

In this newsletter and in my novels, I go back to the 1970s because the changes the decade sparked impact where we are today. With terms like “luxury beliefs” and blue-collar voters and delegates chanting “Memaw” at the RNC, the Rust Belt that emerged in the 1970s is still very much a part of the American fabric. JD Vance, now the region’s most prominent voice, says the thing he would most like to change about the working class isn’t any economic reality, but “the feeling that our choices don’t matter.”

Everyone in Breaking Away matters. They will very much matter to you.

Episode Notes

This Week’s Recommended Viewing

Watch the trailer for Breaking Away

This Week’s Recommended Reading

Some more musings on the Rust Belt

The history of Indiana limestone

This Week’s Recommended Music

"Indiana" by The Samples (on Amazon Music and Spotify)

Just One More Thing

What movies or books from the 1970s tell a story that’s still fresh today?

Bonus question. If you’ve already seen (or on my recommendation have recently watched) Breaking Away, tell me your thoughts.

December will mark the one-year anniversary of Cherchez La Femme. The best part of creating and publishing this Substack, aside from writing essays and receiving your comments, has been searching out articles and videos and a themed music selection to pair with every post. These are intentionally brief (I’ve tried to keep it to one article, one video and always one song) because we all have our own internet rabbit holes and there are only so many hours in the day. Still, I do have my favorites, and it was my hope (and dream) that some of these would become your favorites, too.

In a week of excessive and exhaustive news, it seems fitting to have a little break from heavy reading and use the space to drop in a retrospective.

And even more fortuitously (or is it fate?), I happened upon not one but two posts on Brian Doyle this week, and of course I will share those as well because there is never enough of the Brian Doyle I find so very special (out of at least 215 others).

wrote a post celebrating Brian Doyle’s birthday, with links to many of his essays.

published Doyle’s short essay “Humility”: “All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference.”

My favorite rabbit holes from my first year writing Cherchez La Femme

• Essay on Community College by Tom Hanks

• Dustin Hoffman on Tootsie and his character Dorothy Michaels

• Laurie Anderson reveals what she learned about the “economic exploitation of women” after planning a protest of the New York Playboy Club

• Koko the Gorilla Uses Sign Language

• “These Days” by Glen Campbell

• NBC Sportscasters Dan Hicks and Rowdy Gaines Call Race in Kiddie Pool

• Phoebe Gives Monica a Haircut

• The Ohio State University Marching Band Tribute to Michael Jackson

• Ben Johnson and Harry Carey Jr. Ride Roman Style

Just One More Thing

What’s your favorite internet rabbit hole?