If you know how I adore Ella, then you’ll also know that when I say that this is one of her very greatest vocal performances, I am saying a lot. (Terrific orchestral arrangement also.)
Just one brief note on this viral essay about the shrinking opportunities for younger white men in many professional fields: the category “white” is a notoriously slippery one, but roughly speaking, 30% of Americans are white men. If you keep that in mind, you’ll see that some of the statistics in the essay are considerably more noteworthy than others.
Answerability Without Alibi — a message to my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Mark Hurst: 2025 showed why to get off Big Tech. Co-sign.
[George] Herbert desires to comprehend the infinity and timelessness of God in a finite and temporal world. His poetry is a record of a striving after glimpses of the divine in the human sphere. No difficult question is avoided, no agony of mind is shirked, and his work documents every turn of thought and feeling, from exaltation and a sense of union, to anxiety, doubt, despair, revival and eventual resurrection. Despite the complexity of this pursuit, it is chronicled in language of startling clarity. Herbert is an outstanding example from the Anglican tradition of the fact that one can convey the authentic struggle of heart and mind for the presence of God in simple dress, without having to resort to the idiom of the primary school.
I wrote about reconsidering my dependence on Apple.
The movie’s final scene changes everything, of course, and lifts this darkness. Or so it would seem. I have an artist friend who adores the movie, watches it every year, and cannot watch the ending. I watch it and always cry, now harder than ever. At the age of 66, I can’t tell how much of this reaction comes from the joyous scene itself and how much from its close proximity to the darkness it breaks, from the miracle of reprieve.
Storytelling, with its tricks, its smoothing, cobbling and evading, may be our oldest hack. But if it gives us something we keep needing, it outlives the storyteller and all the décor. For me, the staying power of It’s a Wonderful Life comes from its two gifts. It keeps faith with human goodness and doesn’t pretend the world isn’t broken, that we don’t need help.
