Wednesday Links
Remembering Robert Coles, literary tourism, replacing the pointe shoe, on plagiarism, and more.
Good morning! Let’s start things off on a lighter note . The Irish may be heavy drinkers, but they’ve apparently got nothing on the Scots, who recently drank Boston dry:
The “Tartan Army” took over Boston’s downtown area on Saturday following Scotland’s 1-0 win over Haiti, with Sam Adams revealing that its Boston Taproom ran out of its famous Boston Lager.
From Thursday to Sunday, Scotland fans effectively drank four times as much Boston Lager as the Taproom normally sells in a four-day holiday stretch, Sam Adams told NBC News, with the company forced to schedule an emergency delivery to keep up.
And the Sam Adams Boston Taproom wasn’t the only bar struggling to keep up with the demand of the thirsty soccer fans. Noelle Somers, chief operating officer at Hennessy’s Bar, said the sales from the weekend were three times as much as the city’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities.
“We’ve been here for over 30 years, and we’ve never seen anything like it,” she told the Boston Globe. “We tripled St. Patrick’s Day.”
The Scottish fans drank so much, in fact, they broke one bar’s refrigerator “because the bartenders were opening it constantly to serve more drinks.”
John J. Miller writes in praise of literary tourism:
On my travels, I often visit the places that serve as settings for the murder-mystery stories that I love to read.
Two weeks ago, for example, I walked into an alley beside the National Theatre of Iceland. It’s the site of a body dumping in “The Shadow District,” a 2013 novel by Arnaldur Indridason. The spot evoked a line from the book: “The building loomed darkly over Hverfisgata like the huge outcrop of columnar basalt it was designed to resemble.”
That’s a fitting description of a big structure on a major thoroughfare. I might not have noticed it—let alone appreciated it—but for “The Shadow District.” Mr. Indridason’s tale helped me turn the vicarious pleasure of reading into an indelible experience.
Miller’s not the only one who enjoys such experiences. In the New York Times, Elaine Glusac writes about the growing interest in visiting places where books are set:
In its 2026 travel trends report, the flight-tracking site Skyscanner found that 55 percent of travelers had booked a trip or would consider one inspired by a book. The vacation rental platform Vrbo coined the term “readaways,” or book-inspired group travel, in its trend report, noting that 91 percent of respondents registered interest in a trip devoted to reading and relaxing.
Resort book clubs, hotel libraries and a growing number of literary festivals are also offering readers new ways to indulge readers’ interests. This comes despite a recent finding that the share of people who read for pleasure has dropped 40 percent since 2003.
It helps that vacations often grant time to read.
“It’s about shutting off the computer and the phone and calming yourself down,” said Jane Ubell-Meyer, the founder of Bedside Reading, a service that teams up with hotels to offer complimentary access to a digital library of more than 200 titles. “I think a book helps you with that.”
Will ballet’s pointe shoe ever be replaced by something else? “Pointe shoes have looked and functioned about the same since the early 20th century: typically satin-covered, with fortified insoles and boxes made from fabric, paper, and paste. Few designs have strayed too far from this basic look and structure, despite huge advances in technology and sports medicine. Why has the pointe shoe been so resistant to change?”
A new documentary explores what it is like to cook for a dictator:
Kim Jong-il loved pepperoni pizza. Saddam Hussein couldn’t resist a fish barbecue. Idi Amin reportedly had the capacity for an entire roasted goat. The menus may have differed, but the appetite was the same. For history’s most notorious strongmen, the dining table doubled as a stage for power. For the cooks who served them, every meal came with extraordinary stakes. . . . Charles Otonde Odera . . . describes his early days working for the Ugandan despot Idi Amin as life-changing – a poor villager scraping by one day, and the next driving a Mercedes, supporting eight wives, and living in extraordinary comfort as Amin terrorized and brutalized the local masses. For all the chefs, comfort was the trade. By most measures, theirs was a great gig – logic that can excuse almost anything. “Saddam’s chef got a car every year,” Neel says. “That phrase, ‘it was a great gig,’ I think, actually runs the world. Like, ‘It was just business.’”
It wasn’t until Amin’s second wife, Kay, was found dead in the trunk of a car, amid rumors he had her killed for taking a lover, that Odera began to reconsider the bargain. “I missed my low wages from before,” he says in the doc. “At least my heart was at peace.”
Adam Roberts offers a new reading of John Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy”: “Keats’s poem is usually taken as being a product of him reading the Classics in translation (in Tooke’s Pantheon and Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary) and the poem is certainly full of classical references—Psyche, Lethe, Proserpine—as all the great odes are. But this is the only one of the odes to address somebody directly. The addressee is not named. But here’s the nub of my argument: I think it is Otway, or more precisely, I think the poem started as an ode addressed to Thomas Otway as Melancholy.”
We have all heard of Weimar. Mainly the name. Wasn’t there once a Republic there? Hasn’t it something to do with hideous paintings of disfigured soldiers and angry women wearing monocles, with jerky, angry music, Bertolt Brecht, that film Cabaret, and the Bauhaus? Is it perhaps mentioned, disguised as Pumpernickel, in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair? Yes it is, along with its famous Elephant Hotel. And then of course it is actually in the title of Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar. But it is also a place.
Approach it with me, on a dingy winter’s day of low cloud and sharp wind, on a scruffy Communist express train from Berlin in which I, my wife Eve, and a couple of very obvious secret police spies (who are pretending very badly that they cannot understand English) are traveling. For, in my travels in the old East Germany, Weimar was not just a name from the past. It was one of the very few places in that sad little state which had escaped the deliberate uglification inflicted on everywhere else, and I very much wanted to see this rare combination of Communism and beauty. I had my visa (in those days you had to tell the authorities in advance exactly where you were going, so that they could deploy the spies). We were quickly enveloped in a nostalgic twilight of empty countryside with cobbled roads, and industrial cities which looked like the North of England in the 1950s, long rows of terraced houses with perhaps one car in each street, lots of factory chimneys, huge slabs of crude Plattenbau housing blocks. Who would have thought Handel could have come from here?
I somehow missed the news that the psychiatrist and friend of Walker Percy, Robert Coles, had died. He was 97:
A longtime professor at Harvard, Dr. Coles eschewed ideologies and psychiatric orthodoxies, visiting the homes of children — first in the American South and then around the world — to listen intently to what they, their parents and others had to say. He returned again and again, sometimes for months or even years, building the trust that underpinned his work.
He told searing accounts illustrating elusive truths of a fast-changing society, beginning with the tale of Ruby Bridges, who as a 6-year-old walked through a screaming mob in 1960 as part of an effort to integrate a public school in New Orleans. From the households of poor Black families to those of rich white ones, from Appalachia to the Arctic, Dr. Coles visited children whose voices were not often heard. He once rode a bus for a whole year with Black youngsters being transported to schools in white neighborhoods.
Dr. Coles then wrote it all down, distilling the tape recordings of conversations, the children’s crayon drawings and his voluminous notes into compelling verbal snapshots of how children grapple with challenge. His five-volume book series “Children of Crisis” was published between 1967 and 1977; Volumes 2 and 3 won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
Kenneth L. Woodward remembers Coles in Commonweal:
As Robert Coles and I were walking around Harvard’s campus a half century ago, searching for a suitable place to photograph him for Newsweek, he suddenly stopped and pointed to William James Hall. ‘You want to know what’s the matter with psychology and the social sciences?’ Coles asked me rhetorically. ‘That’s what’s the matter with psychology and the social sciences.’
At the time, William James Hall was home to the department of Social Relations (psychology, sociology and anthropology), and was known for experimenting on students, especially Timothy Leary’s group experiments with psychedelics. But Coles’s ire was directed just as much at the kind of theorizing that, unlike his own work, sought to explain the behavior of children and youths without first observing closely how they actually do behave. . . . Coles, who died on June 4 at the age of ninety-seven, was many things: a doctor, a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, a literature professor, a documentarian, and the author of more than sixty books and nearly two thousand articles, essays, and book reviews. But his genius, central to all his work, was his hard-won ability to listen and observe.”
Joseph Epstein reviews a new book on plagiarism:
After writing for publication for nearly 70 years, I ask myself: Have I ever committed the sin of plagiarism? I hope I haven’t, but I shouldn’t be entirely shocked to learn that somewhere along the way I have. Writers much better known than I have been accused of plagiarism. Among them have been Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Benjamin Franklin. Vladimir Nabokov admitted to “unconscious plagiarism,” as did Helen Keller, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Beatle George Harrison.
No surprise to learn that the greatest amount of plagiarism occurs in schools, in high schools but chiefly in colleges and universities. I’m pleased to report that over 30 years of university teaching I never caught a student plagiarizing in any of my courses. Was I, though, insufficiently on guard? Should I have been more suspicious of that young woman who sat in the back of the classroom scarcely saying a word all quarter long and yet wrote a quite brilliant paper on Joseph Conrad? Or of the young man who, when he did speak generally revealed his ignorance, then wrote a quite good paper on Portrait of a Lady?
I have been told by colleagues that catching a student in plagiarism can be a complicated experience. Suddenly the student’s fate, at least his or her fate as a student, is in your hands, for to report a student for plagiarism could mean expulsion from the university.
I was, of course, aware of plagiarism but failed to comprehend the extent of the phenomenon. Roger Kreuz, author of Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots, a recent book on the subject, claims to have found so much of it in researching his book that, as he writes, “I must confess that this odyssey has dented my faith in human nature.”
I caught many instances of plagiarism in my twenty years of teaching. One of the most memorable was a student in Louisiana. She had copied her entire paper word-for-word from an article online. She first tried the old line that perhaps the professor who published this article a few years earlier had copied from her. I explained why this was impossible, but she persisted in claiming that she had not plagiarized. Exasperated, I finally said: “So you are telling me that these are your words?” . . . “Well, I typed them,” she said.
A reminder for you poets—or aspiring poets—out there: The deadline for the third annual First Things poetry prize is quickly approaching. Submit your work today!
I will be taking a short break next week to bike across Switzerland and clear my head, but I will be back on June 29th. By then, some of you will likely have received the summer issue of Portico. If you missed the first issue, you can now purchase single-issue copies on our subscription page (while supplies last). And if you haven’t subscribed yet, why not give it a try? The fall issue will be a barn burner.
I did go to Edinburgh after reading Trainspotting. Although definitely not because of reading it.
Years ago , I read a number of articles by Robert Coles years ago. I’d completely forgotten about him.