May 2020

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me
The simple News that Nature told,
With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see
For love of Her — Sweet — countrymen
Judge tenderly — of Me

— Emily Dickinson

Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host

“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”