Acrostics

CONTENTS

Will Durant - The Life of Greece 

Donna Tartt - The Secret History 

Kingsolver - Demon Copperhead

OLIVER - THE SUMMER DAY 

Keith McNally - I Regret Almost Everything

Yourcenar - Memoirs of Hadrian

Isabel Allende - The House of the Spirits

Philip Shenon - Jesus Wept

M Bjornerud - Turning to Stone

Haidt - The Anxious Generation

"Civilization is older than we think. Under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women who worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names have been lost in the careless flow of time."

Wordsworth — “That best portion of a good life; little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love.” (Tintern Abbey - William ….., 1798)

Islands — “Between the Greek mainland and Crete, some 220 … dot the Aegean Sea, forming a circle around Delos, and hence are called the Cyclades.” (Book - Author, 1939)

Longbottom — There are all kinds of courage," said Dumbledore, smiling. "It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends. I therefore award ten points to Mr. Neville ....!" (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - J. K. Rowling, 2001)

Leeuwenhoek — “Through his handcrafted microscopes, ….. was the first to observe bacteria, protozoa, and the hidden world of the cell.” (The Scientific Revolution - Steven Shapin, 1996)

Downhearted — “I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time; no man who is … will ever accomplish much.” (Charles Dickens - David Copperfield, 1850)

Unbeknownst — “….. to the rest of the world, she had been carrying a quiet strength all along, revealed only in the trial of adversity.” (Far from the Madding Crows - Thomas Hardy, 1874)

Revived — “At length she …, and with faint voice told how hope had returned to her after the long darkness.” (Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë, 1847)

Awesome — “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of it. When we recognize the scale of the cosmos, it is truly ….” (The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan, 1995)

Nostradamus — “The prophecies of ….., written in cryptic verse, have for centuries stirred fear and fascination among those seeking signs of destiny.” (The Prophecies of ….. - Erika Cheetham, 1973)

Thanatos — “Alongside the life instinct, Eros, there exists in man the death instinct, ….., which strives toward destruction and a return to the inanimate state.” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle - Sigmund Freud, 1920)

Tin — “By the end of the Early Minoan Age the Cretans learn to mix copper with ….., and the Bronze Age begins.” (Book - Author, 1939)

How — “…ever that may be, my loves have left me more often than I have left them, for I have never been able to understand ….. one could have enough of any beloved.” (Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar, 1951)

End — “This is not the ….., it is not even the beginning of the ….., but it is, perhaps, the ….. of the beginning.” (Speech at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon - Winston Churchill, 1942)

Lift — “We think that our worldview represents an ‘epistemic rupture so radical that nothing of the past survives’ in it and that our technologies … us above the oppression of natural history. But stranded on the island of Now, we are lonely.” (Timefulness - Marcia Bjornerud, 2018)

Inhuman —“From this life they took for themselves all its most .... essence, all its poisonous rotten juice—and as readily as if it had been this liquid, and not milk, that they had sucked from their mothers’ breasts in infancy.” (The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973)

Flaw — “There is a crack, a ….. in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” (Anthem - Leonard Cohen, 1992)

Eliza — See them walking in the park, long after dark, Taking in the sights of the city, Look around, look around, ...., They are trying to do the unimaginable (Hamilton - Lin-Manuel Miranda, 2015)

Obediah — “The vision of ….. . Thus saith the Lord God concerning Edom; We have heard a rumour from the Lord, and an ambassador is sent among the heathen.” (The Book of ….., The Holy Bible King James Version)

Flew — “One … Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of only three films to win all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Director, and Screenplay).” (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Milos Forman (director), 1975)

Goethe — “What you have inherited from your fathers, you must earn in order to possess.” (Faust - Johann Wolfgang von ….., 1808)

Raise — “It was the frenzy of Crécy over again. Fallen knights could not ... their horses. Amid call of trumpets, shouted battle cries, and screams of wounded men and horses, both Clermont and the Constable were killed." (A Distant Mirror - Barbara W. Tuchman, 1978)

Edit — “In writing, you must kill all your darlings. To ….. is to learn what to sacrifice.” (attributed - William Faulkner, 1950s lectures)

Envied — “It is better to be ….. than pitied; for men admire those who prosper, but feel no kindness for the unfortunate.” (Histories - Herodotus, 5th century BC)

Chamber of Secrets — “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities," (Harry Potter and the.... - J. K. Rowling, 1998)

Even — “.... Freud suffered his whole life from phobias and from death-anxiety; and he came to fully perceive the world under the aspect of natural terror.” (The Denial of Death - Ernest Becker, 1973)

(Completed August 21, 2025)

“But of course I didn’t see this crucial moment for what it actually was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs.”

Dove — “Back home, the peaceniks had their ….s, the hawks had their flags, and no one wanted to hear about the in-between, where most of us lived and died.” (The Things They Carried - Tim O’Brien)

Ossetia — “Our ….n guides urged the pack mules forward with strange cries that echoed off the canyon walls.” (A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail Lermontov)

Newfoundland — “At thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love, Quoyle steered away to …., the rock that had generated his ancestors, a place he had never been nor thought to go.” (The Shipping News - Annie Proulx)

Nintendo — “My thumb still remembers where the …. buttons were, muscle memory from a childhood spent rescuing princesses.” (Ready Player One - Ernest Cline)

Animus — “That old …. dissolved the moment she walked into her childhood home, replaced by something harder to name – the person she’d been arguing with all these years was herself.” (Memory Wall - Anthony Doerr)

Traditions — “The …. we inherit are like old maps – they show where others have gone, but not always where we need to go.” (Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri)

Amethyst — “The …. lay dark in the mountain’s heart, waiting for discovery, waiting for someone to understand its worth.” (Deep Time - Richard Fortey)

Randy Newman — “Oh Karl, the world isn’t fair, It isn’t and never will be. They tried out your plan, It brought misery instead. If you’d seen how they worked it, You’d be glad you were dead. Just like I’m glad I’m living in the land of the free, Where the rich just get richer, And the poor you don’t ever have to see. It would depress us, Karl, Because we care, That the world still isn’t fair.” (The World Isn’t Fair - …)

Thimble — “Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a diffused …ful of matter in the shape of knowledge.” (Middlemarch - George Eliot)

Tows — “Duty … us back to places we thought we’d left.” (The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion)

Theme — “Defects can play a paradoxical role by bringing out latent powers that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence. It is the paradox of disease, in this sense, its ‘creative’ potential, that forms the central … of this book.” (An Anthropologist on Mars - Oliver Sacks)

Hazy — “The early 1980s are nowhere viewed through the …. gauze of nostalgia as a simpler, sillier time of shoulder pads and big hair, and it’s easy to dismiss the apocalyptic feelings that hung in the air.” (Turning to Stone - Marcia Bjornerud)

Eye contact — “That moment of …. lasted perhaps two seconds, but in it passed everything we would never say to each other.” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera)

Somatic — “What we call intuition is often just … wisdom – the body knowing before the mind catches up.” (The Embodied Mind - Francisco Varela)

Eureka — “True … moments are less about finding something new than seeing the familiar in an unfamiliar way.” (The Evolution of Everything - Matt Ridley)

Chumps — "In a world of increasing complexity, the .... are the ones who pretend to have all the answers." - (The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

Rowdy — “That … laughter at midnight – I didn’t know then it was the sound of friendship becoming memory.” (The Friend - Sigrid Nunez)

Ewe — “They dwindled, Sir, sad sight to see! From ten to five, from five to three, A lamb, a wether, and a ….; And then at last from three to two; And, of my fifty, yesterday I had but only one: And here it lies upon my arm, Alas! and I have none; To-day I fetched it from the rock; It is the last of all my flock.” (The Last of the Flock - William Wordsworth)

Thaw — “Where Phoebus’ fire scarce …s the icicles.” (The Merchant of Venice - William Shakespeare)

(This acrostic was completed during a visit to Bevagna while sitting on the bench near the intersection of Via Gabriele Crescimbeni and Corso Giacomo Matteotti. 

It was originally inspired by a conversation at Castiglione Ugolino with Kate Kadyan three years ago. 

Giacomo Matteotti was the socialist politician kidnapped and murdered by Fascists in 1924 after openly denouncing Mussolini’s regime in Parliament. His death became a rallying point for anti-Fascist resistance.

Gabriele Crescimbeni was a local Bevagna lawyer, arrested during the Nazi occupation for his resistance beliefs and deported to a concentration camp, where he died in 1944.

August 14, 2025)

"It happened the way I knew it would. Live long enough and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between."

Kiwi — unlike the …, which was nearly wiped out, the Carolina parakeet and passenger pigeon became extinct in the first half of the 20th century. The … survived only because of intensive conservation and sustained care.

Inch — "You find out life’s this game of …es. So is football because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it." (Any Given Sunday - Al Pacino)

Nothing — “… in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” (Marie Curie)

Gown — “When I planned my wedding the first time, my ex-husband and I, we were both struggling comics. I rented a wedding ....; the reception hall smelled like feet.” (Sherri Shepherd)

Southwest — “The prime communities of the … are survival communities. Their sustenance is governed by rainfall and wind direction. You can study little enclaves of plant materials, how they huddle together for protection.” (Antoine Predock)

One hundred — “But … years later, the Negro still is not free. …. years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. …. years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” (Martin Luther King Jr.)

Lightweight — Henry Armstrong fought his way out of poverty to become the only man in history to hold the featherweight, …., and welterweight boxing titles simultaneously in 1938.

Vow — “I …ed that I would never relinquish my sense of self again.” (Orange Is the New Black - Piper Kerman)

Eastland — “I see a dozen ….s every morning on my way to work and a dozen more going home at night,” a jab at how everyday life mirrors the disaster’s class cruelty.” (Carl Sandburg)

Redundant — “I have been made … before and it is a terrible blow; … is a rotten word because it makes you think you are useless.” (Billy Connolly)

Death watch — “A measured, muffled snore issued from Aunt Polly’s chamber. And now the tiresome chirping of a cricket that no human ingenuity could locate began. Next the ghastly ticking of a … in the wall at the bed’s head made Tom shudder, it meant that somebody’s days were numbered.” (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain)

Echo — “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an …, and if an … sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.” (Black Boy - Richard Wright)

Mouth — “Nor …. had, no nor mind, expressed / What heart heard of, ghost guessed: / It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.” (Spring and Fall - Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Obit — “Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by …uary, and on the west by tedium.” (Philip Guedalla)

Nonlawyer — Beth Macy in Dopesick describes how families, guided by determined ….. advocates, forced opioid makers into court when official channels failed them.

Consultants — .... at McKinsey & Company advised opioid manufacturers on how to ‘turbocharge’ sales, even as addiction rates climbed.

Outfield — "I thought the greatest ....of all time was in those games in 1953 when Jackie Robinson was playing left field along side Duke Snider in center and Carl Furillo in right." (Edward Walker)

Penne — The ….. Norcina served at Taverna di Isa in Magione Umbria is distinctive in its use of truffles and its generous portions of sausage. It is a favorite dish of the author of this puzzle. 

Pulley — Plutarch's Parallel Lives recounts a scene where Archimedes proved the effectiveness of compound ....s and the block-and-tackle system by using one to pull a fully laden ship towards him. 

Envy — “…’s tooth shall gnaw thy soul.” (Henry VI - William Shakespeare)

Rely — In A.J. Cronin's 1937 novel The Citadel a young doctor becomes disillusioned as he learns how patients are harmed as they  .... on a corrupt medical establishment.

Heroin — In Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh shows ….. as both escape and trap, its rush bought at the cost of everything else worth having.

Evolution — “…. is a theory. It is also a fact.” (“Evolution as Fact and Theory” - Stephen Jay Gould)

Abolish — “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or … it” (The Declaration of Independence - Thomas Jefferson)

Drug addiction — “… is a public health crisis, not a moral failing.” (Julianne Moore)

(Completed at Torre di Capo Piccola - August 11, 2025)

“I don't know exactly what a prayer is,

I do know how to pay attention, 

how to fall down into the grass,

how to be idle.

Tell me, what should i have done?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

Ottawa — “The …., part of the Anishinaabe confederacy, still preserve their language and stories today.” (Living Nations, Living Words - Joy Harjo)

Lock box —“The memories were stored in a …. so tight and unspoken she forgot the combination herself.” (The Secret Life of Objects - Alice Munro)

Ito — “At the 1992 Olympics Midori …. became the first woman to land a triple axel.” (Figure Skating Legends - Michelle Kwan) 

Vanishing point — The ... in The Baptism of Christ shows Piero della Francesca’s command of linear perspective.

Edith Wharton — “Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer revealed the high cost of appearances.” (The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton)

Roth — In The Human Stain, Philip …. reveals how a single secret can distort a whole life. 

The Lake Isle of Innisfree — “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.” (..... - W.B. Yeats)

Hollywood — "He left Nebraska with nothing but a bus ticket and a dream called ….” (The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry)

Endow — “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has ….ed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” (Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina - Galileo Galilei)

Shadow — “A shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel ....s of the indignant desert birds.” (The Second Coming - W.B. Yeats)

Untasted — “He sat with the glass of wine ….. on his knee.” (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson)

Multiplicand — “The …. waits, passive but essential, until the multiplier arrives.” (A Mathematician’s Apology - G.H. Hardy)

Mephistophelean — “The …. bargain he offers is no ordinary temptation, but a sly pact dressed in wit and charm.” (Faust - Goethe)

Eudora Welty — “Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.” (One Writer’s Beginnings - ….)

Rattle — “The .... of the dice in the box, the scent of lilacs in the air, and a far-off train—all mixed together in my memory of that summer.” (A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway)

Do with two out — “Snow fell all night. By morning, the gorge had disappeared. I had sent two Chechens ahead. Neither had returned. What should I ... ? I was undecided.” (A Hero of our Time - Mikhail Lermontov)

Anyway — “People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self‑centered; forgive them …..” (The Paradoxical Commandments - Kent Keith)

Yellow wood — “Two roads diverged in a …., and sorry I could not travel both.” (The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost)

(Completed at Frede & Vester's, Copenhagen, Denmark - August 2, 2025)

“Although I like looking at paintings, I don’t like looking at them next to someone. I can’t focus if the person next to me is doing the same thing. The advantage of being dead is never having to worry about these things.”

Ischemic — “Mine were the more common,” writes Keith McNally of his strokes. “….”: the word sounds cold, but it rewired everything.

Rug — “The …. would be such an ornament to her boudoir… I outbid her by forty rubles, and bought it over her head. I was rewarded with a glance in which the most delightful fury sparkled. About dinnertime, I ordered my Circassian horse, covered with that very …., purposely to be led past her windows.”
(A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov)

Exponent — “Victims or ,,,s,” wrote Woolf of women’s roles in education — silent, essential, largely forgotten.

Giotto — “…. broke the flatness of medieval art, casting shadows, bending space — as if painting had begun to notice us.” (Art & Silence: Essays on Looking - Margaret Elston)

Respond — “The only journey is the one within. And if the outer world seems cold, it is because we have ceased to …. from our depths.” (Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke)

Etoilated — From the French étioler: to bleach or wither. To be …. is to grow without enough light — stretched, weakened, and pale.

The Heath — …. is a wild park of woodland and meadows, tucked inside north London, sprawling over 800 acres — the park that inspired C.S. Lewis to write The Chronicles of Narnia, where Constable spent his final years painting.

Anxieties — “The …. weren’t even mine, I was borrowing them for the afternoon.” (10:04 - Ben Lerner)

London — “…. was a great wonder to us, and we were out for hours and hours at a time, seeing the sights, which appeared to be less capable of exhaustion than we were.”
(Bleak House - Charles Dickens)

Motorbiked — “I …. across the landscape and my mind followed, trying to catch up.” (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig)

One thing — “A species of hope resides in the possibility of seeing …., one phenomenon or essence, so clearly and fully that the light of its understanding illuminates the rest of life.” (The Walk - William deBuys)

Snowflake — “It sifts from leaden sieves,” wrote Dickinson — each …. a silent grammar in alabaster wool.

Think — “You …. you’ll remember it clearly, but memory isn’t kept — it’s rewritten.” (In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado)

Effete — “A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an …. corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” (Spiro Agnew)

Vagabond — “He was a ….; he was a beggar; he was a man without name, without hearth, without home, without bread, without shelter, without country, without a passport…” (Les Misérables - Victor Hugo)

Eighth — “The …. bench was the one with the view, the wind, and the faint smell of regret.” (Field Notes - A. J. Flint)

Rumination — “The …. wasn’t thought exactly — more like thinking’s echo, repeating until the self gave up.” (The Pale King - David Foster Wallace)

Yugoslav — “The …. dream was of unity through difference. It lasted just long enough to become a memory.” (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - Rebecca West)

Task — “The …. was to do good in a world that notices only noise — to move quietly, and leave something steady behind.” (Middlemarch - George Eliot)

Highgate — The …. Cemetery, the final resting place for George Eliot and Karl Marx.

Islington — “A year earlier, she’d become famous in theatrical circles for discovering the dead bodies of playwright Joe Orton and his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, in their …. flat.” (I Regret Almost Everything - Keith McNally)

Nemtsov — Boris …. (1959–2015) was a Russian physicist and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. In June 2017, five Chechnya-born men were found guilty in a Moscow court for agreeing to kill Nemtsov in exchange for 15 million rubles (US $253,000); the identity of the person who hired them remains unknown.

Gestation — “The …. is the stage most likely to be misread as idleness.” (Quiet Work - Eleanor Vass)

(This acrostic is offered in thanks to Virginia and Robin White, who allowed us to stay for two weeks in their home near Boris Nemtsov Place, a short walk from Highgate Cemetery in London, England. It is made possible by Virginia’s gift of the book.)

“I try now to observe my own ending, this series of experiments conducted upon myself continues. So far the modifications are external. I think that through the crevices I see and touch the indestructible foundation.”

Yeti — In Monsters, Inc., the … is a banished monster who lives in the Himalayas. He was exiled from Monstropolis, probably for tampering with mail. He dislikes being called the “Abominable Snowman” and prefers to be called the “Adorable Snowman.”

Ockendon — The name … likely originates from the Old English Woccan and dūn, meaning “Wocca’s hill,” referring to a hill associated with a Saxon named Wocca. The place name is recorded as Wokindon in 1230.

Ugolino — “The first written record of Castiglione … is inked on sheepskin in a massive leather-bound book found in the archives of Perugia.” 
(Jen Vickers)

Rhododendron — “The …s sprawled their unruly heads against the windows, and in the little clearing where the drive swept round the final bend they stood in a monstrous regiment.” (Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier)

Chrysanthemum — “The …s were so magnificently assertive, were so red, so fresh, that they had the effect of an electric shock.” (Kew Gardens – Virginia Woolf)

Effect — “The whole .... is peculiarly soft and spirit-like, for there is no marked edge or outline. How could you draw the outline of these snowy fingers seen against the fog, without exaggeration? (Thoreau and the Language of Trees - Richard Higgins)

None such — “How to keep—is there any any, is there …, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty from vanishing away?” (The Golden Echo – Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Axis — The Earth’s tilt on its … is thought to be the result of a massive collision early in its history with a Mars-sized object called Theia. This impact is also believed to have led to the formation of the Moon. The tilt is the primary reason for Earth’s seasons.

Rheostat — Charles Wheatstone, Britain’s great Victorian inventor, invented the … in 1832.

Merope — … Gaunt, the mother of Lord Voldemort, is a witch from a prominent wizarding family and is known for having had a difficult life. She used a love potion on the muggle Tom Riddle Sr. to become pregnant with Voldemort.

Expedition — “The geology of this region is very interesting; I am tempted to give a short sketch of the … to the Rio Santa Cruz, where the river has cut through the plains and exposed the underlying formations.” (The Voyage of the Beagle – Charles Darwin)

Myth — “It is still a …ical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. The hope is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that man and his products count.”
(The Denial of Death – Ernest Becker)

Out — “…, ..,, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Macbeth – William Shakespeare)

Islington — “The steadiness and confidence with which he had directed our journey back I could not account for. A very few words, here and there, were then enough for him; and thus we came, at between three and four o’clock in the morning, into …” (Bleak House – Charles Dickens)

Rift — “The Olorgesailie people disappeared from the scene about two hundred thousand years ago when the lake dried up and the … Valley started to become the hot and challenging place it is today. Things would never be the same again.” (A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson)

Stout — “He drank at one draught, deliberately, all the dear liquid. Clean. Bitter too. The sweet tang of faintly scented urine. He drank without stopping his … down to the mid G on the glass.” (Ulysses – James Joyce)

Oval — …tine, originally known as Ovomaltine, was invented in 1904 by Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Wander in Bern, Switzerland. It was initially developed as a nutritional supplement to combat malnutrition.

Fishwife — “A Billingsgate … might be described as a Carrie Bradshaw of her day—she drank, she smoked, she spent her own money on whatever she wanted to spend it on. Over the centuries they survived plagues, civil wars and fires, but one thing they couldn’t survive was the Victorians.” (Laura Miller)

Hesitate — “And how should Dorothea not marry?—a girl so handsome and with such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to … before he made her an offer.” (Middlemarch – George Eliot)

Accidents — The discovery of penicillin is one of the great … of history. While Alexander Fleming’s work on bacteria led him to the discovery, it was the unintended contamination of a petri dish with mold that ultimately revealed penicillin’s antibacterial properties.

Duress — “The French cardinals gathered in Anagni and planned revolt. On August 9, 1378, they issued a manifesto declaring Urban’s election invalid as having been made under … of the Roman mob.”(The Renaissance – Will Durant)

Rewritten — "Ernest Hemingway’s philosophy—“writing is rewriting”— has no doubt been … many times over." (E. Lee Walker)

Intersect — “A species of hope resides in the possibility of seeing one thing, one phenomenon or essence, so clearly and fully that the light of its understanding …s and illuminates the rest of one’s life.” (Bill deBuys)

Achieve — “Move him into the sun. Are limbs so dear-…d, are sides full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir? Was it for this the clay grew tall?” (Futility – Wilfred Owen)

Nubbin — “There once was a woman from Dublin,
                   she had a cute doggie named …,
                   he barked in the rain,
                   he was really a pain,
                   but not nearly as much as her husband.”

(Composed while recovering from Covid during our two-week stay in Ben and Merope Beddard's beautiful London home in Islington on Ockendon Road - Jul 16, 2025)

“Memory is fragile, the space of a single life so brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events. We can’t gauge the consequences of our acts. We believe in the fiction of time.”

Towboat — A … pushing burdens upriver.

Humaneness — The fragile thread of ... fraying when cruelty reigns.

Eyewitness — “To forget the dead would be akin to killing a second time. I am an … to their deaths. I owe them this testimony.” (Night - Elie Wiesel)

Helpless — To stand …, watching consequences unfold without the power to alter them.

Overwhelming — The … rush that leaves memory staggered and grasping at fragments.

Unconscionable — “with a wanton and …. cruelty.” (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - Frederick Douglass)

See — “To … a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.” (Auguries of Innocence - William Blake)

Effective — “The system was ….: everyone was afraid, everyone lied, and everyone was guilty.” (The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

Opaque — “And somehow it was …. to his understanding.” (1984 - George Orwell)

Foggiest — “I haven’t the … idea what is going on,” I said truthfully. (The Quiet American - Graham Greene)

Takeaway — “The … from my grief was this: you do not get over it, you just carry it.” (The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion)

Hostage — “We don’t realize it until we are taken ….” (I Am Malala - Malala Yousafzai)

Estimate — “There is no way to … the number of lives that have been lost at sea.” (The Perfect Storm - Sebastian Junger)

Stiffen — “I saw the body …, jerk, and then lie still.” (A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway)

Pinochet — Augusto José Ramón …. Ugarte (1915–2006), dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990. He persecuted leftists, socialists, and political critics resulting in the executions of up to 3,200 people, the internment of as many as 80,000, and the torture of tens of thousands.

Ineffective — “But if the last page has been written by someone else, then the whole book is worthless, ….” (Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler)

Rhetoric — “…. is a part of politics, the art of persuading the multitude by the use of speech.” (De Inventione - Cicero)

Irreconcilable — “The racial tensions are not about to be resolved because the root of the matter is ….” (The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin)

Technique — “The fact is that soon everyone improvises a … for himself in order to survive.” (If This Is a Man / Survival in Auschwitz - Primo Levi)

Segregate — “…. substitutes an ‘I it’ relationship for an ‘I thou’ relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.” (Letter from Birmingham Jail - Martin Luther King Jr.)

(Composed on my way to Italy - April 27, 2025)

"We humbly beg God's forgiveness and ask pardon if our brethren feel injured. It had been a thousand years since the split between Catholics and the Orthodox, more than four centuries since the break with Protestants."

For John Thornton (1966–2025)

Friend. Founder. Fierce believer in truth.

This acrostic is in honor of you.

You built things that mattered.

You saw journalism as a public good and made it real.

You gave others a platform to speak.

Proof — “As this book will document, there is clear .... that John Paul and Benedict joined in a wide-ranging conspiracy to shield child molesters from justice.” (Book - Author)

Headstrong — “The life of an intelligent, .... woman in 9th-century Europe, the kind of woman who might have dared such an adventure in an era when obedience was a woman’s most admired trait”  (Pope Joan - Donna Cross)

Infallible — “Küng argued that the concept of an ... pope had never been valid and was imposed in 1870 only because of the bullying of Pius IX.” (Book - Author)

Lust's — "Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, but .... effect is tempest after sun." (Venus and Adonis - William Shakespeare)

Invertebrates — “They were moral ...., spineless before power and silent in the face of sin, choosing institution over integrity.” (Papal Sin - Garry Wills)

Profess — “Many ... faith, but few are willing to carry its burden when it demands truth over tradition." (Constantine’s Sword - James Carroll)

Share — "Jesus. We really do .... the same brain.  I developed a minor obsession with Amor Towles a year or so ago."   (Text message from John Thornton to Lee Walker)

Hammerheaded — “Only the most ... ideologues could look at centuries of suffering and still insist the Church had never erred.” (God Is Not Great - Christopher Hitchens)

Eucharist — “The wine was cheap, the .... wafer stale, but somehow the mystery held—God smuggled in under cover of carbs.” (Traveling Mercies - Anne Lamott)

Newsboys — “The ... cried the scandals on street corners while the bishops stayed silent in cathedrals—truth shouted by children, buried by men in robes.” (“The Boys on the Steps” - Maureen Dowd)

Oxygenated — “In that moment, it felt like the whole Church took one deep, ... breath—truth had finally been spoken aloud.” (Breath of Grace - Mary Gordon)

Neighbor — “The command to love one’s ... becomes a scandal when the Church cannot protect the children next door.” (The Givenness of Things - Marilynne Robinson)

John Thornton — (1966-2025) the founder of The Texas Tribune and one of the most vital and influential leaders in nonprofit journalism 

Eunuchs — “In the courts of kings and cathedrals alike, the ... stood silent—trusted with access, stripped of power, watching it all unfold.” (The Master’s Chamber - Colm Tóibín)

Seedbed — “The Church was meant to be the ... of grace; instead, it too often became the greenhouse of guilt, shielding rot from the light.” (Learning to Walk in the Dark = Barbara Brown Taylor)

Unwonted — “In the silence of the confessional, it was an ... courage that first named what others had only whispered.” (Confessions of a Quiet Country - Elizabeth Strout)

Strikebreak — “To defend the institution, they crossed the line—every silence, every sealed file a spiritual ... against the faithful.” (Lead Us Not into Temptation - Jason Berry)

Wichita — John Thornton was born in ...., Kansas in 1966. 

Enfant — “The Church claimed to serve the ... Jésus, yet it failed the ....s in its pews—sacrificing flesh to preserve façade.” (Les Voix Étouffées - Laurent Gaudé)

Putted — “While Rome burned, they ... through PR talking points like weekend golfers—measured, mannered, missing the hole entirely.” (Par for the Clergy - Frank Bruni)

Theocratic — “What began as a movement of the heart calcified into a ... machine—shielding authority, resisting reform, and punishing truth.” (Gods and Powers - Elaine Pagels)

"I had trained myself to set any such notions aside in order to develop an objective analytical understanding of nature. The terrain was animate, sentient, creative. It would just take me thirty years to say that out loud."

Mist — "The morning light pours down through the tall trees onto the open space in front of the cabin, sunbeams everywhere and... floating like freshly minted souls." (Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami)

Basalt — "This process created the smooth...ic lava plains of the moon, including the Sea of Tranquility, where Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar module.... was thus the first rock humans encountered on another world." (Book - Author)

Jurassic — "But with the rise of geological prospecting elsewhere, names began to creep in from all over.... refers to the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland. Permian recalls the former Russian province of Perm in the Ural Mountains." (A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition - Bill Bryson)

Outfit — "We now know that the separate bookkeeping devised for Blackwater, DynCorp, and similar...s was part of a careful displacement of oversight from Congress to the vice president and the stewards of his policies." (Moral Imagination - David Bromwich)

Redden — "I also collected a suspiciously light cynthia moth cocoon. My fingers were stiff and ....ed with cold, and my nose ran. I had forgotten the Law of the Wild, which is, "Carry Kleenex." (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard)

Norway — "In 1905, John Munro Longyear was prospecting in a remote part of northern... with an eye toward opening a new iron range. But he needed coal for smelting, the nearest coalfields were on Svalbard-vestiges of an ancient tropical forest on those polar islands" (Timefulness - Author)

Enjoyed — "I am willing to grant that some groups may have.... an edge but I suspect that the second interpretation grasps a central truth about evolution. The Burgess Shale promotes a radical view of evolutionary pathways and predictability." (Wonderful Life - Stephen Jay Gould)

Rhyolite — "There are three major tectonic settings where granite (and its volcanic equivalent, ....) is forming on Earth today: continental arcs such as the Cascades or Andes; continental rift zones like the East African rift; and continental hotspots like Yellowstone." (Book - Author)

Unsteady — "The ice slopes towards the sinkhole and so too does the light, as if pulled into it. We approach it with care-this black hole set within blue-black ice-conscious of our footing, of how easy a slip would be. A few yards from its edge we stop and regard it briefly, shivering and chilled." (Underland - Robert Macfarlane)

Devastated — "It's impossible to give anything close to a full account of the various species, genera, families, and even whole orders that went extinct at the K-T boundary. Mammals' ranks were....; something like two-thirds of the mammalian families living at the end of the Cretaceous disappear at the boundary." (The Sixth Extinction - Elizabeth Kolbert)

Tradition — "The poison may also be passed on from mother to offspring. Insecticide residues have been recovered from human milk - chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides freely cross the barrier of the placenta, the....al protective shield between the embryo and harmful substances in the mother's body." (Silent Spring - Rachel Carson)

Uranium — "uranium has a specific weight of 19, much more than lead, twice as much as copper: the gift given to Bonino by the Nazi aeronaut-astronauts could not be..... But if it wasn't...., what was it?" (The Periodic Table - Primo Levi)

Rainwater — "The tightly folded Appalachians are something like the ribs of a washboard. In the Paleozoic era, when the tectonic washboard was made and repeatedly lifted from the east, falling... gathering in streams found its way westward across the ribs." (In Suspect Terrain - John McPhee)

Novena — "Whole devotions dropped from use, indulgences (Luther's old point of contention), ....s, even the Mass, the central and most stable shared act of the church, had become unrecognizable-a thing of guitars instead of the organ, of English instead of Latin, of youth-culture fads instead of ancient rites." (Bare Ruined Choirs - Garry Wills)

Iridium — "We then had a mystery: the origin of the clay layer... appeared to be extraterrestrial. We first guessed that it had come from a nearby supernova explosion. Some astrophysicists had proposed that the K/T extinction had been triggered by such an explosion" (Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist - Luis W. Alvarez)

Neotectonics — "But the curriculum was still anchored in the logic of nineteenth-century museums. The emerging fields of geochemistry, ...., and climate science were simply absent, or at best, wedged in as footnotes on the last day of traditional courses." (Book - Author)

Gentle — "Combining the two extreme ends of physics-cosmology, the study of the universe, and quantum mechanics, the study of atomic and subatomic systems-is ambitious by any standard. But that hasn't stopped some distinguished physicists from working on the topic. First up was John Wheeler in the 1960s, who argued that quantum uncertainty would fuzz out the singularity, replacing the infinite curvature of spacetime with something....r and more complex." (The Goldilocks Enigma - Paul Davies)

Thousand — "We are equipped to appreciate processes that take seconds, minutes, years or, at most, decades to complete. Darwinism is a theory of cumulative processes so slow that they take between....s and millions of decades to complete. All our intuitive judgements of what is probable turn out to be wrong by many orders of magnitude. Our well-tuned apparatus of scepticism and subjective probability-theory misfires by huge margins, because it is tuned-Ironically, by evolution itself - to work within a lifetime of a few decades. It requires effort of the imagination to escape from the prison of familiar timescale" (The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins)

Ophiolites — "Most exposures of peridotite and serpentinite occur in rare places around the globe, where subduction somehow went awry and slabs of oceanic lithosphere were thrust onto continental crust. These "misshelved" rock complexes are called...., and famous examples occur in Newfoundland, Northern California, Oman, and Cyprus." (Book - Author)

Stealth — "The numbers showed a pattern: tiny changes grew quietly until they took over the whole system. Scientists had to rethink what it meant to predict anything at all." (Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick)

Tachylyte — "Pseudo..... is a dark, glassy rock formed when frictional melting occurs along a fault during an earthquake. Even many geologists find its name befuddling because they've never heard of "true".... Despite its obscure name, however, pseudo.... rewards study because they are the closest we can get to witnessing the deep origins of earthquakes."(Book - Author)

Overtaken — "Nature's own rhythms have been.... by human activities. What once took millennia now happens in decades." (The End of Nature - Bill McKibben)

NAFTA — "Companies found they could move their plants across the border under .... and leave U.S. environmental regulations behind at the Rio Grande." (Living Downstream - Sandra Steingraber)

Estate — "In Staffordshire, on the... of a relation, where I had ample means of investigation, there was a large and extremely barren heath, which had never been touched by the hand of man" (The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin)

"Companies that strive to maximize engagement by using psychological tricks to keep young people clicking were the worst offenders. Social media companies hooked children by designing a firehose of addictive content."

Hyper — "When adolescents have continuous access to a smartphone at that developmentally sensitive age, it may interfere with their maturing ability to focus. Studies show that adolescents with attention deficit....activity disorder (ADHD) are heavier users of smartphones and video games" (Book - Author)

Ankle — "My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac'd, no hat upon his head, his stockings foul'd, ungart'red, and down-gyved to his.... (Hamlet - Shakespeare)

Introvert — "The....'s way of being in the world this deep, sustained attention to inner experience-represents not a retreat from reality but rather a different, equally vatid way of processing it. I am reminded of Temple Grandin's observation that her autism allowed her to see what others missed." (An Anthropologist on Mars - Oliver Sacks)

Dostoevsky — "The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key" (Notes from the Underground - ....)

Took — "It... considerable strength of mind to refuse the endless circus of distraction, to choose instead the harder path of genuine attention." (Upstream - Mary Oliver)

Triggering — "The constant notifications were... a cascade of interruptions, each ping cutting a thought before it could fully form." (The Shallows - Nicholas Carr)

Hazy — "Memory grows... in the digital age-not from age or illness, but from our outsourcing of recall to our devices." (The Gutenberg Elegies - Sven Birkerts)

Enlist — "Social media platforms... our natural desires for connection and validation, turning them into engines of anxiety." (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts - Jaron Lanier)

Accident — "By pure... we created tools that perfectly exploit our brain's vulnerability to distraction." (Irresistible - Adam Alter)

Nonacceptance — "The... of constant digital interruption has become our era's small act of rebellion." (How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell)

Xenophobic — "The... impulse to reject unfamiliar perspectives finds perfect in our personalized news feeds." (#Republic - Cass Sunstein)

Ices — "The mind... up when oversaturated with digital stimutt, losing its natural fluidity of thought." (Come Home - Maryanne Wolf-Reader)

Onomatopoela — "The... of digital life-ping, swish, ding-colonizes our soundscape, sach artificial word-sound tugging at our attention." (Orality and Literacy - Walter J. Ong)

Unfaithful — "Memory becomes... to lived experience when we trust our devices to do our remembering." (Alone Together - Sherry Turkle)

Sacrificed — "What gets... first is the very thing we need most: the capacity for sustained attention." (The Shallows - Nicholas Carr)

Giggle — "Coming from who knows what house dance, there ghosted past us two of the Donnellan sisters. A... bubbled out of one of them and the other hooked her arm and hurried them past." (This Is Happiness - Niall Williams)

Emoted — "Children who primarily... through digital interfaces showed marked differences in reading real human expressions." (The Big Disconnect - Catherine Steiner-Adair)

Newsweek — "As.... shifted to digital, the weekly rhythm of reflection gave way to the constant scroll." (Cognitive Surplus - Clay Shirky)

Edifies — "What genuinely... comes not from screens but from slow, sustained engagement with ideas." (Reader, Come Home - Maryanne Wolf)

Rigged — "The game is... from the start: apps designed not to satisfy but to create endless craving." (Adam Alter - Irresistible)

Accomplish — "The need to ... something real grows more urgent as our lives become increasingly virtual." (William Powers - Hamlet's BlackBerry)

Time — ... Magazine's shift to digital marked another victory of the immediate over the Important." (Cognitive Surplus - Clay Shirky)

Idiom — "The digital age steamrolls over every... of face-to-face conversation, replacing subtle expressions with standardized reactions." (Orality and Literacy - Walter J. Ong)

Obsess — "Students increasingly... over metrics - followers, likes, views - treating these digital signals as measures of self-worth." (It's Complicated - Danah Boyd)

Nymph — "Like a... vanishing at dawn, our capacity for wonder dissolves in the blue light of screens." (Last Child in the Woods - Richard Louv)