Adler to Mill

On authors in my recommended reading:

I remember the prophetic words of the great Dr. Mortimer Adler, well-known philosopher and educator, who remarked in a discussion symposium in the 1980s that unless we get our immigration policy under control, we will risk dividing the country and even severely damaging our economy and cultural way of life. He was not taking sides; he was merely stating his observation. --Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki

Lucretia didn’t want to encourage her precocious daughter by giving her paper to write on, so Wharton would take the plain brown paper off parcels that came to the house, spread the giant sheets out on the floor and write on them in long columns. She wrote her first novel this way, at 11. --Katie Roiphe

Few got so much as a glimpse of her [Emily Dickinson's] white dress—as an adult she only wore white—and only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime. After her death in 1886, hundreds of others were discovered in a wooden chest, and a new legend grew up, sweet with pathos, of a woman too delicate for this world, disappointed in love. --The Economist

it is clear that he [John Stuart Mill] wanted freedom both from certain laws (coercive powers of government) and from certain societal and moral restraints (noncoercive forms of social opinion) of which he happened personally to disapprove. With strategic intent he continued to conflate the two, and in so doing he pushed the ideal of freedom too far. --William D. Gairdner