Reason with a View

  At 2:11 this afternoon, the whole country is asked to stop for two minutes — a nationwide moment of silence, set in law, for everyone who has served in the uniform of the United States. This post is simply that. Two minutes, the flag, and silence. Press play, and keep it with us. This morning we told the story of how this day came to be — the eleventh hour, and the shoe repairman who widened it to hold every veteran: The Eleventh Hour: A Short History of Veterans Day .

At 11:00 in the morning on November 11, 1918, the guns stopped. It wasn't a surrender, exactly — it was an armistice, a cease-fire signed in a railway carriage in a French forest — but after four years of the worst war the world had ever seen, the Western Front went quiet at a set hour: the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Men who had been trying to kill each other at 10:59 put their rifles down at 11:00. That hour is where this holiday lives, and it has never really left it. A year later, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed November 11 as Armistice Day. Congress added its own resolution in 1926, and in 1938 the day became a legal federal holiday, in the words of the act, "dedicated to the cause of world peace." There is something worth sitting with in that phrase. The men who made it a holiday weren't just honoring a war. They were hoping — they'd seen enough — that there wouldn't need to be another one. There was another one. An...

Part 3 of Thanksgiving Around the World — a six-part series on harvest thanksgiving across every inhabited continent, running through Thanksgiving Day. Before we travel today, a word about home: it's Veterans Day here in the United States, and a series about thanksgiving ought to start with the people who have stood guard over everything else this series celebrates. To every man and woman who has worn the uniform — thank you. In Part 2 we were in Asia, where an emperor still tastes the first rice of the year before anyone else sits down to eat. Europe tells the same story in a different accent — and Europe adds a twist. Here, harvest thanksgiving didn't just survive in villages and farmhouses. It got written onto the church calendar, nearly lost more than once, and carried into the present by people who simply refused to stop. And it starts, the way so much in Europe starts, with the Greeks. The oldest of Europe's harvest rites that we know in any detail belonged to wo...

Today is Veterans Day, and this year, for the first time, I know what my grandfather actually did in the war. I didn't know him well. He died in Ohio in June of 1986, when I was nine years old. What I knew about him came through my dad. He grew up poor. He had an eighth-grade education and had to go to work young. He had to leave school to work the family's farm when his dad left. He could build just about anything with his hands — his own air compressors, his own tools — and never made much money doing it. He had a heart attack in his early fifties and went on disability. When my dad started working in high school, he made more money than Grandfather Charlie did. And this: Dad said he served in the Navy in World War II, on a ship called the Wichita, and that he saw very heavy combat in the Pacific. For years, that was all we had. A story. This fall I went looking for the records — the Navy's muster rolls, the lists of who was aboard each ship and when. And I found him....

If you can't sing this song, you weren't with it in the '90s. It was everywhere. It was on the radio, on MTV, in the movie, in every car with the windows down. You didn't decide to learn "Gangsta's Paradise." You just lived in 1995 long enough and it moved in. Start the first line anywhere near somebody my age and they'll finish it without even deciding to. And here's the part most of us never noticed, even after singing it ten thousand times: the song opens with the Bible. "As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death." That's Psalm 23, near word for word. Coolio just keeps walking past where the psalm's comfort starts: "I take a look at my life and realize there's nothin' left." The song came into the world almost by accident. Coolio was at his manager's house to pick up a check when he heard music coming out of the home studio — a demo that producer Doug Rasheed and a singer named L.V. had been buil...

Motivation sometimes looks like discipline. We picture motivation as a feeling — waking up fired up, ready to run through a wall. And some days it does feel like that. Enjoy those days. They're a gift. But most of us will experience days we just find it hard to get motivated. The alarm goes off and nothing in you wants to move. The work that mattered yesterday looks pointless today. The walk, the workout, the hard conversation, the next right thing — you'd rather do any of it tomorrow. Here's the truth nobody puts on the poster: those days are most days, for most people. If your life runs on motivation, your life runs on weather. Feelings change by the hour. They're real, but they're a poor foundation. This is when discipline must be our motivation. Discipline doesn't ask how you feel about it. Discipline is the decision you made on a good day, carried out on a bad one. You said you'd walk — so you walk. You said you'd show up — so you show up. Not ...

I spent three years in the book of Ecclesiastes. Read it over and over, worked through commentaries, and even preached it open-air in downtown Fredericksburg. Three years in twelve chapters. I wasn't in a hurry, and the book rewards slowness. Here's what I came out believing: Ecclesiastes is the book for modern man. Solomon had everything. Wisdom beyond anyone. Wealth beyond measure. Power, pleasure, projects — he built, he planted, he gathered. And at the end of all of it, he wrote the most honest sentence in the Bible: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 1:2, NKJV). We translate it "vanity." The Hebrew word is hevel — vapor. Breath on a cold morning. Here, then gone. Look around. We have it all. More comfort, more entertainment, more achievement available than any generation in history. And our mental health is worse than ever. Anxiety, depression, despair — climbing, especially among the young, especially among those who seemingly have ...

  This is the first in a series I'm calling Eccentrics of History — people who saw something nobody around them could see, and paid for being out of step with their own time. One rule for the whole series: I'll tell you the documented story first, and at the end I'll separate the legend from the record. These folks attract myths the way magnets attract iron filings, and some of the best-known "facts" about them aren't facts at all. You'll see what I mean before this one's over. Start with the man whose work you're using right now. The electricity running your house — alternating current, the induction motor, the system that beat out Edison's direct current and became the standard for the whole world — that's Nikola Tesla. Every light switch in your home is on his side of the argument. In the 1890s he was famous for it: packed lecture halls, sparks flying off his own body for the crowd, and in 1896 power from Niagara Falls reached Buffalo, t...

The blue circle — the universal symbol for diabetes awareness. November is Diabetes Awareness Month, and I want to tell you plainly why it matters to me: type 1 diabetes has touched my family, like it has so many families. I won't dress that up. If someone you love lives with this disease, you already know what I'm about to say. If nobody in your life does, give me a few minutes — because the odds are somebody in your life will, and a little understanding goes a long way. What type 1 actually is Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. The body's own immune system attacks the cells in the pancreas that make insulin, and one day they simply can't make it anymore. Insulin is the hormone that moves sugar out of your blood and into your cells for energy. Without it, the sugar stays in the blood, and the body starves in the middle of plenty. Here is what type 1 is not: it is not caused by eating sugar. It is not caused by lifestyle, or weight, or anything a parent did...

Songpyeon — the crescent rice cakes of Chuseok, steamed over pine needles. Photo: Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Part 2 of Thanksgiving Around the World — a six-part series on harvest thanksgiving across every inhabited continent, running through Thanksgiving Day. In Part 1 we were in Africa, where the rule underneath every harvest festival was the same: the first of the harvest isn't yours. Asia keeps that rule — and in one place, it wrote it into law. Start in the Levant, with the Feast of Sukkot. In the Bible it's called the Feast of Ingathering, and the name tells you what it was: the year's work, gathered in. Grain threshed, grapes pressed, olives picked — and then, before anyone settled in to enjoy it, the whole nation moved outside. For seven days, families ate and slept in booths — rough shelters of branches — to remember that their ancestors had lived in shelters too, on the road out of Egypt, with nothi...

Dr. Walter Edmondson draws blood from one of the participants in the Tuskegee study. Photo: U.S. National Archives, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The Thursday series on conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. What was alleged: For years, the story sounded too dark to believe — that the United States government had run an experiment on Black men in Alabama, watching a disease eat them alive for forty years while pretending to treat them. And a harder version you still hear: that the government gave those men syphilis on purpose. What was true: The first part. All of it, and it is worse in the plain telling than in the embellished one. In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service began a study in Macon County, Alabama, enrolling 600 Black men — 399 who had syphilis and 201 who did not. The men, most of them poor sharecroppers, were told they were being treated for "bad blood." They were given free exams, hot meals, and burial insurance. What they were not given ...

A Taurid fireball streaks past the aurora, November 2015 — one of the swarm years. Photo: Rocky Raybell, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0). When I wrote my fall sky guide a few weeks ago — Look Up: Virginia's Night Sky Between Now and New Year's — the Taurids got one short paragraph. "They don't put up big numbers," I said, "but they're famous for fireballs." That's the whole truth, and it's why they get a post of their own. But let me put the honest part first, because I'd rather you hear it from me than learn it standing in a cold yard. The numbers are not impressive. This is not a swarm year. Every so often the Earth plows through a denser knot of this debris stream and the fireballs really put on a show — 2015 was a year like that, and 2022. The next one isn't expected until 2032. In an ordinary year like this one, each branch of the Taurids produces something like five meteors an hour, and with both branches running at onc...

Part 1 of Thanksgiving Around the World — a six-part series on harvest thanksgiving across every inhabited continent, running through Thanksgiving Day. Renenutet, cobra goddess of the harvest, from the tomb of Qenamun, Egypt — a copy of a painting some 3,400 years old. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.) Long before there was a United States, before there was a Plymouth or a President Lincoln, human beings were doing what we do every fourth Thursday of November — stopping at harvest time to say thank you. And the oldest written-down chapter of that story is African, in Egypt, where the whole year was built around one river. Ancient Egypt lived and died by the Nile flood. The year had three seasons, and all three were about water and grain: the flood, the growing, and the harvest. When the harvest came in, thanks came first — and I mean that literally. At the threshing floor, where the grain was beaten loose, farmers set up little altars and bowls as offerings to Renenute...

Part 4 of Election Day — a short series for the week of the vote: where elections came from, the results as they come in, and the neighbors who run ours. The polls closed at 7:00, and now the counting starts. All day, this series has been about the neighbors who run Election Day. Tonight we watch what they counted. I've put up one page carrying the official Virginia results for our region, updating live all night: the U.S. Senate race, our House race here in the 7th District, the three constitutional amendments, and the local races across the George Washington region — Fredericksburg, Caroline, King George, Spotsylvania, and Stafford. Election Night 2026 across the George Washington Regional Planning District The numbers come straight from the Virginia Department of Elections, exactly as they're reported. They're unofficial until they're certified — but tonight they're the real count, as it happens. However it lands: thank you for voting. And thank you to ever...

Part 3 of Election Day — a short series for the week of the vote: where elections came from, the results as they come in, and the neighbors who run ours. Long before most of us are awake on Election Day, there's a light on in a school cafeteria somewhere, and a folding table being unfolded, and somebody's grandmother pouring coffee out of a thermos she brought from home. They got there at five in the morning. Most of them will still be there at nine tonight. We talk about Election Day like it's a machine — like it just happens, the way weather happens. It doesn't. It runs on people. In the last midterm election, 645,219 poll workers showed up across this country to run in-person voting, more than 600,000 of them on Election Day itself. In the 2024 presidential election, it was over 772,000. Henrico County, Virginia, all by itself fields about 1,100 election officials for one election. Multiply that out across every county and city in America and you start to see ...

 There's a decent chance "Don't Stop Believin'" is the most famous song in America that almost nobody can tell you anything about. You know every word. You've shouted it in a bar, a ballpark, somebody's wedding. But the story behind it is better than the song — and the song is great. It starts with a dad. In the late seventies, Jonathan Cain was a broke musician in Los Angeles, playing other people's songs and watching the dream get further away instead of closer. One night he called home to Chicago, talking about quitting, asking his dad for help. And his father — a working man who knew something about hard times — told him: "Don't stop believin', Jon. Or you're done." Cain wrote it down in a notebook. He carried that notebook for years. Fast forward to 1981. Cain's the new keyboard player in Journey, replacing Gregg Rolie, and the band is holed up in a warehouse in Oakland writing the Escape album. One day he pulls out the ...

Pennsylvania soldiers voting in camp with the Army of the James, 1864 — sketched by William Waud for Harper's Weekly. Public domain, Library of Congress. Part 2 of Election Day — a short series for the week of the vote: where elections came from, what the record says about us, and the neighbors who run ours. Here's a question worth sitting with the week before an election: has this country ever postponed one? Not a primary in one county. Not a city election after a hurricane. The national election — the big one, the one the whole government hangs on. Has war, or plague, or disaster ever made America say, "Not this year. We'll vote when things calm down"? The answer is no. Not once. Not in more than 180 years of keeping the same date. And it isn't because nobody ever thought of it. In the summer of 1864, the Civil War was grinding through its fourth year, and Abraham Lincoln was sure he was going to lose. His own party knew it. Some Republicans suggested...

Epictetus, in an engraving from about 1700. No portrait of him from life survives, so every picture of him is an artist's best guess. (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.) Epictetus knew something about carrying heavy things. He was born a slave in Rome about 2,000 years ago. His master crippled his leg — the story goes it was broken deliberately, and he bore it without crying out. He was freed eventually, and became a teacher, and the notes his student took down still get read today. So when this man talks about how to carry the hard parts of life, he's not guessing. Here's the picture he gives, from his handbook (the classic translation): "Everything has two handles, the one by which it may be carried, the other by which it cannot. If your brother acts unjustly, don't lay hold of it by that handle — that he acted unjustly — for by that it cannot be carried. Lay hold of it by the other: that he is your brother, that you were brought up together. And then y...

All Saints’ Day is November 1. After a week of haunted houses and Halloween playlists, here is the older, bigger day hiding right behind it. Halloween gets all the attention. The costumes, the candy, the movies — I just spent a whole week writing about it, so I'm not throwing stones. This morning, with the porch lights off and the candy bowl empty, the church calendar turns to a day far older and far bigger than Halloween — and most of us walk right past it. Today, November 1, is All Saints' Day. And here's the thing most people never hear: it exists for the saints nobody knows. The early church honored its martyrs on the anniversaries of their deaths. But persecution produced martyrs by the thousands, and the calendar couldn't hold them all. There were faithful men and women who died for Christ in small places, whose names were never written down anywhere. So the church did something beautiful. It made one day for all of them — the famous and the forgotten together....

All week I've been counting down the most haunted places in the country I call home — Fredericksburg, where I live, and Caroline, Essex, and Westmoreland, where I work. We end tonight, Halloween night, in Essex County, at the one that stands alone. Elmwood. It's a great brick mansion from the late 1700s, down a lane near Tappahannock, built when Essex County was tobacco money and river trade. By the late 1800s the house stood empty — and an empty mansion in the woods is an invitation the human imagination cannot refuse. A century ago, the newspapers took up the stories coming out of Elmwood: strange happenings in the vacant house, things seen and heard that nobody could explain. And people came. Not a handful of thrill-seekers — hundreds of them, tramping through the woods on nights when the moon was full, just to stand outside that dark house and see for themselves. Virginia's dean of ghost stories, L.B. Taylor, kept Elmwood near the top of his lists for a reason. Of ...