The Anchoress

Now, I’m not going to take the cheap route, here, and jump all over Barack Obama (or compare him to Dan Quayle) just for suggesting that his time spent schmoozing world leaders is important because he expects to be “dealing with them over the next 8 to 10 years,”. Every schoolchild knows that - unless he’s expecting to repeal the 22nd amendment - no president will serve more than two four year terms. I’m sure Obama, who is a brilliant constitutional scholar and former editor of the Harvard Law Review (albeit one who appears to have published no writings), knows better and simply misspoke. We all do that, right?

I know I do. Frequently. Which is why if elected I will not serve!

Actually, Beldar tells why it IS important to consider the gaffe.

But this is a good opportunity for Americans to test themselves on what they know and don’t know. In a few months, we’ll all be voting. It would probably be a good thing to be aware of just how up-to-date we are with things, and also what we know of civics (that would be knowledge of our founding documents, rights and so forth) which should be interesting given that “civics” classes, as such, are no longer part of most high school curricula.

So…here we go. Two tests, the first one is pretty easy - it’s the stuff you should be picking up with a cursory reading of the news. I got them all correct, although that only translated to 97% for some reason - but it is interesting to compare what you know to the rest of the country, and to break it down.

The second test, the American Civics Literacy Test is much more challenging. I got 93.33%, although I think on 2-3 of my answers I just got lucky.

Take the tests (h/t reader Dick T.) give them to your kids. I’d love to see our presidential candidates take the Civics test…if we could be sure they wouldn’t get coaching! Kim at Wizbang seems to want to see that, too.

I label Dick Meyer as an “omni-spective.” He is an educated, urbane “DC-NY-corridor” secularist who defies the stereotype of snobbish insularity. He is introspective and also outwardly mega-observant; he doesn’t just peer at a surface, but looks into and around everything - hence my label.

Meyer recently left CBS News and headed to NPR and he has taken his Against the Grain column with him. Today’s piece is a good ‘un you will want to read. I have a few small quibbles with it - as usual - mostly because there is some debate as to whether we are actually in recession, (and that debate seems to fall along the usual lines, so maybe it is pointless to belabor) but the piece is not about recession; it’s about Americans blaming others for their difficulties, rather than simply hauling up their slacks and getting on with things:

The first cousin of blamesmanship is the syndrome that turns grown-ups into victims, the social demand that for every bad thing there must be a victim and a villain. The American litigation system is our great monument to these most unattractive ethical postures. Lost money in the market? Sue. Suffered an untimely death in the family? Sue. Couldn’t afford your credit card payments? Blame easy credit, declare bankruptcy and let someone else sue you.
[...]
Government ought to protect the little guy. Business ought not to prey on consumers. Well, yes, sure. But that, again, is only half the story.

Consumers ought not to carry debt they cannot afford. Borrowers are not exempt from being prudent or well-informed simply because loans are available. But such declarations are now considered illiberal, moralistic and unsophisticated. That means we are likely doomed to repeat our mistakes.

By a happy synchronicity, my friend Shana, a “fly-over country” home-schooling mother of 9, who doubtless would horrify Barack Obama with her provincialism, shared with me a letter-full-of-advice she’s written to a nephew who is leaving home to become an apprentice electrician. The whole letter is a gem - we should all have received a copy when we were 18 - and her common sense is worth 1000 social studies - but here are some excerpts:

Glad to hear you went South with Mick! I wish you every good while you’re there. I can’t be ‘your mom’ but I can give you the advice that a mom ought to give a son going out on his own for the first time.

Work hard & learn something, keep your mouth shut and your eyes and ears open, and think before you speak. The real measure of a man is not in how much he makes or what he has in terms of possessions or even in his so-called wit, but in controlling himself. Takes a long time and its harder work than you think, but it worth the effort to do it. Then you will be able to control the one thing most people fail miserably to control - your own self. Conquer yourself - your will, your ambitions, your mouth and your emotions and you can and will conquer anything and be a very respected and admired man. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, to admire in a bigmouth.

ALWAYS show up for work on time, and if you cannot because of error, illness or accident, make sure you call and explain. NEVER lie to the man who pays you or woman who loves you, and NEVER say you’ll do something and fail to live up to your word….

Pay your bills on time. Don’t spend more than you make. If you can’t meet a bill’s deadline, call & make arrangements with your debtors. Anything can be worked out with anyone if you go about it the right way…

Don’t get a credit card unless you are absolutely committed and self-disciplined enough to pay it off every month. Pay cash for as much as possible. If you don’t have the cash and it isn’t an emergency - don’t buy it. See the part about self-control.

Learn to separate needs from wants. You need darn few things in life as badly as you want them.

Open a savings when you open a checking account and pay you first, even a little, so you can begin saving for your own house and, yes retirement, and also so you always have emergency funds. Nothing better in the world than owning your own, without having huge bills around your neck.

Find some way to better yourself frequently. [Read] books, go to museums and study something new, keep your mind alive and active and busy. Ask questions of people who know more than you do and listen to the answers. Take a CPR, Heimlich and first aid course so you know what to do in an emergency. Play frequently, but make sure you play nicely. Don’t make me come down there.

Before you just accept what someone tells you as fact, even me - ask yourself - “What do I get out of it if I listen, but more importantly, what do they get out of ME if I listen to them?” If you think they benefit more than you do, consider the alternatives. Think things over carefully and learn NOT to make a fast decision/agreement unless someone’s life is in danger. Thinking is free, but some snap decisions can be very very expensive.

Shana’s note is a little guidebook to growing up. And - proving perhaps that we Americans can find common ground about more than we realize - Meyer is saying the same thing:

It would be natural to wonder why so many consumers took out loans on grossly inflated assets at interest rates that, while initially low, could increase wildly in the future. It would be natural to wonder why so many people bought things they plainly could not afford with credit cards. It would be natural to wonder why the pleasure of buying and having stuff so often outweighs the pain of economic risk and uncertainty.

Answering such questions leads to self-knowledge and changes in behavior. It is educative. Economic education, mixed with a smidge of fire and brimstone, is no longer a part of our schools’ curriculum. That’s a bad call.

Our focus, however, is now on apportioning blame between the financial foxes on Wall Street and the negligent regulators in Washington. And we should be doing just that — just not to the exclusion of looking in the mirror. And growing up.

I have the coolest friends!

By the way, if you like Meyer’s columns, (and we’ve certainly read enough of them on this blog) you may want to check out his upcoming book, Why We Hate Us; American Discontent in the New Millenium.

It is not a rehash of his columns, but an original and thoughtful look at the overmarketed, overconsumed, over-transient America bereft of the old connections (community, family, church) that kept us grounded and somewhat sane and sensible. I think Why We Hate Us will have a broad appeal to both secular and religious people who are grappling with that nameless, nagging sense that things are ‘way off kilter, here. It comes out August 5.

From I Think, Therefore I Err:

Don’t you worry. I went to Blogging School. I know I’m obliged to post on the latest Obama elitist attack on me. The one where he is embarrassed about us lo class Americans who only speak ‘mercan.

And I actually speak Spanish and English.

And I still take his attack personally. There I was sitting in a cafe in Athens. I said καλημέρα (good morning) and then I had to point, yes point, at the menu to order. I could feel Obama’s eyes beating down on me from his home in Chicago where he and his children were studying yet another foreign language. I was an embarrassment.

Aw…I feel bad for poor Obama, that he has to live in a country where some people don’t like argyla, arugygl, arugula, and cain’t spell it neither - all them ugly ‘mercens that just make Obama feel so bad about his country. We should hang our heads.

Trust that when you’re overseas and struggling a bit with whatever language you haven’t studied for the last year you can count on being thrown under the bus by Obama because obviously you never even tried to learn a thing in your whole pathetic life and are only taking advantage of these foreigners as a place to spend your dollars. See - an ist.

Good Lord. I understand Presidents wanting their folks to be the best educated they can be. And I will let slide the idiotic gaffe about everyone in the US learning Spanish specifically. However - I do not want to be associated with people who are embarrassed by me.

I’d call that a healthy point of view. I certainly don’t want to be led for 4 years by a president who is embarrassed by his country full of rubes.

Mickey Kaus:

P.P.S.: Obama’s lecture to parents about how “you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish“? Also condescending! Especially since, as Abe Greenwald points out, Obama doesn’t speak Spanish.

I think President Bush - that moron - is the only president in recent memory who has been bi-lingual. I miss Bush already; he was never embarrassed by any of us.

More Kaus:

… [Obama's] insultingly missing the point about the need for a common language, of course. If we want a common language, and the common language of Americans is English, then learning Spanish, however beneficial, is not going to achieve that goal. It’s perfectly reasonable for native English speakers to worry if enough new immigrants whose ethnic leaders demand bilingual education will learn English. They probably will, but Obama’s saying it’s wrong to even worry about it. … [via Corner] … And then there’s the whole embarrassed-by-boorish-Americans-who-don’t-know-French riff. A proven vote-getter! … P.P.P.S.: He also seems really tired! …

He has more PPPPPPPSSSSS’s.

Also - seems Obama’s sentiments are not playing well.

A few weeks ago the Senate Intelligence Report, written by the Democrat-majority committee was released and the Washington Post dared to point out that the report stated very clearly that all of Bush’s “lied” leading up to the Iraqi war were actually “substantiated by intelligence.”

Some readers of the piece, clutching their truthiness to them the way Obama accuses the Midwest of clutching their guns and bibles (bibles, truthiness, we’re not so different, after all, are we?) seemed immune to the facts and left some juicy comments along the lines that the writer, Fred Hiatt, was a lying patsy of the Bush Administration, re-writing history and - because he’d reported the Senate Committee’s findings with some clarity - was in dire need of termination from his position.

It made me wonder about the state of critical thinking in the nation, and after talking to a teacher friend, a home-schooling friend and my son’s friends, I wrote this piece which is up at Pajamas Media just now:

“Yeah, it is that simple. He lied, and we all know it. So STFU. Now.” — Marecek

That was one of 1,643 comments left in response to Fred Hiatt’s June 9 piece in the Washington Post, entitled “Bush Lied? If Only It Were That Simple,” which covered the findings of the Select Committee on Intelligence, headed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV).

Marecek’s was the majority opinion.

In writing his piece for the editorial page of the Washington Post, Hiatt — that page’s editor — made the mistake of actually quoting passages of this report, which claimed that a host of “lies” of which President Bush has been accused since 2003 were “substantiated by intelligence.”

Vituperation and ad hominem attacks were left as commentary at the paper’s website, with calls for Hiatt’s immediate firing, for — apparently — his treason in quoting a report, written by a Democratic majority, that dared to depart from a narrative that has become conventional wisdom.

You know? The more I think about this lying idiot that edits WaPo, the more I realize how venal and corrupt the neo-cons really are. They really have no shame. No shame at all. Their corruption is complete. Frankly, the Emperor in Star Wars had more integrity than these neo-cons. Hiatt truly is a lapdog. — santafe2

Read the rest here.

Rick at Brutally Honest has more thoughts and a link to a youtube video that perhaps gives a clue as to how we got here.

A Home-schooling mom says her kids loved this series on thinking.

A friend of mine read yesterday’s piece on freedom of speech, powergrids, etc and after reading about the Pelosi-Claybrook bill, Hillary’s remarks and the adventures up in Canada which do not seem so far removed from what we see moving toward the American mainstream, she considered that a government increasingly leaning toward the suppressing free speech and the creation of laws meant to diminish rather than enhance the liberties of it’s citizens was perhaps not what Thomas Jefferson had in mind. She sent these along, wondering if today’s public school students are ever exposed to our founding fathers, beyond their noble portraits and document quotes.

“Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing [a people] to slavery.” –Thomas Jefferson: Rights of British America, 1774. (*) ME 1:193, Papers 1:125

“When patience has begotten false estimates of its motives, when wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality.” –Thomas Jefferson to M. deStael, 1807. ME 11:282

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience [has] shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” –Thomas Jefferson: Declaration of Independence, 1776. ME 1:29, Papers 1:429

“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” –Thomas Jefferson: his motto.

“If ever there was a holy war, it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independence.” –Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 1813. ME 13:430

You can read more Jefferson on Politics and Government here.

Buster sent this my way and I share it with you. There is an urban legend about it, that the very good advice here was written by Kurt Vonnegut; it was actually written by Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribute. I like the beat.

Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Complete text here.

Via Brutally Honest:

Dr Melissa Clouthier has a great post up about amazing people and nearly miraculous things. I urge you to go read it; my favorite part was this astounding video of what an autistic man can draw by memory after a 45 minute helicopter tour of Rome.

We humans are wonderously, gloriously made, and for all we think we know, I don’t think we understand a bare tenth of what makes us the creatures we are, about ourselves, our brains, our spirits and our beings.

Related: Enlightenment through a stroke and other things.

Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney as John and Abigail Adams

When I was a kid it was a rare thing to own a book and a hardcover book was real treasure, so my family, now, will often gift me with hardcover books that I put into the “to read” pile, and sometimes I don’t get around to reading the book until it comes out in soft cover.

David McCullogh’s comprehensive and incredibly readable John Adams was a book that had been in the pile so long I nearly missed it. I picked it up last week and couldn’t put it down. This is no dry history tome - from page one McCullough grabs the reader and throws him right into the saddle with John Adams and a companion, heading to Philadelphia in the snow, and it is gloriously immediate and real. He brings these truly amazing people to life right before your eyes. I finished the book in less than a week and have been spending idle moments thinking back to the story of John, his astonishingly wise and capable wife Abigail, their son John Quincy and all of the heroes of that age, Washington, Jefferson, Lafayette, Franklin and the rest. I’ve thought how glad I am to have made their acquaintance and how sad I am that this age has none their equal, none so selfless or willing to inconvenience themselves so unstintingly for America. And I’ve come to a better-informed, mature appreciation of the singularity of their accomplishments.

Mostly I came away loving John Adams, who has seemed rather forgotten behind the heroism of Washington or the glamor of Jefferson, but who perhaps more than any other founding patriot literally pulled the original 13 colonies together into a glorious whole, and - rather like Churchill - never flagged in his effort. Like Churchill (and President Bush) he was thoroughly hated for his single-minded and unwavering commitment-unto-obsession. He was mocked (sometimes rightly, he knew) for his vanity. (In that he reminded me a little of Churchill also, who once noted his delight in a good review of his work, “I had never been praised before!”) The press was as astonishingly cruel to him as it was laudatory toward Jefferson (the press, it seems, never was the bastion of facts and fairness I’d once believed) but - for all that - Adams was respected as an honest man whose interests were always to the nation’s before his own. He was, for a small-statured man - a giant of his era, and none can touch him.

Yes…I now love John (and Abigail) Adams. And what an undertaking of research (Adams and Abigail were both beyond prolific correspondants and diary keepers) and sublime prose on McCullough’s part; what a well-earned Pulitzer! Although I couldn’t help but think at one point; does every president have to wait over 200 years before someone will study him thoroughly enough to do him justice against the perceptions of his own time? I also wondered if Adams, Jefferson and the rest could ever have accomplished their undertaking with a hectoring 24hour media at their backs, but I’ve wondered that before. In this book I see much from that era that is familiar in our own, although we seem to be in much shorter supply of both scholars and heroes.

Today at the post office, I saw a huge poster advertising a 7 part dramatization based on McCullough’s book, and I got all excited. Then I saw it was an HBO presentation and got a little sad, because I don’t get HBO. (But my neighbor does, and she’s getting Monk Coffee from me for her birthday so…maybe I can bother her for seven nights!)

The film trailer looks terrific. It stars two of my favorite actors, Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney, as John and Abigail and the always-great David Morse as Washington. This looks like one worth owning, but I can’t urge you enough to buy the book. I actually kept a notebook beside me as I was reading it, both for quotes and for my own musings - it’s that inspiring. One of my notes to myself was about Adams’ profound dislike of slavery, and his initial attempts to address it within the Declaration of Independece. I wrote:

Adams had no use for slavery but knew he could not allow the Declaration to sink or swim on the issue. He chose to first get the independence, get the nation together, and then come back and deal with slavery later…rather reminds me of Reagan’s remarks that you take your 75% and come back to fight another day for the rest, an idea that neither the right nor left extremists in instant-gratification America seem willing to entertain, which is perhaps why so little gets done, anymore.

A few excerpts - maybe they can inspire us through our ugly political season. Certainly some of it feels and sounds awfully contemporary:

“I wander alone, and ponder. I muse, I mope, I ruminate,” he wrote in the seclusion of his diary. “We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in genius, education, in travel, fortune - in everything. I feel unutterable anxiety.”

Hmmmph. Nowadays, we seem to have politicians who feel the times are unfit for them and their “gifts.”

…The mood of the city had become extremely contentious. “The malignant air of calumny has taken possession of almost all ranks and societies of people in this place, ” wrote Christopher Marshall, an apothecary and committed patriot (though a Quaker) who had become one of Adams’ circle of Philadelphia friends.

The Rich, the poor, the high professor and the prophane, seem all to be infected with this grievous disorder, so that love of our neighbor seems to be quite banished, the love of self and opinions so far prevails…The [Tory] enemies of our present struggle…are grown even scurrilous to individuals, and treat all characters who differ from them with the most opprobrious language.

On first meeting, Adams and [Benjamin] Rush had misjudged each other. Adams thought Rush “a sprightly, pretty fellow,” but “too much a talker to be a deep thinker,” while Rush found Adams “cold and reserved.” But they had quickly changed their minds, discovering much in common besides the love of talk. Like Adams, Rush was without affectation and unafraid to speak his mind, sometimes to the point of tactlessness. (”Prudence,” he was fond of saying, “is a rascally virtue.”)

Newspapers were filled with eyewitness accounts of the suffering and defeat. For days in Philadelphia the talk was of little else. then, to compound the atmosphere of uncertainty, the captured General Sullivan appeared in the city. He had been paroled by the British to report to Congress that Admiral Lord Howe wished to confer privately about and accomodation.

…with the outlook as dark as it had ever been…Jefferson decided to delay his departure no more…Having settled his accounts, he mounted his horse, and with his young servant following behind, started for Virginia.

Adams, too, had reached a decision, as he explained to Abigail in a letter…Events having taken such a turn at Long Island, he would remain in Philadelphia. When Joseph Bass arrived the next day with the horses to take him home, it made no difference. “The panic may seize whom it will,” Adams wrote, “it will not seize me.”

I could cite dozens of other bits, but just buy the book and enjoy it. I thought it might lose steam after the revolution, but it never did. McCullough doesn’t offer a dull or dry minute through all of Adams’ long and event-full life. I can’t wait to see the movie.

Related: John Quincy Adams

Thank heavens for Peggy Noonan who so often manages, so elegantly, to articulate the meandering germs running through my brain but remaining unexpressed due to my lack of skill.

In appreciating William F. Buckley today she writes:

…When Jackie Onassis died, a friend of mine who knew her called me and said, with such woe, “Oh, we are losing her kind.” He meant the elegant, the cultivated, the refined. I thought of this with Bill’s passing, that we are losing his kind–people who were deeply, broadly educated in great universities when they taught deeply and broadly, who held deep views of life and the world and art and all the things that make life more delicious and more meaningful. We have work to do as a culture in bringing up future generations that are so well rounded, so full and so inspiring.

That’s precisely what I thought upon hearing of Buckley’s death. I wasn’t thinking of the political, but of the patrician. I too thought of Jackie Onassis and her elegance, because Buckley was all elegance, himself - in his writing, his bearing, his self-assurance and quickness. You might call it “old money” elegance, except that plenty of people from “old money” are crass and trashy, completely at-home with all that is vulgar in a very vulgar age.

The quality of elegance I’m talking about though, really has little to do with money. I might have argued, once, that it had to do with education, and perhaps - once - that was true. The people coming out of the great universities - back when they really were great institutions dedicated to the quest for understanding - would leave Yale or Oxford or the Sorbonne having been imbued with such a broadness of mind and scope of knowledge that he or she would be capable of drawing upon their exposure to art, great literature, philosophy and higher mathematics to hold forth on almost any subject, discussing even - as Ms. Noonan writes Buckley did - the subject of peanut butter, with intelligence, humor and humility.

I say humility, because that sort of education cannot help but enlighten a student as to how privileged he has been to receive it. The truly privileged, when educated rightly, understand that their good fortune in having been exposed to higher things obliges them not to insularity, but to openness. A William F. Buckley or a Jackie Kennedy may not often rub elbows with the hoi polloi, but when they did they used their best manners, because to do less would be disrespectful to the other, and demeaning to everything they had been taught by the great ones who came before. They had no difficulty engaging others outside their spheres because their security within themselves - part of which comes from that humility that recognizes the random vagaries of privilege - allowed that generosity of spirit.

But I don’t think education completely explains this quality which we see disappearing with the deaths of these sorts. Americans are - in terms of numbers, if not in real study - better educated now, than at anytime in our history, but we no longer see the graduates of Yale and Harvard emerging with thoughtful humility, having nourished on the fields of past greatness. Much of that is due to the politically correct curriculum which substitutes weak identity appreciation over strong reason, but part of it is due to our ever-fading sense of wonder and awe at anything but ourselves.

Chris Matthews, recalling that he started out as a Bill Buckley Conservative and said poignantly of Buckley:

He wrote once of a young man who stood alone in an empty church, juggling balls in the air: it was something he could do–throw balls into the air and catch them without dropping, in a swirly feat of personal mastery. As I said, it’s something he could do. It was the one thing he could offer up to God when they were, as best as he could arrange it, alone together. And all the books and columns he wrote, and all the editions of National Review he published, our great William F. Buckley, Jr. was offering up his prayer. This is what he could do.

It takes humility to juggle before God because it’s all you can do, and also takes self-knowledge and self-confidence. It also requires the security of knowing, with absolute certainty, that you were loved into being and for a purpose, which - no matter how privileged your birth or education - makes you just like everyone else.

William F. Buckley and Jackie Onassis seemed to know that, and it made them graceful and great.

It has been told that often when Buckley had a big dinner party, he’d invite a leading liberal to be a guest of honor; Buckley believed in giving attention to those with whom he disagreed. He believed he could learn from them.

Last night I posted a clip from the old Johnny Carson show. It begins with him appreciatively laughing with the post-1960 election Richard Nixon, then allowing his guests to shine in hijinks, and finally with him talking to a woman with a hen. I’ve been watching a lot of Carson lately, and marveling at him. Unlike Buckley, he was not from old money and he did not go to Yale; he was a Nebraskan boy with a quick wit and a curious mind who supplemented his U of N degree by educating himself throughout his life, reading great books and political tomes and studying astronomy, and - like Buckley -he was capable of fully engaging with his guests whether they were political thinkers, opera singers, poets, entertainers or American eccentrics. One had the sense that he knew what he knew, and was glad to discover what they knew, too, to add to his store, to enrich his own understanding. That’s the same gracefulness.

Buckley and Carson were two sides of an American coin forged when society was busily broadening its intellect and admitting all comers, when there was a sense of relishing the battle while respecting the foe, and of looking out for the little guy who might get caught between the thrusts and parries. We’re losing it. As the nation becomes more “privileged” in the superficials she is echoing empty at her depths.

The paradox of privilege is that it is meaningless when it only serves the self, when it thinks it has nothing to learn from anyone else. Buckley, I think, understood that; now he is gone. Who is left to teach it?

Obi’s Sister has a nice round-up.

Michelle Malkin’s round-up - unsurprisingly - is comprehensive