Meador Manor

Loving Lovell

Posted on October 1, 2026 by Granger Meador

Once upon a time, short stories were quite popular. They were a dominant form of mainstream entertainment from the 1920s through the 1940s before television and mass market paperbacks became widespread.

Countless genre magazines offered horror, mystery, romance, science fiction, and westerns. Those were often “pulps” printed on cheap paper, while various “slicks” with expensive glossy paper offered more literary fare. Illustrations were vital for rack sales, while interior illustrations could convince someone thumbing through a magazine to stop and read a story they might otherwise pass by.

The 1950s through the 1980s were a transitional period. Almost all of the pulps were gone by the end of the 1950s, and short stories migrated into slick high-culture monthlies and low-print-run academic magazines. A few genre publications survived, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, which I subscribed to when I was in junior high and high school.

Norman Rockwell was the famous illustrator for many covers of The Saturday Evening Post, which I wrote about two weeks ago, but there were plenty of other talented artists enhancing periodicals before cheaper photography took over, such as J.C. Leyendecker, Jon Whitcomb, Stevan Dohanos, and Al Parker.

Tom Lovell portrait by Everett Raymond Kinstler, 1980

A gifted illustrator whose art was particularly compelling was Tom Lovell. He started in the pulp genre magazines but then graduated to the slicks, while during World War II he was a sergeant in the Marines doing illustrations for Leatherneck.

After the market for illustrating magazine short stories dried up, he did work for National Geographic and some commissioned artwork for the Latter Day Saints before focusing on western art. You can readily borrow on the Internet Archive the book The Art of Tom Lovell: An Invitation to History, which focuses on his later historical art for National Geographic and the western art he concentrated on after 1969.

His Late Western Art

Lovell twice won the Ann Noble Brown Purchase Award, the highest honor of the National Academy of Western Artists Prix de West invitational art sale and exhibition sponsored by the the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Wendy and I have toured several of the annual shows in my hometown.

The Wolf Men by Tom Lovell — *The Wolf Men* won the Prix de West Ann Noble Brown Purchase Award in 1974

The Wolf Men won in 1974, depicting Comanche warriors wearing wolfskin headdresses. Don Hedgpeth shared that such dog soldier societies “guarded the camps during periods of intertribal raiding, preserved discipline during tribal hunts, provided leadership in war, conducted dances and ceremonies for the tribal gatherings, and passed on tribal history and folklore”. In the painting, two dog solders “are covering the tracks of a war party which has crossed the river into enemy territory”. A dozen years later, Lovell won again with Target Practice.

Target Practice by Tom Lovell — *Target Practice* won the Prix de West Ann Noble Brown Purchase Award in 1986

Those paintings show the disparate First People and colonizer cultures of the west, while The Heirloom depicts their intersecting differences, not through conflict but in lifestyle. “…more than ten thousand wagons rolled across the western Plains along the Oregon Trail during the decade of the 1840s. … Hardship and hunger rode alongside the overland immigrants. … Hope was abandoned along the trail, and with the weakening of the team of horses, so were cherished items which had been intended for new homes and new lives in the promised land.”

The Heirloom by Tom Lovell — *The Heirloom* of 1976

Lovell painted it in the year of the bicentennial, and it sold in 2018 for $134,550. Lovell wrote of it, “Two Sioux Indians ride by and pause to sadly note the beginning of white man’s pollution of their world, which continues to this day.”

That reveals his sympathies, and he noted the topic of his valedictorian speech to his New Jersey high school class was, “The Ill-treatment of the American Indian by the U.S. Government”. He commented, “In retrospect, I wonder how the three hundred hapless parents felt, being scolded by a sixteen-year-old on an otherwise cheerful occasion.”

Chiricahua Scout by Tom Lovell — *Chiricahua Scout* of 1990

So this guy was both bright and talented, which helps explain why National Geographic would entrust him to do the painstaking research to bring authenticity to his historical paintings. I can admire his paintings that lack a clear narrative, such as Chiricahua Scout. But a bit of research lets us know that the red headband signifies he was an Apache scout for the Army and issued the Springfield 45-70 rifle to help in the tracking and capture of Geronimo, who spent his final 15 years at Fort Sill in Indian Territory and the new state of Oklahoma.

Lovell noted, “The U. S. Cavalry, sometimes numbering 5,000 troops, tried unsuccessfully to capture Geronimo. Finally with the aid of Chiricahua scouts this was accomplished. As a disgraceful climax, these very scouts were rounded up with other Apache hostiles and sent to Florida as prisoners of war. They were separated from their families, contrary to promises made by Gen. Miles.”

Lovell could also depict livelier aspects of the west, such as Culture at Silver City. There is humor in the formal setting and the uncouth audience. Lovell said he created it with no models or scrap of any kind, except for his wife posing for the diva on the stage.

Culture at Silver City by Tom Lovell — *Culture at Silver City*

You’ll notice how the painting is almost entirely red and black, which reflects the two-color printing process that was often used for interior illustrations in the middle of the 20th century. So I would speculate the work was created for one of the slicks.

His Short Story Illustrations

Lovell’s later work is impressive, but more engaging for me are his works crafted to illustrate various short stories. The images lead the viewer to speculate about the unseen story. An example, which also features mostly red and black, is his Shot in the Dark from 1943.

Shot in the Dark by Tom Lovell — *Shot in the Dark* from 1943

We see an elegantly dressed woman holding a big revolver that has just been fired, leaving a large hole in a doorway. It is obviously night, and she is in a parlor or music room, given the rectangular pianoforte in the background. Did she fire at some intruder who was on the other side of the door? The double shadow adds intrigue.

The time period is uncertain, as the revolver is reportedly an 1863 Remington New Model Army, and the furnishings seem Victorian. The coloration leads one to think this was created as an interior illustration for some short story, but I found no confirmation of its origin.

Unidentified wartime illustration by Tom Lovell — Unidentified

A work limiting itself to black and blue shows a confrontation between a military man and some civilian, with a woman slumped over, holding her head in her hands. German books and newspapers are seen. So does this involve espionage or an underground resistance?

Google Gemini claimed that the piece was captioned, “His hand went up and fastened into the collar of the civilian’s coat. ‘Now, then,’ he said roughly. ‘Let’s have it.'”

It then went on to claim that it accompanied “The Dynamic Man” by C.E. Scoggins in the August 29, 1942 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. However, that might well be just another stupid A.I. hallucination.

Unidentified illustration by Tom Lovell — Unidentified

Another scene in black and green shows the aftermath of a car accident, with a wonderful contrast of the men illuminated by car’s headlight versus the moonlit man at right. Were these men in the car, and is there anyone left inside? Is the man holding his head upset about someone’s injury, or just the car wreck? Perhaps he has a concussion? We don’t know, but the crouching man at the left appears in better shape than the others.

The illustration is from another era, not only in the design of the sedan but in the recognizable but now quite uncommon formal wear. One man is wearing a dark suit coat with tie and white pants, while the others are in white dinner jackets and dark pants we would associate with daytime events and warmer climates. The contrasting clothing makes for a more interesting illustration, but is there a story reason as well?

Dry brush illustration — An early Lovell dry brush illustration

Next let’s step back to the early days of Lovell’s career. It is the late 1920s, and after jobs as a ship deckhand and a construction company timekeeper, he was working on a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University when he went looking for illustration work in New York City. A pulp editor asked if he could handle “dry brush” and Tom, like many a newcomer, said he could and then rushed home to learn how.

The technique was to dip a brush into a bottle of India ink, brush out most of the ink on a scratch pad to spread the hairs on the brush, and then apply it to create a stroke of many fine parallel lines. That created a gray tone while still just using a single color of ink, and was important to the inexpensive pulps which could use them for cheap line engravings instead of more expensive halftone printing. Lovell could earn six dollars for an illustration and sixty dollars for a magazine cover.

Lovell went on to earn his degree, married a fellow student, and was getting work illustrating The Shadow and Wild West Weekly and various other pulps. After gaining enough experience, he stopped working for the pulps and spent six months preparing new samples to break into the glossy magazines like Good Housekeeping, The American Magazine, The Ladies Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan.

Let’s consider an illustration for the story “Blackmail” by Allan Vaughan Elston in The American Magazine‘s December 1949 issue. We see a blond woman in a nice green dress and hat with black gloves standing in the shadows of a home, holding a telephone directory. She is glancing sideways at a man standing in a bright daylit room beyond. What is going on?

Blackmail by Tom Lovell — From “Blackmail” in *The American Magazine*, December 1949

My theory is that she has asked to use his telephone, but is up to something nefarious, and he is suspicious. The internet summarized the story thusly: “An attractive blond goes to the home of Congressional candidate James Norman under false pretenses to plant a fake trail they are having an affair and blackmail him.”

Okay, that fits. However, a pet peeve of mine is when illustrations don’t match the story content, and I wondered if Lovell’s supposedly scrupulous accuracy in later works would be reflected in his earlier short story illustrations. I was able to track down a reprint of the story on pages 26-37 of the March 1953 issue of Ellergy Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The story begins: “The woman was blonde and attractively thiryish. Her suit, handbag, and hat matched, rather startlingly, in a pale shade of green.” Check.

She rings Norman’s front door and asks to look up an address in his phone book, claiming to be late for a dinner party in the neighborhood she had thought was in that block. He invites her in, directing her to an alcove. There she picks up the phone book, thumbs through it, and emerges a bit later. So far, so good.

However, in the story the scene occurs after 7 p.m. when “twilight hadn’t yet faded” which doesn’t at all match the daylight streaming into the front room in the illustration. Worse, the woman in the story stares ruefully at smudges on her finger tips that look like garden mud, using that as an excuse to access a bathroom and plant her make-up compact in it. Yet in the illustration, she is wearing black gloves, which would ruin her plan.

Mormon Abridges the Plates by Tom Lovell — *Mormon Abridges the Plates* circa 1970

So while I admire Lovell’s artwork, and it did get me to read the entire short story, it failed to properly illustrate that story. Hopefully he did better in his later work for National Geographic and in the illustrations he created for the Book of Mormon in the 1960s and early 1970s when he was desperate for commissions. Reportedly his paintings continue to appear alongside others by Harry Anderson, Arnold Friberg, and Ken Riley in the church’s magazines, digital media, and curricular materials.

Common Ground

I had fun tracking down the story for his 1949 “Blackmail” work, but I had no such luck for a more intriguing painting from 1940, created for Sarah-Elizabeth Rodger’s short story “Common Ground” in the June 1940 issue of Ladies Home Journal.

The painting shows two women. One is sitting upright and stoic, with a tear glistening in her eye, comforting a woman slumped across her lap. The seated woman is wearing a wedding ring, but Lovell has carefully positioned the other to show she wears no ring. So what is going on?

Common Ground by Tom Lovell — From “Common Ground” in the June 1940 issue of *Ladies Home Journal*

The title of the short story has led people to speculate that the seated woman is the wife, and the slumped one is the mistress, of a man who had been reported killed in World War II. However, the timing of the short story is rather early for that if the ladies were Americans. Some have speculated that it might show a mother comforting a daughter, but to me the women aren’t far enough apart in age for that. The platinum blonde being comforted is interesting since genuine platinum blondes are quite rare, and her subdued and stylish clothing and heels are more posh than the cheaper and bolder textiles of the seated woman’s outfit.

I couldn’t locate the text of the story, but a Facebook post reported that the story is about two friends, poor Anne and wealthy Helena. Helena is a wealthy hardware heiress who married Karl, a baron in Europe. She divorces him and returns to America, sheltering at a small cottage in Connecticut to visit Anne and her husband and baby. The husband’s job pays $30 per week, while Helena receives $300,000 per year from a trust. Helena gives the husband a lead on a new better-paying job, which he accepts. Anne is in a panic that her husband is about to run off with Helena.

Then Helena receives a cable that her ex-husband has died in an air race in Austria. She weeps on the lap of Anne: “When the cable came about Karl, Anne’s tears fell with her own. ‘Helena, it’s much better than many endings,’ Anne said.”

I can’t check on the accuracy of the illustration, but I do think Lovell did a marvelous job conveying the sadness and fear that grip Anne, and the dark wood of the dresser provides a lovely contrast for the silver and gray for Helena. The spoiler ending is that a friendly neighbor of Anne and David declares his love for Helena, they quickly marry, and they leave for Europe. Anne, David, and baby are left behind together in Connecticut, looking forward to an easier life with David’s new job. My guess is that the European conflict might not enter into the story at all, what with Helena happily moving back and forth between Europe and America.

Storytelling with a Brush

Lovell’s lingering illustrations, separated from their inspirations, inevitably invite speculation. In invite you to use the controls to click through the 19 images in the slideshow below.

One particular mystery is this painting of a white woman frightened by a burning cross in the yard outside her room. Lovell skillfully directs our attention first to the woman’s face, then the burning cross, and only if we examine the picture more carefully do we spot the hooded Klansman peering in at her. Wouldn’t you like to know what story that is from? I surely would.

Klansman and cross outside — An unnerving illustration for an unknown story

In this case, I located some chalk studies for the piece. Notice how much older the woman appears in them. My guess is that his wife was the initial model, while he adjusted the face in the final painting to better match the accompanying story.

A Final Mystery

In my gathering of images for this post, I came across two that were clearly from the same story. They include a tall black woman and an older white little person with a young lady in stylish clothes of the late 19th century. I couldn’t help but wonder what story included such diverse characters.

Saratoga Trunk restaurant scene by Tom Lovell

Saratoga Trunk New Orleans street scence by Tom Lovell

In this case, Google Gemini wasn’t able to figure it out from just the illustrations, but when I added to my prompt that they illustrated a story featuring a tall black woman and a white little person, it deduced they were from Edna Ferber’s Saratoga Trunk, which was serialized in Cosmopolitan in 1941. My knowledge of Cosmopolitan was limited to it being a women’s magazine, popularly called Cosmo, edited for decades by Helen Gurley Brown, and featuring silly romance quizzes.

Well, Cosmopolitan is still hanging on in 2026 after 140 years of publication. It began as a family magazine, and later evolved into a monthly literary one featuring such authors as Willa Cather, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Edith Wharton, and H.G. Wells. In the 1940s it was subtitled The Four-Book Magazine since it first section might include a novelette, six or eight short stories, two serials, six to eight articles, and eight or nine special features while the remaining three featured novels and a digest of current non-fiction books. It had sales of 2,000,000 during World War II and could run 150 pages, so I reckon many of its novels were abridged.

After the war, the magazine declined until Helen Gurley Brown became chief editor in 1965 and radically changed it to serve modern single career women. It became racy, contentious, and quite successful. Brown remained editor for 32 years, and the magazine survived the long slow death of print by changing from a monthly to a bimonthly in 2020 and has been published quarterly since 2024.

As for the novel that Lovell was illustrating, Carolyn Kolb wrote: “Clio Dulaine, heroine of the 1941 blockbuster novel Saratoga Trunk, is the beautiful daughter of a free woman of color and her wealthy white partner. Returning to New Orleans from Paris, she styles herself a Countess and has two goals: finding a rich husband and vengeance against her late father’s family (his accidental death while grabbing the gun from her suicidal mother was the cause of the mother’s and Clio’s exile to France). Meeting her match in guile and ultimately her life partner, gambler-cowboy Clint Maroon, Clio scrambles to the top of Gilded-Age society, exemplified by the Saratoga Springs, New York, resort.”

Google Gemini added that the characters I identified in Lovell’s illustrations were “the faithful, unusual servants” who accompany Clio Dulaine when she returns to New Orleans: Angélique Buiton, her tall, fiercely protective West Indian/Haitian maid, and Cupidon, her fiercely loyal manservant and coachman.

Well, I’ve never read a Ferber novel, but I’ve seen Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis in the 1932 movie version of So Big, I’ve seen snippets of the movie adaptation of Giant, and I’ve heard of Show Boat as the first serious musical. I also know that Cimarron recently entered the public domain.

A few months before the publication of Saratoga Trunk, Ferber wrote to her editor, “I’ve loathed every writing minute of it … Nothing can convince me that anyone will read this mass of blubber.” Yet the novel was a best seller.

The book covers for various editions don’t approach the quality of Lovell’s illustrations for the serialization

It was also made into a movie starring Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper, notable as the only movie in which Bergman sang. I’ve gathered more of Lovell’s work for the serialization by Cosmopolitan, and the five images might tempt me to try my first Ferber novel. I do love Lovell.

Saratoga Trunk veranda scene by Tom Lovell

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Recent Re-Reads

Posted on September 26, 2026 by Granger Meador

I recently finished listening to the 40 hour Audible version of Battle Cry of Freedom, a Civil War history. I’d been inspired to listen to it after finishing Erik Larson’s compelling The Demon of Unrest, which covered the attack on Fort Sumter. The second book was far more comprehensive, but also much drier. So I was ready for something different yet familiar as I thumbed through the purchases I’d made for my Audible library.

I considered starting David McCullough’s John Adams or Truman, but those are 30 and 54 hours long, respectively, and I wasn’t ready for such a long commitment to a nonfiction work.

I also have James Michener’s Hawaii, which is historical fiction. I remember reading a two-part condensation of his report on Kent State in the March and April 1971 issues of Reader’s Digest. Mind you, I wasn’t reading those at age four. Rather, in junior high I acquired a collection of Reader’s Digests dating back to the 1930s from a friend of my father’s, a man who had purchased a lifetime subscription during the Great Depression. I would sometimes grab one to get a slice of life from the past, although I finally got rid of the magazines as they were infested with silverfish. Anyway, I also rejected starting Hawaii, since it runs 52 hours.

That led me to consider a Mary Roberts Rinehart mystery, but I’ve consumed a dozen of them over the past six years, and I couldn’t remember if I’d already listened to The Great Mistake or not, and my Audible library didn’t show it as finished, so I started that.

The Great Mistake by Mary Roberts Rinehart

I didn’t recognize the first chapters, and by the time it was ringing a bell, I was so far along, and realized I didn’t remember whodunnit, that it became the first Rinehart re-listen for me.

Later, checking my blog posts, I saw that in my 2024 end-of-year book review summary, I wrote: “I listened to Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Great Mistake from 1940, but it was far less memorable than her mysteries The After House of 1914, The Window at the White Cat of 1910, or her comedic Where There’s a Will in 1912.”

Well, I guess that helps explain why I could re-listen to it only a couple of years later. I’d been walking 1.5 to 2 hours almost every morning, leaving the house early since August and September had been miserably hot. Yeah, I know, I live in a town with an economy based on fossil fuels, so we’re all just part of the problem.

Anyway, my walking routine could get me through the book in a week or less. I kept on with it, and meanwhile finished reading the superb Lessons in Chemistry on my Kindle, which was published in 2022 and thus much more modern in tone than Rinehart, even though its fictional events took place in the early 1960s.

If I’m listening to fiction, I like to be reading non-fiction, and vice versa. So I looked for something non-fiction on my Kindle or, better yet, a physical book since it was too @#$% hot to go anywhere, and thus I didn’t mind something bulky.

Trek Star: The Geek Life of Doug Drexler – How Star Trek’s Legendary Designer Made All His Idiotic Adolescent Dreams Come True

My eyes wandered to the stack of books beside my recliner and spotted one that arrived a couple of months ago. Over 7″ wide, over 10″ long, and almost 1.5″ thick, weighing in at over 2.5 pounds, it was Trek Star: The Geek Life of Doug Drexler – How Star Trek’s Legendary Designer Made All His Idiotic Adolescent Dreams Come True. I love Drexler, and in late 2025 I had backed a documentary about him on Kickstarter. My autographed Blu-Ray might arrive in a few months, so it was a good time to read the book.

It was a fun read, and admittedly, the Rinehart book was a good listen the second time around. I’m not really into the whodunit puzzles of most classic mysteries, spending little mental energy trying to figure out a solution, but instead relaxing in the atmosphere and enjoying them more as procedurals and escapist adventures.

Listening to it again had me spending more time trying to remember the eventual solution, with only dim recollections of late revelations. Surprisingly, that actually enhanced the book for me, but not enough that I plan to go back and listen again to any more Rineharts. There are so many other novel experiences, pun intended, that await in Audible, Kindle, and physical book formats.

After my Rinehart re-listen snafu, I made amends by making my next Audible listen Richard Osman’s fourth entry in his Thursday Murder Club series: The Last Devil to Die from 2023. It was also quite fun, while also, as that series often does, leaving me deeply moved. It focuses on four pensioners with deep characterizations. Over the previous books we’ve seen the worsening Alzheimer’s of one character’s husband, and that became a central emotional focus for this outing. I was crying as I walked along the Pathfinder Parkway, listening to the couple bravely confronting their dilemma, and I appreciated how Osman allowed that tragedy to realistically cripple the capacity of one of the main characters. The continuity in his series, where old foes can linger on and events leave lasting scars, is one of its strengths.

That leaves one more in the Thursday Murder Club series to go in my Audible library, and Osman is now alternating publishing entries in the series with ones from his new We Solve Murders series. I’ve already got the first one of that newer series in my Audible library, and the second was just released.

While finishing The Last Devil to Die, I completed Trek Star and on a whim opted for a rather odd re-read. I’ve been paying attention to what enters the public domain each year, and I recalled that the first four of the Nancy Drew books from 1930 are now free and would likely be available at Project Gutenberg. I read all of them decades ago, back when a spinster aunt loaned me her old mysteries to keep me busy. Having consumed all of the Hardy Boys and Three Investigators I could find, she set me onto Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and the Dana Girls.

I downloaded The Secret of the Old Clock, which was as thin as I remembered it. My favorites of the Nancy Drew books were Benson’s penultimate work in the series, The Clue in the Crumbling Wall, which will become public domain in 2041, and The Crooked Banister, which included a robot programmed with a cassette tape, but it won’t be public domain until 2067.

The re-read reminded me that Nancy’s first “chum” was Helen Corning; her athletic female friend George and the “pudgy” Bess Marvin, a counterpart to the Hardy Boys’ Chet Morton, did not appear until the fifth book.

While I appreciate that ghostwriter Mildred Wirt Benson, who wrote 23 of the first 30 books, gave Nancy more agency and capability than the norm a century ago, the books were already so dated by the late 1950s that they were gradually revised. Ethnic stereotypes and offensive slang that afflicted many of the Stratemeyer Syndicate‘s series were addressed, such as the drunk black caretaker character in the first book, with his heavily stereotyped black English vernacular. Technology and social norms were updated, although sadly Nancy lost some of her agency and spunk, and, as so often happens, the books were made cheaper by shortening them.

I might or might not re-read any more of the “starter set” of Nancy Drews, given that I still have a slew of adult Mary Stewart, Edith Pargeter, and Louise Penny books that would be fresh for me. As for novel children’s books, a few months ago I read the first of four Carson Street Detective Agency or “Neil and Swede” books by Keith Robertson. Those are all out of print, but they are all available for online borrowing via scans in the Internet Archive.

Happy reading!

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The End of American Hegemony

Posted on September 21, 2026 by Granger Meador

As an early member of Generation X, I grew up amidst the world order that developed after World War II. The U.S. was a military superpower, but the limits of that power had been demonstrated quite clearly. The U.S. withdrew combat troops from South Vietnam before I turned seven years old, and the Cold War with the Soviet Union remained dominant throughout my childhood.

My first social studies class at Mayfield Junior High was a mandatory one on Civil Defense that included survival strategies in case of a nuclear war. Below are a couple of pages from the book we studied: Your Chance to Live, a 1972 publication of the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency.

Start of the nuclear disaster section of my first social studies textbook in junior high

Yeah, a skull in a mushroom cloud juxtaposed with a depiction of the basic types of radiation as beauty contestants in swimsuits with plenty of décolletage. Alpha cannot penetrate, but will irritate your skin. Beta will cause body burns, and gamma can make you ill or kill you. What are we trying to communicate here?

It all struck my 12-year-old self as quite weird, but I’ll admit that illustrator Bradford L. Smith did convey to us the angst and neuroses of his era. I earned a 98% in the 9-week course with perfect attendance, but the report card didn’t have a rating for the development of cynicism, which would have been tops as well.

A year later, Iran seized 66 American citizens at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and held onto 52 of them for 444 days. Thus my teenage years were inaugurated with yet another demonstration of the limits of power coupled to how the media can be manipulated by bad actors.

In school we were learning about how the U.S. killed 250,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after losing about 400,000 of its own military personnel in World War II and after a stunning six million Jews were systematically murdered in the Holocaust. I was studying diagrams of nuclear blast damage radii while at home the television news for over a year was dominated by 52 hostages held by a country with about 1/6 our population and about 1/30 of our economic output.

I guess that prepared me somewhat for the way Donald Trump would expertly dominate the news cycles four decades later, stoking outrage and division while hypnotizing doom scrollers. However, the Vietnam War and the Iranian hostage crisis taught me a lesson Trump had to learn the hard way decades later: the limits of a republic’s military power.

As for military service, my Greatest Generation father had been drafted in 1943 and served in Europe and the Philippines in World War II. Baby Boomer Trump avoided military service during the Vietnam War via five deferments, four educational and one medical. The draft ended in 1973, so when I turned 18 in 1984, like the other males in Generation X, I just had to register for the Selective Service and keep it informed of any changes in address until I turned 26. I was still registered during the Persian Gulf War of 1991, and at the end of that year the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War came to an end.

Middle East terrorists set off a van bomb below the World Trade Center in 1993, hoping to topple one tower and have its debris collapse the second. That failed but was a deadly dress rehearsal of sorts for the airborne attacks in September 2001. Meanwhile, domestic terrorists killed 168 people and injured hundreds more in my hometown of Oklahoma City in 1995.

The response to the 2001 attacks illustrated one of the keys to American hegemony after the Cold War ended. It wasn’t just our thermonuclear bombs and other advanced weaponry that left us as the sole remaining superpower, but also our many allies around the world. Those partnerships were instrumental in shoring up the shortcomings that developed in the U.S. over the decades after the second world war. September 2001 was the only time NATO invoked its Article 5, leading to joint operations against terrorism and NATO taking command of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan in 2003.

One reason we need allies is how our relative industrial might has declined. In 1945, the U.S. produced over 50% of the world’s manufactured goods while war-torn Europe and Asia rebuilt, and in 1950 about 30% of nonfarm workers in the U.S. were employed in manufacturing. Contrast that with today, when the U.S. produces perhaps 15% of the world’s manufactured goods, and only about 8% of our nonfarm workers are employed in that sector.

While the employment decline includes significant gains in productivity, it is also a symptom of significant gaps in our manufacturing capabilities. Last week, Phillips Payson O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, wrote in The Atlantic:

The erosion of American manufacturing superiority is an old story, but it is a key element for understanding the end of the American age. The U.S. could once outbuild other powers by tapping into civilian production. During World War II, Americans retooled the automotive industry to build aircraft. Today, relative to the rest of the world, the United States does almost no civilian shipbuilding. China, in comparison, makes about 50 percent of the ships in the world and controls about 80 percent of the world’s drone manufacture. Having built its military to prevail in a burst of high-intensity fighting, the United States simply lacks the equipment, stockpiles, and rested forces to engage China for any extended period of time.

In the past, the United States could rely on allies to amplify its own power. Nations that shared values or at least interests with Washington have hosted bases, provided diplomatic support for American initiatives, shared intelligence, and sent troops and equipment to support American-led military operations. Today, traditional allies have capabilities that the U.S. sorely needs. For example, Japan and South Korea are the second- and third-largest shipbuilding powers in the world.

Yet, by the spring of 2026, Trump’s bullying, tariffs, and go-it-alone attacks on other countries that impacted fossil fuel distribution had led to 57% of the people in 36 countries viewing the U.S. unfavorably. Almost 2/3 said the U.S. did not take other countries’ interests into account and did not contribute to peace and stability. A majority viewed it as an unreliable partner to other countries.

Notice how Trump’s actions have affected the ratings in Canada, South Korea, Japan, and various European countries, and then reflect on the chart below of the world’s top manufacturers.

Being the second-largest manufacturer with $2.8 trillion of value is great, but when China alone has $4.8 trillion, weakening our alliances with countries that collectively produced $3.5 trillion in value will have enduring consequences.

If you’re looking for Russia, it is the $300 billion RUS block in the European segment. It still has thermonuclear weapons, but its economy pales in comparison to that of several other countries.

America isn’t over by a long shot, but the American Age for the world is ending. East Asia is now the center of the world’s economic output. Europe will invest more in its own defense and economy, South Korea is improving relations with China, and Canada and Mexico cannot trust the leaders the U.S. elects, so they will recalibrate their integrations with our economy. The world may experience a chaotic period of wars and competitions in the coming decades.

As for the U.S., a terrible economic reckoning grows ever more likely, although I cannot predict when it might arrive. The Republican embrace of supply-side economics fueled a growth in the ratio of the federal debt to the overall economy in 1980s, which was relieved by the dotcom boom of the 1990s; Trump has supposedly been hoping that A.I. would do something similar in the coming decade.

As the chart below illustrates, the debt ratio grew enormously during the Obama presidency after the Great Recession of 2008. It was finally tapering off when Trump and the GOP passed their 2017 tax cuts. However, it then spiked when federal spending increased about 50% in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is now approaching the all-time post-World War II peak set in 1946.

Under Trump, $3.1 trillion was spent on the initial pandemic response. Biden followed that up with another $2.4 trillion to help with the recovery, but that also fueled inflation. In 2025, Trump and the GOP forced through yet more tax cuts that will maintain the growth of the debt unless A.I. or other economic changes come to the rescue. If we examine the debt since 1993, without regard to the overall economy, we can see that the growth rate trajectory has increased with each of the past three recessions.

The structural imbalance of spending consistently outpacing revenue will accelerate in the coming years due to rising interest costs, mandatory entitlement spending, and low revenue generation due to tax cuts. A crisis point will arrive by 2032, when the Social Security trust fund will be exhausted if there are no structural changes in that entitlement program.

My guess is that the current debt growth trajectory is already unsustainable, so another recession or the Social Security crisis might someday lead to the U.S. defaulting on its debt and an economic collapse. That would damage China’s economy, and its tightly controlled currency and closed financial system might prevent it from stepping in to replace the deep, open liquidity of the U.S. financial market, leading to a significant worldwide depression.

I’m certainly no fan of Trump’s policies, but he had the support of 77,302,580 Americans in November 2024 who had every opportunity to grasp what he was about. Even now, as pundits talk of his Make America Great Again movement fracturing, over 1/3 of Americans still approve of Mr. Trump’s performance. In Oklahoma, while Trump’s approval rating is -6 among all adult citizens, and he fell from +31 to +1 among registered voters, when you look at who actually voted in the 2024 election, he is still at +17 in the Sooner State. The opinions of the 47% of Okies who were eligible to vote in 2024 yet chose not to do so simply don’t matter.

If the Democrats do manage to regain majorities in both houses of Congress, I hold out little hope for statesmanship. The historian J. Rufus Fears taught that “the statesman is distinguished from a mere politician by four qualities: a bedrock of principles, a moral compass, a vision, and the ability to create a consensus to achieve that vision.” I see very few statesmen or stateswomen running for office these days in either party.

Granted, my political cynicism is a Gen X stereotype. I’ll say that Mayfield Junior High is at least somewhat responsible for me still expecting a big boom…or a big bust.

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DVD Lives

Posted on September 18, 2026 by Granger Meador

They say that as you age, you find yourself resembling your parents more and more. One aspect of that for me is how infrequently I watch movies, despite the convenience of home streaming. I started logging my views on Letterboxd back in the first winter of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in almost six years I have logged less than 40 movies.

Movie watch log — The admittedly bizarre group of movies I watched in the first half of 2026

My log for the first half of 2026 is rather bizarre. On New Year’s Day, I watched the weird cheap science fiction film Unearthly Stranger from 1963 because I was intrigued by a review of it on the Terry Talks Movies YouTube channel.

I didn’t see another movie until April, when I watched three different versions of The Bat, from 1926, 1930, and 1959, as part of crafting a blog post about Mary Roberts Rinehart mysteries.

Later that month, the Once Upon a Record YouTube channel featured Candleshoe. I decided to revisit it, since I hadn’t seen it since it premiered back in 1977, when I was 11 years old. The experience was the movie equivalent of re-reading a childhood book like Henry Reed’s Journey.

Last week I drove down to the Regal Warren in Broken Arrow with some friends for MST3K: The RiffTrax Experiments — Sting of Death. It was first time I’d been in a cinema since The Marvels in November 2023. I’ve always enjoyed RiffTrax cinema events, and the experience reminded me that I have a collection of movies on optical disc that I had saved up to watch during my retirement. I’d been retired for 2.5 months and had yet to load a single disc.

So I finally pulled out the four-disc set those friends purchased for me last Christmas from my Amazon wish list: the Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple collection of Margaret Rutherford films from 1961 through 1964. I’ve read all of Christie’s mysteries and realize that Joan Hickson’s television movies from 1984 to 1992 are the most accurate adaptations. However, I saw one of the old Margaret Rutherford movies years ago — I’ve no idea which one it was of the four — and thought it would be a hoot to see them.

The Rutherford films are less accurate, but quite fun

I have subscriptions to Apple TV, which reportedly can stream over 40,000 movies, and to Amazon Prime Video, which has over 20,000. But availability can vary over time, especially with old foreign titles, and the streaming services have a bitrate that is considerably lower than what an optical disc can provide. Hence my addition of the Rutherford collection on my Amazon wish list.

I cracked open the set, and realized that the discs were DVDs, not Blu-rays, let alone 4K Ultra HD Blu-rays. That meant the resolution was limited to 720×480, rather than 1920×1080 or 3840×2160. I wasn’t surprised that the old movies hadn’t been released on Blu-ray, given their limited appeal, but I was an early adopter of the failed HD DVD discs in 2006 and switched to Blu-ray in 2008 and had an Ultra HD Blu-ray player by 2019, so DVD has seemed obsolete for a couple of decades.

However, I’m also old enough to have rented VHS videocassette players to watch VHS tapes in the early 1980s before having enough money to buy my own player. Accessing many old movies that way, at the equivalent resolution of 333×480, was great for the time, but I was delighted when DVDs came out in the late 1990s with their sharper digital imagery and sound. So I wasn’t going to turn up my nose at a DVD, so long as the aspect ratio was close to being right.

Movie aspect ratios — Only a few of the many aspect ratios for movies

Movies over the decades were released in a ludicrous variety of aspect ratios — the graphic is only a sampling. By 1961, it was unlikely that Murder, She Said had been released in the old 1.33:1 Academy Aperture. I consulted the internet, and it said the film was released in the European Widescreen ratio of 1.66:1.

The disc had WIDESCREEN on it, so at least it wouldn’t be a “pan and scan” rendition in the old 1.33:1 ratio. I popped in the disc, and the old black-and-white movie filled my widescreen television. So it was an anamorphic DVD in which the film has been “squished” into a 720×480 pixel 1.33:1 recording but a flag had been set to signal the television to stretch it back out to 16:9 or 1.77:1.

That’s close enough to the original ratio for the movie to look fine, despite the matting the studio used to make it 1.77:1, and I was surprised at how good much of it did look. Only in a couple of scenes did the image quality noticeably deteriorate, indicating that Warner Bros. hadn’t managed to source a better element for scanning.

An early scene; most of the movie was in good shape

I suppose someday artificial intelligence will be used to colorize this old movie, something the late great Roger Ebert would abhor, while I’m indifferent in this case, since Murder, She Said is certainly not on par with a classic like Citizen Kane. However, I was content to view it as shot.

There were some nice artistic moments, such as at the end of the title sequence when billowing smoke from a train is used with a scene dissolve, and the scream of the trains becoming the scream of a strangled woman.

I enjoyed the interactions of Miss Marple and a library assistant, Mr. Stringer, despite no such character appearing in the novel. I was amused to discover that the actor was Stringer Davis, Margaret Rutherford’s husband, who was cast at her request. In the movie, Miss Marple witnesses a strangulation on a passing train, while in the novel the witness is a friend of hers. Rutherford Hall in the novel became Ackenthorpe Hall in the film, to avoid distraction due to the lead actress’s surname. I understand making such changes for the film version, and despite the film’s differences from the novel, Agatha Christie dedicated her 1962 novel The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side “To Margaret Rutherford in admiration.”

A particular surprise was that Joan Hickson played a character in the film, little knowing that she would portray Miss Marple herself, quite accurately, decades later.

That’s Joan Hickson at left, who would portray Miss Marple decades later

So I was quite happy with my Christmas present, and I look forward to viewing the three remaining DVDs. DVD lives…but in one of the strange coincidences of life, a few hours after watching the disc I happened to upgrade my Mac Mini to macOS 27 Golden Gate, and I noticed a “DVDPlayback” section in an Ars Technica review of that new operating system. It noted that Apple had not introduced a Mac with an optical drive built-in for over 15 years, and while the DVD Player software component is still present and functional, it is slated to be removed in a future macOS release.

Whenever that happens, perhaps I’ll no longer be able to slip a DVD into the external optical drive I have attached to my Mac. Thank goodness I’ll still have my 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player in the living room that can play obsolete physical media.

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The Post Is Going Out of Print…Again

Posted on September 17, 2026 by Granger Meador

A century ago, many magazines printed shorts stories and serialized or abridged novels. A couple of dozen major commercial “slicks” were printed on glossy paper, joined by hundreds of cheap paper “pulps” which concentrated on genres such as westerns, science fiction, and crime.

The dramatic penetration of television into homes in the 1950s alongside the rise of the mass market paperback destroyed the pulps, and they were extinct by the 1960s. However, mimeographs allowed underground and counterculture magazines to thrive, universities and grants supported many low-print-run journals, and eventually desktop publishing supported niche offerings that finally migrated to the internet.

By 2015 there were only three science fiction magazines that completely supported themselves on the revenue they generated: Analog, Asimov’s, and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The mystery genre could only maintain Ellery Queen’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s. All five were still in print in 2026, although The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is now a quarterly and the others can now only manage six issues per year. I was a regular reader of only one of them, over 40 years ago, when my junior high school sold magazine subscriptions for some cause, and I subscribed to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine for several years.

As for the slicks, in the 1920s the prominent ones printing literary content included The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, The Red Book, and The American Magazine.

Major magazines in 1930 — The major slicks that printed short stories and novels a century ago

The American died in 1956, and Collier’s early the next year, felled by plunging advertising revenue and rising production costs. The Red Book had become Redbook by the 1930s and in the 1950s concentrated on young adults to survive television, switching to serve a female audience later that decade. It de-emphasized fiction after 1983 and ceased print publication in 2018.

After 1965, Cosmopolitan was turned away from printing fiction by longtime editor Helen Gurley Brown, who transformed it into a magazine for modern single career women, and it survives as a quarterly. So that brings us to The Saturday Evening Post.

The most famous thing about it was over 320 covers painted by Norman Rockwell. J.C. Leyendecker was no slouch, painting over 350, and George Hughes and John Philip Falter each produced over 100 of its covers. Falter lasted until 1968, by which time the editors viewed painted covers as old-fashioned and out of touch, replacing them with cheaper photographic covers.

2/9/1969 issue — The last issue in early 1969

In 2026, the magazine, which had been reduced to six issues per year some time earlier, announced it was ending its print edition. Its subscriber base, which had peaked at nearly seven million in 1960, had fallen to about 50,000. However, it had died before, back when I was a little kid.

In the turbulent 1960s, the magazine’s conservative politics and values appealed to a declining number of readers. Prominent authors drifted to newer magazines. In 1968, it cut printing costs by cancelling the subscriptions of roughly half of its readers, offering them free transfers to Life magazine. This was perceived as shedding older and more rural readers to appeal more to advertisers, and it wasn’t surprising that the zany effort failed, and The Saturday Evening Post ceased publication with its February 8, 1969 issue.

That would have been the end of it, except that in 1970 the Indianapolis industrialist Beurt SerVaas relaunched it on a quarterly basis as a kind of nostalgia magazine. In 1982, Beurt’s wife, Cory, who was a journalist and physician, revamped it, adding coverage on health and wellness while still providing nostalgic light humor, cartoons, and nods to classic Americana.

Joan SerVaas with 2013 issue — Joan SerVaas with a revamped issue in 2013

In 2013, it launched a major makeover with a new cover design and an effort to increase its profile, given a general public misbelief, which I shared, that it was no longer in existence. I remember catching a glimpse of it on a magazine rack in a library, which tells you how long ago that was, and being surprised to see a modern issue date on it.

As of 2021, an editorial staff of twelve was putting out six issues per year with a claimed circulation of 350,000. It was still publishing fiction, but soon its print runs will be ended for good. So let’s go back to its origins to learn how it got its name.

It began in 1821 as a newspaper printed in the former office of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. The print run was timed to be early enough for its delivery to Philadelphians in the Saturday evening mail. Yeah, back then major cities had two daily mail runs.

It was known for printing letters between ex-presidents Adams and Jefferson and then essays, stories, and poems by such notables as Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Washington Irving, and Mark Twain.

In 1897, Cyrus Curtis, who had transformed a farming magazine into Ladies’ Home Journal, the first magazine to reach a circulation of a million, purchased the Post, wanting to make it a man’s version of the Journal. He hired George Horace Lorimer to edit it, and Lorimer proceeded to be one of the first editors to print the work of Joseph Conrad, O. Henry, Rudyard Kipling, and Jack London. The Call of the Wild was first published, in serialized form, in the magazine in 1903.

I enjoy reading old stories and novels, and several significant authors relied on The Saturday Evening Post. P.G. Wodehouse said “the wolf was always at the door” until the Post gave him his “first break” in 1915 by serializing Something New. Erle Stanley Gardner published 16 serialized Perry Mason novels in it, starting in 1937, adjusting his writing style and softening his protagonist’s rough edges to meet the standards of its conservative editors.

The magazine’s largest issue was a whopping 272 pages a few months after the 1929 stock market crash, weighing almost two pounds. The issue generated $1.5 million, the equivalent of almost $300 million in 2026, from 241 national advertisers. It took sixty 45-ton presses three weeks to churn it out. My, but how things have changed.

Rosie the Riveter" Saturday Evening Post Cover, May 29,1943 ... — One of the most famous covers from May 1943

Joan SerVaas inherited control of the magazine in 2008, and in addition to the 2013 revamp, she focused on digitizing its archives. Subscribers can trawl half a million pages and about 3,500 covers. Now, at age 72, SerVaas is shutting down the presses, attributing the decision to “rising production costs, declining advertising revenue and shifting reader habits”. New articles and fiction will still be published online, alongside the preserved archives.

I never read a single issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It was a magazine for earlier generations, and heck, I’m a retiree. So I cannot say I will miss it, but I felt its second death in print deserved acknowledgment.