Meghan Cox Gurdon

1 month ago | wsj.com | Meghan Cox Gurdon

Testimonies from James Gandolfini’s colleagues reveal a talented man plagued by persistent self-doubt and self-sabotage. Starting out, James Gandolfini was willing to consider all sorts of theatrical roles, but he did not want to play a mafioso. Having grown up in an Italian-American family in blue-collar New Jersey, he was loath to disappoint his parents.

1 month ago | wsj.com | Meghan Cox Gurdon

Testimonies from James Gandolfini’s colleagues reveal a talented man plagued by persistent self-doubt and self-sabotage. Starting out, James Gandolfini was willing to consider all sorts of theatrical roles, but he did not want to play a mafioso. Having grown up in an Italian-American family in blue-collar New Jersey, he was loath to disappoint his parents.

1 month ago | wsj.com | Meghan Cox Gurdon

Children, as is well known, can see things that are invisible to adults. Where our jaded eyes perceive a table, a child beholds a secret hideaway. Where you or I might notice clouds of water vapor, someone much younger will observe cotton candy or an incipient genie. Philip Ardagh’s lightly rhyming picture book “Do You See the Tiger?” takes such imaginative divergence to charming lengths.

1 month ago | wsj.com | Meghan Cox Gurdon

The prolific Charles Dickens had an imagination fired by the ‘marvelousness of everything.’Charles Dickens was a terrific walker. Many nights he roved the streets of London with such insomniac vigor that he might still be striding along as dawn broke in the great skies overhead. Dickens (1812-70) was a busy man whose brain was crammed and active. Rapid, peripatetic movement gave him relief from the pressure of his roiling thoughts.

1 month ago | wsj.com | Meghan Cox Gurdon

When she learned she was pregnant, the author told an app before she told her husband. Then came changes in her social-media feeds. “It took forty-eight hours for the brands to find me,” Amanda Hess writes of the cascade of algorithmic changes that hit her phone when she learned that she was expecting her first child. As a 30-something in 2020, she was accustomed to seeing what she calls “millennial slop” in her social-media feeds. Now everything was about pregnancy.