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From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

When anxiety is running high, when the news cycle can’t get any louder, when it seems like the world is an irredeemable mess – then is a good time to crack open some Wendell Berry. Fortunately for us, Berry, who turned 88 this year, is a prolific writer, so there are many different volumes up for grabs. There isn’t really a wrong direction to go – his essays, his fiction, and his poetry all offer pithy diamonds of wisdom and joy. Berry has been gently but firmly pushing against the status quo for decades. Industrialization, education, politics – in all those areas where civilized debate is essentially nonexistent at the moment, he speaks like a breath of fresh air in a...

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

Francis Nicholson is generally regarded as the most important figure in early American planemaking. He was the first documented planemaker in the Colonies, he was inventive and original, and he appears to have been highly prolific: An astonishingly large number of his planes survive. But I believe it’s time for a reconsideration of Chelor’s significance. An exhaustive survey by Ingraham found that over three quarters of the surviving planes with Francis’s mark were made after he moved to Wrentham. Further, the number of surviving planes with Chelor’s mark actually exceeds the number of Francis’s planes with the Wrentham stamp. Taken together, these facts suggest that Chelor may have been responsible for an explosion of productivity in Nicholson’s shop during the...

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

You’re all fired up with a brilliant argument bursting from your brain. You have your sources arranged on the table, a rough outline composed, and a fully charged laptop glowing before you with a fresh document opened and ready. The world can’t help but await the inevitable gathering of words, phrases, and paragraphs into a cohesive, breathtaking whole: A Great Literary Work. Or a half-decent blog post about woodworking. Whatever. Your fingertips descend into position, finding those satisfying indicator nibs on F and J, and await the transfer of thought to the blurred kinetic motion of typing. Concept into reality. Only, there is a pause. A long pause. Your hands go slack. You’re stuck. Writer’s block.   Every good writer...

From the M&T Daily Dispatch