Nov. 6, 2009 Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes) Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man Nov. 5, 2009 The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes) Nov. 4, 2009 Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered? JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes) Nov. 3, 2009 Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes) Nov. 2, 2009 Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes) Oct. 30, 2009 Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America Oct. 29, 2009 Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity? JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes) Oct. 28, 2009 Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes) Oct. 27, 2009 Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes) Oct. 26, 2009 The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes) Oct. 23, 2009 Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure? JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes) Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us Oct. 22, 2009 Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes) Oct. 21, 2009 Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies' JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes) Oct. 20, 2009 Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes) Oct. 19, 2009 The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q. Is nepotism kosher? JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes) Oct. 16, 2009 Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes) Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost Oct. 15, 2009 Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process' JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes) Oct. 29, 2003 Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review March 8, 2006 / 8 Adar, 5766 Kindly write on only one side of the paper By Paul Johnson http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | A scare article in the U.K. paper, Guardian, says that handwriting will soon disappear. Not so. In fact, in the last two years I have reverted to doing all my writing by hand as they no longer make the machines I like, and my eyes object to staring at a screen. My assistant, the angelic Mary, puts my scribbles on computer or disk. Being left-handed, I have to hold my pen in a funny way, as writing from left to right is unnatural to sinistrals. I envy the Ancient Egyptians, who carved their hieroglyphs either way and wrote hieratic (the written version) from right to left. When I was writing my history of Ancient Egypt, my favourite book was Egyptian Grammar by Alan Gardiner, from which I learned hieroglyphs, and a little hieratic (the commercial cursive, demotic, was much too difficult). Gardiner not only knew more about these scripts than anyone who has ever lived, he also wrote a beautiful hieroglyphic hand. What kind of pen he used I do not know, as he died in 1963 and I never met him to ask. The old scribes of Memphis had to hold their instruments three inches from the end and were never allowed to rest the heel of their hand on the papyrus. Hard work, eh? I sometimes use my Egyptian lore for birthday cards. I paint the limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti (putting in the missing eye) and have her speaking a balloon-message: 'Happy Birthday!' Then I put a bit underneath in hieroglyphics, using Gardiner's Grammar. Writing a book by hand is more fun than using a computer, and perhaps quicker in my case. I was taught copybook writing by a gifted Dominican nun who loved doing illuminated manuscripts in coloured inks and got me to develop a clear and rapid script. ('Do it as if you were writing a letter to Jesus.') If I were younger, I would be tempted to take up writing with a quill on parchment. Quills are very subtle and versatile tools with a natural affinity for this kind of 'support', to use the technical term. You can't get ink to flow in a steady stream (as in a modern pen). You must skillfully direct a puddle of ink on to the surface, manipulating its flow to get tiny variations in form. You can cut the nib wide or narrow and make it as sharp or as blunt as you please — you can also vary the angle of the nib-tip, the way you hold the quill in the hand, and the angle of the surface. All these delightful variables make for complexity and explain the pleasure which a major artist like Matthew Paris got from writing his manuscripts in the 13th century. And not only professionals. It is clear to me that Michelangelo, writing in the beautiful italic which Renaissance scholars had developed from the old Carolingian minuscule, loved writing. So did Queen Elizabeth, though she used a different version of the script. Some of her giant signatures, dotted about state papers, are real works of art. She was a great mistress of the personal footnote, too, added to formal letters penned by her secretary, Robert Beale. And she was up to the deadly tricks of Tudor England. As child and girl she had lived in the shadow of the Tower axe, then at its busiest. If she had to write a letter which might be used in evidence, and ended it halfway down the page, she would fill it with bold, vertical strokes, to prevent an intercepting enemy putting in treasonable matter in an imitation of her hand. Looking at such a page, you can almost feel the anxious heartbeats in the lines. Handwriting is a mirror of the emotions, and in Chinese calligraphy the way the brush is used to convey thought-forms and even philosophical principles is a miracle of skill. We cannot aspire to such subtlety in the West. All the same, a lot can be learned about the state of mind of the writer by a careful scrutiny of a holograph. If I have the chance to pop into the Bibliothèque Nationale, I like to ponder over the manuscripts and proofs of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, one of the most painfully corrected texts in all literature. How the big, heavy, mustachioed Norman sweated over that marvelous story! He knew he was writing a masterpiece but, mon dieu! he wanted to get it exactly right down to the last sordid syllable. Another manuscript which radiates the mind of the author is Dickens's A Christmas Carol. The original is in the Morgan Library, New York, and after I gave a course of public lectures there on American history they presented me with a photocopied text of it, which I love to study. There are a plentiful number of crossings-out on every page, but what emerges is the sheer joy of what Dickens called 'my creative frenzy', experienced when he had hit on a superb story-idea. The opening page, one of the best passages he ever wrote, positively wriggles with pleasure. Only handwriting can convey such instances of what I call 'writer's orgasm'. I enjoy looking at W.M. Thackeray's manuscripts too, with their neat little handwriting, and dotted with his funny drawings. One's pleasure is heightened by the knowledge that the writer was an enormous man, well described as 'looking like a gigantic baby', crouched over his tiny traveling-desk and periodically emitting groans prompted by hangovers, dyspepsia from last night's seven-course dinner etc. With Jane Austen it is not the writing so much as the spelling mistakes which move me — 'Surry is the garden of England,' remarks Mrs Elton, or 'Fanny watered her geraniums'. Another form of handwritten message which haunts me is the terse military order, given by an old-style general, usually in pencil, during a battle. The brief, ambiguous and stupidly worded order from Lord Raglan which led to the charge of the Light Brigade is an outstanding case. One has to imagine a background of often dense smoke, the smell of cordite (and blood) and the screams of the wounded, for commanding generals were well within cannon shot, and often wrote such notes in peril of their lives. Wellington's were of a high order, clear like his mind, tersely to the point. He kept a pad of them in his waistcoat pocket, of reusable material which could be scrubbed clean. Some can be seen at Apsley House. Wellington flicked off thousands of short holograph letters, even when he was Prime Minister, answering all degrees of correspondents, some of them nonentities like artists, writers etc., nearly always by return of messenger. Think of that today! (Though I must admit I have scores from Tony Blair, all entirely in his own hand — good manners.) There survives a letter from Lord Palmerston, written in his clear, elegant hand, complaining of the atrocious handwriting of the Foreign Office clerks, usually badly educated louts from good families who had got their jobs by 'interest'. He compared it to 'Iron Railings leaning out of the perpendicular' and described letters sloping backwards 'like the raking masts of an American schooner'. Reading stuff by one of them was 'like running Penknives into one's eyes'. Ambassadors and consuls got stick, too, especially for using poor-quality ink. Thus: 'Send Mr Pakenham back one of these invisible ink dispatches & say that I hope I shall not again have to observe upon such a neglect of standing instructions.' Today, all things considered, the handwriting of the great and famous is not as bad as you'd expect. President Bush sent me a fan letter the other day: a neat piece of explosive penmanship. And Princess Diana, poor soul, wrote a beautiful hand; obviously taught by an old-fashioned governess. What I cannot find is a really good pen. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. BUY THE BOOK Click HERE to purchase it at a discount. (Sales help fund JWR.). Eminent British historian and author Paul Johnson's latest book is "American Presidents Eminent Lives Boxed Set: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant". Comment by clicking here. Previously: 02/28/06:Creators versus critics 02/21/06: The Rhino Principle © 2006, Paul Johnson

Arnold Ahlert  Mitch Albom  Michael Barone   Dave Barry  Tony Blankley  Andy Borowitz  David Broder  Stratfor Briefing  Mona Charen  Linda Chavez  Ann Coulter  Greg Crosby  Larry Elder  Suzanne Fields  John Fund  Frank J. Gaffney  Lloyd Garver  Jonah Goldberg  Julia Gorin  Jonathan Gurwitz  Paul Greenberg  Lewis Grossberger  Victor Davis Hanson  Betsy Hart  Nat Hentoff  David Horowitz  Laura Ingraham  Cheri Jacobus Jeff Jacoby  Paul Johnson  Jack Kelly  Ed Koch  Ch. Krauthammer  Michael Ledeen  John Leo  David Limbaugh  Kathryn Lopez  Rich Lowry  Michelle Malkin  Jackie Mason  Dick Morris  Bill O'Reilly  Jim Mullen  Clarence Page  Kathleen Parker  Dennis Prager  Wesley Pruden  Tom Purcell  Jonathan Rauch  Celia Rivenbark  Robert Robb  Cokie & Steve Roberts  Pat Sajak  Debra J. Saunders  Culture Shlock  Roger Simon  Michael Smerconish  Thomas Sowell  Mark Steyn  John Stossel  Cal Thomas  Bob Tyrrell  Diana West  Dave Weinbaum  George Will  Walter Williams  Byron York  Mort Zuckerman  Robert Arial  Chuck Asay  Baloo  Chip Bok  Dry Bones   Lisa Benson  John Branch  Gary Brookins  John Cole  J. D. Crowe  John Deering  Brian Duffy  Everything's Relative  Mallard Fillmore  Jake Fuller  Bob Gorrel  Joe Heller  David Hitch  Jerry Holber  Steve Kelley  Jeff Koterba  Dick Locher  Chan Lowe  Ranan R. Lurie  Jimmy Margulies  Rick McKee  Michael Ramirez  Kevin Siers  Jeff Stahler  Ed Stein  Danna Summers  John Trever  Gary Varvel  Kirk Walters  How 2  Lori Borgman  The Savvy Consumer  Elder matters  Fixit  Dr. Peter Gott  GET A JOB! by Marty Nemko  Richard Lederer  Tech Maven  Every Monday Matters  Nutrition Myths  Bookmark These  Bruce Williams  How Stuff Works