Some people see the glass half full.Others see it half empty.I see a glass that's twice as bigas it needs to be.--- George Carlin
Dorothy Parker died alone in a hotel room in 1967 with almost nothing left. No family. No career. No money. When her will was read, everyone was stunned. She had left her entire estate to Martin Luther King Jr.
To understand why, you have to go back to when she was eight years old.
She was standing at a window during a blizzard, watching men dig through the snow with bare, purple hands. Their feet were wrapped in burlap rags because they had no boots.
Behind her, her wealthy aunt smiled and said: "Isn't it wonderful? All those men have work."
Dorothy said nothing. But she never forgot.
Some people had to suffer so others could feel generous about it. That realization became the engine of her entire life.By thirty, she was one of the most celebrated writers in America.The sharpest voice at New York's legendary Algonquin Round Table. A poetry bestseller. Short stories in The New Yorker. Two Academy Award nominations.Hollywood paid her a fortune.Then in 1936, she sat with journalists and refugees who had escaped Nazi Germany. They described what they had seen — the arrests, the disappearances, the systematic violence.
“This is only the beginning," one told her. “Another war is coming."
Parker cancelled her social calendarand got to work.
Within months she helped co-found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, uniting thousands of actors, writers, and directors with one goal: warn America before it was too late.
Hollywood didn't want to hear it.
Studio executives dismissed her. When she described Nazi atrocities at meetings, some suggested she must be drinking. A woman this emotional, this insistent — surely she was being hysterical.
She kept speaking anyway.
In 1937 she boarded a ship to Spain, where fascist forces backed by Hitler and Mussolini were crushing a democratic republic while the world looked away. She walked through bombed villages. Sat in refugee camps. Broadcast on Madrid Radio. Sent dispatches from the rubble pleading for the world to pay attention.
When she came home she wrote: "I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be."
The woman whose entire reputation was built on devastating wit had found the one subjectshe couldn't joke about.
The FBI opened a file on her.Then another. Then another.By the time they were done: over a thousand pages documenting her meetings, her donations, her speeches, the names of everyone she'd spoken to. The government was carefully recording the woman who had tried to warn it about fascism.
After Pearl Harbor finally brought America into the war she'd predicted for five years, Parker applied for a passport to cover the conflict as a journalist.She was refused. The government now considered her a security risk.The blacklist arrived in 1950.Her name appeared in Red Channels — a publication listing suspected Communists in entertainment. No trial. No evidence. No opportunity to respond.
Just her name on a page.The woman who co-wrote A Star Is Born, who collaborated with Hitchcock, who had been twice nominated for the Academy Award — was suddenly unemployable.The very studio heads who had ignored her warnings about Hitler now used those same warnings as proof she was dangerous.She had been right. That was her crime.
For the next seventeen years, Dorothy Parker lived quietly in a hotel room in New York. Career finished. Money gone.The brilliant circle of friends from the Algonquin days scattered or dead.She wrote when she could. She drank more than she should.On June 7, 1967, she died alone in her room at the Hotel Volney. She was 73.Then her will was read.She had left her entire estate to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Not to a literary foundation. Not to a university. Not to a theatre that would put her name on a wall.To the leader of the Civil Rights Movement.Because Dorothy Parker had understood something for sixty years that took the rest of the world much longer to grasp.The men with purple hands in the blizzard. The refugees in the Spanish camps. The Black Americans marching in the streets.It was one fight, wearing different faces.
Less than a year after her death, Dr. King was assassinated. Under the terms of her will, her estate passed directly to the NAACP.
In 2026, the NAACP still receives royalties from Dorothy Parker's work.
Every time someone reads her poetry, buys her short stories, or watches a film she wrote — the money flows to the organization fighting for civil rights.
A woman who died nearly sixty years ago, dismissed as hysterical and un-American, is still funding justice from the grave.She was right too early, again and again and again.The world punished her for it every single time.She kept being right anyway.
And even now — she's still fighting.
“At the same meeting of the roth July letters were read from Mrs. E. Maude Everitt and Mr. R. Hood Wright relative to the registration by Mr. Wood Wright of a dog. a cross between a Borzoi and a Deerhound.
“Mrs. Everittcomplained that as Secretary to the Borzoi Club, and a prominent breeder and exhibitor of Deer- hounds, Mr. Hood Wright ought, as a matter of duty, to use every endeavour to keep up purity of breed.
“Mr. Hood Wright, in his reply, asserted that, in his opinion, it was absolutely necessary to introduce fresh blood into the particular breed, asDeerhound were rapidly becoming so inbred that a large proportion of the pups died at birth, being too weak to suck, were difficult to rear, and when reared even the best seem especially liable to various diseases, and this entirely owing to the practice of inbreeding.
“The question having been fully discussed, the Committee decided that it cannot be permitted to register a cross-bred dog as belonging to a breed already recognised in the Kennel Club's classification of breeds.”
At about dawn, I called one of my neighbors and said “Your cows have eaten my lettuce, they’re shitting on my porch, and I’m going to kill every one of the bastards if you don’t get them out of here in 10 minutes.”At that point in my killing rage, I was advised that the laws of Colorado make it mandatory for a landowner to fence his land against the entrance of cattle—rather than requiring the owner of the cattle to fence them in.In other words, the burden is on the afflicted … at which point I said that I really wanted the cows in my yard, because it gave me an opportunity to practice random high-speed patterns on my motorcycle—running the cows hither and yon across the landscape, burning off valuable pounds of market meat in the process, and chasing the bastards till they foam at the mouth and fall in their tracks. (The bulls are tricky; they don’t always run, and when they charge you have to be very fast and cool with the gear-changes—or they’ll crush you.)— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 1968
▪️Hole In One Golf Insurance: In Japan, golfers who hit a hole-in-one are expected to throw parties “comparable to a small wedding,” including live music, food, drinks, and commemorative tree plantings. In response, a hole-in-one insurance industry has been created, with approximately 30% of all Japanese golfers shelling out $50-$70 a year to insure themselves against up to $3,500 in hole-in-one party expenses.▪️Foreign Student Enrollment Insurance:The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has paid over $424,000 a year to insure itself against a significant drop in tuition revenue from Chinese students. The university’s three-year contract with an insurance broker provides coverage of up to $60 million in lost revenue should there be a tightening of exit or entry visas.▪️In the news at the moment is the high and rising cost of operating oil tankers in war zones, whether that’s Russian ships in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic, or American and European ships in the Straits of Hormuz or Bab al-Mandab. No ship owner will sail without insurance, and just two or three ships sunk or on fire in a broadly-defined war zone has a ripple effect across the globe.
“Bully dog owners have been left in a panic over the future of their pets after a leading charity announced it is pulling the Government-mandated insurance.“The Dogs Trust was the only organisation willing to provide the type of insurance needed by XL Bully owners, but from July it will no longer be available.This does not mean the dogs are set to be totally banned as ministers have pledged to find an alternative insurance solution.“But owners and animal rescue centres fear the uncertainty will mean some dogs are dumped or destroyed in the “panic” over the looming insurance void.“‘Owners feel the rug has been pulled out from under us,’ one said.“Conservative ministers banned the sale and breeding of XL Bullies in February 2024. But they allowed the dogs to be kept so long as owners met a set of strict requirements.“The controversial breed had been ‘disproportionally involved’ in a sharp rise in fatal dog attacks leading up to the ban, according to Government statistics.“More than 55,000 XL Bully dog owners across the UK got a legal exemption before the ban came into force in February 2024.“Their pets must be microchipped, neutered, kept on a lead and muzzled when in public. Owners must also have third-party liability insurance, which costs £25 a year with the Dogs Trust.“Decision to pull insurance ‘not taken lightly’“The charity said it had never intended to act as an insurer in the long-term, explaining that the role was “leading to a significant increase in our costs”.“It said it was ‘incredibly disappointed’ to have made the ‘difficult decision’, adding: ‘It is not one we have taken lightly’.
A sly fox slipped on to a cargo ship and travelled from Southampton to New York, according to officials at Bronx Zoo.The zoo, which is looking after the animal, said it appears healthy after early examinations.It is unclear how the male red fox boarded the ship, which had been transporting cars, to make the 3,400 mile journey to the east coast of the US.It left Southampton, Hampshire, on 4 February, and the vessel docked at the Port of New York and New Jersey on 18 February.Diane J Sabatino, executive assistant commissioner at the US Customs and Border Protection Department, wrote on X that port officers had found the ‘sly stowaway’, and agriculture specialists had coordinated with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service and New Jersey Fish and Wildlife to find the fox a new home at Bronx ZooOfficials brought the fox to the zoo the next day. He is estimated to be two years old and weighs 5kg (11lbs).Keith Lovett, the zoo’s director of animal programmes, said: ‘He seems to be settling in well. It’s gone through a lot.’A long-term home for the mammal will be found after he undergoes additional health checks.The omnivore has a diet of produce, proteins and some biscuit-like items at the zoo’s veterinary centre.The species, formally named Vulpes vulpes, is widespread in Europe, Asia, North America and parts of Africa.
“The most perfect thing I have ever seen just happened on the replacement train bus service between Newport and Cwmbran: White man sat in front of a mother and her son. Mother was wearing a niqab. After about 5 minutes of the mother talking to her son in another language the man, for whatever reason, feels the need to tell the woman ‘When you're in the UK you should really be speaking English.’ At which point, an old woman in front of him turns around and says, ‘She's in Wales, and she’s speaking Welsh.’”
“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now, they are going to reap the whirlwind.”
Trump, Rubio, Hegseth, and Miller just killed the father, mother, and sister of the new Supreme Leader of Iran.
I’m not psychic, but I understand how balls and bombs bounce.
"I have a theory that the moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. I have tried this experiment a thousand times and I have never been disappointed. The more I look at a thing, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I want to see. It is like peeling an onion. There is always another layer, and another, and another. And each layer is more beautiful than the last.“This is the way I look at the world. I don't see it as a collection of objects, but as a vast and mysterious organism. I see the beauty in the smallest things, and I find wonder in the most ordinary events. I am always looking for the hidden meaning, the secret message. I am always trying to understand the mystery of life.“I know that I will never understand everything, but that doesn't stop me from trying. I am content to live in the mystery, to be surrounded by the unknown. I am content to be a seeker, a pilgrim, a traveler on the road to nowhere. -- Henry Miller, Black Spring
This land is your land, this land is my landFrom California to the New York island,From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters; This land was made for you and me.As I was walking that ribbon of highwayI saw above me that endless skyway;I saw below me that golden valley;This land was made for you and me.I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footstepsTo the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;And all around me a voice was sounding;This land was made for you and me.When the sun came shining, and I was strolling, And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling, As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting: This land was made for you and me.As I went walking I saw a sign there,And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."But on the other side it didn't say nothing.That side was made for you and me.In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,By the relief office I seen my people;As they stood there hungry, I stood there askingIs this land made for you and me?Nobody living can ever stop me,As I go walking that freedom highway;Nobody living can ever make me turn backThis land was made for you and me.
