Jim is observing the Labor Day holiday weekend, the punctuation mark of the summer before the official start of the school year. His current Kindle reading is Walter Issacson's biography of Benjamin Franklin, that most startlingly modern of Founding Fathers. Isaacson's portrait of Franklin is rendered with a journalistic flair that nevertheless shows real scrupulousness in his scholarship.
Beginning next week, two new sets of posts on the self-made man -- one on the relationship between God and the self-made man, and the other on the archetype of the yeoman farmer -- will begin running on this site. Until then, best to all for a felicitous final stretch of leisure.
