Author: SeniorWomenWeb

Skydivers Don’t Need Parachutes, Scientists Don’t Actually Find: Be wary of parachute journalism. And also parachute research.

By Chloe Reichel, Harvard Kennedy School, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy

Be wary of parachute journalism. And also parachute research.

A new study in the British Medical Journal serves as an example for all journalists who swoop in and out of academic papers without much care.

The paper, titled “Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma When Jumping from Aircraft: Randomized Controlled Trial,” finds that the safety devices do not significantly reduce the likelihood of death or major injury for people jumping from an aircraft as compared with the control group, equipped only with empty backpacks.

It has all the makings of a click-worthy headline: SKYDIVERS DON’T NEED PARACHUTES, SCIENTISTS FIND. Until you actually read the paper.

When you take the time to read beyond the abstract, you learn that all participants were jumping from a stationary, grounded airplane. The participants “could have been at lower risk of death or major trauma because they jumped from an average altitude of 0.6 m (standard deviation 0.1) on aircraft moving at an average of 0 km/h (standard deviation 0),” the authors write. “Clinicians will need to consider this information when extrapolating to their own settings of parachute use.”

(Study participant jumping from aircraft with empty backpack. Figure reprinted from paper with permission from Robert Yeh)

Led by Harvard Medical School professor Robert Yeh, the study was published as part of the British Medical Journal’s annual Christmas edition, which highlights lighthearted and satirical research. The study authors consider the research a tongue-in-cheek illustration of an important point about interpreting results of medical research. “The PARACHUTE trial satirically highlights some of the limitations of randomized controlled trials,” they write.

“Our intended audience was for clinicians, medical personnel, people who conduct research,” Yeh said in a phone call with Journalist’s Resource. He was surprised and gratified to find the research resonated with journalists, too.

“It’s a parable to talk about the dangers of potentially misinterpreting research findings,” Yeh said of the research. “I think it’s relevant to any consumers of research, particularly to journalists in a time crunch.”

Consider it a strain of ‘parachute journalism’ — a practice news outlets are often criticized for, in which a reporter travels to an unfamiliar place to cover a single story without any prior knowledge of the area, and then leaves. This study shows why it’s important to avoid parachute journalism when reporting about research (including, but not limited to, work on the aerial devices themselves).

The authors advise thoroughness when evaluating scholarship. Read the study (the whole thing!) with an analytical eye: “Interpretation requires a complete and critical appraisal of the study,” they write.

Beyond the general critique of careless interpretations of seemingly sexy study findings, the authors make a subtler point about clinical trials. They screened 92 potential participants for the study, but only 23 were eligible and willing to participate. The authors suggest that this resembles common practice in clinical trials, where a small fraction of the patients screened is included. They add that prior research shows participants who might stand to gain the most from the experimental treatment often are less likely to be included in clinical trials.

To extend the analogy, if you’re testing the medical equivalent of a parachute on the patient equivalent of someone jumping two feet from an airplane, you’re unlikely to learn whether or not the treatment actually works.

Despite these critiques of randomized clinical trials, the authors maintain that they “remain the gold standard for the evaluation of most new treatments.”

“Our message was to understand trials and research in context, in the clinical environment in which research is conducted,” Yeh said.

To this end, the authors suggest careful interpretation of published results and better efforts to include patients who most need the treatment in clinical trials.

In the interest of preventing misleading headlines and inaccurate news stories, Journalist’s Resource has several tip sheets to help reporters understand and interpret a study’s findings.

In “10 Things We Wish We’d Known Earlier About Research: Tips from Journalist’s Resource,” Denise-Marie Ordway cautions against focusing too much on a paper’s abstract.

“Many people think of the abstract as a summary of the most compelling findings. Oftentimes, this is not the case,” she writes. “The two best places to find information about key findings are 1) the ‘results’ section, which typically is located in the middle of a research article and is where authors explain what they have learned and provide their statistical analyses and 2) the ‘discussion’ or ‘conclusions’ section, which is usually located at the end of the paper and offers a summary of findings as well as a discussion of the real-world implications of the author’s work.”

Another tip from Ordway on discerning good research from bad: Ask yourself, “Can you follow the methodology?” If you can’t understand how the study was conducted, you can’t check the quality of the work, which could lead to breathless coverage of shoddy research.

If you don’t understand a study’s methodology, ask an expert source for help. “The onus shouldn’t fall completely on journalists to do statistical analyses or say whether they’re correct,” said Christie Aschwanden, FiveThirtyEight’s lead writer for science, in an interview with Journalist’s Resource.

And don’t try jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, unless it’s firmly on the ground.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

January 8, 2019
Stateline: Some Drug Users in Western US Seek Out Deadly Fentanyl. Here’s Why.

Amber Sheldon, right, greets a frequent client at the harm reduction program at Glide in San Francisco. The program offers clean syringes, drug test strips and other supplies to frequent drug users. Sheldon and others in the city’s harm reduction community help drug users learn how to protect themselves and others from fatal overdoses. The Pew Charitable Trusts

By: Christine Vestal, Stateline, Pew Trusts

Ever since the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl started showing up in the US illicit drug supply eight years ago, experts have surmised that drug traffickers were using the inexpensive white powder to boost the potency of heroin, sometimes adding too much and inadvertently killing their customers.

In a series of interviews with heroin users in Rhode Island in 2017, Brown University researchers reported that users “described fentanyl as unpleasant, potentially deadly, and to be avoided.” They concluded that demand for the deadly contaminant was low and that its presence in the drug supply was “generating user interest in effective risk mitigation strategies, including treatment.”

But here in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin district, where fentanyl was only rarely seen until last year, drug users tell a starkly different story. For many of them, fentanyl is a high-value drug that, if used carefully, can prevent dope sickness and deliver a strong high for a fraction of the price of heroin.

More than half of drug users here purposely seek fentanyl, despite its dangers, according to harm reduction workers who talk to hundreds of drug users every day. Fifty times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine, the synthetic opioid was rarely detected in US illicit drug markets or in the bodies of fatal overdose victims just a decade ago. Now it has become the biggest killer in the nation’s raging drug overdose epidemic.

To be sure, many other drug-using San Franciscans say they try to avoid the deadly white powder, and some reported overdosing after unwittingly consuming a wide variety of fentanyl-laced drugs, including methamphetamines, cocaine and counterfeit Xanax and Vicodin pills.

Still, an increasing number of drug users here say they are opting for fentanyl when it’s available, a trend not reported elsewhere in the United States. And despite its powerful potency, fentanyl isn’t killing nearly as many people here as it is on the East Coast and in Appalachia.

In San Francisco, the consumer preference for fentanyl and relatively low death rate likely stem in large part from the way the drug is marketed by dealers, said Phillip Coffin, director of substance use research at the city’s public health department.

Fentanyl that is sold here is clearly labeled. It’s rarely disguised as heroin, as it is on the East Coast and in Appalachia. As a result, users who buy fentanyl know what they’re getting and, in most cases, take the necessary precautions, Coffin said. It’s still a much more dangerous drug than heroin, which is typically sold as black tar in California and tends to be inconsistent in potency and quality, he added.

Another reason for San Francisco’s relatively low death rate from fentanyl is the city’s entrenched and well-funded harm reduction community, Coffin said. After the first fentanyl outbreak here in 2015, public health and harm reduction groups joined forces to sharply increase the amount of Narcan distributed to all drug users and intensify outreach programs.

January 7, 2019
Jo Freeman: With the 116th Congress the Party Gap has Become a Party Chasm

by Jo Freeman

On January 3rd 132 women took the oath of office to be a Member of Congress. Included in this number are 25 Senators, 102 Representatives and 5 delegates. This is the largest number of women who have ever served in Congress at one time.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat, California

While many have greatly lauded this great leap upward over the 112 women who were M.C.s during 115th Congress, few have noted that this gain was almost entirely among Democrats. Of the 36 women elected to the House for the first time, only one is a Republican. Of the 3 new Senators, only one is a Republican.

Since two Democratic women Senators were defeated for re-election, the number of Democratic women stayed at 17, while the number of Republican women went from 6 to 8 in the Senate. In the House Democratic women increased their presence from 64 to 91, while Republican women lost seats, going from 25 to 16.

Women are now 25 percent of both houses of Congress, but not of both parties. Women are over one-third of the Democratic Caucus in both houses (36% and 39%), 15 percent of Republicans in the Senate, and only 8 percent of Republicans in the House.

This is also true in the state legislatures. Excluding Nebraska, which has a non-partisan, unicameral legislature, women are entering 2019 as 31.2 percent of Democrats and 17.2 percent of Republicans in the state legislatures.

In the last thirty years, a party gap has developed among elected officials because the Democrats run and elect more women than do the Republicans at every level. The party gap is not the same as the gender gap — the fact that in most elections a higher percentage of women vote for the Democrats than do men — but it is just as important.

Both have grown larger, but the party gap is now a chasm.

January 3, 2019
Iberia: Reminders that Power Can Vanish and What Turns Out to Be Important is How You Can Live Today

By Sonya Zalubowski*

After 14 days of touring the Iberian peninsula, it occurs to me that I might want one day to return in another lifetime as the valued black pig, the “pata negra.” Only I’d designate it “jubilada,” for the Spanish word “retired,” hopefully making it safe from slaughter.

The Alcazar in Segovia, Spain; Roger Wallstadt, Wikipedia

That idea may have only started off as a joke I made to my fellow travelers but I came to realize during my journey to the backroad inns of Portugal and southern Spain that the pig and the way it is treated is emblematic of what these Iberian folk value. They take the small pleasures in life seriously, such as the nutty taste of a well-satisfied pig that has been allowed to roam freely as it munches itself into a fatty richness.

An attitude replicated in the way I saw Iberians approach their days. Work, yes, but time also for morning coffee with friends and then afternoon siestas in a day that stretches well into the late night, try dinner at 10 p.m. The entire day is used, not just focused on work.

It also occurred to me that perhaps that laid-back approach owes something to the area’s rich history. The people are surrounded by remnants of a succession of cultures ranging all the way back to prehistoric to Roman, Visigoth and Moorish, to the kings and queens whose rule dominated Europe as they sent out Portuguese and Spanish explorers, to 20th century despots and finally present day governments.   All reminders that power can vanish and what turns out to be important is how you can live today.

The “pata negra,” whose name reflects their black hooves, thrive in an area that stretches from eastern Portugal for thousands of acres of rolling pastureland dotted by oak trees into southwest Spain’s Extremadura and Andalucia regions.   Most of it is devoted to raising happy pigs and cattle.

The area was surprisingly empty of humans, given the peninsula’s long history. The pigs, believed to be a cross between a wild boar and animals first brought to the area by the Phoenicians, are prized for their rich marbling, a function of that seasonal diet of fat acorns. Some of them three times the size of any acorn I’d ever seen.

Juan Pedro Alvarez Vacas, the energetic and enthusiastic Spanish guide on my Overseas Adventure Travel** trip, said that food and freedom for the animals were the main reasons Spain had such good beef and pork.

In every restaurant, we found evidence of the pork harvest, the prized leg of the “Pata Negra,” hanging above the bar from its black hoof as it air cured. A tiny plastic cup was attached at the bottom to catch any dripping fat during the process which can take years.   The Iberian ham is thinly sliced on a special apparatus, resulting in wafer-thin portions that highlight the reddish color and fat marbling.

Our group was first introduced to the famous specialty — I saw legs of Iberian jamon costing over 500 dollars — at a midmorning breakfast. Slices of bread were topped with olive oil, followed by pureed tomatoes and the ham. I never ate anything so tasty in my life, the combination of the intensely nutty flavor reminiscent of acorns along with the melt in your mouth texture.

Further dipping was allowed in olive oil dribbled into saucers.   Juan Pedro said the Spanish require there always be a source for dipping. At one point, he even led us to a restaurant that featured freshly deep-fried churros which we dipped into cups of warm thick chocolate.

Bulls, too, enjoy pampered existences.   We visited the ranch owned by matador Rafael Tejada outside Ronda, where he breeds fighters for the ring. Only the bulls he deems best suited get to lead the privileged life on his ranch, allowed much like Ferdinand the bull to roam the oak tree studded acreage where black pigs also play.   Until the day they must show up in the bullring. A minute number of bulls win pardons, we learned, if they show noble courage during the fight. One such bull already had a grandson who had also won a pardon.

We asked Tejada, now 45, what were his thoughts when he stepped into the ring. He joked, “What am I doing here?” But, he said, he had no plans to retire soon. None of the bulls raised on his ranch is used in his own bullfights.

The beef I enjoyed during the trip, presumably failed fighters, was succulent, tender and juicy. Unlike any I’d had before. I had an aversion to US beef but here I ate it all.

January 2, 2019
A New Lawsuit and Partial Shutdown: Alleging that the Federal Government is Violating the Law by Requiring Some Federal Employees to Work Without Pay

AFGE workers protesting December 2018 government shutdown

— Editor’s Note: Two points about this lawsuit are it doesn’t force an injunction and doesn’t protect private contractors.

Today, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and Kalijarvi, Chuzi, Newman & Fitch (KCNF DC) sued the federal government on behalf of AFGE members and federal employees being forced to work without pay.  The lawsuit alleges that the federal government is violating the law by requiring some federal employees to work without pay during a shutdown. These employees perform a variety of dangerous roles: correctional officers, Border Patrol and ICE agents, transportation security officers, and other employees who are labeled as “essential”.

“Our members put their lives on the line to keep our country safe,” said J. David Cox Sr., national president, *American Federation of Government Employees, “requiring them to work without pay is nothing short of inhumane. Positions that are considered ‘essential’ during a government shutdown are some of the most dangerous jobs in the federal government. They are frontline public safety positions, including many in law enforcement, among other critical roles. A substantial number of those working without pay are military veterans. Our nation’s heroes, AFGE members and their families deserve the decency of knowing when their next paycheck is coming and that they will be paid for their work. Our intent is to force the government and the administration to make all federal employees whole.”

“The harm to federal employees began at the first moment of the shutdown. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees are working under sometimes dangerous conditions, including the plaintiffs who were forced to work overtime without pay,” said Heidi Burakiewicz, partner at KCNF DC.  “Approximately 420,000 federal employees are continuing to work, but don’t know when they will get their next paychecks. This is not an acceptable way for any employer, let alone the U.S. government, to treat its employees. These employees still need to pay childcare expenses, buy gas, and incur other expenses to go to work every day and yet, they are not getting paid. It is a blatant violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.”

The lawsuit is brought on behalf of all “essential” federal employees, those who are required to work without pay during the shutdown. The Bureau of Prisons (BOP), and the high-security penitentiaries where the named plaintiffs work, USP Hazelton and USP Canaan, are egregiously understaffed, often requiring employees to work large amounts of overtime in some of the most dangerous prisons in the country. USP Hazelton has been the site of three inmate murders in less than seven months. The shutdown and conditions under which the federal government is requiring these employees and others to work puts lives at risk and endangers our communities.

After the 2013 shutdown, approximately 25,000 essential federal employees, represented by KCNF DC, sued the government, arguing that the Fair Labor Standards Act requires that all employees, including federal employees, be paid on time for their services. In 2014, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims agreed and, in 2017, the court held further that the employees were entitled to twice their back pay because of the violation. However, even while the government is calculating the damages to those approximately 25,000 employees, the Office of Personnel Management has not required that essential federal employees be paid on time during the current shutdown.

Read the full complaint

*The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is the largest federal employee union, representing 700,000 workers in the federal government and the government of the District of Columbia.  For the latest AFGE news and information, visit the AFGE Media Center.

January 1, 2019
What Does Your House Really Cost and Can You Afford It In Retirement?

By HTG Investment Advisors*

Many articles focus on the question of housing affordability for young people starting out, but few We are equally sure that very few of our clients know what their houses really cost them in total.

Let’s acknowledge from the start that our houses cost more than we are willing to admit. For some, it may be perfectly understandable to stay put, but for others, it can be financially dangerous. It’s best to see the ‘writing on the wall’ before the wall needs replacing.

This admission has real implications for financial planning because our success in making our assets last our lifetimes is heavily influenced by our spending, and if housing represents a significant component, we need to get it right.

We’ve created a spreadsheet to help you calculate and anticipate what your home costs. You can access the spreadsheet here.

We begin with the mortgage, insurance, and taxes, well-known and easy to identify costs.

Next, we list regular maintenance which consists of lawn and pool upkeep. Again, pretty easy to figure.

The next category is ‘irregular, regular maintenance’. These are things that happen on a regular basis, perhaps every year or two or three, but not on any set schedule. Your lawnmower breaks down, a tree needs to be trimmed, a drain is clogged, and a room needs to be painted.

The next category is called ‘major maintenance’ and these are bigger ticket items that happen even less often, but need to be planned for. Here’s where the costs can add up. A new roof, painting the exterior, re-grading your driveway, improving your drainage, modifying for accessible features, or replacing a major system (AC/furnace, well pump) are larger, more infrequent items.

To help you remember and budget for these items, the spreadsheet has an exhaustive list. Input what you think you spend and then spread the cost over 1 to 20 years to create an annual budget.

We recommend that our clients budget 1% to 2% of the fair market value (FMV) of their home towards regular and long-term maintenance. The exact percentage depends on the age of their home and how much of the value relates to the land versus the building. We prefer that they prepare a detailed budget, but at a minimum, they need to budget 1% to 2%. The spreadsheet allows you to see if your budget meets that guideline.

Renovations

If there’s one thing that homeowners overlook, it’s the fact that if our houses are to retain their value, they need to be refreshed periodically. Yes, some of us are satisfied with a 1980s kitchen, but most want to stay more up-to-date. If you consider the fact that the IRS allows for a building to depreciate over 27.5 years, it stands to reason that you may need to almost completely replace your home over 25-40 years. And if you don’t, it may be falling down around you. Many retirees simply delay maintenance, so as to keep costs down. It may work for a while, but ultimately it will catch up to you. And if you are banking on your home to pay long-term care costs or for a move to a more elderly friendly environment, you might be disappointed in what you get.

Mortgage Payoff

While it is certainly admirable to pay off your mortgage before you retire, our experience is that retirees and pre-retirees over-estimate the impact. In today’s world of low mortgage rates, paying off the last $100,000 of your mortgage, may free up cash flow, but isn’t saving you much in interest cost. You are still left with paying insurance, and property taxes, which will continue to go up. It rarely makes an unaffordable house suddenly affordable. For more information on this topic, read “Sometimes Paying Down Debt Isn’t a Good Idea.”

Add up all your costs to see what percentage of your retirement income they represent. Then use the guidelines that are applied to new home buyers and try to keep housing costs at 1/3 of your overall gross income.

*©2018 HTG Investment Advisors, New Canaan, CT 06840

Right: Promotional photo of Cary Grant and Myrna Loy for the film Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948)

December 31, 2018
The Body Transformed: The Purpose and Power of Jewelry; “The urge to adorn ourselves is now nearly universal”

Above, Hellenistic, ca. 200 B.C., Greek, gold. These serpentine armbands represent two tritons, male and female, each holding a small winged Eros. The hoops behind the tritons’ heads were used to attach the armbands to the sleeves of a garment, for otherwise, their weight (each over 6 1/2 ounces) would have caused them to slip down the arms. Rogers Fund, 1956, Metropolitan Museum of Art

What is jewelry? Why do we wear it? What meanings does it convey? Featured in this exhibit will be a rare head-to-toe ensemble from ancient Egypt that accompanied the elite into the afterlife, as well as items from the Royal Cemetery of Ur, implicated in one of the most mysterious rituals of ancient Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is presenting the exhibition Jewelry: The Body Transformed which will traverse time and space to explore how jewelry acts upon and activates the body it adorns. This global conversation about one of the most personal and universal of art forms brings together some 230 objects drawn almost exclusively from The Met collection. A dazzling array of headdresses and ear ornaments, brooches and belts, necklaces and rings created between 2600 B.C.E. and the present day will be shown along with sculptures, paintings, prints, and photographs that will enrich and amplify the many stories of transformation that jewelry tells. The exhibit is scheduled to end February 24, 2019.

“Jewelry is one of the oldest modes of creative expression — predating even cave painting by tens of thousands of years — and the urge to adorn ourselves is now nearly universal,” commented Max Hollein, Director of The Met. “This exhibition will examine the practice of creating and wearing jewelry through The Met’s global collection, revealing the many layers of significance imbued in this deeply meaningful form of art.”

If the body is a stage, jewelry is one of its most dazzling performers. Throughout history and across cultures, jewelry has served as an extension and amplification of the body, accentuating it, enhancing it, distorting it, and ultimately transforming it. Jewelry is an essential feature in the acts that make us human, be they rituals of marriage or death, celebrations or battles. At every turn, it expresses some of our highest aspirations.

“To fully understand the power of jewelry, it is not enough to look at it as miniature sculpture,” stated Melanie Holcomb, Curator, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. “While jewelry is ubiquitous, the cultures of the world differ widely regarding where on the body it should be worn. By focusing on jewelry’s interaction with — and agency upon — the human body, this exhibition brings in a key element that has been missing in previous studies of the subject.”

Exhibition Overview

The exhibition opens with a dramatic installation that emphasizes the universality of jewelry — precious objects made for the body, a singular and glorious setting for the display of art. Great jewelry from around the world will be presented in a radiant display that groups these ornaments according to the part of the body they adorn: head and hair; nose, lips, and ears; neck and chest; arms and hands; and waist, ankles, and feet.

Years 500–700, one of a pair of bracelets, probably made in Constantinople, Byzantine, gold, silver, pearls, amethyst, sapphire, glass, quartz. Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917, Metropolitan Museum of Art

December 28, 2018
Journalists Trying To Help Readers Cope May Mislead on Holiday-Suicide Myth

During the holidays, many in the press write stories aiming to help readers cope with the blues and other seasonal conditions. But some journalists inadvertently support a myth about the holidays and suicide, or quote well-intentioned sources who should know better.

Despite the fact that the holiday season has some of the lowest average daily suicide rates, some journalists continue to perpetuate the holiday-suicide myth.

In the 2017-18 holiday season, two-thirds of the print news and feature stories that mentioned both the holidays and suicide drew a false connection between them, according to the latest analysis by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The analysis was based on stories in the Nexis database and excluded coincidental references.

Figure 1. Percentage of stories supporting the myth vs. those debunking it. Excludes stories citing both in a coincidental manner (no causal association).

The result was unchanged from the prior holiday season. Of the 31 stories examined, 65 percent supported the holiday-suicide myth, while 35 percent debunked it. An additional 32 stories made coincidental reference to holidays and suicide and were excluded. (See figure 1.)

Figure 2. Average number of suicides per day in each month from January 1999 to December 2016. Data from November, December and January are in shaded areas. Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.

“Although many of the stories supporting the myth were published in rural areas, we hope that greater awareness of actual suicide risk will help residents of those regions to better cope with whatever stresses they might experience during the holiday period,” said Dan Romer, research director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC).

December 27, 2018
Christmas Presence: Jewelry, a Musical Powder Box, a Bike, See’s Candy and Double Acrostics

by Julia Sneden

I read somewhere that we have the Magi to thank for the tradition of bearing gifts at this time of the year, but I suspect that like many other Christmas customs, gift giving has its roots in pagan times. Surely the Celts’ celebration of winter solstice, or the Saturnalia of ancient Rome, or other assorted gatherings of the ancient world included the giving and receiving of gifts. It’s an urge deeply embedded in human nature. For that matter, anyone who has ever received a dog’s gift of a proudly retrieved stick, or, from a cat, the much less welcome gift of the remains of a mouse or bird left on the master’s doorstep, knows that gift giving extends to the rest of the animal world, too.

I once knew an outrageous and utterly charming elderly woman who, at parties, would hold us young folk spellbound by reciting the provenance of her dazzling jewelry collection. “Now this brooch,” she would say, pointing to a spray of diamonds, “was the gift of a maharajah who admired tall women. And the ear bobs came from Lord La-Di-Dah, who scandalized the New York Navy Ball in 1913 by dancing every other dance with me, all evening long.” And then, fixing us with a piercing look, she’d grin wickedly. “I’ve always heard that it is more blessed to give than to receive, but don’t you think receiving is a lot more fun?”

There have been lots of memorable Christmas gifts in my life, both given and received. I remember vividly that the year I was six, I noticed my mother’s fondness for a musical powder box that stood on the cosmetics counter of our local drugstore. I relayed the information to my father, who then hatched a rather intricate plan whereby my brother would somehow distract my mother while he and I purchased the music box. The store even wrapped our gift, and to this day I can see the bright blue paper, covered with winking white Santa faces in red hats — perhaps a patriotic nod to wartime, all that red white and blue. Somehow we sneaked the parcel out of the drugstore and into the car, and then into the house where I was allowed to hide it under my skirted dresser. Our collusion was even more thrilling than the present, I think, but Mother cried most satisfactorily when she opened it. The music box sat on her dresser for more than fifty years.

I remember the Christmas that I was wild to have a bike. I was seven years old, and the world was at war, which meant that metal and rubber products went to military uses. No one was making toys or bicycles. Somehow my mother found a secondhand bike that she painted a hideous yellow and put under the tree. I can still recall my dismay when I saw it. It was a bike, all right, and I didn’t mind that it had a few dents or that the paint was still sticky in some places. But it was a boy’s bike, a smaller version of my brother’s, not at all what I had had in mind. I felt like crying, but I knew I couldn’t. So I put a good face on it, and rode the darned bike all over the neighborhood and dared anyone to laugh at me. No one did, probably because we were all making do with what we had, in those days. And a couple of years later, when the war was over, there was another bike under the tree, this time a dazzling, brand new blue and red girls bike with a basket and a bell.

December 24, 2018
Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol, Being a Short Story of Christmas, and a Viewing of The Man Who Invented Christmas
Compelled by personal financial difficulties, Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in only six weeks, during a period of intense creativity in fall 1843. The original manuscript of A Christmas Carol reveals Dickens’s method of composition, allowing us to see the author at work. The pace of writing and revision, apparently contiguous, is urgent, rapid, and boldly confident. Deleted text is struck out with a cursive and continuous looping movement of the pen and replaced with more active verbs — to achieve greater vividness or immediacy of effect — and fewer words for concision. This heavily revised sixty-six-page draft — the only manuscript of the story — was sent to the printer in order for the book to be published on 19 December, just in time for the Christmas market.

When the manuscript of A Christmas Carol was returned by the printer, Dickens sent it to a bookbinder (possibly Thomas Robert Eeles of Cursitor Street, London), who bound it in crimson morocco, a handsome, durable goatskin leather. The binding is elegantly decorated in gilt, and the name “Thomas Mitton Esqre” is stamped in gilt on the front cover. Dickens presented the bound manuscript to Mitton, his close friend and creditor, possibly as a Christmas gift, and most probably in gratitude for the generous loan of £270 in the preceding six months.
Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
A Christmas carol in prose: being a ghost story of Christmas
Autograph manuscript signed, December 1843
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan before 1900
MA 97

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November 13, 2018 through January 6, 2019

Every holiday season, the Morgan displays Charles Dickens’s original manuscript of A Christmas Carol in Pierpont Morgan’s historic library. Dickens wrote his iconic tale in a six-week flurry of activity beginning in October 1843 and ending in time for Christmas publication. He had the manuscript bound in red morocco as a gift for his solicitor, Thomas Mitton. The manuscript then passed through several owners before Pierpont Morgan acquired it in the 1890s.

This year the manuscript of A Christmas Carol is open to Dickens’s unforgettable character sketch of one of literature’s great villain-heroes, Ebenezer Scrooge — the “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” who spent one crazy night with four ghosts and emerged transformed into “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”

Explore Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol online and view other related highlights from the collection.

Share in the festivities with your own copy of A Christmas Carol available from the Morgan Shop. This is the first-ever trade edition of Charles Dickens’s “own and only” manuscript of his classic and beloved story. It contains a facsimile of the original manuscript of A Christmas Carol, published in full-color, with a foreword by Colm Tóibín and introduction by Declan Kiely.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870), A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, illustration by John Leech, London: Chapman & Hall, 1843. Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987. PML 132030.

Editor’s Note: The Morgan is a beautiful small museum, well worth your visit. And Amazon Prime’s presentation of The Man Who Invented Christmas is a marvelous retelling of A Christmas Carol from the author’s viewpoint.
December 21, 2018