From 50 years ago, memories of an even earlier Thanksgiving.

Now remembered as much for his outlandish persona as for his work, Truman Capote (1924-1984).was one of post-World War II era America's best short story writers.

Here, he reads his tale, The Thanksgiving Visitor. It was first published fifty years ago this Thanksgiving, in McCall's Magazine.  It's an hour.

Book Week will be live for Thanksgiving. After all, dinner won't be ready for hours yet.

Book Week: We'll be on the job Thursday. Huddle around our 50-gallon drum of burning trash, ye exiles and castaways.

Thanksgiving is upon us.

Every year, it seems to get a little worse, and now Big Data is telling us the ways:

Using smartphone-tracking data and precinct-level voting, we show that politically divided families shortened Thanksgiving dinners by 20-30 minutes following the divisive 2016 election. This decline survives comparisons with 2015 and extensive demographic and spatial controls, and more than doubles in media markets with heavy political advertising. These effects appear asymmetric: while Democratic voters traveled less in 2016, political differences shortened Thanksgiving dinners more among Republican voters, especially where political advertising was heaviest. Partisan polarization may degrade close family ties with large aggregate implications; we estimate 27 million person-hours of cross-partisan Thanksgiving discourse were lost in 2016 to ad-fueled partisan effects.

We could all, perhaps, do worse, than to consider Seth Godin's Thanksgiving Reading as an add-on before everyone nods off or gets into a fight.

Here's what he wrote about it in 2015:

In ten days, just about everyone in the United States will celebrate the best holiday of the year: Thanksgiving. I’m hoping that this year, you and your family will help me start a new holiday tradition.

At its best, this is a holiday about gratitude, about family and about possibility. It brings people together to not only celebrate the end of the harvest, but to look one in another in the eye and share something magical.

In a digital age, one where humanity has been corrupted by commerce at every turn, there are very few Thanksgiving piñatas stuffed with coins, no huge market in Thanksgiving wrapping paper, no rush to the stores. We mostly save that for the next day, when the retail-industrial establishment kicks into high gear.

I’m delighted to point you to the Thanksgiving Reader . The file you'll find there is free, it’s printable, it’s sharable and it might give us something universal and personal to do this Thanksgiving.

The idea is simple: At your Thanksgiving celebration (and yes, it’s okay to use it outside the US!), consider going around the table and having each person read a section aloud.

During these ten or fifteen minutes, millions of people will all be reading the same words, thinking about the same issues, connecting with each other over the essence of what we celebrate. After all the travel and the cooking and the hassle, for these ten or fifteen minutes, perhaps we can all breathe the same air and think hard about what we’re thankful for.

It’s free to download and share. I hope you’ll let some people in your life know about it and incorporate it in your celebration this year. There’s no commercial element involved—after all, it’s Thanksgiving. 

Please share. And we're happy to hear your suggestions.

Thank you for everything you do, and for the difference you make to your family and the people who care about you.

[and for international readers, in troubled times...]

Wherever you are, you could celebrate Thanksgiving today. Or any day.

Not the Thanksgiving of a bountiful Massachusetts harvest before the long winter, the holiday of pilgrims and pie. That's a holiday of scarcity averted. I'm imagining something else...

A modern Thanksgiving would celebrate two things:

The people in our lives who give us the support and love we need to make a difference, and...

The opportunity to build something bigger than ourselves, something worth contributing to. The ability to make connections, to lend a hand, to invent and create.

There are more of both now than there have ever been before. For me, for you, for just about all of us. Thank you.

[Backup download in case the other one has too much traffic:  Download The Thanksgiving Reader]

And who's Seth Godin, you ask?

He's a tech guru who writes- himself- one of the best blogs in the universe.

And he's a thoughtful-enough human to appear on Krista Tippett's radio show and wow everybody.

More than once.

Birthday: Rust Never Sleeps

From The Writer's Almanac:

It’s the birthday of Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young, born in Toronto in 1945. He had a rough childhood: he was stricken with polio when he was six years old, and nearly died. Even after he recovered from the outbreak, his health was so bad that he could hardly walk. His parents took him to New Smyrna Beach, Florida, that December so he could regain his strength; they ended up staying for six months, and young Neil spent hours watching all the shiny new American cars drive by. He developed a lasting love of cars during this period, and he always names them. Over the years, he’s had vehicles named “Hank,” “LincVolt,” and “Pocahontas.” “Every car is full of stories,” he once said. “Who rode in ’em, where they went, where they ended up, how they got here.”

Even as a kid, he loved music, and he learned to play the ukulele after he received a cheap plastic one in his Christmas stocking. As the years went by, his love for music deepened, until it meant more to him than school. He dropped out of high school to form a band — the Squires — in 1963. They played in coffeehouses and clubs around Winnipeg, where Neil had moved with his mother after his parents’ divorce. Neil bought himself a car to get the band to their gigs. It was a hearse, which he dubbed “Mortimer Hearseburg.” When “Mort,” as he called it, inevitably broke down beyond repair, Young bought another hearse, a 1953 Pontiac that he named “Mort II.”

He got to know a lot of up-and-coming musicians, like Joni Mitchell, Steven Stills, and the Guess Who, while touring on the Canadian folk circuit. Mitchell loved his song “Sugar Mountain” so much that it inspired her song “The Circle Game.” By 1966, Young had formed the band Buffalo Springfield with his friend Bruce Palmer, along with Steven Stills, Richie Furay, and Dewey Martin. “For What It’s Worth” was the first single off their debut, self-titled album, and it hit the Top Ten. That same year, Young developed epilepsy, and began having seizures — sometimes while on stage with the band. And in 2005, he suffered a life-threatening brain aneurysm.

Neil has three kids: a son, Zeke, with actress Carrie Snodgress; and Ben and Amber Jean with Pegi Morton. Zeke and Ben both have cerebral palsy; Zeke’s case is mild, but Ben uses a wheelchair and speaks through a computerized communication device. Ben shares a love for model trains with his dad, and Neil built a 3,000-square-foot model railway system on his California ranch so that he and Ben would have something to do together. He also bought a part-ownership of the Lionel Train Company, helping to save the company from bankruptcy. In return, he worked with Lionel to design controls that would be easier for his sons to operate. In the 1980s, Neil and Pegi co-founded the Bridge School for children with severe physical and speech impairments. Up until this year, Neil and Pegi held an annual, weekend-long benefit concert that brought in big names like Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, Bob Dylan, and Tom Petty to raise money for Bridge School.

Young broke his toe in 2011, which took him out of commission for a while. To kill the time, he wrote an autobiography: Waging Heavy Peace (2012). In the book, he writes: “Writing is very convenient, has a low expense and is a great way to pass the time. I highly recommend it to any old rocker who is out of cash and doesn’t know what to do next.”