Penguin Press will publish Ron Chernow’s biography on Mark Twain, next week, on May 13.

A recent article by Lauren Michele Jackson in this week’s edition of the magazine, the “New Yorker,” reviewed Chernow’s extensive biography on Twain. One sentence jumped out.

“In 1891, amid mounting debts, Twain and family went into self-imposed exile in Europe, where they remained until the century turned and he found himself able to repay his creditors.”

Twain loved Hannibal, Missouri and the Mississippi River, but he loved Europe too. He loved to travel. He concluded “Innocents Abroad” with a memorable quote:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

The fact is, when famous, Mark Twain chose to expatriate himself from America to Europe.

Years later, following Europe’s Great War (WWI), in the 1920’s, several American writers chose to make homes in Paris, France. Among others, they included: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Thomas Wolfe, and John Dos Passos.

Called the “Lost Generation,” these American authors delighted in the “vibrant cultural atmosphere,” when seated at tables at cafes on Paris’s sidewalks, plus “the sense of freedom,” they felt when released from “the perceived materialism and social constraints of the U.S.”

These Lost Generation American authors considered themselves expatriates.

During the five years that F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda lived in France, he wrote parts of “The Great Gatsby,” his better novel, that turned 100 years old days ago, on April 10.

Some like best Fitzgerald’s final words in the novel, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter.”

I prefer the novel’s first words, spoken by Nick Carraway, “My father gave me some advice. “Just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

At least once, on July 7, 1924, Ernest Hemingway crossed France’s border into Spain, into the district of Navarre, and in the city of Pamplona, he ran in the city’s annual running of the bulls.

In 1960, Hemingway and his wife bought a home in Cuba, and lived there for twenty years.

Ernest Hemingway was an expatriate.

Today’s American expatriates might migrate to a country in Europe—Sweden, Norway, United Kingdom, or Switzerland, yet others might choose a different location.

Lydia Polgreen, a writer for the “New York Times,” ran a column for the April 27, edition. She begins “We know one type of migration well. It’s millions of people traveling to wealthy countries in search of safety and opportunity.

“But another type of migration involves people from wealthy countries seeking new lives elsewhere, sometimes in wealthy countries, but also in poorer countries.”

Lydia gives an example of an American who lives now in Mexico City. She writes

“Chuck Muldoon graduated from a top U.S. university with a degree in linguistics, taught himself to write code, and then visited Mexico City for a few weeks. He was enchanted. In late 2021, he rented a room near the Colonia Juarez plaza, and has remained since, working remote.

“He has a residency permit and pays taxes on the money he earns in Mexico.”

Chuck Muldoon is today’s American expatriate.

Lydia Polgreen ends her column, “So it is perhaps not surprising that migrants from rich and poor nations alike are looking at Mexico anew, despite its challenges.”

As usual, Mark Twain said it best, “Travel is fatal to prejudice.”

“When the debate is lost, slander becomes the loser’s tool.” -Socrates

“The propaganda machine is always looking for someone to hate.” -heard on National Public Radio, on Saturday, April 26, 2025

“He who can does; he who cannot teaches.” -George Bernard Shaw. I wonder if G. B. Shaw ever taught junior high or high school students. If he had, he might express a different opinion on teaching, and learn that it is hard work, not so well rewarded, but so worthwhile.

“He who can teach, teaches college; he who cannot teaches kids.” -an elaboration on Shaw’s quote above.

“People who can think, do not get things done, while people who get things done do not have time to think.” -a wise Norwegian author

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. They do not know what they do not know.” -H. L. Mencken

“The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are [so] sure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Bertrand Russell, from his “Christian Ethics,” in his book, Marriage and Morals

“Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider”. -Francis Bacon

In the above passage, Bacon underscores the importance of critical thinking, of pondering a passage, of hesitating to believe or act upon its words when first encountered.

“The people who know how to run the world are too busy cutting hair and driving taxi cabs.” -George Burns

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” -Charles Darwin

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” -H. L. Mencken

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: “A cognitive bias when unskilled people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices.

“Their incompetence robs them of their mental ability to realize it.

“If participants improved their skills in a tested area, their cognitive competence increased, and helped them to recognize the limitations of their abilities.

“As people gain more education and intelligence, they become more aware of their limitations. This awareness can be beneficial helping people avoid costly mistakes.”

A contractor once said of an experienced brick-layer, “he forgot more about brick-laying than most people ever learned.”

“A study in 2018 indicated that Americans who know little about politics and government are more likely than other Americans to overestimate their knowledge of those topics.”

“I know that up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here at the bottom, we, too, should have rights.” -Dr. Seuss, from “Yertle the Turtle”

     In 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their forty-three fellow explorers headed west up the Missouri River, bound for the west coast. As they met a succession of different Native American tribes, they were often amazed by the variety in the languages they heard.

     They noted that some had complex grammars, some had unusual vocabularies, some had different pitches or tones for the same words, some spoke consonant clusters without vowels. 

     In what is now the United States, at the time that Europeans arrived, Native Americans spoke between 300 to 500 diverse languages. Today, most of those have vanished, gone extinct.

     Linguists can divide some of their languages into families. For example, the Athabaskan family includes about 38 languages spoken by tribes in Alaska, western Canada, as well as by the Navaho, or the Dine, of Arizona and New Mexico.

     What is unusual are the “isolates,” those languages that display no relationship to any other language. For example, the Zuni has no commonalities with any languages that surround them in eastern New Mexico or elsewhere. In total, there are about 30 to 40 isolates in North America. 

     Linguists still wonder, from where did those Native Americans originate?

     What is most misfortunate is that the Native Americans had no written language. No doubt, they produced oral stories, histories, fables that they passed on to their children, but once the next generation stopped speaking their native language, most stories died with them.

     One of the world’s larger language families is the Indo-European family. From it, linguists identify eight branches: Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Armenian, Greek, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Italic, and Celtic. All languages within those branches share a common ancestor.  

     English, German, and Norwegian belong to the Germanic branch; Spanish, Portuguese, and French to the Italic; Scottish Gaelic and Irish to the Celtic; and Russian to the Balto-Slavic. 

      Because these European languages possessed a written language, over the centuries each recorded their stories, tales, myths, histories, and built a canon, a body of literary works. Thus,  a few languages were bold enough to save their stories, but for others, the world lost their stories.

     The greatest act of literary salvation ever occurred in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare expired. John Heminges and Henry Condell, two members of the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s acting company, collected and then published that year Shakespeare’s plays in the First Folio.

     The Spanish saved Cervantes’s “Don Quixote,” and also Felix Lope de Vega’s 500 plays and 3000 sonnets, all from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. 

     Someone saved Plato and Aristotle’s Greek works. Others saved Ovid and Cicero’s Latin works. Yet, others saved Paul’s letters and the four Gospels. On it goes, and the world is richer.

     Yiddish is another Germanic language. It began in Germany’s Rhine River valley in the ninth century and was the vernacular of the Jewish people of Central Europe for ten centuries. Mainly German, it was infused with vocabulary from Hebrew and Aramaic.

     Prior to the Holocaust in mid-twentieth century, between eleven and thirteen million people spoke Yiddish. Some Yiddish words migrated into English: schtick, chutzpah, shmooze, klutz, kvetch, and anything that ends with “nik,” such as beatnik.

     Some 85% of the six million Jewish people whom the Nazis murdered in mid-twentieth century spoke Yiddish. Many survivors came to America, lugging with them their Yiddish books.

      However, the next generation preferred English over Yiddish. The Yiddish books were soon disregarded, then discarded, and some were pitched into dumpsters.   

     In late-twentieth century, a young Jewish guy named Aaron Lansky decided he would rescue the remaining books. He collected an estimated 1.5 million Yiddish books from all over the U.S., at his Yiddish Book Center, and made them available to libraries, universities, collectors.

     Rutgers University estimates that in the United States there are only about 250,000 Yiddish speakers remaining, in Israel another 250,000, and elsewhere 100,000.

     Languages live for centuries, but then in the face of a brutal attack, they will die off. What lives are the stories within their books. Save their books, save their stories.  

On May 8, 1980, forty-five years ago, the World Health Organization, a part of the United Nations, announced that officials had eradicated small pox from the world’s population. The last case occurred in Somalia in 1977, and the last case in the United States occurred in 1949. 

     This news delighted everyone, in that small pox had plagued humanity for centuries. Human ingenuity had defeated small pox, a triumph of science, of technology, and of a strategy. 

     Whenever WHO officials heard of a breakout of small pox, they would rush into the nearby villages and neighborhoods and vaccinate as much of the population as they could to prevent the epidemic from spreading too far. Done again and again, they circled and beat down the disease. 

     Small pox is caused by variola virus. It is contagious and will spread from person to person. A fever gives way to a rash, that turns into numerous poxes, skin eruptions that fill with fluid.

     An estimated three out of ten people died from the disease. If they lived, their skin, especially their face, was pockmarked. The most famous of those so afflicted was George Washington.

     Cotton Mather was a Puritan clergyman in colonial Boston at the North Church. Mather noticed that, beginning in 1630, a small pox epidemic would arrive about every twelve years. 

     Kenneth Silverman, Mather’s biographer, wrote, “The small pox epidemic that struck Boston in April of 1721 lasted a full twelve months and infected half the city’s population. By February 1722, 5,889 persons had suffered an infection, and of those 844 had died.”

     As the epidemic gathered momentum, Cotton decided he must fight back.

     From the Royal Society in London, Cotton learned about inoculation as a preventative treatment. In addition, an African slave named Onesimus, who lived in Cotton’s home in Boston, told the clergyman about his experience in Africa and what his people, the Guramantese, did.

     Onesimus explained,

     “People take Juice of Small-Pox; and cutty-skin, and putt in a Drop; then by and by a little sicky, sicky; then very few little things like Small-Pox; and no body die of it; and no body have Small-Pox any more.” Onesimus showed Cotton the scar on his arm.

     Cotton convinced a doctor in Boston, Zabdiel Boylston, to inoculate some three hundred people in Boston. Only one person, a lady with other health issues, died, and none of the three hundred came down with the disease. Dozens lived who may have died without inoculation.

     James Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s older brother, owned a Boston newspaper, the “New England Courant.” Scathing and vicious, James attacked in print Cotton and Boylston, for trying an untested preventative technology, but James’s hateful words did not stop the two men. 

     Much of the credit for inoculation though is given to a British physician named Edward Jenner. Late in the 18th century, in Gloucestershire, England, Jenner noticed that milkmaids who suffered from cowpox lesions upon their hands were immune to small pox. 

     Cowpox was benign when contrasted to small pox, just a few lesions on the hands. 

     In 1796, Jenner conducted a daring experiment. He withdrew fluid from a cowpox lesion on the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes, and injected that fluid into a cut on the arm of an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps, son of Jenner’s gardener. 

     Later, Jenner exposed the young Phipps to small pox, but the lad did not demonstrate small pox’s symptoms, proving that the lad now enjoyed immunity to small pox. 

     Jenner’s process received the name “vaccination,” taken from the Latin word for cow, vacca.

     While others screamed their opposition, science, co-joined with technology and a working strategy, subdued and then eradicated small pox, a triumph of human ingenuity.

     Modernity demanded vaccination. Because of it, the dreaded small pox disease evaporated.

James Harvey Robinson, a noted historian at Columbia University in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, wrote the following.   

      “We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship.”

     In recent days, I came across two articles, both written in the same year, 2017, that share the same title, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds.”

     Elizabeth Kolbert’s article appeared in the “New Yorker” magazine on February 19, 2017, and James Clear’s article appeared on his website, “James Clear.com,” on a day in 2017.

     Kolbert is a science journalist, who won the Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction, in 2015. 

      In her article, she mentions six scientific studies conducted by university  psychologists at Stanford, Yale, Brown, Colorado University, and in Lyon, France, plus three books, “The Enigma of Reason,” The Knowledge Illusion,” and Denying to the Grave.”

     Kolbert points out that the first books’ authors above, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, insist that human beings’ ability to reason evolved on the savannas of Africa, “to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.” 

     Mercer and Sperber write, “Reason is an adaptation to the hyper-social niche humans have evolved for themselves.” Human beings learned to reason, in order to cooperate, to kill food.

     The difficulty with this reasoning ability—intended to get along with others—is that it leads to “confirmation bias,” that “tendency to embrace information that supports certain beliefs and to reject information that contradicts them.” If an idea fits into our mind’s view, we accept it. 

     Steve Sloman, at Brown University, and Philip Fernbach, at Colorado University, identified a second fault with reasoning, the “illusion of explanatory depth.” 

     They write, “People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people.” “We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, a development in our evolutionary history.”

     “Strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding. Our dependence on other’s minds reinforces the problem.” “Sociability is key to how the human mind functions.”  

     Sloman and Fernbach suggest that if people would “work through the implications of policy proposals, they would realize how clueless they are, and would then modify their views.”

     James Clear, the second author mentioned above, steers wide of scientific literature and psychological studies, and instead gives his readers thoughtful clarity and profound advice. 

     Clear asks the same question, “Why facts don’t change our minds?” Like Kolbert outlined above, Clear believes that sociability is key. He writes,

    “Truth and accuracy are not the only things that matter. Humans also seem to have a deep desire to belong. We want to fit in, to bond with others, and earn others’ approval.

     “We don’t always believe things because they are correct. Sometimes we believe things because they make us look good to the people we care about.

     “Facts don’t change our minds. Friendship does. Be kind first. Be right later.”

     How to kill off bad ideas? Clear says to refuse to repeat them. “Silence is death for an idea.”

     Clear quotes the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, who wrote, “Remember that to argue and win, is to break down the reality of the other person. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.” Clear points out that “kind” and “kin” originated from the same root word. 

     Clear suggests that thoughtful people should act as scouts, rather than soldiers. He writes,

     “Soldiers are on the intellectual attack, looking to defeat the people who differ from them. Victory is the operative emotion. Scouts are like intellectual explorers, slowly trying to map the terrain with others. Curiosity is their driving force.” 

     Elizabeth Kolbert and James Clear agreed that our minds will change within a kind and caring group context, inside a tribe or a community, and not by presenting facts, proof, or documents.