Free for ALL Friday!
It's Free for All Friday!
It’s Free for All Friday, and this week’s collection is basically about the tiny ceremonies we create to convince ourselves we have some control over time.
Spoiler: We don’t. But sometimes, we can find meaning just for trying.
These ducks are local celebrities and walk the red carpet daily
“We’ve got to march with purpose,” duck master Kenon Walker tells the ducks each morning in a pep talk.
Every morning at 10:30, Kenon Walker rolls out a red carpet across the hotel lobby in preparation for the first performance of the day. Then he goes to the rooftop to fetch five ducks.
Walker is the duck master of the Peabody Memphis, continuing a decades-old tradition of caring for the resident ducks and leading them on their daily march to and from the lobby fountain. The procession is sometimes watched by hundreds of onlookers gathered around the fountain.
“We’ve got to march with smiles in that lobby,” Walker, 45, tells the ducks each morning in a pep talk. “We’ve got to march with purpose.”
The story of the Peabody ducks goes back to 1933, when the general manager, Frank Schutt, and his friend Chip Barwick returned from an unsuccessful hunting trip in Arkansas. The two men drank too much whiskey and decided to put three of their live duck decoys — legal at the time — in the hotel lobby fountain as a prank. Hotel guests were charmed.
“A crowd had gathered, and they loved them, so the ducks stayed and became a fixture in the hotel,” said Kelly Brock, the hotel’s director of marketing and communications.
For the past 35 years, the ducks have come from the same local farm. Each team of five ducks stays for three months before “retiring” to live their days in the wild.
The ducks live on the heated rooftop of the hotel, which staff refer to as the “royal duck palace,” complete with a fountain and wooden reproduction of the Peabody Hotel.
The key to their 50-year marriages and close-knit families? Friendship.
Six women in their 70s, all married and all mothers and grandmothers, have been meeting twice a month for 44 years. They talk about everything that life throws at them.
The members of this impossible-to-get-into club have logged a combined 330 years of marriage. Among them, they count 15 children, 27 grandchildren (with one on the way), assorted professions and innumerable tears shed, hands held and assurances given that none of life’s difficulties will be faced alone.
In Long Island community centers and therapists’ offices, they have met on approximately 880 occasions and talked, in the strictest confidence, for some 80,000 minutes about pacifiers and timeouts; about feeling overwhelmed by careers and feeling undervalued without them. They have discussed empty nests, dying parents, tensions with adult siblings, marital conflicts, parenting grown children — oh, the worry never stops — retirement, aging, illness and even the death of one of their own.
This is “Group,” a generically named, remarkably devoted circle of friends.
Group is six women, all in their 70s and each married for a half-century. They have been gathering on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month (minus July and August) for 44 years. Over 90 minutes, they share with each other — and a paid facilitator — their worries, struggles and triumphs. It is not, clinically speaking, group therapy. But it is also not a social gathering.
“We are not swapping recipes,” said Miriam Caslow, 74. “This is hard work.”
My wife and I planned our retirement perfectly. Then, she got sick.
A former Wall Street Journal retirement columnist shares the hard lessons he has had to learn about life after work.
I had heard the adage many times: Man plans, God laughs.
I just never imagined it would apply to my retirement.
Ten years ago, my wife, Karen, and I walked away from full-time work. Just four years later, Karen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Within a year, I was a full-time caregiver, a role I still play today. And the retirement we had spent so much time planning and working toward ground to a halt.
The irony: I had worked for more than three decades as a reporter and editor for The Wall Street Journal—and had spent my final years at the paper writing columns and editing articles about retirement and retirement planning. I even co-wrote a book about later life and “how to plan it, live it and enjoy it,” as the subtitle promised.
56-year-old man got over $170,000 in student loan forgiveness under Trump: ‘I could not believe it’
The fate of several student loan forgiveness programs has become uncertain under the Trump administration. But borrowers continue to get the relief.
On Oct. 23, the day after Daniel Gray’s 56th birthday, he received an email that made him feel like he was dreaming: The U.S. Department of Education would forgive his more than $170,000 student loan balance.
“I could not believe it,” Gray said. “This is the first time I’ve been without debt since I’m 18.”
Yet the relief should not have been so surprising.
Gray began paying his student loan debt in the 1990s and was eligible for the loan cancellation under the terms of his income-driven repayment plan. IDR plans lead to loan erasure after a certain period, typically 20 years or 25 years. But, like many borrowers, Gray was worried by reports that the relief was becoming harder to access under the Trump administration.
“Because of what’s been going on, it was unclear whether they’d get forgiven,” Gray said.
The real history behind ‘Hamnet’ and the tragically short life of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway’s only son
Believe it or not, I had missed this book entirely before I wrote Monday’s edition of Big Optimism. Now, I can’t stop seeing it!
William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway married in 1582, when he was 18 and she was 26. Hathaway was three months pregnant with Shakespeare’s child at the time.
The couple’s firstborn, Susanna, was born in 1583. A set of twins, daughter Judith and son Hamnet, followed in 1585. In 1596, Hamnet died at the age of 11. Historians aren’t sure what caused his death—the records of the time don’t specify.
Author Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, Hamnet, imagines the dynamics of the Shakespeare family, particularly the love that Hathaway had for her children and the pain of losing her son. O’Farrell depicts Hathaway, called Agnes in the book, as a woman with supernatural abilities, who craves the embrace of nature and spends her time in the woods practicing falconry. Hamnet is portrayed as a spirited young boy who adores his family, particularly his twin sister. In O’Farrell’s vividly realized world, Hamnet’s death is attributed to the bubonic plague. Shakespeare, though a featured character, is never directly named in the book. Instead, he’s referred to as “husband” or “father.”
The novel connects Hamnet’s death to the creation of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, which is believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601. The names Hamnet and Hamlet were considered interchangeable in Elizabethan England—a fact that stuck with O’Farrell after she first learned about the existence of Shakespeare’s son when she was in school.
“It just always fascinated me, the link between the death of this son and the writing of the play Hamlet,” O’Farrell said in a 2023 interview.
A film adaptation of O’Farrell’s novel was set to be released in the United States [yesterday]. Directed by Academy Award winner Chloé Zhao, Hamnet stars Jessie Buckley as Hathaway and Paul Mescal as Shakespeare.
How ‘Stranger Things’ defined the era of the algorithm
A nostalgic hit built out of vintage pop-culture references captured the “If you liked that, you’ll like this” spirit of Netflix.
In the summer of 2016, streaming TV was still figuring itself out. Netflix had been producing original series for a few years, with occasional company from Amazon, Hulu, Yahoo and the like. Disney+, Apple TV and HBO Max were still gleams in some billionaires’ eyes.
I’m not sure anybody was expecting the answer to come from a popcorn horror thriller that premiered that July. But the success of “Stranger Things,” which is about to end its run after nearly a decade, told us that the future of streaming TV was largely in the past.
I don’t mean merely that the series is a period piece, though its evocation of the 1980s in small-town Hawkins, Ind., is a big part of the appeal; you can almost smell the hair spray and taste the Orange Julius. I mean that the series is an entertainment machine built by repurposing vintage pop-culture parts — something that streaming would come to specialize in.
“Stranger Things” succeeds in part because of how well it evokes pop culture that audiences already love. It is, in other words, a human-made equivalent of the algorithm, the software engine that has come to define the experience and the aesthetic of streaming.
The best TV to catch up on over the Thanksgiving weekend
The chance to catch up on the best television you never had time for this year.
For TV nerds, there is one thing about the week of Thanksgiving that’s better than a delicious, post-feast slice of pumpkin pie or the chance to shame your annoying cousin with your knowledge of Star Trek trivia.
To that end, here’s a list of the coolest TV series worth catching up on during this Thanksgiving holiday — including standouts from 2025 and a couple recommendations that are always worth revisiting.
Next time someone complains about having nothing to watch, show them this — there’s still lots out there, if you’ve got the stamina and an open mind.
https://youtube.com/shorts/io5_k_U9REg?si=sXaZpEOyLvKWRUpJ
Come on Bill. Here’s a link to the Peabody Duck Walk.
Read the WSJ article about retirement and how things can often go sidewise even when you think you know what you’re talking about. Looking back on my life with my husband, we managed to do exactly what the author said he and his wife should have done. We downsized and travelled first. We did pay for long term care that did eventually get called on toward the end of my husband’s life. Mine stopped when I moved out of the states in 2023. Where I am now, health care costs have been pretty manageable so far.
Love the whole reimagining of Shakespeare, his wife Ann Hathaway and their children. Such a talented man could not be devoid of deep passion so there had to be a driver all that passion; a focus. I think our lit courses in schools(such as they may still be)sell the studied authors short when the focus is strictly on what they wrote and not the why.
As a side note, Will and Anne were probably very lucky to have lost only one child in an age when children and adults were carried off on the wings of disease as easily as feathers in a tornado. Hamnet could have died of what was then known as morbid sore throat(diphtheria)as the plague or any of the myriad diseases that stalked society then.
Have already watched “The Diplomat”. I fell in love with that show last year and am already looking forward to next season and who she’s going to try to seduce next. Allison Janny is truly superb in this show as the president instead of press secretary or chief of staff where she shown first in “The West Wing”, which I still rewatch on DVD.
Hope you are having a good weekend Bill. Happy, happy. Christmas is next 🎅.
Could not read the article WSJ article as it is my life at the moment. My husband went off on disability with cancer four years ago. Then in May this year, he was diagnosed with dementia. My great plans to travel are reduced to 15 minutes of telling him he needs to put on pants before he goes outside. One of these days he will get out before I catch him. But at least he wears underwear. I am continuing to plan travel for when he goes into long term care, which is closer than we both realize. In a way it’s better, because we always travelled to where he wanted to go, not where I wanted.
We have a hotel in our city with ducks in a pond. And one with a marmot in the front yard. We also have a downtown park where peacocks roam all summer. Great way to interact with nature. Ducks are such messy animals though.
It will be interesting to see if the women’s families stay close when the women themselves are gone. I grew up in a close family, had multiple clan gatherings over the year. When my grandparents died, the gatherings dropped down to special days. Then my dad died and my aunt went into a seniors homes and I only see my cousins at funerals. Haven’t seem most of my siblings or their kids in more than five years. Things change, people change. For me, I would not ant those people up in my business all the time.