The house I grew up in was built in 1913, in that murky era between horses and cars, when a homebuilder had to decide which way the transportation winds were blowing. The man who built the house evidently believed cars were a fad, so he constructed a barn behind the house. My father was always trying to park his too-big car in a too-small stall, like someone struggling into a too-tight pair of pants. Half the back end hung out. While the barn was a bust, storage-wise it was ideal, handily absorbing the flotsam and jetsam of my parents’ lives. Growing up, I spent many a rainy Saturday in that old barn mining for gold.

When my wife and I bought our first home, I began to fill the garage with all manner of useful items over my wife’s objections. We have five bicycles. Their tires are flat, their frames coated with dust, their chains rusted to the sprockets. But it’s nothing a bicycle pump and a squirt of WD-40 can’t fix. I have four bicycle pumps and three cans of WD-40. Supplies aren’t the problem; expectations are. If I fix the bikes, my wife will expect me to repair everything else and sell it all on Craigslist, which I have no intention of doing. There’s no sense raising her hopes only to see them dashed.

I have four lawn chairs I intend to fix just as soon as I find the time to get the webbing to repair them. I bought them 20 years ago at a garage sale. The lady selling them apparently didn’t understand their value. The seats need to be replaced, but it’s nearly impossible to find a good old-fashioned lawn chair anymore. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve tripled in value. With CD interest rates running around 2 percent, I can’t afford not to keep them.

As a general rule, my wife avoids the garage. But every now and then she wanders in, poking around. She invariably sees something she thinks I don’t need and quizzes me about it. Like the time she came upon my watering can.

“Why do we need that?” she asked. “There’s a hole in it.”

“It’s nothing that a little duct tape can’t fix,” I said. I have six rolls, and possibly more, in an old refrigerator.

Her efforts to reform me reach a fever pitch each spring, a season customarily associated with putting things in order. Spring is my least favorite time of year.

In April my wife hints at her intentions. “Wouldn’t it be nice if there were room in the garage to park our cars,” she says. I let her remark pass. It’s only the warm-up.

In early May, always on a Saturday morning, she reminds me the town dump is having a free community day, and that we can throw away anything we want for free.

As if she has to remind me! It’s my favorite day of the year. I drive to the dump and bring back a truckload of perfectly fine stuff other people have discarded. That’s how I got my three-wheeled lawn mower with the blown engine. I’m going to fix it one of these days.

Not long ago, my wife and I were watching television at my parent’s house and a show about hoarders came on. Their houses are stacked from floor to ceiling. A psychiatrist was saying it’s a mental illness, an excuse we trot out when we don’t want to face the truth. Let’s put the blame where it belongs, on architects who 70 years ago stopped designing houses with adequate storage. My parent’s house had a full basement, a full attic, a two-story barn, and three extra rooms with no specific purpose, to be used at the homeowner’s discretion. As a consequence, my parents got along just fine. If the architect who designed our house 22 years ago knew what he was doing, my wife and I wouldn’t have to argue every spring.

The New No-Car Garage The Saturday Evening Post

Stunning! Roseate spoonbill alights in the Florida wetland.
Photo courtesy Floridastock/Shutterstock.

America loves its birds. We spend a fortune on them—$4 billion a year just to feed wild ones and another $1 billion annually on feeders, birdbaths, and birdhouses. All told, 46.7 million Americans consider themselves birders, according to the most recent U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey. As astoundingly large as this number is, the activity continues to surge, growing faster than mountain biking or skiing. Bird watchers, ahem, birders (the preferred modern term) have their pick of well over 200 festivals devoted to birds each year.

[Want to test your bird knowledge? See how many bird calls you recognize in this audio quiz.]

What exactly is it about our winged friends that makes them so appealing? Well, they’re pretty, for one. “Everybody loves birds,” ornithologist John Fitzpatrick tells me. He’s director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, popularly known as the Bird Lab, which is ground zero for most things avian in North America. “You don’t need to know a thing about them to enjoy them. They enjoyed birds in the days of the ancient Egyptians and in caveman days.”

Fitzpatrick goes deeper than your average backyard enthusiast. He’s helped discover seven species of birds in South America and is a central player in the ongoing controversy over whether the ivory-billed woodpecker, long believed extinct, has been rediscovered in Arkansas. But he gets the purely visceral appeal of birding: “Birds are colorful. They sing and fly and migrate so they join us in different parts of the world. They move enough annually so they mean seasonally different things for us.”

Another part of birding’s pull is social. “People want to share what they’ve seen with other people,” Fitzpatrick says. “That makes it a communal action. At Cornell now, we’re getting dozens of freshmen every year coming here because of the Bird Lab. Many of these are teenagers who are just superb birders.”

Take Luke Seitz, for example, a 19-year-old Cornell freshman who was an accomplished bird photographer and painter (lukeseitzart.com) before he went to college. When he was 16, Seitz graduated early from high school and landed a job on a whale-watching boat. He socked away money all summer to finance the first of several trips to photograph birds—in Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. He then volunteered as a guide at eco-lodges that cater to birders. Sometimes, he would offer one of his paintings in exchange for a few nights lodging. “Birding makes me feel like I have a connection to nature,” he says.

Just as important to birding’s appeal is the sheer joy of being out in the wild with a purpose—namely to track, record, and study wildlife. “Experiences are becoming more valuable than things,” says Courtney Buechert, a birder who has led the Christmas Bird Count in southern Marin County, California, since the 1970s. (His day job is CEO of Eleven Inc., one of the top ad agencies in San Francisco.) “People realized you can buy stuff, but other people can buy stuff too. Experiences are something that are uniquely yours.”

It doesn’t hurt that birding is a lot easier to get into than many other pursuits—you don’t need to be in great physical shape, invest in a lot of equipment, travel far, or wait for the right kind of weather. “I can do this anytime, anywhere I am,” says Buechert. “I was once sitting in a conference room having a meeting with a client and a red-tailed hawk came and landed on the railing. You’re talking about a bird that is a foot high with a can opener attached to the front of its face.”

Birding, like the environmental movement, is largely a product of the 20th century and has run parallel to the country’s rapid urbanization. In 1900, less than 40 percent of Americans lived in an urban setting, and birding—often done with a shotgun rather than binoculars—was still largely the domain of naturalists, artists, and egg collectors. More than a century later, nearly 80 percent of Americans are urban dwellers, and birding provides us a perch in the world of plants and animals.

Northern hawk owl: Day hunter can spot prey half a mile away.
Photo courtesy Luke Seitz/lukeseitzart.com.

To better understand the possibilities of urban birding, I drop in on Dominik Mosur, a 35-year-old Polish emigré who works as an animal care attendant at San Francisco’s Randall Museum and as a volunteer for the Golden Gate Audubon Society. In 2011, Mosur set a single-year record (what birders call a “big year”) by spotting 273 species in the county of San Francisco, everything from an American avocet to a common yellowthroat. He invites me to join a monthly bird walk that starts at the museum and meanders through the surrounding parkland.

We meet at the entrance at 8 a.m., a dozen early-risers led by Mosur and his Audubon colleague Brian Fitch. It is a crystal-clear autumn morning, but it also happens to be one in which Bay Area birds would share the sky with space shuttle Endeavour. (It is scheduled to fly, piggyback on a 747, over the Golden Gate Bridge and around the city on its final journey before heading to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.)

We spend the first 15 minutes sweeping the nearby trees and telephone lines, spotting an American goldfinch, a pair of pine siskins, and a young red-shouldered hawk, among others. But the action doesn’t really take wing until we arrive at a large patch of poison oak that occupies a spot near the top of Corona Hill. A Lincoln’s sparrow perches on a branch, and then someone spots a savannah sparrow. Mosur, excited, stage whispers, “It’s picking up.” A warbling vireo lands in a bush near a golden-crowned sparrow. “That’s a pretty good sparrow flock right there, even if it’s only three birds,” Mosur says, noting that each of the sparrows is the first of fall for Corona Hill. “Good variety!”

At that point, more and more people armed with binoculars and long-lens cameras start trudging up the hill. These late arrivals are what birders might call accidentals or strays. They are here to see the Endeavour.

The birders, unflappable, stay focused on their LBJs—little brown jobs. While most of the day’s visitors to Corona Hill will view but one flying object, our little group of birders tally 46 avian species and the Endeavour.

The walk unequivocally demonstrates one other facet of birding, which I call connoisseurship—not in the sense of ever-more rarefied taste, but in the sense of a densely layered appreciation for nuance and subtlety. Wine enthusiasts like to ponder the importance of terroir and to argue over whether the 2005 Bordeaux will be the match of the 1982s. Long-time baseball fans can expound on the details of the infield fly rule and debate which left-handed pitcher has the best move to first base. Avid birders, as I had seen, have the expertise and enthusiasm to differentiate between the Lincoln’s sparrow and the savannah sparrow and to get excited about it. They can deftly juggle the differences between the immature and adult plumage of hundreds of species or passionately discourse on the benefits of roof prism binoculars over Porro prism pairs; they can look at a bay full of rafting ducks, as Buechert did when 12 years old, and notice the one tufted duck among the thousands of locals, even though they have never seen one outside of a book before. Connoisseurship, I think, is a field mark of passion.

Bird Nerds Unite! The Saturday Evening Post

A few days before the 2012 presidential election, Joe Scarborough, the conservative host of Morning Joe on liberal MSNBC, proclaimed, “Anybody that thinks this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue … they’re jokes.” He felt reports that put Obama ahead were biased, and he had one particular culprit in mind, Nate Silver, a presumably liberal polling expert who calculated that President Obama had a 79 percent chance of beating Romney.

There was just one problem. It turned out to be Scarborough himself whose judgment was clouded by bias—as Silver recognized when he offered to bet the anchorman $1,000 on the outcome of the election, a wager Scarborough wouldn’t take. Silver turned out to be amazingly accurate in how he called the race.

That’s the problem with media bias. We all know it’s there, and we all know we need to see it, detect it, and overcome it if we’re ever going to know the truth, but we also all see it in different places. All too often, we think whoever we agree with is unbiased. It’s the other guy, the one we disagree with, who holds the biased opinion. How, then, are we ever to get at the truth, the truth we need, not only just to know what’s going on, but to be responsible citizens in a democracy?

It’s a very old problem, and it’s not about to go away, though there are definitely things we can do to try to smoke out biased reporting and see the facts more clearly. We’ll get to that later, but first, a little history. Bias in the media wasn’t always considered a negative. In fact, until about 100 years ago, it hardly ever occurred to anyone that media should be unbiased. Everyone agreed that an informed electorate was the basis of a free society, but they didn’t take that to mean that the news should be delivered without a point of view. They did agree, however, that in the U.S. the freedom of the press was sacred. That was a founding principle of our nation, and one of the great things that set us apart from every government that had come before.

The idea of a truly free press was born in 1735, when a New York newspaperman named John Peter Zenger was put on trial for libel for defaming the royal governor. Zenger’s lawyer insisted that he was innocent because what he had printed was the truth. No law at the time protected a journalist who told truth that hurt a public official, but the jury set Zenger free anyway—and established the notion of a press unafraid to speak truth to power as a cornerstone of liberty.

What makes the jury’s decision all the more intriguing is that it was quite well known that Zenger’s paper had been founded expressly to attack the royal governor. Freedom of the press was considered to be quite a separate matter from bias, as indeed it should be. By the time of the American Revolution, the colonies were awash in partisan newspapers and pamphlets. One of the British outrages that led to the Revolution was the Stamp Act—which put a tax on newspapers. In Europe the press had always been controlled by the ruling aristocracy and bent to serve its purposes; in the colonies, it became the weapon of the people, and publications like Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense fired the people to revolt against their overseas overlords. The only kind of media bias anyone really worried about was bias imposed from above, by the king and his men.

And so, when the Constitution was written its very first amendment stated “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …”

With those words, a free press was enshrined along with freedom of speech and religion as one of our most crucial liberties. The government went well beyond mere words in supporting it, too. Where other nations heavily taxed their newspapers, the young United States did the opposite. It subsidized them. The Postal Act of 1792, which established the nation’s mail service, gave newspapers discounted postage rates, and legislators often provided funding for papers in their districts.

With that help the American press flourished so much that by 1835 the U.S. had five times as many daily papers as the British Isles. However, high officials often hated and distrusted what the papers printed. In 1798 President John Adams went so far as to push through the notorious Sedition Act, which made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious” writings about the president or Congress. The law would backfire badly, turning its victims into free-speech martyrs. Thomas Jefferson got rid of the Sedition Act soon after he was elected president.

Not all bias is political bias. In the 1830s James Gordon Bennett used sensationalism and colorful embroidering of the truth to build his New York Herald into the biggest newspaper in the world. As but one lurid example, his paper described the corpse of a murdered prostitute in 1836 as follows: “The perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all, all surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medici.”

Newspapers were, after all, businesses first, and the primary concern was selling papers. By 1871 a British observer would describe the typical American newspaper as “a print published by a literary Barnum, whose type, paper, talents, morality, and taste are all equally wretched and inferior; who is certain to give us flippancy for wit, personality for principle, bombast for eloquence, malignity without satire, and news without truth or reliability.”

How biased was the press in the 19th century? In 1860 Bennett’s Herald reported that Abraham Lincoln was “a fourth-rate lecturer who cannot speak good grammar.”

By the end of that century, the United States was a nation of mass-readership newspapers. Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World led the way, with signs in its city room that read, “Accuracy, Accuracy, Accuracy! Who? What? Where? When? How? The Facts—The Color—The Facts!”

Despite the noble motto, in the World and in its archrival, William Randolph Hearst’s Journal, “there was a lot of willful omission and lying,” as Brooke Gladstone, media historian and host of the NPR show On the Media, points out in her book, The Influencing Machine. Hearst himself is best remembered for his (possibly apocryphal) 1897 telegram to the artist Frederic Remington, who told him there was no fighting in Cuba to report on: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

The tide began to turn with the century. Adolph Ochs bought The New York Times in 1896 and announced that it would henceforth “give the news … impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interest involved.” Lack of bias became a new ideal in the Progressive Era of the early 1900s. In 1904 Joseph Pulitzer endowed one of the first journalism schools, at Columbia University, to “raise journalism to the rank of a learned profession,” and others soon followed. In 1922 editors founded their first professional association, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and drafted a code of ethics that declared, “News reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind.”

Balancing Act The Saturday Evening Post

Then: Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner as Mr. Spock and
Captain Kirk in Star Trek. Courtesy NBC/Photofest.

Director J. J. Abrams, whose Star Trek Into Darkness opens this month, is not counting on the sci-fi special effects (although there will be plenty) to guarantee the success of the sequel to his huge 2009 hit Star Trek. “I want it to be real and relevant,” he says, speaking of the 12th film based on the iconic ’60s TV show. “Cool as they are, the spaceships and the gadgetry aren’t what really matters.”

For Abrams, the crew of the Enterprise is paramount. “You want to be cruising with them on an amazing and fun adventure,” he says, echoing the words of Star Trek’s late creator, Gene Roddenberry, who famously pooh-poohed the technology component of his stories: “I wrote my daydreams,” he said. And his late wife Majel Barrett-Roddenberry pointed out: “He wrote about things that he understood, and that wasn’t science, it wasn’t technology.”

Maybe Roddenberry put his other interests before science, but there are countless concepts and tools we first encountered on Star Trek that have since become, not only real, but a part of our lives.

“Their Universal Translator? Today we’ve got an app for that,” notes Linda Wetzel, who teaches a course at Georgetown University on the philosophy of Star Trek. “We may not have phasers, but we have lasers and tasers. And we can talk to computers now, and they understand us.”

But the show was never really about the gear: “The original series tackled burning issues of the day,” says Wetzel. “It explored big ideas—philosophical, political, and scientific. Star Trek asks ‘What if?’ and just runs with it.”

The show first beamed into millions of living rooms in the tumultuous ’60s when visions of Armageddon danced in our heads; the U.S. and the Soviet Union were uneasy adversaries in a nuclear stand-off. Space exploration had become a priority after the Russians one-upped us with the launch of the Sputnik satellite followed by Uri Gagarin’s historic flight into space. We responded with a huge and expensive effort to put a man on the moon.

Against this dark, historical backdrop, Star Trek broke new ground with a racially diverse spaceship crew that included Nichelle Nichols as communications officer Uhura and George Takei as helmsman Sulu. It held out the possibility that an uncertain future could have a happy ending as The Federation tried to contain the vicious and violent Klingons, whose homeworld Kronos was a superpower not unlike the Soviet Union, while the Enterprise discovered life on other planets. And the series explored timeless questions about where we were going—not just in outer space but in our lives as human beings.

As William Shatner, the original Captain Kirk, explains, “A wonderful story is something people can relate to—whether it’s a search inside or an exploration of our future in space. I think the real, lasting connection is that we entertain people. I never came to the set thinking ‘Today I save the universe.’ I usually would say, ‘Where are the bagels?’”

Professor George Slusser, curator of the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy at University of California, Riverside, agrees. It’s important, he notes, that Roddenberry never let the values he promoted stand in the way of entertaining his audience. “A person who has a hard day isn’t interested in reading about philosophy or hard science,” Slusser says. “But they will sit down with a beer in their hand and watch Star Trek and encounter some grand ideas. And they may not even realize they’re getting them.”

Now: Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine reprise the roles of Mr. Spock and
Captain Kirk in Star Trek. Courtesy Paramount/PhotoFest.

As the late James Doohan who played Scotty once put it, “We knew about the lessons in Star Trek, and we knew as actors how important it was that we get them across. I remember Roddenberry once said to me, ‘If we think it’s going to be difficult for the audience to believe something, we’ll just cut to your close-up.’ I thought that was marvelous.”

Leonard Nimoy, who became legendary as Mr. Spock, says that Roddenberry’s perspective on life changed his own. “I was much more emotional before I started to play him,” he remembers. “Spock had a big impact on me personally. It made me understand better how to approach a difficult situation without the emotion taking over. And I hope some of that was passed on to the audience.”

What could have been the end of Star Trek turned out to be a new beginning. After three seasons on NBC, the series was cancelled because of low ratings. But in a serendipitous twist, reruns in TV syndication became more popular than the series had been on NBC and also attracted a coveted younger audience. That led to the first Enterprise venture on the big screen, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The flick got mixed reviews for drawing mainly on previously produced television episodes, but it scored huge at the box office with ticket sales of $82.3 million domestically, thanks in large part to Trekkers who returned to see it countless times.

The movie’s success jump-started a string of sequels, which were basically review-proof as Trekkers rallied around the box office—although many claimed, in a strange calculation with which a lot of critics seemed to agree, that the even-numbered sequels were always better than the odd-numbered ones.

Roddenberry had little involvement in Star Trek on the big screen but, nearly 20 years after the TV series had debuted on prime time, he re-imagined his vision in the syndicated Star Trek: The Next Generation, or TNG for short. An entirely new cast was led by Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, who had the emotional control that was often missing in the impulsive Kirk, and the series’ trademark diversity included Whoopi Goldberg as an alien bartender and LeVar Burton as the blind engineer.

The series reflected a new time in America. While Captain Kirk’s Enterprise was always pressing on to a new planet and another conflict, Captain Picard headed a calmer and more sophisticated ship, complete with chamber music concerts. There was not much fighting but a lot of negotiating. The Klingons had been tamed and were now allies of The Federation. Everything was running pretty smoothly except for frequent technical turmoil ranging from dangerous radiation leaks to warp jumps that had to be calculated to the nanosecond.

To Boldly Return The Saturday Evening Post

1. “Live long and prosper” is the greeting of which planet?
a. Vulcan
b. Romulus
c. Earth

2. Which actress played the first female commanding officer in a leading role?
a. Kate Mulgrew
b. Denise Crosby
c. Nichelle Nichols

3. Name that alien:
a. Lieutenant Worf, Klingon
b. Nero, Romulan
c. Sybok, Vulcan

4. Who was the captain of the Enterprise in the original Star Trek pilot?
a. Christopher Pike
b. James T. Kirk
c. Jean-Luc Picard
 
5. In the original series, what was the tip off that a character would die early on in a mission?
a. The character would say the line, “Beam me up, Scotty.”
b. The character was the first one off the ship.
c. The character was wearing a red shirt.

6. Before Leonard Nimoy, which actor did Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry consider to play Spock?
a. Adam West
b. Patrick Stewart
c. Peter Graves

7. Besides Whoopi Goldberg, which other Oscar host appeared on a Star Trek TV series?
a. Seth McFarland
b. Billy Crystal
c. Johnny Carson

8. Other than Kirstie Alley, which Cheers cast member also appeared in the Star Trek franchise?
a. Rhea Perlman
b. Kelsey Grammer
c. Woody Harrelson

Check the Answers!

Trek Trivia The Saturday Evening Post

But it was another 26-year-old, Roger Tory Peterson, who produced the book that would change birding and, some say, kick-start the environmental movement. In 1934, Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds proved the perfect tool for both novice birders and their experienced brethren; it was inexpensive ($2.75), portable (just 7.5-by-5 inches), and useful, introducing what came to be known as the Peterson Identification System, which deploys arrows to point out the distinguishing field marks discussed in the text. Peterson’s book (now $26) is a must for any birder, and here are a few more:

The Sibley Guide to Birds
544 pages, $39.95

Pros: Sibley is extremely thorough and reliable, featuring illustrations of birds in flight as well as standing, perched, or afloat; 6,600 illustrations in all.

Cons: At roughly 6-by-10 inches, it’s not very portable—though it also comes in two smaller regional (east/west) versions.

Kaufman Field Guide to Birds Of North America
392 pages, $18.95

Pros: Digitally enhanced photography (though some birders don’t like this aspect) is helpful for beginners.

Cons: Some readers complain about blurry or pale images.

National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America,
Sixth Edition
576 pages, $27.95

Pros: It’s comprehensive and up-to-date, featuring all 990 species found in North America. It also has terrific maps, with major fall and spring migration routes.

Cons: Too large and heavy for practical field use; like Sibley, it comes in smaller eastern and western editions.

Bird Nerd Library Essentials The Saturday Evening Post

See worthy: When searching for binoculars, consider weight, optic quality, and fit. Don’t cut corners to save a few bucks.

Experienced birders encourage beginners to spend as much money as they can afford on binoculars. A well-built pair can last for decades and may get you deeper into birding more quickly by allowing you to discern telling field marks, be they the iris on a herring gull or the black cap on a Wilson’s warbler.

In making your choice, you’ll want to consider weight, field of view, close-focus distance, and fit. As for the specifications, all binoculars come with a two-part numerical description. The first number relates to the magnification; the second, to the diameter of the big lens, which will indicate the brightness. So an 8 x 42 pair magnifies an image eight times and has a lens of 42 millimeters. Generally, you’re looking for magnification between 7 and 10 and lens size (or brightness) between 35 and 50. Anything less will be insufficient; anything more will make the binoculars heavy and unwieldy. And one final tip from 19-year-old birder Luke Seitz: “Always, always waterproof.”

How to Pick the Right Binoculars The Saturday Evening Post

How do you know you can trust what you read? Start by recognizing that there is no such thing as completely unbiased news. No one can report any news story without encapsulating complicated events, deciding what’s really important, leaving out what the reporter thinks are insignificant details, and adopting a point of view that makes it possible to stitch together all the elements and tell a story. Therefore no two people will ever report any news story the same way. So there is no such thing as a single objective telling of a news event. That said, the following tactics will bring you closer to the objective truth.

1. Triangulate from less biased sources. Fox News has a clearly conservative slant; MSNBC has a liberal one. Whatever news source you begin with, think about how hard that source tries to be unbiased.

2. Separate news from opinion. Always ask yourself whether what you’re getting is reporting or commentary. In newspapers the distinction is usually pretty clear. There’s news on the front page and commentary on the editorial page. On television and on the Internet, it’s often less clear. Sites like Drudge Report on the right and Talking Points Memo on the left report news, but from a definite point of view and with a lot of opinion mixed in.

3. Be suspicious. Always have your antennae out for anything that sounds untrue. If something you hear or read seems questionable, a simple Google or Google News search can often ferret out the truth. Factcheck.org, politifact.com, and snopes.com are good nonpartisan sites devoted to separating truth from fiction.

4. Balance your news diet. Try to get at least some of your news from the other side. Even if you feel strongly about an issue or a news event yourself, it’s vital to take in opposing positions. Somewhere between one extreme and the other usually lies the truth. But above all …

5. Recognize your own biases. The multiplicity of voices available to us today allows people to find news sources that consistently present the news the way they like it. This tends to strengthen people’s prejudices and make all of us even more polarized than ever. Try always to stay aware of this tendency in yourself. It’s there in all of us.

Only The Facts The Saturday Evening Post

• Raven’s Bread, a newsletter for an international readership of self-declared hermits: ravensbreadministries.com/news.html
• Consider The Ravens: On Contemporary Hermit Life by Paul A. and Karen Karper Fredette (iUniverse Books)
• Sister Laurel O’Neal’s blog, Notes from Stillsong Hermitage: notesfromstillsong.blogspot.com
• Thoughts In Solitude by Thomas Merton (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux)

Famous American Hermits

Want to know more about the hermits who have gone before you? Get to know these famous hermits who lived the simple life before it was en vogue.

• Robert Voorhis, a former slave, escaped bondage and chose to live in a small, secluded cave for nearly 14 years.
• Dorothy Molter, remembered fondly as “The Root Beer Lady,” has a museum dedicated to her life in the wilderness of Minnesota.
• Richard Proenneke, a woodworking genius, donated his hand-built log cabin to the Lake Clark National Park and Preserve in Alaska before his death in 2003.
• Daniel Suelo, who lives and travels entirely without money, writes a blog about his alternative lifestyle and updates it from libraries across the U.S. In 2012 Mark Sundeen wrote Suelo’s biography, The Man Who Quit Money (Riverhead Books).

Resources for Would-be Hermits The Saturday Evening Post

Uncle Sam wants … your money.

Ever since I was a kid and read that Al Capone was arrested for tax evasion, I have feared the Internal Revenue Service. Think of it, Al Capone had killed a zillion people, and while the police were trying to find proof to arrest him for murder, a skinny nerd with a green eyeshade nailed Capone for tax evasion. Insofar as it is possible, I try never to irritate the IRS.

In an effort to stay on the good side of the IRS, I’ve offered them several suggestions to keep them in the black. For starters, since I’m self-employed, I have to pay my income taxes four times a year. I always forget to pay until the day they’re due and end up paying with a credit card so I don’t get arrested and sent to Alcatraz like Al Capone. I use a Kroger credit card, but if the IRS had a credit card, I would use theirs. Credit card companies make $20 billion a year, give or take a few, and it’s time the IRS got a piece of the action. Using an IRS credit card could earn points toward a tax deduction. If you ratted out your tax delinquent neighbor with the barking dog that poops in your yard, you could get bonus points. It was a great idea, but the IRS hasn’t responded.

Or, consider a lottery play: Powerball recently hit $587.5 million. Two families split the money. Chances are good they’ll do something stupid with it and ruin their lives. Since the lottery and the IRS are both run by the government, it makes sense for the lottery to rig it so the IRS wins. For a $2 investment, the IRS could have made $587.5 million. Before long, the government would be awash in money, free of debt. I sent this suggestion to the IRS, but nothing came of it.

They also didn’t respond to my suggestion they buy metal detectors and hit the beaches on the weekend. There have been thousands of shipwrecks over the years, most of them involving ships filled to the brim with gold doubloons. Nic Davies of Shrewsbury, England, in his first venture out with a metal detector, found 10,000 ancient Roman coins buried in a clay pot. Officials estimate they’re worth a billion zillion dollars. Personally, I don’t care for treasure hunters because they dig holes, don’t bother to refill them, and I fall in them and break my legs. But if the IRS agents found enough buried money so we wouldn’t have to pay taxes anymore, I’d learn to cope.

In that same vein, the IRS could send its employees out to garage sales to buy Van Gogh paintings hidden underneath dogs-playing-poker pictures. A half dozen times a year I hear of someone doing this. It’s a great way to make some fast money, but when I wrote the IRS, there was no reply. Nothing. Nada. Zip. It’s no wonder our country’s coffers are empty.

To hear people talk, you’d think the IRS was invented by Adolf Hitler. In fact, it was created in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln to help pay for the Civil War. In nearly every presidential poll, Lincoln ranks as our favorite president. The Republicans refer to themselves as the Party of Lincoln, because, if they called themselves the Party of the IRS, they’d never win another office. Don’t get me wrong, I love and admire the IRS and wish them nothing but the best.

We are fast approaching another April 15, my favorite day of the year. Most people hate that day, but not me. (Did I mention my admiration for the IRS?) I’ll spend the weeks leading up to it carefully going over my financial records, making sure to report every dollar I’ve made in the past year, even the $50 my mom and dad gave me for Christmas. If you happen to work for the IRS, I know you’re busy checking everyone’s return. Save yourself the time and trouble, and don’t give mine a second glance.

The IRS Has A Secret Admirer The Saturday Evening Post

I must have been 12 or 13 when my father suggested I go downtown with him to get some money from the bank. It was a Saturday afternoon, and, although he was a senior executive at the “Multibanco” in Chihuahua, I doubted he was going to be admitted on the weekend to help himself to some pesos. So I kept watching soccer on TV. My team, Atlético Español, was finding a new way to lose; that’s what they did.

But no, Dad was clearly up to something. “C’mon, I have a card that will get me cash,” he said, grinning. He did have a sense of humor and an adventurous streak, so I figured I should play along.

“OK,” I said. “Vamos.”

We got into our un-air-conditioned orange VW Caribe and headed downtown. The Multibanco was right across the street from the zócalo, in the shadows of Chihuahua’s 18th-century cathedral, the first and last baroque structure built in our otherwise unpretentious city.

Outside the bank, by the parking lot, was a small kiosk I had never noticed before, like a walk-in phone booth. We walked over to it, and my dad fumbled for a card that he reverentially slid out from a little envelope and into an opening that caused a buzz and click, and in we went to the booth, where he proceeded, before his wide-eyed, jaw-dragging son, to retrieve a few hundred pesos from a machine. I don’t think I could have been more astonished had he beamed us into the 23rd century.

Three decades later, I type down this memory on a plane as I listen to one of a few hundred albums on my iPad before settling in to read one of the dozens of books on the same nimble tablet with the interactive screen.

We live in an age when we can have nearly anything all the time, and my first inkling of that coming age came that languid Saturday afternoon in Chihuahua, when Dad pulled his act of magic at the city’s first ATM.

There were other milestones along the way, of course. The Walkman seemed like a huge leap forward, providing stereophonic mobility. So did having an AT&T long-distance calling card. When I first came to school in the States, I had to drag rolls and rolls of change to the payphone down the hallway to connect for a few minutes with Mexico to speak to my parents or to enjoy some awkward, static-filled small talk with a certain Margarita. Then came these calling cards that let you commandeer any payphone as if it were your own, without the need to have a piggy bank in tow (although those monthly bills were an invariable shocker).

Oddly enough, what should have been more obvious milestones on the road to “everything all the time” didn’t seem like such. My first desktop computer in college felt more like a spiffier typewriter than a potential conduit to all the world’s information, but then it wouldn’t be another decade until I “dialed” online after getting one of those AOL CDs in the mail (it was probably the 10th one I’d gotten). And even that didn’t feel so noteworthy, truth be told; I quickly grew bored of a couple of chat rooms and went back to the TV.

Amazon did feel epochal, this notion that you could be sitting in your PJs at midnight and order a book from your bedroom that would show up a few days later at your doorstep. The memory of those first orders in the late ’90s still gives me chills, even now when I can download two entire books onto my iPad in the time it takes to board a plane, as I just did.

Let’s get back to TV for a second. That’s been an entertainment constant throughout my life, but precisely because it has been a constant—at least the physical act of staring at a screen—it’s the starkest illustration of how we’ve moved from a life of fleeting moments to this everything-all-the-time age.

The World is Getting Better, Not Worse! The Saturday Evening Post

Is your cellular service contract about to expire? Don’t sign a new wireless contract just yet. Rather than automatically going with one of the big four cellular carriers—AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, or Verizon Wireless—consider one of the smaller guys instead.

Prepaid mobile phone carriers offer wireless service that can save you hundreds of dollars over the life of a standard two-year cellular plan. Since prepaid plans don’t have contracts, you can walk away without paying an early-termination fee—up to $350 for Verizon Wireless customers and $325 at AT&T.

Prepaid carriers such as Boost Mobile, Cricket, MetroPCS, and Straight Talk have been around for years, but their popularity is growing among U.S. consumers. Sales of smartphones at prepaid carriers rose 23 percent in the third quarter of 2012 over the prior quarter, according to the NPD Group, a consumer research firm. Meanwhile, smartphone sales fell 12 percent at the top-tier carriers during that period.

Why the change? One reason is prepaid carriers today have a much better selection of smartphones, including such favorites as the Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S III. While you’ll pay full price for smartphones from prepaid carriers—not the subsidized price that comes with a two-year contract—you’ll also save big on your monthly bill.

MetroPCS, for instance, charges $500 for a Galaxy S III, but AT&T charges $200 for the same phone with a two-year plan. Yes, Metro charges $300 more up-front, but it also saves you big bucks on the back end.

Example: a $50-per-month smartphone plan from MetroPCS includes unlimited nationwide calling, text messaging, and data, the first 2.5 GB of which are at 4G LTE speeds. By comparison, AT&T customers pay $90 a month for 450 phone minutes, unlimited texting, and 3 GB of data. (AT&T charges $10 per additional 1 GB beyond 3 GB.)

Add it all up, and the MetroPCS customer pays $40 less per month for a comparable plan. Over two years—the life of a standard AT&T contract—that’s a savings of $960. Subtract the extra $300 that MetroPCS charges for the Galaxy S III, and you’re still $660 ahead.

Coverage areas do vary, so it’s always a good idea to check a carrier’s website to see if it’s available where you live. MetroPCS says its wireless service covers 90 percent of Americans.

Even Bigger Savings

If you’re not picky about the type of smartphone you use, Republic Wireless has a deal that can’t be beat: $19 per month for unlimited talk, text, and data—with a catch or two. First, Republic uses a technology it calls “hybrid calling,” which means it uses both Wi-Fi and cellular connections to make calls, send texts, or download files. Its first choice is Wi-Fi—whether at home, work, or sipping a latte at Starbucks. If your Republic Wireless phone can’t find an available Wi-Fi link, it uses Sprint’s 3G network instead. The second catch: Republic offers its customers just one smartphone, the Motorola Defy XT, a middling Android handset that costs $259, so Republic isn’t the best choice for users who crave the latest, greatest handsets. But for bargain hunters, $19 a month is hard to beat.

Ting is another prepaid carrier with an innovative idea: Rather than choosing an all-you-can-eat plan, or buying more minutes and data than you need, why not build a plan based on your actual usage? Say you use a smartphone infrequently, a few calls, a few texts, and the occasional Web search. Ting’s a la carte menu might be the ticket: 100 phone minutes cost $3; 1,000 text messages is $5; and 500 MB of data is $13. Add a $6 “device fee,” and your total monthly bill comes to $27 (plus regulatory fees and other surcharges). And Ting uses Sprint’s wireless network.

Virgin Mobile, another Sprint-based carrier, also has a variety of affordable prepaid options, including a $35 per month plan with 300 phone minutes, and unlimited text and data. And don’t overlook prepaid plans from larger carriers. T-Mobile, which plans to merge with MetroPCS, offers a $30-per-month, no-contract plan with 100 talk minutes and unlimited text and data.

So go prepaid and save big.

For a chart of prepaid phone suppliers and plan details, go to saturdayeveningpost.com/smartphone-plans.

How to Save a Bundle on Smartphone Service The Saturday Evening Post

On New Year’s Day, Congress finally, at the very last moment, passed the fiscal cliff legislation that saved the economy from free fall. Everyone on every side of the negotiations made sacrifices to make it happen. Or so it seemed. But one pharmaceutical company got wording stuck in the bill that will bring it hundreds of millions of dollars over the next couple of years.

The law ensures that Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology business, will have two years to sell its dialysis pill Sensipar without any limits on what Medicare has to pay for it, even though the fiscal cliff bill is supposed to save $4.9 billion over 10 years by reducing overpayments for dialysis drugs and treatments. Exempting Sensipar from those controls will cost Medicare as much as $500 million.

How did the company arrange such a windfall? The provision requested by Amgen was added to the final draft of the legislation by Senate staff members, according to published reports. Why? Amgen has no fewer than 74 lobbyists in Washington, including the former chiefs of staff of both Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Sen. Max Baucus. It has contributed more than $5 million to candidates and their political action committees since 2007. Those lobbyists had repeated meetings with senators’ staffers in the fall. Critics contend that bowing to special interests is part of the reason for our current dilemma.

“Sadly, the lawmaker-lobbyist cabal has once again acted to serve their own financial interests; continuing to place patients at risk and passing the costs on to the taxpayer,” Dennis J. Cotter, a health policy researcher in metropolitan Washington, D.C., told the Post.

Amgen is a very big lobbying presence in Washington, but there’s nothing that special about it. Just about every business there is, from AAI Corporation to Zurich Financial, has its lobbyists prowling the halls of Congress, doing everything they can to serve their industries’ purposes, sometimes at the expense of the greater good. So does just about every special interest group.

Lobbying is a huge business. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, there were 12,051 registered lobbyists in Washington in 2012, and they spent a total of $2.47 billion trying to get government officials to do their bidding. The biggest spender of all? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which forked out almost $96 million on lobbying, followed by the National Association of Realtors, $26 million. One of the top industry sectors? Health, which spent $365 million—more than 10 times as much as organized labor.

How can so much money flowing around the nation’s capital not corrupt? It certainly does, and the revolving door between Congress and K Street, the main street of lobbying, is not just a myth. Almost two-thirds of all lobbying, in dollars spent, involves former congressional staffers. Is such a situation excusable? Should it even be legal?

Absolutely. In fact, it’s necessary. And even the founding fathers knew it. Our most revered, sacred law of all enshrines it. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution doesn’t just guarantee freedom of speech and religion. It says, in full,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Those final words are what allows lobbying. As crucial as is our right to talk freely and worship freely, so is our right to present our concerns to Congress, and to “assemble” to do so—that is, to join forces as part of a special interest group. That’s how government works. Lobbying is as much a part of what makes representative government tick as voting or town hall meetings.

Furthermore, lobbying has evolved over time from a shady and secretive business, where outright bribes were commonplace, to a heavily regulated one, where transparency rules and where the great majority of lobbyists are open and forthright about what they do and how much they spend and why. As enormous a presence as lobbying has become in Washington (and there’s lobbying in every state capital and county and town, too), it is far more civilized and controlled and honorable today than it ever used to be. At various times, laws have been passed to make it more so, when its evils have become too undeniable.

During the very first Congress, in the 1790s, a senator wrote that a lobbyist had said “he would give [Rep. John] Vining a 1,000 Guineas for his Vote, but … he might get it for a 10th part of the Sum.” Men were already descending on Congress to try to influence votes on taxes, federal workers’ pay, veterans’ benefits, and other matters. One of the biggest earliest lobbying interests was the Bank of the United States, a quasi-government institution with enemies that included Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Its lobbyists’ activities grew so pernicious and yet accepted that in December 1833 Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts wrote to the bank’s president, “I believe my retainer has not been renewed, or refreshed, as usual. If it be wished that my relation to the bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainer.” Could Tony Soprano demand a payoff more bluntly?

That’s not all Tony Soprano could relate to. According to the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, who made a study of lobbying in the early United States, “clubs, brothels, and ‘gambling dens’ became natural habitats of the lobbyists, since these institutions were occasionally visited by members of Congress, who, far from home, came seeking good food, drink, and agreeable company.”

By 1869 a newspaper columnist could write this lurid description: “Winding in and out through the long, devious basement passage, crawling through the corridors, trailing its slimy length from gallery to committee room, at last it lies stretched at full length on the floor of Congress—this dazzling reptile, this huge, scaly serpent of the lobby.”

What exactly was the serpent up to? America’s first big industry, the railroad, was growing fast at the time, and it begat America’s first big organized lobbying effort. Laying rails across the country involved getting major government land grants and subsidies, and railroad barons hired hundreds of lobbyists at a time. Their work included giving lawmakers passes for free train travel and even cash payouts. The early railroad lobby reached an ugly peak in the Crédit Mobilier scandal of 1872, when senators and congressmen were given free railroad stock in return for passing railroad-favorable laws.

Learning to Love Our Lobbyist Friends The Saturday Evening Post

Nine of our 47 vice presidents inherited the presidency—eight from a president’s death and one because President Richard Nixon quit. Seven vice presidents died in office. Two vice presidents resigned: John C. Calhoun to go to the Senate, and Spiro Agnew to go into hiding.

George Clinton was the first of seven vice presidents to die in office (1812). The second was Elbridge Gerry (1814), who gave his name to the notorious and ongoing practice of gerrymandering—creating misshapen voting districts to ensure your party’s victory. Both served under James Madison, president from 1809 to 1817.

Richard Mentor Johnson, V.P. under Martin Van Buren (1837–1841), rose to political prominence partly on his reputation for having personally killed Shawnee Chief Tecumseh in the war of 1812. His reputation came undone in subsequent years when word got out that his common-law wife, with whom he had two daughters, was the light-skinned slave Julia Chinn. She died in the cholera epidemic of 1833, and her existence was conveniently swept under the rug during his period serving as V.P. For the record, Johnson educated and deeded property to his two daughters.

Theodore Roosevelt found the job of presiding over the Senate so tedious that he often slept at his desk. He famously said of his senatorial charges, “When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‘Present’ or ‘Guilty.’”

Charles G. Dawes is the sole vice president to write a hit song. His 1912 “Melody in A Major” later had words added and became “It’s All in the Game.” Tommy Edwards took the song to number one in 1958, seven years after Dawes’s death.

Not until Alben Barkley in 1949 was the vice president called “The Veep,” a term coined by a young Barkley relative. It was noted by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1949 and has passed into common usage.

E Pluribus Trivia The Saturday Evening Post

Forty-seven men have occupied the office of vice president, and while they were in there, they did little other than serve as presiding officer of the Senate, their only constitutional mandate.

Vice presidents were chosen more for perceived vote-getting abilities than because of genuine credentials as public servants—which many had. Even so, an aura of veiled weirdness has hovered over the office for more than two centuries.

In 1788, the U.S. held its first presidential election under a flawed system: The man with the most electoral votes got to be president, and the man finishing second became vice president. President John Adams, elected following Washington in 1796, and Vice President Thomas Jefferson detested each other. Imagine George W. Bush with Al Gore as vice president or an Obama-Romney administration, and you’ll understand.

In 1800, Jefferson and Adams faced off—the first time two former vice presidents mutually sought the presidency. But Adams finished third while Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied with 73 votes each. Burr had agreed in advance to serve as Jefferson’s vice president, and that’s how things ultimately worked out.

Jefferson’s near-disaster led to the passage of the 12th Amendment, which required electors to cast separate votes for the two offices. This spared us, up to a point, acrimony between the two top office holders. Since the first vice president was elected in 1788, a motley of murderers, traitors, bribe takers, and outright crooks have paraded through the vice presidency. What’s more, during the 224 years between 1788 and 2012, the office has stood vacant on 18 occasions for a total of almost 38 years.

The nation survived not only those 18 vacancies but also the 10 and one-half vice presidents we examine below.

Aaron Burr

(1801-1805)

Our third vice president, Aaron Burr of New York, set the tone of lunacy that so often defines the office. Burr killed Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in an illegal duel and got himself charged with murder in both New York and New Jersey. After leaving office, shady land deals in the western wilderness got him charged with treason. He was never convicted of either crime.

John Tyler*

(1841)

How do you get one-half of a vice president? John Tyler of Virginia did it this way. He was the “too” of the 1840 campaign slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” The “Tippecanoe” half of the ticket was William Henry Harrison who spoke for three hours at his rainy inauguration, caught pneumonia, and died 31 days later, making Tyler our shortest-serving vice president.

Incredibly, though the Constitution provided for a vice president, it did not state expressly that the vice president would assume the office of president following a chief executive’s death. A quick-acting Congress rectified this … in 1967.

Before even being elevated to the presidency, Tyler signaled his lack of interest in his elected position. In fact, immediately after Harrison’s inauguration, Tyler left Washington and didn’t return until he was summoned at the president’s death. On his return, Tyler resisted congressional attempts to name him “temporary” or “acting” president and served almost a full term as a no-asterisk president. In that post, however, he was unremarkable and historians have called him weak. He so alienated his party that he was denied its nomination for the election of 1844.

The Worst 10 1/2* Vice Presidents The Saturday Evening Post