Introducing "Monsieur Big-Hat"
Melville Jacoby Bill Lascher Melville Jacoby Bill Lascher

Introducing "Monsieur Big-Hat"

Most of my posts about Melville Jacoby focus squarely on nonfiction. He was a journalist. I am a journalist. Though Mel worked for a time as a broadcaster and was handy with a camera, he was first and foremost a writer. So it shouldn't be terribly surprising that he dabbled in fiction a bit. I found one of those stories — "Monsieur Big-Hat" — and put it together with some photos Mel took of an air raid in Chongqing to make a short ebook that's now available online. The story describes what happens when an American correspondent meets a French diplomat as bombs fall on the Chinese wartime capital in June, 1940.

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Thinkingest Bill Lascher Thinkingest Bill Lascher

The Thinkingest Episode 5: The Fluidity of Freaks

[audio:http://lascheratlarge.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Episode-5.mp3] What's behind the term "overthinking?" What's behind this urge to have a podcast of the things we over-analyze and dissect to exhaustion? In some sense there's an anxiety about being thought a freak, about doing things "wrong" by some sense. So I thought I'd spend some time having a conversation with Stevi Costa, an old friend of mine who devotes most of her overthinking to studying freaks and their portrayal in literature.

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