Trollope eventually got quite responsible work at the post office.

Some writers found consular and diplomatic posts: among the Americans, Hawthorne, Howell, and (James Russell) Lowell; among the French, Chateaubriand and Stendhal.

Louis Auchincloss was a lawyer.

I am not in that market, but this seems implausible. My neighborhood is pretty prosperous, but I doubt that $400k/year is the standard. Yet kids do go off to daycare.

They might be spending more than the recommended 7% of their income on childcare. That's where the 400k number came from.

400K gross before taxes is qty2. of $200k/yr which is IC4 or so, right? Seems plausible enough.

Median family income in the US is a little over 100k. 400k to afford childcare is a ridiculous lie/error.

Yes, that’s the point they’re claiming: a median family cannot afford healthcare. Are there any figures in particular asserted by the article that you consider faulty, or merely the conclusion?

"Uh, excuse me. This ad for a payday loan company says the vast majority of households can't afford this thing that most households with children do, in fact, afford and pay for. Which figures do you dispute?"

Concluding something farcical and then asking people to debate it is silly and a waste of time. 400k is an extremely high household income. Childcare is a common expense for families with children. The claim that only extremely high income people can afford a common expense is wrong on its face and needs no further analysis.

That was the story that was current back then, at least the tying to a tree part. It may have been invented, but not by the New Yorker writer.

This is in the US? I have rarely heard political homilies.

Religion has been far more politicised in the US than elsewhere. And not exactly in a direction that makes sense to me (a European protestant).

European Protestantism and American Protestantism differ in substantial ways. Crudely, European Protestantism went the way of Hegelian dialectics and evolving beyond the Christianity of the Bible. American (conservative) Protestantism largely reacted against that. I think both groups are largely held together by politics today though their politics differ in the expected ways.

What does this have to do with the post?

It's spam.

An acquaintance made some money as cantor to a synagogue around here. He was not Jewish, but I gather that the combination of singing and getting paid felt just fine.

In 1982 the Secretary of the Interior, James Watts, announced that Wayne Newton would perform at the National Mall on Independence Day, at least implying that the Beach Boys, who had been there the year before, really didn't reflect good American values. He was mocked for his, and the next year the Beach Boys came back. I did not go to the Mall, but heard some of their performance on the radio. They were terrible, and a musician I knew said that this was because men's voices deepen with age but the Beach Boys were still trying to sing in the original keys.

Jaroslav Pelikan's history of Christian doctrine runs to five volumes. I haven't read the last, but the first four are very readable. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) runs to something under 400 pages. Given the word "Catholic", I will add that Pelikan started off Lutheran and ended in one of the Orthodox churches.

Elite distance runners are likely to be running farther than a half marathon every day. There used to be a notion that your weekly mileage ought to be triple the distance you are training for, which for a marathon is about 79 miles per week, eleven-plus miles per day. My body would not tolerate much more than 60 miles per week, and honestly I don't know what most other recreational runners did.

Kids today miss the chagrin of damaging a protruding door handle, and the entertainment of one of their elders entirely removing one against some obstacle.