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Readers often ask, “Whence issue these columns?” Here’s the current answer. Last winter we traded our suburban home of 43 years for high-rise housing in downtown Chicago. We can see three states looking south from our condo, and from my study, looking north, I see the lakeshore and the glow of Wisconsin cities. “Doesn’t the beauty of that view distract you when you write?” Answer: “Yes, and the distraction probably is sometimes evident in some of the writing.”

The press has been making much of 29 binders and 2,400 pages of jottings found among the relics of baseball great Joe DiMaggio. According to Clyde Haberman in the New York Times (July 17), no one who reads those jottings will be “stumbling upon Proustian insights.” For one thing, DiMaggio was “notoriously—how to put it kindly?—frugal,” and recorded every taxi fare and tip.