This is the Kader Daily Podcast for Monday, January 31st, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Terry Teachout was a polymath, a jazz musician, a deadline editorialist, that he's best known as the Wall Street Journal's National... a Among his many friends, Cato's Walter Olson, who details why Terry Teachout was a writer

worth reading and appreciating.

Years ago, I was gifted a biography of H.L.

Menkin by Terry Teachout. I'm sorry he didn't give me the

biography but it was the book that that he wrote about H. L. Menkin and it wasn't

until years later that I knew anything about him other than that book.

And having spent just a little bit of time reading about him and having read him now for for years what an amazing and wide-ranging

career he had. Indeed it's hard to think of any contemporary figure who wrote as widely about as many different

arts and as wide a sweep from ballet and dance, one of his first loves to jazz, where he was a jazz musician as well as writing about

jazz throughout his adult life, too, being theater critic for the Wall Street Journal,

cultural critic for commentary, doing podcasts on topics that included

Broadway theatre and film noir, and many, many others.

So for, I think there are some lessons here for young people who may not know what they want to do with their lives frankly

because Terry Teachout had worked in daily newspapers for a long time writing not just about culture.

By no means just about culture and in his early years he picked up the suite of skills that you can learn through daily newspaper

which included being able to turn around copy very quickly when Stephen

Sondheim died he had his newly written obituary at the Wall Street Journal within one hour,

and being able to get on with the writer's block and all of the other fancy ways of describing that are complained of by many people who try to do cultural writing.

Terry, as far as I know, never complained about it and working at the New York Daily news for several years doing things like turning around

editorials about the news of the day before we'll do that for you.

...