Discover Top Posts Tagged with #tom junod

Popular Recent

I tell her that if we look inside ourselves we will find a universe that is as infinite as the universe we see when we stand under the stars at night.

— Tom Junod, In The Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir (Doubleday, March 10, 2026)

#Tom Junod #In the days of my youth I was told what it means to be a man #inside #interal #soul searching #universe #mind #thoughts

#tom junod #fred rogers #a beautiful day in the neighborhood #kindness #mr rogers #kindness is a practice #kindness is a discipline

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Directed by Marielle Heller

Cinematography by Jody Lee Lipes

"Mentionable is manageable."

--- 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐑𝐨𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐬

#mr. rogers #mr. roger's neighborhood #mr rogers #fred rogers #it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood #it's a beautiful day #a beautiful day movie #movie quotes #movies #tom hanks #tom junod #qtilekc

I first met him 21 years ago, and now our relationship is the subject of a new movie. He’s never been more revered—or more misunderstood.

December 2019 issue

(The Atlantic) -- A long time ago, a man of resourceful and relentless kindness saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. He trusted me when I thought I was untrustworthy, and took an interest in me that went beyond my initial interest in him. He was the first person I ever wrote about who became my friend, and our friendship endured until he died. Now a movie has been made from the story I wrote about him, which is to say “inspired by” the story I wrote about him, which is to say that in the movie my name is Lloyd Vogel and I get into a fistfight with my father at my sister’s wedding.

I did not get into a fistfight with my father at my sister’s wedding. My sister didn’t have a wedding. And yet the movie, called A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, seems like a culmination of the gifts that Fred Rogers gave me and all of us, gifts that fit the definition of grace because they feel, at least in my case, undeserved. I still don’t know what he saw in me, why he decided to trust me, or what, to this day, he wanted from me, if anything at all. He puzzles me now as much as he did when I first met him at the door of the apartment he kept in New York City, dressed, as he’d warned me when we spoke on the phone and he invited me over, in a shabby blue bathrobe and a pair of slippers. Fred was, let’s not forget, a rather peculiar man, and it is not just his goodness but rather the peculiarity of his goodness that has made him, 16 years after his death, triumphant as a symbol of human possibility, although just about everything he stood for has been lost...

... And so I have to start by mentioning that I have begun writing a story about Mister Rogers the day after two young men armed with assault rifles killed a total of 31 people in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.

I am often asked what Fred would have made of our time—what he would have made of Donald Trump, what he would have made of Twitter, what he would have made of what is generally called our “polarization” but is in fact the discovery that we don’t like our neighbors very much once we encounter them proclaiming their political opinions on social media. I often hear people say that they wish Fred were still around to offer his guidance and also that they are thankful he is gone, because at least he has been spared from seeing what we have become. In all of this, there is something plaintive and a little desperate, an unspoken lament that he has left us when we need him most, as though instead of dying of stomach cancer he was assumed by rapture, abandoning us to our own devices and the judgment implicit in his absence...

... It isn’t that he is revered but not followed so much as he is revered because he is not followed—because remembering him as a nice man is easier than thinking of him as a demanding one. He spoke most clearly through his example, but our culture consoles itself with the simple fact that he once existed. There is no use asking further questions of him, only of ourselves. We know what Mister Rogers would do, but even now we don’t know what to do with the lessons of Mister Rogers.

#Fred Rogers #Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood #A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood #Tom Junod #The Atlantic