This and That

June 2025 edition: TV, movie reviews, news, announcements and Frederick Forsyth, Bobby Sherman, Sly Stone, Brian Wilson, Lalo Schifrin obituaries

Here are some important or marginalized dates to remember next month—mark yours—because July’s calendar includes:

July 1st: America’s Objectivist Conference (OCON) begins in Boston.

July 4th: America’s Independence Day.

July 6th: Today’s the birthday of Sylvester Stallone and former President George W. Bush, whom I briefly interviewed in downtown Los Angeles in 1999.

July 9th: Tom Hanks was born in Concord, California on this date in 1956.

July 10th: Actor Ron Glass—the writer and police detective character on ABC’s Barney Miller—and The Waltons creator and author Earl Hamner, Jr. (whom I interviewed at his office in Studio City) were born on this date.

July 11th: Superman (DC Comics/Warner Bros.) debuts in movie theaters.

July 13th: America’s 45th president, then-candidate Donald John Trump, was shot during an assassination attempt in Western Pennsylvania’s Butler County in 2024.

July 14th: Barack Obama entered the United States of America in a pact agreeing to nuclear development by the Islamic dictatorship of Iran in Vienna, Austria on this date in 2015. A year later, an Islamic terrorist drove a truck bomb into a crowd in Nice, France. Also, Gerald Rudolph Ford, America’s 38th President of the United States, was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1913.

July 16: Barbara Stanwyck was born on this date. Barry Goldwater—America’s first Jewish major presidential nominee—declared in his acceptance speech for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in San Francisco, California: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

July 17th: TWA Flight 800 explodes, breaks apart and crashes into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New York City in 1996. Disneyland opens in 1955.

July 20th: American astronaut Neil Armstrong becomes the first man on the moon in 1969.

July 23rd: Talk radio pioneer Don Imus was born in 1940.

July 26th: According to Erik Sass in The Mental Floss History of the United States (2010, HarperCollins): “With two atom bombs ready to use…President Truman joined the other allies in issuing the Potsdam Declaration, calling for Japan’s unconditional surrender.”

July 27th: Norman Lear was born. Ayn Rand attends dinner at the White House with President Ford and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser in 1976.

July 28th: On the Waterfront directed by Elia Kazan debuts in movie theaters. Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life debuts on Blu-Ray.

July 29th: Japan rejects America’s call for unconditional surrender in 1945; final preparations to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima begin.

July 30th: Christopher Nolan was born on this date in 1970.

July 31st: Ernst Lubitsch’s So This is Paris debuts in 1926.

“Deal With God” Debuts Online in America

I’m delighted to announce that Classic Chicago magazine published the third tale in my resilient woman trilogy, “Deal With God”.

You can read the story (with pictures I engineered courtesy of X’s Grok technology) here. This romantic-dystopian science fiction is my first published fiction (and, coincidentally, my first story podcast episode); the short story was chosen and featured in an anthology, Reaching the Dead End, by Free Spirit Publishers in 2024.

This version’s slightly adapted. Listen to me read my story aloud if you’re a Speakeasy, Annual or Monthly subscriber to Short Stories by Scott Holleran.

Virtues: Celebrating Independence, Pride and…Pride Month?

I came out against Pride Month and gay pride in an essay for my monthly LinkedIn newsletter, The Scout. Read my argument, “Why Pride Matters and the Smearing of Pride” here. I’ve been wanting to write that essay for a long time. It’s been decades since I came out as gay. As a writer and journalist, I’m proud to have never used the LGBT acronym or any of its spawn (or its problematic origin term, the redundant gay and lesbian) in over 30 years of writing non-fiction for publication. Another virtue, independence, is the topic this summer in a new edition of The Scout; read my case for celebrating America’s independence.