Delanceyplace

hound dog--9/25/26

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Before Elvis by Preston Lauterbach. Big Mama Thornton/Willimae Smith was the original performer of the Elvis Presley hit “Hound Dog”:

“'You see the history of this and the history of that and Willie Mae's name never comes up. It's like they took a big eraser and scratched that part of history out.’ –Etta James

“In early March of 1949, less than five months after the Presley family moved to Memphis, a traveling variety show stopped in town for a four-day stint at the Palace Theatre on Beale Street. Doing business as Sammy Green's Hot Harlem Revue, it boasted in its ads of a thirty-person cast and sparkling musical comedy but mentioned only one attraction by name: ‘Willimae Smith (Sister of Bessie) The Blues Queen.’

“For Elvis, this may have been the closest he ever got to the originator of his most successful record. ‘Willimae Smith’ would soon quit the Hot Harlem Revue, drop the false sisterhood, and obtain an immortal sobriquet all her own as ‘Big Mama’ Thornton, original singer of ‘Hound Dog.’

“Deep divers into American music will inform you, correctly albeit nasally, that the King's inspiration for and arrangement of the song 'Hound Dog' came directly from a Vegas lounge act called Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys. But ‘Hound Dog’ exists solely because of Willie Mae Thornton. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote the song specifically for her and have maintained that her version remains unrivaled. Thornton's recording of ‘Hound Dog’ was one of the biggest R&B hits of 1953, selling at least a half million copies. Without Big Mama, we have no ‘Hound Dog.’ And without ‘Hound Dog,’ Elvis Presley has a different top-selling record and perhaps a different career. Most importantly, Elvis and ‘Hound Dog’ affected Big Mama's life more profoundly than any other aspect of her career. So anyone who might wish to write a book extolling the underappreciated impact of Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys has my blessing. This is the story of Big Mama Thornton.

Thornton c. 1955–1960

"'Let me explain something,’ Thornton said in a 1974 interview with Anthony Connor and Robert Neff. ‘You know what, I'm for real. But everybody comes asking me the same thing, man. It sounds like a record stuck. Yackity, yackity, yackity, yack.’ One of the interviewers replied, ‘What would you like to talk about?’ She said, ‘What I like to talk about?’ ‘Yes, that's what we're getting to, really.’ ‘I like to talk about the future,’ she said. ‘Not the past. Because the past is done and over with.’

“At that moment, Thornton had yet to reach the age of fifty, though she had survived a century in showbiz years.

“She was asked, ‘Your history is important, isn't it?’

"'Yes.’

"'It might hurt somebody,’ she chuckled.

"The interviewers took a slightly Freudian turn away from this dead end.

"'What is the happiest period in your life?’ one asked. ‘When I was asleep,’ Thornton said.

"'How about when you were awake?’

"'I just made myself happy,’ she said. ‘A lot of you don't know, but I was worried a lot of times. You don't know that though. I always kept a smile on my face. I'd always be around my friends, buy drinks, laugh. But they don't know what was going through my mind .... Cause a lot of times, man, I didn't have nothing to eat. They don't know it. I was smiling. I didn't have nowhere to stay, they didn't know that.’

“The interviewers continued to struggle. ‘I'm sorry, I'm so tired,’ one remarked.

"'You tired, man,’ Thornton snapped. ‘I'm the one that did the show. I am the one that did the show. What did you done?’

“Later, one of them asked, ‘If you were going to do it all over again,’ but she cut him off.

“'No,’ she scoffed. 'No way.'”

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sea anemones -9/24/26

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 03:02:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from Life Between the Tides by Adam Nicolson. A fight among the sea anemones:

"At the western edge of the pool on Rubha an t-Sasunnaich, where it shallows towards one of the volcanic dykes, the anemones were proliferating all summer. In some parts by September there were more than 300 of them in a square yard, all sizes, none quite touching, but each gently sifting from the surrounding water the food they needed.

"In other places, I had found the wavering grey-yellow arms of the snakelocks and, in cracks and crevices further down the tide, the green blotched strawberry anemones, their bodies stuck with bits of sand and coralline flakes, the variegated tentacles of a dahlia anemone and some white elegant ones, as bright as candles.

"Here in the pool, they were all the usual beadlets, Actinia equina, the most common of all, slightly various in their colours but named after the ring of little blue stinging cells or acrorhagi -- a Victorian Greekism meaning 'high berries' -- arranged as a necklace inside the lip of the columnar body. The acrorhagi are usually invisible when the main tentacles are up but appear as the anemone folds down into itself when conditions are not good -- if the tide has dropped away, or the salinity has fallen or the temperature risen.

Beadlet anemone

"Otherwise, these simple animals merely wave their tentacles in the passing water like flowers in sunlight. That is why they are called anemones, named only in the late eighteenth century from their resemblance to the flowers of wood and meadow.

"Brush your fingers through them, as the Australian poet Gwen Harwood has said, and you will find your 'fingers meet some hungering gentleness'. The little stings the anemones give you with these red tentacles do not hurt, but feel more like a kind of stickiness than an attack.

"Some anemones are sexual, and release their sperm and eggs into the surrounding water, relying on some chance union, but these beadlets reproduce asexually, making tiny, genetically identical versions of themselves which emerge into the surrounding world as their fully functioning progeny. If you ruffle through them enough, you will find tiny anemone reproductions spilling out on to your fingers, each baby blob of life looking in a magnifying glass like a raspberry mousse.

"They are among the simplest animals, not very different from their long-distant ancestors whose rare soft-body fossils have been found in deposits more than 500 million years old. They have no centralised nervous system, no brain, no organs of excretion -- whatever needs to come out as waste is ejected through the same tentacle-surrounded hole by which the food went in. Their muscles and nerves are simpler and less organized than in almost any other animal. They have no skeleton; water pressure alone, held tight within the body cavity by the mouth closing over it, provides their solidity. Foods are dissolved by simple digestive enzymes into the chemical constituents that the anemone can absorb.

"They are scavengers, eating the dead and broken parts of animals that float past in the tide. High up near the grass, they ingest plenty of dead midges and mosquitoes. Further down, it is little sandhoppers, parts of prawns, crab megalopses and lots of tiny unattached young mussels: in short, most of the characters that have populated this book. A large one has been seen to swallow a smelt six inches long. Some Irish scientists have tested the anemones' appetite for something more, popping rather large mussels into the oral cavity to see what happened. The anemones accepted the offering easily enough and the mussels disappeared inside them while the scientists waited. Up to two hours later, the complete and uninterfered-with mussel came back out. The anemone had been unable to get access to the meat. When the scientists cut the muscle by which the bivalve kept itself closed, there was a different outcome. Very nearly nine hours later, the shells were spat out by the anemone, the meat of the mussel having entirely disappeared.

"I collected some from the shallows at the edge of the pool. They are easy to peel off, if you lift them gently and carefully from the rocks they are stuck to. They come away almost exactly like Post-its, closing their tentacles with the disturbance but otherwise untroubled. The bodies of these Actiniae in the pool are red all the way down, the colour just paling at the foot. Some others that I found at the far end of the headland, and on rocks lower in the tide, had a blue line around the foot of their columnar bodies. Both were beadier anemones, but of two different morphs, each living in slightly different environments.

"In separate lidded boxes filled with seawater, I took them back to the aquarium in the house and left them to acclimatize for an hour or so. By the time I went to look, things had started to happen. One of the Bluefoots had been in a fight and had suffered in it, with pale wounds from its enemy's attack cells, the acrorhagi, stapled down one side of its body. An attacking anemone leaves part of the acrorhagus on the body-column of its adversary, continuing to deliver its toxins even after the fight is over. The flesh around these 'acrorhagus peels' had crumpled and puckered with the damage.

"The Bluefoots had now moved to another stone where again it found itself next to a Redfoot. The two of them were meeting each other with their outer tentacles. Redfoot was bigger, its base spread wide and oddly warty, with its tentacles fully displayed, while Bluefoot looked less happy, tentacles retracted, a little inward (see second colour place section).

"Soon, though, Bluefoot made its defensive move and started to lean in towards the Redfoot enemy, which reacted at first by pulling back some of its outer tentacles. It was a temporary withdrawal. Minutes afterwards, Redfoot pulled itself up to its greatest height, reshaping its whole body and contorting its blue attack cells into a tiara of violence towards Bluefoot, leaving its upper red tentacles withdrawn, hooked and clawed. It was a ferocious display of aggression, of selfhood, of one being set against another.

"Toxic darts spurted from Redfoot's acrorhagi into Bluefoot's body, sticking into the flesh, standing out from it like arrows in a target and leaving white threads wrapped around the enemy's waist. For the second time Bluefoot gave up the fight, detaching itself from the rock and starting to drift past and away from its aggressor.

"This attempt to escape re-summoned all the defensive aggressive instincts in Redfoot. As Bluefoot rolled over and past it, revealing the pale grey underside of its foot, Redfoot once again came up into its flamboyant, menacing attack form. Bluefoot was now in a hopeless situation, upside down and defenceless next to the fierce, charged presence of its enemy.

"As its crumpled body drifted past, Redfoot, still wearing its extraordinary erect war-corona, bent over and down, on to the spot Bluefoot had just vacated, and deposited there a single tiny new anemone, an asexual done of itself, generated and brooded within its body cavity, placed to occupy the neighbouring area of rock that would now become part of its own clonal territory.

"Bluefoot was wafted away by the currents in the aquarium, finding a place at the far end, tucked down behind a large stone. Meanwhile, Redfoot, the crisis over, resumed its composure, with its tiny, soon-to-be-space-occupying clone happily settled beside it. That clone's minuscule tentacles were already sifting the passing water."

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genetic changes--9/23/26

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Beyond Inheritance by Roxanne Khamsi. There are constant genetic changes happening within our testes and ovaries during our own lives:

“Like astronomers who use telescopes to peer into the sky for clues about the dawn of the universe, and geologists who dig deep into the ground for hints about how the Earth formed, geneticists are not immune to the pull of origin stories. They pore over sequence data from present-day humans and re-create theoretical lineages that posit when different ailments crept into our species. Through these methods, some have calculated, for example, that fifty-two thousand years ago or so, midway through the Stone Age in Europe, one of our human ancestors was born with a mutation that causes cystic fibrosis. Nowadays, it's the most common life-threatening inherited genetic disease in the United States. Other teams have suggested that sickle cell disease, one of the most frequent heritable blood disorders in the world, dates back to between twenty-two thousand and seven thousand years ago–perhaps to an individual living in northern Africa or the rainforests of what is now known as Cameroon. Meanwhile, some researchers reckon that the most recent common ancestor carrying a prevalent mutation for Tay-Sachs disease–which progressively destroys the nerves of the brain and spinal cord-lived around twelve hundred years ago.

“Scientists have generally viewed mutation in reproductive cells–which transmit traits to future generations–as something that happens, but happens seldom. They have thought broadly about the chance of advantageous DNA changes that occasionally help spur the evolution of new species, for example. And likewise, the emergence of disadvantageous mutations for devastating conditions such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell, and Tay-Sachs seemed for so long to be like huge but infrequent earthquakes in the genome. In other words, they seemed rare. To this day, many researchers still view reproductive cells-which form the ‘germ line’ that passes genetic material from generation to generation–as relatively impervious to new DNA changes. ‘I think that this is the stereotype that many people have,’ explains Kateryna Makova, a scientist at Penn State University. ‘They think that the germ line is very fixed.’

“And, in fact, even when new mutations do occur in our reproductive sperm and egg cells, the vast majority likely have zero impact. They usually land in the extensive unimportant tracts of the genome. ‘One important thing to realize is that most mutations are just neutral,’ Makova says. This understanding was introduced in the late 1960s by the Japanese biologist Motoo Kimura. He argued that a lot of evolutionary change is simply the result of random genetic drift, and that many of the tiny changes in the genome don't affect what our DNA actually produces.

But consequential DNA errors do sometimes crop up in an individual's reproductive cells during their lifetime. And in recent years, many scientists have gained a greater appreciation of the importance of this phenomenon. Much like those astronomers who now, equipped with high-tech telescopes, can spot the birth of numerous new stars in distant galaxies, geneticists are better than ever at detecting new sequence changes in reproductive cells. The technical name for these errors is ‘de novo germline mutations.’ (The Latin phrase de novo is roughly translated as ‘from the new.’)

X-chromosomes (red) and Y-chromosomes (green) in embryonic stem cells of male (X/Y) and female (X/X) mice.

“Earlier in this book, we met patients with health conditions caused by new mutations–people like Ascrea, who had a heart condition that almost claimed her life, or the pregnant woman with the blood disorder called paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria who passed away. But in each of these cases, the new mutation happened during development and affected only some of their cells. The acquired genetic conditions described in the preceding chapters have affected parts of the brain, lymph nodes, and skin, just to name a few. Mutations that strike only in those tissues can disrupt the life of the affected individual but are not transmitted to their children. In contrast, when the reproductive cells that go on to form an individual are struck with a new genetic error, it can get endlessly passed down to subsequent generations. In this way, a noninherited mutation becomes an inherited one. And since the genomes of the sperm and egg are recapitulated in every cell of a developing embryo, all the child's cells will carry that mutation. The stakes are extremely high.

“There's a scientific awakening among geneticists that there are more genetic changes happening within our testes and ovaries while we live than previously thought, and that these might have implications beyond our own health to affect the genetic well-being of our children.

“Part of the reason that de novo germline mutations have been overlooked is that finding them used to be an insurmountable technical challenge. Detecting how often these tiny changes within the three billion letters (or subunits) of DNA occur in each generation has been likened to measuring the frequency of needles in haystacks. But that has slowly begun to change. New sequencing tools and computational methods have made it easier and cheaper to pick up small typos and structural variations in the genome, beyond the major chromosomal abnormalities that can be detected with a microscope. One analysis of genetic data from twenty-eight people across four generations of a Utah family revealed around 150 de novo genetic changes per generation detectable by modern technology. That number was about 50 percent higher than previous estimates.

“It's not unheard-of now to encounter people whose illnesses are linked to a de novo germline mutation. New research has linked such mutations to aggressive cancers such as retinoblastoma, which originates in the eyes, and osteosarcoma, which starts in the bones. Akiva Zablocki, the head of the Hyper IgM Foundation, whom we met briefly in chapter 3, knows about de novo mutations and their health impact. His wife, who is the youngest of seven siblings, was the only one in her family to have the hyper IgM mutation, which means it was most likely a de novo change in either the sperm or egg that formed her. Because she was a carrier for the trait, she passed it on to their son (who, thankfully, received a successful bone marrow transplant for the immune disorder).

“Of the tens of thousands of de novo germline mutations identified in disease so far, almost half have been linked to autism (which might be a reflection of the robust research funding allocated to study this neurodevelopmental condition). A survey of forty-six thousand mutations found that 45 percent had been associated with autism. This strong signal correlating genetic changes in reproductive cells with autism is notable because prior research has suggested that children born to older fathers, whose sperm is more likely to contain new mutations, are at heightened risk of this disease.

“There's a hope that knowing more about de novo germline genetic errors will help scientists better understand the molecular machinery that breaks down in certain diseases–and that this, in turn, will point drug developers toward the cellular functions to target and resuscitate with new medications. Sometimes, discovering a de novo mutation can even provide long-sought answers about tragedies that seem to strike out of the blue: In recent years, doctors have identified cases in which these genetic aberrations were likely the cause of some previously unexplained sudden infant deaths. The reality is that congenital genetic diseases do not always go back millennia. Sometimes they creep in and cause unthinkable heartbreak within the time span of our lives.”

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spain, gold, and silver--9/22/26

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from The Almighty Dollar by Brendan Greeley. Spain’s vast imports of silver from the New World brought dislocation and havoc:

“When mining began in the valley in Bohemia, what we think of today as the country of Spain was just a group of kingdoms allied by marriage. Toledo had been by medieval standards an industrial city, exporting cloth and steel all over Europe. Medieval Iberian kingdoms didn't have capital cities the way we think of them now, but up on its hill Toledo was the spiritual and political center of Castile, the largest and most powerful of the kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula.

“Charles V, Philip II, and Philip III, the father, son, and grandson who held the Castilian crown in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had been blessed with two gifts. First, they were Habsburgs. The family had married its way into land all over Europe. Second, Castile had claimed some of North America and most of Central and South America, and with them a little bit of gold and a lot of silver. The volume of silver coming out of the Americas was wildly out of scale with anything Europe had ever seen. At their peak in the 1530s, European mines produced about eleven thousand kilograms of silver a year. By the 1550s, American mines had reached fourteen thousand kilograms. By the 1580s, that had more than doubled, to thirty-four thousand.A vast imperial apparatus served a single purpose: move silver out of the . ground, down the mountains, and out across the Atlantic to Europe, or across the Pacific to China, all so the Habsburg kings of Castile could take their cut.

“By law, the kings had the exclusive right to operate any mines underneath their pieces of the earth. But a hole in a mountain on the other side of an ocean is a difficult thing to manage, and so the Habsburgs let private speculators stake claims and run the mines, pushing that silver into existing markets. In return, speculators had to pay the quinto–a tax of a fifth of all that silver–to the Spanish crown. By the second half of the sixteenth century silver fleets arrived in Seville every year, and the Habsburgs treated their quinto on chat silver the same way Stephan Schlick had treated his monopoly right to buy at St. Joachimsthal. They went to bankers and borrowed against the future.

“All this new silver ultimately took on a familiar form. The Habsburgs coined their silver at almost the same weight, size, and purity as the joachimsthaler [a well-established European dollar], By the middle of the sixteenth century, merchants in Leipzig, Hamburg, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and even Florence and Genoa had come to expect their silver in taler, and the Habsburgs tweaked Castile's monetary system so they could coin silver in something so much like a taler that in northern Europe it was immediately recognized as one. In 1581 we get the first English mention of a ‘Philippes doler,’ for Philip II. The dollar coins that would eventually begin to circulate in England's American colonies came not from Saxony or Bohemia but from mines and mints in what are today Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico.

Electrotype copy of a 1525 Joachimsthaler of the Kingdom of Bohemia.

“The Habsburgs commanded a new empire, but they weren't in charge of Europe's silver markets, and so they minted more or less faithful copies of the old joachimsthaler. Then they eclipsed the investors at St. Joachimsthal as the world's dominant supplier of silver dollars. It was silver Spanish dollars that would end up in England's colonies in North America, by then always stamped with the two pillars of Hercules, draped with S-shaped banners and the old Habsburg motto, plus ultra–farther beyond.

“In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, war was the Habsburgs' single largest expense. The quinto allowed Philip II to send armadas to win at the Battle of Lepanto against the Ottoman Empire in 1571, then lose in the English Channel against England and the weather in 1588. Silver sustained a brutal, decades-long war to hold Habsburg possessions in what are today Belgium and the Netherlands. The quinto also paid to run new viceroyalties in Central and South America, and for regular subsidies to outposts like Havana to protect and sustain the fleets on their way to Seville. Silver made the Spanish Empire possible and served as its unifying purpose. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, war and expansion had turned Castile from a kingdom into a heartland–both the center and the origin of something larger called Spain.

“Castilians also looked around their own cities at home and saw an economic and demographic catastrophe. In 1500, per capita GDP in the kingdoms of Spain had been just below that of the Netherlands. By 1600, however, economic growth in the Netherlands had taken off, leaving Spain far behind. From 1530 to 1591, population more than doubled in Castile, growing more than in almost any other part of Spain. But between 1591 and 1700, population shrank by a fifth in the same region, even as it continued to grow almost everywhere else on the peninsula. Spain's empire had been good for the Habsburgs. It had been bad for Castile. It had been terrible for Toledo.

“The city had been a prize of late-antique and medieval invasions for a millennium–the Visigoths, the Moors, the Christian kings of the reconquest. It had its own archbishop. It was the home of the Inquisition, and a frequent host to the Cortes, a meeting of Castilian cities. In 1535, Charles V had taken the city's Alcázar, a medieval fort, and turned it into a palace. Bue Toledo isn't laid out for the spectacles of an imperial capital. In the sixteenth century, it was crowded and overbuilt, hemmed in by nature and surrounded by walls. And so in I 561, Philip II started building a brand-new imperial capital in the small town of Madrid. For a while, the hilltop continued to grow. In 1597, Toledo was still bigger than Madrid. Twenty years later, however, Toledo had lost three quarters of its population. In 1602, there were 1,000 baptisms in Toledo. By 1622, that had dropped to 640. Imagine that within two decades almost half the children of your city have disappeared. It would feel like the end of the world.

“Toledo had a strong intellectual community of church and civil leaders who were proud of the university and even met at regular poetry contests. They were bewildered by depopulation, and spent so much time and ink trying to explain it we can now identify a Toledo School, a philosophy to explain how an industrial city dies. The document Carlos showed me over coffee at the archives came from that community. Addressed to the king from the University of Toledo, it opens with a simple plea: Manufactured goods should not leave Spain, and foreign-made goods should not enter. We have documents like this today. It's an open letter from a trade group, begging for tariffs. The letter would have been passed around in Madrid, at a special council that Philip III had called to figure out an answer to the question that had consumed the kingdom: We have so much silver. What went wrong? Toledo's answer, grounded in the self-interest of its merchants, was to flip the question on its head. The city hadn't collapsed despite all those silver dollars. It had collapsed because of them.”

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civil war newspapers--9/21/26

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection--from Empire of Ink by Alex Wright. Newspapers published by Civil War armed forces themselves helped accelerate the transformation of the American press from a hodgepodge of small-town partisan papers into an increasingly nationalized press:

“One morning in July 1861, the Ohio Seventh Regiment of the Union army rolled into the sleepy town of Weston, Virginia. There, they discovered the abandoned offices of the town's newspaper, The Weston Herald. The previous owner had fled town in a hurry, leaving behind a scattered mess of papers and a functioning hand-crank press. Four of the officers promptly decided to commandeer the printshop–and publish their own newspaper. On July 4, the inaugural edition of The Ohio Seventh appeared.

“Opening with a patriotic reprinting of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ the newly minted soldier-editors announced their intention to keep publishing the paper ‘as often as circumstances admit.’ They also included a, rousing letter written by an anonymous soldier: ‘Now that the Regiment; can boast of running a press on their own hook, I can see no possible reason why we should not avail ourselves of the opportunity of expressing our sentiments, in regard to the Union and all its glories.’ They also took the occasion to address the remaining town residents, reassuring anyone who might happen to read their paper that they came not as enemies but ‘as long absented friends,’ and that they harbored no intention to ‘war against any of your institutions, not even against the institution of slavery.’

“As the soldiers thumbed through the previous publisher's papers scattered around the office, they stumbled on a particularly damning artifact: a draft story describing the town's invasion–before it happened. The headline read: ‘Fiendish Work! Defenseless Women and Children Outraged and Butchered!!’ It went on to recount a series of gruesome and entirely fictitious outrages: women raped, children murdered, and ordinary citizens hanged by the dozens on their own doorsteps. Not a single word of it was true. The editor had apparently written the article and set it in type long before the Union soldiers ever arrived and had prepared to send it out via telegraph to other Southern newspapers. But the editor never executed the plan. He had apparently fled in a hurry without transmitting the dispatch. Enraged, the Union soldiers decided to print the article in its entirety, along with a scathing rebuttal to counteract the libel: ous propaganda, using their newly acquired literary artillery to defend their regiments honor.

“Alongside the bloody national reckoning of the Civil War, a quieter revolution was taking place. The conflict unleashed a torrent of print, powered by telegraph wires, railway lines, steam presses–and a new breed of portable presses designed expressly for military use. On the front lines, soldiers could now publish their own dispatches from the field, while correspondents wired stories from the battlefields to city papers at unprecedented speeds. Together, these developments helped accelerate the transformation of the press from a hodgepodge of small-town partisan papers into an increasingly nationalized press chronicling the war in real time–and laying the groundwork for the professionalized, industrialized mass media of the postwar era.

The Telegraph printing house in Macon, Georgia, c. 1876

“On that same July 4 of 1861, Private Henry Peterman launched a similar editorial foray: printing the first issue of the Pennsylvania Thirteenth. Two weeks earlier, he and a few fellow soldiers had pooled funds to buy a used Adams Cottage Press from a local editor, Reverend Charles H. Russell, who was preparing to enlist. Unlike The Ohio Seventh–which was written and edited by members of the officer corps–the Pennsylvania Thirteenth was produced entirely by enlisted men, with little in the way of top-down military pronouncements. Instead, the paper traded mostly in the day-to-day minutiae of camp life: humorous anecdotes, light verse, and occasional jibes at the harsh lot of the soldier's life.

“One of the paper's early poems, ‘The Knapsack Drill,’ neatly encapsulated the newspaper's everyman ethos:

“A soldier's life is hard enough–

He takes the smooth part with the rough;

‘Tis nothing strange, but it's a bitter pill–

He's oft put through the 'knapsack drill'

Should he perchance go off to town

To see the sights and run around,

And with ‘goodies’ there his jacket fill,

He thinks not of the 'knapsack drill.’

The guard comes up and reads his pass–

The time is up, and then, alas?

There–to pay; the colonel will

Put him through the ‘knapsack drill.’

The officers, so nice and fine,

Whene'er they choose will have a time;

Their goblets to the brim will fill

And never fear the '’knapsack drill.’

Our three years' time will soon be done,

And if we live we'll all go home;

Of pleasure then we'll drink our fill,

And fear no more the '’knapsack drill.’

“The campy poem set the tone for the rest of the newspaper's run, which balanced similarly witty, irreverent fare with more prosaic reports about regimental goings-on. One issue described a New Year's dinner where the soldiers feasted on roast turkey, oysters, and lemonade–only to see their dessert course interrupted when word spread that the company was about to mobilize for battle. In another issue, an anonymous soldier-scribe chronicled the doings of their adopted dog Jack, who ‘continues to take greater interest in the regimental drills and dress parades than some of the officers and men.’

“Elsewhere, the paper tiptoed toward weightier topics like temperance, but with characteristically arch wit. Three new voluntary associations had recently formed in response to the problem of overindulgence: a ‘Patriotic League’ whose members pledged to abstain altogether; a group of ‘Covenanters,’ who vowed to practice moderation, on the premise that ‘one should eat when he's hungry and drink when he's dry, but neither get drunk nor swear’; and, finally, the ‘Hoodoodens,’ ‘a select association’ consisting of just two soldiers, who ‘walk in and say nothing, eat, drink and pay nothing.’ Yet it appears that despite the presence of these associations amid the troops, the whiskey continued to flow. At one point the editors bemoaned the tragic departure of a beloved roving liquor seller: ‘No More shall we hear the cheerful whisper of ‘First-rate whisky–only a dollar a bottle.’

“Despite its often lighthearted tone, the Pennsylvania Thirteenth took its publishing business seriously. The paper sold out its initial press run of 1,500 copies per issue. Peterman and his compatriots vowed not to take a profit, however, turning the newspaper's revenue (at three to five cents a copy) back into funding the enterprise. Over the next fourteen months, they managed to produce fourteen issues. The final edition, dated September 12, 1862, carried an ominous report: ‘Something's up.– Judging from appearances, our regiment will be on the march in a very few days .... [E]re another week we will see the spires of Richmond.’ The story was wrong. They were marching to Antietam, the deadliest one-day battle in American history. The Pennsylvania Thirteenth had breathed its last.

“As the war continued, these homespun camp newspapers proliferated. In November 1861, a group of Illinois Volunteers under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant seized a printing press in Bloomfield, Missouri, and published the first edition of a newspaper that lives to this day: Stars and Stripes. Most soldier papers came and went quickly, however–sometimes in as few as one or two issues–as their editors stayed on the march.

“Many of these papers seem devoted to lifting the troops' spirits with stories of pranks and assorted merriment. An 1862 edition of The Camp Gazette at Camp Joe Hooker in Massachusetts recounts the tale of several "boys in the Irish Brigade" who had stolen a barrel of ale from the nearby military depot and set off into the woods, where they promptly emptied its contents. Suitably emboldened, they decided to go on an impromptu turkey hunt with their pistols, achieving little success in such a lubricated state–until the sound of their gunshots attracted the attention of the camp watch. The men, ‘while engaged in this delectable undertaking were pounced upon by the provo guard,’ and promptly returned to quarters.”

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barry diller--9/18/26

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 02:49:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Who Kew by Barry Diller. Legendary business mogul Barry Diller started in the mailroom of the William Morris talent agency:

“I wasn't really working, I was studying. I had the world's greatest entertainment ‘library’ at hand–the William Morris file room. It was a huge place with hundreds of metal file cabinets that housed the entire history of the entertainment business. I found excuses to disappear into it and deeply read every file from A to Z.

“At William Morris in the 1960s, the primary job of a mail-room boy was to get out of there as fast as you could. The next step was to become an assistant to an agent, listen in on his calls, and begin to learn what his job entailed. By osmosis, you would emerge as a junior agent.

“As a mail boy, you didn't really sort the mail; your job was basically to run around and pick up and deliver things, more like a messenger service. One of my duties was to take the day's mail to the post office in huge bags. One day, early on, I lugged the huge bag of mail to the parking lot, put it in my trunk, got in the car, and promptly drove home and went up to my room. Two days later the bell rang in my head–Oh my fucking god, I forgot the mail! It was still in the trunk of my car. I raced to the post office, but they refused to take it because it was already postmarked.

“The post office clerk said I had to take it back and have every item repostmarked. I thought; Well, this is surely curtains.

“Somehow I talked the post office clerk into accepting the mispostmarked mail and lived to spend another day mail-rooming.

“There were eight or ten of us there at any one time. The mail boys either got their jobs through connections or were such fervid hustlers that they couldn't be denied. There were no requirements for being in the mail room, no college degrees needed or tests to pass. But to be an agent did take a scrappy charm, and a streetwise gregariousness. What it didn't particularly take was brains, since the main part of an agent's job is simply to sign clients. Selling yourself to a performer–who by definition is likely insecure and vulnerable–isn't a monumentally difficult obstacle. You simply need that savvy and confidence. I had neither, so I knew from the outset that I'd never graduate to junior agent.

“The other mail boys loved doing the mail runs to the studios; there were people to meet and impress and contacts to file away for future use. But I wasn't learning anything other than the best driving route to the Valley. Lord knows why, given my life's taste for the fastest cars, I drove a blue Buick convertible–the first car I bought on my own (well ... on my parents' own).

“Once, though, during my runs, I did have the pleasure of accidentally knocking down Louella Parsons's Christmas tree and setting it on fire. I entered her dour, gloomy house and tripped over the five hundred presents (read: bribes) that were scattered around her dark living room. Parsons was the enormously powerful Hollywood columnist whose influence had only recently receded, but she still received those holiday tributes. I was so lucky to see the last gasps of old Hollywood life–the moguls who started it all were passing from the scene and with them their outsized exuberance, egos, and excesses. I remember a poignant scene from the lobby of the Beverly Theater when I was in my late teens and went to a preview of a new movie. The heretofore immaculately-turned-out great old mogul Jack Warner was emerging from the bathroom and it saddened me to see he'd left a pee stain on his trousers.

Diller with his wife Diane von Fürstenberg at the 2009 Metropolitan Opera premiere

“Early on I knew I wasn't much like the other guys in the mail room. They were so aggressive about ‘making it,’ while I was just oh-so-tentatively putting my ambition training wheels on. Then, one Christmas holiday, into the mail room walked David Geffen, a scrawny nineteen-year-old who looked more like a malnourished twelve. He introduced himself, saying he worked in the New York office, but wanted to use the holiday to find out what the L.A. office was like. I thought, Whoa, now that's ambition. l could actually feel the hunger for success vibrating out of him. I'd never met, then or since, someone with more focus, more pure drive and ferocious intelligence than David. Unlike me, who loves process, David is the most efficient problem solver ever born. No artificial intelligence will ever exceed his ability to go faster from problem to solution, or from poverty to so many billions. Despite all the biological aggression and occasional occupational conflict that has bubbled between us at various times over sixty years of knowing each other, I treasure him now as my best friend.

‘On one of my missions as a messenger, I was assigned to go to the airport to pick up Barbra Streisand. Barbra was already on her first step to stardom, coming out to L.A. to appear at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub. We aimlessly chatted along the way, then I dropped her off at the hotel, saying I hoped I'd see her again, and she, politely dismissive, said the same. The next night at a party the Danny Thomases gave for her opening night, she was surprised to see yesterday's chauffeur introduced to her as one of the guests. Over these sixty years, Barbra and I have become good friends, although I have definitely tried her patience. One night some years ago she was receiving an award, and I was to introduce her to a Hollywood audience of five thousand. She called me the afternoon before the event, and, naturally, the controlling one asked me to read her my intro. I did so, and at the end I made the unforgivable mistake of pronouncing her last name as STREISand rather than StreiSAND. She shrieked at me, and I vowed to do it right when I made the introduction that night. Of course, I got scrambled and didn't, and her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish.

“I was rescued from messengering around the city by a mandatory threemonth rotation, during which all mail boys had to spend their time mimeographing hundreds of copies of the interoffice telegrams sent out daily to all the agents. Everyone hated that job. The room was in the basement, and not only was there no natural light, but the job gave the boys no exposure to their higher-ups, and thus no opportunities to impress them. I, however, loved every minute and managed to extend my three-month rotation to almost three years. It wasn't the mimeographing–that I finished in half an hour–but it meant I could spend the rest of the day in the file room, where I was transfixed by the history of every transaction going back to the turn of the century.”

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native americans in the civil war -- 9/17/26

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 02:38:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic by Manisha Sinha. The Native Americans in the Civil War:

When recalling his time in an Illinois militia in the Black Hawk War of 1832, Abraham Lincoln—whose settler grandfather had been killed by Indians—joked that the only thing he had killed were mosquitoes. The so-called Black Hawk War, named after a Sauk chief, was a merciless slaughter of Sauks and Foxes (Mesquakies), who had returned to their lands after being forcibly exiled by the U.S. Army. Like other settlers who served in the militia, Lincoln received a land grant for his service, further dispossessing the Sauks.

“During the Civil War, preoccupied with defeating the Confederacy, President Lincoln—who, compared to many Americans, was not a diehard Indian hater—did not give much thought to the Indian wars. In 1862, 303 Dakota warriors were condemned to execution in a summary military trial after the Dakota-US conflict led by Little Crow in Minnesota, after years of reneged treaties, land grabs, and mistreatment that had reduced the Dakota Sioux to starvation and desperation. Lincoln pored over the trial records and commuted the sentences of all except thirty-nine accused of particularly egregious actions. In the end, thirty eight were hanged—the largest mass hanging in American history and a blot on Lincoln's presidency. And like most US presidents, Lincoln signed off on laws dispossessing Indians. Besides indigenous people themselves, only abolitionists like the Indian advocate John Beeson protested. As he put it, the Dakota were a ‘sovereign people’ and ‘their hostile acts in Minnesota ... [were] one of war, and not rebellion; and for what the most civilized nations would deem sufficient occasion for war.’ The Dakota Sioux and some Ho-Chunks (Winnebagos), who had not taken part in the uprising, were expelled from their homes and consigned to reservations.

“The Civil War brought devastation to Native America. Even as army regulars stationed in the West were summoned east, volunteers under generals such as James Carleton continued to wage war on the Indian frontier. The gruesome Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado Territory in 1864 saw volunteers of the Third Colorado Cavalry murder nearly four hundred Arapaho and Cheyenne, mainly women and children. Captain Silas Soule, an abolitionist, blew the whistle on his commanding officer, Col. John Chivington, a Methodist minister, who ordered the massacre. At a court-martial led by Samuel F. Tappan of the abolitionist Tappan family, another officer, Major Patrick Wynkoop, testified that the Indian women had been tortured and ‘profaned’ in a manner that was truly ‘sickening.’

Sauk Indian family photographed by Frank Rinehart in 1899

“The report of the Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, written by radical Benjamin F. Wade, strongly condemned Chivington's actions and the victims were given forty thousand dollars. Congress passed a joint resolution suspending all pay and allowances to Chivington's regiment. Charles Sumner called it an ‘exceptional crime,’ the ‘most atrocious in the history of any country.’ Despite congressional inquiries, Chivington went mostly unpunished. A month after the Sand Creek massacre, a Colorado cavalry regiment killed Lean Bear, a Cheyenne chief and one of the peace chiefs who had met with Lincoln in 1863 to protest settler encroachments. He was still wearing the peace medal Lincoln had given to him when he was murdered.

“Indigenous nations in ‘Indian territory,’ what is now the state of Oklahoma,—the so-called five civilized nations that had been expelled from their homelands in the 1830s-signed treaties with the Confederacy and fought on its behalf. Yet substantial numbers of people in these nations, especially among the Creeks and the Seminoles, many of whom had intermarried with former slaves, sided with the Union. Such indigenous unionists formed the first Indian regiments of the Civil War, in Kansas. Stand Watie, like many of the ‘mixed blood’ slaveholding elites of the Cherokee nation, supported the Confederacy and rose to the rank of a brigadier general in the Confederate army. His rival, John Ross, the ‘principal chief’ of the Cherokees, whom abolitionists had lauded before the war, had initially advocated neutrality and supported the Union. The Cherokees eventually surrendered to Union forces, and Ross met with Lincoln in 1862, trying to preserve the sovereignty of his nation. In a subsequent letter, Ross assured Lincoln that his nation had signed a treaty with the Confederacy out of necessity and that the true loyalty of Cherokees lay with the United States. At the end of the war, the fact that many of these nations were slaveholding—a mark of ‘civilization’ in the South—left them vulnerable when they signed treaties with the United States in 1866 that abolished slavery and recognized the equality of Indian freedpeople. (The status of Afro-Indians as full fledged members of Indian nations continues to be disputed.) In the late nineteenth century, the federal government gave Indian freedpeople and black settlers land in Indian territory, even as the abolitionist dream of land reform in the South withered.

“The pitting of freedpeople's rights against tribal sovereignty was the tragedy of formal Reconstruction in Indian territory. The southern Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctaws abused freedpeople in much the same way as southern ex-slaveholders, reported agents of the Freedmen's Bureau. The remarkable northern Creek chief, Oktarsars Harjo, posited an alternative and, unfortunately, a minority vision: native sovereignty that included freedpeople. As he put it, ‘we were all one nation.’ Black settlers, fleeing southern terrorism, also cannot simply be viewed as equal participants in American colonialism in the West. The 1866 treaties between the US government and the five ‘civilized’ southern Indian nations resulted, C. N. Vann of the Cherokee nation argued, in land being taken from them and given to railroad corporations or designated as public domain. He was outraged ‘that the Government shall rob its wards and cover itself with ignominy, in order that these corporations may pile up mountainous fortunes.’ Indian territory would be opened to white settlement in 1889, paving the way for further dispossession and Oklahoma statehood. The loss of sovereignty suffered by indigenous nations in the West was compounded by wartime laws that were predicated on their dispossession: the Homestead Acts, which gave homesteads to settlers, citizens as well as immigrants, on ‘public’ lands, and the Pacific Railroad Act, which allowed for the construction of a transcontinental railroad through Native America.”

author: Manisha Sinha title: The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 publisher: Liveright date: page(s): 310-312

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losing your y chromosome--9/16/26

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 02:58:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Beyond Inheritance by Roxanne Khamsi. As men age, some lose their Y chromosome:

“At the time, one of the main methods that scientists had to assess the genetic integrity of a cell was to simply stain it with a dye and then peer into a microscope to count how many chromosomes it possessed. The chromosomes appeared as deeply hued squiggles on the glass microscope slides. Each cell in regular tissue in the body normally contains forty-six chromosomes. Jacobs, who worked at the UK's Medical Research Council, had every reason to expect this number when she evaluated blood cells from almost a hundred healthy people ranging in age from five months to eighty-two years. None of these study participants had ever received X-ray treatment, which can cause genetic damage. Their chromosome count should have been normal. But when she and her collaborators analyzed the cells, they saw a strange trend: Some of them had entire chromosomes missing, and this was especially true of those from older individuals.

“Two years later another study came out from Jacobs and other scientists at the same research institute, including the epidemiologist Richard Doll, who famously linked smoking to cancer. In this follow-up, the team determined that the chromosomes people would lose in some of their cells as they got older were often their sex chromosomes: In other words, women would lose an X chromosome and men would lose their Y chromosome. The latter, known as ‘loss of Y chromosome,’ received more attention, which is perhaps unsurprising given that medical research has historically focused more on men.

“Within a couple of decades, scientists began to connect loss of Y with disease. The first study to do so was published in 1985. In the experiment, researchers examined the genetic integrity of bone marrow cells taken from patients with a kind of cancer called acute myeloid leukemia. They found that loss of Y was present in the patients they examined, and the condition seemed to revert back to normal in those whose cancer was successfully treated.

“It's tempting to see data like that and presume that losing the Y chromosome causes cancer. But it's best not to leap to that assumption.

G-banding patterns of human Y chromosome

“The truth is, chromosomal loss might simply be a red herring. A study of genetic data from more than two hundred thousand men in the UK uncovered a twist: It seems that other gene mutations might be at the root of both loss of Y and cancer. The analysis found more than 150 DNA variations associated with Y-chromosome loss and discerned that many of them were located near cancer-susceptibility genes. Notably, the variants linked to loss of Y were also correlated to cancers affecting the brain, kidneys, and other organs in both the men and women in the study. Women do not have any Y chromosomes to lose, so it's unlikely that the disappearance of this chromosome is to blame for the malignancies. Scientists believe that DNA changes such as the 150 variants they identified might make a cell prone to genetic instability–which, in turn, could result either in the accidental discarding of a chromosome or in DNA errors that turn a cell malignant. In other words, perhaps loss of Y and cancer simply share a root cause.

“Despite the uncertainty about whether loss of Y is a cause of disease or is simply along for the ride, interest in the phenomenon has continued. Loss of Y has now been associated with a myriad of problems ranging from diabetes to Alzheimer's disease to a shorter lifespan.

“There's also a better understanding of how frequently this chromosome goes AWOL in men as they head toward their golden years. The study of two hundred thousand men in the UK found that the proportion of participants with significant loss of Y rose from 3 percent at age forty to 44 percent among those at age seventy. According to some scientists, it is the most common mutation of any kind to arise after birth in men. Loss of Y can also be extraordinarily pervasive within the body: A small study found that one man was missing this chromosome in almost 90 percent of his sampled blood cells.

“How do cells missing a chromosome become so abundant? When Jacobs and her coauthors published their findings decades ago, they put forward a few theories. One possibility, they wrote, was that dividing cells in older people are more likely to make mistakes when sorting their chromosomes. Or, perhaps, cells with an abnormal chromosome count somehow stick around. When it comes to loss of Y specifically, scientists have speculated that the Y chromosome may carry a growth suppressing gene, so jettisoning the chromosome would free a cell from that constraint. There is also the possibility that cells undergoing some other change that gives them an advantage might coincidentally drop their Y chromosome in the process.

“Although less is known about loss of X–in which one of the two X chromosomes that women carry starts disappearing from their cells–there's an inkling that it's common, too. Jacobs is one of the few scientists to publish about this. In 2007, she coauthored a study of almost twenty thousand cells from more than 650 girls and women that detailed a ‘highly significant’ relationship between the X chromosome's disappearance and aging. Whereas around 0.07 percent of girls younger than age sixteen showed X chromosome loss, the number climbed to 7.3 percent of women by age sixty-five. (Sadly, the number of published papers related to this phenomenon in women remains paltry.)

“There's still plenty more mystery to unravel about loss of Y and the disappearance of the X chromosome. But one thing is becoming clear: Even if people seem perfectly healthy as they grow older, there can be populations of abnormal cells taking hold in their bodies."

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burning books--9/15/26

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 02:53:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Churchill's Citadel by Katherine Carter. Book burning by German university students in the 1930s:

“This mood among the youth of Britain was in stark contrast with young people in Germany, 3 million of whom joined Hitler's Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazis’ paramilitary wing, by the end of 1933. Festering resentment towards established political leaders and financial hardship drove the young people of Germany to radical alternatives. Hitler promised them strong leadership and a national rebirth, which were particularly appealing to that disaffected generation, and many undertook direct action as a result.

“On 10 May 1933, university students in 34 towns across Germany began burning books deemed 'undesirable' to the new governing regime with such fervour that over 25,000 were incinerated in one night. In Berlin alone, over 5,000 students bearing the swastika created an inferno of destruction outside the opera house, consisting of 2,000 books deemed to be 'un-German'. They burned books by Jewish, left-wing and liberal authors and those by critics of Nazism. Those thrown into the fires included works by Karl Marx, Helen Keller, H. G. Wells, Ernest Hemingway and Albert Einstein. These almost ritualistic spectacles were accompanied by the chanting of oaths and the wielding of flaming torches. Einstein heard of this devastating cultural destruction while staying in Belgium. He then wrote of it in a letter to his and Churchill's mutual friend, Professor Lindemann, with whom Churchill had travelled to Munich the previous year. ‘I am sitting here in my very pleasant exile’, Einstein wrote, with a palpable sense of relief at being far from such scenes. His choice of wording was perhaps surprising given the £1,000 reward advertised by a German newspaper for anyone who could successfully take his life. Lindemann replied, ‘It seems that the Nazis have got their hands on the machine and they will probably be there for a long time.’

“Albert Einstein was among those who had initially underestimated the Nazis. In an interview for the New York Times in December 1930, he said that Hitler was 'living on the empty stomach of Germany' and 'As soon as economic conditions improve, he will no longer be important.' Two years later, Einstein was once again in America, this time in California, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. Within weeks of the Nazis' seizure of power, his property and possessions were confiscated. ‘I dare not enter Germany because of Hitler’, he wrote to his close friend and rumoured lover, Margarete Lenbach, on 27 February 1933. On his return to Europe, he visited the German Embassy in Brussels to surrender his German citizenship. He told a journalist before his departure from the United States that 'Humanity is more important than national citizenship.’ Einstein had to decide his next move quickly. It was then that he received an invitation from Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson, a maverick Member of Parliament with an adventurous spirit, who was also a long-time friend of Churchill's. While offering sympathy for Einstein's plight, he said 'That even Einstein should be without a home has moved me deeply' and offered Einstein and his wife the use of his London home for a year. This was a surprisingly generous offer given that the pair had only met once and even then only in passing. Einstein politely declined, choosing to remain in Belgium and stay instead in Le Coq-sur-Mer, a small resort near Ostend. However, a seed had been planted, and it was not the last time that the great physicist would hear from the MP for Birmingham Handsworth.

Nazi youth brigades burning "un-German" works by Jewish and left-wing authors at the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, 1933

“Writing at the end of May 1933 to fellow physicist Max Born, who had also recently escaped from Germany, Einstein said of his reputation there, ‘I've been promoted to an ‘evil monster’.’ He added, 'all my money has been taken away from me. But I console myself with the thought that the latter would soon be gone anyway.’ By that time, Nazi policies had forced the abrupt retirement or removal from office of all Jewish state employees, including those working in Germany's universities. When it was pointed out to Hitler that this could have catastrophic consequences on the development of scientific understanding and application in his country, he replied, ‘Then we shall do without physics and chemistry for 100 years.’ Sensing the inevitable, Einstein wrote to Lindemann, saying, 'I shall never see the land of my birth again.'

“Churchill had known Professor Lindemann since the latter months of the First World War, when he ‘distinguished himself by conducting, in the air, a number of experiments, hitherto reserved for daring pilots, to overcome the almost mortal dangers of ‘spin’. The pair became much closer from 1932 onwards, and Lindemann frequently travelled from Oxford to visit the Churchills at Chartwell. He went on to become the most frequent signatory in the house's visitors' book, and by the summer of 1933, with the Churchills having lived in the house for nine years, he had signed it 40 times. He became Churchill's chief advisor on scientific aspects of modern warfare, especially air defense, and the pair often talked on the subject until the early hours of the morning. His insights were more than compensation for any difficulties his hosts faced in accommodating his strict vegetarian diet. Churchill’s literary assistant, Maurice Ashley, later recalled his dietary requirements as consisting of just ‘whites of egg and stewed apple’, both of which fortunately could be found in plentiful supply in Chartwell's kitchen garden. Lindemann was also teetotal, and so couldn't partake in the ever-present champagne at Chartwell, which was almost always Pol Roger and was in plentiful supply in the early months of 1933 as the family had much to celebrate.”

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andrew jackson, adultery, and bigamy--9/14/26

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 02:20:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from American Lion by Jon Meacham. Andrew and Rachel Jackson’s marriage, at a point before she had divorced her husband, brought venomous charges against them during Jackson’s presidential campaign:

“By the time Jackson left the home of Mrs. Donelson, upon Lewis Robards's second abandonment of his wife, he seems to have developed romantic feelings for Rachel. They might well have been latent from the start, given her obvious attractiveness. Doubtless the misbehavior of Robards toward Rachel aroused a certain protectiveness in Jackson. And the fact that Robards accused him of unacceptable intimacies could have made him feel that if he were going to be condemned anyway, he might as well be condemned for cause.

“However it happened, Jackson found himself in the grip of the same emotion that has deranged young persons, and more than a few older ones, since humans acquired wits to lose. Sometime during 1789 Jackson determined to have Rachel for his own. She was still legally bound to Robards, but the moral tie–the bond of trust and affection that makes any marriage real–had been broken by Robards's mistreatment of her, which by now included infidelities Robards scarcely bothered to deny. And sometime during this same period, Rachel decided to have Jackson for her own.

“A divorce appeared no closer than it had been, so the two lovers acted without it. Just what they did and, more to the point, when they did it, have been the source of controversy ever since. John Overton and Jackson's defenders later asserted that Mrs. Donelson, on hearing that Robards intended to return from Kentucky to claim his wife again, laid plans to escape with Rachel to Natchez, in Spanish-administered (though American-claimed) territory on the east bank of the Mississippi, where she had friends. But the journey itself, across hundreds of miles of Indian territory, would be dangerous, and Mrs. Donelson could find only one male escort. This man, a Colonel Stark, asked Jackson to join them. He agreed.

“The journey required several weeks during the winter of 1790-91, by the Overton account. Jackson saw Rachel and her mother safely installed with their friends, and he returned to Nashville in time to conduct the business of the prosecutor's office in April 1791. He had been back but a short while when he learned that Robards had obtained an act from the Virginia legislature authorizing him to sue for divorce from Rachel. The grounds for the divorce suit were ‘that the defendant hath deserted the plaintiff, and that she hath lived in adultery with another man since such desertion.’ Rachel's alleged lover wasn't named, but Robards certainly had Jackson in mind. Overton and the Jackson partisans asserted that the charge of adultery was unfounded, the product of the same fevered imagination that had plagued Robards's marriage from the start. Jackson had become Rachel's protector but nothing more.

“In fact, the adultery charge was almost certainly true. Overton's chronology, by design or forgetfulness, was off by a year on certain, crucial points. Spanish and other records reveal that the Donelson-Jackson journey to Natchez occurred in the winter of 1789-90. Nor was Jackson a late addition to the traveling party. Jackson had been in Natchez earlier in the year exploring opportunities to trade. At that time he had sworn the oath of allegiance to Spain required of all Americans intending to do business or reside in the area. Quite conceivably the journey to Natchez was Jackson's idea. If Jackson and Rachel were to be together, it couldn't be in Nashville, at least not yet. Too many people knew that Rachel was still married to Robards. But Natchez was far away, beyond the reach of Robards should he really be intent on returning, beyond the gaze of censorious neighbors, and beyond the effective power of American law. In Natchez Jackson and Rachel could live as husband and wife, and no one would bother them. If Robards heard of the elopement, he might well divorce Rachel, which would be all the better.

“Jackson's partisans afterward asserted that their man, upon learning that Robards had indeed initiated divorce proceedings, returned to Natchez, where he and Rachel were wed. Together they traveled back to Nashville in the autumn of 1791 and presented themselves to the community as husband and wife.

“Again the timing is off. Documents relating to the estate of John Donelson and drafted in January 1791 list Rachel as ‘Rachel Jackson.’ And various evidence demonstrates that the couple were back in Nashville by that spring. The assertion that they were married in Natchez is also open to dispute, as no record of a ceremony has been found nor witness to the event.

“The most likely explanation is that Jackson and Rachel, impatient at the legal impediment to their love, eloped to Natchez and simply began to cohabit. What were their long-term plans? They themselves probably didn't know. Like many other young lovers, they couldn't see past the moment of their infatuation. One thing is certain: Jackson didn't know he would one day become a candidate for president and have to explain his actions to the world. He was twenty-two, had no particular prospects, and was in love. Rachel was the best thing in his life, and he would risk everything else–which wasn't much, at this point–to be with her.

They probably guessed that any controversy would die down. Robards would divorce Rachel. If they returned to Nashville the neighbors would find other things to gossip about. Life would go on.

“And so it did. Whether they arrived in Nashville in the spring or the autumn of 1791–in either case, after the news of Robards's divorce action–they did so as husband and wife. No one asked to see a divorce decree or a marriage license. The Donelson clan closed around Rachel and her new husband, judging him a great improvement over the old one.

“The union, however irregularly accomplished, provided Jackson an emotional security he had never experienced. Fatherless since birth, motherless since his early teens, with neither surviving siblings nor close cousins, Jackson made Rachel the emotional center of his universe. ‘My Dearest Heart,’ he wrote her on one occasion when his job took him away, ‘It is with the greatest pleasure I sit down to write you. Though I am absent my heart rests with you. With what pleasing hopes I view the future period when I shall be restored to your arms, there to spend my days in domestic sweetness with you, the Dear Companion of my life.’ Rachel became the one unchallengeable truth in Jackson's fractious and often violent world. His many enemies leveled all manner of allegations against him in his long career in public life, but no one ever questioned his utter faithfulness and devotion to Rachel.

“Consequently he was embarrassed and angered when he discovered, on a working visit to Jonesboro in late 1793, that Robards's divorce from Rachel had only just been granted. Robards had started the process more than two years earlier but not finished it till now. This discomfiting news, besides reviving the troublesome questions of Jackson and Rachel's elopement, revealed that even their purported marriage was illegal. Overton suggested a quiet wedding ceremony to settle the matter. ‘To this suggestion he replied that he had long since been married,’ Overton recalled.

“Yet Overton pointed out that whatever Jackson and Rachel might think, the courts had their own logic. Jackson reluctantly succumbed to Overton's reasoning, and in January 1794 he and Rachel exchanged vows before a Nashville justice of the peace. And there the matter rested for several years, till Jackson and Rachel almost forgot it had ever been an issue.”

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the wright brothers--9/10/26

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 02:30:00 -0400

Today's encore selection--from To Boldly Go Where No Book Has Gone Before by Luke O'Neill. Orville and Wilbur invent the airplane:

“Orville and Wilbur Wright invented and flew the first airplane, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. Their interest in flying had begun when their father gave them a toy made of paper, bamboo and cork that had a rubber band for its rotor, and which flew like a helicopter. The two brothers played with it until it broke and then made their own.

“While still a teenager, Wilbur was struck by a hockey stick which knocked out all his front teeth. He didn't like going out after that, and he spent a lot of time reading in his father's library. His brother Orville, on the other hand, dropped out of high school and set up a printing shop. Wilbur joined him in the business and the brothers launched a newspaper called West Side News in their home town of Dayton, Ohio.

“The 1890s saw the popularization of the 'safety bicycle', with a chain-drive transmission and gears. Powered by the legs via pedals, the links in a flexible chain connect with the teeth on one circular chain ring and transfer energy to a second chain ring linked to the axle of a wheel or propeller. The relative circumference of the two rings, or gear ratio, regulates the speed of the axle. This invention led to a bicycle craze in the US in which millions of people bought bicycles, and the bike boom was especially significant for women. Cycling increased women's mobility outside the home, which among other things allowed them to meet (and marry) a broader range of people than those found in their home towns, transforming gender relations. Many women bought bicycles, and this gave rise to the 'rational clothing' movement, with less restrictive skirts. A special 'bicycle wear corset' was even invented. This change in women's clothing might seem minor today but it was radical at the time.

“The Wright brothers were well aware of the demand, and decided to open a bicycle sales and repair shop, as well as making their own bicycles. They also kept publishing newspapers and magazines, and were inspired by articles about Otto Lilienthal, a German who had made gliders. In August 1896, Lilienthal was killed when one of his gliders crashed to the ground. His death focused the brothers' minds on a key issue: how to control the wings of a glider. Watching birds, Wilbur figured out that birds change the angle of the ends of their wings to move left or right.

“And so they began to design an aircraft. They made the wings of the aircraft they designed movable, and in 1900 they went to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to start their manned gliding experiments. They chose the location because of regular breezes and soft sandy surfaces to land on. A key feature was to put a 'camber' into the wings — a curvature of the top surface. Lift was achieved by the air flowing more quickly over the upper side of the cambered wing than the underside. The brothers' first flights with the glider were unmanned, but then Wilbur climbed on board and was able to fly the glider over distances of a few metres.

Seconds into the first airplane flight, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903

“In 1901 they returned to Kitty Hawk and built gliders with larger wing areas. These proved difficult to control, and on their way home from that year's efforts, Wilbur said to Orville that man would 'not fly in a thousand years'. As with probably all inventors and indeed scientists, they had reached a low point and almost quit. But instead they went back to the drawing board. By 1903 they were ready to test their new design, with an engine attached to drive a propeller (which had been used in boats) to achieve lift-off. The propeller was used to achieve 'thrust' — the pulling of air behind the propeller to create a pressure difference, pushing the aircraft forward — which they knew was needed to counteract the drag caused by gravity. And it worked!

“The aircraft was called the Wright Flyer. Wilbur won a coin toss to see who would go first — and his attempt lasted three seconds. On 14 December, which by coincidence was the 121st anniversary of the Montgolfier brothers' first unmanned hot-air-balloon flight, the aircraft did better; and on 17 December, Orville flew 120 feet in 12 seconds. They then took turns, with one flight lasting 59 seconds over 852 feet. The Wright Flyer was the first airplane — a machine that could fly over the ground under the control of a pilot.

“The brothers sent a telegram to their father asking him to 'inform the press'. He contacted the Dayton Journal, but they refused to cover the story, saying that the flights were too short to be important. A telegraph operator leaked the news to a Virginia newspaper — suitably called the Virginian-Pilot—and the story was reprinted in several newspapers, including the Dayton Journal. The problem was the article was a major exaggeration. The journalist had clearly felt the news had to be 'sexed up', and the headline read: 'Flying machine soars three miles in teeth of high wind'. It did say 'No balloon attached', which was true. The Wright brothers issued a statement saying the article was 'fictitious' and gave their own account, which few newspapers published, deeming it less interesting.”

author: Luke O'Neill title: To Boldly Go Where No Book Has Gone Before: A Joyous Journey Through All of Science publisher: Penguin date: page(s): 58-60

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nobel prize winner kati kariko--9/9/26

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 02:29:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from Breaking Through by Katalin Karikó. The early struggles of Katalin Karikó, who, along with Drew Weissman, developed the extraordinary mRNA technology that was used globally in a vaccine to combat the COVID virus and is now being used to develop a broad array of vaccines for other diseases:

“I didn’t feel smart. Not here [in the United States]. Back in Kisujszallas, [Hungary], I'd begun my education as a relatively ordinary student. I'd succeeded by outworking everyone else, eventually feeling as capable as anyone. Now, at university, it was the same story. The other students in my program seemed to learn things so much more easily than I did. Again, I had to work for everything I got.

“We took classes in evolutionary biology, organic chemistry, analytical chemistry, physical chemistry, physics, and mathematics. Some of us—those of us who hadn't been exposed to English, which is to say most of us from small towns—took English classes, too. I'd had zero exposure to English, and I'll be honest: I suffered through those courses. After the third year of university courses, I spent a whole summer learning English; I passed my exams, but the language would never feel natural to me. For the rest of my life, even after decades in America, I would speak with a thick Hungarian accent. I'd use the past tense incorrectly (‘he didn't jumped’ instead of ‘he didn't jump’). Sometimes when I talked, I would see native English speakers—even colleagues who had known me for a long time—squint at me, their telltale looks of confusion signs that they did not understand what I was saying.

“I struggled with other things. I had no experience in a chemistry lab, for example. Other students, who had taken chemistry lab in high school, moved efficiently around the room, setting up test tubes and glassware (beakers, pipettes, and burettes) as if it were second nature. They pulled solutions into droppers effortlessly, knew without asking how to calibrate a scale. I was clumsy. I had no muscle memory for this work, no intuition at first. And the work we were doing was sometimes hard.

Katalin Karikó wall painting in Budapest, Hungary

In analytical chemistry lab, for example, the professor would hand us mystery solutions—an ampulla of clear liquid, say, with no other information. It was up to us to figure out what the solution was made of, using a series of individual tests. We'd each work through the challenge logically, one step at a time. We'd drop the substance onto a flame; if colors flared orange, that meant it had sodium. (To this day, when I cook at a gas burner, I cannot resist dropping a bit of salt onto the flame to watch the color change.) If it turned blue, on the other hand, it meant the solution contained copper. These challenges were easy at first, but they grew increasingly complex. We might work for three hours before we could deduce the chemical composition of the solution in our hands. Sometimes I failed to figure it out entirely. In those moments, especially at first, I felt out of place. I'd try to remind myself then: Was this not precisely what Hans Selye had described, asking yes-or-no questions of the universe? (Is the solution acidic? Litmus paper turns red, so yes. Did it turn blue? Then no.) Was this not, in fact, the work of Columbo?

“Just one more thing. That's how I got better: just one more question, one more test, one more thing I might think of, one more task to which I could apply myself. I could read, reread, then start over. I could memorize, test myself on what I had just learned, then study some more, just to be sure. Again and again and again: just one more thing.

“If I have any superpower, it has always been this: a willingness to work hard and methodically, and refuse to stop.

“We had a lot of homework, and I did every bit of it. It felt so difficult to retain all this information, as if filling my brain with new information might squeeze out things I had previously learned. I was often up until two in the morning. I'd sleep for just three or four hours before waking to do a bit more homework before classes. If I grew tired, I opened a window. The truth is, I was always tired, so the window was always open, even when it was snowing. (I still do this now, even in winter, to keep myself awake.)

“Each morning, I'd cross the bridge toward my classes, traffic whizzing past me as I walked. Although I had a bicycle at first, it was soon stolen. I didn't get another. In the cafeteria, I ate whatever was served. The dorm had a kitchen where other students cooked meals, but I never did. I wasn't fussy. The food was fine. And, anyway, who had time to cook?”

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the invention of the alphabet--9/8/26

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 03:00:00 -0400

In today's encore selection -- the invention of the first alphabet -- a much simpler system of writing -- using only 20 to 30 characters as compared to the thousands required in a hieroglyphic system -- unleashed an era in which broad literacy and abstract ideas were possible to an unprecedented degree. Though it is popularly believed the alphabet came from the Phoenicians, this invention predated them and may have come from the Egyptians:

"In February, 1905, after exploring the Middle East for more than two decades, [British archeologist Flinders] Petrie and his wife arrived at an old turquoise formation in the western Sinai at Serabit el-Khadim, which had been mined as recently as fifty years before by a retired English major and his family. There, although he and others did not realize it for years, Petrie made the most important discovery of his career.

"At the mine the Petries came upon a large collection of statues and inscriptions. Most were expertly carved and bore standard hieroglyphic or hieratic writing, almost certainly produced by the mine's Egyptian overseers.

"His observant wife Hilda also found some rocks bearing cruder inscriptions. On closer inspection, they noted that this writing included only about thirty or so different symbols that were not recognizably hieroglyphic or hieratic -- both hieroglyphic and hieratic writing used about a thousand symbols. Further, these simpler inscriptions always coincided with primitive, non-Egyptian statues; the writing appeared to flow from left to right, also unlike the well-known hieroglyphic, hieratic, or later Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets.

"Petrie dated the inscriptions to approximately 1400 BC. He clearly recognized them as an alphabet, and one that preceded by about five hundred years the earliest known Phoenician writing, heretofore felt to be the first alphabet. ...

"It fell to an Egyptologist, Alan Gardiner, to realize that the Petries had actually stumbled across the origin of the alphabet, or something very close to it. Linguists had long known that Latin script -- the everyday alphabet of today's Western world -- evolved from Greek letters, which had themselves derived from Phoenician, as did Hebrew. ...

"Over the millennium following the alphabet's invention around 1500 BC, the simple phonemic lettering system Petrie discovered made possible the first stirrings of mass literacy that would unleash much of the subsequent political and social ferment of human history.

"On the basis of archaeological and linguistic evidence, most authorities believe that the proto-Semitic inscriptions the Petries first found at Serabit derived from Egyptian hieratic or hieroglyphic writing. While the precise origin of the proto-Semitic alphabet will never be known, the Serabit inscriptions suggest that it was probably invented somewhere in the Sinai or Canaan by non-Egyptian Semites who had come there from somewhere in the Levant to work as miners for the Egyptians.

"Did the first simplified alphabetic script really originate in the mines at Serabit? After Flinders' excavations there, archaeologists uncovered, at several other sites in Palestine, more primitive inscriptions that look alphabetic and possibly predate the Serabit inscriptions by as much as a century or two. More recently, an American research team has uncovered proto-Semitic inscriptions at Wadi el-Hol, several hundred miles south of Serabit el-Khadim, on the Nile; they suggest that the Egyptians may have in fact invented the script to better communicate with their Semitic workers/slaves.

Wadi el-Hol inscriptions II drawing

"Another intriguing candidate for 'inventor of the alphabet' is the Midianites, a Sinai people who mined copper and who could have derived it from the writing of their Egyptian overseers in the same way as did the miners of Serabit. ...

"[The rise of monotheism was during the same period and] the temporal and geographic connection between the alphabet and monotheism in Egypt-Palestine during the middle of the second millennium may be more than coincidence. What might tie them together? The notion of a disembodied, formless, all-seeing, and ever-present supreme being requires a far more abstract frame of mind than that needed for the older plethora of anthropomorphized beings who oversaw the heavenly bodies, the crops, fertility, and the seas. Alphabetic writing requires the same high degree of abstraction and may have provided a literate priestly caste with the intellectual tools necessary to imagine a belief system overseen by a single disembodied deity. Whatever the reason, Judaism and the West acquired their God and their Book."

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gender nonconformity--9/4/26

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 02:43:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins by Caitlin McGurk. In the 1920s, The New Yorker’s brilliant and prescient editor Harold Ross and one of its most highly regarded cartoonists Barbara Shermund made a very concerted effort “to appeal to a diversity of metropolitan types–including queer readers”:

“Ross was thinking broadly about cosmopolitan readership, and wanted the ideas solicited by gag men as well as cartoonists to appeal to a diversity of metropolitan types–including queer readers. In letter dated June 21, 1928 from Ross to one of Shermund's cartoonist contemporaries, Gardner Rea, he sent edits along for some submitted artwork that he found ‘unpleasant,’ nothing, ‘we are especially anxious to please the fairy trade.' Whether the artwork (the piece which he was referring to is unknown) contained something demeaning toward homosexuals is unknown: but this offhand comment is enough to indicate that there was a known queer readership, possibly among the investors as well.

“If he was thinking about appealing directly to queer readers by then, it seems that within her first full year of contributing cartoons, Shermund was already doing so on her own accord. This can first be seen as early as her tenth captioned contribution to the magazine, appearing on July 31, 1926. We see two pretty young gentlemen in arms standing in a park and chatting nearly nose-to-nose with one another, observing a third character in the foreground dressed fairly androgynously, wearing a tie and knickerbockers, smoking a cigarette–with only long eyelashes as a possible indication of gender. Their conversation goes, ‘What is that, a boy or a girl?’ ‘'A girl.’ ‘How can you tell?’ ‘The sex appeal.’ The androgynous character stands seductively, with bedroom eyes and a slight smirk, gazing directly out at the reader with a sense of enjoyment at being observed. The punch line, which is that ‘the sex appeal’ is the giveaway to what her gender is, reads as particularly ironic coming from the two speaking figures who themselves read as effeminate as she does virile.

“Shermund's nod to the emergence of gender nonconformity in the women's style of the day would have been spot on for what she was witnessing in certain circles, though it was far from reaching mainstream acceptance. No negative judgment is clearly cast by any of the figures, all of whom read as queer. At the time, smoking, for women, was something done at home or in company indoors. It was not only considered vulgar for a woman to do so in public–it could invite citation or warning from police. Further, our character appears to be taking pleasure in their ‘unchaperoned’ smoke, breaking countless taboos of the time, and reveling in it. For a woman in the mid-1920s, smoking alone in public, dressed so androgynously, was a bold demonstration of feminism and queerness.

Cover of The New Yorker issue for October 3, 1925, by Shermund

“A few months later, on October 2, 1926, we see another cartoon from Shermund that delights in gender contrasts. In a ranch scene, a burly cowhand is shown on the ground, partially risen from having been thrown, presumably, by the unbroken steed that is bucking behind him. He glares up suspiciously at a rather fey observer, a thin young man, fashionably dressed in riding breeches with a fitted sweater and cap. The foppish gentleman with huge, eager eyes leans over him, hands raised in mincing excitement as he enthusiastically blurts out, ‘My dear fellow, you've no idea how picturesque you are!’ The cowboy's facial expression says it all–suspicion, perhaps some disgust, and offense at the flowery comparison or very experience of being perceived by this effeminate individual. The disparity in their expressions and body language is a delight. The otherwise dominant and masculine rancher is cast to the ground by the horse in a vulnerable position as the young man leers over him not just excitedly but confidently–he feels no need to hide his effusive admiration.”

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the inflection point of 1893 – 9/3/26

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 03:20:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from The Last American Aristocrat by David S. Brown. The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, designed to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, made such an impact on those who visited it that many felt, as political commentator Henry Adams did, that it “represented a definite turn in American if not global civilization”:

"In 1893 Adams traveled twice to Chicago, eager to absorb the World's Columbian Exposition, a six-month celebration commemorating the four-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the New World. Extolling America's power and progress barely a generation removed from the Civil War, the fair featured a hastily built plaster 'White City' of exhibits that spilled over Jackson Park and into the adjoining Midway Plaisance. An incredible twenty-seven million visitors from around the world passed through its ornate gates. Henry had come to Chicago believing that the city, the industrial capital of the ascendant Midwest, the country's dominant political region following the collapse of the old southern plantocracy, represented a definite turn in American if not global civilization. It combined the country's liberal, democratic qualities with an unprecedented technological prowess that pointed toward a new chapter in human history. Meditating some years later on the Exposition's importance, he wrote, 'Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time whether the American people knew where they were driving .... Chicago was the first expression of American thought as unity; one must start there.'

"By 'unity' Adams supposed Chicago to be the epitome of the dynamic urban-immigrant-industrial process coming to define the nation's surging metropolitan areas. The country's fourth-largest city in 1880, it more than doubled in population to some one million by 1890, second only to New York; fully three-quarters of its residents were the offspring of foreign-born parents. Chicago's rapid rise, its questionable distinction as the roiling center of newly erected mills and machine shops littered about a thick brick forest of foundries, received a boost when the city, following a fierce competition with New York and St. Louis, won the right to host the Exposition. Ostensibly a quadricentennial of America's accomplishments, one could easily have interpreted the fair more narrowly as a tribute to nineteenth-century industrial development, or still more precisely as a coming-out party for its host. Barely two decades earlier (1871) the Chicago Fire had ravaged over three square miles of the city, left more than 100,000 homeless, and gutted much of the central business district; some three hundred perished. The October blaze, its exact cause unknown, followed a summer drought and originated near a barn belonging to Catherine and Patrick O'Leary in an area choked with wooden buildings. An enterprising reporter for the Chicago Republican claimed the O'Leary's cow had kicked over a lantern and started the inferno, though he later owned up to the fib. In the fire's aftermath arrived the new Chicago, a banking, commerce, and manufacturing phoenix; its buildings, insinuating the architectural imagination of Louis Sullivan, were scaffolded by iron and steel and soared high above whatever indifferent infrastructure had survived the flames. This birth of the skyscraper, a mechanical civilization's reply to the pyramids of Giza and the medieval Towers of Bologna, announced the city as an avatar of a coming age.

"Not everyone, of course, appreciated the extraordinary energy emanating from Chicago. The British writer Rudyard Kipling, like Henry an inveterate global traveler, condemned the city's emphasis on dollar-chasing in a teasing piece, 'How I Struck Chicago, and How Chicago Struck Me: Of Religion, Politics, and Pig-Sticking, and the Incarnation of the City among Shambles,' written shortly after the Exposition ended. 'This place is the first American city I have encountered,' he confessed, before hastily adding, 'I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages .... They told me to go to the Palmer House [hotel] which is a gilded and mirrored rabbit-warren, and there I found a huge hall of tessellate marble, crammed with people talking about money and spitting about everywhere.' The Italian poet and playwright Giuseppe Giacosa also toured America and, much like Adams, saw in Chicago the incarnation of a fresh civilization: 'I think that whoever ignores it is not entirely acquainted with our century and of what it is the ultimate expression.' The nature of that expression caused Giacosa to think that 'the dominant characteristic of the exterior life of Chicago is violence.' ...

"One could not hope to find continuity in Chicago, [Adams wrote,] for the city represented nothing so much as a pronounced 'rupture in historical sequence!' Eager to identify the forces behind this upending of the old cosmic order, Adams designated the Exposition a celebration of the 'watt,' the 'ampère,' and the 'erg,' units of energy that symbolized, both literally and metaphorically, the harnessing of hitherto untapped physical and chemical resources."

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famine in world war II -- 9/1/26

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 02:08:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe. Famine in world War II:

“One of the few things that united Europe during the war was the ubiquitous presence of hunger. International trade in foodstuffs had faltered almost as soon as war broke out, and ceased altogether when the various military blockades began to take hold around the continent. The first foods to disappear were imported fruits. In Britain, the public attempted to take this with good humour. Signs began to appear in greengrocers' windows, claiming 'Yes, we have no bananas' and in 1943 the feature film Millions Like Us began with an ironic on-screen definition of an orange, supposedly for those who could not remember what one looked like. On the continent one of the shortages that made itself most immediately felt was of coffee, which became so scarce that the population was forced to drink a variety of substitutes made from chicory, dandelion roots or acorns.

“Other, more serious shortages soon followed. Sugar was one of the first things to become scarce, as well as perishable goods like milk, cream, eggs and fresh meat. In response to such shortages, rationing was introduced in Britain, across most of continental Europe, and even in the United States. Neither were the neutral countries immune to shortages: in Spain, for example, even staple foods such as potatoes and olive oil were tightly rationed, and the huge drop in imported goods forced the people of Switzerland to make do with 28 per cent fewer calories in 1944 than they had before the war. Over the course of the next five years eggs were almost universally powdered in order to preserve them, butter was replaced with margarine, milk was reserved for young children, and traditional meats such as lamb, pork or beef became so scarce that people began rearing rabbits in their back gardens and allotments as a substitute. The struggle to stave off famine was every bit as important as the military struggle, and was taken just as seriously.

“The first country to topple over the brink was Greece. In the winter of 1941-2, just six months after being invaded by Axis troops, more than 100,000 people starved to death. The coming of war had thrown the country into administrative anarchy and, coupled with restrictions on people's movement, this had caused a collapse of the food distribution systems. Farmers began to hoard their foodstuffs, inflation spiralled out of control and unemployment soared. There was also a near complete breakdown of law and order. Many historians have blamed the occupying German troops for sparking the famine by requisitioning food stores, but in truth these food stores were often looted by local people, partisans or individual soldiers.

“Regardless of what caused the famine, the results were catastrophic. In Athens and Thessaloniki the mortality rate increased threefold. In some of the islands, such as Mykonos, the death rate was as much as nine times its usual level. Of the 410,000 Greek deaths that occurred during the whole of the war, probably 250,000 were due to starvation and related problems. The situation became so parlous that in the autumn of 1942 the British took the unprecedented step of raising their blockade to allow ships carrying food through to the country. By agreement between the Germans and the British, relief flowed into Greece throughout the rest of the war, and continued to do so for almost all of the chaotic period that followed liberation at the end of 1944.

Child's ration book, used in Britain during the Second World War

“If the effect of war on Greek food distribution was fairly instantaneous, in western Europe the full force of the shortages took much longer to materialize. Holland, for example, did not feel the worst effects of famine until the winter of 1944-5. Unlike in Greece it was not administrative chaos that caused Holland's 'Hunger Winter', but the Nazis' long-term policy of depriving the country of what it needed to survive. Almost from the moment the Germans arrived in May 1940 they had begun to requisition everything: metals, clothing, textiles, bicycles, food and livestock. Entire factories were dismantled and shipped into Germany. Holland had always relied on importing food and fodder for its livestock, but these imports ceased in 1940, leaving the country to struggle on with what little was left after the German requisitions. Potatoes and bread were severely rationed throughout the war, and the people were forced to supplement their diet with sugar beets and even tulip bulbs.

“By May 1944 the situation was desperate. Reports coming from inside Holland warned of impending disaster unless the country were liberated soon. Once again, the British raised their blockade to allow aid through, but only to a very limited degree. Churchill was worried that regular food aid would simply end up in German hands, and the British Chiefs of Staff feared that the German navy would use the aid ships as guides through the mined waters of the Dutch coast. So the people of Holland were forced to wait for the liberation and starve.

“By the time the Allies finally entered western Holland in May 1945 between 100,000 and 150,000 Dutch people were suffering from hunger oedema ('dropsy'). The country was spared a catastrophe on the scale of the Greek famine only because the war ended, and huge quantities of relief were finally allowed in. But for thousands it was already too late. Journalists entering Amsterdam described the city as 'a vast concentration camp' displaying 'horrors comparable to those of Belsen and Buchenwald'. Over 5,000 people had died of starvation or related illnesses in that city alone. The famine death toll for the country as a whole was between 16,000 and 20,000.

“The Nazis did not starve Holland out of pure malice. Compared with other nationalities, the Nazis actually felt well disposed towards the Dutch, whom they regarded as essentially 'Germanic' people who needed to be led 'back to the Germanic community'. The problem was that Germany had her own food problems to worry about. Even before the war the German leadership had believed national food production to be in crisis. By the beginning of 1942 grain stocks were all but exhausted, the national swine herd had been reduced by 25 per cent for lack of feed, and rations of both bread and meat had been cut. Even the bumper German harvest in 1943 did not stave off crisis, and while rations were raised temporarily, they soon resumed their decline.

“To give some idea of the problem Germany faced, one must consider the calorific needs of the population. The average adult requires about 2,500 calories per day to keep themselves healthy, and more if they are doing heavy work. Crucially, this amount cannot be made up of carbohydrates alone if they are to avoid hunger-related illnesses like oedema - it must also contain vitamins supplied by fresh vegetables, proteins and fat. At the beginning of the war German civilians were consuming a healthy average of 2,570 calories per day. This fell to 2,445 the following year, to 2,078 calories in 1943, and to 1,412 calories by the end of the war. 'Hunger knocks on every door,' wrote one German housewife in February 1945. 'New ration cards are to last for five weeks instead of four, and no one knows if they will be issued at all. We count out potatoes every day, five small ones each, and bread is becoming more scarce. We are growing thinner and thinner, colder and colder and more and more ravenous.’

“In order to prevent their own people from starving, the Nazis plundered their occupied territories. As early as 1941 they reduced the official ration for 'normal consumers' in Norway and Czechoslovakia to around 1,600 calories per day, and in Belgium and France to only 1,300 calories per day. 15 The local populations in these countries only prevented themselves from being slowly starved to death by resorting to the black market. The situation in Holland was not substantially different from that in Belgium or France: the main difference was that Holland was not liberated until nine months later. The famine occurred because by that time even the black market had been exhausted, and the Wehrmacht's scorched earth policy had destroyed more than 20 per cent of the nation's farmland through flooding. By the end of the war, the official daily food ration in occupied Holland had dropped to just 400 calories—that is, half the amount received by the inmates of the Belsen concentration camp. In Rotterdam, the food ran out altogether."

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meriwether lewis commits suicide--8/31/26

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 02:18:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from This Vast Enterprise by Craig Fehrman. Years after his famed Lewis and Clark expedition, Meriwether Lewis committed suicide:

“[Meriwether] Lewis ended up in St. Louis … as governor of the Louisiana territory. He arrived with Seaman and John Pernier, a free, mixed-race man he'd met through Jefferson. (Lewis never did buy an enslaved body servant like York.) He worked closely with [his former partner in exploration William] Clark, dining and briefly living with him and Julia. It would never be like the expedition, but, as Lewis told his friend, ‘I ... still consider myself your messmate.’

“As governor, Lewis struggled with settlers in Louisiana and politicians in Washington. ‘Slander, detraction, and violence stalk through our forests,’ wrote one official, ‘as well as our villages.’ This was a new kind of problem. A scout party could not fix St. Louis.

“Lewis also struggled with his book. He hired a printer and wrote a prospectus in 1807, promising three volumes–his own narrative, a survey of the Native nations, and a final volume just for science–plus Clark's big map, revised with their latitude and longitude data. Given Lewis's literary talents, and given the Corps' global fame, the book seemed destined to become the third great work of American nonfiction, joining Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. The president remained ecstatic, pledging to ship early copies around the world to his scholarly friends.

“Months went by without Lewis writing a single word. This was not a poet, blocked on a sonnet. The expedition wasn't finished until the book was. His inability to write threatened everything the Corps had achieved together. Lewis understood this, of course, which must have turned his silence into self-criticism, his difficulty into despair. He'd lost the focused physicality of exploration. Now he lost the forced introspection of writing–the daily nudge to describe his problems and also his solutions.

“The expedition haunted Lewis in more tangible ways. Graveline, carrying guns for Piahito's sons and news of their father's death, finally reached the Arikara on June 3, 1807. They reacted with rage, calling Jefferson a 'liar' and promising, in the words of one witness, to ‘kill.’

Portrait by Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin, 1805

“Later that summer, the Americans tried to return Sheheke and his family to their Mandan town. Sheheke's escort numbered about fifty men, a mix of traders and soldiers led by Pryor, who'd been promoted to ensign after the expedition.

“At the start, the escort traveled with the Partisan and his party, who had recently made their alliance with Clark. They passed through Sicangu territory with no trouble. (The Lakota, one soldier reported, showed ‘a friendly disposition to the citizens of the United States.’) When Pryor and Sheheke reached the Ankara, though, they found more than six hundred angry and well-armed men. A battle followed, with the Arikara shooting at them with American guns loaded with American bullets. Pryor retreated with four dead and eight wounded–and with Sheheke still stuck in St. Louis, 1,600 miles from home.

“It was the latest blow to Lewis and his mind. He tried to parry these blows, and sometimes he succeeded. There were times when he still laughed–when he joked, after a romantic rejection, that ‘I never felt less like a hero than at the present moment.’ There were times when he still wrote–when he drafted an incisive essay on the fur trade, though his book remained untouched.

“But those times became less frequent. The captain began drinking heavily, indulging, in the words of a fellow officer, in ‘the free use he made of liquor, which he acknowledged very candidly to me.’ His finances spiraled. He had speculated on land and owned more than he could use, especially since he showed no interest in buying or even hiring slaves.

“In 1809, Lewis cried to send Sheheke home a second time. The Arikara remained angry, and Lewis fortified the second escort by linking it to a group of private traders, something Dearborn had done with Pryor's attempt. Unfortunately, Madison had replaced Jefferson as president, which meant William Eustis had replaced Dearborn as secretary of war. Eustis refused to cover some of Lewis's expenses for Sheheke, leaving the captain personally responsible. His creditors began to circle, but what bothered Lewis most was that Eustis had questioned his patriotism, his honor.

“Lewis decided to go to Washington to defend himself in person. Before he left, he sat down with Clark to review his finances, line by line. He told Clark at lease part of the truth about the book. Clark wanted to help his friend but didn't know how. ‘If his mind had been at ease,’ Clark wrote, ‘I should have parted cheerfully.’ But his mind was not.

“Lewis headed for Washington, traveling with Seaman and Pernier. He continued to drink. He took opiates, perhaps because he was suffering from malaria; multiple people described him as ‘deranged.’

“As he rode along the Natchez Trace toward Nashville, Lewis began talking out loud to Clark, who was hundreds of miles away. Lewis told his co-captain he could hear him getting close. He told him he always knew he would rescue him.

“On October 11, at a rural inn, Lewis shot himself twice and died. Seaman refused to leave his owner's body. The captain was buried near the Natchez Trace.

“Lewis killed himself because he decided that being alive hurt more than being dead. There was no easy explanation for that hurt–no neat equation of family history plus no Northwest Passage equals depression. (If there was one, Lewis would have solved it.) It was a muddle of addiction and exhaustion and neurochemistry, plus the mounting pressures of his job and his book, plus the unintended consequences of his foreign policy, starting with Piahito.

“No one was shocked by Lewis's act–not Clark, not Jefferson, not Madison, not the soldiers and senators who knew Lewis so well. They were sad, but they were not surprised. When Clark heard the news, he wrote, ‘I fear, O!, I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him.’

“More than a decade later, in 1825, Clark could write something shorter, but not easier.

“In his notebook, he wrote ‘Captain Lewis.’ Then he wrote, ‘dead.”

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fickle humans--8/28/26

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 03:08:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Confessions of an Art Dealer by John Howard Swanson. Trying desperately to get a slightly better deal on an antique:

"In the buying of works of art of any description the purchaser, be he connoisseur, amateur, or dealer, learns a very great deal about the frailties of human nature. Indeed, one of my greatest annoyances has always been the frequent manner in which people change their mind about the prices they have asked for a piece of porcelain, a picture, or antique furniture. This is usually due to a mixture of ignorance and sheer greed. Time and again I have lost things after having quoted for and supposedly bought them at a very fair price, and such incidents left a bitter taste in my mouth, because too often my loss came through giving advice or approximate values out of a kindly feeling and a spirit of friendship.

“A peculiarly unhappy case of this sort happened during my first year in Liverpool, when I was asked by a client to visit a small exhibition in aid of charity, at the school in West Derby. I was shown round by a fussy little gentleman named Radford, who insisted on telling me all about the various pieces. Now and then he went ‘all abroad,’ and very soon I had to do the ‘telling’; which resulted in our becoming quite friendly. I did not see much of him in the next few months, but one morning he came in, bearing a brown-paper parcel.

A vintage travel gear seller at Marché Dauphine, Saint-Ouen, Paris

"'I want you to have a look at this,’ he said, opening it with care. ‘What do you think it’s worth?’

“It was a rather fine Louis XV fan, worth about £75. I told him the value and added that there was precious little demand in Liverpool for old fans of that type.

"Will you keep it for me and try and sell it to some Continental dealer who may come over?’ he pleaded.

“I agreed. Just by luck, a Dutch dealer did come over a few weeks later: he told me he was making a small collection of French and Spanish fans for a client.

"'Here is the very thing!’ I exclaimed, glad to be able to do a stroke of business for Mr. Radford. ‘You can have it for £80.’

“After some argument the Dutchman said he would take it at that price, and at once I wrote to Radford. I was really pleased at having got an additional £5 for him. Next day he came into the shop, looking quite hot and bothered.

"'I had no idea you would sell the fan without consulting me!’ he puffed. ‘You see, it really belongs to my mother and I cannot dispose of it without her consent.’

“This looked queer to me. Radford was certainly on the wrong side of sixty, so surely he could make up his mind one way or another without recourse to ‘Mother!’

"'Oh well,’ I replied, rather piqued. ‘You asked me to sell it and I got a better price. However, if you really want it back I will ask my client to relinquish it.’

“After a great show of gratitude from Radford, I prevailed upon my Dutch friend to return the fan, though he shook his head and gave me sage advice.

"'This is a trick, my friend,’ he said. ‘Watch that client of yours. I do not trust him.’

“Having got his fan back, Radford assured me he would ask his mother's permission to sell and that within a day or two I should know one way or the other. Within twenty-four hours I was rung up by Mr. Kidson, the well-known Liverpool art dealer.

“'I say, Duveen, I want to ask you a confidential question. I have a fellow here who has a Louis XV fan: he says you offered him £80 for it. Is that right?’

“'What do you want to know exactly?’ I parried.

“'Well, I don't often buy French stuff, but what would you give me for it? This man wants £100.’

“The cat was well and truly out-of-the-bag.

“'I won't buy at any price!' I shouted.

“When my Dutch friend heard the details, he chuckled.

“‘Don't worry. That man will come back to you again.’

“'I'll show him where he gets off!’

“'Don't be silly: this is a matter of business. If you like, put all the blame on me.’

“That very afternoon who should turn up but the grey-haired and gushing Mr. Radford. I'd have given a lot to take the smile off his face with a good ‘piece of my mind!’

“‘Mr. Duveen,’ he exclaimed, ‘I've done my best for you with my mother, and she is willing to accept £100 for the fan.’

“'I’m sorry,’ I replied, ‘but the friend who was to have bought it has already left for the Continent. I'll write to him, if you like.’

“Of course, I never wrote at all: I was too sore over the whole shabby business. When he next came in I explained that the Dutchman had completed his collection and did not want the fan after all. Later I heard from Kidson, the dealer, that Radford had asked him to take the fan to London where, at a sale, it fetched just £50. I'm afraid I was so uncharitable as to be pleased that the would-be biter had been bitten!”

author: John Howard Swanson title: Confessions of an Art Dealer: An Autobiography publisher: Vitality Pubns date: page(s): 227-230

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six flags over texas -- 8/27/26

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 03:20:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from The Amusement Park by Stephen M. Silverman. For those growing up in Texas, the 1961 opening of Six Flags was the answer to 1955's Disneyland in Southern California. The fate of Six Flags was not quite the same:

"Angus Gilchrist Wynne Jr. ( 1914-1979) was of a new breed, although, like Warner LeRoy, he was born to privilege and larger than life -- in Wynne's case, like the state he hailed from. His father, Angus Sr., was a Texas land developer and president of the State Bar, which he had founded. Like his father, Angus Jr. developed property. His company, American Home Realty, was responsible for the fifty-three-acre Wynnewood Village in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, the country's largest retail complex of its kind at the time. Having been to Disneyland with his family, and liking what he saw, Wynne approached Disney with a proposal to build an entire entertainment complex somewhere between Fort Worth and Dallas. Only by then, Walt was being courted by several others, all of whose offers he declined.

"Not one to take no for an answer, Wynne set about building his own $10 million amusement kingdom in Arlington, exactly midway between the forty miles separating Fort Worth and Dallas. According to local lore, he planned to call the 150 acres [Texas Under Six Flags], for the six sovereigns that ruled the land beginning in 1519 -- Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy, and the United States -- that is, until Wynne's wife, Joann, snapped, 'Texas isn't under anything.' It would be called Six Flags over Texas. (In 2017, because of connotations associated with the Confederate flag, the logo's six separate banners were replaced with six Stars and Stripes, in order, said a company rep, 'to focus on celebrating the things that unite us versus those that divide us.')

"Randall Duell, an MGM art director and set designer, was hired to design the project, just as he later would the 1964 visitors' center at Universal Studios, Nashville's Opryland USA (1972-1997), and the thirty-three-acre MGM Grand Adventure (1993-2002) in Las Vegas. Six Flags was the first project under the banner of his own architecture firm.

"For Six Flags, Duell aimed for Hollywood realism -- such as making a souvenir shop look like an old hacienda by masking it with window shapes and props. One backlot technique he adapted was to use pathway curves and hills to keep distant views from spoiling the atmospheric effect of an immediate location, so that, for example, the Six Flags Missile Chaser scrambler ride could not be seen from the Indian Village. It was actually a technique H. C. Stilling had employed at Tivoli.

"Laid out in similar fashion as Disneyland's hub system, with its series of spoke-like walkways and a narrow-gauge railroad around them, Duell's Six Flags edifices were built to small scale (especially second stories), with the six different themed areas each defined by its own color palette.

"In all, after a year of formal planning, and another ten months for construction, by opening day, August 5, 1961, there were fourteen rides. The USA section was called Modern, and had miniature automobiles and a petting zoo, as well as the AstroLift skyway. This led to the Texas cowboy town, with its saloon, jail, and goat ride. Elsewhere, the Confederacy section had a plantation and a mule-powered Little Dixie Carousel; Mexico, an Allan Herschell La Cucaracha Wild Mouse; France, a LaSalle's River Adventure; and Spain, Los Conquistadores Mule Pack Ride. The Skull Rock skulking over its tree slide -- and accessible by a Tom Sawyer-like river raft -- looks remarkably like Disneyland's.

The original logo for Six Flags over Texas

"Working closely with Wynne to bring Six Flags to fruition was the consulting company Marco Engineering, whose president had gone to great lengths to build a name for himself in the amusement industry: C. V. Wood.

"One of his earliest contributions to Six Flags over Texas was to purchase rides from the already defunct Magic Mountain in Colorado and move them to Texas.

"Otherwise, he divided his time between Arlington and the Bronx, for Freedomland.

"With four hundred thousand customers required to break even its first season, attendance at Six Flags exceeded expectations: 8,374 people showed up on opening day, and 550,000 over the entire first season. Rather than rest on his laurels, Wynne accepted the offer personally extended by Vice President (and proud Texan) Lyndon B. Johnson, and state governor John Connally to head the Texas State Pavilion at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair. After accepting, Wynne then extended the invitation to Randall Duell to design it.

"Both ended up stepping into a cow pie.

"In Wynne's estimation, one pavilion alone could not contain all that Texas had to offer, so seven buildings, themed very much like the six lands at Six Flags, were prepared for the three-acre site. The seventh housed a twenty-four-hundred-seat music hall, for a very unTexan To Broadway, with Love extravaganza, described as 'an anthology packed with the moods and music of the American theater from The Black Crook of 1864 to recent hits.'

No expense was spared, and no concept too outlandish, which explained why 'an enormous Brahman bull was kept corralled inside an elegant French bedroom, as being symbolic of the pampered lives that modern livestock supposedly live,' said one recollection of the ill-fated Texas Pavilion. Wynne personally financed the venture and was forced into bankruptcy. Originally budgeted to cost $5 million, the project lost $100,000 a week and left Wynne with debts of $7 million, according to court filings.

"The fault lay in several directions: disappointing fair attendance, which flew in the face of Robert Moses's overly optimistic projections when he was steamrolling the fair into existence; the exhausting distance from the fair entrance to the Texas compound in the Flushing Meadows hinterlands; and a widely held bias against Texas in the aftermath of President Kennedy's murder in Dallas on November 22, 1963, only five months before the fair opened."

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parking killed cities--8/26/26

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:29:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar. The requirements enacted in America’s downtowns for overly plentiful parking helped drive out the things that citizens love about their cities:

“In 2017, a lawyer named Mark Vallianatos conceived a tour of Los Angeles he called ‘Forbidden City.’ It sounded mysterious, perhaps even indecent, but it was something like the opposite: an architecture tour with a heavy dose of regulatory history. The premise was simple. Los Angeles banned itself.

“The Forbidden City was not a distant imperial fortress; it was all around. The familiar houses and apartment blocks of neighborhoods like Hollywood, Koreatown, and Mid-City; gated courts of stucco cottages grouped around grassy courtyards; handsome two-story houses in the style of old Spanish missions or Cape Cods, split into two (duplexes), three (triplexes), or four apartments (fourplexes). Hollywood apartment towers, with their schlocky appropriations of French chateaus or Chinese pagodas. Elegant, Bauhaus-inspired midrise apartment buildings. The Forbidden City is the everyday architecture of Los Angeles neighborhoods–the glamorous and the mundane, essential, quintessentially LA. All of it was illegal to build, because none of these buildings had enough parking spaces.

“On a warm February day in 2020, I joined Vallianatos for a Forbidden City reprise. ‘We banned the parts of Los Angeles that people love the most,’ Vallianatos said, walking up the hill into Highland Park, an early streetcar suburb near Pasadena. Dressed in a natty green suit and thick architect glasses, the square-faced Vallianatos looked a little out of place in the California sunshine, and a lot out of place as he skulked around gates and peeked over box hedges. He was looking for electrical meters and mailboxes. That's how you figure out how many apartments sit behind a facade; it's how you know when what looks like a single-family home is in fact a fourplex. He approached a two-story house with a light-blue coat of paint behind neatly trimmed bushes. Five dials. Five apartments. Evidence that this particular building would be illegal to build in 2020. Circling around back, it was clear why: three measly parking spaces. And built for the small cars Angelenos drove in 1923, when the first tenants moved in. The tripartite garage looked like a toolshed.

Parking, 5 cents a day, Hollywood, United States, 1949

“If you wanted to build a five-unit building in Highland Park in 2020, you had to build at least five parking spaces (for five studio units), eight parking spaces (for five one-bedroom apartments), or ten parking spaces (for five two-bedroom apartments). Given those stipulations, on a lot this size, you wouldn't be able to build this building at all. It was an architectural fossil; the environment that gave it life was long gone.

"The overall theme is that most of these older neighborhoods in LA have a mix of smaller apartments and houses," Vallianatos went on. A dog barked, birds chirped, a drill whined in the warm air. Another rehab under way in the Forbidden City. One consequence of prohibiting such buildings from being built today is that the old ones are constant targets for luxury renovations. We passed an austere white-walled synagogue–no parking, forbidden–and paused below the scalloped red roof of a Mission Revival bungalow court with ten apartments around a manicured garden. Forbidden. In a new home in Los Angeles in 2020, as in virtually every other city and suburb in America, a parking space was as obligatory as a toilet. In fact more so. A two-bedroom apartment did not require two toilets. But it did require two parking spaces.

"'We banned them through parking before we banned them through zoning,' he said wistfully. 'It's the city that could have been.' Vallianatos's specialty was policy, not architecture. To him, the shape of buildings was a product of law first–and taste a distant second. (Shortly after we spoke, he read The Great Gatsby–is it just me, he thought, or is this book all about housing and cars?) Around the time Mark gave the first Forbidden City tour, he cofounded a group called Abundant Housing LA, which advocated for local housing growth–a contested subject, even as prices skyrocketed and homelessness increased. By day, he worked as an executive at the county transportation agency, LA Metro. It's no wonder he got interested in parking. Parking lies at the intersection of transportation and land use, a bastard field of study shunned by both architects and traffic engineers.

“Most people in Los Angeles drive, of course. But by making parking spots as obligatory as bathrooms, the city–like virtually every jurisdiction in America–forced housing to bear the costs of driving. Most everything we have built in this country since the I960s can be seen through Vallianatos's glasses: it is the architecture of parking requirements, and it is all around us.

“In 1991, the journalist Joel Garreau wrote a book called Edge City about the suburban, highway-adjacent clusters of offices, retail, and hotels that make up the typical setting for white-collar labor in America today. He spoke to hundreds of developers about why these places looked the way they did, and what it meant. ‘The measure of time, individualism, and civilization, they repeat, is parking.’ Developers had two laws that explained ‘just about everything in the physical arrangement of Edge City’:

“Putting those two axioms together with the high cost of building parking structures, Garreau explained why all these Forbidden City buildings were missing from postwar American architecture: they had vanished into what the apartment builder Payton Chung called the Valley of High Parking Requirements. On one edge of the valley were single-family homes, fast-food restaurants, low-slung commercial box stores-all the familiar building types that could be comfortably ‘parked’ at ground level, even if parking took up 60 or 70 percent of the property. On the other edge of the valley were high-density, high-value properties like offices, hotels, malls, and condos that could afford to build structured (or even subterranean) parking garages. Anything in between was impossible to build because it was impossible to park–surface parking would take up too much room; structured parking would cost too much to build. The Valley of High Parking Requirements was barren ground where nothing would grow. Ginger Hitzke's project in Solana Beach was in the valley. So was Pastor Nathan Carter's storefront church. And the fishermen's grocery store that Daniel McKenna-Foster had to shut down in Kodiak, Alaska.

“Anybody who wanted to build a small apartment building in the United States in 2020 needed to confront a multivariate financial geometry problem that began with how many parking spaces you could fit on a lot. The size, quantity, and shape of the housing followed from there. Sometimes, with just one parcel, it was hard to make anything work at all. Buy the lot next door and you could unlock some economies of scale–like a driveway with stalls on each side. Buy four and–well, most small-time developers couldn't afford four, even if you could find four buildable, adjacent properties. In any case, parking was the immovable object at the heart of neighborhood architecture, not just socially, as in Solana Beach, but technically as well. ‘Parking is like eggs,’ one builder said. ‘You can't buy just one, you have to buy a whole floor .... If you have to build one-and-a-half floors, you'll build two floors.’

“Mostly, America just stopped building small buildings. Parking requirements helped trigger an extinction-level event for bite-sized, infill apartment buildings like row houses, brownstones, and triple-deckers; the production of buildings with two to four units fell more than 90 percent between 1971 and 2021.

“What apartments did get built were clustered in megastructures whose design was dictated by parking placement. One popular model is the ‘Texas donut,’ in which a ring of apartments encircles a five- or six- story parking garage (this is the type of building you see in the cool neighborhoods of growing cities). Another is the ‘parking podium tower,’ like Chicago's corncob Marina City, in which the housing sits atop the parking.

“For mixed-used or commercial properties, the calculus is simpler, because so much more parking is required. There is less room to negotiate. Take the core of any small American town. Central parcels here were originally developed as commercial storefronts facing the sidewalk with offices or even housing above. Put twenty or thirty of them side by side and, voilà, Main Street.

“But if you wanted to open a shop on one of those lots in an American city in 2020, you needed to provide 1,200 square feet of parking for every 1,000 square feet of interior commercial space. More than half your lot was parking now. If you wanted to build a two-story shop, two thirds of your lot had to be parking. If you wanted to build three stories, the footprint of your building shrank to barely more than a quarter of the lot, a totem in a field of asphalt.

“For restaurants, the math was much worse. In most cities, ten parking spaces were required for every 1,000 square feet of restaurant, so your classic Main Street lot of 7,500 square feet could support a restaurant of only 1,500 square feet. Eighty percent of the lot was parking now. The developer Mott Smith, who works in Los Angeles, told me about his trips to present new projects at community meetings in the 2010s. ‘I had some architect friends, and we’d show the neighbors a picture from the community of some beautiful, zero-lot-line 1930s building with a café and a caption saying, 'What you want.' Then we'd spend the next hour explaining why the requirements make it so unless you're building a Taco Bell, you need not apply.’ Fast-food architecture–low slung, compact structures on huge lots–is really the architecture of parking requirements. Buildings that repel each other like magnets of the same pole. Parking minimums were like ‘dark energy,’ Don Shoup wrote, that hidden force that powers the expansion of the universe. Parking minimums powered the expansion of the city.

“In 1968, the architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown heralded this new phase of American architecture with a contrarian, pop appraisal of Las Vegas as a city worth studying, loving, even emulating. Their comparison of a supermarket parking lot to the Château de Versailles was a Slate pitch of its day:

“The A&P parking lot is a current phase in the evolution of vast space since Versailles. The space which divides high-speed highway and low, sparse buildings produces no enclosure and little direction. To move through a piazza is to move between high enclosing forms. To move through this landscape is to move over vast expansive texture: the megatexture of the commercial landscape. The parking lot is the parterre of the asphalt landscape. The patterns of parking lines give direction much as the paving patterns, curbs, borders, and tapis verts give direction in Versailles; grids of lamp posts substitute for obelisks and rows of urns and statues, as points of identity and continuity in the vast space.

“And the Las Vegas they adored was downright urban by the standards of millennial exurban sprawl.”

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ramòn casas i carbò--8/25/26

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 02:52:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Charles Deering and Ramón Casas by Isabel Coll Mirabent. Ramòn Casas i Carbò, the extraordinary Catalan portraitist, lived from 1866 to 1932 and did most of his work in Spain and France:

"Ramòn Casas i Carbò, was born into a wealthy Catalan family, an advantage that gave him the freedom to work as he pleased. At sixteen, he was installed in Paris, where his great aptitude for drawing allowed him to join the studio of Carolus Duran, an important master whose principal point of reference was Velàzquez–a standard that he instilled in his students, including Casas. In Paris, the young painter discovered the existence of daring and independent artists who, in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, were opting not to follow disciplined academic teaching, preferring instead to develop their careers independently of any directives. Casas decided to follow the same route, abandoning traditional norms and taking more innovative pathways, which would find expression in the works he produced during his trip to Andalusia (1883), in his bullfighting paintings (1884-87), and in his paintings en plein air, in which he succeeds in expressing feelings with a pictorial language as sincere as it is eloquent.

“Toward the end of 1890, Ramòn Casas moved to Paris with Santiago Rusiñol, where they took up residence in the area of Montmartre. He quickly immersed himself in his bohemian surroundings, cradle of so many literary schools and origin of so many trends in art, the promised land of so many painters. His fascination for Montmartre resulted in paintings of simple scenes from life, subjects that he renders through his brushwork as richly lyrical impressions. During his time in Paris, Casas completed a series of portraits full of psychological power. In all of his compositions, Casas used a direct and spontaneous technique, working with spatial approaches influenced by Japanese art, eschewing traditional plastic modeling, and refusing all chromatic and formal adaptation that might be considered conventional. Casas successfully combined these artistic techniques in paintings of bold personality, very different from what was being done at the time in Spain.

“In 1893, Casas decided to move back to Spain and take up residence in Barcelona. The painter, like all his Catalan countrymen, was immersed in the sociopolitical problems of the era. It is not surprising that he painted, for instance, an execution in Vile Garrote, a daring composition of great expressive realism, which would acquire the character of a ‘graphic and historical document.’ He did other compositions in the same spirit, such as Embarkation of Troops, The Corpus Procession, and The Charge. In all of them, Casas took on historical themes of notable social potency, which had never much interested impressionist painters. With excellent results, without excess of theatricality or of exaltation, he demonstrated in these works his ability to capture and express the psychology of the collective. In these paintings, the main character is the people, a mass of humanity, whom the painter depicts in various forms, surrounding an empty space. In this same period, Casas began to diversify his painting and drawing. Included in this rich period of activity are his famous ‘chulas,’ paintings of women–a genre that, despite its repetitions in theme, Casas developed into a very suggestive poetic universe.

“At the same time, Casas felt the need to participate in activities that would favor the development of Catalan art. For this reason, he gave artistic and financial support to the Els Quatre Gats foundation (1897), where works that exemplified modern and intelligent creativity were displayed, by new artists such as Picasso, Nonell, and Canals. Casas created a series of posters to promote Els Quatre Gats and the activities that took place there. With these works and others that he produced in 1898–the posters for Anis del Mono and Cordoniu Cava–Casas became an important and established member of the organization. Continuing with this interest in expanding and enriching the Barcelona art scene, he spearheaded initiatives linked with the practice of painting, such as the magazines Pèl & Ploma (1899) and Eorma (1904), which he would edit with Miguel Utrillo.

Self-portrait, 1908

“As a portraitist, Casas became a favorite of the bourgeois and intellectual society of the era. Working in pencil and paint, he produced compositions of extraordinary physical and psychological fidelity, executed with intensity and chromatic power and an impeccable and sure touch. During the last years of the century, admirers–Charles Deering among them–and collectors of art began to realize the importance of Casas's work and started to buy his paintings. At the turn of the century, Casas began work on The Charge, a painting with a historical theme, in which he shows himself to be an attentive observer of the situation, able to show an image of the actions of authority (page 154). Thus, to emphasize the contrast between the victor and the defeated, he places a fallen man in the foreground. It seemed that Casas wanted to close one painterly period, something he achieved definitively in 1910, when he began to paint a new Charge in response to a commission from Deering (plate 19). For that later painting, Casas painted a new oppressive action by the Civil Guard, now situated in a town in the Catalan interior.

“Also at the beginning of the new century, Casas was commissioned to decorate the Rotunda of the Barcelona Circle of the Lyceum, in which he displayed his innate tendency toward elegance and his ability to portray women with delicate sensuality. A little later, in January 1904, he completed a portrait of King Alfonso XIII, a painting influenced by Velàzquez's equestrian paintings. This portrait later became a part of Deering's collection.

“In 1906, with the beginning of his relationship with Julia Peraire, Casas painted a series of portraits of her in which he aimed not only to depict her physical features but also to show his feelings for her. A typical work of the period is a folding screen with five panels, each one bearing a representation of Julia; the screen was commissioned by Charles Deering for Maricel. Works that Casas produced in his final years were also connected with Charles Deering, in particular those that take up as their subject the town of Tamarit in Tarragona. The variety of these pieces demonstrates that Casas never ceased to explore and evolve in his art."

author: Isabel Coll Mirabent title: Charles Deering and Ramón Casas publisher: Northwestern University Press date: page(s): 89, 91, 93

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the krays--8/24/26

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 02:46:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Mafia by Ryan Gingeras. Reputed to be London’s toughest gangsters, the twins Ronald and Reginald Kray dominated its post-World War II crime scene:

"The Axis surrender of 1945 marked the beginning of a global renaissance within the history of mafias. Pre-war mafias in Asia and Europe regained their strength and acquired greater vitality with the establishment of new governments and regimes. The rapid growth of the United States and other First World economies created tantalizing marketplaces for all sorts of illicit wares and services. Cold War politics amplified mafias' political and social power, and the general public in various countries discovered these truths in striking ways, leading to both scandal and disillusionment. Mafias, more than ever, became a problem transcending continental and cultural divisions.

“As leaders of the free world, American officials looked upon this trend with worry. Growing concerns after 1945 pushed Washington to invest large amounts of money and attention in combating organized crime at home and abroad. Official efforts to raise popular awareness of this crusade arguably constitute the most important legacy of this endeavor. Through a series of televised hearings and testimonials, officials in Washington appeared to pull back the curtain on a secret world defined by corruption, violence, and intrigue. As the public's interest peaked, Hollywood distilled these revelations in a way that cemented their significance for all time. The Godfather's release in 1971 saw to it that audiences everywhere came to know what mafias were and how they appeared to wield power. Greater numbers of people soon saw fraternities across the world as iterations of the same phenomenon. As a consequence, many languages adopted the words ‘mafia’ and ‘godfather.’

“Ironically, it was at this moment that many of the oldest mafias began to weaken in critical ways. The growing effectiveness of law enforcement hastened their decline. Yet as old godfathers were sent to prison, the universe of mafias continued to grow and diversify. Two dramatic economic developments were responsible: the end of the Second World War and the rapid expansion of the cocaine industry. Both heightened public awareness of an ever-growing list of new and exotic mafias. For observers and critics at the end of the twentieth century, the end of the Cold War and the rise of Latin America's cartels and the new mafias of Eastern Europe heralded a far deadlier phase.

Reggie (left) and Ronnie Kray, photographed

“Twins Ronald and Reginald Kray arose from anonymity in the shadow of London's post-war recovery. As the sons of a rag picker, Ronnie and Reg possessed an earthy authenticity that spoke to their early careers as amateur East End boxers. Their path to notoriety was conventional for aspiring gangsters in the mid-1950s. They took over nightclubs, profited from extortion, and dabbled in random criminal schemes. Fame found them as they began to strike it rich. Their main haunts in the West End brought in movie stars and professional athletes, as well as politicians and artists. Newspapers caught on to the Krays by the early 1960s and transformed them into household names. The celebrities they later claimed to have met or partied with included The Beatles, Joe Louis, Frank Sinatra, Sonny Liston, and Judy Garland. The brothers basked in this publicity and were unafraid to let their love of the limelight show.

“It was their renown as London's preeminent hard men that brought Ronnie Kray to New York in the early part of 1966. After he arrived at Kennedy Airport, a car brought him to a house in Red Hook, close to the Brooklyn docks. The residence belonged to Joe Gallo and his brothers, arguably the most feared members of New York's Profaci crime family. The early stages of the meeting were awkward. As he awaited his host, a brother of one of the Profaci members, ‘an evil-looking midget,’ hovered menacingly behind him. None of this scared Ron. He was, as he remembered it, decidedly starstruck. ‘The atmosphere was electric,’ he later revealed. ‘I suddenly knew I was in the big league, and I'd better make out a good case for being here, otherwise these bastards were liable to chop my balls off.’ His patience and fortitude paid off after he elicited a potential deal. Members of the American Mafia were laying claim to casinos in London. What they wanted were local partners to help care for ‘big-time American gamblers’ coming over to Britain from Las Vegas. Other deals appeared in the offing if their relationship continued. But the outbreak of violent feuds with their South London rivals, the Richardsons, got the better of them. Ron was the first to land in prison in 1969 after being found guilty at the Old Bailey of murdering a man before a slew of witnesses in an East End pub. Reggie followed him months later after he butchered another man with a kitchen knife. In their old age, they both confessed to being less professional than their counterparts across the Atlantic. One of their biggest mistakes, Reg lamented, was that they had taken the lives of others. ‘A Mafia boss would never kill–he'd always get one of his button men to do it for him. [Philadelphia boss] Angelo Bruno once said to us, "Never get shit on your own hands." And he was right.’

“Ronnie and Reg did lord over London's underworld, albeit briefly. But unlike the Profaci family, or Angelo Bruno's crews in Philadelphia, their ‘firm’ of gangsters dissolved once they went to prison. What made the Krays significant was their star power. For the British press, and seemingly for many celebrities, the twins were the closest thing to a homegrown mafia that Britain in the Swinging Sixties had to offer. Even though their exploits inspired several cinematic tributes, close observers of their time tended to downplay their impact. ‘Neither the Krays nor the Richardsons, for all their crimes, ever really came near to the Chicago mobsters they both tried to emulate,’ as one journalist noted in 1970. Just how interested the American Mafia was in forming a relationship with the Krays was up for debate. Without much of a drug scene, and a rather robust national gaming board overseeing British gambling establishments, it seemed the American Mafia ‘never thought it worth their while’ to set up shop in London.”

author: Ryan Gingeras title: Mafia: A Global History publisher: Avid Reader Press date: page(s): 133-137

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freud and the sexual revolution -- 8/20/26

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from The Birth of the Pill by Jonathan Eig. In the 1800s, in much of the United States and other countries, birth control and abortion were banned to discourage promiscuity. Attitudes began to change in 1909 after a lecture in America by Sigmund Freud. By 1923, Wilhelm Reich had announced that the orgasm was the key to curing neuroses -- and proclaimed the need for a "sexual revolution." "Genital stagnation," he warned, would lead to both emotional and physical problems:

"Throughout most of human history, men and women have seldom been treated as equals where sex comes into play. In the Old Testament, when Sarah could not bear children for Abraham, Abraham took a maidservant for a mistress. King Solomon not only had hundreds of wives but had hundreds of concubines, too. In imperial Rome, a woman guilty of adultery was exiled from her home and banned from marrying again. Roman Catholic doctrine declared that sexual intercourse was only for procreation and that thinking or acting otherwise was a sin. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, promiscuous women were burned at the stake. In Victorian England, women were told they were not supposed to enjoy sex, and men were encouraged to visit prostitutes rather than defile their own wives. To discourage promiscuity, birth control and abortion were outlawed in many countries, including the United States, and women were often forced to rely on illegal abortions to control family size. Not until the early twentieth century did anyone dare suggest that sex should be accepted and even embraced as healthy or something to be enjoyed by both men and women.

"American attitudes toward sex took a big turn in 1909, when Sigmund Freud gave a series of lectures at ... Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Group photo, 1909, in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung;
back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi.

"Born in 1856 in the Austrian town of Freiberg, in what is now the Czech Republic, Freud studied medicine and specialized in nervous and brain disorders. He was influenced by the work of a Viennese colleague, Josef Breuer, who found that he could help deeply troubled patients by getting them to speak openly about the earliest occurrence of their symptoms. Freud theorized that many neuroses were rooted in trauma that had often been forgotten and hidden from consciousness. If patients could be helped to recall their experiences, he suggested, they could rid themselves of their neurotic symptoms.

"In 1900, Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. The unconscious mind was a powerful force, he proclaimed, and sexual drive was the most powerful of all determinants of a person's psychology. Sexual urges required gratification, Freud wrote; abstinence was both unnatural and potentially harmful. In Europe, critics complained that Freud was making too much of sexuality, and the good doctor came to be despised. But upon arriving in America he found a welcome and influential audience. 'Don't they know we're bringing them the plague?' Freud asked his fellow analyst Carl Gustav Jung as the two men stood on the deck of their ship, staring down at the cheering throngs awaiting their arrival.

"Most Americans never bothered to read Freud, but they came to understand, correctly or not, that he had endorsed sex as a desire equal in importance to hunger or thirst. His followers argued that sexual satisfaction was essential to happiness and mental health. Young women in particular, recalled the writer Malcolm Cowley, 'were reading Freud and attempting to lose their inhibitions.' Freudians did not worship Freud; they worshiped intercourse and orgasms. Among the believers, nothing satisfied desire and made the world a better place more than a mind-blowing, spine-shivering orgasm, or 'la petite mort' (the little death), as the French called it, suggesting a mystical quality to sex.

An orgone box, 1960.

"Margaret Sanger took up the cause, and so did Wilhelm Reich, another disciple of Freud. In 1923, [Wilhelm] Reich told the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society that he believed orgasm was the key to curing neuroses. 'Genital stagnation,' he warned, would lead not only to emotional problems but also 'heart ailments ... excessive perspiration, hot flashes and chills, trembling, dizziness, diarrhea, and, occasionally, increased salivation.' Women and adolescents were particularly vulnerable, he said, because they were expected to remain abstinent (at least until marriage, for women) while men were free to satisfy their sexual appetites. Reich believed that everyone needed orgasms -- and lots of them -- to discharge their sexual energy and remain healthy. What's more, he said, unless that energy was released, the world would never achieve progressive political or social reform. It would take nothing less than a sexual revolution -- a term of Reich's creation to create a truly free society. Reich was the prophet of the orgasm. He even devised a special box -- the Orgone Energy Accumulator -- to help harness orgasmic energy, which he believed circulated in the atmosphere and in the human bloodstream. Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, William Steig, and many other intellectuals later sat in the box (Albert Einstein considered it but politely declined). Eventually the federal government labeled Reich a fraud, but by then it didn't matter. He had already inspired a generation of believers who would become central players in the sexual revolution."

author: Jonathan Eig title: The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution publisher: W. W. Norton & Company date: Copyright 2014 by Jonathan Eig page(s): 14 - 16

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obsidian as black gold-- 8/19/26

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from Mountains of Fire by Clive Oppenheimer. Obsidian was a prized object in ancient times—and it's still prized today for the value of the information it provides to archeologists:

“Some archeologists refer to obsidian as ‘black gold’ owing to its prestige in prehistoric times. It is among the resources that volcanoes offer up.

“While archaic humans already exploited obsidian a million years ago, it was our own species that learned to fashion it with flair in Africa in the Middle and Later Stone Age over the last quarter of a million years. The very word ‘obsidian’ has an African connection, as we learn from Pliny’s Natural History: it derives from Obsidius, a Roman consul who is said to have discovered the rock in Ethiopia. Figuring out how to turn brittle obsidian into precision implements may even have helped to drive wider social, cultural and behavioural change.

“I wonder if our Stone Age ancestors loved it for its lustre and gleam as much as its keen edge.

“Obsidian is extremely useful, too, for modern day archaeologists, who use it to reveal the human geography of the unwritten past. A magma reservoir in the Earth’s crust evolves chemically and physically over time. It cools and slowly crystallises. Denser minerals settle out, depleting the remaining molten rock in magnesium and iron, while enriching it in silicon. The magma can also melt the rock at its walls, and sometimes two different magmas connect and mingle. These myriad processes impart a particular bouquet to the molten rock – like wine, magma is defined by its terroir. The equivalent of a sommelier for magma is an igneous geochemist.

“A skilled one could immediately discriminate between a bull-bodied Californian andesite and a gritty Auvergne mugearite.

Polished snowflake obsidian, formed through the inclusion of cristobalite crystals

“However, most volcanic rocks contain assemblages of common minerals, such as olivine, quartz and feldspar. If handed a piece of lava and its bulk chemical composition, our connoisseur would struggle to identify the individual volcano that gave birth to it. Crystal-free obsidian, on the other hand, has a unique geochemical fingerprint defined by the amounts of different elements. If two obsidian tools have the same print, they were made with the same source rock; if a tool’s print matches that of an outcrop, that is where the raw material came from.

“The technique was pioneered in the 1960s for the Mediterranean, where rich obsidian sources are found on Sardinia, Lipari and Melos. For an archaeologist finding obsidian tools in Tunisia, for example, it is as if they are stamped ‘Made in Italy.’ Obsidian sources are found in most of the volcanic belts of the world – including the Americas, Oceania, the near East, and Northeast and Southeast Asia – so the method is widely applicable. It provides direct evidence for the ranges over which people could exchange ideas as well as pieces of stone, yielding unique insights into prehistoric human culture, mobility and cooperation, even in the absence of a single human fossil. For a volcanologist, it offers a perfect point of collaboration with archaeologists.”

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violence in america--8/18/26

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 02:03:00 -0400

Today's selection -- From They Called It Peace by Lauren Benton. Violence in the earliest days of the Europeans in the Americas:

“Histories of nineteenth-century imperial violence often treat naval and land campaigns separately. They also tend to focus on actions within a single empire, an approach that associates imperial violence with projects of imperial and national state formation. But protection emergencies unfolded in structurally similar ways on land and sea, and trends toward political consolidation do not fully explain the dynamics of violence. Even as empires expanded their jurisdiction in pluripolitical regions and opposed Indigenous autonomy, serial acts of violence did more than incorporate unruly territories and subjects. They made Indigenous polities subject to being variously assigned by Europeans to the status of subjects, rebels, or enemies.

“We can glimpse the way bundled protection emergencies resolved into war in the Río de Ia Plata in the early nineteenth century. The region was home to Guarani recently released from Jesuit missions, as well as seminomadic groups labeled ‘pagans’ by Spaniards and Portuguese, and it was bounded by ranching concerns and crisscrossed by itinerant traders and smugglers. Years of encroachment by Portuguese and Spanish settlers and slavers had splintered Indigenous groups and encompassed them in networks of trade and labor. Charnias and Minuanes were among those actively trading with settlers and in some cases operating as clients or proxies of the Portuguese as they sought to extend their influence. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the region's political economy centered on a lucrative contraband trade in hides, only partially channeled into official circuits. Spanish and Portuguese elites were experimenting with ways to project power into the countryside in order to privatize wild herds and establish title to land.

“Like many other regions, the Rio de la Plata was a site of militarization and new forms of patrolling. Militias on horseback were organized in major towns. We get a sense of the goals and politics of patrolling by examining efforts to step up rural policing in the hinterlands of Montevideo. In the 1770s and 1780s, the Montevideo town council began to appeal to Madrid for a show of military force in the countryside through the creation of partidas–sorties of specialized military outfits into the interior. The viceroy complied, and in 1796 he created a force of blandengues in Montevideo modeled on a similar corps founded in 1752 in Buenos Aires. Viceroy Áviles explained in Buenos Aires in 1800 that the main goals were ‘to contain the raids of the charnias and minuanes ... and to bring into civil and Christian society that other class of vagrants, even more pernicious, who are dispersed throughout the countryside.'

Blandengue by Johann Moritz Rugendas

“In advocating the creation of blandengue forces, Spanish officials routinely characterized the countryside as the disorderly domain of rustlers, smugglers, thieves, and indios–a region of chronic conflict in desperate need of order. Increasingly, Charruas and Minuanes were singled out for ‘pacification.' Blandengue captains were themselves partly responsible for this shift in rhetoric. Many of the men in the new force were recruited, through an act of amnesty, from among groups of fugitives subsisting on occasional work or smuggling and closely identified with the itinerant poor of the countryside. José Gervasio Artigas, who would become the leader of a backcountry revolution in the Banda Oriental, was a blandengue captain and a former smuggler.

“The first forays of blandengues against Indigenous communities intensified violence in the region by producing an uptick in Indigenous attacks on estancias. Some of these attacks were undoubtedly reprisals for blandengue raids in which Indigenous women and children were taken as captives and sold or assigned as quasi-slaves to estancias and urban households. In 1799, the viceroy insisted on mounting two attempts to negotiate for peace with Indigenous groups, with one expedition led by the blandengue official Juan Ventura Ifrán.

“The diary of Ifrán's patrol, written in 1799, conveys the sheer tedium of backcountry patrolling. The force of about fifty blandengues was bogged down by heavy winter rains and had difficulty even locating Indigenous bands with whom to parley. It was only after two months of travel that Ifrán finally encountered some camps of the ‘Minuana nation.’ He was able to convince about twenty-two Minuanes to accept the ‘protection’ of his forces and accompany the troops to a settlement–though later the quasi-captives would desert the expedition. Ifrán’s group then located a larger band of Minuanes. Attempts to convince the cacique of the group, Masalana, to follow Ifrán to a settlement did not go well. Masalana declared that he would rather ‘die in the countryside,’ and he withdrew with his followers across the Uruguay River to avoid further interactions.

“The militarization of the region could not be reduced to the logic of European-Indigenous tensions. Christianized Native people operated across these groups and at crucial moments drove negotiations. Christians in Masalana’s group urged the cacique not to trust Ifrán’s forces because they had no ties to ‘true Christians.’ The diary also shows how the failure of one set of negotiations could set up violence in the next encounter. Soon after Masalana withdrew, Ifrán's party came across another Indigenous encampment. This time Ifrán ordered his men to sneak up on the settlement at night. He claimed that he instructed one of the Christian Charrúus accompanying the blandengues to shout out an offer of peace at dawn, but in fact his forces were already in position to attack and it was no surprise when a skirmish broke out. Ifrán's men killed five Minuanes. The rest fled, leaving a sizable herd of horses–probably the intended target of Ifrán's group all along; the soldiers immediately took possession of them.”

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george washington, builder--8/17/26

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 02:12:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from George Washington's Eye by Joseph Manca. George Washington was deeply involved in the expansion and design of his Mount Vernon Mansion House:

“We have many fewer documents concerning the building from 1757 to 1759 than we do for the 1770s expansion, and no useful remarks by early observers concerning the authorship of the building's design. While Washington was away from the estate, neighbor and friend George William Fairfax looked into the progress of the expansion. Fairfax talked to the builder, John Patterson, and offered ‘to assist Mr Patterson with my advice if wanted.’ On 5 August 1758, Fairfax wrote to Washington:

“I have scarcely time to acquaint you, That I was Yesterday at Mount Vernon to Visit Mr Patterson, who consulted me about taking up the upper Floors, as you gave him no orders about chem, whereupon I had them clean'd in order to View them the better, and found most of them very uneaven and several defective planks, upon which I made Patterson calculate the difference of Expence between New laying them & intire new, which you'l see is too trifling to hesitate a moment provided you choose either. Undoubtedly they may do with a little plaining, but that cant bring them even, or make them of a piece with the rest of the House. If you prefer a new Floor, there must be new Doors also, So that we beg you'l consider this matter and lett us have your directions–This word reminds me of breaking one of yours, which we hope youl pardon, But it was upon seeing full imploy for the joiners, and that it would take too much of their time That I took the liberty to hire a hand to paint the House, which is suffering for want of it–I think the Chimneys above are to much contracted, and would be better were they inlarged. For if you remember they are taken in, but whether to prevent Smoaking or for a Stove you perhaps can best tell, and the only one that can direct us.

“A little over a week later, Patterson wrote to Washington, referring to the ‘Plan’ the colonel had devised but also noting that he made a decision about the placement of the stairs to the garret. We can deduce from these documents that Washington designed the additions himself but that some lesser decisions were made by those on the spot (John Patterson, William George Fairfax). Washington left the ‘directions’ and a ‘Plan’ and was the ‘only one’ who could decide large matters.

Mount Vernon with the Washington family on the terrace, a 1796 portrait by Benjamin Henry Latrobe

“We have even more certain indications of Washington's design of the 1770s expansion. Washington's voluminous correspondence about the house includes mention of carpenters, stucco workers, and painters, yet there is no letter, record of payment, or other notice of any outside architect. In one of the few letters by him on this topic, he stated to Cary on 6 October 1773 that he was ‘under a necessity of making some Repairs to, and alteration in my House.’ Similarly, he told Bryan Fairfax on 4 July 1774, ‘I am very much engaged in raising one of the additions to my house, which I think (perhaps it is fancy) goes on better whilst I am present, than in my absence from the workmen.' Much later, in May 1798, Washington wrote to Sally

Fairfax, who had left Belvoir and the Virginia colony for England in 1774, that "I made considerable additions to my dwelling house, & alterations in my Offices, & Gardens.' While these statements seem to support the attribution of the design to him, they are hardly conclusive. Still, a number of observers during and after Washington's lifetime suggested or dearly proclaimed his authorship of the expanded mansion.

“Martha's grandson George Washington Parke Custis (b. 1781) spent his childhood at Mount Vernon, where George and Martha raised him. Custis wrote of George Washington that ‘all the embellishments of the house and grounds are owing to his creative hand,' and noted his responsibility for the ‘elegant and tasteful arrangement of his house and grounds.’ The great man, Custis claimed, served as ‘his own architect and builder, laying off everything himself–the buildings, gardens, and grounds all arose co ornament and usefulness under his fostering hand." When English merchant Robert Hunter Jr. visited the estate on 17 November 1785, he noted:

“He has about 4000 acres, well cultivated and superintends the whole himself. Indeed, his greatest pride now is to be thought the first farmer in America. He is quite a Cincinnatus, and often works with his men himself: strips off his coat and labors like a common man. The General has a great turn for mechanics. It's astonishing with what niceness he directs everything in the building way, condescending even to measure the things himself, that all may be perfectly uniform. The style of the house is very elegant, something like the Prince de Conde's at Chantille near Paris, only not quite so large. But it's a pity he did not build a new one at once, as it has cost him nearly as much repairing his old one. His improvements, I'm told, are very great within the last year.

“Thomas Lee Shippen, visiting from Philadelphia in 1790, wrote to relatives, calling attention to the ‘taste and industry of our Washington,' relating George's aesthetic contribution and his ‘industry’ in bringing the house to completion. More direct was the opinion of Baron Friedrich von Steuben, who passed by Mount Vernon in 1780. The baron spent a good deal of time conversing with Washington and understood him to be the architect. Commenting on the ‘external appearance’ of the mansion house, the baron said that if ‘Washington were not a better general than he was an architect the affairs of American would be in a very bad condition.’ Pierre-Étienne Du Ponceau, the baron's aide-de-camp, heard the remark and recorded it in 1837.

“After Washington's death, some visitors expressed an awareness of his authorship of Mount Vernon. Thomas P. Cope, a Philadelphia merchant who wrote a lengthy diary of his travels and activities, visited Mount Vernon in 1802: ‘The building & style of finishing is quite plain. There are few architectural ornaments about it. Considering that it is the produce of patchwork, it preserves more uniformity than is common in like cases. It was an old family residence, & the General has from time to time made such additions & improvements as occasion required. Yet on the whole it is a slight building, neither is the furniture uncommonly rich or elegant. It has rather a comfortable, substantial appearance, not void of fashion or taste.’ Similarly, artist William Birch, who visited Mount Vernon in 1803, wrote in his Country Seats of the United States (1808): ‘The additions of a piazza to the water front, and of a drawing room, are proofs of the legitimacy of the General's taste.’ Gen. Andrew Jackson attributed the design to Washington, writing in November 1815 that at Mount Vernon ‘stands the venerable dwelling of the patriarch of our Liberties, corresponding in its style, with the plain and simple taste of him who planned it.’ Scottish visitor John Duncan (Travels [1823]) noted that ‘some partial alterations were made on the house by the General, but report says that he subsequently regretted that he did not entirely rebuild it.’ Even more helpful is the description in 1822 by tourist Charles Ruggles. In a letter to his sister, he criticized the design and suggested that the architecture could be ascribed to Washington himself:

“Mount Vernon is by nature a most beautiful place. The house is of wood–old, plain, and has rather a gothic appearance. It was built by Laurence Washington. The General added to it a piazza of more modern fashion than the original building, and two wings which have nothing to distinguish them from farmhouse architecture. A stranger is struck with the plainness, and I may add, the stiffness of appearance by which the whole is characterized. It would perhaps be unfair to judge of General Washingtons taste by what we now see, because he did not originally build the house; and because its appearance may be changed since his death. The changes which have taken place are, however, chiefly produced by decay–few from purposed alterations: and on the whole one would be led to think that the General paid no great regard to ornament and that in whatever he attempted in that way he was unsuccessful.

“Finally, the last major pre-Civil War piece of writing on Mount Vernon, Benson Lossing's Mount Vernon and its Associations (1859), published later as The Home of Washington (1870), claimed that ‘Washington was his own architect, and drew every plan and specification for the workmen with his own hand.'”

author: Joseph Manca title: George Washington's Eye: Landscape, Architecture, and Design at Mount Vernon publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press date: Copyright 2012 page(s): 17-18

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barbara shermund--8/14/26

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 02:50:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins by Caitlin McGurk. The impossibly gifted cartoonist Barbara Shermund (1899 – 1978) whose work appeared in The New Yorker from its start in 1925.

“Shermund loved to draw women. There are several distinct themes that run throughout her work, but none as consistently as women talking to each other. In private parlors and bars, at perfume counters or on picnics, Shermund's women confide in or conspire with each other, gossip or goad, and create scenes in which the reader feels privy to a private conversation. To that end, it comes as no surprise that one of her greatest inspirations was writing and drawing from life–and most of her captions read as bits of overheard conversation between friends, roommates, or family members. While her work may not always pass the Bechdel Test of today, when women discuss male counterparts, it's most frequently at the latter's expense. Her affinity for and fascination with how women interact with each other–the way they reveal themselves in the company of close friends, or lament life's petty problems in operatic terms–is apparent. Often, her cartoons seem to serve up a dose of drama and ask, does any of this really matter? She delighted in contrasts: pitting the perspectives of youth and age against each other, a shy shopper and a brassy saleswoman, a clueless rich collector and the starving artist they admire. If someone took themselves–their troubles, their dreams, their tastes–too seriously, they made for the perfect subject. More often than not, the humor of Shermund's work is in the sense of a shared experience of shock or amusement reflected in the face of whatever character is on the receiving end of her narrator's quips. One gets the feeling that they are in on the joke with the other occupants of the scene by way of an inked eyebrow raise or eye roll in place of a real-life elbow nudge. Occasionally, they stare directly out at us, making eye contact with the reader as if to say, ‘can you believe this?’ at life's little ludicrous moments. In this way, her people bring us into the picture, situating us within a relatable scene. Although her work seemed to laugh hardest at wealthy society-types, she skewered everyone, including the elites, intellectuals, and artists to whom the magazine catered. As Dale Kramer put it in Ross and The New Yorker, ‘high society would be kidded, but preferably as if from the inside.’

Self portrait of Shermund

“Ross and his editors strongly encouraged–and supported–his contributors to get out into the world and draw from life. With a small sketchbook on her always (a few of which survive in private collections), Shermund created countless drawings of people, usually women, in conversation on the train or bus, out on the street or in fashionable shops. Fragments of comments or conversations would be jotted down in the margins, as well as occasional notes on costuming. She sketched from the theater, from boxing matches and fencing bouts, and used this form of life drawing to help develop a keen understanding of what the slightest gesture or glance could communicate. New York City offered endless opportunities for Shermund to immerse herself in and observe scenes from other people's lives as they unfolded, as did her extensive travel experience. When she mentioned in a letter to her editors in 1928 that she might head off to California for a visit soon, their reply encouraged her to consider working up some drawings that could take place on a transcontinental train while she was at it.

“She was bursting with her own ideas in those early days, and it's possible that the "realness" of Shermund's work may also be what made her difficult to pair with a compatible writer at first. In the magazine cartooning business, the use of ‘gag men’–or caption writers–had long been standard practice. Although people of all genders sent in ideas, the term ‘gag men’ was standard for the time and usually referred to those consistently contracted for the punch lines. Certain sectors of cartoonists can't imagine separating the writing and drawing process. But when it came to single panel cartoons for magazines like The New Yorker, Collier's, Life, or later, Esquire, an artist would occasionally be paired with a writer or could even accept submissions directly. In her earliest years at The New Yorker, Shermund wrote most of her gags, which was how she established her brand-in essence, this baseline work of hers gave the editors a sense of what themes interested her, what characters and settings she was most drawn to, and what a Shermund cartoon looked and read like. It's from this guideline of understanding the personality and tempo of her work that the editors could then send her ideas that seemed fitting to her style. Finding the right idea for her to draw could be a challenge, and rarely did the cartoons written by others hit as hard as those fully formed from her own mind. Ross and the art staff respected their cartoonists enough that they truly treated the shopped-out gags as suggestions rather than assignments, meaning Shermund could reject an idea if she felt it just didn't work or wasn't her style."

author: Caitlin McGurk title: Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund publisher: Fantagraphics date: page(s): 58-62

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friends, foes, and followers of fishes -- 8/13/26

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 02:43:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from Intertwined by Michael Gross. Remoras and manta rays:

“Larger fish species are often seen accompanied by smaller species—which may be anything from helpful cleaners, via unobtrusive fellow travelers, through to flesh-eating parasites. Some of these ecological relations have been studied in detail, but many, especially the more dynamic ones, remain poorly understood. These connections may be vital for our understanding of the fate of marine species in a changing oceanic environment.

“Manta rays, with their vast wingspan of up to seven meters (23 ft.), are among the most charismatic fish species one can observe in the warmer parts of the oceans and thus a key attraction for scuba-diving destinations such as the Maldives or Hawaii. Of the

two species now merged into the genus Mobula (together with the devil rays), the smaller, more coastal reef manta ray (Mobula alfredi) can readily be observed near coral reefs, while the giant ocean manta ray (Mobula birostris) is slightly more elusive.

“Both species had been listed as vulnerable on the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List of Threatened Species, but M. birostris has now been moved to endangered.

“Countries such as Indonesia have realized that the long-lived animals are much more economically valuable alive as a tourist attraction than dead on the fish market and have protected them accordingly. However, a growing demand for the cartilage of the manta ray's gill plates is still fueling an unsustainable level of killing, which often happens either illegally or in international waters.

“The Manta Trust, an international charity based in the United Kingdom, is working to improve the protection and appreciation of manta rays. Its experts can even identify thousands of individual manta rays. While the rays are mostly black from above (the dorsal side), their ventral side is typically white with a pattern of black spots that is unique in each individual.

M. alfredi group in the Maldives

“Working with the dive and snorkel tourism industry in the Maldives, the Manta Trust has established an image database identifying individual resident reef manta rays by their spots; the database had passed 5,000 entries in December 2020. As with the starlike patterns of whale sharks and the whisker spots of lions, the rays' spots are like fingerprints that identify individuals, thus enabling researchers to better understand the life cycle of the animals, including their social network within their own species and with other species.

“Manta rays are often observed aggregating in groups of several dozen individuals, and they are often seen accompanied by smaller fish species, including some that attach themselves to the rays. These fellow travelers obviously use the large rays for their own benefit, but are they parasites, mutualists, or commensalists (i.e., do they harm, benefit, or have no effect on the rays)? As it is difficult to monitor the contacts of a fast-moving species, surprisingly little is known about the interspecies connection of manta rays.

“Aimee Nicholson-Jack from the Manta Trust and colleagues expanded the scope of knowledge on the manta ray ‘hitchhikers’ with what the authors say is only the second systematic analysis of such species to be published in a peer-reviewed format. Using the Maldives database and photographic evidence accumulated in three decades worth of citizen science engagement, the researchers evaluated the associations observed for 4,901 M. alfredi individuals identified in 353 sites.

“They found 12 species associated with the reef manta rays, including, for the first time, species that don't belong to the well-known family Echeneidae (remoras). The most observed companion was the sharksucker remora (Echeneis naucrates), which was observed in 10% of the sightings. It was most likely to be present when the rays were visiting cleaning stations, which are nearshore locations where populations of cleaner fish feed on crustacean parasites present on the rays. Near-term pregnant female rays were more likely to be seen with E. naucrates, but this may be causally related with the fact that they spend more time at cleaning stations. Interestingly, juvenile remoras tended to be found with juvenile rays.

“In addition to filter feeding near the surface, manta rays dive to depths below 200 meters (660 ft.) to hunt. It is thought that E. naucrates is unable to survive at that depth, so the movement pattern of the ray explains why the hitchhikers aren't always with them. A tagging study of M. alfredi diving behavior found that all tagged individuals went to depths beyond 300 meters (980 ft.), with a maximum recorded depth of 672 meters (2,205 ft.).

“By contrast, the most common companion of the giant oceanic manta ray, the giant remora (Remora remora), seems to stay with the ray for longer and often attaches itself. Based on records of 663 identified M. birostris individuals, R. remora was present in just over half the sightings.

“While the remoras provide some benefits to the manta ray host, including removal of crustacean parasites, the habit of attaching to the ray can also come with a fitness cost. The researchers observed examples of scars due to remora attachment and of remoras attached in unsuitable places, such as inside the gills or the anus.

“A third remora species, the white suckerfish (Remora albescens), was only rarely seen on the images analyzed, but it has been discovered within the mouths of rays examined more closely, which leads the authors to suggest that these remoras are more commonly associated with rays than the observation data suggest. …

“Among the hitchhiking species, the remoras have attracted attention for the efficiency of the reversible suction mechanism they use to attach to their hosts, which apart from rays also include other marine megafauna from sharks to whales (animals with more than 44 kg, or 97 lb., body weight are considered megafauna). The attachment survives remarkable drag forces on fast-swimming animals but can be fastened or released in a fraction of a second. They achieve this with an adhesive disc that evolved from dorsal fin elements and consists of a series of parallel lamellae surrounded by a fleshy lip. When the lip makes contact, the lamellae rotate to expand the enclosed space and thus reduce the pressure.

“Brooke Flammang's group at New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark has studied the suction apparatus for clues to remora behavior, especially when, where, and why they attach or let go. Investigating the anatomy of the lip in E. naucrates, the researchers discovered densely innervated structures that they propose to be push-rod mechanoreceptors that allow the remoras to sense when they have made contact with a host and quickly trigger attachment. Once attached, the mechanism would enable the remoras to sense shear forces and ensure they remain fixed.

“While entirely plausible in terms of what the remoras need to hitch a ride, this was a sensational discovery because it is unprecedented among fishes. The only other comparable mechanism the researchers could find in the literature is in monotremes (platypus and echidnae).

“Regarding the question where remoras attach and how they behave on their host surface, Flammang had a lucky break when she saw a conference talk from whale researcher Jeremy Goldbogen of Stanford University, who had tagged blue whales with video cameras and ‘inadvertently gotten hundreds of hours of remora footage.’ After seeing the movies of remoras skating on the surface of the whales, Flammang set out to analyze their behavior. Until then, all the information available was based on photos and short-term observations.

“Working with experts on fluid dynamics and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, Flammang and colleagues obtained models of the flow conditions around the whale. They identified various areas where the anatomy of the whale reduces the drag forces and makes it easier for the remoras to remain attached, such as behind the blowhole and behind the fins. In these areas, the drag force on a whale swimming at 1.5 meters (5 ft.) per second is reduced by up to 80%. Sure enough, the videos show the remoras preferentially settling in these areas, thus saving energy. Calculations showed, however, that they could maintain attachment anywhere on the whale, even on the highly agile tail fluke.

“While the remoras had their favorite spots, they didn't always stay in one place. Footage shows them gliding across the surface of their host, to get from one sweet spot to another, or to meet with fellow passengers. Knowing the best spot to attach to animals like whales, rays, and shark will prove helpful to conservation research, as it can facilitate tagging the animals. With applications like tagging in mind, Flammang's group has developed biomimetic suction devices based on the remora studies.”

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palantir culture--8/12/26

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 02:44:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from The Philosopher in the Valley by Michael Steinberger. Alex Karp of the controversial data firm Palantir:

“Karp often boasted of Palantir's meritocratic culture–he insisted that the company hired people strictly on the basis of qualifications. This wasn't entirely true: Palantir had its share of nepo hires, employees who had leveraged connections of one sort or another to get jobs there. Unsurprisingly, Ivy League universities and other comparably prestigious schools were overrepresented (except for Haverford: Karp insisted he wasn't blackballing our alma mater, but he was Palantir's lone Haverford grad). The company's payroll also included people with impressive achievements outside the classroom. A number of military veterans worked at Palantir. So did a former Olympian and a current astronaut.

“Karp was good to those who worked for him. He was not one to scream or threaten, nor did he ever publicly upbraid or humiliate people. This was a reflection of his temperament, but also the fact that Palantirians were his de facto family, and he treated them as such (perhaps too much so: it occasionally felt as if he infantilized his colleagues, and some of them, in turn, seemed like needy children, constantly seeking his attention and approval). If anything, he was sometimes too loyal, a loyalty that could bleed into stubbornness. While Palantir was generally an agreeable place to work, there were a few employees who were not well-liked or trusted by others. But Karp resisted getting rid of them. He could be obstinate that way, although he also just really disliked firing people.

“Karp often joked that his job was ‘managing unmanageable people.’ He was mainly referring to the nearly two thousand software engineers that the company employed, and he was convinced that he had an almost unique ability to lead them. ‘Once I stumbled on it, it turned out that I was built for certain things that are really valuable, like managing very complex, sometimes difficult– highly in many cases–technical software engineers. There are just very few people in the world built for that.’ While Karp was not lacking in self-regard, it was true that he had proven to be very adept at guiding the software engineers who worked at Palantir. One paradoxical reason for this was because he had no computer science training; he didn't try to micromanage them because he couldn't, and his respect for boundaries earned him their goodwill and trust.

Alex Karp at work, December 2015

“This isn't to say that Karp refrained from offering input on technical matters. It was his idea to equip Palantir’s software with robust privacy controls, a feature that became one of the company's major selling points. But whenever he shared his thoughts about the work the engineers were doing, he made clear that pushback was welcome.

“In this way, too, he had won the confidence and allegiance of Palantir's engineers. Probably the biggest factor, though, was that he genuinely held the engineers in high regard, and not just because they were Palantir's lifeblood. Karp saw them as they saw themselves: as creatives. He recognized that a lot of ingenuity went into their work and that there was a certain beauty to the finished product. He gave the engineers their space and showed them respect. Karp liked to describe Palantir as ‘an artists' colony,’ and he really meant it.

“In turn, Palantirians were intensely devoted to him. This partly reflected faith in his judgment–a belief, born of experience, that Karp's instincts, on subjects ranging from geopolitics to product development to project assignments, were almost unerring. But his colleagues were also loyal to Karp because working for him was a blast. One company executive, who had more than enough money to retire on, told me he couldn't bring himself to walk away because being around Karp was simply too much fun. ‘It's just a wild ride,’ he said with a satisfied smile. When Palantirians met for drinks or dinner, Karp was frequently the topic of conversation. It was often said that the company had a cultish vibe, and there was some truth to this. Certainly, there was a cult of personality around Karp. In the mid-2010s, several French employees hired a cartoonist to produce a graphic novel about Karp (it was never publicly released, but the cartoonist later got a job at Palantir).

“Karp kept his private life walled off from even his closest associates at the company, which added to the fascination with him. (It wasn't until 2017 that he told his colleagues that his mother was black, and this was only because a reporter had learned that he was biracial.) He took pleasure in the aura that he enjoyed inside Palantir and was convinced that it helped make the company functional. In a workplace full of headstrong iconoclasts, he was the glue that held everything together. ‘You need a way you can bond, and my eccentric, nonstandard character is the bonding mechanism,’ he explained.

“But Karp also believed that his managerial acumen was tied to his dyslexia. From his point of view, the key variable in his life was not his racial or ethnic identity but, rather, dyslexia, which had turned out to be a burden and a blessing, although he liked to put it more colorfully: dyslexia, he said, ‘fucked me but also gave me wings to fly.’ Even though Karp ended up doing well in school, his formative years were marked by his struggle with dyslexia. But along the way, he developed certain attributes that would prove useful in business. He couldn't process as many details as other people, so he learned to get by on less information, which he believed gave him an advantage in situations that called for quick, decisive judgments. Dyslexia also taught him the power of collaboration; it is a disability, and those who have it need the help of others. In an environment that required team-building and delegating responsibility, Karp found that he had an intrinsic advantage. Dyslexics, he said, aren't raised on an ethos of self-reliance and tend to excel in situations in which it is important to get people to understand that ‘maybe if we work together it would be more powerful than if we don't.”

author: Michael Steinberger title: The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster date: Copyright 2025 page(s): 26-29

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devastation in turkey--8/11/26

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 03:20:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from From Life Itself by Suzy Hansen. In the 2000s, it was inflation and the neglect of its agricultural base that brought economic havoc to the country of Turkey:

"Ismail had been expecting that $1 would be worth 8 liras that year. School would start, people wouldn't be able to afford expenses for their children, and mothers wouldn't be able to bring food into their homes. ‘I say it again, by October it will be eight.’

“He was close. The lira shot to six that autumn. When I moved there in 2007, it had been 1.4. Suddenly food became so expensive, people stopped buying kilos of vegetables. They bought them one by one instead. Turkey had once been a proud agricultural economy, and Turks loved their fresh food. Young people, like their migrant parents before them, still loved to visit their country villages and return with fresh tomatoes and jars of honey and lumps of Aegean cheese. The country used to be self-sufficient in food, but not now, not since the liberalization process that started with Turgut Özal and continued with Erdoğan. They imported lentils, Ismail said. They imported refined wheat. They imported chickpeas! They imported livestock! They gave tax breaks and made it easier to import these things than to produce them. The food system was broken. They needed foreign currency to buy petrol, but now they also needed it to buy food.

“Decades of industrialization, migration to the cities, abandonment of farmers' subsidies, and entry into the global economy had decimated the country's agricultural production, forcing farmers into factories and mines to make a living. Perhaps this had worked while Turkey's economy expanded. But now the country's debts were so huge, and the currency so weak, that by 2018 a financial crisis became a food crisis, the source of so much shame. Turks suddenly noticed not only how expensive the food was but how low quality their food had become.

"Now they are confronting America!’ Ismail said. To make matters worse, the new president, Trump, was fighting with Erdoğan over Andrew Brunson, an American pastor the Turks had jailed after the 2016 military coup because they thought he was in cahoots with the PKK and the Gülenists (because they thought everyone was in cahoots with the PKK and the Gülenists), Erdoğan wouldn't release him, so the Americans imposed sanctions on Turkish officials, which sent the lira tumbling even more. ‘My brother, we need to make peace with all the states of the world,’ Ismail said. ‘There's a saying, I think a foreigner said it: The sky is blue, the wheat is gold, how sweet is the taste of peace.

Turkish Lira banknotes

“I'm the son of Turks. I'm a Turk,’ he continued. ‘Foreigners do not interest me. We fell out with America. What quarrel, ya. You broke up with them. Yesterday it was Greece. You fall out with everyone.' When Erdogan fought with America, he made it seem like he was standing up for not only Turkey, but the whole world. His courage made many Turks proud.

“'But what are you standing up to?' Ismail said. 'We are all fathers; we have to think of our children. I have two daughters; my hands have never been separated from them for forty years. I brought them up without complaining when there was a problem, financial or moral. The state is also a father. You will lead this nation. The children work and struggle, and they live in luxury. How can this be?'”

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