Delanceyplace

stephen sondheim--10/9/26

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Never Mind the Happy by Marc Shaiman. In 1999, award-winning composer and lyricist Marc Shaiman had a chance encounter with the legendary Stephen Sondheim:

"After living exclusively in Los Angeles for a decade, and with Hairspray rehearsals about to start, it was time for Scott Wittman and me to find a place back in New York. In 1999, we found a fabulous apartment in Chelsea with a soundproof studio in the back, and once again had a home in Manhattan.

“On November 19 that year, Patti LuPone made her solo debut at Carnegie Hall. Scott directed the act, and I was lucky enough to be called in to do some of the arranging and piano playing. And let me tell you, until you've played ‘My Way’ for Patti LuPone at Carnegie Hall, you haven't lived.

“After the concert, Scott and I hosted a party at our apartment. When we got out of the cab, who should be wandering around outside our building but Stephen Sondheim. He had been at the concert and been given our address but didn't take down the apartment number. So, we ushered him through the front door and accompanied him upstairs.

“As a teenager, I would take the bus into Manhattan to visit the historic Colony Music store and buy the piano/vocal scores for Company, Follies, and A Little Night Music. I would play along to the cast albums (when I wasn't playing along to the Mary Poppins soundtrack or Bette Midler records) and marvel at the depth and passion of Sondheim's music and lyrics. I'm also a huge fan of the shows he wrote later, but because those three were part of that very formative time in my life, they are still my favorites.

“Was I in a state of shock that Stephen Sondheim was in our home? Yes, I was.

“The apartment was full of people celebrating, everyone in a great mood. Patti said, ‘Ya know, Marc, a great ice breaker with Steve is to ask him if he wants to smoke a joint. He loves pot’

“Now, I had only recently started smoking pot again, trying to learn how to relax after a decade of high-pressure film scoring. So, I went over and said, ‘Hey, Steve, Patti mentioned you might like to smoke a joint?’

Sondheim in 1970

“He quickly took me up on the invitation, so I grabbed two of the other guys who had worked on Patti's concert, conductor Rob Fisher and orchestrator Bruce Coughlin, and off we went to the soundproof studio in the back.

“The four of us started smoking, making conversation about music and showbiz, but because he is Stephen Sondheim, we each keep deferentially passing the joint back to him instead of around in a circle. So he is easily taking in four times as much as the rest of us. Not to mention, this is when that new, stronger pot was becoming the norm, so this joint packed a punch.

“I started feeling comfortable in front of Stephen fucking Sondheim and began telling him about working on the South Park movie (which he adored) as well as sharing other stories and dirty jokes–and actually making him laugh!

“Suddenly, he got up and walked across the studio, and leaned against crates the caterers had used to bring in silverware. Seeing him walking away, I asked, ‘Uh oh, was my last story a little too much?’

“But before he could answer ... BOOM! Sondheim fell to the floor.

“Because the party was loud and the studio was soundproof, no one in the front of the apartment could hear the sound of three jaws dropping as Rob, Bruce, and I freaked the fuck out.

“I raced over to him. He sat up groggily and said, ‘Boy, that pot is really strong.'

"Yes it is:' I said. "I think we have had enough!"

“Sondheim stood up, said he was okay, and we started making conversation again when all of a sudden ... BOOM! Down he went a second time.

“I placed a pillow under his head and, after a few moments, he said, ‘I think I should just go home now. Help me to a cab.'

“So now I'm walking with him down the corridor between the studio and the elevator. He seems fine, we're talking, it really seems like the worst is over–but nope.

“TIMBER! Down he goes a third time.

“I am now standing over him, looking down at Stephen Sondheim, God of The Musical Theater. I can tell that his eyes have rolled to the back of his head, his complexion is ashen, and I think to myself, Oh my God, I have done what every musical theater writer has ever wanted to do the year before their musical hits Broadway ... I've killed Stephen Sondheim!

“Thankfully, that wasn't true. He came to and we put him in a cab back to his townhouse in Turtle Bay.

“I got his number from Patti the next morning and called him to make sure he was okay. ‘Yes, I am, thank you for calling,' he said. ‘Just do me a favor, wait until I'm dead to tell this story.'

“Well, Mr. Sondheim, I waited. It was hard, but I waited!

“When he did pass away in 2021, everyone was writing gorgeous remembrances full of appropriate praise and deification. I went to Times Square that Sunday and joined in the mass choir that had been invited to sing ‘Sunday,’ a song so perfect that I have never not broken into tears upon hearing it. But as I sang and cried, I also thought of this story I wanted to share. Not just because it was a secret I had managed to keep for two decades, but because it humanized him in a way we weren't hearing at the time.”

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the truth about pasta -- 10/8/26

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 03:20:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from The Italians by John Hooper. Italy and pasta:

"Pasta has long been a part of Italian cuisine, but only quite recently acquired the dominant, pervasive role it plays now. The oldest form is thought to be lasagna, which is known to have been cooked in ancient Rome, though not quite in the way it is today. Dried pasta seems to have been invented quite separately, in North Africa, as expedition food for desert caravans. It was probably brought to Sicily by the island's Muslim conquerors. In a codex published in 1154, a Moroccan geographer and botanist known as al-Idrisi described a thriving pasta manufacturing industry near Palermo, which exported its products to Muslim and Christian countries alike. Among them was a stringlike pasta then known by the name itrija. Dried pasta had the same advantages for seafarers as it did for camel drivers, so it is hardly surprising that it next appears in Genoa. It is mentioned in a document written in 1279, and production of vermicelli, which was to remain a Genoese specialty, had begun by the fourteenth century. The consumption of pasta continued nevertheless to be associated with Sicilians until in the eighteenth century the nickname of mangiamaccheroni gradually came to be bestowed on the Neapolitans. By 1785, Naples had 280 pasta shops.

"Amazing Pasta," by David Adam Kess

"Grated cheese was used for flavoring from an early stage, but sugar and cinnamon were also thought to make tasty accompaniments. Pasta was often prepared in quite different ways, boiled in broth or milk rather than plain water. In their study of the history of Italian cuisine, Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari quote an early cookery writer who was adamant that 'macaroni must be boiled for a period of two hours.'

"Nor was tomato sauce added until comparatively recently. The tomato, which almost certainly reached Italy through Spain, had acquired its name -- the pomo d'oro, or 'golden apple' -- at least as early as 1568. But it was treated by Italians -- as indeed by many other people, including Americans -- with immense suspicion, and entered Italian cuisine only very slowly. The first mention of tomatoes in a written recipe comes at the end of the seventeenth century. Over the next one hundred years, tomatoes seem to have won a firm place in Neapolitan cooking. But right up until the end of the nineteenth century, it was more usual in central Italy to use agresto, a concoction made of sour grapes, to give 'bite' to a dish."

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when our bodies autocorrect--10/7/26

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Beyond Inheritance by Roxanne Khamsi. In plants, mutations can occur within older parts of the plant that are passed on to that plant’s new, younger growth:

“The strange events in which anomalous branches take over are often seen in special plants, such as those with variegated leaves or dwarfed traits. These ornamental cultivars are the result of a genetic mutation to begin with, and a second, reverse mutation in part of these plants can cause that portion to revert back to normal growth.

“Part of the appeal of studying revertant mutations in trees is that unlike in the human body, where cells grow in squishy tissues or circulate in blood, plants have more static tissue. You can find new genetic changes in one part of the plant and easily follow them as they are passed on to the subsequent branches that sprout off from that point. For example, a group of Swiss scientists at the University of Lausanne examined the famous 234-year-old ‘Napoleon’ oak tree on their campus-so named because it was already growing there when the French general and his troops crossed the grounds-and were able to trace the mutations that were passed from older parts of the plant to its new, younger branches.

“Trees are a magnificent example of how a single organism can accumulate mutations over time. The sheer genetic diversity in a single long-lived tree might surprise you. A group in Canada did a genetic analysis of bark and needle samples from twenty Sitka spruce trees growing on Vancouver Island and estimated that a single tree could have up to one hundred thousand genetic differences between its base and the tip of its crown. Meanwhile, a recent study from another group suggested that, among trees of the same size, older ones have accumulated more mutations per meter than their younger but equally big counterparts. Because of this, the researchers concluded that long-lived trees might possess more genetic adaptations to their environment that boost the chances of their species' survival.

Sitka spruce in the Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park

“These findings support a theory that Tom Whitham wrote about in the early 1980s. He contributed to what became known as the ‘genetic mosaic theory’ of plant defense. The idea was basically that trees have the opportunity over many years to collect mutations that protect their newer parts against pests. Whitham gave the example of narrowleaf cottonwood trees, in which acquired genetic variations seemed to confer certain branches safety against invading aphids.

“Less than a decade after Whitham published his ideas about plant defense, Australian scientists discovered a striking case of a beneficial mutation rescuing a tree. The researchers were exploring a section of New South Wales that had experienced a beetle outbreak when they happened upon a strange-looking eucalyptus tree. The tree had been completely decimated by pests, which had eaten all the leaves–save for one section at the top. The immune leaves belonged to a lone branch that reached for the sky. It remained virtually untouched, whereas the other branches were infested with beetles. In the early 2010s, another group of scientists analyzed samples from the tree and found ten specific DNA changes that were present in cells of that special branch but not the rest of the tree. This gave hard evidence that genetic changes were responsible for the branch's resilience.

“Mutations can have miraculous effects. They can help an organism thrive beyond its initial genetic destiny. But they don't just rescue plants. If you look close enough, you can find examples of the phenomenon of revertant mutation happening in other species, including humans.”

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richmond saves the king--10/6/26

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Radical Duke by Danielle Allen. The pro-American sympathies and reform-minded efforts of the Earl of Shelburne and the Duke of Richmond were decisive in bringing the American Revolution to an end and addressing British government corruption:

“[William Petty Earl of] Shelburne’s premiership would be brief–nine months. If ever any political phenomenon could count as a riptide sucking someone back out to sea, it was Charles James Fox–whose exuberant, combative, fiery oratory won him an unmatched following in the House of Commons. Shelburne could not resist its force, and both the King and Richmond would also suffer losses from the conflict between those two Whigs–each brilliant, each egotistical.

“The turbulence would sink Shelburne's ministry; leave the nation adrift without a government for a second time, this time for an excruciating six weeks; drive the King once more to consider abdication; and push Richmond out of office, thwarted and demoralized.

Sir William Petty

“Yet, as ever, [Charles Lennox, Duke of] Richmond and the King stood out from the crowd. Both had their eye on Britain's future–not on personal gain. Deftly harmonizing after years of adversarial distance, together they spotted a means of charting a course: They both bet all on the rising talent of William Pitt the Younger, the King for the sake of his crown and Richmond for reform–seeing in the young leader's moderation but a steppingstone to a fuller program. With Richmond's help, the King would soon make Pitt prime minister at the age of twenty-four, the youngest prime minister in British history. In so doing, the two men laid the foundation block of modern Britain. To get there they had months of dangerous politics to navigate.

Once in office, in July 1782, Shelburne moved quickly to advance an initial reform agenda–rooting out corruption in government offices. He also immediately drafted preliminary articles of peace with the Americans–essentially a rough draft for the full treaty. Their ethos was pragmatism and conciliation to restore relationships and spur a commercial alliance. These preliminary articles were ratified in Britain on November 30, 1782.

“Richmond would have been largely pleased with the start of the administration. His contributions to the debates over the treaty also had the backing of the Americans. Thomas Paine, for one, wrote to Shelburne from Philadelphia, with a copy of his 1782 Letter Addressed to the Abbé de Raynal, which he intended-as he explained in his cover letter-as a defense of views expressed by Richmond. Shelburne passed the pamphlet on to Richmond, and it remains at Goodwood to this day.

“The anti-corruption work also advanced, thanks especially to the partnership with Richmond. Shelburne sought to stamp out a practice of bureaucrats' accepting fees for every little transaction they touched. He wanted to replace this essentially corrupt habit with regular salaries for civil servants. Richmond had already undertaken just such measures on his own authority at the ordnance. As Shelburne said in his memoirs, the Duke of Richmond was the ‘one man in Administration or Opposition [who] was in earnest in the support of any reform."

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copley’s boston childhood --10/2/26

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from A Revolution in Color by Jane Kamensky. The Boston childhood of portrait artist John Singleton Copley, who painted portraits of the well-to-do in New England, then moved to London just before the American Revolution to ply his trade there. Boston was then the uneasy amalgam of pious Calvinism and the cosmopolitan merchant trading business by which it flourished:

"After becoming well-established as a portrait painter of the wealthy in colonial New England, he moved to London in 1774, never returning to America. In London, he met considerable success as a portraitist for the next two decades, and also painted a number of large history paintings, which were innovative in their readiness to depict modern subjects and modern dress. His later years were less successful, and he died heavily in debt. He was father of John Copley, 1st Baron Lyndhurst and half-brother of Henry Pelham, the American painter, engraver, and cartographer.

“John Singleton Copley grew up facing the sea, heaving heart of Britain's growing blue-water empire. He lived with his mother in three rooms of a small wooden house along Boston's Long Wharf, an arm of land that jutted into the harbor, as if reaching for London thousands of miles across the ocean. The clapboard buildings that lined one side of the wharf were attached, side to side. The windows on the north faced the older and denser part of the town, where the streets had names like Ship and Fleet and Fish. Boats moored on the south side of the wharf, just a few feet from the Copleys' front door. Facing that way from the second-floor window, the boy would have seen masts and sails, shipyards and ropewalks. He fell asleep to the twang of halyards and woke to the shouts of sailors and hawkers, and strumpets trudging home from the taverns to sleep.

Self-portrait, c. 1769

“Every now and again, on the king's birthday, or on a feast day declared in honor of a military victory, Jack (as he was known) would have heard celebratory blasts from Castle William, where a hundred mounted cannon guarded the king’s island fortress, the empire’s might on display even there, at the mouth of a harbor at the edge of the British imagination. Jack and his mother lived in a world where war was the rule, peace the exception. On the day he was born, 3 July 1738, the Boston Gazette reprinted an article from the Jamaica Courant, which excerpted a letter from Paris, which offered a clutch of prognostications. For 1738: ‘War will be declar’d throughout the whole World.’ The prophecy was not fulfilled that year, but it would be, several times, during the boy’s long life.

“Like many trading centers, Jack Copley's Boston was a shockingly cosmopolitan place: the ‘Metropolis of New England ... the largest, most populous and flourishing Town in the British Dominions in America,’ as a map printed there in 1743 put it. The plan's cartouche featured Neptune, god of the sea, on one side, and Mercury, god of commerce, on the other. The king's colors dotted the harbor, fluttering from a forest of masts made of tall white New England pine, on hundreds of ships every year. Jack was born in summer, the best season for sailing as it was for painting. Dockworkers busied themselves unloading cargoes from Antigua and Surinam and Honduras, from Lisbon and the Canary Islands, from Rhode Island and Connecticut, and filling the hulls of ships bound for London and Jamaica and Newfoundland. Merchants advertised Carolina indigo and German steel and Madeira wine and Irish linen. There was also, on the last page of the Gazette on the day of Jack's birth, as on most days, an anonymous notice offering for sale a human being: a ‘healthy strong Negro Boy,’ aged about fifteen. That boy or his parents or their parents likely came from West Central Africa, via the Caribbean, where Boston merchants traded fish and lumber for sugar and cotton and sometimes slaves. The Copleys, too, set themselves up as traders in faraway goods. From a storefront below their little flat, Jack's mother sold ‘the best Virginia Tobacco, Cut, Pigtail, and spun, of all Sorts, by Wholesale or Retail, at the cheapest Rates.’

“The Boston of Jack's boyhood was also, in roughly equal measure, a parochial place, wary of strangers and aggressively pious, even by the standards of its day. A hundred years before his birth, the founders of the Massachusetts Bay colony had proclaimed, with a confidence all the more poignant for its absurdity, that they would create, in this new England, a shining city on a hill for all Christendom to emulate. A century later, Boston was home to some seventeen thousand souls gathered in sixteen churches, most of them of a stringent Calvinist stripe. From sundown on Saturdays until dawn on Mondays, ferries stopped and shops closed tight. Even a stroll across the Common or along the waterfront was forbidden on the Lord's Day. On Sundays and fast days, the boy and his mother woke to a symphony of bells. The Gazette's little group of prophecies forecast that in 1748, the year Jack turned ten, ‘Jesus Christ will come to Judge the World.”

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dead zones in the ocean -- 10/1/26

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 03:20:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen. Dead zones in the ocean:

"Every summer in the Gulf of Mexico, an area of the ocean up to the size of New Jersey loses its oxygen and almost everything in it dies. For its part, New Jersey suffers its own seasonal anoxia, as does Lake Erie, which saw the arrival of a toxic algae bloom so large in 2014 that it shut down the drinking supply for the city of Toledo. In 2016 the coast of Florida was battered by waves of thick, sea-life-smothering algal muck; boat owners described it as having the consistency of guacamole. The same kinds of problems afflict the greatly impoverished Chesapeake Bay, which up until relatively recently was a biological paradise. The Chesapeake once boasted oyster reefs so extensive as to represent a navigational hazard to boats, as well as a menagerie of sea life that included 'dolphins, manatees, river otters, sea turtles, alligators, giant sturgeon, sharks and rays.' That roster might surprise modern pleasure boaters on the murky bay, where today one is about as likely to find a hippopotamus as a manatee. Farther afield, oxygen-poor waters beset the Baltic and East China Seas. This deadly phenomenon -- runaway algae growth robbing the seas of oxygen -- is called eutrophication. ...

Red circles show the location and size of many dead zones. Black dots show dead zones of unknown size.

"Eutrophication is caused by too much of a good thing -- an overdose of plant food. Today the Gulf of Mexico's problem starts in the heartland. When farmers in the endless rectangular patchwork of the Midwest and the Great Plains spread fertilizer rich in nitrogen and phosphorus on their crops, what isn't taken up by the plants is eventually washed into the Mississippi River. When the Mississippi empties into the ocean south of Louisiana, that accumulated Miracle-Gro spurs explosive algae growth in the open ocean. When the algae blooms die en masse, they sink and decompose, a process that uses up most of the oxygen in the water column.

"Without oxygen, everything else suffocates, and the result is massive fish kills that make themselves known to Gulf Coast beachgoers in yearly biblical tides of lifeless stingrays, flounder, shrimp, eels, and fish. Underwater, dead crabs, clams, and burrowing worms litter the seabed like the casualties of an invertebrate Battle of the Somme. ... These algae blooms and dead zones around the world are spreading, driven by development and the growth of industrial agriculture."

author: Peter Brannen title: The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions publisher: HarperCollins date: Copyright 2017 by Peter Brannen page(s): 76-78

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cocaine cough drops and other cures--9/30/26

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Empire of Ink by Alex Wright. Revenue from the advertising of quack patent medicines fueled an explosion of growth in US newspapers in the late 1800s:

“The Joslyn Castle at 3902 Davenport Street in Omaha, Nebraska, stands as one of the country's great architectural curiosities. With its medieval-looking turrets and battlements springing up over the sprawling thirty-two-room mansion, the house looks nothing remotely like anything else in Omaha–or much of anywhere west of the Mississippi, for that matter (with the possible exception of the Hearst Castle–with which it shares a certain media-baron pedigree). The five-acre grounds originally featured riding stables, sprawling vegetable gardens, a year-round greenhouse for growing the poinsettias that decorated the halls–and, improbably, a small herd of cattle. Inside, the residence featured stained glass windows, grand sweeping staircases, chandeliers and wall sconces placed with twenty-four-carat gold, a bowling alley, and marble drinking fountains designed especially for the household dogs.

“The owner, George P. Joslyn, struck a similarly larger-than-life figure, with his gold-capped teeth, finely tailored clothes, and outsized personality. He lived, as historian Eugene C. Harter puts it, ‘like a corn-pone Arab sheik.’ Along with his wife Sarah–an aspiring grande dame and ardent temperance advocate who nonetheless loved to throw lavish parties–he frequently hosted visiting dignitaries, local grandees, and favored corporate customers for teas, dinners, and overnight sojourns. Guests would gather around the house's custom-fitted Aeolian pipe organ for celebrations in the winter or witness the firing of the couple's brass cannon on the Fourth ofJuly. To divert attention from his staggering wealth,Joslyn often appeared in public wearing a twenty-five-cent chewing tobacco stickpina–a clumsy attempt to retain a veneer of his humble origins even as his fortune ballooned.

“The man was also, by all accounts, utterly ruthless.

“Joslyn's career offers a revealing case study in how the rise of advertising–especially in the form of patent medicines–transformed the newspaper business from a politically driven civic enterprise into an engine of consumer capitalism. This trend would only accelerate as the industry continued to expand in the closing decades of the century.

“The Joslyn family owed its remarkable prosperity to its stewardship of the Western Newspaper Union. In 1878, a young Joslyn had taken a job as a shipping clerk for eighteen dollars a week at his uncle's printing company in Des Moines, Iowa. That company, known at the time as the Iowa Printing Company, would eventually change its name to the Western Newspaper Union (WNU) and become a competitor to Kellogg's American Newspaper Union. Joslyn, eager to prove himself, soon moved up in the company pecking order to become a salesman, then general manager, and finally president.

Clark Stanley's Snake Oil

“A master negotiator and dealmaker, Joslyn recognized the power of newspaper advertising early on–and foresaw correctly that it would fundamentally reshape the American economy. Unlike previous readyprint outfits (like Kellogg's ANU) that relied on a combination of publisher subscriptions and advertising revenue, Joslyn pushed his company to pivot to an entirely ad-supported model, typically charging newspapers nothing whatsoever for the company's preprinted pages. The company sold national advertising (overwhelmingly patent medicine ads) across a vast network of small weeklies, then used those receipts to underwrite its preprinted ‘patent-inside’ pages. As a result, WNU could send preprinted pages to newspapers for little or nothing, while keeping the ad revenue itself Although editors had the option to buy readyprint with or without ads, about 97 percent of them chose the cheaper ad-supported version. It was, in effect, an early version of the same business model that has powered countless internet empires: creating a product that's free to consumers, funded entirely by advertisers who want to target their wares at a group of engaged readers. By 1900, the WNU was the largest news syndicate in the country, with more than fourteen thousand subscribers. By this time Joslyn was sitting atop a gusher of cash flow-the vast majority of it coming from a single category of advertising: patent medicines.

“Most of these remedies were not actually patented, nor for the most part were they particularly medicinal. But they nonetheless proved wildly popular in the late nineteenth century, nowhere more so than in the pages of the nation's small-town newspapers. They bore names like Fink's Magic Oil, Munyon's Paw Paw Pills, Dr. Samuel Collins' Great Indian Pain-Killing Remedy, Dr. Hand's Pleasant Physic, and the aptly named Panacea Ointment. The ranks of advertisers also included purveyors of that iconic patent medicine: snake oil, with numerous ads hawking the benefits of rattlesnake oil remedies for ailments as diverse as appendicitis, croup, varicose veins, and everyday aches and pains.

“Most–though not all–of these products were bunk. Some were nothing more than thinly veiled intoxicants, often involving heavy doses of alcohol (up to 40 percent in some cases) or other now-controlled substances. A French tonic wine (made popular by Pope Leo XIII) contained six milligrams of cocaine per fluid ounce (‘Fortifies and Refreshes Body and Brain!’). Dr. Bell's Anti-Pain, a remedy featuring a mix of alcohol and chloroform, promised to put customers at ease when confronted with a wide range of ailments including colic, flux, diarrhea, rheumatism, and toothaches. Opium tinctures were suggested for children's teething or ‘female complaints,’ while marijuana cures were marketed as a remedy for headaches, pain, and neuralgia. The most successful patent medicine of all, Coca-Cola, was originally marketed not as a refreshment but as a curative, containing traces of cocaine until 1903 (when it was replaced by caffeine).

“No one benefited more from the trade than Joslyn. The business was so lucrative that he eventually decided to try his hand at patent medicine himself, founding a separate company that marketed a custom-made potion named Big G (for ‘George’) that reputedly cured syphilis, among other things. Rumor has it that Joslyn won the formula in a poker game (although this tale remains open to some dispute). By all accounts many customers found that it worked as advertised and it proved enormously popular–and also, unfortunately, highly poisonous. Eventually the federal government intervened to outlaw its sale. But by that time Joslyn had already made a mint on the scuff, padding his already considerable fortune.

“While many patent medicines promised one-off cures for specific ailments, others attracted loyal repeat customers. Among the most popular was Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, an herbal ‘women's tonic’ with a wide range of uses including menstrual cramps and menopausal symptoms, as well as a host of other female complaints–even promising to dissolve and expel uterine tumors. Originally a homemade remedy concocted by the eponymous Mrs. Pinkham–a former schoolteacher from Lynn, Massachusetts–it contained a mix of unicorn root, life root, black cohosh, pleurisy root, and fenugreek seed in a solution of alcohol. The company ran advertisements in newspapers nationwide, always accompanied by a regal-looking portrait of Pinkham. The formula purported to relieve a wide range of ailments. One advertisement claimed chat it ‘revives the drooping spirits, invigorates and harmonizes the organic functions; gives elasticity and firmness to the step, restores the natural lustre of the eye, and plants on the pale cheek the beauty of fresh rose of life's spring and early summertime.’ The remedy relied on a proprietary blend of herbs and minerals, but one ingredient in particular may have contributed heavily to customer loyalty: It consisted of about 20 percent alcohol.”

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hitler’s predecessor--9/29/26

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 02:12:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Churchill's Citadel by Katherine Carter. In the 1930s, Winston Churchill kept close tabs on Adolf Hitler by connecting with his predeccesor as Chancellor, Heinrich Brüning:

“For insights and analysis of the political goings-on in Germany in the 1930s, there were few better-informed individuals who made the journey to Chartwell than Heinrich Brüning. As a leading politician during Germany's post-war Weimar Republic, and Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932, he witnessed Hitler's political ascent from an uncomfortable front-row seat. By 1937 he had long since fled his country, out of fear for his life after the Nazis came to power. He travelled to Churchill's country home in August 1937, accompanied by Gottfried Treviranus, his former Transport Minister and close personal friend. Treviranus was lucky to be alive, having escaped an attempt on his life by the Nazis in June 1934. The two men visited Churchill, convinced that Hitler's regime could be overthrown. Their insights into potential opposition to Nazism within Germany planted a seed in Churchill's mind that there could be a bloodless way of averting yet another global war, though the two men's testimonials brought into sharp relief the extraordinary risks faced by anyone who opposed Adolf Hitler.

“Churchill's keen interest in post-war politics in Germany had long pre-dated the rise of Hitler. Prince Bismarck, grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II, remembered meeting Churchill in London in October 1930 where the pair discussed the latest political developments. Churchill had apparently been following recent newspaper reports and was ‘extremely well informed’ and ‘pleased about the parliamentary victory of the Brüning government.’ This high opinion appeared to have diminished, however, when the Chancellor visited London in 1931. He met many of the British political establishment, but Churchill's presence was notably lacking. Bruning supposedly thought that this snub was because Churchill held him responsible for the German rearmament that began during his time as Chancellor. Brüning's own position became increasingly precarious against a backdrop of rising unemployment and electoral success for the Nazi Party. He made one last attempt at redeeming himself in the eyes of the German electorate at the disarmament negotiations of April 1932, but, when he returned to Berlin empty-handed, his fall swiftly began. On. 30 May, in what has since been described as 'a pathetic interview’, President Hindenburg told him to resign.

Brüning c. 1930

“Following the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor in 1933 Bruning became increasingly nervous about the constant surveillance he was subject to, and began to change his lodgings every two or three days. Fortunately, there were those who regarded him as one of Germany's greatest statesmen and were willing to provide refuge for him. The following spring, one acquaintance observed that he had begun to resemble 'a hunted animal, constantly startled and already exhausted, just waiting for the final bullet'. In May 1934 Bruning burned what was left of his personal papers and fled Germany, initially crossing the border into Holland. Within a month, on 12 June, he was in London, lunching with British political figures, including Archie Sinclair and Bob Boothby. His timing meant that he escaped one of the most terrifying ordeals faced by Hitler's opponents, the Night of the Long Knives, and one of his closest associates would see first-hand the terror this entailed.”

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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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