Delanceyplace

finding exoplanets -- 10/29/26

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 02:07:00 -0400

Today's encore selection-- from Alien Earths by Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger. Discovering planets in other parts of the galaxy is hard:

“The discovery of new worlds outside our solar system started with a mystery: a tiny wobble. In 1995 two Swiss astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, whom we met earlier, detected a weird signal from the star 51 Pegasi. The star, a near twin to our own Sun, about fifty light-years away from Earth, unexpectedly wobbled back and forth on its stellar journey. And stars don't wobble for no reason.

“Majestic Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system, contains the vast majority of the material left over from our Sun's creation and provided the first clues as to what afflicted 51 Pegasi. Jupiter makes our Sun wobble just a tiny bit. Jupiter is a humongous ball of swirling gas around a rocky core a dozen Earths big. This colossal gas giant, the fifth planet from the Sun, out beyond Mars, is a sight to behold: stunning patterns of storms cover the whole planet. Monstrous weather systems stir and twist the gases and paint the planet in patterns that look like van Gogh's The Starry Night.

“If Jupiter were an empty box, all the other planets could fit into it and there'd still be room to spare. Jupiter dwarfs the Earth; you would need to put seventy Earths, one next to the other, to make a belt for Jupiter's middle (a fresh idea for a Halloween costume!). Powerful wind speeds exceeding 400 miles ( ~ 600 km) per hour create some of the largest storms in the solar system. One of them, Jupiter's Great Red Spot, has been observed for over a century—and is large enough to easily engulf Earth. Voyager 1—the spacecraft carrying the Golden Record out of the solar system-sent back the first detailed images of this gigantic storm in 1979.

“But compared to the Sun, Jupiter is a lightweight. If Jupiter were a tablespoon of water, the Sun would be a four-gallon jug. If you had a cosmic set of scales, you would need about a thousand tablespoons of water on one side (a pile of Jupiters) to balance the Sun on the other side. In this comparison, Earth would be the size of a waterdrop. To balance the Sun on these cosmic scales, you'd need to place about three hundred thousand waterdrops (a humongous amount of Earths) on the other side. All the planets in our solar system together would make the cosmic scale tilt only a minuscule bit. The Sun is just so massive. The disk surrounding a nascent star contains only a tiny part of the material that creates the star at its center, and that disk forms all of its planets.

“It would take about a hundred Earths to span the diameter of the Sun. To imagine this, line up one hundred peppercorns on the floor. (Pro tip: it is extremely helpful if the peppercorns are not the same color as the floor. In my first trial, I used black peppercorns on a dark floor, which, in hindsight, was not the smartest choice.) The one-hundred-peppercorn line shows the vast size of the Sun compared to our Pale Blue Dot. You would need more than one million Earths to fill the inside of the Sun ( volume is proportional to radius cubed).

Sunset studies on Titan by Cassini help understand exoplanet atmospheres (artist's concept).

“So finding an exoplanet in the vast cosmos is extremely hard. If you wanted to find a planet circling another star, what kind would be the easiest to locate? Astronomers looked around our solar system and chose as their prototype the biggest, most massive planet to look for somewhere else: Jupiter.

“The Sun's gravity loses some of its pull at the colossal giant planet's distance, so Jupiter does not need to travel as fast as the Earth to counter its gravitational pull. The balance between gravity and speed determines how long it takes for a planet to complete a circle around its star. While Earth does it in one year, Jupiter takes a leisurely eleven Earth years to circle the Sun. Knowing they would have a slightly easier time finding massive planets like Jupiter than finding tiny Earths, astronomers settled in for a decade-long search.

Like the other giant planets in our solar system, Jupiter consists mostly of gas and ice because it formed far enough away from the hot Sun that ice and gas did not evaporate, leaving massive amounts of planet-building material as we have seen. It's cold beyond the ice line. Jupiter receives only one photon for every twenty-five photons Earth gets.

“Planets are different than stars in more ways than just their size. They do not have nuclear-fusion reactors in their cores, so they do not produce energy and they do not shine. Like our Moon, they just reflect the starlight that hits them. That makes planets tiny, dim objects, incredibly hard to spot beside a huge, illuminating star. Seen from space, the Sun is more than one billion times brighter than Earth to our eyes. Think of it this way: one billion seconds is about thirty-one and a half years. If we compare the numbers not in brightness but in time, you would have to wait more than thirty-one and a half years of starlight to get one second of light from the planet. The light of an Earth is drowned out by the light of its host star.

“But planet hunters have clever ways of finding their quarry. When you look up at night, you can see thousands of stars moving across the sky. In most cases, what appears to be the motion of the stars is actually the result of the Earth rotating around its axis and circling the Sun. But sometimes, there is an additional, unexpected motion, an indication that we’ve spotted something truly spectacular. Because even lightweight planets tug—just a little—on their heavyweight hosts. Both the star and its planet counter the other's gravitational pull by adding a little extra to their movements. Because the star is so much more massive, it wobbles only slightly if a planetary companion tugs on it. But that tiny wobble makes all the difference. It led astronomers to discover the first new worlds on our cosmic shore.”

author: Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger title: Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos publisher: St. Martin's Press date: page(s): 159-163

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evolution's tomfoolery--10/28/26

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection--from On The Future of Species by Adrian Woolfson. The human body contains vestiges of an irrelevant evolutionary past carried forward into the present:

“Unlike the George Washington Bridge, which was anchored on solid rock, the Tappan Zee [Bridge was poorly located at a wide part of the river and] required an elaborate underwater flotation system. The cost of building this, along with the bridge's excessive dimensions, strained an already inadequate budget. A materials shortage precipitated by the onset of the Korean War served only to compound the problem, leading to shoddy construction. Completed in 1955, the bridge rapidly fell into disrepair and was demolished in 2017. This provided the perfect opportunity to correct an irrelevant, historically defined feature by relocating the bridge to a narrower part of the crossing. But by then, an extensive infrastructure had grown around its original location, making relocation impractical. The replacement bridge was, as a result, constructed alongside the position of the original, thereby perpetuating a historically contingent suboptimal design.

“Biological systems, including the human body, contain their own Tappan Zees – vestiges of an irrelevant past carried forward into the present. These evolutionary relics continue to constrain our biology. The causes of many such awkward anomalies originated long before the evolution of our species, yet they reverberate across biological time, undermining our biology. One such 'Tappan Zee' is the human spine.

“While well suited to the lifestyle of our quadrupedal, tree-dwelling ape ancestors, the morphology of the human spine is poorly adapted for walking on two legs. Evolution has, nevertheless, succeeded in awkwardly reconfiguring the original design to accommodate its new bipedal function. But this is akin to trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. To support an upright posture, the angle between the femur and the hip gradually widened, the pelvic structures readjusted, and the spine acquired its characteristic inward curve. This remarkable and unlikely transformation was like turning a table into a chair. That it succeeded at all is a testament to the extraordinary malleability of biology systems and the generative power of Darwinian evolution.

“The resultant remodelled anatomy, however, is far from what one would design by choice, especially from a biomechanical standpoint. The human spine is, in fact, a design disaster. Were it possible to redesign it from scratch, it would not be modelled on the design of a creature that walked on four legs. Bruce Latimer, an anatomist at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio, likened the unwieldy rotation of a spine by the ninety degrees necessary to make it vertical for bipedal walking to 'stacking 26 cups and saucers on top of each other', and then 'balancing a head on top'. The vertebrae are the cups; the discs between them, the saucers. In this new configuration, the weight of the head places constant, excessive pressure on these fragile structures.

The human spinal column and its regions

“But this 'jerry-rigged' redesign of the spine had to operate within very tight parameters. Chief among these was the need to accommodate the pelvic birth canal. Humans give birth to babies with much larger bodies and brains than primate babies, necessitating a large pelvis. Unfortunately, these two features – bipedal locomotion and childbirth – have conflicting design needs. While delivering a baby requires a wide pelvis, walking upright favours a narrow one. The evolutionary compromise was an inward-curving spine with its characteristic 'S' shape, accommodating both functions, albeit imperfectly. This compromise has left us prone to back pain, vertebral fractures and obstetric complications.

“Our feet, too, are poorly designed, representing another anatomical compromise. Anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva at Boston University has used the human foot as an example of how evolution 'works with duct tape and paper clips' to patch solutions together quickly. Had you asked an engineer to design a human foot, they would have been unlikely to make it with so many moving parts. Its exuberant deployment of bones is especially notable when one realises that the twenty-six bones in the foot account for a quarter of all the bones in the human body.

“While this configuration is well suited for tree-dwelling apes that need to grasp branches, it is both unnecessary and cumbersome for a bipedal species. Though evolution has attempted to bolster its rigidity, the human foot remains susceptible to inward and outward twisting, and its arches prone to collapse. These vulnerabilities lead to a host of ailments and afflictions including tendonitis, plantar fasciitis and broken ankles. Had we been consulted, we might have fashioned our feet more like those of ostriches, whose ankle and lower-leg bones are fused into a single, powerful structure optimised for walking and running.

“One of the most striking biological examples of an anatomical 'Tappan Zee' is the eccentric distribution of the left recurrent laryngeal nerve. The anatomy of this nerve, which facilitates sound production in the larynx, has a highly irrational feature. While the right recurrent laryngeal nerve branches off from the vagus nerve as it exits the brain at the base of the skull and proceeds directly to the larynx, the left eschews this direct course, embarking instead on a bizarre detour. It passes down in front of the aorta, loops underneath and behind it, performing a U-turn before ascending back up to the larynx, ending up essentially where it started. It is hard to imagine any advantage to this circuitous path, and a rational engineer would never have designed it that way.

“The left recurrent laryngeal nerve's eccentric route is, however, more than just a curiosity. It comes with jeopardy. Compression, ischaemia or injury to the left recurrent laryngeal nerve is more common than on the right, and may result in left-sided vocal cord paralysis. While relatively rare in humans, in long-necked species like horses, this anatomical quirk can cause significant issues. Horses, for example, are prone to develop a condition called equine recurrent laryngeal neuropathy. This is predominantly left-sided, and may cause respiratory problems. It is especially pronounced in racehorses, their size and elongated necks making them particularly susceptible. In the long-necked African giraffe, the nerve's convoluted route can extend to a staggering fifteen feet. Had the nerve been routed directly to the larynx, a length of one foot would have sufficed. The left recurrent laryngeal nerve of the gargantuan, long-necked, sauropod dinosaur Supersaurus – living between 230 and 66 million years ago, and with a neck six times the length of a giraffe's – would have been subject to a detour of up to ninety-two feet. It provides a striking example of evolution's tomfoolery.”

author: Adrian Woolfson title: On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence publisher: The MIT Press date: Copyright 2026 page(s): 101-103

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ireland against england--10/27/26

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from The Eighteenth Century by John O. Voll. Ireland’s strange historical relationship with England as its oldest colony made it ripe for neglect and mistreatment:

“'Ireland is too great to be unconnected with us and too near to be dependent on a foreign state and too little to be independent': [Britisher] C. T. Grenville's aphorism of 1784 encapsulated the inherent difficulties in the Anglo-Irish relationship. Ireland's position within the eighteenth-century Empire was even more problematic. The country was, admittedly, 'England's oldest colony', but she had been held rather than wholly governed since the twelfth century. Moreover, since 15421 Ireland had also constituted a kingdom in her own right. This regal status, along with the (albeit fitful) existence of a Parliament of undeniable medieval origins consisting of a House of Commons and House of Lords, seemed to mark Ireland off decisively from every colony subsequently acquired by England, which could only boast of assorted Assemblies, Councils, and courts. Furthermore, as an island lying closely off a larger island, itself located just off continental Europe, Ireland's geographical position meant that the eighteenth-century colonial stereotypes (extreme temperatures, exotic produce, curious animals, slavery, distance from the mother country) were conspicuously lacking there. In fact, the country grew nothing that could not be had at allegedly better quality in England. True, there was fertile land in abundance: and this was an undoubted attraction. But even if Ireland had been barren rock, her proximity to both continental Europe and to England meant that she constituted in English eyes an all-too-convenient base for foreign enemies and a likely haven for domestic rebels and malcontents. Ireland was simply 'too near', as Grenville remarked, to be left alone by England or other European powers: but proximity and colonial status seemed at odds with one another. Was there a place for a colony on the doorstep of the mother country?' And if Ireland was not a colony, could two kingdoms, adjacent to one another, and under the one King, coexist in the one Empire?

"The Camp on Vinegar Hill" - an illustration by George Cruikshank to accompany William Hamilton Maxwell's 1845 work History of the Irish rebellion in 1798

“There was a further complication. Unlike the populations of other colonies in the Atlantic world, the population of Ireland by the late-seventeenth century resolutely resisted simple categorization into colonized and colonizer. Religion, not national origins or even date of arrival, was to be the great divide: but this is not to say that Protestant-Catholic hostility is the key to understanding Irish history in this period. In the early eighteenth century Protestant Ireland was riven by rivalry between the members of the Presbyterian church and the adherents of the Established Church. The latter, called by historians the Anglo-Irish, were not at all disposed to share the fruits of the victories at the Boyne (1690) and Aughrim (1691) over the Catholic Irish with the largely Scottish, anti-episcopal, and socially inferior Dissenters. Accordingly, while the Anglican governing elite in the 1690s brought in Penal Laws against Catholics, it also legislated against Presbyterians. It did so because the Catholic threat had been seen off, because the Presbyterians seemed to be a new rival for power, and because the Anglo-Irish were confident of English goodwill and support. At an early date, however, it was made dear to the Anglo-Irish that English ministers were by no means disposed to view them as partners in the 'Glorious Revolution': certainly, there was no question of automatic access for Irish goods into the trade network of the British Empire. In this respect at least, Ireland, though at the centre of the Empire, was still irredeemably peripheral.

“By the late seventeenth century, then, Ireland, ‘this famous island set in a Virginian sea,’ resembled not so much a model colony, a tetra Florida near home, drawn up in conformity with an official blueprint, but rather an unruly palimpsest, on which, though much rewritten and scored out, could be discerned in an untidy jumble 'kingdom', 'colony', 'dependency', and, faintly, 'nation'. The ambiguities within such designations, and the attempt to resolve the contradictions between them, are fundamental to any assessment of Ireland's developing position within the British Empire during the eighteenth century.”

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irving fisher’s big idea--10/26/26

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from The Almighty Dollar by Brendan Greeley. The use of scrip dollars in the Great Depression:

“In October 1932, Irving Fisher spent two days at Iowa State University. Fisher liked to talk. He met with students, gave a speech about the economics of Prohibition, then gave another speech about the Depression, this one broadcast to most of central Iowa on the university's AM radio station. That year bank failures had again drained dollars out of the economy. Prices and wages had begun to drop, which meant that people were earning less money while their debts remained the same. This was particularly a problem in Iowa, a state of indebted farmers whose banks had been hit hard.

“Herbert Hoover, the president of the United States, was frantically trying to keep banks open and dollars stable, but the problem was so broad that solutions became a parlor game in America. Everyone either had an idea or was ready to listen to one. After Fisher's broadcast in Iowa, the professor in charge of the station sent Fisher a letter, forwarding cards from all over the state, asking for more details–from a farmer, from two hardware store owners, from an assistant cashier at a bank who was grateful the station didn't play any jazz. They had all asked about one of Fisher's solutions for the bank problem: scrip dollars.

"Scrip’ is a broad term, but it usually refers to locally produced money, used when nothing else is available–like the colonial bills of credit, or the municipal notes in New Orleans. In his broadcast, Fisher had mentioned Hawarden, Iowa, a small city on the Big Sioux River on the border with South Dakota. Charles Zylstra, a Dutch immigrant with some experience in community banking, had talked the town into an experiment: Storekeepers in Hawarden were already accepting scrip dollars, guaranteed by the city itself. Once again~ bank dollars had failed so spectacularly in 1932 that there was panicked interest all over Iowa and all over the country about ways to replace the dollars that were locked behind bank doors. As late as the 1930s, Americans were still relying on a colonial idea to save their local dollars.

Front of Hawarden stamp scrip certificate.

“It wasn't paper bank notes that had failed that year, though. It was bank deposits. Since the panic of 1837, the United States had steadily found ways to make paper dollar notes more secure, ultimately taking the privilege of note printing away from commercial banks and handing it to twelve new regional public banks–the Federal Reserve. But bankers are creative. By the end of the nineteenth century, they had again changed how dollars worked in America, a change so thorough it's easy now to take it for granted. Banks in America stopped producing new dollars as printed notes, and started producing them as deposits, written down on a ledger. Dollar notes became dollar deposits.

“The bank deposits were just as fragile as the bank notes had been. At the start of the Great Depression in 1932 and 1933, Americans ran scared to their banks, ready to swap deposits on a bank ledger for the secure, physical certainty of paper notes from the Federal Reserve banks. But a lot of Americans found their bank doors closed, their deposits frozen. The decisions that led to all those closed doors rested in part on a new set of ideas about money, tested in Britain and adopted in America: the gold standard. Over the nineteenth century, banks in America had started holding more gold than silver as a reserve, as new gold from California flooded into the rest of the country. The U.S. Department of the Treasury turned every remaining bank note dollar into sound money, building an intricate system that would swap any paper dollar for a fixed amount of gold. As we saw in the last chapter, sound money is a good idea in theory, and it works well for some people. But perfectly sound money forced a long deflation in America at the end of the nineteenth century, and during frequent panics it forced bankers to liquidate everything they could, then close their doors, leaving the fate of their remaining deposits uncertain. That is what had happened, again, in the fall of 1932.

“The city of Hawarden became famous for its scrip dollars. Charles Zylstra had not invented the idea. But in Hawarden, for the first time that Irving Fisher knew of, actual merchants were accepting real paper scrip. After his speech at Iowa State that October, Fisher took the train west to Hawarden to see for himself. He stayed only a couple of hours. Zylstra was out of town, but the president of the city's Chamber of Commerce arranged some conversations at city hall. Then Fisher did what he always did: He made sure there was a quote for the paper.

"The stamped money or scrip used by the city of Hawarden, Iowa is the most interesting experiment I know for combatting the depression,’ Fisher told the Hawarden Independent. A correspondent for the Associated Press picked up the remarks and filed them for national distribution; anything Dr. Irving Fisher of Yale said was news. On November 28, Fisher's column for papers all over the country declared Hawarden's experiment a success. Reporters, politicians, and the curious all over America began to think of Fisher, Hawarden, and scrip dollars as inextricable parts of the same idea. Delegations from cities all over the Midwest arrived to see how the scrip worked. By December, Hawarden could watch itself on a Pathé newsreel about scrip at the Tivoli Theatre on Central Avenue. Irving Fisher had put a railroad town in northwestern Iowa at the center of the last widespread experiment in making dollars outside America's banks, an experiment still less than a hundred years old today.

“It's easy to forget about what dollars are when they work, but in 1932 dollars held as bank deposits weren't working. One outcome of the New Deal in the early l 930s was to finally force banks to start paying to insure their deposits. The insurance made bank dollars more reliable, and over the rest of the twentieth century dollar deposits in an American bank became the most prized money anyone in the world could hold. But in the fall of 1932, it was once again up to individual Americans to find ways to produce their own money. All those Iowans who wrote to Irving Fisher after his radio broadcast weren't just reaching out to a celebrity. Their bank dollars were failing, and they needed a replacement.”

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when korea banned rock ‘n’ roll--10/23/26

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from The Birth of Korean Cool by Euny Hong. During the 1970s, rock music was banned in Korea, and police would stop women on the streets and take a ruler to measure if their skirts were long enough:

“Say what you will about the quality of K-Pop music, but Lee Moon-won, Korea's most influential pop culture critic, made a shockingly frank pronouncement in describing K-pop: ‘Koreans are not good at creativity.’

“If he's right, then President Park Geun-hye's promise of turning Korea into a ‘creative economy’ is in trouble.

“Sitting across from him, my eyes widened and I asked him to elaborate. ‘Koreans are better at packaging and marketing. Look at Samsung, for example. With K-pop, the songwriters are not Korean. They're European. The people who do the editing studied in the United States; they're multinational. The dance choreographers are from everywhere. It’s really a factory.’

“Many of the songwriters are European–Swedes especially. ‘Korean pop is based on Europop,’ Lee explained. Which totally explains why K-pop songs sound like Eurovision Song Contest entries. He elaborated, ‘The European sound influence is electronic and techno music. There's a heavy electronic base.’

“K-pop boy bands TVXQl and Big Bang are examples of Europop-influenced acts; other K-pop bands fall into other mainstream genres like R & B (Rain or MBLAQ) or bubble gum pop (Girls' Generation).

24K performing choreography in a practice studio

“There's a very good reason for the lack of an original, homegrown Korean sound: the Korean pop scene got a very late start because of censorship that stifled musical talent and creativity. For a critical period during the 1970s, rock music was banned in Korea.

“As a consequence of this ban, the Korean pop sound did not absorb any influence from the whole 1970s sound progression, including classic rock, punk, glam rock, and early heavy metal. No Led Zeppelin, no Sex Pistols, no David Bowie.

“During his eighteen-year rule from 1962 to 1979 (ending with his assassination), President Park Chung-hee (father of current South Korean President Park Geun-hye) instituted on-again, off-again martial law. Park was the hero behind Korea's rags-to-riches ascent (and–full disclosure–my grandfather's employer). It's now considered politically incorrect to refer to Park as a dictator, but I am failing to find another word to describe someone who amends voting laws to all but ensure his presidency for life.

“Park's iron-fisted policies were partly in response to North Korea, which was putting most of its resources into building its military; this made South Korea extremely nervous. In 1972, Park responded to the threat of invasion as any sensible ruler would: by banning miniskirts, long hair on men, and rock 'n' roll. That pretty much ruled out mods, rockers, and hippies–imminent threats to national security.

“Police would stop women on the streets, take a ruler to their skirts, and force them to go home and change if the gap between the hemline and the knee exceeded twenty centimeters. They would grab long-haired men and cut off their hair on the spot. No doubt these tactics will go down in the annals of history as the most effective war prevention gesture of all time. I'm sure that the North Korean rulers were quivering in their boots when they got wind of it.

“Wi Tack-whan, head of the Korean Culture and Tourism Institute, recalled, ‘You couldn't have English words on your clothes or you'd get arrested. Even if you carried a guitar around, they would take it away. Songs were a way of protest.’"

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the most famous cookbook author in america --10/22/26

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Deborah Blum. Fannie Farmer’s 1896 cookbook sold millions of copies, gained a devoted following, and had a profoundly positive impact on the food industry:

"In 1903 Fannie Farmer was the most famous cookbook author in the United States. She had become a household name after publishing The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book seven years earlier. In it she had included more than recipes, written about more than preparation, presentation, and flavor. She'd also discussed food chemistry and principles of nutrition as she understood them.

Fannie Merritt Farmer

'Food,' the book began simply, 'is anything that nourishes the body.' She proceeded to explain that 'thirteen elements enter into the composition of the body: oxygen, 62½ percent; carbon, 21½ percent; hydrogen, 10 percent; nitrogen, 3 percent; calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, chlorine, sodium, magnesium, iron, and fluorine the remaining 3 percent.' While other chemical elements were found in food, she noted, 'as their uses are unknown, [they] will not be considered.' Farmer's editor at Little, Brown and Company of Boston had wondered whether women needed such chemical information. Cookbooks, replied Farmer, were an essential form of education for American women, most of whom were afforded little if any opportunity to attend college.

"Little, Brown eventually agreed to print the book, but only if the author herself paid for the first print run. Within a year, Farmer's 1896 opus had been reprinted three times; within a decade it had sold close to 400,000 copies (and by the midtwentieth century that number would top two million). Little, Brown's hesitation worked to Farmer's advantage. She had agreed to pay for publishing the book only if she retained control of the rights. By her death in 1914, thanks to her cookbook sales, she held stock in businesses that ranged from railroad companies to chocolate factories.

"In 1903 she was already financially secure. At forty-six, she could write as she chose. She chose to write a book that she would consider the most important of her career: Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent. The idea had arisen directly out of her own struggles for good health. Born in 1857, the youngest daughter of a Boston printer, she'd suffered a collapse at the age of sixteen. Doctors diagnosed the cause as a 'paralytic stroke,' although later experts would wonder if the girl had suffered a polio infection. For several years Fannie was unable to walk. Her mother nursed her; her father carried her from bed to chair. She was in her twenties before she began to hobble around the house; thirty before she was independent enough to enroll as a student at the Boston Cooking School.

"There, in addition to cooking techniques, students learned about germ theory -- the understanding that microbes cause illness, still a cutting-edge idea in the nineteenth century -- and how to apply hygienic principles. They studied the chemistry of food and read the latest research into the principles of nutrition. Within three years she was assisting the principal, and by the time she wrote her famous first cookbook, she had become the head of the cooking school.

"Farmer may have been the most influential author so far to warn of impurities in the food supply. Her devoted audience -- composed largely of mothers and homemakers -- was particularly receptive to the warning. An entire section of Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent was focused on the 'unappetizing and unhealthful pollution' of commercially sold milk. This supposedly 'pure' food, she wrote, was still filthy, still too often thinned with water, full of chalk, food dyes, and harmful microorganisms. She joined other Americans advocating for pasteurization, the pathogen-killing heat process widely used in Europe. 'The pathogenic germs in milk are often causes of typhoid fever, diphtheria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and cholera,' she warned. Some American dairies, especially in the larger cities, had begun employing the process, but it made their products more expensive. Most dairymen continued to prefer far cheaper chemical preservations. Farmer wanted to alert her devoted readers of the dangers of 'borax, boracic acid, salicylic acid, benzoic acid, potassium chromate, and carbonate of soda.'

"Earlier cookbook authors had also warned of the risks of food fakery; nineteenth-century recipes had routinely included asides about fraudulent spices or sham coffees. But Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent gained extra attention because of its famous author and because it was published in 1904, a year in which public awareness of food problems was increasing, partly due to press coverage of Wiley's experiments. That May the New York Times announced that the first group of Chemistry Bureau volunteers had officially retired from the job of 'eating poisons under the direction of the Agricultural Department' and been allowed to resume their normal lives. 'The ill effects of eating drugs used in preserving articles of diet are said to be visible on all members of the squad, and one or two of them appear to be on the verge of breaking down,' the Times noted."

author: Deborah Blum title: The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century publisher: Penguin Press date: Copyright 2018 by Deborah Blum page(s): 98-100

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“where do babies come from?"--10/21/26

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from From One Cell by Ben Stanger. The process of embryogenesis:

“It is a question we have all pondered at some point in our lives, a question as personal as it is universal. There are, of course, many ways to answer this question, but the one that we most often learn in school is that life begins as a single cell, the product of fertilization between egg and sperm. That cell divides once, then again, and again, and so on, until a fully formed human being, containing more than a trillion cells, ultimately comes into existence.

“To a first approximation, this description of the embryo's development, also called embryogenesis, is accurate. But if we step back for a moment and think about all the things that must go right during this process, it's a marvel that any of us are here. As the fertilized egg divides, its progeny coalesce into structures (organs) so complicated that we cannot begin to engineer them outside of the body. With every division, a cell makes a high-fidelity copy of its DNA, which it then passes along to its daughters. With time, those daughters, and their descendants, take on new identities–blood, bone, skin, and so on–that make them wholly distinct from their parents.

Cell divisions

“The end product of these cellular gymnastics is a body ready for countless contingencies–a scarcity of food and water or threats from predators, infectious agents, and toxins. There are countless opportunities for error, and yet mistakes are quite rare. Every day, billions of animals take the final step in a journey that led them from solitary cell to fully formed organism, a daily tally that includes over 300,000 human beings. Embryonic development is the primary and most important rite of passage, the supply chain for virtually every new animal on our planet.

“How does the marvel of development happen so seamlessly and reproducibly? How do cells know how to specialize, when to divide, where to go, and how to behave? Is development principally controlled by our genes or by the environment? How does a species ensure that the process of development repeats itself with each new generation, limiting errors that might cause it to face extinction? And most remarkable of all, how does an entire animal–one capable of movement, respiration, digestion, sensation, and reason–arise from a single cell? It is a conundrum we can refer to as the ‘One Cell Problem.’

“Human beings have wrestled with versions of these questions since antiquity, but until the mid-nineteenth century we lacked the technology to observe embryos with any degree of refinement. Hence, most of the concepts about development that emerged before this time were incomplete, or flat-out wrong. With powerful molecular tools at our disposal, we now find ourselves at a unique moment–a time when we can point to the genes, cells, and molecules that orchestrate development and describe, in broad strokes, how we come into being.”

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junius rocks the monarchy--10/20/26

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Radical Duke by Danielle Allen. In the years just before the American Revolution, a series of anonymous letters appeared in the British press, shockingly critical of the king. The collection included 69 letters: 29 intended for public readership and 40 written to individuals, later made public.

“Still only thirty-one years old, [King] George III had not yet stabilized his reign. After nine years on the throne, he had gone through six prime ministers. His efforts to suppress dissent with increasingly punitive treatment of critics weren't working; if anything, the criticism just intensified. The greatest direct challenge came from Junius, in the form of this 1 December letter.

“Although the King essentially never spoke to ordinary people, and spoke to the aristocrats around him only in a highly formal and stylized fashion, the regiment introduced the infamous letter by conjuring up an ideal situation of equality, where any honest man might approach the King for a conversation, human to human.

“It may be a matter of curious speculation to consider, if an honest man were permitted to approach a King, in what terms he would address himself to his Sovereign. Let it be imagined, no matter how improbable, that the first prejudice against character is removed, that the ceremonious difficulties of an audience are surmounted, that he feels himself animated by the purest and most honourable affections to his King and country, and that the great person, whom he addresses, has spirit enough to bid him speak freely, and understanding enough to listen to him with attention. Unacquainted with the vain impertinence of forms, he would deliver his sentiments with dignity and firmness, but not without respect.

“Then, with none of the customary invocations of the King's majesty, the letter began, ‘Sir, It is the misfortune of your life, and originally the cause of every reproach and distress, which has attended your government, that you should never have been acquainted with the language of truth.’ The simple fact of this address would have been breathtakingly shocking to contemporary readers.

“Junius next proceeded to describe the urgency of the moment, one in which the vast body of the people was rising up in a spirit of resistance:

“When the complaints of a brave and powerful people are observed to increase in proportion to the wrongs they have suffered; when instead of sinking into submission, they are roused to resistance, the time will soon arrive at which every inferior consideration must yield to the security of the Sovereign, and to the general safety of the state.

“Such a moment had arrived, Junius argued, and it required that George understand ‘the great duty he owes to his people,’ and seek advice for ‘how to gratify the wishes, and secure the happiness of his subjects.’ Junius was ready to provide that advice to his King because he had not yet given up on him and could still attribute his errors to ‘pernicious lessons’ from Bute. They were far from thinking the King ‘capable of a direct, deliberate purpose to invade the original rights of British subjects.’

Sir Philip Francis, a possible identity of Junius

“The advice came in the form of a review of the entire policy of George Ill's reign to date–from his original identification of himself as a ‘Briton’ rather than as an ‘Englishman’; his decision to alter the whole system of government when he ascended the throne; his misplaced confidence in Bute; the enormous attack on the constitution in the decision not to let Wilkes take his seat in Parliament; the ‘plunder and oppression’ of the people of Ireland; and this provocation of the Americans who ‘divided as they are into a thousand forms of policy and religion,...all agree—they equally detest the pageantry of a King.’ The letter then bemoaned the degradation of the army: 'those gallant troops by whom every hazardous, laborious service is performed, are left to perish in garrisons abroad, or pine in quarters at home, neglected and forgotten.’ Finally, Junius turned again to the undoing of the constitution by the decision of Parliament, to overrule the selection made by the voters, and he added a threat. ‘The same pretended power, which robs an English subject of his birthright, may rob an English King of his crown.’

“Junius went on to tell the King how to right the ship of state: ‘You have still an honourable part to act. The affections of your subjects may sf be recovered. But before you subdue their hearts, you must gain a noble victory over your own. Discard those little, personal resentments, which have too long directed your public conduct. Pardon this man [Wilkes] the remainder of his punishment, and if resentment still prevails, make it, what it should have been long since, an act, not of mercy, but contempt.’

“The brilliance of the advice to pardon Wilkes was that it solved a constitutional puzzle. The House of Commons had robbed the people of their vote by determining that Wilkes, a convicted criminal, could not serve on account of his conviction. If either the King or the House of Lords were to undo that decision, they would be violating the parliamentary powers of the Commons. The Wilkes event had stopped up the system of checks and balances and seemingly left no check that could operate without undoing the entire constitutional system. There was one solution, though: If the King were to pardon Wilkes, which was his prerogative, the House of Commons could seat Wilkes (since he would no longer be a convicted felon), the people would have their voting right restored, and no branch of the government would have had its own prerogatives violated.

“The Junius letter brilliantly deployed Montesquieu's theory of constitutionalism to find a pathway out of the crisis created by the refusal to seat Wilkes. The letter explicitly articulated the point about separation of powers, invoking the King's duty ‘to prevent one of the three estates from encroaching upon the other two, or assuming the authority of them all." Maintaining the balance among House of Commons, House of Lords, and Crown was ‘the great constitutional line, by which all their proceedings should be directed.’

“Junius concluded by giving a chilling warning to the King–not to behave as the Stuart monarchs had behaved. Unspoken, but clearly implied, is the memory that one Stuart king had been toppled and beheaded, the next overthrown and forced abroad, and a pretender to the line brutally vanquished at Culloden:

“The people of England are loyal to the house of Hanover, not from a vain preference of one family to another, but from a conviction that the establishment of that family was necessary to the support of their civil and religious liberties....The name of Stuart, of itself, is only contemptible;–... The Prince, who imitates their conduct, should be warned by their example; and while he plumes himself upon the security of his title to the crown, should remember, that as it was acquired by one revolution, it may be lost by another.

“No one had yet so directly threatened George III with revolution. The most radical Whig tracts from the late seventeenth century, like those associated with Algernon Sidney or John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, from the period of the Glorious Revolution which removed James II, had articulated a right to resist and remove a monarch. Those were theoretical texts. This was an immediate, practical threat to a Hanoverian monarch. The Junius regiment published this essay into the ponderous silence of a fall without a parliamentary session. It was the inaugural howl of the Age of Revolution. Immediately, there was ‘a hue and cry’ after Junius, and Woodfall was charged with seditious libel–that is, defamatory speech against government, punishable with substantial fines, imprisonment, the public pillory, and banishment.

“With snow falling and black frost clinging to the city, the King opened the 1769-70 session of Parliament on January 9. What followed immediately was political collapse–swift, bitter, and almost theatrical in its disorder, largely owing to the Junius letters. Ministers turned on one another. Key figures resigned or were cast out in rapid succession. The government, barely held together by factions and royal will, seemed to be unraveling by the hour. The lord chancellor publicly attacked his cabinet colleagues over the Wilkes affair, opposing their continued resistance to seating Wilkes. The King dismissed him. Four other cabinet members were also immediately dismissed. Then commander in chief, Lord Granby, resigned on January 17. The new lord chancellor, Charles Yorke, died three days after accepting the role, and was generally thought to have killed himself. On January 20, the solicitor general and vicetreasurer of Ireland resigned. On January 27, 1770, the implosion was complete when the Duke of Grafton resigned as prime minister. ‘Nothing,’ wrote Horace Walpole, ‘could be more distressful than the situation into which the Duke of Grafton had brought the King and in which he abandoned him.'"

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up the skyscraper--10/19/26

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Cubed by Nikil Saval. Vast forests of skyscrapers began to dominate America’s major cities in the twentieth century:

“'If your eyes could penetrate the opaque masses of the facades, they would see an incredible spectacle: three hundred thousand, five hundred thousand men and women–perhaps more–at work in a pool of space at the same time. A humanity having broken its millenary destiny which was to be attached to the ground, which is suspended between heaven and earth, going up and down at high speed in clusters of twenty and in sheaves of two hundred. Is it a new scene in purgatory?'

– Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White

“By mid-century, with the United States hunkering down for the first frigid decade of the Cold War, nothing signaled the dynamism of American business more than the skylines of its cities. The Communists might have touted the equality of their peoples, but in terms of the jagged inequality of their skylines Moscow and East Berlin, let alone Beijing and Hanoi, had nothing on New York and Chicago, whose silhouettes looked a lot like the wild spikes and dives of a GDP chart. Photographs of the time of lower Manhattan from across the Brooklyn Bridge show a mountainous cluster of ridges, some of them sleek and glassy, others stern shafts of masonry and steel, ornamented by spires and finials, while the Loop in Chicago was a tour through a flatter and more elegant skyscraper plateau,placidly regarding the smooth curve of Lake Michigan. Skyscrapers were the birth and growth of the office made visible.

“Until the resurgence of globalization after the Cold War, when tall buildings began to bloom along the coastline of southern China and on the Arabian Peninsula, the skyscraper would remain one of the most peculiarly American of white-collar institutions, much more a symbol of the prowess, even ruthlessness, of American-style capitalism than what it equally was: an especially tall collection of boring offices. Abroad they were viewed as objects of aspiration for men and women of business; it's no wonder that the signal image of the growth of contemporary China is Shanghai's Pudong district, burgeoning with weird and futuristic skyscrapers. As Taylorism and other related managerial ideas spread throughout the world, the administrative branches of industry, along with financial institutions, grew enormously throughout the Western world (if not quite to the same extent as in the United States). But European cities didn't exhibit the same pattern of development. They were older, denser, constrained by centuries of building tradition as well as the sheer thickness of their urban fabric. European cities imposed height restrictions well before skyscrapers even became popular in the United States. The London Building Act of 1894 limited heights to 30 meters; in Berlin for many years the maximum was 22. Wartime devastation cleared spaces to build higher, and restrictions were loosened, but a certain resistance remained–enabled by strong welfare states where property developers were tacitly seen as enemies of social democracy. By 1950, the tallest building in the United States was 373.5 meters (the Empire State Building). Fifteen years later, London's tallest buildings were the Shell Centre and Portland House, which were 107 meters and 100 meters, respectively. The next three tallest were below 70 meters.

“The relentless pace of skyscraper building in the United States meant that the character of its cities changed drastically. The transformation was so enormous, powerful, and lasting that for contemporary city dwellers and visitors it can be hard to imagine what urban life might otherwise have been like, without so many offices around. Places like Chicago and New York, once known as much for their industries (the stockyards in Chicago, shipping in New York) as for their financial districts, became full to the brim with offices. Small, low-density residential areas were rezoned and demolished, replaced by buildings that housed thousands of office workers. Between 1871 and 1923, New York built about seventy-four million square feet of office space; from the 1920s through the early 1930s, the city added more than thirty-eight million more–thirteen million built from 1930 to 1933, the first years of the Great Depression. Even the collapse of the world economy could not stop the building; it was the endless capacity to build that seemed, on the ground, at once the most exhilarating and the most frightening fact of all: that all the short houses and apartments could be leveled for more offices; that one could simply build higher and higher. And the infinity of the skyscraper corresponded to the deepening and widening of the offices inside. The experience of the man on the street, alienated by the towers around him, became a classic trope of American literature. ‘What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?’ Allen Ginsberg wailed in Howl (1955). It was ‘Moloch,’ the god of child sacrifice, ‘whose buildings are judgment! ... whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!/ Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!’ And Ginsberg testified only to the presence of the skyscrapers; some years later the poet James Merrill, in ‘An Urban Convalescence’ (1962), would conjure the absence caused by the process of destruction, the thousands of buildings cleared in the ‘urban renewal’ plans to make way for the new buildings. ‘You would think the simple fact of having lasted / Threatened our cities like mysterious fires.’ By the middle of the century, it had become a source of worry to many that the jagged skyline might only be a mirage of variety; that any beautiful skyscraper was actually filled story after story with identical-looking white-collar workers; that the city glinting over the river at night consisted of little more than millions of square feet of office space.”

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our house was not a home--10/16/26

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by Liza Minnelli. The dream house of Liza Minnelli’s childhood turned out to be something very different than a dream:

“Mama, Sid, and I moved into an amazing new house in the summer of 1953. I'll never forget the first time I saw it. For me, it was like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when everything changes from black-and-white to color. 144 South Mapleton Drive, tucked into a corner of Holmby Hills near Westwood, was something else.

“Suddenly, we were living in a beautiful two-story, nineteen-room house that was more than a mansion. It was a Tudor-style estate. The only question was–could we afford it? With production just beginning on A Star Is Born, Mama and Sid had no doubts. The big bucks would be rolling in soon enough. Well, good luck with that. If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. I know now that South Mapleton Drive was a symbol of dysfunction from the start. Sid was a gambler, determined to impress Mama. She was struggling with pills and alcohol. Not exactly the right moment for two people to bet their future on a movie yet to be made.

“I was seven years old on the day we moved in, and just walking through the house was an overwhelming experience. Five bedrooms. Five baths. A forty-foot living room with a vaulted ceiling, a black Steinway piano, a huge dining-room table, even a trampoline in the backyard. There were beautifully decorated bedrooms for me and my new baby sister, Lorna, who was born several months before. Talk about luxury! We had two spacious dens. Renaissancestyle chairs. A golden rug. Italian statues. This was the home where I'd grow up over the next seven years. And it seemed to be the epitome of a very rich person's house. A symbol of the American Dream with a picture-perfect family lucky to be living there.

Minnelli with her mother on the set of Summer Stock in 1950

“But who were we kidding? My life on South Mapleton Drive would be anything but normal. Looking back, I realize that moving into that beautiful albatross of a house was strike two for the end of my childhood. (Strike one was kicking Mama in the head several years earlier. We'll get to strike three in a bit). I've often said that I became an adult too early and a child much too late. Our years as a ‘family’ in Holmby Hills would be turbulent and unpredictable, every day. Life was luxurious, unstable, and in many ways very scary. Mapleton is where I began my first real adult job, as a caretaker for my mother–something no kid should ever experience.

“But it was also here, in this tree-shaded oasis, that my dream and determination to become a dancer, actress, and singer took root. I spent hours in my room, learning songs from Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, of course Mama, and all the greats from the American Songbook. It's the house where I sang at parties for her friends and spent hours practicing my dancing in front of a mirror. I was fascinated watching Mama rehearse new material at the piano with Roger Edens. He was her original vocal trainer at MGM, a lifelong friend and a major creative force in the studio's Golden Age of Musicals. As I watched, she gave me a master class in how to be, and not to be, an artist, and I was a quick study. My memories of her are as vivid today as they were back then, the very best and the very worst of everything.

“We were living in a dream house, but it was not a home for long. By 1960, when I was fourteen, Mama and Sid were forced to sell the place under foreclosure. They were no longer able to outrun their mounting income-tax and financial problems. This was a shock but, in truth, the turbulence jolting our family began before we even moved into the new house.

“My sister, Lorna, a beautiful, sweet-tempered girl with golden curls and a beaming smile, was born on November 21, 1952. I was so excited to have a baby sister. I practiced taking care of her with my dolls, even before she arrived. I'm happy to tell you that she was, and still is, much more fun than any doll! I've always adored her and my brother, Joey, born three years later.

“Soon after Mama came home from the hospital, we thought she'd be happy, too. Within days of returning, she tried to kill herself.

“We now understand that Mama was wrestling with postpartum depression, made worse by overdosing on barbiturates, amphetamines, and alcohol. A cycle of chemical highs and lows that was beyond any comprehension–not just for me, but for all the adults around her. She was wrestling with terrible demons that arrived and departed with zero warning. It was a foreshadowing of what my own life would become decades later.”

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making a movie -- 10/15/26

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions by Ed Zwick. “Little is learned from success”:

“Movies aren't born. They fight their way to life. And the struggle can wear you down. I send the script to a movie star's manager, who says, ‘I love the script for him.’ It means her assistant read it. When the movie star's ‘covering agent’ says, ‘I love the script for him,’ it means the actor is technically available and needs an offer to read it. When the movie star's ‘responsible agent’ says, ‘My client loves the script,’ it means the actor has notes. When the movie star's lawyer says the same thing, it means he's going to make the negotiations as painful as possible. When the movie star himself says, ‘I love the script,’ it means he wants to know who's going to rewrite it.

“And then comes the same process with the studio. When the creative executive says, ‘We're gonna make this movie,’ it means she'll try to get the VP to read it. When the VP says he'll make it, it means he's read positive coverage. When the EVP says it, it means she'll take credit for finding it if the president of production likes it. When the president of production says it, it means he needs to tell the CEO which actor is starring in it. And at last, when the CEO says, ‘We're gonna make this movie,’ it means it'll get made if he still has his job in six months.

“One day, while Menno Meyjes and I were dealing with an especially galling set of studio notes, he said something that should be tattooed on every director's bicep: ‘Working in Hollywood is a series of small humiliations interrupted by bigger ones.’ Because there's often a secret loathing between artists and management that's toxic and ultimately destructive to the process. They tend to think of us as irresponsible children while we in turn consider them venal philistines. Yet we also love each other. Or say we do. Certainly, we are dependent on each other. They give us millions to indulge our fantasies. We make them millions to send their kids to private school. We lunch together, schmooze at parties. They visit us on the set and celebrate with us when we succeed. When we fail, not so much. And when they call something a passion project, it means they're patronizing you and never intend to make it.

Film director John Badham during filming of The Godchild in 1974

“After fifty years of getting their notes, the sum creative contribution from all but a few truly gifted executives might be reduced to four words: ‘Faster. Dumber. More likable.’ Every script ‘needs work,’ every first cut is ‘eighty percent there.’ In the new millennial Hollywood, the legacy of Silicon Valley start-up culture is felt everywhere. Everything is decided by ‘the group.’ An idea needs to be ‘socialized.’ But since when is consensus the best way to judge art? Is homogeneity really the goal? Each year they introduce a crop of new phrases: ‘edge it up,’ ‘backload it,’ ‘unpack it,’ ‘lean into it.’ At such moments I remember Cameron Crowe describing an executive as someone who claims to know the way, doesn't have a map, and can't drive a car. As Steven Soderbergh once told an executive, ‘You confuse having an opinion with having an idea.’

“Before each film I've had to ask myself, ‘Am I a retail businessman, or do I care most about expressing my personal vision with millions of other people's money?’ It's not a simple question. The answer affects every decision, from script to casting to release. My films have to enjoy at least a certain amount of commercial success if I want to keep getting them made. Then again, the best definition of success I ever heard was going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

“No matter how much good fortune I've had, I always feel like I'm never more than a big failure away from movie jail. Happily, I'm also never more than a hit away from being paroled. Even if a movie happens to be a hit, things are never simple. Success is essentially mysterious; marvelous, unidentifiable forces in the universe have converged to make a movie exceed my imagination. Did I think of that camera move, or was it the dolly grip? What if it hadn't rained that day and I had shot the crucial scene in bright sunlight the way it was originally intended? Only in humiliating failure have I ever been willing to open myself to the harsh self-scrutiny that leads to growth as an artist. In success, the revisionist history claims everyone loved each other and can't wait to work together again, which wasn't necessarily the case. Sometimes I think little is learned from success except maybe a greater fear of failure.”

author: Ed Zwick title: Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions publisher: Gallery Books date: page(s): 277-279

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engines of abundance--10/14/26

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Empire of Ink by Alex Wright. The 1832 invention of the rotary press:

“One day in 1832, a young man from Boston named Josiah Warren caused a public stir in New York when he unveiled his new invention: a prototype rotary printing press. A brilliant polymath, committed anarchist, and "crank of nearly the first order," in the words of his biographer Crispin Sartwell, Warren was also a printer by training. He had recently returned to the East Coast with his young family after a two-year stint living in the experimental utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana. Initially fascinated with the community's radical, quasi-socialist approach to cooperative living, he had grown disillusioned with the conformist pressures of living in such an environment, and now he had come back to the bustle of urban life to find a new path forward.

“A prolific writer and inveterate tinkerer, Warren experimented constantly with new philosophies and ways of life, different literary styles, and tools for self.expression: for example, he experimented with using small caps (a typographic style using uppercase letters sized to the height of lowercase) for varying degrees of emphasis, using gratuitous helpings of exclamation marks in ways chat might have made Tom Wolfe blush, and constructing a sophisticated system for indexing that allowed readers to follow a particular theme throughout the length of a book–a kind of rudimentary hypertext. He also invented a lamp that burned lard rather than tallow; devised a new form of musical notation: and prototyped an image reproduction method he called ‘Universal Typography,’ which helped lay the groundwork for stereotype printing. But his most consequential invention was the new press he unveiled that day in New York.

“Even in its earliest incarnation, the rotary press was a technological marvel, capable of turning out sixty pages a minute, more than ten times faster than traditional hand-pulled presses. Dispensing with the traditional approach of printing pages one sheet at a time on a flatbed plate, it fed a continuous roll of paper through a series of cylinders. Its design was deceptively simple–consisting of three rollers, a few pulleys, and a self-inking device–so simple, in fact, that Warren did not bother to file a patent. The first time he had demonstrated the machine in Indiana, a group of printers panicked. As his son George later recalled, "’hey had never seen a press that would print more than four to six copies per minute and they were going to be d–m if any bloody press should take the bread out of their mouths by doing the work in no time.’ They promptly cried to sabotage it, forcing Warren to haul it back home. But when he later reassembled the device and demonstrated it in New York, it drew admiring crowds.

Hoe's six-cylinder rotary press from the 1860s. The printing plates are located on the large cylinder in the middle.

“For Warren, this was more than just a mechanical invention; it was part of a larger project to put his philosophical ideals into practice. Two years earlier, he had penned an essay entitled ‘Reduction in the Cost of Printing Apparatus,’ where he laid out his vision for radically expanding access to printing cools for the general public. ‘At this time, 1830, the means of printing are so expensive, that the great mass of the people are almost totally deprived of their use–while the wealthy few (by their capital or influence,) wield this mighty engine, to increase their own power, and to weaken that of others.’ While the number of newspapers had been growing steadily, and growing numbers of ordinary citizens had started to find their voice in print (as we have seen in the previous chapters), Warren envisioned a far more radical expansion, in which vast numbers of people would have ready access to their own personal printing presses. He was convinced that such a development would lead to a great outpouring of individuality and equip people to reach their full potential for self-expression and civic participation. The rotary press was to be the first step in a great march of technological progress that would gradually lower the barriers to entry for the general public to express themselves on the printed page.

“Warren's machine was just a prototype, but it epitomized a larger technological turning point. In the decades to come, American printing would be transformed not only by faster, more powerful presses but by equally momentous changes in how paper itself was made. From steam-driven rotary machines to the mass production of wood-pulp newsprint, advances in both press and paper technology together reshaped the economics of publishing, removed bottlenecks that had constrained growth for centuries, and paved the way for the mass-market newspaper. This chapter explores these deeply intertwined stories.

“Among the audience watching the New York debut of Warren's rotary press was Robert Hoe, an English-born carpenter turned printing press maker whose company built the popular Washington handpress. Hoe had already begun experimenting with a rotary concept based on earlier work by Friedrich Koenig and David Napier, but while those devices also used a cylindrical device to apply ink to paper, they relied on single sheets and a flatbed mechanism. Warren's use of a continuous paper roll signaled a breakthrough, as the paper wound from cylinder to cylinder, with metal ‘fingers’ gripping it firmly along the way. Hoe's company had also beep. experimenting with a new industrial innovation: steam power (which Koenig had already implemented in his landmark printing press installation for The Times of London). Hoe took Warren's rotary concept and fused it with Napier's cylinder mechanics and Koenig's steam-powered innovation, to create the first fully industrialized rotary press. The Hoe press would go on to become a stalwart of big-city printshops across the United States and Europe and fuel the rise of the city's penny press–the direct precursor of twentieth-century mass media newspapers.

“Alas, Warren's contributions to the rotary printing revolution have been largely obscured–not least because he never filed a patent. Looking back, one cannot help but wonder what this committed, deeply idealistic anarchist would have thought of the use to which his pioneering invention would ultimately be put: not to liberate the masses with the tools of free expression but to help large media conglomerates accumulate and consolidate power.”

author: Alex Wright title: Empire of Ink: The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper publisher: Basic Books date: Copyright June 2026 page(s): 79-82

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a shortage of money--10/13/26

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from The Almighty Dollar by Brendan Greeley. In the years before the American Revolution, the colonies suffered an acute money shortage that stunted economic growth. The British Parliament made it worse by passing the Currency Act, which prohibited paper currency, making it all the more likely that the colonies would be forced to split from the mother country:

“Colonists up and down the North American Atlantic coast had a consistent complaint: There were never enough coins, and what coins they had were mostly Spanish, moving from Spain's American viceroyalties with trade through the Caribbean. In Maryland, the few coins that did circulate tended to come from ships paying customs duties and port fees, and from wheat sales in the north of the province to the merchants in Philadelphia who supplied Barbados and Jamaica, Britain's sugar islands. Read through the August 1764 issues of the Maryland Gazette–Jonas and Anne Catharine Green's newspaper–and you can see the old silver Spanish dollars everywhere.

“The City of Philadelphia advertised a race to be held the next month–three-mile heats for four-year-old horses, for a purse of ‘ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS.’ Samuel Galloway advertised a ‘CARGO of healthy SLAVES,’ suitable for the ironworks in Baltimore Town. Dollars would be taken. Thomas Rutland asked for the return of a servant named John Ward, a round-shouldered, black-haired man with a great love of strong drink, and offered a reward of £3–payable in dollars. John Wilmot of South River asked for the return of a ‘country-born negro man’ named Taney, who was about six feet tall and slow of speech and had a small scar on his forehead. Wilmot thought Taney might be waiting in Annapolis to get on a ship and offered a 4 dollar reward.

“At the end of the eighteenth century, the flow of Spanish silver dollars continued to move along the same old paths, from Zacatecas east to Seville and Europe, and from Potosí west to Manila and the port cities of southern China. It was hard but not impossible for colonists to hold on to some of these dollars as they crossed the Atlantic. Merchants in port cities like Boston and Philadelphia shipped wheat, hogs, and lumber south to the sugar islands, and returned with rum, molasses, slaves, and silver dollars. There was some wheat in Maryland, which put Annapolis at the very southern edge of the North American colonies that could make this trade. In Maryland, dollars were big money for expensive things.

A five dollar banknote issued by the Second Continental Congress in 1775

“But the province had the same old problem as the silver miners in Joachimsthal. People held a few silver dollars and gold pistoles–a Spanish coin worth about 4 dollars. But there weren't enough of either, and there were almost no petty coins for small purchases. Colonists even used shears to clip the coins they had into smaller change, since a quarter of a piece of eight was worth just a little more than a shilling. The practice was particularly common in Maryland, enough so that the assembly tried to forbid it, then in 1729 finally gave up and accepted it. There's an old argument among economists and historians over whether colonists were just complaining about the lack of coins, as colonists do. But serious people in Maryland at the time certainly saw it as a problem.

“In April 1761, Stephen West advertised in the Gazette that he was selling goods from Europe, as well as rum, sugar, molasses, and salt from the Caribbean. He would buy pork, wheat, corn, and wooden staves, but was so desperate for any kind of money to carry out the transactions that he offered in his ad to produce some himself. ‘As I daily suffer much inconvenience in my business for want of small change,’ he wrote, ‘which is indeed a universal complaint of almost every body in any sort of business, I intend, if not better method is proposed, to print, for the convenience of my neighbors and myself, a parcel of small notes’–paper money. He offered to publish the exact number of bills he'd issued, promised that the bills would be redeemable for ‘good Spanish dollars,’ and wrote that he hoped to talk it over with other prominent men. West was so desperate for small change he didn't seem to think he could run an import business unless he made his own.

“In September 1763, the Greens had taken the unusual step of dedicating almost the entire front page of the Maryland Gazette to an anonymous letter on the nature of money. The lack of gold and silver, the letter reported, was ‘an Evil universally felt and complained of.’ Men normally willing to lend coins at interest couldn't meet demand; they literally couldn't supply the coins to lend. Even when there had been gold and silver in the province, the writer pointed out, the ‘Wane of Small Money for Exchange’ had been ‘attended by the Greatest Inconveniences to the People.’

“When Horatio Sharpe sent those two letters across the Atlantic to Lord Baltimore and his secretary, Parliament had just made the problem of small change worse. Since just before 1700, almost all the colonies had been slowly developing ways to print money and make it hold its value, but in 1764 Parliament had passed the Currency Act, essentially stopping this process cold. The act made it illegal for any of the colonies to issue paper money as legal tender. If something is legal tender, everyone has to accept it for everything–rent, debts, taxes. We don't think of paper money as a major political issue now, so it's hard to see what a shock the Currency Act was, but Benjamin Franklin would later tell the House of Commons that it was one of the colonists' main frustrations. Sharpe put his letters to Calvert and Lord Baltimore on a ship in August 1764 to thread a needle. He knew there wasn't enough small change in Maryland. He needed to produce some, while working within the letter of the Currency Act. Whatever he did, he couldn't print legal tender.”

author: Brendan Greeley title: The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money publisher: Crown Currency date: Copyright May 2026 page(s): 109-111

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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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