Delanceyplace

gauguin’s vision of the sermon -- 4/17/2026

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 02:49:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux. ‘I’ve Never Painted So Clearly':

“In January 1888, Gauguin left Paris for Pont-Aven. He was still not well, and he felt that his best chance to recover his health was to stay at the Pension Gloanec, where he could live cheaply and calmly and be generously fed. Between January and April he spent the majority of the time in bed, feeling sorry for himself and fuming against fate. He was bored, the weather was atrocious; he painted a few snowscapes, he had searing stomach pains and he had no money. Not until July did he feel himself cured, though the gut ache persisted, as it would for the rest of his life. To restore his strength, he took lessons in the boxing salle and the fencing salle, swelling his reputation for cutting a dash. As Pont-Aven welcomed its customary summer migration, Laval joined him, back from Martinique and as devoted as ever. 'For my part, the more I go on, the more I admire your talent, and I feel respect and affection for you. You made me understand the superior strength that permits me to make efforts to grow. I embrace you tenderly as a courageous elder brother who set the example for me.' Laval never forgot that Gauguin had saved him from suicide.

“Up until now, though Gauguin was concerned with infusing his work with spirituality, he had not introduced religious references. In Brittany they were inescapable. While much of France was succumbing to the moral anaesthesia of industrialised capitalism, Brittany still clung stubbornly to muddy-clogs ruralism and a deeply held Catholic faith. During his money-go-round in the City of Gold, Gauguin had hung a pair of wooden clogs on his wall. We see them from time to time in his Paris interiors, sneaky little invaders from pre-industrial times. Now, like the local Brittany peasants, he carved his own.

“Spirituality was as strongly rooted in Brittany as in himself, though he had long turned away from organised religion and the established Church. Moche animism had laid the foundation. On to this, Bishop Dupanloup had grafted the idea that a universal religio-intellectual synthesis was necessary, and this fitted well with Gauguin's own synaesthetic nature. The Breton position was a synthesis of Catholicism, Celtic and Druidic legend, animism and superstition.

Vision After the Sermon

“At the heart of every hamlet and village in the area was a small, squat church built of local stone. Most dated from around 1460 and were erected on the sites of Druid temples beside sacred springs that, according to Roman historians, were the place of Druidic human sacrifice. Following Christianisation, these sites absorbed the Christian symbolism of Jesus Christ the sacrificial victim through whose redeeming blood flowed the water of eternal life.

“Once a year, on the feast day of its patron saint, each of these little village churches was the centre of a unique ceremony called a pardon. It was the most important day in the church's calendar. The pardon had its origins in the ancient Celtic Tailteann Games, dating from somewhere around 1600 BC. Funeral games for the dead, they had included wrestling contests and these had survived down the ages, becoming known in Breton as the gouren. Christianity had transformed the wrestling contest from a slugfest ending in the defeated having his throat cut by a Druid into the representation of a moral conflict at the end of which the victorious wrestler, having proven through his strength that he was the most spiritually pure, was rewarded with a farm animal to swell his herd and his prosperity.

“Human rivers streamed through woods and green meadows from miles around to witness the event, dressed in their best to receive God's pardon for their sins. Snowy coiffes floated above dark dresses like foam on inky water, their white ribbons dancing like spume on the wind. First, they received absolution from the priest. Then they danced a gavotte, a rather formal folk dance, on the levelled area of ground by the church where the wrestling match had always taken place. As they danced, their wooden clogs flattened the grass of the arena which they gathered round to watch the young men of the village renouncing the devil before engaging in the wrestling competition. The champion, in Christian times, was deemed to have proven himself the most spiritually pure young man in the village. His prize, the live heifer which we see in Gauguin's painting tied to a tree during the match, symbolised the conquered opponent of previous times, who had then been sacrificed at the sacred spring.

“This is what Gauguin painted in The Vision of the Sermon. Past and present, reality and imagination, a fusion of the familiar with the magical and strange. Like in his portrait of Clovis asleep, Gauguin is attempting to show an outward and an inward state simultaneously. But he brings a further complexity to the picture as the Vision also tells the Bible story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, a story Gauguin identified with.

“The Breton women gathered for the pardon, dressed in their regional costume, have just listened to the priest on the right (whose tonsured profile some believe to be a Gauguin self-portrait). He has delivered a sermon on Genesis 32:22-32, which tells how the prophet Jacob wrestled all night with a mysterious angel before receiving a blessing from God.

“Gauguin wrote a letter describing the picture to Vincent van Gogh. The landscape and the fight, he explained, were taking place in the imagination of the people. The tree-trunk slashed diagonally across the space divided real space from imagined, the profane from the sacred. (This, if it really is a self-portrait, fixes Gauguin firmly in the spiritual space.) In the real space on the left, the prayerful Breton women stand in the circle to watch the contest. The heifer that is the victor's prize also occupies real space, tied to the tree-trunk. To the right of the tree, the space occupied by the imagination, the vision appears. The boys are transformed into Jacob wrestling with the angel. The wrestlers also, Gauguin says, symbolise himself wrestling with the tough process of artistic creation, and wrestling for the redemption of his life through art.

“The Vision shows Gauguin finally freeing himself from the subordination to appearances and committing to the inwardness of colour, as he had begun to do on Fruit Porters at Turin Bight. The whole scene, not only the imagined, takes place on vermillion ground, unifying the space while striking a fantastical and mystical note. Like the rest of the Vision, there are two ways of reading the red ground: literally and symbolically. Literally, the colour was not totally impossible: the pardon took place on the third Sunday in September, when the buckwheat in the fields turns red. Symbolically, red is the colour of blood and of life, and of intense emotion. The Vision also saw the further development of another motif that had fascinated him ever since his Impressionist days, the tree motif used in the Japanese manner as vertical screen to divide space, as in Fruit Porters at Turin Bight.

"The letter describing the Vision to Vincent included a sketch of the picture, and Vincent used exactly the same compositional device – the diagonal tree bisecting the canvas – in his famous Sower with Setting Sun (1888) which he painted some six weeks later. The Sower is also a religious allegory but one based on Christ's parable of the sower broadcasting the seeds of religious faith, which Vincent saw as symbolising the artist sowing the seeds of the new artistic truth.

“Gauguin wanted the Vision to hang in one of the local churches whose deep history had inspired its creation. He said that he wished to see the synthetic effect the modern piece would have among the rustic Romanesque and Gothic forms within the chapels. He offered it first to the church at Pont-Aven, but the church was in the throes of modernising its interior, so he was not unduly downcast when the priest turned it down. Far more authentic was the Church of Saint-Arnet at Nizon, with its deep, dark interior rich with pre-Christian figures and symbols, overlaid with later medieval paintings, sculptures and carvings. The canvas is quite large, seventy-three by ninety-two centimetres, and a group of his young pupils including Laval and Emile Bernard helped Gauguin to carry it four kilometres uphill through the fields to the Nizon church. There they hoisted the picture up above the door where the vermillion ground darkened to the colour of rich soil, just as Gauguin had envisaged. Pleased at how it looked, he sent Bernard off to the presbytery to fetch the priest to receive the gift. “

author: Sue Prideaux title: Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin publisher: W. W. Norton & Company date: page(s): 116-120

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the transcontinental railroad -- 4/16/2026

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 02:18:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from Continental Reckoning by Elliott West. The most ambitious big U.S. government project of the nineteenth century was the transcontinental railroad:

"No event in the West during these years commanded more public attention than the Pacific rail project. Journals and newspapers followed it in scores of articles, and few literary visitors resisted observing and writing about the spectacle. Its scale and visibility alone made it difficult to ignore, but it had more than that going for it. The simple fact of its being built, the particulars of how it was carried out, and imagined events and threats that in fact were not there were the ideal makings for myths around the emerging West and its meanings for a reconstructing America.

“The most obvious theme was of western settlement as the unifying sequel to the Civil War's saving the Union. As if in relay, the Union Pacific's first rails were being laid simultaneous with the end of the war. Its most prominent field commanders came from high in the ranks in eastern campaigns. Maj. Gen. Grenville Dodge had served in Missouri, Tennessee, and Mississippi, and Brig. Gen. Jack Casement in engagements throughout the war, eventually marching through Georgia under William T. Sherman. Sherman himself would oversee protection along the route. Descriptions of construction evoked troops in mass array. Construction teams stood ‘like the grand reserve of an army’ behind the graders, and once at work their spiking of rails sounded up close like a ‘hotly contested skirmish’ and from a distance like the ‘roar of the wonderful advance.’

“In 1873 the popular Croffut's Transcontinental Tourist Guide recalled that in 1860 the nation had faced being riven, not into two, but into three parts—North, South, and West. It had taken the Civil War, that ‘carnival of blood,’ to convince naysayers into building the Pacific railroad that now joined all three into one. The next year Croffut's would feature on its cover John Gast's American Progress, with its floating female figure leading the railroad westward while stringing a telegraph line. Politicians hailed the project as truly national. A ‘free and living Republic’ would spring up along rail lines as ‘surely as grass and flowers follow in the spring,’ one promised. His reference was not to Nevada or Oregon but to the former Confederacy. Railroads were called agents of both reconstruction and recommitment. They would fuse all sections into one by tapping their resources, easing the movement of their peoples, and overcoming a bloody past with a binding prosperity.

The U.S. Post Office issued a commemorative stamp in 1944, on the 75th anniversary of the first transcontinental railroad in America.

“In this, the shift in the railroad's message could not have been sharper. An especially illuminating irony of the Union Pacific is this: Credit Mobilier, the corrupt engine that drove construction of what was now celebrated as the nation's great unifier, had been born in dedication to national division. Before it was acquired and renamed by Thomas Durant and George Francis Train, it was the Pennsylvania Fiscal Agency, brainchild of Duff Green, an ardent slavery apologist from Georgia who hoped to fund lines from New Orleans through Texas and then both westward to Southern California and southwestward through Mexico to Mazatlan. His was one of many visions of a powerful bi-oceanic Southeast resting on the institution ‘intended by a wise Providence’ for any civilized order—Black slavery.

“Now, with the Union preserved, the rhetoric of sectional dissonance gave way to one of railroads as agents of coalescence. As with the telegraph, bodily metaphors seemed irresistible. When the Pacific line was completed, Chicago celebrated with a hundred thousand persons in a seven-mile-long procession that ended with a windy oration by Vice President Schuyler Colfax. His imagery was both tangled and revealing. The nation had been literally reborn. Before the war it had been divided north-to-south but also, overall, had been a sprawling, inchoate body, what France's Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand had called ‘a giant without bones,’ In the war that body had found its strength and now, reaching westward, it had found its form. The new America lay toward the Pacific, the railroad its spine and with ‘iron ribs in every direction’ and arms reaching for the commerce of Asia.

“This vision, of the railroad embodying a renewed nation, had distinctive western colorations. First among them was virility, a West of unbridled masculine energy. Its clearest description was in the towns, ‘Hell on Wheels,’ that served as supply and recreation points. North Platte in Nebraska, Julesburg in Colorado, Benton, Laramie, Cheyenne, and Green River in Wyoming, and Bear River in Utah—some had been snoozing stage stops before being shaken awake. Others were built from nothing. All were collections of tents and flimsy plank buildings along dust-blown streets. Like other western working sites, notably mining camps and cattle towns, they were dominated by young men with spending money and glands at full throttle, on the loose from monotonous grunt work done under tight discipline. There was open, rampant vice. Visitors like Henry Morton Stanley wrote of the many hard cases, sharpers, and especially prostitutes, ‘expensive articles [who] come in for a large share of the money wasted.’ A large, revolving population of over-liquored men translated into plenty of brawling and high-decibel disorder. There were a handful of homicides and in Bear River a riot that took at least a dozen lives. Cheyenne vigilantes hanged seven men in 1867 and 1868.

“That rough reality, however, was consistently overstressed. An eastern reporter claimed absurdly that Julesburg hosted 750 brothels and gambling houses. Samuel Bowles wrote that the towns, ‘congregation[s] of scum and wickedness,’ averaged a murder a day. Stanley agreed on the homicidal clip and noted that men walked the streets of Julesburg who had murdered for five dollars. The going rate in Cheyenne was ten, wrote a Chicago Tribune correspondent. There is nothing to back up such claims, however. The Frontier Index, a newspaper that moved with the railroad, eagerly recorded the violence it witnessed from Laramie to Green River to Bear River, yet between March and November of 1868 it noted only a single murder and three lynchings (and dozens of arrests for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct).

“Even correcting for lively exaggeration, there seems something like a compulsive inflation of mayhem and dissipation that would be repeated over and again by visitors to the new country. The towns pictured at the tip of the railroad were expressions of expansion as national machismo. It was an image that would appear and prosper in various settings, a West of hairy chests and split lips.”

author: Elliott West title: Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion publisher: University of Nebraska Press date: page(s): 196-198

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science in 1927 -- 4/15/2026

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 02:33:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Science by Year by DK. Scientific breakthroughs in the year 1927:

“The year started with a milestone in communication technology. On January 7, a collaboration between the American Telephone Company and Britain's General Post Office opened the first transatlantic telephone service. On its first day 31 calls were made between New York and London.”

“A further development came in the field of quantum physics. Erwin Schrodinger had laid the foundations for quantum mechanics with his description of the wavelike characteristics of particles. Now, German physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) reasoned that the wave function of a particle could not be localized to a specific point in space and have a definable wavelength. Heisenberg developed this as his uncertainty principle. Its consequences are extraordinary: The more accurately a particle’s position is measured, the less accurately it is possible to determine its movement, and vice versa. Later, the Copenhagen Interpretation stated that it is impossible to experimentally measure wavelike and particlelike properties at the same time.

Solvay Conference on Quantum Mechanics

“While Baird worked in London on his television, the American Bell Company was also developing the technology. In April, Bell had a breakthrough when the company sent the first long-distance TV transmission using the semimechanical television from Washington to New York. Five months later, American inventor Philo Farnsworth (1906-71) introduced a way of scanning and transmitting electronically. Russian-American inventor Vladimir Zworykin (1888-1982) was working on similar technology at the same time, but it was Farnsworth who made it a reality.

“In April, Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaitre [1894-1966) published a scientific paper containing a revolutionary theory: that the universe is expanding. Lemaitre elaborated upon his theory in a presentation to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1931, suggesting that the universe had originated from a primeval atom. His 'exploding cosmic egg' model anticipated the work of American astronomer Edwin Hubble [see 1929) and was the forerunner of the Big Bang theory [see pp.344-45].”

author: DK title: Science Year by Year: The Ultimate Visual Guide to the Discoveries that Changed the World publisher: DK date: page(s): 259

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marcus aurelius -- 4/14/2025

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 02:22:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Advice from the famed Stoic philosophical work Meditations, by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius:

“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquillity; and I affirm that tranquillity is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind. Constantly then give to thyself this retreat, and renew thyself; and let thy principles be brief and fundamental, which, as soon as thou shalt recur to them, will be sufficient to cleanse the soul completely and to send thee back free from all discontent with the things to which thou returnest. For with what art thou discontented? With the badness of men? Recall to the mind this conclusion, that rational animals exist for one another, and that to endure is a part of justice, and that men do wrong involuntarily; and consider how many already, after mutual enmity, suspicion, hatred, and fighting, have been stretched dead, reduced to ashes; and be quiet at last. But perhaps thou art dissatisfied with that which is assigned to thee out of the universe. Recall to thy recollection this alternative; either there is providence or atoms [fortuitous concurrence of things]; or remember the arguments by which it has been proved that the world is a kind of political community [and be quiet at last]. But perhaps corporeal things will still fasten upon thee. Consider then further that the mind mingles not with the breath, whether moving gently or violently, when it has once drawn itself apart and discovered its own power, and think also of all that thou hast heard and assented to about pain and pleasure [and be quiet at last]. But perhaps the desire of the thing called fame will torment thee. See how soon everything is forgotten, and look at the chaos of infinite time on each side of [the present], and the emptiness of applause, and the changeableness and want of judgment in those who pretend to give praise, and the narrowness of the space within which it is circumscribed [and be quiet at last]. For the whole earth is a point, and how small a nook in it is this thy dwelling, and how few are there in it, and what kind of people are they who will praise thee.”

Marble bust, Musée Saint-Raymond (Toulouse, France)

“This then remains: Remember to retire into this little territory of thy own, and above all do not distract or strain thyself, but be free, and look at things as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, as a mortal. But among the things readiest to thy hand to which thou shalt turn, let there be these, which are two. One is that things do not touch the soul, for they are external and remain immovable; but our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within. The other is that all these things which thou seest change immediately and will no longer be; and constantly bear in mind how many of these changes thou hast already witnessed. The universe is transformation: life is opinion.”

author: Marcus Aurelius title: Meditations publisher: date: page(s): 50-52

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our bill of rights--4/13/2026

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:30:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Constitutional Myths by Ray Raphael. Given widespread unease with the Constitution, a Bill of Rights was added. Nineteen were considered, ten were adopted:

“The Constitution of the United States, drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788, did not follow the precedent set by these state constitutions. Despite spending almost four months drafting their new plan, the framers did not include within it a thoughtful listing of rights but only a scattering of guarantees. On September 12, just five days before the end of the Convention, George Mason finally suggested that delegates add a "Bill of Rights" similar to the state declarations of rights, but his motion failed to garner the support of a single state delegation.”

“Although state conventions ratified the Constitution, several included a caveat: the new plan should be amended as soon as possible. In fact, they proposed scores of amendments, some resembling provisions of what we now know as the Bill of Rights, but many others altering or even deleting structural features of the Constitution. New York's convention coupled its list of proposed amendments with a demand for a second federal convention to consider these various proposals. The profusion of proposed amendments, plus the prospect of a second convention, frightened supporters of the Constitution, who feared that a new convention, if it met, would revise the fledgling Constitution before it could be put into effect and gut some of its major provisions.”

“Most leading Federalists hunkered down. In arguing against a second federal convention, they insisted that a bill of rights was not necessary and could even jeopardize rights that were not included. The job of the Constitution, they said, was to state what government could do, not what it couldn't do. Rights already were secured because the government possessed no power that allowed it to impinge upon them. In fact, any catalog of specified rights would imply that rights were limited to those in the catalog, and not others.”

“James Madison and George Washington agreed with this argument, but they also took an accurate measure of people's displeasure. It was strong and it was widespread. Rather than fight a rearguard action against the wave of discontent, they preferred to channel and control it. Article V of the Constitution stipulated that either Congress or state conventions might propose amendments. If Congress acted first, Madison and Washington reasoned, it could take charge of the issue and protect the substantive features of the new plan–congressional taxation, for instance–while giving ground elsewhere. Madison, meanwhile, pledged to his Virginia constituents that he would work to add a bill of rights if they elected him to represent them in Congress.”

“Once elected, in the First Federal Congress, Madison whittled down the large list of amendments suggested by the states' ratifying conventions. With President Washington's blessing, he proposed nineteen that did not endanger key constitutional components. After considerable debate and some revision, Congress pared Madison's list down to twelve amendments, which it sent to the states for approval. Ten of these, which we call today the Bill of Rights, were ratified by three-quarters of the states, as required by the new Constitution. The genesis of the Bill of Rights, like the origins of the Constitution, was political as well as theoretical.”

“The short-term effect of the framing and ratification of the Bill of Rights was to put a Federalist stamp on the amendments and to doom the attempts by the Constitution's opponents to modify the substantive or structural features of the new plan. The long-term effect was to reinforce America's culture of rights and to infuse specific rights into American jurisprudence. After more than two centuries, the Bill of Rights, which had been so casually dismissed by the framers, figures so prominently in our minds that it often eclipses the Constitution itself. In an era when the word "government" has a bad name, the ten amendments that circumscribe the federal government's authority over individuals are often viewed more favorably than the Constitution the framers created in 1787.”

author: Ray Raphael title: Constitutional Myths: What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right publisher: The New Press date: page(s): 132-134

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young gustav klimt -- 4/10/2026

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 03:00:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Gustav Klimt by Tobias G. Natter. Gustav Klimt, the famed late-nineteenth century Austrian painter whose work helped define Art Nouveau, now brings record-breaking prices for his artwork:

“Gustav Klimt was six years old when his parents enrolled him at the local elementary school at 61 Lerchenfelderstrasse in Vienna's 7th district in 1868. The young Gustav Klimt displayed a pronounced talent for art even as a pupil, and his teacher suggested to his parents that they should send him to the Kunstgewerbeschule, the School of Applied Art newly opened in 1867. The fact that his father, Ernst (1834-1892), was an engraver undoubtedly helped foster Gustav's creative leanings. It is a sign of his parents' appreciation of natural talent that they paid for their sons to attend the School of Applied Arts rather than arranging for them to begin an apprenticeship right after elementary school. In October 1876 the fourteen-year-old Gustav passed the entrance examination to the School of Applied Arts--which involved copying an antique head--with cop marks. Sitting beside him during the same examination was Franz Marsch (1861-1942), who would become a close friend and colleague for many years. Soon thereafter, Gustav's younger brother Ernst Klimt (1864-1892) also successfully sat the entrance examination of the School of Applied Arts and thus completed the artist trio in 1878.

“In comparison to the traditional curriculum caught at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, established in 1692, the reaching system at the School of Applied Arts was progressive. The school had evolved out of the Imperial and Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, which had opened its doors in 1864. Just as the Austrian Museum was modeled on the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum), founded in London in 1852, one year after the first Great Exhibition, so its School of Applied Arts oriented itself towards the English schools of design, the most modern educational institutes of the day for students wishing to train in the industrial arts. The founder of the two institutions in Vienna, Rudolf von Eitelberger (1817-1885), had inscribed the ‘elevation of taste’ as what we might call a mission statement into the statutes. Eitelberger, himself a professor at the University of Vienna, saw art and applied art as inextricably linked. For this reason, the three major disciplines of architecture, sculpture and painting remained the basis of the education delivered by the School of Applied Arts, ‘for industrial art consists of nothing other than the application of these three arts to the requirements of everyday life’. When it came to filling the professorial chairs, applicants were informed that consideration would be given to ‘artists who demonstrate thorough proficiency in the particular area of art for which they will have responsibility and at the same time a love of the applied arts as a whole; not artists, however, who are only disposed to work in the sphere of industrial art on an occasional and incidental basis’. Rudolf von Eitelberger wanted the School of Applied Arts to educate ‘skilled forces for the needs of the art industry’; it was to train designers and draughtsmen for factories and craftsmen and teachers for industrial, technical and vocational colleges and for other schools of drawing and design. The School of Applied Arts correspondingly offered a number of different courses, of which the painting and figural drawing classes were taught by Ferdinand Laufberger (1829-1881).

Photographic portrait from 1914

“The curriculum followed by Gustav and Ernst led to a qualification as a drawing teacher: two years in the preparatory class and exams in the third year. As a candidate for the teaching profession, Gustav Klimt had to draw plaster casts in the morning, attend lectures in the afternoon and take life classes at night. Our information about Klimt's training at the School of Applied Arts comes to us not only from the institution's own files, but also from the curriculum vitae written by Gustav Klimt himself and Franz Macsch's Autobiographical Sketches. For the first two years, he attended classes held by three professors: Karl Hrachowina (1845-1896), a practising etcher who joined the teaching staff in 1877 and taught free-hand drawing and historical styles of ornament; Ludwig Minnigerode (1847-1900), a pupil of Eduard von Engerch (1818-1.897) at the Vienna Academy and teacher of genre painting and portraiture at the School of Applied Arts from 1876 to 1900; and Michael Rieser (1828-1905), professor of history painting and portraiture from 1868 co 1880. In the case of Franz Matsch, Gustav Klimt and Ernst Klimt, the new teaching methods soon produced results: busy on stained glass designs for the recently completed Votive Church by Heinrich von Ferscel (1828- 1883), Rieser gave his best preparatory-class students, Gustav Klimt and Franz Matsch, the job of enlarging his sketches for some of the windows, as we know from Macsch's writings. The two students were paid for their work, which probably represented their first joint commission. At the start of his career as an artist, Klimt also made a little money by painting chiefly naturalistic portraits, often based on photographs. In her writings, his sister Hermine recollected char, ‘in his spare time at home, [Gustav] painted portraits from photographs. He did this work to the complete satisfaction of his customers. He was paid 5 gulden apiece’.

“In his third year at the School of Applied Arts, when Klimt had already passed the first round of exams and was studying under Michael Rieser for the State examination that would allow him to qualify as a drawing teacher, Rudolf von Eitelberger paid a visit to the school studio. Rieser took the occasion to draw Eichelberger's attention to the work of his gifted senior students Gustav Klimt, Ernst Klimt and Franz Marsch. According to Matsch, Eitelberger exclaimed: ‘Drawing- teachers? [ ... ] You must become painters!’. Eitelberger decided to award scholarships of twenty gulden a month to all three and invited them to join the painting and decorative-art class for a further two years of study. ‘The “Brothers Klimt and Matsch Company” was financed’, as Franz Matsch wrote in his memoirs. Eitelberger recognized the young artists' talent at a point in time when, with Vienna's Ringstrasse in the grip of a construction boom, graduates of the class for painting and decorative art were in enormous demand.”

author: Tobias G. Natter title: Gustav Klimt. Drawings and Paintings publisher: TASCHEN date: page(s): 13

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homing pigeons -- 4/9/2026

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:20:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from Saladin by John Man. During the time of the Crusades, messenger pigeons were used as a primary form of communication:

"Let us recall how close all the antagonists and protagonists [during the Crusades] in [Saladin’s] story were, and how much they knew about each other. Turks, Arabs and Europeans were enemies and rivals, but also allies, trading partners and friends, often all these things in quick succession.

"Information flew between them, literally, because all major cities were linked by pigeon-post. This gets only passing mention in Arab sources, possibly because it was so routine as to be unworthy of comment. It would have started a long, unrecorded time -- perhaps centuries -- before, with pigeons being kept for food, as we keep chickens. Over the years, people noticed that they were able to find their way home from very far away (modern fanciers race their pigeons for up to 1,600 kilometres). Pigeons can fly for up to twelve hours at 100 kilometres per hour, for three days, resting at night. All leaders, civilian and military, would have kept pigeons ready to send to distant cities or take into battle.

Pigeons with messages attached.

"The historian al-Maqrizi recorded one very nonroutine use of homing pigeons. In the late tenth century, the fifth Fatimid caliph al-Aziz loved the cherries of Baalbek. As a treat, his vizier -- in effect, prime minister -- arranged for 600 homing pigeons to be sent off from Baalbek to Cairo, each carrying a silk bag attached to either leg, with a single cherry inside each bag. The pigeons had 600 kilometres to fly. If they left in the morning, al-Aziz could have had fresh cherries for dessert that evening, with enough left over for his many guests.

"Others took note, and were impressed. Sir John Mandeville mentions pigeons in his fourteenth-century book of Travels. This was a compendium of travellers' tales, with a heavy emphasis on tales. 'Sir John' never existed; he was (probably, possibly) a Flemish physician, perhaps a traveller himself, but also a fantasist and shameless plagiarist. He wrote in French, but many much-corrupted translations of the lost original gave the work international popularity. From somewhere -- perhaps during his own travels in the Holy Land -- 'Sir John' heard about the pigeon-post. As an early and rather cumbersome translation puts it:

In that country and other countries beyond they have a custom, when they shall use war, and when men hold siege about city or castle; and they within dare not send out messengers with letter from lord to lord for to ask succour, they make their letters and bind them to the neck of a culver [an obsolete word for a pigeon, perhaps from the Latin columba], and let the culver flee. And the culvers be so taught, that they flee with those letters to the very place that men would send them to. For the culvers be nourished in those places where they be sent to.

"Consider: for this system to work at all, every major town must have trained its teams of pigeons, which would have been divided among every other major town. How many towns the size of Baalbek or larger would have been part of the pigeon-postal system? Shall we say twenty? The 600 cherry-carriers were raised and trained in Cairo, their home base, then transferred by horse or camel to Baalbek, along with (say) a few dozen more which would have been kept for official business. But Baalbek would have had pigeons delivered from all the other nineteen cities as well, and constantly redelivered after each mission. And as breeders know today, you need redundancy.

"Not all pigeons are equally talented: the good ones lead the bad. Nor is there a guarantee that any one pigeon will survive severe weather or predators. Over 160 kilometres, 95 per cent survive; but over several hundred kilometres you expect to lose about 50-80 per cent of them. Of al-Aziz's 600 cherry-carriers, perhaps only 300 made it. To be sure of a message getting through long distance, you had to copy the same message three or more times and attach it to that many different birds. There must have been a whole specialist industry of dovecote builders, breeders, trainers, transporters and supervisors -- hundreds of people to look after tens of thousands of pigeons."

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edison in manhattan--4/8/2026

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 02:48:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes. Moving from Menlo Park, Thomas Edison sets out to conquer New York:

“In February of 1881, Edison and his key staff members began shifting, at long last, into Manhattan, joining the already legendary cacophony of the Empire City, what one guidebook of the era described as "the intense activity and bustle alike visible and audible in all the conditions of its street-life. The crush of carriages, drays, trucks, and other vehicles, private and public, roaring and rattling over the stone-paved streets; the crowds of swiftly moving men walking as if not to lose a second of time, their faces preoccupied and eager; the sidewalks encumbered, without regard to the convenience of pedestrians, with boxes and bales of goods–in a word, the whole aspect of New York in its business portions is a true key to the character of its population, as the most energetic and restless of people. By the end of February, Edison had signed a lease for the handsome former Bishop Mansion at 65 Fifth Avenue, an ornate four-story double brownstone in the city’s most fashionable quarter, just below 14th Street.

“At the highly visible headquarters for the new Edison Electric Illuminating Company, Edison quickly rigged up a steam engine and generator and by mid-April had equipped its tall-ceilinged rooms with numerous ‘electroliers’ (electric chandeliers) and other attractive light fixtures. Illuminated every evening and long in the wee hours, 65 Fifth Avenue was a glorious and radiant new electrical reality, where Edison held court most nights. The back parlor served as his campaign headquarters, complete with a wall-size map of Manhattan and his designated first lighting district. Long before moving into New York, Edison had thoroughly canvassed his prospective ‘first district’ central station electric customers and determined that 1,500 were coal-gas customers using twenty thousand jets. All this was indicated on a map, along with the planned routes of the subways, switches, and so forth. For his new role as businessman, Edison moved up sartorially from his old blue flannel suit to a seedy Prince Albert frock coat. He was in his usual ebullient spirits: ‘We’re up in the world now. I remember ten years ago–I had just come from Boston–I had to walk the streets of New York all night because I hadn’t the price of a bed. And now think of it! I’m to occupy a whole house in Fifth Avenue.’

“Edison certainly liked to promote this Horatio Alger story that predated those popular books, describing himself as arriving in New York as almost penniless youth with a great talent for wireless technology and machines. He happened, so he said, to be in the first days of a lowly job at the Gold Indicator Company, which supplied Wall street via ticker tapes with the fast-changing price of gold, when the equipment ground to a halt. As the officers began to panic, Edison examined the silent machine and observed that the trouble was a broken contact spring. Amid the hysteria, he quickly fixed the problem and was duly promoted to the important position of technician. And so was launched his prosperous career as an inventor and improver of telegraphy equipment. The reality, says Edison scholar Paul Israel, was that while Edison certainly started life with a few advantages, when he first came to Manhattan he was already well connected and had a respectable-not lowly-job as an engineer, and any money problems were short-lived.

“When Edison returned to New York this time, he brought with him many of his main Menlo Park crew, each assigned new and greater responsibilities. In mid-February, John Kruesi, Edison's trusted Swiss mechanic, the man who could fabricate and make almost anything work, had opened the Edison Electric Tube Company at 65 Washington Street. Kruesi was the general in charge of Edison's toughest campaign-the manufacture and then physical installation (beneath some of Manhattan's busiest, filthiest thoroughfares) of fourteen miles of underground distribution cables and wires. He would command a big gang of Irish laborers, many of whom viewed electricity as some evil sprite. They would share the nighttime streets with the city's denizens of the dark, including the great army of rag pickers and their dog-pulled wooden carts, each licensed to root through the daily refuse for salvageable cloth. Kruesi's longtime Menlo Park assistant, Charles Dean, was put in charge of the all-important Edison Machine Works, located in an old ironworks building at 104 Goerck Street near the East River docks on the crowded and noisome Lower East Side. Here in this grimy setting would be perfected and manufactured the workhorses of the Edison system–the generators. Meanwhile, back at Menlo Park, Francis Upton, the scientist, was running the light bulb factory, now churning out a thousand lights a day. These three enterprises were all organized and financed by Edison or his closest associates

“Even as Edison himself settled into Manhattan, his other right hand man, Charles Batchelor, sailed off to Paris to launch the Edison European branch. Business manager and sometime Edison promoter Edward Johnson headed to England to push the Edison light there. Both were to lay the groundwork for the electrical empire Edison had envisioned from the start. Edison was a famous commercial name already overseas, for he had conducted major European business with his previous inventions. He had existing partners and contacts and now Batchelor and Johnson were to begin launching the famous boss's biggest enterprise yet–central electric stations, as well as isolated or stand-alone electric plants for individual factories or buildings. The Edison Electric Light Company of Europe had already been formed in January of 1880. So even as Edison labored away in Gotham, Charles Batchelor was hard at work in Paris organizing the all-important Edison system display for that summer's International Electrical Exhibition. Across the Channel, Johnson began building a demonstration central station that would light up the centrally located Holborn Viaduct.

“Back in New York, down on Wall Street, Edison's investors were again questioning the necessity–and the ensuing huge expense–of burying the electric wires in ‘subways,’ something Edison had been determined to do from the start. By the 1880s, anyone lifting his or her gaze above street level in the commercial blocks of American cities could barely see the sky for the ugly maze of hundreds of electric wires strung higgledy-piggledy between towering wooden poles. The wires crisscrossed the streets and were festooned from windows and rooftops as if huge crazed spiders had run amok. A range of fast expanding industries now depended upon electricity (most of it still battery produced) –including the telegraph, telephone, stock tickers, fire and burglar alarms, and certain small manufacturers. In any city, numerous companies vied to provide these various services, and where they found customers, they installed more poles-some towering a hundred feet and higher. Firms came and went, but their wires remained, deteriorating, fraying, dropping onto one another, and creating short circuits. However, all these early electric-based services operated on very low voltage direct current derived from large batteries. These wires might cause a shock but would not electrocute a hapless passerby.

The Edison Machine Works on Goerck Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan

“All that changed with the coming of the new outdoor arc lighting in the 1880s. The extremely high voltage alternating current required to operate these lights–as high as 3,500 volts–made their outdoor wires potentially truly perilous. The Brush Electric Company had installed its first lights on Broadway between 14th and 34th Streets at the end of 1880, and their brilliant blue white light soon earned Broadway its sobriquet ‘the Great White Way.’ New York City then contracted with Brush to light more of Broadway and several squares.

“Hotels, theaters, and other public spots installed arc lights. Brush built three central power stations and transmitted its high-power electricity–typically 2,000 to 3,000 volts–on wires strung among the existing low-voltage tangle. Edison wanted nothing to do with these mangled nests of live and abandoned wires and insisted that the Edison system, by burying its wires, would be both safe and reliable. The new Edison system operated on low-voltage direct current, which was efficient and economical only within a half-mile radius of the generator. Beyond the distance, the cost of copper wiring became prohibitive and the energy loss too great. However, Edison prided himself upon the low voltages of his system and believed its buried wires added a great margin of safety for the general public and his customers.

“In late April 1881, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company finally received city permission to begin digging its subways. In the meantime, the company had already wired about fifty first-district homes and office buildings and promised that current would be flowing by the fall, providing them lovely electric light just as the winter gloom closed in. The city's permission came with one deeply worrying caveat: Five city inspectors–to be paid $25 a week by Edison–would monitor progress. Edison envisioned all kinds of trouble aimed mainly at extracting bribes. But in true Tammany ‘do no work’ fashion, the inspectors appeared only on Saturday afternoon to collect their pay. Kruesi quickly broke ground with his Irish street crews, working largely at night when the city's much maligned streetcleaning crews spread out to remove the two to three million pounds of equine manure left behind each day by the city's 150,000 horses. Kruesi soon found that digging down two feet was far more time consuming and arduous than expected. Edison and Kruesi personally had to install the connector boxes located every twenty feet. Worse yet, the suppliers of the copper wiring and the iron pipes (the latter substituting for the original wooden boxes) had stopped delivering. June was slow going, as it rained every day but one. Then, on July 2, the Edison men organizing the evening's subway work heard shocking news: President James Garfield, waiting at the Baltimore and Potomac station for a train to the cool of the New Jersey seaside, had been shot twice in the back by an angry job seeker. Still alive, the president was carefully conveyed to the stifling heat of the White House. The nation prayed that Garfield would survive this terrible attack.

“At the time, Edison was scouting the worst slum streets of his first district, looking for a cheap but capacious building to house the heart and soul of his system-the central generators. That August, with the summer heat exacerbating the usual stench of horse piss and manure, great piles of garbage, and sour beer and sawdust from the ubiquitous bucket shops, Edison purchased 255-57 Pearl Street for $65,000. From this squalid block, Edison's electricity would eventually gently hum forth a half mile in each direction, lighting up the all-important financial district centered on Wall Street and much of newspaper row. ‘The Pearl Street Station,’ Edison later said, ‘was the biggest and most responsible thing I had ever undertaken. It was a gigantic problem, with many ramifications .... All our apparatus, devices and parts were home-devised and home-made. Our men were completely new and without central station experience. What might happen on turning a big current into the conductors under the streets of New York no one could say.’ The Edison dynamos-powered by coal-fired steam engines-produced an initial alternating current electricity that was then gathered from the machine by ‘commutators’ and brushes and turned into a direct current. One of the perennial problems with these early generators was that the constant friction against the commutators and brushes meant regular replacement. Every step of the way, myriad technical problems arose that had to be resolved. Again and again, the starting date was postponed.”

author: Jill Jonnes title: Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks date: page(s): 76-81

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evolution of saint petersburg -- 4/7/2026

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 03:06:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from The Design of Cities by Edmund N. Bacon. The design of the city of Saint Petersburg:

“Saint Petersburg (now Leningrad) in Russia is one of the few great cities built in its entirety after Renaissance design ideas had reached their full maturity. Its planners had available to them the experience of a broad range of completed civic works.'

“When Peter the Great decided he was tired of Moscow and wanted to create an entirely new capital for Russia, and in 1712 announced it would be on the banks of the Neva River, Paris had already achieved a dynamic scale.

“In contrast to Paris, where the design forces burst outward from the old city, in Saint Petersburg the lines of force thrust inward from the regional countryside. Their convergence was at the one point of attraction which adequately symbolizes the underlying concept of the new city, the point of contact of man and the sea, the shipbuilding ways enclosed within the arms of the Admiralty. The convergence of these three lines of movement, the evolution of which is demonstrated on these pages, determined the form of the major elements of Saint Petersburg and provided a powerful framework for the subtle and highly refined design to be carried out later.

“In 1725 the design tension has already been established between architectural elements on both sides of the river, appropriate for a maritime settlement. The pull from the hinterland is expressed in the yellow line, the first thrust of the single road from the east direct to the tower on the moated Admiralty. This building is the focal point in space, which, though completely rebuilt in subsequent years, retained its pre-eminence as the symbolic center of the city. The road from the southwest is foreseen as an idea, and the axial way does not exist.

Saint Petersburg, 1744

“By 1750 the plans have begun to take on the character of a city. Streets have been built, and the three converging ways are firmly established, although their thrust has not yet fully extended, in a design sense, to their objective, the Admiralty tower. The Winter Palace, later to be rebuilt, appears to the right. The multiple design interrelationships at this point have not yet been resolved.

“In 1800 the three converging roads have been carried through to a definite junction with the still-moated Admiralty, but the spaces created are accidental and unintegrated as a total concept. The small church below the Admiralty later will be replaced by the Saint Isaac Cathedral, related in a design sense with the westernmost of the converging streets. On the banks of the Neva to the east, the Winter Palace has been rebuilt to its present form. Here, too, the residual open spaces are undefined, but contain within them the germ of the idea which was to be so powerfully expressed later. The crosshatch structure on the point which splits the river channel had been built to express architecturally the idea of the terrain. The next generation replaced it with a building perpendicular to the architectural mass behind it. As shown in the 1850 plan, this building asserted its design influence directly into the water by the curved bulkhead on its axis.

“1850 [saw] … the full realization of the whole series of design influences which had been building up over the previous hundred years into one of the most dynamic compositions ever made. Here we see the Admiralty rebuilt in a form reminiscent of the older building (see page 196) but on a much more powerful scale and in better relationship to the force of the axial thrusts. The original and the present elevations of the Admiralty are shown at the same scale, for comparison, on page 198. The Winter Palace axis has been extended southward by the great column which marks the focal center of the remarkable parabolic-shaped space defined by the Ministry of War, forged out of the old structures. The thrust of the space before the Admiralty is contained and turned back on itself by the enclosure of the area around the column. This provides a firm counterfoil for the elongated extension of the space west of the Admiralty, beyond the Cathedral of Saint Isaac, into the depths of the city.

“The interaction of the cross-movements of this highly dynamic and extraordinarily shaped space with the extreme formality created by the symmetrical convergence of the three axes meeting at the Admiralty tower is one of the wonders of urban design."

author: Edmund N. Bacon title: Design of Cities: Revised Edition publisher: Penguin Books date: page(s): 196-197

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civil war uniforms--4/6/2026

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 03:06:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from A Nation Unraveled by Sarah Jones Weicksel. Uniforms were crucial in the America Civil War for forming and bolstering individual and collective identity

“In July 1863, William Willoughby; a Union soldier stationed along the North Carolina coast, wrote a letter home to his wife, Nancy, in New Haven, Connecticut. The Battle of Gettysburg had ended a few days prior, but Willoughby was not writing about battle, nor much of anything related to military movements. Instead, he asked her to make 'two more shirts yes four more if you will–like those two plaid wool shirts' she had previously made. The sizes, he noted, should be 'two of one size and two of the other.'

“This was just one in a series of clothing requests made by Willoughby going back several months, including shirts and caps of different sizes. He was also keenly interested in an accounting of the money Nancy spent on materials and of her labor. Over time, Willoughby's instructions became increasingly detailed: 'Select buttons as will not be likely to pull out from the eye. Boardman wants you to make two button holes on the sleeves of his two shirts instead of buttons and buttonholes and then send two buttons so he can link them together and have sleeve buttons I mean two buttons for each sleeve ... and mark each mans shirts make them well and strong and of as good material as the last.' The garments were not for William himself. The Willoughbys were running their own informal, possibly clandestine, clothing business and his comrades were their customers. William Willoughby was clearly committed to supplying a quality product to his customers. The Willoughbys had a lively market for home-sewn shirts among William's Union comrades in North Carl olina, for whom the details of their clothing mattered. The pages that follow explain why those soldiers considered it worthwhile to have clothing shipped several hundred miles from Connecticut, rather than draw it from a quartermaster, and just why Boardman was so concerned about his buttons.

A plate showing the uniform of a U.S. Army first sergeant, circa 1858, influenced by the French army

“Civil War soldiers' uniforms are generally understood within the broader context of disputed government contracts and manufacturers who were responsible for establishing a standard commercial sizing system for men–a system that thrust the already-burgeoning ready-made clothing industry into the modern era of mass production. Certainly this was a development of no small matter–the widespread acceptance of a sizing system shaped the modern garment industry. However, the ways in which soldiers and their families experienced the sudden large-scale demand for uniforms was far more complex. That is a story about mud and mire, ill-fitting boots, chafing pants, and stolen knapsacks. It is a history of people grappling with available technologies and production methods, remedying governmental failures, and working out the problems of fitting clothes to the conditions of battle and camp life.

“Uniforms were critical, in waging war, performing not only the practical purpose of clothing men's bodies, but also the work of shoring up the collective identities and community support necessary for successfully deploying and supporting armies. Uniforms were central to creating shared identities that centered on soldiers' manhood: the donning of a uniform signaled a man's transition from civilian to soldier and defined a relationship to the government. Supply shortages and quality problems meant that uniforms were often more effective at initially arousing patriotic fervor than maintaining it.

“Within the complex relationship between the home front and battlefront developed both a public culture of manhood and private and public struggles to maintain soldiers' comfort, health, and appearance. Soldiers' garments helped people parse the blurred boundaries between manhood, duty, and incompatible gender norms for men within the context of war. People understood many of these garments as possessing transformative qualities: Brass elevated a soldier's status; a fitted uniform replaced the rags worn by a 'slumped slave;' transforming him into a 'battle-ready' man; body armor purportedly 'steeled' a soldier's body and mind for battle. Clothing, the process of provisioning, and the circumstances of war intertwined to define gender, and in the process shaped people's everyday experiences of, and attitudes toward, an expanding federal government.

“Competing and complementary understandings of manhood were expressed through multiple material forms that evolved during the war, including body armor and a 'battlefront style' of brightly colored shirts and body armor. But at the outbreak of war, white Americans across the United States and its territories turned to the same clothing culture as a public means of defining manhood. In the midst of sectional strife, both sides of the conflict adopted uniform culture not just as their military culture but as the dominant culture writ large. This was a culture that defined both manhood and womanhood in the context of war-it was, I argue, a national 'brass manhood.'"

author: Sarah Jones Weicksel title: A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era (Civil War America) publisher: University of North Carolina Press date: page(s): 19-20

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tyla's voice --4/3/2026

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 03:20:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Tyla by Jamey Lowell. Tyla on discovering her voice

“Tyla's relationship with music deepened long before anyone outside her home realized she had real potential. What began as casual singing around the house started to take a more intentional shape as she grew older. The spark didn't arrive in a dramatic moment. It came quietly, building through small decisions she made as a teenager, the songs she listened to, the artists she studied, the confidence she gained each time she pushed herself a little further.

“Like many young singers, her earliest experiments were private. She sang in her room where no one could interrupt, often repeating a single line until she felt it land in her chest rather than just in her throat. She recorded voice notes on her phone to hear how she actually sounded, a habit that embarrassed her at first, because playback stripped away the comfort of the moment and exposed the truth of her voice. But she kept doing it because those recordings helped her learn. She listened back, noticed where she strained, where she rushed, and where she felt at ease. It was a slow, personal form of training.

“Dancing played its own role. Tyla wasn't just drawn to melodies; she was pulled toward rhythm. Music didn't feel static to her. It moved. It demanded motion. She taught herself routines by watching music videos, pausing and rewinding until she understood the way a performer's body matched the beat. The combination of singing and dancing began shaping her identity as an entertainer long before she considered herself one. Performance, even in its rough early form, felt natural to her.

Tyla in 2021

“Her influences at the time reflected the mix of cultures she grew up around. She listened to international pop stars whose voices filled global charts, but she also felt at home with South African artists who carried the pulse of the country's evolving sound. R&B singers taught her tone control and emotional delivery. Pop artists showed her the power of hooks and visual presence. South African icons taught her how rhythm could carry meaning even before words entered the picture. She absorbed pieces from all of them without trying to copy anyone outright. What she wanted wasn't imitation but understanding, a sense of how voices worked, how songs were built, how artists carved out personal style.

“As she reached her mid-teens, her experiments grew bolder. She searched for beats online and sang over them, using whatever equipment she had. Sometimes it was a basic microphone, other times just her phone. These early recordings weren't made with the expectation of going viral or building a fan base. They were made because she needed to try. Each track helped her find new textures in her voice and new ways to phrase her ideas. She practiced harmonies, tried different tones, and pushed into the higher parts of her register. She didn't always know what she was doing, but she learned through trial, error, and persistence.

“Her personality shaped this stage of discovery, too. Tyla wasn't loud about her ambitions. She shared clips online sparingly, often holding onto them for days before deciding to post. When she did share, the responses gave her a small but meaningful push. The encouragement felt validating, but what mattered more was that strangers had reacted to her voice at all. It meant she wasn't the only one who heard something in it.

“At home, her family noticed her growing focus. They had always known she loved music, but now it was becoming more than a pastime. They saw her staying up late to write or practice. They saw her listening to songs differently, not just enjoying them but studying their structure. While they still emphasized practical career plans, they also recognized that music wasn't slipping away as she grew older. It was taking root.

“She began writing her own lyrics more frequently, turning teenage emotions into verses and choruses. She wrote about things she felt but didn't always say out loud: small disappointments, confidence shifts, daydreams, moments of frustration. These early songs weren't polished, but they were honest. They gave her a voice that belonged to her alone.”

author: Jamey Lowell title: TYLA: Breaking Barriers in Music: How She Became the First South African Solo Artist in Decades to Crack the U.S. Charts publisher: date: page(s): 17-20

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the commuter -- 4/2/2026

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 03:30:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from Here is New York by E.B. White. In his classic 1949 book, E.B. White, famed as a writer for The New Yorker and for the children's book Charlotte's Web, contrasts those who were born and now live in New York to those who commute to New York and to those who came from another place to live in New York:

"There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second there is the New York of the commuter -- the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last -- the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York's high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

"The commuter is the queerest bird of all. The suburb he inhabits has no essential vitality of its own and is a mere roost where he comes at day's end to go to sleep. Except in rare cases, the man who lives in Mamaroneck or Little Neck or Teaneck, and works in New York, discovers nothing much about the city except the time of arrival and departure of trains and buses, and the path to a quick lunch. He is desk-bound, and has never, idly roaming in the gloaming, stumbled suddenly on Belvedere Tower in the Park, seen the ramparts rise sheer from the water of the pond, and the boys along the shore fishing for minnows, girls stretched out negligently on the shelves of the rocks; he has never come suddenly on anything at all in New York as a loiterer, because he has had no time between trains. He has fished in Manhattan's wallet and dug out coins, but has never listened to Manhattan's breathing, never awakened to its morning, never dropped off to sleep in its night.

"About 400,000 men and women come charging onto the Island each weekday morning, out of the mouths of tubes and tunnels. Not many among them have ever spent a drowsy afternoon in the great rustling oaken silence of the reading room of the Public Library, with the book elevator (like an old water wheel) spewing out books onto the trays. They tend their furnaces in Westchester and in Jersey but have never seen the furnaces of the Bowery, the fires that burn in oil drums on zero winter nights. They may work in the financial district downtown and never see the extravagant plantings of Rockefeller Center -- the daffodils and grape hyacinths and birches and the flags trimmed to the wind on a fine morning in spring. Or they may work in a midtown office and may let a whole year swing round without sighting Governors Island from the sea wall. The commuter dies with tremendous mileage to his credit, but he is no rover. His entrances and exits are more devious then those in a prairie-dog village; and he calmly plays bridge while buried in the mud at the bottom of the East River. The Long Island Rail Road alone carried forty million commuters last year; but many of them were the same fellow retracing his steps.

"The terrain of New York is such that a resident sometimes travels farther, in the end, than a commuter. Irving Berlin's journey from Cherry Street in the lower East Side to an apartment uptown was through an alley and was only three or four miles in length; but it was like going three times around the world."

author: E.B. White title: Here is New York publisher: The Little Bookroom date: Copyright E. B. White 1949, 1976 page(s): 25-29

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germs can fly--4/1/2026

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 02:02:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Air-Borne by Carl Zimmer. An atmospheric kingdom of life:

“Yellow fever returned to Philadelphia a number of times over the next decade, and each time Rush became more convinced that 'the miasmata from our atmosphere' were to blame. Writing in 1805 to former president John Adams, Rush declared the outbreaks were bringing him victory over his contagionist rivals. 'A new era has begun in the science of medicine in our city since the appearance of the yellow fever among us,' Rush wrote.

“These were not the declarations of a crank. When Rush died in 1813, he was hailed as the greatest American physician. 'Like a primal fixed star, amid the host of heaven, he shone with a lustre wholly his own,' a minister declared at a memorial for Rush. 'He has done more good in this world than Franklin or Washington,' John Adams wrote.

“After his death, Rush inspired a new generation of anticontagionists. They held control of the medical establishment in both the United States and Europe, and they roundly condemned contagionism as bad for both health and business. Quarantines needlessly slowed down trade by forcing ships to stay isolated for weeks before unloading their goods. In 1824, the British physician Charles Maclean declared that quarantines were worse than useless: by trapping people in the very places where the air carried death, they were "little short of willful murder.

“In the early 1800s, contagionists remained profoundly ignorant about the microorganisms they believed spread diseases. They had yet to link any particular germ to any particular disease. Someone like Maclean could continue to mock the very idea that a germ could spread a disease. In an age dedicated to science, nothing seemed less scientific. 'This unknown and incomprehensible power is endowed with the faculties of self-generation, self-annihilation, self-resuscitation, self-transportation, self-propagation, and an immense variety of other capabilities, no less wonderful, which it condescends to exercise for the destruction of mankind,' Maclean sneered.

Scanning electron microscope image of Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera

“Even as Maclean attacked the contagionists, the world of microorganisms became less unknown, less incomprehensible. In 1824, when Maclean launched his withering attacks, the German naturalist Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg was in Africa on an epic series of journeys that would take him across Arabian deserts and Siberian forests. Along the way, he made the first systematic survey of microorganisms.

“Back in Germany, Ehrenberg organized his tiny creatures into a new classification. He named one group of species Bacteria. He recognized that microorganisms were the most abundant form of life on Earth, thriving everywhere he looked. He found fossils of microorganisms in chalk and limestone–or, to be more precise, he realized that chalk and limestone were made of their long-dead cells. 'Of small things worlds are built,' Ehrenberg once declared.

“While Maclean sneered at the idea of self-transporting germs, Ehrenberg found evidence that they could take spectacular journeys. They could even fly. Ehrenberg's first clue came from strange black sheets called paper meteorites, which were believed to have fallen from the heavens. They were so strange that museums kept them in their collections along with other oddities of nature. When Ehrenberg examined the paper meteorites, he recognized what others before him had missed: the sheets were actually dried mats of microorganisms. He speculated that they had started out growing in intertidal pools on beaches. Storm winds came along, peeling them from the coast and lofting them high in the atmosphere, where they drifted for hundreds or thousands of miles before dropping down to Earth.

"Thinking back on the microorganisms he had encountered in so many places, Ehrenberg reasoned that storms might also sweep up microorganisms from deserts and ponds. If you knew what to look for, you could even find evidence for flying microorganisms in historical records. There were many accounts of blood raining down from the sky. In The Iliad, Zeus sends a red downpour as a sign of coming slaughter. In the fourteenth century, a shower of blood in Germany presaged the arrival of the Black Death. Ehrenberg believed that that blood rain was real, but not really blood. It was instead a red mix of dust and microorganisms raised into the sky and then washed down in storms. 'How many thousand millions of tons of microscopic life forms might have been lifted and have fallen like meteorites onto the Earth since Homer's blood rain!' Ehrenberg exclaimed.

“In 1844, Ehrenberg enlisted Charles Darwin in his search for flying life. Ehrenberg knew that the young British geologist had visited some of the most remote places on Earth during his voyage on the Beagle. He wondered if Darwin might have had any samples to spare from places like the Galapagos Islands. Darwin was happy to help, and he added a gift he thought might interest Ehrenberg: a vial of mysterious red dust.

“Darwin had collected it twelve years earlier, when he was just starting on his five-year voyage on the Beagle. As the ship sailed across the Atlantic toward Brazil, he noticed one day that the sky was turning hazy. The cause, Darwin later wrote, was 'the falling of impalpably fine dust.' It dirtied the ship as it settled on every surface, and the crew of the Beagle complained as the dust stung their eyes. 'Vessels even have run on shore owing to the obscurity of the atmosphere,'Darwin wrote.

“Darwin swept a smidgen of dust into a packet and stored it away in his quarters on the ship for later study. When he returned to England in 1836, he brought the dust back home along with his vast collection of fossils, rocks, and preserved animals and plants to his country estate. As Darwin developed his theory of evolution, he did not have time to even peek at the packet. Ehrenberg's request tickled his memory. He tracked down the dust and sent it to Berlin.

“Darwin had suspected that the dust had come from some distant volcanic eruption, but Ehrenberg saw no evidence for that under his microscope. Instead, he was looking at life. Most of the dust was composed of microorganisms covered in shells of silica. Some of them reminded Ehrenberg of freshwater species that lived in South America.

“In June 1844, Ehrenberg sent Darwin his preliminary findings. 'I am truly astonished at this,' Darwin wrote back.

"'I will feast on them for a long time yet,' Ehrenberg promised him. Darwin persuaded other naturalists to send their supplies of Atlantic dust to Berlin. All told, Ehrenberg discovered sixty-seven species of microorganisms in the samples. He puzzled with Darwin over where they had traveled from. Ehrenberg favored South America as the source, while Darwin favored Africa. In 1846, Darwin published an account of some of the results of Ehrenberg's analysis.

"Fundamentally, it didn't matter if Darwin or Ehrenberg was right. Either way, the microorganisms must have soared around a far swath of the planet, perhaps flying above the clouds. They were one more piece of evidence that Ehrenberg could marshal to show how far microorganisms could travel. In the words of one Victorian scientist, Ehrenberg's studies 'proved the actual existence of an atmospheric kingdom of life.'"

author: Carl Zimmer title: Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe publisher: Dutton date: page(s): 14-17

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the romans -- 3/31/2026

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 03:09:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Western Civilization by Jackson J. Spielvogel. The Roman Republic.

Roman territory on the eve of the assassination of Julius Caesar, 44 BC

"The Romans did not have a master plan for the creation of an empire; as it had been in Italy, much of their continued expansion was opportunistic, in response to perceived threats to their security. The more they expanded, the more threats to their security appeared on the horizon, involving them in yet more conflicts. Indeed, the Romans liked to portray themselves as declaring war only for defensive reasons or to protect allies. That is only part of the story, however. It is likely, as some historians have recently suggested, that at some point a group of Roman aristocratic leaders emerged who favored expansion both for the glory it offered and for the economic benefits it provided. Certainly, by the second century B.C., aristocratic senators perceived new opportunities for lucrative foreign commands, enormous spoils of war, and an abundant supply of slave labor for their growing landed estates. By that same time, the destruction of Corinth and Carthage indicate that Roman imperialism had become more arrogant and brutal as well. Rome's foreign success also had enormous repercussions for the internal development of the Roman Republic."

author: Jackson J. Spielvogel title: Western Civilization: A Brief History publisher: Cengage Learning date: page(s): 103

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the federalist papers--3/30/3036

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 02:30:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Constitutional Myths by Ray Raphael. Famed Federalist Papers are argument, not commentary, on the US Constitution:

“During the ratification debates, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay penned eighty-five essays under the single pseudonym 'Publius,' a founder of the Roman Republic. Although authorship for several of these has been disputed, most scholars now agree that Hamilton wrote at least fifty, Madison most of the rest, and Jay only five. In Hamilton's home state of New York, opponents of the proposed Constitution, led by Governor George Clinton, held power, and critics were continually pressing their arguments in New York City's newspapers. Joining the fray as Publius, Hamilton wrote an essay addressed, 'To the People of the State of New York,' first published in the Independent Journal on October 27, 1787, under the heading 'The Federalist.' In this targeted attempt to change public opinion in New York, Publius promised to give readers a comprehensive explanation and defense of the new federal Constitution, which he compared 'to your own State constitution.

“To share the writing effort, Hamilton invited John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and William Duer to write other letters under Publius's name. Morris declined and Jay fell ill after contributing four letters. Hamilton judged Duer's efforts not up to the standard he was trying to set, and he next turned to James Madison, who was in New York at the time representing Virginia in the Confederation Congress. Because Congress rarely met for lack of a quorum, Madison agreed to take part. Like the New Yorkers Hamilton and Jay, Madison addressed his letters 'To the People of the State of New York.'

“Publius's essays, first appearing in newspapers but later published in two bound volumes titled The Federalist, treat the Constitution as a multifaceted but cohesive whole, a logically consistent implementation of republican theory. Initially, the essays circulated among supporters of the Constitution and helped them refine their arguments. Once the ratification controversy ended, The Federalist had a significant impact on subsequent American jurisprudence and political philosophy, continuing to this day. Commonly viewed as an expansion of the ideas expressed in the Constitution and the most thorough contemporaneous presentation of its philosophical underpinnings, The Federalist is regularly assigned to college students; studied by legal and constitutional scholars, historians, and political scientists; and cited frequently in the opinions of Supreme Court justices. The Federalist has become the Constitution's Talmud, an explanatory adjunct to scripture.

"But…

“Publius's remarkable essays were effective arguments, not disinterested and authoritative commentaries. These are very different genres, and right from the start, Hamilton made it clear which he intended. In The Federalist No. 1, Publius announced without apology that he would offer 'arguments' to convince readers that 'the safest course for your liberty, your dignity, and your happiness' was to adopt the new plan of government. 'Yes, my countrymen, I own to you that, after having given it an attentive consideration, I am clearly of opinion it is your interest to adopt it,' he wrote. 'I will not amuse you with an appearance of deliberation when I have decided. I frankly acknowledge to you my convictions, and I will freely lay before you the reasons on which they are founded.' Hamilton promised he would 'not disgrace the cause of truth,' but his tone was certainly combative. Many of the Constitution's opponents, he charged, were driven by 'perverted ambition,' hoping either 'to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country' or to 'divide the empire into several partial confederacies.'

Alexander Hamilton, author of the majority of The Federalist Papers

“James Madison also conceded motive, although in friendlier terms. 'The ultimate object of these papers is to determine clearly and fully the merits of this Constitution, and the expediency of adopting it,' he wrote in The Federalist No. 37, introducing a series of twenty-two consecutive essays under his authorship. Madison argued that he could not explain or defend the Constitution 'without taking a more critical and thorough survey of the work of the convention, without examining it on all its sides, comparing it in all its parts, and calculating its probable effects.' Madison's 'survey' highlighted what he described as the Constitution's balance between federal and state authority, although he himself had pushed for a much stronger national government at the Federal Convention (see chapter 5).

“In its historical context, The Federalist was a political document–certainly an impressive one, but no more 'authoritative' than other attempts by the Constitution's supporters and opponents to persuade contemporaries to vote for or against the Constitution. In pamphlets and newspapers and oral debates, supporters and opponents had at it for the better part of a year. Though the eighty-five Federalist essays were part of this grand debate, they were scarcely the whole of it. The State Historical Society of Wisconsin has collected and reproduced these arguments in twenty-two hefty volumes and multiple microform supplements entitled The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. As five of the original thirteen states are not yet covered, editors project six more volumes on ratification and still more on the framing and adoption of the Bill of Rights. The Federalist essays fill less than one of these volumes.”

“Hamilton, Madison, and Jay faced a daunting task. On the one hand, they needed to convince a wary public of the need to create a federal government with 'supreme' authority over the states, and they had to gain acceptance for several controversial provisions: a standing army, Congress's power to levy direct taxes, and trusting all executive authority to one man, the president. On the other hand, they could not scare people off by painting the new powers of the federal government in stark colors. They had to push both hard and gently, and to understand The Federalist we must view its arguments in this light.

“This is not the way The Federalist is treated in our national narrative. Instead, despite its conflicting tasks and sometimes contradictory messages, we accept it at face value and enshrine it as a quasi-official founding document. This authority is not warranted. The Federalist offers one possible reading of the Constitution offered by exceedingly intelligent writers pushing for ratification, but this is not in some mystical sense the certifiably authoritative reading.

“Founding-era Americans knew nothing of a work called The Federalist Papers. In the winter and spring of 1787-88, as the proposed Constitution was being debated, citizens in New York City, and a few elsewhere, might be found reading newspaper articles under the heading 'The Federalist.' Mathew Carey's magazine The American Museum published a few of the early essays, and a select group of readers had access to the two bound volumes, the first appearing in March 1788 and the second late in May. The initial printing of this now-famous work was only 500 copies, and 'several hundred' of these were still unsold in the fall of 1788, after the Constitution had been ratified. Nationally, the readership was exceedingly small.

“Eleven years later, unsold books from the first printing were placed back on the market, and in 1802 George F. Hopkins republished The Federalist in a new edition, this time naming the authors. After that, once or twice a decade, The Federalist was repackaged for a new audience.

“The Federalist did not become The Federalist Papers until the midtwentieth century. In 1944, the noted scholar Douglass Adair wrote an article entitled, 'The Authorship of the Disputed Federalist Papers.' He did not call the entire work The Federalist Papers; rather, he used 'Federalist' to denote which 'papers' he was discussing. Within the text of the article Adair, like all other scholars at the time and most scholars today, referred only to The Federalist.

“Four years later, perhaps borrowing from the title of Adair's article, the newly established Great Books Foundation, in 'Session 16' of its 'First Year Course,' featured eighteen of the eighty-five 'Federalist Papers,' followed by the text of the Constitution. (Session 1 included the Declaration of Independence and selections from the OId Testament; Sessions 17 and 18 concluded the course with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto.) The foundation's rebranding was tentative. The title head on each page remained 'The Federalist,' and each essay was introduced by the name and date of the newspaper in which it first appeared, seeming to justify the word 'papers.'

“In 1961 the New American Library, under its Mentor imprint, picked up on the Great Books Foundation's title and ran with it in its new edition, offering neither explanation nor apology. The title head on its pages said 'The Federalist Papers,' as did its cover and title page. 'Good reading for the millions' was Mentor's slogan, but the editors likely felt that 'the millions' might have some trouble with eighty-five ponderous essays written for a very different audience. The original, obscure title only compounded that problem. Was 'The Federalist' a person? a political party? a document? a philosophy? The reifying, self-reflexive new title, The Federalist Papers, provided clarity and gave the work a physical stamp.

“The Mentor edition of The Federalist Papers circulated widely, and the name swiftly took hold. To this day, Publius's essays bear the label bequeathed to them by mid-twentieth-century commercial publishers. Try asking a seemingly informed American citizen what The Federalist refers to and you will most likely get a blank stare; The Federalist Papers, on the other hand, might induce a response–a vague memory of a high school civics class, a reading assignment in college, or possibly a reasonable description of Publius's essays. Even Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court's ardent originalist who insists on sticking to the historical record in all instances (see chapter 8), refers casually to Publius's essays by a name the authors never knew.”

author: Ray Raphael title: Constitutional Myths: What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right publisher: The New Press date: page(s): 103-107

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football -- 3/27/2026

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:30:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Football by Chuck Klosterman. “The difference between an informed fan and a casual fan is the ability to see order within disorder”:

“Dave Hickey's 'The Heresy of Zone Defense' ranks among the finest essays ever written about any sport. Using a memorable reverse layup by hoop legend Julius Erving as a proxy, Hickey (an art critic) argues that the rules of basketball (and almost anything else) should not attempt to govern, but to liberate. Hickey believed official regulations and unofficial conventions should always be designed to foster freedom, and that any directive fostering the opposite should be altered. His outlook on basketball intertwines with a larger conviction that what's beautiful and electrifying about any activity is its extemporaneous nature, conveyed through the creativity of its participants. This view, first published in 1995, has become the standard position for basketball essentialists.”

"'Basketball, unlike football with its prescribed routes, is an improvisational game, similar to jazz,' the former NBA coach Phil Jackson wrote in his 2004 memoir, and that's a reasonable way to appreciate the genius of Dr. J or Kobe Bryant or Nikola Jokić. It's an idealization of basketball at its imaginative apex, and it's how most people prefer to think about the aesthetics of sports. We watch a game to watch its players, so the normal wish is to grant those players the maximum amount of freedom. The irony is that the more this thinking has become normative, the more every American sport--with the exception of one aberrant outlier--has evolved away from its central identity, diminishing its symbolic stature. The aberration is football. Football flourishes by making freedom impossible.”

The football field at The Dome at America's Center in St. Louis as seen from behind one end zone.

“Every sport involves some level of strategic control, and the more you understand that sport, the more that control becomes visible. Ice hockey appears anarchic and random to a person who rarely watches it, but once that person learns that something called a wheel breakout exists, he or she can suddenly recognize when it happens in real time. The difference between an informed fan and a casual fan is the ability to see order within disorder; it's nonsensically satisfying to locate the levers of control--we're trained to view as suffocating and unfun. What makes football different is that the control is so ingrained and pervasive that we stop thinking about it as control. Instead, we understand it as the game's natural state, and any moment of true improvisation becomes a transfixing exception. This has been true since its earliest days, personified by the influence of Walter Camp, the so-called Father of American Football. A player and coach at Yale near the end of the nineteenth century, Camp was the driving force and central architect behind how the rules of football were constructed. A mainstay at the rule-making meetings for the fledgling Intercollegiate Football Association, he doggedly pushed for a logic-based approach, continually trying to negate any element of chance from how football games were decided. It was Camp who came up with the modern system of downs and the scoring framework, and it was Camp who decided that 11 players per side was the correct number of participants. Camp was so obsessed with the laws of football that the stress eventually killed him; he died in a hotel room in 1925, having traveled to New York to attend yet. another rule-related meeting. If Camp were alive today, he'd be delighted by how many of his rules are still relevant to the contemporary version of football. But he'd be even more pleased--and possibly dumbfounded--by the depth to which his scientific approach has infiltrated every facet of the game. Camp's quasi-rationalist philosophy is not merely the foundation for how football is officiated and scored. Camp's philosophy is the spiritual principle for how football is played, how it is understood, and how it is controlled.”

“Describing how NFL football transpires on a play-by-play basis is like trying to explain the incremental mechanics of a nuclear reactor. The levels of editing are so unlike every other sport that there's a tendency to talk around it, almost as if what's transpiring on the field were somehow a surprise to everyone involved. But there are few surprises in football, and when there are, it usually means someone fucked up. The most elementary of plays--a handoff to the tailback, running between the right tackle and the tight end--is the final manifestation of a decision made by an offensive coordinator sitting in a glass booth hundreds of feet above the field, relayed to the sideline over a landline phone, and transmitted into the wireless headset of the quarterback. The description of the play is converted into a code, decrypted with the assistance of the QB's laminated wristband. The quarterback can then run the play or call an audible, depending on how the defense is aligned (a calculation made by the opposing team's defensive coordinator, generally operating from the sideline but receiving real-time tactical data from a different assistant watching in a different glass booth). Whom each lineman blocks is dictated by the defensive configuration, with every foreseeable scenario rehearsed in practice hundreds of times. The decision to run the tailback off-tackle is an extension of the overall game plan, built from hours of film study and predictive analytics. The play call is rooted in a conceptual philosophy, and the players involved have often been acquired because their skill set matches that philosophy.”

“Does that sound needlessly convoluted? If so, here's the insane part: My explanation in the previous paragraph is so oversimplified that it doesn't reflect a sliver of how stage-managed the process truly is. It's not that basketball is jazz and football is anti-jazz, or that basketball is jazz and football is prog rock. It's more that basketball aspires to jazz and football aspires to petroleum engineering. Which, I am fully aware, sounds terrible. Dave Hickey would see this concentration of control as the worst thing about football, in terms of its humanity, and that every dehumanizing aspect of football culture originates from this connection to hierarchical control. But if that is indeed the case, there's almost no need to further explain why football is so metaphorically important to society. There is no need to dissect why so many working-class Americans relate to a game built on executive control, or why the institution of football has managed to prosper in an era when public faith in all other forms of institutional power has declined. Don't see the problem as a problem. See the problem as evidence of meaning.”

author: Chuck Klosterman title: Football publisher: Penguin Press date: page(s): 42-45

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the act of breathing -- 3/26/2026

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 03:20:00 -0400

Today's encore selection - from Extreme Medicine by Kevin Fong, M.D. The human body constantly amazes us with its intricate, delicate and resilient organs. Here's a brief description of how oxygen comes in contact with the three million alveoli in our lighter-than-sponge lungs:

"The desire to breathe is among our most primitive urges. We're designed to draw air into our lungs, to exchange fresh oxygen for the waste gas of carbon dioxide. Our lives depend upon this perpetual to and fro of gases ...

"When we describe the path that oxygen takes from the outside world to its final destination in our mitochondria, we do so as though it has agency of its own. We talk of molecules of oxygen moving into our bodies, diffusing across membranes, arriving at mitochondria, almost as though they know where they want to go. But of course oxygen has no free will of its own. In the act of living, your body must solve the problem of how to grab molecules of this gas from the atmosphere and bundle them into cells in sufficient concentration that they can do the stuff of life.

Diagram of the human lungs with the respiratory tract visible, and different colours for each lobe

"The first part of that performance is the act of breathing. Your ribs are attached to your breastbone at the front and the bony column that is your spine at the rear. At the end of each exhalation, they slope steeply downward toward the ground. Contracting the muscles in the chest wall that do the work of breathing lifts the ribs up, to a nearly horizontal position, increasing the volume of the chest. At the same time your diaphragm, the large dome-shaped muscle that separates the chest from the contents of your abdomen, contracts and drops down, further increasing the volume of the cavity inside your chest.

"Your lungs sit inside the cage formed by your ribs, adherent to the chest wall. As the chest moves, your lungs move with them. As the volume in your chest cavity increases, so too does that inside your lungs. The increase in volume leads to a decrease in pressure in your chest. That in turn produces suction, in exactly the same way as separating the handles on a bellows does, and air begins to flow.

"That air passes through your upper airways, the larynx, and the trachea, and then down into your bronchial tree. I always thought of that branching network of airways as inverted sprigs of broccoli rather than trees. In terms of morphology, that's not far off. There's a hollow central trunk that sprouts branches of ever decreasing caliber, at the very end of which are saclike structures called alveoli: the buds, if you like, at the end of that sprig of broccoli. The cadaveric lung, formalin-soaked in the medical school's dissecting rooms, is solid and heavy; its airspaces are occupied by pungent preservative fluid. But in life, air-filled lungs are lighter than sponge, light enough to float on water. ...

"That fine structure exists to provide a massive surface area over which air can be brought into contact with blood. The alveoli, those tiny air sacs at the end of the bronchial tree, are each no more than a fraction of a millimeter in diameter, but each lung holds one and a half million. If you were to unfurl them and lay them out flat, they would form a mat of tissue half the size of a tennis court at Wimbledon. That vast area is required to bring enough air into contact with enough blood to keep you alive.

"Over the surfaces of those alveoli runs a spiderlike network of capillaries, vessels with walls a single cell thick, providing just enough structure to confine the blood cells squeezing through them, while offering the minimum obstruction to the molecules of oxygen diffusing through their walls.

"This is the most delicate interface in your body. Nowhere else is the point of contact between your body and the material from the outside world more insubstantial or delicate. That is why it is buried deep in your chest and protected with a formidable cage of ribs."

author: Kevin Fong, M.D. title: Extreme Medicine: How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the Twentieth Century publisher: The Penguin Press date: page(s): 155-159

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science in 1820 --3/25/2026

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 02:10:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Science Year by Year by DK. Scientific breakthroughs in 1820:

''The experimental investigation by which ampere established the law of the mechanical action between electric currents is one of the most brilliant achievements in science.”

-James Clerk Maxwell, British theoretical physicist, from A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, 1873

"Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851) revealed the link between electricity and magnetism. At a public lecture in Copenhagen, he astonished the audience by showing a compass needle move as he brought it near a wire conducting electricity. Influenced by Ørsted's discovery, French physicist Andre-Marie Ampère created a theory of electromagnetism. This showed that electric currents flowing in opposite directions create magnetic fields that cause the wires to be attracted, while currents flowing the same way lead to the wires being repelled. British physicist John Herapath [1790-1868) explained how temperature and pressure in gas are created by moving molecules, an early version of the kinetic theory of gases.

Portrait of Hans Christian Ørsted by Christian Albrecht Jensen (1842)

"In Paris. French naturalist Georges Cuvier ridiculed the ideas of fellow naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who argued that species have transformed, or evolved, through time. This idea is now an accepted part of the theory of evolution.

"Also in Paris, chemists Pierre Joseph Pelletier [ 1788-1842) and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou [1795-1877) worked on isolating medically active ingredients from plants. In 1820, they isolated quinine from cinchona bark, which later became important in treating malaria."

author: DK title: Science Year by Year: The Ultimate Visual Guide to the Discoveries that Changed the World publisher: DK date: page(s): 181

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demographics and military defense--3/24/2026

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 02:30:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Asia's Aging Security by Andrew Oros. The impact of declining fertility rates in Asia:

“The incredible population growth in the twentieth century was one of that century's defining hallmarks. Total world population nearly quadrupled, far exceeding the growth projected for the twenty-first century. It took all human history to reach the then–high mark of an estimated 1.6 billion people on the planet in 1900, but only one hundred years to add 4-6 billion more by the end of that century. Both popular writing and academic scholarship expressed widespread alarm at twentieth-century population growth, which was widely viewed as contributing to interstate conflict, threatening economic development of especially poorer countries, and perhaps even leading to a worldwide resource shortfall that would result in mass starvation. Many predictions both about how population demographics would shift and about the effects of these shifts on human security turned out to be incorrect.

“While this study focuses on the demographic challenges posed by twenty first-century population trends in the Indo-Pacific (which, as explained, are quite different from twentieth-century demographic shifts), it is important to understand how demographic change was understood to affect national security at that time, as insights and memories from the period still inform (sometimes, mistakenly) policy decisions and scholarship in this century. Moreover, instances of international conflict in the twentieth century have shaped existing international relations theory and, in several cases, remain conflict flashpoints in the Indo-Pacific in the twenty-first century (as discussed further in chapter 2).

“Brooks and her coauthors provide a useful summary of the world's overall demographic transition beginning even before the twentieth century that underscores the scale of recent change and implications for global security, drawing especially on Ronald Lee's 'The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries of Fundamental Change.' The first stage, they summarize, is the one that described all countries prior to around 1800, which 'displayed three characteristics: (1) very short lifespans (life expectancy was around twenty-seven years on average in all centuries prior to 1800); (2) very high birth rates (approximately six births per woman on average prior to 1800); and (3) relatively stable population sizes (as death rates more or less offset high fertility levels, with occasional short-term spikes in mortality caused by pandemics, famines, or wars).'

Countries by fertility rate as of 2024

“This first stage sets the demographic context for military-security strategies and experience for most of recorded human history and is one that is not at all relevant to the Indo-Pacific security environment today, where demographics across the entire region differ from this early stage.

“A second stage of demographic transition began in the Northern Hemisphere early in the nineteenth century, where mortality rates declined and thus average life expectancy increased due to numerous factors that Lee's summary explains. The third stage is when fertility rates decline in response to longer life expectancies (due especially to decreased infant mortality), but populations continue to grow due to longer life expectancies and still above-replacement birthrates. It was this stage that resulted in the ballooning of populations worldwide in the twentieth century and continues in some regions of the world in the twenty-first century (especially South and Western Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa).

“Late-stage rapid aging–the focus of this study–characterizes the fourth and fifth stages of the worldwide demographic transition underway. The fourth phase began to emerge particularly in advanced industrial countries in the 1970s, with several Asian countries on the leading edge of this change, where there is decline of fertility below the replacement level combined with long life expectancies, resulting in significant aging of generally stable population sizes. This stage occurred naturally as a result of personal decisions in Japan and elsewhere in the early 1970s as well as through China's One-Child Policy government mandate (officially from 1979 but less systematically prior to that as well).

“In the fifth stage of demographic transition theory, which only a few states have yet experienced (including China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and Taiwan), fertility rates are so low that total population sizes begin to shrink, combined with even faster aging of the total population due to further increasing life expectancies. This new stage is projected to result in a proliferation of 'super-aged' societies worldwide by the mid-twenty-first century, including all the Northeast Asian region apart from Mongolia and others in the southern Indo-Pacific region as well. It also is projected to lead to a large number of states around the world experiencing total population shrinkage.

“To underscore the growing shift into this fifth stage of the global demographic transition, consider these 2024 statistics from the UN Population Division: In 63 countries and territories, containing 28 percent of the world's population in 2024, the size of the population peaked before 2024. In an additional 48 countries and territories, accounting for 10 percent of the world's population in 2054, population size is projected to peak between 2025 and 2054.7 Thus, worldwide, 111 countries and territories are projected to experience population shrinkage by 2024. This is the new demographic reality for the twenty-first century and one impetus for this study: to consider the security implications of this important shift in human development.

“The next section focuses on the first three stages of worldwide demographic transition, considering how international relations theory and security planners understood the impact of changing population characteristics through the ballooning population phase. The following section then contrasts theories based on twentieth-century experience with the new demographic realities of the twenty-first century IndoPacific, where nearly all traditional regional powers have entered the fourth and fifth stages of demographic transition, including the late-stage rapid-aging phenomenon.”

author: Andrew Oros title: Asia's Aging Security: How Demographic Change Affects America's Allies and Adversaries (Contemporary Asia in the World) publisher: Columbia University Press date: page(s): 30-33

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paul gauguin--3/20/2026

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 02:45:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux. Paul Gauguin loses his job at a bank:

“In 1882, L'Union Générale, an ill-founded bank, collapsed. It had been established six years previously by Roman Catholic grandees with the aim of destroying the hold of German Jews, notably the Rothschilds, over the French economy. Other banks fell in its wake. The Paris stock market crashed. Gauguin was given notice to quit his job. His meteoric financial ascent had never taught him to budget or – God forbid! – to save. He had always enjoyed spending to his limits and beyond; now his portfolio of shares had lost its value, the art market was wiped out, and he was left with debts to pay off, a wife whom he had educated up to expensive tastes and four children to support. He tried hard to get another job in the financial sector but his ostentatious taxi-ticking ways and irritating proliferation of trousers, taken together with his preference for socialising with low-life artists and artisans rather than his smart colleagues, lent a delicious Schadenfreude to witnessing his fall. If Gustave Arosa had still been a power in the land, things might have been different, but Arosa was old and ill. In the year following the crash, he died. With his death, Gauguin lost his safety net.

“The following year, 1883, was spent fruitlessly job-seeking, with pressure mounting when Mette again became pregnant. In December, she gave birth to their fifth child, Paul, called Pola to differentiate him from his father. Pola brought along with him the spectral vision of Gauguin turning into Papa Pissarro, the father of a multitudinous brood, knocking on doors to sell his pictures for seven francs apiece while his wife became ever more discontented and shrewish. Anywhere would be cheaper to live than Paris. In January 1884, with baby Pola a month old, they moved eighty or so miles north-west, to the city of Rouen, long beloved of artists for its cool northern light and picturesque medieval subjects: spires, bell towers, crooked lanes and half-timbered houses jostling for space inside a ring of tall ramparts rising out of smooth, expansive views of woods and meadows. Turner had painted there. Monet, already captivated, would soon return to obsess over the light on Rouen's cathedral front. Pissarro had told Gauguin that he never tired of painting the city's inexhaustible motifs. He had also told him that a collector of Impressionist paintings lived there, a pastry chef named Murer. This sounded hopeful.

“He rented a little house on the Impasse Malherne (now Impasse Gauguin), a narrow lane on the towering heights of the Rampe Beauvoisine. He figured that he had enough money to keep him going for a year. He started work, producing pictures at a furious rate, more or less one a day. Mostly landscapes, local variations on motifs he had painted with Pissarro and Cézanne. Gauguin was painting alone, and it was not working. Everything was wrong on the canvas, and he had no idea how to put it right. He needed Pissarro's critical guidance. He kept inviting him to come; Pissarro kept refusing. Eventually, in April 1884, he sent seven paintings to Durand-Ruel. The plan was for Pissarro to visit the gallery to critique them, and Durand-Ruel to exhibit and sell them. One painting was 'handed over to the financier Lafuite on the very day that it arrived' presumably in payment for a debt. None of the others sold. Pissarro went to look at them and wrote to tell Gauguin that he found them petty and monotonous. Gauguin knew as much. 'I have not yet arrived where I want to be. I must chafe a little longer yet,' he replied humbly.

Mette Gauguin in an Evening Dress by Paul Gauguin

“He was looking for a money-making job. The pastry cook Murer had been a dreadful disappointment. Far from purchasing, he accepted just one painting to hang in his hotel, where it failed to find a buyer: Gauguin made no further impression on the city, either as a man or as an artist. Accustomed to attention, he felt invisible. His confidence was failing. He and Mette were beginning to squabble about money. He decided to paint a 'society' portrait of her that might bring in commissions from Rouen's pretty women. Wanting to look elegant for the portrait, Mette bought an expensive dress on credit. This led to a row, and then he discovered that she had secretly been borrowing large sums from their friends: 400 francs from Schuffenecker, 2,000 francs from Mrs Heegaard. He was furious; she was furious. She pointed out that children were expensive, and they had more than they could afford to keep. Already they had sent Emil back to Denmark where the Countess Moltke, a contact of bygone days who was rich and fond of Mette, had undertaken to pay for Emil's education. For fear of getting pregnant again, Mette refused to sleep with Gauguin. He ranted about divorce and the result was Mette in Evening Dress, a second passionate portrait of his wife that, like Meite Asleep on a Sofa, depicts Mette the Inaccessible.

“Sensual, challenging and unnerving, she is decked out in full evening dress, gloves, fan, hair piled up in an elaborate chignon, a narrow black ribbon round the creamy neck directing the eye down to the bosom. Gauguin always struggled with what he saw as potentially saccharine subjects and Mette in Evening Dress is certainly not as pretty as a selling canvas ought to be. He could not yet achieve the textural luminosities of silk, satin, roses and pearls that had made Renoir's 1874 The Theatre Box the ne plus ultra of such portraits. The best bit of painting is the optical mixture of pink and pale apple-green on the swooping bodice; otherwise it is a picture of an angry wife turning away from her husband and refusing to look at him, but even while they were quarreling over the cost of the dress, Gauguin admitted to her that he liked it very much.”

author: Sue Prideaux title: Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin publisher: W. W. Norton & Company date: page(s): 70-72

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the british, the hindus, the sikhs, and the muslims -- 3/19/2026

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 03:30:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong. Prior to the arrival and gradual takeover of India by the British during the 1700s and 1800s, both the Hindu and Sikh religions were highly diverse and diffuse, differing regionally within India and lacking in central authority. That changed with the ascension of the British. Also with that arrival and ascension, the Muslims of the Moghul Empire, hitherto the ruling class in India, were demoted and humiliated:

"The irony was, of course, that until the British had arrived, nobody had thought of themselves as 'Hindu' in this sectarian way. The British tendency to see the different faith communities in stereotypical ways also helped to radicalize the Sikh tradition; they promoted the idea that Sikhs were an essentially warlike and heroic people. In recognition of Sikh support during the 1857 mutiny, the British had overcome their initial reluctance to admit members of the Khalsa into the army; moreover, once they were recruited, they were allowed to wear their traditional uniforms. This special treatment meant that gradually the idea that Sikhs were a separate and distinctive race gained ground.

"Hitherto Sikhs and Hindus had lived together peacefully in the Punjab, sharing the same cultural traditions. There had been no central Sikh authority, so variant forms of Sikhism flourished. This had always been the norm in India, where religious identities had been multiple and defined regionally. But during the 1870s Sikhs began to develop their own reform movement in an attempt to adapt to these new realities. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were about a hundred Sikh Sabha groups all over the Punjab, dedicated to an assertion of Sikh distinctiveness, building Sikh schools and colleges, and producing a flood of polemical literature. On the surface these groups seemed in tune with Sikh tradition, but this separation entirely subverted Nanak's original vision. Sikhs were now expected to adopt a single identity. Over the years a Sikh fundamentalism would emerge that interpreted the tradition selectively, claiming to return to the martial teachings of the tenth guru but ignoring the peaceful ethos of the early gurus. This new Sikhism was passionately opposed to secularism: Sikhs must have political power in order to enforce this conformity. A tradition that once had been open to all had been invaded by fear of the 'other,' represented by a host of enemies -- Hindus, heretics, modernizers, secularists, and any form of political dominance.

Sikh soldiers in the British 15th Punjab Infantry Regiment in 1858

"There was a similar distortion of the Muslim tradition. The British abolition of the Moghul Empire had been a traumatic watershed, summarily demoting a people who hitherto had seemed virtual masters of the globe. For the first time, they were being ruled by hostile infidels in one of the core cultures of the civilized world. Given the symbolic importance of the ummah's [community's] well-being, this was not simply a political anxiety but one that touched the spiritual recesses of their being. Some Muslims would therefore cultivate a history of grievance. We have previously seen that the experience of humiliation can damage a tradition and become a catalyst for violence. Segments of the Hindu population, who had been subjected to Muslim rule for seven hundred years, had their own smoldering resentment of Moghul imperialism, so Muslims suddenly felt extremely vulnerable, especially since the British blamed them for the Mutiny of 1857.

"Many were afraid that Islam would disappear from the subcontinent and that Muslims would entirely lose their identity. Their first impulse was to withdraw from the mainstream and cling to the glories of the distant past. In 1867 in Deoband, near Delhi, a cadre of ulema [scholars] began to issue detailed fatwas [pronouncements] that governed every single aspect of life to help Muslims live authentically under foreign rule. Over time the Deobandis established a network of madrassas throughout the subcontinent that promoted a form of Islam that was as reductive in its own way as the Arya Samaj. They too attempted a return to 'fundamentals' -- the pristine Islam of the Prophet and the rashidun -- and vehemently decried such later developments as the Shiah. Islam had for centuries displayed a remarkable ability to assimilate other cultural traditions, but their colonial humiliation caused the Deobandis to retreat from the West in rather the same way as Ibn Taymiyyah had recoiled from Mongol civilization.

"Deobandi Islam refused to countenance itjihad ('independent reasoning') and argued for an overly strict and literal interpretation of the Shariah. The Deobandis were socially progressive in their rejection of the caste system and their determination to educate the poorest Muslims, but they were virulently opposed to any innovation --adamant, for instance, in their condemnation of the compulsory education of women. In the early days, Deobandis were not violent, but they would later become more militant. They would have a drastic effect on subcontinental Islam, which had traditionally leaned toward the more inclusive spiritualities of Sufism and Falsafah, both of which the Deobandis now utterly condemned. During the twentieth century they would gain considerable influence in the Muslim world and would rank in importance with the prestigious al-Azha Madrassa in Cairo. The British subjugation of India had driven some Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims into a defensive posture that could easily segue into violence."

author: Karen Armstrong title: Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence publisher: Anchor A. Knopf date: page(s): 289-291

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mattering -- 3/18/2026

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 02:29:00 -0400

Today's selection -- from The Mattering Instinct by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. One of the most fundamental of all human needs is to matter:

“We speak both of what matters and of who matters. In fact, we speak a great deal about both.

“Consider what matters. In recent decades, the phrase why X matters has become a template for dozens of book titles, including Why Beauty Matters, Why Emotions Matter, Why Family Matters, Why Genealogy Matters, Why Good Sex Matters, Why Jesus Matters, Why Knowledge Matters, Why Liberalism Matters, Why Money Matters, and Why Stories Matter. The profusion of titles, many of them mutually exclusive--after all, if Jesus matters, then how, too, can money?--testifies to our preoccupation with what matters.

"And it's not only the question of what matters but also of who matters that's urgent. Consider: In 2013, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, a Black American, was visiting, together with his father, his father's fiance at her townhouse in a gated community in Florida. While the grownups were out, Trayvon went to a nearby convenience store to get himself some snacks and, on his way back, was shot by a Neighborhood Watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, himself a member of a minority as a Hispanic American. Zimmerman found Trayvon suspicious looking--the boy's hoodie was prominently mentioned in news stories--and called the police, while he continued to trail the teenager, a course of action ultimately ending in the boy's death. Trayvon hadn't been armed. All that was found on him was a bag of Skittles and an iced tea.

“After the acquittal of the shooter, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter exploded onto social media. The three-word slogan soon went beyond mere hashtags and placards, following the deaths of two more unarmed Black Americans, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, to become a political movement. Those who opposed Black Lives Matter sometimes offered as rejoinders their own three-word slogans: 'All Lives Matter,' or 'Blue Lives Matter,' this last referring to police officers. Of course, 'Black Lives Matter' isn't inconsistent with either 'All Lives Matter' or 'Blue Lives Matter,' since 'Black Lives Matter' isn't synonymous with 'Only Black Lives Matter.' The power and the poignancy of the original slogan lay in its minimalism. But what the battle of the slogans made clear is the potency of the verb to matter, in this instance applied not to the question of what matters but rather who matters.

“So what exactly does the verb to matter mean? Here is a quick working definition: To matter is to be deserving of attention. It's the same whether we are speaking of what matters or who matters. The thing or the person that matters makes a claim on us; at the very least, a claim is made on our attention.

“The claim of being deserving of attention may be based on consequences that would ensue from paying attention or not paying attention--as when we ask, say, does voting really matter? We're asking whether voting makes a difference; and so whether it's worth our while to pay the attention called for in voting. It's still the question of being deserving of attention, but what decides the issue is the consequences. In other circumstances, claims of mattering--of being deserving of attention--are independent of considerations of consequences, as when we assert that Black lives matter or that all lives matter. Here it's intrinsic mattering, having nothing to do with consequences. And what intrinsic mattering comes down to is being deserving of attention. To claim that Black lives matter, as all lives matter, is to make claims regarding the deservingness of attention.

“This leaves us with two more terms to explicate: attention and deservingness.

Protest march in response to the Jamar Clark killing, Minneapolis, Minnesota, November 2015

“Attention is a mental phenomenon studied by contemporary psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists–in other words, it is a subject for the empirical sciences.

“The best definition I know of the phenomenon was given by the philosopher and psychologist William James. Attention, he wrote, is 'the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts.' Focalization, concentration of consciousness, are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.

“James implies that attention is something we do. 'It is the taking possession by the mind.' The world's languages agree. In English we pay attention, while in other languages we give, lend, gift, dedicate, sacrifice, prepare, turn, attach, apply, infuse, and arouse our attention. The linguistic formations all imply that there is activity and agency in attention. His definition also makes clear how attention, as an activity, is to be distinguished from the broader notion of consciousness. After all, that confused, dazed, scatterbrained state is a state of consciousness, though the 'real opposite' of paying attention.

“His definition also entails that attention is limited and selective: withdrawal from some things. Every act of attention is an act of exclusion. In paying attention to something, we are forced to ignore a multitude of other things. And he ties this limitedness and selectivity with attention's usefulness: in order to deal effectively. Contemporary psychology agrees. Attention's limitedness and selectivity is crucial to its usefulness and linked to the reason why organisms evolved attention in the first place: to pay attention to changeable things in the organism's immediate environment that can help or hinder it, nourish or annihilate it. That unpleasant smell, for example, may very well signal toxicity. Note the presence of the word changeable. The function of attention is tied to what is variable, not just to what is relevant to fitness. Oxygen, our heartbeat, gravity, and many other things are vital to our survival, and our unconscious mental processes must take them into account. But they tend to be constant, so there is no need to allocate our limited window of attention to them, unless circumstances alarmingly change.

“The agency entailed in the act of paying attention means that we have some control over what we do and don't pay attention to. You may be unable to remain oblivious to the bad music blasting in your gym or the rank smell seeping into your kitchen--stimuli that are intense or that pop out of your surroundings. But you can decide to pay no attention to, say, gossip or popular culture, social media or your weight. You can decide that they simply don't matter, which is to say that they're not deserving of your attention. And this brings us to the second component of the English verb to matter--namely deservingness.

“Deservingness introduces an entirely different level of consideration into our preoccupations with mattering. It's a level that goes beyond the psychological, beyond the empirical altogether. Deservingness draws us into the nonempirical sphere of values and justifications, of oughts and ought-nots. This is the sphere that philosophers call normative, because it invokes norms of justification. The mattering instinct means that we are normative creatures down to our core. We think and act and shape our lives within the sphere of justifications. Instead of calling ourselves Homo sapiens, we might better have christened ourselves Homo justificans.

“It's the presence of deservingness in the concept of mattering that raises us up into an entirely different order of both complexity and perplexedness. The mattering instinct has us straining beyond the empirical for the normative knowledge that eludes us. We are carried over into the sphere of values and justifications without being equipped to see our way through. Here is the epistemic elusiveness that injects the unsubdued doubt--and hence unease--into the heart of what it is to pursue a human life.

“We speak both of what matters and of who matters. And behind our preoccupations with both is the most urgent of all our mattering questions, which is voiced in the first person: Do I matter? This is the mother of our mattering questions. Ultimately, we want to know what matters because we desperately want our own lives to be driven by what matters. We want to know who matters because we desperately want to be numbered among the ones who matter.

“Self-mattering–feeling ourselves overwhelmingly deserving of our own attention–is baked into our identity. The usefulness of attention, to which William James alluded, is its usefulness to ourselves. So it's no wonder that the greater part of our attention is given over to ourselves, whether overtly or tacitly. Throughout the enormous complexity of how the mind works, our self-mattering is presumed. And yet, astonishing creatures that we are, we are able, by way of the capacity for self-reflection with which our brains come equipped, to step outside of our self-mattering, which is to step outside ourselves, to pose the mother of all mattering questions. We'll look more closely at how this comes about in chapter three, Becoming Human.

“It's the deservingness component that separates the mattering for which we long from such empirical psychological states as having confidence or self-esteem. You can go online right now, or schedule a visit to a psychologist, and take a test that measures your confidence or self-esteem. There will be a series of statements to which you respond with the degree of your agreement, such as: I feel that I am a person of worth, at least on an equal plane with others. I feel that I have a number of good qualities. All in all, I am inclined to feel that I'm a failure. The test may even provide a numerical score, similar to an IQ test. The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, for example, which is one of the most widely used measures of self-esteem and from which I've taken the above statements, provides a numerical value from 1 to 30, with any score under 15 indicating low self-esteem. It was none other than William James who first formulated the concept of self-esteem, offering an equation as its definition.

“But these assessments of how good you feel about yourself, often in relation to others, aren't tests of whether you truly, objectively, existentially matter. To figure out that question, the mother of all mattering questions, you can't take an empirical test. Your self-esteem score, whether high or low, may be grounded in self-delusion, and the mother question is a demand for the answer that lies on the other side of self-delusion. Do I truly and objectively matter? I know that I can't help feeling that I do, but do I really?

“When it comes to our own mattering, we are staunch realists. We don't want feelings. We want the facts.”

author: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein title: The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us publisher: Liveright date: page(s): 22-28

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cinco de mayo--3/17/2026

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 02:23:00 -0400

Today's selection--from Mexico by Paul Gillingham. Debt and the Mexican Holiday “Cinco de Mayo”:

“Debt had plagued Mexico since the London stock market collapse of 1826. That disaster, largely the fruit of British financiers' incompetence and dishonesty, left Mexicans paying the bill for decades. The companies founded in the bubble had gone bankrupt, and Mexican: bonds had become worthless overnight, leaving a country without significant tax income owing high interest payments on assets that ha, effectively ceased to exist. The $15 million the US paid Mexico under the 1848 peace treaty went straight to debt service. By the end of the civil war Mexico owed foreigners over 80 million pesos, and a single year's interest payment to the British alone was 2.5 million pesos. Shut out of sovereign credit, Mexican governments turned to extortionate private loans; the flailing conservatives took on an obligation for 15 million pesos from a Swiss financier, Jean-Baptiste Jecker, in return for $750,000 in immediate funds. When Juárez came to power he repudiated the Jecker loan, recognizing the validity of all other debts and Mexico's inability to service them. On July 17, 1861, he suspended all payments, with the assurance that it was a temporary measure.

“It wasn't just British debt; the Spanish and French had made lesser loans, and key members of the French government were involved in the swindle of the Jecker bonds. The French had considered military intervention to collectMexican debt decades earlier. On October 31, 1861, they formed a coalition with the British and Spanish, formalized in a Convention of London, under which the three powers' warships would seize the customs houses of Veracruz and Tampico and divert taxes on Atlantic trade directly to debt service. In the past it would have been a risky move, given the naval power of the United States and the Monroe Doctrine's prohibition of European adventures in the New World. But the US had been at war with itself since April 1861, and in July the government had lost the first pitched battle at Bull Run. The South was trying to establish good relations with the Juarez government; Coahuila and Nuevo Leon even raised the prospect of joining the Confederacy. When Lincoln mooted assuming five years of Mexico's debt service in exchange for European nonintervention, Congress turned him down. It was a propitious moment for muscular informal imperialism; some thought the mere arrival of the warships might restore debt payments.

Battle of Puebla, 5th May 1862, by Francisco P. Miranda

“Yet the Emperor of France, Napoleon Ill, was thinking more in terms of formal imperialism, a ground invasion of Mexico to install a European monarch. His wife, Eugenie, originally a Spanish countess, had been chatting to down-at-heel Mexican monarchists for years; in September 1861, reviewing minor European royals for a suitable candidate, she, Napoleon III, and a conservative Mexican diplomat called José Manuel Hidalgo y Esnaurrízar came up with an underemployed Habsburg. Archduke Maximilian was the younger brother of the current Austrian Emperor Franz Josef and was at a loose end. The plan got a chilly reception from British prime minister Lord Palmerston, a wily realist, and the Convention of London included a clause prohibiting the joint force from interference in Mexico's domestic politics. Seizing the customs houses if necessary was as far as the alliance would go. Napoleon III agreed and then inserted a get-out-of-jail-free card, a further clause that gave field commanders the discretion to respond to fast-moving events as they saw best fit. He then secretly ordered the French admiral to occupy Mexico City whatever happened.

“The fleet arrived in early 1862 with seven thousand troops (Napoleon III, a cheapskate, provided less than half of them), who occupied Veracruz without much fuss. When Juárez agreed to resume debt payments the British and Spanish withdrew; the French installed a puppet conservative émigré as president and advanced on Mexico City. For anyone who had studied past invasions–and the French had, drawing up a map of what the US had faced in 1847–it was clear that invaders had to leave the lowlands quickly, before tropical disease set in, and should expect stiff Mexican resistance. The French found both out in short order. When General Élie Frédéric Forey arrived in the autumn he set out for healthy Orizaba too slowly, leaving behind 200 sick in Veracruz; out of his remaining 515 men less than half survived. And Forey was a new commander in chief, bringing in fresh troops, because the first French regiments had been savaged by guerrillas and lost a set-piece battle at Puebla.

“Puebla was the gateway to the central valley, and the Mexicans garrisoned it scientifically with twelve thousand men. Outside the city they turned two former monasteries into forts; inside the city they dug trenches and built parapets on rooftops. On May 5, 1862, the French, overconfident, launched an all-out frontal assault on the well-organized defenses and were massacred. In the capital Mexicans launched the first-ever Cinco de Mayo celebrations. The French only returned to Puebla a year later, after raising their own army to twenty-eight thousand men. This time they abandoned elan and inched forward behind siegeworks; it took them two months to capture the city, and only after agreeing to let the Mexican rank and file go free. Juárez's government left the capital for San Luis Potosi, and on June 10, 1863, the French finally marched into Mexico City.

“Nine months later Archduke Maximilian accepted the imperial crown, and on June 12, 1864, he arrived in the capital of his Mexican Empire redivivus. He was backed only by Napoleon Ill and King Leopold of Belgium, his father-in-law. Napoleon III was a self-made emperor, a naturalized Swiss citizen, a 'parvenu' to Maximilian, ' princely lumpenproletariat' to Karl Marx. King Leopold was a recent invention too, a princeling who accepted the newly invented crown of Belgium after turning down Greece as a bit too risky. In the royal scheme of things, Maximilian had more legitimacy than either; his family had once ruled Mexico for nearly two hundred years. He nevertheless conditioned acceptance on a vote to confirm everyday Mexicans' agreement, and Napoleon III duly provided the numbers, claiming without any ballot papers that five and a half million Mexicans desired a Habsburg restoration. In reality there was a petition with six names. One gimcrack emperor installed another.

"There were well-placed skeptics to whom Maximilian might have listened. Napoleon III tried to bribe General Miguel Miramón into joining the first expedition; the ex-president refused because, he explained, there was no monarchist party in Mexico. After losing the Battle of Puebla the French commander reported to Paris that he had 'never met a single supporter of monarchy?' The main monarchist emigre, José María Gutiérrez de Estrada, was clueless and utterly marginal in Mexican politics: He had been in exile for more than twenty years, after publishing a pamphlet-partly in English-calling for a foreign prince; he was from Yucatan, he married into a family of Spanish aristocrats, and his neck was saved by the French consul. He wasn't even charismatic; when someone asked Napoleon III what he thought of Gutiérrez de Estrada, the reply was 'Nothing at all.'"

author: Paul Gillingham title: Mexico: A 500-Year History publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press date: page(s): 302-305

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andrew mccarthy and molly ringwald -- 3/13/2026

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 03:20:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from Brat: An '80s Story by Andrew McCarthy. Molly Ringwald helped Andrew McCarthy land a key part in John Hughes’ breakthrough hit Pretty in Pink:

"The Breakfast Club had recently been released, and with its success coming on the heels of Sixteen Candles, both John and Molly Ringwald were in an enviable position. A new type of teen film was emerging and John was the visionary behind it, with Molly as his muse. John's movies had a singular voice, confidence, and sincerity. Molly was equally assured, unique and raw. Pretty in Pink was to be their next collaboration. John had written the movie for Molly but he was going to only produce the film, handing the directing chore over to a softhearted, self-deprecating New York neurotic named Howard Deutch. All I cared about at this point was that they were coming to New York and, according to my agent, weren't interested in auditioning me. They were looking for a 'hunk,' a 'star quarterback type,' to play the rich love interest to Molly's girl from the wrong side of the tracks. I was informed I did not fit the bill.

"But with St. Elmo's Fire coming out soon, there was a bit of prerelease buzz. In some conversations -- primarily the ones initiated by movie publicists -- it was being called 'the young Big Chill,' an ensemble film filled with stars a decade older, stars like William Hurt and Kevin Kline. (In fact, when St. Elmo's Fire was released a few months later, one reviewer called it 'a poor man's Big Chill, a day late and a dollar short.' At least the publicists had done their job and gotten the two films spoken of in the same sentence.) And because of that chatter about my soon-to-be-released movie (you are never more intriguing than before anyone has seen your work), I was awarded a courtesy audition.

"I waited my turn out in the hall. Most of the time actors go into an audition room and read the scene with a casting assistant -- usually a well-meaning person and a terrible actor. But in this case Molly was there, seated beside the video camera. At the time, I had not seen any of Molly's films, although it would have been impossible not to recognize her after walking past my newsstand on Sheridan Square and seeing all the magazine covers with her likeness. Behind her, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, perched an eager, dark-haired, and well-intentioned man: the director, Howie. Then in the back of the room, behind the equipment, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his baggy trousers as he tilted his chair back up on two legs, bobbing against the wall, was a blond-haired, soft-featured man with wire glasses: Hughes. He nodded in my general direction and never spoke.

"I did my bit. Molly was attentive and read with care. No one else showed much interest.

"'Thanks for coming in,' the casting associate muttered. 'Fuck 'em,' I thought on the way out.

"Once the door was shut, Molly apparently turned to John and said, 'That's the kind of guy I would fall for.'

"'THAT wimpy guy?' John said. 'He's sensitive, poetic,' Molly said.

"John wasn't convinced, but over the next few days the calls to my agent went from 'He did a nice job' to 'We like him a lot for this.' It was testament to John's belief in Molly that he got behind the idea and cast me. It was another example of what I believe was the key to John's success in his youth films. Not only on-screen did John give young people credit for being full human beings with opinions worth listening to; he carried this line of thinking through in all areas. Later, on set, John brought a small boom box around and between setups would play snatches of music and ask for the actors' opinions. He was gathering information for what would become the sound track, and he wisely solicited the ears of the generation who would be listening. That sound track was as responsible for the success of the film as what appeared on the screen.

"As I was offered the job only a short time before filming, and since there was no question of whether or not I would do the film, I returned to my old schoolboy ways and felt no need to read the script -- until I was on the plane out to Los Angeles to begin shooting. The basic plot of the film -- which John boasted he wrote in a weekend -- hung on Molly's character, named Andie, wanting to go to her school prom with my character, Blane. In the end, peer pressure proves too much for Blane and he stands Andie up on the big night. Blane mopes at home and Andie takes comfort in her best friend; lesson learned. In the few scenes I had read of the script, it never occurred to me that Blane would lack moral conviction and back out. Reading on the plane, I was shocked by his spineless nature. Upon landing, I called my manager, Mary, and complained,

"'This guy is a total loser. I can't do this movie!'

"'Honey, you read the script,' Mary replied. 'You knew what happened.'

"What could I say?"

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hearing loss is from ear hair damage -- 3/12/2026

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 03:20:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from Shouting Won't Help by Katherine Bouton. In most cases, when our hearing is impaired, it is because of damage to ear hair. Although that damage becomes evident when we are older, it often relates to damage incurred when we are young:

"By far the most common [condition that destroys hearing is] exposure to either long-term moderately loud noise or sudden very loud noise. ... What actually happens in the inner ear when it is exposed to ... loud noise?

"The inner ear is home to the cochlea, a bony spiral cavity about the size of a pea, which turns on itself two and a half times and looks like a snail shell ('cochlea' comes from the Latin term for 'snail'). Sound waves, or vibrations, enter the cochlea (having been given a boost by the middle ear's three interconnected bones, including the stapes, the smallest bone in the body). As this happens, fluid in the cochlea sets in motion the thousands of hair cells located in the organ of Corti, deep in the inner ear.

"The hair cells in the organ of Corti are organized into four rows. The three outer rows of cells pick up the movement and change it into a mechanical impulse, which amplifies the signal -- now traveling through the cochlear bath and thus dulled, as sound would be if you were underwater. The inner hair cells, in a single row, each respond to a particular frequency. They are activated to release a neurotransmitter to the auditory nerve fibers, which also number in the thousands and also each respond to a different frequency. The neurons transmit the sound via the auditory nerve to the brain, ultimately reaching the auditory cortex, which translates the sound into something that we recognize as speech or birdsong or a car passing on the road. The translation that occurs in the auditory cortex allows us to distinguish between similar speech sounds like 'ah' and 'eh,' 'b' and 'p,' 'ch' and 'sh.' How the cortex does this is beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that you hear with your brain. The auditory system merely transmits the signals. But if the signals can't get to the brain, then the brain can't do its job.

"In a lot of deafness, the first things you lose are the outer hair cells. The inner hair cells may be undamaged, but because you've lost the mechanical response of the outer cells, the cochlea is not as sensitive, not as fine-tuned in its response. The result is that some neurons respond to more frequencies than they should, sending a muddled signal to the brain. The primary damage is to speech recognition. 'Bet' sounds like 'pet,' 'church' sounds like 'shirts.' Brad May, of Johns Hopkins, calls this 'brain deafness.' ...

"[This] type of hearing loss [is] often referred to as nerve damage but [it is] not, technically, since [it doesn't] affect the acoustic nerve, only the hair cells that communicate with it. ...

"A person with mild to moderate hearing loss can still hear in a quiet room or other favorable environment. But when too many frequencies are destroyed, he or she may not understand speech, even under the best of conditions. The muddled transmissions also make it difficult for the auditory system to filter unwanted noise: the din and clatter of a restaurant, the engine of a bus, the hum of a fan or air conditioner. Intrusive noise may be simply two or three people talking at once, creating a background sound of indistinguishable voices, or it may be a large, resonant room echoing sound off the walls. ... Since hearing aids aren't as good as the human ear at screening out unwanted noise, using them can be frustrating, especially in noisy environments.

"Assuming my hair cells are damaged, they probably look flattened, like a field of wheat after a hailstorm. ... Each cell in those four rows of cells (the single inner row, which communicates with the brain, and three outer rows) is topped by a tiny standing hair, or stereocilium. The hair cells, [audiologist Sharon Kujawa] said, are 'connected to each other with fine little filaments, so that when sound comes in and they bend, it allows currents to flow through.' This movement triggers the release of the neurotransmitter substances. After intense noise exposure, the hair cells lie flat. If the noise is not too loud, they eventually right themselves. The threshold shift is temporary.

"But Kujawa and [M. Charles] Liberman have found that even though the threshold reverts to normal, permanent damage may have occurred. ... [They] found that the damage occurs not in the hair cells themselves, which may recover, but in the spiral ganglion cells (SGCs -- the cells in the cochlear neurons). The hair cells communicate with SGCs in the process of passing information to the brain.

"Although hearing is restored, the damage is done almost instantaneously. ... Even though we think of this kind of hearing loss as related to aging, the truth is that ears are most vulnerable to noise damage when they're young. ... Teenagers -- with their ubiquitous iPods and MP3 players, not to mention noise exposure from video games, loud stadiums, and rock concerts -- are experiencing these loud noises at an especially vulnerable age. Another vulnerable population, newborn infants, might suffer damage from continuous noise in a neonatal ICU or from a white noise machines parents sometimes use to help fussy infants sleep."

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the most catastrophic battle of the civil war -- 3/11/2026

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 03:20:00 -0400

Today's encore selection -- from Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. In 1863, the Union and Confederate armies commanded by Major General Joseph Hooker and Robert E. Lee met at Chancellorsville, Virginia. Hooker commanded an army of 134,000 men and had the tactical advantage over Lee's army of 61,000 Confederate soldiers. Despite having the upper hand, Hooker suffered a devastating defeat:

"One of the most famous battles of the American Civil War took place in the spring of 1863 in the northern Virginia town of Chancellorsville. It pitted the legendary Confederate general Robert E. Lee against 'Fighting Joe' Hooker, commander of the Union's Army of the Potomac. Lee was by then well into his fifties and of uncertain health. He was a devout and principled man, with a long, somber face and a full gray beard. He was revered by his troops and had demonstrated by that point in the war an unmatched tactical genius. His opponent, Hooker, was his antithesis. Hooker was young, tall, and fair. 'He was a bachelor and liked the company of women,' the historian Gary Gallagher says. 'Charles Francis Adams has a famous quotation that Hooker's headquarters was part barroom and part brothel and no decent person would have business there.' Under his command, the Army of the Potomac had been transformed from a ragged, ill-disciplined group into what Hooker called 'the finest body of soldiers the sun ever shone on.' That was typical Hooker. He did not lack for self-confidence. 'It is no vanity in me to say I am a damned sight better general than you had on that field,' he told Lincoln after the Battle of Bull Run. And when he confronted Lee in the spring of 1863, he was even more sure of himself. 'My plans are perfect,' he said before committing his troops to battle. 'And when I start to carry them out, may God have mercy on Bobby Lee, for I shall have none.'

"The situation at Chancellorsville was quite simple.

"The top half of Virginia is bisected by the Rappahannock River, which meanders from the Blue Ridge Mountains in the north and empties into Chesapeake Bay. In 1863, in the third year of the Civil War, Lee had dug in along the southern banks of the Rappahannock, midway between Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, and, to the north, Washington, D.C., where President Lincoln anxiously awaited news of the war's progress. Lee had 61,000 men in his army and was assisted by another of the Confederacy's legendary commanders, Stonewall Jackson. Hooker faced Lee across the river, and he had under his command 134,000 men and twice as many artillery pieces. One obvious option for Hooker would have been to charge across the river at Lee directly, hoping to overwhelm him with superior numbers. But Hooker decided on something far more elegant. He took about half of his troops and had them march fifteen miles upriver, then stealthily cross the Rappahannock and march back, until they were massed directly behind Lee's army at a crossroads known as Chancellorsville. Hooker's position was unassailable. He had Lee in a vise: Lee had a larger army in front of him and a larger army behind him.

Soldiers of the VI Corps, Army of the Potomac, in trenches before storming Marye's Heights at the Second Battle of Fredericksburg during the Chancellorsville campaign, Virginia, May 1863.

"Hooker also had intelligence that was vastly superior to Lee's. He had a network of spies throughout the Confederate army, whose intelligence allowed him to do what even today seems extraordinary -- that is, move 70,000 troops into position behind his enemy's army without his enemy's knowledge. What's more, he had two hot-air balloons at his disposal, which he sent up periodically to provide almost perfect aerial reconnaissance of Lee's positions. The Battle of Chancellorsville was a fight that, by any normal measure, ought to have been won by the Union army in a rout. When Hooker joined his troops at Chancellorsville, he gathered them around and read to them his final orders: 'It is with heartfelt satisfaction that the commanding general announces to the army that the operations of the last three days have determined that our enemy must either ingloriously fly, or come out from behind his own defenses and give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits.'

"But when the battle began, what had seemed perfectly clear-cut in the planning stage quickly turned murky. Hooker thought that Lee, faced with such a dire situation, would retreat in the only direction he could -- back to Richmond -- and that in the chaos of retreat, his army would be a sitting duck for the pursuing Union forces. This is the scenario that he had thought about and talked about and that had hardened in his mind. But Lee did not retreat. Instead, he divided his forces and turned, unexpectedly, to face Hooker at Chancellorsville. Hooker had the advantage of position and numbers. But now he was thrown into confusion. Lee was not acting like a man heavily outnumbered. He was acting like a man with a numerical advantage. A number of Confederate deserters were captured by the Union forces, and they said that another Confederate general, James Longstreet, had come to Lee's defense with massive reinforcements. Was this true? The fact is that it wasn't, but Hooker was confused. On paper, he had an insurmountable advantage over Lee. But the battle was not being fought on paper. It was being fought in the moment. He told his troops to halt, then to withdraw. He ceded his battlefield advantage. 'It's all right,' Hooker told Darius Couch, one of his generals, in an attempt to put a brave face on the situation. 'I've got Lee just where I want him. He must fight me on my own ground.' But Couch was not fooled. 'I retired from his presence,' he would say later, 'with the belief that my commander was a whipped man.'

"Lee sensed that weakness as well. So he acted without hesitation. He divided his army again and set Stonewall Jackson, under cover of darkness and fog, to creep far around Hooker's flank and attack at the farthest edge of Hooker's position, where the Union army felt it was most invulnerable. At just after five o'clock in the afternoon, Lee's forces attacked. Hooker's troops were eating supper. Their rifles were off to the side, stacked in piles. Lee's troops came screaming out of the surrounding forest, bayonets drawn, and Hooker's army turned and ran. It was one of the most devastating defeats of the Civil War."

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the irish--3/10/2026

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 02:30:00 -0400

Today's selection-- from Rot by Padraic X. Scanlan. The treatment of the Irish by the English:

“In the eighteenth century, Ireland was roughly 80 percent Catholic, but only 5 percent of Irish land was owned by Catholic landlords. Dispossession, reinforced by laws forbidding Catholic participation in political and economic life, were key features of British colonialism in Ireland. Colonisation had a long history. In the twelfth century, Norman soldiers invaded Ireland, extending the Norman Conquest of England across the Irish Sea. After the invasion, the new Anglo-Norman nobility was all but independent until King Henry VII reimposed English government and limited the Irish Parliament's authority after his victory in the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487). In 1541, after a failed rebellion led by the Earl of Kildare against the Crown, Henry VIII declared himself king of Ireland as well as England.

“From the 1540s on, the Crown experimented with the colonisation of Ireland by English, Welsh, and Scottish settlers. These ‘plantations’—meant in the sense of a grove of trees planted to birth a forest—were supposed to pacify Ireland through gradual Anglicisation. The first plantations in Munster crumbled. But in the early seventeenth century, with the support of King James I, six counties in the northern province of Ulster—Donegal, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Cavan, Armagh, and Londonderry—were cleared of many Catholics by force and resettled by English and Scottish Protestants. A seventh county, Antrim, was settled ‘privately’ by independent Protestant settlers with the Crown's tacit endorsement. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the majority-Protestant ‘Ulster Plantation’ (six counties of which now compose Northern Ireland) was often a relatively more prosperous exception to the poverty of the other provinces. On the eve of the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, there were one hundred thousand Protestant settlers in Ireland—some thirty thousand Scots and seventy thousand Welsh and English. Although outnumbered fifteen to one by Catholics, Protestants already owned more than 40 percent of Irish land.

“In 1641, during the Civil Wars, the Irish Catholic nobility rebelled and won de facto independence. But from 1649 to 1651, after the defeat of the Royalists and the execution of King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell—the leading figure in the army raised by Parliament and Lord Protector of England from 1653—launched a ruthless reconquest of Ireland. Historians question the degree to which Cromwell personally intended to exterminate Catholics, although some of his followers considered the invasion of Ireland a holy war. Reports of massacres of Protestants fuelled the fire. Irish Catholics, one pamphlet declared, ‘are the very offal of men, dregs of mankind, reproach of Christendom.... Cursed be he that maketh not his sword stark drunk with Irish blood.’

“In 1652, many Catholics were formally stripped of their land by act of Parliament and driven from their homes to the western province of Connaught, designated as the new home of the ‘native’ Irish. Catholic priests were executed. Many Irish soldiers fled the island to join the French and Spanish armies; thousands who were captured were sent as indentured labourers to England's Caribbean colonies. The humiliation and trauma of the invasion made Cromwell a figure of mythic evil in Irish folk memory. In one story, Cromwell punished a soldier who stole milk by stabbing the thief in the stomach, ‘out of which spurted the milk…a warning that none of his soldiers could do anything without his permission.’

“After Oliver Cromwell's death, the Commonwealth collapsed, and in 1660 Charles II was restored to the throne (Cromwell's corpse was exhumed, put on trial, and convicted of treason). Two years later, select Irish Catholic landowners who had remained loyal to the Crown were restored to their lands. In 1685, Charles died. His brother, James, was Catholic. However, James was in his fifties, and his heir, Mary, firmly Protestant, was married to William of Orange, stadtholder of the Netherlands and a stalwart of the Dutch armed struggle against Spain, one of Europe's great Catholic monarchies. James was crowned James II with the grudging consent of Parliament. All but the hottest Puritans conceded that the accession of an older Catholic king with a Protestant heir was better than renewed war.

“In power, James edged toward restoring all Catholic land in Ireland. In 1687, the Catholic Earl of Tyrconnell was appointed lord lieutenant and persuaded James II to annul the laws prohibiting the partial return of land to ‘innocent’ Catholics. Anticipating that the Cromwellian settlement would be overturned, Protestant landowners fled. Paramilitaries in Ulster armed themselves. In 1688, James's wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son whose claim to the throne would trump that of his Protestant half sister. A Catholic king was tolerable; a Catholic dynasty was not. A group of leading MPs secretly invited James's son-in-law, William of Orange, to take the English throne. In November 1688, William landed in England at the head of an army. James II fled, and William was crowned William III in 1689, ruling as co-monarch with the deposed king's daughter, now Mary II.

“In England, the 1688 invasion was a ‘Glorious Revolution.’ In Ireland, it began a new war of conquest. When William's army drove James II from England, he fled first to Ireland, where many Catholic aristocrats rallied around his cause. William invaded Ireland, personally leading his troops against an army led by James, at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690—one of the last European battles in which two monarchs faced each other on the battlefield.

“England tightened its grip on Ireland, and the persecution of Irish Catholics continued. In 1707, England and Wales merged with Scotland, formerly a separate kingdom (although under a single Crown), to form Great Britain. The new British Parliament, following on laws passed under Cromwell, passed a series of acts, known as the Penal Laws, to persecute Irish (and British) Catholics. Catholics had been barred from all public offices in Ireland since 1607, and in 1707 the ban was extended to Presbyterians. Catholics were forbidden to marry Protestants, and they could not sit in either the English or the Irish Parliament or vote in elections. Catholics were barred from many professions. Catholicism assumed a ‘catacomb existence.’ Although Catholics were the majority even in Ulster, by the nineteenth century there were only 2,015 Catholic churches serving Ireland's 6.5 million Catholics. Priests would travel, sometimes in secret, on ‘stations,’ going out twice a year to hear confession and say Mass in private homes.

Ireland in the 1730s

“The Penal Laws against Catholic rites were often indifferently enforced in Ireland, but the laws that disinherited and dispossessed Catholic landlords were scrupulously followed. The heirs of Catholics could inherit land only if they converted to the Anglican church, and no Catholic could inherit land owned by a Protestant. Any landlord who converted to Catholicism forfeited his property to the Crown and faced an indefinite prison term. Some two thousand landowners, many descendants of Cromwell's and William's soldiers and allies, owned virtually all of Ireland's arable land, some in estates larger than fifty thousand acres. Protestant landlords, however, depended on the despised Catholic majority for rent and labour.

“As the new state of Great Britain consolidated, the British Empire grew. Ireland was largely shut out of trade to Britain, so Irish merchants sent most of their goods across the Atlantic, with 85 percent bound for the Caribbean colonies. A cargo of Irish linen, for example, might go to Barbados to be sold for sugar, with the sugar taken to England to be sold for cash. The risks of this attenuated trading network raised the cost of borrowing for Irish merchants, who both paid more for credit and earned less on exports. Meanwhile, Irish landlords collected rent on estates that, some rarely, if ever, visited. William Petty, the English polymath who served Cromwell, Charles II, and James II, noted that as early as 1664, at least 25 percent of Irish landlords lived in England, where ‘all that belongs to them goes out, but returns not.’

“As the gap between the British and Irish economies grew, the idea of the Irish as insinuating papists at best and ungovernable barbarians at worst solidified in British popular culture. Jonathan Swift's famous satire, ‘A Modest Proposal,’ published in 1729, skewered both the poverty of the Irish countryside and an already well-defined contempt for the Irish in Britain. In the essay, Swift proposed the slaughter of Irish children, ‘plump, and fat’ as a solution to Irish poverty. ‘A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish,’ Swift wrote. ‘I grant this food,’ he continued, ‘will be somewhat dear, and there-fore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.’ Swift was revolted both by Irish poverty and by the willingness of Britons to think of the Irish as not only poor but feral, cannibal, subhuman.”

author: Padraic X. Scanlan title: Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine publisher: Basic Books date: page(s): 29-34

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an actor’s training--3/6/2026

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 03:00:00 -0500

Today's selection-- from The Alchemy of Acting by Jim Blumetti. Lessons in micro expressions and contemporary training for actors:

“An actor’s training cannot remain static in an evolving industry. Methods that once perfectly prepared performers for 1990s cinema or early 2000s television often fall short in developing the skills demanded by today's productions. If the medium changes — and it always does — your training must change with it.

“This doesn't mean discarding classical foundations. It means adapting them. It means supplementing traditional training with work designed specifically for the nuanced, thought-driven performances that today's cameras demand. The intimacy of contemporary film and television doesn't reward size or projection — it rewards interiority, precision, and authenticity.

“Modern training should emphasize thought visibility — the ability to think truthfully on camera, not just act. Micro expression control — understanding how the smallest facial movements communicate volumes. Internal monologue development — cultivating a rich, unspoken inner life that subtly animates the performance. Technological adaptation — learning how different camera setups, frame sizes, and digital formats alter performance requirements.

“Much of the most relevant training today comes not from the classroom but from studying today's best performers with analytical eyes.

“Watch Florence Pugh's minute shifts in awareness.

“Observe Steven Yeun's compelling stillness.

“Track Jodie Comer's ability to make her thought patterns visible without a word.

“Break down their work frame by frame — not for what they do, but for how they think on camera.

“The actor who evolves alongside the industry doesn't just survive — they thrive.

“Range today isn't only about playing different characters.

“It's about adapting to different mediums, evolving technologies, and shifting stylistic approaches as the art form itself continues to change.

“The ones who endure are the ones who evolve.

“The Never-Ending Apprenticeship

“The most successful actors in the world never stop training.

“Just as athletes continually refine their mechanics, actors must keep sharpening their craft — not for accolades, but for survival. The industry evolves. The work demands new techniques. And growth — both personal and artistic — constantly changes the way an actor approaches the craft.

“Why does the training never end? Because acting is a muscle.

“Without consistent use, it weakens. It dulls. It loses responsiveness.

“Every new role presents new challenges.

“Every new medium — film, television, streaming, digital — demands fresh adaptation.

“Mastery isn't about knowing everything. It's about staying open — alert to what you don't know yet.

“Repetition isn't stagnation. It's refinement. It sharpens instincts, making them faster, clearer, more reliable.

“Look at the ones who endure:

“Meryl Streep still works with voice coaches decades into her career.

“Anthony Hopkins, well into his eighties, continues to refine his technique.

“Viola Davis regularly returns to theater between film projects to maintain her technical foundation.

“These are not beginners clinging to the basics. They are masters who understand that real mastery is never finished.

“Try this:

“Identify three areas of your craft where you feel weakest. Voice work? Movement? Emotional range? Create a six-month training plan to address those weaknesses. Be specific. Be consistent. Be honest about where you need work.

“Many actors avoid precisely the areas that need the most attention. The naturally charismatic performer avoids technical precision. The technically gifted actor sidesteps emotional vulnerability. The dramatic actor shies away from comedy. But true growth requires the courage to confront weakness, not sitting in your comfort zone relying on your strengths.

“The work never ends. And that — more than anything — is why it stays alive.”

author: Jim Blumetti title: The Alchemy of Acting: The Evolution of Craft in Film publisher: Arcane Pen Press date: page(s): 300-303

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frida kahlo miscarries -- 3/5/2026

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 03:20:00 -0500

Today's encore selection -- from Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera. Frida Kahlo's friend Lucienne comes to stay with her when Frida miscarries.

"[Diego] Rivera [could not] make Frida obey the doctor's orders and stay quietly in the apartment. She was lonely, sick, bored. He was fired with enthusiasm for his work and had no intention of staying home to look after his wife. So when Lucienne Bloch came to Detroit in June, he insisted that the young artist move in. 'Frida has nothing to do,' he told Lucienne. 'She has no friends. She's very lonely.' He hoped that Lucienne would encourage Frida to paint, but Frida had other ideas. She was, Lucienne recalls, learning to drive instead.

"Lucienne slept in the living room on a Murphy bed that she would push out of sight in the morning before her hosts awoke so that they would not feel crowded. While Diego was away, Frida sketched or painted desultorily in the living room, and Lucienne worked at the dining room table, designing small figurines for a Dutch glassworks.

"As the end of June approached and the summer heat made the small apartment stifling, Frida began to spot, her uterus 'hurt,' and she suffered prolonged attacks of nausea. Nothing, however, could shake her optimism. Lucienne recalls: 'She was just hoping to be pregnant, so I said, "Have you seen the doctor?" and she said, "Yes, I have a doctor, but he tells me I can't do this, I can't do that, and that's a lot of bunk." She did not visit him the way she should have.'

"Frida lost her child on July 4, 1932. Lucienne's diary for the next day tells the story: 'Sunday evening. Frieda was so blue and menstruating so. She went to bed and the doctor came and told her, as usual, that it was nothing, that she must be quiet. In the night I heard the worst cries of despair, but thinking that Diego would call me if I could help, I only dozed and had nightmares. At five, Diego rushed into the room all disheveled and pale and asked me to call the doctor. He came at six with an ambulance and got her, in the agonies of birth . . . out of the pool of blood she had made and . . . the huge clots of blood she kept losing. She looked so tiny, twelve years old. Her tresses were wet with tears.'

"Frida was rushed in the ambulance to the Henry Ford Hospital. Lucienne and Diego followed in a taxi. As orderlies wheeled Frida through a cement corridor in the hospital's basement, she looked up between painful contractions and saw a maze of different-colored pipes near the ceiling. 'Look, Diego! Que precioso! How beautiful!' she cried.

"Rivera was distraught while he waited for news of Frida's condition. 'Diego was tired all day,' Lucienne's diary records. 'Hastings tried to cheer him up by going with all of us to the fourth of July parade. In my mind, there was all the time the big chunks of blood and Frida's screaming. Diego thought the same. He thinks that a woman, to stand such pain, is far superior to a man who never could stand the pain of childbirth.'

"Frida's thirteen days in the hospital were grim. A man lay dying in the next room. She felt like escaping but she was too sick to move, and the heat enervated her even more. She kept bleeding and weeping. Seized by fits of despair at the thought that she might never have children, at not really knowing what was wrong with her, why her fetus had not taken form but had 'disintegrated' in her womb, she would cry, 'I wish I were dead! I don't know why I have to go on living like this.' Rivera was appalled at her suffering and was full of premonitions of disaster. When they extracted liquid from her spine, he became convinced that she had meningitis.

Henry Ford Hospital, 1932 by Frida Kahlo

"But five days after her miscarriage, she took up a pencil and drew a bust-length Self-Portrait. In it she wears a kimono and a hair net, and her face is swollen from tears. And even in the midst of misery she could find laughter. When Lucienne brought her a parody of a condolence telegram that she had composed and signed 'Mrs. Henry Ford,' Frida laughed so hard, Lucienne recalls, that what was left of the decomposed fetus was delivered, and she bled profusely.

"Frida wanted to draw her lost child, wanted to see him exactly as he should have looked at the moment when he was miscarried. The second day in the hospital, she begged a doctor to let her have medical books with illustrations on the subject, but the doctor refused; the hospital did not allow patients to have books on medicine because the images in them might be upsetting. Frida was furious. Diego interceded, telling the doctor, 'You are not dealing with an average person. Frida will do something with it. She will do an artwork.' Finally Diego himself provided Frida with a medical book, and she made a careful pencil study of a male fetus. Two other pencil drawings that probably come from this same moment, and that are more surrealistic and fanciful than anything she had done before, show Frida asleep in bed surrounded by strange images that represent her dreams, or perhaps the fleeting visions seen under anesthesia, and are attached to her head by long, looping lines. Apparently done using the Surrealist technique of 'automatism,' the images seem to have sprung into being through free association -- a hand with roots, a foot that is like a tuber, city buildings, Diego's face. In one of the drawings, Frida lies naked on top of the bedcovers. Her long hair flows over the edge of the bed and metamorphoses into a network of roots that creep along the floor."

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satellites--3/5/3036

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 02:03:00 -0500

Today's selection-- from The Web Beneath the Waves by Samanth Subramanian. The modern communications satellite:

“A month after the volcanic eruption, SpaceX donated fifty Starlink terminals to Tonga—the country's first fat slice of connectivity. As Tonga's resident DHL agent, Sam Vea has photos on his phone of the momentous day he took delivery—the black cardboard boxes of terminals arriving on a small Air New Zealand cargo truck, shrink-wrapped in plastic and stacked on wooden pallets. If he was beaming, you couldn't tell; even in the afternoon heat, everyone wore masks. The Starlinks were distributed across institutions like ministries and banks but also to public spaces like community halls and restaurants; many went to the outer islands, including Vava'u. '’All the Wi-Fi was free, so anyone could come into range and use it,’ Ahio said. ‘It was always congested!’ People could also buy point-to-point radio links that could throw the Wi-Fi signal a little further, to reach their shops or bakeries or schools. On Vava'u, Brian Meikle gestured around the coffee shop where he and I sat talking—a lovely, airy spot with a pizza oven and a balcony that looked down upon the island's marina. In the summer of 2022, he said, the coffee shop fell within range of a Starlink signal, ‘and it became an internet lounge. The reliability wasn't the best, but it was better than nothing. You'd see masses of people come into town just for the internet.’ They would sit around for hours, working or studying, and if the cafe was full or shut, they'd loiter just outside, pecking at their phones. A foreign diplomat told me that she'd see Tongans in these Wi-Fi oases late into the night, trying to catch up on work: ‘One woman told me she was doing an online course at the University of the South Pacific, and that she had to sit in her car typing out her coursework.’ When another COVID lockdown was imposed in late March, shutting down even shops and gas stations, people from rural Vava'u often tried to sneak into town, past the guard posts, to get online. The Starlinks were simultaneously a blessing and not enough—but they were Tonga's only bond to the world until the snapped cable at the bottom of the ocean could be dredged up and repaired.

“The modern communications satellite is a remarkable device. A Starlink costs around a quarter of a million dollars to manufacture, weighs just 500 pounds, and can be carried into orbit a couple of dozen at a time. Elon Musk wants to have 30,000 of them circling the planet. Others are plotting to spray their own satellites into orbit as well. Amazon has approvals to deploy 3,236 satellites as part of its Project Kuiper. Three Chinese projects—one of them named ‘Qianfan,’ translating into the utterly romantic ‘Thousand Sails’—aspire to place a total of 38,000 satellites into space. Even in these teeming numbers, though, they don't herald any big transformations in how we send and receive data. A satellite can only offer data transfer speeds of a dozen gigabytes a second at best—far below the multiple tera-bytes per second that physical cables transmit. Satellites are invaluable in emergencies—as in Tonga—or war zones like the Ukrainian front, or for military installations or a ranch in the middle of nowhere. But to serve a community with fast, reliable, and voluminous internet, there's no alternative to a cable.

“Not that people haven't tried. The highest-profile attempt to dematerialize the internet—to shoot information through the air—was Loon, a project from Google's X research facility, popularly known as a moonshot factory. X's headquarters, set inside a former mall, is not far from the main Google campus in Mountain View. On a September day, I arrived early for my appointment, so I sat outdoors in blinding California sunshine, watching a Waymo autonomous car—another X project—make slow, endless loops around the parking lot.

“In a conference room, I met X's CEO Astra Teller, who wheeled in on a Segway. Teller was born Eric; ‘Astro’ was a high-school nickname, but it proved to be a fine and fortuitous one for the chief of a moonshot factory dedicated to envisioning a polished techno-future. That future included bringing the whole world online. Fiber connectivity is a no-brainer ‘if everyone lives in cities,’ Teller told me. ‘Except, like, three billion people don't live in cities—they live in extra-urban or rural places, or even in groups the size of cities but where the infrastructure isn't there. That seemed like one of the legitimate, huge problems facing the world.’

60 Starlink satellites stacked together before deployment on May 24, 2019

“Teller jumped up from his seat and went to the whiteboard to start drawing: a stick figure with a rectangular device in its hand, a circle right above her, another circle at the same level but off to the right. Each circle was a tennis-court-sized balloon made of polyethylene and filled with hydrogen or helium, floating 60,000 feet above the earth's surface—or, to be precise, not

so much floating as riding the currents of stratospheric air, rising and falling deliberately as part of a great, coordinated, circumplanetary matrix of such balloons. Aboard the balloons were

LTE and cellular radios powered by small solar panels, which could beam 100 megabits a second of wireless internet down to a patch of Earth fifty miles in diameter. The balloons also communicated with each other at one gigabit a second, high-frequency radio waves bouncing back and forth with the precision of hitting the nose on the head of a moving penny, until they could be transmitted down to a ground station that was connected to the internet by—of course—good old-fashioned fiber. There was no escaping the physical medium, Teller said; Loon depended on cables—submarine as well as terrestrial—just as much as any other network.

“X launched its first test balloons in 2013 from New Zealand, and for years, the launches, flights, and retrievals of these balloons were shepherded by a team led by Nick Kohli, who rapidly acquired the designation of ‘global balloon concierge.’ Kohli used to be an emergency medical technician with a pilot's license and a background in search-and-rescue, until he got headhunted by a mysterious team that quizzed him about his knowledge of radios and asked him questions like: ‘How would you plan a multi-day expedition to this set of coordinates?’ ‘It was on Day One, when I had orientation, that I realized what we were actually doing,’ Kohli told me. Through his time at X, Kohli super-intended the flights of thousands of balloons in tests and pilot projects. After each balloon reached the end of its lifespan, measured in the hundreds of days, it came back from the strato-sphere down to Earth, for Kohli's squad to collect. ‘We must have had a 95 percent success rate in collecting these downed balloons,’ he said. Kohli himself retrieved upward of six hundred balloons—sometimes under the strangest circumstances. Once, X negotiated a soft landing of a balloon with the Colombian government—except that the military didn't get the memo.’You can empathize with them, because they're looking at this balloon, going: ‘What is this, UFO?’” Kohli said. ‘There's this picture of two Colombian military guards that had captured our balloon, and they made a big PR moment out of it. They put it in jail! And they put it in a shopfront for people to see that they were protecting the community!’”

author: Samanth Subramanian title: The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables that Connect our World publisher: Columbia Global Reports date: page(s): 54-58

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