I guess we know who watches the watchmen now, huh? Turns out, it's the watchmen, and they say there's nothing to worry about!

Love work, loathe mastery over others, and avoid intimacy with the government. Pirkei Avot 1:10

My first email account was a VAX account and I used it to email exactly two people. 1) A very cute boy from MIT and 2) my professor for Newton to Einstein: The Trail of Light.

Because no one else had email yet.

"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct... All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary." Orwell, 1984

Okay, I'm not an economist, but I feel like this guy might have made some shaky economic decisions somewhere along the line.

In the Middle Ages violating sanctuary by, say, killing Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, would get you excommunicated, or executed, or (at the very least) fined.

How is it possible that we're all just cheerfully lining up to hand over the things that make us human?

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.

--Shakespeare, teaching the sin of emphathy

What had you got? I’ll tell you. You had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,

Plodding to th’ ports and costs for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,

The Great Antidote: Extra: Alain Bertaud on Urban Planning and Cities | Adam Smith Works Diversity in cities creates challenges but the largeness of cities make them great places to address those challenges.

Using a podcast with urban planner Alain Bertaud as a starting point, I explore similarities between housing regulations that restrict building (and repurposing) and limits on the Smithian "extent of the market"—and therefore the division of labour and our ability to solve problems of/in cities.

Levellers, you say?
How about 7 volumes worth of primary source material?https://oll.libertyfund.org/collections/the-levellers

It is very odd watching Episcopalians suddenly taking political heat. My decision to reread Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, rewatch the Tudors, and run a reading group on Shakespeare's plays was supposed to distract me from contemporary politics, not mirror it! But there you go...

Here's a deep cut for you. Try Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books or Nancy and Plum, all by Betty MacDonald. Exceptional kids fiction.

Put 2 T flour and 2 T butter in the blender. Salt and pepper to taste. Turn on blender. Add, in alternating small batches, through the small central opening in blender lid, 2 C cubes cheese and 2 cups hot milk. (start and end w milk) Pour over cooked pasta and bake at 350 until it's done.

I just listened my way backwards to all the episodes of The Recipe, which is a delight. And the mac and cheese episode got me wondering if you'd ever heard of my Mom's approach to mac and cheese--which is to make the sauce in the blender (the fancy new appliance you got if you got married in 1960).

Owlcrate!!

Maybe it's all my years in Indiana, home of the Kinsey center, but I find it somewhat difficult to read "International Love Data Week" in the way it was presumably intended.

We need a word for the moment when a metaphor turns out to be just plain facts.