In 1962 Michael Harrington’s "The Other America: Poverty in the United States" was published. It was truly one of those remarkable books that fundamentally changed the nature of the debate. Like Rachel Carson’s "Silent Spring" published the same year, it managed to draw attention to a significant but largely unrecognized threat to the country.
Even carved in wood, the cuckoo is a mess of contradictions. The man credited for inventing it in 1730 was not even born until four years later, and there is a description of a mechanical cuckoo that dates to 1629. Though the classic Swiss chalet version of the cuckoo clock is now iconic, the first popularizations were made in Germany’s Black Forest and bore hunting scenes.
A daydream is like a pill we pop to numb our misery. It pushes us from a grim present into a sunshiny future—one that is not likely to materialize. Yet there we stay, for as long as we possibly can, luxuriating in fake warmth.
This was a hard lesson. But I was not traumatized by it. I had learned enough from Negro History Week to know that there were Black people who had it a lot tougher and had learned harder lessons in a harder way. They soldiered on. I would not be much of a Black person if I let something like this really get me down.
Nero was loved by soldiers and commoners but deeply resented by the Roman aristocracy. The stories about Nero were recorded years after his death—by suicide, at the age of thirty, when the Roman Senate declared him a public enemy. By the time his life was written, politics was being adjusted to favor a different dynastic line.
In 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics informed us that we were spending about fifteen minutes a day reading for pleasure—and two hours and fifty minutes watching tv. In 2021, the tv total had risen to more than three hours a day. Reading was no longer even measured.
St. Louis was always more than its 314. You could argue that a second area code overlaid on this one’s territory will somehow expand our reach, reminding us of growth, of all the communication flying back and forth.
Written into Seed as Idea are rich themes of community food resilience, security, sustainability, diversity, and social justice—and a chance to educate the rest of us.
The logistics of erasing breed labels are tricky. Software needs to be rewritten, because shelter workers are often choosing from a drop-down list of breeds. “Mixed,” “mutt,” and “Heinz-57” are not options, and the choice is forced.
The supply chain is a royal mess, and I find it refreshing. Subtract serious delays and shortages and economic ruin, and what you have left is a strikingly effective form of psychotherapy.