In the New Yorker...

[Front-Ranger]

This is not from a New Yorker article, but on the news the Southern Baptists are saying that since Roe v Wade was overturned, they feel empowered to go after an overturn of equal marriage rights. I feel like we're playing Jenga with the laws of the land; keep pulling them out one by one until the whole thing topples. 

How do people feel about the article on fewer Gen Z people having sex?

[Jeff Wrangler]

How do people feel about the article on fewer Gen Z people having sex?

Haven't got to that one yet, and it doesn't sound like an article that would interest me anyway.

I've skipped ahead to the article about Philadelphia's Mutter Museum. I once used the library there for some research (it wasn't very helpful), but I've never toured the exhibits.

I was interested to learn that Dr. Mutter was one of the first surgeons in Philadelphia to advocate the use of anesthesia for surgery.

[serious crayons]

I'm STILL not getting print NYers. I called yesterday and the woman on the phone apologized and said something about my apartment number being left off. I wasn't clear if she meant it was left off when I called to complain nine days earlier about not getting them, or before that. They had no problem getting them to me for about four years until they stopped a couple of months ago, so I don't know what the deal is.

[Jeff Wrangler]

I'm STILL not getting print NYers. I called yesterday and the woman on the phone apologized and said something about my apartment number being left off. I wasn't clear if she meant it was left off when I called to complain nine days earlier about not getting them, or before that. They had no problem getting them to me for about four years until they stopped a couple of months ago, so I don't know what the deal is.

Yeah, what's up with that? 

[Front-Ranger]

I've been getting ready to take some back issues to the Little Free Library, so I was reading "A Time to Kill" in the April 28 issue. I usually pass over Civil War content, but this one seemed newly relevant. History is being rewritten a lot and the latest versions can be unsettling. (I'm sure the versions coming out after the Trumpistration gets to them will be even more unsettling still.)

I wasn't aware of the efforts before Lincoln to get slavery abolished. Also, I didn't know that Lincoln proposed compromises such as gradual emancipation for the border states only. After reading the article, I still can't answer for myself the question of whether the Civil War could have been avoided. Possibly if wealthy Northern industrialists had bought and relocated all the slaves in the Southern states, but then that would have left no one to work the plantations.

What a charismatic person Lincoln was! I'm almost inspired to read his biography or watch the movie with Daniel Day-Lewis.

[Jeff Wrangler]

What a charismatic person Lincoln was! I'm almost inspired to read his biography or watch the movie with Daniel Day-Lewis.

The movie with Daniel Day-Lewis is quite good. Tommy Lee Jones is Lancaster, Pennsylvania's own Thaddeus Stevens.

[Front-Ranger]

Interesting, Wrangler.

I was also struck by the profile of Sayaka Murata in the April 14th issue. I've not heard of the concept of defamiliarization before. Making the familiar strange. I like that idea and have started to practice it. Isn't that what makes Brokeback Mountain, the story, so shocking and effective? You take a couple of gay men and put them in a different environment, like rural Wyoming, and voila! You have a mindbending story.

I've often tried to visualize what Earth would look like for space creatures looking down on us. A bunch of beetles scurrying around on round rubber feet, I imagine. A few birds, some large with shiny metal feathers, and a few snakelike things slithering along tracks.

[Jeff Wrangler]

In that June 30 article about the Mutter Museum, I think the woman in the photograph on page 41 looks like the woman in the famous Grant Wood painting "American Gothic."

[serious crayons]

Yeah, what's up with that? 

Finally came a couple of days ago. I've been reading the Civil War article.

I've seen, and also enjoyed, the Daniel Day-Lewis Lincoln movie.

I'm a little vague on this, but my feeling is that Lincoln, though presumably favoring abolition, was not a big anti-slavery crusader as much as a leader trying to find compromises that would keep the country together. That's shocking from today's perspective, but it's hard for us to put ourselves in the mindset of a time when slavery had been practiced so long and so routinely that it wasn't regarded as the great evil we see it as now. Maybe more like the way now we'd regard some people not having health insurance or something like that. Far from ideal, but maybe at the time considered short of outright evil.

[Front-Ranger]

That's the same impression I got about Lincoln. Going back to Washington, he was also opposed to slavery, but he did have enslaved people, who came from his wife's side (she was a widow). He directed that all the slaves should be freed upon his wife's death, and some were freed before that. Washington was opposed to some issues privately but didn't speak out publicly. And Jefferson! He wrote the Constitution, including "All men are created equal" while having children with his Black maid. How Shakesperian.