PicoBlog

Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s National Poetry Month project: Sing the Body: A Collection of Poems Praising Our Selves! With support from Florida International University’s Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab (WPHL) and Florida International University’s Center for Women and Gender Studies, we are publishing poems that celebrate body positivity and our selves. In addition to publishing the poems as poems of the day, 10 select Sing the Body poems will be displayed on FIU’s main campus near mirrors and places where women encounter themselves.

My Brown University economics colleague Oded Galor does not lack for ambition. His new book, The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality seeks to explain how our species has progressed from a handful of hunter-gatherers eking out an existence in Africa to a flourishing, technologically and economically advanced civilization. That’s 300,000 years of economic history, all in one book. It sounds improbable, but Oded has been gathering the empirical and theoretical insights that underpin this work for decades.

Dear Classical Wisdom Reader, Well, that was fun! If you missed it, yesterday I took part in our latest Roundtable Discussion, where I talked about the influence of the Classics on the Irish novelist James Joyce. The recording will be available for Members very soon! We had a great time talking about the different ways the Classics come down to us, and the ‘Great Conversation’ we have with the past. One of the ways we talked about this is through the ancient storytelling convention of the katabasis, or journey to the underworld.

(Listen to the radio version here.) My summer routine is to wake up between 4 and 5 am and drink my coffee on the front porch, listening to birds as I puzzle through the day’s Wordle; then I head to my computer. As the morning light grows, I peek out the window at birds while checking my email. Most of it is spam—lately I’ve been getting offers every day from dubious entities offering to use AI to convert my blogposts to a podcast, and from other dubious entities offering to use AI to convert my podcast to blogposts.

When Lewis Carroll published Alice In Wonderland, people thought the Queen of Hearts was making fun of Queen Victoria. The scrawny little King running behind her didn’t help. Yup. Queen Victoria and Albert, they whispered. Mocking the royals in words written for children was a thing. That’s what most nursery rhymes were. (If you’re interested in that, let me know!) He finally had to fess up. When Alice in Wonderland made its theatrical debut two years later, he announced that the Queen of Hearts was not Queen Victoria.

There was an Officer-Involved-Shooting (OIS) in Weber County, Utah where an officer fired his weapon at an offender in a vehicle - who was driving away. Typically that brief fact pattern is enough to cause concern and likely trigger exhaustive administrative and criminal investigations into the officer’s actions. But, added to the growing “bad facts” section of this case - there were allegedly three minor victims, being held against their will, in the offender vehicle at the time of the OIS…

On February 29, the Ohio Senate passed HB 27 which extends funding for the Ohio Adoption Grant program to State Fiscal Years (SFY) 2025 and 2026, (July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2026). The bill now goes back to the Ohio House, where it is likely to pass. The measure, as passed by the Senate, appropriates 34 million dollars each for SFY 2025 and 2026. The amount ultimately may change if the House version needs to be reconciled with the Senate bill in Conference Committee.

Note: This newsletter is supported by Donnelly’s Public House, a wonderful canal-side establishment in the village of Fairport. Seth Wile and Megan Phillips are so close to completing something that’s so wildly cool. The couple, engaged to be married, renovated a historic bowling alley in the village of Honeoye Falls. West Main Lanes, 126 W. Main St., opened last September. (The property has continued to host weekly horseshoe leagues.) And then next month, they’ll officially open an on-site craft brewery, Okay Beer Company, marrying two of their passions: Bowling and beer.

Share The daily media coverage focuses on the latest thing Donald Trump has said, which seems to get worse and worse: lies, lawlessness, threats of violence and doubling down on the language of racial hatred, quoting words, for example, from Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s. Such coverage is vital, so that Trump’s words and actions don’t become normalized and accepted. All of this is a threat to democracy, the commentators say, as they try to correct the lies and remind us that no one – even a former president – should be held the law in America, despite Trump’s lawyer’s court arguments.