A summons for jury duty is always a surprise and usually unwelcome. In my lifetime, I have been called three previous times. In the first instance, I didn’t have to report. In the second, a settlement was announced just before jury selection began, and in the third, a civil lawsuit, I was not selected. But
Much as been made of the Underground Railroad, the overland network of paths that headed north and was utilized by escaping slaves for decades. But many don’t realize there were other paths to freedom. One of these was the so-called Saltwater Railroad, which ran south into Florida, following the coastal waterway. Recall that Florida was
I ran across an interesting bit of philosophy from a source that’s new to me. It’s attributed to the Hasidic rabbi Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezeritch, as related in The Marginalian of August 24, 2022 — “3 Things to Learn From a Child, 7 From a Thief” (https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/08/24/bob-dylan-interview/). From a child you can learn
As a history nerd, one of my recurring interests is the parts of history that never make it into textbooks. You’ve probably heard of the Black women mathematicians who helped win the space race, as documented in the excellent book and movie Hidden Figures. Recently I found a story that is both similar in content
You may have heard that traffic deaths are increasing. That is disturbing because since the early 1970s the trend has been down. That’s when cars became safer with seatbelt laws and crackdowns on drunk driving. Then came airbags and advanced technology to prevent accidents. Unfortunately, the death rate began to rise around 2015 when the
If you’ve ever had some of your best ideas while showering, it’s not an accident. There’s actually a scientific reason for it. Basically, any activity that can be done automatically frees your mind to be creative. This can be walking your dog, taking a shower, or anything that doesn’t require much thought. “People always get
I’ve been a Disney fan for most of my life, and if anyone asks about what interests me most about Disneyana, I say “information.” I’m always looking for books and magazines with that theme. That’s why I was intrigued to find the book Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries that Inspired the Golden Age of
Have you ever had a flood of memories triggered by a smell? If so, you are far from alone. There’s a reason for how smells can pull up specific memories, and it starts with the structure of the brain itself. Unlike sound, for example, which travels from our ears to the brainstem, then up to
Look through historical photos of groups and events, and you see a uniform similarity. There are a lot of men, usually of the same race. But every once in a while, a woman is somewhere in the frame. Sometimes they are unidentified. But we know one thing for sure — they were all trailblazers. Someone
Seaweed is a plant, right? And many plants depend on pollination for reproduction. So how is seaweed able to reproduce? The trail does lead to the process familiar to many land plants. First, scientists discovered in 2016 that zooplankton can pollinate seagrass in the Caribbean. Now scientists have found a small, bug-like crustacean called Idotea balthica that can pollinate
