Driving through Adrian today, about 45 degrees with a low gray ceiling and plenty of drizzle.  It’s the county seat in an agricultural region, where manufacturing jobs used to pay the bills alongside monoculture cropping and its federal subsidies.  The jobs are gone now and the ag companies pay the farmers roughly what they’d make [...]

The plague bacteria that swept through medieval Europe had been declared extinct just over a month ago. A quick google search reveals articles with headlines such as ‘Medieval plague bacteria strain probably extinct’ and ‘Black death strain extinct’. Few writers mentioned that the original research on which they reported was a technical paper first and [...]

One of Walter Mosley’s novels begins: Ghetto Humor “Daddy, why do black people kill each other?” “Practicing.” I guess that’s black black-humor.  It also has a big grain of truth. People do most what they practice and practice most what they do… practice here meaning rehearsal or repetition, not a generalization of practical effort.  Hair [...]