The Diggers
In the twenty-first century, Cobalt (Co on the periodic table) has become a highly valued commodity; one of the few elements that make our rechargeable batteries perform as they do. In 2021, 72% of the global supply of cobalt...
Elmore Leonard
I was chatting with my neighbor a while back and he mentioned Elmore Leonard. After a few minutes, it occurred to me that a guy who writes a column titled “Books & Such” always has some homework to do....
Louis Le Prince
In 1888, French inventor Louis Le Prince used a device the world had never seen to capture the first known motion pictures: a two second clip of his family walking in what is now referred to as the Roundhay...
The More Things Change…
After reading American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (2022) by historian Adam Hochschild, it occurs to me that our nation’s current social, cultural, and political problems are not so much a product of...
For the Future
The climate on our planet is changing; and reversing the inevitable seems as if it will require a bit more cooperation than humanity has yet been unable to muster. The alarm bell has been ringing for so long that...
The Axe Handle
In 1974 I found myself traveling through Arkansas on my way to California. Since I wasn’t old enough to drive, I hitched a ride with a man driving a large truck. He had in his possession an axe handle...
The Morgan
Among his many endeavors, financier John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) populated his private library in New York—now the Morgan Library and Museum —with some of the earliest books crafted by the moveable type printing press invented by Johannes Gutenberg in...
The Gift of Reading III
If there must be a theme for this collection of books, it can be said for certain that I loved and appreciated and now share with you each and every one of them So, here are four histories, three...
A Podcast Primer
Liberal MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow has stepped back from her long-running eponymous primetime show (TRMS), but just inked a $30 million per year contract with NBCUniversal, MSNBC’s parent company. While citing a number of health problems related to potential...
Bobby
There is a great deal of chatter out there about our divided dysfunctional political system which now includes a growing incidence of references to impending civil war. While the folks who study these things see it as unlikely that...
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