8.21

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My favorite Sun Tzu quote might be: “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.” First, it suggests I can win at life by doing three of my favorite things:

making no effort
enjoying a water feature
relaxing

Liverpool was the first stop on Grant’s two-and-a-half-year trip around the world. After eight years in the White House, with no ancestral home to return to, Grant and his wife, Julia, decided to indulge their wanderlust and take a long-desired tour overseas. The trip also solved the immediate problem of what Grant, a spry man of fifty-five, should do after leaving the White House. He didn’t have a plantation to run like Andrew Jackson, nor did he want to design buildings or found a university like Thomas Jefferson. He’d turned down the chance to run for a third term. By leaving the country, Grant also believed he would be giving President Rutherford B. Hayes, who’d barely squeaked into the White House, a chance to govern without reporters constantly running to his predecessor for comment.

The Augustinian friars of Medieval Britain pledged themselves to a life of poverty, but their friaries offered a pretty high standard of communal living. The monks dwelled in buildings with sophisticated stone and glass work, studied in libraries, and dined on the products of bountiful gardens. When nature called, they enjoyed dedicated latrines and hand-washing facilities, complete with running water systems that were rare even among the era’s wealthiest households. But new research on human remains from a friary buried below the University of Cambridge shows that the monks suffered greatly from a gastrointestinal affliction—worms.

After a few years of sailing on French ships, the market closes up for him because technically he’s not supposed to be on French ships without having the formal permission of the Russian authorities. This is, again, one of the ways in which the issues of empire, belonging, citizenship, and labor markets come together in Conrad’s life, in the way that they do in people’s lives today. He ends up not being able to find work. He also is running out of money and is hit with an attack of what we can only call now clinical depression. It culminates in a suicide attempt in Marseilles, an episode that a lot of biographers don’t say a lot about because they’re interested in talking about other things

In April, prosecutors failed to win a single conviction in one of the government’s biggest domestic terror investigations in decades. A jury acquitted two men—Brandon Caserta and Daniel Harris—on every count after defense attorneys successfully argued their clients were entrapped by the FBI..

Why Read The Bible In Hebrew? Let’s talk about one of the most influentialt stories *ever* for thinking about the nature of human progress—the Tower of Babel. What exactly did Babel’s builders do wrong? A thread (for non-Hebrew readers too!)