A little July 4 history from my favorite NPR voice:

As every kid who spent summers in the back of a minivan knows, it’s not a truce if you’re still hitting each other.

Published in full for the first time, the notes for a short toast John Maynard Keynes gave at a Malthusian League dinner in 1926. Here is the key bit. He thinks England's population will soon peak and decline, which was wrong by a century or so (barring more immigration), but the eugenics bit... /1

"Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion." - Ben Franklin on Emmers' German ancestors

When your weekend plans involve coffee and obscure sources ☕📜 Powered by Archival Dust was made for you. www.redbubble.com/i/mug/Powere... #CoffeeAddict #HistoryHumour

Samuel Alito's dad was born in Calabria, Italy in 1914, which was a completely failed state shithole at the time. You either spent your life farming dirt or got killed at 16 working for an Ndrangheta underboss. Now his son spends all day panicking about uncivilized Haitians.

Dan is my husband, as well as a phenomenal science reporter and editor with experience at not just SciAm but NatGeo, USAT, BuzzFeed, and Science News, too (and has a background in aerospace engineering to boot). You should definitely hire him. I don't know anyone who hustles more to get a story.

Why didn't they protect the reflecting pool?

Carlo Ginzburg, Who Told the History of the Obscure, Dies at 87 www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/b.... His scholarship was inspirational to me.

This analysis also explains why baseball—a sport played in the streets and with few barriers to entry, was considered the “national pastime” in the US for most of the 20th century. If Tik Tok gave tenure, she would have it.

(of course) i meant in Vino, Veritas

Veritas

Always heartening when one sees nonlawyers use the perfect "term of art" in a legal proceeding. Civics for everyone!

Hmm. Paxton's defense lawyer in both his Texas impeachment & his securities fraud case has endorsed Talarico. www.notus.org/2026-electio... Of course, a person's lawyer doesn't have to support his client's political efforts, but he had given Paxton campaign contributions; now switched to Talarico.

That is exactly what he means. It is his 2026 iteration of “feeble minded.”

Baby steps: Cornyn drops Trump highway plan after primary defeat Cornyn shelves bill: After losing the GOP primary to Ken Paxton, Sen. John Cornyn says renaming U.S. 287 for Trump is no longer a priority.

George Santos called me after my story revealing federal investigations into his suspected market manipulation on Kalshi. And he said: "This story is going to get you a gun in your face." Then he lied about it. www.npr.org/2026/06/04/n...

Yikes, that was 42 years ago. Steve was always kind to me. Sorry he will not be around next year to mark the Buck centennial.

Mike drop

Told a reporter in an interview yesterday that anti-immigrant hate and anti-trans hate are just different components of the same project—which Miller makes clear here.

Unlikely

Something I think about often is Georgia State's annual book conference. We have the best legal scholars in the country hand over a book manuscript to 15-20 of the best scholars in the country. And the author sits there for seven hours, just listening. They take notes and talk for all of 15 minutes.

I wrote about how American eugenics shapes the way Trump and his allies view the world and the harm they inflict on it. Includes a cameo from one of the key researchers in this field for the last 40+ years, @plombardo2024.bsky.social.

This week will be frantic as I finish revisions on SNOWBLIND. It's a classic story of Arctic death and survival that turns into something very different. I can't wait for you to get a chance to read it (though, alas, we both have to wait for that, as it won't be published until next year...).

This will be an important book that we are lucky to see at this stage

oh my god this is so embarrassing x.com/AAGShumate/s...

Done

This is a very old story in Wyoming

Supreme Court of Georgia suspends prosecutor’s privilege to practice law before the court for six months after filing a brief with the court that contained non-existent cases and cases that do not stand for the proposition asserted in the brief due to AI usage. www.gasupreme.us/wp-content/u...

Yes and www.vanityfair.com/news/story/r...

Many papers applauded the decision

99 years ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Buck v. Bell endorsing Virginia's eugenic sterilization law.