Thursday Night Notes

A little of this, a little of that

This is my second to last week of nearly five weeks on the road. Philadelphia tonight, Yale tomorrow, then back to DC for another week.

So some loose ends.

• Some years ago I ran across a statistic that that the median age of members of nudist colonies—apparently they still exist—is 56, which seems unappealing even to mosquitos.

But do you really want to feel old?

The median age of viewers of MTV today is also 56.

• Some other time maybe I’ll respond to Tucker Carlson’s appalling take today on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But for now, I’ll let this stand as a comment:

The guy has a screw loose.

• Anybody remember talk two or three years ago that Tucker should/could run for president? Good times, good times!

• While we’re at it:

• My two cents (which is problematic, since the U.S. stopped making pennies yesterday, and I don’t want to pay a nickel for my thoughts—fight inflation!):

• Maybe Witcoff and Kushner can get New York City to join the Abraham Accords?

• How do we know the climate cult is in terminal decline? Criminals are finally back to stealing priceless artworks from museums rather than throwing tomato soup on them.

• Here’s something you’re not allowed to say at the New York Times, unless you are John McWhorter:

Siddharth Kara brings these revolting events, as well as their consequential reverberations, to life in the stunning new book “The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery.” Among its many revelations — including a description of the Middle Passage as visceral as the account of plantation life in Percival Everett’s “James” — is the starkness of the fact that Africans were sold into slavery by other Africans. Not just a few of them. According to the historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood in their study of the slave trade in the early 1600s, about 90 percent of the Black Africans sold as slaves in English and Dutch North America during that period had first been captured in war by fellow Black Africans. The captives were sold to white traders for gold and weapons, and then fed into the hungry maw of the plantation economy across the ocean.

Just as you aren’t ever supposed to mention that Columbus put an end to cannibalism and child sacrifice among the supposedly “noble savages” he encountered on his voyages.