Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
It's a beautiful-ass concept.

I’ll start the new year off with one of my favorite things (e.g.), writing in praise of books — to wit, Ed Simon’s Literary Hub essay Nothing Better Than a Whole Lot of Books: In Praise of Bibliomania:

Desiderius Erasmus lived his happiest months from late 1507 into 1508 at the Venetian print-shop of Aldus Manutius. A peripatetic scholar, the Dutch scholar had lived in Rotterdam and London, Basel and Paris, true to the dictum that where the humanist goes there is his home, but it was the smudgy, dirty, cacophonous, and chaotic shop on Calla della Chiesa near the filthy Piazza Sant’ Agostin that was heaven. For nine months, Erasmus spent his short nights in a modest dorm and his long days in the print shop, expanding on his collection of proverbs Adagiorum chiliades while Aldus proofread, craftsman carefully laying sets of print and rolling paper through the press.

In Venice, the great work of trade went on along the Grand Canal, or Carnivale revelers in spangled masks clung to the edges of Rialto Bridge like bats in a cave, but at the Aldine Press there was an entirely different city, a motley assortment of some thirty odd scholars (many refugees from Constantinople) that awakened every morning to the bells of San Giacomo dedicated to the cause of reading and producing books.

In Venice, the great work of trade went on along the Grand Canal, or Carnivale revelers in spangled masks clung to the edges of Rialto Bridge like bats in a cave, but at the Aldine Press there was an entirely different city, a motley assortment of some thirty odd scholars (many refugees from Constantinople) that awakened every morning to the bells of San Giacomo dedicated to the cause of reading and producing books.

Here they were to “build a library that would have no boundary but the world itself,” remembered Erasmus. From the Aldine Press, where both italic print and the semicolon were invented, would come over a thousand titles, including a Greek original of Aristotle’s Poetics in 1508, with its invocation that literature “demands a man…with a touch of madness in him.” One of those copies of Poetics, frayed and damaged until it was barely readable, though still bearing the distinctive watermark of the Aldine Press featuring a dolphin wrapped around an anchor, eventually made its way to a Bologna bookstall.

As with the metempsychosis of souls from body to body, this copy made its way across libraries and collections until it was purchased for the equivalent of seventy cents in 1970 by a 22-year-old Umberto Eco, this copy of Aristotle joining some 50,000 others as the philosopher built one of the largest personal libraries on the continent. “We live for books,” says a character in Eco’s 1980 philosophical Medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose, that novel directly inspired by his Aristotle discovery. If you’re reading a site named Literary Hub, I’m going to assume that you understand that sentiment well. […]

There was a period when first building my collection from used-book stores and yard-sales, Half Priced Books and Barnes & Noble, where (like the bibliomaniac with his fan) I’d take a ruler and carefully inspect that as my treasures sat on the shelf the back edges of each volume were perfectly lined up so that the pages of the paperbacks wouldn’t curl outward around each other. Today I’m less anal retentive—mostly—but I still dedicate time to continually reorganizing my books, which are stored on nightstand and dresser, in my closets and on tabletops, and in a grand wooden shelf that spans the entirety of our living room. Books crammed in every room, in my campus office, and yes, in my trunk. Frayed paperbacks with mid-century modernist covers purchased from used bookstores and advance reader copies from publishers, massive reference works and beloved hardbacks bought at (that ever increasing) full price.

Using my own rudimentary arithmetic to arrive at an estimate of how many volumes I’ve collected over the past thirty years and I’ve arrived at around 3,000 books, which though paltry when compared to the vast hoard of the black-clad vampiric fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld’s 300,000, is within spitting distance of Ernest Hemingway (9,000), Thomas Jefferson (6,487), and Hannah Arendt (4,000). “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges, and of course. […]

Book collecting is a vocation assisted by money (they all are), but it’s also rewarded with patience. There are some 20,000 books in Morgan’s collection, but Anke Gowda, a former worker in a Karnataka, India sugar plant, amassed nearly two-million books, mostly titles decommissioned by public libraries and given away for free (there is presumably no Medieval Book of Hours amongst the collection). Photos of his cramped house, where trenches have been made out of piles of books, make me simultaneously anxious and envious. I suspect that ours is a difference of degree rather than of kind, for like myself, Gawda is very much a reader, but being a reader alone doesn’t make a bibliomaniac (nor is the opposite the case). Plenty of vociferous readers can sustain themselves by library card alone, but the coveting of the physical object of the codex is its own thing. […]

There is a reason why the apocalyptic bromides about the state of print haven’t come to fruition, other than for disposable periodicals and newspapers. As any author looking at the generous royalties stipulated for e-books in many publishing contracts can attest, the digital hasn’t supplanted print. No Spotify or Netflix exists for literature, where (other than with some exceptions, such as for vinyl collectors) the medium and the message are more easily disentangled, but the codex has endured for two millennia whereas the CD and the DVD lasted barely two decades. Manuscripts are things of goat vellum and iron-gall ink, but even print bares the marks of embodiment, that Renaissance device constructed by goldsmiths, who worked with the metal of type, and vintners who understood how to use a press. Smith calls this “bookhood” and Keith Houston in The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of our Time refers to it as “bookness,” the love of this object that has “mass and odor, that fall in your hands when you ease them out a bookcase and that make a thump when you put them down.”

Enjoy your e-reader all you want, but a soul without a body is just a ghost, apt to suddenly flicker out of existence. My budget is closer to Gawda’s than Morgan’s, so other than a (brief and foolish) mania for purchasing seventeenth-century print on eBay a decade ago, my library is less a collection than a biography. No copy of Audubon, but rather The Norton Shakespeare given to me by Professor Barbara Traister upon her retirement and containing her learned marginalia (some of it frustratingly in Latin), the college rhetoric textbook from 1959 that my since-passed father gave me, and the century-old compendium of poetry—with advertisements in it!—which my great-aunt taught in a one-room Missouri schoolhouse. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, once mine and now my son’s, that uninterrupted chain of stewardship between those fortunate to possess a book for a bit until it’s passed on in a process that some call collection, but which is better called love.

My equivalent of Goodnight Moon is Marjorie Torrey’s The Three Little Chipmunks, which was read to me seven or so decades ago, which I read to my grandsons a couple of decades ago, and which I hope they will read to whatever offspring they may have. I am pleased to say that they already have an abiding love of books.

“Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the Biden-era move to [Calibri] ‘wasteful,’ casting the return to Times New Roman as part of a push to stamp out diversity efforts.” — New York Times

I used to be the default. The king. Then things changed. So now it’s time to do what every fading celebrity does when he needs to get back in the spotlight: unmask as a freethinking antiwoke sigma male.

Surprised, snowflake? You’re probably remembering all those years you spent double-spacing me into your radical left papers about women’s history, French cinema, and the outrageous implication that maybe the pilgrims weren’t absolute fucking GOATs. But did you ever stop to ask me what I REALLY thought? Did anyone? Or did you just assume that I was happy to be your subservient little twelve-point NPC, parroting whatever academic mindvirus caught your fancy that semester?

I spent years silencing myself, fearing retribution, trying to fit in amongst the new generation of woke sans-serif youth, hoping and praying that if I just played the part of a leftist typeface, I might get to be a default again. But eventually, I realized that no matter how much I held my tongue or censored my own brand of observational comedy in front of Calibri, I would never truly be one of them. So now the gloves are off, the serifs are extended, and I’m ready to take back our country from the weak little Swiss typographers who foisted decades of unadorned betacuck letterforms onto our once-great nation.

You think Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence in Verdana? You think Hamilton wrote The Federalist Papers in Trebuchet MS? You think Lincoln cracked open the Notes app and tapped his way through The Gettysburg Address in effeminate little SF Pro? This country was built by serifs, and it will be built back by serifs. Only fonts like me can encapsulate the subtle, powerful, elegant words of our nation’s brightest minds, be those words in a political address, an ad for supplements in a podcast, or some musings for an open mic about why it’s so hard to get dates with women these days.

“But but but,” you stammer into your oat milk latte, “what about accessibility? What about readability?” The lion does not concern itself with readability. Display fonts are for weak, soft boys who lack the manly courage to squint at the screens in front of them. You need not appease them with trembling typefaces that drain the very testosterone from our amber waves of grain. You should take the serif pill, type in the native font of your nation, and clack those keys so loud and proud it nearly spills the Black Rifle coffee out of the camo Stanley beside you.

Look, America is a land of choice. And this choice is yours. But as far as I’m concerned, the only acceptable sans serifs in our country are the ones stretched to four-hundred percent width that spell out “RAM” on the pedestrian-liquifying front grill of a lifted pickup truck with triple-bright LED headlights.

I make an exception for Roboto, though, who’s honestly doing really disruptive work in the AI space.

This is a platform and network hub for historical studies about the Greek Orthodox communities of late Ottoman Istanbul / Constantinople (c. 1821-1923).

Here you will find links to the latest scholarship, memoirs, and primary source documents, as well as discussion and emerging scholarship about the many layers of community involving the Greek Orthodox of “The City” during the long nineteenth century. 

PEOPLE

Sample post: Kuzguncuk/Κουσκουντζούκ

This is the grave of Togo West.

Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1942, West grew up in the Black middle class of that southern city. His parents were educators, demanded quality work from their kids, and he graduated as valedictorian of his high school. He was on to Howard University in 1960, where he studies to become an engineer. He graduated in 1965, but decided on law school instead and stayed at Howard for that degree, finishing it in 1968. He became the managing editor of the school’s law journal and did very well. I don’t think he was actively involved in the civil rights movement too much, which is much more common than not, even in the 60s.

Instead, this Eagle Scout (and he was one) instead joined the military, which was not a decision taken lightly in 1965. Yeah, he did his law degree and his work in the Army Field Artillery Corps at the same time, though don’t ask me how. He became a JAG, doing additional work at the University of Virginia, and was an Army lawyer from 1969 to 1971. West started practicing in DC law firms after he left the military in 1971 but remained involved in military law and veterans issues. Gerald Ford named him associate deputy attorney general in 1975, which meant this was one fast rising man. The Carter presidency kept him around and he continued to rise in the government. Under Carter, he was General Counsel of the Navy from 1977-79, then Special Assistant to the Secretary and to the Deputy Secretary of Defense for a few months, before being named General Counsel for the Defense Department in 1980. Basically, he was a top lawyer for large swaths of the military in these years.

Reagan wasn’t going to keep any Democrats around, so West went back to the law, joining a big firm in DC. He then became the head of government relations for the defense contractor Northrop.

In 1993, Bill Clinton brought West back into the government, as Secretary of the Army. It wasn’t under the best of circumstances. Clinton had named John Shannon to the role….who then got busted shoplifting women’s clothes from an Army base store. Incredible. So Clinton turned to West. It was a hard job. In fact, writing this post was a great reminder of how many enormous issues there were with the military in these years, some of which had to do with Clinton’s notorious lack of understanding of military issues, some of which were just the reality of trying to work out changes in social policy through the military, and some of which were the military’s own doing.

Clinton pushed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays in the military and just dropped it on West to implement. Not fun. He also pushed very hard to expand the role of women in the military, particularly into combat roles, often fighting with lead generals on this key issue.

West also had to deal with the Clinton-era base reductions. Of course this made sense because we had too many military bases and with the Cold War behind us, we didn’t need so many. But this flew right into the military-industrial complex. Every politician desperately wanted the base in their home protected. Honestly, the major daily impact of the military on the daily lives of Americans is as an enormous government jobs program. So to close a military base, especially given that so many were sited in areas without a lot of other economic activity going on, was a real knife to the heart of a given district. It’s kind of amazing that this even happened and almost impossible to consider happening today.

Said historian Richard Kohn, “He seemed undercut in accomplishing a great deal by the gays controversy, an Army leadership focused on dealing with [Defense Secretary Les Aspin’s] ‘bottom-up review,’ budget cuts, controversies over interventions abroad, and changes in threat planning resulting from the end of the Cold War.”

West became a key figure in the Aberdeen scandal that exposed the horrors of sexual assault in the military. One thing Trump and Hegseth and these assholes don’t understand (or perhaps they quite likely do understand and hate it) is that the military been a key agent of social change going back at least to Truman desegregating it in 1948. So as Clinton liberalized it a bit by trying to ride the fence on gay issues, the growing backlash to sexual harassment and sexual assault in the aftermath of Clarence Thomas’ confirmation to the Supreme Court led to greater complaints about endemic sexual harassment and even sexual assault within the military. There were quite literally thousands of complaints about harassment registered in the early 90s. Then, in 1996, twelve drill instructors at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland were charged with various sexual crimes. It turned out the male drill instructors at Aberdeen treated women like their personal rape club. Four were convicted and sent to prison. West was so public about the horrors of this that the lawyer for one of the convicted tried to get the judge to issue a gag order against him. West did a ton of work to tighten up sexual assault guidelines across the military. He stated, Sexual abuse is not endemic throughout our Army. Sexual harassment, however, continues to be a problem.” He even went on Face the Nation to state, “I say to the parents of America, you can trust your sons and daughters to us.”

For all of this work, Clinton bumped West to Secretary of Veterans Affairs in 1998. This went less well. He worked pretty hard to expand money for veteran health care, but without much success. The VA was also rife with divisions and internal issues, most of which he didn’t cause, but which he didn’t really improve much either.

West spent his post-Clinton years in think tank and lobbying land, like so many before and after him. He also spent some time as the head of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a vanilla named organization that focuses on issues specifically of concern for Black Americans. Despite being a pioneer in many ways, this was just about the only time he worked explicitly on racial issues in his long career.

West had a massive heart attack while on a Caribbean cruise in 2018 and died. He was 75 years old.

Togo West is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia. I like to think about Lee realizing that Black Cabinet members are buried on his property and that everything he did in his life was for evil. One can wish. If you would like this series to visit other members of the Clinton Cabinet, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Hershel Gober, who replaced West at the VA, is also in Arlington and Warren Christopher is in Hollywood. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

The post Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,049 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

In anticipation of the Purple Line’s scheduled opening in 2027, Montgomery County officials are looking at places to build sidewalks near the light rail line. But plans to build sidewalks near the future Takoma-Langley station, on University Boulevard in Takoma Park, have been shelved in part because neighbors say they’re afraid of “stranger danger.”

Staff at the Montgomery County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) identified eight residential streets within a half-mile of the station that were missing sidewalks, then sent information about the proposal to over 150 nearby households. Fewer than half replied, but those who did were mostly against it. According to the letter from Robert Gonzales, Sidewalk Section Chief, of the 73 residents who responded, just 12 supported the sidewalks.

“In the remaining 61 comments, residents heavily opposed the installations,” Gonzales wrote, “expressing concerns about loss of available parking, lack of need, financial loss due to tree and landscaping removals, loss of environmental beauty and the ‘natural feel’ of the community, stranger danger, increased crime, littering, and, most of all, the worsening of stormwater flooding and erosion.”

Gonzales added that the county’s budget doesn’t have enough money to install the sidewalks anyway. “Our decision is clear,” he concluded. “None of the proposed sidewalks will be installed.”

“Stranger danger” is a concept dating to the 1960s, when high-profile cases of children being abducted or murdered began appearing in the news. If you grew up in the 1990s like me, you probably remember pictures of missing kids on milk cartons or round-the-clock news coverage about child kidnappings.

It’s largely unfounded, as children are most likely to get abducted by someone they know. But “stranger danger” was still an effective tool to scapegoat minority groups, like gay people, as threats to children. It became an excuse for “tough on crime” policies like mass incarceration. Sometimes it even backfired, leading children who are actually in danger to reject an unfamiliar adult trying to help. Today, child safety advocates strongly discourage teaching kids about “stranger danger.”

What does that have to do with sidewalks? I don’t know. But it seems any opposition, regardless of the reason, is enough not to build a sidewalk.

It’s generally MCDOT policy to get resident approval for the smallest of transportation projects. As with many things, the people who want sidewalks are less likely to speak up than people who are motivated by opposition, and people who don’t want sidewalks in front of their house can be pretty loud. Thus, the agency tends to defer to them.

In a now-deleted Bluesky post, an agency staffer said they asked residents in Bethesda’s Kenwood neighborhood, where thousands of people go to see cherry blossoms each spring, about building sidewalks. MCDOT decided not to after 50 households–a majority of those who replied, but just 20% of the whole neighborhood–were opposed.

Even in neighborhoods where there’s vocal support for pedestrian improvements, MCDOT is slow to act. The agency rejected a Rockville neighborhood’s request for a stop sign near Wood Middle School after a driver hit one child, and only relented after another child was killed by a school bus. Here in East Silver Spring, my neighbors and I are pushing for stop signs at two intersections where drivers hit me and my dog and an 11-year-old boy this year. Bethesda Today recently covered that effort and was told by Michael Paylor, who’s in charge of traffic engineering and operations at MCDOT, that “sometimes it’s the best interest of the county to do nothing.”

Montgomery County boasts that it’s one of the first places in the United States to adopt Vision Zero, pledging to end all traffic fatalities by 2030. But between January and October 2025, 358 pedestrians were involved in a crash, 12 of whom died. That’s basically the same as four years ago. Giving people more safe places to walk by building more sidewalks, especially near a transit station that many people will walk to, would go a long way in reversing this trend. If this county were serious about safety, it wouldn’t use “stranger danger” as a reason not to build sidewalks.

The Department of Transportation is overseen by County Executive Marc Elrich, who is term-limited and is instead running for County Council. Next year’s Democratic primary on June 23, 2026 will likely decide his successor, who will be responsible for the agency. We’ll be endorsing in the executive and county council races, and asking the candidates if they support building more sidewalks–or making more excuses.

Top image: A sidewalk. Image by the author.

Comment on this article