Dragons and Other Monsters

 
From Smithsonian:

The dragon resting on its golden hoard. The gallant knight charging to rescue the maiden from the scaly beast. These are images long associated with the European Middle Ages, yet most (all) medieval people went their whole lives without meeting even a single winged, fire-breathing behemoth. Dragons and other monsters, nights dark and full of terror, lurked largely in the domain of stories—tales, filtered through the intervening centuries and our own interests, that remain with us today.

As Halloween approaches, we’re naturally thinking about scary stories. Though horror today is most often about entertainment—the thrill of the jump scare or the suspense of the thriller—it hasn’t always been that way. In the European Middle Ages, monster stories served as religious teaching tools, offering examples of what not to do, manifestations of the threats posed by the supernatural and the diabolical, and metaphors for the evil humans do to one another. (Read more.)

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Four Fake Polling Firms Rigged the 2026 Primaries

 From The Enterprise:

A voter who already suspects the polls are rigged against him will not be surprised by a bogus 22-point deficit. It will discourage him, and a discouraged voter stays home. In a primary, a fake poll ends candidacies, while in a general election it drains turnout from exactly the voters who had learned to distrust the polls in the first place.

Pollster Nate Silver insists the damage was small, and he has a number to back him up. Pulling Wedgewood out of his Michigan average moved El-Sayed’s lead by 0.6 points, from 3.6 to 3.0. The figure is accurate and also beside the point, since the average was never what the forgers were aiming at. The donor was. So was the reporter who asked McMorrow when she planned to drop out.

Deleting a fraudulent poll from an average cannot undo the campaign decisions and public perceptions it helped create. McMorrow cannot un-withdraw. Crowley’s donors cannot get back the week they spent hedging, and no correction on a polling tracker returns the money a Mississippi Democrat raised on a lie. Real money changed hands, real decisions were made, real markets moved, and harm like that is exactly what criminal law exists to address. (Read more.)

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Nostalgia Is the Past Made Powerless

 From The Wardrobe Door:

Any TV show or movie that was remotely popular in previous decades is being rebooted, remade and re-marketed to old and new fans. An IMDb list highlights upcoming sequels, prequels, remakes and spinoffs. It currently sits at 426 projects in some stage of development.

Of the top 10 domestic grossing movies of 2025, four were sequels, two were live-action versions of animated movies, two were adapting some of the most iconic comic book characters of all time, and one was a video game adaptation. Only one was an original movie. Many of the same types of movies are dominating the 2026 box office so far.

Filmmakers and studios assume, most often rightly, that someone who grew up watching a character will pay to see them again, even though significant time has passed and there’s no guarantee it will live up to the previous incarnation.

But why do we buy the tickets? Why are we not clamoring, as we do in most other avenues of life, for something new? Why is nostalgia ruling our entertainment?

It’s the only place we feel it’s safe to allow the past to visit the present. (Read more.)

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Shades of Victorian Fashion: Orange, Pumpkin, and Peach

The Victorians loved vibrant colors. From Mimi Matthews:

Unlike popular autumnal shades, such as golds, browns, and burnished reds, the Victorians generally regarded the color orange with disfavor. Fashion magazines of the day advised against wearing orange dresses, calling the color ugly and claiming that it was unflattering to every complexion. Even worse, as fashion historian C. Willett Cunnington reports, some believed that the color orange implied “a degree of animal passion which the pure ought not to possess.” I had not intended to give orange an article of its own, but it’s Halloween today and I can think of no better occasion to showcase a selection of this much maligned—but nonetheless striking—shade of Victorian fashion. (Read more.)

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No, Europe Did Not Just Tell Its Citizens to Prepare for World War III

 From The Enterprise:

Germany’s 10 days, the scariest number on the list, comes from the federal civil defense concept published in 2016, which also advised 5 days of water. The Bundestag recorded the figure in October, during the Obama administration. Since then, it has been revised to 10 days of food and drink, and it now sits on the Federal Office of Civil Protection website beside a checklist that reads like the back of a Boy Scout handbook.

Sweden has been at this since 1943, when the government mailed every household a booklet called If War Comes. New editions went out in 1952 and 1961, another in 2018, and the latest in November 2024, which tells households to manage for at least a week without electricity, running water, or a working grocery store. The edition now circulating on 𝕏 is titled If Crisis or War Comes, and that title does most of the work for the panic merchants.

The word war is right there on the cover, and the other governments use it too. The EU strategy lists geopolitical crisis among its hazards. The British campaign calls itself practical preparation for disruptions to essential services, and nobody in Whitehall pretends Russia isn’t among the things that could disrupt them. A risk register lists what could happen; treating it as a forecast of what will happen is the error every one of these posts commits. A hospital keeps a plan for a plane crash, and the plan is not evidence that a plane is coming. Sweden printed war on its cover in 1943, 1952, and 1961, and no Soviet division ever landed on Gotland. (Read more.)

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Halloween and Catholicism

May 13, which is the feast of Our Lady, Queen of All Martyrs, was the original All Saints Day. So the origins of All Saints and Halloween had nothing to do with Samhain, as some people seem to think. Later, the Pope changed All Saints from May to November because after the harvest there was more food in Rome to feed the pilgrims. And for other reasons, as told in the article. From uCatholic:

The practice of a festival day to honor the whole communion of Saints, rather than that just a single saint, seems to happen for the first time in the Catholic Church with the consecration of the Pantheon as a public place for the Church’s worship. This happened in the year 609 (or 610) on May 13th. The Pantheon had been originally dedicated for the use of Roman religion as a place where all the gods would be honored. Boniface displaced the images of the gods from their shrines and gave the building over to the Saints of the Church, particularly the Martyrs. This was a kind of “in your face” to pagan culture. Boniface was saying that the old gods had been defeated and were defeated by the faith of the Church’s Martyrs. 

Also, May 13th was a day associated in Roman religion with what was called the festival of the Lemurs or ancestral spirits. It is likely that Boniface’s choice of this day to claim the Pantheon for Christian worship was intentional and it was a way of saying that the Martyrs are the great ancestors of all the baptized and it is their memory and witness that is rightly honored on the day that Romans recalled their ancestors. 

How we get from May 13th to November 1st is interesting. The festival of All Saints seems to emerge from the dedication of another Roman church that was consecrated by Pope Gregory III. The church is named St. Peter and all the Saints. It was a subsequent pope, Gregory IV, who extended the annual festival that commemorates this church dedication to the whole Church as All Saints Day. The extension of festivals specific to the Church of Rome is an part and parcel of how the Catholic Faith becomes the underlying cultural matrix from which a new kind of European civilization would emerge. (Read more.)

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Secret Numbers and Royal Betrayal: Queen Henrietta Maria’s Coded Letters to King Charles I in 1642

 

 From The Writing Desk:

How a queen’s secret correspondence helped sustain the Royalist cause as England descended into civil war.

One of the challenges in writing about the English Civil War is the number of ‘rabbit holes’ to distract me. One example is exploring the wealth of secret correspondence between the king and queen. 

In the summer of 1642, England faced catastrophe. King Charles I and Parliament reached an impasse, armies gathered, and Queen Henrietta Maria was in The Hague, working to raise money and secure the weapons her husband desperately needed. The problem was a letter could be intercepted, its contents exposed, and the information used against the Crown.

Henrietta Maria and Charles relied on secret codes or ‘ciphers’. Their letters were more than messages between husband and wife. They were full of information about money, military supplies, diplomatic negotiations and people whose loyalties might determine the outcome of the coming war.

As part of my research into this I bought a copy of the original letters from Queen Henrietta Maria to Charles I, including correspondence written in ciphers. These letters provide a fascinating glimpse into a secret world, hidden behind an apparently meaningless string of numbers. (Read more.)

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Strengthening Social Security for Future Generations

 From Stone Cold Truth:

For years, certain free-market conservatives have dismissed Social Security as a bankrupt, compulsory government Ponzi scheme. They pointed to demographics, political raiding of the trust funds, and a worker-to-beneficiary ratio that has collapsed from over 40-to-1 in the early decades to under 3-to-1 today. The actuarial math looked grim enough that those critics appeared headed for vindication.

Trustees reports have long projected the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund’s exhaustion in the early 2030s. After that point, incoming payroll taxes would cover only about 78 percent of scheduled benefits. That trajectory has shifted under President Trump.

Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano, a trustee of the system, has stated plainly that the program “will be around for another 90 years.”

“This is a long journey. It’s 90 years old, and it’ll be around for another 90 years,” he said. “The president has promised to protect and preserve and that’s what we’re doing.”

The change rests on concrete actions. These include stronger anti-fraud measures, tax relief for seniors, and—most fundamentally—a growing economy that generates the revenue any safety net requires.

President Trump eliminated federal income taxes on Social Security for the vast majority of beneficiaries through the One Big Beautiful Bill. This delivered the largest tax break for seniors in history and fulfilled a core campaign promise. Roughly 88 to 90 percent of recipients will now pay no federal tax on their benefits, keeping more of what they earned through decades of work. This is not merely relief. It reinforces the program’s legitimacy as a return on contributions rather than a pure transfer. (Read more.)

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The Cultural History of ‘The Addams Family’

 From 2019 in Smithsonian:

In the summer of 1938, a determined salesman dropped in on a haunted mansion to peddle his “vibrationless, noiseless” vacuum doubling as both a “great time and a back saver” that “no well-appointed home should without.” It was a single-panel cartoon on page nine of The New Yorker fetching the author a tidy $85 sum. It introduced the world to an unnamed brood that will, once again, be returning to the big screen on Friday.

Mysterious and spooky and all together ooky, the Addams Family is back, this time as an animated big screen version to deliver Halloween frights for young fans meeting them anew and for old-timers who remember the original cartoons hatched in the twisted mind of artist Charles Addams. Throughout their various iterations, the family has cemented itself in the mausoleum of pop horror culture history, which to some degree is strange within itself. Unlike Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, or any of the machete-wielding madmen at the multiplex, the Addamses have been both surprisingly difficult to forget but equally challenging to bring back to life. How exactly did they find themselves in this kooky situation? Let’s fire up the Packard V-12 hearse and take a spin down Memory (0001 Cemetery) Lane...(Read more.)

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