Meanderings, 19 April 2025 - by Scot McKnight
It’s Holy Saturday. For a link to a long post about Holy Saturday, click here. SourceThe piping plovers are back!CHICAGO – They’re back!Two Piping Plovers were spotted at Montrose Beach Friday afternoon.
Chicago Piping Plovers confirmed one of the birds is Pippin, while the birding community believes the other is Uncle Larry out of Michigan.The Plovers annual arrival comes earlier than years past. They may be sticking around for summer or just stopping over en route to their usual breeding territory.The Piping Plover vanished from Chicago and Cook County in 1948. Nearly extinct from the region, the bird was declared federally endangered in the 1980s.
The Capybara Cafe: ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla.
Animal lovers now have a place to hang out with the “it” animals of the moment — big furry rodents. In the back of a real estate office building in what is known as America’s oldest city, capybaras are crawling into visitors’ laps, munching on corn on the cob and hunting for scratches from humans at The Capybara Cafe in St. Augustine, Florida.
Quiverfull Archivist and dreaming in cult:
I’ve been told that dreaming in another language signals fluency, but my dreams still speak the language of the cult. It’s been over 20 years since I left that tiny community in New York—20 years of determined labor to carve new neural pathways in my brain, 20 years of physical distance from the landscapes of my childhood—but I cannot forget that coercion is my mother tongue.
Rita Daniels and Harriet Tubman:
Rita Daniels learned at 9 that she is the great-great-great-grandniece of famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who led countless enslaved Africans to freedom through the Underground Railroad. It was a moment that changed how she viewed herself and American history for the rest of her life. So when Daniels, now 70, learned in recent days that the National Park Service drastically altered its webpage on Tubman and the Underground Railroad in February, she was devastated.
The Chinese Century?
Witnessing America’s flamboyantly stupid economic self-harm and its slow descent into authoritarianism has made some people ask whether the 21st century will end up being the Chinese Century. Thomas Friedman says yes:
Tyler Cowen has his doubts, arguing that Chinese success free-rides on a bunch of American-provided public goods:
