AMERICANA / 5 MAJOR CIVIL WAR REVELATIONS RECENT TIMES

The following five recent significant Civil War revelations are subjective, but historians of the period point out each has either altered historical understanding, supplied exceptional visual evidence or opened a major new avenue of research. 

1. A scientific explanation for the loss of the H.L. Hunley

The Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley [above] sank the USS Housatonic in 1864, becoming the first submarine to destroy an enemy warship in combat. But the Hunley and all eight crewmen also disappeared immediately afterward. 

In 2017, biomedical engineer Rachel Lance published experimental research proposing that the shock wave from the submarine’s own spar-torpedo explosion passed through the iron hull and caused fatal lung and brain trauma. This helped explain why the crew remained at their stations, why the remains showed no obvious escape attempt and why relatively little skeletal trauma was evident. The blast-wave explanation is highly influential but should be presented as a leading scientific theory, not a universally settled verdict; investigators associated with the submarine’s conservation project have considered other combinations of damage, flooding and crew incapacitation. 

 Factoid: The weapon that made the Hunley famous may also have killed its crew within milliseconds. 

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2. The youthful Harriet Tubman photograph 

 In 2017, an album assembled by abolitionist and educator Emily Howland yielded a previously unknown portrait of Harriet Tubman [above], probably taken in Auburn, New York, around 1868–69. Tubman appears about 48 or 49—far younger than in the elderly portraits familiar to most Americans. Its importance goes beyond appearance. 

The photograph places Tubman visually close to her Civil War years, when she worked for the Union as a nurse, scout, intelligence operative and leader associated with the Combahee River Raid. 

The album also contained the only known photograph of John Willis Menard, the first Black man elected to Congress. The Library of Congress and Smithsonian jointly acquired the album. 

Factoid: The best-known image of Tubman had made her seem permanently elderly; this discovery restored the face of the formidable middle-aged woman who had only recently completed her wartime service. 

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3. The Manassas battlefield surgeon’s burial pit 

Construction work at Manassas National Battlefield Park led to the discovery in 2014 of a field-hospital burial pit [above] connected with the Second Battle of Manassas, fought in August 1862. The find was publicly announced after archaeological and forensic study in 2018. Inside were two Union soldiers buried among eleven amputated arms and legs.                  

Researchers found bullet and surgical evidence showing both the destructive power of Civil War ammunition and the desperate work performed by battlefield surgeons. It was the first Civil War surgeon’s pit to be professionally excavated and studied, and the first in which complete soldiers were found buried with amputated limbs. The two soldiers were later reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery. 

Factoid: Civil War surgeons were not casually “sawing off limbs.” Amputation was often the only available means of preventing catastrophic infection after a Minié-ball shattered bone. 

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4. Artificial intelligence begins returning names to unidentified soldiers 

 Launched publicly in 2018, Civil War Photo Sleuth combines facial-comparison technology, crowdsourcing, military records and visual clues such as uniforms, insignia and photographer locations. It does not simply tell users, “This is your soldier.” It narrows thousands of possibilities into candidates that must be checked against regimental histories, ages, ranks and verified photographs. 

The project represents a major change in Civil War photographic research: anonymous tintypes that sat unidentified for generations can now sometimes be connected with names and biographies. 

Important caution: Facial recognition is evidence, not proof. Period photographs may be reversed, poorly exposed, retouched or taken decades apart. A responsible identification still requires documentary corroboration. 

 Factoid: The Civil War may eventually become the first nineteenth-century conflict in which thousands of previously anonymous photographed combatants regain their names through digital comparison. 

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Liljenquist Family. In 2010 Businessman Tom Liljenquist from the Virginia/DC area donated 700 images of Civil War soldiers to the Library of Congress.  Tom and his sons (left to right) Jason, Christian and Brandon built the collection over 15 years.

 5. Thousands of ordinary Civil War faces are becoming a searchable historical record 

 Since 2013, the continuing expansion and digital organization of the Library of Congress’s Liljenquist Family Collection has transformed the visual history of the war. The collection now contains more than 8,000 ambrotypes, tintypes and cartes de visite representing Union and Confederate soldiers, African American servicemen, sailors, nurses, women and children. 

 In 2022, Library researchers announced that hundreds of these portraits had been mapped to battles, hospitals, prisons and other wartime locations. Instead of presenting the Civil War principally through generals and famous Brady photographs, the project connects individual faces with the places where ordinary people fought, suffered, nursed and died. 

Factoid: The most important new Civil War “photograph” may not be one dramatic image, but the accumulation of thousands of private portraits once kept in family albums, lockets and dresser drawers. 

THE FOODIST / CLUELESS IN THE KITCHEN i.e. PANCAKES

 Melissa Clark, a food reporter and columnist for The New York Times. pretty much comes out and says Americans really don't know jack about--flap jack pancakes. 

She claims "a golden stack of pancakes, slicked with butter, dripping with syrup, is one of the most rewarding breakfasts you can cook on a weekend — a perfect way to start the day. "But not all pancakes reach those burnished heights. Some are flat; some are pale and spongy; some burn on the outside and stay raw in the middle." 

 Clark recently revealed her secret to "Best Buttermilk Pancakes" in the NY Times. "The secret to consistently perfect pancakes lies in a few simple but crucial moves. And sometimes the biggest mistakes are not the things you did but the things you didn't do," states Melissa. 

 Basically, Clark insists the culprit is not resting your batter. 

 Who knew your batter needed a nap? 

 She has a litany of other tips that we the unwashed masses have missed since we left mom's apron strings. 

 Here you go: https://cooking.nytimes.com/article/pancake-mistakes-cooking-tips 

If the link from the blog doesn't work--you can seek out the June 17, 2026 update of Clark's missive in the New York Times. Well worth learning about the benefits of lumpy batter and to rest your batter ten to 30 minutes on the counter. She points out the batter will also keep for 48 hours in the refridge. A longer rest deepens the flavor giving the buttermilk more time to work on the flour. Remember, she's the boss. 

 Click the link above to find the recipe. And she also answers the age-old Goldilocks question: what does the perfect pancake look like. 

 Left is too light. Center is just right. And right is an abysmal filature. If your pancakes look like the one of the right then get your butt to I-HOP. 

 We tease. 

Enjoy her article. We did and were enlightened beyond measure, especially now to find the right temperature sweet spot when heating the pan you've had since your wife's most recent bridal shower.  

DESIGN / ABOARD THE GRAF ZEPPELLIN

Lunch is about to be served aboard the lighter than air vessel: Graf Zeppelin in 1929. The German made hydrogen-fueled airship made a total of 559 voyages, including several voyages to America and the Middle East during its relatively short life span. 

The Graf Zeppelin was the most celebrated airship of its age, a silver giant that turned long-distance flight into spectacle. Officially designated LZ 127, it was built in Germany and named for Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, pioneer of rigid airships. 

The craft first flew on September 18, 1928, under the command of Dr. Hugo Eckener. Measuring 776 feet from nose to tail, the Graf Zeppelin carried passengers in surprising comfort, with ten sleeping cabins, a dining room, and broad windows overlooking continents and oceans. 

In 1929 it completed a publicized round-the-world journey, traveling from Lakehurst, New Jersey, across the Atlantic, Europe, Siberia, Japan, and the Pacific before returning to the United States. The voyage made Eckener and his crew international celebrities. 

During nine years of service, the Graf Zeppelin flew more than one million miles and carried thousands of passengers and pieces of mail. It also conducted scientific and mapping expeditions, including a notable Arctic flight in 1931. 

Unlike the ill-fated Hindenburg, the Graf Zeppelin never suffered a fatal accident. Its career ended after the Hindenburg disaster in 1937 destroyed public confidence in passenger airships. Dismantled in 1940, it remains an enduring symbol of aviation’s bold, elegant, and adventurous early years.

All aboard, 1929

  

Graf Zeppelin

Lounge, top, and Dining Room

SPACE CADETS / METEOR WATCH DAY

Today is Meteor Watch Day, a day to look up at the skies and beyond the wonder of nature's celestial fireworks, Many times a year, hundreds of celestial fireballs light up the night skies. 

They may be called shooting stars, but they don't really have anything to do with stars. These small space particles are meteoroids and they are literally celestial debris. 

 Meteor, Meteoroid or Meteorite? 

A meteoroid can be dust particles or fragments from a comet or an asteroid. Whenever a meteoroid enters Earth's atmosphere, it generates a flash of light called a meteor, or shooting star. High temperatures caused by friction between the meteoroid and gasses in the Earth’s atmosphere heats the meteoroid to the point where it starts glowing. The streak of light is the trail of the burning hot air, or sometimes glowing material, which the meteoroid leaves in its wake. 

 Meteors generally glow for a very short period of time. 

 If a meteoroid does not fully disintegrate while passing through Earth’s atmosphere and hits Earth, it is known as a meteorite. 

MEDIA MONDAY / THE TIMES MAGAZINE REOPENS THE EPSTEIN CELL

OPINION. By the Staff of PillartoPost.org--For nearly seven years, the death of Jeffrey Epstein has occupied that murky territory where official explanations, public distrust and conspiracy theories collide. 

Now The New York Times Magazine has returned to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan and reconstructed Epstein’s final weeks with the patience and detail of a first-rate police procedural. The result is a formidable piece of investigative journalism. 

Rather than chasing the most cinematic theory—that someone entered Epstein’s cell and murdered him—the Times examines the less glamorous but increasingly persuasive explanation: Epstein repeatedly signaled that he intended to kill himself, while an astonishingly dysfunctional federal prison failed to protect him from doing so. 

Excerpt from The New York Times Magazine

The article’s most important witness is Nicholas Tartaglione, Epstein’s former cellmate. 

Tartaglione is hardly an ideal source. 

A former police officer, he is now serving life sentences for four murders. Yet the Times does not ask readers to accept his story on faith. His recollections are placed beside prison records, witness accounts, handwritten notes and the testimony of other inmates. According to Tartaglione, Epstein asked how to make a noose after a judge denied him bail. 

On separate occasions, he reportedly saw Epstein fastening a sheet to a window grate and discovered another improvised noose hidden beneath a mattress. 

Tartaglione says he warned guards, only to have his concerns dismissed. Another inmate later warned that Epstein should not be left alone. 

He was left alone. 

That is the terrible rhythm of the Times investigation. 

Warning follows warning. 

Safeguard follows safeguard. 

Each one fails. 

The familiar irregularities remain: inattentive guards, falsified logs, inadequate supervision, malfunctioning or incomplete camera coverage and a prisoner who should not have been without a cellmate. These failures have long nourished suspicions that Epstein was murdered to keep him from exposing powerful associates. 

The Times does not pretend those suspicions arose from nowhere. The circumstances were so irregular that distrust was inevitable. 

But the strength of this article is its refusal to confuse irregularity with proof of assassination. The reporting suggests that Epstein’s death may have required no secret intruder or elaborate conspiracy. It required only a suicidal prisoner and a collapsing institution unable—or unwilling—to perform its most elementary duties. 

That conclusion is less dramatic than murder. 

It may also be more disturbing. 

A conspiracy would require a small group of villains acting with precision. The Times portrays something broader and more familiar: bureaucratic neglect, indifference and incompetence accumulating until death became almost unavoidable. 

The article is also valuable for what it does not attempt to do. It neither rehabilitates Epstein nor turns his final despair into tragedy. He remains a convicted sex offender accused of exploiting girls and young women. 

The purpose of examining his death is not to invite sympathy for him. 

It is to establish what happened inside a federal institution responsible for keeping him alive until trial. That distinction matters. Epstein’s death denied his victims a public reckoning and prevented a courtroom examination of the people and institutions that enabled him. 

The prison’s failure therefore harmed far more than the prisoner. This is painstaking journalism: documents, interviews, contradictions and small physical details assembled into a credible narrative. 

Readers who arrive expecting a final answer to every Epstein mystery may remain unsatisfied. No article can erase every unanswered question created by years of secrecy and official bungling. 

But the Times investigation does something more useful than feeding the mystery. It narrows it. 

And in an era when speculation often travels faster than evidence, narrowing a mystery through persistent reporting is no small achievement. 

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To read original 6-16-26 NYTMagazine article: CLICK HERE.

or post it yourself: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/magazine/jeffrey-epstein-death-mental-health.html 

SUNDAY REVIEW / FROM BELLO TO BELLA / Short Fiction

ORIGINAL SHORT FICTION by Clive Stunning, PillartoPost.org's Travel Writer and occasional coffee aficionado--In 1979, I arrived at the Villa Contarini in Arquà Petrarca carrying the usual equipment of the travel writer: two notebooks, three pens, a dinner jacket I did not entirely trust, and enough clean shirts to suggest I had planned the trip more carefully than I had. 

The Villa was part of the CAIO hotel group then, a name that meant something in Italy. CAIO hotels did not merely give you a room. They received you. Even the laundry came back looking as though it had been educated abroad. 

The young junior night manager apologized profusely when I arrived. The hotel had been overbooked, he explained, and he had been forced to place me in an elegant room without windows. I later learned at dinner that it was known among the staff as the “mistress room.” It had apparently been selected for me because I was single and the youngest member of the small cadre of travel writers touring Italy. 

Because I was a nonpaying guest. How in the hell could I complain? The room was comfortable and beautifully furnished, although it offered no view worth mentioning. No hills. No cypress trees. No distant church dome floating over the Veneto. 

The Villa Contarini had once been the private home of Giuseppe Volta (of scooter fame), who founded the magnificent CAIO hotel chain in 1921. If one had to be hidden away in a windowless room, this was the place to do it. 

That evening, the Villa hosted a dinner for our group of American travel writers. We were seated at a long table with hotel executives, local officials and several Italians whose titles I never fully understood but whose suits fit perfectly. The young man beside me was one of the junior assistant managers who had assigned me the mistress room. 

He was considerably younger than the general manager and possessed the effortless charm that Italian hotel men once seemed to acquire at birth. He was handsome without appearing vain, attentive without being servile and amused by nearly everything I said. 

We took to each other at once. 

His English was excellent. The woman reporter seated on his other side melted under his charm and announced that this was the best meal she had eaten in Italy. I was pleased when a fellow companion distracted her long enough for me to practice my Italian with Gian, which was previously limited to food, wine, apologies and directions to the nearest bar. The gap did not seem to matter. 

Switching back to English, we chatted about newspapers, baseball, San Francisco, Venice and especially American women—the sort who appeared in Playboy magazine. We also discussed the peculiar demands of travel writers, who expected to be treated like royalty while pretending to be incorruptible observers. At some point, I casually mentioned that during a fashion assignment in Hollywood I had met a model who earlier in her career had posed for the magazine and had gone on to become its Playmate of the Year. The finest wine in all of Italy suddenly appeared all around the table. 

Somewhere between the risotto, the second bottle of wine and the unexpected cognac, the assistant manager touched the cuff of my blue oxford-cloth shirt. “Brooks Brothers?” he asked. 

“Of course,” I smiled (hidden stains and all). 

He laughed. It was a small moment, but in those days the blue Brooks Brothers oxford was a kind of uniform. Reporters wore it. Editors wore it. Men who wished to appear respectable after an evening of doubtful decisions wore it. My new friend admired the shirt with such sincerity that the compliment stayed with me after dinner. 

Back in my room, I looked at the shirt hanging over a chair. I had other shirts in my suitcase. I had several, in fact. But that was not the point. They were not Brooks Bros. made. 

Impulsively, I called room service. 

A man answered. 

“I need this shirt washed and ironed,” I said. 

“Yes, sir. Tomorrow morning.” 

“No. Tonight.” 

There was a silence then a troubled: “Tonight, sir?” 

“As soon as humanly possible.” I explained that the shirt was needed urgently. I did not explain that I had no intention of wearing it again. 

The attendant, who I talked to on the phone, arrived, took the shirt and regarded me with the grave discretion of a man who had seen stranger requests from Americans. I did drop the name of the assistant manager. Nothing registered. I realized that was rude the minute the name Giancarlo Guzmani flew out of my mouth. 

However, what seemed like a remarkably short time later, there was another knock. The shirt had returned, freshly laundered, perfectly pressed and folded with architectural precision. Around it was a paper band bearing the name of CAIO Hotels. 

It looked magnificent. 

I took out one of my newspaper business cards and slipped it into the breast pocket. Then I handed the shirt back to the room-service man. “Please deliver this to the assistant manager,” I said. I gave him Giancarlo’s name. 

The attendant looked at the shirt, then at me. “A gift,” I explained. 

His expression changed. 

He understood immediately. 

Italians understand gifts. I gave him another tip. This time twenty dollars, which in 1979 was not a tip so much as an economic policy. 

“Tonight,” I said. 

“Tonight,” he assured me. I closed the door and congratulated myself. It had been a good gesture. Spontaneous, stylish and slightly extravagant. The kind of thing a travel writer might later improve in the telling. I also meant it sincerely because I truly enjoyed the dinner and the conversation. 

I poured myself a glass from the bottle of 1964 Castello San Vittorio Brunello di Montalcino Riserva that had been awaiting me since check in and I began making notes about the dinner.  Bon mots flowed about the young assistant manager. The wine. The dining room. Life in general at the moment. The strange pleasure of giving away my best shirt simply because another man had admired it. 

Not more than an hour passed before someone knocked on my door. I assumed it was the room-service man returning with a message. 

Instead, a young woman stood in the hallway. She was beautiful, perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three, with dark hair and the self-possession of someone accustomed to being noticed. She wore high heels and a tan trench coat buttoned at the waist. 

“Is it raining?” I asked. 

She smiled politely. 

She did not understand English. She knew coy. I tried Italian. What little I knew abandoned me at once. She stepped into the room and closed the door. For a moment, we simply looked at one another. Then she reached into the pocket of the trench coat and handed me a business card. 

It was mine. 

On the back, in careful English, someone had written: Thank you. I can never thank you enough for your kindness--Gian. 

I read it twice. 

The young woman watched my face to see whether I understood. 

I began to understand, but couldn't believe what I was thinking. 

Who she was, I never learned. 

Perhaps she was a friend of my dinner companion. Perhaps she was someone the hotel knew could be relied upon to express gratitude when gratitude exceeded the ordinary vocabulary of hospitality. 

Or, for a young single man in a foreign country proof that God did exist. 

It seemed impolite to ask. 

She placed her hands at the belt of the trench coat. Soon, the heavy coat fell in a puddle around her Chuck Jourdan high heels. 

The room that didn’t have a window suddenly had a breathtaking view I would savor until breakfast and remember for the rest of my life. 

COFFEE BEANS & BEINGS / A CAFE SUSPENDED BETWEEN RUIN AND REFLECTION

The museum's purpose-built cafe-lounge is shown to the right of the image.

AGE ALONG SIDE BEAUTY

The café inside the Zhang Yan Cultural Museum, on the western outskirts of Shanghai, is not the usual museum afterthought—a counter, a few tables and an espresso machine installed near the exit. It is one of the building’s most persuasive rooms. Enclosed almost entirely in glass, the café-lounge occupies the ground floor of a new two-story wing. 

A garden lies on one side; a long, dark reflecting pool on the other. The glass reduces the boundary between indoors and outdoors to little more than a shimmer. One does not simply sit down for coffee here. 

One pauses between water, stone, trees and the carefully preserved evidence of another century. There is no reliable published evidence I found describing the coffee menu, pastries, prices or service, so this is necessarily a review of the café as a place rather than as a restaurant. 

Yet cafés have always been judged by more than what arrives in the cup. Some are memorable because of the room, the company or the view. This one earns its distinction by offering a seat within an architectural conversation between survival and change. 

 

The museum stands in Zhang Yan Village in Chonggu Town, an ancient settlement whose history reaches back roughly a thousand years. As younger residents left and old houses deteriorated, the village became part of a broader effort to revive China’s aging rural communities. 

The museum was completed in 2019 as a group of exhibition halls devoted broadly to the village’s past, present and future. The designers were Horizontal Design, the Shenzhen-based practice led on this project by chief creative design director Ju Bin. The chief architects were Zhou Zhimin and He Bin, supported by an architectural team that included Zhang Jia, Deng Shuyu, Song Wenyu, Hu Yao, Huang Ping and Xu Weiwei. 

Horizontal Design also handled the interiors. Their achievement is not that they made an old building look new. It is that they resisted doing so. Parts of the former Zhang family residence were too damaged to inhabit, but its weathered outer walls remained. Rather than remove them or manufacture a picturesque imitation, the architects inserted a sharply modern white-concrete gallery inside the surviving shell. 

The new structure is held approximately 30 centimeters away from the old masonry, a slim but eloquent gap acknowledging that the two belong to different moments. Elsewhere, a better-preserved village-history hall retained its wooden load-bearing structure and courtyard. 

A third exhibition space was built on the discovered footprint of a building that had previously disappeared. The result is neither restoration in costume nor modernization by demolition. 

Old brick, dark timber, pale concrete, water and glass are permitted to remain visibly themselves. The café is the project’s gentlest expression of that philosophy. The ruined walls elsewhere in the museum speak of fracture and endurance. 

The café answers with transparency and calm. Its glass perimeter allows the garden and reflecting pool to become part of the interior decoration without being reduced to decoration. A mature tree rises beside the water. Large stones sit with the composure of sculpture. The white planes of the new building are doubled in the pool, while the old village remains close enough to prevent the scene from becoming an abstract modernist retreat. 

 A good museum café restores the visitor without removing him from the museum’s ideas. This one appears to do exactly that. The coffee break becomes another gallery experience—less formal, certainly, but still concerned with memory, proportion, material and light. One can imagine sitting there after walking through the surviving timber hall and the contemporary concrete galleries, watching the reflections move slightly as a cup cools on the table. 

The surroundings ask for quiet without enforcing it. They offer refinement without the international luxury-hotel habit of erasing local identity. That is where the Zhang Yan café rises above handsome design. It belongs unmistakably to this museum, this village and this particular act of preservation. 

 

Horizontal Design has given Zhang Yan an internationally significant work of architecture, but it has not turned the village into a stage set for visiting aesthetes. The ancient walls retain their wounds. 

The additions do not disguise their modernity. 

The café, poised between garden and water, gives visitors a graceful place from which to contemplate both. Many cafés sell escape. This one offers something better: the pleasure of remaining exactly where you are. 

FRIDAY FILM / INTRO TO 'SQUARE AUPAIR' A NEW CHARACTER IN TOY STORY’S MORAL TALE

 

The fifth film turns the arrival of a children’s tablet into a warning about the world that created the “iPad Kid.” 

Toy Story film series has always understood that toys matter because children give them life. The newest chapter reverses that compact: what happens when a glowing screen asks for the child’s complete attention and the old companions are left staring from the floor? Sociologist Aarushi Bhandari sees more than a movie plot. She sees a moral tale about technology, exhausted parents and a society that has allowed a tablet to become the village.

GUEST BLOG / By Aarushi Bhandari, Davidson College Originally published by The Conversation-- In the trailer for “Toy Story 5,” a little girl named Bonnie is playing with her toys when a package arrives in the mail. 

She opens it to find Lilypad, a tablet for children. 

The iconic toys from the series—Woody, Buzz Lightyear, the Potato Heads, Forky and Slinky Dog—watch in dismay as Bonnie casts them all aside in favor of the bright tablet screen. Rex the dinosaur exclaims, “What? Extinction? Not again!” 

The film zeros in on a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon: the “iPad kid,” a term used—often disparagingly—to describe a generation of children who grew up enchanted by screens. 

A lot of the discussion around tablet use among kids shames parents, framing it as an example of lazy or bad parenting. Yet factors such as long working hours and lack of access to affordable childcare compel many parents to rely on tablets. 

"As a scholar of the attention economy—and also as a mom to a 4-year-old—I’ve noticed a disconnect between the resources U.S. society offers parents and what’s expected of them in the digital age," points out article author Bhandari. 

THE PANDEMIC AND THE “SQUARE AU PAIR” 

When the first “Toy Story” came out in 1995, many single-income families could still afford to comfortably raise multiple children. It was more common for new parents to live near extended family members, such as grandparents, who could provide childcare support. Federal policies provided some low-income families with cash assistance that helped ease the transition to parenthood. 

Since then, parenting has become much more challenging. Single-income households with children under 18 have steadily declined as wages have stagnated, forcing both parents into the workforce. At the same time, it has become harder to qualify for government benefits. 

Even when mothers earn a paycheck, working moms experience what sociologists call the “motherhood penalty”—career disadvantages, including lower wages and barriers to promotion following childbirth—even as U.S. parental-leave policies remain weak. 

So it is hardly surprising that fewer Americans are choosing to become parents under these conditions. Those who did have children in the years leading up to 2020 then ran directly into the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The lockdowns that began in March 2020 closed schools and many workplaces. Some parents worked from home; others continued essential work in grocery stores, hospitals and elsewhere. Children stayed home as schools shifted to remote learning. 

It is important to remember that institutions with social legitimacy and authority encouraged tablet use during the pandemic. School systems around the world normalized screens for remote learning. Children as young as four were given tablets, allowing parents space to complete their own work and household tasks. Some mothers called the device “the square au pair.” 

In this sense, the tablet became a form of school-sanctioned childcare. Economic activity was minimally disrupted. Productivity hummed along. And the kids? Comfortably distracted. 

FOR SOME HOUSEHOLDS, THERE IS LITTLE CHOICE 

When lockdowns ended, tablets remained integrated into the education system. In 2021, four in five U.S. households with children had a tablet. Beyond schoolwork, children also use tablets for video games and television. 

The adverse effects of excessive screen time have been documented for decades, but scholars have only recently begun to unpack the specific harms of interactive tablet use among young children. 

Children who use tablets are more likely to experience emotional dysregulation and dependence on screens. Researchers have also found tablet use among children to be significantly associated with ADHD diagnoses. 

At the same time, screen use among children is tied to social class. Parents in working- and middle-class households are more likely to rely on screens than high-income parents who can hire childcare services such as full-time nannies. 

Parental education is another factor. Americans generally have little grasp of digital hygiene—the best practices that can minimize the negative effects of screens. Households in which parents did not graduate from college are even less likely to receive useful guidance. 

While schools hand out tablets, most fail to provide students and families with comprehensive education about the adverse effects of excessive screen time. 

In other words, this is not merely a Generation Alpha problem. Most people—adults included, with or without children—are not properly educated about their choices around technology. Yet adults continue to be shamed if they hand a child a tablet, even while parents bear the burden of challenging an educational system that has normalized those same devices. 

FRANKENSTEIN’S VILLAGE 

When work is the only sturdy pillar in a society where government benefits for low-income people, family ties and community institutions have eroded, tablets replace the metaphorical village—the web of social support that helps families thrive. 

In pursuit of jobs or affordable housing, many young parents move farther from their extended families and the communities where they grew up. Working parents forced to rely on daycare—sometimes for children only a few weeks old—spend an exorbitant amount for the service. 

Some have no alternative but to send infants to expensive daycare centers often staffed by underpaid workers who are mothers themselves. 

Meanwhile, traditional gender roles ensure that many mothers still go home to a second shift. Working women continue to perform a disproportionate share of cooking, cleaning and childcare. No matter how overworked or exhausted some parents are, they cannot afford help as inflation and the cost of living remain high. 

Big Tech takes advantage of this crisis with a “solution” that ultimately treats children as products, manipulating their emotions and mining their data. As I argue in my book, “Attention and Alienation,” children’s dependence on screens is a key component of the attention economy. 

The earlier a life is monetized, the longer it is profitable. 

“Toy Story 5” and its critical view of the tablet may be helpful. But it will take more than a blockbuster movie to protect small children from the harms of too much screen time. It will require strong parental-leave policies, expansive and affordable childcare, fair wages and shared household labor. 

In other words, there needs to be a full rehabilitation of the village. 

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About the author: Aarushi Bhandari is an assistant professor of sociology at Davidson College. The original article appeared in TheConversation.com

Illustration: AI was instructed by the blog to create the posted image in the style of the late Sidney Paget, a gifted Brit illustrator of the early 20th century.

THE FOODIST / WILD RICE RETREAT: WHERE THE VEGGIES HAVE MANNERS & GUESTS REMEMBER HOW TO BREATHE

By Rosemary T. Sage, PillartoPost.org's outdoor dining writer--There are retreats where one is expected to survive three days on cucumber water, inspirational quotations and the uneasy suspicion that everyone else has already achieved inner peace. Wild Rice Retreat, outside Bayfield, Wisconsin, appears to be something far more civilized: a handsome woodland refuge where contemplation is encouraged, supper is taken seriously and nobody confiscates the butter—although the kitchen may persuade you that roasted vegetables, properly handled, can be every bit as satisfying. 

The retreat occupies 100 wooded acres near the shore of Lake Superior. Its Scandinavian-inspired buildings are all pale wood, enormous windows and clean, confident lines. The accommodations range from compact RicePods to larger Nests and Treehaus suites, each designed to place the forest directly before you. There are balconies or patios, kitchenettes, fine linens and robes—but no televisions. This is intentional. You are expected to look at the trees, read a book, speak to another human being or, in a moment of daring, do absolutely nothing. 

And now, thank heaven, to the food. 

The onsite kitchen, called Root, follows what the retreat describes as a holistic, Ayurvedic-inspired approach. That phrase may frighten the diner who believes “wellness cuisine” means a radish balanced upon a teaspoon of lentils. But the emphasis here is on real ingredients—fresh fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, herbs and spices—prepared to nourish rather than punish. Resort stays currently include a light breakfast, brunch and dinner, so one is not required to attain enlightenment on an empty stomach. 

 

Earlier reported menus have included crisp sunchokes with black-garlic aioli, nettle-and-cashew agnolotti with wood-roasted mushrooms, and rice pudding with blackberries, coconut and maple syrup. That is not penitential cooking. That is a kitchen paying attention. The cooking is predominantly plant-forward, but it appears to understand the essential culinary principle that healthfulness is no excuse for timidity. Food must have flavor, contrast, texture and enough generosity to make the diner glad to be alive. 

 

Recent guests continue to praise the meals as both delicious and unusually satisfying. Several report that the cooking changed the way they thought about nourishment after returning home—a considerable compliment, since most hotel meals inspire little beyond a search for the nearest antacid. 

Between meals, Wild Rice offers yoga, meditation, movement classes, creative workshops and guided retreats. Guests may follow the program faithfully or construct their own day. The wisest course may be to attempt one class, congratulate oneself extravagantly and then retire to the sauna. The Sanctuary includes a sauna, rain-room experience, firepit and meditation space; massage and other private wellness sessions are also available. 

 

The retreat’s great strength is that it does not appear to insist upon improvement. It provides the conditions—quiet, woods, movement, thoughtful cooking—and allows the guest to decide what to do with them. You may practice yoga at sunrise. You may write. You may hike the Brownstone Trail toward Bayfield. Or you may sit in a robe with a cup of coffee and watch Lake Superior conduct its ancient business. 

There are cautions. 

Some RicePods are genuinely small, and at least one guest reported expecting greater space and privacy. Another found the cabins insufficiently screened from one another and a class space somewhat crowded. Anyone requiring a ballroom-sized bedroom, complete seclusion or an evening with cable news should examine the lodging categories carefully before booking. 

 

Wild Rice Retreat will not suit the traveler who judges a vacation by the number of attractions conquered before lunch. It is for the person who has become tired without quite noticing it—the writer whose sentences have grown stale, the cook who has forgotten the pleasure of a proper carrot, the couple who would like to hear each other without a television commenting from the corner. 

The verdict? 

Wild Rice Retreat appears to accomplish something rare: it offers luxury without gaudiness, wellness without scolding and vegetable-centered cooking without making dinner feel like a medical appointment. Go prepared to breathe deeply, eat splendidly and relinquish the remote control. And should someone place before you a plate of wood-roasted mushrooms and cashew agnolotti, do not ask whether it is good for you. Take a bite. You will have your answer. 

WILD RICE RETREAT PHOTO GALLERY

DESIGN / DAVID HOCKNEY, ARTIST, (1937-2026

 Self-Portrait, 2023. The New York Times called his work "...both conservative and iconoclastic, defying the dominant abstract schools of the mid-20th century." 

"David Hockney 2025, which opened at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris last year, was the largest ever exhibition of Hockney's paintings. NYTimes image via Getty.

LOCAL. PADRES’ M&M TREATS PAINT A MASTERPIECE

 

WORKS OF ART. Adrian Morejon and Mason Miller, San Diego Padres.  Image by Pillartopost.org's F. Stop Fitzgerald.

On Monday night at Petco Park, the San Diego Padres defeated the Atlanta Braves, 1-0, in one of those games that reminded us why a beautifully pitched baseball game can be every bit as satisfying as a slugfest. 

 It was an important victory over the first-place team in the National League East. It was also a rare 2026 sighting: a Padres starting pitcher working seven complete innings and earning the win. Michael King, who had lost his previous four decisions, delivered seven scoreless innings. He allowed six hits, walked nobody and struck out five while throwing 93 pitches. Manny Machado supplied the game’s only run with a 418-foot home run in the fourth inning. 

 But what made this 77th game of the season memorable was the way it ended. It might not have been the Padres’ most exciting victory of the year, but if the bullpen performances of Adrián Morejón and Mason Miller were oil paintings, their combined effort would be the one you would hang in a Balboa Park art museum as an example of relief-pitching artistry. 

Morejón took the eighth inning and retired the Braves in order, recording two strikeouts. The 27-year-old Cuban lefthander features a fastball that approaches 100 mph, accompanied by a devastating sweeping breaking ball. When he is locating both pitches, hitters have little chance. 

 Then came Miller. The righthander worked around a two-out single and walk before freezing Mike Yastrzemski with a called third strike to end the game. Miller recorded two strikeouts and earned his 21st save in 21 opportunities. One of his fastballs was clocked at 103 mph. Masterpiece work. 

 Morejón is demonstrating that he belongs in prime time. Miller, meanwhile, is displaying the sort of overpowering stuff that inspires Hall of Fame thoughts—even if it remains much too early to make reservations in Cooperstown. 

 Call them the Padres’ M&M treats. New manager Craig Stammen’s use of Morejón in the eighth and Miller in the ninth also reflects a willingness to adjust rather than manage according to an inflexible formula. Jason Adam, the regular eighth-inning reliever during the first part of the season, has not been as sharp lately. Moving him earlier in games allows Stammen to use Adam, Morejón and Miller according to matchups and availability rather than automatically assigning each pitcher a specific inning. 

 Whatever order they appear in, Adam, Morejón and Miller form one of baseball’s most imposing late-inning combinations. The Padres’ bullpen ranked second in the majors entering this difficult stretch of the schedule. Monday’s game also underscored the season-long uncertainty surrounding the starting rotation. 

King was excellent (ended a personal four game losing streak), but performances like his have been too uncommon. Randy Vásquez, Griffin Canning and Lucas Giolito have provided little reason for confidence as July approaches. 

San Diego’s starting staff recently ranked 26th in the majors in earned-run average. The offense has not offered much relief. 

The Padres entered the Atlanta series batting approximately .218 as a team, near the bottom of Major League Baseball, and went 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position Monday. Machado’s solo home run had to stand up by itself. 

 Considering the unreliable starting pitching and the weakest-hitting lineup in baseball, it is a mild miracle that the Padres are 40-37 and only nine games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League West. That is what an elite bullpen can do. It can preserve a season while everyone else tries to figure things out. 

Last night, King painted the first seven innings. Morejón and Miller applied the finishing strokes. Then the Padres hung a 1-0 masterpiece on the wall with more than 42,000 in attendance. --By Thomas Shess. PillartoPost.org writer.

AMERICANA / WANT TO STEP ON MARS & NEVER LEAVE THE WEST COAST?

VISIT EARTH'S MONUMENT VALLEY.

Mars like scenery abounds along the Arizona/Utah border in the Monument Valley.  No horses were harmed in the creation of this blog posting.  

Long before NASA sent rovers crawling across the red deserts of Mars, Americans had already found a place that looked uncannily close to the popular imagination of the Red Planet. 

Monument Valley, spread across the Arizona–Utah border within the Navajo Nation, is one of the few landscapes on Earth where scale, color, and silence combine to produce something genuinely extraterrestrial. 

 

The Mittens (left) and Merrick Butte (far right).

The first impression is geological shock. The valley floor lies open and barren beneath isolated sandstone towers that rise hundreds of feet into the desert sky. The famous Mittens and Merrick Butte appear almost too symmetrical to be natural. Iron oxide in the rock gives the landscape its deep red coloration, the same mineral process responsible for much of Mars’ rusty hue. 

In dry weather, the dust itself seems tinted with oxidized metal. NASA scientists have long used deserts across the American Southwest as rough analog environments while testing rover equipment, survival systems, and geological theories connected to Mars exploration. 

The terrain around Monument Valley and neighboring regions of Utah contains exposed sedimentary formations, ancient seabeds, and erosion patterns that help researchers study how wind and time shape barren worlds. 

Astronaut training exercises and rover field tests have taken place throughout the broader Colorado Plateau because the region combines isolation, difficult terrain, and landscapes stripped nearly bare of vegetation. 

One of Monument Valley's impressive monoliths.

 The valley sits inside the immense Colorado Plateau, one of the most geologically revealing places on Earth. Some rock layers visible here were forming before dinosaurs appeared. Over millions of years, uplift and erosion peeled away softer material and left behind the massive sandstone monoliths seen today. 

Geologists sometimes describe the American Southwest as a place where the Earth has been “turned inside out,” exposing ancient strata normally buried deep underground. 

Hollywood Discovers Mars on Earth

 Director John Ford transformed Monument Valley into the visual soul of the American western through films such as Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, and The Searchers starring John Wayne. Before Ford arrived, much of the world had never heard of Monument Valley. Afterward, its towering buttes became shorthand for the mythic American frontier. 

 Ford favored the valley because of its immense scale and uncluttered horizons. His camera repeatedly placed solitary riders and wagon trains against colossal sandstone formations, emphasizing both grandeur and human isolation. 

In The Searchers, the landscape itself seems to mirror the emotional severity of the story. Monument Valley was no mere backdrop in Ford’s work; it became a character. The real valley, however, feels stranger than the movies. Distances distort in desert heat. Shadows stretch unnaturally long across the plain. The silence can feel almost physical. 

Sunrise over the Mittens, facing East

Visitors often remark that the landscape seems less like scenery than the exposed surface of another planet. Astronomers have occasionally joked that if early Mars probes had accidentally transmitted photographs of Monument Valley, many viewers might not immediately recognize the mistake. That illusion becomes strongest near sunrise and sunset, when angled light ignites the cliffs into shades of crimson, copper, and burnt orange while darkness pools across the valley floor. 

However,  Monument Valley is not the most scientifically Marslike place on Earth. Antarctica’s Dry Valleys and Chile’s Atacama Desert are closer analogs for Martian chemistry and extreme dryness. 

But Monument Valley may be the place that most resembles the Mars of human imagination: immense, red, ancient, silent, and stripped to essentials. 

 Other Marslike Landscapes on Earth: 

 • Wadi Rum Gigantic red sandstone valleys in Jordan (above) used as filming locations for numerous Mars movies including The Martian. Wikimedia Commons Images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wadi_Rum 

• McMurdo Dry Valleys A frozen desert where almost no snow falls. Scientists consider it among the closest terrestrial analogs to Martian surface conditions. Wikimedia Commons Images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:McMurdo_Dry_Valleys 

 • Hanksville, Utah is home to the Mars Desert Research Station, where crews simulate life on Mars in isolation suits and mock habitats. Wikimedia Commons Images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Hanksville,_Utah 

 • Red Centre Australia’s vast interior contains iron-rich deserts and rocky plains visually similar to orbital imagery from Mars. Wikimedia Commons Images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Red_Centre,_Australia 

 • Dallol A volcanic hydrothermal landscape colored by sulfur, salt, and mineral deposits that resembles science-fiction artwork. Wikimedia Commons Images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Dallol 

 • Death Valley National Park Extreme heat, salt flats, volcanic craters, and barren terrain have made parts of the park useful for planetary research. Wikimedia Commons Images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Death_Valley_National_Park 

High in the Chilean Andes surrounding the Atacama Desert, the U.S. National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab operates several of the world’s premier observatories. This long-exposure image was taken from Cerro Pachón, a 2,700-meter (8,900-foot) summit overlooking the Elqui Valley. The glowing trails of stars, passing aircraft, and distant lights from the city of La Serena are intensified by the camera’s extended exposure and telephoto lens.

• Atacama Desert (above) is one of the driest places on Earth. NASA has tested instruments here because portions of the desert resemble Martian soil chemistry and aridity. Wikimedia Commons Images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Atacama_Desert 

ACTUAL IMAGE FROM PLANET MARS

Actual Mars landscape through the rear view NASA rover camera.

MEDIA MONDAY/ MAGAZINE THAT REFUSES TO LET GREAT WRITERS STAY DEAD

Current edition of The Strand Magazine.

By ThomasShess.com--Founder--PillartoPost.org daily online magazine style blog:  

Most magazines regard the past as an archive. The Strand Magazine treats it as an active crime scene. Somewhere inside a university library, an author’s estate or a carton of forgotten papers, there may be an unpublished story waiting for someone patient enough to recognize it. Under managing editor Andrew F. Gulli, The Strand has become remarkably adept at finding those literary strays, establishing their authenticity and returning them to readers. 

 Its latest rescue is Edith Wharton’s “The Men Who Saved the World,” an unfinished short story believed to have been written in 1918 and preserved among Wharton’s papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The story appeared for the first time in Issue 78 of The Strand, more than a century after Wharton set it aside. 

 The discovery was substantial enough to attract coverage from The New York Times. and the international press. NPR’s All Things Considered program interviewed Gulli about the story, which places an American nurse at an elegant dinner in a French château close enough to the First World War front for artillery to rattle the windows. The household is attempting to restore the rituals of polite society at the same table once used for battlefield amputations. 

 That is pure Wharton territory: privilege arranging the flowers while suffering waits outside the door. 

 The manuscript does more than add another title to the Wharton bibliography. It extends our understanding of a writer too often confined to the drawing rooms of old New York. 

Wharton lived in France during the WWI, organized assistance for refugees, established charitable operations and traveled close to the front. In this newly published work, she turns the moral vision of The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence toward the comfortable people capable of hearing the guns without comprehending what they mean. 

 Finding such work has become one of The Strand’s defining pursuits. In recent years the magazine has brought forward forgotten, unpublished or rarely seen writing by Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, Truman Capote, James M. Cain, Rod Serling and G.K. Chesterton. 

Earlier recoveries included work by Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, Tennessee Williams and H.G. Wells. 

 The magazine does not merely raid famous filing cabinets for marketable names. At its best, it restores a missing angle of vision. A newly found Graham Greene ghost story shows the grave political novelist enjoying the playful machinery of supernatural fear. 

A John D. MacDonald noir uncovers an early version of the moral uneasiness that later marked his crime fiction. 

Chandler’s strange autobiographical nightmare exposes uncertainties concealed beneath the public armor of the hard-boiled professional. 

 These are not always abandoned masterpieces. Some were unfinished, withheld or simply lost in the administrative rubble that accumulates around a writing life. Their importance lies elsewhere. They let readers enter the workshop. We see great writers experimenting, doubting, failing, amusing themselves or approaching familiar subjects from an unexpected direction. 

 That makes The Strand part magazine, part literary detective agency and part public archive. 

***

 The publication carries an imposing inheritance. Publisher George Newnes founded the original British Strand Magazine in 1890, with its first issue dated January 1891. Its offices were just off the Strand, the historic London thoroughfare connecting the City of London with Westminster. Hence the name. 

Newnes envisioned an affordable, heavily illustrated magazine for a broad family readership—famously seeking a picture on every page. 

 Its most consequential early decision was publishing Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Sidney Paget’s illustrations helped give Holmes the physical form generations still recognize, while the stories transformed both the detective hero and the magazine. 

At its height, the original Strand reached hundreds of thousands of readers each month and became one of Britain’s most influential homes for popular fiction. It continued until 1950. 

***

 The present American-based Strand was revived in 1998. It honors the old magazine without embalming it. Alongside archival discoveries, it publishes contemporary fiction, interviews, reviews and work by established and emerging mystery writers. Alexander McCall Smith, Michael Connelly, Walter Mosley, Sophie Hannah, Jeffery Deaver and many others have appeared in its pages. 

 That balance is essential. A magazine devoted only to reverence becomes a museum catalog. One interested only in the new becomes another disposable product. The Strand maintains a conversation between writers living and dead. 

 PBS NewsHour has previously reported several of the magazine’s recoveries, including lost work by Hemingway, Steinbeck and J.M. Barrie, and covered its publication of Mark Twain’s “The Undertaker’s Tale” as far back as 2009. The current Wharton discovery has renewed that wider national attention, with The New York Times., the Associated Press, NPR and publications abroad recognizing that this modest literary quarterly continues to produce genuine cultural news. 

 Much of the credit belongs to Gulli, whose editorial curiosity appears to be accompanied by the less glamorous virtues required for archival work: persistence, skepticism and a willingness to ask one more librarian, scholar or literary executor what might still be sitting in a box. 

The result is a magazine with a purpose larger than nostalgia. At a moment when publishing increasingly measures success by immediate attention, The Strand practices a slower faith. It believes a story may remain valuable even when its author is gone, its original market has vanished and its pages have lain unread for a hundred years. It also understands something every writer hopes is true: A manuscript may be forgotten without being finished with us.