Each spring in northern New Mexico, before the water is let in, the people who share an acequia walk its length with shovels. The mayordomo, elected to manage the ditch, goes ahead with a stick and marks off a section […]
A bricklayer in 1890 laying a course of common brick stooped to the pile at his feet, picked up a brick, turned it over to find the better face, tapped it to knock off loose mortar, and carried it up […]
On high ground above tree line, trails are often marked by cairns: small stacks of stones, one in sight of next, trails leading across rock where no path wears into the ground. Nobody knows who are their builders. A hiker […]
In 1492 the abbot of Sponheim, Johannes Trithemius, wrote a treatise called In Praise of Scribes. Monks, he argued, should keep copying books by hand even though the new presses could produce them faster. Copying was devotion. A scribe meditated […]
Before it was Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara Valley had another name. Promoters in the early twentieth century called it the Valley of Heart's Delight: miles of prune, apricot, peach, and cherry orchards between the bay and the hills, among […]
Historic events usually don't arrive on a date. The numerals Europe counts with didn't have a launch day. Leonardo of Pisa, the mathematician later called Fibonacci, brought the Hindu-Arabic system to Italian merchants in his Liber Abaci in 1202, and […]
Social Liberty