John Brown's Notes and Essays

The young women of the Polish ghetto were a defiant and resourceful breed, acting as couriers, smugglers and, sometimes, warriors. Image from article: Comrades from the pioneer training commune in Białystok, 1938. PHOTO: COURTESY OF GHETTO FIGHTERS' HOUSE MUSEUM  By Diane Cole , The Wall Street Journal , March 30, 2021 6:30 pm ET They were nicknamed the “ghetto girls” but the label does not do justice to the defiant, mostly forgotten Eastern European Jewish women in their teens and 20s who, acting in resistance to the Nazis, undertook one mission impossible after another to disrupt the machinery of the Holocaust and save as many Jews as they could. Now, in her well-researched and riveting chronicle “The Light of Days,” Judy Batalion brings these unsung heroines to the forefront. She has recovered their stories from diaries and memoirs written variously in Yiddish, Polish and Hebrew, some composed during the war (one in prison, on toilet paper, then hidden beneath floorboards), oth

John Maynard Keynes was both a far-seeing economist and a shrewd investor, a savant who was undaunted by the churn of the markets. Image from article:  John Maynard Keynes in his study in 1940.  PHOTO:  GETTY IMAGES By Philip Delves Broughton, The Wall Street Journal , March 29, 2021 6:37 pm In this frenzied moment of limitless stimulus and GameStop fever, the notion of value investing seems almost quaint. Why waste your time bargain hunting for good companies at good prices, and then wait decades for your returns to compound, when there’s a snappy little ETF right there waiting to catapult you to riches in months? John Maynard Keynes is best remembered as an economist who made the case for governments to spend their way out of recessions. But as an investor, he was a kind of proto-Warren Buffett, a diligent savant who could crunch the numbers, discern the qualitative aspects of a toothsome investment and remain unflustered by the churn of the markets. As a young man at Cambridge Unive

"Plants aren’t people. Ambulatory and omnivorous, human beings are a migratory species. That’s not true for the vast majority of plants, which evolved to thrive as part of the unique web of life ..."  image from cited article -- Margaret Renkl, "What You May Not Know About Those April Flowers [:] Americans have cultivated nonnative plants and flowers for so long it has skewed our experience of spring," The New York Times , March 28, 2021

Rows upon rows of police cars, fire trucks and construction vehicles showed up for Logan Lloyd’s 6th birthday, a day after his father was killed while battling a blaze at an assisted living center. “We knew it was going to be big, but we didn’t know it was going to be that big,” an organizer of the truck procession said. “We were all in awe, like, ‘Oh my God. This is really happening.’” Credit...Jason Trow/Rockland-Westchester Journal News  By Michael Levenson , The New York Times , March 28, 2021, 6:00 a.m. ET [original article contains additional links] Matt Boney said a fire chief had grabbed him on Tuesday night as they prepared to pull the body of their fallen comrade, Jared Lloyd, from the rubble of an assisted living center in Rockland County, N.Y., where Mr. Lloyd had died trying to rescue residents from a fire hours earlier. The chief, he said, told him that one of Mr. Lloyd’s two sons, Logan, was turning 6 on Wednesday — in just a few hours — and had asked his mother if a fi

Many workers have been asked by their employers to do more in the past year—after a certain point, that can backfire    image (not from article) from By  Krithika Varagur  The Wall Street Journal , March 28, 2021 8:00 am ET  [ original article contains additional photos and on how to obtain  additional information on the subject ]     Dana Barnett already had two roles at Maverick Pools, which builds swimming pools and spas, when the pandemic started: She was both its chief procurement officer and a project manager. But when the Chicago area locked down in March, her job ballooned even further.  “It kind of happened naturally,” says Ms. Barnett, who is based in Barrington, Ill. She soon found herself knee-deep in administrative work, writing extra project proposals and sending client emails from her personal address rather than a shared company one, because she knew she would be the person answering the correspondence. Her pre-pandemic office usually ran from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., but she

Strategy, ukrinform.net , 26.03.2021 15:18; date of posting Saturday, 27 March 2021, 15:29; see also  Ukraine Foreign Ministry image from Wikipedia For the first time in the history of Ukraine, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has adopted a five-year Public Diplomacy Strategy which sets forth seven areas of activity to promote a positive image of the state. "This week, at a meeting of the board… the Public Diplomacy Strategy was adopted. It is a thorough document, which is adopted for the first time in the history of Ukraine… The strategy was adopted for five years. We will develop a positive image of Ukraine abroad and communicate with partners based on it. For the first time in Ukraine, we officially set forth and define seven areas of public diplomacy: cultural, expert, economic, culinary, digital, scientific, educational and sports ," Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba [jb -- see ] said at an online briefing on Friday, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.  He added that the s

Disruptions to education during the pandemic are turning people away from a profession that was already struggling to attract new recruits. Image from article: Education programs were already struggling to recruit new students to the profession, long before the pandemic forced teachers to hold classes remotely. Credit...Benjamin Norman for The New York Times By Emma Goldberg , The New York Times , March 27, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET [original article contains links and additional illustrations.] Excerpt:   Few professions have been more upended by the pandemic than teaching, as school districts have vacillated between in-person, remote and hybrid models of learning, leaving teachers concerned for their health and scrambling to do their jobs effectively. For students considering a profession in turmoil, the disruptions have seeded doubts, which can be seen in declining enrollment numbers. A survey by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education found that 19 percent of undergrad

Can an academic world aiming for moral purity be redirected to the spirit of inquiry and toleration?   Image from article: A student march at the University of California, Berkeley, 2011. PHOTO: MAX WHITTAKER/GETTY IMAGES  By Michael S. Roth , The Wall Street Journal , March 26, 2021 5:43 pm; see also  "Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us" is a plea for moderate, open-minded liberalism in an age of self-righteous certainty. Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro are professors of literature and economics, respectively, at Northwestern University, where Mr. Schapiro is also the president. The two have taught and written together, and this book is a sequel to their “Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn From the Humanities.” That, too, was a plea to take the blinders off, especially aimed at economists who often tend not to pay much attention to fields other than their own.  Messrs. Morson and Schapiro are academics who have spent a good deal of thei

An investigation into a legacy of Georgia's white supremacy hiding in plain sight behind the state's new Jim Crow-style voting law. --By Will Bunch | columnist, The Philadelphia Inquirer , published Mar 26, 2021 Image from article:  Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and allies as he signed his state's new voting law in his office Thursday Excerpt from the Bunch article: Sometimes America’s legacy of white supremacy is hiding in plain sight, literally. When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a hastily passed voter suppression law that many are calling the new, new Jim Crow on Thursday night, surrounded by a half-dozen white men, h e did so in front of a painting of a plantation where more than 100 Black people had been enslaved. ...  As Kemp’s tweet of the closed-door bill-signing ceremony was making the rounds Thursday night, I had questions about the Old South-looking scene that the governor’s office had centered in the photo. Thanks to crowd-sourcing and specifically the help of my Twi

  Image from article: Queen Elizabeth I knighting Francis Drake, 1581. Credit...Alamy   Book Review by Nigel Cliff , The New York Times , March 10, 2021  IN SEARCH OF A KINGDOM Francis Drake, Elizabeth I, and the Perilous Birth of the British Empire By Laurence Bergreen England is a nation divided. In one camp, nationalists decry the diabolical threat to their freedom posed by dastardly Continentals, instead throwing their hopes on a shadow empire of boundless trading opportunities. In the other, pro-Europeans bitterly protest that their country is making a cataclysmic mistake and bide their time. Sound familiar? Just kidding. It’s not Boris Johnson’s Brexit Britain but the England of the late 16th century, the subject of “In Search of a Kingdom.”   In Laurence Bergreen’s colorful assessment, an unlikely alliance between Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Francis Drake empowered English Protestants to see off Continental Catholics and stake out the beginnings of the British Empire. Drake, a f