Missives from Samsara

Those that know me know I have a personal interest in the letter J. I recently learned that it was the most recent letter added to the alphabet. It apparently appears after the letter ‘i’ because it started as a flourish to that letter at the end of a Roman numeral, what is known as a swash.

Take “XIIJ”, or 13. In this case the ‘J’ is used in the place of the last ‘I’ to signify that a series of ones has ended. Apparently, ‘i’ and ‘j’ were used interchangeably to write both the consonant and vowel sounds, The first time the two were distinguished as separate letters was in a 1524 text called (in English) ‘Trission’s epistle about the letters recently added in the Italian language’, written by Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550).

Jesus plays a role, too. Distinguishing the soft ‘j’ sound helped Trissino choose how the Greek word Iesus, a translation of the Hebrew Yeshua, should be spelled, and pronounced, the way it is today.

Change takes time though, and as late as the mid-1700s, English lexicographer Samuel Johnson still argued that ‘j’ was merely a variant of ‘i.’

Not surprisingly, the letter ‘j’ is one of the least common letters in English.

I finished 5 books this month and am really enjoying the new ones I am reading.

What’s new these days is that I am also reading a few Kindle ebooks on my iPad. My Kindle purchase rule is to buy nothing that costs more than $3.99. That said, I have still managed to acquire 28 at this point. Happy days!

While reading Jill Lepore’s new book about the Constitution, We the People, I came across the quote below about when New Hampshire officially declared that slavery was abolished in the state. It surprised me that a New England state waited so long to do that. I also remembered their strident state motto, “Live Free or Die.”

I decided to put down the book and poke around to find out what happened, as New Hampshire’s motto seemed a bit hypocritical in light of the relatively late 1857 abolition of slavery. For starters, I learned that the phrase came from a letter written by a New Hampshire veteran of the Revolutionary War. His name was John Stark and the full line from the private letter was “Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.”

The state didn’t actually adopt the motto until 1945, as World War II was ending. The primary meaning behind the phrase as a state motto had to do with political sovereignty and the abhorance of living under governmental tyranny. But what about individual freedom? Why would a state that so boldly proclaims the importance of liberty wait until such a late date to ban slavery?

Apparently, the New Hampshire state constitution, ratified in 1783, stated ‘all men are born equally free and independent,’ which many assumed abolished slavery. However, no law officially banning the practice was every passed. Slavery faded out over time and by 1840, the census indicated that there was only 1 enslaved person in the state.

The reason they eventually made it official in 1857 had to do with the politics of the time. Their 1857 law explicitly stated ‘No person, because of descent, should be disqualified from becoming a citizen of the state.’ It was a direct response to the terrible Dred Scott decision of that same year in which Roger Taney wrote that black Americans were not and could not become American citizens. That makes more sense.

So, my conclusion after digging a bit deeper is that my initial thoughts of hypocrisy by New Hampshire were not totally warranted. Slavery had disappeared in New Hampshire, but the politics of the tumultuous 1850s encouraged New Hampshire to make it official. Sorry I doubted you New Hampshire!

I came across a reference to the Battle of Towton while reading Neil Howe’s fascinating The Fourth Turning is Here — a book I’ve been pretty absorbed in the past few days, as I mentioned in a recent post. Howe’s central argument is that history moves in cycles, and that every eighty years or so, societies go through a violent, transformative upheaval. Towton shows up in the narrative as a decisive event in the War of the Roses.

Towton was fought on Palm Sunday, March 29, 1461, in the middle of the war, which was England’s brutal dynastic civil war between the Houses of York and Lancaster. The Yorkist forces of the newly proclaimed Edward IV clashed with a massive Lancastrian army in what became, by most accounts, the deadliest battle ever fought on British soil. Estimates of the dead range widely, but tens of thousands of men were likely killed in a single day of savage fighting. When the Lancastrian line finally broke, the retreat turned into a massacre, with fleeing soldiers cut down across the fields and meadows of Yorkshire.

The mentioning of Yorkshire jumped out at me because I spent my junior year abroad at Sheffield University, which sits maybe 35 miles south of where all this took place. I remember the landscape outside of Sheffield fairly well. What comes to mind are the rolling green hills shrouded in fog, the old stone walls, and the way the countryside feels ancient. To think that one of the most violent days in human history happened just up the road is a bit mind-bending.

Howe’s book has me looking at history differently. As I touched on in an earlier post; less as a straight line and more as a recurring pattern of crisis, renewal, and crisis again. The Battle of Towton is a reminder that those cycles can be extraordinarily brutal. England in 1461 wasn’t so different from other moments in history when political order collapses and people settle their differences in the worst possible way.

Worth remembering, in whatever turning we happen to be in right now.

Trump’s tariff policies are obviously controversial. It is true that they are bringing in some new governmet revenue. According to CNBC (and others), tariff revenue in 2025 was $124 billion, a 304% increase over the previous year. However, the New York Times reported today on a study just released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that illuminates who exactly is paying these taxes.

Zooming out a bit, the findings from the New York Fed highlight a central debate in trade policy: the trade-off between using tariffs as a tool for industrial strategy (the old Hamiltonian approach) and the resulting inflationary pressure on the domestic economy. While tariffs are often intended to protect local industries or exert geopolitical leverage, this new study underscores the “pass-through” effect, where import taxes act as a de facto consumption tax on Americans. As policymakers weigh the benefits of “de-risking” supply chains and reducing dependence on specific trading partners, they must confront the reality that these structural shifts often come at a direct cost to the purchasing power of domestic businesses and households.

More specifically, the New York Fed study reveals that the vast majority of the economic burden from the 2025 U.S. tariffs (nearly 90 percent!) is being borne by domestic firms and consumers rather than foreign exporters. Apparently, while the average tariff rate spiked from 2.6% to 13% over the year, foreign exporters generally did not lower their prices to absorb the cost. Instead, these costs were passed through to U.S. importers, leading to an 11% increase in prices for goods subject to the average tariff.

So the federal government is raising more revenue, but they are raising it from us.

Note: The graph below is taken from the NY Fed study by Mary Amiti, Chris Flanagan, Sebastian Heise, and David E. Weinstein

I am currently ‘reading’ 9 books. I put that in quotes, because I really have almost given up on the two bottom books in the stack, both of which I started last summer. February will be my last go with them and if I don’t make any progress, I’ll abandon them; which I don’t like to do, but you know, life is short. I’m exactly 60% of the way done with the Paul Johnson tome. I seem to average about a 100 pages a month on it so I should be done by late May. The Great Hunt is getting a bit more interesting, but I will not continue with The Wheel of Time series. It is just average and comes nowhere near LOTRs. The top five books in the stack, the ones I started most recently, are all enjoyable. I imagine the Kelton book will be finished next.

Today at Powell’s I picked up a novel I’ve heard a lot of good things about called Stoner by British writer John Williams. It came out in the 1960s, but apparently went a bit viral in the oughts. It currently has more than a quarter million ratings on Goodreads. Glad to add it to my TBR pile.

I got a very interesting book for Christmas called The Case Agaist Reality. It is a short, dense work of philosophy that I am slowly working my way through. Something I just came across in the book has to do with the shrinking of the human brain over the past 20,000 years. Indeed, some apparently argue this shrinking began as much as 100,00 years ago. This was news to me.

Apparently, according to some thinkers, as societies arose and became more complex, our ancestors increasingly didn’t need to ‘know everything’ to survive. They could become specialists. This is an obvious idea to me from a cultural and economic standpoint, but I didn’t realize it has had an impact on our brain size and the ratio of brain size to body mass.

The idea is that Individuals who may not have survived alone or in small groups, could survive in larger, more complex communities. Indeed, culture acts as a sort of buffer, or safety net. Tools, stored food, medical expertise, shared memories (and eventually writing); these all help carry the cognitive burden for people allowing for leaner biological cognition without losing ‘intelligence.’ At the same time, selection pressures decreased, as one could get away with not being an outstanding generalist. At the end of the day, it appears complex societies didn’t make humans dumber; they changed which kinds of minds could survive.

These ideas are still controversial and there doesn’t seem to be consensus. The fact that our brains have been shrinking however doesn’t seem to be in doubt.