Meet strongylodon macrobotrys

     Under ordinary conditions, we would not have rushed back to the Orchid show 11 days after attending the opening of the 1960s-themed "Feelin' Groovy."
     But we have houseguests, and "Take 'em to the Botanic Garden" is our go-to host move.
     Not that we didn't enjoy our second visit. We did. Particularly this distinctly blue-green pod of flowers found hanging off a vine in the Tropical Greenhouse. Not part of the show — not an orchid, obviously, but strongylodon macrobotrys, also known as a jade vine, a woody creeper endemic to the Philippines. It's not new — the woody vine grows all the way across a wide doorway. I just don't recall ever seeing it in bloom. One of the many appeals of the Garden: no matter how many times you go, and we go a lot, you always see something you didn't notice before.

     Its name, strongylodon macrobotrys, begs for dissection. Strongylos is Greek for round, also describing certain worms and parasites (as well as a village in Cyprus) and odous is tooth, giving us the dread "orthodontist" and showing up in Hebrew, such as in the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" passage in Matthew. Macro is "large," of course, but also "long," and botrys," is a very old word, found in ancient Greek and Babylonian Aramaic, to describe a bunch of grapes, or unripe dates.

    So "round-toothed long cluster," which certainly describes the flowery calyx (a pod of flowers; good Scrabble word).

     The plant itself is related to — and the Trump administration wouldn't want me to tell you this, which is reason aplenty to dive into the story in detail — a notorious moment in the intersection between botany and colonialism.
     In 1836, Congress authorized the U.S. Exploring Expedition, "for the purpose of exploring and surveying the Southern Ocean, ... as well to determine the existence of all doubtful islands and shoals, as to discover, and accurately fix, the position of those..."
     The six-ship flotilla, with 500 officers and men, as well as nine civilian scientists, left Chesapeake Bay on Aug. 18, 1838 and was gone for four years, logging 87,000 miles and hitting the Philippines in 1840, where strongylodon macrobotrys was first collected. It was the last U.S. nautical mission to circumnavigate the globe completely under sail. led by a New York naval officer, Charles Wilkes, experienced with charts and instruments (he studied under Nathaniel Bowditch, whose "American Practical Navigator" is used to this day), but not actual seafaring or relations with native populations. When two sailors were killed in Fiji, bartering for food, Wilkes seized 80 Fijians and killed them.

     The U.S. Naval Institute described Wilkes (no relation to John Wilkes Booth; I checked) who was considered by some a model for both Ahab and Capt. Queeg, this way:

     "Wilkes never doubted his ability to complete with total success any task he undertook. With this self-assurance, however, came a huge ego, and this ego was in turn covered by a paper-thin skin. Wilkes was quick to detect a slight or insult, real or imagined, and was unforgiving of the perpetrator(s). He was extremely excitable and suspicious by nature, constantly suspecting officers of forming cabals to plot against his authority."

     Nevertheless, the mission was considered a success. Naturalist Titian Peale declared it had elevated “our country in the rank of Civilized nations.”

     A reminder that it is the engaging in science, not the dismantling of it, that brings respect. Or did. 

     When he returned, Wilkes was court-martialed for excessive cruelty to his men but retained his position — it isn't just the CPD that lets its bad apples stick around and fester — and during the Civil War, Wilkes seized a British Mail ship, almost drawing Britain into the war against the Union, for which he was court-martialed again. He retired a rear admiral.

     Well, I'd say we got enough for today from some interestingly-colored flowers.

Trump administration slashes away at science, but scientists are pushing back

 

National Center on Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado

   My father had one good idea.
     OK, that is unfair. He had many good ideas. Marrying my mom, for starters. He also held patents in the design of compact nuclear reactors.
     In fact, those two good ideas might be related — there was a shakedown cruise of an atomic-powered submarine that my father, a naval reservist, was keen to avoid. Married men were exempt. Perhaps it's cynical of me to connect them.
     But he also had one really good idea that resonated around the world and has an impact today.
     My father's really good idea occurred to him in the early 1970s. The 747 Jumbo Jet had been introduced, to endless publicity — the spiral staircase leading to the lounge in the bulging upper deck hump, the enormous capacity, 400 passengers, making long haul air travel economical for millions. And — what my father noticed — radar systems and other instruments that monitored atmospheric conditions around the plane. A constant stream of data.
     You know ... Robert Steinberg thought ...what if that weather data wasn't just used to fly the plane? What if it was sent to a central location? And then used ... to predict the weather?
     It would be a big improvement over weather stations — scattered mountaintop outposts, with thermometers and spinning anemometers and such. Plus weather balloons, instrument packages floated high into the upper atmosphere for expensive keyhole glimpses.
     He wrote an article titled, "Role of Commercial Aircraft in Global Monitoring Systems," that ran in the April 27, 1973, issue of Science.
     "The new family of wide-bodied jets such as the 747, DC-10, and L-1011 aircraft can be used to supply important global atmospheric and tropical meteorological data for which there is a pressing need," my father wrote. "In the final analysis, commercial aircraft may offer the most inexpensive way to monitor our atmosphere in the near future."
     By summer, NASA loaned him out to NCAR — the National Center for Atmospheric Research — in Boulder, Colorado. NCAR was in a stunning, I.M. Pei-designed building of reddish concrete. Boulder was nice. Mountains. He traveled the world, signing up airlines. The idea took hold.
     "Aircraft-based observations play a big role in the accuracy of weather forecasts — reducing forecast errors in numerical weather prediction systems by up to 10%" according to the World Meterological Association.
     This is a long way of saying that, in an era of constant shocks to American science — 25,000 federal researchers and support staff left the government this past year, thousands of grants slashed, agencies shuttered, scientific data yanked off line, the U.S. scientific establishment being "systematically destroyed" in the words of the Union of Concerned Scientists, NCAR being scuttled stood out as personal.
     And political. NCAR is being closed down by the Trump administration for the sin of "climate alarmism." Because atmospheric research points to uncomfortable facts that business and its handmaiden, government, don't want to think about anymore.
     We should be clear why all of this is happening. Business makes money, but if it has to, oh, consider pollution, or worry about the purity of food or the efficacy of drugs, it makes less money. So watchdog agencies, and research facilities and university centers that would counterbalance the whims of business are being scrapped.
     Scientists are not going quietly.

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Artisanal bread

 

     Well ... it's been an interesting couple days, since Monday night when, tired from a long day and with a full house of kids and a granddaughter, I wrote this and went to bed, only to wake up Tuesday and find out Jesse Jackson had died, shortly after midnight.
     So I clawed this post back, and put up Jackson's obituary in its place. It seemed the right news judgment call ("Hmmm, country bread or the death of a major national figure? Let's go ... with the ... bread.") 

     Then Wednesday I ran the column the paper asked me to write about Jackson's passing. Now things have quieted down, for the moment, so it's back to artisanal bread. Apologies to the 49 readers who read this before 5 a.m. Tuesday, when I took it down. And if there are any new readers from the ... 2 million hits the Jackson obituary received (thank you Apple News!) the way the blog works is, we usually have subjects of some kind of topical interest but, given the blog's quotidian nature (every ... goddamn ... day) sometimes we plumb the depths of the truly trivial. Which is also what happens to take up the bulk of all our lives, so it does remind us: the small stuff is important too.

     Often I snap photographs for the purpose of sharing them with you, here. But that is not why I took the above. Central Street in front of Hewn Bakery was jammed with cars one recent Sunday, and rather than park a block or two away, I pulled into an illegal space, left my wife guarding the car, and ran in to check out the situation, breadwise. 

     We had never been to Hewn, but my wife had heard good things about it and suggested a visit, post brunch with the kids at Blind Faith. I took the photo, then hurried back outside to show her the bread selection. We discussed our options, and settled on an rye with oats, which did indeed prove to be quite good.

     You would think that, being raised on Wonder bread and, later, Buttercrust, which was basically Wonder dyed yellow with some corn meal sprinkled on the top, that I would retain some residual nostalgia for garbage white bread. But I really don't. Except under very unusual circumstances — say being served a metal plate of barbecue at a joint in Memphis, or a Kentucky Hot Brown, I never want to see another slice of white bread for the rest of my life. Someday I'm going to write something about the food I was served as a child. But I'm not ready yet. I think I'm going to wait a few years, to make sure my mother is good and dead, and won't claw out of the grave and get me for my indiscretion. 
     Returning to Hewn, which also has an outlet in Wilmette (and a third in Libertyville, thank you, Charles Troy). My wife is addicted to pecan rolls, so I grabbed one of those for her as well.

     Any thoughts on the name "Hewn"? I get that it is supposed to evoke the hardy artisan, powerful forearms coated with flour, drawing rough loafs from the primordial essence of natural grains and yeast and such, plunging them on wooden boards into wood-fired ovens. A name redolent of adzes and wide plank floors. But it still, to me, would be better attached to a line of ranch oak furniture, chairs with the bark still on the legs, and such. "Do you want some of this bread? It was hewn by me..." is not a question one leaps to answer with an emphatic "yes!"
     Moving on. If this seems a bit light, well, my oldest, his wife and the granddaughter, now 8 months, showed up Monday afternoon. I wish I could share her photo with you, but the chance that the cuteness might burn your retinas is too great, and I can't risk the liability. As it is, her mesmeric presence caused me to forget all responsibility, organized thought, or concern for anything that wasn't being bounced on my knee. I spent the day making sputtering noises, widening my eyes, breaking into insane grins, singing from my vast array of 1920s pop hits learned from my mother, who could sing far better than she could cook. Tunes such as "April Showers" and "Toot-Toot-Tootsie Goodbye" and not thinking for a single moment what I might post here. The results speak for themselves. The good news is that I will have to, somehow, ignore all that in the morning  and turn out a newspaper column of some sort. But you'll have to wait for that until Wednesday. Assuming I can draw myself away from the Concentrated Essence of all Sweetness and Adorableness in the Known Universe long enough to do it.

Rev. Jesse Jackson charmed the great and the infamous, trying to make a difference

Rev. Jesse Jackson, 1982 (Chicago Sun-Times file photo)

     The Century Shopping Centre at 2828 N. Clark Street was built inside the old Diversey Theatre, a defunct 1925 vaudeville house. It has an interior atrium, sort of Water Tower Place Lite, and a winding ramp, past seven stories of shops.
     My then wife-to-be and I were wandering there, years ago, heading up the ramp, when we encountered a mass of people coming the other way. Rev. Jesse Jackson, with a knot of shoppers, photographers and media. Campaigning for Eugene Sawyer, if I recall correctly.
     "I'd like to meet him!" my future spouse said.
     I brought her up to Rev. Jackson and made the introduction.
     "May I kiss you?" he asked, to my surprise, and hers. But she agreed. The kiss occurred.
     We parted ways, the famous civil rights leaders and his entourage heading one way, my significant other and I heading another. Someone needed to say something. A thought came to me.
     "Congratulations," I said. "You just kissed Yasser Arafat by proxy."
     That neatly summarizes the dilemma of Rev. Jackson, who died Tuesday. He met the Dalai Lama and the bloodstained leader of the P.L.O. He hung out with Martin Luther King and Robert Mugabe, responsible for the deaths of 20,000 Zimbabweans. A moral man, generally, who met highly immoral people and sometimes held their hands and prayed. He visited Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad and Fidel Castro.
      "Jackson has made a career of giving dictators such as Slobodan Milosevic a chance to show their gentler side by releasing captives at his request," a Time magazine columnist noted in 1999. "It’s not mere ego tripping, as some cynics charge, or an expression of Jackson’s deeply held belief in nonviolence. It’s almost Faustian. I think he needs the rush that only bargaining with evil can provide."
     Another dilemma for Rev. Jackson. To draw media attention to particular problems, prisoners, picket lines, he needed to draw attention to himself. It wasn't supposed to be about him. Yet it was.
     Rev. Jackson was master of firing torpedoes that circled back and impacted into his own vessel. He mounted the first viable presidential campaign by a Black candidate in 1984, then hired Louis Farrakhan to do his campaign security and called New York "Hymietown" in the presence of a newspaper reporter, who Farrakhan later threatened to kill for spilling the beans.
     The "man of contrasts" summation might be a cliche. But with Rev. Jackson, it was true. He could whipsaw you with it. In 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president, Jackson made the rounds of editorial offices, humbly pointing out that it was pioneers such as, ahem, himself, who made Obama's triumph possible.

     Then Jackson immediately said, into an open Fox News microphone, that he'd like to castrate Obama. Which puffed away the cloud of revered pioneer respect he was trying to fog around himself

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Rev. Jesse Jackson, civil rights leader and Chicago icon, dead at 84

 

Rev. Jesse Jackson (photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin)

    “I may be poor ...” began the call-and-response Rev. Jesse Jackson led in various forms before rapt audiences for more than half a century. “But I am ... somebody! I may be on welfare. But I am ... somebody! I may be in jail. But I am ... somebody! I may be uneducated, But I am ... somebody. I am Black. Beautiful. Proud. I must be respected. I must be protected. I am ... somebody!”
     That, in essence, is the message Rev. Jackson devoted his life to championing — for Black people in general and himself in particular. From leading Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s open housing campaign in Chicago in 1964, through his close association with the great civil rights leader during the last three years of King’s life, to the tumultuous 1970s, when Jackson started what became the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, to the 1980s, when he ran the first viable presidential campaign by a Black candidate in the United States, to the 1990s, when he traveled the globe, to free hostages, advise leaders, join picket lines and lend his internationally famous name to often desperate causes. To his later years, when he settled into the role as a revered elder statesman of Black Chicago and an unceasing voice for social justice.
     Rev. Jackson died at age 84 on Tuesday, the family said in a statement. He had been in declining health for a decade; in 2017 he announced he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease two years earlier, but last April revealed that it was actually misdiagnosed progressive supranuclear palsy, a condition also affecting bodily movements. He stepped down as president of PUSH in July 2023, citing health concerns. Rev. Jackson appeared onstage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 2024, when he was presented to the crowd after a video celebrating his life, but did not speak.  

This ran Feb. 18, 2026

     If the legend of his mentor, Martin Luther King was simplified, almost beatified, by early death — a martyr at 39, an icon who had a dream — then the legacy of his eager protege was complicated by long life. Rev. Jesse Jackson was in the public eye for six decades, a tireless wielder of social pressure. He was respected and dismissed, inspiring adoration and disdain, a Chicago institution who left footprints on the world stage, an ardent advocate for civil rights whose attempts to wield political power himself were thwarted, and channeled into the power of protest, persuasion and complaint.
     ”Yet, there are doubts and criticisms raised about this complex man, a man characterized by ambiguity and contradiction,” the New York Times magazine wrote about him in 1972. “He is a brilliant speaker, a skilled mobilizer. He is also vain and self-seeking, a star, a man of great ambition, a man who, at times, uses the tricks of a demagogue.”
     Which is another way to describe a powerful orator who inspired and uplifted millions of people, whether one-on-one or through the media he played skillfully around the world. In everything he did, Jackson was always pushing to be counted and make a difference. To be somebody.
     He was born under highly unpromising circumstances, on Oct. 8, 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, in a three-room, tin-roofed house without running water. His mother was an unwed 16-year-old high school student named Helen Burns. His father, Noah Robinson, was a married neighbor more than twice her age — 33 — with three stepchildren.
     When Jesse was a toddler, his mother married Charles Jackson, who adopted Jesse when he was about 12. Charles Jackson worked as a janitor, and sometimes young Jesse would help him clean buildings.
     It was a deeply segregated time and place. When baseball star Jackie Robinson came to Greenville for the NAACP, he wasn’t allowed to use the bathroom at the airport. Young Jesse was taunted for his stammer, which would return in moments of excitement later in life. His mother was his first adoring audience. She always told him, Rev. Jackson later recalled: “You’re going to be somebody. Just hold on.”
     His calling came early.
     “Jesse was an unusual kind of fella, even when he was just learning to talk,’’ Robinson remembered. ‘’He would say he’s going to be a preacher. He would say, ‘I’m going to lead people through the rivers of water.’‘’

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'Boss Lincoln' reminds us that Honest Abe didn't float into the presidency but clawed his way there

Daniel Chester French’s statue of Abraham Lincoln in his memorial in Washington, D.C. I love how his right foot is slightly raised, as if he were about to leap up and kick some laggard American ass, like the tireless political operative that Matthew Pinsker details in his excellent new biography, “Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln.”

     You can believe something all your life and then, confronted with new evidence, suddenly realize how ridiculous your thinking was.
     Well, I can anyway. Many people cling to error as if their lives depend on it. Maybe they do. To me, the ability to admit being wrong is not a flaw but a superpower.
     Had you previously asked me to describe the rise of Abraham Lincoln, I'd have said something about young Abe writing letters with coal on the back of a shovel in a log cabin, growing into a lanky, wisecracking Illinois railroad lawyer who shambled into the presidency in 1860 because he was so homespun and wise.
     Dumb.
     Then I cracked open "Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln," by Matthew Pinsker, published last week.
     Lincoln was a driven, scheming political animal, "barking out orders, providing advice," scrawling "BURN THIS" at the bottom of letters, abusing the congressional franking privilege to deluge constituents with his speeches, glad-handing every farmer he met.
     Then as now, truth was the first victim of the partisan battle royale.

     "I have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth and aristocratic family distinction," Lincoln gripes, of slurs after his marriage to well-off Mary Todd, noting that 12 years earlier he'd been a "friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flat boat."
     Any biography rests on the fascinating facts it shares, and Pinsker drives home what a mover and shaker Lincoln was, years before the presidency, with this:
     "He was a man of consequence, important enough even to have a town named after him," Pinsker writes. "... the town of Lincoln, Illinois, was born in August, 1853" in honor of the skilled lobbyist who had pushed rail lines through Northern Illinois.
     We're reminded the past isn't a playpen: They weren't handing out presidencies to whatever Bible-quoting yahoo showed up and asked. At one point, Lincoln himself pauses to mock that thinking:
     "Do you suppose that I should ever have got into notice, if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed forward by older men?"
     Not anymore I don't.
     As we are still arguing who can be sheared of human dignity and under what circumstances (color of skin, then; condition of immigration papers, now) the book is terrifyingly relevant — and offers the comfort of reminding us that our extraordinary times might not be quite so extraordinary.
     In 1858, the worry is about immigrants voting illegally. Spying "fifteen Celtic gentlemen with black carpet-sacks" at a railroad junction, Lincoln follows them, spying while the Irish workers hang around a saloon.

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Chicago resistance to ICE echoes opposition to Fugitive Slave Act 175 years ago

“A Ride for Liberty — The Fugitive Slaves” by Eastman Johnson. “The absence of white figures in this liberation subject makes it virtually unique in art of the period — these African Americans are independent agents of their own freedom,” writes the Brooklyn Museum.

     Jim Gray arrived in chains.
     At the railroad station in Ottawa, Illinois, about 80 miles southwest of Chicago.
     Gray wore leg irons, his arms bound to his sides, and was led by a rope.
     It was Oct. 19, 1859.
     The month before he had escaped from slavery in New Madrid, Missouri. Caught by an Illinois sheriff "in sympathy with the slave owners," Gray was being returned to bondage. A crowd awaited him, including a local merchant named John Hossack, an immigrant from Scotland.
     "What crime has he committed?" Hossack shouted. "Has he done anything but want to be free?"
     A question that echoes through the years and across the country today. With federal immigration agents this past year prowling Democratic cities — Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis — kidnapping Latino individuals and dragging them off to exile, and billions being pumped into immigration enforcement, gearing up to grab more people and confine them to enormous facilities now being constructed nationwide, it's impossible not to think of the Fugitive Slave Act, the 1850 law that also created a federal force tasked with snaring people for the crime of wanting to live in freedom.
     There was already a law, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, empowering owners to retrieve their chattel from the North. But Southerners were upset that California was being admitted to the union as a free state. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was a sop to them, meting out punishment to anyone helping Blacks escape slavery, and creating monetary incentives for agents bringing escapees back. The law gave bite to the slave drivers' bark.

John Hossack (Ottawa Museum)

     Then as now, local communities fiercely resisted this federal intrusion into their constitutional rights. Then as now, street clashes erupted as national law and human decency faced off against each other. This being February — Black History Month — and with the Trump administration waging war on Black History, scrubbing it from the Smithsonian, from college campuses and federal websites in an attempt to declare the civil rights struggle an unmentionable blot upon enforced patriotic zeal, it seemed important to explore the subject in depth, while we still enjoy the right to do so.
     "All historical analogies are the same," said Matthew Pinsker, a history professor and director of the House Divided Project at Dickinson College. "There's always some similarities and plenty of differences. This is a battle between the national administration and blue state governments. In the Fugitive Slave days, it was a battle between Washington and Northern states, which passed laws called 'personal liberty laws' that were like the sanctuary city laws that Trump is trying to overturn."
     Hundreds of Ottawa residents showed up for Gray's hearing the next day in the courtroom of Justice Dean Caton, who ruled that while Gray had broken no Illinois law, the Fugitive Slave Act demanded he go to Springfield to face charges.
     Gray never got there.
     As a marshal began to lead Gray from the courthouse, local men sprang into action. The officer was restrained, while Hossack grabbed Gray by the elbow.
     "If you want liberty, run!" Hossack urged, dragging Gray from the courthouse. They jumped a fence, climbed into a waiting carriage, and were sped out of town.
     Gray escaped north to Canada. But Hossack was arrested and sent to stand trial at the federal court in Chicago.

Chicago's resistance. Strong then, strong now

     Resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act was particularly strong in Chicago, the city "a sinkhole of abolition" in the words of one downstate editor. A hub of actual railroads, it was also a center for the Underground Railroad, an informal confederation hurrying those escaping slavery north to Canada. When a slave catcher arrived at Chicago in October, 1850, he was informed that his safety could not be guaranteed, and the enslaved servant he had brought with him was helped to escape.
     The same month, the Chicago Common Council — predecessor of the City Council — passed a law condemning the Fugitive Slave Act as "cruel and unjust" and ordering the police force — nine men at the time — "not to render any assistance for the arrest of fugitive slaves."
     Uncannily similar to the challenge Mayor Brandon Johnson would face 175 years later: How much cooperation must local government give to federal authorities enforcing a despised and unjust law? The Council in 1850 minced no words, damning any free-state representatives supporting the bill as "fit only to be ranked with the traitors, Benedict Arnold, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed his Lord and master for 30 pieces of silver."
     Last October, the City Council passed a similar, if less florid, resolution, focused on trying to protect children from traumatic seizure by ICE agents and urging citizens to report the misconduct they witness.
     What was motivating Chicago to push back against the Fugitive Slave Act? While it's tempting to just superimpose Chicago's current sanctuary city liberalism onto the mid-19th century city, that wasn't the case. There were only 323 Black people living in Chicago in 1850 — about 1% of the population. Illinois had passed its own "Black Laws" in 1848, forbidding the immigration of free Blacks into the state and, as amended in 1853, forbidding Black visitors from spending more than 10 nights in the city.
     "These protectors of fugitive slaves raised no objection to the exclusion of Negro testimony against a white person in the courts of law," historian Bessie Louise Pierce noted in 1940. "They seemed to see no inconsistencies in providing a separate section in the theaters for Negroes, and in segregating the races in the common schools."
     To whites, this was more about protecting their own rights than the rights of Black Chicagoans.

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