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The Weekly Wrap: October 25-31

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The Weekly Wrap: October 25-31

Imagining a Different Use for Campaign Funds

I just learned that the U.S. midterm elections have set new records for advertising spending. As of October 23, the Ohio Senate race had already spent $460 million. Elon Musk alone has donated over $250 million nationally to political campaigns.

My wife and I often shake our heads at all the things those campaign funds are not spent on. Here’s one comparison you might consider.Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library provides books to children at roughly $2.20 to $2.60 per book, including shipping. Last year, they provided 40 million books globally. Using the higher cost, this would cost $104 million.

Imagine this. If this money were used for childhood literacy efforts instead of beseiging us with “ads nauseum,” the money spent in Ohio alone could fund a quadrupling of the Imagination Library’s work.

Equally, cash-strapped libraries could expand book acquisitions and programming for children and adults. Ohio, which actually spends the most per capita on library funding at $531 million, could nearly double that contribution from one race alone (and probably could double it when final figures are in).

Of course, there are many other causes on which these funds could be spent. Literacy efforts happen to be something I care about. But the point is that these efforts do not lack needed funding because the money isn’t there. The spending on this campaign reveals the fabulous wealth some in our country enjoy. And our constitution and courts have said that if they want to spend this on campaigns, they are free to do so.

But I can’t help wondering about the folly of pouring so much into political ads that disgust us all and play fast and loose with the truth. And I can’t help imagining the better uses to which it might be put.

Five Articles Worth Reading

A new book makes the case that we would likely have known little of Vincent Van Gogh, apart from his eccentricities, were it not for his sister. “The Woman Who Made Vincent van Gogh Famous” reviews Joan Martelli’s new book, The Widow Van Gogh on the efforts of Johanna van Gogh-Bonger.

It’s the most popular course at Harvard. Students have to read a hefty book weekly and write regular essays. Also, no digital devices and no pass/fail. And 180 freshman vie for 90 spots. “The Brutal Harvard Class That Suddenly Everyone Wants to Take” gives me hope.

I’ve joined my wife in painting for perhaps the last ten or so years. If nothing else, painting makes you observe–shapes, lighting color values, composition. It also makes you look differently at the art of others. “Teaching Students to See What They Miss” describes using art to teach students “slow looking.” As a result, they found it made students better listeners and more attentive in other ways.

I moved away from Youngstown fifty years ago. I returned many times, I also researched and wrote blog pieces about the town for ten years (go to On Youngstown to access these). Through all that, I discovered the values and outlook and personal history that helped form me. Platon, a photographer and filmmaker, returned to the home of his youth, Paros, a Greek island. In a photo essay, he describes “The Greek Island That Taught Me the Art of Living.”

Finally, we bought our son a set of LEGOs as a child. And we often helped him add to his collection. He’s now in his early forties, and still buying new LEGO sets. Jess Uhre Rahbek explained for me “How LEGO Engineered the Perfect Plaything.” The article even includes original patent drawings from 1961, a basic design that has not changed.

Quote of the Week

I learned on Thursday of the death of Sir Patrick Stewart. In a Washington Post interview from 2023, he remarked:

“Every single day, no matter how early I have to get up, I begin with a cup of tea and a book, not a script, not emails, a book.”

Miscellaneous Musings

Beyond his roles in theatre and on television and film, one of the gifts many remember from Patrick Stewart came during the COVID lockdowns of 2020. While we alternately washed our groceries and ranted about wearing masks, Stewart would appear on YouTube and other social media reading a sonnet of Shakespeare each day. He gently reminded us of the good, the true, and the beautiful when this seemed in scarce supply. Something we might learn from as we remember him.

Undoing Manifest Destiny by L. Daniel Hawk is a challenging book that I won’t say much more about until I review it. But one of the things I connected with is that Hawk, a native Ohioan, includes vignettes of Ohio’s history with Indigenous peoples as illustrations of key themes for each of his chapters.

I’ve always loved a good book recounting a military battle. This was a free book from Thriftbooks but Waterloo: A Near Run Thing by David Howarth is the perfect account of that battle–human interest, chronology, the topography of the battle–it’s all there in just the right amount of detail.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: The Month in Review: October 2026

Tuesday: L. Daniel Hawk, Undoing Manifest Destiny

Wednesday: Osvaldo Padilla, The Pastoral Epistles

Thursday: David Howarth, Waterloo: A Near Run Thing

Friday: Doris Brocke, Happy As Your Moose

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for October 25-31.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

Review: Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science

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Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science
Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science by Edward Lurie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Louis Agassiz might well be considered the foremost naturalist of the first half of the nineteenth century. He brought a rigor to the scientific enterprise in America that inspired everyone from cabinet members to farmers. And he also reflects the human dilemma of being caught late in life in a paradigm shift as the work of Charles Darwin won over a younger generation of zoologists, some who had studied with Agassiz.

This is an older work, published in 1960 and a cheap find at a used book sale at our local library! Lurie traces Agassiz from his youth in Switzerland, his clear sense of a plan for his life from age 15 that led to a succession of studies first in Neuchatel, and then in Germany, his efforts to forestall his parents aims that he would settle down to a respectable medical practice in his home town, and fortuitous relationships with Humboldt and Cuvier. It was with the latter that his metaphysical and scientific convictions about special creation and the fixed nature of species were formed. During this time he gained great reknown in Europe with lectures on glaciation and how these wiped out species and how different species were specially created in various locations following the last ice age.

This in turn led to lectures in America in 1846, and the offer of a Harvard appointment. In one of the darker sections of the book, we see his choice of American science over his dying first wife. Nevertheless, supported by rich Boston patrons and lecture income, he establishes a research program and the prolific collection of specimens that would continue for the rest of his life, far outstripping the ability to catalogue and properly display and utilize them. This led to plans for a Museum of Comparative Zoology, functioning under Harvard’s aegis with some funding from the college and much from patrons, the state, and even Agassiz’s own earnings. Along the way, he married Elizabeth Cary, a wife totally dedicated to and enthralled with his work.

The Museum in many ways represented both the pinnacle of his accomplishments in attracting researchers, rigorous publications, and one of the most comprehensive collections of zoological specimens, living and fossil, anywhere in the world. The efforts to sustain this Museum led to ever more taxing efforts that colored Agassiz’s responses to Darwin’s theories, alienated him from colleagues, and eventually fatally compromised his health. He suffered two strokes, the second of which proved fatal resulting in his death in December of 1873.

I was expecting to find a portrait of an increasingly rigid man, and to some extent this was so. And yet in his last years, he reconciled with Asa Gray and others he had alienated and even corresponded cordially with Darwin and wrestled with Darwin’s explanations and the data Darwin cited in support. He never changed his basic position, however, and in an Atlantic Monthly article published posthumously, he presented both his respect for Darwin’s work and his critique of the theory and reasons for continuing to hold his own views.

Along the way, Lurie helps us to understand how Agassiz gained such a standing and following. He was a driven personality with an expansive vision, huge energy, a compelling lecturer, and a dedicated researcher who could affirm original discoveries of his students, or even common citizens who sent him a specimen he had not seen before. Agassiz made science exciting not just for scientists but the wider public. This biography charts the strengths and weaknesses of such a figure and is worth the attention of anyone with great aspirations in science.

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Harvard Book Store’s Top 100

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Only have time for a brief post today. Came across Harvard Book Store’s Top 100 list.  Several observations:

1. If I am correct, I’ve only read 30 on this list! Yay! There are still good books out there I haven’t read.

2. I was glad to see some of my personal favorites on the list including The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Jayber Crow.

3. I was saddened that Cry, the Beloved Country  was not included. This work ranks for me up with Hemingway’s writing, and in many ways is far more moving as a tale of reconciliation.

4. Can’t figure out how Hundred Years of Solitude made #4.

5. Kind of wonder if the Harry Potter stories or Hitchhikers Guide will still make this list in 25 years.

6. I appreciated the foreign authors and need to dip into some folk like Calvino, Murakami, and others.

7. I was happily surprised to see two of Marilynne Robinson’s books in this list, Housekeeping and Gilead.

8. David Foster Wallace and Neil Gaiman keep popping up. Need to read them sometime.

If you’ve had a chance to look over this list, what surprised you and why? How many have you read?