Roundtable

The Rest Is History

Two cents from Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and Ben Franklin.

By Apoorva Tadepalli

Friday, July 11, 2025

Sheet of Studies of a Dragonfly, Grasshopper, Butterflies, Moths, and Beetles, c. 1636

Sheet of Studies of a Dragonfly, Grasshopper, Butterflies, Moths, and Beetles, c. 1636, by Pieter Holsteyn II. The J. Paul Getty Museum.

• A history of “Flash Flood Alley” along the Guadalupe River, which has flooded “nearly once every decade” for the past century. (ABC News)

• The misadventures (“some real, some not”) of Benjamin Franklin. (Histories)

Further reading: Extracts, a new series on our Substack; this week from COMEDY (Winter 2014)

• The past and future of American patriotism. (New America)

• “Neither Lyell nor Darwin measured time on a human scale. It didn’t take days, months, or even calendar years for Mount Etna to rise or for the animals of the Galápagos to become unique species. These things now have their daily and seasonal rhythms, but the temporality of their arising belongs to another order, one that the nineteenth century was just beginning to chart.” (Harper’s)

Further reading: CLIMATE (Fall 2019)TIME (Fall 2014)

• Virginia Woolf’s defense, and declaration, of taste. (The Atlantic)

• The rise and fall of the knowledge worker: “The aristocracy of the knowledge economy, once able to negotiate its terms, is slowly being dethroned.” (Jacobin)

Further reading: LINES OF WORK (Spring 2011)

• An incomplete list of things Jane Austen disliked. (Literary Hub)

• “It’s not what they want to tell you; it’s what they’re trying very hard not to tell you.” Ron Chernow, author of Mark Twain, on the art of biography and what motivates great Americans. (iHeart)

Further reading: A lost passage by Mark Twain, a lost obituary of Mark Twain, and “Twain Dreams

• Found by art detective: Historical documents stolen from the Hague. (The Art Newspaper)

• Returned by France: An eleventh-century tapestry depicting the Norman conquest of Britain. (Smithsonian)

• Obituaries: Fanny Howe, Young Noble, Richard Greenberg, Jane Lazarre, John Martin, Paul Shin, Langley Perer, Ed Fiori, Norman Tebbit, Julian McMahon, Thomas Neurath, Dave Cortez, Carla Maxwell, Mark Snow, Stan Baker, Brian Clarke, Steven Rose, Bobby Jenks, Olivier Marleix, and at least 120 people killed in the central Texas floods.