Interesting. Issue 003. Aug 2019. It didn't happen like I thought it did.
Glassy “hell ball” spherules (Alan Hildebrand, University of Calgary) (source)
This week brings histories I thought I knew — revised.
- All dinosaurs on the planet died in a matter of hours. All of them.
- Republicans were the first to argue and pass legislation to limit individuals’ right to bear arms in the US.
Those would be spoilers except… when you sink into the details of both stories, it gets more interesting. A lot more interesting.
Also, Sister Helen Prejean’s take on virginity, and a bonus song — with the best hoola hoop you’ve ever seen — to lighten the mood around here.
Lindsey
People & Stories
Three that made me pause this week.
Dinosaur Extinction
The story I learned in school: An asteroid hit. The atmosphere got so dusty that it blocked out a lot of sun. The Earth got really cold, plants died, and over hundreds of years, all the dinosaurs died, too.
The updated theory:
The asteroid was about the size of Mt. Everest, hurtling toward the earth at 20,000 mph, twenty times faster than a bullet. When it hit, the force was equivalent to 100 million hydrogen bombs going off all at once in the same spot.
“If you were in the right (wrong) place to look behind the asteroid as it came in, you’d probably be able to see clearly through to space. You would suddenly be looking at a nighttime hole in a daytime sky.”
(100 million hydrogen bombs isn’t enough to kill dinosaurs on the other side of the planet, though.)
The asteroid plows 20 miles into the Earth. It’s so hot that all the rock it hits turns into liquid, and then gas, and - as it’s displaced - it flies into space. Some of this Earth sand bounces off Mars. It rapidly cools and turns into tiny droplets of glass. The glass spreads out, and now the glass drops surround the globe. 90% come raining back to Earth.
It’s “the greatest meteor shower anyone’s ever seen.” There’s “such a massive rain of these things coming in,” and each of them creates heat. Almost all of them burn up in the process. The sky turns red. “Estimates are that on that day, temperatures topped out at 1,200 degrees.” Your blood would literally start to boil inside your body.
“So essentially, according to this theory, the dinosaurs and everything else on Earth that day would have been incinerated… it would have taken maybe two hours. A business lunch.”
- Adapted from Dinopocalypse Redux, Radiolab
Gun Control
No one ever wrote about it. Except for the third amendment, there was no amendment that was less written about, less legislated, less debated, less a subject of Supreme Court conversation than the Second Amendment.
There's 200 years of everything being chill, and then basically in just a flash, the Second Amendment goes from being ignored to being explosive.
I'm a carpenter. I'm a builder. I'm a stand-up comedian. Jazz drummer. Structure repairman of high-performance aircraft. I did electromagnetic field blacklight non-destruct testing for the Gemini missile program, and I'm an expert shot with guns. I was an expert shot with guns when I was 12 years old. I was raised a hunter and a fisherman besides being a carpenter and a builder. When I'm 12 years old, my father buys me a high-powered rifle. Hollow-tip ammo. I can knock an elephant down with that shit. You see what I'm getting at?
My name is Bobby Seale. I created the Black Panther Party. I'm the founding chairman and National Organizer of the Black Panther Party.
You could argue that the whole individual gun rights movement started in the 1960s with the Black Panthers in Oakland. October, 1966, Bobby Seale and his friend Huey P, Newton, they start this organization called the Black Panthers. Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
ARCHIVE CLIP, Huey P. Newton: The Second Amendment of the Constitution guarantees the citizen a right to bear arms on public property. That's our constitutional, democratic, civil human right.
Adam Winkler says people who argued that were in the minority. They weren't taken too seriously. This was one of the first times that the individual rights reading [of the Second Amendment] was forced into the mainstream, because coming out of law school class, Huey tells Bobby if we have a right to bear arms, we individuals?
Then we can patrol the police, observe the police.
SEAN: He also pointed to a California state law that said you could carry a gun as long as it wasn't concealed.
BOBBY SEALE: If the gun is not concealed, it's not illegal. So ...
ADAM WINKLER: The Black Panthers started policing the police.
- Excerted from The Gun Show, Radiolab
You have to listen to this whole story.
Sister Helen Prejean
She was 18 when she joined the Sisters of St. Joseph’s, an order begun in France in 1650 with a particular mission for the education of girls.
She was a scrappy, mouthy novitiate, often in trouble. Bounding out of the family station wagon on the day she joined the convent, she announced, “I’m here! I’m here to become a bride of Christ!’”
And she was wildly competitive, once practicing the down-turned gaze meant to indicate modesty so zealously that she knocked down another nun.
At a religious education program in Ontario, she met a young priest, and they fell in love. Nuns and priests were experimenting with a relationship model called “the third way,” which was sort of like dating except the couples stayed celibate and true to their orders.
“If this sounds confusing and tricky in the extreme,” she writes, “that’s because that’s exactly what it is.” William was not only smitten with Sister Helen, he was also jealous and controlling, as well as being an alcoholic. It took seven years for her to end the relationship.
Then came a nascent feminist awakening, as she examined the meaning of celibacy beyond biology. Attending to William’s emotional needs, she writes, had consumed more and more of her time and focus, competing with “the single-heartedness” that is the essence of her vocation.
“Virginity is completely identified with sex,” she said, “what a person has not experienced. It’s that closed-off, puritanical kind of thing.” But Sister Helen’s practice of celibacy taught her that the Virgin archetype was something more radical. “It is the single-heartedness that is the integrity in one’s being,” she said, and then quoted Jean Shinoda Bolen, the Jungian author: “She does what she does, because what she does is true.”
It is a state available to everyone, she writes, even politicians. “Although in the United States, the brokering of money and power in politics sets the ‘purity bar’ pretty high.”…
- Excerpted from Sister Helen Prejean Explains It All for You, The New York Times
Bonus
If you haven’t seen this gem of the internet yet: Khruangbin - Evan Finds The Third Room (Official Video)
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