This week’s Unicorns take a break from political content, because you’ve probably had enough of it. So here is other strange and delightful content to go with your coffee today.
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Lindsey Liles profiles a woman who holds the ultimate nope job: “She’s One of Florida’s Most Lethal Python Hunters.”
But wait, you may ask (as I did), Florida has pythons? Weren’t alligators enough already?! A taste from this fascinating story:
At sixty-two years old, Kalil is a full-time, year-round professional python hunter, and the original python huntress: She is the first woman to hold this job, not that gender crosses anyone’s mind out here in the living, breathing wilderness of the Everglades. I am tagging along to witness her in action and to experience what it’s like to catch one of the most devastating invasive species in the world.
Burmese pythons are native to Southeast Asia, where they stalk and swim the marshes, rainforests, and grasslands, preying on just about anything that moves. By the 1970s they had started arriving in Florida, and especially in Miami, as an exotic pet trade boomed. But some pet owners found they didn’t know what to do with a hungry constrictor that was creeping toward twenty feet and two hundred pounds, so they opened cages and back doors and let their companions slither away. Other snakes, perhaps, simply escaped. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew destroyed a breeding center for pet pythons near the Everglades, loosing hundreds more. In a tropical landscape that so nicely echoed their homelands, the reptiles began to do what they do best—hunt.
In general, snakes are eating machines. Evolution sculpted them for the task, outfitting them with an almost surgical capacity for killing: solid-muscle bodies with organs packed sleekly inside, elastic jaws to fit large victims, and various methods of neat execution ranging from muscle-freezing venom to constriction. Of their four thousand–plus relatives, Burmese pythons number among the five largest snakes in the world. And though they don’t belong there, Florida, with its year-round warmth and plentiful prey base, suits the giant reptiles. Had they been released anywhere with reliable cold snaps, they wouldn’t have stuck. But down at the sweltering tip of our continent, so welcoming to invasives like Tegu lizards, feral hogs, and Cuban tree frogs, the pythons thrived. And by the time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service banned their import to the United States in 2012, they already had Florida in a choke hold.
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Speaking of unusual work—writing professor Jo Mackiewicz moonlights as a welder and wrote about it for The Conversation. A taste:
Although I have a good gig as a full professor at Iowa State University, I’ve daydreamed about learning a trade – something that required both my mind and my hands.
So in 2018, I started night courses in welding at Des Moines Area Community College. For three years, I studied different types of welding and during the day worked on a book about the communication between welding teachers and students. I wasn’t the only woman who became interested in trades work during this time. Recognizing the good pay and job security, U.S. women have moved in greater numbers into skilled trades such as welding and fabrication within the past 10 years.
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Alan Cornett’s essay “Finding Your Needle in Chesterton’s Haystack” introduces a resource you didn’t think you needed but maybe you do. A taste:
For the bibliophile GKC was also big in another significant way: He was prodigious in literary output. He was also eminently quotable. (Oh, to have had him on Twitter!) Those two combined means that if there is a topic of importance Chesterton probably had something to say about it and almost certainly he said something witty to offer.
Ah, but finding it! There’s the challenge.
Enter An Index to G.K. Chesterton, edited by Joseph W. Sprug, and published by the Catholic University of America Press in 1966. Chesterton had died some thirty years prior to the book’s publication and his reputation wasn’t what it had been (or is now). The book certainly provided a portal for a new generation to enter the Chestertonian universe.
An Index to G.K. Chesterton is not a bibliography as we might think of one. There was, apparently, no effort to track down the rare or obscure. Instead, the book is exactly what the title declares: It is an index, arranged by topic in alphabetical order, and citing a Chesterton book with a page number and often providing some clue to the subtopic. It’s essentially the same as any index in the back of any book, except that it draws from dozens and dozens of Chesterton’s works.
How many books? Well, it purports to cover every published book by Chesterton from 1900 to the then most recent posthumous collection. I counted and came up with ninety-two different works used for the index.
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In Mere Orthodoxy, Elizabeth Stice considers “The Centrality of Consolation” in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis.
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Meanwhile in Comment, Jeff Bilbro reviews Shannon Valor’s new book on AI. A taste:
I have been reading a lot of books on AI in recent months, and most of them are quite bad. Some, like Salman Khan’s Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing), are hilariously terrible hype narratives. Some are tedious and feel like they were written by ChatGPT. Others are a bit better but do little more than recite potted histories of the development of AI, describe how these technologies work, and conclude that we should use them for good and not for evil. Fair enough, but also not very helpful. I had higher hopes for Shannon Vallor’s The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking, mostly because Vallor’s first book, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (which I reviewed when it came out), demonstrates her careful application of the virtue ethics tradition to new technological challenges. Her new book also gets a lot right: Vallor identifies the real threats posed by AI, and she offers a helpful critique of effective altruism. By the end of the book, however, I wished for greater analytic clarity and the kinds of responses that, by its own admission, we most need.
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If you prefer your book coverage in audio form, you can listen to this fun conversation, as my favorite American historian talked with another wonderful American historian, Daniel Silliman, about his new biography of Nixon on the Faith and History podcast. And you can check out Dan Williams’s review of this book at Current.
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Speaking of how families (and moms) survive and thrive, I loved Leah Libresco Sargeant’s conversation with Stephanie Murray about “The Great Baby Swap”! The idea is simple—”Twice a week, she and another family pool kids, and one set of parents get a night off.”
This is a fantastic and countercultural idea in a world where the expectation is… get a paid babysitter! Make everything part of the market economy! But sitters are expensive, especially if you are largely living on one income. Besides, the greatest problem I have run into over the years is: sitters are impossible to find for the times I’ve needed one.
While our “Baby Swap” isn’t as formalized as Murray’s, we have a kid swap system with local friends going right now on an as-need basis, including emergencies when, say, one child is sick, and the parent doesn’t want to have to take all of the other kids to the pediatrician.
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Finally, I reviewed David Dusenbury, The Innocence of Pontius Pilate: How the Roman Trial of Jesus Shaped History for Providence Magazine. A taste:
But the continued interest in the question of Pilate’s innocence on the part of Jews, Christians, and over time, Muslims and much later, agnostics and atheists too shows that something significant is at stake. It is, at the end, not just a debate over the justice of one isolated trial, but over justice in a larger sense: If Jesus, supposedly the perfect, if not divine man was executed, can true justice exist on this earth? Dusenbury points out the significance of Byzantine Emperor Justinian’s (482-565) Institutes for such conversations. The Institutes, which open his magisterial collection of Roman law, begin with the dedication: “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ…” In other words, the sanctity of Justinian’s law code relies on his veneration of an innocent man whom the Roman legal system executed—and considered it justice. Is this a paradox? Or a restoration of true justice by a Christian emperor, wisely versed in both the Law of Rome and the Gospel of Christ?
Legal history and the pursuit of justice are tricky, of course, and two millennia of twisting and reimagining of terms whose modern meanings we take for granted muddy up the waters. So it is with a term of particular significance to the stories of Pilate and Jesus: “secular.” In common parlance, we simply take this to mean the opposite of “religious.” Except, that’s not what it meant originally.
Its Latin roots are obvious—saeculum for Romans designated the measure of a human life; a generation. Marking the end of one saeculum and the beginning of the next were opulent Secular Games, honoring the Roman gods for their protection of the city. Augustus celebrated these games in 17 BC, and the poet Horace composed a hymn, Carmen Saeculare, which still survives. Its very first line is an invocation to the god Apollo and his twin sister Artemis. So much for “secular” as “not religious.”