january 1919

Editor’s Note: Every Tuesday, Abby Freireich and Brian Platzer take questions from readers about their kids’ education. Have one? Email them at homeroom@theatlantic.com.

Dear Abby and Brian,

Everything feels untenable. I am so frustrated for my son, whom I’ll refer to as “Caleb,” who is in first grade. I’m frustrated for his teachers too, and for me and my wife. Caleb is on the verge of tears by the time online school ends at 2:30, and, to be honest, so am I. His schedule is different every day, and he can’t read well enough to follow all the directions, so even though I am working and ignoring him most of the time, he interrupts me just often enough to make me seem unprofessional. After his day is done, we let him watch TV until my wife or I can stop working, which is around 5 o’clock most days. This means that one of us has about an hour with Caleb before bath, dinner, and bedtime.

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“You are … irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.” So wrote Johanna Schopenhauer in a 1807 letter to her 19-year-old son Arthur. “No one can tolerate being reproved by you, who also still show so many weaknesses yourself, least of all in your adverse manner, which in oracular tones, proclaims this is so and so, without ever supposing an objection. If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Jane Austen begins Pride and Prejudice, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” In early-19th-century society—an aristocratic world of inherited wealth—marriage occupied center stage. A good spouse was an all-purpose resource: essential for moving up in the world, as for Austen’s heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, or for sustaining a dynasty, as for the object of her affections, Mr. Darcy.  

School and work were not a path to wealth and status—certainly not for women, nor even for men. Elites were indifferent to education and disdained work. The landed gentry in Pride and Prejudice look down on Elizabeth’s working uncle, no matter that he gets his income from “a very respectable line of trade.” The economic facts on the ground supported their antipathy. The highest-paying jobs tended to be in government. But even at the end of the century, an elite English civil servant made just 17.8 times the median wage, and his American counterpart just 7.8 times. Mr. Darcy’s £10,000 a year from inherited capital was more than 300 times the median wage.   

Of all the flaws in the perplexing “audit” of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona, the hypocrisy shines through most clearly.

As Donald Trump and his allies grasped at straws to cast doubt on the results of last year’s presidential race, they settled on a few common complaints. They said that the election process was tainted by procedures that had been hastily changed in the lead-up to voting, that it was run by partisan hacks, that outside observers were provided insufficient access to oversee the process, and that the election was corrupted by private money given by philanthropists to boards of elections to help them adapt to the pandemic.

Now, more than six months after the election, the circus in Arizona, ordered by the state Senate, has become the last stand of the denialists. The review has attracted the close attention of Trump himself, who has fired off repeated, blustery statements about the count from his Mar-a-Lago exile. But Arizona is committing all the same sins that Trump’s supporters have been denouncing, using a brazenly partisan process run by apparently unqualified parties, with procedures kept secret and subject to change. Observers are being asked to sign nondisclosure agreements, reporters have been kicked out of the site, and the exercise is being largely funded by interested outside parties—even though the Arizona legislature recently passed a law that prevents local boards from accepting outside funding.

Some 440 million years ago, the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, suburb of Waukesha was unrecognizable. Where malls and breweries now stand was a shallow, tropical sea resembling a Bahamian cay. A hundred million years removed from the Cambrian explosion, when the diversity of life skyrocketed, this area teemed with alien creatures like spiny worms and armored trilobites. But look closer, and this primeval ocean takes on a familiar feel: Here, the some of the first scorpions scuttled alongside the earliest leeches. There were even conodonts—eel-like creatures sporting a shadow of a spine, making them some of our earliest relatives.

The amateur paleontologists Jerry Gunderson and Ron Meyer discovered these fossils at a Waukesha quarry in 1984. After splitting open rocks from a thin layer known as the Brandon Bridge Formation, they uncovered ultrarare fossilized soft tissue. Soft tissue, such as skin and organs, tends to be the first thing to decay after death. Knowing they had found something special, Gunderson and Meyer frantically shaved off slabs of the fossil-bearing rock, preventing them from being pulverized in the pursuit of limestone. They donated their find to the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum, where thousands of Waukesha specimens now fill drawer after drawer.