What Do You Know?
1. According to a new study of animals’ violence against their own species, the world’s most murderous mammal is the ____________.
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2. Medical errors may be responsible for at least $____________ in overcharges to American patients every year.
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3. In a recent survey, ____________ percent of respondents said they think transgender people should be required to use bathrooms corresponding to their gender at birth.
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Reader Response
John tries to make sense of Donald Trump’s motives:
I’ve considered yearning for power, the appeal of self-dealing at the highest level, and all sorts of motivations. And I’ve especially been stumped by Trump’s appeal to the masses. Really worked on that one and couldn’t come up with much. … But I think I’ve figured it out ...
It is simply the striving to be the most famous person on earth. Nothing more or less. The common theme across everything I’ve read or observed about him says that Donald Trump wants to be the most famous person in the world, and that person of course is the president of the United States. How many Americans can name the Prime Minister of New Zealand? How many New Zealanders do you think know who Barack Obama is?
Read here for many more readers on Trump.
Look Back
Today would have been the 160th birthday of Kate Douglas Wiggin, an American author and educator who founded the first free kindergarten in San Francisco. From 1893 to 1901 she published a series of serial novels in The Atlantic that followed the adventures of a character named Penelope, who in our January 1893 issue introduced herself like this:
Here we are in London again—Francesca, Salemina, and I. Salemina is a philanthropist of the Boston philanthropists, limited. I am an artist. Francesca is—It is very difficult to label Francesca. She is, at her present development, just a nice girl; this is about all. The sense of humanity hasn’t dawned upon her yet. She is even unaware that personal responsibility for the universe has come into vogue, and so she is happy.
Francesca is short of twenty years old, Salemina short of forty, I short of thirty. Francesca is in love, Salemina has never been in love, I never shall be in love. Francesca is rich, Salemina is well-to-do, I am poor. There we are in a nutshell.
You can read PDFs of Wiggin’s work for The Atlantic here.
Verbs
Dogs groomed, bread baked, hole dug, Oscars buzzed, cutout candidate carpooled, face-punch auctioned.
Answers: meerkat, $120 billion, 46