The humidity is hovering on the upper end of the dew point we like best. There will be a couple months of swelter coming, the steamy languor of Virginia’s Piedmont summer. But that is a constant in these parts. The other part that is not usual is the scope and drama associated with the generational […]

History was big this week. Yesterday, they carefully dismantled the statues down in Charlottesville of General Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Those two were fairly big in Refuge Farm history, since General Lee started his campaign toward Gettysburg here, and just over at Cedar Mountain, Jackson got some of his reputation. The cast-metal statues […]

Do you still read the paper? I mean, do you trundle past the front door and actually open it to stoop and retrieve a bundle of newsprint to scan while pouring scalding coffee down your gullet? It used to be normal. It has been a journey. Decades ago, I was a New York Times subscriber, […]

I don’t know about your viewing habits, but as a retiree, I find ‘staying up late’ to be anything beyond eight o’clock in the evening. I try to catch Tucker Carlson when the evening medication has not dulled my senses overmuch, but can’t say I often make it beyond the introductory monologue. Last night was […]

Socotra House LLC wants to express regret for a delay in new Footnotes to explain that we have no animus to any of the screwy ideas now festooning our public life. The disturbance in the Intern Bunkhouse was unfortunate, law enforcement was not called, due to problems with potential selective enforcement, and we wish to […]

The Holiday- the one yesterday that commemorates the ouster of the British King from these shores- enabled abolitionists to outlaw the abominable institution that still scars our world. It took a while- the better part of a century and the end or undoing of nearly a million lives to do it. Every family was affected […]

(The Gnome at lower left signifies his allegiance in Arlington with pride). The current malaise abroad in the land is sort of astonishing. You haven’t even heard the term “malaise” in a couple decades. We know it from former President Jimmy Carter’s speech in 1979, the year I was living on an old ship in […]

It is a holiday weekend. Marlow started us off this morning with an account of train travel. Many of us ride something like the rails in our clustered cities. “Light rail,” they tell us, a replacement for the old heavy-gauge universal track that opened our land before the arrival of the automobile and the superhighway. […]

Socotra House LLC relies on an extensive network of alert readers to report on the disparate reports from around the globe. China insiders claimed the top Counterintellignce officer in the PRC was the “Source” identified by the Defense Intelligence Agency as an authority on the origin of the COVID virus. His name- “Dong Jingwei-” was […]

Ah, a Wednesday in Virginia’s gentle Piedmont! The skies are mostly clear, and the Lady in Red assures us we will only scrape the bottom of triple-digit temperatures later. Nice robust humidity. Summer. There is other stuff going on, of course. We are awash in it, like the cash flooding out of the Treasury. Did […]