A Jury of One's Peers

A jury in New South Wales, Australia once returned a verdict of "not guilty" for a man convicted of cow theft provided, the jury said, the man return the cows he had stolen. The judge ordered the jury to return to session to deliberate further. The jurors returned, this time with a verdict of "not guilty" and, they added, the man did not have to return the cows.

Source: Barbara Holland, "Do You Swear That You Will Well and Truly Try...?" Smithsonian, March 1995, 108-117.

Mary Lee Settle on the Banality of Evil

American writer Mary Lee Settle had served the British war effort in London, 1944, doing journalism, at a time when England was subject to countless bomb raids by Germany.

When Nazi Germany fell and the Japanese empire was defeated, Settle had hopes that the Second World War had eliminated an evil from this world. She returned to America.

One night, she was having dinner in a New York restaurant with some artists, where one artist casually made a remark that was pro-Hitler, this only months after the defeat of the Third Reich. She was polite during the conversation but found the earliest opportunity to leave.

Afterward, she felt sick to her stomach, and felt guilty that she had not spoken up. Her first thought following the meal was that the war effort had done nothing to erase an undeniable evil.

Stephen Jay Gould on Critical Thinking

Until the time of his passing, biologist Stephen Jay Gould stood out as one of the world's best popularizers of science, most of all for his masterful storytelling. His 1985 essay "Nasty Little Facts" is an exercise in a well-told story about a scientific discovery and the reaction to the fact. It also serves as a moral about critical thinking.

Gould begins his essay with the following apparent mystery. There was a particular kind of life that scientists believed to have developed during the Cambrian period, about 510 million years ago. But then in the mid-eighties, this particular form of life was discovered, still living, in the oceans.

The Battle of Gettysburg

Before the Battle of Gettysburg, the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania was "of no importance and no consequence: like Waterloo (where Napoleon was defeated) it was illuminated by the sheer war. The essence of war is accident," Arthur C. Danto writes eloquently, in an otherwise bloodthirsty apologia of an essay titled "Gettysburg."

The battle itself happened as a kind of accident. The commanding Confederate general Robert E. Lee had happened upon the town on July 1, 1863, when fellow General James Longstreet rode up beside a stationary, horse-backed Lee and espied through his binoculars the gathered Union soldiers between the town's two great ridges. Longstreet proposed going around and behind, cutting the Union off from reinforcements that could move in from D.C. "No," said Lee, "the enemy is there and I am going to attack him there." Those words and that decision proved famous, fateful, and fatal.

The Battle of Gettysburg was the turning point of the war, the battle in which it became clear that Union forces would prevail. 50,000 men lost their lives on the battlefield that day, the bloodiest in the entire war.

Gerald Early on Jazz

Gerald Early's essay "Passing of Jazz's Old Guard," published in a 1985 issue of Kenyon Review, is an excellent education in jazz. Ostensibly, it is a profile of and elegy to those artists who have brought the artform to public consciousness. Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Stitt get namechecked in the subtitle. But most important of all is the education the essay gives you.

A jazz enthusiast himself, Early wants you to check out these artists. There's Mingus, Monk, and Stitt, but have you have heard Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon, Wilbur Ware? Read the essay, and you'll learn of them, too, and many others. Of course, Mingus, Monk, and Stitt are held up by Early, because Early regards these figures as paragons of the form. And for his purposes, a study of their lives shows the difficulties of the prototypical jazz musician.