“For a Dollar and a Dream:  State Lotteries in Modern America,” by the historian Jonathan D. Cohen points to a peculiar contradiction:  on the one hand, the lottery is vastly less profitable than its proponents make it out to be, a deception that has come at the expense of public coffers and public services.  On the other hand, it is so popular that it is both extremely lucrative for the private companies that make and sell tickets and financially crippling for its most dedicated players.  One in two American adults buys a lottery ticket at least once a year, one in four buys one at least once a month, and the most avid players buy them at rates that might shock you.  At my local store, some customers snap up entire rolls—at a minimum, three hundred dollars’ worth of tickets—and others show up in the morning, play until they win something, then come back in the evening and do it again.  All of this, repeated every day at grocery stores and liquor stores and mini-marts across the country, renders the lottery a ninety-one-billion-dollar business.  “Americans spend more on lottery tickets every year than on cigarettes, coffee, or smartphones,” Cohen writes, “and they spend more on lottery tickets annually than on video streaming services, concert tickets, books, and movie tickets combined.”  Lotteries are an ancient pastime.  They were common in the Roman Empire—Nero was a fan of them; make of that what you will—and are attested to throughout the Bible, where the casting of lots is used for everything from selecting the next king of Israel to choosing who will get to keep Jesus’ garments after the Crucifixion.  In many of these early instances, they were deployed either as a kind of party game—during Roman Saturnalias, tickets were distributed free to guests, some of whom won extravagant prizes—or as a means of divining God’s will.  Often, though, lotteries were organized to raise money for public works.  The earliest known version of keno dates to the Han dynasty and is said to have helped pay for the Great Wall of China.  Two centuries later, Caesar Augustus started a lottery to subsidize repairs for the city of Rome.  Kathryn Schulz  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/what-weve-lost-playing-the-lottery?   

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, first published October 18, 2022  Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival.  In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.  Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.  Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society.  Those problems have yet to be solved in ours.  Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration.  In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story.  Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60194162-demon-copperhead

One of the coolest forms of eco friendly vegan leather comes from mushrooms.  What’s the only thing that may smell better than coffee leather?  Wine leather, of course!  This list includes paper, cork, and apples at 15 ECO FRIENDLY VEGAN LEATHER ALTERNATIVES by Chere Di Boscio  at https://eluxemagazine.com/fashion/5-truly-eco-friendly-vegan-leathers/   

“Dagnabbit,” along with the English words “bear” and “wolf,” are creations of a terrified populace, scared of beings visible and not.  These words are called, among linguists, taboo deformations.  The predominant theory is that this name came from a simple description, meaning “the brown one.”  In Slavic languages, the descriptions got even better:  the Russian word for bear is medved, which means “honey eater.”  These names weren’t done to be cute; they were created out of fear.  It’s worth noting that not everyone was that scared of bears.  Some languages allowed the true name of the bear to evolve in a normal fashion with minor changes; the Greek name was arktos, the Latin ursos.  Today in French, it’s ours, and in Spanish it’s oso.  Dan Nosowitz  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-does-dagnabbit-mean#   

The Maya Codex of Mexico (MCM) is a Maya screenfold codex manuscript of a pre-Columbian type.  Long known as the Grolier Codex or Sáenz Codex, in 2018 it was officially renamed the Códice Maya de México (CMM) by the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico.  It is one of only four known extant Maya codices, and the only one that still resides in the Americas.  The MCM first appeared in a private collection in the 1960s and was shown at "The Maya Scribe and His World", an exhibition held at the Grolier Club in New York City in 1971, hence its former name.  An almanac that charts the movements of the planet Venus, it originally consisted of twenty pages; the first eight and the last two are now missing.  The greatest height of any of the surviving page fragments is 19 centimeters (7.5 in) of folio 8, and the average page width is 12.5 centimeters (4.9 in).  The red frame lines at the bottom of pages four through eight indicates that the dimensions were once substantially taller, and that the scribe prepared a space for text under the figure on each page.  Accordingly, the manuscript would once have measured 250 centimeters (98.4 in), roughly the size of the Dresden Codex.  Its authenticity was disputed at the time of its discovery, but has been upheld by multiple studies.  In 2018, a team of scientists coordinated by the National Institute for Anthropology and History demonstrated conclusively that the document dates to the period between 1021 and 1154 CE.  The Mexican studies confirm that it is the oldest surviving codex from Mexico and the oldest book of the Americas.  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Codex_of_Mexico   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2589  November 9, 2022