A C. T U. A L. L Y

If you’d rather contemplate a date than fret over The Debate, then join me in vegging out with Palermo’s strange and wonderful vegetation.   I took these photos between January 2015 and today.   Some of them were taken in the Villa Giulia , a large public park with specimen trees open from dawn to dusk and located nearby.   Many come from the Orto Botanico , said to be the oldest botanical garden in Italy.   The rest were taken on our balcony or while walking around town.   Some of the plants featured I can identify, and others not.   If there are any budding botanists out there who want to jump in with genus and species , please do!   I have to admit that when it comes to vegetation, my ignorance doesn’t diminish my bliss.   Vegging out is my one of my preferred antidotes to tuning in. Because they are so prolific and ubiquitous, let’s start with the cactus family.   These were taken at a biannual plant sale at the Orto Botanico . This ...

Well, I could have written about Barton Gellman’s cover story in the November issue of The Atlantic (“The Election that Could Break America”).    Or I could have written about Daniel Ziblatt’s blinking red light warning about the fate of democracy in America :  [I]t can be observed in the United States that government institutions are weak, that there is strong political polarization and pronounced inequality, and that social unrest is associated with an economic crisis. All of these are features that can make democracy turn into authoritarian overnight.  a warning he reiterated in a recent interview for “The Interpreter” in The New York Times :  “ If you have one of the two parties in a two-party system not committed to the rules, your system is really in trouble. There’s just no way out of that,” Mr. Ziblatt said. Asked if he knew of any democracies where this had happened and the system had recovered, he paused for several moments before answering, ...