Beauty in a parched parade . . .
Sunday, July 5, 2026, It's Sol's day at 8 a.m. . . . After overnight storms in Green Country, light Northerlies are in the TulseyTown forecasts for a cooler day in the upper 80's with a very slight chance for an afternoon shower. The heat returns tomorrow.
How we square our commonality and individualism has always engendered fierce national debate. Road traffic serves as a rare alignment of self-interest and the common good. There is a spiritual lesson in this – our interdependence – and it’s not a novel one: The self is illusory. And this illusion, the notion that we are all distinct individuals living among other separate individuals in an external universe, is at the core of income inequality, racism, climate change, and just about every other source of human misery. Our ability to solve these existential riddles will stem from a collective spiritual revelation as much as political resolve. – Jeff Krasno, Interdependence Day, substack, 7.4.26
Dissent isn't a threat to America. Dissent built America. Because the American people do not bow to kings. – Elizabeth Warren, 250 Years Ago We Fired a King, email 7.4.26
It's been two hundred fifty years since 56 men risked their necks signing a document built on one radical idea: You get to decide your own future. So somewhere between the parade and the potato salad, I hope you took one second to appreciate how rare that really is. [If you didn't yesterday, consider doing it today.]The British still say we go overboard with this holiday. Fair enough. But the only thing that ever went overboard was their tea. – Kim Komando, The Current, 7.4.26.
Today in 1687, Isaac Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.” In it, along with laws of motion, celestial and terrestrial mechanics were unified under one umbrella: gravity. It remains one of the most important books in the history of science. For a deeper dive into the Principia. ( For history/science denizens looking for a day-long-Sunday task. )
The ultimate Swiftian experience: News of the closest thing America has to a royal wedding was both everywhere and unknowable. – Emily Yahr, The Washington Post. 7.5.26
Prophecy
You see no beauty in the parched parade,
The quivering, heat-glazed highways mile on mile,
The fields where beauty holds a debt unpaid,
The gray, drab barracks in monotonous, grim file.
You take no joy when dust wraiths dimly curl
Above the winding column crawling on far hills.
You see but short beyond the present whirl
Of circumstance, your little wrongs and petty ills.
But when it all has passed and you have lost
The swinging rhythmic cadence of the marching feet,
Then you will reck as paltry small the cost,
And memory will purge the bitter from the sweet.
– Robert Penn Warren, “Prophecy” – This poem is in the public domain. Published by the Academy of American Poets in Poem-a-Day on July 4, 2026,