"This day, Mistress Dorothy Bradford, wife to Mr. William Bradford, fell overboard and was drowned.”

Why Ukraine Matters

Part 1 — First Day of 9th Grade

“Welcome to World History,” Mr. Hershey said as the last bell finally stopped ringing. He capped his marker and turned toward the class. “I’m Mr. Hershey. This semester we’re going to spend a good chunk of time learning about Ukraine. Its origins, its geography, the rise of its independence, and why that independence is being challenged.”

A map of Europe glowed on the projector behind him.

“You’ve probably heard about the war on the news or online,” he said. “Some of you might feel like you already understand it. Some of you might feel completely lost. Either way is fine. We’re going to start from the beginning, so we actually know what we’re talking about. This first lesson will be an overview and then we will dissect it part by part for the rest of the semester.”

He rested a hand on the desk beside him, steadying himself before he entered this caveat, this political warning.

“By the way, this class isn’t about American party politics. You can calm your parents down and let them know that we’re not here to argue about Democrats or Republicans or which cable channel tells the truth. We’re going to learn why Ukraine is a nation in its own right and why another country is trying to take that away. We will stick to real history and real human lives. You can talk about why Putin really isn’t a bad guy or why Russia really isn’t wrong at your own house. Here, we will stick to the facts.”

“No b.s. in this class”.

“Sorry about that. I’m allowed to say that once per week in high school classes, that’s what I’ve been told by my bosses. It’s in my contract with the school district. No, Ukraine is not a Nazi state with communist intentions. That’s such a bizarre distraction from the Putin propaganda machine.”

He projected an image of a stamp titled “Russian warship, go f* yourself,”** a phrase made famous when Ukrainian border guard Roman Hrybov radioed it to the Russian cruiser Moskva on the first day of the 2022 invasion. It quickly became a national symbol of defiance—printed on stamps, chanted at protests, and remembered even more after the Moskva sank.

The class woke up and gave him their full attention. They kind of liked him so far. They knew of his reputation kind of a rebel with a heart. And his name was obviously disarming.

“We also have a new student this year. Her name is Anna. She’s from Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine that has been heavily affected by the war.”

He nodded toward the center rows. “Hi, Anna.”

Some students turned. A couple of them smiled. Most tried not to stare too long.

“Kids her age aren’t supposed to know the sound of artillery or what it feels like to leave home without a return ticket”, Mr. Hershey said.

“Her father is serving in the Ukrainian military,” Mr. Hershey continued. “He’s still there. I know we all hope for his safe return from war.”

The room stayed quiet. Not awkward. Just out of respect. These were ninth graders but they weren’t monsters.

“You might have seen a lot of loud opinions about Ukraine online,” he said. “Some supportive. Some hostile. Some that make it sound like people fleeing a war are a threat. Bias doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from things we pick up before we know how to question them.”

He walked over to the projector and tapped the map.

“Here’s what we’ll do in this unit. We’ll learn where Ukraine came from. We’ll learn what makes it different from Russia, even though Russia has tried for centuries to claim the opposite. We’ll look at how countries decide who they are. What they fight for. What they refuse to give up.”

He clicked to the next slide. The title read:

Why Ukraine Matters

“This is a story about a place that keeps choosing to exist,” he said. “Even when someone powerful tells them they shouldn’t.”

He looked out at the class, a mix of curiosity and caution staring back.

“So. Welcome to 9th grade. I look forward to learning with you.”

With insights into the context and story from Contemplatebooks.com.

Excerpt:

"But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I held the lantern motionless. I tried how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eye. Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. [He treats stillness as mastery, the sound grows anyway. Control fails.] It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant. The old man’s terror must have been extreme! [Projection, he describes his own rising fear.] It grew louder, I say, louder every moment!—do you mark me well? I have told you that I am nervous: so I am. [He admits nervousness while still pressing the sanity case, a contradiction he cannot hear.] And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror. [Silence becomes an amplifier, his mind fills it.] Yet, for some minutes longer I refrained and stood still. But the beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst. And now a new anxiety seized me—the sound would be heard by a neighbour! [Social exposure is the true fear, this is why darkness feels therapeutic to him.] The old man’s hour had come! With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once—once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done. [Elation at control, the high after the act.] But, for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall. [Denial, he talks himself down.] At length it ceased. The old man was dead. I removed the bed and examined the corpse. Yes, he was stone, stone dead. I placed my hand upon the heart and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation. He was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more. [He thinks he killed the gaze that judged him. The story will prove him wrong.]"

That last line — “His eye would trouble me no more” — is the narrator silencing judgment. The “eye” represents whatever he feels watching him — a parent, God, society, or even his own conscience. It’s the gaze that sees too much, the part of life that reminds him he’s small, flawed, exposed. By destroying it, he’s quieting the feeling of being seen and judged that has afflicted his soul for too long.

They found a parking spot at the cafeteria near his dorm because the other spots were full and check-in was here.

Inside, the floor was new and the tables were clean. A girl in a campus T-shirt wiped a counter and changed the music to something light. There were balloons tied to a cardboard sign that said Welcome, and under it in smaller letters, Parent HQ.

They set their cups down. The father tested the lid. The mother slid a paper napkin under hers as if the cup might leave a mark on a table like this.

“You’re sure you don’t want anything to eat before we leave,” she said.

“I’m fine,” the boy said.

“It’s a long walk to the dorms,” the father said.

“I’ll be fine,” the boy said. He smiled, a small thing, and looked out through the glass at the cars. “There are a lot of people here.”

“They said the first day would be the busiest,” the mother said. “If you want we can stay overnight and bring you back in the morning.”

“No, it's fine,” the boy said.

The father took off his cap and set it next to the cup. He rested his hands around the coffee and kept them there. On the far wall a student volunteer taped a paper arrow over an old arrow and made it point in the same direction.

“They think it’s easier the second time,” the mother said, not looking at either of them.

“Who does,” the boy said.

“People,” she said. “Church people. Your aunt. Everyone.”

The father sipped his coffee. It was hot and not very strong. He kept his hands around it anyway.

“Do you have the towels,” the mother said.

“They’re in the bin,” the boy said.

“And the phone charger.”

“In the side pocket.”

“You’ll need quarters for laundry,” she said.

“They use an app,” the boy said.

“Right,” she said. “Of course.”

A family came in with a mini fridge strapped to a handcart. The father watched the cart wheel bump the threshold and not catch. The boy watched the fridge.

“You can text when you get your key,” the mother said.

“Do you want him to text you when he finds the bathroom,” the father said. He said it like a joke.

“I’ll remember,” the boy said.

The mother touched the paper napkin and folded one corner over the other. She looked at the folded triangle as if it gave off heat.

“You know where you’re going after we unload,” the father said. “No circles.”

“They give you a map,” the boy said.

“They aren’t good maps,” the father said.

“They’re fine,” the boy said. “I walked it on the website.”

“Right,” the father said. “That helps.”

The girl in the campus shirt came over and asked if they needed anything. The mother said they were fine. The father said they were fine. The boy said he was fine. The girl smiled and walked back to the counter and picked up her phone.

The mother lifted the lid on her cup and put it back down. She could see the steam rising off it. “Do you think your pillow is good enough,” she said.

“I like it,” the boy said.

“You didn’t like it last year.”

“I like it now.”

The father looked at the boy’s hands. They were steady where they held the cup. He thought of all the mornings those hands had moved through the kitchen without thinking, opening the wrong drawer, then the right drawer, then carrying a bowl to the table with cereal in it. It felt strange to sit across from those same hands and not already know what they were about to do.

“Your room looked good when we left,” the mother said.

“Sorry I didn't clean it very good,” the boy said.

“It’s not that,” she said. “It just looked good. I'll miss you.”

He nodded. He turned his cup. He looked like he understood and also like he had a bus to catch that no one else could see.

*Short Summary by Contemplatebooks.com

The novel starts with Dr. Manette, who has been locked away in a French prison for 18 years, so broken that he spends his days making shoes. His daughter Lucie brings him back to life, showing that love and loyalty can heal the deepest wounds. Lucie marries Charles Darnay, a French noble who rejects the cruelty of his family, while Sydney Carton, a gifted but wasted lawyer, quietly falls in love with her too. Carton, the lawyer, sees himself as hopeless and useless, yet he promises he’d give his life for her if he ever had the chance. Meanwhile, in France, years of starvation and abuse explode into revolution, led by people like Madame Defarge, who keeps a knitted death list for her enemies. Justice turns into revenge, and the guillotine becomes a daily spectacle.

Darnay is eventually dragged back into the chaos, arrested only because of who his family was. He’s sentenced to die, and it looks like Lucie will lose her husband just as she once lost her father. But Carton steps in, finally making good on his promise. Because he looks so much like Darnay, he switches places with him and goes to the guillotine in Darnay’s place. In that moment, Carton finds his redemption: after a life he thought meaningless, his sacrifice gives Lucie, Darnay, and their child a future. Dickens leaves us with the point that runs through the whole story that true resurrection doesn’t come through violence or revenge, but through love, sacrifice, and the willingness to lay down your life for others. The original book was written in three parts, or three books, we have condensed it down to chapters and reduced it, significantly.

It’s the story of a dad hitting mid-life, realizing he’s lost a bit of his spark, and fumbling through ways to connect with his teenage son. Ethan used to glide through life, talented in sports, confident, the kind of guy who never had to try that hard. Now he’s 45, wandering Costco aisles with his wife, quietly questioning what’s missing.

His son Matthew is 17, reserved, stoic, smart in his own way but uninterested in school or college. He finds meaning in pickleball, something Ethan, a serious tennis player, dismisses as a knockoff game. Ethan doubts his son’s choices, and Matthew stays silent, pushing further away.

Graduation is the pivot point. Matthew crosses the stage without flash, already half-gone, while Ethan feels both pride and panic.

it’s a father and son at a crossroads: one man questioning his purpose in middle age, the other just starting out, reluctant to explain himself, both staring past each other.

Can pickleball bring them together?

“The Story of an Hour” is a short story written by Kate Chopin in 1894 (considered by scholars to have been a forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of southern or Catholic background, such as Zelda Fitzgerald). Her story was originally published in Vogue magazine and was controversial by American standards of the time. The title of the story refers to the time that elapses between the moments from when the main character (Louise Mallard), hears that her husband, is dead, and then discovers that he is alive after all. Louise reacts initially with immediate grief and heads to her room where she gradually comes to the realization that she is happy and liberated now that her husband has died and breathes a quick prayer that her life alone “might be long”.

Charles Hazelius Sternberg lived almost a century, dying in 1943 in Lawrence, Kansas. Even in his last years he was still preparing fossils, writing, and advising younger collectors. By then his sons had carried on the trade, his specimens filled museums from New York to London, and his own name had become part of the history of paleontology. He was one of the last of the old field men, men who had hunted bone with picks and burlap, eating antelope and sleeping under canvas, sending their finds east by wagon and rail.

The “dinosaur mummy” from Converse County remained his most famous prize. Even now, more than a hundred years later, it still raises questions. The skeleton lay in swimming pose, body stretched, forelimbs spread, tail trailing behind. Along the rock were broad patches of preserved hide, pebbled scales, and thin sheets of webbing between the fingers. It was as if the animal had been overtaken mid-stroke, buried instantly before scavengers or currents could scatter it.

What was it doing there? The beds in that country were laid down in the last days of the Cretaceous, when rivers and bayous cut through forests of magnolia and cypress. Perhaps this animal had waded into one of those channels to feed, using its broad bill to strip plants from the banks. Perhaps it fled into the water to escape a predator. The skeleton tells only the end: a sudden collapse, mud sealing it over, time pressing it into stone.

For Sternberg, the find carried another weight. He had long spoken of his daughter Maude, his favorite he called her, who died at 20 years old, but lived in his dreams. He wrote of walking ancient shorelines with her at his side, her voice pointing him to the places where fossils lay. The dinosaur mummy felt like one of those dreams made real, an animal drowned in a Cretaceous river, found because he had refused to leave the country until the land gave up its secret.

Some will choose to scroll Instagram.

And soon they land upon an influencer. She, too, is posed at an angle, the body turned just so, her head tilted toward the camera with practiced ease. Her dress is not of mourning but of sponsored fabric, tagged helpfully below the post, available for purchase with a discount code. A ring light, not sunlight, gives her skin its glow. The veil is gone, replaced by a spray tan and contouring powder.

Her eyes, wide and exaggerated, shine not with moisture but with the gloss of editing filters. The lashes are long, but each one uniform, machine-made, identical. The brows are drawn too, inked, plucked, penciled, until not a stray hair remains. The nose, slimmed by ai, is all angle without air. The mouth curves into a smile, the same smile found on a thousand other accounts, seductive, trying to lure in the male audience, rehearsed and smoothed until it has no mystery at all. The cheeks glow, with the ray of product placement. Money, or the aspiration of money.

If you stare for an hour, there is no pulse in the throat, only the faint flicker of the screen refreshing itself, new likes tallying, empty, maybe contrived. Nothing deepens with time; everything grows thinner the longer you look. The work does not make a master tremble, it makes you weary.

Scroll on Soldier.

Scroll on.

The author Samuel Butler was born in 1835, the son of a strict clergyman who expected him to follow the same path. He resisted, left England for New Zealand, and made money sheep farming before returning to live as a writer and satirist. Butler was restless, skeptical of authority, and fascinated by Darwin’s theory of evolution, which influenced all his work. In Erewhon (1872), he built a fictional country to parody Victorian norms, flipping morality and common sense on their head. It was in this satirical frame that he wrote his most famous chapters, “The Book of the Machines.”

The setting of Erewhon is a land that outlawed advanced machines centuries earlier, fearing they might evolve beyond human control. In those chapters, Butler argues that machines progress like living organisms, with humans as their reproductive organs, and that unchecked growth could make them surpass us. It reads now like an early map of the AI debate: machines gaining a kind of consciousness, the erosion of human work, and the consolidation of wealth into the hands of the few who control the systems. What Butler imagined as satire has become reality with automation replacing jobs, AI systems writing and reasoning, and massive profits pooling at a few tech companies. His warning that dependence on machines could reshape society wasn’t just fantasy; it was the opening chapter of the story we’re in.

What follows here are the chapters that seem to predict the rise of AI.

I wasn’t always afraid of flying. When I was younger, I flew to Europe alone. No nerves, no second thoughts. I didn’t notice the bumps. I just watched a movie. It wasn’t until later, after kids, that the fear started.

I remember a flight to Reno. Clear skies, nothing unusual. The pilot said they’d stop in-flight service early because of the mountains and wind waves. I didn’t think much about it until the plane started dropping. Not gentle shifts, but real drops. I gripped the armrests, then the seat in front of me.

My wife looked calm, maybe even enjoying it. I stared at her. Was this normal? Are we supposed to accept being suspended in the sky, pretending not to think about falling? What was I even scared of? I knew the plane wasn’t going to crash, that turbulence doesn’t bring planes down. But that didn’t matter. Something in me cracked.

From then on I felt out of control. Even at home I dreaded the next vacation, the next flight. I obsessed over it. Every bump, every thought of it. I couldn’t shake it. I hated myself for it. Middle-aged man, wife, kids, and I’m white-knuckling like a child.

I knew it was irrational, but that didn’t help. I read the books, tried the tricks, even went to therapy. Nothing stuck. I was ashamed, like I had some disease of the mind I couldn’t admit.

But not on this train. On this train I feel good. The ground is under me. The rhythm makes sense.

I wish America had trains. Real trains. Damn the politicians. Damn the airplane lobbies. I love traveling, but I hate flying. I can’t do it.

Getting here to Spain was a miracle. I forced myself, but it cost me. I wasted myself on the way.

John Chapman was born in 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts. His father, Nathaniel, was a farmer and a Minuteman who fought at Bunker Hill. His mother, Elizabeth, died when John was two. The baby she died giving birth to didn’t live long either.

Nathaniel remarried a few years later and had ten more children. John grew up in a crowded house, sometimes in Leominster, sometimes farther west in Longmeadow along the Connecticut River.

It wasn’t a wealthy family. Nathaniel did what work he could; farming, carpentry, sometimes labor for hire. The Revolution had burned through whatever savings they had, and soldiers weren’t paid enough to raise a family that size.

No one wrote much about John as a boy. He shows up again in the records as a teenager, apprenticing with a man named Crawford, who ran an apple nursery. Crawford taught him how to grow trees from seed, how to graft branches to rootstock, and how to protect young trees from frost and animals.

John never married. Which is crucial to his story. Seeds, he scattered all across the Ohio valley, just not his own.

There were six at his funeral. Seven, if you count the man asleep in the chair. Eight, if you count the writer of this account, who followed at a distance and said nothing. It was June 1809. Hot, sluggish. The road out of Harlem ran quiet, except for the clattering wheels and the low talk of the procession: a couple of Black men, six drunken Irishmen in a carriage, a Quaker on horseback, and a coffin headed for West Chester. No procession in New York ever looked more like a mistake........

“It’s AI slop,” Doug said, without hesitation, but with a trace of fear.

He’d seen the phrase tossed around in the Reddit threads he followed. AI slop was the new shorthand for any piece of modern writing that felt off. Bloated. Predictable. Sanitized. Or maybe from a jealous reader. You saw it in Amazon reviews like a stamp, This is AI slop. Don’t bother.

It wasn’t a critique. It was an execution.

Doug dismissed the style.

“Look at the em dashes and the way the tone swings negative,” he said, holding his phone out. “It reads like ChatGPT.”

Tess slid closer on the couch. Doug pointed to the section he meant, the part about the layoffs and the seven tech companies. It wasn’t wrong, exactly. But it had that tone. That clean, polished, context-aware rhythm that never quite earned its confidence.

Tess re-read at the paragraph, then nodded slightly.

She knew. She absolutely knew.

She was living in the minefield every day. At the college, nothing was clear. No campus-wide policy, no ethical guidelines. Just rumors and half-statements passed around in department meetings.

Some professors had gone scorched earth and run everything through the filters, fail anything under 75% human. No negotiation. No grace.

Others tried to work with it. Blend it. Teach their students how to use it without becoming it.

Tess hadn’t picked a side. Not fully. She still marked up papers by hand. Still circled lazy sentences. But more and more, she was marking structure.

She pointed to the sentence Doug was referring to.

“This one here,” she said. “‘Not governments. Not voters.’ That’s classic corrective contrast. It’s not X, it’s Y. It’s quintessential ChatGPT”.

Doug nodded.

“It’s the pivot,” Tess said. “Sets you up, then flips it. ChatGPT does it constantly. It feels decisive. But it’s just a pattern.”

“And the em dashes?” Doug asked. “Only AI uses those, not a student in your university would know how to use one properly. Ain’t no one there James Baldwin.”

“Cover for voice,” she said. “When the AI doesn’t know how to keep tone consistent, it leans on punctuation to hold the sentence together.”

Doug smirked. “So your student fed it a prompt?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe she wrote it. Maybe she wrote with it. That’s what’s hard. Is it cheating?”

Start with the end. Just how the story of Moses is given to us. Not in triumph or resolution, but in a passage of scripture so abrupt and unadorned that it invites suspicion. Here is Deuteronomy 34:

“And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo… And the Lord shewed him all the land… And the Lord said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob… I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither. So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab… but no man knoweth of his grave unto this day.”

This version of Anna Karenina was created in 2020 well before the advent of artificial intelligence. It was translated and thoughtfully modernized by a human hand, with the goal of preserving Tolstoy’s original prose while making the language and pacing more accessible to today’s reader.

Leo Tolstoy stands as one of the greatest voices in Russian literature. Born into aristocracy, he dropped out of school and spent much of his early life on his family estate, gambling heavily on cards and sports. After racking up significant debts, he joined the army with his brother during the Crimean War. There, the mass suffering deeply disturbed him, and his disillusionment with violence and institutional power began.

His fiction reflects the society he lived in and the personal philosophies that consumed him. A baptized Christian who believed in God, Tolstoy was never at ease with organized religion. His vocal criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church eventually led to his excommunication, after which people in Moscow would reportedly line the streets and cheer when he passed by.

Tolstoy began Anna Karenina in 1875, thirteen years into his marriage to Sophia, the woman he both adored and struggled to understand. Their recovered diaries show a man tortured by lust and spiritual guilt, confessing to Sophia that he often felt “not in control of himself.” Despite these tensions, they had thirteen children and remained together until the end of his life.

At 82, Tolstoy quietly left home one night, desperate for peace and solitude. He boarded a train bound for a remote monastery but fell ill with pneumonia and died at a small station days later. Sophia, despite years of strain and sorrow, remained devoted to him. In her final reflections, she said simply: “The truth is, I have much love.”

Chapter 1

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

There was chaos in the Oblonsky household. Dolly Oblonsky had discovered her husband, Stepan, was having an affair with a French girl who had once been the family’s governess. Dolly announced she could no longer live under the same roof with him. Three days had passed since then, and everyone in the house felt it. The mood was heavy. No one saw the point of pretending anymore. Strangers thrown together at a roadside inn seemed to have more in common than the Oblonskys did now.

Dolly stayed locked in her room. Stepan hadn’t been home in three days. The children ran wild through the house. The English governess got into a fight with the housekeeper and began searching for new work. The cook quit just before dinner.

Part 1 of the Short Story Series, Dear Moses

“And the woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.”
—Exodus 2:2–3

I killed for Pharaoh.

Not just once. Not just the overseer in the sand. I carried a blade for him before that, before I knew who I was. I rode chariots with the king’s soldiers. We fought against Kush. Against raiders from the east. I saw fire in the hills and bodies split down the middle. We killed fast and hard and didn’t bury anyone who wasn’t ours.

I was good at it. My arms were strong. I didn’t flinch. The generals liked me because I followed orders and didn’t ask why. They said I had the blood of gods.

Maybe I believed it. But not in the Gods. Just in the strength of a human willing.

They started to favor me, fed me well. Dressed me in fine robes. Taught me how to sit at court and drink like a noble. I spoke their language clean. Not like the workers. Not like the Hebrews.

That word, Hebrew, it didn’t mean much to me then. Just a name for the ones who built everything and got nothing.

I passed them every day. Men hauling stone in the heat. Women with their backs bent from the fields. Children crying and still made to work. And I didn’t look long.

Not until I did.

There was one man. Couldn’t have been older than me. His hands were bleeding. Rope burns across both wrists. He was lifting bricks anyway. No shouting, no noise. Just working through it. I watched him. I don’t know why.

He looked up at me.

Not in fear. Not hate either. Just a tired kind of knowing. Like he already knew I wasn’t who I thought I was.

I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

After that I started walking the long way through the quarter. Not just once. A dozen times. More. I listened. I saw how the guards talked to them. How they spat near their feet. How they hit them just to be seen hitting someone.

Something started cracking.

I didn’t know God. Not then. I knew Pharaoh. I knew kings. I knew bronze and fire and the way a man’s eyes go when you cut too deep. But God? No.

What I felt was smaller. Human.

I started to see them not as slaves, but as people.

And that was the beginning of the end.

You can’t fight for Pharaoh with the same hands that watch a man bleed and know he didn’t deserve it.

So I stopped going to court.

I stopped showing up at the drills.

I started walking more in silence.

I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know who I was. But I knew I wasn’t theirs.

Not anymore.

Napoleon didn’t invade Spain. Not at first. He came in through the back, through Portugal; quickly, quietly, and with hardly a shot fired.

By the fall of 1807, France and Spain had signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, supposedly agreeing to carve up Portugal between them. The French would march in from the north and center. The Spanish would help from the sides. On paper, it was about punishing Portugal for its alliance with Britain. But in truth, it was about control, Napoleon’s control, and Portugal was the test run.

The French Army of the Gironde, 25,000 strong under General Junot, crossed into Spain on October 18. They took their time, covering three hundred miles in twenty-five days. No battles. No resistance. Behind the scenes, French engineers sketched out every fort, bridge, and mountain pass they passed, mapping Spain like a future enemy, not a friend.

Meanwhile, Spanish troops, unknowingly aiding their own undoing, moved into position from Galicia and Badajoz. Their role was to secure the flanks and help the French take Lisbon. But the real purpose of the operation became clearer with each step. Napoleon had no intention of stopping at the Portuguese border. Portugal was never the endgame. It was the excuse.

By the time Junot marched into Lisbon in November, the country had been taken without a single major engagement. A kingdom of three million had surrendered in silence. Not from lack of pride, but from the sheer psychological weight of Napoleon’s name. The Portuguese government crumbled. The royal family fled to Brazil. And with Portugal in hand, Napoleon had his foot firmly planted on the western edge of Europe.

Spain was next. It just didn’t know it yet.

What Shakespeare Taught us about Life and Death

In the spring of 1616, William Shakespeare returned to his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon for good. He was fifty-two years old and, by outward appearance, in decent health. He had already written his final play. The London stages had gone quiet. His daughters were grown, one of them newly married. He had signed his will a few weeks earlier, and two days after his birthday, he was dead. The official records say little, but a local vicar later wrote that Shakespeare, along with fellow writers Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton, drank too much at a dinner and caught a fever that killed him. The story is thin, but it holds just enough truth to make you think: The world’s greatest poet may have laughed himself right into the grave. And maybe he was at peace with that. Because somewhere in the middle of his plays, buried in his kings, his clowns, his traitors and lovers, Shakespeare had already made peace with death. Not as something to run from, but something to understand. To name. To live beside. “A coward dies a thousand deaths,” he wrote in Julius Caesar, “the valiant taste of death but once.” The ones who fear it die from it daily. But the ones who look it in the eye, who learn to carry it, die just once. And they live better because of it.

Columbus died on May 20, 1506, in Valladolid, Spain. He was 54 years old, broken by illness, debt, and the weight of unfulfilled promises. The years of ocean voyages, brutal weather, and battle with both nature and men had left his body twisted with arthritis and his spirit worn thin. Once the toast of Europe, he spent his last months largely ignored, left to draft long, pleading letters to a royal court that no longer had use for him. The riches he believed he had opened to Spain never arrived as he’d hoped. The lands he had claimed in the name of the Crown were now being governed without his input. The titles and powers promised to him, especially his lifelong demand to be restored as Viceroy of the Indies, were never granted.

He finalized his will on May 19, 1506. In it, he asked that a male heir of his family always live in Genoa, the city of his birth, to honor his roots. He also instructed Diego to care for Beatriz Enriquez, the mother of his illegitimate son Fernando. “This weighs much upon my conscience,” he wrote. “The reason cannot be written here.”

To this day, some claim the line of Columbus still exists, quietly, anonymously, somewhere in Genoa. A descendant who still honors the will. A man who keeps a house there, who lights a candle on Ascension Day, and keeps a worn copy of the Admiral’s map tucked in a drawer. Some believe this quiet heir maintains legal presence through the Bank of St. George or resides near the old Casa di Colombo, where the Admiral himself was once a boy. He may even be tied, however distantly, to the noble line of the Dukes of Veragua, descendants who were ennobled by the Spanish crown but never fully embraced in Genoa.

The next day, Ascension Day, he died. Tradition says his final words were taken from the Gospel of Luke: “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.” He was buried first at the Franciscan convent in Valladolid. From there, his body was moved to Seville’s Monastery of Santa María de las Cuevas. Later still, it was reportedly taken to San Domingo. Centuries after, some claimed his remains were moved again to Havana, then returned to Seville after Spain lost Cuba. No one knows for certain where he lies. His body, like so many parts of his story, is disputed.

He left behind little wealth and no confirmed gravesite, but his legacy stirred centuries of praise, resentment, and confusion. In Seville, his name is etched into plaques and memorials, yet most modern tour guides accompany these with a pause or an asterisk. There is a statue of him at the Cathedral of Seville, where some say his bones rest in a massive tomb guarded by four heraldic kings. His chains, the ones he wore when he was arrested and sent back to Spain in disgrace, are still displayed at the Cathedral of Seville, a sobering relic of how far he fell. At museums in Genoa, you can see models of his ships and maps he helped inspire. And in Valladolid, a small plaque marks the building where he died.

Columbus died convinced of his mission. He believed that God had called him, and he convinced himself that he had been justified in what he had done. But the weight of his actions never fully left him. He was tormented by sins he could not name, ones he carried to his deathbed. He died a man of fierce will and great ambition, but also one worn down by a world that changed faster than he could.

The world continues to remember him, uneasily, unevenly, and in ways that shift with each generation.