Marking the 250th; mainstream Democrats' nerves; and my reading challenge is done.

Lester120 | Deposit Photos

It's the day after the 4th of July, and even though most of the big stuff is over, the weekend lingers on. So happy Independence Day, y'all, and happy 250th to the USA. 

A lot of Americans don't feel like there's much to celebrate on this anniversary of our nation's birth, especially given the shitshow that Trump has made of the nationwide celebration. I remember the bicentennial in 1976; Watergate was not long behind us (Nixon resigned in '74), and it seemed like our political system was healthy and had stood up to the rule of law. It felt like we could go on, like we could continue striving for that more perfect union the Founding Fathers talked about.

Today, not so much.

But: I'm not a huge follower of astrology, but I've happened upon several astrological forecasts of late that indicate we are heading for some kind of upheaval, likely this month. But I have a sense that there's already an upheaval ongoing, and it has to do with the success of democratic socialist candidates during this primary season.

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I can tell you this much: the moderate Democrats who have kept a lock on their party for years (into their dotage, in many cases) are freaking out. A few days ago, Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic wrote a piece about how "Marxist-Leninist organizers" have been infiltrating the Democratic Socialists of America since Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential candidacy and are poised to take over the organization. He says the DSA has begun supporting "militant anti-Zionism" and is otherwise aligning itself with communist organizations. And he compares the use of "Democratic" in DSA to authoritarian regimes around the world that use the same word. Pretty scary stuff. (The Atlantic has a stiff paywall -- a subscription is $89 a year, which is why I dropped mine several years ago. I'm accessing the article via Apple News.)

The Atlantic, despite its reputation as liberal-leaning, went with this piece at the same time that conservative columnists at the Washington Post and headline writers at the Wall Street Journal are either dropping "democratic" from references to democratic socialist candidates altogether or being wibbly-wobbly about it: sometimes they refer to them as "democratic socialists" and sometimes as just "socialists", as if the two terms are synonymous. Which they're not.

(Chait, by the way, is reportedly a progressive, but he's also Jewish, which might explain why he's sensitive about the whole Zionism thing.)

The founding editor of the DSA's Jacobin magazine, Bhaskar Sunkara, published a response to Chait's piece, which you can read here. (There's no paywall, but you'll have to give up your email address to read it.) The gist of it is that Chait is misreading the DSA's history, that it's a big tent that allows people who hold a lot of leftist viewpoints to join, and that there's a through-line from the DSA's founding to its stances today that Chait is misreading.

We're also in an atmosphere where Trump, at Mount Rushmore Friday, conflated democratic socialism with communism and claimed America is under attack: "You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both."

I mean, one expects that out of Trump, who lies all the time. And conservatives have equated socialism with communism in their diatribes for generations; it's a short step for them to rope in democratic socialism and equate that with communism, too. But that Democrats are working so blatantly to discredit the DSA is new.

Here's my view: The Democrats in positions of power really like it there, and they will do anything to stay. They have been biding their time since Trump 2.0 began, telling us they have no power in Congress right now so they can't do anything to rein him in, thereby hoping to encourage a groundswell of blue votes that would win them control of at least one house of Congress, and ideally both, this year. 

The groundswell has built, all right, but it's not the one they wanted. People on the left are sick of Trump's self-dealing and other shenanigans, and they're sick of Democrats' mealy-mouthed responses to it all. They want fresh faces with fresh ideas. So they're voting for younger candidates who espouse democratic socialist views, even as those candidates run as Democrats.

It's not happening everywhere; some democratic socialist candidates are losing their primaries. But it's clear that the successes they've had are scaring the pants off the Democratic leadership. And New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani's successes for the little guy are only making it worse. His speech on the eve of Independence Day has received a fair bit of news coverage.

Some commentators see democratic socialism as the left's equivalent of MAGA. It's true that MAGA started as a collection of disgruntled far-right voters who, juiced by Fox News, coalesced around Trump's candidacy. Democratic socialism is attracting disgruntled far-left voters, and in that sense, I guess, they're similar.

Could democratic socialists take over the Democratic Party the way MAGA has taken over the GOP? It won't happen this year. But by 2028? If they find a candidate with something near to Trump's charisma, I think it could happen. I'm not seeing anyone who's that much of a rising star yet; Mamdani is a naturalized citizen, so he can't be president. But a lot can happen in two years.

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Oh! I nearly forgot. I finished reading Underground Airlines. I pretty much gave the background for the story last week, so I'll just say a couple of things. First, it turns out that I could have used it as my book set in Indiana; a bunch of the action happens in Indianapolis. Second, it's a terrific read. Third, I get why it attracted the criticism that it did: here's a white author writing about the Black experience. But I think it was pretty sensitively handled, and anyway, c'mon, it's alternate history. The Black experience in the world of the novel can be different than what's happening in the real world today. That's the beauty of speculative fiction: imagining how things might be different.

I haven't sent in my results yet, but it's on my to-do list. Maybe I'll get a sticker or something. I'll let you know.

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These moments of bloggy prognostication have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy barbecue leftovers!

Summer reading progress and a new crafty project.

I said I would post about my IU Summer Reading Challenge progress last Sunday, but I lied. I went out of town last weekend, and the preceding week got away from me. So that's what's on tap for this post. 

By skipping last week, I also missed out on mentioning that here in the northern hemisphere, the summer solstice was last Sunday. So blessed Litha and happy solstice to everyone! 

Yurumi | Deposit Photos

From here on out, the days will get warmer, but the amount of daylight will be decreasing a little bit each day. (The news is better for folks down under, of course; last Sunday was their shortest day of the year.)

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Reading Challenge news: In our last episode, I reported on the first two books I had finished. Since then, I have read three more:

• For a book set in Indiana, I picked Annie's Quilt, the first book in the Amish Quilts of Indiana series, by Sarah Price. It's a romance, which is fairly far out of my typical wheelhouse, but I liked it. Annie is a young Amish woman who lives in Shipshewana, IN, in the northeastern part of the state near the Michigan border. Her life revolves around church, friends, family, chores on the family's dairy farm, and her job at a fabric shop in town. She dreams of marrying a fine Amish man who's not a farmer because she knows how much hard work is involved in farming and she wants to keep her job in town. You can guess where this is going: a handsome young man, a cousin of one of her friends, comes to town; they fall in love; she thinks he's aiming for a trade; it turns out he's a farmer (oh no!); but it all comes right in the end. I found it well-written and an easy read.
• For a travel memoir, I waffled. I started with Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon on a friend's recommendation, but found it too slow paced for me right now. (I might be a little anxious to get this challenge over with.) So I fell back on my original goal of a travel memoir written by a woman and picked Let's Not Play Small: A Memoir of Divorce, Healing, and Reinvention Through Solo Travel by Dawn Ritter Fischer. And I had problems with it. For starters, I'm not the right audience for this book; the author describes it as a "book to inspire women to travel solo. An invitation to step into the unknown and uncover the extraordinary within themselves. A summons to absorb the life lessons and embrace the self-discovery that arrives when we dare to do the uncommon." Unfortunately, this mission statement doesn't show up until page 272. I've already done a fair bit of solo travel, including some international trips, although I haven't chucked it all and gone full-tilt nomad as she has, so her exhortations to not "play small" throughout had me sighing in resignation. Also, the book could use better editing, including cropping out her repeated use of "little did I know" foreshadowing. Full disclosure: I skipped the bonus section with tips for the nomad life. When she actually wrote about her travel experiences, it was a decent read, but otherwise the book wasn't for me.
• For a slow-burn romance, I read This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews, the pseudonym of a husband-and-wife team. This is a terrific book, y'all. It's a portal fantasy. A woman named Maggie is yanked out of our world and dumped in the world of an unfinished fantasy trilogy, the first two books of which she has read and re-read to the point of being able to quote large chunks of them from memory. She immediately knows where in the story she has arrived, and she's able to rise in society by "prophesying" what's going to happen next. Of course she gets involved with a duke in disguise; eventually she figures out who he really is, and then you get into the typical "I'm super attracted to you but you lied to me so I can't love you except I do" slow-burn dance. But it's all very well done. This is the first of Andrews' books that I've read; apparently there are Easter eggs galore for their fans. It's also the first book in a series, and I'm already jonesing for the next one. (Here's hoping they don't leave the series unfinished...)

Since my goal to complete the challenge was six books, I only have to read one more. It needs to be a book that I meant to read last summer -- which I'm translating as "anything sitting unread on my Kindle that I didn't buy this year". I'm still mulling over that choice. But the winner may be Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters, published in 2016. I recently saw it mentioned on some listicle or other, and it turns out it's been sitting on my Kindle for who knows how long. (Amazon knows how long; I bought it at the tail end of 2016.) The genre is alternative US history. The premise is that President Lincoln was assassinated before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War never occurred, and slavery is still legal in four Southern states. It got a lot of praise when it was released, as well as some criticism because the author is white and is describing Black experiences. I'll let you know what I think.

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Besides traveling and reading more than I have in several years, I've also hatched a plan for a new craft project. 

I have finally admitted to myself that the window shades in the bedroom and office/craft room drive me crazy. They are honeycomb shades, but not the nicer kind; the shade material feels kind of like cardboard, and the giant metal strip at the bottom bangs loudly against the window frame in a breeze. They do open at the top and bottom (which I didn't discover until about a month ago), but honestly it's not a feature that's a dealbreaker for me (evidenced by the fact that I didn't discover they could do it until about a month ago). 

Nice honeycomb shades are spendy, as I learned when I replaced the blinds on the fabulous wall o' windows last year. I thought maybe I would prefer Roman blinds for these rooms instead; if nothing else, there would be less hardware to clank against the window. Of course my windows are not a standard size, so they would have to be custom. So I did a little looking around online. Even at sale prices, custom Roman blinds are almost as spendy as honeycomb shades.

But they're just big fabric rectangles and some dowel rods, I thought. How hard would it be to make them?

Long story short: we are going to find out. 

I've already ordered all the fabric. For the office/craft room, I'm getting a William Morris willow print in a performance linen that will match the Ruggable rug I use as a chair pad at my desk. For the bedroom, I'm going with a midnight blue swirl pattern in a sateen finish. The lining fabric is also on the way, as is the hardware for pulling the shades up. And I've been looking at videos for assembly directions. (I've been laughing at the ones where they're drawing lines on the fabric and cutting the pieces out with scissors. Have these people never heard of rotary cutters?)

Anyway, stay tuned.

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These moments of reading and crafty blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay cool!

Technology is here to help us. Yeah, right.

I was today years old when the USB-C revolution came for me.

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It occurred to me this past week, when I was finishing a book for the IU Summer Reading Challenge (update on that in a sec), that my Kindle Paperwhite seemed to be running awfully slowly. Page turns weren't as crisp as they should have been, and searching for a book in the online store was pretty much a nightmare. 

Do you remember that meme about Microsoft Explorer? There are several variations, but here's one: Someone is leading a cheer amongst Firefox, Explorer, Opera, and Safari. The first question is, "What are we?" "Browsers!" three of the browsers reply. "What do we want?" "More speed!" the same three browsers say. "When do we want it?" "Right now!" those same browsers say. And Explorer finally yells out, "Browsers!"

Shopping the Kindle store on my Paperwhite was like that. 

So I checked my purchase history on Amazon. Come to find out my device was an 8th generation Paperwhite, purchased in 2017. (I also recalled that I bought it then because someone had swiped my previous Paperwhite off my desk at the law firm, but never mind that.) The newest Paperwhite is generation 12.

It then occurred to me that maybe I hadn't been so keen on reading lately because my old Paperwhite was making the process less than pleasant. So I shelled out for a new one.

It arrived yesterday. It's a titch bigger than my old one, so I've ordered a new case. And I discovered something else when I went to plug it in for a full charge: the plug is different. My old Paperwhite has a micro USB port. The new one has a USB-C.

Micro USB on top, USB-C on bottom.
Lynne Cantwell | June 2026

I vaguely recalled Apple being in a kerfuffle with the European Union a while back over its proprietary Lightning port. Seems the powers-that-be in the EU got tired of needing different cords and chargers for different devices, so they forced Apple to switch over to USB-C as of 2024. What I missed back then was that the new law applied to other tech devices, too -- including Kindles.

I regarded the new cord for a minute, and then I texted my daughters. I'm the only iPhone user in the family; they both switched to Android several years ago. And they confirmed that their current phones take USB-C cables. "You'll be using that, too, next time you get a new phone," Kitty said.

She's right. The new iPhone models all come with USB-C ports. Thanks a lot, EU.

Don't get me wrong -- I am all for standardization. It's just that I've gotten whiplash from all the tech changes I've lived through: for audio, vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD to vinyl again; and for video, Betamax (anyone remember that one?) to videocassette to DVD to Blu-Ray to streaming to the gods alone know what will come next. And that doesn't begin to cover all the different connectors for different devices and purposes.

If USB-C is the final iteration for chargers and cables, okay. One port to rule them all! I just hope it stays that way. I'm tired of buying new tech just to keep up.

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I am going to have to keep at least one micro USB cable, though; my ancient Anker five-charge portable battery still needs one for recharging.

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Oh, right. The reading challenge. I have finished two books this week! And that was on the old, slow-as-molasses-in-January Kindle, too.

(I debated whether to resurrect the Rursday Reads blog for this project, but it hardly seems worth it for only six books.)

First, Heinlein's The Door into Summer: Published in 1957, this is sci-fi for fun. The novel opens in 1970. Dan Davis is an electronics engineer who is a genius at developing robots that make life easier for human beings. He hooks up with a partner, Miles, who has a head for business, and they get along swimmingly until they bring in Belle Gentry to be their bookkeeper. Belle pulls a grand con on both of them, swindling Dan out of his share of the company. Dan drinks himself into a stupor, then decides that he and his cat Pete should take what's called the Cold Sleep -- suspended animation -- for 30 years and wake up in 2000. Belle screws that up for him, too, or so it seems; Belle reengineers Dan's plans and Pete runs away. When Dan wakes up in 2000, he discovers he is flat broke. It takes him a while, but he hatches a plan to time-travel back to 1970, rescue Pete, and make sure Belle doesn't get all his money, after all. 

Here in 2026, it was entertaining for me to see what Heinlein got right about 1970 (not much) and 2000 (even less). This was written well before his Lazarus Long period, so while there's misogyny in the book, it's not as bad as Heinlein got in his later years. I ended up enjoying it.

The second book I read was Wok Walk by Melissa Bowersock. This is volume 50 in her series featuring an ex-LAPD detective named Lacey Fitzpatrick and her husband, a Navajo medium named Sam Firecloud. Together they investigate cases in which a dead person's spirit stays earthbound for some reason; between Lacey's research and Sam's talent for contacting those spirits, they are able to get them to move on to the next world. In this volume, the client is a family who own a Chinese restaurant. The patriarch is shot to death, out of the blue, on the back stoop of the restaurant while on a smoking break; as Sam discovers, even the victim doesn't know who killed him or why. The police, too, are stymied. Eventually the truth is uncovered, the shooter is not who I expected, and the family members are able to get closure on more than just the patriarch's death.

I'm not gonna lie: One reason I like this series is because the books are short. They are more like novellas than novels. But I also enjoy the dynamic between Lacey, Sam, and Sam's children, and it's fun watching the kids grow. And the horror is usually minimal. Plus Melissa is a friend and fellow Indies Unlimited contributor, and she writes well. What more can you ask?

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So that's where we're at. Next up is a book recommended to me by Kay Robinett, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews. I'm not sure whether I've read anything by Andrews before, but Kay loved the book, so I'm going to give it a whirl. I'll report back. 

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These moments of technological blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. I promise to keep reading if you will.

Tricking myself into reading more.

I have a confession to make -- a terrible one for someone who used to write books and read all the time: I've fallen out of the habit of reading.

I don't exactly know when it happened, but I think I can trace it back to when I went full-time for the Legislative Council Service three years ago. Reading and correcting hundreds of pages of other people's documents per day, a lot of them pretty dense legalese, makes reading for pleasure less fun. Instead of picking up a book, I've been doomscrolling all day and watching TV every evening.

This is not healthy, I know. It has also made me less fun (I am not going to go back and count the number of blog posts I've written about stuff I first learned about on Facebook -- I just know it's a lot). So when my alma mater, Indiana University, sent me an email about the university's first-ever summer reading challenge, I clicked the link for the kit before I could overthink it. 

Stolen from IU's website. Somehow I don't think the school will care.

The kit contains the rules, a page of bookmarks you're supposed to print on cardstock and cut out, a log for keeping track of the books you've read, and two bingo cards: one for kids and one for adults. Here's the one for adults: 

Also stolen from IU's website.

Hopefully you can embiggen that enough to read the prompts. One of them is "A book by an IU alum"; I considered filling that square with one of mine, but that seems hardly sporting. I also think it would be cheating to use one book for multiple categories, but the rules don't explicitly prohibit it (I expect they will next year -- I can't possibly be the only person who has thought of it).

You can get bingo several ways: the traditional across, down, or diagonal, or all the red spaces to make a trident. I think I'm going to go for the diagonal that goes top left to bottom right: a book set in Indiana, a book you meant to read last summer, a book about time travel, a slow-burn romance, a fantasy novel, a travel memoir, and the free space (let's not get crazy - I'm easing back into the habit). I've already got my fantasy novel lined up -- my friend Melissa Bowersock's newest, Wok Walk (the primary category for her series is detective fiction, but there are plenty of fantasy elements, too) -- and for the time-travel novel, I'm using Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, which Amazon says I bought for my Kindle in 2014 but I don't think I ever read it. I started it yesterday, and it's not ringing a bell. (Then I looked over the challenge rules and realized, whoops, I'm not supposed to start reading 'til tomorrow. I didn't get that far into it, I swear!)

As for a book I meant to read last summer, my Kindle is chockablock with books I haven't read. I'll just pick one of them for that category. Surely I meant to read them all last summer, right?

That leaves: a book set in Indiana: a slow-burn romance: and a travel memoir. I could ask Mama Google for listicles, but I'd rather know what you guys are reading. So if you have a favorite that would fit any of those three categories, let me know.

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I mean, I could cheat and use one of my books for the one set in Indiana. Or reread one of Kurt Vonnegut's novels. But I should probably read something new.

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"What the hell," you ask, "do a trident and a buffalo have to to with a Midwestern university?" 

The trident is the shape of the IU logo (which I had never noticed before this, and certainly not when I was a student there in the late '70s).

The buffalo, I believe, comes from the state seal of Indiana, a description of which is set out in statute as follows (we here at hearth/myth are determined to provide more information than you ever cared to know): 

Indiana Code: IC 1-2-4-1

Sec. 1. The official seal for the state of Indiana shall be described as follows:

A perfect circle, two and five eighths (2 5/8) inches in diameter, inclosed by a plain line. Another circle within the first, two and three eighths (2 3/8) inches in diameter inclosed by a beaded line, leaving a margin of one quarter (1/4) of an inch. In the top half of this margin are the words "Seal of the State of Indiana".

At the bottom center, 1816, flanked on either side by a diamond, with two (2) dots and a leaf of the tulip tree (liriodendron tulipifera), at both ends of the diamond. The inner circle has two (2) trees in the left background, three (3) hills in the center background with nearly a full sun setting behind and between the first and second hill from the left.

There are fourteen (14) rays from the sun, starting with two (2) short ones on the left, the third being longer and then alternating, short and long. There are two (2) sycamore trees on the right, the larger one being nearer the center and having a notch cut nearly half way through, from the left side, a short distance above the ground. The woodsman is wearing a hat and holding his ax nearly perpendicular on his right. The ax blade is turned away from him and is even with his hat.

The buffalo is in the foreground, facing to the left of front. His tail is up, front feet on the ground with back feet in the air, as he jumps over a log.

The ground has shoots of blue grass, in the area of the buffalo and woodsman.

(Formerly: Acts 1963, c.207, s.1.)

There's been a lot of discussion about the imagery over the years. Here is what I can tell you: the tulip tree is the Indiana state tree; Indiana entered the Union in 1816; and the rest of it seems to be in honor of the nation's westward expansion, with the pioneer fellow chopping down trees and chasing the buffalo away. (There actually were bison in Indiana at one time.) Describing the sun as setting rather than rising has been a topic of discussion since the state's inception; one fellow in 1819 insisted the sun was meant to be rising east of the Allegheny Mountains, which pioneers had to cross to get to the state. 

Sure, Jan. If those mountains are the Alleghenies (which are part of the Appalachians), that bison is running toward Minnesota.

Here's the seal. Judge for yourself. 

Alancotton | Dreamstime.com

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These moments of habitual reading blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Yay, reading!