Most Recent Posts

The British Library is now showing original manuscripts of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, the first time they've come to the United Kingdom.

But those documents are not the main event at this exhibition. It's the Magna Carta, issued by King John in 1215 — more than 500 years before the American documents, as library curator Julian Harrison notes.

This exhibit, "Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy," is all part of an effort to show how the English document shaped today's world. The publicity describes this as a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition. And for once, that does not seem like exaggeration.

The British Library is displaying two original copies of the Magna Carta. Harrison can recite the key passage of the text by heart — translated into modern English from the original Latin:

"No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned save by the lawful judgment of their equals or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice."

In 1215, it was revolutionary for a king to say that not even he was above the law.

Of course, King John did not actually want to issue this document. He was at war with English barons; they gave him no choice. Then the king went behind their backs and secretly wrote a letter to Pope Innocent III, saying "I have been forced to sign this awful thing!"

"What people often don't realize is that Magna Carta itself was only valid for 10 weeks," Harrison says.

The pope responded with a letter known as a "papal bull," which is also on display.

"The pope says, 'I declare the charter to be null and void of all validity forever," Harrison says.

i

Two original Magna Carta manuscripts from 1215 are on display at The British Library in London. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Two original Magna Carta manuscripts from 1215 are on display at The British Library in London.

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

And yet the document became the foundation of the modern judicial system.

"It's incredible, isn't it?" adds Harrison.

This exhibition includes videos where modern-day leaders describe the Magna Carta's relevance. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer talks about what it means for today's court rulings.

"The tradition of not imprisoning people without an ability to go to court and show that it's arbitrary is something that long predates our own constitution, and that we were picking up a tradition that Magna Carta exemplifies, and the strength of that tradition lies in its history," Breyer says.

Finally, Harrison, the curator, leads me into the room where two of the original Magna Carta manuscripts are on display. One is illegible; it was nearly destroyed in a fire. The other is clearly written in Latin calligraphy on a sheepskin parchment. It's a single page, and the writing is tiny.

"The scribe, we estimate, would have taken at least eight hours to write it out. There's actually part of the manuscript, he actually missed one of the clauses, and he adds it at the bottom of the document," Harrison says.

People are coming from all over the world to see what is the most successful exhibition the British Library has ever mounted. It continues through the end of August.

Visitor Jill Murdoch, from central England, says there's something special about laying eyes on the original artifact.

"The idea that comes to mind is you can go online and look at a picture of an elephant or a giraffe, but there's nothing like going to Africa and actually seeing one wild," she says. "So to see the actual document that it was written on in 12-hundred and something is extraordinary. It's an extraordinary experience."

Magna Carta

[Sandwich Monday note: Gillian is our resident British Person.]

Americans often look upon British food as bland and stodgy, so for this week's Sandwich Monday, I decided to prove everyone wrong with my offer of Hunger Breaks All Day Breakfast: a can of baked beans, sausage, bacon and "egg nuggets." After a trip across the Atlantic, we blitzed our meal in the microwave, then poured it back into the can for the complete experience. A cup of strong tea and drizzle are optional.

Miles: If we had two of these and a bit of string, we could make the world's most revolting telephone.

Gillian: Oh, it tastes like home!

Mike: Did you grow up in a boxcar?

i

Ian detects egg nugget. NPR hide caption

itoggle caption NPR

Ian detects egg nugget.

NPR

Miles: What came first, the egg nugget or the chicken nugget?

Ann: I found this to be "quite lovely," actually. That's British slang for "wouldn't mind eating this if I was in prison."

Peter: It's got everything you need for a classic British breakfast. Except for fried bread. And tea. And scones. And plates and cups. And any sense of hope.

i

Ann is shocked by the mind-blowing flavor of egg nugget. NPR hide caption

itoggle caption NPR

Ann is shocked by the mind-blowing flavor of egg nugget.

NPR

Robert: It says "all day breakfast" but really, what are the chances of this being consumed any other time than 3 A.M.?

Eva: Make sure and stick your pinky out while eating from the can.

Ian: If you want to scare someone, tell them snakes are about to jump out of the can and then it's this.

[The verdict: not bad. It has a bit of that Chef Boyardee or Campbell's microwave lunch flavor. That's probably not a good flavor, but it carries with it enough nostalgia to make it work.]

Sandwich Monday is a satirical feature from the humorists at Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me!

sandwich monday

One of the central conceits of the first season of HBO's Veep was the carnival of humiliations suffered by Selina Meyer, played so brilliantly by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in her capacity as vice president. She battled for relevance while waiting for the phone to ring, surrounded by a staff even more determinedly clinging to shreds of power and significance than she was. Later, Selina wound up battling primary opponents in her own bid to become president — a path that proved to have its own endless frustrations.

Thus, it was risky as the third season ended last summer to abruptly accelerate Selina's career trajectory by having the president resign with less than a year remaining in his term, leaving her to continue her struggling campaign while simultaneously serving, for now, as the first female president.

In theory, what Selina has wanted for the last three seasons, she suddenly has: she is president. She is relevant. People take her calls. This is a fundamental upending of the series if you assume that her real goal has been the presidency. Indeed, her discovery that she would become president not only thrilled her, but led to the moment in which she and her super-devoted personal aide, Gary (Tony Hale), wound up laughing hysterically together in a bathroom as she rummaged through the contents of what they call The Bag, which he carries at all times so as to be of help to her whatever she may need. For a sometimes brutal satire, the show is capable of moments of jarring, unanticipated warmth, but to its credit, it keeps them vanishingly rare and forgets them instantly.

The fourth-season opener on Sunday night began with a gambit that could, in less sure hands, seem like a gimmick: we found Selina at the podium, speaking to Congress, suddenly abandoned by her teleprompter. Then we flashed back, 24 hours earlier. This is a structural ploy that's been used so often in television in recent years that it could stiffen viewers if all it meant was "Wait for the disasters that brought this on!"

In fact, though, what they were getting at was the real heart of the show's bite: the disasters weren't as patently incompetent as they might have seemed. Rather than just being the result of a technical glitch or a dodo incapable of doing his or her job, the teleprompter disaster originated with a cascade of people trying to do their jobs. Even Selina.

The easy way to make political satire is to make all the people venal monsters, selfish and shallow, uninterested in doing anything good, incompetent in every way. That's the most comfortable kind of political satire as well, since it reassures everyone watching that the problem is the monsters we elect and the monsters they employ, and if we could only sweep those people out, we would suddenly be in the warm embrace of a system humming along to our shared benefit.

But Veep is more politically savvy than that. What sets off the teleprompter screw-up is Selina's meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in which she's shocked to hear them offer up an obsolete submarine program she can get rid of — saving $50 billion that she can allocate in her budget. They assure her that it's an old weapon they no longer need, and that they, the ones you'd expect to be first to defend it if it had any merit and the ones she expects to give her the hardest time about defense cuts, are okay with losing it. When they're gone, she and her staff celebrate having apparently found $50 billion in free money. Money that was basically lying around. Money nobody will miss. And so she has her staff — led by her director of communications, Mike, played by Matt Walsh, and a new speechwriter she inherited from the resigned president who's played by Zak Orth — write the cut into her address to Congress.

As she's minutes from delivering the speech, her staff gets a visit from Congressman Furlong (and men he introduces as "the military-industrial complex"), who explains to her that while the military may not need the submarine for submarine purposes, its manufacture employs people in many states, all of which have members of Congress who cannot just go along with a substantial loss of local jobs. And thus, if she pushes for the elimination of the submarine, they will take it out on her precious Families First Act.

There are two ways to look at this, of course. One is that it's outrageous to want to make an obsolete weapon simply because you're paying people to make it and you don't want to stop paying them. But the other is that this is what representatives do: they try to make sure their people back home are getting their share. The people who voted for them expect them to keep an eye out for their jobs and their money and their economic interests. It's more complicated than anybody being a monster.

What Selina and her staff learn here is simply that there's no such thing as $50 billion lying around that nobody is going to miss; that was a fantasy. Getting money is going to be as hard as always, for the same reasons as always: the money that's being spent means something to somebody.

She needs the speech rewritten on the fly, so she has to vamp on her way up the aisle to buy time. Of course, if you're greeting her in those moments, you don't think she's buying time, you just think she's an idiot. And maybe later, you tell that to the press, and now other people think she's an idiot, because they don't know that she was trying to give her staff time to rewrite a speech.

Mike tries to get her back to an earlier draft, but he's editing while she's taking the podium, and eventually, she finds herself confronted with that blinking cursor. (It's actually more like a command prompt, I think; I'm not sure how likely that is, but: bygones.) She can't read from a printed copy, because Gary, trying to help preserve the line of her suit, swiped her glasses. And when Mike does get her the earlier version of the speech, his inability to keep up with his one obsessive saving and labeling scheme means she winds up with the wrong one. It's one that contains the placeholder text "FUTURE WHATEVER."

Admirably, Selina neither triumphs nor entirely crashes when she's forced to improvise — sometimes she does okay and sometimes she sounds like a fool. But she winds up reading a wrong version of the speech that doubles down by adding $10 million to the program she wanted to abolish. It's absurd, it's wasteful, and none of it is the result of people who aren't, at some level, trying to function.

The theme that so often emerges from Veep — where Selina is sometimes the villain and sometimes the hero, quite a feat of nuance — is that these characters don't inhabit a great system that happens to be full of terrible people. They inhabit a system that provides perverse incentives that perpetuate dysfunction. It's a braver way to cut into political culture than it would be if that teleprompter had ended up going on the fritz because some political enemy, rubbing his hands together, had cut the wires.

The male milk-giving goat of Gaza has been turned into meat.

Owner Jaser Abu Said sold the goat for the 400 Jordanian dinar (close to $600) that he and his business partner spent on it. He found a buyer willing to slaughter the goat for meat. And he stuck around to witness the goat's demise personally, along with representatives from the Gaza government.

Goats and Soda

A Hermaphrodite Goat Could Be The Ultimate Scapegoat

Why government officials at a goat slaughtering — which happens pretty frequently in Gaza?

The goat appeared to be a hermaphrodite. It looked like a male, with a large build and visible male sex organs. But it also had udders. And gave milk.

Officials got involved when they heard that some people wanted the goat's milk, believing it could help fertility or cure ailments.

Worried that people could be deceived, the deputy minister of agriculture for Gaza's southern region ordered the animal killed.

The execution order said the goat had been used to violate the public health, which "may cause severe damage to civilians."

Owner Abu Said first said he'd do it himself, but on the appointed day, he hid the goat instead. Police came by, and after an hour at the station, he said he agreed to let the government test the milk.

His business partner, Abdel Rahman, said if the goat was to be slaughtered, at least they should be paid.

And so they were, not by the government but the buyer willing to slaughter it immediately. And the goat was killed even before results of tests on the milk were in. Dr. Zakharia Kafarna, director of veterinary services for the Ministry of Agriculture, says he wanted it that way.

He said that even if the goat's milk had tested normal, people who believed that milk from a male animal had curative powers could be deceived if the goat fell into the wrong hands. "People would believe the milk can heal them," he said. "We don't want people to be fooled."

Tests of the milk found nothing curative — or dangerous. Just "a few milk cells" a male goat "is not supposed to have," Kafarna said. He thought perhaps it was a case of a simple hormone disorder, not a true hermaphrodite goat.

The milk — and meat — Kafarna deemed safe to consume.

If another such goat crosses his path, he'll order it slaughtered too.

hermaphrodite

goat

Gaza