Some thirty years ago (31,to be precise) I wrote a story for the Sherman Sentinel called “Double Agent”. I intended it as a spoof. Its hero was someone I named Arnold Zwischen, which in German means “between”. I portrayed him as the smallest boy in his school class, being constantly victimized by two rival separate equal-opportunity gangs of bullies who enjoyed watching their respective leaders give him knuckle rubs, arm twists, and finger bending exercises whenever they could catch him. One day in the bathroom (he had been in a stall with his feet up out of sight, hoping to be overlooked) he happened to overhear the leader of one gang planning to organize an ambush of the other gang. It was to take place that afternoon after school in the playground. After he had stopped shaking and had a chance to digest the information, his first thought was that this would be a win-win. He would have the good fortune to have a ringside seat at the humiliation of one or the other group, both his nemeses. His second thought was that this would be little consolation for the additional torture he would surely be subjected to by the losers, as they attempted to compensate up for their humiliation. His third, and most productive thought was that there might yet be a way to turn this bit of foreknowledge to his personal advantage. So he approached the leader of the gang due to be ambushed and revealed the details of where and when this was scheduled to happen. This was greeted with skepticism, but no immediate knuckle rubbing. He then sought out the leader of the aggressor gang with the news that somehow their proposed victims had managed to become aware of the proposed attack, and planned to be not only on the alert but in possession of an array of defensive weaponry including baseball bats and even (according to rumor) brass knuckles. Again the news he was received skeptically, but again there was no immediate physical mistreatment. And at the appointed hour at the designated place he was pleased to watch from the distant sidelines as the opposing forces strutted about at a respectful distance from each other, without offering to actually engage. The leaders of each gang managed to thank Arnold dismissively afterward, telling him offhandedly to “keep his eyes open” and report any future plans he might become aware of, and there was an unannounced moratorium on arm twistings and finger bending. Arnold decided then and there on his career.

He had also discovered a basic truth about leaders : their power can only be exercised within a framework of generally accepted rules. Those rules must exist by general consent. A smart leader knows that for the balance of power to be maintained there must be an accepted power structure. He must tolerate some form of opposition. Elimination of all opposition would be as fatal as defeat, for it would eliminate a large portion of the audience before which he can strut and therefore the (manageable) tension that permits him to strut as everyone’s protector. Strutting is after all the basic goal of any power struggle, strutting before one’s own troops as well as before the enemy. The old (pre-coup) order must therefore to some extent be preserved, though with roles carefully reversed. And the new leader must be careful not to go too far, into unknown territory where results become unpredictable. Advance knowledge of the other side’s deadlines and redlines is therefore invaluable. The bluff necessary to attract and keep one’s followers must not be allowed to ignore the danger of overreach. If everyone is aware of everyone else’s plans, the situation is at its most stable. Judgments can be made most safely when your opponent’s redlines are clearly known. This lesson has since Los Alamos been reinforced by the existence of Armageddon waiting in the silos, ready to respond to any nervous or itchy or deranged trigger finger.

So Arnold, in my spoof, went on to found a company called AXX (Arnold’s Double Cross) whose services could be engaged by anyone from a neighborhood storekeeper worried about being put out of business by a price war with an incoming chain to a World Power worried about just how far its provocations will be tolerated before escalation took over. An AXX client, in exchange for divulging his own plans would get matching information about his adversary. Both sides — both clients — would be aware that Arnold was playing a double game and as a result the world became a safer place.

Now, thirty years later, I am beginning to wonder whether my “spoof” was such a spoof after all. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and unbelievably powerful computers and cleverer and cleverer hackers and decryptors and more motivated whistle-blowers are beginning to put Arnold’s belief to a real-world test. International aggression requires a lot of planning. Strategies must be coordinated ahead of time and many groups must be clued in so they will be ready to act when the signal is given. Successful action requires reliable communication, and such communication today requires that communication be both secure and quick, and this means one must use electronic signals. These, in their travels, whether through wires or optic cables or free-range in cyberspace, are today increasingly interceptable and decryptable, and the interceptors and the decryptors have so far easily maintained their technological lead over the defenders of privacy. This seems to be irreversible, and, were AXX to have been a real company, it would have been a fatal blow. The service that my fictitious Arnold offered for a fee is now more and more available to anyone with some computer smarts and some relatively cheap equipment. The only difference is that while Arnold guaranteed equal disclosure to both sides, in today’s spy world the extent of the sharing is uncertain. This very uncertainty though, in the light of the finality created at Los Alamos, may simply serve to reinforce the power of the idea.

Arnold is now retired He is living on a piece of land as near as he could find to the exact center of the United States, as far removed from any large city and any missile silos as possible, watching the oceans and the winds rise and tending his garden and hoping for the best. He sends his regards.

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With the prospect that Donald Trump’s numerous wives, children, and in-laws may be advising him in choosing candidates for official positions in his administration — or even assuming such positions themselves — we are apparently going to have to take a fresh look at our opinions of nepotism in Washington.

The initial inclination of most people will be to say that it’s bad. Nepotism — awarding people jobs on the basis of a family relationship or membership in an old-boy network means ignoring merit in favor of genes or loyalty. “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.” That entrenches financial and political dynasties at the expense of any talented contender who was not, as Texas Governor Ann Richards so memorably tagged George W. Bush, “born on third base”. It’s just another aspect of the spoils system Andrew Jackson brought to the American government after Lincoln’s assassination. It forgoes the possibility of recruiting people of demonstrated ability in favor of appointing people who had the good luck to be born to the right parents or attended the right schools and joined the right clubs. This is a difficult hurdle for a democracy that is supposed to also be a meritocracy.

But it might help to review a bit of history. The word “nepotism” derives from the Italian nipote meaning “nephew”. Its meaning was originally very specific. In the Middle Ages when the Church began to accumulate vast wealth Popes and members of the clergy were not permitted to acknowledge offspring. Thus, under the prevailing laws of primogeniture, the riches they often managed to acquire while in office could not legally be bestowed on their children, and they rebelled at the idea of forfeiting them to the Church. The solution used by Donald Trump’s accountants — his “charitable” foundations — had not yet been invented, but an equally effective technique was to leave the loot to a nephew who had been made aware that his first duty was to keep it securely in the family. That worked until 1682, when Pope Innocent XII, who had himself been born on third base and presumably didn’t need the extra income from indulgences, (which may by that time have become an embarrassment anyway because of that meddlesome Luther) issued a bull forbidding it. That was strictly a Church ruling, of course, and did not affect the Divine Right of Kings, who continued to pass the royal torch only according to direct bloodlines regardless of even the most obvious evidence of incapability or sometimes outright imbecility. Government by royalty has generally not survived, but the custom has, now adopted by the politically connected. Think of the do-good foundations and “libraries” now routinely established by our ex-presidents, providing jobs to sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters on and on generations into the future by means of extended copyrights and eleemosynary employment. Considering that democracy was once considered the foe of aristocracy, this should be seen as a victory of selfish corruption over ideological righteousness, no?

Well, maybe yes and maybe no. Take that business of the Divine Right of Kings. In a once largely illiterate world it ensured that a new ruler would have had the benefit of the best available education, the best tutors, doctors, and diplomatic counselors. In short it meant that the newly installed leader would actually be qualified to lead. The stability of the country (no less than that of the Church) was therefore enhanced. Quality of leadership succession was being protected against inexperience and ignorance. Jealously protected succession — nepotism in its purest form — was thus a form of social insurance against incompetence.

So nepotism is not necessarily just about keeping wealth and power in the family; it’s also about reinforcing the values of the family. If those values are good, nepotism can be a blessing. But Cosa Nostra is also a family. In today’s world, where power is increasingly based on money, and the oligarch is likely to be more influential than the senator, the network connections established at Harvard or Yale are likely to be worth more than those from Podunk State U (although the quality of the education acquired from any of them may in fact be the same and today may be no better than that available free on a simple laptop computer). The payoff for the sixty-three thousand dollars a year you will spend at at Cambridge or New Haven will only come in the future if you have unexpectedly become President in a campaign based largely on your hairdo and the appointees you will need are people you once knew as Stinky or Biff and are in your cell phone’s address book. If your pool of friends from Wharton doesn’t include people outside the one percent you may have to turn to mysterious aspirants who have never before been elected to anything or done anything to demonstrate their skills at government — such as army generals, for example, or the editors of fake news sites, or addled preachers in pillow-case hats claiming that the Civil War was never lost. This can be a scary thing for the rest of us, given the history of earlier administrations that have turned for staffing to the Pentagon or to people who turned out to be common burglars.

Face it. The job is too big to be handled with midnight Tweets. You are going to need help. A lot of help. Experienced help. There will be no time for qualifying civil service exams. Some thoughtful nepotism by some of your predecessors might have presented you with a bigger labor pool.

Too late for this time around, but with a large stable of sons and daughters and sons-in-law and daughters-in-law to choose from you may yet be able to have an impact. “The Trump Dynasty” has a nice solid ring to it. Good name for a resort hotel. (Like “Trump University”, which had none of the characteristics of a university except exorbitant tuition fees.) The Brand is only going to be stronger after 2020, regardless of what kind of shape our country may then be in. The Kennedys and the Bushes and the Clintons have had their shot. Their dynasties failed to take hold. Time to show them now what a student of P. T. Barnum can do.

But where does that leave us on the question of nepotism — is it in itself good or bad? I’d say the jury is still out. Pretty much where we started. In our governing institutions, ideology is not the point. Nepotism itself is neither good nor bad. People are good or bad. If they do their jobs well, how they got them of no consequence. If they do their jobs badly, whether they got them honestly or by lying and cheating or family influence will make no difference. What will save us as a country is if the good people outnumber the bad ones and they stick to their convictions. Good luck, Donald. Good luck, America.

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Just in case we didn’t already have enough to deal with in the election that came out wrong, we have lately added a new one : knees. Some of our young people, who by virtue of their athletic prowess have achieved sufficient celebrity to anoint themselves “spokespeople”, have taken to dropping to one knee during the pre-game playing of the national anthem instead of standing at attention in the prescribed “pledge of allegiance” stance — bareheaded, right hand over the heart. This they do to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, and to show their dissatisfaction with the way minorities are treated by our current laws, and particularly by our law enforcement employees. It has proved infuriating to super patriots (which was of course the purpose) — the same people who were outraged by the flag burners a few years ago. Aside from the emotional reaction, and the political points to be scored, what are the legal ramifications, if there are any?

Start with that pledge of allegiance. It was thought up by an army colonel in 1877 and included in a 1892 issue of a magazine called The Youths’ Companion. What prompted its composition I don’t know, but in 1942 Congress formally approved it and in 1945 it was officially adopted. In its original form it was a formula suitable for any country and any flag and the original wording was “I pledge allegiance to my flag…”. This was later revised by Congress to “the flag of the United States of America” and included in the Flag Code of the U.S. Further revision was deemed necessary in 1954, during Ike’s administration, and the words “under God” were inserted, to the accompaniment of some grumbling by those who disagreed over which God we were referring to and of course by atheists and strict Constitutionalists, who said no God should be officially recognized by their government. In its present form it reads:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.

While reciting this, citizens who are not veterans or in military uniform are supposed to stand at attention, the head uncovered, right hand over the heart, facing the flag. Vets and members of the military are to salute. These are the same postures and procedures that are specified for people listening to public performances of the national anthem, which brings us back to the protests — going down on one knee and facing away from the flag.

The citizens most likely to be upset over such lèse majesté are generally the same ones who flaunt flag lapel pins (that means all politicians), fly flags on poles in front of their houses or office buildings or hotels (often day and night, and regardless of the weather, which is forbidden by the Flag Code), and display giant flags spread out and held up by hundreds of band members and cheerleaders at football games (a form of display of the flag that is specifically banned by Article 175 of the Code, which says that the flag must never be displayed flat), and who line the sidewalks or the shoulders of their public roads with flags to demonstrate their patriotic enthusiasm.

So exactly what is it that these knee-ers are protesting? They don’t want themselves included in a mindless chant about how wonderful the United States is unless and until they can look forward to a change. Black Lives Matter as a slogan is all very well, but slogans in themselves are powerless unless they can stir up some real action. Kneeing started in professional football, a sport that in this country comes as close to being a national religion as anything we have. Since football’s heroes are so worshipped — even more than electronically powered rap stars — their participation in a protest counts as huge. (“Yuge” in the words of our current heroic president-elect.) Whether you think black lives matter or that they don’t, the sight of a major league starting quarterback kneeling while other people are standing at attention forces you to think about why he is doing it. Given the intensity of patriotic feeling evidenced by all those flag pins and flags and salutes, he is putting a lot on the line. Mohammed Ali’s refusal to fight “them Congs” cost him his heavyweight boxing title. Will Colin Kapernick’s kneel cost the 49ers games? Ugly threats have already been made. “He will be made to pay” say the comments on the Internet.

Which brings us to the essential question of why each of us shouldn’t be allowed to define patriotism for him- or herself. If we are grateful that we were (by a throw of the dice) born in a country whose policies we can respect (instead of, for example, Zimbabwe or Syria) may we not be permitted to advocate for ways in which we think it might be even better? Would we even be a country to start with if the real Boston Tea Partiers had agreed to show proper respect for the Union Jack and sing God Save the King back in the day? We fought a bitter war over the right NOT to kneel to royal prerogative. Will we have to fight another one over the right TO kneel? I thought that one had been settled.

Perhaps this is just a passing fad, and it will fade like the clenched fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Olympics in 1968. Or perhaps it isn’t, and it will spread and turn Monday Night Football into a demonstration of disunity that will turn football fans into ugly partisans. A lot will depend on whether we all believe we live in the same country, with the same goals, or whether we think the black-white division is permanent and unbridgeable. That will have to be decided one citizen at a time. Hold your breath.

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For Baseball Fans

The pitcher is considered the key player on a baseball team. His value is based on his ability to balance the supposed three variables governing the tossing of a baseball across the 60-foot gap separating his release point from home plate — velocity, location, and “stuff”. Velocity and location are today easily measured (and nowadays magically displayed after each pitch on a TV screen). “Stuff” is immortalized in the tales of legendary pitchers, long-suffering broken-fingered catchers, sharp-eyed umpires, and bewildered batters. There is an extensive lexicon to describe what the ball appears to be doing during that brief flight (about four tenths of a second). It “breaks at the last minute”, “tails away”, “drops off the table”, “hops”, “sinks”, “cuts” and performs many more bewildering maneuvers. They may all be included under the general heading, “curves”, to describe any deviation from a straight line. Curveballs are supposedly created by the spin the pitcher imparts to the ball as he releases it, similar to the “topspin” and the “drop” in tennis and the “hook” or “slice” in golf. Its rotation as it moves through the air is said to subject it to unequal lateral or vertical pressures according to Bernouilli’s principle. (He discovered that pressure on a surface varies with the speed of the fluid flow over it, thus the pressure on the side of the ball spinning in the same direction as its trajectory will be lower and cause the ball to move in the opposite direction). Conversation about the varieties of curves made possible by this phenomenon have fascinated fans, filled the columns of sportswriters, and the pockets of professional pitchers since the game was invented.

The question of whether the curveball actually exists was debated as early as 1877, when a three-man expert commission appointed by the Cincinnati Inquirer was unable to agree about it. In those days the only available evidence was anecdotal, gathered from people with an obvious interest in keeping the topic alive. In 1941, with the development of stroboscopic photography (making possible split-second images of rapidly moving objects on photographic film by using brief flashes of light instead of a shutter) LIFE magazine conceived the idea of assigning Gjon Mili, a pioneer of that art, to settle the controversy. Mr Mili set up two cameras, one above, and one to the side of, the path between the pitcher’s rubber and home plate, and LIFE engaged two of the foremost curveballers of that era — Cy Blanton of the Philadelphia Phillies and Carl Hubbell of the New York Giants — to demonstrate their skills. The results were unequivocal : no matter what the pitchers themselves or the eyewitnesses “saw” the cameras detected no deviation from a straight line in any pitch except for that seen (in the side view camera) by the unvarying 32-feet per second per second descent caused by gravity. Not content with photographic evidence alone, the experimenters built a wind tunnel and a baseball impaled on the shaft of a variable-speed electric motor, to show that no human being could possess enough power in his arm or wrist to create the amount of spin that would be required to cause Mr Bernouilli’s principle to come into play. The ball was just too heavy and the velocity too low for it to happen. Furthermore, there is no theory in Physics that would allow a thrown ball to behave any differently as it neared the plate than it had been behaving all along the way there.

So what was, and still is, going on? Our 12-year-olds continue to practice “upshoots” and “inshoots” and our 20-million-dollar-a-year professional pitchers continue to talk of the differences between “two-seamers” and “four-seamers” and “cutters” and our professional hitters continue to recount how pitches “dove for the corner”, or “broke just as it reached the plate”, or “really had some hop”. Go stand in a batter’s box yourself and let your buddy throw you his best screwball and you will very likely in fact “see” it curve or dive or hop according to prediction, if not as markedly as Mr Blanton’s or Mr Hubble’s professional versions might. What to make of that?

Call an ophthalmologist. He will explain to you that the “seeing-est” part of the eye is the fovea, an extremely small area in the very center of the retina where the sharpest image is formed. It is this part of the batter’s eye that first focuses on the ball as it leaves the pitcher’s hand. The ball seems to him to be coming very nearly straight-on at that point and therefore remains centered in the fovea as it gets closer until (unless it is destined to hit him squarely between the eyes) it suddenly seems to swerve as its image leaves the exact center of the fovea. There is a tiny time lag as this takes place, and it is this time lag that is interpreted by the brain as a change in behavior — a “drop”, a curve, or a “break”. The ball appears to change direction as its image fails to continue directly toward the batter, but reports that it will be somewhere out over the plate. Especially if the interpreting brain “wants” to see it that way. Any policeman who has ever participated in an identification line-up will tell you that what the brain wants to see it will see, regardless of reality.

What though, you may interject at this point, of the non-rotating knuckle ball, which, owing to its lack of spin, is said to make totally unforeseeable dives and darts as it nears the plate? First, it is firmly subject to the rules of Physics. There are no variable forces acting on it that can vary once the ball has left the pitcher’s hand. It will travel in a simple straight line. The difference is then in the beholder’s expectations. If his expectations are that there will be unpredictable movement, then it will be perceived as unpredictable movement. In the ballpark this may make it an even more intimidating weapon than spin. Real quibblers may wonder why baseball’s experts have failed to ask themselves why, if spin is what makes baseballs curve, a spinless pitch can be expected to be especially unpredictable.

So now that that’s all settled we can accept the reality that the pitcher’s third weapon after velocity and location is not “stuff’ but his skill at the guessing game that constitutes every at bat, and we can teach our 12-year-olds to work on that skill instead of destroying the tendons in their arms by forcing them to perform unnatural motions that will likely deform their developing anatomies, yes?

Well, no. All that experimenting and explaining has historically had exactly zero effect on the real world of baseball. Not “approximately zero”; “exactly zero”. There is too much history, legend, and fame invested on the old beliefs. (Not to speak of too many dollars in the salaries of pitchers and their agents and the cost to the careers of politicians whose voting-booth support from fans can be jeopardized if they try to resist the blackmail of local cheerleaders for new taxpayer subsidized stadiums, and the ever-ballooning price of tickets.) We perpetuate the myths because they match our desire to be entertained. Don’t ask the magician how he appeared to have sawed the girl in half; just sit back and enjoy the show.

And what has all that got to do with real-world concerns anyway? Why do I write about it instead of about more “critical” issues? What has it got to do with Mexicans stealing our jobs, immigrants sponging on our wealth, welfare mothers frantically producing babies to fatten their child allowances, Muslim ladies hiding bomb six-packs inside their chadors, black helicopters guarding the secrets of Roswell, and global warming conspirators trying to bring down the capitalist system by inventing a boogey man called “climate change”?

Or for the questions of whether Hillary Clinton has really signed a blood pact with Satan to take away all male prerogatives in the United States or whether Donald Trump is just a rich man’s spoiled son with more libido than brains?

I leave those questions for you to meditate. I’m going to be busy with post mortems on the World Series.

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I have noticed something I find unsettling about our current crop of national leaders : they don’t seem to be interested in the future. You would think that after their struggles to achieve the powerful positions they have finally won they would now want to exercise their authority to change the future direction of their countries in pursuit of their new visions. Having taken advantage of dissatisfaction among their followers to upend the status quo, you would think that they would then be full-throated advocates for change. Instead they mostly seem to want to turn the clock back to some previous mythical Golden Age. That golden age usually seems to be one where challenges to authority — especially their own newfound authority — are effectively suppressed, and where anyone who questions authority is severely dealt with. “Make America Great Again” and put crooked Hillary in jail.”

Vladimir Putin wants to recreate the Soviet Union and make Russia a great power again, if not engineer a complete reversion to the time of the tsars. Benyamin Netanyahu in Israel wants to restore the Kingdom of God, where a four thousand year old promise is all that is needed to ensure his legitimacy. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey seems to want to re-establish the old Ottoman Empire, with Islamic law and hatred of the Infidel as the revived standard. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq thinks the plan of the former Sunni domination of the pan Arabic world should be re-instituted. General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt is determined to get back as fast as he can to the good old authoritative days of Hosni Mubarak or Anwar Sadat, or even King Farouk. François Hollande in France insists that his own flirtations with socialism are in no way to be considered a weakening of his belief that France is the only really civilized country in Europe, entitled forever on that account to a seat for its elite at the table where major European decisions are made. Theresa May in England has taken the first step in washing Britain’s hands of the great unwashed and disrespectful EU rabble (especially southern and eastern branches) and reconstituting the old British Empire as Churchill and the Iron Lady once ran it. Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang sees all of Korea as his private fief, to be unified as it used to be under his leadership. Kinzō Abe in Japan shows signs of flexing Japan’s old-time muscles to keep China from gaining too much Pacific rim influence, and some say Xi Jinping may be toying with reforms in China’s rotating politburo chief executives in order to prolong his own position as top man.

Of more immediate concern for us Americans, of course, is Donald Trump, who wants to go back to the time when the white man’s onerous burden was made bearable by the rewards of unquestioned elite authority, and a free hand (unfortunate expression in his case, perhaps) with women. And our Republican Party, that does everything in its (inexorably waning) power to exclude Blacks, immigrants, any young person who has ever thought of revising the inequitable tax laws, immigrants, and minorities from their ranks; preferring instead (apparently) to let their dwindling legions go down to defeat with the Confederate flag proudly flying.

Against this list of statesmen whose vision seems to be firmly fixed on the rear-view mirror, we can still gratefully point to a few who seem interested in exploring the possibilities of a more adventurous future — Bernie Sanders here in our own country, Angela Merkel in Germany, Justin Trudeau in Canada, Youssef Chahed in Tunisia — but except for Merkel they don’t appear to be having much success.

Do these retreat-fixated people have no vision? Is all modern politics, like all old politics, just about who is going to be the next Big Man? Are all the thousands of books written by the economists and philosophers and political theorists of recent generations just ineffective academic scribblings, to be cast aside the moment the possibility of a Swiss bank account shows up on a new leader’s horizon?

The exceptions to this trend appear to be in Scandinavia, where experiments with new approaches to government are welcomed, or at least tolerated, by a better educated and more interested public. Sweden, for instance, is exploring the elimination of cash. All three countries are debating how a new world economy might be organized if there aren’t (and probably never again will be) enough jobs for all the people who want them. The right to a basic income is under consideration. Denmark is starting to question whether old people who feel their usefulness has come to an end should be allowed to choose their own times and methods for a dignified departure. (Interestingly, all three countries have preserved their anachronistic monarchies as useful symbols of national unity, while divesting them of any real influence. A better choice than relying on the unifying power of the Internet perhaps?) They have shrunk their militaries to the minimum (although, regrettably, they have not so far shown any signs of forgoing the profits from selling their unwanted arms to their more bellicose neighbors). They have long since recognized health care and social security and education as basic rights, and have defined driving and firearm possession as privileges to be earned, limited, and regulated. They are, in short, looking at innovation. They have recognized that keeping a tight lid on pressure for reform is a way to ensure that change, when it inevitably does come, will be explosive and disruptive instead of carefully considered.

Are we paying enough attention? How many of the leaders of those three countries can you even name? What do you know about the possible reasons for their electoral successes?

Looking backward for lessons to be learned is one thing; a desire to retreat into the past as Utopia is quite another.

I am reminded of a 1923 New Yorker profile of Henry Luce, co-founder of TIME magazine, by Wolcott Gibbs, one of its more irreverent writers in those freewheeling days when the magazine reflected the personality of the snobbish lepidopterist Eustace Tilley on its cover : “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind,” he wrote, parodying that publication’s overwrought style. “Where it all will end, knows God.”

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