In Our Time

 

Snowed In and Reading

Machiavelli by Ross King

After reading the very long history of the Renaissance by Ada Palmer, I decided to read a biography of one of the most memorable characters of the era. Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power by Ross King is a wonderful study of a complex man. Over time, politically motivated opinion-makers have converted his memory to a caricature, especially because of his notorious book The Prince and its most famous quote that isn’t really there: “The ends justify the means.”

I enjoyed learning the details of a highly accomplished political man and the complex forces in the many political entities in Italy in his time. Here is a long quote about what Machiavelli said about morality and the obligation one has to do good and follow moral principles:

Machiavelli … does not hold that this conventional morality is entirely practical in the brutal world of Italian politics. “The gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide,” he writes, “that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done moves toward self-destruction rather than self-preservation.”

Nostrums having to do with keeping oaths and showing mercy are all very laudable on paper, but the man who transfers these moral precepts into the political arena will find himself drastically compromised. Machiavelli offers a new approach to political morality: “The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. Therefore if a prince wants to maintain his rule he must be prepared not to be virtuous, and to make use of this, or not, according to his need.” Qualities that the world considers virtues will lead a leader to ruin, while those regarded as vices will often bring safety and prosperity. Good leadership requires a prince to “know how to do evil.” (King, p. 156)

The Maid by Nita Prose

Molly, the narrator of this novel, is a maid in a luxury hotel whose observations of the vast gap between herself and the very entitled guests create an amusing read. However, the gap between Molly and the people whose rooms she cleans is not just amusing, it implies that you should think about the way society privileges you (assuming that you sometimes are in the position of the guests). 

Molly’s  observations include lots of unflattering details about the guests and their possessions. I like this one: “Isn’t it interesting how luxury has an unmistakable scent, as unmistakable as fear or death?” (p. 141)

Is the US a class-based society? As I read The Maid, I found this question both directly and indirectly a motivation throughout much of the story. Both Molly and her recently-deceased grandmother felt that working as hotel maids was their vocation, and they had a commitment to doing a really good job. The other workers in the hotel were vividly described in Molly’s narrative, in contrast to the way they acted as if they were invisible — and were really unseen by the guests. 

The novel is not just a study of the work done by the employees of a hotel: it also tells a story about a rather dramatic death of a hotel guest, about a complex criminal network that took advantage of the hotel, and of how Molly (working with several of her co-employees) basically sleuths out the details of the criminal activities, how they happened, and who was responsible. Altogether, this makes the book hold one’s interest though it’s pretty long — to me it was worth reading.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

 

Dinner in our deep frozen town

 

I think the low last night was minus 10° F.

Dinner for a cold evening: ABC stew

Day 1: I cooked the stew, then refrigerated it overnight.
ABC: Apricots, Beef, Carrots (plus lots more ingredients).

Day 2: I rewarmed stew in oven, then adjusted seasoning on top of the stove.

The table, ready for our guests Alice and Carol to arrive for dinner.

Parsley and cilantro garnish a plate of stew. We ate it with couscous and crusty bread.

Ingredients for ABC Stew

Spice Rub: adjust amounts to your taste

Coriander

Cinnamon

Cumin

Paprika

Ground ginger

Red pepper flakes

Remaining Ingredients 

2 pounds beef stew meat

olive oil

2 medium onions, finely chopped

2 large carrots, sliced

1 15-ounce can of chickpeas, drained (optional)

1 15-ounce can of diced tomatoes

2 cups chicken stock from concentrate

1/2 cup dates, pitted and quartered

1/2 cup dried apricots, halved

1/4 cup prunes, halved

Salt & black pepper

Serving

1/4 cup cilantro and parsley, chopped

Couscous

Crusty bread

Directions

Day 1: Mix the ingredients for the spice rub in a covered bowl; coat the beef with the spice, cover, and refrigerate for at least 4 hours.

In a large frying pan with a lid, heat olive oil over medium-high heat: use enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan. Add the meat and stir to coat in the oil. Continue to cook for about 5 minutes until browned. You may need to do this in a few batches. Transfer browned meat to a bowl.

Turn the heat down, and add the onions to the pan. Brown them for about 5 minutes, or until softened. Add the browned meat, chickpeas (if using), tomatoes, and stock. Bring to a boil, cover, and simmer for 1 1/2 hours. Then add the dates prunes, and apricots. Simmer for another 1 1/2 hours. The beef should be very tender and the liquid should be thickened. Remove to oven-proof cooking pot and refrigerate over night.

Day 2: At least 1 1/2 hours before serving, reheat the stew in the oven. Adjust the thickness of the sauce by either boiling it down or by adding more liquid until result is as you like it. Season with salt and pepper. Top with cilantro and parsley and serve over couscous.

Dessert

Alice’s cookies and Blueberries

Photos © 2026 mae sander

Axolotls

 

An axolotl in Lake Xochimilco, Mexico  —See this article on Axolotls, published this week,
which inspired me to look up more information about them.

An axolotl on a 50 peso note (source)
The image is based on a mural by Diego Rivera.

Everyone loves the smiling face of the axolotl, a type of salamander that lives in a small number of waterways in Mexico City. Very few axolotls survive in the wild — it’s an endangered species. One of them lives in a special axolotl museum in Mexico City called Axolotitlán. They are relatively widely available as pets in the US, though prohibited in some states. Axolotls are not very cuddly as their bones are fragile, so they shouldn’t be handled, only admired in an aquarium. Quite a few children’s books and toys represent these appealing critters. For more info: a detailed article about them appeared in Smithsonian a few years ago. 

One of many kids’ books about axolotls.

What, Me Worry?

If you were a fan of Mad Magazine in its glory years, you may remember the poem by Alfred E. Neuman.

Axolotls

 I wandered lonely as a clod, 

 Picking up old rags and bottles, 

When onward on my daily plod 

 I came upon some axolotls 

Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 

 A sight to make a man's blood freeze.

Some had handles, some were plain— 

 Skins green and orange, in the main. 

My hair stood up, my blood ran cold. 

 I fled with fear upon my soul. 

I find my solace now in bottles, 

 and I forget them axolotls. 

                                                   —Alfred E. Neuman

A mural of an axolotl (source)

This post is to be shared with Deb’s Readerbuzz. Sami’s Murals, and Eileen’s Critters.

Photos as credited, text © 2026 mae sander

Identities

“After hundreds of years, if there were so many sinners left, what had the Inquisition accomplished? They might root out Jews and Muslims and Erasmists and alumbrados, but then what was left?” (p. 367)

“When Luzia had seen the burnt bread, she hadn’t thought much about passing her hand over it and singing the words her aunt had taught her, “Aboltar kazal, aboltar mazal.” A change of scene, a change of fortune. She sang them very softly. They were not quite Spanish, just as Luzia was not quite Spanish. But Doña Valentina would never have her in this house, even in the dark, hot, windowless kitchen, if she detected a whiff of Jew. Luzia knew that she should be careful, but it was difficult not to do something the easy way when everything else was so hard.” (p 6)

From the beginning, The Familiar is a book about secrecy and identity. Luzia, at the center of the novel,  has both an out-facing identity as a servant in an impoverished upper-class home in late-medieval Spain, and also a secret identity as a Jew who would like to flee to Salonika where she could practice her true religion openly. The novel adds an element of magical realism to this identity: Luzia can also do magic. 

Here is  Luzia’s view of the conversion which her ancestors had experienced a few generations earlier:

“Their great religion can make bread into flesh and wine into blood. But they don’t believe that any amount of holy water or prayer can truly make a Jew a Christian.” (p. 121)

“I have been baptized, she reminded herself. She went dutifully to mass. She knew her Pater Noster, the Ave Maria and Salve Regina, her psalms and commandments. She would happily eat ham and mend a dress after sundown on the Sabbath. And yet she felt her magic like a damning thread, binding her to the past, and to every Jew in every synagogue who still bent their head in prayer.” (p. 198)

The counter-theme of this book is a completely different identity: that of an immortal and magically created human-like being named Santángel who becomes Luzia’s friend and ally in struggling to survive and escape. He says: 

“In another life, in another world, I would be called a familiar. My gifts are not my own. They exist only to serve others. People fear me because I want them to, because their fear makes my life easier.” (p. 165)

The plot of this book is elaborate (maybe too much so). There are many twists as the stories of several characters are being told. That’s all I have to say about it. 

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Remembering Martin Luther King

 

An Insane Threat

 

Beautiful Greenland from our trip in 2022.

Even in summer, huge icebergs were blocking our ship at one point.
What a fascinating place, and now the target of our horrible leader.

In Greenland this week: a large percent of the people are protesting the insane threats
of the US President to invade this beautiful country.

ADDED From the blog She Who Seeks:

Blog post © 2026

 Original photos © 2022 mae sander 

Crowd photo from news media

Murderers, Poets and Barbecue

 

Creepy country house in 1925. Helena Bonham Carter. Agatha Christie. New Netflick…Just wow!

E.C.R. Lorac’s novel offers us another aristocratic family down on their luck,
living in the ruins of their family manor. Suspense! Murder! More Wow!

The Poet X — a poor high-school girl trying to become a poet.
Couldn’t be more different from stories of the English aristocracy!

Barbecue Take-Out for Dinner

Barbecue from Satchel’s: chicken, beef, coleslaw, salads, cornbread.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Overwhelmed by the Renaissance

A not-quite reading success…

“Every day of our lives we’re targeted by at least one lie about history.” (p. 25)

“The plague is as important as the Mona Lisa to our effort to understand this Renaissance, both terrible and great.” (p. 193)

“When you zoom in on a moment in the past, it’s always (A) messier than you thought, and (B) includes more women.” (p. 234)

“If you know only one thing about Savonarola it’s the Bonfire of the Vanities, the Renaissance’s darkest hour (nope), a mass book burning (nope) and art burning (nope), invented by Savonarola (nope) to exert the stifling force of Church and Faith against the broadening of art, science, and thought that he hated (still nope).” (p. 291)

“ I’ve looked through one of Galileo’s telescopes, it’s in Florence, and realizing it’s less powerful than the plastic Hamburglar binoculars I once got in a McDonald’s Happy Meal filled me with new awe that a cunning mind armed with the right questions can get a long, long way with simple tools.” (p. 570)

My Reading

I only managed to sort-of-carefully read the first 500 pages of Ada Palmer’s tome Inventing the Renaissance. I scanned the rest. It’s much much too long, and it has a number of flaws, the main one being that it is precious in the sense of being affected and self-congratulatory. Worse yet, it’s constantly offering rather ordinary and boring  bits of the author’s autobiography — mainly about her experience as a graduate student and her students’ reactions to the subject matter.

Inventing the Renaissance manages to cover several hundred years of humanist thought, to define many concepts, and to provide sketches of the accomplishments of dozens of thinkers of the age and many patrons of these thinkers. I’m a fan of Leonardo da Vinci, Isabella d’Este, Michelangelo, Lucrezia Borgia, Pico della Mirandola, Niccolò Machiavelli, several members of the Medici family, Benvenuto Cellini (“the Florentine goldsmith-sculptor-assassin-jailbreaker-necromancer”), and so on. It’s interesting to read a not-so-critical view of Savonarola. But eventually the level of detail seems brutal, especially when one’s boredom is amplified by details of the author’s academic career.

Of course the book provides a huge dose of historic narrative, character studies of many Renaissance figures, summaries of philosophical narratives, introductions to the major thinkers and interests of the age (both famous ones and obscure ones), a bit about the politics of art works like Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel, and much more. At the end, there’s even a brief history of printing — which in my opinion deserves more prominence: the author characterizes the introduction of printed books as “an information revolution: not new technology (we’re on the Gutenberg-type press until the nineteenth century) but a distribution network revolution.” (p. 587) I felt that her view was weak.

Unless you are a glutton for an extreme level of detail about obscure points, and unless you are a fan of the author’s fascination with her own life and academic achievements, I strongly doubt that you would enjoy reading this book. And although I have in the past immersed myself in some of the biographies of the same individuals featured here, I found it horrendously dense and challenging to follow, which is not a compliment. I say: leave the reading of this academic stuff to the professionals!

Thinking of Famous Art in the Renaissance

I enjoyed the art history, such as discussion of Michelangelo’s slaves.

Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel. One of the most amazing mural paintings in history:
the book has interesting historical info about this art work and its creator.
Shared with Deb’s Sunday salon at Readerbuzz.

Leonardo’s portrait of Cecelia Gallerani, mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan was painted when Leonardo was “sent there by Lorenzo de Medici as something between an ambassador and a gift for his Sforza allies.” (p. 326) The ermine is shared with Eileen’s Critters!

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Photos of art works from Wikipedia

Cooking Dinner

Carrot salad (partially made) and tuna steaks on the kitchen counter before dinner prep begins.

 

Ingredients for tuna steak recipe from the New York Times.

Tuna, mostly covered by the pepper-olive-and lemon zest.

Carrot salad, partly eaten.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

On the Weekend

 Brunch at Alice’s Apartment

Dinner at Home

Pork chops and snow peas with mushrooms.

Recent Reading Failures

I’m finding it hard to follow this book, which varies from one location, from one
set of characters, from one mindset, and then switches to another place, time, person, scene.
When I began reading Tokarcuk’s Flights, it was a relief to read well-formed sentences
and well-thought-out phrases, no stupid analogies (see next book)!
But then I bogged down and only read half.

Free book from amazon.com. It stinks. Bad writing, bad characterization, 
bad in every way. I tried hard but only read around 30%,

And a hoped-for reading success…

An insanely long book (over 700 pages), but maybe I’ll read it all.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Good and Evil

“Enshittification is when you combine the banality of evil with an internet-connected device and a federal law that criminalizes doing anything with that device that the manufacturer dislikes.” (p 141)

Why “everything” got worse — easy answer: in this book, “everything”
pretty much adds up to Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, the iPhone, and maybe Google.

Does Cory Doctorow have a life outside of the online world? He probably does. However, you wouldn’t know it from this book, despite a brief acknowledgement of the mess the US is in because of our hideous administration in Washington. The book is a weird read because it’s so devoid of what I would call real life. Does the man ever eat? Read fiction? Go for a walk? I understand that every book has to have a focus, but this book reaches a lot of conclusions based on a kind of hyper-focus that makes it seem distorted.

Here’s a summary of what he means by everything: “We are living through a Great Enshittening. Somehow, humans have unleashed the Enshittocene, in which all of our artifacts and hyperobjects are turning into piles of shit.” (p. 55)

Ok, there’s occasional mention of history:

“Never let anyone tell you that the Luddites were afraid of technology or angry about ‘progress.’ That’s a lie propagated by history’s winners, whose great fortunes required oceans of blood from child laborers, murdered protesters, and enslaved Africans in the ‘New World’ who provided the cotton for their machines.” (p. 196)

The book is a dense read: in fact, I had to read the first half of it twice. There’s a lot of real information about the very recent history of technology. But the author considerably overstates the claim that he covers everything. In fact, as I said, it’s hyperfocused.

UPDATE: Cory Doctorow’s summary of the current state of the main points of the book, in case you want the abbreviated version:

Stuff from Real Life: Good and Evil

New table and chairs in my little House at Pooh Corner.
NOTE: Of course I know that’s Paddington, not Pooh. But Pooh built a house (at Pooh Corner)
and Paddington didn’t have a house of his own. So it’s the HOUSE that I named, not the bear. 
Bears are generous and share with one another.


The house Pooh built for Eeyore.

Renewed effort to go to the fitness center.

New recipe: Len’s Shrimp Curry Dinner.

There’s always something to try at Trader Joe’s.

HEADLINES FROM RECENT NEWS

George W. Bush Celebrates No Longer Having Launched Dumbest War in U.S. History

ANDY BOROWITZ

Rubio Tells Lawmakers Trump Wants to Buy Greenland

President Trump has said since his first term that he wants to acquire Greenland, and he asked aides for an updated plan on Monday. European leaders reject the president’s assertions.

Trump administration halts more than $10bn for childcare and family assistance

Democrats condemn move in California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York, calling it ‘vindictive’ and ‘cruel

EDUCATION

Texas A&M blocks Plato readings on gender ideology in philosophy class

Texas A&M University blocked a philosophy professor from teaching certain Plato texts after a new rule against "advocating" gender and race ideology.

We have had some snow but not excessive!

Dreaming of Paris which is snow-covered this week.

It’s always good to think about penguins!

Blog post copyright 2025 mae sander