"The great state of South Dakota was stolen in 1743 by the French in the person of Louis-Joseph Gaultier de La Vérendrye."

"La Vérendrye—who very grandly called himself Le Chevalier—was a fur trapper and explorer acting on behalf of his father, Pierre, commandant of New France. (Nepotism is a South Dakota tradition.) The precise Native American tribe from whom South Dakota was stolen is not certain, but Le Chevalier called them the Gens de la Petite-Cerise or 'People of the Little Cherry,' and probably they were the Arikara, a Plains Indians tribe that had broken off from the Pawnee. This is the rare instance in human history in which the theft of somebody’s little cherry was commemorated on a chiseled plaque. That was a hunk of lead dug up in 1913 and known today as the Verendrye Plate. Bearing the inscription of King Louis XV, the plate had been engraved in Latin by Le Chevalier’s père (who, incidentally, is not the same Pierre after whom South Dakota’s capital city is named). Le Chevalier scattered similar lead plates along his journey, chortling in his journal about one of these that 'the savages … did not know of the tablet of lead that I had placed in the earth.'"

From "South Dakota Is a Moral Sewer and Should Be Abolished/Governor Kristi Noem isn’t the problem. The other Dakota is a make-believe state devoted to the preservation of wealth dynasties, and it should just go away" by Timothy Noah (The New Republic).

By the way: "It's one of the first things you learn when you move to South Dakota - the correct pronunciation of our state capital is 'peer' (like the one you fish off of), not 'pee-air' (like the first name of a Frenchman)."

"What accounts for the growing number of octogenarians and beyond who are accomplished and still accomplishing?"

Asks Jane Brody in "A Birthday Milestone: Turning 80!" (NYT). 

The article doesn't really answer the question, not any better than you'd answer it on your own: Maintain your physical and mental well being so you can continue accomplishing, and also get yourself into some line of accomplishment that's intrinsically motivating. Brody names some famous people who are still productive in their field after the age of 80 (but fails to mention Bob Dylan, who's about to turn 80).

Here's a little text from the end of the article, about regrets (which is really a different topic!):

Have I any regrets? I regret taking French instead of Spanish in high school and I keep trying to learn the latter, a far more practical language, on my own. I regret that I never learned to speed-read; whether for work or leisure, I read slowly, as if everything in print is a complex scientific text. Although I’d visited all seven continents before I turned 50, I never got to see the orangutans in their native Borneo or the gorillas in Rwanda. But I’m content now to see them up close on public television....

I thought speed-reading was a hoax. And I think it's best to leave the great apes alone. I'm put off by the elaborate fakery of traveling to Borneo/Rwanda in pursuit of an authentic encounter with orangutans/gorillas. 

And is Spanish a "more practical language" than French? French is as practical to French-speaking people as Spanish is to Spanish-speaking people, I would imagine. I think she doesn't mean Spanish is a "more practical language" but that someone living in America will find it more practical to know Spanish than to know French. One reason for slow reading is that people writing in their first language are not taking the trouble to think about what they are writing.

ADDED: My line of accomplishment is blogging, and I find it continually intrinsically motivating. So though I'm only 70, let me offer some different advice about remaining active while aging. You don't have to keep powering along in the career you chose for yourself decades ago. You can discover something within or adjacent to it that is more purely what inspires you and brings you flow. Then retire and do exactly that. I called blogging a line of "accomplishment," but I'm no longer oriented toward accomplishing anything. I live in the day. A day lived now is as good as a day lived anywhere else in the string of days that is your life. What does it matter how close to the end of the line it is? 

ALSO: From the Wikipedia article "Speed Reading," here's a photo captioned "Jimmy Carter and his daughter Amy participate in a speed reading course":

Do you think they are speed reading? The speed-reading craze got started with President Kennedy. Was he really speed-reading? Skim a few articles on the subject and I think you'll quickly get the main idea: People who claim to speed read are skimming. To read, you have to read all the words in order. You don't have to read. You can go way more quickly by skipping a lot of the words. But even skimming the articles on the subject, you should know you're bullshitting if you call that reading and claim to be "speed reading."

AND: Here's an article by Timothy Noah at Slate, "The 1,000-Word Dash/College-educated people who fret they read too slow should relax. Nobody reads much faster than 400 words per minute":

"It is as if Nixon held a press conference and began it by saying, 'Yes, I’m a crook. And the American people deserve to know it.'"

"'But McGovern would have been a terrible president and so it was entirely worthwhile. Sure, I committed a high crime in tampering with the last election. But sometimes high crimes are necessary to save the country from the Democrats.' Nixon, for all his profound flaws, would never have said such a thing. His cover-up was, in a way, a tribute to the rule of law the way hypocrisy is often a tribute to virtue. He had some reverence for the Constitution, even as he betrayed it. He had some sense of responsibility for the wider system of government, and for his own political party, even as he struggled to save himself. Nixon committed high crimes — but, unlike Trump, he didn’t celebrate or publicize them or declare them legal and simply dare the body politic to take him down."

Writes Andrew Sullivan (in "Trump Is Begging to Be Impeached. Give Him What He Wants — Immediately" in New York Magazine).

But it isn't as if Nixon held a press conference and said "I’m a crook." It's as if Nixon had stepped down from his "I am not a crook" abstraction and said "I worked to cover up the break in and it was perfectly legal and done for the good of the country." Many people would have been shocked. They'd call the President a liar and lecture righteously about the real meaning of the law. That would be the analogy to Trump. And — who knows? — maybe if Nixon had the Trumpian style, he'd have toughed it out and kept his partisans from cutting off their support and dooming him.

And here's a funny sentence from Sullivan: "Nixon ordered the break-in and the cover-up and tried to keep it all on the down low, where indeed it might have stayed if he hadn’t taped all his incriminating conversations."

Nixon ordered the break-in?! Who says that?!

I googled my question and came up with "Did Nixon really order the Watergate break-in?" a 2014 article by Timothy Noah (at MSNBC), which looked at a then-new book by John Dean, "The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It." MSNBC, John Dean... this is the anti-Nixon view:

Who ordered it? “There is no evidence,” Dean writes, “in all the Nixon-Watergate-related conversations that anyone in the White House had advance knowledge that Liddy was going into the Watergate.” By “evidence” Dean must mean “definitive evidence,” because he quotes Haldeman saying that setting up the espionage team for Nixon’s re-election had been the idea of campaign chief and former attorney general John Mitchell. “Mitchell,” Haldeman told Nixon several months later, “was pushing” for “[s]ecret papers, and financial data that [DNC Chairman Lawrence] O’Brien had, that he was going to get.”...

(In the Watergate tapes, Nixon repeatedly asks why and how the break-in occurred, but of course he alone knew that future generations were listening in. It’s also possible he couldn’t remember whether he’d ordered the break-in or not. Dean thinks Nixon was haunted by the possibility that he might have and then forgotten about it. Nixon was, after all, already in the break-ins business, having previously ordered the firebombing of the liberal Brookings Institution to steal some files – a yarn too rococo to detail here. Happily, that order was never carried out.)

Sullivan's "Nixon ordered the break-in" is — as they say — fake news. It was a bad analogy anyway, because Trump's open acknowledgement that he wanted Ukraine to investigate Biden is not the same as saying "I’m a crook," but by tossing in "Nixon ordered the break-in," Sullivan really makes a hash of it.

And I don't know if Sullivan wrote the headline — "Trump Is Begging to Be Impeached. Give Him What He Wants — Immediately" — but it carries a repulsive blaming-the-victim logic that he (and New York Magazine) should disown. Immediately. Somebody thinks that's funny and incisive, but it smells like the despicable response to rape and other physical violence: She was begging for it and got what she wanted.

The only other way to think of begging for it is in the Br'er Rabbit sense — that the seeming victim wants you to fall into a trap. And that can't be what Sullivan is thinking (though it may be what Trump is doing)?

Whoa! Chris Hughes, having radically disrupted The New Republic, is now walking away from it.

Wow! What a media villain!

The New Republic, the century-old magazine that was rocked a year ago by the mass exodus of its staff following an effort by its owner to make it more digitally focused, is being put up for sale. Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook who purchased a majority stake in the struggling title in 2012, said in a staff memo Monday that he had underestimated “the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate,” and would seek to find a new owner.....

ADDED: My son John posted about this on Facebook, I commented there, and Timothy Noah (late of TNR and now of Politico) responded. I said I was interested in what he had to say, and he wrote this:

New owner should take a leaf from the supposedly market-worshipping right and not expect TNR to return a profit. If that's good enuf for National Review and the Weekly Standard why can't it be good enough for a magazine put out by people who are far less reverent about the virtues of untrammelled free enterprise? Plus the one GOOD thing about this golden age of income inequality is that it's produced a lot of rich people who can easily afford to subsidize a modest annual deficit. Hughes's mistake--a common one--was to pour a lot of money into the thing that he was never going to get back. Hence $20 million in losses over only four years. Also, the magazine should stop doing "long form" journalism because it's too expensive and it isn't really what TNR's been about all these years anyway. It should do lots of 1500- to 2000-word politicalreportage flavored with judicious opinion and wit, and it should do longer literary essays. In other words, it should be like the TNR of the 1980s only online and without the Cold War hawker. New owner should recapture its audience of political junkies, academics, and the intelligentsia, all of whom, I get the sense, have abandoned the magazine since Hughes took over.

AND: Roger Kimball: "ANYONE WANT TO BUY A CORPSE? YOURS FOR A BUCK."

"No Apologies: Why Mitt Romney Should Own His Rapaciousness."

That's the headline provided by email from The New Republic for this article by Timothy Noah, which, at the page, is headlined "Mitt Romney, Crybaby Capitalist."

I know, Noah is irritating if you're not rooting against Romney, but isn't there something to this point? It's something David Gregory kept trying to bring out on "Meet the Press" last Sunday. First, he was talking to Ed Gillespie (Senior Adviser, Romney 2012 Campaign/Former Chair, Republican National Committee), and I'll just ignore Gillespie's evasions. Here's Gregory, spliced together:

I talk with Tim Noah about the Wisconsin protests and a few other things.

ADDED: Meade makes an accidental appearance a little after 41:00, and I cover him up with a sheet of paper.

"Why don't Americans pay more attention to growing income disparity? One reason may be our enduring belief in social mobility."

Timothy Noah wrings his hands and puzzles over the perplexing problem that he, himself, answers with astonishing ease.