And I Couldn't Eat It

Playing mah-jongg yesterday, I encountered this happy-go-lucky chocolate-covered peanut. Its particular joie de vivre, and its brazen disregard of the norms for bite-size snacks, made it a fascinating and compelling subject.



For other choco-nut pics in the new Christmas album, go here.

Manna-hatta

Going on in this way [in the 1630s], with every muscle and every ounce of guile put into maintaining survival, the Dutch settlers of Manhattan might scarcely have noticed what was happening over the next few years.

The sails out in the harbor appeared more frequently, bringing more faces, and more varied ones. Ebony faces from the central highlands of Angola. Arab faces creased from North African sandstorms. An Italian, a Pole, a Dane.

Something was happening that was quite unlike the unfolding of society at the two English colonies to their north, where the rigid Puritans, who arrived in 1630, and the even more rigid Pilgrims maintained, in their wide-brimmed piety, monocultures in the wild.

Manhattan was a business settlement, a way station on the rising Atlantic trade circuit. News of its existence spread to places as far afield as the Amazonian thickets of Bahia and Pernambuco in Brazil...

A trickle had started. In small clusters, the world began coming to North America via this island nestled in its inviting harbor.

--Excerpted and edited from The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America, by Will Shorto (Vintage Books, 2004)