a lovely essay by the historian robert darden, the great cat massacre, a conspiracy of region printers in the eighteenth century to massacre cats, and they do massacre these cats and they laugh about it. what is so funny about a massacre of cats? the essay is a wonderful examination of the joking this of culture and you know that you finally get the time and place if you get their jokes. i am not getting the joke. i worked really hard in that piece of historical research to get that joke. i knew i could not actually communicate that joke to my reader because it required too may -- many layers of explanation. there's another moment of research in that project that speaks to a different problem, which is that one of these guys held for months in the dungeon of the basement of city hall was described, the man's name was caesar, a black slave, one of the few men who was literate, while he was in jail he read little and cried much. those four words, he read little and cried much. it was the only description of an emotional aspect have any of these guys who were living knowing they were goin