Students tried—unsuccessfully, I hope—to get a professor fired for allegedly falling asleep during an “anti-racist meeting” on Zoom. Patricia Simon, who teaches theater arts at Marymount Manhattan College, said she was just “looking down or briefly resting my Zoom-weary eyes.” The students started a petition on Change.org (which really should be renamed—Whine.com?) claiming that her apparent lack of excitement does not “align with the anti-racist views and actions that were promised to be adopted by the department earlier this week,” and that it—yes, her nap—“has only capitalized on a pattern of negligence and disrespect.”

We’re all a little weary, professor Simon, of these juvenile tyrants, and your briefly resting head captures how we all feel right now. So why not actually capitalize on it? Put it on a t-shirt. I’d buy it.

In other news: Miles Harvey tells the story of a forged letter that began a Mormon succession crisis: “On July 9, 1844, a letter from a dead man arrived at the post office in Burlington, Wisconsin, forty miles southwest of Milwaukee. Addressed to ‘Mr. James J. Strang,’ it had been postmarked three weeks earlier in the Mormon city of Nauvoo, Illinois. The dead man was Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He had written the letter nine days before his murder, but already he could see what fate would soon befall him. ‘The wolves are upon the scent, and I am waiting to be offered up,’ he confided to Strang, whom he addressed as ‘My Dear Son.’”

Atlas to guard a temple of Zeus: “A colossal statue of Atlas, buried for centuries among ancient ruins, will soon take its rightful place among the ancient Greek temples of Agrigento on Sicily. The city’s archaeological park announced that the artwork, one of the most celebrated sculptures on the island, will be raised upright in front of the Temple of Zeus.”

“Fine as frog’s hair”—a dictionary of Southern Appalachian phrases.

A new translation of Asterix into English aims to conquer America. Will it?

Kyle Smith reviews Flannery: “Flannery (which was slated to be shown at New York City’s Film Forum but is instead being released online) is, like its subject, heavily constrained by circumstance but liberated by imagination. The film makes use of only a single filmed television interview with O’Connor, shot in 1955, but her stories come to life via charming animated sequences and droll narration by Mary Steenburgen.”

How Disney World was built: “This democratization of travel was precisely what Walt Disney observed on November 22, 1963, when he flew over Orlando in a private plane, assessing the area’s potential for his Disney World project. He looked down and saw Interstate 4 intersecting with Florida’s Turnpike, both roads teeming with fast-moving traffic. Not far away from this hub, he eyed a vast stretch of virgin swamp. ‘This is it!’ Disney exclaimed over the roar of engines. With such a combination of highways and undeveloped land, Disney could build his dreamed-of tourist mecca—America’s “total destination resort,” as his planners referred to it. He bought up 27,000 acres, anonymously and piecemeal, from Central Florida farmers, ranchers, and rural landholders. For $200 per acre, owners were more than happy to sell to one of the five dummy corporations orchestrating Disney’s clandestine ‘Project X.’ In time, the locals noticed that the ground was shifting beneath their feet. Rumors ran rampant as to who or what was purchasing southwest Orlando. In October 1965, one headline in the Sentinel read: ‘We Say ‘Mystery’ Industry Is Disney.’ A year later, Uncle Walt officially announced his plans for a ‘bigger and better’ version of Disneyland in Florida. The Associated Press crowned him ‘the most celebrated visitor since Ponce de Leon.’ . . . Times were tough in the early sixties. Perhaps this explains why Disney’s announcement sounded like a godsend to these beleaguered mom-and-pop enterprises. ‘Anyone who is going to spend $100 million nearby is good, and a good thing,’ the owner of Cypress Gardens was quoted as saying. And he was terrifically wrong. About his own prospects, but also about the size of the investment.”

Kevin Williamson reviews Thomas Sowell’s Charter Schools and Their Enemies. 

Photos: Winners of the Audubon Photography Awards

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