Two completely unrelated links that are both part of my working life and fascinating.

First, from a presidential trivia group on Facebook, I got the link to this article, about the new Society of Presidential Descendants. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/10/28/president-descendant-society/?fbclid=IwAR17JJL5QR-J3BsKO4dOo1uPQ8bd-Tnzx4gkRsd6t9si8X4L2ErImrLt57k

We frequently talk about their ancestors, though I also made an attempt to discuss some of their descendants in my books. But this article talks about the fact that all those descendants are actually people who, through no action of their own, have to deal with being living connections to history. Some interesting stories in that article.

The other link, from an editors’ group on Facebook, talks about punctuation.
https://medium.com/creators-hub/what-i-learned-about-my-writing-by-seeing-only-the-punctuation-efd5334060b1

This is of specific interest to me, because last weekend I debuted my new talk, “Punctilious Punctuation,” at Boston Mensa’s Regional Gathering. Now I’m in the process of polishing that talk a bit more, based on the audience’s reaction and my own sense “hearing” it live. But anyway, this linked article talks about punctuation when the words infesting it have been removed. There are a couple of links in the article—including one to an app the author cobbled together, which will remove the words from a block of text to show you the punctuation—which I also recommend exploring after you’ve read the main text. Fascinating stuff there.