A poster by James Montgomery Flagg, born 141 years ago today.

Here we go again — a new week is starting, and all of us, everywhere, are just letting it happen. This is madness.

But at the least, we shouldn’t walk into this without knowing a couple things:

• It is the 115th birthday of the excellent Raymond Radiguet, author of The Devil in the Flesh, who was, by your age, long dead. Liesl Schillinger has called it  “one of the most potent, provocative, romantic reading experiences you could ever give yourself.”
• It is the 145th anniversary of the verdict in United States v. Susan B. Anthony, the suffragist’s trial on federal charges of Voting While Female. As the New York Times noted at the time, Anthony expressed “not a particle of doubt of her right to vote.” She was convicted and fined $100, which she refused to pay.
• William Reese, a legendary dealer in rare books, has died of prostate cancer at sixty-two. Raised on a cattle farm, Reese got into book-dealing by accident, when, as a sophomore at Yale, he unknowingly bought what turned out to be the fourth-oldest map of Mexico City in existence, and sold it to the university’s library to cover the rest of his tuition.
• In New Jersey today, lawmakers will begin considering a suite of legislation aimed at making textbooks more available to college students.
• On Saturday, we wrote about the very likable book brigade being planned in the great city of Wichita, Kansas, to help move a collection of books from the city’s Central Library to its new Advanced Learning Library. Well, guess what? The book brigade happened!
• We’ve been lucky in the past that Dirty Wars and Polished Silver author Lynda Schuster has covered the unfortunate changes to her adoptive hometown’s biggest paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Those changes became some of the biggest media news in the country this weekend, when editorial cartoonist Rob Rogers was abruptly fired, and promptly wrote about it for the New York Times.
• Did everyone see the micro-archive that SUNY Buffalo poetry professor Kaplan Harris assembled, documenting Dinesh D’Souza’s relationship to poetry? The only thing funnier than D’Souza chastising the NEA for funding Amiri Baraka is Robert Creeley writing to Allen Ginsberg to call D’Souza a “jr fascist.”
• Happy seventy-sixth birthday to Sir Paul McCartney — poet, audition-passer, Paperback Writer writer, and very sympathetic fellow.