“A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts”*…
Nearly $1 trillion of art is expected to change hands in the coming decade, as boomers’ art collections get passed down. There won’t be enough buyers or museums to absorb it all. Felix Salmon on what inter-generational transfer may mean for the art world…
… The baby boomers spent money at an astonishing rate. In the single year of 2005, US boomers spent $7 trillion in 2026 dollars, per McKinsey. Twenty years earlier, in 1985, their predecessors in the Silent Generation had spent just $3 trillion in today’s dollars. Spending on art accelerated as the rich got richer, moved into ever-larger houses and became eager to splash out on discretionary purchases.
That unprecedented demand for art created an unprecedented supply of it too. “The art world became professionalized during the lifetime of the boomers,” notes Michael Darling, a co-founder of Museum Exchange, a company that tries to find museums willing to accept donors’ art. The number of artists making a living from their work reached previously unthinkable levels, with a concomitant increase in the number of galleries. There were about 150 art galleries in New York in 1946, per a 2005 Rand report. That doubled by 1961 and then doubled again by the early 2000s. In Los Angeles, the number of galleries went from almost zero in 1957 to more than 400 in 2005.
When patrons were limited to a few royal courts and religious institutions, the number of people who could make a living by producing art was relatively low. The boomers, blessed with vastly greater numbers, turned their money into battalions of collectable artists. In 1988 the Artnet Price Database, which tracks artists sold at auction, included 8,300 artists, including substantially all the Old Masters. By 2012 there were 90,275.
When you inherit art that was expensive when acquired, it’s difficult to think of it as “stuff” that could be thrown away or given to a thrift store. At the same time, storing and figuring out what to do with it can be enormously challenging. One way of making sure someone appreciates the art is to sell it. But finding buyers can be extraordinarily difficult. Most artists get forgotten over time. Even living artists have a hard time selling their work. A dead artist… needs a dealer who’s committed to resuscitating interest in them — and those dealers are few and far between, since it’s nearly always easier to sell the work of a living artist than a dead one.
Just looking at items that can be sold for cash on the secondary market, which is a tiny minority of all the art out there, roughly $1 trillion of art is expected to change hands just in the next 10 years, per Deloitte. No one is ready. The great wealth transfer includes a vast quantity of paintings and sculptures. A small proportion of it will have some sentimental value and be kept for that reason, but most of it is going to get moved out one way or another — sold, donated or even trashed…
[Salmon explores the options: continued stewardship by the heirs, sale (through auction houses or galleries), or donation (to museums)– all of which are, as he explains, fraught. But perhaps the biggest problem is the evolution of taste…]
… An even bigger barrier for inheritors looking to pass on a collection is the way tastes change over time. Boomers grew up looking at artists like Carl Andre or Balthus, congratulating themselves on how daringly receptive they were to the shattering of historical norms; as those norms get rebuilt, younger art lovers are much more likely to find reasons to avoid showing them entirely. Instead, their collections feature more women artists and tend to be more diverse in many other ways too.
The art world doesn’t fixate on the ultra-new in the way Hollywood or pop music does, where most consumption is of products produced and released in the past year or less. All the same, galleries overwhelmingly show new work by living artists, so that’s what most art collectors end up buying. That means heirs often end up inheriting work that used to be new and exciting but today is often little more than a faint memory.
The rise and fall of artists and artistic reputations is the subject of the emerging discipline of cultural evolution. Just as Darwinian evolution selects for species that do the best at surviving, artistic evolution selects for works that continue to attract our attention. Oleg Sobchuk, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, explains that art disappears from our collective memory first quickly and then slowly, in a process known as bi-exponential decay. “Sometimes we think about art as speaking to something that makes us human, that it’s general and timeless,” he says. “But in most cases, art is about something that is happening at that period of time.” The further we get away from the moment an artwork is made, the less of our attention it can generally command.
In paleontology there’s the concept of the “turnover pulse,” where the rate of extinction rises sharply; it’s not dissimilar to the theory of the paradigm shift in the history of science. In art, it’s been more than a century since the modernist revolution that started with impressionism and continued through Picasso and Duchamp. Now, for the first time, the dominant collectors and curators — not to mention artists — will be people who grew up in the age of the internet.
“Every new media, when it appears, creates some kind of rupture,” Sobchuk says. “Usually it functions as a revolution. The culture was in the hands of a small number of powerful individuals, and then from time to time, you have a technological revolution.” That doesn’t mean digital art will displace painting and sculpture. But it probably means there’s less appetite and reverence for modernism. Which doesn’t bode well for those inheriting a lot of it…
[Salmon explains why, though this transfer is essentially inevitable, it will unfold more slowly than we might think (TLDR: “Because there will still be many boomer buyers for every collector planning ahead and unwinding a collection, there won’t be nearly as much of a supply-and-demand mismatch over the next decade as the broader generational shift might imply…”) He concludes…]
… The great art transfer is a much bigger deal than “what are we going to do with all this stuff.” The art we keep will stay in the canon; the art we discard will be lost to history. All the same, the stuff question is becoming urgent, and its answer is sad, if simple: A tiny proportion of the art we inherit will be treasured and valued, and a little bit more will find a good home elsewhere, perhaps slowly accumulating historical value even if it continues to lose cultural cachet. But most of it will probably acquire signs of physical deterioration and neglect — bumps and scratches and sunbleaching… All artists are mortal, after all, and only a minuscule fraction of them achieves immortality through their work. The rest are bound to fade away, sooner or later.
Ars longa? “Boomers Are Leaving Behind More Art Than Anyone Wants,” (or here), from @felixsalmon.com in @bloomberg.com.
Also worth following: the series in e-flux on the relationship between contemporary art, real estate, housing, gentrification, and the material conditions of artists’ lives. Revisiting earlier pieces, it begins with “Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part I,” from Martha Rossler.
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As we contemplate the canon, we might send birthday greetings to two artists whose places in the firmament seem, at least so far, secure:
Diego Velázquez was baptized on this date in 1599. A Baroque master of the Spanish Golden Age and leading artist in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal, he is generally considered one of the greatest artists in the history of Western art.
Andrew Warhola was born on this date in 1928 in Pittsburgh, PA. Better known as Andy Warhol, he was a leading figure in the Pop art movement; his work (painting, filmmaking, photography, publishing, and performance art) challenged traditional boundaries between high and low culture and provoked us to think more clearly about the relationship of reference and referent. Widely considered the most important artist of the second half of the 20th century, he was a role model for a generation of post-modernist artists.
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters in the end”*…
C. J. Moran (peter-guillam123 on Github) maps the classics…
The short version: PlotLines plays classic books as journeys, on maps of their own era… PlotLines takes out-of-copyright classics and draws their characters’ journeys on a period map. Pick a book, press play, and the whole cast moves at once – or follow one person and let the map travel with them. Hover any stop and you get the place as the text itself names it, with the line that puts them there.
It began with Dracula, because Stoker wrote what is probably the best travel itinerary in Victorian fiction – a clerk crossing Europe by train, a ghost ship rounding Gibraltar with her captain lashed to the wheel, a three-pronged chase up a Romanian river at the end.
There are forty-three books now, and they are no longer all novels, or all set in Europe. A walk at Hardy’s pace across Wessex; a single London day of near-misses; a raft the length of the Mississippi; a stolen dog’s road from a Californian orchard to the Klondike ice; a two-town comedy running between Tokyo and Shikoku; a 120-chapter Chinese epic that needs five threads moving at once before it makes any sense at all; and a family driven out of a Southern town that is never once named. The shelf has turned out wider than I expected when I started, and more will follow…
Each book opens with a choice: watch the story or explore its places. A shelf of journeys: “PlotLines.”
See also: “Reading Maps“– more “journeys from fiction drawn on the real world”
* Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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As we trace steps (and think about the ways in which travel has changed), we might recall that it was on this date in 1891 that The Hotel Hauffe in Leipzig, Germany became the first establishment to honor an American Express Travelers Cheque. Travelers cheques were first issued in 1772 by the London Credit Exchange Company for use in 90 European cities; and in 1874, Thomas Cook was issuing “circular notes” that operated in the manner of travelers cheques. But until the late 19th century, well-off travelers relied mostly on letters of credit… and less wealthy travelers risked carrying cash. American Express’ was the first system of significant scale and global scope, and offered cheques in relatively small denominations, making them available to many more travelers.
“I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, ‘Hey, the sign says you’re open 24 hours.’ He said, ‘Yes, but not in a row.'”*…
As Max Burns reports, a wave of corporate consolidation is reshaping the grocery industry; today, the U.S. has one-third fewer grocery stores than it did 25 years ago. The result is that just four corporations—Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Albertsons—control more than two-thirds of the U.S. grocery market, This is squeezing workers, limiting competition, and giving this handful of retailers unprecedented control over what Americans pay for food…
If it feels to you like American consumers have fewer choices than ever before, your mind isn’t playing tricks on you. Federal regulators are approving corporate mega-mergers at the fastest rate since the 1980s. Consumers are feeling those industry-spanning consolidations everywhere, as hardly a sector of American life has escaped Wall Street’s goal of building the largest and most powerful corporate conglomerates in world history.
From power utilities and artificial intelligence to broadcast news networks and railroads, a few massive corporate players have come to dominate American commercial life in ways not seen since the Gilded Age trusts of the 19th century. Those consolidations have generated historic profits for executives and major shareholders while working families are faced with lower quality goods and services, fewer options, and a hostile labor market unfairly skewed toward the interests of the ultra-rich.
Democrats have been quick to criticize some of the nation’s biggest mergers as anti-worker and anti-consumer, but one critical sector of the U.S. economy has managed to escape widespread public criticism: grocery stores. Thanks to a record rise in special interest cash donations to both Democrats and Republicans, grocery-industry lobby groups have managed to keep prices high, wages low, and consumer choice limited while avoiding federal policymakers’ crosshairs. The result is an invisible crisis in the nation’s food industry that threatens to reshape how and what Americans eat.
In a corporate landscape defined by Republican deregulation, America’s grocery stores and food suppliers are consolidating despite active federal laws explicitly intended to prevent anticompetitive behavior. Perhaps the most important of those laws is the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, or RPA, also known as the Anti-Price Discrimination Act. For decades, RPA ensured fair competition by banning food suppliers from charging different prices to different stores; at least it did until the Reagan-era Federal Trade Commission largely stopped enforcing it in the 1980s. Even though RPA is still the law of the land, food suppliers like Pepsi now routinely ignore the law without consequence.
“Big corporations have buying power, and they can oppress and dictate to producers what they want to pay for crops,” Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos told me. “A corporation can come to a farmer and say ‘we’ll pay you this price for potatoes, but you can’t give that price to anyone else,’ so they fix prices in a way that hurts independent supermarkets and independent businesses.”
Megacorporations aren’t subtle about flexing their market power to fix prices in ways that protect other megacorporations. Last year President Donald Trump’s FTC dismissed an RPA claim against PepsiCo which alleged that Pepsi illegally offered grocery chain Walmart unfair pricing discounts while charging smaller chains more for the same products. When independent grocery stores undercut Walmart by lowering the price of Pepsi products, PepsiCo allegedly responded by raising wholesale prices or refusing to do business with the smaller stores until they raised prices above those at Walmart.
As independent grocery stores struggle, they become more likely to sell out to larger national chains, leading to consolidation that makes both prices and employee wages less competitive. As president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 3000, Faye Guenther represents over 50,000 grocery and retail workers across the Pacific Northwest. Guenther has spent years fighting the growing imbalance between rising prices and falling wages. Now, she says, things have reached a crisis point for regular Americans…
Read on for Burns’ looks at the impact on workers (TLDR: fewer jobs, lower wages), availability of stores (TDLR: or its opposite, food deserts), and food prices (TLDR: they’re rising), and for his suggested remedies.
The painful reality behind the joke “I’m getting stronger with age. I can now lift $100 worth of groceries with one hand!”: “America’s Grocery Monopoly Problem,” from @themaxburns.bsky.social in @damemagazine.bsky.social.
See also: “Grocery Retail: The Last Link in the Monopoly Chain.”
Also apposite: “Big Food Versus the People” (what court battles reveal about the ultra-processed food industry’s corporate litigation strategies). Further to which: “Is the recycling symbol free speech? A judge just ruled it could be“…
A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.
In a preliminary injunction issued earlier this month, U.S. District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.
The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60 percent of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling — not collected and thrown away — could bear the chasing arrows.
Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court….
Of course, there’s always eating out… but of course, that’s got its own issues: “The restaurant business is changing beyond recognition,” gift article from @economist.com.
Oh, and we might note that this is National Farmers Market Week.
* Steven Wright
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As we chow down, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that the officially-adjudicated “first supermarket” opened: King Kullen in Queens, New York.
Grocery chains had been around since 1859, when The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) was established. But they rarely sold fresh meat or produce and relied on the old mercantile system of clerks puling items from shelves on request. As long-time readers may recall, the first self-service grocery store was the Piggly Wiggly, which shifted to self-serve in 1916.
The first modern supermarkets appeared just over twenty years later, offering a full range of food items, beverages, and household items under one self-service roof, often with an emphasis on low prices as well as convenience. There were a number of contenders for the “first supermarket” crown…
To end the debate, the Food Marketing Institute in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and with funding from H.J. Heinz, researched the issue. They defined the attributes of a supermarket as “self-service, separate product departments, discount pricing, marketing and volume selling.” They determined that the first true supermarket in the United States was opened by a former Kroger employee, Michael J. Cullen, on 4 August 1930, inside a 6,000-square-foot former garage in Jamaica, Queens in New York City. The store King Kullen, operated under the logic of “pile it high and sell it cheap.” The store layout was designed by Joseph Unger, who originated the concept of customers using baskets to collect groceries before checking out at a counter. Everything displayed for sale in the store “had prices clearly marked”, meaning that consumers would no longer need to haggle over prices. Cullen described his store as “the world’s greatest price wrecker.” At the time of his death in 1936, there were seventeen King Kullen stores in operation. Although Saunders had brought the world self-service, uniform stores, and nationwide marketing, Cullen built on this idea by adding separate food departments, selling large volumes of food at discount prices and adding a parking lot. Moreover, the supermarket format as pioneered by King Kullen was not only cheap, but convenient, in how it combined so many different departments under one roof which had formerly required trips to separate stores. – source
““The strangenesses are multiplying… though the world before they began was already a strange place, so often it’s difficult to know if an event falls into the category of the old, ordinary strangenesses or the new, extraordinary variety.”*…
In a review of five recent books, Robert Baskin considers the genre of “weird fiction”…
On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, the British science fiction and fantasy writer M. John Harrison [accomplished author, Booker judge, and long-list nominee this year] asked a question on Third Alternative magazine’s messageboard: “The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything?” This incited a taxonomic fury, as writers, fans, and amateur scholars attempted to define this new subgenre. Harrison eventually offered his own definition; the New Weird, like stories published in the namesake early twentieth-century pulp magazine Weird Tales, is a mix of “horror, sf, and fantasy,” with an emphasis on the horror…
[Baskin usess the books in question to review the genre’s history (Poe, Lovecraft, Edith Wharton [!]) and its current state (Miéville, VanderMeer, et al.); he concludes…]
… So why read this shit? Why reissue it?
Weird fiction is a literature of crisis. The main narrative move of every important Weird fiction story is the Weird intrusion, the appearance of the new and wrong object or sensation or practice that does not belong. These intrusions challenge and endanger the protagonist’s sense of metaphysical stability. In the King in Yellow, the Weird intruder is the titular play—the madness of the text refuses to remain on the page. China Miéville argues that this awareness of crisis makes Weird Fiction uniquely open to interpretation: a “leeway for readings against the ideological grain is part of what makes Weird Fiction such an ongoingly fascinating field.” The Weird is not just a literature of fear and repulsion; it also always includes wonder and attraction. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” – Lovecraft’s contribution to the Weird Mount Rushmore – depicts the state’s extermination of a group of racially ambiguous New Englanders who made the mistake of breeding with fishy foreigners. Despite this, the story ends in sublime ambiguity [spoiler for a nearly century-old story to follow]. The protagonist, who has spent the rest of the story in hateful terror of the Innsmouth locals, discovers that he is one of them, and in my favorite passage in all of Lovecraft, decides to go to the sea with his cousin and embrace The Weird: “We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’hanthlei, and in that layer of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.” What was once feared is now cause for exultation. The move between terror and wonder recurs throughout the Weird corpus—if you’re attuned to its Weird frequencies…
A literature for our times: “‘We Shall Dwell Amidst Wonder and Glory For Ever’: On Weird Fiction,” from @clereviewbooks.bsky.social.
* Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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As we engage extremity, we might recall that i was on this date in 1946 that Santa Claus Land, the world’s first themed amusement park, opened in Santa Claus, Indiana…
In 1941, Louis J. Koch visited the town of Santa Claus in Indiana. He found it sad that some children would visit this town eager to meet Santa only to find that he was not there. This fueled his desire to create a Santa Claus Land park where kids could see Santa any time of the year. Due to World War II, construction didn’t begin until August 1945.
The park opened on this day in 1946 with free admission, a toy shop, toy displays, a restaurant, a few rides and of course the jolly old elf himself. Later, a deer farm was added.
In 1955, a new section, Pleasureland (now known as Rudolph’s Reindeer Ranch) was added. As the park grew, the focus of the park grew as well focusing on families rather than just children.
By 1984, the park added a Halloween and a Fourth of July section to the park and changed its name to Holiday World. In 1993, the Koch family added the Splashin’ Safari Water Park. In 2006, during the park’s 60th anniversary, Holiday World added a Thanksgiving section.
– source
“Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations… a community of minds, reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars”*…
The sharing of experimental results and the underlying data is critical to the advance of science. Indeed, when I had the chance to do a scenario planning exercise with a collection of the leading research university librarians in the U.S. a couple of decades ago, the biggest threat/fear they surfaced was the concern that the free and open exchange of ideas and data, as manifest formally in scientific publication and informally in the collegial cooperation among scientists, would be occluded by an increasing proprietary embrace of knowledge.
73% of geneticists surveyed in an article in the 23/30 January 2002 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association agreed that although keeping data private may help the individual researcher, data hoarding is detrimental to the progress of science Still, sadly, that threat has grown since the turn of the millennium.
By way of current (and dramatic) example: as Celina Zhao reports, more than half of AI “unicorns” have never published a paper or preprint…
Today’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) startups make no shortage of bold promises. Their technologies, some boast, will revolutionize software development, drug discovery, and scientific research.
Yet a new preprint posted on 16 July on bioRxiv suggests many of these firms barely participate in one of science’s most fundamental practices: publicly documenting discoveries in scientific literature so other researchers can evaluate and build on them. More than half of AI unicorns—private companies valued at more than $1 billion—have never played a leading role in publishing a scientific paper or preprint, according to the new analysis. Collectively, they accounted for just one in every 1000 AI papers published in 2025.
“For a field that is supposedly reshaping science and is so advanced in terms of scientific potential, not having any scientific documentation seems like a very weird paradox,” says paper co-author John Ioannidis, a metascientist at Stanford University [see here]. “How can you judge that what they say is real, validated, and reproducible?” The scarcity of publications, others say, also makes it harder to assess AI’s social impacts, including energy use and safety.
But University of Alberta AI ethicist Mohamed Abdalla says the findings reflect the incentives facing commercial AI developers, rather than solely a failure to uphold scientific norms. “It’s not the company’s job to advance science, right?” he says. “The company’s job is to advance money.”
Ioannidis has long studied how unicorns, particularly in biotech, engage with the scientific literature. (In 2015, he was the first to publicly scrutinize the lack of peer-reviewed studies produced by Theranos, the blood testing startup that proved to be based on fraudulent data.) He wondered whether AI unicorns would show similar patterns.
To find out, he and his team first identified all 317 unicorn AI companies that have existed from 1998 to 2025. Then, they searched for publications affiliated with these startups—including journal articles, conference papers, reviews, and preprints. They selected those where a company researcher played a leading role as a first or last author, indicating the startup had made a substantial contribution to the work. The final data set included 2077 final publications, comprising 1389 peer-reviewed papers and 688 preprints.
More than half of the startups had never produced a single qualifying paper, the analysis revealed. Scientific influence proved even more concentrated, with the top 5% of firms accounting for greater than 90% of all citations. OpenAI alone was responsible for nearly 40% of all citations in the data set, followed by the Chinese computer vision company Megvii and the platform Hugging Face. And even at the most prolific companies, much of the output came from the same small group of repeat authors. For example, despite OpenAI employing roughly 4500 people, only eight researchers had authored five or more qualifying papers.
The findings are unsurprising to some AI researchers given how the industry is structured. For example, unlike the pharmaceutical industry, where published discoveries can be protected by patents, AI companies have learned they often gain little from publicly disclosing technical advances, says Nur Ahmed, an AI researcher at the University of Arkansas. Google’s landmark 2017 paper on the transformer—the architecture that underpins today’s large language models—has become a classic cautionary example, Abdalla adds. Although Google patented aspects of the technology, “I don’t think anybody’s paying Google for that,” he says.
Startups also operate on much faster timelines than academia, where peer review can lumber on for months or even years. That’s why many AI companies have embraced what Avijit Ghosh, an AI policy researcher at Hugging Face, calls the “blogification” of research: announcing new models and releasing code or data sets through blog posts and technical reports rather than scientific journals. The new analysis didn’t track those outputs, he points out.
For Ghosh, the debate shouldn’t center on publishing in journals versus blogs. What matters is whether companies are releasing enough code, data sets, or model weights (the numbers that determine how a model interprets and responds to a prompt) for others to independently verify and build on their work, he says.
The preprint also found that firms based in China consistently published more papers than their counterparts based in the United States. Whereas leading U.S. frontier labs have increasingly kept the details of their most capable models secret or “closed sourced,” leading Chinese companies have embraced “open-source” models. Moonshot AI, one of the Chinese startups included in the study, recently unveiled Kimi K3—one of the strongest open models to date—and publicly released its model weights through Hugging Face today.
But whether models are open or closed, the rapid pace toward increasingly powerful generalist AI worries Emma Pierson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. She argues AI research—whether published freely or kept secret—risks accelerating models that pose serious societal and safety concerns, including supercharging cyberattacks. “If we were racing forward on cancer-curing AI, I would be like, ’Fantastic, full steam ahead,’” she says. “But that’s not what we’re racing toward, right?”…
The secretive unicorns: “AI’s top startups are barely publishing their research,” from @science.org.
By way of example? In order to have a broader footprint in AI for (default proprietary) scientific discovery, Google moves away from a successful AI effort (that did publish): “Google DeepMind dismantles Nobel-winning AlphaFold team in strategy shift” (gift article from the FT). One wonders: when these LLMs run out of published papers on which to train, where (and how) will they source the knowledge they need to stay useful?
* Neil deGrasse Tyson
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As we share and share alike, we might recall that it was on this date in 1887 that Chester A. Hodge of Beloit, Wisconsin received patent No. 367,398 for ‘spur rowel’ barbed wire (consisting of spur shaped wheels with 8 or 10 points mounted between 2 wires). It was one of many patents for barbed wire (e.g., here), which spread across the American West rapidly (thanks, in no small measure to the guy featured in the almanac entry here)– and (by protecting farmers from foraging free-ranging cattle) paved the way for the expansion of wheat (and other kinds of) farming… even as it spelled the doom of a commons– the open range.
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