Two new additions to the Quarex library this week — one that's important and one that's just plain fun.
This one got a major expansion — from 10 chapters to 15, from 60 topics to 108. It now traces the full arc from the pre-Watergate era (when both parties still policed their own) through Nixon's resignation trauma, the evangelical alliance, Fox News and QAnon, McConnell's Senate norm destruction, and right up through Trump's second term.
Not light reading, but the kind of thing where you keep saying "wait, that actually happened?" Yes. All of it. Eat your vegetables.
This is the palate cleanser. Ten chapters about ordinary people who solved problems that defeated entire institutions — the Wright brothers beating the Smithsonian-funded competition with bicycle shop tools, a 15-year-old blind kid inventing a literacy system no one has improved in 200 years, a Hollywood actress co-inventing the technology behind your WiFi, and a farm boy who saw the idea for television while plowing a potato field.
Every chapter is a story about someone who was told "that's impossible" and did it anyway. Much more fun than the Watergate book.
The election database got its latest scrape this week. Across House, Senate, and Governor races: 157 candidates added, 81 removed across 45 states and territories. Maryland's 5th district alone picked up 15 new candidates. Full breakdown here:
— Peter