Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Gustavus Adolphus, late king of Sweden, plans a trip to Palestine, and requests international compatriots.

“And this statue of Liberty is a gift to a people from another people who do not love or value liberty for the Chinese.”

Monkeys are ungrateful creatures, but can be caught with pitch-lined gloves. They like to ride pigs. A monkey will unfold all your papers and scatter them about the room.

A description of the Pyrophone, an early sound synthesizer utilizing tubes and fire.

The country is tired of the Philippine War. It would like to close the account.

With $50,000 over the course of his life, what did John Jones accomplish?

One of the most agonizing pieces of prose ever written, and a warning to all who would use puns.

In the intervening years, this speech has been reinterpreted and co-opted by: those who would make King into a good negro, forgetting his uncomfortable, “Why We Can’t Wait” radicalism; those who would make King into an Uncle Tom, claiming that he didn’t go far enough, that his non-violence can be equated with weakness; those who would throw the first stone, and use his philandering as a convenient reason to dismiss his nights and days of work, his jail time, his constant labor; and those who take pleasure in the rhetorical grace of the speech, but ignore its native substance, and sample the speech for pop songs, layer it into montages, or use it in television commercials. None of this co-opting changes the fact that the speech is one of the few excellent pieces of exhortatory, visionary rhetoric ever written, and certainly the last great city-on-the-hill vision of America that we’ve received—written by a man who lived under segregation in the old, bad south. 40 years to the day later, the vision is far from realized. But at least it’s a lighthouse towards which to steer.