So glad you have signed up to receive the For Random Learning Comes Newsletter! This is the fifty-fifth edition. Previous editions can be found on the blog's Newsletter page. I send it out weekly, so if you don't get my email on Saturday morning, please let me know! (Check your junk and spam folders too.) My five latest posts are at the end of this newsletter, latest first. *** I've been a bit more prolific this week, with three new poems to share. I don't know whether its the toasty, nearly 100-degree Florida weather, driving me inside: or the nail-biter January 6th hearings (for my reaction to January 6th from a few days later, read Great Patriots) making my gears turn; or the jaw-dropping Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade, a precedent of nearly 50 years, pushing me back into my chair. But I find I need to pull the release valve in my mind and let it all out. The first poem Dystopia is quite political and ushers us into the brave new world (to call out Alduous Huxley's portrayal of another future that leaves us shuddering) following the overturning of Roe. Perhaps some of you feel as disoriented as I. Perhaps some of you baked a cake, to celebrate. The second poem is called Wishful Thinking and touches on another tenet of sexual policy that many of us take for granted: the equal treatment of all genders and preferences. In my poem the narrator warns that all may not be as settled as we'd like to believe, as the ghosts of the past do not always yield to modernity without a fight. This seems especially powerful in light of the overturning of Roe. The third poem, Shares, is more of a pun, where I equate "shares" on social media with "shares" on the --lately extremely volatile-- stock market. I reach back to the misdeeds in mortgage bundling that precipitated the Great Recession of 2008 forward. With murmurs of a looming recession in the news this week, this poem spells out a doom of a different kind, a reputational crash, so to speak. Anyway, all is not gloom and doom here. Although I actually am reading, very slowly, the meaty book "Doom" by Naill Ferguson. He's a very prolific writer and professor at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, who has also done books on money "The Ascent of Money", on network theory and the power of networks through history "The Square and the Tower" as well as "Civilization," an explanation of how Europeans made the advances they did to usher in our modern world, and why, and who got hurt along the way. Those are only the ones I've read so far. I also enjoy his video presentations and the very informative podcast Good Fellows, even though from time to time they will chide liberals to the point that I feel a bit slighted. :) And I definitely disagree with Mr. Ferguson on the prospects of our current governor as Presidential candidate! See Frat Boy. Sorry to digress. Have a lovely week! Andrea *** If you haven't signed up for my newsletter yet, I hope you will consider doing so. And tell your friends! There's a blue signup form on every page. You can also follow my Twitter account, @AndreaLedew,which posts my previously published blogposts, poems and flash fiction. This will give you an idea of just how much mischief I've been up to over the past five or six years. Thanks again for your continued readership and support. It means a lot to me. Have a great week! Andrea The links below will take you to the five most recent posts. The blue logo takes you to the homepage. The section on English Majors has the most recent stuff.

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