I spent the month trying to get through some of the backlog that has been piling up on the shelf to the left of my desk. That might be a fool’s game as the backlog never seems to shrink, but I’ll keep at it for a few more months, at least.
I finished up an issue of Analog that I started last month. Then I moved on to some old issues of Jacobin. The Fall 2024 issue included an informative article about the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Hanns Eisler. And one about the artist Wyndham Lewis. The Winter 2025 issue of the same included an article about the anti-monopoly movement in the USA. That’s relevant as the whole point of this blog seems, sometimes, to be to provide commentary on the TOEFL/IELTS monopoly on English testing.
Meanwhile, I strolled over to the Doksan Public Library where I read the April 2026 issue of National Geographic. It contained this great article about a Byzantine Shipwreck and whey the ship was carrying a cache of gold and jewels. The article would have provided the basis for a perfect TOEFL integrated writing question. Alas, that type of question was removed from the test in January.
