Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Behind the Scenes Minis: The Apostrophe and the Rich Guy About this episode Tracy talks about a book that she didn't use for research on Viola Roseboro'. Holly talks about how wealth inequality has shaped science history.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
0:04 Speaker 01 Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness? I'm Shaquille O'Neal, and this shouldn't be anybody's experience. Ask your doctor about Zepbound Trisepotide, the first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in adults with obesity.
0:20 Speaker 02 Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic
1:05 Speaker 02 reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant-to-be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.
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3:17 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
3:28 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
3:31 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
3:32 Tracy V. Wilson? This week on the show, we talked about Viola Roseborough.
3:35 Holly Frey? Oh, yeah.
3:37 Tracy V. Wilson? I, it was really that apostrophe that caught my attention at the end of her name that made me go, why is that spelled that way?
3:46 Holly Frey? Viola, what are you doing?
3:47 Tracy V. Wilson? I had one specific difficulty with research for this, which is that, as we alluded to, there is one book-length biography that I know of, of her.
4:01 Holly Frey? Oh, yeah.
4:02 Tracy V. Wilson? One. It is by Jane Kirkland Graham, someone I could find no information about other than the fact that she wrote this biography.
4:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Of Viola Roseboro. It was published in 1955. It is more than 600 pages long.
4:24 Holly Frey? Whoa, that's a minutia biography.
4:27 Tracy V. Wilson? That's a lot, and it is two volumes published under one cover. So sometimes I can find, when there are obscure books like this, I do have access to a lot of different libraries. And sometimes when there's something pretty obscure, I can find it in one of those libraries. That was not the case this time. There are maybe nine copies of this book in any library anywhere in the United States. It's possible that some of them can be sent through interlibrary loan, but like, an extremely rare book that was published in 1955, maybe not. Also, 600 pages is like, really long for our show.
5:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Like, that's, that's not really an amount of time that we can devote to one subject.
5:18 Holly Frey? Yeah, unless you're just like, doing nothing else with your week. And I mean, nothing else.
5:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Absolutely nothing. Or if it's gonna become a two-part episode, that could potentially work. So I guess I lied a little bit. I could also, in addition to Jane Kirkland Graham having written this book, I also did find out that she lived in Bamberg, South Carolina, and was a schoolteacher. That was it. So what I wound up doing was I read every review that I could find of this book. And there are a number of reviews of it that were published in like, literary journals. And the reviewers, the same kinds of words showed up in a lot of the reviews. Words like unusual and unorthodox.
6:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Because apparently, as Holly guessed, from the fact that it was more than 600 pages long, it does get into the minutia of things. Apparently, there's a lot of discussion of where individual facts came from. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who said what? Some of the chapters of the book apparently have. Extensive citations, basically, throughout the text, but there's no index and there's no formal bibliography, which the reviewers all found made it very hard to like, re-find information.
6:47 Holly Frey? Right.
6:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Like, there was no index to refer back to if they were like, where was the part that she was talking about that time she was in Rhode Island? Who could say? It's some there. So.
6:58 Holly Frey? She needed Viola Roseborough to edit that bit.
7:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Maybe so. It's possible that Jane Kirkland Graham was really Jean Kirkland, who was one of Roseborough's correspondents, friends with Roseborough, friends with some of Roseborough's friends, and decided to write a biography of her after her death, but it's not totally clear. One of the reviewers, named Scott C. Osborne, pointed out the many flaws in this biography, but also called it, quote, "prodigious research, obviously performed with love." So all of that, I was like, I, I could see if I can get this through interlibrary loan, which would mean delaying when I could work on this episode. I would have to wait for the book to arrive.
7:47 Holly Frey? Right.
7:48 Tracy V. Wilson? But after having read the same consistent criticisms of the biography, I was like, I feel like this biography is just gonna make it harder.
7:58 Holly Frey? Right. It's gonna drag down the research process.
8:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I would have filled in some of the gaps that I do have about her, but it would have added so much to the research process, just to get through it. I did really love one particular thing that was said by Isabel Howell in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly, in their review of this book, which was, quote, "Her cordial and generous acknowledgements of indebtedness to the Vanderbilt and Tennessee State Library staffs ought to be an encouragement to all librarians." So I guess Jane Kirkland Graham was full of thanks and praise for the librarians who helped her with the prodigious research, obviously, performed with love.
8:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Viola Roseborough was also featured in that Southern Women in New York article that we talked about in the Elizabeth Bisland episode.
8:54 Holly Frey? Oh, yeah, yeah.
8:55 Tracy V. Wilson? She did have a similar trajectory. That was one of the reasons why I did not immediately jump into figuring out more about her after Elizabeth Bisland. I was like, this does seem like it's gonna have some of the same
9:06 Holly Frey? Right.
9:06 Tracy V. Wilson? moments of, you know, person who grew up elsewhere, moving to New York, trying to make a living as a writer. So let's wait just a couple of months before we get into it. I feel like if I had known her, I would have loved and hated her.
9:21 Holly Frey? I think I would have just hated her. Is that terrible to say?
9:25 Tracy V. Wilson? No.
9:26 Holly Frey? There's a specific personality that she seems to fit the bill of that I have encountered many times in my life. And people go, you will love this person because I am a chatty person and I like to chitter chatter. But I don't like people. I mean, when I was younger, yes. But as I have gotten older, more mature, I do not like people who are mean for sport.
9:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
9:52 Holly Frey? I don't care how witty you are, if you're being a jerk. I think you're a pretentious jerk. That's the nice word I can use. There are much, much more salty words bubbling in my esophagus right now. I just, I don't, I don't care that you're, you're a hoot. I think you're a jerk at the end of the day. Like her whole like, ah, I hate that I can't just insult people. I'm like, I'm out. I'm out like a trout.
10:16 Tracy V. Wilson? You're done.
10:17 Holly Frey? I'm swimming away from this one.
10:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
10:22 Tracy V. Wilson? I was reminded of Steel Magnolias, and if you don't have anything nice to say, come sit by me.
10:27 Holly Frey? Which is also attributed, as we've discussed on the show before, to Alice Roosevelt.
10:31 Tracy V. Wilson? I forgot that.
10:32 Holly Frey? Which is an interesting, you know, little
10:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
10:35 Holly Frey? connection point.
10:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
10:36 Holly Frey? Yeah. I mean, listen, I love a little gossip. I love calling it like it is. But I also just think if you are going into conversations because you want to be mean, there's also that thing where she's like, I take control of it. And I'm like, I'm out. That's a, that's a bossy person. I don't, I don't mind if you are a person that dominates conversations as long as you're a delight. But if you're just kind of being bossy because you think you're better than everybody else.
10:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Then you're done.
11:00 Holly Frey? I'm sorry, Viola. I don't think we can hang.
11:08 Speaker 01 Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness? I'm Shaquille O'Neal and this shouldn't be anybody's experience. Ask your doctor about Zepbound Trisepotide, the first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in adults with obesity.
11:24 Speaker 02 Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced-calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain
12:08 Speaker 02 or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant-to-be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulphonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.
12:31 Speaker 01 Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com.
12:39 Speaker 06 First thought is like, wow, how are we gonna do all this?
12:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
13:02 Speaker 06 It was gonna rival anything that was already built, and that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
13:09 Tracy V. Wilson? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game to game.
13:16 Speaker 07 Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.
13:22 Tracy V. Wilson? And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
13:25 Speaker 07 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.
13:30 Speaker 06 What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
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13:36 Holly Frey? Connecting changes everything. AT&T.
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14:45 Holly Frey? This life check in is brought to you by State Farm. Porque el bienestar de tu familia también merece protección. Okay, real talk. I'm about to become a dad again. And wow, it hits different the second time. Hi, I'm Wilmer Valderrama, and I've done, you know, I've done the red carpets, the long days on set and all that, but nothing prepares you for that moment when you're building a crib and you realize you're building a future. Familia is everything to me. The laughs, the chaos, the unconditional love, but also the pressure, la responsabilidad. If you're stepping into something big right now, starting a family, getting engaged, movie
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15:42 Tracy V. Wilson? The things I loved about her are how much she loved reading, how much she really seems to have found joy in finding interesting new work in the mailbag at the magazine. How much she really seems to have never lost sight of the fact that that's an incredibly cool job to have, if that's something that you find joy in, right? I think it's easy for everybody in every job, no matter how cool it is, to eventually kind of fall into a mundane rut with it. And it doesn't seem like she ever did that. It seems like she always was like, all right, I get to go to work and I get to find
16:25 Tracy V. Wilson? some amazing new story in this mailbag full of stories. And then I get to help that writer get more well-known in the world. And I think she really loved that and put her heart into it for as long as she was doing it. The fact that somehow she was at least briefly able to afford an apartment in New York and multiple cottages. That's the thing I'm curious about. Did she actually have enough money to do that? Or was she really financially overextending herself? And that is what contributed to the 1920s being so much harder for her. I had initially, before I quite realized the timeline, I had attributed that more to the Great Depression.
17:06 Holly Frey? Right.
17:07 Tracy V. Wilson? But a lot, like the height of the Great Depression was after she was having a lot of those struggles.
17:13 Holly Frey? That struck me while we were talking through this. I'm like, oh, she hit the down ramp before the depression even hit. That had to have been a rough, rough time.
17:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. So, uh, I like that she.
17:27 Tracy V. Wilson? Like to make her own way that I similarly to you don't necessarily like that she enjoyed being mean or insulting.
17:37 Holly Frey? I just, you know, that's always that thing where it's like, okay, what is that person getting out of it? Like, why do you want it? Why is that a thing you prize?
17:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
17:46 Holly Frey? And it's usually doesn't take you to a good place.
17:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That seems to have, I think, been one of the contradictions about her because people also talked about how she was really generous with her friends. And even when she didn't have any money, she was always scraping something together to try to buy little treats for people and especially books. Like if somebody came to visit her, they always left with a book. But then sometimes she could be very blunt in her criticisms of people, sometimes beyond what's really necessary.
18:21 Holly Frey? The other thing too, is that she wanted to make her own way in the world, which I love.
18:28 Holly Frey? But not to put any of that effort towards ensuring other women could do the same.
18:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Sure, sure.
18:35 Holly Frey? And I'm like, girl.
18:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
18:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, the contradictions in how she was living her life and what she thought politically. I wonder if that 600 and something page biography sheds any light on that.
18:53 Holly Frey? Right.
18:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Like where that was coming from. Was it like, I got mine and I don't need to worry about anybody else? Or was there something else going on there? Don't know.
19:01 Holly Frey? Yeah, I don't, it's really hard to, is that her form of rebellion because she grew up with hippie parents? Is it, you know what I mean? Like,
19:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Sure.
19:13 Holly Frey? Trying to parse that file is a little tricky.
19:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe someday, because I think there are various services is not even the right word, sort of print on demand situations that will print rare out of print books on demand.
19:34 Holly Frey? Right.
19:34 Tracy V. Wilson? And I think one of those does have this biography. So I also could have spent money and waited a long time to get it. So maybe.
19:48 Holly Frey? I also have a question for you.
19:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
19:51 Holly Frey? Because I'm curious what your take is on Willa Cather's will.
19:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
19:56 Holly Frey? And it being disregarded after.
20:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay, that so here is my understanding of this situation. And I'm going to say I did not, I got to a point where I felt like I had a satisfactory answer, but I do not know, I cannot promise this is like the whole story. So Willa Cather's will said, none of my correspondence published in whole or in part.
20:20 Holly Frey? Right.
20:22 Tracy V. Wilson? And then also, there was an executor who all of that was tied to. And that executor eventually died. And at that point, everything that the will had specified to go through the executor, all of that expired. And the setup that had been established to maintain her literary legacy dissolved with the expiration of all of that. So then a new, basically executor, like the will is over, but like a new organization had to be sort of developed to maintain the Willa Cather legacy.
21:00 Holly Frey? Right.
21:01 Tracy V. Wilson? And that organization ultimately decided that it was of importance to history and literature and study of Willa Cather to be able to publish that correspondence. And also, I think she had specified in her will not to have any adaptations of her work. And so I think they may have revisited that also. So my understanding is that all of this. Was within the bounds of what was legal within the terms of her will.
21:34 Holly Frey? Yeah, it just made me feel icky.
21:36 Tracy V. Wilson? I get it.
21:37 Holly Frey? Like she, she literally said she did not want this.
21:40 Tracy V. Wilson? She said forever.
21:42 Holly Frey? And you.
21:42 Tracy V. Wilson? As far as I know, she said forever.
21:43 Holly Frey? Okay, but it's later now. And legally, we can, so we're just.
21:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, I don't know if the details of the will were do not ever publish this until after the death of this person.
21:57 Holly Frey? Gotcha.
21:57 Tracy V. Wilson? The executor, or if it was do not ever publish this ever, ever.
22:02 Holly Frey? I mean, I don't, yeah, I don't know.
22:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I don't either. And I don't really feel like doing an episode on Willa Cather to figure it out more.
22:13 Holly Frey? As we said during recording, I'm not that, not really a fan of her work.
22:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. And I'm also like, I'm not a lawyer and that what I, everything I just said was sort of my understanding.
22:24 Holly Frey? Right, right.
22:24 Tracy V. Wilson? On having to try to figure out like, wait a minute, this thing that here says that she said for her letters never to be published. But I read some of her letters while researching this episode, what's going on? So, yeah, I don't for sure know either.
22:43 Holly Frey? I mean, I'm, I'm going through the like logic flow, right of like, well, she did try to get her letters back from people.
22:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
22:51 Holly Frey? So she didn't want them out there, but maybe that's because she wanted to control it with a weird clause in her will. I don't know.
22:57 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
22:57 Holly Frey? I haven't read her will.
22:58 Tracy V. Wilson? And there's possibly, it's possible that we will get an email either from a lawyer or someone who knows a lot more about Willa Cather. Who can give a fuller explanation than my layperson, not a lawyer, who looked just enough to figure out. If she said no, why is this on the internet?
23:17 Holly Frey? Yeah.
23:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
23:19 Holly Frey? Fascinating.
23:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I kind of like not necessarily with Willa Cather because again, no plans to do a Willa Cather episode. But there have definitely been times that we have worked on episodes on the show where like there's a question of would this person want these details?
23:39 Holly Frey? Right.
23:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Out there and sometimes there's sort of a question of like the historical interest about something.
23:46 Holly Frey? Yeah.
23:47 Tracy V. Wilson? What is the importance of understanding this versus like, what is the harm to this person or their legacy or what they would have wanted? And sometimes those things are complicated.
23:55 Holly Frey? Yes, because often too, they involve other people.
23:58 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
23:59 Holly Frey? Which makes it layers and layers of trying to figure out what path feels the the right feels like the right one.
24:07 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
24:08 Holly Frey? Anyway, history, you complicated thing.
24:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
24:16 Speaker 01 Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness. I'm Shaquille O'Neal and this shouldn't be anybody's experience. Ask your doctor about Zepbound Trisepotide, the first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in adults with obesity.
24:32 Speaker 02 Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic
25:17 Speaker 02 reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant-to-be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulphonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.
25:39 Speaker 01 Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbound.lily.com.
25:46 Speaker 06 This mood check is brought to you by Stay Porque tu bienestar también merece protección. ¿Qué tal, mi gente? Honey German checking in contigo. Take a second. Literalmente, un momentico para ti. How's your corazón feeling today? If it's a little tired, a little oof, you're not alone. Have you eaten algo rico? Taken a deep breath? Maybe even turned off your phone for cinco minutitos? I promise, the memes will still be there. Sometimes self-care isn't candles and meditation. It's just saying no. It's drinking a little bit of agua. It's letting yourself rest sin pena. You don't have to prove anything today. Just be, breathe. Estás haciendo lo mejor que puedes. And yes, that's enough.
26:30 Speaker 06 Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
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27:01 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
27:46 Holly Frey? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
28:03 Holly Frey? Okay, I have several things I want to discuss about Robert Boyle.
28:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Great.
28:08 Holly Frey? The first is now a personal bucket list item, sort of.
28:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
28:12 Holly Frey? Lismore Castle.
28:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
28:14 Holly Frey? Where he was born is available for booking.
28:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh.
28:20 Holly Frey? You can book out the whole property. I don't know how much it is. They won't say so on their website, so you know it's a lot.
28:26 Tracy V. Wilson? A lot. That's, that means a lot.
28:28 Holly Frey? Come on, lottery win. We're all going to Lismore Castle. Like if it hap- if it were to happen, if I just stumbled into a redonkadoodle sum of money.
28:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
28:37 Holly Frey? I'd be on that website getting quotes.
28:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
28:40 Holly Frey? It's beautiful and it's obviously been renovated and, and kept up and it's now like an event space. They'll rent it out for special events, but you can also just rent out the property to stay for a weekend with your friends or whatever. Imagine the cool party you could have there.
28:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
28:55 Holly Frey? It's gorgeous. I think it is also, I don't have their website up in front of me, but I think it is also like a property you can just go visit for the day, like a park area and green spaces that you can look at and also architecture that's obviously interesting, but so pretty.
29:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Nice.
29:12 Holly Frey? And I like that it's been there since the 12th century.
29:15 Tracy V. Wilson? 12th century.
29:16 Holly Frey? Yeah, that's cool. It's cool. The next thing I want to talk about
29:22 Holly Frey? is that third person autobiography.
29:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
29:26 Holly Frey? A lot of discussion of it calls it a fictionalized autobiography and it might be, it doesn't seem super embellished to me. I didn't live his life. Obviously I don't know, but like the details of like his birth, his family upbringing, where they were, all very, very identical to his actual life.
29:48 Holly Frey? And then I came across a portion of it where he was introducing a, a letter he had written to his sister, I believe. And I was like, this is why you wrote this in the third person, my dude. Because in not saying it about himself, he can praise himself.
30:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh.
30:06 Holly Frey? Because he's introducing this letter and he's like, you know, essentially like, you'll see what a good writer this person is. They're amazing. And I'm just like, I, I see what you did here. I see.
30:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
30:17 Holly Frey? I'm on to you, Robert Boyle.
30:23 Holly Frey? It made me laugh so hard, but also because when you read his letters, they're so clunky.
30:28 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
30:28 Holly Frey? Um, I'm sure in the time, he was giving himself points for verbocity, but like in terms of clarity.
30:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
30:36 Holly Frey? No.
30:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. When I was reading through the outline, all the things I had to read that were quotations of his work were read through repeatedly by me to try to make sure I understood what he was saying.
30:50 Holly Frey? They're clunky. But again, that also, I mean, that becomes an interesting like discussion point of the ways that different things have been valued in writing and intellectual communication and correspondence over the centuries, right? To him, it was, I know a lot of big words and I can string them together. Whereas I think today we'd be like.
31:11 Tracy V. Wilson? I don't know what you're talking about.
31:12 Holly Frey? Clarity in scientific writing in particular, clarity in all things.
31:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, and we read clunky stuff in the heart lib episode too, didn't we?
31:21 Holly Frey? Yeah.
31:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Am I remembering that right?
31:22 Holly Frey? Yeah. It's a clunky time. They were all clunky writing each other. So, you know, it's, if you believe that adage that you're the average of the five people you're closest to.
31:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
31:34 Holly Frey? They're all just writing that same style. It just is a feedback loop, a self replicating feedback loop.
31:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
31:41 Holly Frey? But that third person did crack me up. But then when he did the skeptical chemist and he chose to do that as a fictional dialogue, there was also part of me that's like, maybe he just likes to mix it up. Like he doesn't like the directness of an actual scientific essay or a scientific writing style.
32:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, and there are other things that were written as dialogues.
32:04 Holly Frey? Yeah.
32:05 Tracy V. Wilson? So it's like, he didn't, he didn't make that all up, but.
32:08 Holly Frey? No, no, no, no, no.
32:09 Tracy V. Wilson? It's interesting that he chose it for that particular thing.
32:12 Holly Frey? It did make me chuckle.
32:13 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
32:14 Holly Frey? Okay, the big thing I want to talk about.
32:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Yes.
32:17 Holly Frey? Is wealth and wealth inequality.
32:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
32:22 Holly Frey? Because, listen, Robert Boyle was a man born to incredible privilege.
32:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
32:30 Holly Frey? And if you really look at his whole life, everything he was able to achieve was a direct result of that privilege, right? He inherited a big, empty castle that he could go stay at.
32:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
32:46 Holly Frey? Is it a castle? Or in any case, a big estate. Where he could go stay and do experiments because he didn't have to work and he didn't have anything else going on. Not many people have that.
32:57 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
32:58 Holly Frey? Ever. And then, you know, even when he was like at Oxford, he, you know, he fell in with a lot of great thinkers in part because that, the work he did in his big, empty home, opened the door for him to have, you know, intellectual discourse with other people that did experiments, which then brought him into their circle at Oxford and then at London. And even in his later years, when he's living with his sister Catherine, they are living in a very fancy part of town. They were on Pall Mall, which, you know, was where all of the wealthy people lived. And he was able to afford to set up a whole lab of his own that was not part of his, his Oxford setup.
33:40 Holly Frey? So like, it is one of those things that especially kept jumping out to me, and I don't know if I'm just being hypercritical of poor Robert Boyle, but like, he gets held up as the first modern chemist, but he didn't really invent or discover a whole lot.
33:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
33:57 Holly Frey? He just spent a lot of money in his lab doing things, which is cool. And it does, again, foster that idea of exploration and experimentation among his peers. But I'm also like, the one thing that you're really well known for was kind of an accident.
34:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
34:15 Holly Frey? And, I mean, I shouldn't boil it down to that. He was doing a, a very clearly laid out experiment and observing the results, but. I feel like a lot of his place in the history of science is because he was a wealthy dude.
34:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
34:30 Holly Frey? Got to do wealthy dude stuff.
34:32 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
34:32 Holly Frey? And then met other wealthy dudes and they wealthy duded together.
34:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Well, we had the whole era of like the gentleman in science, scientist gentleman.
34:42 Holly Frey? Oh, yeah.
34:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Like, some of that was a bit later than Robert Boyle, like more into the 18th and 19th centuries. Prior to as much formalization of and professionalization of like the educational system and the idea of what a chemist is.
35:00 Holly Frey? Yeah.
35:01 Tracy V. Wilson? But yeah, I think about that, too. And I also think about how many of them also had a sister or a daughter or a wife who was doing a lot of record keeping or note taking or whatever.
35:14 Holly Frey? Well, and Catherine is actually on my list because she had her hands in a lot of pies in the best way of like supporting financially, just supporting like through encouragement, a lot of people that were doing a lot of science and other things. She is a pretty interesting figure and really pretty pivotal in that surge of discovery at the time.
35:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
35:40 Holly Frey? But yeah, it makes you start to look at like all of the people that, I shouldn't say all, many of the people that are lauded as, you know, great pioneers in their field were able to be that because in many cases, there was general wealth in the mix.
35:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
35:57 Holly Frey? Now, there is an interesting flip on this, though, because then I think about less than 100 years earlier. Thomas Harriet and Galileo were both looking at the moon through a telescope at the same time.
36:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, sure.
36:11 Holly Frey? But because Thomas Harriet had tons of money, he didn't publish anything because he didn't need to. Whereas Galileo was like, I'm, look at the thing I looked at. I know what the moon looks like, you guys. Somebody pay me. So there's a flip on that one, but even so, it's just, I'm fascinated by the way that wealth plays into the stories that we tell about discovery. Pioneering in scientific fields, et cetera.
36:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
36:37 Holly Frey? When there are so many other people who were probably working as hard or harder. Possibly even in the same fields, but maybe even not in, you know, some other job that don't ever get recognized. Anyway, that's, I gotta be in my bonnet today about this. I don't know what's up with that. It's, it's a, it's a voting day. So maybe it's just.
36:58 Tracy V. Wilson? Maybe that's it.
37:04 Holly Frey? Anyway, Robert Boyle, I find him fascinating.
37:08 Tracy V. Wilson? I didn't know anything about the like religious elements of his work at all.
37:15 Holly Frey? Oh, yeah. It is weird because he was, he was so hell bent on the idea that everyone that was not Christian was doing it wrong. Which is such a weird mindset for someone who is kind of trying to bumble their way through understanding the world more deeply. Like, you know, you don't know everything because you're trying to learn things, but also you think you know, everything.
37:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
37:43 Holly Frey? What's going on, Rob?
37:49 Holly Frey? Anyway, Robert Boyle, fascinating person, very important in history, but also you gotta, you gotta look at the context. Yeah, may, may we all have the good fortune to get a ton of money and do experiments and putter in the way we desire. If this is your weekend coming up, I hope you have whatever financing you would need in place to do something cool, maybe experimental, but in a safe way. But also I just hope like you have peace, you have some rest and relaxation and time to just think about whatever you would like and putter if you want. I love a good putter. Oh, I love it so much. If you don't have time off this weekend, I hope that you still get some puttering in. I'm gonna putter around in my selling room after we're done recording.
38:34 Holly Frey? Will I do anything of value? I don't know, but I'm gonna putter. I hope though, that if, if you are working, that you have as smooth a time as possible in those endeavors. And I hope that everyone is kind to one another and we all take care of each other. We will be back here on Monday with a brand new episode. We will also have a classic episode for you tomorrow.
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