ABOUT THIS ISSUE: MARCH 1, 2026

Monday was a fun day and a travel day. My last day in Key West, I started the draft for this week's issue after breakfast and went on another walk about town. I bought a tasty-looking calorie bomb of a peanut butter and chocolate cookie at a Duval Street bakery, bagging it to save for a lunchtime treat. I stopped in an art gallery and had a nice conversation with an employee about the artists whose work was displayed, and my old friend J.S.G. Boggs. For lunch I found a place offering New Orleans dishes and ordered a wonderful bowl of gumbo, which I followed up with that scrumptious cookie. Back at the Augsburgers' rental house I packed up my things and hung out with Maria and David Fanning before we shared an Uber to the airport. We stopped for drinks at a concourse restaurant before proceeding to our separate gates.

My flight was full and included people planning to drive rental cars from Dulles Airport hundreds of miles to their homes because their planned flights had been canceled due to the Nor'easter that brought feet of snow up and down the east coast, thankfully sparing the D.C. area. Our neighborhood dodged a bullet this time. By Saturday the high hit the 60s and nearly every trace of the earlier snowfalls was gone.

I'll insert a plug here for a new book I read on my trip and finished on the flight home. "Time's Second Arrow" by Robert Hazen and Michael Wong postulates a new law of nature of commensurate importance to Newton's laws of motion - a unified theory of increasing functional information from the Big Bang forward, a single view of evolution across eons, encompassing the scale of atoms, molecules, minerals, life, knowledge and intelligence.

Finally, here are some interesting articles I came across this week. Although non-numismatic, one discusses the "penny dreadful."

Books and screens (https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem)

If I'm Driving Over a Bridge, I Kind of Want to Know the Guy Who Built It Would Be Ruined If It Collapsed (https://www.candyforbreakfast.email/p/if-im-driving-over-a-bridge-i-kind)

How the Library of Congress Unearthed a Famous, Presumed-Lost Silent Film! (https://www.facebook.com/reel/1201105085126666)

The Lost Ending of "Gaslight" That You Didn't Know You Needed (https://www.publicbooks.org/the-lost-ending-of-gaslight-that-you-didnt-know-you-needed/)

The archivist preserving decaying floppy disks (https://www.popsci.com/technology/floppy-disk-archivist-project/)

Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible (https://www.wired.com/story/say-goodbye-to-the-undersea-cable-that-made-the-global-internet-possible/)

A Brief History of the History of Science (https://asteriskmag.com/issues/13/a-brief-history-of-the-history-of-science)

AI and the Economics of the Human Touch (https://agglomerations.substack.com/p/economics-of-the-human)

Welcome to the Museum of Hoaxes (https://hoaxes.org/about)

-Editor

Wayne Homren
Wayne Homren is the founding editor of The E-Sylum and a consultant for the Newman Numismatic Portal. His collecting interests at various times included U.S. Encased Postage Stamps, merchant counterstamps, Pittsburgh Obsolete paper money, Civil War tokens and scrip, Carnegie Hero Medals, charge coins and numismatic literature. He also collects and has given presentations on the work of Money Artist J.S.G. Boggs. In the non-numismatic world he's worked in artificial intelligence, data science, and as a Program Manager for the U.S. Department of Defense.

Garrett Ziss
Garrett Ziss is a numismatic collector and researcher, with a focus on American paper money and early U.S. silver and copper coins. He is also a part-time U.S. coin cataloger for Heritage Auctions. Garrett assists Editor Wayne Homren by editing and formatting a selection of articles and images each week. When he's not engaged in numismatics, Garrett is pursuing a Master's Degree in Quantitative Economics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Pete Smith
Numismatic researcher and author Pete Smith of Minnesota has written about early American coppers, Vermont coinage, numismatic literature, tokens and medals, the history of the U.S. Mint and much more. Author of American Numismatic Biographies, he contributes original articles to The E-Sylum often highlighting interesting figures in American numismatic history.

Greg Bennick
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins and US counterstamps. He is on the board of both CONECA and TAMS and enjoys having in-depth conversations with prominent numismatists from all areas of the hobby. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime on the web or via instagram @minterrors.

John Nebel
Numismatist, photographer, and ANS Board member and Fellow John Nebel of Boulder, CO helped the ANA and other clubs like NBS get online in the early days of the internet, hosting websites gratis through his Computer Systems Design Co. To this day he hosts some 50 ANA member club sites along with our coinbooks.org.

Bruce Perdue
Encased coinage collector (encasedcoins.info) Bruce Perdue of Aurora, Illinois has been the volunteer NBS webmaster from its early days and works each week to add the latest E-Sylum issue to our archive and send out the email announcement.

Bruce Perdue, President, Central States Numismatic Society. Interviewer: David Lisot, CoinTelevision.com. The 77th annual Central States Numismatic Society Coin Convention will take place in Schaumburg, Illinois outside Chicago in April 2016. President Bruce Perdue shares what it has been like to be involved with this organization of coin collectors.