“Quid Plura?” is still here, and although the site is updated less than before, I’m still pleased to have an online notebook for stuff that fits nowhere else. I say that every year, and it’s still true. Writing projects, the ongoing pandemic, and a string of losses made for a tiring year, but a few blog posts did go live in 2021, and there are more in the pipeline. As is my tradition, here’s a rundown of the blog-year that was.

First and foremost, I’d love it if readers would buy a copy of I Have Started for Canaan, the book I co-wrote in 2020 with my friends at the Sugarland Ethno-History Project. As far as we can tell, the book is the first full-length history of a Reconstruction-era African American town in Maryland, and it tells a hopeful and inspiring American story. All proceeds go toward the upkeep of the community’s historic church and, eventually, the construction of a small museum to house their vast collection, and I hope you’ll give it a look.

Did a kid obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons go mad in the steam tunnels at his college? I revisited rumors from the 1980s and discovered the weirdly poignant truth.

I put in a good word for Human Voices Wake Us, the poetry podcast of a semi-anonymous friend whose enthusiasms are eloquent, engaging, and wonderfully un-commercial.

The Brood X cicadas returned, and I dug up Benjamin Banneker’s admirably civilized observations upon their earlier emergence.

I watched the new Green Knight movie and found it, for better or for worse, to be a product of its time.

At the end of the year, I found a passage from All Creatures Great and Small that sums up life’s tendency to surprise and change us in welcome ways.

Thanks, as always, for stopping by!