I’ve passed this old strip plaza in Riverdale, Maryland, in Prince George’s County, a million times. Usually it was on the way to my favorite Chinese buffet, out in Lanham. I always stopped and noticed it, because it looked so retro. I never, however, thought there was anything particularly interesting in it. On a Maryland Facebook group I follow, I saw an announcement a few weeks ago: a pizza joint called Pizza Oven in Riverdale, the last of an erstwhile chain that once stretched to the Eastern Shore, was closing.

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent. Long term Ælfgif-who? readers might remember Queen Bertha, a Christian woman who travelled from Francia to Kent in the late sixth century to marry a non-Christian king, Æthelberht. We explored the possibility that it was Bertha’s influence that led to the eventual conversion of the king and the people of Kent to Christianity.

(Note: This is part two of a three-part series on the effort to retroactively justify Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd. You can read part one here.) In my first post about the documentary The Fall of Minneapolis and a column by Coleman Hughes promoting it, I looked at the false claim that what Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd couldn’t have been illegal because it was taught by the Minneapolis Police Department.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci. Paid subscribers first learned about Michelle Skidelsky’s work a few weeks ago in the Sunday Scroll … just saying. —Kate TikTok’s For You page algorithm has the unique ability to drop its users directly in the middle of an argument. Already several stitches deep, you’re forced to work backward for context. That’s confusing in the best of times, but even more so when the argument is about something as simple as “we should generally be polite to one another.

Today’s post is a how-to on calculating the Sahm rule. It’s for anyone who wants to apply it themselves or apply the logic to other data. Alternatively, you can follow the monthly updates on FRED—that’s what I do. Share The Sahm rule is based on the U.S. unemployment rate (U-3). You can download the data from FRED—a national treasure—here. The unemployment rate was 3.9% in October and has been below 4% for the longest stretch since the 1960s.