John Dickerson

John Dickerson is co-anchor of "CBS Evening News" and anchor of "CBS Evening News Plus." He is also a Contributing Writer to The Atlantic and is co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest.

  • 03/25/2023: In the days of easy poison

    When people dropped dead for any variety of reasons, it was much easier to poison your enemies,and have your murder written off as just another one of those episodes where a person was dropping dead because people dropped dead all the time. This seems to have been what happened. In the case of. William Longespee the First Earl of Salisbury.

    File:William Longespée.jpg - Wikimedia CommonsHubert De Burgh and Billy Long, as no one called him, got crosswise with each other. They were both loyal subjects to the kings during the 13th century. But De Burgh didn’t think Longespee was sufficiently loyal. They had a set-to and ultimately De Burgh backed down. To make it up to Longespee, De Burgh invited him over to his house for a feast. Several days after the repast, Longespee turned up dead.

    Oh well, people die all the time in the Middle Ages. It is, after all, the 13th century and the lines at the pharmacy for leaches were notoriously long, even for nobles.

     

    Fine. Then, in 1791, during the refurbishment of the Salisbury Cathedral, William Longespee’s tomb was opened and the mummified corps of a rat was found in his skull. The rat displayed serious arsenic poisoning.

    The mummified rat is still on display at the cathedral because it was assumed that the rat died from the arsenic that was placed in Billy Long’s dinner by Hubert De Burgh.

     

    More from the Salisbury Journal.

    This entire episode was kicked off by a notation I found in one of my notebooks from June, 1990 when I was traveling through England as a junior in college:

    Notebook rat skull

  • More Notions

  • 04/14/2023: Summer's End

    It’s hot today for the first time of the season, which makes it feel like the start of summer. Time to start stacking the sandbags against the end of summer blues. The sun is going down. This song came on shuffle. It’s from John Prine’s Tree of Forgiveness. Yesterday was the five-year anniversary of the […]
  • 04/08/2023: Chat GPT and checking yourself

    When your words don’t land as you intend it can be because a) you were unclear b) the people listening misunderstood your point or c) some members of the audience are willfully misunderstanding what you say. I was recently asked about the Tennessee lawmakers kicked out of the body. So I asked Chat GPT to […]
  • 04/02/2023: CBS This Morning on Trump Indictment

  • 04/01/2023: What's in the Indictment? A debate with Chat GPT

    Here is an argument about the recent indictment of former President Trump: Former President Donald Trump has been indicted. The people who know what is in the indictment aren’t talking. The people who are talking don’t know what’s in the indictment. None of them do. It’s sealed. Nevertheless, a lot of time will be spent […]
  • 04/01/2023: Chat GPT is terrible at poltiics

    Question: The Manhattan district attorney has issued an indictment of Donald Trump but the facts are not known and will not be known for several days, how should that encourage or discourage a person from forming opinions about the indictment itself? As an AI language model, I cannot provide personal opinions, but I can offer […]
  • 03/28/2023: See the gift, ease the burden.

    Everyone has at least one gift and one burden. It is hard to find the gift in some people. See the gift, ease the burden.

  • 03/26/2023: Old note found: moving up the time of grace

    Dr. Nadia Chaudhri died on October 5, 2021. She narrated her death from cancer on her Twitter feed. Every time I read her writing I thought about the grace on display. The lessons she was able to give us. I just found a note I wrote to myself after reading one of her entries: “move […]
  • 03/25/2023: A satisfying GPT exchange

    A lot of the coverage of change GPT has been about the learning and development of artificial intelligence. What I wonder is how we, as humans, are going to slowly learn and acculturate to the kinds of exchanges with ChatGPT and its cousins. What I’m thinking about is the psychological closeness that will accrue in […]