The Tennessee Library Association has published some useful advice on meetings; you may notice that Dr. Boli contributed an illustration. The article has some of the best and most straightforward advice on running a meeting you will find anywhere, and it is earnestly recommended.

One small quibble, however. The writers trace the history of meetings back to Genesis 37:

The first recorded committee meeting appears in the book of Genesis, when Joseph’s brothers debated whether to kill him or sell him into slavery.

Dr. Boli, however, would cite a much earlier recorded committee meeting in Genesis 1:

And God said, Let us make man in our Image, after our likenesse: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the foule of the aire, and over the cattell, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

“Let us make man in our image”: strange as it may seem, it is perfectly orthodox Christian theology to say that the Trinity contains, within its unity, a committee.

“If it rests with Germany, war will not come again. This country has a more profound impression than any other of the evils war causes. Ninety-five per cent of the members of our national administration have had personal experience with the horrors of war and know that it is not an adventure but a ghastly catastrophe. Nineteen eighteen was a lesson and a warning for us. We ask only that our present frontiers be maintained, and believe me, we shall never fight again except in self-defense.”

——Adolf Hitler.

Photo by Michael Vadon, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

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Dear Dr. Boli: What does it mean for American politics that Donald Trump is the leading Republican candidate in the polls? —Sincerely, Reince Priebus.

Dear Sir: It means that poll-takers, who are as indolent as any of the rest of us, have been polling third-graders at recess. Third-graders are usually willing to answer questions, especially if you tell them it counts on their permanent record; and who can blame harried pollsters if they prefer not to chase down unwilling and potentially hostile adult subjects in the public street?

In debating his opponents, Mr. Trump uses a particular style of argument that is enormously effective on the third-grade demographic:

OPPONENT. I believe you are mistaken in your inference.

TRUMP. You’re ugly.

OPPONENT. What I mean is that there is overwhelming scientific evidence to support my assertion that vaccines do not cause autism.

TRUMP. I mean, seriously, who puts a face like that on network TV?

Because it is not usually encountered outside the playground, this rhetorical figure does not have a common name. Dr. Boli will therefore give it one, and call it the argumentum ad vultum, the argument against the face or countenance. It may be fallacious, but it is in its own way unanswerable. Even fashion models and movie stars who are paid to be attractive are generally convinced, in their secret hearts, that they are hideously ugly. Third-graders admire this argument because they know that it instantly brings debate to an end with a resounding victory.

Unfortunately for Mr. Trump, success in the public-opinion surveys may not translate very easily into success in the primaries. The number of registered Republicans who are old enough to vote but stupid enough to be still repeating third grade is very, very small. Furthermore, by bringing the argumentum ad vultum into the arsenal of modern political debate, Mr. Trump runs the very real risk that someone may eventually decide to employ it against him.

You may speak of Achilles, or Odysseus, or Aeneas, but they were heroes only intermittently. Achilles sulked in his tent; Odysseus was prone to fits of rage; Aeneas sacrificed anyone and anything to his idea of destiny. They all must bow before Martha C. A. Uehmler, who, though she died at the young age of not quite forty-three, was always pleasant; who, in other words, subject like the rest of us to the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, lived a life of unremitting heroism.

Last week, Queen Elizabeth II broke Victoria’s record to become the longest-reigning monarch in British history. (But not in Canadian history; that honor belongs to Louis XIV.) Here are some things you may not have known about the enigmatic queen of Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

For reasons known only to himself, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, always refers to the queen as “Audrey.”

Elizabeth, who trained as a mechanic in the Second World War, still holds the speed record for disassembling a Land Rover, a skill she reportedly demonstrates two or three times in every visit to Balmoral. It takes a team of full-time mechanics more than a week to put one of the vehicles back together.

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines was named after Elizabeth’s favorite British rock band of the middle 1960s.

An entire wing of Buckingham Palace is filled with migrant workers addressing birthday cards to politicians in the Commonwealth realms.

Since Elizabeth almost never gives interviews, her opinion of the Kardashian sisters remains a mystery.

A liveried servant, always in attendance on the queen, carries an ornate gold filigree box with two cyanide capsules. In the unlikely event of an insoluble constitutional crisis, protocol demands that the queen shove them down the throat of her prime minister.

Palace insiders say that Queen Elizabeth has been known to use strong language exactly once, when a certain since-deceased prime minister asked her whether she intended to abdicate in favor of her son Charles; the Queen’s response, according to these witnesses, was “Oh, Lord no.”