# EW JOURNAL

> by ELVEANDER WELFENDORFF


## Posts

- [THE FLAG THAT MARKETS PRICE EVERY DAY](https://ewbyew.com/the-flag-that-markets-price-every-day/): What is a national flag actually worth? Nobody asks the question seriously, because nobody expects a sensible answer back. A flag hangs outside an embassy, folds into a soldier’s coffin, flies at half-mast the morning after a disaster, and is run up a pole at the opening ceremony of a games that will not return to that city for another century. At no point in any of this does anyone quote a price for it, bid against a rival buyer for it, or mark its value up or down between one morning and the next. A flag simply means whatever its […]
- [A THOUSAND BOXES, ONE FLAME](https://ewbyew.com/a-thousand-boxes-one-flame/): Six impossible things before breakfast is the boast the White Queen makes to Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, offered as a kind of daily exercise, the way someone else might mention a morning jog. Pressed by Alice, who insists that one cannot simply believe impossible things, the Queen explains that practice is the whole secret: “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day.” Lewis Carroll wrote that exchange under a pen name. Under his own name, Charles Dodgson held the mathematical lectureship at Christ Church, Oxford, for […]
- [THE MAN WHO EATS SLOWLY](https://ewbyew.com/the-man-who-eats-slowly/): Forty-seven days. That is how long Vicksburg, Mississippi, held out against the Union siege lines thrown around it in the spring of 1863, and the number was kept, meticulously, by the one man outside the walls doing the actual counting. Ulysses S. Grant had already tried to take Vicksburg by storming it twice, on 19 and 22 May, both attacks thrown directly at the Confederate earthworks and both repulsed at real cost in dead and wounded soldiers. After the second failure, Grant switched to a different weapon entirely: a count. How many days of food sat behind those walls, and how […]
- [THE FOUNTAIN WITH NO ONE LEFT TO DRINK](https://ewbyew.com/the-fountain-with-no-one-left-to-drink/): Istanbul still keeps hundreds of small stone fountains built into the walls of old streets and courtyards, each with a tap, a basin and a carved inscription naming whoever paid for it and why. Most no longer run. A visitor who stops to read one of the drier inscriptions usually finds a sentence promising water to anyone passing along one specific road, or to pilgrims bound for a particular gate, in a city that has long since grown around both the road and the gate until neither one means anything a passer-by could actually point to. The stone itself is in […]
- [THE BOOK IN WHICH GENTLEMEN COULD NOT RETREAT](https://ewbyew.com/the-book-in-which-gentlemen-could-not-retreat/): St James’s Street, in 1693, gained a new chocolate house, one of dozens that opened in London that decade and, on the face of it, no different from the rest. Within a century the business had shed the chocolate entirely and become White’s, the oldest and most exclusive gentlemen’s club in London, a club younger than the City’s livery companies but, by one standard comparison, a year older than the Bank of England itself. By 1778 it had settled into the building at numbers 37 and 38 St James’s Street that it still occupies today, its membership drawn from precisely the […]
- [THE EMPIRE WITH NO TERRITORY](https://ewbyew.com/the-empire-with-no-territory/): Where, exactly, is a dollar created? The textbook answer involves a printing press in Washington and a ledger at the Federal Reserve, and for most dollars that will ever exist, the textbook answer is the true one. A very large and largely invisible fraction of them are created somewhere else entirely: on a trading floor in London, or Tokyo, or the Cayman Islands, where a bank that answers to no American regulator takes a dollar deposit from one customer and lends dollars to another, manufacturing, in the lending, dollars that the United States Treasury never printed and the Federal Reserve never […]
- [THE RHINO AT THE END OF THE TABLE](https://ewbyew.com/the-rhino-at-the-end-of-the-table/): A rhinoceros is a difficult animal to miss. It is grey, it weighs more than two tonnes, and for years before it finally charges it simply stands exactly where it has always stood, in full view from across the room. A rhino left alone is, by the standards of a two-tonne animal, remarkably placid; it only charges when something finally forces the question, and by then the distance that made it look avoidable has already closed. Michele Wucker coined the term grey rhino at a Davos panel in 2013 and developed the idea at length in a 2016 book, deliberately set […]
- [THE CRACK BEHIND THE DECIMALS](https://ewbyew.com/the-crack-behind-the-decimals/): A military psychologist’s file on an officer candidate in Israel’s new army, sometime in the early 1950s, might have read: displays natural authority, keeps his head under pressure, strongly recommended for command. The number eventually attached to recommendations of exactly that kind, once anyone checked them against how the candidates actually performed months later in the field, turned out barely better than a coin flip would have managed without interviewing anybody at all. The psychologist’s name was Daniel Kahneman, and the gap he had just found, between how right a judgement feels and how right it actually is, he later gave […]
- [THE LUXURY THAT FACED INWARDS](https://ewbyew.com/the-luxury-that-faced-inwards/): A magistrate of Venice’s Provveditori sopra le Pompe stops a woman at the foot of the Rialto steps, sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century, and does the one thing his office exists to let him do: he looks at her sleeves, in daylight, in the open street, the only place his authority actually reaches. He can measure their width against the figure the Republic has fixed by statute. He can count, or try to count, the pearls sewn along her bodice. A small crowd gathers for this sort of thing, the way a crowd gathers for any public reckoning, […]
- [THE EMERALD THAT WAS GLASS](https://ewbyew.com/the-emerald-that-was-glass/): Genoa Cathedral keeps, behind glass in its own treasury and rarely shown to the public, a shallow bowl with six sides, the colour of still, deep water. The chronicles place its arrival in 1101, carried home by Guglielmo Embriaco after the crusader fleet he commanded took Caesarea. Not long afterward Genoa settled the question of what the bowl actually was: a single emerald of a size no later age ever matched, and the very dish Christ had used at the Last Supper. For roughly seven hundred years the Republic treated both claims as established fact, which, for every practical purpose that […]
- [THE SOVEREIGN'S FACE ON THE COIN](https://ewbyew.com/the-sovereigns-face-on-the-coin/): A denarius of Augustus, struck in the last decades before our era, is a disc of silver about nineteen millimetres across and some ninety-five to ninety-eight parts pure, and on one face there is a head in profile, laureate, turned to the right. A farmer in Gaul handling that coin in the year 10 is holding a portrait of a man he will never see. Getting word from Gaul to Rome, or an order back again, could take the better part of a season, and a farmer out past the frontier garrisons rarely learned what his emperor even looked like, though […]
- [THE ADMIRAL WHO NUMBERED THE WIND](https://ewbyew.com/the-admiral-who-numbered-the-wind/): The log of HMS Woolwich, a forty-four-gun ship of the Royal Navy, in the year 1805: her commander is Francis Beaufort, a thirty-one-year-old Irish-born officer with a taste for measurement, and he has begun writing the weather down in a way nobody had asked him to. The same taste would eventually make him Hydrographer of the Navy, a post in which the identical instinct operated at a larger scale, turning the sea’s genuine unpredictability into charts and tables precise enough that captains who had never met him could trust their ships to his numbers. Captains before him had reached for adjectives, […]
- [THE MATHEMATICS OF PATIENCE](https://ewbyew.com/the-mathematics-of-patience/): A preschooler at the Bing Nursery School on the Stanford campus, somewhere in the late 1960s, has been shown a marshmallow on a plate and given an arrangement she can repeat back. The adult is going to leave the room. If she waits until he returns, she gets two. If she cannot wait, there is a small bell on the table, and ringing it brings him back at once, and then she gets one. He leaves. The door closes. What the camera records over the following fifteen minutes is a person of four or five conducting an experiment on herself with […]
- [THE ARCHITECTURE OF WEALTH](https://ewbyew.com/the-architecture-of-wealth/): In the Michaelmas term of 1472 a fiction was argued before the Court of Common Pleas at Westminster, and every party to it knew it was a fiction. A landowner bound by an entail wished to sell; the law said he could not. So he conveyed the land to a lawyer acting for him, who was then sued for it by a third man acting for the purchaser, and the lawyer, when called upon to defend the title, declined to appear. Judgment went against him by default. The land passed to the demandant free of every restriction that had bound it, […]
- [THE OBJECT WE REFUSE TO DESTROY](https://ewbyew.com/the-object-we-refuse-to-destroy/): A cylinder of platinum and iridium, thirty-nine millimetres in diameter and thirty-nine millimetres in height, sits in a safe in the basement of a small pavilion in Sèvres, on the western edge of Paris, under three bell jars of glass nested one inside the other. Ninety parts platinum, ten parts iridium, an alloy chosen because it resists nearly everything the air can do to a metal. To reach it, three keys are required, held by three different officials, and none of them can open the vault alone. It was sanctioned in 1889 by the first General Conference on Weights and Measures, […]
- [THE COINS THAT NEVER MOVED](https://ewbyew.com/the-coins-that-never-moved/): Yap has no limestone. That single geological fact is the beginning of the whole arrangement, and it is the detail most retellings drop first. The stone from which the discs were cut lies on Palau, some two hundred and fifty miles of open Pacific away, and every disc on Yap arrived there by canoe and raft after men had quarried it with shell tools on somebody else’s island, negotiated for the right to do so, and carried it home across water that regularly killed them. Some of the largest discs, quarried whole from a single block of stone, exceed three metres […]
- [THE SWAN THAT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO EXIST](https://ewbyew.com/the-swan-that-wasnt-supposed-to-exist/): Juvenal reached, in the sixth satire, for a phrase to describe a woman who did not exist, and what he produced was rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno, a rare fowl upon the earth, and very like a black swan. The joke works only if the audience agrees instantly that the thing is impossible. It functions as a stock impossibility, in the same family as a square circle, a figure of speech doing no ornithological work at all, and for fifteen hundred years European writers used it exactly that way, a proverb for the thing that cannot be, deployed by […]
- [THE SHIPS THAT NEVER SAILED BACK](https://ewbyew.com/the-ships-that-never-sailed-back/): The beach at Veracruz, the summer of 1519, and eleven vessels drawn up on the sand with their gear coming out of them: cordage, sails, ironwork, anchors, the compasses and any planking worth saving. This is the part the legend leaves out, and it is the part that matters. Cortés stripped his fleet methodically and had the hulls holed and grounded, an inventory operation carried out in full view of his own men. The salvaged material, he put straight into the settlement he was founding on that shore, and Bernal Díaz, who was standing there, says the pilots were in on […]
- [FRANKLIN'S TWO-HUNDRED-YEAR EXPERIMENT](https://ewbyew.com/franklins-two-hundred-year-experiment/): Franklin sat down in June 1789, roughly a year before he died, and added a codicil to a will already written, the sort of thing a man adds when something has occurred to him since, and it is not a short document. It sets aside a thousand pounds sterling to Boston and a thousand to Philadelphia, and then it does something a testator almost never does: it explains, at length and with evident pleasure, the reasoning behind the sum. The money was to be lent in small amounts, at five percent, to young married artificers who had served an apprenticeship and […]
- [THE URINAL IN THE MUSEUM](https://ewbyew.com/the-urinal-in-the-museum/): A plumber’s merchant on Fifth Avenue, the J. L. Mott Iron Works, kept a showroom of sanitary ware in the spring of 1917: basins, traps, cisterns, and along one wall the flat-back urinals that a builder ordered by the dozen for a hotel or a barracks. A customer came in and bought one. He did not haggle, and there was nothing to haggle over, since the object was catalogue stock of a type installed in thousands of buildings across the eastern United States that decade. He carried it away, laid it on its back so that the drainage holes faced the […]
- [THE BED THAT MEASURED THE MAN](https://ewbyew.com/the-bed-that-measured-the-man/): The standard was a bronze bar of a yard’s length, legalised by the Weights and Measures Act of 1824 as the imperial standard, and on the night of 16 October 1834 it was in the Palace of Westminster when the Palace burned. The bar survived the fire in the sense that pieces of it were recovered. It did not survive as a standard. For the better part of two decades the United Kingdom, at the height of its commercial reach, had no legally realisable unit of length, contracts, surveys, ordnance and tolls all referring, by statute, to an object that had […]
- [THE MAP WITH NO MONSTERS](https://ewbyew.com/the-map-with-no-monsters/): Hic sunt dracones. Here be dragons. The phrase every schoolchild knows to be written across the blank parts of old maps appears, so far as anyone has established, on exactly one surviving artefact: a small engraved copper globe of about 1508, the Hunt-Lenox Globe, held in the Rare Book Division of the New York Public Library. For most of the last decade it had rather less exclusive company. A globe engraved on two conjoined halves of an ostrich egg surfaced at a London map fair in 2012, dated by its owner to 1504, carrying the identical inscription in the identical place, […]
- [FAUST SIGNS THE CONTRACT](https://ewbyew.com/faust-signs-the-contract/): Florence, the second half of the 1420s. The commune has just opened a fund for dowries, the Monte delle doti, established in 1425 to receive deposits nobody expects to see again for a decade or more, at rates, something in the region of eleven or twelve percent compounded across terms of seven and a half or fifteen years, that were not charity. The commune needed the money. A father walks in and deposits a sum on behalf of a daughter aged five. He will not see the money again. If she reaches the age of marriage and marries, the fund pays […]
- [THE BANKERS WHO BOUGHT A RENAISSANCE](https://ewbyew.com/the-bankers-who-bought-a-renaissance/): “Item, a house in the parish of San Tommaso, with a garden and a well.” A line of that kind is what the Florentine catasto returns are made of, page after page, from the year 1427 onwards, when the commune required every household in its territory to declare what it held, what was owed to it, and what it owed to others. Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici filed his, as everyone did. Property was itemised, debts deducted, and a figure emerged at the bottom against which the household would be taxed. The instrument was, for its century, an administrative marvel. It […]
- [THE EMPEROR'S NEW PRICE](https://ewbyew.com/the-emperors-new-price/): On the night of Friday, the sixth of February 1637, in an Amsterdam tavern called the Menniste Bruyloft, a Haarlem cooper named Andries de Busscher put a pound of Switser bulbs on the table and asked the room for a price. Switsers were the striped ones, red streaked over yellow, and a pound of them functioned, that winter, like a currency more than a rarity; men who dealt in them had watched the same weight move from something near a hundred and twenty-five guilders at the turn of the year to something near fifteen hundred by the first of February. The […]
- [VAN GOGH](https://ewbyew.com/van-gogh/): Brussels, then, the second week of March in the year 1890. Inside a rented exhibition hall, canvases by Cézanne, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Signac hung on walls that had carried the annual show of a group calling itself Les XX since 1884. Among them, one small picture of vines gone the colour of wine changed hands that week for four hundred francs, the only sale of its kind the year would record for the man who painted it. The buyer was Anna Boch, herself a painter and a member of Les XX since its founding, whose brother Eugène had sat for a […]
- [ECONOMICS](https://ewbyew.com/economics/): The bronze weights sat on the counter of a European grain market some seven hundred years ago, dull with handling, kept honest by a magistrate whose entire job was making sure the scale never lied. That number, the price at which bread could be sold that day, the aldermen posted each morning on a chalked board beside it. A baker who charged more risked his licence. A baker who charged less risked nothing, since the town was rarely troubled by excessive generosity. Behind that number stood a doctrine, worked out at length by the Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas in the middle […]
- [ARISTOTLE](https://ewbyew.com/aristotle/): In the winter of a year nobody can date with certainty, somewhere in the sixth century before our era, a man went from one olive press to the next along the coast of Miletus, and across the water on Chios. His deposits he paid quietly, press by press, through a season when nobody else wanted the equipment at all. Idle equipment draws no bidders. He had been mocked for his poverty more than once, on the grounds that a life spent watching the sky produces nothing a household can eat. Such a press was simple machinery: a heavy wooden beam pivoted […]

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- [About EWbyEW](https://ewbyew.com/about-ew/): There is a particular kind of lecture hall silence that settles when a room of students has understood the formula and not the thing. I remember it well, because for a long time I was the source of it. The slide showed a discounted cash flow model, correctly derived, and I could reproduce it. I could tell you what the denominator did. What I could not have told you, at that moment, was why any of it existed. That a discount rate is a confession. That an entire apparatus of finance had been erected around a single unflattering fact about human […]
- [Privacy and Cookies](https://ewbyew.com/privacy-and-cookies/): EW Journal by Elveander Welfendorff Website: EWbyEW.com Version: 1.0  |  Effective date and last updated: 18th of August 2026 Short summary EW Journal is a privately operated, publicly accessible personal blog and independent editorial project operated by Elveander Welfendorff. It publishes essays and commentary at the intersection of art, humanities, finance, wealth, time, civilisation, markets and institutions. The Website is not a company, financial service, payment service, subscription service, membership service or paid-access platform. Reading the editorial material does not normally require an account or the submission of personal information. The Website uses WordPress and Hostinger services. It may use strictly […]

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