Leah Shutkever. In the Guinness Book of World Records.

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On October 26, 2022, the judge ruled that Walden's contact with Land should have ended when it became clear that Land was not sleeping in the park or in need of assistance, and that the city was not responsible for Walden's actions.

On November 22, 2022, the city settled the lawsuit for $30,000.

I was at the pool today when a woman started having a conversation on her phone using the speaker.

I politely asked her if she could not use the speaker and pointed to my headphones.
She said, “I don’t have headphones.”
So I said, “You can just hold the phone next to your ear.”

She looked at me with a completely blank expression and said, “I’m on speakerphone.”
I said, “Well… that’s the problem.”

Apparently, we had reached the limits of modern technology.

In 1229, Ögedei Khan inherited an empire with a serious cash-flow problem. His father's conquests had been enormously destructive but not especially profitable — plunder went to whichever commander captured a city, so almost nothing reached the imperial treasury. By the time Ögedei took the throne, contemporary accounts describe the state warehouses as effectively empty.

A faction at court had a solution that made perfect sense by steppe logic: the recently conquered farmland of northern China was useless to Mongols. Sedentary peasants produced nothing a nomadic army valued. So exterminate the population and convert the whole North China Plain into grazing pasture. Millions of people, reclassified as an inefficient land use.

Yelü Chucai was a Khitan aristocrat descended from the old Liao imperial house, a Confucian-trained administrator who had served the Jin dynasty) before the Mongols took Beijing. He understood exactly what his own court was and was not persuaded by. An appeal to mercy, culture or the value of human life would have marked him as a soft conquered-people's advocate and gotten him ignored, or worse.

So he argued in the only currency that carried weight: revenue.

He told Ögedei that a properly administered tax system in the Central Plains — land tax, commercial tax, plus state monopolies on salt, iron, wine and vinegar — would return roughly 500,000 liang of silver, 80,000 bolts of silk and over 400,000 shi of grain every year. Not once. Every year, forever, while the conquest of the Southern Song still had to be paid for. Dead peasants pay tax exactly once.

Ögedei told him to prove it. Yelü Chucai set up ten regional tax bureaus staffed with Confucian scholars who actually knew how to administer the region. In 1231, he had the year's take laid out in the palace courtyard for the Khan to walk through personally: the silver, the silk, the grain, matching his projection.

He got the job of running taxation in northern China. The pasture plan was never revived.

The fact-check corner: the story comes primarily from his biography in the History of Yuan, the official dynastic history compiled about a century later, plus a memorial written by his contemporary Song Zizhen. Both are sympathetic sources, and some historians think the "turn China into pasture" proposal was never as close to being enacted as the account implies — that it's partly a literary device to make Yelü Chucai the hero of the fiscal reform he genuinely did carry out. The tax figures and the 1231 courtyard display, though, are consistently attested.

6 of my large paintings, including my most recent work, have been selected for the Next Generation RBSA 2026 exhibition at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists.

RBSA is one of the oldest artist societies in the world, so being part of this exhibition is a huge honour for me. I’m honestly still finding it hard to believe that I made it this far!

The selection process has been quite a journey: I first submitted my work online, then had an interview, and was later invited to exhibit. After the exhibition, there will be a final decision on who will be accepted into the Next Generation RBSA programme, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll be one of them. I would be absolutely thrilled if it happens.

The exhibition is at the RBSA Gallery in Birmingham, UK, in the Jewellery Quarter, and runs until 12 September inclusive. Entry is free and the gallery is open from 10:30am to 5pm. If you’re in Birmingham or somewhere nearby and would like to see my work in person, I’d be absolutely delighted if you took the opportunity to visit.