Thursday Things: Just Emilia Edition
12 June 2025. Vol 7 No 24. By Dan McGirt. #305
Thursday Things is here! This week we find a shipwreck, get back from the beach, get stuck in an elevator, and more!
If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know.
Just finished Just Emilia. Image: Thursday Things
Just a minute now
Last week Thursday Things was at the beach and on the road and I didn’t put together a full edition. There were no items linked, no commentary, minimal effort. It consisted of three photos with captions. I didn’t even get last week’s edition out the door until after 5 pm!
In other news, last week’s edition of Thursday Things got the most likes of any issue so far in 2025! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m going to assume Happy Subscribers were happy I took a vacation and not that you were telling me to say less and only post pictures from now on!
Just Emilia
My Thursday Things spin-off Read Along sputtered on the launch pad last year — my eye for new projects to launch often exceeds my bandwidth — so I haven’t talked about my offline reading as much as I intended.
I’m currently reading about six books (a mystery, a biography, a futurist text, Xenophon’s Hellenika, a classic Chinese martial arts novel, and Plutarch’s Lives), but I put them all on pause to read a newly released novel that arrived yesterday and that I finished this morning.
Just Emilia [Paperback | Kindle] by Jennifer Oko is, per the blurb, a book in which “[t]he past, present, and future collide in a DC Metro elevator as three women get caught up in a gripping time-traveling tale of memory, emotion, and unspoken truths about their shared history.”
Admittedly, not my usual reading fare. There are exactly zero sword fights, mysterious murders, epic battles, or magic whatsits in this book. But Just Emilia is magical nonetheless, and there is mystery, and there is drama, and there are sharp pointy things, and there is conflict which, if not epic, is certainly consequential for those involved — all in the confines of an elevator!
(Well, most of it. There are flashbacks too. And flash forwards. That are also somehow flashbacks. You had to be there.)
Okay, yes, I know the author, and I’ve read all her previous books and this is her best (so far) and I say that without any bias whatsoever. I love Jen’s descriptions, her eye for detail, and the realness of her characters. You could do worse than to spend a few hours trapped in an elevator with Just Emilia.
That’s my … er … elevator pitch for the book.1
Here’s Jen discussing her book at local DC bookstore Politics & Prose earlier this week:
Shipwreck rules
That mystery I mentioned I’m reading involves archaeologists excavating a sunken Spanish galleon off the coast of Georgia,2 so maybe I had shipwrecks on the mind when I encountered this item:
What to do if you find a shipwreck
Pop quiz! What do you do? Apparently, loot it for any sunken treasure found aboard is not the right answer.
At least not officially…
You might be wondering: What should you do if you find a shipwreck? I was also curious, so I did some digging on the legality, safety, and ethics of discovering a historic shipwreck. In short, don’t touch anything and report the wreck to your state or local government. Note that this article focuses on the US—the specific regulations will differ in other countries.
Alas, there are rules about such things. More than that, there are laws, with steep criminal and civil penalties for their violation:
First, it’s almost certainly not legal to take items from a shipwreck. In the United States, the Abandoned Shipwreck act of 1987 states that all shipwrecks legally belong to the state in which they’re found. The only major exceptions are sunken U.S. military vessels, which belong to the military; wrecks found on federal land, which belong to the federal government; and wrecks found on Native American reservations, which belong to the specific tribe. This is true for wrecks found on land, on beaches, and in the water.
Just because I’m always looking for the loopholes, that does seem to leave out airborne shipwrecks.
Although if the lost ship you find is hovering in the air, getting away with some loot is the least of your problems…
Put simply, discovering a shipwreck in the United States doesn’t give you any kind of legal right to salvage the wreck. Attempting to disturb a shipwreck could result in stiff penalties, including jail time and fines.
So if you are lucky enough to stumble onto — or dive into — an undiscovered wreck, now you know what to do — tell no one, and make sure there are no witnesses when you salvage those pieces of eight!
What harm could there be in taking one little gold coin? Image: Disney
Whither universities?
Or should that be wither universities?
I fancy myself an amateur futurist. As I’ve mentioned more than once, one of my formative influences was reading Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and its follow-ups.
We are living in the middle of Future Shock every day, and the pace of change is only accelerating, affecting every aspect of how we live, work, travel, communicate, and learn. Waves of transformative technology — the internet, the mobile internet, AI, biotech, spacetech, nanotech — wash over us, changing, remaking, and even unmaking institutions that have stood as pillars of society for decades, or even centuries.
One such institution is the university. These temples of learning have strong medieval roots and seem like permanent fixtures of modern society, the capstones of our education system. But how certain is the future of the university?
This thought-provoking Substack piece predicts that the end may be nigh for the university as we know it. How nigh? As nigh as the Class of 2026.
I let you dig into it for yourself if such things interest you. Author “John Carter” (probably not his real name…) makes some bold predictions. We’ll know how they play out in the next few years, so mark your calendars.
This week’s edition is unofficially brought to you by Just Emilia by Jennifer Oko, available wherever fine books are sold, including Amazon: Just Emilia [Paperback | Kindle]
Cool cover. Not a paid endorsement. (But if you want to pay me to endorse something, get in touch. My rates for selling out are eminently reasonable!) Image: Regal House Publishing
Thank you for reading!
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Sorry. Couldn’t resist. It was right there.
Skeleton Crew is the fourth book in Beverly Connor's Lindsay Chamberlain series. “Archaeologist Lindsay Chamberlain excavates the 1558 wreck of a Spanish galleon and finds evidence of a murder at sea. As she discovers clues to the identity of the murderer, her own situation becomes less tenable because of the presence of modern-day pirates and two killings possibly related to the excavation.”
I think we're all happy you took some needed time off.