“Ask anyone under 25 if they’ve heard of Billy Squier, and the answer is likely no. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t heard him.”

“It’s almost as if dudes think, ‘Imagine what it’s like if I’m with my lady and I take it down’ — like it’s sexy. That’s what people contemplating the man bun must think.”

President George Washington’s favorite nephew would go on to make his uncle proud. But at the age of sixteen, rumor had it that Bushrod Washington was bringing shame upon the family.

His mother, Hannah Washington, was the wife of George Washington’s brother — and the gossip had it that her son was attracting unfavorable attention in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Apparently he was getting a reputation.

We don’t know now what she wrote to her son, but on November 23, Swann Auction Galleries will place Bushrod’s response up for sale.1 With a steady quill penning careful script, the future Supreme Court justice steadfastly denied the allegation:

The uneasiness I have suffered since the reception of yours can scarcely be exprest. Is it possible you can believe I could be so lost to every Idea of Gratitude as to forget my duty to the best of parents….? I cannot conjecture by what means you could possibly be informed of a Report which never had any foundation than the busy tongues of those who seem to with for Strife.

Bushrod freely admitted that his extracurricular activities, while chaste, had no doubt led to such speculation. A serious student has limited free time, and he determined it was best spent in the company of women, including the lady in question.

It has always been my choice since I came to Town rather to expend any small portion of an Evening I had to spare from my Studys amongst the Ladies…. The Lady you refer to was often present & had in common with the rest every testimony of friendship of which they all merited a large portion at my hands.

He maintained his conduct was faultless, and went as far as to suggest Hannah, had she been privy to the scene, would readily concur. Despite this unwavering defense, Bushrod was clearly wary of parental ire, specifically from his father and, by extension, his uncle.

[D]o inform Papa (if the report has come to his Ears that I have wrote & shall be miserable ‘till I hear from you again that I may know you are satisfied.

Bushrod redeemed himself as an adult.2 Uncle George sponsored his legal studies with fellow founder James Wilson, and by all accounts, he was successful, or successful enough to leave a positive impression on John James Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice of the United Sates. At Marshall’s suggestion, President John Adams, who had served as the first vice president of the United States, formally nominated Bushrod to Wilson’s vacant seat on the Supreme Court. He was 36.3 Two days later, on December 20, 1798, Bushrod was confirmed by the Senate. He became an associate justice on February 4, 1799, the same year his uncle would die.

The first President of the United States had no children of his own. Washington had contracted smallpox during a 1751 trip to Barbados, and it is believed the disease may have left him sterile. His wife, Martha, had been a wealthy widow of 28 when they met, with four children of her own. He helped raise two of her children, as well as two of her grandchildren.

He bequeathed to Martha and her heirs his “improved lot in the Town of Alexandria.” Bushrod, however, would serve as his executor and heir. It was a big year for him: not only did he join the Supreme Court, but he also received the entirety of President’s private and public papers along with Mount Vernon, Washington’s plantation estate in Virginia.4

At the age of 67, Bushrod was in a state of rapid decline, after a not particularly notable career on the Court. He died on November 26, 1829, while attending court in Philadelphia. His wife, Anne, was said to be so stricken with grief that it killed her just two days later, and they were buried side-by-side at Mount Vernon. They had no children.5 Bushrod divided his uncle’s estate among his own nephews and niece, Mary Lee Washington. While we know much of the history of George Washington’s slaves, of Bushrod Washington’s, who brought dozens to Mount Vernon, less is known.

Swann Galleries estimates the two-and-a-half page letter to be worth $2,000–3,000.

1. It seems likely she addressed the issue directly, and did not first inform her husband or brother-in-law. Women were certainly relegated to the domestic sphere, and children fell under their purview. Men rarely involved themselves in such matters at all, let alone at the prompting of idle gossip. Intervention only occurred when the necessity for it was undeniable.

2. Bushrod had unsuccessfully asked his uncle to secure an appointment in the Federal Court early in his career, only to learn that “nepotism was not one of his uncle’s redeeming vices.”

3. Bushrod was not the president’s first choice, but he seemed resigned to the suggestion.

4. He owned Mount Vernon for 27 years with little alteration, save a porch built on the southwest end.

5. There are rumors that a Washington, either Bushrod or his brothers, impregnated a slave named Venus around 1784, which resulted in the birth of West Ford. A book by Linda Allen Bryant, a descendent of Ford, suggests that George Washington was the father. This claim is complicated by the assumption that Washington was sterile, and the lack of DNA evidence to support it. There is a two-hundred-year-old oral history from Bryant’s family that shows the Washington family did treat Ford particularly well, but there is no explanation as to why.

Alexis Coe is a columnist at The Awl, The Toast, and SF Weekly. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, the Atlantic, Slate, The Millions, The Hairpin, and other publications. Her first book, on an 1892 murder in Memphis, will be published next year. Mount Vernon photo by Rob Shenk.

In the tradition of House That Looks Like Hitler, here is Housing Estate Shaped Like Swastika.

Hahahah, this bear walks through the gate LIKE HE WAS PEOPLE! PEOPLE! Below, bonus bear video for your midday Monday enjoyment.

Remember these guys? Here’s what they’re up to now.

“A medical testing company called Quest Diagnostics analyzed decades worth of drug tests — about 125 million of them — and found that only 3.6-percent came back positive for cocaine and marijuana. That’s down from more 13-percent in 1988. Seems like a good trend. But there were some exceptions beginning with prescription drugs. Positive tests for Vicodin and Oxycontin were up sharply over the past few years. And researchers warn the lower rates of pot and cocaine use could also be due to the fact that more people are beating the tests.”

This is kind of pretty and dreamy and I guess that’s enough for me today. Next week will be Thanksgiving and then it’s going to be a nonstop parade of gloom, darkness, drinking and forced joy until you suddenly find yourself in 2014 wondering what happened and why your insides hurt, so as much as this week seems like it is never going to end you should probably try to appreciate it as the last period of calm and normalcy before it all goes sideways to hell. [Via]

“Our jobs are probably not make-work handed to us by crafty overlords. But they may be something more insidious — an elaborate kind of wealth redistribution system, masquerading as value-creating economic activity, sustained and powered by all the economy’s loopholes and flaws that Econ 101 barely mentions. If that’s the case, then we really ought to ask ourselves: Why are we working so hard, instead of collecting checks to sit on a beach?”

“That night, after Mr. Ballmer watched his son sing at his high-school baccalaureate ceremony — a Coldplay song with the lyrics: ‘It’s such a shame for us to part; nobody said it was easy; no one ever said it would be this hard’ — he says he told his wife and three sons he was probably leaving Microsoft. They all cried.”

I saw this photo last week and it made me realize that if the human race somehow survives for another hundred years, and not just in a living-in-holes and running-from-fires kind of way but actually in a warmer but not dissimilar world to the one we have now, we will reach a point in time where actors who star in period pieces set during the last century will have had no physical experience with a corded phone — no time spent tethered to an object mounted on a wall or planted in one corner of the room, twirling the cord around your arm until it left an impression on your skin, craning your neck to see the television, never being able to put the phone down for a second because it would snap back to the cradle, etc. Which is fine, I mean, good for them, it sucked, but unless they are like the Daniel Day-Lewises of 2052 they will not engage with those phones in the way that someone who spent any amount of time on them would, and there will be one more layer of artifice added to what is already a fake and silly enterprise. Again, in the scheme of things it doesn’t matter one bit, and the odds are that we’ll all be dead anyway, and if we’re not (or, more accurately, you’re not; I will be long gone) we won’t have much time to worry about the verisimilitude of telephonic communication in movies or TV or God forbid web series. It is one of those things that will disappear and will be almost as impossible to describe to the generations yet unborn as the rotary dial is now. I only bring it up because on this day fifty years ago the people from Bell Telephone (another one that I guess you had to be there for) brought out the touchtone model, which was another thing we used to have before you’d swipe your germ-encrusted fingers on a glass screen to make contact with someone else who you are probably only texting with because who talks to each other anymore? Anyway, you could press buttons to dial a call! It was AMAZING. If someone asked you for someone else’s number you would pantomime the physical act of dialing to help yourself remember it. The digits actually meant something. It took another 40 years before we realized what the pound sign was for, and once we finally did the geeks turned it into a giant honking indicator of some stupid inside joke you use to show all your friends how hip you are when really you are just another schmuck wasting time on a microblogging service while everything else is passing you by and you are being drawn inexorably closer to death. But I digress. Anyway, happy birthday push-button phone. I hope you are at peace in phone heaven.