✦
Why We Sit Left vs Right
✦
The Surprising History of Morocco
✦
How Jogging Became Cool
✦

Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

Every time someone calls a politician left-wing or right-wing, they are describing where a group of Frenchmen chose to sit in 1789. That spring, King Louis XVI had summoned the Estates-General to Versailles to rescue the country's finances, and by June the commoners' delegates had declared themselves a National Assembly. More than a thousand deputies now shared one hall, and as the arguments grew louder they drifted toward the people they agreed with. The split hardened in late August and September, during a bitter fight over whether the king should keep a veto over new laws. A royalist deputy, the Baron de Gauville, later explained what happened. "Those who were loyal to religion and the king took up positions to the right of the chair," he wrote, "so as to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free rein in the opposing camp." The revolutionaries who had been doing the shouting ended up on the left.

What started as a way to avoid rowdy neighbors soon became a map of French politics. When a new Legislative Assembly took over in 1791, its members sorted themselves the same way, with the reformers on the left and the defenders of the king on the right. In the National Convention of 1792, the most radical deputies took the high benches on the left and became known as "the Mountain," while the undecided mass below them was called "the Plain," or less kindly "the Marsh." After the Terror ended in 1794, the government tried to break up the factions by banning seating by side, but the habit outlasted the rule. When the monarchy returned in 1814 and 1815, the ultra-royalists went straight back to the right, and soon the French had words for every shade in between, from the "extreme left" to the "center-right."

The labels then spread to democracies whose parliaments were never arranged that way, which is why the seating and the politics don't always line up. In the British House of Commons the government sits on the Speaker's right no matter who wins, so a Labour government spends its time in power on the right side of the room. The US House of Representatives has its own reversal, because since the 19th century Democrats have sat to the Speaker's right and Republicans to the left, a custom that survived when the chamber swapped its desks for benches in 1913. Paris is still the place where the words fit the room. The French National Assembly meets in a semicircle in the Palais Bourbon, with the left-wing parties on the president's left and the right-wing parties on the right, roughly where the Baron de Gauville went looking for some peace and quiet.

On December 20, 1777, while George Washington's army was settling into its hard winter at Valley Forge, a ruler on the other side of the Atlantic did the new United States a quiet favor. Sultan Mohammed III of Morocco announced that ships flying the American flag were welcome in his ports, with the same privileges as the nations that already had treaties with him. In the diplomacy of the time that amounted to recognizing a country barely a year and a half old, and the US State Department calls Morocco the first nation to do it. The sultan wanted trade, but the Americans were busy fighting a war and didn't reply for years. In 1784 a Moroccan corsair finally got their attention by capturing an American merchant ship. Negotiations followed, and in 1786 the two countries signed a Treaty of Peace and Friendship that is still in force, the oldest unbroken treaty in American history.

Morocco had a habit of getting there first. Nearly a thousand years earlier, in the city of Fez, a woman named Fatima al-Fihri used her inheritance to build a mosque for her community, migrants who had come from Kairouan in what is now Tunisia, while her sister Mariam is said to have founded another mosque nearby. Fatima's mosque, al-Qarawiyyin, was founded in 859 and grew into a center of learning that drew scholars for centuries. Guinness World Records lists it as the oldest existing, continually operating educational institution in the world, more than two centuries older than the University of Bologna, which dates to 1088. Historians still argue over whether a medieval madrasa counts as a university, since al-Qarawiyyin only joined Morocco's modern university system in 1963, but either way it has been teaching for more than 1,150 years.

Morocco also kept its independence while its neighbors lost theirs. The Ottoman Empire took most of North Africa but never ruled Morocco, which from 1672 to 1727 belonged to its most formidable sultan, Moulay Ismail. He reigned for 55 years and reputedly fathered more than 800 children, and his family, the Alaouite dynasty, still rules the country today. The friendship with America that Mohammed III started lasted as well. In 1821 his son, Sultan Moulay Suleiman, gave the United States a building in Tangier to house its consul, and it became the first property the US government ever owned anywhere abroad. It is now a museum, and the only US National Historic Landmark in a foreign country.