Welcome back to A Little Wiser! We hope everyone’s having a great week. Please feel free to reply with any topics you’d like to see soon. Today's wisdom explores:

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The Surprising Origins of Familiar Flowers
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The Bayeux Tapestry
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The Pardon Economy
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Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

The flowers we think of as belonging naturally to certain places are almost always travelers, carried across the world by trade, empire, and obsession. The tulip is a great example. Though it is now the very symbol of the Netherlands, it is not remotely Dutch. It grew first as a hardy wildflower in the mountains of Central Asia, particularly around Kazakhstan, where nomadic peoples prized it as a herald of spring. The Ottoman Turks also fell in love with it, cultivating it in the palace gardens of Constantinople and naming it after the Persian word for turban. Only in the late 16th century did a Flemish botanist named Carolus Clusius plant the first tulips in a Leiden garden. The Dutch infatuation that followed grew into one of history's strangest financial episodes. During the "Tulip Mania" that peaked in February 1637, single bulbs of the most coveted striped varieties changed hands for the price of a canal house, before the market collapsed almost overnight, in what is often called the world's first speculative bubble.

Other everyday blooms carry origins just as unexpected. The sunflower, so associated with the fields of Provence and Tuscany, is actually native to the Americas, domesticated by Indigenous peoples thousands of years ago. They grew it as a crop, harvesting its seeds for food, oil, and dye, and it reached Europe only when Spanish explorers carried it back in the 16th century. The rose, though woven into English identity and Persian poetry alike, is one of the most ancient flowers of all. Fossil evidence dates it back some 35 million years, and it was cultivated across Asia at least 5,000 years ago before spreading westward. The delicate daisy takes a humbler path. It is native to Europe, and its name is a worn-down version of the Old English "day's eye," because the flower closes its petals at dusk and opens them again at dawn.

The deeper story hiding in a bouquet is one of human movement and desire. Almost every flower in a modern florist's window has been pulled far from its birthplace and reshaped by centuries of selective breeding, so that the plump, showy blooms we buy often bear little resemblance to their modest wild ancestors. The chrysanthemum was cultivated in China more than 2,500 years ago and held so sacred in Japan that it became the emblem of the emperor himself, adorning the imperial throne. The carnation traces back to the ancient Mediterranean, where the Greeks and Romans wove it into ceremonial garlands. What unites them is that a flower's journey almost always mirrors our own, following the paths of traders, conquerors, diplomats, and collectors who could not bear to leave a beautiful thing where they found it. The tulip in a Dutch field, the sunflower in an Italian one, and the rose in an English garden are all, in a sense, immigrants, m

The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most treasured artifacts to survive from the Middle Ages. It is not a tapestry at all. A true tapestry is woven on a loom, whereas this is an embroidery, made by stitching colored woolen yarn onto a background of bleached linen. And it was almost certainly not made in Bayeux, but in England, most likely by Anglo-Saxon needle workers in Canterbury. What it is, beyond doubt, is astonishing. It stretches nearly 70 meters long, roughly the length of a city block, yet stands only about 50 centimeters tall. Across that strip of cloth it tells the story of the Norman Conquest of England in a single continuous scene. The narrative unfolds across 58 scenes crowded with more than 600 human figures, hundreds of animals both real and mythical, ships, castles, and battles, all sewn in just eight colors of wool almost a thousand years ago.

The story it tells is the great turning point of English history, the events leading to the Battle of Hastings in 1066. It begins in 1064, when the Anglo-Saxon earl Harold Godwinson travels to Normandy and, according to the tapestry, swears a solemn oath on holy relics to support William, Duke of Normandy, in his claim to the English throne. When the old king Edward the Confessor dies in January 1066, Harold breaks that oath and seizes the crown for himself. The enraged William gathers a fleet, crosses the Channel, and the two armies clash at Hastings on 14 October 1066, where Harold is killed and William becomes the Conqueror. Tellingly, the tapestry tells this tale from the Norman point of view, casting Harold as an oath-breaker who brought his doom upon himself. That is unsurprising, given that it was probably commissioned by William's own half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, to glorify the conquest.

The cloth is packed with details that make it a priceless window onto the eleventh century, showing how people built boats, prepared food, and wore their armor into battle. One of its most famous moments is a blazing star with a streaming tail, which medieval viewers read as a terrible omen of Harold's downfall. We now know it to be Halley's Comet, making its regular pass through the sky in 1066. Its most debated scene shows a figure apparently struck in the eye by an arrow, long thought to depict the death of Harold, though scholars still argue over it. The tapestry's survival is a small miracle in itself, having narrowly escaped destruction many times. During the French Revolution it was reportedly almost cut up to cover wagons, and during the Second World War the Nazis, fascinated by its Germanic Norman heritage, moved it around France and briefly housed it in the Louvre.

Since the days of George Washington, the US president has held one of the most extraordinary powers in the constitution: the ability to pardon a convicted criminal. Almost every president has used it, and Donald Trump has granted clemency (official mercy that reduces or wipes away a punishment) to more than 1,500 people in 2025 alone (though most of these came through mass actions like the January 6 pardons, not individual grants). Among them were high-profile political allies like Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows. Traditionally, the path to a pardon ran through the Justice Department, which screens applicants and recommends clemency for those who show genuine remorse. A CBS News investigation broadcast this week suggests that path is increasingly being bypassed, and that a lucrative marketplace for access to the president has emerged instead.

The centerpiece of the report was a hidden-camera sting. Ammon Covino, convicted of illegal wildlife trafficking in 2013, had served 23 months and already been rejected for a pardon through the standard DOJ application. He agreed to approach two self-styled "pardon brokers" while secretly recording them for 60 Minutes. The brokers, lobbyists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, laid out a very different route to clemency. "With this particular White House, you have to put pressure on the president from all directions in a consistent way to force his hand," Burkman explained. He described a strategy of catching Trump in a "pincer movement" until he signed simply to stop hearing about it. Their fee was $300,000, which they said would cover the cost of getting close to the president, including fundraiser tickets and the hiring of MAGA "influencers" who meet with Trump regularly.

According to the CBS analysis, roughly 70 percent of Trump's second-term clemency actions bypassed the Justice Department. The investigation pointed to several pardons that followed money into Trump's orbit. They included a businessman pardoned for fraud after donating $2 million to support the president's re-election, a CEO convicted of money laundering who was pardoned after boosting the Trump family's crypto venture, and a healthcare executive whose mother reportedly paid a million dollars to attend a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser. It is worth stressing that straying from DOJ recommendations is not unique to Trump. Joe Biden pardoned his own son Hunter and figures like Dr Anthony Fauci, and the brokers themselves may be selling little more than bravado. The former DOJ pardon attorney Ed Martin flatly denied seeing any evidence of a transactional system, calling the brokers "snake oil salesmen". The White House was equally firm, insisting that "anyone spending money to lobby for pardons is foolishly wasting their money" and that the president "performs his constitutional duties in an ethically sound manner." Whether the brokers are grifters exploiting the desperate or genuine middlemen in a pay-to-play market is the question at hand.

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The A Little Wiser Team