ReadGlobe · morning brief · archive
Thursday 15 October
1 · The text
Born a slave, with no record of when
He does not know his birthday, his ancestry, or his father — and says so without self-pity.
2 min · Booker T. Washington · Up from Slavery · 1901 · public domain
I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time. As nearly as I have been able to learn, I was born near a cross-roads post-office called Hale’s Ford, and the year was 1858 or 1859. I do not know the month or the day. The earliest impressions I can now recall are of the plantation and the slave quarters—the latter being the part of the plantation where the slaves had their cabins.
My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings. This was so, however, not because my owners were especially cruel, for they were not, as compared with many others. I was born in a typical log cabin, about fourteen by sixteen feet square. In this cabin I lived with my mother and a brother and sister till after the Civil War, when we were all declared free.
Of my ancestry I know almost nothing. In the slave quarters, and even later, I heard whispered conversations among the coloured people of the tortures which the slaves, including, no doubt, my ancestors on my mother’s side, suffered in the middle passage of the slave ship while being conveyed from Africa to America. I have been unsuccessful in securing any information that would throw any accurate light upon the history of my family beyond my mother. She, I remember, had a half-brother and a half-sister. In the days of slavery not very much attention was given to family history and family records—that is, black family records. My mother, I suppose, attracted the attention of a purchaser who was afterward my owner and hers. Her addition to the slave family attracted about as much attention as the purchase of a new horse or cow. Of my father I know even less than of my mother. I do not even know his name. I have heard reports to the effect that he was a white man who lived on one of the near-by plantations. Whoever he was, I never heard of his taking the least interest in me or providing in any way for my rearing. But I do not find especial fault with him. He was simply another unfortunate victim of the institution which the Nation unhappily had engrafted upon it at that time.
2 · One idea · Decision-making & productivity
The Eisenhower matrix
The famous line about urgent and important work did not start with Eisenhower. He said so himself.
In August 1954 he told the World Council of Churches that a former college president had put it to him this way: I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent. He never gave the man's name.
Picture your inbox at eight in the morning. Forty messages are shouting. The one task that will matter in five years has not sent a single notification.
The loudest thing on the list is rarely the one that counts.
In one line. The Eisenhower matrix sorts tasks on two axes — urgent vs important — into four boxes: do now (urgent + important), schedule (important, not urgent), delegate (urgent, not important), and delete (neither). It separates what matters from what merely shouts.
Worked example
A manager’s day fills with urgent-but-trivial pings (delegate/delete) while the important-not-urgent strategy doc (schedule) slips for weeks. The matrix makes the trade-off visible: the strategy work is what actually moves the goal, yet nothing was ever “urgent” enough to force it.
How to use it, and where it fails3 · One number
People living in cities and towns, world
195029%
202558%
2.0 times the 1950 level.
The majority of humanity has lived in towns for less than a generation.
Source: Our World in Data, world estimates, read 2026-09-24.