American Glossary – County Highway

Departments

America by the Numbers

By The Editors

5 Percentage of Americans who believe that Adolf Hitler was a “completely good person” or a “good person who did some bad things”65 Percentage of Americans who think Hitler was “a completely bad person”74 Percentage of Americans who believe it was right for America to participate in WWII 88.8 Percentage of Americans who believe that Jews have the right to an independent country 8 Percentage of Americans who believed in 2017 that political violence was “at least a little bit justified”25 Percentage of Americans identifying themselves as “very liberal” in 2025 who believe that violence can be justified in support of political goals5 Americans identifying themselves in 2025 as “very conservative” who believe that violence can be justified in support of political goals45 Percentage of Americans of both parties who believe that members of the opposite political party are “downright evil”4.3 Percentage of American children 0-17 who are orphans3 Number of times that Janet Pflaumer-Phillips …

Editorial

Bouquets and Brickbats

By The Editors

Bouquet To Sam Shoemaker, who made — or grew — a kayak entirely from mushrooms and paddled it 26.4 miles from Catalina Island in California to San Pedro. Accompanying Shoemaker on his voyage, the longest open-water journey in a mushroom kayak ever recorded, was a 50-foot-long fin whale, which breached the water and then followed the kayak for three miles. “It was just like a psychedelic experience,” the artist and mycologist said afterwards, without admitting whether or not he himself was actually on mushrooms. While dreams of replacing plastic with fungal materials and launching colonies of floating mushroom houses may never be realized, the experience of seeing a whale up close while paddling across the open seas in a new-age boat made of mushrooms certainly seems like a decent-enough bedtime story to tell future generations of Shoemakers. Hopefully, they will treasure Sam’s adventure, instead of putting their aged family patriarch away in a mental hospital for inventing tall …