Earlier this year, Our World in Data celebrated the fact we have now passed “peak agricultural land”: over the last few decades, the global land area devoted to food production has declined. While the decline is not large and while the data is uncertain, the fact itself is significant and not in dispute: until recently, agricultural land use rose exponentially to feed the world’s growing population.

On this day in 1572, French Catholics slaughtered thirty thousand Protestants (known as Huguenots) in the streets of Paris. The French king and the pope helped organize the the biggest religious massacre in Europe in the 1500s. Roughly half the Bovards living in Paris were killed in the bloodbath. Three surviving Bovards fled past drunken guards at Paris’s city gates, raced to the coast, hijacked a rowboat, and made it across the English Channel and took refuge in London. Or at least that’s the Bovard family lore I’ve read. (I know not to bet the rent money on that lore’s accuracy.)

This is the story of a man, an intellectual, born after World War I, who spent studying his university years in New York and became acquainted and studied under German Jewish émigré who fled the Nazi regime in Germany, later becoming mentor and protégé.