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Cake in a Cup

August 4, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Kirbie Cravings.
This is one of many ways people make cake in a cup.

Because my older granddaughter likes to make a “mug cake” when there’s nothing sweet in the house for dessert, I was fascinated to read about Alex Posner, a woman who started a mug cake craze when she was only a teen.

Gabriella Gershenson writes at the New York Times, “The line starts as early as 6 a.m. and goes around the block. People wait for hours in the rain. Some of them cry when it doesn’t work out. Online, millions tune in to videos for the pretty colors and distinct sounds.

“The frenzy is all for a few spoonfuls of dessert in a cup known as the dotcake, a simple confection topped with frosting and nonpareil sprinkles exported from Long Island to Butterfield Market locations in New York. It tastes a lot like cake from a mix.

“ ‘People say it’s just cake and sprinkles, because it is just cake and sprinkles,’ said Alex Posner, 27, an owner of the Dotcakes, a bakery in Roslyn, N.Y., who created the baked good and sells it to Butterfield.

“Simple as they are, over the last month, dotcakes have exploded into a social media phenomenon. … Already, there are endless interpretations — dotcake ice cream, doughnuts, bagels and even manicures. …

‌”Those who manage to acquire one are often eager to recreate what has become a dotcake cliché: running a spoon over the hard, sprinkle-paved surface, oohing at the sound, then digging into the individually-portioned desserts, which come in vanilla, chocolate, red velvet, vanilla chocolate chip, and funfetti flavors.

“They seem tailor made for the TikTok era, with their tidy circle of colorful packed sprinkles, and the teeth-cracking crunch that serves as a kind of A.S.M.R [Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response]. There’s the nostalgic familiarity of a classic frosted cake, and if you’d rather not wait in line, it’s easy enough to make at home. …

“ ‘It’s a multisensory experience,’ said Alexa Matthews, a food influencer and the director of marketing at Butterfield Market, the only retailer in the city that sells the Dotcakes’s products. She added, ‘That’s what’s taking it to the next level.’

“Butterfield Market, an upscale grocer, often sells foods that are trendy or become internet sensations. … The store has given cake samples to some content creators, which may have pushed the popularity of dotcake over the edge.

“Are they worth the hype? ‘Everyone online just said it tastes like Betty Crocker,’ the influencer Lucie Rauschnabel said in a recent video, where she recreated a version at home.

“ ‘There’s a little bit of an eye-roll element to the fact that this cake went viral,’ said Carmel Hagen, the founder of the baking ingredient company Supernatural. …

“The most polarizing aspect of the dotcake may be the type of sprinkle that has catapulted to fame alongside it. It’s not the soft sprinkle or jimmy that has graced many an ice cream cone or funfetti cake. It’s the nonpareil — the hard, round bauble that was previously a wallflower of the baking aisle. …

“Posner sells around 3,000 ‘dotcups’ a week, plus 50 to 70 custom orders each day. … When she started Dotcakes in 2017 as a high school student working out of her parents home, ‘the point wasn’t the cake, it was the decoration,’ she said, citing pointillism and its totemic artist, Georges Seurat, as inspiration. ‘And now the point is the cake.’ ”

FYI: Coco doesn’t use a cake mix.

Coco’s Chocolate Chip Mug Cake
(Sometimes she calls it a Mug Cookie)

1 tbsp salted butter, melted
Add 1 tbsp brown sugar & 1 tbsp white sugar.
Mix.
Add 1 egg yolk and & 1 tsp vanilla.
Mix
Add 2 tbsp flour.
Mix well.
Mix in as many chocolate chips as you like.
Microwave for 45-60 seconds.

More at the Times, here.

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Mississippi’s Stellar Reading Program

August 3, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Rory Doyle for the New York Times.
Mississippi sends literacy coaches to low-performing elementary schools, one key part of its strategy.

Educators have known for some time that the most important school years for gaining literacy is third and fourth grade. That’s why Mississippi poured its limited resources into teaching reading at that level — and turned the state around.

Sarah Mervosh writes at the New York Times, “In Kim Luckett-Langston’s first year as principal of Hazlehurst Elementary School, one of the lowest performing schools in what had been one of the lowest performing states, she quickly diagnosed the problem.

“Children at her school, outside Jackson, Miss., were suffering from what she calls A.B.T.: ‘Ain’t been taught.’

“Kindergartners arrived not knowing their letters from their numbers. After a few years in school, they were still far behind. A decade ago, just 12 percent of Hazlehurst students were reading on grade level.

“Today, Hazlehurst has clawed that figure to 35 percent. And Mississippi has emerged as one of the best places in the country for a poor child to get an education.

“Mississippi has gone from 49th in the country on national tests in 2013, to a top 10 state for fourth graders learning to read — even as test scores have fallen almost everywhere else.

“Poverty remains a driving factor in student achievement, and wealthy states like Massachusetts still have the highest share of students proficient in reading and math. But adjusted for poverty and other student demographics, Mississippi is No. 1 for fourth grade reading and math, and at or near the top in eighth grade, according to the Urban Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

“ ‘If you want to ask the question, “Which states are helping kids coming from difficult circumstances learn as much as they can?” Mississippi is now doing much better than many other states, including wealthier states in affluent progressive areas,’ said Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a center-right think tank.

“Mississippi’s gains have been confined mostly to the early years, where the state has focused its efforts. … Yet Mississippi has figured out something almost no other state has, and it has involved far more than just changing the way reading is taught, the most common explanation for its success.

“Even as schools elsewhere have focused on issues like school funding, social justice and mental health in recent years, Mississippi schools like Hazlehurst have made academics their North Star.

“ ‘At the end of the day, our job is teaching. Their job is learning,’ said Ms. Langston, who added that no matter what is going on in a child’s life, the classroom is the one thing she can control. ‘If we don’t meet that need, we have failed them.’

“Mississippi’s progress has made it the envy of the education world, inspiring countless think pieces and recurring debates about whether the ‘Mississippi miracle’ could be real.

“How could Mississippi, with its low education spending and high child poverty, pull it off? It did not do so by relying on some of the most common proposals held up as solutions in education, like reducing class sizes, or dramatically boosting per-student funding.

“Rather, the state pushed through a vast list of other changes from the top down, including changing the way reading is taught, in an approach known as the  science of reading, but also embracing contentious school accountability policies other states have backed away from.

“ ‘Science of reading is really important — it was a key piece of what we did,’ said Rachel Canter, the longtime leader of Mississippi First, an education reform group, who now works at the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left Washington think tank. ‘But people are missing the forest for the trees if they are only looking at that.’ In addition to the reading overhaul, Mississippi raised academic standards and started giving each school a letter grade, A to F. 

“But unlike No Child Left Behind, the Bush-era federal law that set a goal of having every child in America be proficient in reading and math, Mississippi also measures how much students progress toward proficiency. Schools get credit if students show improvement — and double credit for the improvement of students in the bottom 25 percent.

“The state also takes an unusually strong role in telling schools what to do.

“The Mississippi Department of Education sends literacy and math coaches into low-performing elementary schools, with the goal of teaching teachers, not children. And state officials vet and approve curriculum used by the vast majority of districts, unusual in a country that prizes local control of schools.

“Mississippi also made other changes, like investing in pre-K, and holding back third graders who cannot read well, one of its most debated policies. …

“In Hazlehurst, a rural area 35 miles south of Jackson, more than half of children live in poverty and two in three adults don’t have a college degree. A chicken plant and the local Walmart are two main employers. The elementary school serves about 625 students, mostly Black or Hispanic. All are eligible for free or reduced price lunch. …

“It is the kind of school that might have been punished and labeled as failing during No Child Left Behind.

“Today, it is flooded with support.”

More at the Times, here.

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Learn To Dance Badly

August 2, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Salt Dance.
Dancer and choreographer Alex Ketley is also a lecturer at Stanford University.

Alex Ketley, the choreographer behind a confidence-building college class based on “bad dancing,” has a way of looking at things differently. For example, he befriended an unusual death-row inmate during Covid and later created a theater piece with him. More about that later.

First, Tracie White at Stanford Magazine has an article that explains the college class.

” ‘Welcome to bad dancing,’ says Alex Ketley, a professional choreographer and former member of the San Francisco Ballet who teaches Dance 123: Hot Mess & Deliberate Failure as Practice. Ketley, an advanced lecturer in the department of theater and performance studies and a former Guggenheim Fellow, says it’s his most popular course. 

“About 20 undergraduates and graduate students have signed up for what the course catalog describes as ‘a dance class in how we become the worst dancer possible.’ …

“ ‘Run with absolute abandon,’ Ketley says. And, like kids at recess, the students swarm onto the floor at Roble Gym, prancing, leaping, and stumbling into one another. Next, ‘make crazy monster faces,’ Ketley instructs. Now, he says, ‘Repeat the phrase: “I’m alive and filled with watermelon.” ’ 

“After class, Ketley says that his objective is for students to challenge and expand their perception of what is beautiful by performing silly pantomimes and reacting to movement prompts that are virtually impossible to do well.

” ‘What happens,’ he asks, ‘if we accept failure as a creative virtue?’ By letting go of perfection, students might discover something unexpected a’obsessively’ explored movement. He designed the course after using chaos in his own process and watching thousands of other performers: ‘I noticed a type of brilliance when people relinquish control.’

“Why is dance the right medium? ‘It’s fun,’ he says. “So much of our dance training is claustrophobically serious. Happiness, in a repressive culture, is transgressive.’

“The class culminates in a group performance when, Ketley says, students discover how far they’ve come from feeling fearful and embarrassed to dancing in front of complete strangers. …

“Elijah Williams, ’26, took the course hoping it would be a confidence booster. Several weeks in, it’s become one of his favorite classes — a helpful lesson in how to break out of your shell. Plus, he says, ‘I feel more able to express myself through failure.’ ” 

About the project with the prisoner: “Winner of a National Dance Project Award and generous multi-year funding from the Luger Family Trust, ‘An Approximation of Resilience’ was a portrait of Bill Clark, a 71 year old artist and writer who has spent the past 33 years confined to a 4ft x 10ft cell on California’s Death Row. Despite this, he has become an inspirational figure through his artwork and his educational outreach.

“In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, choreographer and Guggenheim Fellow Alex Ketley became increasingly worried about how the pandemic was affecting our incarcerated population. He went on a website called Write-A-Prisoner, and was struck by Bill’s profile, primarily that he said he experienced a crushing loneliness being nearly perpetually confined to his cell. Ketley wrote a one page letter saying hello, and two weeks later received a seven page handwritten letter back from Clark. This began a close friendship. After the quarantine lifted, Ketley visited Clark almost every week for five years.

” ‘An Approximation of Resilience’ was an hour long dance-theater installation, created with a stellar group of performers and artists, that takes the premise that beauty exists anywhere if it is given the opportunity to be seen and celebrated. … It premiered in the spring of 2025 at City Dance Studio in San Francisco and was performed across a four weekend run. …

“In 2026, Alex Ketley won an Isadora Duncan Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Bay Area Individual for his work on ‘An Approximation of Resilience.’ “

More at Stanford Magazine, here, and at Ketley’s website, here.

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Gen Z Is Loving Crosswords

August 1, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Mohamed Marey via Unsplash.

I know a lot of people who work a daily puzzle to maintain cognitive health — puzzles like Wordle, Sudoku, anagrams, and crosswords. These people are mostly over 50, so I find it interesting that younger people are getting into puzzles, too, especially crosswords.

Cameron Pugh writes at the Christian Science Monitor, “People are doing crossword puzzles everywhere these days. On the train. During a break at work. In bed before turning in. Crosswords have leapt from their traditional home in the newspaper and taken over phone and computer screens. 

“And no generation is more thrilled about it than Gen Z. Fifty percent of Gen Zers say they do crosswords regularly, according to a poll by Unscrambled Words, a website that helps users solve anagrams. That’s the highest share of any generation surveyed, outstripping baby boomers at 38%, Gen Xers at 31%, and millennials at 15%.

“ ‘We are living in the golden age of puzzles,’ says Will Shortz, who has edited crosswords for the New York Times since 1993. He holds perhaps the world’s only degree in enigmatology, or the study of puzzles. … ‘They’re not just for old people anymore.’ …

“When Mr. Shortz started at the Times, which printed its first crossword in 1942, the paper had run puzzles created by teenagers six times. Today, Mr. Shortz says he has published puzzles by at least 75 teens. In 2021, Soleil Saint-Cyr, at 17 years of age, became the youngest woman to publish a crossword in the Times. 

“Crosswords have also swept through student newspapers, demonstrating their growing appeal among younger audiences. The Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia launched a puzzle section in 2024. Student Life, which covers Washington University in St. Louis, began publishing mini crosswords in 2022. …

“Crosswords saw an explosion in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Natan Last, who last year wrote Across the Universe, a book that charts the history of crossword puzzles. That includes Gen Zers such as Luke Schreiber, a rising junior at Princeton University in New Jersey. 

“ ‘It started off as a bit of a pandemic hobby. My dad liked solving crosswords, and so that gave me the idea to try my hand at creating them,’ Mr. Schreiber says.

“Mr. Schreiber is one of two head puzzles editors at the Daily Princetonian, the school’s student newspaper. He has also published puzzles in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today.

“Some of the crossword’s success with Gen Z traces back to news organizations, which during the pandemic began to see games as a way to grow their audiences. … By 2021, the Times Games section had 1 million subscribers; in 2024, a spokesperson for the Times told AdWeek that more than 10 million people played the paper’s digital games each day. …

“For students, Mr. Schreiber says, the crossword acts as a needed break from homework. 

“ ‘Students are looking for something that isn’t work – you know, isn’t studying or homework or something like that – but also isn’t a video game,’ he says. A crossword is ‘considered a little more intellectual than a video game, but it still is fun and not quite work.’ …

“The now-defunct New York World is credited with publishing the first crossword on Dec. 21, 1913. Created by Arthur Wynne, the ‘Word-Cross’ took the shape of a diamond and lacked the now-familiar black squares. …

“Mr. Shortz sold his first puzzle at 14, springboarding his now-storied career as a cruciverbalist. (That’s the shorthand for a crossword aficionado.) When he started at the Times, he endeavored to draw in a wider audience. ‘I think the crossword should reflect the life, language, and culture of everybody who reads the Times, and that’s everybody from smart teens up to the oldest people,’ he told the New Yorker in 2023. …

“Young creators, Mr. Last says, have driven a cultural renaissance for a pastime that sometimes came off as stuffy and uptight. ‘They treat the puzzle like a mixtape, and they treat language as powerful and arbitrating,’ he says. ‘They are very, very focused on an inclusive puzzle – where inclusive is both political and cultural.’ ”

More at the Monitor, here.

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Golf-Course Builder Gets into Rewilding

July 31, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian.
Shaun Hancox, the “Picasso of Ponds,” says the excavator “becomes an extension of yourself, it just flows.“

I find the rewilding movement (taking developed land and returning it to nature) inspirational for several reasons. Of course it benefits the environment but it also reminds me that it’s possible for humans to reverse some of the damage they create.

Patrick Barkham writes at the Guardian about a guy in the UK who is using his golf-course building skills in a new way.

“He is known as ‘the Picasso of ponds’ but the tableaux being created by Shaun Hancox in a boggy field in Somerset currently looks more like a building site. An orange and black excavator is rhythmically removing lumpy clay soil and sculpting it into brown banks.

“The result looks like a scar of bare earth on what was once green pasture – but the magic happens as soon as rain fills the newly created depressions. Plants seed swiftly, invertebrates and amphibians rapidly find the water, and life explodes.

“Britain has lost at least 400,000 ponds over the past century, according to the Freshwater Habitats Trust. A similar number remain but many are overgrown, degraded or affected by nutrient pollution.

“Everyone realizes we’re in a sorry state with freshwater and it needs to be addressed,’ says Hancox, of Creative Wetlands, a contractor who has dug scores of new ponds for charities and rewilding projects across Britain.

“Hancox acquired his skills … digging landfill sites and golf courses for his family’s groundworks company. ‘My original job was a shaper on golf courses. We travelled all over, to Portugal, Germany, Belgium, building bunkers and drainage – everything really that wasn’t good for wildlife. I’ve always had a massive interest in wildlife, so we’ve got to the stage now where we want to put something back.’

“Building golf courses helped Hancox become a master of pond creation. … He says, ‘A golf ball rolls very much how water moves. When you’re putting in a wildlife pond, you look at the landscape and give your pond the best chance of holding water and doing what it should do. It’s the same if you’re doing a fairway – you want to shed the water or get it into a drainage system or into certain areas. The shapes of the ponds are almost golf course bunkers but in a more rustic, natural way.’

“At Heal Somerset, a 185-hectare (460 acre) former dairy farm being turned over to nature by the charity Heal Rewilding, Hancox is digging four new ponds, including one double-bowled pond 30 metres in diameter.

“The ponds are specifically for great-crested newts, which have been found in low numbers on the farm but have no suitable ponds in which to breed. Usually within a year of being created the ponds fill with aquatic life, including damselflies and dragonflies, and provide food and shelter for birds, from moorhens to house martins, who feed on the insects and use the pond-side mud to build nests.

“Crucially, these new ponds are not connected to any river system, which can wash nutrient-rich or polluted water into them. Instead, they are charged by clean rainwater or clean groundwater, enabling more delicate aquatic plants to thrive.

“Pete Case, of the Newt Conservation Partnership, says: ‘You can fiddle with rivers all you like but pond creation is the simplest and cheapest way of bringing clean water back to the landscape.’ …

“Case is full of praise for Hancox’s skills. The partnership, a coalition of the Freshwater Habitats Trust and the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust, identifies new pond sites, builds and monitors them. It is funded by the NatureSpace partnership, whereby housebuilders pay to create replacement terrestrial wetland habitat or ponds that are lost or damaged by development. This project, which operates across 70 local authorities in England, ensures that any new pond habitat is maintained for 25 years, with the ponds inspected and the landowner receiving an annual payment to manage it.

“It guarantees that they will be suitable for newts in 25 years’ time,” Case says. The partnership assesses the surrounding land to check it will meet newts’ needs. ‘When it comes to newt conservation, everyone focuses on making a pond, but newts spend two-thirds of their life on land. If you don’t get that bit right, they aren’t going to do so well.’ “

Oh, my goodness! Don’t you love that there are humans who create and sustain an organization called the Newt Conservation Partnership?

More at the Guardian, here.

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The Secrets Under Notre Dame

July 30, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: AP Photo/Nicolas Garriga.
A  restoration project at Notre Dame Cathedral is uncovering evidence of daily life from centuries of Parisian history.

Today’s story is about the city of Paris deciding to put a shaded plaza in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. It’s also about the need to first uncover any artifacts that may be buried in the space, and right now a dig is focused on Roman artifacts.

(I must say, when I read phrases like, “as the Roman empire collapsed,” I wonder if the Romans refused to believe that collapse could ever happen. Maybe there’s a lesson for us.)

Thomas Adamson writes at the Associated Press, “Wilting in the summer sun, a line of tourists waits to climb Notre Dame cathedral and meet its gargoyles.

“Four meters (13 feet) beneath them, a team of archaeologists is digging the other way — straight down and back in time, to Roman Paris 2,000 years ago.

“In 2019, fire brought Notre Dame’s spire crashing down as the world watched. The cathedral was rebuilt and reopened in late 2024, and now Paris wants to soften the hot, bare square in front of it with trees and shade. But in a city this old, the soil cannot be turned until what lies beneath it is excavated, in case it is damaged during works.

“So a slice of Notre Dame’s forecourt has become an excavation site — an open pit ringed by barriers and crossed by a wooden walkway, a few steps from the line-up.

“French media have dubbed it the ‘dig of the century.’

“ ‘It’s a rare opportunity for us to work on something that’s tangibly going to make a difference to the history of Paris,’ Lucie Altenburg, a conservator with the Paris archaeology unit, told the Associated Press.

“Among the hundreds of objects already found: a fourth-century coin stamped with the face of the Emperor Constantine, and shards of medieval pottery painted on the inside with marks no expert has yet deciphered — like a modern Da Vinci Code. …

“This is the bargain in every old city: The past is not in a museum down the street — it is under the street. Cities rise. Each age builds on the rubble of the last, and the ground climbs with it; in Rome, it has risen about 9 meters (30 feet) since the empire fell in the fifth century AD. …

“At the cathedral’s birth in 1163, the entire square was packed with medieval houses, split by a single street, said Camille Colonna, the archaeologist leading the dig.

“Digging down, her team has reached their cellars — and therefore also the time in history they represent.

“Below them lie Merovingian and Carolingian grain pits, from the sixth to the 10th centuries; below those, darker and deeper still, a dense Roman quarter from the fourth and fifth centuries.

“Twenty centuries are stacked in 4 meters (13 feet) of earth. …

“The richest finds here come from the foulest place: the deep pits beneath the medieval houses, old latrines that doubled as rubbish dumps. Out of them the team keeps lifting whole jugs and cups — thrown away centuries ago, yet still intact — among the broken plates and animal bones.

“It’s ‘rare to find complete ceramics,’ said Valentine Breloux, an archaeologist with the unit. Here the soft waste cushioned them. … Then some other objects came that confounded experts. As conservators cleaned what looked like ordinary medieval pottery, they found faint reddish writing painted on the inside — the same mysterious markings on shard after shard.

“What they mean has yet to be deciphered. Of everything she has cleaned from Notre Dame, Breloux said, these are the most ‘astonishing.’

“The coins came up as black discs, eaten by rust. But under an X-ray, a face returned: it was Constantine, the Roman emperor who ruled in the early 300s AD. Such objects also ‘can be invaluable in giving us the date of the (underground) layer,’ Altenburg said.

“The Roman finds are the ones the archaeologists value most — the deepest, oldest and least understood. In Roman times, the town was called Lutetia, and its center lay across the river, on the Left Bank.

“As the Roman empire collapsed, people pulled back to the Ile de la Cite, where Notre Dame would later rise, and fortified the island with walls of stone taken from earlier buildings.

“Colonna’s team found some proof: a Roman doorstep found in the dig, taken from a much bigger building, carried over, turned upside down, and laid in a road as paving. …

“For archaeologists, the cathedral dig is a rare treat. In France, like elsewhere, they work only where building work is about to begin — a bit like how industrial quarry workers end up unearthing dinosaur remains. …

“The new square should be mostly finished by 2028: a kind of woodland clearing, with 160 new trees and a thin film of water sliding over the stone to cool it in summer — part of how Paris is bracing for ever hotter summers induced by global warming. …

“Until then, the Notre Dame team wants to go deeper still — past the Romans, toward whoever came before them, the Gauls who gave the city its first name.”

More at AP, here.

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Is There a Pianist in the House?

July 29, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: 7News Australia.
Sterling Nasa, a university student in Australia, unexpectedly came to the rescue of a concert production of the film La La Land.

A movie musical about the magic of Hollywood produced some magic of its own at a concert production in Australia. You could say that composer/conductor Justin Hurwitz pulled a rabbit out of a hat.

Kelly Burke writes at the Guardian,”La La Land is a much adored homage to Hollywood, where dreamers take chances and seize unexpected moments.

“On Saturday night at the ICC’s Darling Harbour theatre, that idea became a reality for a 21-year-old university student who was thrust into the spotlight at a live performance of the movie’s score. …

“Sterling Nasa was in the audience at ‘La La Land in Concert,’ a touring production where the movie – which features Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone – is projected on to a screen while a live orchestra plays the musical score in synchronization with the film.

“The performance proceeded normally until the interval, which stretched out to 40 minutes. Then the film’s Oscar-winning composer and conductor, Justin Hurwitz, walked out alone to address the audience.

“The orchestra’s keyboardist had suddenly fallen ill. Was there by any chance a pianist in the house?

“[In the intermission] as the orchestra’s musicians frantically phoned local contacts, offers started rolling in of backup players who were 15 to 20 minutes away. But Hurwitz knew time had run out.

“ ‘I figured nobody’s as close as they say they are … so I just thought, well, we have 2,500 people in here. … I wanted to make sure that somebody wasn’t just overly confident. I asked a couple of follow-up questions like, “Are you sure? Can you really sight-read? Can you play key signatures you’ve never played before?”

“Nasa, who plays piano and organ and is the bagpipes tutor at his old school, Scots College, hesitated when the call went out.

“ ‘I was a little bit tentative,’ the University of Sydney politics and international studies student told ABC Radio on Monday morning. ‘I do owe a lot of the experience to my friend, Scarlett, who sort of … put my hand up for me. But I did end up finding the confidence and it was a very good decision to go down and volunteer myself.’

“A longtime admirer of Hurwitz’s work, Nasa suddenly found himself sitting at an electric keyboard, staring at a complex score he had never rehearsed.

“The ultimate test came during the performance of the John Legend piece ‘Start a Fire,’ which features an intricate synthesizer solo designed to match the erratic hand movements of Gosling’s character on screen. It was the exact moment Hurwitz was most nervous about.

“ ‘The synth solo is really technical. … ‘As it was coming up, I was thinking, “Oh no, how’s he going to be able to handle the solo?” ‘

“Nasa told the ABC he was thinking the same thing.

“ ‘I saw it on the score and I thought, oh, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to sight-read that in one go,’ he said.

“Like Gosling’s jazz-pianist character Sebastian, the student had to decide whether to stay in the shadows or take a monumental leap of faith. With no time to overthink, he chose to trust his instincts.

” ‘I took a little bit of a creative liberty and just decided to improvise, which I think ended up being a good choice.’

“The gamble paid off, carrying the orchestra through the number – and earning Nasa a resounding ovation from the audience. …

“Hurwitz said, ‘That is a whole other skill on top of sight-reading. To be able to play a really cool solo in the right key, in the right scale, on the fly with no rehearsal – it was remarkable.’ …

” ‘I just told him how blown away I was, and obviously how thankful I was,’ Hurwitz said. ‘All of our heads were spinning a little bit because it was such a surreal moment.’ …

“Reflecting on the incredible turn of events, Nasa said it was an unforgettable privilege to play a soundtrack he had loved for years.

“ ‘It was quite a blessing to get to play a work that I’m in such admiration of,’ he said. …

“Nasa will be heading back to his regular university lectures. But has the student missed his calling in life? …

“ ‘I don’t know what he’s most passionate about,’ Hurwitz said. ‘Maybe he likes international relations a little more than music. But that’s what La La Land is about. You’ve got to do what you love the most.’ ”

More at the Guardian, here; also at People, here. There’s a cool video interview at People.

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Baseball Goes Bananas

July 28, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Elias Williams for The New York Times.
Derek Klena went from performing in front of theater crowds of around 1,000 people to nearly 70,000 baseball fans when he transitioned from Broadway to Savannah Bananas.

If you haven’t yet heard of the kooky baseball team the Savannah Bananas, let me be the first to introduce you. Today’s article focuses on a pitcher who never could choose between his love of baseball and his love of theater — until he realized he didn’t have to.

Jonathan Abrams reports at the New York Times, “Months ago, Klena joined the Savannah Bananas, the barnstorming baseball club that has become nothing short of a sensation with its playful take on America’s pastime. Joining the club known for both choreography and curveballs meant Klena had to put his Tony-nominated theater career on hold. But that doesn’t mean the drama had to stop.

“When a relief pitcher is summoned in the big leagues, his trip to the mound is often accompanied by a signature song. … A few days before the Bananas got ready to play at Yankee Stadium, Klena described his vision for an entrance: He’d come in from the Yankees bullpen, wearing a cloak and with a mask covering half of his face. He’d hold a lantern in one hand and a microphone in the other, singing his way onto the field. The Phantom of the Opera takes the mound.

“The only issue he foresaw was figuring out a boat apparatus attached to a power scooter to transport him and best replicate the musical’s famous scene.

“ ‘We’ll get to see what this boat adventure turns into,’ Klena, 34, said over breakfast a few days out from the Bananas games in New York. …

“Klena’s decision to join the Bananas is a snapshot of shifts in modern entertainment and how traditions are being upended. The Bananas have only been around for about a decade but, using a fan-first concept and bits tailor-made for social media, they easily sell out stadiums and appeal to a demographic that traditional baseball has struggled to reach.

The club has 11.5 million followers on TikTok, 4.2 million on Instagram and 2.5 million YouTube subscribers.

“ ‘Broadway has built its platform on being in the room to experience it,’ said Klena, who has starred in many shows. … ‘You have to go to New York. You have go to the theater. There’s something super special about that, and that’s what’s made Broadway so niche and it’s been the secret to its success for a long time. But the digital world has changed the way that people view things and how fast they can get them.’

“Klena is by no means giving up on theater and acting. He plans to audition for roles while with the Bananas as long as they fit into his demanding baseball schedule.

Growing up in Southern California, Klena’s childhood somewhat resembled that of Troy Bolton, the athlete-singer from “High School Musical” who struggled to balance his two devotions.

“John Klena, his father, coached him in baseball throughout much of his childhood. His presence helped whenever Derek Klena had to leave a game early to make a play or show. …

“In high school, John Klena could no longer be the buffer between coaches and directors. Derek Klena pursued theater outside of his schooling, and also pitched on the baseball team.

“ ‘I had a lot of traumatizing conversations with my coach about why I couldn’t make practice or why I was going to be late to things because I had theater.’ …

“He chose UCLA for college, joining the theater program. He also walked on the baseball team. … Eventually he reached a crossroads that had been approaching since childhood.

“ ‘I realized that it was going to be a pretty steep uphill climb to make any sort of dent in that pitching lineup,’ he said. …

“He entered a singing competition, landed an agent and received callbacks for auditions before landing a role in Carrie: The Musical, figuring he’d take a few months off from school.

“ ‘I’ve been out here now for about 14 years,’ he said.

“He met his future wife, Elycia Scriven, at UCLA. The pair moved to New York after Klena continued landing roles. He also joined the Broadway softball league and dominated.

“Klena’s talents landed him the attention of the songwriting duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who cast him as the lead in Dogfight, a musical about three young Marines preparing to deploy to Vietnam. A few years later he received a Tony nomination for his performance in Jagged Little Pill. Last year, Pasek and Paul suggested Klena to Jesse Cole, the founder of the Bananas. …

“Klena grabbed a mitt and took his family for a bullpen session. He found that his fastball still touched the 80s on the radar gun.

“ ‘Everything is a risk,’ he said of his decision. ‘And so why not take this risk on something that is going so well, it’s only growing, and it’s a proven concept, doing something that I know is built for me?’ “

More at the Times, here. If you want to read about the team’s choreographer, click at ESPN, here.

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Accordion Stories

July 27, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Ryan Caron King/Connecticut Public Radio.
Accordions on display at the New England Accordion Connection & Museum Company in North Canaan, Connecticut. The museum has over 500 on display, and is one of two accordion museums in the country.

After reading at Connecticut Public Radio about an accordion museum, I thought about how many different associations I have with these instruments.

I think of strolling troubadours at romantic restaurants. I think of my Wisconsin relatives and how they always get the band at weddings to play a polka. And I think of a Massachusetts novelist who made the accordion practically a character in her book Hoopi Shoopi Donna.

Would love to hear what the word “accordion” makes you think of.

Lori Mack writes, “Walk into North Canaan’s historic railroad station, and you’ll see hundreds of accordions stacked floor to ceiling. It’s a wall of gleaming buttons, piano keys, mother-of-pearl, rhinestones, and chrome.

“That’s where you’ll find Paul Ramunni.

“He’s curator and owner of the New England Accordion Connection and Museum Company, a space devoted not just to instruments, but to the stories they carry. …

“Long dismissed as ‘corny’ because of its ties to polka music, the accordion has often been the butt of jokes. Ramunni played through his teenage years, but stopped when he went to college. Then, decades later, something unexpected brought him back.

“ ‘Forty-two years later … I woke up in Vermont and had the urge to play again,’ he said.

“A single phone call led him to a nearby seller with a collection of accordions — and concertinas said to have come from Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp.

“ ‘That was the moment that changed things for me,’ Ramunni said.

“At the time, he was working as an accountant. But collecting instruments soon became something more.

“ ‘I thought I was collecting accordions,’ he said. ‘And then I realized I was saving the stories.’

“Many of those stories are rooted in war, migration and survival.

“One begins in Nazi Germany, with a young accordion prodigy named Rosemarie Molitor. According to Ramunni, she was asked to perform at Nazi dinner parties. She refused. As punishment, her father was forced to drive trucks loaded with explosives to the front lines. But the family survived the war.

“Years later, relatives brought Molitor’s accordions to Ramunni’s museum. He asked when Molitor died, and was surprised by the answer.

“ ‘She hasn’t passed,’ they told him.

“Molitor, who was in her 90s and living in California, spoke with Ramunni over FaceTime. …

“Other instruments in the collection carry their own histories: One was used to entertain Al Capone in the 1930s, another belonged to television host Lawrence Welk, and one was played for more than 225,000 troops during World War II.

“But the museum isn’t just about the past. The accordion still has the power to connect people, Ramunni says.

“He remembers two orchestral musicians who stopped by while in the area for another event. Neither had ever played the instrument. One was a bassoonist, the other a clarinetist.

“Ramunni brought them into a back room and handed them an accordion. Within minutes, he said, they were laughing like children — giggling, playing, completely absorbed.

“Afterward, he asked where they were from. One was from Iran. The other, Israel. The musician from Iran told him they had only met a week earlier.

“ ‘A bond developed over the music,’ the bassoonist told Ramunni. ‘And we agreed we would never let anything come between us that would hurt that bond or destroy it.’

“For Ramunni, that moment captured what the accordion represents: Not just that it can make music, but that music brings people together.

“That sense of discovery played out again that day when a man driving through town with his family spotted the sign for the museum and pulled in.

“ ‘I don’t know how to play one — I think they’re cool, though,’ said Alex Beardsley of Prospect. …

“Nearby, Ramunni showed a 5-year-old boy how the instrument works, opening the bellows as spirited music filled the room. The sound rose and fell, lifting into something playful and alive.

“On the back of his business card, Ramunni sums up accordions this way:

“ ‘They each have their own special voice, characteristics, flaws, and beauty. I guess in a way the same could be said of each of us.’ ”

More at GBH, here.

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Artist Edmonia Lewis

July 26, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Henry Rocher/Harvard Art Museums Fogg Museum.
“Edmonia Lewis 1845-1907” (circa 1870).

Having just learned of an order to post signs outside the Smithsonian saying that the history inside is false, I’m sharing — in the interest of holding on to history based on facts — the kind of information you can still find at the Smithsonian.

Sháńdíín Brown has an article at Hyperallergic about black indigenous sculptor Edmonia Lewis and the exhibit about her in Massachusetts.

” ‘Sometimes the times were dark and the outlook was lonesome, but where there is a will, there is a way,’ the Black and Indigenous sculptor Edmonia Lewis once said. The quotation, now printed and spotlit on a dark blue wall in the exhibition ‘Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone,’ continues, ‘That is what I tell my people whenever I meet them, that they must not be discouraged, but work ahead until the world is bound to respect them for what they have accomplished.’

“Lewis — who was born in Greenbush, New York, in 1844 and died in London in 1907 — is paid such respect in her first major retrospective at the Peabody Essex Museum [Salem, Massachusetts] held over a century after the artist’s death.

“Co-organized by the Peabody Essex Museum and the Georgia Museum of Art, the extensively researched exhibition tells an expansive narrative of the artist’s sculpture practice and legacy, displaying 30 of Lewis’s Neoclassical white marble sculptures alongside a plethora of archival materials and works by other artists.

“One of the strongest elements of ‘Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone’ is that the curatorial framework allows for Lewis to be understood simultaneously as a Black and Indigenous artist without conflating the two identities. Indeed, each quite literally occupies its own space in the exhibition: Four thematic rooms — ‘Antislavery and Emancipation,’ ‘Indigenous Artistic Worlds, ‘the Studios of Rome,’ and ‘Religion, Mythology, Transcendence’ — are in conversation with one another and designated by different colors of wall paint. Through collaboration with Black and Native scholars, the groundbreaking exhibition is the first of its kind to present Lewis’s work in dialogue with both of her ancestries. …

“In 1865, Lewis moved from Boston to Rome — a premier hub for American Neoclassical sculptors from the late 1820s to the mid-1870s — and worked there as a sculptor until the early 1890s, when she moved to London. The exhibition informs visitors that within a few years of her arrival in Italy, Lewis was the first woman artist of Black and Indigenous descent to achieve widespread international acclaim. ”I was practically driven to Rome,’ Lewis explained, because ‘the land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.’ …

“While abroad, Lewis’s practice did not shy away from activism; her work commented on current American political events. The first carved marble sculpture by Lewis that exhibition-goers encounter is ‘Forever Free’ (1867), in which a man stands upright and looks up with his fist in the air. Broken shackles hang from his arm as a woman kneels beside him with clasped hands, also looking upward. ‘Forever Free’ was the first sculpture by a Black American artist to celebrate Emancipation.

“Made in Rome, the composition borrows visual elements from ancient Greco-Roman marble statuary. Throughout her work, Lewis used the language of Neoclassical sculpture to spread her message while also borrowing imagery from her own time. For example, the exhibition links the kneeling woman in ‘Forever Free’ to a similar image printed on the copper token ‘Am I Not a Woman & A Sister,‘ produced by the American Anti-Slavery Society, and a 1863 newspaper printing of the Emancipation Proclamation. 

“Displayed alongside 18th-century, 19th-century, and contemporary Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe art, ‘Hiawatha’s Marriage’ (modeled 1866, carved 1870) is displayed in another room. In response to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s popular poem of 1855, ‘The Song of Hiawatha,’ Lewis carved the union of Dakota woman Minnehaha and Ojibwe warrior Hiawatha. …

“The exhibition closes by demonstrating Lewis’s legacy in a powerful work by Gisela Torres, a London-based interdisciplinary artist of Afro-Cuban descent who feels a deep ‘psychic connection’ with the sculptor. In a video work titled ‘Reverie and Slumber’ (2020), Torres dreams of Lewis. Video footage of Rome is projected on plaster casts of Torres’s head, overlaid with audio of the artist singing Peggy Lee’s 1969 song ‘Is That All There Is?’ and whispering names of other Black women sculptors. … ‘Reverie and Slumber’ is from Torres’s ongoing reclamation series Looking for Edmonia (Self-Portrait) (2018–present), which began after she read an article about the discovery of Lewis’s unmarked grave in a London cemetery where she regularly walked. 

” ‘Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone’ [contributes] not just in its carefully curated presentation of her artworks, but also in its critical research on the artist and her life, demonstrating how her legacy was carried forward by the Black community. It is deeply moving. I imagine that, as the exhibition travels to two other museums, it will reach other contemporary artists who, like Torres, follow in Lewis’s footsteps. “

More at Hyperallergic, here.

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Nature Gets a ‘Seat on the Board’

July 25, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: The Financial Timees/Mark Cocksedge.
The castle sits on a hill above the Tamar estuary; the manor house dates to 1808. Owners House of Hackney are intentional about doing right by Mother Nature.

In 2010, our sorry high court confirmed the principle of corporate personhood in the US, leading to the injection of a flood of business money into our election system. One of the consequences has been the difficulty of electing candidates who care about climate change, conservation, or the environment. So I suppose that giving something like voting rights to Nature, the topic of today’s article, is only fair. I wish it were happening here, not just in the UK.

Tiffanie Darke at the Financial Times writes, ” ‘Nature has the best designs’ has long been the lodestar of interiors brand House of Hackney. And when co-founders Frieda Gormley and husband Javvy M Royle moved to the Castle of Trematon, Cornwall, in 2019, they set about papering, carpeting and upholstering in the joyous cacophony of botanical prints for which the brand is celebrated. …

“Letting nature in took a different approach outside: there was to be no digging, no glyphosate, no more foreign planting.  But with the move, their love of nature evolved into a more serious project. Fifteen years after they founded the brand with the purpose of championing craft, nature and community, they began ‘to hunger for meaningful change.’ … Which prompted the question: what if nature could redesign the business?

“The House of Hackney is now termed a ‘regenerative business’ — one that ‘puts in more than you take out,’ says Gormley, and that uses the systems of reciprocity on which nature thrives to construct its models, both internal and external.

“Its decision to appoint ‘Mother Nature and Future Generations’ to a board director role has become a case study at Harvard Business School. ‘Giving voice and decision rights to the environment and the future do not tend to be well represented in either business or government,’ says Harvard professor Peter Tufano.  Working with the True Price Foundation, a Dutch organization that has been providing sustainability-focused accounting services to companies, governments and institutions since 2012, House of Hackney assessed its impact through an Integrated Profit and Loss (IP & L) framework. This accounts for four types of capital : produced (the financial and physical assets), natural (the health of ecosystems and resources), human (the wellbeing of people) and social (the strength of communities and relationships). …

“While the company’s [negative] impact was laid bare, the path to reduce it was clear. And so House of Hackney set itself up as a live experiment, hoping to be a trailblazer that would prove business can actively regenerate a resource-depleted world, and act ethically in a corporate environment. How it has attempted this, through governance, culture and design, is the subject of a new book, In the Company of Nature, written by Gormley. …

In 2022, British beauty brand Faith in Nature became the first business to appoint a board position to nature.

” ‘For a product line that is of 99.5 per cent natural origin, it was initially “a creative act,’ ” says brand director Simeon Rose, and figuring out the legality took ‘a lot of bloody-mindedness.’ The work of the Rights of Nature movement, which had succeeded in securing rights for a river in New Zealand, offered a template, while the groundwork was executed by Brontie Ansell of Lawyers for Nature with the Earth Law Centre.

“Ansell became House of Hackney’s guide. Both companies were already B Corp, but neither felt that went far enough. ‘Consumers are sick to death of the sustainability narrative. People want to see more effort, more responsibility, more leadership,’ says Ansell. ‘Charities have to show public benefit and increased public wellbeing, but business just needs to make money. Why not eat away at the fringes of that divide? Let’s have businesses that have a greater purpose.’ …

“ ‘We don’t have ambition for non-purposeful growth, we are happy to stay as an incubator brand,’ says Gormley. … ‘We do the experimentation that other companies can use. And we enjoy the process: the day-to-day creativity of designing beautiful things, but also designing beautiful systems.’ ”

More at FT, here.

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The Importance of Waffles at ‘Dugnads’

July 24, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Bowl of Delicious.
According to the Christian Science Monitor, participating in a “dugnad” is just part of being Norwegian. A kind of community volunteering there, it usually involves an element of fun, such as waffles for mud-spattered workers or a cookout for kids.

Most Norwegian children are raised knowing that service for the good of the community is an essential part of life. It’s not presented as an unpleasant chore, according to the Christian Science Monitor, but work that you do with others and always combine with some fun.

Mark Sappenfield writes, “There is no precise word in English for what Ann Helen Myrvold is doing. ‘Volunteering’ perhaps comes closest. But it’s more than that.

“She has not come to this part of suburban Oslo just to beautify the stream Gjersrudbekken on its forested tumble toward the fjord. She has come from some deeply ingrained Norwegian sense of obligation, of community, of responsibility – and, of course, for the waffles.

“True, what she is doing looks remarkably like a run-of-the-mill cleanup, removing everything from car tires to motorized scooters from the stream’s path with a sweet treat for everyone afterward. But she and her friends from a nearby university have been doing things like this since kindergarten, cleaning neighborhoods and holding bake sales to fund sports teams.

“Dugnad is not just the activity, but the mindset behind it. And at a time when social scientists see the fabric of societies fraying – churches and community organizations declining, connections across demographic lines dwindling – dugnads are something of an antidote.

“No one here would argue that dugnads are the reason why Norway consistently ranks as one of the highest-trust countries in the world. But no one would argue that they don’t play a role, either. They are a binding force, both simple and sweeping, that give Norwegians not only a sense of doing good, but of doing it together. …

“Says Ms. Myrvold, ‘You start at a young age, and you just learn to do it and love it. You see it as teambuilding.’

“The tradition has its roots in Norway’s history as a poor nation of small farmers and fishermen. When a church or bridge needed to be built, or a neighbor was building a barn, everyone came together to help.

“ ‘It was a kind of social insurance or a mobilizing of resources, and it was steeped in a sense of justice,’ says Karl Henrik Sivesind, a professor at the Institute for Social Research in Oslo who has studied the tradition. ‘It’s not for your own advantage. You chip in, and everyone chips in.’

“Today, social scientists lament the loss of ‘social capital’ – the connections in a community that drive trust and bring broader benefits for all. The dugnad is an incubator of social capital, Dr. Sivesind says.

“ ‘If you look at the word itself, it has a social element,’ he says, noting that its verbal roots reference the concept of virtue. ‘You contribute to necessities of organization, and you meet people, build networks, and get to know people in your neighborhood.’

“The Gjersrudbekken cleanup is organized by Rusken, a three-person bureau in the Oslo city government that organizes volunteer cleanups and is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Ms. Myrvold signed up with several friends who attend the nearby Norwegian University of Life Sciences. …

“To all the young women clad in bright orange vests and industrial work gloves, participating in a dugnad is just part of being Norwegian. And it usually involves an element of fun, whether that’s waffles for mud-spattered workers or a cookout for kids.

“Across town, Norway’s biggest hiking and outdoor activities organization is holding a dugnad of its own, skewers for sausages included.

“The Norwegian Trekking Association is among the most beloved groups in the country, maintaining trails and cabins for a nation of nature lovers. Today, in a playground of the residential neighborhood of Bærum, they’ve built a bonfire.

“The plan is to teach local children wilderness skills such as first aid. Many kids have brought stuffed animals to practice on. But it’s also a chance for neighbors to meet and talk….

“Maria Ruud has brought her 7-year-old daughter. She says she’s been doing these sorts of things ‘forever.’ Local carnivals for kids, neighborhood cleanups where ‘you find a task the kids can do,’ and Norway’s famous May 17 Independence Day celebrations – all made possible by dugnads.

“She acknowledges that she sometimes doesn’t look forward to the work, whether that’s planning games and food or raking leaves. But there’s a bigger benefit.

“ ‘The good part is the social side,’ Ms. Ruud says. ‘You come together and share the work. As humans, you feel like you’re a part of something bigger. We need that to make our life meaningful.’ …

“Kristin Sandaker ticks off the dugnads she has done over the years. At one flea market to support a local youth orchestra, she recalls getting in 24,000 steps simply lugging items around. …

“But she worries that the forces that would divide Norway are growing. The political polarization that shapes much of European politics has a foothold in Norway, too. And immigration can inadvertently raise the risks of different communities becoming detached and distant from one another.

“Dugnads are a counterbalance. There’s a fellowship that comes from taking 24,000 steps or being ankle-deep in mud with someone.

“ ‘It is the most obvious proof that we can do things together,’ Ms. Sandaker says. With the current state of things, ‘this gets even more important – that people get together in this way.’ ”

More at the Monitor, here. Do you see anything like a dugnad in your community?

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Homeless Writers in Asheville

July 23, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: David Conrads.
Leslee Johnson is the editor of the Intersection, a newspaper produced in Asheville, North Carolina, mostly by writers and artists experiencing extreme poverty. Johnson is a lecturer at the Asheville campus of the University of North Carolina.

When I was commuting to Boston, I often bought the Homeless Empowerment Project’s newspaper, Spare Change News, which was a way for unhoused people to make a little money while looking to get housed.

David Conrads writes about something similar at the Christian Science Monitor.

“Every Saturday, 12 Baskets Café in Asheville, North Carolina, becomes a newsroom. Writers spread out around the large dining room tables – some typing on laptops, others working old-school on pads of paper.

“On a recent weekend, Melissa Mayes is finishing an article on women experiencing poverty and homelessness in the city. Though she has never had to live on the street, Ms. Mayes, a retired nurse, is disabled, has difficulty affording groceries, and spent five years sleeping on friends’ couches before finally moving into her own federally subsidized apartment. The subject of women struggling to obtain food and housing is close to her heart.

“ ‘I see these beautiful souls,’ she wrote in the Intersection, a broadsheet newspaper produced by the group of writers and artists who come to the café, most of whom are homeless or living in extreme poverty. ‘I have come to know certainties of who they are: brave, relentless, hopeful. Also, broken, yet always healing. They make me laugh with their keen observations, cry with their disappointments.’

“That passage is from Ms. Mayes’ article, headlined ‘Have You Seen Her?’ in the April/May issue of the Intersection. … The publication is sponsored by the nonprofit Asheville Poverty Initiative (API), which also runs the café. The Intersection covers a wide range of topics and includes community news items, profiles, opinion pieces, poetry, and artwork.

“The force behind the paper is Leslee Johnson, a poet, essayist, and lecturer in English on the Asheville campus of the University of North Carolina (UNCA) who began having lunch at 12 Baskets four years ago. … She says, ‘IIt was a place where I felt more comfortable and present than in some areas of my life.’

“After learning she was a writer, some of the regular patrons opened up about their own writing projects. Ms. Johnson started a creative writing group, playfully dubbed the Moonlight Cheese Alliance, in which more than a dozen or so people meet at the café every Friday after lunch. …

“The seed to expand to a newspaper was planted when Ms. Johnson attended the Conference on Community Writing, a national gathering aimed at exploring writing as a tool for social change. She learned of a newspaper in Cincinnati written and sold by homeless and formerly homeless people. …

“ ‘We were doing something pretty close to the Cincinnati paper,’ she says. ‘There was energy around expanding from literature and poetry to news and opinions and games and humor.’

“But the true spark that brought the Intersection to life was a 2025 ordinance passed by the Asheville City Council extending restrictions on panhandling.

“ ‘When the panhandling ordinance was extended down Haywood Road, directly impacting a number of folks we serve every day, we knew we needed to step up and offer the paper,’ says Ben Williamson, executive director of API.

“Poverty and homelessness are major concerns in this city of about 95,000. … It is also one of the most expensive housing rental markets in the country. For Ms. Johnson, the Intersection is one tool to help the city address these concerns.

“ ‘As part of Asheville Poverty Initiative, our umbrella organization, we exist to build community and educate about the realities of poverty,’ she says. ‘Specifically, the street paper reduces fear and dismantles stereotypes by publishing news, opinion, and creative work by those living in deep poverty and homelessness.’ …

“Sellers wear blue vests and lanyards identifying them as official vendors of the Intersection. API offers vendors, many of whom are also contributors, an initial 10 copies of the paper at no charge and subsequent copies for $1 each. Vendors sell the papers for $4 apiece. …

“Emily Witherspoon is a contributor and vendor for the Intersection. Formerly homeless for two years, she now lives in an apartment and works several part-time jobs. She enjoys selling the paper and appreciates the opportunity to earn extra money.

“ ‘It’s fun, and it’s legal,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to stand there worrying about getting arrested.’ …

“In addition to her work with the Intersection and the Moonlight Cheese Alliance, Ms. Johnson directs UNCA’s Prison Education Program and has coordinated college-level classes and academic programming at Buncombe County Detention Facility in Asheville. …

“ ‘There is a lot of creativity and brilliance that goes unheard,’ Ms. Johnson says. ‘If I’m in a position to create a space to shine light on that, I feel like that’s an obligation.’ ”

More at the Monitor, here. “12 Baskets Café”! Gotta love the imagination that goes into the naming of coffee shops in general. Why is that, I wonder?

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Why the Great Pyramid Is So Resilient

July 22, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Asem Salama / Scientific Reports..
A diagram of the inside of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

Today’s story about the brilliant design of the the Great Pyramid of Giza reminds me that people living in the 21st century should never assume they are more intelligent than people centuries ago. Many of our ethical stances show improvement. We have advanced gadgets and skills. But we have lost ancient skills needed to manipulate ancient gadgets.

And what about building construction? The high rise in New York City that threatens to collapse is surely an example of inferior design capability.

Compare that to the pyramids. Richard Widdington writes at Artnet, “Over the past 4,600 years, the Great Pyramid of Giza has weathered a dozen or so major earthquakes. … Cumulatively, seismic activity is one factor that explains why the structure has lost around 30 feet in height since it was completed at the peak of Egypt’s Old Kingdom.

“Otherwise, the wonder of the ancient world has endured relatively unscathed. Unlike the earlier Step Pyramid at Saqqara or the aptly named Bent Pyramid at Dahshur, the Great Pyramid of Giza is free from earthquake-induced structural damage. A new study led by seismologists at Egypt’s National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics measured such resilience and concluded that it might be partly by design.

“[Researchers] used an accelerometer to measure natural vibrations at 37 locations inside and around the pyramid, including on its exterior stones, within its chambers, and in the surrounding soil. They found the majority of the vibrations inside the structure exhibited ‘exceptional homogeneity’ and ranged between 2.0 and 2.6 hertz. This means the stress of an earthquake is distributed evenly throughout the pyramid. Crucially, this differed from the surrounding soil, which averaged 0.6 hertz, effectively offering the ground as a natural shield that prevents seismic energy from amplifying as it passes into the monument. Building on top of a carefully leveled limestone bedrock, researchers noted, also helped to anchor the structure. The results were published in Scientific Reports in May.

“ ‘The Great Pyramid behaves as a single, cohesive unit that naturally vibrates at a fundamental frequency of approximately 2.3 Hz,’ one of the researchers, Asem Salama, said over email. ‘The frequency difference prevents the destructive phenomenon of resonance, the primary culprit behind the collapse of modern buildings, when a structure’s frequency matches the earthquakes vibrations.’

“Another factor preventing shockwaves from amplifying as they rise through the pyramid is a series of five rooms built directly above the King’s Chamber, which sits at the heart of the structure. Known as weight-relief chambers, they were designed to protect the hallowed space from the immense weight of the stone blocks above it. In the context of earthquakes, however, they act as a built-in ‘shock absorbers,’ diminishing the vibrations that reach them.

“Last, there’s the Great Pyramid of Giza’s most visibly obvious advantage: its bottom-heavy, symmetrical shape. This ensures weight and stress are distributed evenly throughout the structure.

“​ ‘The earthquake resilience of the Great Pyramid of Giza is not a historical fluke, but the pinnacle of an ancient engineering evolution,’ Salama said. ‘Much like modern engineering advances through iterative science and lessons learned from past structural failures, Egyptian architects refined their techniques over generations. Prior disasters, such as the collapse of the Meidum Pyramid, provided critical data. By the time the Great Pyramid’s architects broke ground, they had mastered the physics of permanence.’ ”

More at Artnet, here. No firewall.

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Why You Are Like a Zebrafish

July 21, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Max Planck Institute for Biology.
Although zebrafish don’t have eyelids, light does disrupt their sleep, and, like humans, they have four stages of sleep.

Many creatures on Planet Earth have things in common that you’d never suspect. Today we learn about research showing that the humble zebrafish has sleep patterns almost identical to human sleep stages.

Sara Novak writes at the New York Times, “Whether tucked away in a colony of coral, hidden in the darkness of an aquatic cave or floating catatonic just above the ocean floor, fish take opportunities for rest and recovery, just as we do.

“Like humans, most fish are diurnal, meaning they sleep mostly at night; while they don’t have eyelids, and therefore can’t shut out the darkness, light does disrupt their sleep. And just like us, when they snooze they’re motionless and slow to respond to environmental stimuli. If you deprive them of sleep, they will make up for the loss by sleeping longer the next night.

“Now, a new study, released this month in Nature Communications, shows just how much fish sleep really does resemble our own. By tracking eye movements of zebrafish, the researchers were able to identify four different substates of sleep. …

“ ‘There’s complexity to their sleep structure,’ said Jennifer Mengbo Li, a co-author of the study and a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany.

“Three of the four substates happen at night, lasting a total of 10 hours. The first — and deepest — is characterized by a stone-cold stare. As the waking hours near, a second, lighter substate sets in: The zebrafish’s eyes twitch, sideways in the same direction, before moving slowly back to center. In the third substate, entered as morning approaches, both eyes turn to the same side and stay there.

“During the fourth and final substate, which takes place in brief bursts during the day, the zebrafish’s eyes move back and forth, as if sweeping the surroundings for potential risks. But the eyes can be deceiving:

These five-to-10-minute naps are deep enough that much of the brain activity is suppressed, and the zebrafish are hard to wake up. …

“As part of the study, researchers were able to follow the fish using what’s best described as a self-driving autonomous microscope and camera system. Designed by Drew Robson, another co-author of the study and a fellow Max Planck neuroscientist, the scope and camera followed 105 fish around the tank as they swam, hunted and slept.

“ ‘This is the first time we can record the whole brain of a freely moving animal,’ said the lead study author, Vikash Choudhary, a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute. …

“ ‘Researchers were able to show that zebrafish do have specific sleep states and that certain populations of neurons are activated and might be markers for these sleep states,’ said David Prober, a biologist at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved in this study.

“Dr. Prober contends that the zebrafish brain — though smaller and simpler than a human brain — can still help identify the most essential mechanisms associated with sleep. His lab has found that many of the genes, neurons and drugs that regulate sleep in humans and other mammals have similar effects in fish.

“Michael Heithaus, a marine ecologist at Florida International University who was not involved in the study, said that it’s thrilling that scientists have begun teasing these different sleep states apart and trying to understand their purpose.”

More at the Times, here. What a shame it would be for the US to lose funding for this type of science and the scientists who pursue it! It seems obscure, but it adds to our knowledge of the planet we call home and often helps us understand ourselves better.

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