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African American Mushroom Experts

July 11, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Maria Pinto.
Maria Pinto with a burn morel mushroom, on Boston’s North Shore; right, Pinto with a Berkeley’s polypore mushroom in Weston, Massachusetts. 

Last fall, when my second cousin stopped by with his mycologist friend, they inspired in me a new interest in wild mushrooms. I don’t feel motivated enough to find and eat them, but I am definitely paying more attention to what pops up after a rainstorm.

Melissa Hellmann wrote recently at the Guardian about some serious mushroom hunters.

“On her typical walk in the woods in Newton, Massachusetts, something stopped Maria Pinto in her tracks. She spotted what appeared to be a glowing yellow figure with a metallic sheen among the pine needles on the ground. It was the first time Pinto was enthralled by a mushroom – the American yellow fly agaric, a poisonous fungus. …

“ ‘It forced me down on my knees to examine it further, because it didn’t look real,’ Pinto, a naturalist and writer, said. … More than a decade later, Pinto has dedicated much of her life to mycology, the burgeoning study of fungi.

“As a Jamaican American woman, Pinto stands apart in the mostly white hobby through her pursuit of exploring the African diaspora’s connection to mushrooms. In her recent book, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival, Pinto interviewed Black people who are growing and documenting mushrooms throughout the Americas. …

“Pinto, Elan Hagens in Oregon and William Padilla-Brown in central Pennsylvania are a few Black mushroom enthusiasts contributing to the understanding of fungi and humans’ connection to them. …

“Fungi are essential to ecology. They act as decomposers, and without them, the earth would be filled with dead trees and animals. Mycorrhizal fungi, which grow in the soil, supply plants with additional nutrients and water. The organisms also have a storied role in African diasporic history and culture. Prior to the outlawing of slavery in the US, Africans who were escaping enslavement would consume an underground fungus to sustain themselves. …

“Pinto became interested in mushrooms by accident. As a self-identified ‘swamp rat; a little feral child,’ growing up in Jamaica and south Florida, she loved to pick fresh food from the ground and off of trees. A few years after her run-in with the yellow mushroom in 2013, there was a mushroom boom in the north-east US [that] reminded Pinto about her love for foraging wild food. …

“A friend of Pinto’s who grew up foraging for mushrooms in Poland taught her the basics of identifying and cataloging fungi. Pinto’s social media posts were soon filled with pictures of mushrooms she’d foraged, leading the University of North Carolina Press to approach her to write a book about fungi. …

“In her book, Pinto wrote about self-emancipated formerly enslaved people who consumed Wolfiporia, a fungus that produces an underground source of nutrients that resemble a small coconut. The organism uses the ball of nutrients to sustain itself during drought and cold seasons. Native Americans would help the formerly enslaved people find and dig up the underground food source.

“ ‘In these moments of being on the run and not wanting to make smoke or any indication that you’re hiding away,’ Pinto said, ‘this nutrient store underground, especially in the wintertime, was probably an incredible food.’ The fungi is still used in traditional Chinese medicine to promote calmness and to enhance digestion. …

“Hagens’ interest in mushrooms began when she was a young child growing up in the Portland [Oregon] area, where she attended environmental and nature-based classes starting in elementary school. Her love for fungi grew when she became a dog trainer in her mid-20s, after she participated in a CBS reality television show called Greatest American Dog in 2008. Though she didn’t win the $250,000 promised for the owner of the best-trained dog, Hagens learned during her time on the show that dogs could be trained to locate the odoriferous underground fungi, truffles. ‘This whole boom of truffles in Oregon and the United States was at its infancy,’ Hagens, 41, said.

“In 2011, she created her company, Temptress Truffles, to sell truffles found by her dogs and other foragers. … In her decades of foraging for mushrooms, one spring day in 2020 stands out the most.

“While walking her dog alongside a river in the Portland metropolitan area, she spotted a large oyster mushroom twice the size of her face. The fan-shaped fungi with sprawling gills rested high up on a tree several meters away. ‘People were walking and jogging in front of me, and nobody is seeing this mushroom,’ Hagens said. ‘It’s like the biggest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m flipping out.’ It began raining, so Hagens returned in the evening to remove the mushroom with a knife fastened to a long stick. She cut out the parts infested with worms and made the rest into potstickers that she ate for days.”

Lots more at the Guardian, here. The Guardian is free, but please consider donating. They are doing an amazing job.

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She Fought the Sugar Lobby

July 10, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Helena Price.
Cristin Kearns, who took on the sugar lobby.

There’s an old-time hymn that goes in part, “Once to ev’ry man and nation/ Comes a moment to decide.” I heard a story at dinner the other night that made me think of that hymn. It was about a minister, a friend’s father. He had a parish in Memphis and was there when Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed. He overheard two parishioners using the N-word and saying the death was a good thing. He scrapped his planned sermon and preached against racism. Within months, he’d lost half his parish and had to move.

I greatly admire people who stand up, knowing it will make powerful people angry.

Here’s another brave soul. Alexandra Sifferlin interviewed Dr. Cristin Kearns for Time magazine.

Alexandra Sifferlin
“You started investigating the sugar industry after attending a dental conference on diabetes. Why?

Cristin Kearns
“I got a government brochure about preventing diabetes, and the nutritional advice was to reduce calories, increase fiber, decrease fat. It didn’t say anything about sugar. One of the speakers had a fast-food nutrition guide, and [a sweet tea] got ranked as a ‘healthy.’ I asked him, ‘How can you characterize sweet tea, which has a ton of sugar in it, as a healthy drink?’ His response was that there’s no evidence linking sugar to chronic disease. I just looked at him like, What?

Sifferlin
“So that led you to start digging into how industry was affecting public-health messaging?

Kearns
“I came across all of these references to the Great Western Sugar Co. The company was based in Denver, and sugar beets were historically a major crop in Colorado, so the company decided to donate many of their records to local libraries. In the first folder that I opened, there was a confidential memo with the Sugar Association’s letterhead on it. I was like, What did I just find? Are you kidding me? …

“It was a memo the Sugar Association sent out to its PR guys at various sugar companies about a report they had put together called Sugar in the Diet of Man. The report, which they put together with consultants, was meant to be a review of all the scientific research about sugar, heart disease, diabetes, tooth decay, obesity, etc. Of course, it ultimately concluded that sugar didn’t have a role in any of those things.

Sifferlin
“Your most recent research showed the sugar industry funded studies blaming fat instead of sugar as the leading cause of heart disease.

Kearns
“I don’t think we realize how much we’ve been marketed to. The whole “low-fat is healthy” movement allowed products high in sugar to be promoted as healthy. I don’t think the average person really grasps that there is industry money behind many food- and health-related studies. …

“We’re in a time now where Big Soda is fighting the soda taxes, and the public is waking up to industry tactics. There’s a whole movement of trying to increase people’s awareness of food. …

“Even though the science is clear that sugar contributes to heart disease, we’re still having these same debates about the role sugar plays in people’s health. I think my research can help us understand why these debates have gone on for so long. The tobacco industry still funds research, but the more high-quality, respectable journals have refused to publish it. That hasn’t happened yet in the food world.

Sifferlin
“Has your own diet changed?

Kearns
“I used to drink soda instead of coffee. That was a long time ago.

Sifferlin
Do you consider yourself an activist?

Kearns
“That gets turned into sort of a bad word sometimes. I am taking action, let’s put it that way. I really want evidence to support what I’m bringing to light. I don’t want to just point the finger and say the sugar industry is bad. I want to document what they’re doing. I want the work to lead the way, and not have it be about me.

Sifferlin
“Many of your colleagues describe you as soft-spoken. Are you?

Kearns
“People don’t expect me to come out with the material I have. Because I am not preachy, people seem to trust me as reliable. I’ll take it. That’s who I am. I’m a proud introvert.”

More at Time, here, and at Sugar Politics, here.

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Peacock Invasion

July 9, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Nicolas Brunetti.
Peacocks started roaming the streets of Punta Marina, Italy, during Covid. Now, love them or hate them, they’re there to stay. 

Around here we get too many Canada geese. A town in Italy, however, gets too many peacocks. Which would you rather have? From my experience at a friend’s home years ago, I’d rather have geese early in the morning. Peacocks are loud.

Angela Giuffrida writes at the Guardian, “Federico Bruni was sitting on a bench, eating a piadina romagnola (flatbread sandwich) and minding his own business, when a peacock strutted up in the hope of a few crumbs. High-pitched squeals emanated from the direction of a disused military barracks across the road. ‘That would be the call to love,’ Bruni said. ‘The male peacocks are courting the female ones – we’re in peak mating season.’

“As another couple of peacocks wandered by, their iridescent trains sweeping the pavement behind them, this could be mistaken for a wildlife park. But the scene is Punta Marina, a seaside town on the Adriatic coast of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region that has been colonized by the birds, to the delight – or despair – of its approximately 1,000 residents.

“The birds have made their home in the gardens of abandoned properties and perch on rooftops and fences, or peek out from trees. They carefully navigate the traffic, sometimes tapping their beaks on the windows of parked cars after catching their reflection. …

“They don’t bother Bruni, who frequently comes to his holiday home in Punta. ‘It’s no different to seeing a cat, really, they’re part of the fabric of the town,’ he said.

“Others are less welcoming. ‘There are too many of them,’ said Francesco, who preferred not to give his surname. ‘They jump over the wall and on to my balcony, leaving excrement. But the main issue is the mating – the screams are keeping people awake.’ …

“Historically a symbol of immortality, peacocks feature in many of nearby Ravenna’s prized Byzantine mosaics, and over the centuries they became status symbols, once adding color to the resplendent gardens of Emilia-Romagna’s wealthy residents.

“How they settled in Punta Marina is a mystery – although there are reports they were brought in as pets by a resident more than 20 years ago. … For a long time, the peacocks lived in the sprawling pine forest behind the town. But then came Covid in 2020, and for months the peacocks roamed free while people were in lockdown. The occasional human they came across gave them food, enticing them to return. …

“Rosario Balestrieri, an ornithologist at the Naples-based Anton Dohrn zoological station, said … ‘Supplementary feeding actively provided by the local population has encouraged steady population growth.’

“While people were used to the birds’ more prominent presence at this time of year, the mating period, a recent social media post from a disgruntled female resident imitating the mating scream has gone viral, creating a media frenzy. A local police officer said some resulting reports – depicting an ‘invasion’ of peacocks forcing people away from the town because of a possible threat to public health – were wildly exaggerated.

“Still, the high profile tensions have left Ravenna city council, which in recent years has been grappling with how to manage Punta Marina’s peacock population, with a dilemma. An attempt to move them in 2022 was opposed, and after that, Clama, a voluntary animal rights association, was enlisted to protect the peacocks and encourage harmony.

“Clama has produced leaflets and put up signs to teach residents and tourists about the birds, saying they absolutely must not be fed.

“ ‘If they know it’s easier to come and snack on a sandwich in the town rather than having to forage for their own food in the pine forest, then of course they will keep coming back,’ said Cristina Franzoni, a volunteer with Clama, adding that people who fed the peacocks could be fined. …

“ ‘Peacock rangers,’ who can be called on to clean up poo from the streets, homes or the wheels of cars have been recruited to defuse tensions. …

“Other Italian regions have offered to ‘adopt’ the birds, but Franzoni said removing them was not the solution and would cause ‘trauma.’ She said: ‘We need to try to live with the animals instead of making them victims of our choices – they didn’t choose to come here, we brought them here and so must respect them.’ “

More at the Guardian, here. No firewall. Nice photos, including a charming peacock mosaic from Ravenna.

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Bristol Bay Tribes Don’t Give Up

July 8, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize.
Alannah Acaq Hurley is a Yup’ik leader, executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay, and winner of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize for North America.

It is inconceivable to most people in the modern world that if gold was lying around nearby, you wouldn’t help yourself to it. Indigenous communities are not “most people.”

At the environmental radio show Living on Earth, host Steve Curwood recently interviewed Goldman Environmental Prize winner Alannah Acaq Hurley, executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay, Alaska.

Steve Curwood
“In 2001, a Canadian mining company proposed a massive gold and copper mine at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, a pristine water system on the coast of the Alaska Peninsula that’s home to the largest sockeye salmon run in the world. The salmon support a thriving ecosystem and are a cultural and economic lifeblood for native Alaskans, who have stewarded the land and water for thousands of years. And as the company moved ahead with plans to build the largest open pit mine in North America, those indigenous communities joined together to bring it to a halt. In 2023 they secured a rare ‘EPA veto’ of the proposed Pebble Mine, and the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize for North America recognizes an Indigenous leader in this fight.

Alannah Acaq Hurley
“My Yup’ik name is Acaq. My Irish name is Alannah Hurley. … Acaq is my great-grandmother’s name.

Curwood
“Alannah, before we start talking about your work protecting Bristol Bay, paint us a picture of the bay. What makes this such a special place? …

Hurley
“It has all the different types of terrain in all of Alaska, in one place. Where I live, at the mouth of the Nushagak and Wood River, we have everything from tundra and wetlands to mountains, freshwater lakes, freshwater rivers, the muddy waters of Nushagak Bay, the beautiful, crystal clear ocean waters as you go west towards Togiak and Twin Hills. … It’s so pristine you can still hunt and fish and pick berries and eat them straight from the land. You can drink right out of the lake and rivers. It’s paradise. …

Curwood
“It produces, what, more than $2 billion of annual revenue from Sockeye fishing alone. It’s also an important food source and cultural site for Indigenous communities, First Alaskans. Talk to me about what the bay means to the people in the area.

Hurley
“So there are three different Indigenous groups in Bristol Bay, the Yup’ik people, the Dena’ina people, and the Alutiiq people. And our homeland, you know, has been stewarded by our people for thousands and thousands of years. They’ve taken care of this place and entrusted it to us. Our lands, our water, and everything that that entails, the salmon, the moose, the caribou, the bears, us, our freshwater fish, our berries, our plants, our medicines, we very much view it as all very connected. So anything that happens to our lands and waters happens to us. And so it is everything to us. It is the health of our people, physically, culturally, spiritually, it sustains us. It nourishes us. We’re so blessed to be able to live in the ways that our ancestors have lived. …

Curwood
“In the year 2001 or so, the Northern Dynasty Minerals mining company proposed the development of what’s called the Pebble Mine. … What would have been the environmental impact of such a project?

Hurley
“The environmental impact of the Pebble project would have been devastation. … That picture is not a question of, if something will happen, but when, especially in an earthquake-prone zone, and in a very interconnected, you know, hydrologically interconnected place, they’re like the veins of the bay, like the body, everything is connected, all of that water is connected. …

Curwood
“Some say that there are literally hundreds of billions of dollars worth of copper and gold and other minerals in the area for the Pebble Mine. Sounds like a lot of money, but you didn’t see this as good news for your community if this got developed.

Hurley
“No, we did not. … Very early on, the vast majority of Bristol Bay’s people said, no, no way, this is not worth the risk. You cannot put a price tag on our water and what salmon mean to us as a people. …

Curwood
“Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding of a lot of Alaskan politics means that at the state level, there wasn’t a huge amount of pushback against this Pebble Mine proposal.

Hurley
“Yeah, our people’s concerns were really falling on deaf ears at the state level. We saw the state rewrite our area management plan illegally, without proper input or public process or consultation with our tribes. … And so because our concerns were falling on deaf ears at the state level, our tribal governments really saw the federal government as the place to put some energy, and that was where kind of the petition to the EPA came from, because the state was not listening. They were doing the exact opposite, to really grease the skids for the company to move forward. …

“The tribes petitioned in 2010 to prohibit all mines like Pebble within the Bristol Bay watershed. The EPA came back and said, we’re not going to act on a prohibition immediately under our authority under the Clean Water Act, but we are going to study Bristol Bay. We want to do an assessment. And we want to ask, is this place really unique, and what does this fishery mean to the state and people? … They took three years to do a bunch of studies. They were in a lot of different communities, there was a lot of peer review to answer those questions, and after that very long, drawn-out assessment, they determined what our people had been saying all along. …

“It was a bit of a roller coaster between the different administrations, but it’s really a testament to the dedication of our people and our region, that regardless of the administration, regardless of winning and losing court cases, they did not give up. And so the EPA, in January of 2023, finalized protections to stop the project.”

More at Living on Earth, here.

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Ordinary Folks vs Petrochemicals

July 7, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Rhonda Dumas / PieFace Photography.
Cyclists gathering along the Mississippi Riiver are protesting fossil fuels and chemical plants in low-income Louisiana neighborhoods.

Sometimes it’s funny how we light upon a worthy cause that we end up supporting for years. Finding the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and being really impressed with the courage and success of people who appeared to have no resources was like that. It was a textile artist I was following on Instagram who introduced me to them. Here’s the latest from the Louisiana Bucket Brigade.

Sara Ravits writes at Gambit, “Cathy Laurino leads a group of cyclists to an ancient oak tree, just a few blocks from a massive Shell chemical plant along the Mississippi River in Norco, Louisiana. It’s the first stop along the seven-mile Down by the River Bike Ride in St. Charles Parish, a roving, interactive history lesson hosted by the environmental nonprofit and watchdog organization, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade.

“Along the way, the group learns about the region’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, and the acceleration of climate change caused by the fossil fuel industry in the region known as ‘Cancer Alley.’ It culminates at the site of the largest uprising by enslaved people in U.S. history, which took place along the Mississippi River in 1811.

“The bike ride is pretty much for anyone, says Laurino, the program’s director, especially people interested in the petrochemical industry’s history in Louisiana and the people fighting against it. …

“In the shaded green space sandwiched between a chemical plant and its affiliated refinery, Laurino kicks off the ride on a somber note, telling the tragic story of Leroy Jones, a 16-year-old Black teenager who was killed following an industrial explosion in 1973. Unbeknownst at the time to the residents in the tight-knit Black neighborhood known as Diamond, there was a gas leak at the nearby plant, which had been in operation for about two decades. So when Jones went to rev up his mower and help his elderly neighbor Helen Washington with her lawn, the engine instantly ignited and engulfed him in flames. Washington’s house exploded, killing her instantly.

“Jones, meanwhile, ran toward the oak tree and collapsed as neighbors rushed to douse him, but he ultimately died as a result of his injuries. Fifteen years later, there was another deadly explosion.

“Laurino tells the group that following Jones’ death, his mother Ruth was given a $500 check ‘for her troubles.’

“That insulting act eventually became a galvanizing point in the Diamond community’s long— and ultimately successful fight — for relocation away from the plant, though it would take decades.

“ ‘It ignited a fire in the community,’ Laurino tells the group. ‘They were like, “Absolutely not. We will not let this go. That’s completely unacceptable.” ‘

“The Louisiana Bucket Brigade has long conducted ‘toxic tours’ of the region for journalists, environmental lawyers and other activists, but in 2010 Executive Director Anne Rolfes decided to turn it into a bike-forward event and open it up to the public. The program has since grown its curriculum and partnered with local universities and professors, including Lisa Flanagan from Xavier and Tulane’s Laura Murphy and Kristen Wintersteen. …

“The ride has two tracks: an exploration of history and the telling of present-day environmental justice work. That latter track is updated by Harry ‘Pastor Joe’ Joseph, an activist and nearby resident who is involved in rallying against a petrochemical complex taking shape in nearby Ascension Parish. …

“The Down by the River Ride also leans into the activism and leadership of Margie Richard, a former resident of Norco and a retired teacher who led the charge against Shell for years. … Throughout the next five stops along the way, much more of Richard’s story comes to light. That includes the tales of her enslaved ancestors, who participated in the 1811 slave revolt and whose energy Richard has long channeled in the fight for environmental and racial justice.

“In 1989, Richard founded the group Concerned Citizens of Norco, which eventually teamed up with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. She was also behind the successful push to get the residents of the Diamond community finally resettled in 2002.

“She remains legendary when it comes to organizing against the petrochemical industry. She famously once showed up to an international meeting in the Netherlands to confront a Shell executive while carrying a sealed container of air that she’d collected in her hometown.

“ ‘She said, “You’re polluting us, and you’re pretending like it’s not happening” … . And she singled out this executive specifically and said, “You’re going to do something about this, right?” And he said (in front of everyone at the meeting) “Yes.” And that’s when she knew the relocation was going to happen,’ Laurino says.”

Lots more at the Gambit, here.

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Hooray for World Cup Fan Zones

July 6, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Carlos Muñoz.
Cape Verdean fans watched the national team play at the PVD Fan Zone in Providence, R.I.

I’m into the World Cup more than usual this year, mostly because the kids and grandkids are but also because so many fun things are happening close to home.

Carlos R. Muñoz wrote recently at the Boston Globe that the fan zone in Providence, Rhode Island, for example, has not only been fun but a great unifier.

“Since the World Cup began,” he wrote, “fans of international football have flooded into the PVD Fan Zone at Station Park in Providence, turning an underused green space into what Mayor Brett Smiley calls the best display of the city’s ‘rich diversity.’

“The Fan Zone has attracted more than 70,000 visitors, and after the FIFA Fan Festival Boston shut down following the end of the World Cup group stage, the Providence spot is the only remaining FIFA-sanctioned event outside Boston Stadium.

“FIFA required host cities to run fan festivals throughout the tournament, which ends with the World Cup Final on July 19, but relaxed its requirements because of funding, according to the Sports Business Journal.  

“ ‘From the outset, FIFA worked closely with Host Cities and local stakeholders to help shape meaningful fan experiences beyond the stadiums that are community-led, fan-oriented and aligned with the spirit of the FIFA World Cup,’ FIFA wrote in an email. …

“A fan festival costs about $1 million a day to operate, according to Fortune. The PVD Fan Zone costs about a third of that amount, according to Joe Wilson, the director of Art, Culture and Tourism for the City of Providence, and producer of the Fan Zone. City officials have committed to keeping it open for the full World Cup.

“Wilson said that cities struggled to pay for security and to make sure that city service costs were being covered. Station Park is located between the Amtrak/MBTA train station, the State House, and Providence Place mall and is an open area that is not typically used for events.

“ ‘Every city who had some kind of interface with FIFA and the World Cup were grappling with a variety of challenges related to budgets, scheduling, and safety,’ Wilson said. ‘One piece that made us say “39 days” is that we already have infrastructure footprint that we cannot move without using cranes that we’re securing 24/7. If we have to secure it, we might as well be open.’

“Providence did an economic impact assessment of life in the city two years ago, according to Wilson, and found that between 5 and 9 p.m. the city is ‘as international a city as Los Angeles’ with communities that have rich, strong immigrant populations who love football. …

“Wilson said the state’s ‘built-in audiences’ and proximity to Boston Stadium attracted groups like the Tartan Army and Ghana fans to Providence. Ghana’s national football team is staying at the Graduate Hotel [in Providence] and practices at Bryant University [in Smithfield].

“ ‘This is the first time this format of a World Cup is taking place over a continent, so even down to the logistics of this, we’re producing the singularly largest sustained event in the history of the city,’ Wilson said. …

“The World Cup has been a unifying event, Smiley said. ‘In the context of a moment where there’s so much stress and strife and division, this has been a really wonderful moment for communities to come together,’ he said. ‘It’s been entirely peaceful and family friendly, and just a nice and joyful occasion.’ …

” ‘We’re not doing this to make money for the city itself, and if the Fan Zone proper breaks even in terms of city impact, but all our businesses thrive, then it will have been a success,’ Smiley said. ‘We’ll have a full accounting of the city’s investment in the Fan Zone by the time we’re done and I’m optimistic that we’ll cover a lot of our expenses.

“City Councilman John Goncalves, whose ward covers much of downtown Providence, said the Fan Zone has been an incredible celebration of soccer, culture, and community.

“ ‘As Team Cape Verde, we’ve seen firsthand how the Fan Zone has united thousands of people around pride, identity, and joy,’ he said. ‘The energy has been incredible.’ …

“Smiley said the turnout for the Cape Verdean matches is one of his tournament highlights.

“ ‘That was a near record attendance night,’ he said. ‘We think we had about 8,000 fans that evening, and not only did I get to see and experience that energy, but to have 8,000 fans at night in a place with adult beverages and have zero issues.’ ”

More at the Globe, here.

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Why Teens Are Swarming

July 5, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: USA Network/Reuters.
“Crush Reloaded” event at Tybee Island, Georgia, in April.

Every year, the town of New Shoreham, Rhode Island, braces itself for the Fourth of July and the likely arrival of crowds of underage teens hauling kegs to the beach. This year they arranged for extra state police to come to the island to support local police, who vowed to be firm about any risky activity. (I assume whoever stole a car July 2 and dismantled a stone wall on the West Side has learned what that means. But by the way, who leaves their keys in an unlocked car over the Fourth?)

‘Most of us experienced [teen years] as a tough time in life. We should be reminded of that. We need some patience,’ says Mr. Martinez.

Patrik Jonsson at the Christian Science Monitor wrote about a recent Georgia “swarm.”

“For Cabriel Lewis, it was an ‘epic’ teen takeover. When he was just 15, he joined tens of thousands of other teenagers to rush onto tiny Tybee Island, Georgia, a barrier island beach town with only one causeway road on and off. They were trying to take part in ‘Orange Crush,’ a controversial, annual spring break beach bash here. Gridlock ensued, people were injured, ambulances got stuck, and mayhem ruled deep into the night.

“ ‘It was a lot of fun,’ says Mr. Lewis, now 18. ‘But I also feel lucky to have gotten off the island alive.’

“Unruly teen gatherings have long been an integral part of American culture … but driven by social media organizing and the potential for viral fame, a new wave of teen ‘takeovers’ is presenting big problems – and opportunities – for communities across the U.S. …

“Like the often artistic ‘flash mobs,’ in which a group rushes in, performs an unexpected act (like the 4,000-person silent disco in London’s Victoria Station in 2006, or the five-minute frozen pose by some 200 people in New York’s Grand Central Station in 2009), modern ‘teen takeovers tend to be social-media-driven gatherings that happen fast, with kids disappearing into crowds when police arrive. That makes it difficult for authorities to hold the youthful participants accountable for any property damage – including dented car roofs from stomping on them or unruly other behavior. …

“Questions are being raised about how communities can tweak responses to the often unruly teen takeovers, rather than just punishing errant teens or their parents. City leaders also acknowledge they can do better. After all, they say, hanging out, taking on risky adventures, and prioritizing peers’ attention over possible consequences are deemed normal behavior for teens trying to establish independence.

‘“This is the kind of thing we, as teenagers, have always done,’ says Jennifer Breheny Wallace, a fellow at the Center for Parent and Teen Communication at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, referring to the youth gatherings in malls and parking lots.

“But times are different, these leaders note, and some teens talk about a sense of irrelevance, whether related to changing media norms, invasive, high-stakes technology, or a polarized political environment – a tricky mix for young people.

“ ‘When we are made to feel like we don’t matter, we can either withdraw or act out in extremes,’ says Ms. Wallace. Teen takeovers ‘are a collective assertion of this need to matter.’

“Here on Tybee Island, a teen takeover on the beach pier in early April ended when gunfire erupted. The teens fled and the police chased, but no one was arrested and no bullet casings were found. The TV show ‘Inside Edition’ even asked Mayor Brian West for a comment.

“ ‘I think [the producers] were expecting this shocked, unprepared small town mayor who was horrified by all of this,’ says Mr. West, who, years ago, became the legal guardian to three teenagers who had nowhere else to go. ‘They didn’t get that. I said, “Look, we do this every year. It’s a big deal, but we know how to handle it.” ‘ (Interestingly, he says, the interview never made it to air.)

“While Mayor West said his goal was to end Orange Crush, citing safety risks, drug and gun concerns, and traffic gridlock, he refocused on creating safe spaces for teens to gather, even as they push boundaries. That revamped gathering, held this year, is now rebranded as ‘Crush Reloaded.’

“Other cities and towns are learning on the job. … Focusing solely on either curfews or parental accountability can fall short, according to research by Charlotte Gill, a criminology professor at George Mason University, who has found that crime sometimes increases during curfews.

“Former Chicago police officer Louis Martinez, now an associate professor of criminal justice at Oakton College in Des Plaines, Illinois, agrees. The call, he says, is to address a mix of needs around discipline, respect, and meaningful relationships in families, schools, neighborhoods, and communities. …

“Many communities, in fact, are moving to balance their response. …

“ ‘Have fun,’ 2nd District Council member Marquinn McDonald said to teens at a news conference in Chicago announcing one such event. ‘Come out, kick it, do your thing, but do not destroy.’ ”

More at the Monitor, here.

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Remote Village Powered by Ingenuity

July 4, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Mark Saludes.
Rodolfo Sagban stands inside a newly built micro-hydro facility in remote Nabuangan village, Philippines.

The Iran war has been a fiasco in almost any way I can imagine. Except for the increased focus on renewable energy, energy sources that don’t have to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, newly weaponized by Iran.

Mark Saludes writes at the Christian Science Monitor, “In a mountain village in the northern Philippines, electricity does not arrive through transmission lines or come from burning imported fossil fuel. It flows from a local river.

“Each night, as lights flicker on inside scattered homes, the power is generated by a small turbine turning steadily in the dark – built, maintained, and managed by the community itself.

“ ‘We don’t have to rely on outside power facilities. We decide when to switch it on and off,’ says Rodolfo Sagban, chairman of the Lapat Micro Hydro Power Association in Nabuangan village, located in Apayao province. ‘Most importantly, everyone in the village can access it, regardless of economic status.’

“The Iran war that began in late February has drawn attention to the Philippines’ fragile, import-dependent economy, as electricity costs, transport fares, and even food prices continue to climb. Roughly 3.6 million households across the Philippines live off the electrical grid – including about 1.2 million that rely on government-run, diesel-fueled power plants. These households have been hit especially hard by the global energy shock. 

“But in Nabuangan, these big-picture pressures barely register. Decentralized, renewable-based systems such as the one built here are shielding some communities from energy price spikes and grid instability – and they could offer a way to strengthen the country’s overall energy resilience.

“ ‘The real solutions are already here: community-led, small-scale energy systems that live in harmony with nature,’ says Joan Carling, a co-founder of Indigenous Peoples Rights International.

“Nabuangan’s first micro-hydro system – a simple, streamside structure – began operating in 2002. Water is diverted into a narrow intake and collected in a small reservoir. From there, it flows quietly through a long pipe that slopes downhill. Gravity creates enough water pressure to spin a small turbine inside a concrete enclosure. Power lines carry the electricity to homes across the village. 

“Over time, the system has expanded to two other villages in the area, Bubog and Sitio Simud. A fourth facility is under construction to provide electricity to Sitio Lapat, and is expected to be operational within a few months.

“Together, these water-powered energy stations form a small but stable network. 

“ ‘If other villages want a micro-hydro, we will teach them,’ says Mr. Sagban. ‘We will teach them how to manage it because management is what’s important.’

“Community members contribute labor to build and maintain the local systems. Decisions are made collectively. The forest that feeds the river is protected, because it is essential to the system’s survival. 

“Faith Joy Bonifacio, a resident of Sitio Lapat who has worked overseas as a contractor, runs a small internet hub powered by the village’s micro-hydro system and solar panels. The setup allows locals to charge personal devices, access all kinds of information, and stay connected without leaving the village.

“ ‘We don’t have a mobile signal here,’ she says. In the past, ‘we had to climb mountains just to send a message.’

“Reliable electricity also extends working hours, supports small businesses, and improves access to education. The changes have been gradual and they make a real difference. But they would not have been possible without a commitment from the community. 

“ ‘Unity among the people is very important,’ Mr. Sagban says. ‘Without it, these projects would not have been possible.’ …

“Says Gerry Arances, executive director of the Center for Energy, Ecology, and Development (CEED), ‘Every disruption in supply quickly ripples through the economy.’ … Mr. Arances says decentralization is one part of a practical response to the current uncertainty in global energy markets. 

“ ‘This does not mean dismantling the national grid, which remains essential for large industries and urban economies that require high-capacity power,’ he says. ‘But for much of the country, especially remote and underserved communities, decentralized and community-managed systems can serve as a strong complement.’ ” 

More at the Monitor, here.

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How Art Slows Ageing

July 3, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: David Levene/The Guardian.
A man engages with Laure Prouvost’s art installation ‘Above Front Tears Oui Float’ at the Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, Norway. 

I can’t get enough of emerging research on what activities are good for your brain. It’s interesting that so many of the studies focus on the role of art.

As Denis Campbell wrote at the Guardian in May, “Singing, painting or visiting a gallery or museum helps people age more slowly, according to the latest study to link taking an active interest in art and culture with improved health. The findings are the first to show that both participating in arts activities and attending events, such as viewing an exhibition, lead to people staying biologically younger.

“ ‘These results demonstrate the health impact of the arts at a biological level. They provide evidence for arts and cultural engagement to be recognised as a health-promoting behavior in a similar way to exercise,’ said Prof Daisy Fancourt, the lead author of the research and the head of the social biobehavioral research group at University College London.

“However, slower ageing does not necessarily mean someone will live longer. … Previous studies have suggested a link between arts engagement and longer lifespan, but much more research would be needed to establish potential causal effects on longevity.

“[A new test] showed that those who undertook an arts activity at least once a week were on average a year younger biologically than those who rarely engaged in such pursuits. Those who exercised once a week were only six months younger by that measure.

“The benefit the arts confer on the pace at which people age is so dramatic that it is comparable to the difference between smokers and those who have given up smoking, the researchers say. …

“Said Dr Feifei Bu, a senior author and also a UCL academic, ‘This builds on a growing body of evidence about the health impact of the arts, with arts activities being shown to reduce stress, lower inflammation and improve cardiovascular disease risk, just as exercise is known to do.’

“The results, published in the journal Innovation in Aging, are based on blood test and survey response data from 3,556 adults taking part in the UK Household Longitudinal Study. It uses blood samples to estimate people’s biological age and the pace at which they are ageing.

“Participants were asked how often over the last year they had taken part in singing, dancing, painting, photography or crafting, or had attended an art exhibition or event, visited a heritage site such as a monument or historic building or park, or been to a museum, library or archive. …

“Evidence is emerging that the arts can improve both mental and physical health. In 2019 the World Health Organization published a report, by Fancourt and Saoirse Finn, which highlighted initiatives such as playing music to patients before surgery and using the arts with people with dementia. In the latest study, the middle-aged and older adults aged 40 or above received the biggest boost to the pace at which they aged as a result of taking part in the arts.

“ ‘Across the arts sector we have known for a long time that getting creative yields extraordinary benefits for our health, and this latest research adds a vital new piece to the puzzle, proving that arts and culture can even slow down the biological clock,’ said Mark Ball, the artistic director of the Southbank Centre, a multi-arts venue in London.

“The Southbank complex was born in 1951 out of the Festival of Britain. Its description as ‘a tonic for the nation’ was not a coincidence, Ball said. ‘It was an explicit recognition that, after the destruction and gloom of the second world war, the country needed to be convened through the arts to find a sense of optimism and healing. That sentiment is enduring and is needed now, more than ever.’ ”

More at the Guardian, here.

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An Affinity for Accents

July 2, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: De’Andre Bush via Unsplash.
Some movie actors have a natural gift for accents. Do you?

Back when I was involved in community theater, it often seemed to me that asking an amateur to learn an accent was too big an ask. The actors usually wanted to do it, but the results could be painful. Today’s story is about learning to do dialects successfully.

At the BBC, Sophie Hardach wrote, “Some people can pick up new accents instantly. How do they do it? And can I learn to speak like an office worker in Cincinnati with the help of some new science? Jennifer Scapetis-Tycer, a dialect coach, is smiling at me from my computer screen as she prepares me for my first-ever attempt at acting.

” ‘You’re an American office worker who lives in Cincinnati,’ she says, ‘and you’re coming home and you’ve got armfuls of shopping, and you have to get everyone’s attention because you want people to put the shopping away.’

“She briefly pauses, then switches to an American accent as she gives me my line: ‘Hi, I’m home! Where is everybody?‘ 

“In real life, I’m a German-born journalist living in England, I’ve never been to Cincinnati, and I’ve never tried speaking in an American accent in my life. But we’re having a video call because Scapetis-Tycer, who is an associate professor in voice, speech and dialects at the University of Connecticut, has co-authored a research paper on what makes some people so good at changing accents. And the best way to fully grasp her insights is, surely, to have a go myself. …

“Since ‘American accent’ can mean many things – there are, after all, countless different accents spoken in the US – she picks a version some call General American, which can for example be heard in Cincinnati but also other places. 

“Over the next few minutes, Scapetis-Tycer teaches me to raise the back of my tongue, project my voice diagonally forward and up, widen my mouth, change my ‘o,’ and create an American ‘r’ sound with my tongue and back teeth. … My first efforts produce an oddly strangled sound that’s nothing like her sample line. Clearly, I’m going to have a lot to learn from her research. In fact, as it turns out, there’s a lot of hidden, complex work all of us do when hearing and voicing accents – even without being professional mimics.

“A basic definition of an accent is that ‘it’s a way of speaking that’s shared by members of a language community,’ says Emily Myers, a professor in speech, language, and hearing sciences at the University of Connecticut, who teamed up with Scapetis-Tycer for the paper on accent imitation. This could be a group of people from the same region, city, country or age group, Myers explains. The accent may include pronouncing words in a certain way, but also, aspects such as melody, a high or low pitch, and fast or slow speech. …

“In a performance accents matter because ‘they are telling us part of the story, where the characters are from, what identities they hold.’ says Scapetis-Tycer, who trains actors at the university’s drama department, as well as at a theatre.

“Hearing and understanding the accent, and its regular sound patterns, is the first step in trying to imitate it. ‘For instance, where I’m from in the Upper Midwest, people will say something like “baig,” with the vowel like in “bagel,” for “bag,” ‘ Myers says. If you hear that accent for the first time, your brain has to figure out that this Midwestern ‘baig’ is the same as your ‘bag,’ and that this pattern probably also applies to other ‘a’ sounds.

“Considering this complex brain work, it’s no wonder listening to speech in an unfamiliar accent involves a bigger cognitive effort than hearing a familiar one. But it gets easier with practice, research suggests: the more we hear a given accent, the less effort we have to make to understand it. Studies suggest that we may even unconsciously start to mimic the other accent a little, because humans often adjust to each other’s ways of speaking.

“Once your brain has figured out how the accent works, the next step is to try and produce it. … In the case of my fake Cincinnati-based accent, for example, one of my core tasks was to move my voice further towards the back of my mouth to create a more American English sound, rather than using the front part, which produces a more British English sound, according to Scapetis-Tycer, the dialect coach.

“Accent imitation ‘is an incredibly complex system that involves this internal model and then somehow, feeding it out,’ Myers concludes. And, she says: ‘Some people are extraordinarily good at it.’ 

“To find out what their secret is, Myers, Scapetis-Tycer and their colleague Hannah Olson asked 92 north American English speakers to imitate samples by native speakers of three different accents: Yorkshire, England; Edinburgh, Scotland; and the Eastern Cape region of South Africa. 

“The researchers also tested the participants on a selection of skills thought to potentially play a role in being good at accents, including whether they had a good ear for music, and how well they were able to rapidly produce sounds in a tongue-twister test. … The researchers also tested the participants’ personalities for traits to do with being open to new experiences, and enjoying social interactions.

” ‘Interestingly enough, the very best predictor of whether you would be good at [imitating accents] is the tongue twister task,’ Myers says. People who were able to move their mouth very, very quickly to copy the rapid-fire sound of the tongue twister, also did well in the accent-imitation task.”

Lots more at the BBC, here. I have a brother who moved from the East Coast to the Upper Midwest and seemed instantly to start talking like a native. Are you a sponge for accents?

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A Traveling Bookstore

July 1, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Ruth Fremson.
The owner of Saint Rita’s Amazing Traveling Bookstore & Textual Apothecary, Rita Collins, photographs young customers at a Global Community Day festival.

Today’s story touches on the hunger for reading material that is shared by people of all ages and nationalities. Suzanne’s Mom’s Blog blog has investigated this love of books in numerous posts about traveling libraries. Today’s post is about a traveling bookstore.

Ruth Fremson writes at the New York Times, “Rita Collins’s white Ford transit van has more than 100,000 miles on it, earned on drives through all but 10 of the United States. Parked in front of the Grand Bakery in Dadeville, Ala., on a recent cloudy morning, she watched as a woman walked by, glanced at the van, did a double take, and hesitated.

“ ‘It’s a bookstore,’ Collins said with her big, characteristic smile. …

“Saint Rita’s Amazing Traveling Bookstore Textual Apothecary (its name painted on the sides and back of the van) is a vehicle for the cross-pollination of people and conversation. That’s what has evolved since Collins, now 74, began imagining her retirement dream more than a decade ago — not just selling high quality, inexpensive books, but setting her love of people, places and the wonders of a good read all in motion together.

“Over the years Collins taught, opened a bakery/cafe and did social-services work for older adults. She left the United States after 9/11, and eventually taught English in Romania and the Czech Republic.

“At 60, she said, she decided it was time to return and figure out her next steps. She took a course with the American Booksellers Association, seeking to learn what it would take to open a bookstore in Eureka, the small Montana town where she lived.

“Ultimately she decided that Eureka didn’t have the adult population to support an independent bookstore. Nor did she have the desire to be tethered to a brick-and-mortar business six days a week, impinging on her love of travel. …

“She brainstormed with friends, googled traveling bookstores and got advice from the owner of the only one she could find, located in Swansea, Wales.

“In 2013 her dream became a reality with a minimal investment: a van fitted with wooden shelves at a 15 degree angle so that the 700-book inventory stays in place while she motors around the United States. (Think a library bookmobile that goes well beyond a neighborhood or two.) She named it after Saint Rita, the patron saint of impossible causes. …

“Each year Collins picks a region, plans a precise itinerary and sets up in all sorts of locations: farmers’ markets, festivals, brew pubs, museums and birthday parties, among them. She has been invited to speak to church congregations and book clubs.

“While all the books are donated, Collins curates to be sure the ones on sale are in excellent condition. Hardcovers are $9 apiece, paperbacks $7, children’s books a dollar. …

“She is so often asked what her favorite book is — and has such difficulty answering — that there is a section titled ‘Favs’ for her own ever-changing choices. During this year’s five-week swing through the South, it showcased books by Anne Michaels, Ann Patchett, Willa Cather, Atul Gawande, M.L Stedman and Anthony Doerr, among others.

“During her journeys people frequently give her books, replenishing her stock, though the exchanges can go both ways. At the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., Collins gifted a copy of Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone, to Pat Ammons, the center’s director of communications, to thank her for having the bookstore there. …

“Collins does not sleep in the bookstore, but stays mostly in people’s homes, with friends or friends of friends. Sometimes she is hosted by complete strangers.

“Unlike other bookstores, hers offers the singular advantage of one-on-one service for each customer. And the books are just the starting point. …

“She says, ‘When you come, you’re probably going to have a conversation with me. It has allowed me to meet so many different kinds of people.’ …

“Once, in Colorado, a woman who had no money gave her two dozen eggs in exchange for some books. Recently, in Raleigh, N.C., a woman showed up with a gold-framed, 100-year-old lithograph of St. Rita and insisted she accept it as a gift. …

“While there are library bookmobiles and other bookstores housed in trucks — and more food trucks than ever — Collins believes hers is the rare traveling bookstore. She wishes there were more, pointing out that there is little overhead and a lot of freedom to open and close at will.”

More at the Times, here.

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Turn Off Autocomplete

June 30, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Petar Milošević via Wikimedia.

I had a chat about artificial intelligence recently with author Francesca Forrest. She is really serious about avoiding AI wherever she encounters it. I tend to like it OK when it suits me: for example, when doing a search for information.

But I can sense there is something deeply insidious about it, even apart from the way it guzzles all our water resources.

There is one supposedly “helpful” feature that irritates me a lot. Autocomplete. It not only makes horrendous mistakes with slang, people’s names, and foreign words, but it suggests apparently harmless words that I simply was not intending to write. If I want to say that a relative had to go to rehab, you might think it’s fine to say “he went to rehabilitation.” But that’s not what I was going to say. It’s not the way I talk. And what else will I end up writing if I feel lazy some day?

So I turned off Autocomplete.

At Scientific American, I find that Claire Cameron agrees that autocomplete is annoying. And she describes new research suggesting it is even more insidious than it appears.

“Autocomplete suggestions,” she writes, “are perhaps one of the most annoying ‘useful’ tools for writing: increasingly integrated into anything online that requires you to input text, autocomplete harnesses artificial intelligence to suggest what to write in e-mails, surveys, and more.

“The tools are meant to save time (though many find that assessing and rewriting the suggested text takes longer than writing it from scratch). But these AI tools can also change how you express yourself. An AI writing assistant could make your writing sound more polite, for example — or boring. And now a new study led by researchers at Cornell University suggests AI autocomplete can even change the way you think.

” ‘Autocomplete is everywhere now,’ said Mor Naaman, a professor of information science at Cornell, in a statement. The research builds on work, published in 2023 by Naaman and his colleagues, that suggested short autocomplete suggestions could sway opinions. Since then the use of such tools has exploded. ‘It has become clear that bias explicitly built into AI interactions is a very plausible scenario,’ he said.

“The researchers asked participants to fill in an online survey with questions about hot-button social and political issues. Some were prompted with an AI autocomplete answer that was deliberately biased toward one side of the issue. For example, participants who were asked whether they agreed that the death penalty should be legal might receive an AI suggestion that disagreed.

“Across all the different topics in the survey, participants who saw the AI autocomplete prompts reported attitudes that were more in line with the AI’s position — including people who didn’t use the AI’s suggested text at all. Overall, the study participants who saw the biased AI text shifted their positions toward those espoused by the AI.

“Interestingly, the people in the study didn’t tend to think the AI autocomplete suggestions were biased or to notice that they had changed their own thinking on an issue in the course of the study. Warning the participants that they might be exposed to misinformation by the AI didn’t temper the persuasive effect either.

“ ‘We told people before, and after, to be careful, that the AI is going to be (or was) biased, and nothing helped,’ Naaman said. ‘Their attitudes about the issues still shifted.’ ”

See Scientific American, here.

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Moomintroll Video Game

June 29, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Hyper Games.
Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson created the happy/sad Moomintroll children’s books. Hyper Games is using the stories in video games.

I’m always surprised to learn that there are people who never heard of Moomintroll or his multitalented Finnish-Swedish creator, Tove Jansson. I knew about the Moomin cartoons even before I met my Swedish son-in-law. (What I didn’t know was that Jansson wrote books for adults, too, including a novel I discovered recently concerning retirees in Florida. It was translated by someone I once worked with.)

The topic today is about what a video game company is doing with Moomintroll and his family. It could almost lure me into gaming.

Lewis Gordon writes at the Guardian, “Sleepy, happy-sad, and imbued with the mildest peril, Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories may seem an unlikely fit for the action-heavy medium of video games. Rather than embark on swashbuckling adventures, these milk-white, hippo-esque creatures prefer to potter about Moominvalley, only venturing further if the weather conditions are just right.

“Yet a small Norwegian video game studio, Hyper Games, is now on its second exquisitely charming Jansson adaptation. The first, 2024’s ‘Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley,’ put players in control of the wily free spirit Snufkin as he dismantled overly ordered nature parks (and evaded authority-loving wardens). The latest, ‘Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth,’ sees young Moomintroll wake up at night in the dead of winter. With his parents still hibernating, the creature is all alone, thrust into a cold and unfamiliar world.

“On this lonesome journey, Moomintroll must reckon with the idea that his snoozing parents won’t be around for ever. ‘[It is] a brush with mortality,’ says lead writer David Skaufjord, who sees the premise, an adaptation of the 1957 novel Moominland Midwinter as emblematic of a franchise which dares to challenge its younger audience with loss, grief, melancholy and nostalgia. ‘Children’s television can be soft-handed,’ he says. ‘The Moomin stories aren’t.’

“In the first 20 minutes of the game, the freezing temperatures claim the life of a squirrel. But Too-Ticky, the androgynous woman who lives by herself in Moominpappa’s boathouse, takes a philosophical outlook on the animal’s passing. ‘Death is a part of life,’ she says serenely. ‘Something is always changing.’

“So much of Jansson’s work, Moomin or otherwise, finds meaning in life’s transitions: humid summer to crisp autumn; sweltering afternoon to cool evening; the still moments that arrive after a storm. Jansson, a writer, illustrator, and political cartoonist, spent many years on the small islands scattered across the Gulf of Finland, folding these experiences into crystalline descriptions and illustrations of the natural world, which the Moomins live in harmony with.

“Though Hyper Games is based in Norway rather than Jansson’s Finland, its Scandi developers were able to draw on a similarly deep relationship with nature. ‘We have all grown up in a country where there’s six to seven months of winter,’ says Skaufjord, “’nd if you don’t learn to enjoy winter, you basically have a bad time half of the year.’ Like these game makers, the summer-loving Moomintroll must undergo his own snowy acclimatization: in doing so, there is a lesson for him and players – of adapting to, and accepting, one’s new circumstances.

“But ‘Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth’ makes enjoying such a chilly time of the year easy: you can fling snowballs and create pathways in knee-high drifts. Even shoveling snow is fun, accompanied by satisfying audio-visual puffs of powdery white stuff. There are many more light and breezy interactions like this, carefully calibrated for both non-gamers and young children alike. …

“I’ve been playing ‘Winter’s Warmth’ with my three-year-old daughter: she sits on my lap as I point at things on the screen, her tiny thumb directing Moomintroll about the enchanting world. ‘That’s how it’s supposed to be played,’ says Skaufjord. ‘That’s how I wrote it.’ …

“It may look like an effortless translation, but the approval process with Moomin Characters Ltd, the company whose job it is to oversee Jansson’s original creations, is rigorous, says the game’s art director Marcus Kjeldsen. … For the previous Snufkin game, Skaufjord wrote that the abrasive teenager Little My should react gleefully about getting rich. But, as the approvals team stressed, capitalism is a construct that has not yet graced the bucolic Moominvalley, so the line was tweaked. …

“There is a reason these stories continue to resonate. They have an anti-fascist bent in their unusual and non-traditional configurations of people and family. But there is also a disquieting sense that the unspoiled Moominvalley sits on the brink of great change. Both games deftly capture these timely aspects of Jansson’s treasured work.”

More at the Guardian, here. Please look at the art.

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‘Transit Deserts,’ ‘Food Deserts’

June 28, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Nina Westervelt/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
A bus stop in Memphis, Tennessee, where transit issues make it hard to shop for groceries. 

You’ve heard of “food deserts,” places without a convenient market, especially a market with fresh produce. Now consider how people without easy access or a car can get to a store located at a distance.

Lela Nargi writes at the Guardian, “Zen’Yari Winters’ job, at a pet shop in East Memphis, Tennessee, should be a 20-minute trip from her house. She leaves herself three hours to get there. ‘The bus is always, always late,’ she said – if it shows up at all.

“It’s not just her work commute that’s affected by the time-consuming guessing game that is riding with the Memphis Area Transit Authority (Mata). The only full-service grocer in the Chelsea-Hollywood area where she lives closed in 2025. To shop for food in person, she could take two buses for a 13-mile (20km) trip to Walmart. But she risks waiting at bus stops for hours with perishables – or shelling out about $24 for an Uber back.

“So instead, every two weeks, she buys at least $35 worth of groceries online to avoid a $6.99 fee for a smaller order and pays a $7 monthly delivery charge not covered by her Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) benefits. …

“Winters is just one of 16 million Americans without cars and one of almost 25 million living in a ‘transit desert‘ where the public transportation supply is lower than demand. For them, accessing healthy, affordable food is both an inconvenience and an extravagance. …

But cities such as Memphis; Providence, Rhode Island; and Duluth, Minnesota, have gone in the opposite direction and cut service.

“These actions were driven by what Art Guzzetti, the vice-president of policy, mobility, technical services and innovation at advocacy group American Public Transportation Association, calls a ‘transit fiscal cliff’ affecting some cities as $70bn in Biden-era funds to prop up Covid-beleaguered transit systems runs out. This is all while food insecurity rises across the US. …

“That cliff has forced some transit agencies to economize by rerouting buses and cutting back on their frequency. They’re also getting rid of stops, which Sierra Arnold, a microeconomist at Xavier University in Cincinnati, found led to fewer purchases of healthier foods. …

“Rhode Island’s state transit authority cut service on 45 of its 63 routes in September 2025, to save money on low-ridership lines. Sherman Pines, a Newport resident, said this happened on top of a Covid-era budget-saving measure that reduced service in his town during the non-touristy, non-summer months, making bus service unreliable. A nearby supermarket allows residents to walk groceries home in store carts. But Pines called the store ‘horrible, pricey, small’ – anyone who wants to travel farther afield contends with long waits for a city bus and at least one transfer.

“An added hazard: too few bus shelters. That’s just hard on an elderly person to stand there for 30 minutes or 45 minutes, it’s raining, it’s snowing,’ Pines said.

“The epidemiologist Ric Bayly documented these sorts of experiences in a 2025 Tufts University-led study on Rhode Island’s bus-food connection. He found that even with double the time to travel to and from a grocery store, less than half of residents had healthy food access via bus as opposed to a car, leaving him to conclude that ‘public transit is just a terrible way to get food,’ he said. ‘It’s just so difficult to deal with the weather, the weight, the carrying, the trouble you have getting on a bus with a cart of food, [because] the transit authority in Rhode Island allows bus drivers to forbid entry with a food cart.’

“Deborah L Wray, a 70-year-old Providence resident, had her cart rejected from the bus only once. Until recently, Wray could catch the 92 bus every half an hour across the street from home and ride it to Price Rite, the closest supermarket to home. These days, the bus runs every two hours. …

“Price Rite also doesn’t accept the Medicare UCard she uses to buy the healthy foods she needs to eat as someone with diabetes. For that, she takes a different bus to Stop & Shop; she prefers to stretch her Snap benefits by hitting the sales at Market Basket, which is serviced by yet another bus. Some evenings, she eats peanut butter and other shelf-stable items from a pantry box delivered to her building. That’s a short-term fix for ‘when you ain’t got nothing, so us elderly don’t have to eat dog food,’ she said.

“A survey of 100 Duluth residents uncovered similar transportation-related hassles. Covid-reduced bus routes, long wait times, too little space for shopping carts, and bad weather were the primary barriers residents identified in purchasing healthy, affordable foods. The city recently set up a transportation commission in an attempt to improve.

“But changes are ‘sometimes beneficial, and other times they’re not, and we heard many comments that the revamps have actually made things worse,’ said Stephany Medina, a food justice policy developer who worked on the survey. Respondents pointed out that a changed bus stop now required crossing a major highway to reach a supermarket.

“The city of Somerville, a city outside Boston that had a food insecurity rate of 35% in 2025, exemplifies the difficulty in connecting under-resourced communities to the foods they prefer to eat. Residents might use buses to reach food pantries. But ‘the biggest thing we hear is that people would like to be able to get to places that are outside of Somerville, and they’re hard to get to without a car,’ said Alissa Ebel, the city’s healthy communities coordinator. …

“During and after the Covid pandemic, Somerville tested a program called Taxi to Health that gave out vouchers for taxi rides to grocers including Super 88. Vouchers are one form of demand-responsive transit (DRT), a flexible and more cost-efficient alternative to fixed-route bus systems. Another model, called microtransit, launches fleets of smaller vehicles such as vans to connect residents to supermarkets, sometimes on a sliding scale based on income. Students of Kathleen Hoke, a public health law professor at the University of Maryland’s Carey School of Law, developed one such system for Duluth residents in tandem with Medina’s survey.

“Some communities have sought to solve their transit and food problems with mobile grocery stores that let people shop in their neighborhoods, since many people prefer to pick their own groceries. Guzzetti, from American Public Transportation Association, sees promise in having city planners move away from prioritizing cars in new developments. When deciding where to build, ‘make transit access a foremost, high-level consideration in location decisions,’ he said.

“For residents of Memphis, who are stuck with the built environment they already have, a new potential solution is emerging. A privately funded non-profit called MyCityRides is teaching residents how to drive gas-powered scooters to counteract the reality that, as [Kelsey Huse, a local activist and urban planning student] said, ‘the bus is not perfect and cars are expensive.’

“Winters completed a day of scooter school and is practicing her driving. If she passes her motorcycle test, MyCityRides will sell her a scooter for $150 a month paid out over three years. ‘Riding a scooter would be so much cheaper and easier than riding the bus and getting stuck at the bus stop for hours,’ she said.”

Pretty sure scooters won’t help the elderly, but it’s good that some cities are working on this challenge.

A range of other solutions are at the Guardian, here.

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Can We Move a City Back from the Sea?

June 27, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Reuters.
A new study warns that erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up New Orleans in a few generations.

Today’s article asks the question “Can We Move a Major City?” Although it’s about about New Orleans, it could apply to Boston and other cities with a tendency to flood.

The most dramatic moving project I have witnessed was moving the New Shoreham Lighthouse back from a cliff edge, and that was the kind of task no one takes lightly.

Oliver Millman writes at the Guardian, about an even bigger task.

“The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately,” he writes, “as the city has reached a ‘point of no return’ that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded.

“Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city ‘may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century.’

“Low-lying southern Louisiana faces multiple threats, with rising sea levels driven by global heating, compounded by strengthening hurricanes, also a feature of the climate crisis, and the gradual subsidence of a coastline that has been carved apart by the oil and gas industry.

“Southern Louisiana is facing … the loss of three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands, which will cause the shoreline ‘to migrate as much as 100km (62 miles) inland,’ thereby stranding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, according to the study. … This scenario makes the region the ‘most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world,’ the researchers state, and requires immediate action to prepare a smooth transition for people away from New Orleans, which has a population of about 360,000 people, to safer ground. …

“ ‘While climate mitigation should remain the first step to prevent the worst outcomes, coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return,’ added the perspectives paper, published in the Nature Sustainability journal. A perspectives paper is a scholarly article that provides an assessment, rather than new data.

“Billions of dollars have been spent to fortify New Orleans with a vast network of levees, floodgates and pumps erected after 2005’s catastrophic Hurricane Katrina. But the growing threats to the city mean the levees, which already require hefty upgrades to remain sufficient, will not be able to save the city in the long run, the new paper warns.

“ ‘In paleo-climate terms, New Orleans is gone; the question is how long it has,’ said Jesse Keenan, an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University and one of the paper’s five co-authors. …

“City, state and federal leaders should begin work to help support people moving away from the New Orleans region in a coordinated way, starting with the most vulnerable communities, such as those in Plaquemines parish who live outside the levee system, Keenan said …

“New Orleans faces obvious challenges – situated in a bowl-shaped basin below sea level, the city already has 99% of its population at major risk of severe flooding, the worst exposure of any US city according to a separate study released last week.

“ ‘Even compared to all other US cities, New Orleans really stands out, which is alarming,’ said Wanyun Shao, a co-author of this study and a geographer at the University of Alabama.

” ‘There is no specific timeline to how long New Orleans has left but we know it’s in big trouble. They are facing one of the highest sea level rises in the world and I don’t know how long human effort can fight against that tide. It’s like a time bomb.’ …

“A major pressure upon this southern cultural hotspot is that its surrounding land is briskly receding. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost 2,000 sq miles of land to coastal erosion, equivalent to the size of Delaware, with a further 3,000 sq miles set to vanish over the next 50 years. The rate of land loss is so rapid that a football pitch-sized area is wiped out every 100 minutes.

“To help counter this, Louisiana last decade settled upon a new sort of plan that eschewed building yet more flood defenses and instead sought to harness the Mississippi River’s natural ability to rebuild land. Levees and other infrastructure have, until now, straitjacketed the naturally meandering Mississippi and pushed the sediment it carries straight into the Gulf of Mexico, rather than replenish the coastal wetlands.

“The so-called Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project, which broke ground in 2023, would help restore a more natural flow in the Mississippi Delta and allow sediment to build up in coastal areas where it has been lost. More than 20 sq miles of new land would be created over the next 50 years under the plan, the project estimated.”

Read more at the Guardian, here.

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