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New Fans for Typewriters

August 27, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/Christian Science Monitor.
Michelle Geffken’s typewriter collection.

We tend to think that young people who grew up in the digital world love the digital world, that they can handle all the notifications and unsolicited distractions constantly bombarding them in a way that older people can’t. As an older person myself, I find the emails from tumblr, for example — “looking for distractions?” — dumfounding. “What?!” I say, “You can’t be serious!”

But some young people are sick of all that. Consider how some are responding to teachers who recommend typewriters.

Victoria Hoffmann and Mackenzie Farkus report at the Christian Science Monitor, “Michelle Geffken’s color-filled home, in a leafy neighborhood by the Boston area’s oldest arboretum, is a veritable museum for typewriters. The machines, of all shapes and sizes, are scattered throughout the house. …

“Ms. Geffken authors Paper Blogging, a blog curated for writers and other creatives, where she describes herself as a ‘nature artist, home educator, and collector of vintage typewriters.’ She has been enthralled with the machines since her teens, she says. …

“It was, she says, love at first clack.

“And she is far from alone in this attraction. Since Ms. Geffken began collecting typewriters in earnest in 2017, the number of enthusiasts for the ribbon-and-ink machines has skyrocketed. For instance, when Ms. Geffken joined the Antique Typewriter Collectors group on Facebook in 2019, it had about 7,000 members. Today, it’s a digital gathering space for more than 53,000 typewriter enthusiasts who regularly share tips on repairs and typewriting projects. …

“Some within this typewriter community say their interest is part of a larger cultural shift away from digital devices: that in a world overwhelmed by cellphones, laptops, and other screens, there is a growing space for the old school and analog – from landline phones to Walkmans. But typewriters, they also say, are just noisily enjoyable. …

“The first documented typewriter is from 1575 Italy, when Francesco Rampazetto, a printer and publisher, invented the scrittura tattile, a machine that left imprints of letters on paper. More than 250 years later, politician and inventor William Austin Burt patented the ‘typographer.’ He invented the machine to help handle the amount of paperwork that his job as a surveyor entailed.

“The Sholes and Glidden Typewriter went on sale July 1, 1874, at a base price of $125. And in 1878, the Remington No. 2 rolled out, with a special function for both uppercase and lowercase letters. … The last major manufacturer of typewriters in the world — Godrej and Boyce, located in Mumbai — closed in 2011. …

“Richard Polt, a professor of philosophy at Xavier University, says today’s resurgence of typewriters is ‘a break or ‘a form of resistance’ from technology. [He says] ‘A good solid 1% of the American population would enjoy and benefit from using a typewriter, and that’s millions of people.’

“Lucas Dul, owner of Typewriter Chicago, is one of these millions. He’s a typewriter enthusiast, purchasing and learning to repair typewriters himself over the past 12 years. He has many ways of using typewriters, he says. He types out ideas for novels and short-form poetry on the machines. He uses them to journal his thoughts. And sometimes, Mr. Dul says, he and a friend will sit on the sidewalks of Chicago, offering to type poetry for strangers passing by.

“Mr. Dul says that typewriters offer a distraction-free experience for writing. … ‘You’re not distracted by the machine itself. It’s not going to correct your spelling or correct your grammar. There are no emails, no pop-ups, nothing.’ …

“The 2016 documentary California Typewriter, which has remained popular with the typewriter crowd, documents the growing interest in analog technology. That’s on display in Grit Matthias Phelps’ class at Cornell University.

“Ms. Phelps, a senior lecturer for the Department of German Studies, instructs her students to complete at least one test or writing assignment per semester with only a typewriter. … Her students love it.

“Yunxi Han, a senior studying landscape architecture, used a typewriter for the first time in Ms. Phelps’ class. Ms. Han was taken by the feel of the keyboard and the sounds the slider made when shifting to the next line of her paper. Though she found the switch from digital technology to analog technology unfamiliar, she also found it a relaxing break from screens and laptops.”

More at the Monitor, here.

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Hope for an Orson Welles Epic

August 26, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: RGR Collection/Alamy.
Genius filmmaker Orson Welles during the shooting of Don Quixote, an epic shot in many countries and never quite finished. 

Have you read Don Quixote, the great novel written by Miguel de Cervantes in 1607? I found it rough going, maybe because I had to read a translation. I’m sure blogger Rebecca at Fake Flamenco has read it in the original.

Something new is happening with the book that gave us the word quixotic. The great quixotic movie maker Orson Welles is having his unfinished version of the story pieced together by an all-star crew.

Stephen Burgen writes at the Guardian, “More than 70 years after he shot the first few frames, Orson Welles’s ambitious project to put Don Quixote on the big screen may finally be completed thanks to a consortium of European film archivists.

“Oja Kodar, the American film-maker’s partner and collaborator, has given her blessing to the project led by archives in France, Spain and Italy, along with the Munich film museum, to produce a coherent film out of 30 hours of footage scattered among them.

“Welles’s reworking of the classic novel by Miguel de Cervantes began in 1957 as a film for television backed by Frank Sinatra but the scheme fell through. After that, Welles worked on it almost to the day he died in 1985, shooting scenes in Mexico, Italy and Spain whenever he could find a backer.

“The team tasked with reconstructing the film, led by Esteve Riambau, a Welles authority and former head of the Catalan film archive, have their work cut out. To begin with, the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome must digitise 50,000 metres (164,000ft) of negative to add to the 50,000 metres of 16mm and 35mm film held by Spain and the 80 minutes of 35mm footage in France.

“ ‘We don’t have a complete script but enough to reconstruct it,’ Riambau said. ‘Half the material is in the form of a negative in Rome which has to be printed before we can see it.’

“As scenes were shot in three countries from 1956 to 1976, the project had to be viewed as a work in progress, he added. ‘It would be surprising to discover that every scene has been shot but I think there’s enough. It’s hard to say what [Welles] wanted definitively because in the script there are alternative scenes, but we’ll work with what we have.

“ ‘We’re not going to invent anything or use special effects to fill in the gaps. We’re not working with hypotheses. The idea is to show the original in so far as it’s possible, but it’s like working on a mosaic where there are missing pieces.’

“First published in 1605, Cervantes’s novel tells the story of Don Quixote, a minor noble who has a series of adventures as he lives out a fantasy life as a chivalrous knight accompanied by his sidekick, Sancho Panza. It is considered the first modern novel.

“The film is hardly a faithful version of Cervantes’s work. ‘There are some opening scenes that are faithful to the book but there are others that are, shall we say, enhanced,’ Riambau said. … The soundtrack is also incomplete but, where it exists, the parts of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are voiced by Welles himself.

“Welles co-wrote, produced, directed and starred in his first film, Citizen Kane (1941), which to this day regularly tops polls of the greatest films of all time. …

“ ‘For me, Welles is much more than a film-maker, he’s more like Michelangelo,’ said Riambau. …

“Welles called the project his bambino (baby) and wrote several versions of the screenplay. … Riambau said Welles had joked that he was going to change the film’s title to ‘when are you going to finish Don Quixote?’ …

“ ‘I think we’ll need at least until 2028.’ ”

More at the Guardian, here. No paywall, but please consider a donation to the Guardian.

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Reading on Screens Lowers Understanding

August 25, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Suzanne and John’s Mom.
Multitasking.

Today we present the scientific case for reading on paper instead of screens. You may have figured this out for yourself.

Markham Heid writes at Time magazine, “In the 1980s, Norway was quick to prioritize the use of computers in its classrooms. During the early 2000s, the country’s government declared the use of digital technologies a basic skill — as necessary as the ability to read, write, and do arithmetic — and for the past decade, Norwegian students have done most of their coursework on tablets and laptops. …

“Marte Blikstad-Balas, a professor in the department of teacher education and school research at the University of Oslo [says] ‘Now you see a very sharp U-turn. Especially for children in grades one to four, we’re trying to build down our digital infrastructure.’ A big reason for this reversal is the relatively poor reading performance of Norwegian students.”

Shallow reading becomes a habit.

“Despite spending more per pupil than most other countries, Norway’s students are mediocre readers. That’s according to the most recent report from the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tracks student performance in reading, math, and science around the world. Perhaps most alarmingly, a 2021 international survey found that Norway’s students ranked last among 65 countries when it came to their enjoyment of reading.  

“These findings have helped fuel calls from Norwegian parents for schools to roll back the use of screen-based tools and to reprioritize old-school book reading — a trend that is also picking up steam among American parents and lawmakers. …

“Blikstad-Balas has spent much of her career studying the effects of digital technologies in classrooms. Recently, some of her research has examined screen-based reading in comparison to reading on paper. Her findings reveal some of the problems that arise when learning goes digital; they also suggest that reading something on a screen may be a fundamentally different and ‘shallower’ experience than reading on paper.

“For one recent study, she and colleagues had a small group of eighth-grade students read two short sections of text — one about a walrus, one about a beetle — of text either on a screen or on paper. The students wore eye-tracking glasses while reading, which allowed the researchers to collect data on how the students’ attention moved over the text. Reading comprehension — the students’ ability to correctly answer questions about what they’d just read — was significantly lower when the students read on screens. The researchers also found that the number of ‘transitions,’ where students would go back and re-read the text before submitting their answers, more than doubled — and in some cases tripled — when kids read on screens. …

“While this finding was unsurprising, she says it refutes some criticisms of older screen-vs.-paper reading research. ‘Some have said, well, people grow up reading on paper, not screens, so of course they’ll do better [in that medium],’ she says. ‘The children in this particular study grew up in mostly digital learning environments,’ she continues. ‘If anybody should be better at reading on screens, these kids should. And they’re not.’

“A bigger surprise came when she and her colleagues asked the students to assess their own performance. ‘They said they believed they were equally good in both conditions,’ she says. …

“How might reading on screens create comprehension shortfalls compared to reading on paper? There are two leading explanations.

“One has to do with the spatial and tactile attributes of paper-based text. When a reader has a book in their hands, for example, sentences and paragraphs are fixed in specific locations on the page and within the larger body of text. There’s evidence that the human brain finds it easier to both grasp and retain textual information when it possesses these physical properties, which screen-based texts lack. …

“The second explanation has to do with the busy, distraction-heavy nature of online information. ‘When you read things on the internet, a lot of what you’re doing is choosing what not to read and what not to look at,’ Blikstad-Balas explains. When people spend a lot of time in that kind of reading environment, they may be training themselves to skim and skip around whenever they encounter screen-based text—even when skimming and skipping is unhelpful. …

“It’s important to note that the difference in reading performance between screens and printed text is often small. ‘If it’s a 10-question test, we’ve found the difference would be something like half of a question,’ says Ladislao Salmerón, a professor at the University of Valencia in Spain who studies how digitization changes the reading experience.

“But such small differences may snowball into larger deficits. ‘Reading ability is cumulative and develops through the whole life cycle,’ he explains. ‘If every opportunity a person has to read, they’re engaging in this shallow, scanning kind of reading, their skills may never evolve to allow for comprehension of more complex ideas or syntactical structures.’ ”

More at Time, here.

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How to Deal with a Dead Whale

August 24, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: BBC Wildlife Magazine.
Beached humpback whale.

In late June of this year, a dead whale washed up on the east side of New Shoreham and quickly became a problem for island residents. It appeared to have been dead a long time, as Rhode Island’s Providence Journal reported, probably killed by a ship strike before becoming dinner for sharks.

Decomposition of whales, like anything else that big, smells overpoweringly bad.

At BBC Wildlife Magazine, marine science and conservation writer Melissa Hobson writes about how to deal with a whale carcass — not a problem I realize many of you will ever confront.

“In a first-of-its-kind experiment,” Hobson says, “researchers in Australia had the opportunity to tag a dead whale to see how the carcass moved through the ocean and where it fell to the seafloor. With an increase in whale strandings in Australia, understanding how remains travel with ocean currents is important when making decisions about disposing of carcasses.

” ‘As we’ve seen more and more whales stranding on Australian beaches in past years, the effective, safe and culturally sensitive removal of whale remains near or on public beaches has become a major issue,’ says Olaf Meynecke, from Griffith University’s Whales and Climate Research Program, who led the study.

“Current disposal methods, which include leaving the carcass on the beach, exploding it or sending it to landfill, can be difficult, expensive and pose public health risks. 

“In July 2023, they found a dead humpback whale floating off the coast of Noosa Heads, Queensland. The 14m female was probably killed by a ship strike. The researchers took this opportunity to test disposal at sea: a solution that could benefit the environment and members of the public. 

“Meynecke and his team moved the whale 18.5 miles (30km) offshore, added a satellite tag and tracked its location for six days until it fell to the seabed. This allowed them to develop and test a method to predict where the whale would drift with the wind and currents – a scientific first.

“ ‘Our study shows that forecasting of where whale remains might end up when floating at sea is possible with surprisingly high accuracy,’ says Meynecke.

“Whales that died from strandings have previously been towed out to deeper waters but some ended up in shipping lanes or back on shore. Being able to accurately predict where they will drift could give authorities a safe and cost-effective way of disposing of carcasses.

“If a dead whale is returned to the ocean, it also benefits animals that feed on it – from tiger sharks to deep-sea scavengers – and returns its nutrients to the ocean.

“ ‘Strategically placing whale remains offshore can enhance nutrient cycling and foster biodiversity, contribute to carbon removal and marine floor enrichment for up to seven years,’ says Meynecke.”

More at BBC Wildlife Magazine, here.

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What Authors Say About AI

August 23, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Benedict Evans/The Guardian.
This is 826 Valencia Street, San Francisco, the center for young writers that author Dave Eggers co-founded in 2002.

Authors in general are not OK with the way artificial intelligence undermines the value of human creativity. They also notice faster than the rest of us when AI begins to impinge on our thought processes.

In a long, discursive Guardian interview, Sophie McBain finds that acclaimed author Dave Eggars is not going to take it lying down. She writes, “Eggers had thought, over two decades of working with children, that he had met and seen every educational challenge. Then AI entered the classrooms.

” ‘The AI challenge really is beyond an existential one. Every time I think I’m going to talk to somebody who would never deign to use AI in any form I find there’s this very porous line where, you know, a smart 10-year-old will say, “Well, I don’t use it to write, I just use it to generate ideas,” which is far, far worse.’

“When he hears stories like that, he likes to remind students of their uniqueness. ‘You’re one of one,’ he’ll say. ‘You’re unprecedented in the entire line of human history. Only you have your brain. Only you can think of what you can think of. Only you can tell a story in a particular way. Why would you cede that to a machine?’

“Eggers’s voice, usually quiet, almost monotone, rises as he warms to his theme. ‘Once you have a machine think for you and write for you, you’re cooked as a species. That’s it. That’s the worse dystopian outcome there could ever be,’ he says. He can think of nothing worse than ‘the idea of us willingly, without any overlord telling us so, saying, “I think my voice would be better expressed by an unthinking machine who has plagiarized all of the world’s authors and has come up with this terrible soup of bad writing.” ‘

“For all the dispiriting news about AI-written books and reviews, Eggers believes that eventually there will be a countermovement, much as there is growing resistance to giving teenagers smartphones and social media access.

“Most teachers, he suspects, understand the problem with tech in schools. The problem stems from policymakers. He mentions a speech in which the US education secretary Linda McMahon talks about the benefits of introducing AI into schools, even for children as young as five. …

“Eggers and his wife, the writer Vendela Vida, are part of two class action lawsuits against Anthropic over the AI firm’s unauthorized use of their books to train large language learning systems. ‘I guarantee you they didn’t even think they were stealing anything because it’s just “content” to them,’ he says. Content is the ‘world’s worst word,’ he adds, because it dehumanizes writing and suggests ‘it has no real value inherently, and it doesn’t matter if humans made it or not.’

“He has written two dystopian novels, The Circle (2013) and The Every (2021), about a monopolistic big tech firm that is trying to take over every aspect of human existence, and somehow reality seems capable of outdoing his imagination.

“In The Every, the president communicates in emojis, rather than rightwing memes, and AI is used to sanitisze novels, rather than write them from scratch. He was recently invited by Sam Altman of OpenAI to speak on campus about AI-written novels.

“To everyone’s credit, Eggers says, it was an interesting, open conversation. ‘It was a really nice afternoon, actually, because what we always forget is that the maniacal illusions of a few of the people at the very top are not always shared by the rank-and-file … at least some of the people working there do want to be told what’s right and what’s wrong,’ he says. ‘But I definitely did have to give them the bad news … there’s no such thing as AI art. Only humans can create art.’ At best, the stuff a machine can spit out can be described as ‘computer generated imagery.’ “

More from Dave Eggers at the Guardian, here. A likeminded author, Margaret Atwood, calls AI “garbage in, garbage out,” at Deadline, here. You can probably come up with many more examples.

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Comedian, 100, Still Laughing

August 22, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File.
Comedian Mel Brooks at 99.

I have seen the great comedian Mel Brooks get very uncomfortable when he couldn’t make people laugh.

He was talking to our teenage group on Fire Island and laughing at a girl who said she was writing her memoirs.

A teenager writing memoirs was to him pretty funny — what life experience does someone that young have to write about? But the teens didn’t laugh because they didn’t have the same perspective. It made him uncomfortable.

A friend’s father who commuted with him on the “Daddy Boat” thought Brooks had a kind of compulsion to make everyone laugh all the time.

For myself, I always thought Brooks’s ‘2000 Year Old Man’ routines were hilarious. Even when I was a kid.

Jake Coyle wrote recently at the Associated Press, “The ‘2000 Year Old Man’ is turning 100. Mel Brooks on Sunday will celebrate his centennial birthday.

“The comedian and filmmaker has been awaiting the milestone. Earlier this year, Judd Apatow titled his retrospective documentary on him: Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!

“ ‘I was born to make people laugh,’ Brooks says in the film. ‘So, I do that.’

“Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn, New York, on June 28, 1926. After serving in the Army during World War II and performing in the Borscht Belt, Sid Caesar hired him as a writer. On his Show of Shows, Brooks met Carl Reiner, who’d remain a lifelong friend and with whom he created the ‘2000 Year Old Man’ sketches.

“Reiner would pepper Brooks’ ancient man with questions about what Jesus was like. ‘Jesus … yes, yes,’ Brooks would answer. ‘Thin lad. Wore sandals. Always walked around with 12 other guys.’

“Brooks went to make classic comedies like The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety. It all started, Brooks told The Associated Press in 2021, with his childhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

“ ‘I wanted to keep the party going. I wanted to keep the happiness and joy and explosions of laughter going into a dour part of our lives, not our childhood anymore,’ Brooks recalled. ‘I was once interviewed and the guy said, “What was the happiest part of your life? Was it winning the Academy Award? Was it marrying Anne Bancroft?” I said no, not at all. It was my childhood. From about 4 or 5 to 9, it was the most exciting, happiest, joyous life that anyone could experience.

“ ‘The guy said, “What happened at 9?” I said, “Homework.” ‘ …

“ ‘I’ve always been proud to say that I make people laugh for a living,’ Brooks said [recently] in a statement. ‘So, knowing that my work will have a home at comedy’s national archive and continue making people laugh leaves me with a deep sense of pride.’

“To mark the occasion of Brooks’ centennial, the American Film Institute on Friday named 1974’s Blazing Saddles the funniest film of all time. It has previously ranked sixth on its list of 100 greatest movies. Brooks’ film displaced Some Like It Hot. …

“Brooks has sometimes made mortality a joke, too. In a 1980s sketch, he created a coin-operated gravestone for himself that played a videotaped message. It began: ‘I was Mel Brooks, one of the funniest little Jews to walk the Earth.’

“When asked in that AP 2021 interview if he thought much about death, Brooks said no. ‘I gave up after 60 thinking about it because if I did, I’d be thinking about it all the time. So I don’t think about it much. When and if it happens it’s going to be a sad day — for everybody but me,’ Brooks said, laughing.

“ ‘I enjoy living,’ he added. ‘I’d like to do it as long as I can.’ ”

More at AP, here, and Fire Island News, here. You can read still more at the New York Times, here.

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When the Beach Was Aboriginal Space

August 21, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Diana Panuccio/Art Gallery of New South.
One of the new landscapes of Aboriginal artist Billy Bain — a new development in his career. 

Around the world, indigenous people have been pushed and pushed into spaces nobody wants. That is, until the land becomes desirable for new reasons, and then they have to fight to keep it.

As Steve Dow writes at the Guardian, an artist in Australia is intent on reclaiming the beaches for Aborigines.

“As a teenager in the mid 2000s, Billy Bain would ride waves around Sydney’s northern beaches, having traveled the world watching his champion surfer father Rob Bain compete. But even though he was minutes from his home in Avalon, he was often made to feel an unwelcome outsider.

“ ‘I’d be told that I’m not from there, so I need to go in [to shore],’ he says, seeing these warnings as veiled threats of violence. ‘Otherwise, you know, “something’s gonna happen to you.” ‘

“Now 33, the Dharug artist sees simply being an Aboriginal surfer as a way of reclaiming space. ‘[The northern beaches are] quite an isolated and predominantly white place,’ he says.

‘You know, the beach was and still is an Aboriginal space, but in popular culture it has been represented as a very white space.

” ‘There’s obviously the bronze Aussie, which is your typical tan, athletic white male, but it’s not seen as being a space that Aboriginal people inhabit any more.’

“In his studio in Granville in Sydney’s inner west, Bain is preparing for an upcoming solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, ‘By the River.’ The survey will feature new work, including five landscape paintings of the Dyarubbin/Hawkesbury river – a location that connects the Manly born artist with the country of his ancestors.

” ‘Geographically it was actually very close for us,’ says Bain, who has come to see surfing on the northern beaches as a form of cultural return, because the Dyarubbin flows into an estuary at Pittwater. ‘I see the story of the eel and how it spawns out at sea and then it finds its way back up these river systems to be an interesting metaphor for a return. I see myself as having a similar journey.’

“For ‘By the River,’ Bain has made 11 funny, figurative Indigenous family members (and one dog) dressed in bikinis, shorts and even a pair of budgie smugglers painted in Aboriginal colors: red and black with a yellow tie. …

“The figures will be displayed holding aloft a four-meter, long-finned eel – a totem animal and spirit of resilience known in Dharug language as a burra – which Bain has fashioned as a soft sculpture using cloth on a wire and steel frame, adorned by 200 textile elements handwoven by his mother, Kathleen Bain.

“Kathleen, a Dharug woman … would encourage her children to create with all sorts of materials, and Bain would especially love making faces and figures from the wax scraped from his surfboards.

“Bain’s surfer father has also been part of his artistic process. The pair took a small ‘tinny’ boat up the Dyarubbin, bush bashing along the clifftops and finding ancient Aboriginal handprints in caves, to help form the drawings for his five landscape paintings. …

“Ultimately, Bain’s art practice has become ‘a healing thing,’ he says. ‘It’s been such a massive part of learning to express myself.’ …

“Artists don’t exist to change the mind of doubters, but ‘fun, seductive’ humor in art can convey some serious ideas, Bain says. … ‘I do have quite a positive look on the human spirit and people’s ability to be good-natured and embrace other people. I think that’s intrinsic in us as humans.’ ”

If you live in New South Wales, you have until November 8 to see the show.

More at the Guardian, here. No firewall, but please consider supporting their outstanding joyrnalism.

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But What If AI Saves Dying Languages?

August 20, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Richard Ellis/Alamy.
Copies of the Gullah-language Bible, De Nyew Testament. I once had a Bible collection that included this one. Some experts say artificial intelligence will help save endangered languages like Gullah Geechee.

For many reasons, including the fact that artificial intelligence “godfather” Geoffrey Hinton has said AI could wipe out humanity in three decades, I am not a fan. I know it can be helpful in medicine and other things I care about, but three decades is scary.

But what if AI saves dying languages?

Jonathan Abrams wrote recently at the New York Times about people using AI as a tool to do just that.

“While relaxing a couple of years ago, Prof. Joshua Caffery found himself in the mood to unwind with some old-time Cajun music. He asked Amazon’s Alexa to play selections from Dewey Balfa, a celebrated fiddler and singer credited with popularizing the genre.

“Instead, Alexa frustratingly steered him to the catalog of the modern pop artist, Dua Lipa, Caffery said.

“ ‘I love Dua Lipa,’ said Caffery, the director of the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. ‘Don’t get me wrong. But it seems problematic if you’re interested in a different kind of culture and you want to surround yourself with the music of your region.’ …

“Louisiana French, the oral dialect of which Balfa was a cultural guardian, is part of the Bayou’s societal DNA, a link to its history, music and identity. Today, Caffery described the language as struggling and endangered. …

“In response, Caffery assembled a small team at the center to train its own language learning model in automatic speech recognition for Louisiana French, drawing from a trove of historical artifacts and interviews.

“Over the months, as the learning language model is trained on bits of the language — such as an old-age French nursery rhyme — it brings centuries-old dialect closer into the digital age.

“ ‘It’s scary how fast all this happened,’ Caffery said. ‘I don’t even think I knew a large-language model existed two years ago.’ …

“The efforts are part of inroads to preserve dialects at risk of being lost, and bridge a disconnect between large-language model machines, while maintaining a community’s ability to control and own its digital destiny.

“In the United States, questions exist over how to preserve languages like Louisiana French, the Gullah Geechee language (the English-based Creole language of some coastal regions in the Atlantic southeast) and Appalachian English in the modern, digital age.

“Globally, researchers at the University of Edinburgh are using artificial intelligence to strengthen and revive Scottish Gaelic and Manx. Google recently announced the availability of voice recordings of nearly 30 sub-Saharan African languages to help build tools like voice assistants and translation apps. …

“The importance of accurate speech recognition becomes greater as important tasks like job hiring and medical transcriptions become more automated and digitized, [Christine Mallinson, a professor of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County] said. …

” ‘There’s accents, patterns of grammar, word choice. Those differences are connected to our families, our neighborhoods, our age and gender and racial and ethnic and cultural backgrounds and where we grew up.’ …

“For centuries, Louisiana French was the predominant language spoken in South Louisiana. In 1921, a new state constitution declared English the primary language. Many parents stopped teaching their children the language out of fear of discrimination, as students who spoke Louisiana French in class were often punished with knuckle-rappings.

“A reversal came in 1968 when the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana was created to advance French, largely through education and community initiatives. In 2023, the Advocate of Baton Rouge estimated about 120,000 Louisianans still spoke French.

“Caffery grew up in Franklin, La., an antebellum town on Bayou Teche. As a child, he ate Cajun and Creole food. His grandparents sometimes sang Old French songs and passed along phrases in the language.

“ ‘Whether you spoke it or speak it, the language is floating in the air,’ he said. ‘There’s this feeling of there is this beautiful thing that we want to hang on to.’ …

“The Center of Louisiana Studies houses a vast trove of Cajun and Creole folklore recordings that include over 12,000 hours of oral histories, field recordings and music performances recorded on everything from wax cylinders to reel-to-reel tape. …

“The language is almost entirely preserved in vocal recordings. ‘A lot of it is sung in the language, and it’s something that’s vanishing,’ Caffery said. ‘Just in the same way you’d want food that’s local to your region, it’s important to have culture that is local to the region that makes you feel rooted and certain.’ ”

More at the Times, here,

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The Great Elephant Migration

August 19, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photos: Suzanne and John’s Mom.

When I first wrote about the Great Elephant Migration in 2024, here, the monumental display was in Newport, Rhode Island. Now it’s in Boston, and my friend and I went by train and subway to see it for ourselves.

There were a hundred elephants. We didn’t manage to see them all. The show stretched at least six, long city blocks along leafy Commonwealth Ave.

Here’s one message: there are humans who coexist comfortably with wild animals in their midst and we could, too. In India, for instance, where these magnificent sculptures come from, elephants pursue their daily activities in and around humans pursuing theirs. In fact, most indigenous people are close to nature like that. The rest of us may love wild animals but follow a principle of separation, usually settling wildlife in protected areas.

Ruth Ganesh, a trustee of Elephant Family USA and co-founder of the Coexistence Collective, told a Forbes reporter in my 2024 post that her organization hopes the herd will spread “this beautiful perspective of coexistence” and teach people to see “other species as our biological kin.”

Asian elephant expert and co-founder of the Real Elephant Collective in India, Tarsh Thekaekara, added, “Animals will survive in human dominated landscapes if people tolerate them.”

My friend and I found many aspects to this story intriguing. We were curious to know what the handsome elephants were made from. Turns out it’s a plant that’s invasive in India, lantana camara, so weeding them out and using them for art benefits the environment in an additional way. Up close, the weeds look like long, bendable sticks. You could imagine them being used as whips.

Each of the exhibit’s 100 elephants has a unique name because each one is a replica of a real elephant back home.

As Artemisia Luk reported at Boston’s WBUR, indigenous artisans from the  Nilgiri Hills in Southern India made the replicas. “Each sculpture takes three to four months to complete and is inspired by a real-life elephant that lives in the region. Currently, Ganesh said that 300 artisans are employed through the initiative. Together, they make up the Real Elephant Collective, and come from  Paniya, Soliga, Bettakurumba and Kattunayakan communities. …

“Elephants in the Boston herd sell for up to $22,500 depending on size. Each elephant is paired with a conservation organization, which receives the funds from its sale. In Boston, local beneficiaries include the New England Aquarium’s North Atlantic Right Whale conservation efforts and the Boston Public Art Triennial’s conservation projects. Since 2024, the Great Elephant Migration has raised $1.4 million across cities.

“Baby elephants may be spotted across the city as local businesses and organizations ‘adopt’ them. In New England, permanent installations of the elephants can be spotted in Newport, Rhode Island and Kensington, New Hampshire.

“Boston is the first stop of 2026 for the project after their last installation in Beverly Hills in July 2025. The majority of the elephants were made new and traveled directly from India via ship.”

Blog friends, you have only until September 13 to see this free installation in Boston, but you may have a chance in other cities this year — Rome, for example, Las Vegas, or Washington, D.C.

More at the show’s website, here, and at WBUR, here. Robin Lubbock’s photos at WBUR capture the massive extent of the exhibit. Most of the photos in today’s post are mine.

Photo below: Kristina Joyce.

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Star-Shaped Hail

August 18, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Matthew Cappucci/MyRadar.
Star-shaped hail seen in June 2026 near Arthur, Illinois.

Here’s a new one for extreme-weather buffs: star-shaped hail. Meteorologist and storm chaser Matthew Cappucci traveled miles to report on the rarity for the app My Radar. He shares his findings at the Washington Post.

“Anyone who knows me knows I have a thing for hail. An avid storm chaser, I’ve replaced 10 windshields. My dimpled, dented truck looks like a golf ball. I keep a freezer in the back seat.

“But the hail I encountered earlier this month in Arthur, Illinois, was unlike any other stones I’ve seen. They were as wide as baseballs — but shaped like stars.

“The National Weather Service had issued a severe thunderstorm warning for Douglas and Moultrie counties at 6:16 p.m. on June 17. The nearby town of Decatur, about 30 miles to the west, had just logged a 78 mph wind gust. As I approached Arthur from the south, I knew I was getting into a gnarly storm.

“Before the rain even began, the sky turned a neon green-blue. It evolved into a phosphorescent aquamarine. Contrary to popular belief, the infamous ‘green sky’ phenomenon doesn’t signify an impending tornado — but it’s nearly a guarantee of hail.

“That’s because severe thunderstorms usually happen in the late afternoon near peak heating, which comes two or three hours before sunset. At that time of day, the sun — lower in the sky — has to shine through our atmosphere at an angle, meaning the light passes through more of it. Much of the blue light (shorter wavelengths) is scattered away; the longer wavelengths, like yellow and red, are better at penetrating deeper into the atmosphere and reaching the ground.

“Tall thunderstorms, however, scatter blue and bluish-green light. That’s especially true if the clouds are carrying lots of hail. Added together, the yellow and blue make green.

“As I drove north on Route 1500E, the rain arrived suddenly, along with winds strong enough to rock my truck back and forth. I was sneaking in behind the worst of the storm; my goal was to arrive in Arthur immediately after the hail. I wanted to collect some without losing my windshield.

“But even five miles south of the storm’s core, I still experienced about 30 seconds of hail. Apparently the storm’s spinning updraft was enough to fling random tennis ball-sized stones out the side. … Only three or four hit my truck.

“Arriving in Arthur, however, the landscape was littered with stones between 1.5 and 3 inches in diameter. Most were about two inches across. They weren’t round, however — they were shaped like stars. Each had little arms or antennas. If they hadn’t been so damaging, they’d almost be cute.

“What caused the wonky protuberances? Wet growth.

“Hail forms high aloft in storm clouds, where temperatures are between minus-22 and 14 degrees Fahrenheit. Too much colder, and the air is too dry to hold moisture. Any warmer, and hailstones take too long to freeze.

“There are two different types of hailstone growth. Each are responsible for forming different types of layers. …

“Dry growth tends to support rounder hailstones. Wet growth, however, happens at warmer temperatures. Larger droplets take longer to freeze. That gradual freezing keeps the edges of the hailstone ‘sticky’ in a sense, as if the growing stone were coated in glue. Smaller hail embryos, akin to the seeds of undeveloped hailstones, collide with the sticky stones. They fuse together, forming weird protrusions. The jagged spikes get coated in new layers of ice, and the hailstone grows in curious ways.

“Atmospheric scientists are still working to learn more about hail. What role does the shape of hailstones have on the force it imparts when it hits the ground? Do hailstones have varying levels of hardness? And what factors dictate the size distribution of hail?”

More at the Post, here.

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A Tendency to Laugh

August 17, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Simone Fischer/Unsplash.
Humans aren’t the only ones who like to share a good laugh.

Today’s story is about the similarities and differences in something we humans share with certain neighbors on Planet Earth. Laughter.

Emily Anthes writes at the New York Times, “Humor is deeply personal. A punchline or a pratfall that leaves one person doubled over in delight might elicit blank stares from another. But laughter is universal, an innate instinct shared by humans everywhere.

“And not just humans. Chimps chuckle, gorillas guffaw, bonobos bust a gut. All the planet’s great apes laugh, and they often do so in the same kind of regular, repeating rhythm that humans do, scientists found in a small new study.

“The research sheds light on how laughter evolved with and among great apes, becoming faster and more variable in humans. … Apes appeared to laugh in ways that were largely fixed; humans were more flexible in their expressions of mirth, changing up the tempo of their chuckles depending on the circumstance, the scientists found.

“ ‘I think we can say we are the masters of laughter,’ said Chiara De Gregorio, a research fellow at the University of Warwick in Britain and an author of the study. ‘We can have a small, polite laugh in front of the Queen of England, and then we are in the pub with our friends, and we laugh so much in a different way. We can even laugh in a way that communicates to the other person that we actually didn’t find the joke they said funny.’ …

“In the new study, which was published [in June] in the journal Communications Biology, the researchers analyzed the recorded laughter of four children and 13 young, captive apes: four orangutans, two gorillas, three bonobos and four chimpanzees. Some of the recordings featured laughter produced during play, while others captured laughter elicited by tickling.

“(Many of the recordings were initially created two decades ago by Marina Davila-Ross, a comparative psychologist at the University of Portsmouth in Britain and an author of the new study. ‘I wasn’t lucky enough to be there tickling baby gorillas at the time,’ Dr. De Gregorio said.)

“During tickling, the scientists found, all the species produced laughter that shared the same basic rhythmic characteristic: It was isochronous, meaning that each vocalization — each pant, hoot or ‘ha’ — occurred at regular, evenly spaced intervals, like the ticking of a clock or metronome.

“The scientists did not observe this same regularity in the laughter that [humans] produced during play, perhaps because the physical, rough-and-tumble nature of many of these play sessions disrupted regular breathing patterns.

“Though the laughter of humans and apes shared some basic rhythmic properties, the tempo, or speed, of these rhythms varied considerably. … On average, humans had laughter that was quicker. …

“Even though humans were the fastest laughers on average, they displayed enormous variability in their laugh speeds, laughing languidly in some circumstances and rapidly in others. They [also changed] the tempo of their laughter depending on the context, laughing faster, for instance, while being tickled than during play.

“The study had limitations; the subject pool was small, and the researchers analyzed just a handful of laughter’s many characteristics. But future studies with larger sample sizes could help scientists learn more about how humans made it their own.

“ ‘Laughter is such an important part of our way of communication,’ Dr. De Gregorio said. ‘It’s able to communicate way more than, “I’m playing and I’m having fun.” ‘ “

More at the Times, here. Check out the recordings of various kinds of apes laughing.

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Brain Injured, He Still Can Repair Bikes

August 16, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Jovelle Tamayo/Washington Post.
When Rob is finished repairing an unwanted bike, he posts it on Buy Nothing and finds someone who needs it.

I learned something about the brain today that I never knew, something that made sense. It’s called “procedural memory.”

Maggie Penman writes at the Washington Post, “Rob P. sits in his garage scrubbing a broken shifter on an old bicycle. It’s his second hour scouring it, trying to free it from the gummed-up grease preventing it from changing gears.

“The shifter would cost about $10 to replace, but that’s not how Rob operates. If it takes him 10 hours to fix it, that is time well spent.

“Rob, who repairs virtually unfixable bicycles for free and gives them away in his community, is working to keep bikes out of landfills. But he’s also working on something else: feeling useful again, and figuring out what his brain is capable of after a catastrophic accident.

“Rob was hit by a car in a crosswalk in 2017 and spent three months in hospitals. He suffered a traumatic brain injury that left him partially blind and with lingering paralysis on the left side of his body. He didn’t remember some of his closest friends, his home or his city. He remains cognitively and physically impaired.

“A few years into his recovery, he was struggling with depression and needed to figure out how to put meaning back into his days. …

“Before he was hit by a car, Rob was a computer programmer for two decades. He does not remember what he used to do in that job, but his brain retained the skills he picked up in his teens and early 20s, when he worked in bike shops.

“ ‘He’s degreasing and de-rusting and hand-scrubbing spokes, completely taking things apart, reviving them and putting them back together,’ his wife, Becky, said.

“Rob believes he can offer something no one else can — repairing what a bike shop wouldn’t bother with because the cost of fixes would far exceed the value of the bicycle. …

“If you look closely at the two-wheelers he repairs, notes scribbled on blue tape are stuck to each seat. When he forgets whose bicycle he’s fixing, he looks to see a name and a date scrawled on the tape. When he doesn’t remember what the bike needs, there’s a piece of tape that says ‘flip fork’ or ‘fender.’ …

“When Rob woke up in a hospital in 2017 after being in a coma for a month … he didn’t remember what had happened, where he was or who the president was. But he recognized Becky.

“It took Rob nearly four years of rehab before he started to think about doing something beyond his recovery.

“He had always talked about starting a bike shop to offer free tune-ups to friends and neighbors but never had the time. So Becky suggested he try it. He started small in 2021, fixing bikes for his niece and her classmates to help them raise money for their school. The work felt familiar, if slow, and he relished the sense of accomplishment. He wanted to try more.

“He turned to Seattle’s Buy Nothing group — an online platform where people offer free stuff they don’t need anymore. He found bikes rusting all over the city, a treasure trove of bent frames and broken chains that were like puzzles waiting for him to solve. …

“When Rob is finished with a donated bike, he posts it on Buy Nothing and finds someone who needs it. Then he takes a picture of the new owner with the bike and sends it to the person who donated it.

“ ‘I say, “Look how happy you made this person because you donated this bike.” ‘ Rob said. …

“Eric Spier, a physician and medical director of the Brain Injury Program at Craig Hospital in Colorado, said fixing bikes involves ‘procedural memory,’ which makes it less vulnerable to injury.

“ ‘I’d have no idea where the letters are on a keyboard, but as soon as I put my hands on the keyboard I can type,’ Spier said. ‘That’s fixing a bicycle. Those things are deeply rooted in the brain.’ ”

Cool. I thought about that and how in a “senior moment,” I find it helpful to remind myself where I am in my activities, my procedures, you could say. Do you have tricks to shake you out of that moment of “drawing a blank”?

More at the Post, here.

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This Cat Has Surprised Scientists

August 15, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Mohammed Almuntasir.
Sand cats (Felis margarita) like this are the world’s only felids adapted to true desert conditions. 

Here’s another example of just how far human curiosity can take us when we persevere. For years, the idea that a catlike animal could survive in the desert was thought to be more myth than fact. But a wildlife photographer in Libya was determined to find out if it was possible.

Amr Fathallah writes at the Guardian, “When wildlife photographer Mohammed Almuntasir uploaded 18 seconds of footage to YouTube, he thought little more about the small, pale cat seen digging a hollow in the sand in the remote dunes of south-west Libya.

“The video, however, posted in 2017, turned out to be the first material evidence that the sand cat (Felis margarita), the world’s only felid adapted to true desert conditions, existed in the country.

“ ‘When I posted it, nobody believed it had been filmed in Libya,’ he said. ‘Everyone denied it, but I kept insisting that the cat is here, in several places; one of them was only 70km (43 miles) from Zintan, where I live.’

“Nearly a decade later there is increasing evidence that this was not just one sand cat but that south-western Libya may represent a previously unrecognized stronghold for the species. The sand cat is no bigger than a domestic cat and its sandy color means it is almost impossible to spot in the terrain it inhabits, earning it the nickname ‘ghost of the desert.’

“Almuntasir did not actively circulate his film of the cat, but it drew attention on its own, prompting numerous researchers to contact him over the years, including Firas Hayder, a zoologist specializing in small carnivores and a postdoctoral researcher at Sol Plaatje University in South Africa.

“ ‘He convinced me that we should collaborate on a study to document the return of this animal to Libya and register it among Libyan wildlife species,’ Almuntasir says.

“Libya’s south-west is one of the least studied terrestrial environments in north Africa and Hayder says he had reviewed every scientific source that mentioned the sand cat in Libya and found that none had produced a single piece of evidence or set of coordinates.

“ ‘When I asked Mohammed where he had seen the cat, he told me he had observed it in multiple areas,’ Hayder says. ‘That was what surprised me.’ …

“After meeting, Hayder and Almuntasir embarked on an eight-year collaboration conducted almost entirely remotely.

“ ‘I taught Mohammed the field research methods from South Africa – how to record GPS coordinates, how to document each sighting with photographs or video,’ Hayder says. ‘He applied all of that across the south-western desert, collecting testimony from local Tuareg communities who know the terrain intimately.’

“Almuntasir, who grew up in the Nafusa mountains, where residents are deeply familiar with Hamada al Hamra, a vast rocky desert plateau in south-western Libya covering 84,000 sq km, joined local hunters on their expeditions, carrying a camera instead of a rifle.

“ ‘They would tell me about places where they had seen the sand cat and record the coordinates, and I would compile them all to plan a dedicated trip to visit each location,’ he says.

In some cases, he and his guides followed paw prints for days to locate a burrow, then pitched a tent and waited for the animal to emerge.

“Their efforts culminated in a peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Arid Environments in February 2026 documenting the sand cat at 13 sites across the Libyan Sahara, as well as the Saharan striped polecat at eight new locations, seven of them outside the species’ recognized [range]. A high proportion of sand cat sightings, 15 out of 36, were concentrated in Wadi Armet, an isolated valley roughly 1,000km [621 miles] south-west of Tripoli. …

“ ‘There has always been a large question mark over Libya because of the scarcity of studies and surveys,’ Ibrahim Elkahwage, head of the Libyan Wildlife Trust … tells the Guardian. ‘This research is an important contribution that could help reveal the enormous biodiversity hidden in the Libyan Sahara.’ “

This story was produced in collaboration with the journalism group Egab.

More at the Guardian, here.

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Reconsidering ‘America the Beautiful’

August 14, 2026 by suzannesmom

Photo: Kevin Condon.
The patriotic song “America the Beautiful” has been given diverse new versions thanks to pianist Min Kwon’s ambitious music project.

What I’ve always loved about the song “America the Beautiful” is its recognition that a country, our country, can never be perfect and should always strive to improve in ways that matter. “God mend thine ev’ry flaw/Confirm thy soul in self-control/Thy liberty in law.” Wow. So different from the “bombs bursting in air” of the official national anthem! Plenty of Americans would be glad to switch songs.

In 1972, Ray Charles recorded the more or less definitive performance.

Jesse Dorris writes at the Guardian, “Despite what you may have heard, there is no definitive version of the song ‘America the Beautiful.’

“Katharine Lee Bates wrote its lyrics as a poem in 1893, inspired by an ecstatic road trip from the Massachusetts house she shared with her longtime companion Katharine Coman to a teaching gig in Colorado. Over the next few decades, dozens of musicians set it to music, including a tune by New Jersey’s Samuel A Ward. The uniting of the text to a hymn Ward had previously composed in 1882 became, in time, a standard. In 1972, Ray Charles recorded the more or less definitive performance of it. But everyone from Pete Seeger to Tammy Faye Messner have tried their hand at Bates’s ode to equality between peoples and equanimity with nature. …

“The Korean-born, New Jersey-based pianist Min Kwon has spent her career thinking of ways to build communities through interpretation. As professor of piano at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, she curated concerts featuring university pianists at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall – like a 2015 performance of 50 variations on a waltz the Viennese music publisher Anton Diabelli commissioned in the 1820s from composers including Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt. …

“Kwon regularly leads masterclasses and tours around the world. Like much of the world, though, the Covid-19 lockdowns put all that on pause. ‘America was in crisis, we were all feeling very isolated. We were desperate for connection and hope,’ she says. … She began looking around at the country she had made her home, which, in the summer of 2020, was rising up against the racist killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor while buckling under the rise of the far right. ‘I do believe America, as a melting pot, is a heart of creation,’ she says. ‘I wanted somehow to celebrate that.’

“What would that sound like? ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ America’s actual anthem, was a little too patriotic for her taste. Bates and Ward’s ‘America the Beautiful’ fit the bill better. … And so, over the course of email threads and WhatsApp texts, lockdown Zoom calls and YouTube live streams, Kwon developed ‘America/Beautiful,’ a flock of 76 interpretations. ‘Some are prayers, some are protests, some are dreams or confessions,’ she says. … From American minimalist icon Terry Riley, for example, she says she was expecting long contemplation à la his classic song ‘In C.’ Instead, his ‘Crown of Brotherhood’ is, she says, ‘a piano ragtime, something so fun and in good humor.’ …

“Kwon has recorded each of the compositions for a five-CD box set, released in time for America’s 250th anniversary. She has also mounted performances of them, including a collaboration with the New York City-based non-profit Death of Classical, which, in June, found her on a black grand piano that barely fit into the main passage between the 30 or so family vaults deep within the catacombs at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. An impressively physical player, Kwon passionately negotiated avant-pop phenomenon Leila Adu-Gilmore’s ‘United Underdog,’ in which her moody processional through passages of the original composition grow into a finale so ferocious Kwon performed it via slammed forearms across the keyboard.

“A more gentle counterpoint arrived with a special guest, Vijay Iyer, who joined her at the piano for his ‘Crown thy Good,’ an elegiac duet in which each vanished into a vault behind them during the other’s solo selections. It became a moment of showing up for each other, of finding common ground and mutual creation. Kwon’s daughters happened to be born on President’s Day and the Fourth of July, she says. ‘I want to leave a body of new work for them, that later generations can look back on [and] say: “Lots of bad things happened, but look what came out of it.” ‘ “

More at the Guardian, here.

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Summer Gallery

August 13, 2026 by suzannesmom

Most photos: Suzanne and John’s Mom.

I begin this collection of summer photos with my only 2026 example of New Shoreham’s Painted Rock showing its artistic side. Lately, most people have used the rock for messy graffiti honoring friends’ birthdays, weddings, family gatherings. I am still trying to puzzle out why so many people have have turned inward like that to their own tribes. In the past, there was more art for art’s sake.

Below, Emily Bhargava and Tova Speter’s contribution to Lexington’s 250th Riding through History exhibit of decorated horses. “Illumi-neigh-ted” was inspired by Paul Revere’s lantern.

Next, Susana Rodrigues performs flamenco at our retirement place.

The photo below is by Suzanne from a trip to the 2026 Newport Folk Festival.

Next, an artistic creation by my older granddaughter. It was made from the clay of New Shoreham bluffs. She also cooked a magnificent dinner during her time on the island.

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