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.
Photo: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images. Members of the Tartan Army before one of Scotland’s 2026 World Cup games.
There were many things about the 2026 World Cup that gave Americans a kind of unexpected permission to be happy. Among those things were enthusiastic fan groups that came from abroad. Consider Scotland’s Tartan Army and the fun of having kilts and bagpipes filling the streets.
Adeel Hassan wrote at the New York Times in May, “Fans of Scotland’s World Cup team, thousands strong, will march on Providence, Rhode Island’s capital, next month and local officials will be applauding and cheering them every step of the way.
“Providence aggressively and strategically promoted itself as an alternative to host the parade of fans, known as the Tartan Army. City officials helped broker hotel deals and open up college dormitories to house the Scottish team supporters, a fan said. …
“Many of the approximately 10,000 Scottish team supporters will be staying in Providence-area hotels, college dormitories and Airbnbs, Rhode Island officials said.
“ ‘Our estimate is around 40 percent savings on accommodation compared to Boston rates,’ Ian Cox of the Providence Tartan Army said. ‘The real reasons supporters are choosing Providence are simple: It is actually closer to Gillette Stadium, it is a beautiful and walkable city, and the people here have been incredibly welcoming and helpful throughout our planning.’ …
“The proximity of the two cities presents fans with a choice of where to make a home base for part of the 39-day tournament.
“There are two kinds of fans, international and domestic, said Victor Matheson, a professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., and a longtime soccer fan. …
“ ‘Tourist No. 1 is the soccer fan who is using the World Cup as an excuse to go do other cool things that they’ve always wanted to do,’ he said. ‘That sort of tourist is obviously going to pick Boston over Providence because, from an international tourism perspective, Boston is a place to come.’
“The second fan is here only for the soccer matches, said Professor Matheson, who studies the economics of large sporting events.
“Describing the perspective of a die-hard soccer fan, he said: ‘I’m just not going to walk the Freedom Trail. I don’t care about Paul Revere. I don’t care about Old Ironsides. What I care about is soccer.
“ ‘Those fans are looking for like-minded fans,’ he added. ‘They’re looking for a place with cool bars, and a place that’s moderately cheap, so they can afford tickets to the event.’ …
“The only direct train service to Gillette Stadium is from Boston, though, and most fans from Rhode Island will be arriving by bus.
“The Tartan Army negotiated its own bus contract, and its members will arrive on game day on roughly 40 school buses, at $45 per person, less than half the established rate of $95, Mr. Cox said.
“Plenty of the Scottish fans and others staying in Rhode Island are using short-term housing rentals.
“ ‘Globally, what we’ve heard is that Airbnbs are as, if not more, popular than some hotels,’ because of the nature of how fans are traveling for the games, [Providence Mayor Brett] Smiley said. ‘Visitors seem to be coming in groups.’
“Airbnb housing, he said, distributes fans throughout the city’s neighborhoods, helping other businesses, rather than having all the fans concentrated downtown.
“Airbnb gave $250,000 to Ocean State 2026, the state’s official tournament organizer, to support soccer clinics, community celebrations and cultural programs. It is also giving two dozen World Cup tickets to children through a lottery.
“About a million people are expected to travel through the Providence area, according to Ocean State 2026. … The benefits will be spread out across the state, said James Diossa, chairman of Ocean State 2026 and the state’s general treasurer.
“Central Falls, a majority-Latino city, will be home to Colombia’s large fan base, he said, while Pawtucket and East Providence will be where many fans of the Cape Verde and Portugal teams will congregate. There will also be a fan zone for the Portugal national team in Providence. …
“Scotland’s last appearance in the World Cup was in 1998, and its fans have already left a mark on this one. They have made a $10,000 donation to Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence.
“ ‘Part of what makes that possible is the money our supporters have saved,’ Mr. Cox said. ‘Every dollar not spent on overpriced bus tickets, FIFA’s outrageously expensive parking, Boston 2026’s unaffordable train, or Boston hotel rates, is a dollar that can go back into the community.
“Providence has welcomed us with open arms, and we intend to repay that warmth in full.’ ”
Photo: Shane O’Neill/Washington Post. Organizers pasted Summer of Ludd posters over different advertisements in a Brooklyn subway station, seen in June 2026.
What kinds of activities could lure you to experience a phone-free day? Is there enough rebellion out there to make a phone-free movement survive?
In June, Ethan Beck wrote at the Washington Post about a new kind of Luddite who is offering lots of alternatives to constant scrolling — alternatives characterized by interacting with other humans.
“Dan Fox hasn’t run for office before,” says Beck. “But that hasn’t stopped the strapping 38-year-old comedian from setting his sights on the presidency. Just don’t ask about his campaign.
“ ‘All I want to say right now is that my platform is that I have no platforms,’ said Fox. …
“On June 30, he’ll announce his candidacy in Washington Square Park. But Fox’s bid has been gestating for years. In 2015, he attended a Tame Impala concert, where he saw a sea of devices in the air, and left Radio City Music Hall ready to proselytize about how smartphones are ruining our lives. This crusade has taken many forms: Fox works for Light, a company that sells phones without internet access, and hosts a weekly, phone-free gathering in his Fort Greene brownstone.
“All of which brings us to the presidential run. Fox’s kickoff event comes three days into the Summer of Ludd, a festival designed to yank individuals off of their phones and into the real world. This fête builds off a burgeoning Luddite renaissance in New York, the result of an amorphous community of phone-free event organizers, self-described ‘attention activists,’ aligned nonprofits and a few not-smart phone companies.
“You’ll notice that Summer of Ludd isn’t anywhere online. … But organizers have other ways of reaching potential future Luddites. More than 15,000 guidebooks to the week’s phone-free events have been printed and scattered across trendy bookstores and cafes in the city. Wheat-pasted monochrome posters, with the festival’s ethos of ‘Free! Public! Participatory!’ and a festival hotline, can be found plastered over subway ads. …
“But the festival’s home base is Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, where, starting on June 28, daily meditations, jam sessions and puppet shows will take place. …
“Summer of Ludd organizers describe the goal of the event as twofold: help people understand how platforms are profiting off their helpless users, and remind them of a better, more meaningful world off social media. It’s the result of years of tech-skeptical organizing, according to various people involved with the festival. …
“Not all of the organizers consider themselves Luddites. But many were inspired by Logan Lane’s Luddite Club, which she started in 2021 while at Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School.
The club’s name came from Ned Ludd, a figure from English folklore who inspired 19th-century workers in their fight against industrialization. …
“Amanda Hanna-McLeer, who taught film, media and graphic design at Murrow, felt relieved that her students were concerned about phone addiction. Drawing from her experience working on shows including Broad City and The Americans, she shot a documentary about Lane’s Luddite Club and the wider neo-Luddite world in New York. Now, she’s hard at work on Luddite Recreations, a play she’s staging three times during Summer of Ludd, which tells the story of the textile-mill Luddites — only the factory owners look suspiciously like present-day technology CEOs.
“If the word luddite conjures images of anguished farmers and phone-smashing absolutists, Hanna-McLeer emphasizes that this movement isn’t about being anti-progress.
“ ‘You don’t have to have a flip phone and no social media to join us,’ said Hanna-McLeer, 33, while on break from building props. ‘You just have to be willing to examine your life in tandem with technology.’ “
Look at it this way: Who should be in charge of what you think about?
Photo: Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff. Johendy De La Cruz Arias (right), a senior at Margarita Muniz Academy, looked up at his father Jonathan Arias, who he said was the driving force behind his decision to earn the Seal of Biliteracy at Boston Public Schools.
There was a time when US schools try to force students to stop using their native tongue and focus on English. Other countries did the same to push the dominant language.
But how much better to celebrate having two languages! If nothing else, it’s a clearly marketable skill.
‘A new language develops a new cognitive system in your brain,’
Thai Theodoro writes at the Boston Globe, “A record number of Boston students were recognized this year for speaking two or more languages, a milestone that includes both English native speakers learning a second language and immigrant children, mostly Spanish speakers, learning English. ..
“ ‘A new language develops a new cognitive system in your brain,’ said Cecilia Soriano, director of development at the Margarita Muñiz Academy. ‘You’re twice as able to deal with things because you’ve got two systems up in your brain that are able to help you understand the world around you.’
“For Johendy De La Cruz Arias, a senior at Margarita Muñiz Academy, his Dominican father was the driving force behind his decision to earn a Seal of Biliteracy.
“De La Cruz Arias is a second-generation immigrant from the Dominican Republic, and will attend Simmons University, becoming the first in his family to attend college. When he started schooling, he didn’t speak English.
“But I kept learning it, practicing with my dad and my brothers at the house,” he said. ‘[Dad] brought us here for a better future, and I feel proud of myself that I’m making his wish come true.’
“Most recent data, from 2024, shows English learners accounted for 21 percent of Massachusetts seal recipients, according to the 2024 National Seal of Biliteracy Report for 2022-2023 Academic Year.
“To earn a Seal of Biliteracy, students must meet local graduation requirements, demonstrate proficiency in English by meeting state standards on the English Language Arts Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, and satisfy world language proficiency requirements through a state-approved assessment.
“Manicka Fils-Aime, a senior at New Mission High School who was born in Haiti, achieved a seal in Haitian Creole and English.
“ ‘Achieving the seal means that I’m capable of making something good of myself,’ said Fils-Aime.
“The growth in the number of multilingual students also follows Boston Public Schools’ adoption of MassCore in 2021, which established world language coursework as part of the district’s graduation requirements for the class of 2026, and beyond. …
“Spanish accounted for the largest share of Seal of Biliteracy recipients this year, with 327 certified students. Chinese followed with 37 recipients, while Haitian Creole and Portuguese were nearly tied with 30 and 29 recipients, respectively.
“When immigrant children study their home language at school, they feel more connected, perform better academically and are more likely to graduate, said Maria Carreira, executive director of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.
“ ‘All of this contributes to students who are ultimately better prepared to participate in what is an increasingly diverse society with different people in the United States and across the world,’ Carreira said.
“At New Mission High School in Hyde Park, the majority of the 42 students who earned a Seal of Biliteracy did so in their native, non-English language, said Karen Loughran, the co-head of the school.
“Most of the seals were from students who speak Spanish and Haitian Creole, with some Somali, Portuguese, Vietnamese, French, and Russian.
” ‘Our students are starting to feel pride in themselves every day,’ said Kareem Cutler, co-head of the school. ‘Our community as a whole comes around these students to support them, celebrate them, help them acknowledge the importance of getting the Seal of Biliteracy.’ “
More at the Globe, here. Older people are learning (almost too late) that being bilingual is good for their brains, too. I hope it’s not too late! I’m trying to learn Swedish.
A great deal of thought has been given to what makes for a happy childhood. Some studies even aim to show which countries have the happiest children.
In the Netherlands, a uniquely Dutch evening ritual may have something to do with overall contentment.
Hannah Docter-Loeb writes at the Guardian, “I shouldn’t have been surprised that the rain didn’t stop the Dutch kids. All day it had been thunderstorming, and the forecast didn’t look so great for the evening. And yet at 5pm, hundreds of kids started arriving – many by bike – with their parents to Amsterdam’s Westerpark, a beloved city park that caters to a more residential area of the capital. Today, it functions as a starting point: volunteers coordinate registration, and groups of children gather, decked out in raincoats and eager to embark on either a 5km or a 10km excursion around the surrounding neighborhoods.
“It’s the second night of Avondvierdaagse (which literally means ‘four-day evening walk’), organized by a group of neighborhood volunteers. It’s not a race, but if children complete every night, they get medals, a bouquet of flowers and, if they’re lucky, a lot of sweets.
“It’s not just Amsterdam; across villages, towns and cities in the Netherlands, hundreds of thousands of Dutch people are doing the same: every year, kids spend four evenings in early summer exploring their neighborhoods with their school friends and parents as part of the Week van de Avond4daagse. … There are also four-day cycling and swimming events. According to the Royal Dutch Walking Association (KWbN), which helps coordinate the events, half a million people take part every year, in 700 locations across the country, powered by tens of thousands of volunteers.
” ‘The event is just so Dutch – they don’t have this really anywhere else,’ says fellow volunteer Judith van Oudheusden as we cycle from one checkpoint to another to catch the wave of kids at another part of the route. We are responsible for stamping cards to confirm they have completed this part of today’s 10km walk. A full card means they can get their medal on the last day, a feat many are determined to accomplish. … Van Oudheusden participated in the activity as a child, she says, and then walked with her own children when they were younger. Volunteering is a full circle moment for her.
“Avondvierdaagse originated from military ideology, explains Inger Leemans, professor of cultural history at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The first march was held in 1909 in Nijmegen as a military training event. But when the second world war broke out, different towns started to organize their own walks for soldiers. After the war, citizens were invited to walk along with them: the four-day marches in Nijmegen grew into an immensely popular event where tens of thousands of soldiers and citizens walked in solidarity.
“Aimed at older crowds, this is now the largest walking event in the world, with 45,000 participants from more than 80 countries, walking the same 30km, 40km and 50km routes each year. According to Arno van Gemert, a team leader for programs and projects at KWbN, the Avondvierdaagse is … mainly aimed at primary school children and their parents. …
“Most people now see it as a national event, comparable to other festivities such as King’s Day, a national holiday to celebrate the Dutch monarch’s birthday, involving street parties, flea markets, and lots of orange apparel. Avondvierdaagse even has its own traditional delicacy: half an orange, topped with a white Wilhelmina peppermint and wrapped in a piece of muslin, for kids to suck on as they walk. …
“While the original walks were not necessarily to promote exercise, Avondvierdaagse has become a way to motivate kids to enjoy being outside and moving their bodies. ‘It’s important that children are physically active and can develop their motor skills from a young age,’ explains Sanne de Vries, professor of physical activity in childhood at Leiden University Medical Center. Encouraging children to go through the whole week of walking – rain or shine – and rewarding them at the end can help build a positive association with physical activity. ‘Positive emotion that sticks is important.’
“It also helps build resilience. ‘It’s been presented to them as a big challenge because it’s 5km and it sounds super hard,’ says Fernanda Gomes, 44, who is walking the shorter route with her seven-year-old daughter, Alicia. … ‘Even if it’s raining, they do it and the message behind it is very great for the children.’
“Dutch kids are consistently judged to be some of the happiest in the world. This year, a Unicef report again ranked them number one out of 44 western countries for overall wellbeing, and for mental health. Rich social relations were cited as a key factor. Research has shown that Dutch children have strong connections with their peers. In addition, many Dutch parents work part-time, so have more time to spend with their children. Children also have increased independence: parents let their kids roam more freely, and many start young.”
Photo: Patrick Martin. More than 50 high school seniors from Charleston county school of the arts visited the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.
Those of us who enjoy eating in restaurants with authentic cuisine from different countries know how food has taught us a lot about those countries. That’s the premise behind a high school class in South Carolina that hopes to educate seniors about some fascinating South Carolina islanders.
Melissa Hellmann writes at the Guardian, “When students from Charleston county school of the arts in South Carolina entered a research institute on the African diaspora, staff greeted them with ‘welcome home.’
“The field trip at the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture was the culmination of a six-week English course about memoir. Students learned about the culture of Gullah Geechee people — the descendants of formerly enslaved West Africans who retained their customs — through the lens of food such as okra, red rice and beans.
“The more than 50 high school seniors leafed through pamphlets on local food festivals, advertisements from the 1960s and Gullah Geechee cookbooks spanning more than 30 years. A few Gullah students in the class found information about their families in the center’s archives.
“During the visit, a Gullah Geechee chef, Reggie Miller, prepared a meal of Carolina gold rice, broccoli grown on nearby John’s Island and locally sourced chicken for the students. The visit culminated with the students creating a ‘zine about Gullah Geechee foodways that was built on archives from the center, and which showed how family recipes and traditions shape history.
“ ‘These cultural foodway legacies have been part of the Charleston and the southern United States culture and even beyond that for hundreds of years and students may have just not learned about it in school,’ said Patrick Martin, an English teacher at the school. Martin received a $1,000 memoir grant through the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), Penguin Random House and the Anne Frank Fonds to teach the course. …
“High school and college students throughout South Carolina this past school year have learned about Gullah Geechee history and culture in the context of food. These classes mark a shift in the past decade in which educators are increasingly teaching about Gullah Geechee culture and history in classrooms. Coastal Carolina University students, for instance, created multimedia projects about Gullah foodways through support from the Charles Joyner Institute for Gullah and African Diaspora Studies, and the student-driven publishing lab the Athenaeum Press. Twelve students contributed articles, photography and graphic design to the project, funded by a $150,000 Mellon Foundation pilot grant. Students wrote about the history and cultural significance of rice, hibiscus, peas, watermelon and collard greens within the Gullah Geechee community.
“Recently published literature such as Natalie Daise’s Okra Stew: A Gullah Geechee Family Tradition, and Rita Woods’s The Last Dreamwalker serve as new tools for teachers to introduce Gullah Geechee culture to their students, said Dr Tamara Butler, the executive director of the Avery Research Center. Teaching about Gullah Geechee foodways is one way that classrooms can connect to the community’s history and heritage, particularly in the face of environmental changes.
“ ‘Gullah Geechee folks’ struggles are included in environmental sciences. We’re expanding beyond the English classroom and social studies classroom and into the science classrooms as well,’ Butler said. ‘Foodways are one of the ways you can get at that: what foods are available to us in the face of climate change? What’s available to us as people are being displaced? What recipes can we still hold on to and adapt, especially now as prices are going up, and fertilizer is not available? …
“As part of the Coastal Carolina University project, it was important to [Zenobia Harper, the Joyner Institute director] and Alli Crandell, the director of the Athenaeum Press, to give back to the Gullah Geechee community. The students helped five Gullah makers increase their social media presence and designed packages for their products.”
More at the Guardian, here.This sounds like a great way to educate young people. But the story makes me wonder why state and federal governments don’t contribute more to such quality education. Did you notice how many charitable funders were mentioned, even from abroad?
Photo: Scott Baldauf/Christian Science Monitor. A reproduction of the Dove, one of two vessels that brought settlers to Maryland in 1634.
‘It’s always important to remind people that rights can come and rights can go.’
Today’s article about an early form of religious liberty in Maryland shows that freedom can wax and wane. It relies on people of many faiths who realize that liberty for those who worship differently benefits them, too.
Scott Baldauf writes at the Christian Science Monitor, “When the Second Continental Congress declared independence from the British crown on July 4, 1776, it would be another 15 years before the Founding Fathers adopted a constitution that enshrined the ‘free exercise’ of religion.
“But the yearning for that ideal – and the American distaste for established churches – had much earlier roots. In 1644, Rhode Island founder Roger Williams called for a ‘wall or hedge of separation’ between the church and what he called ‘the wilderness of the world.’ Five years later, Maryland’s General Assembly passed ‘An Act Concerning Religion,’ which aimed to keep the peace among settlers of competing Christian faiths, at a time when Protestants and Catholics were killing each other back home in England.
“The Toleration Act, as it became known, was a far cry from the First Amendment, and it only lasted about 50 years, says Anna Majeski, the Lilly Endowment curator of religious history for the Maryland Center for History and Culture in Baltimore.
“Even so, the act still had the power to inspire European settlers to reimagine how society could be built. It proposed and field-tested a new way of behavior that created, briefly, a safe space for religious expression for both Catholics and Protestants. While the act was repealed twice and reinstated twice, it provided a precedent that later inspired the First Amendment.
“ ‘The 1649 act is the opening of a 200-year argument about religious liberty,’ says Fatimah Fanusie, a religious historian and director of the Civic Leaders Fellowship program at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. ‘It has progressive language within it, but it also has religious exclusions for non-Trinitarian Christians, Unitarians, and Jews.’ …
“ ‘We’re still having that 200-year argument today, but I do think we have moved significantly beyond the types of exclusions – at least legally – that existed in the 17th century,’ Professor Fanusie says. Over time, those who were excluded from religious protection ‘helped to create the climate that produced the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.’
“One major hurdle was that each of the 13 Colonies had its own dominant churches, with Puritans and Congregationalists in New England, the Church of England in the mid-Atlantic states, and Baptists farther south. Maryland’s experiments in religious tolerance sounded great on paper, but proved difficult to enforce in people’s behavior.
“ ‘This was an experiment born out of pragmatism,’ says Dr. Majeski. Maryland’s founders, brothers Cecil Calvert (the second Lord Baltimore) and Leonard Calvert, were Catholics and wanted to create a haven for Catholics from persecution back in England.
“ ‘They knew they needed people of other faiths to populate the colony. The only way to do that was tolerance.’ …
“By today’s standards, the Toleration Act would be considered deeply flawed. It only protected religious practices for Trinitarian Christians who followed ‘the father, sonne, and holy Ghost.’ Those of other faiths, including Quakers, Unitarians, Jews, and followers of Native American faiths, enjoyed no such protection.
“The act also proved unable to prevent the civil wars back in England from reaching Maryland’s shores. In 1654, after Puritan Parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell toppled King Charles I, Puritan settlers in Maryland toppled their provincial government and rescinded the Toleration Act. The pendulum swung back and forth between Catholics and Protestants over the next four decades, until it was rescinded for a final time in 1692.
“Peter Friesen, director of education at Historic St. Mary’s City, says that Marylanders celebrate the role their state had in establishing the concept of religious freedom in the Colonies, but tend to forget the Toleration Act was made null and void multiple times.
“ ‘To me, it’s always important to remind people that rights can come and rights can go,’ Mr. Friesen says. “It’s up to us to keep our rights and to fight for them and to be diligent with our rights, because as soon as you take them from other people, then it’s easier to take them from more people.’ ”
Photo: Chris Webb. Husband and wife Gavin and Alice Munro have been turning trees into furniture since 2006 in Derbyshire, England. Each chair takes six to 12 years to make.
Visiting my grandfather in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, when I was a kid, I found so many aspects of his place magical. One was a bench in the woods that had been created by tying a plank of wood between two saplings and giving it time.
Naturally, I thought about that when I read today’s story by Sydney Page at the Washington Post. It’s about a couple who created an unusual job for themselves when they began to create unusual chairs.
“When Gavin Munro was about 7 years old,” Page reports, “he looked at his parents’ overgrown bonsai trees and noticed that the silhouette of one looked like a throne. The image stayed with him.
“At the time, Munro was spending long stretches in the hospital being treated for scoliosis and Klippel-Feil syndrome, a rare bone disorder. He passed the time by watching the trees and wildlife outside his window. Nature, he said, helped him heal.
“ ‘The first seeds were sown when I was a little boy,’ said Munro, who has spent the past 20 years trying to grow trees into chairs.
“Since 2006, Munro and his wife, Alice Munro, have been shaping young trees into furniture on a field in Derbyshire, England, that they refer to as the Chair Orchard.
“The process takes six to 12 years per chair — depending on the species and weather — and so far, they have produced about 15 prototypes.
“For me, it’s about sustainability and watching the amazing wildlife developing in the orchard,” Alice said.
“Some of the chairs are usable as furniture, but for now they are sold as works of art, and are priced beginning around $87,000. The Munros hope to ramp up production, and they have led workshops at schools and design programs in the hope of teaching others their technique.
“Gavin, who is a furniture designer by trade, and Alice, who has a background in horticulture, run Full Grown, a company the employs specialized ancient techniques — including coppicing, grafting, pleaching and espalier — to shape living trees into chairs. …
“Before he began experimenting, Gavin said he read about others who had grown furniture from trees, including John Krubsack, a banker from Wisconsin who created a chair in a similar fashion, and Axel Erlandson, who made sculptures and furniture by grafting branches and trees together. …
“In 2006, the Munros took over a shady, windy corner of a friend’s farm in Derbyshire to start testing. They quickly realized that the trees didn’t get sufficient sunlight, so they leveled the hillside into flat rows and replanted — only to have cows trample over the trees. …
“The experiments then moved to Alice’s late mother’s garden, where their first chairs were produced. In 2008, the Munros planted some 3,000 trees on a rented field that became the Chair Orchard. Over the years, they’ve experimented with several tree species, including willow, oak, ash, hazel, beech and cherry.
“The process begins with a single sapling, left to establish its roots and grow for about five years. The Munros then coppice the tree — cutting it down to the stump — which encourages new shoots to grow from the roots. Those shoots are guided around a frame, shaping them gradually into the form of an upside-down chair.
“To coax the tree into the correct shape, the Munros prune unwanted branches and graft others — which involves binding shoots together so they slowly fuse into one. They also make small cuts in the bark to influence the direction of growth. Once the chair is ready to be harvested, it is dried indoors for a year. …
“It has been, the Munros said, a constant process of trial and error — which is why they have far fewer finished chairs than they had hoped at this point.
“ ‘The generation we thought was going to work actually grew out of shape when it got close to harvesting,’ Gavin said, adding that they have also produced lamps, tables, benches and structures.
“Along the way, they have learned to lean into nature.
“ ‘We’re trying to ask as little as possible from the trees and offer as much protection,’ Gavin said.
“ ‘The better you treat the tree, the more it’s going to work with you,’ said his wife. ‘The more we’ve worked with nature rather than trying to control nature, the more successful we’ve been.’ “
Photo: Christopher Smith/For the Washington Post. Mackenzie Cannon works at the café/post office in Bucyrus, Kansas, where residents of the tiny town were determined to keep their Zip code.
When I was a kid in New York State, a friend of my parents who was an artist and weaver decided he ought to also have a job with benefits and became postmaster of a tiny rural post office. His name was Earl. Today I’m drawn to an article about the creation of a coffee shop called Earl’s that saved a rural post office in Kansas from the chopping block.
Annie Gowen writes at the Washington Post, “ There was no ribbon cutting. No balloon arch. When the clerk threw open the doors of the post office in this tiny Kansas town, she got right to business, handing out P.O. box keys and selling stamps.
“ ‘Welcome to the new post office!’ Mackenzie Cannon, the clerk, called out this week to one of the new customers. …
“Bucyrus —population: 168 — is only about 35 miles south of Kansas City, but enough farmland and red barns sit between the last suburban subdivision and the town’s quiet main street that it still feels like country. It offers little in the way of excitement, unless you count Fourth of July fireworks and the time that an F5 tornado narrowly missed the town in 1957. But for people like Cannon, 29, the close-knit place is home — the word she had tattooed on her shoulder.
“ ‘The older I get the more I realize how special it is,’ Cannon said.
“Two years ago, the U.S. Postal Service decided to shutter its decrepit outpost here. It was so old, ‘the ceiling fell in while I was working,’ Cannon recalled. The plan was to transfer mail operations to a nearby town, and locals feared they would lose their Zip code, which they felt was akin to wiping Bucyrus off the map.
“ ‘That ain’t happenin’,’ Greg Foote, the scion of a local ranching family, said when he heard the news. He and his colleague Aaron Kuhlmann hatched a plan to build a new post office in a building that would also house the town’s only cafe in decades.
“A spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service praised this ‘unique arrangement’ that has allowed the agency to keep delivering the mail in town. They said removing a Zip code was a rare occurrence.
“ ‘I just felt like it was the right thing to do for the area, to keep that Bucyrus pride going and keep that Zip code alive,’ Foote said.
“Foote’s family has farmed here since the ’40s, starting with a small dairy operation and then corn and soybean farm owned by his grandfather, Earl, the founder and first president of the Kansas Corn Growers Association.
“Foote’s father, Bob, founded Foote Cattle Company in 1985, which has grown to become one of the largest feedlot and ranching operations in the country.
“Bob, who died in 2022, and his wife, Gail, saved the Bucyrus post office once before. When the 1921-era building was first threatened with closure in 1991, the couple stepped in, rehabbed it and leased it back to the Postal Service for 30 years. But by 2024, it was beyond repair.
“The post office ‘was always a gathering space,’ Gail Foote said this week. It was the center of the community she calls ‘the best place on Earth, really.’
“Behind the counter Tuesday, Cannon recounted how when she was a child growing up in Bucyrus, she spent most of her time in the backyard making mud pies or collecting cicadas. …
“ ‘Is there stuff going on?’ she said of life in Bucyrus. ‘There’s tractors going down the road — that’s something!’
“Trains barrel by, too, horns blaring, just steps from the post office. The Union Pacific doesn’t stop there anymore. …
” ‘Foote named the cafe Earl’s Coffee Company after his grandpa, whose pictures adorn the walls alongside images of local ranch hands like Tubby, who died recently. The steak burrito is named ‘the Tub’ after him, and his daughter can’t come in without crying.
“The cafe sold out of food the first five days, Kuhlmann said, and he had to buy three new refrigerators to keep up with demand.
“On Tuesday, a steady stream of customers came by. The cafe smelled like espresso and fresh lumber. New ‘Earl’s’ T-shirts were neatly folded in the merchandise corner.
“The sleeves read 66013 — the Zip code they helped save.”
Photo: Kirbie Cravings. This is one of many ways people make cake in a cup.The article mentions using nonpareils on top, but some bakers use sprinkles, as here.
Because my older granddaughter likes to make a “mug cake” when there’s nothing sweet in the house for dessert, I was fascinated to read about Alex Posner, a woman who started a mug cake craze when she was only a teen.
Gabriella Gershenson writes at the New York Times, “The line starts as early as 6 a.m. and goes around the block. People wait for hours in the rain. Some of them cry when it doesn’t work out. Online, millions tune in to videos for the pretty colors and distinct sounds.
“The frenzy is all for a few spoonfuls of dessert in a cup known as the dotcake, a simple confection topped with frosting and nonpareil sprinkles exported from Long Island to Butterfield Market locations in New York. It tastes a lot like cake from a mix.
“ ‘People say it’s just cake and sprinkles, because it is just cake and sprinkles,’ said Alex Posner, 27, an owner of the Dotcakes, a bakery in Roslyn, N.Y., who created the baked good and sells it to Butterfield.
“Simple as they are, over the last month, dotcakes have exploded into a social media phenomenon. … Already, there are endless interpretations — dotcake ice cream, doughnuts, bagels and even manicures. …
”Those who manage to acquire one are often eager to recreate what has become a dotcake cliché: running a spoon over the hard, sprinkle-paved surface, oohing at the sound, then digging into the individually-portioned desserts, which come in vanilla, chocolate, red velvet, vanilla chocolate chip, and funfetti flavors.
“They seem tailor made for the TikTok era, with their tidy circle of colorful packed sprinkles, and the teeth-cracking crunch that serves as a kind of A.S.M.R [Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response]. There’s the nostalgic familiarity of a classic frosted cake, and if you’d rather not wait in line, it’s easy enough to make at home. …
“ ‘It’s a multisensory experience,’ said Alexa Matthews, a food influencer and the director of marketing at Butterfield Market, the only retailer in the city that sells the Dotcakes’s products. She added, ‘That’s what’s taking it to the next level.’
“Butterfield Market, an upscale grocer, often sells foods that are trendy or become internet sensations. … The store has given cake samples to some content creators, which may have pushed the popularity of dotcake over the edge.
“Are they worth the hype? ‘Everyone online just said it tastes like Betty Crocker,’ the influencer Lucie Rauschnabel said in a recent video, where she recreated a version at home.
“ ‘There’s a little bit of an eye-roll element to the fact that this cake went viral,’ said Carmel Hagen, the founder of the baking ingredient company Supernatural. …
“The most polarizing aspect of the dotcake may be the type of sprinkle that has catapulted to fame alongside it. It’s not the soft sprinkle or jimmy that has graced many an ice cream cone or funfetti cake. It’s the nonpareil — the hard, round bauble that was previously a wallflower of the baking aisle. …
“Posner sells around 3,000 ‘dotcups’ a week, plus 50 to 70 custom orders each day. … When she started Dotcakes in 2017 as a high school student working out of her parents home, ‘the point wasn’t the cake, it was the decoration,’ she said, citing pointillism and its totemic artist, Georges Seurat, as inspiration. ‘And now the point is the cake.’ ”
FYI: Coco doesn’t use a cake mix.
Coco’s Chocolate Chip Mug Cake (Sometimes she calls it a Mug Cookie)
1 tbsp salted butter, melted Add 1 tbsp brown sugar & 1 tbsp white sugar. Mix. Add 1 egg yolk and & 1 tsp vanilla. Mix Add 2 tbsp flour. Mix well. Mix in as many chocolate chips as you like. Microwave for 45-60 seconds.
Photo: Rory Doyle for the New York Times. Mississippi sends literacy coaches to low-performing elementary schools, one key part of its strategy.
Educators have known for some time that the most important school years for gaining literacy is third and fourth grade. That’s why Mississippi poured its limited resources into teaching reading at that level — and turned the state around.
Sarah Mervosh writes at the New York Times, “In Kim Luckett-Langston’s first year as principal of Hazlehurst Elementary School, one of the lowest performing schools in what had been one of the lowest performing states, she quickly diagnosed the problem.
“Children at her school, outside Jackson, Miss., were suffering from what she calls A.B.T.: ‘Ain’t been taught.’
“Kindergartners arrived not knowing their letters from their numbers. After a few years in school, they were still far behind. A decade ago, just 12 percent of Hazlehurst students were reading on grade level.
“Today, Hazlehurst has clawed that figure to 35 percent. And Mississippi has emerged as one of the best places in the country for a poor child to get an education.
“Mississippi has gone from 49th in the country on national tests in 2013, to a top 10 state for fourth graders learning to read — even as test scores have fallen almost everywhere else.
“Poverty remains a driving factor in student achievement, and wealthy states like Massachusetts still have the highest share of students proficient in reading and math. But adjusted for poverty and other student demographics, Mississippi is No. 1 for fourth grade reading and math, and at or near the top in eighth grade, according to the Urban Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
“ ‘If you want to ask the question, “Which states are helping kids coming from difficult circumstances learn as much as they can?” Mississippi is now doing much better than many other states, including wealthier states in affluent progressive areas,’ said Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a center-right think tank.
“Mississippi’s gains have been confined mostly to the early years, where the state has focused its efforts. … Yet Mississippi has figured out something almost no other state has, and it has involved far more than just changing the way reading is taught, the most common explanation for its success.
“Even as schools elsewhere have focused on issues like school funding, social justice and mental health in recent years, Mississippi schools like Hazlehurst have made academics their North Star.
“ ‘At the end of the day, our job is teaching. Their job is learning,’ said Ms. Langston, who added that no matter what is going on in a child’s life, the classroom is the one thing she can control. ‘If we don’t meet that need, we have failed them.’
“Mississippi’s progress has made it the envy of the education world, inspiring countlessthink pieces and recurringdebates about whether the ‘Mississippi miracle’ could be real.
“How could Mississippi, with its low education spending and high child poverty, pull it off? It did not do so by relying on some of the most common proposals held up as solutions in education, like reducing class sizes, or dramatically boosting per-student funding.
“Rather, the state pushed through a vast list of other changes from the top down, including changing the way reading is taught, in an approach known as the science of reading, but also embracing contentious school accountability policies other states have backed away from.
“ ‘Science of reading is really important — it was a key piece of what we did,’ said Rachel Canter, the longtime leader of Mississippi First, an education reform group, who now works at the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left Washington think tank. ‘But people are missing the forest for the trees if they are only looking at that.’ In addition to the reading overhaul, Mississippi raised academic standards and started giving each school a letter grade, A to F.
“But unlike No Child Left Behind, the Bush-era federal law that set a goal of having every child in America be proficient in reading and math, Mississippi also measures how much students progress toward proficiency. Schools get credit if students show improvement — and double credit for the improvement of students in the bottom 25 percent.
“The state also takes an unusually strong role in telling schools what to do.
“The Mississippi Department of Education sends literacy and math coaches into low-performing elementary schools, with the goal of teaching teachers, not children. And state officials vet and approve curriculum used by the vast majority of districts, unusual in a country that prizes local control of schools.
“Mississippi also made other changes, like investing in pre-K, and holding back third graders who cannot read well, one of its most debated policies. …
“In Hazlehurst, a rural area 35 miles south of Jackson, more than half of children live in poverty and two in three adults don’t have a college degree. A chicken plant and the local Walmart are two main employers. The elementary school serves about 625 students, mostly Black or Hispanic. All are eligible for free or reduced price lunch. …
“It is the kind of school that might have been punished and labeled as failing during No Child Left Behind.
Photo: Salt Dance. Dancer and choreographer Alex Ketley is also a lecturer at Stanford University.
Alex Ketley, the choreographer behind a confidence-building college class based on “bad dancing,” has a way of looking at things differently. For example, he befriended an unusual death-row inmate during Covid and later created a theater piece with him. More about that later.
First, Tracie White at Stanford Magazine has an article that explains the college class.
” ‘Welcome to bad dancing,’ says Alex Ketley, a professional choreographer and former member of the San Francisco Ballet who teaches Dance 123: Hot Mess & Deliberate Failure as Practice. Ketley, an advanced lecturer in the department of theater and performance studies and a former Guggenheim Fellow, says it’s his most popular course.
“About 20 undergraduates and graduate students have signed up for what the course catalog describes as ‘a dance class in how we become the worst dancer possible.’ …
“ ‘Run with absolute abandon,’ Ketley says. And, like kids at recess, the students swarm onto the floor at Roble Gym, prancing, leaping, and stumbling into one another. Next, ‘make crazy monster faces,’ Ketley instructs. Now, he says, ‘Repeat the phrase: “I’m alive and filled with watermelon.” ’
“After class, Ketley says that his objective is for students to challenge and expand their perception of what is beautiful by performing silly pantomimes and reacting to movement prompts that are virtually impossible to do well.
” ‘What happens,’ he asks, ‘if we accept failure as a creative virtue?’ By letting go of perfection, students might discover something unexpected a’obsessively’ explored movement. He designed the course after using chaos in his own process and watching thousands of other performers: ‘I noticed a type of brilliance when people relinquish control.’
“Why is dance the right medium? ‘It’s fun,’ he says. “So much of our dance training is claustrophobically serious. Happiness, in a repressive culture, is transgressive.’
“The class culminates in a group performance when, Ketley says, students discover how far they’ve come from feeling fearful and embarrassed to dancing in front of complete strangers. …
“Elijah Williams, ’26, took the course hoping it would be a confidence booster. Several weeks in, it’s become one of his favorite classes — a helpful lesson in how to break out of your shell. Plus, he says, ‘I feel more able to express myself through failure.’ ”
About the project with the prisoner: “Winner of a National Dance Project Award and generous multi-year funding from the Luger Family Trust, ‘An Approximation of Resilience’ was a portrait of Bill Clark, a 71 year old artist and writer who has spent the past 33 years confined to a 4ft x 10ft cell on California’s Death Row. Despite this, he has become an inspirational figure through his artwork and his educational outreach.
“In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, choreographer and Guggenheim Fellow Alex Ketley became increasingly worried about how the pandemic was affecting our incarcerated population. He went on a website called Write-A-Prisoner, and was struck by Bill’s profile, primarily that he said he experienced a crushing loneliness being nearly perpetually confined to his cell. Ketley wrote a one page letter saying hello, and two weeks later received a seven page handwritten letter back from Clark. This began a close friendship. After the quarantine lifted, Ketley visited Clark almost every week for five years.
” ‘An Approximation of Resilience’ was an hour long dance-theater installation, created with a stellar group of performers and artists, that takes the premise that beauty exists anywhere if it is given the opportunity to be seen and celebrated. … It premiered in the spring of 2025 at City Dance Studio in San Francisco and was performed across a four weekend run. …
“In 2026, Alex Ketley won an Isadora Duncan Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Bay Area Individual for his work on ‘An Approximation of Resilience.’ “
More at Stanford Magazine, here, and at Ketley’s website, here.
I know a lot of people who work a daily puzzle to maintain cognitive health — puzzles like Wordle, Sudoku, anagrams, and crosswords. These people are mostly over 50, so I find it interesting that younger people are getting into puzzles, too, especially crosswords.
Cameron Pugh writes at the Christian Science Monitor, “People are doing crossword puzzles everywhere these days. On the train. During a break at work. In bed before turning in. Crosswords have leapt from their traditional home in the newspaper and taken over phone and computer screens.
“And no generation is more thrilled about it than Gen Z. Fifty percent of Gen Zers say they do crosswords regularly, according to a poll by Unscrambled Words, a website that helps users solve anagrams. That’s the highest share of any generation surveyed, outstripping baby boomers at 38%, Gen Xers at 31%, and millennials at 15%.
“ ‘We are living in the golden age of puzzles,’ says Will Shortz, who has edited crosswords for the NewYork Times since 1993. He holds perhaps the world’s only degree in enigmatology, or the study of puzzles. … ‘They’re not just for old people anymore.’ …
“When Mr. Shortz started at the Times, which printed its first crossword in 1942, the paper had run puzzles created by teenagers six times. Today, Mr. Shortz says he has published puzzles by at least 75 teens. In 2021, Soleil Saint-Cyr, at 17 years of age, became the youngest woman to publish a crossword in the Times.
“Crosswords have also swept through student newspapers, demonstrating their growing appeal among younger audiences. The Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia launched a puzzle section in 2024. Student Life, which covers Washington University in St. Louis, began publishing mini crosswords in 2022. …
“Crosswords saw an explosion in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Natan Last, who last year wrote Across the Universe, a book that charts the history of crossword puzzles. That includes Gen Zers such as Luke Schreiber, a rising junior at Princeton University in New Jersey.
“ ‘It started off as a bit of a pandemic hobby. My dad liked solving crosswords, and so that gave me the idea to try my hand at creating them,’ Mr. Schreiber says.
“Mr. Schreiber is one of two head puzzles editors at the Daily Princetonian, the school’s student newspaper. He has also published puzzles in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today.
“Some of the crossword’s success with Gen Z traces back to news organizations, which during the pandemic began to see games as a way to grow their audiences. … By 2021, the Times Games section had 1 million subscribers; in 2024, a spokesperson for the Times told AdWeek that more than 10 million people played the paper’s digital games each day. …
“For students, Mr. Schreiber says, the crossword acts as a needed break from homework.
“ ‘Students are looking for something that isn’t work – you know, isn’t studying or homework or something like that – but also isn’t a video game,’ he says. A crossword is ‘considered a little more intellectual than a video game, but it still is fun and not quite work.’ …
“The now-defunct New York World is credited with publishing the first crossword on Dec. 21, 1913. Created by Arthur Wynne, the ‘Word-Cross’ took the shape of a diamond and lacked the now-familiar black squares. …
“Mr. Shortz sold his first puzzle at 14, springboarding his now-storied career as a cruciverbalist. (That’s the shorthand for a crossword aficionado.) When he started at the Times, he endeavored to draw in a wider audience. ‘I think the crossword should reflect the life, language, and culture of everybody who reads the Times, and that’s everybody from smart teens up to the oldest people,’ he told the New Yorker in 2023. …
“Young creators, Mr. Last says, have driven a cultural renaissance for a pastime that sometimes came off as stuffy and uptight. ‘They treat the puzzle like a mixtape, and they treat language as powerful and arbitrating,’ he says. ‘They are very, very focused on an inclusive puzzle – where inclusive is both political and cultural.’ ”
Photo: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian. Shaun Hancox, the “Picasso of Ponds,” says the excavator “becomes an extension of yourself, it just flows.“
I find the rewilding movement (taking developed land and returning it to nature) inspirational for several reasons. Of course it benefits the environment but it also reminds me that it’s possible for humans to reverse some of the damage they create.
Patrick Barkham writes at the Guardian about a guy in the UK who is using his golf-course building skills in a new way.
“He is known as ‘the Picasso of ponds’ but the tableaux being created by Shaun Hancox in a boggy field in Somerset currently looks more like a building site. An orange and black excavator is rhythmically removing lumpy clay soil and sculpting it into brown banks.
“The result looks like a scar of bare earth on what was once green pasture – but the magic happens as soon as rain fills the newly created depressions. Plants seed swiftly, invertebrates and amphibians rapidly find the water, and life explodes.
“Britain has lost at least 400,000 ponds over the past century, according to the Freshwater Habitats Trust. A similar number remain but many are overgrown, degraded or affected by nutrient pollution.
“Everyone realizes we’re in a sorry state with freshwater and it needs to be addressed,’ says Hancox, of Creative Wetlands, a contractor who has dug scores of new ponds for charities and rewilding projects across Britain.
“Hancox acquired his skills … digging landfill sites and golf courses for his family’s groundworks company. ‘My original job was a shaper on golf courses. We travelled all over, to Portugal, Germany, Belgium, building bunkers and drainage – everything really that wasn’t good for wildlife. I’ve always had a massive interest in wildlife, so we’ve got to the stage now where we want to put something back.’
“Building golf courses helped Hancox become a master of pond creation. … He says, ‘A golf ball rolls very much how water moves. When you’re putting in a wildlife pond, you look at the landscape and give your pond the best chance of holding water and doing what it should do. It’s the same if you’re doing a fairway – you want to shed the water or get it into a drainage system or into certain areas. The shapes of the ponds are almost golf course bunkers but in a more rustic, natural way.’
“At Heal Somerset, a 185-hectare (460 acre) former dairy farm being turned over to nature by the charity Heal Rewilding, Hancox is digging four new ponds, including one double-bowled pond 30 metres in diameter.
“The ponds are specifically for great-crested newts, which have been found in low numbers on the farm but have no suitable ponds in which to breed. Usually within a year of being created the ponds fill with aquatic life, including damselflies and dragonflies, and provide food and shelter for birds, from moorhens to house martins, who feed on the insects and use the pond-side mud to build nests.
“Crucially, these new ponds are not connected to any river system, which can wash nutrient-rich or polluted water into them. Instead, they are charged by clean rainwater or clean groundwater, enabling more delicate aquatic plants to thrive.
“Pete Case, of the Newt Conservation Partnership, says: ‘You can fiddle with rivers all you like but pond creation is the simplest and cheapest way of bringing clean water back to the landscape.’ …
“Case is full of praise for Hancox’s skills. The partnership, a coalition of the Freshwater Habitats Trust and the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust, identifies new pond sites, builds and monitors them. It is funded by the NatureSpace partnership, whereby housebuilders pay to create replacement terrestrial wetland habitat or ponds that are lost or damaged by development. This project, which operates across 70 local authorities in England, ensures that any new pond habitat is maintained for 25 years, with the ponds inspected and the landowner receiving an annual payment to manage it.
“It guarantees that they will be suitable for newts in 25 years’ time,” Case says. The partnership assesses the surrounding land to check it will meet newts’ needs. ‘When it comes to newt conservation, everyone focuses on making a pond, but newts spend two-thirds of their life on land. If you don’t get that bit right, they aren’t going to do so well.’ “
Oh, my goodness! Don’t you love that there are humans who create and sustain an organization called the Newt Conservation Partnership?
Photo: AP Photo/Nicolas Garriga. A restoration project at Notre Dame Cathedral is uncovering evidence of daily life from centuries of Parisian history.
Today’s story is about the city of Paris deciding to put a shaded plaza in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. It’s also about the need to first uncover any artifacts that may be buried in the space, and right now a dig is focused on Roman artifacts.
(I must say, when I read phrases like, “as the Roman empire collapsed,” I wonder if the Romans refused to believe that collapse could ever happen. Maybe there’s a lesson for us.)
Thomas Adamson writes at the Associated Press, “Wilting in the summer sun, a line of tourists waits to climb Notre Dame cathedral and meet its gargoyles.
“Four meters (13 feet) beneath them, a team of archaeologists is digging the other way — straight down and back in time, to Roman Paris 2,000 years ago.
“In 2019, fire brought Notre Dame’s spire crashing down as the world watched. The cathedral was rebuilt and reopened in late 2024, and now Paris wants to soften the hot, bare square in front of it with trees and shade. But in a city this old, the soil cannot be turned until what lies beneath it is excavated, in case it is damaged during works.
“So a slice of Notre Dame’s forecourt has become an excavation site — an open pit ringed by barriers and crossed by a wooden walkway, a few steps from the line-up.
“French media have dubbed it the ‘dig of the century.’
“ ‘It’s a rare opportunity for us to work on something that’s tangibly going to make a difference to the history of Paris,’ Lucie Altenburg, a conservator with the Paris archaeology unit, told the Associated Press.
“Among the hundreds of objects already found: a fourth-century coin stamped with the face of the Emperor Constantine, and shards of medieval pottery painted on the inside with marks no expert has yet deciphered — like a modern Da Vinci Code. …
“This is the bargain in every old city: The past is not in a museum down the street — it is under the street. Cities rise. Each age builds on the rubble of the last, and the ground climbs with it; in Rome, it has risen about 9 meters (30 feet) since the empire fell in the fifth century AD. …
“At the cathedral’s birth in 1163, the entire square was packed with medieval houses, split by a single street, said Camille Colonna, the archaeologist leading the dig.
“Digging down, her team has reached their cellars — and therefore also the time in history they represent.
“Below them lie Merovingian and Carolingian grain pits, from the sixth to the 10th centuries; below those, darker and deeper still, a dense Roman quarter from the fourth and fifth centuries.
“Twenty centuries are stacked in 4 meters (13 feet) of earth. …
“The richest finds here come from the foulest place: the deep pits beneath the medieval houses, old latrines that doubled as rubbish dumps. Out of them the team keeps lifting whole jugs and cups — thrown away centuries ago, yet still intact — among the broken plates and animal bones.
“It’s ‘rare to find complete ceramics,’ said Valentine Breloux, an archaeologist with the unit. Here the soft waste cushioned them. … Then some other objects came that confounded experts. As conservators cleaned what looked like ordinary medieval pottery, they found faint reddish writing painted on the inside — the same mysterious markings on shard after shard.
“What they mean has yet to be deciphered. Of everything she has cleaned from Notre Dame, Breloux said, these are the most ‘astonishing.’
“The coins came up as black discs, eaten by rust. But under an X-ray, a face returned: it was Constantine, the Roman emperor who ruled in the early 300s AD. Such objects also ‘can be invaluable in giving us the date of the (underground) layer,’ Altenburg said.
“The Roman finds are the ones the archaeologists value most — the deepest, oldest and least understood. In Roman times, the town was called Lutetia, and its center lay across the river, on the Left Bank.
“As the Roman empire collapsed, people pulled back to the Ile de la Cite, where Notre Dame would later rise, and fortified the island with walls of stone taken from earlier buildings.
“Colonna’s team found some proof: a Roman doorstep found in the dig, taken from a much bigger building, carried over, turned upside down, and laid in a road as paving. …
“For archaeologists, the cathedral dig is a rare treat. In France, like elsewhere, they work only where building work is about to begin — a bit like how industrial quarry workers end up unearthing dinosaur remains. …
“The new square should be mostly finished by 2028: a kind of woodland clearing, with 160 new trees and a thin film of water sliding over the stone to cool it in summer — part of how Paris is bracing for ever hotter summers induced by global warming. …
“Until then, the Notre Dame team wants to go deeper still — past the Romans, toward whoever came before them, the Gauls who gave the city its first name.”
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