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A Traveling Bookstore

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on July 1, 2026| Leave a Comment »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More at the Times, here.

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Turn Off Autocomplete

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on June 30, 2026| 2 Comments »

Photo: Petar Milošević via Wikimedia.

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

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

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

So I turned off Autocomplete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See Scientific American, here.

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Moomintroll Video Game

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 29, 2026| 7 Comments »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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‘Transit Deserts,’ ‘Food Deserts’

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 28, 2026| 7 Comments »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Can We Move a City Back from the Sea?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 27, 2026| 6 Comments »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more at the Guardian, here.

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Can Bison and Ranchers Coexist?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 26, 2026| 7 Comments »

Photo: John Stember.
An environmental organization called American Prairie says the northern grasslands of Montana are the only place left in the United States where an entire prairie ecosystem could be restored.

Are you familiar with the musical Oklahoma! and the song that goes, “the farmer and the cowman should be friends”? I can’t help thinking of it as I read this New York Times article about a group called American Prairie, which believes bison and and cattle should coexist.

Jack Healy reports that the federal government wants to evict hundreds of bison from their sanctuary in Montana and replace them with cattle. …

“ ‘This is a part of our country’s heritage,’ said Alison Fox, executive director of American Prairie, a deep-pocketed nonprofit that has spent two decades buying ranches and grazing leases on public land in northern Montana to create the newly embattled home for bison.

“The conflict centers on 900 bison owned by the group, which was allowed by multiple administrations … to graze on federal lands, much to the consternation of politically conservative ranchers who wanted the land for cattle.

“This winter, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management reversed course and canceled the bison grazing permits. Citing the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, the agency said the federal grasslands where the animals grazed should go to livestock being raised for food, not bison largely enjoying their right to roam. The agency deemed the bison to be wildlife, not production livestock.

“Conservation groups condemned the decision, as did Native American tribes, who say the anti-bison effort threatens their own herds as they try to revive bison populations that were hunted to near extinction by 19th-century settlers.

“But Montana ranchers like Perri Jacobs celebrated. … ‘These lands are here for food,’ said Ms. Jacobs, whose family has raised cows in northern Montana for nearly 110 years. ‘We have to understand that progress and time march forward. Bison just don’t fit on the landscape anymore.’ …

“The bison fight fits squarely in a larger war over the West, as the [administration] pushes to open more public land to oil drilling, mining and logging. …

“ ‘We must ensure that public lands remain accessible and productive, rather than being locked away for the vision of special interests,’ Gov. Greg Gianforte said after the federal permits were canceled.

American Prairie argues that cows and bison can coexist, and is trying to undo the Bureau of Land Management’s decision.

“The bureau, it said, scrapped decades of successful land policies by arbitrarily redefining what constitutes ‘livestock’ in the American West. … American Prairie says it will have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to alter fence lines and haul bison away from lands where they belong.

“That argument falls flat with many ranchers along the rolling plains of Phillips County, which is larger than Connecticut and stretches south from the Canadian border to the Missouri River Breaks. Signs along cattle gates and wire fences declare, ‘Save the Cowboy, Stop American Prairie.’

“The enmity began when American Prairie began buying ranch land and the accompanying grazing leases more than 20 years ago, with the aim of building one of the largest nature reserves in the country. Its property and grazing lands have grown to about double the size of Los Angeles.

“The resentment has sharpened since the Covid-19 pandemic, as wealthy out-of-staters drove up land prices with dreams of snagging their slice of a state that’s been called ‘The Last Best Place.’ …  

“American Prairie … says it tries to be a good neighbor. Its bison are tagged and vaccinated, and kept behind well-maintained electrified fences to keep them from traipsing into cattle fields. It leases land not occupied by bison to local cattle ranchers, and has opened up public access through much of its land. It sends live bison to help tribes expand and diversify their herds, and donates meat to local food pantries.”

More at the Times, here. Update: The change went through and American Prairie sued. More about that here.

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New York’s High Line and the Buddha

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on June 25, 2026| 3 Comments »

Photo: Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic.
Frontal view of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s High Line commission “The Light That Shines Through the Universe” (2026) in New York City.

It’s always a tragedy when warfare destroys art. I remember how I felt for Buddhists when the Taliban destroyed the famous Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 in Afghanistan.

Now, an exhibit honoring those statues has appeared on New York City’s beautiful elevated park, the High Line. Rhea Nayyar at Hyperallergic describes seeing it and what it signifies to her.

“Between the sea of sky-blue high-rise windows and the traffic funneling toward the Lincoln Tunnel, a large sandstone Buddha stands tall on the High Line, inviting Manhattan to embrace a moment of tranquility.

“Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s ‘The Light That Shines Through the Universe‘ (2026), the park’s fifth site-specific commission, was selected from nearly 60 proposals. It was recently installed at West 30th Street and 10th Avenue, and is on view through Spring 2027. The 27-foot-tall sculpture stands out from its contemporary surroundings not only because of its warmth and timeworn quality, but because it resurrects a critical piece of destroyed cultural heritage — the Bamiyan Buddhas.

 “ ‘This sculpture creates a friction with the surroundings here in New York. It’s not sleek like everything else you can see here,’ High Line’s art director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani said to Hyperallergic. ‘It offers a hint to the public that temporality is not necessarily a straight line, that things can come back.’ …

“The Bamiyan Buddhas, enormous reliefs that dated back to around the 6th century, were hewn into a sandstone cliffside of the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan, a region along the Silk Road trade route that became a prominent Buddhist site. Of the two figures, the larger Buddha was affectionately referred to as ‘Salsal,’ which translates to ‘the light that shines through the universe.’ …

“Nguyen, who has recast or reinterpreted artillery associated with the Vietnam War throughout his practice, took the same approach to make the sculpture’s hands, which are disconnected from the sandstone body. He told Hyperallergic that he was able to source artillery brass from Afghanistan through a friend’s network across the Bamiyan region and bring it over the Pakistani border. There, he recast them into the shapes of mudras — symbolic hand gestures used extensively in Buddhist and Hindu iconography — before transporting them to Vietnam, where the sandstone was sourced and carved.

“Glinting from the sun overhead, the right hand invokes the Abhaya mudra, which signifies fearlessness, while the left hand connotes compassion and sincerity through the Varada mudra.

“Nguyen stated that his statue was not a replica of the lost cultural heritage, but rather an “echo.”

“ ‘ You keep a story, idea, or memory alive by retelling,’ he explained. ‘When I engage in this process of remaking, it’s like retelling the story. It gets translated through my hands and eyes.’

“Though it feels particularly timely because of the ever-evolving United States- and Israel-led violence in Iran, Alemani noted that Nguyen’s proposal had been selected a long time ago. ‘It’s a testimony to the strength of the artist’s voice that sometimes, the works we select become even more relevant when we install them,’ Alemani said.”

More at Hyperallergic, here.

Do you agree with the writer that the sculpture is telling us that history repeats itself? Do you have other reactions? I feel it’s also about humanity refusing to let good things be destroyed entirely.

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30 Years at the Guys’ Book Club

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 24, 2026| 2 Comments »

Photo: Maxine Wallace/Washington Post.
Above, a men’s book club that meets every month in Maryland. The club celebrated its 30th anniversary in May.

Although my book club experience years ago didn’t work for me, I know what such reading groups have meant to friends of mine, especially the long-lasting groups. Most people I know have been in women’s groups, a few in co-ed ones, but this is my first time reading about a long-lasting men’s book group.

Maggie Penman writes at the Washington Post, “On a sunny Sunday afternoon in late April, eight men in Silver Spring, Maryland, gathered for a monthly tradition that began 30 years ago: a book club meeting.

‘The club is an eclectic group of men, mostly in their 70s — a former high school English teacher, a retired diplomat, an Israeli Army veteran — and they read widely. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry. Faulkner, Dostoevsky, J.K. Rowling. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin. …

“Whoever is hosting chooses the book, and on this day it was Michael Slott’s turn. The only rules are that the book is generally available at the library and ideally no more than 400 pages long. Slott broke both with his choice of the obscure 1974 science fiction novel, The Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (592 pages in some editions).

“The discussion began with someone asking for a show of hands of who finished the book — about half had. This is slightly lower than their usual batting average. … Dave Main said the book was very much of its time. ‘When I read a book, I think about when it was written,’ Main said. ‘This is totally a Cold War novel.’ …

“Mozena argued that the book didn’t age well because of the dearth of female characters and people of color. …

“After about 45 minutes, Slott brought out leftover chocolate cake from his wife’s recent birthday, and the conversation moved on to other books, specifically the older ones that the group thought had aged well (they had all loved Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five) and the ones that hadn’t (many of them were disappointed when they reread Joseph Heller’s Catch-22). …

“The book club was started by Schneider in May 1996 during a very different time in his life, when he was still working and had young kids at home.

“ ‘I can’t imagine how I did it,’ Schneider said. He worked in the labor movement, advocating for health and safety regulations for construction workers, and his days were long; he left the house before 7 a.m. and often didn’t return until 6 p.m. ‘But, you know, one book a month, it’s not a lot to read.’

“At first it was just him and a few neighbors — a way of getting people together. He and Bill Arnold had kids around the same age, so they met through the PTA; Ted Schroll and Slott lived on his street. Some people have come and gone, but the original members remain. Everyone attributes its longevity to Schneider’s commitment and organizational abilities — he maintains a list of books the group has read — the document is nine pages long, single-spaced — and sends reminders about meetings.

“ ‘I think the really difficult thing about keeping a book group going is picking good books,’ Schneider said. His daughter is a librarian and often gives recommendations. When in doubt, the group will fall back on classics or prize winners, though that isn’t a foolproof method. …

“Since the group takes turns choosing books, the men often suggest something they’ve already read and liked, knowing they’ll have seven friends with whom to discuss it. Favorites have included Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing and A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, by Nathan Thrall.

“As the April meeting wrapped up, the group discussed who would host in May (Mozena) and what book they would read next (he chose The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich, a ghost story set in a Minneapolis bookstore).

“Despite having had criticisms of that night’s book, Mozena made a point of thanking Slott for suggesting it, especially since he wouldn’t have chosen to read it himself.

“ ‘It’s worth taking the time to read books,’ Mozena said.”

More at the Post, here. I do admire people who are game to read something they would never have chosen for themselves. I probably I lose out by not being like that, but there’s so much I already want to read — and read again.

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Ukraine’s ‘Origami’ Deer Goes to Venice

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on June 23, 2026| 6 Comments »

Photo: David Levene/Guardian.
Zhanna Kadyrova’s sculpture arrives at the headquarters of Unesco in Paris, on its way to the Venice biennale. “It has become a symbol of hope” in Ukraine.

The Venice Biennale is a celebration of art and culture from countries around the world. What different nations send to the event shows what they think they stand for and what they want others to know. This year, war-torn Ukraine didn’t try to send high art but a sculpture that has become a symbol of hope.

Charlotte Higgins reported at the Guardian in May, “On a perfect spring day in Paris, the deer is first visible in the distance, poised between an avenue of just-budding plane trees in the 7th arrondissement. Its head is raised, its body poised. Seen there among the trees, it really could be a wild animal. In reality, it is a concrete deer, and not even a particularly naturalistic one, since it has the distinct look of origami about it. The sculpture is a play of scale and weight, as if feather-light folded paper has been enlarged and transformed into heavy concrete.

“The deer is strapped to a flat-bed truck, and it is being driven into the grand modernist headquarters of Unesco, the UN agency that looks after heritage, culture and education. It will stand there for a day in its gardens, with Alexander Calder’s Spirale for company and the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop. It is the last stop on a long overland journey across eastern, central and western Europe before it crosses the Venetian lagoon and docks in Venice for the 2026 art biennale, where, from this month, it will be the most prominent component of Ukraine’s national pavilion.

“The deer sculpture is by Kyiv-based artist Zhanna Kadyrova, who has been making resonant work reflecting the violence of the Russian attack of Ukraine since 2022. The work, however, predates Russia’s full-scale invasion. In 2018, she was commissioned by the city of Pokrovsk, in the Donetsk region, to help regenerate a large park. It was one of a number of efforts to invest in the cities of Ukraine’s east after Russian-backed separatists took over chunks of territory in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. She and her partner, Denys Ruban, worked in the city for several months. …

“Fast forward to the summer of 2024. More than two years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Pokrovsk was on the frontline. Kadyrova’s friend Leonid Marushchak – an educator, historian and now co-curator of Ukraine’s Venice pavilion – was at that time organizing perilous evacuations of museum collections from frontline towns. … Marushchak said: ‘I saw the deer was still standing there. I called Zhanna to find out if she was not against the evacuation of the sculpture. We went to the local museum – some of the staff were still working. They said they understand that they have to evacuate it, but they had no idea how to do it.’

“Marushchak began negotiating with the city authorities – whose first priority, as drone and artillery attacks heightened in their intensity, was not a slightly odd contemporary concrete sculpture in the park. His ‘trick,’ as he called it, was to undertake to evacuate a statue of Mykola Leontovych, too – a beloved Ukrainian composer who wrote the renowned, evocative Carol of the Bells. …

“A moving film, which will also be shown in Venice, documents the process. While the men are at work, Kadyrova asks locals – some about to leave for ever, some determined to tough it out come what may – what they think of the sculpture. Some are nonplussed, but others clearly love it, and the conversation is bound up with the ache of leaving a place, maybe for good. …

“It was last year that Kadyrova and Marushchak, with fellow curator Ksenia Malykh, proposed a project centering on the sculpture for Ukraine’s Venice Biennale pavilion. … And so, early this spring, the sculpture set out on its journey to Venice – a slow and circuitous one through Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Brussels and finally Paris.

“Along the way, it has paused in each city, often in grand imperial architectural settings in which it was never intended to be seen, designed as it was for a park in a small, industrial city. And over the course of its journey, it has accrued more and more meaning and significance. Refugees from Pokrovsk, Kadyrova tells me, regularly come to see the deer, and a new tradition has arisen, of touching it and making a wish.”

More at the Guardian, here.

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Richie Rich Hires an Orchestra

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 22, 2026| 10 Comments »

Representing a puzzling trend in the classical music world, pianist heiress Marina Quasha has become a conductor without traditional training. She is now music director of the German-Romantic Orchester and recognized for paying her musicians well.

What does it take to become an orchestra conductor these days? Sometimes all it takes is a love of music and money in the bank.

Jeffrey Arlo Brown writes at the Baffler, “On the evening of February 18, the Deutsch-Romantisches Orchester (DRO) gave a performance in Berlin’s Funkhaus, a one-time radio broadcasting center converted into a chic concert hall. It was a classical concert like any other — except for the guest list, five-course banquet, and glaring mismatch between the skill levels of the professional instrumentalists and their conductor, a relatively unknown young musician named Marina Quasha.

“Just after 7:00 p.m., Quasha strode to the podium in the cavernous concert hall. A kind of gray mist hovered above the orchestra. She gave the audience a tiny combination bow-nod. She then raised her hands and launched into conducting the overture to Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, followed by arias selected from Tosca and Macbeth, and, finally, Brahms’s First Symphony. Her work smacked of inexperience: Beautiful individual solos were undermined by an overall loud, blunt, and sludgy sound, a sign of missing vision and restraint. She let phrases that needed distinction bleed together and neglected the subtle countermelodies that give the music richness. Her hands beat timid time, and the musicians often ignored her tempo — they barely even looked at her.

“After the concert, attendees and musicians alike filed into the banquet hall, where three long tables with thin candles, handwritten place cards, and elegant menus waited. Amid the chatter, a musician gushed about the DRO’s innovative approach to reaching new audiences, as if we weren’t at an invitation-only concert followed by a luxurious dinner. Others, commenting on Quasha’s conducting ability, offered a masterclass in the art of the polite non-compliment. ‘It’s quite an exciting project.’ ‘She has something in her heart.’ ‘We all have room to grow.’ Perhaps they felt reluctant to bite the hand feeding them — and me — [oysters] and citron caviar.

“In between courses, Quasha popped by where I was sitting and mentioned that she was going to Malta, where she was applying for citizenship in the hopes of competing for the country in horse show jumping at the 2028 Olympics.

“Later, I forwarded a recording of the concert to two musicians whose ears I trust without telling them who made it. The first, a pianist, sent me a list of six general problems and thirty-seven significant but more specific issues including timestamps. ‘The moments when the music mostly plays itself were fine,’ he said, ‘but the parts that actually required conducting skills were sorely lacking.’ The second, an accomplished conductor, told me, “I sense that the orchestra doesn’t trust the conductor.’ … Nevertheless, he said, he could tell the conductor was working with ‘an expensive instrument.’

“Expensive, indeed: Quasha later told me the Funkhaus concert had cost over $290,000. Seventy-seven percent of orchestras in the United States had annual budgets under $300,000 in 2022, according to the League of American Orchestras. Why did all this energy, skill, and money flow into a concert led by a conducting neophyte? The answer lies in a concerning trend new to classical music: the rise of pay-to-play, boutique musical experiences for the ultra-wealthy.

“The musical adventuring of socialite-turned-soprano Florence Foster Jenkins and [others] show that rich people never really lost their desire to prove themselves in the musical realm. But the last decade or so has seen a striking rise in pay-to-play arrangements, a situation that recalls the days when orchestras belonged to princes. These experiences allow people with money but little musical ability to roleplay composer and conductor — for a price. This development flows naturally from this era’s extreme inequality as well as classical music’s precarious state, even in such historically generous countries as Germany. It risks reshaping the art itself to align with the whims of wealthy dilettantes.

“Examples abound. In 2012, Alexey Kononenko, a former mathematician at the mysterious hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, began a career as a composer. Despite never having learned to play an instrument, a rudimentary grasp of music theory, and a ratio of inspiration to imitation that would embarrass a large language model, Kononenko, who goes by the stage name Alexey Shor, has had his works performed all over the world by many of its best musicians. …

“Or consider Susan Lim. Last May, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the City of London Choir, and the outstanding pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet gave a performance of a composition by the surgeon and AI booster, who hired musicians to turn her inchoate ideas about technology into music and allow herself the privilege of calling herself a ‘songwriter.’ The work depicts a stuffed lion’s journey from to inanimate toy to sentient companion by way of lyrics like ‘It’s a beautiful invention / Robotics, artificial intelligence / It’s the new medication.’ …

“All this make-believe art making has an uncanny quality. The concerts look and sound a lot like normal concerts, with professional musicians picking up the wealthy dabbler’s slack. The overall effect is hard to localize at first, but it boils down to this: Rich people are building their own classical music world, one where the long years of intense training, fierce competition, and harrowing precarity musicians endure to master their craft matter less than … cold, hard cash. …

“At least Quasha is giving some musicians sorely needed well-paid gigs. But pay-to-play schemes for wealthy dilettantes risk undermining the important thing in classical music that is still largely working — its commitment to artistic excellence — hollowing it out completely in the process. The danger is partly political: Will cash-strapped governments like Germany’s see projects like the DRO and decide they don’t need to pay for its uniquely diverse publicly funded network of 129 professional orchestras if a rich person is happy to pick up the tab for starting their own?”

More at the Baffler, here. You’re allowed one free article.

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Dad Jokes for Father’s Day

Posted in Uncategorized on June 21, 2026| 3 Comments »

Photo: Westend61/Getty Images.

I’m wondering if Father’s Day is part of other people’s family traditions and, if so, how everyone celebrates. Wikipedia lists 100 countries that have some kind of recognition, but it doesn’t give many details.

The dads in our family usually receive gifts or get a special outing. And, of course, children have been known to make beautiful cards. What about entertainments? Does anyone perform for their father or tell dad jokes?

Sarah Lemire at Today writes, “Did you hear about the father who lost his left leg? He’s all right now. How about this one: My dad said he wanted something groundbreaking for Father’s Day. So I got him a shovel. …

‘Of course, it also doesn’t hurt to also give Dad a thoughtful card with a few heartfelt sentiments written inside to remind him that when it comes to dads, he’s simply the best.

“In the end, however, laughter is the real gift, and [here’s] everything you need to deliver the perfect punchline this Father’s Day. …

“I was going to tell my dad a pizza joke for Father’s Day. But I decided it was too cheesy.

“For Father’s Day, I got my dad a book on anti-gravity. Now he can’t put it down.

“My dad opened a gym once. But it didn’t work out.

“Why did the golfer cry? He was going through a rough patch.

“My dad is really bad at golf. I told him to join the club. …

“My dad used to steal soap, but eventually he came clean.

“I took my dad camping for Father’s Day. It was in tents.

“My dad used to be addicted to the hokey pokey. But then he turned himself around.

“My father ate a frog. Now I’m worried he’s going to croak.

“Why do golf announcers whisper? They don’t want to wake up the spectators. …

“My father spilled invisible ink all over himself. He’s at the hospital waiting to be seen.

“My dad quit his job as an archeologist. Now his career is in ruins.

“The last time my dad played baseball he got arrested. Apparently he tried to steal second base.

“My dad’s computer caught a cold. He must have left a window open.

“My dad said he wanted something groundbreaking for Father’s Day. So I got him a shovel. …

“I never liked my dad’s facial hair. But now it’s starting to grow on me.

“My dad bought a pair of camouflage pants. Now I can’t find him.

“My father doesn’t like trees. He thinks they’re shady.

“For Father’s Day, my dad asked for a gift with no strings attached. So I bought him a broken guitar. …

“I got my dad a book about glue once. He couldn’t put it down.

“My dad won’t play cards in the jungle. He says there are too many cheetahs.

“My grandfather got fired from the keyboard factory. He wasn’t putting in enough shifts.

“My dad wanted to listen to music while we were fishing. So I put on something catchy.”

More bad jokes at Today, here.

And you might like to read about Sonora Dodd, who started Father’s Day in Spokane, Washington, in 1910. Her dad had raised six children after their mother died, and she wanted to see him get some credit. More here.

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Mauritania’s Ancient Manuscripts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 20, 2026| 3 Comments »

Photo: Kang-Chun Cheng.
Habott opening a book on Sufism interpretation in the family library.

I had to do a little research before sharing today’s article about a family’s work to preserve ancient manuscripts. I’m sorry to say that my geography is weak, and I didn’t know where to find Mauritania.

According to Wikipedia, Mauritania is a country in Northwest Africa, situated in the middle of Mali, Senegal, Algeria, and Western Sahara. Its full name is the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.

At the Dial recently, Kang-Chun Cheng described the history of the manuscripts and focused on why climate change and desertification is threatening them.

“Dressed in a boubou, a traditional Arab robe, ” Cheng writes, “Mohammed Abdullah Ould Gholam Habott, 51, puts on gloves before delicately handling the ancient manuscripts. He opens a book about Sufism, a mystical practice within Islam, and then another about its interpretation. Gingerly, he thumbs through the pages of Arabic script.

“Habott is the custodian of his family’s library and has been for 24 years. The size of a large sitting room, the library contains more than 1,000 pieces of Quranic manuscripts, legal texts and scientific writings –– some of the oldest in West Africa — ranging from mathematics to astronomy. It’s one of three such libraries still open to the public in Chinguetti, an ancient desert village in northern Mauritania.

“Established around 777 AD, Chinguetti — meaning ‘spring of horses’ in the extinct Azayr language — is home to roughly 4,800 people. The unforgiving environment makes survival feel like a concession; temperatures can exceed 43 degrees Celsius [109.4 F] during the day, then plummet down to 10 degrees after the sun sets. …

“Designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996, Chinguetti once served as an important trading outpost for the Mediterranean Timbuktu caravan route and a resting spot for religious pilgrims en route to Mecca. Small libraries were built to maintain and organize holy writings left behind by generations of transient pilgrims. Today, tourists and researchers travel great distances to look at them.

“Books are stored in storage cabinets, on open shelves and in wood and glass display cases. With few windows, the libraries are kept relatively dark and the texts out of the hot sun, but the rooms are far from temperature controlled. These simple preservation methods may not be enough to withstand changes to the desert climate.

“Temperatures here are rising up to 1.5 times faster than the global average, rainfall is plummeting, and sandstorms are becoming more common. While the texts are relatively safe in the arid desert air, the fates of the libraries themselves are precarious. Desertification threatens to bury towns. With fewer trees and vegetation, sand can more easily migrate onto the streets. In some places, dunes reach window height and pour into people’s homes.      

“The libraries in Chinguetti are owned and overseen by families, custodial positions passed down through generations. From a young age, Habott was captivated by stories that his grandfather told him of pilgrimages to Mecca and traveling to Andalusia, Spain, to purchase Moorish texts. His family’s library has existed since the 1800s and, as the eighth custodian, Habott tells me he felt proud of the culture and heritage the libraries carried. …

“His two sons, aged 12 and 18, don’t share this dream. Chinguetti’s remoteness and lack of resources (access to electricity only stabilized in 2013) mean there are very few economic opportunities. Many young people have little incentive to stay; the city’s population has been steadily declining for years as youth travel elsewhere for blue-collar work and a larger life. …

“ ‘An ocean of sand is coming,’ Habbott says from the dry coolness of his library. ‘I ask Allah to keep this family going.’ ”

A nice collection of photos may be enjoyed at the Dial, here. No firewall.

In case, like me, you had never heard of the Dial, here’s what they say about themselves: “We created The Dial in 2023 to make space for daring writing unconstrained by geography. English-language journalism is growing perilously small in voice, in ambition and in subject. We see an opportunity to publish stories from the point of view of those on the ground — with the world itself as our center of gravity, rather than Brooklyn. We trained as editors at The New York Review of Books, Politico’s European newsroom and the Atlantic.” I like the sound of their goals!

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Some Thoughts on Juneteenth

Posted in Uncategorized on June 19, 2026| 3 Comments »

Photo: Amy Edmunds.
Edith Edmunds, 99 at the time NPR interviewed her, is pictured with one of her Underground Railroad “code” quilts.

June 19th, or Juneteenth, is a date long celebrated in the Black community and now more widely honored. According to Wikipedia, the name refers to June 19, 1865, the day when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas.

Vanessa Romo reported a while back at National Public Radio (NPR) about Edith Edmunds and the connection between African American history and quilting.

“For Edith Edmunds, the art of quilt making is inextricably linked to the Black struggle for freedom. That’s why she plans to be sewing on Juneteenth.

” ‘It’s what I love to do’ she told NPR in a phone interview.

“Edmunds, who is 99 years old, has been making quilts since she was seven, when she first learned to sew on a pedal-powered treadle machine using scraps of fabric. But it wasn’t until 50 years ago, after reading a magazine article, that she learned how runaway enslaved people in the South used encoded messages in quilts to make their way north along the Underground Railroad.

” ‘In the spring and summer it was common for people to hang their quilts and wall hangings outside on fences, or bushes, or out of windows and it happened that that was the same time of year many enslaved people tried to escape,’ Edmunds explained.

“For those not in the know, the decorated quilts would simply go unnoticed, but for those looking for signs, ‘the quilts conveyed messages to people who were about to escape, who were planning to escape, and also for people that were on the run,’ she said. …

“Both of Edmunds’ grandfathers were born into slavery in Halifax County, Va. They were still children when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. … Edmunds said she often thinks about them while she’s sewing.

” ‘I think about what my ancestors must have gone through in slavery,’ she said.

“So, what better way to mark the day 160 years ago when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, on to spread the news that slavery had been outlawed — two years earlier — than to spend it in communion with her family’s past.

“Edmunds’ daughter, Amy Edmunds, told NPR that she’s been helping her mother learn more about the secret language of quilts. They were especially inspired after reading Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad, which relies on an oral history relayed by the descendants of enslaved people in South Carolina. In the 1999 book, the authors decode the 10 patterns that make up the Underground Railroad Quilt Codes.

“The first pattern Edmunds learned to make — the one she read about in the magazine decades ago — is called the ‘monkey wrench.’

” ‘It tells the enslaved to get ready for a journey, so when they saw it they knew the time was near,’ she said.

“Since then she’s completed several quilts, mastering each of the coded blocks. The ‘north star’ told runaways to follow the light of the north star as they traveled at night. A ‘bow tie’ square warned a fleeing slave to clean up and change their clothes so they wouldn’t stand out among free Black people. The ‘drunken pair’ told the enslaved not to walk straight but to walk zigzag so that they couldn’t be tracked. A log cabin with a black center indicated a safe house, while a log cabin with a light center conveyed they should stay away.

“If a person on the run stumbled upon a quilt with a ‘shoofly’ block on it, it meant they’d reached someone who could provide safe, temporary shelter, Edmunds said.

” ‘This was a person who would secretly hide the enslaved in a cave, in a church, or even in a graveyard,’ she said, adding that they could be a Black or white person who was involved in the Underground Railroad. ‘A shoofly risked their own freedom for a stranger.’

“Over the years, Edmunds and her daughter have sought to learn as much as they can about their family history and the history of the coded quilts. Amy Edmunds said it’s been a challenging endeavor.”

That’s because there is no written history, making experts skeptical.

” ‘There is no evidence of it at all,’ Tracy Vaughn-Manley, a Black Studies professor at Northwestern University, told NPR in an interview last year.

“Vaughn-Manley, who studies Black quilting, said the theories posited by Jacqueline Tobin, a women’s studies professor at the University of Denver, and Raymond Dobard, an art historian from Howard University, who co-wrote Hidden in Plain View, are not substantiated. …

” ‘No letters, no notes, nothing that would signify that quilts were used as codes,’ Vaughn-Manley said.

“But other academics, including Mary Twining-Baird, an Atlanta-based quilt scholar and emeritus professor of English and Folklore at Clark Atlanta University, have stood by Tobin and Dobard’s research.

” ‘If people’s lives are at stake, then it stands to reason that there would be no trace of the quilts,’ Twining-Baird told the Smithsonian in 2019.

‘She added: ‘Of course there is no documentation! Literally, if anyone found out they could lose their lives.’

“This is the argument Amy and Edith Edmunds make as well. In fact, the younger Edmunds notes the long history of pictographs and symbols, like the Adinkra, which are used in fabric and pottery across West Africa.

” ‘They’re a form of language to help people to be able to communicate, across boundaries. And so. It would make sense that these designs and these symbols would be used to convey messages. It would be something that was already a part of the culture,’ she said.

“Edith Edmunds, who is two months shy of her 100th birthday, [said Juneteenth] ‘gives me a chance to talk about the Underground Railroad with urgency. … The younger generations don’t know what really happened back then — with the Underground Railroad. So I hope I’m opening somebody’s eyes and their minds.’ “

More at NPR, here.

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A Park for Park Avenue

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 18, 2026| 1 Comment »

Photo: Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects and Planners.
Architects have submitted two designs for a park on a section of New York’s Park Avenue. This is the scheme with a bike lane.

Back in the day, when I was going to high school and living during the week with my mother’s sister, Park Avenue was not much of a park. I remember daffodils in spring, but they were surrounded by an iron fence.

Today I learn that there are plans to make big changes. At Markets Today (via MSN), Christopher Bonanos shares his opinions about a proposed park project.

“Two summers ago, the city announced that it was taking a good hard look at (as every politician seemed to phrase it) ‘putting the park back in Park Avenue.’ … A century ago, the median down the middle of Park Avenue was much more welcoming than it is today, a place with seating and substantial plantings where you’d consider spending time.

“Starting in the 1920s, the city added a traffic lane on each side by paring the median down to a narrow strip, creating a pleasant but not useful viewing garden. In 2024, the city announced a call for proposals wherein those two lanes would be reclaimed from traffic for leisure and greenery. It was a once-in-a-century opportunity, because the aged Metro-North tunnel running under the avenue is being reconstructed, allowing its roof above to be rethought. …

“The rebuilt mall, the announcement said, would extend from 46th Street, where it emerges from the pass-throughs at the Helmsley Building, up to 57th Street. Each half of Park Avenue would go from four lanes to three. [Recently] we got a first look at plans produced by the firm Starr Whitehouse, and here they are. …

“The biggest difference between the two design schemes is a protected bike lane that snakes its way up the western side of the median, present in one rendering and absent from the other. The proposed park is, unlike its 1910s forebear, not symmetrical or uniform in shape. Carve-outs for left-turn lanes alter its form on every other block. … Bollards at the ends of each section will permanently keep errant (or malicious) drivers out of the median.

“That said, there’s somewhat less greenery and more paving than you might expect: The center islands have no plants at the corners, for example. …

“The best aspect of all: There’s seating! God bless everyone involved for rejecting the tools of hostile architecture and incorporating built-in masonry benches. That makes sense, given that office workers’ lunchtime and smoke breaks are a major use case for this project. They do set up the prospect of clashes between camped-out people and the police (and maybe Park Avenue office tenants’ security teams, too) over those spaces, and at the risk of sounding cynical, you can bet that the cops will prevail. But perhaps those conflicts will not arise as often as you’d expect. Judging by the newish seating in the plaza a few blocks away between Grand Central Terminal and One Vanderbilt, it will not be permanently occupied by unhoused people.

“The bike lanes are, at least when seen at the macro level of these renderings, not quite refined yet. They’re going to need a lot of visual cues and signage to keep walkers, cyclists, and cars out of one another’s way. The bike path runs through the crosswalks, and disabled or slow-moving pedestrians, or those who are simply inattentive, will have to contend with riders zinging through at high speed. If the bike lane is sharply delineated with curbs, that will help a lot. …

“One question that comes up is what knock-on effects will arise from shearing off car lanes. Some of the car trips now using them will simply disappear, as they do every time the inverse of induced demand, known as ‘reduced demand,’ kicks in. … To me, looking at both proposals, the plan that’s all park seems much more workable at a day-to-day ground level. I’d offer that the bike lane might instead be set on the outside edge of Park Avenue, at the sidewalk curbs, away from the median, even if that means shaving a couple of feet off the park to make room. Or we could perhaps shift the bikers over one short block to Madison Avenue. …

“An easy guess is that, if all of this turns out to be popular and successful, similar changes will happen all the way to 96th Street. … The question then becomes whether affluent residents of Park Avenue on the Upper East Side will approve of the greenery more than they will grumble about constraints upon their cars and drivers.

“Given that this is far too businesslike a city to ever go all out and turn an avenue into a full-on park — that is, to build our own version of the Rose Kennedy Greenway — it’s going to be a real public asset.”

More at MSN, here.

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More States Are Protecting Books

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 17, 2026| 2 Comments »

Publisher Penguin Random House (PRH) celebrated Right to Read Day in Albany on April 20, during National Library Week. Clockwise from top left: Skip Dye, senior vice president of library sales and digital strategy; Eric Rosswood of New York Authors Against Book Bans; Dan Novack; Rosie Stewart; and student advocate Kaya Richards of SUNY–Buffalo.

Supporters of libraries and the First Amendment are often taken off guard when supporters of book bans get going. But they just need a little time to get organized. See how they’re starting to influence lawmakers in US states.

Nathalie op de Beeck writes at Publishers Weekly (PW), “In an encouraging turn, advocates of the right to read are noticing signs that legal pushback and public pressure are influencing state legislatures. States are fine-tuning imprecise language around librarianship and rethinking broad terms such as ‘appropriate’ and ‘harmful to minors’ — a promising development — although they’re also continuing to test constitutional limits.

“In Idaho, two challenges to the censorious Idaho House Bill 710, known as the Children’s School and Library Protection Act, have resulted in amendments to Idaho state code, even though the district court has yet to issue a ruling. While the amendments make the code more specific, they also establish a reading age category of ‘adolescent minors,’ ages 13–17, and indicate that many lawmakers believe libraries engage in ‘government speech.’

“Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, two recent bills aimed at limiting the freedom to read have failed. Wisconsin AB 5, a proposed act that would have required ‘school boards to make textbooks, curricula, and instructional materials available for inspection by school district residents,’ was vetoed by Wisconsin governor Tony Evers in October 2025. Another bill, AB 961, mandating conspicuous ‘warning labels for explicit content’ on ‘visual, written, or auditory material,’ was introduced in January and ‘dead’ as of March 23.

“And in Alaska, a bill favoring libraries has been proposed. Senate Bill 238, a library standards policy introduced by Fairbanks state senator Scott Kawasaki, was endorsed by the state chapter of Authors Against Book Bans during National Library Week, April 19–25. It sets guidelines for protecting librarians from criminal or civil liability, ensuring that material is ‘taken as a whole’ when under review, and requiring that complaints come from residents from the library’s jurisdiction.

“So what accounts for these more nuanced approaches to the First Amendment and the Supreme Court’s Miller test for obscenity?

” ‘It’s hard to assign directionality to it, when there are so many countervailing things going on nationwide,’ said Rosie Stewart, senior manager of public policy at Penguin Random House. ‘Concern about midterms’ could be a driving force. …

” ‘We’ve had success in blue states that want to protect from book banning at the local level, but these efforts have moved to purple or even red states, to the point of Alaska now moving this forward,’ Stewart added. PRH is also watching Virginia Senate Bill 19, which codified Miller language and passed on April 6, and Arizona Senate Bill 1435, a book ban bill likely to be vetoed by Governor Katie Hobbs.

“Sarah Lamdan, the executive director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, thinks many legislators are kicking the tire and testing for weakness in the constitutional language. …

“Lamdan pointed to a key finding from the ALA’s State of America’s Libraries Report: Approximately 91.7% of titles challenged in 2025 were targeted by pressure groups and government decision makers, whereas only 2% of challenges came from parents, and 1.4% came from individual library patrons.

“Those who challenge the freedom to read ‘are well-funded,’ Lamdan told PW, ‘so when they do something blatantly unconstitutional, they have the capacity to try again. It’s relentless because it’s a national political campaign.’

“John Chrastka, executive director of nonprofit advocacy organization EveryLibrary … called the situation ‘unmoored and highly weaponized ahead of elections.’

“[He argued that] ‘the family is not universal, but “appropriate” and “inappropriate” are used in the censorship contexts as universal terms. … Moving that conversation into one of relevance/irrelevance is important’ for library collection retention and development.

“Stewart, of PRH, credits book industry advocates for their nonstop effort to defend reading rights. ‘In the last couple years, our side has gotten so much more organized,’ she said. ‘In almost every state, there is a coalition that can activate, and it’s much broader than just the libraries fighting for themselves. It includes publishers, booksellers, and authors—that’s how we were able to kill most of the bills that came forward in Iowa this session.’

” ‘It’s a messy playing field,’ Stewart said, ‘but I guess I’m saying, I’d rather be us than them.’ “

More at Publishers Weekly, here.

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