Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Bird-Friendly High Rises

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on January 2, 2023| 10 Comments »

Photo: Ann Hermes/CSM Staff
Collections at the Field Museum include more than 100,000 birds killed in collisions with buildings in Chicago,” the Christian Science Monitor reports. “Each bird is stuffed and tagged.”

I learned decades ago that if small birds start flying into my windows, I need to hang up images of hawks or cats to warn them away. Sometimes I bought images of predators from Audubon or Duncraft. Other times I cut shapes out of black cardboard.

For skyscrapers, it’s not so easy, even though suburban homes kill more birds. At the Christian Science Monitor, Richard Mertens writes about the skyscraper challenge.

“The bird lies on its side, a clump of feathers no bigger than a crumpled leaf. It’s just a dark speck on the concrete, with massive glass and steel skyscrapers rising above it in the pre-dawn light.

“Annette Prince sees it at once. She hurries over and lifts it gently in her right hand. It has a slender bill, a tuft of yellow on its rump, and dark eyes that show no glimmer of life. A yellow-rumped warbler, bound for the warmth of the Caribbean or the American South, has met its end in Chicago’s Loop. …

“In the contest between birds and cities, the cities are winning. Scientists estimate that, on average, at least a million birds die in collisions with buildings each day in the United States – and as many as a billion a year. Most perish during the spring and fall migrations in which vast numbers journey up and down the continent, flying mainly at night. City lights attract and disorient them, and many end up crashing into windows, not just the sides of gleaming office towers but suburban patio doors as well. The problem, then, is twofold: lights and glass.

The light from ever-expanding cities is disrupting the movement of creatures that evolved to migrate in the dark, using the stars and the Earth’s magnetism as their guides.

“And the modern architectural penchant for glass has proved deadly for them. Most glass is invisible to birds, appearing either as clear air to fly through or as a reflection of the trees and sky behind them.

“There are growing efforts to make cities safer for birds. The National Audubon Society’s Lights Out programs, in which owners and managers agree to switch off exterior lights during migration, have spread to 45 U.S. cities. Architects and developers are learning how to make buildings bird-friendly by using specially treated glass that birds can see. Grassroots activists like Ms. Prince are monitoring collisions, pressuring businesses and local officials to take bird safety seriously, and in some places asking homeowners to consider their own windows. Scientists say more birds die by hitting houses – urban and rural – than by striking downtown skyscrapers.

“For many conservationists, the issue is far more than birds. … ‘It’s a proxy for a much bigger problem of our stewardship of the planet,’ says Andrew Farnsworth, an ornithologist with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and an expert on bird collisions. …

“A 2019 study by the Cornell Lab concluded that the North American bird population had declined by 29%, more than 3 billion birds, over the previous half-century. The biggest reason, scientists say, is probably habitat loss. Feral cats also kill birds – by some estimates more than windows – as do collisions with vehicles and power lines. But the combination of buildings and city lights is deadly.

“By this measure, Chicago may be the deadliest city of all. According to a 2019 study, Chicago endangers more migrating birds than any American city, followed by Dallas and Houston. It’s a matter of lighting, but also geography. Chicago sits on the Lake Michigan shore and within the Mississippi Flyway, a broad path that funnels migrating birds from as far as the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, Central America, and beyond.

“Yet if Chicago is one of the worst cities for birds, it’s also one of the best. It has produced a strong response in defense of avian migrants, including a well-established Lights Out program and architects who use bird-friendly designs. It also has some of the most determined advocates for bird safety in the country. Ms. Prince’s group started with just a handful of volunteers two decades ago and has grown to more than 150. These monitors take turns patrolling a square mile or more of downtown Chicago, searching at daybreak for dead or wounded birds. It’s difficult, labor-intensive work, and few cities can match the scale of the effort.

“If a bird is alive, monitors take it to a rehabilitation center in the suburbs. They take the dead ones to Chicago’s Field Museum, where volunteers prepare them for storage in the museum’s collections.  Over the years, the museum has acquired more than 100,000 birds this way. Songbirds, especially warblers and sparrows, are the most common, but bird kills encompass as many as 170 species.

“The monitors also work with building managers to reduce collisions. Turning off exterior lighting is a start. The lights of entryways, lobbies, and glassed-in atria also attract birds. Moreover, birds drawn to a city typically spend a day or two there, pausing to rest and feed before continuing their journey. Most collisions happen on the lower floors, during the day. Monitors encourage building managers to dim interior lights, move plants away from windows, and apply speckled film to clear glass so birds can see it.

“Geoffrey Credi was one of the first to embrace this effort. Two decades ago, Mr. Credi, director of operations at Blue Cross Blue Shield Tower in downtown Chicago, attended a symposium about birds and buildings. He was surprised to discover that his building, which overlooks Grant Park, was considered one of the worst in town. He already knew there was a problem. Collision monitors and custodial staff had found birds outside. Mr. Credi threw himself into efforts to make the building safer. He and his staff began to track where birds were hitting. They had speckled film applied to clear-glass entryways. An olive tree in an atrium attracted birds, so Mr. Credi had it moved. …

“The effect of city lights on birds is well established. One of the most dramatic examples involves the 9/11 memorial in New York. The National 9/11 Memorial & Museum’s ‘Tribute in Light’ consists of two columns of light shining into the night, a symbol of the fallen towers. It’s switched on once a year to mark the anniversary.

“Members of NYC Audubon and others were alarmed when it was first turned on in 2002. Videos show hundreds of birds circling and crossing through the light, like insects in a car beam. Radar and ground observation revealed that the number of birds in lower Manhattan increased from around 500 to as many as 15,700. Conservationists reached a compromise with the museum. Monitors would consult radar and watch the sky. When the number of birds in the beams exceeds 1,000 in 20 minutes, the organizers would turn off the lights for 20 minutes.

“ ‘There was an immediate reduction,’ says Dr. Farnsworth. Some years, he says, the lights go off eight times on the tribute night. Other years, when migration is low, they stay on all night.

“Meanwhile, architects are beginning to design buildings that reduce bird collisions. Jeanne Gang, a prominent Chicago architect, is well known for her efforts. Her designs do not eschew glass, but modify it in critical places to discourage collisions. On lower floors, the glass is fritted – printed in the factory with a ceramic pattern that is both durable and visible to birds.

“A simple pattern consists of lots of small dots. But other patterns work, too. Glass on a dormitory complex that Ms. Gang designed for the University of Chicago is imprinted with pale white chevrons, making an aesthetic element out of a safety feature. Elsewhere in the building, decorative steel panels screen the glass. Retractable shades reduce transparency. At glass corners, vertical shields eliminate the see-through effect that is perilous for birds. …

“The world of bird-friendly architecture is evolving rapidly. Glass companies are coming out with more products, including glass imprinted with patterns only visible to humans under ultraviolet light. Birds can see the patterns; people can’t. Architects also are finding new ways to reconcile the competing demands of function, aesthetics, and economics. At the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, architects used fritted glass to reduce sunlight into the building and save on energy bills. The pattern also reduces bird collisions.”

Lots more at the Monitor, here. No firewall, but subscriptions are solicited.

Read Full Post »

When Forgetfulness Is OK

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 1, 2023| 10 Comments »

Photo: Harv Greenberg via Etsy.
How to illustrate a story on the brain’s mysterious remembering and forgetting? Do you approve of this shot of Arizona’s Antelope Canyon for the purpose?

As forgetful moments become more common for me, I tend to think of them only as bad news. This article by Sanjay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto at BBC Future asks me to look on the bright side.

“On 25 February 1988, at a performance in Worcester, Massachusetts,” they write, “Bruce Springsteen forgot the opening lines to his all-time greatest hit, ‘Born to Run.’

“According to the conventional wisdom about the nature of forgetting, set down in the decades straddling the turn of 20th Century, this simply should not have happened. Forgetting seems like the inevitable consequence of entropy: where memory formation represents a sort of order in our brains that inevitably turns to disorder. …

“In such a model, the preservation of information like song lyrics requires constant upkeep – which, in the case of ‘Born to Run,’ no one could accuse Springsteen of neglecting. … According to the entropic model of forgetting, such a slip-up made little sense. … Schools and education systems around the world had been built based on the best psychological theories of the early 20th Century. If these models of learning – and its supposed opposite number, forgetting – were wrong, who could tell how many learners had been done a disservice? …

“Efforts to explain forgetting date back to the late 1800s, when psychological researchers began – slowly, at first – to incorporate mathematical tools into their experiments. The German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus studied his own powers of recall by memorising long series of nonsense syllables, then recording how well he remembered them as time elapsed. His ability to summon up this meaningless information, he discovered, sloped downward over time in a curved distribution: he lost most of his hard-won syllables quickly, but a small percentage of them persisted in his memory long after his initial memorization efforts.

“These results seemed to support the intuitive idea that forgetting was the result of the simple erosion of information. But even in these early efforts, wrinkles appeared in the data suggesting that there might be more to forgetting than met the eye. Importantly, the timing of Ebbinghaus’s rehearsals wielded enormous influence over how well he remembered items, with a spaced-out practice schedule outperforming rehearsal sessions that were bunched together.

“This finding was mysterious, hinting at some unexplained requirements of the memorizing mind, but at the same time it was unsurprising. Indeed, the benefits of spacing out one’s studies were known to most students. …

“In Ebbinghaus’s time [quantitative] methods were the exception in psychological research, but a generation later, they were rapidly gaining adherents. Perhaps no psychologist was more responsible for this change than Columbia University’s number-loving psychologist Edward L. Thorndike. … His research laid the groundwork for the influential mid-century movement in psychology known as Behaviorism, which attempts to explain behaviors purely as a function of environmental conditioning, not any intervening mental processes. …

“From his observations he produced three basic laws of learning for human and non-human animals alike. These concerned how the brain ‘stamps in‘ associations (which he dubbed his Law of Effect); under what conditions learning occurs (his Law of Readiness); and how memories are maintained or forgotten: his Law of Exercise, which breaks down into sub-theories of use and disuse. …

“Thorndike’s theory of forgetting largely aligned with Ebbinghaus’s observations, except it didn’t account for the still-mysterious fact that spaced rehearsal of information seemed to steel-plate information against forgetfulness. It would take decades for cognitive scientists to come up with a model of forgetting that satisfactorily accounted for this issue. …

“In both the standardization of education and the ongoing research into learning, forgetting became something of a sideshow. Its status began to improve, however, thanks to two separate research traditions begun in the 1960s and 1970s. One operates at the level of neurons and is detectable through tiny electrodes implanted in cells, while the other operates at the level of cognitive psychology and is detectable through cleverly designed quizzes.

“At the cellular level, Eric Kandel, in a Nobel-winning series of studies, demonstrated that memories are preserved in the form of strengthened connections between neurons. Training regimes, he showed, whether conducted on intact, living, learning animals, or by electrically prodding neurons in a dish, create such beefed-up connections. And, as Ebbinghaus first observed, training (or rehearsal, or study) with extra time scheduled in between led these connections to be longer-lasting. This is a fact that holds true throughout the animal kingdom, from sea slugs to mammals. …

“At the cellular level, part of the answer may be that some of the mechanisms involved in preserving memories seem to require downtime: recharging periods, in effect, before neurons can get back to the work of strengthening their connections.

“A different, yet perhaps complementary, answer is forthcoming in the research tradition of cognitive psychology. Here, a variety of studies suggest that gaps in one’s rehearsal or study schedule are so helpful because, counterintuitively, they create the opportunity for a salutary bit of forgetting. To understanding how forgetting can be useful, it’s important to first recognize that a memory is never simply strong or weak.

Forgetting, it seemed, was less like a cliff slowly collapsing into the sea, and more like a house deep in the woods that becomes harder and harder to find.

“Rather, the ease with which you can summon up a memory (its retrieval strength) is different from how fully represented it is in your mind (its storage strength). The name of your parent, for instance, would be one example of a memory with both high storage and retrieval strength. A phone number you held in your head only momentarily a decade ago could be said to have low storage and retrieval strength. The name of someone you met a party mere minutes ago might have high retrieval but low storage strength. …

“Psychologists became aware of the distinction between storage and retrieval as early as the 1930s, when John Alexander McGeoch, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, tasked study subjects with memorizing pairs of unrelated words. For example, every time I say pencil, for instance, you say chessboard. That task became far more difficult, he discovered, when, before asking his subjects to recite what they’d memorized, he confronted them with decoy pairs: pencil and cheese, pencil and table. The decoy pairs, it seemed, competed with the true pair for the memorizer’s attention.

“As this line of research gained traction, the metaphor for forgetting changed. Forgetting, it seemed, was less like a cliff slowly collapsing into the sea, and more like a house deep in the woods that becomes harder and harder to find. The house might be perfectly sound – that is, its storage strength remains high – but if the path leading to it becomes surrounded by equally plausible paths leading the wrong way, one’s formerly clear mental map can transform into a maze.

“In Springsteen’s case, it’s easy to see how his mental wayfinding might have gotten thrown off track. ‘The reason for the muff, apparently was that he was concentrating so much on the spoken introduction, telling the audience how the song has assumed a new meaning to him over the years,’ the Los Angeles Times’ music critic wrote several days after the event. The new introduction meant he was approaching the same old memory from a different set of cues: a different starting point. Suddenly, the once-reliable path to the opening lines of the song was surrounded by false starts. But soon, the lyrics came roaring back.” The idea is that now the memory is more accessible and the heightened accessibility will stick around. 

Pretty cool stuff. More at the BBC, here. No firewall.

Read Full Post »

The Case for Floating Wetlands

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 31, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Dave Burke/SOM.
Floating wetlands along the Chicago River’s Wild Mile.

Here’s an idea whose time has come. Now that we know the role of wetlands in cleaning up pollutants, why not create wetlands where they’re needed most? Having read today’s article, I’m not sure how I feel about the use of phragmites, so often considered an invasive weed. But I’m glad it’s so good at absorbing pollution.

Susan Cosier reports at YaleEnvironment360, “As cities around the world look to rid their waterways of remaining pollution, researchers are installing artificial islands brimming with grasses and sedges. The islands’ surfaces attract wildlife, while the underwater plant roots absorb contaminants and support aquatic life.

“Five small islands roughly the size of backyard swimming pools float next to the concrete riverbank of Bubbly Creek, a stretch of the Chicago River named for the gas that once rose to the surface after stockyards dumped animal waste and byproducts into the waterway. Clumps of short, native grasses and plants, including sedges, swamp milkweed, and queen of the prairie, rise from a gravel-like material spread across each artificial island’s surface.

A few rectangles cut from their middles hold bottomless baskets, structures that will, project designers hope, provide an attachment surface for freshwater mussels that once flourished in the river.

“Three thousand square feet in total, these artificial wetlands are part of an effort to clean up a portion of a river that has long served the interests of industry. This floating wetland project is one of many proliferating around the world as cities increasingly look to green infrastructure to address toxic legacies. …

“Like natural wetlands, floating versions provide a range of ecosystem services. They filter sediment and contaminants from stormwater, and laboratory experiments show that some plants have the ability to lock up some chemicals and metals found in acid mine drainage. These systems take up excess agricultural nutrients that can lead to algal blooms and dead zones, and recent research suggests they could be used to reduce manmade contaminants that persist in the environment. Though it’s difficult to quantify the exact benefits these systems offer, and they have limitations as a tool in remediating polluted waterways, they could provide another option, researchers say.

“Nick Wesley, executive director of Urban Rivers, a nonprofit working with the Shedd Aquarium on the Chicago project, believes floating systems are a natural fit for the urban environment. …. ‘We’re trying to [restore] what the naturalized river would be.’ In many cities, he continues, floating wetlands could provide a low-cost alternative to conventional infrastructure projects because they’re modular and easy to install and to monitor.

“Wesley’s group began, in 2018, with a floating wetlands project on the Chicago River’s North Branch. Called the Wild Mile, the installation aims to improve water quality and has already begun attracting invertebrates, including mollusks and crustaceans. Last month, the group expanded to the shores of Bubbly Creek. Urban Rivers, Shedd employees, and a team of volunteers bolted together polyethylene and metal frames, draped them with matting, dropped them in the water, added plants, and anchored the islands to the river bottom so they stay in place as the roots grow into the water. …

“Floating wetlands ‘are having a bit of a moment,’ says Richard Grosshans, a research scientist with the International Institute for Sustainable Development who works on the floating structures. ‘They function very similarly to a natural wetland: they have the same processes, plants and microorganisms, bacteria and algae.’ …

“Floating wetlands were first tested in retention ponds, the kind often located near developments to hold stormwater, to see if they filtered pollution. ‘The front end of it was, “Will they work? How well do they work? And what plants should we recommend?” ‘ says Sarah White, an environmental toxicologist and horticulturalist at Clemson University who has worked on floating wetlands since 2006. Partnering with researchers at Virginia Tech, White found that the wetland plants she tested not only did well in ponds with lots of nutrient pollution, but the adaptable, resilient plants actually thrived. She did not always choose native plants, opting instead for those that would make the islands more attractive, so that more urban planners would use them.

“In the early 2010s, Chris Walker, a researcher at the University of South Australia, began testing floating wetlands in wastewater, quantifying the pollutants that four species of plants took up in their tissues and improvements to water quality. Two species, twig rush Baumea articulata and the common reed Phragmites australis, showed the highest uptake of nitrogen and phosphorus of any floating wetland research to date. …

“His team also started testing the ability of floating wetlands to filter out emerging contaminants like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are not always filtered by treatment plants and are linked to elevated cholesterol levels, problems with reproductive health, and kidney and testicular cancers. The reed Phragmites australis placed in a floating wetland began absorbing the pollutant into its tissues in less than a month. …

“In Boston, Max Rome, a PhD student at Northeastern University, is attempting to quantify the benefits of wetlands that have been floating since 2020 in the Charles River, another historically degraded waterway. He found that one acre of wetland can absorb the nutrient pollution — usually dumped into the river via stormwater — from seven to 15 acres of dense urban development.

“Rome is also looking into whether floating wetlands can create small pockets of improved water quality or habitat that allow certain native species, like freshwater sponges, to regain a toehold in the river. To do that, he monitored water quality near the wetlands and compared it to other places in the river.

“ ‘The last generation did a really good job of dealing with point source pollution — and it was a huge task,’ he says, referring to the success of the Clean Water Act in reducing effluent from discharge pipes. His generation has a new job, he adds: grappling with ‘ecological restoration of these degraded water bodies at the same time that we do pollution reduction,’ something the wetlands could help address.”

More at YaleEnvironment360, here. Lovely pictures. No firewall.

Read Full Post »

More on Fairy Circles

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 30, 2022| 1 Comment »

Photo: Thorsten Becker via Wikimedia.
Fairy circles in Namibia, Africa. According to the New York Times, Namibia’s fairy circles may become “embedded within a matrix of fresh green grasses” during the rainy season.

Have you ever wondered about “fairy circles”? So have a lot of other people, scientists included. If you search on the term at this blog, you can see that I have been trying to keep readers abreast of the latest news about fairy circles as it becomes available. Today’s report is by Rachel Nuwer at the New York Times.

“The strange, barren spots pepper the vast Namib Desert, which stretches from southern Angola to northern South Africa. They are known as ‘fairy circles,’ and for a natural phenomenon with such a whimsical name, scientific debates over their origins have been heated.

“ ‘The to and fro between opposing camps has often been nothing less than vitriolic,’ said Michael Cramer, an ecophysiologist at the University of Cape Town who has studied fairy circles.

“Despite decades of research, no consensus exists about the origin of the mysterious formations. Theories have included poisonous gases, noxious bushes and plant-killing microbes or fungi. Two of the explanations — the circles are made by termites, or they result from plants competing over limited water — have dominated the scientific debate. …

“A rigorous study published in October will not end this fight, but it does seem to give the water-related hypothesis a clear lead over the termite theory.

“ ‘Plants are forced to create these circles to redistribute water to maximize their chances of survival,’ said Stephan Getzin, an ecologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany and an author of the study. ‘We call it ecosystem engineering.’

“The Namib Desert is one of the driest places in the world, usually receiving only a few inches of rain each year. Researchers first proposed in 2004 that plants, in competition for water in this harsh ecosystem, may self-organize into fairy circles — an idea originally adapted from pattern-formation theory developed by the mathematician Alan Turing.

“Over the past decade, Dr. Getzin and others have published more than a dozen papers in support of the hypothesis, known as plant water stress.

“For their latest study, Dr. Getzin and his colleagues spent three years examining fairy circles at 10 study sites across 620 miles of desert. One of those years, 2020, was a drought, while 2021 and 2022 were exceptionally rainy — a lucky break that permitted the researchers to compare different conditions, Dr. Getzin said.

“They used soil moisture sensors to collect continuous readings every 30 minutes of water content in the sand in and around fairy circles. They also examined hundreds of individual grass shoots and roots excavated at various intervals from within the circles and the surrounding areas.

After rain, the researchers found that grasses germinated both inside and outside fairy circles, but that within about 20 days virtually all of the young shoots inside a circle had died.

“They also found that the top eight inches of soil within fairy circles quickly dried out, something they hypothesize is caused when established plants surrounding fairy circles actively draw water toward them.

“Plants are constantly transpiring — or losing water — through their leaves. Their roots, meanwhile, take water in. In Namibia’s sandy soil, this creates a vacuum effect that moves water from the interior of fairy circles toward the plants’ roots at the circle’s fringe and beyond. …

“The new paper also speaks to the termite hypothesis, which has been championed by Norbert Jürgens, an ecologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany. He reported in 2013 that fairy circles were in fact generated by sand termites that damage grass roots.

“In the new paper, Dr. Getzin and his colleagues noted that termites were conspicuously missing from their study sites, and that they found no signs of root damage in grass that died after rainfall.

“ ‘We can say the reason is not termites, because there were no termites present at all,’ Dr. Getzin said. ‘The reason is desiccation.’

“Dr. Jürgens declined a request to comment.

“Walter Tschinkel, an entomologist at Florida State University who was not involved in the research but who has published papers in support of the water-stress hypothesis, said the new findings provided ‘more nails in the termite coffin.’ …

“Yvette Naudé, an analytical chemist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa who was not involved in the research, agreed that the new study seemed to confirm that, ‘contrary to popular belief, termite activity does not cause the fairy circles.’ …

“Advocates of the water-stress hypothesis still need to contend with other explanations, Dr. Naudé said. She continues to suspect, based on earlier studies, that something about the composition of fairy circle soil is inhibiting plant growth. …

“One of the reasons so many different fairy circle theories persist, Dr. Cramer said, is that it is exceedingly difficult to prove causation for ‘a long-lived ecological pattern that cannot be replicated in the lab.’ To finally put the debate to rest, he called for ‘some manipulative experiments to test the ideas in the field.’ “

Ready to take sides? Read more at the Times, here. Personally, I will always believe the circles are created by fairies, and no amount of rigorous science will change my view.

Read Full Post »

Animals’ Inner Lives

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 29, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Photo: קלאופטרה.
Part of “Matanya’s graduation project” at Wikipedia. See amusing answers to the perennial question “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

The way the people at the Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, NY, talk about the animals they study reminds me so much of the naturalist Sy Montgomery, a frequent visitor to Boston Public Radio. I only ever heard her speak disparagingly of one critter, and it was one without a brain. To her, all creatures have personalities, even souls.

Emily Anthes reported recently at the New York Times about the Farm Sanctuary.

“It was a crisp October day at Farm Sanctuary, and inside the small, red barn, the chicken people were restless.

“A rooster, or maybe two, yodeled somewhere out of sight. A bruiser of a turkey strutted through an open door, tail feathers spread like an ornamental fan. And a penned flock of white-feathered hens emitted tiny, intermittent squeaks, an asynchronous symphony of chicken sneezes.

“The hens were experiencing a flare-up of a chronic respiratory condition, said Sasha Prasad-Shreckengast, the sanctuary’s manager of research and animal welfare, who was preparing to enter the chicken pen. She donned gloves and shoe covers, threw on a pair of blue scrubs and then slipped inside, squatting to bring herself face-to-face with the first hen who approached.

“ ‘Who are you?’ she cooed.

“Ms. Prasad-Shreckengast meant the question literally. She was trying to find the birds that were enrolled in her study: an investigation into whether chickens — animals not often heralded for their brainpower — enjoy learning.

“But her question was also the big philosophical one driving the new, in-house research team at Farm Sanctuary, a nonprofit that has spent more than 35 years trying to end animal agriculture. …

“A growing body of research suggests that farmed species are brainy beings: Chickens can anticipate the future, goats appear to solicit help from humans, and pigs may pick up on one another’s emotions.

“But scientists still know far less about the minds of chickens or cows than they do about those of apes or dogs, said Christian Nawroth, a scientist studying behavior and cognition at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany. ‘I’m still baffled how little we know about farm animals, given the amount or the numbers that we keep,’ he said. …

‘They have their own desires, and their own wants and preferences and needs, and their own inner lives — the same way that human people do,’ said Lauri Torgerson-White, the sanctuary’s director of research.

“Now the sanctuary is trying to collect enough data to convince the general public of the humanity of animals.

“ ‘Our hope,’ Ms. Torgerson-White said, ‘is that through utilizing really rigorous methodologies, we are able to uncover pieces of information about the inner lives of farmed animals that can be used to really change hearts and minds about how these animals are used by society.’

“The sanctuary is conducting the research in accordance with its own strict ethical standards, which include giving the animals the right to choose whether or not to participate in studies. Consequently, the researchers have sometimes found themselves grappling with the very thing that they are keen to demonstrate: that animals have minds of their own.

“And today, the birds in ‘West Chicken’ seemed a bit under the weather. Ms. Prasad-Shreckengast crossed her fingers that a few of them might still be up for a brief demonstration. …

“Farm Sanctuary began not as a home for rescued animals but with a group of young activists working to expose animal cruelty at farms, stockyards and slaughterhouses.

“ ‘We lived in a school bus on a tofu farm for a couple of years,’ said Gene Baur, the president and co-founder of the organization. But in the course of its investigations, the group kept stumbling upon ‘living animals left for dead,’ he recalled. ‘And so we started rescuing them.’ …

“In 2020, the organization, which now houses about 700 animals, began assembling an internal research team. The goal was to assemble more evidence that, as Mr. Baur put it, ‘these animals are more than just pieces of meat. There’s emotion there.

‘There is individual personality there. There’s somebody, not something.’

“The research team worked with Lori Gruen, an animal ethicist at Wesleyan University, to develop a set of ethics guidelines. The goal, Dr. Gruen explained, was to create a framework for conducting animal research ‘without dominance, without control, without instrumentalization.’

“Among other stipulations, the guidelines prohibit invasive procedures — forbidding even blood draws unless they are medically necessary — and state that the studies must benefit the animals. And participation? It’s voluntary. …

“The idea is not entirely novel. Zoo animals, for instance, are often trained to cooperate in their own health care, as well as in studies that might stem from it. But such practices remain far from the norm.

“For the researchers at Farm Sanctuary, voluntary participation was not only an ethical imperative but also, they thought, a path to better science. Many prior studies have been conducted on farms or in laboratories, settings in which stress or fear might affect animals’ behavior or even impair their cognitive performance, the researchers note.

“ ‘Our hope is that they’re able to tell us more about what the upper limits are for their cognition and emotional capacities and social structures because of the environment that they’re in and because of the way we are performing the research,’ Ms. Torgerson-White said.

“Although the approach is unconventional, outside scientists described the sanctuary’s ethical guidelines as admirable and its research questions as interesting.”

“ ‘The idea that you could study these species, who are usually only studied in sort of pseudofarm conditions, in more naturalistic environments that actually meet not just their needs but even their most arcane preferences — I think they’re right,’ said Georgia Mason, who directs the Campbell Center for the Study of Animal Welfare at the University of Guelph. ‘I think that really allows you to do something special.’ ”

More at the Times, here. You might also be interested in this op-ed at the Times by Sarah Smarsh on the difference between “harvesting” animals on small farms and harvesting them in the big, industrialized farms that dominate our food supply.

Read Full Post »

Plant-Centered Eating

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 28, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Suzanne and John’s Mom.
Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, founded the Small Planet Institute, which focuses on social solutions to environmental, hunger, and political challenges.

The environmental radio show Living on Earth is staying on top of concerns about our global food system and the role it plays in “environmental crises like global warming and water pollution even as it fails to adequately feed billions of people.” Diet for a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappé recently joined host Steve Curwood to discuss how “embracing the plant world in our diets connects to climate, health, and democracy.”

“STEVE CURWOOD: Our present food system is polluting and wasteful. For starters, about a third is thrown away, tossed from kitchens and plates in rich places and spoiled where people can’t afford to refrigerate. And many industrial growing systems pollute and waste as well, using too much water, land and chemicals in ways that also add to climate disaster. Yet around the world more than 2 billion people are food insecure.

“Fifty years ago Frances Moore Lappé wrote the bestselling Diet for a Small Planet in a bid to address the hunger crisis, and along the way she seeded a plant-centered food revolution in the kitchens of America. She joins me now from Belmont, Massachusetts. … Frankie, just to be clear, what is a plant-centered diet?

“FRANCES MOORE: Well, it’s embracing the plant world. When I moved from meat, you know I grew up in Texas cow town, right. So people said oh you’re giving up so much and I said, no, no, no, it’s the plant world that has all the taste differences, the color, the shapes, the textures, you know, it’s where all the yummy stuff is. And so for me being plant centered is I don’t follow recipes a lot but going into the kitchen and looking, you know, seeing what’s there and finding out spices and herbs I love and for example, I turned a basic beans and rice dish into an Italian dish by just changing the herbs that are used in it. It’s called Roman Rice and Beans in Diet for a Small Planet. …

“CURWOOD: So what’s changed in the last 50 years since you wrote Diet for a Small Planet? …

“MOORE: We’re sort of moving in two directions at once because we’ve got it now we know what to do and all over the world, people are aligning with nature to grow our food [but] the dominant extractive approach that is so dangerous and so unnecessary is still going strong. …

“Our food system globally contributes about 37% of greenhouse gas emissions and about 40% of that is from the livestock sector. So that’s a huge contribution. And now I’m calling it a plant- and planet-centered diet because if we really addressed this crisis and grew a healthy plant-centered diet, that would cut the agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by about two-thirds. A professor at the University of Minnesota calculated that it would be the equivalent to removing basically all the vehicles off the planet.

“CURWOOD: Now, people listening to us need to be reassured that you’re not saying you can never eat meat, you’re just telling us to make it a rare occasion. …

“MOORE: I really want to be big tent and to welcome people if they are eager to align with their body because there’s a lot of evidence that this plant-centered stuff is really good for us. … Any step we can take, I celebrate.

“CURWOOD: Now, the meat production industry has gone to great lengths to concentrate operations. …

“MOORE: What woke me up at age 26 [was] that I saw meat production as a protein factory in reverse. Consider this, we use about 80% of our agricultural land to produce livestock, but they give to us only 18% of our calories. So right there, that is pretty darn inefficient and for beef, one estimate says that of the grains fed to livestock we get about 3% to 5% of the calories and protein that we eat from all of that grain that gets fed to livestock in this country. So it’s really hard to imagine anything less efficient. …

“CURWOOD: Tell me a little bit more about the the health risk of red meat.

“MOORE: Well, I was actually shocked to learn recently that the WHO, the World Health Organization, has deemed red meat a probable carcinogen. And when I looked into it a bit that has to do with heme iron in red meat. … And then on processed meat, the WHO has deemed processed meat a carcinogen. …

“CURWOOD: Why [is] the food we eat is also linked to the health of our democracy in your view? …

“MOORE: Our democracy [is] the taproot crisis and we also have a living-planet crisis and we also have an economic crisis [of] concentration of wealth, but the taproot is democracy, because that is the way that we make decisions together to solve problems. [If] we’re going to solve these huge problems of our environment and the impact of farming on climate change, which is quite significant, we have to have democracy. And what we have now I think of as a very corrupted form because private interests those who are benefiting very much from fossil fuels and from the meat-production industry and [they] have tremendous power in Washington. There are now 20 corporate lobbyists in Washington for every single person that you and I elect to represent us in Washington. That is problematic, that is what I call a corrupted system, and that’s why I think it’s so important, Steve, we’ve got to solve these problems, and we’ve got to have democracy to solve them.”

More on that at Living on Earth, here. No firewall.

Read Full Post »

Lucille Corcos Levy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 27, 2022| 4 Comments »

Art: Lucille Corcos Levy.
A family scene in winter, probably South Mountain Road, Rockland County, NY. In the collection of Victor Lloyd.

Would someone please make a Wikipedia entry on artist/illustrator Lucille Corcos? I tried a decade ago, but a Wikipedia moderator took it down. I love the wavy aesthetic of her art — so full of energy and love of life.

At the time that I made my one and only Wikipedia entry, internet links were not considered good enough for citations, and that was the reason given for removal. I have since read that Wikipedia is prejudiced against posts about women and/or by women. I haven’t seen any statistics on that and don’t know if it used to be the case but is no longer.

Lucille Corcos (1909 to 1973) was a working artist who was the main breadwinner for her family, although artist husband Edgar Levy also had a following. She trained at the Art Students’ League in New York City and began professionally as a children’s book illustrator.

I knew the family when I was a child because my father wrote the Upjohn Company’s 10-year-anniversary book with artist Will Burton, who was a Levy neighbor. More recently, I noticed Corcos’s work in a museum. Still, there’s a huge Wikipedia entry for one of her artistic sons, and nothing for her.

I might as well share some of the information I collected on Corcos before giving up, starting with a fascinating book I read (Cipe Pineles Golden and Martha Scotford, Cipe Pineles: A Life in Design [New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999]).

“Lucille and Edgar left the city in 1941 with their son David,” wrote Martha Scotford. “Son Joel was born a couple years later. They moved to South Mountain Road in New City. … Corcos was a successful painter and illustrator by this time. In the 1930s, fashion, culture and home magazines published her work and her popularity continued into the 1960s.

“[Designer] Cipe Pineles’s close friendship with Corcos had begun when Pineles commissioned Corcos’s work for Seventeen and Charm. Her humor in personal interactions and in her art made her an engaging collaborator.

“Corcos’s paintings were densely packed with many small stories and commentary. The compositions had detailed multiple subjects; perspective and scale were distorted for practical and expressive purposes. This new modern primitivism was considered part of a native tradition in American art and its ‘unacademic’ nature was celebrated.

“Corcos’s subjects included rural landscapes and urban scenes, ranging from Christmas Eve, Rockefeller Center, to the Oyster Party to Everybody Meets the Boat. In addition to doing commissioned illustration, Lucille Corcos built her career as a fine artist and was a steady participant in New York gallery shows from 1936 to 1954. During the same time, she was a part of major exhibitions in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other institutions in New York.”

Click here for the Corcos books held in the University of Minnesota’s Children’s Literature Research Collections, where you can also find a write-up about her work for Fortune magazine and links to the pictures.

I remember the family’s actual Fire Island house (painted in 1950), here, and I want to point out that Everybody Meets the Boat is another classic Fire Island scene.

If any reader is better at research than I am, maybe you could find an article I heard was in the July 12, 1954, issue of Life magazine showing two Corcos paintings, one of her life in a wintery Rockland County, another of activities around the Fire Island house in summer.

Sorry this is all a bit jumbled. Maybe that’s the real reason the moderator deleted what I wrote at Wikipedia. Someone more knowledgable should tackle this worthy subject.

Read Full Post »

Gotta Love Icelanders

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 26, 2022| 7 Comments »

Photo: PenguinRandomHouse.
In Iceland, Christmas Eve signals the long-awaited “book flood,” Jólabókaflóð. Icelanders love to read. And the prime minister writes books herself.

Up at a Vermont ski lodge as Christmas approached, Suzanne’s family experienced the power outage from the latest winter storm. What is there to do in darkness but read a book by candlelight — or at least by headlamp? They did.

In Iceland, where winters are especially dark, Icelanders love to read.

David Mouriquand reports, “Euronews Culture was recently in Reykjavík for the European Film Awards, and while in the city, we sat down with Iceland’s Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, one of only eight women in power in Europe. 

“She made her mark on the global cultural map this year when she published her first thriller novel, entitled Reykjavík, which she co-wrote with best-selling author of the ‘Dark Iceland’ series Ragnar Jónasson.

“Jakobsdóttir, former minister of education, science and culture, is the chairperson of the Left-Green movement and has been serving as the prime minister since 2017. …

“I’d be remiss not to mention the fact that you published a novel this year, a crime novel. It’s not the first time that this has happened in Iceland, as one of your predecessors, Davíð Oddsson, published a novel when he was in office. What is it about writing and the crime / noir genre that appeals to you?

“I used to study crime fiction. I studied Icelandic literature and crime fiction was my main topic, so I have always enjoyed crime. In fiction, not in reality! And I actually was writing my master’s thesis when the Icelandic crime novel was flourishing and becoming rather big. It has become even bigger in the last decade or so. And it has been a longstanding dream to write a novel of my own, but I definitely would not have done it if I didn’t have this co-author (Ragnar Jónasson), who pushed me and said: ‘We have to do this together!’

“I must admit that I really enjoyed writing it, and I think that even us politicians can be creative. I think it’s very good for us, because sometimes we are not very creative in our politics! And it’s because the writing time was during the time of the pandemic, when I was totally absorbed in the virus and was getting, let’s say, obsessed with the virus and its effects and what we were doing.

“So having this kind of pet project to think about sometimes late in the evening or when I had an hour or two actually saved my mental health during the pandemic.

“The more I thought about you writing your novel, the more I thought: Wouldn’t the world be a better place if world leaders took the time to embrace a creative outlet? So, tap dancing for Biden, or oil painting for Macron… Terrible ideas, granted, but as you say, it’s very good for politicians to get creative…

“I definitely think that the world would be a better place! Not just politicians, but all of us. I don’t think we all do major works of art, but I think it’s a very healthy thing to really grow and nurture that creative strength that I think we all have. I don’t think we do enough of it. So, yes definitely, the world would be a better place.” More at EuroNewsCulture, here.

Sara Miller Llana at the Christian Science Monitor stresses that Iceland as a whole is a book-loving country: “Hördur Gudmundsson spends the better part of his day with a book in his hands – but only in winter.

“As the skies darken, he will spend full mornings at his favorite bookstore, IÐA Zimsen, near the Icelandic capital’s harbor. After supper he’ll turn to his hobby: bookbinding. He’s already bound all the works of Iceland’s most famous author, Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness, and now is deep into the works of Gunnar Gunnarsson.

“By Icelandic standards, this doesn’t make him a fringe book buff. Iceland is known as one of the world’s most literary countries, when it comes to the love of both reading and writing. 

‘It must be in our mother’s milk,’ says Mr. Gudmundsson, a retired trades teacher.

“Books in Reykjavík, the first nonnative English-speaking city to be designated a UNESCO City of Literature, are everywhere. At one breakfast spot, the counter serves as a giant bookshelf. Tomes are piled onto the sills of steamed-up cafe windows.

“The streets of Reykjavík are an ode to the characters of the medieval sagas. Written in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Icelandic sagas retell the exploits of Norse settlers beginning in the ninth century. The works are a source of pride and a pillar of Iceland’s literary sensibilities. Tours in Iceland’s only city take visitors to the birthplaces of authors like Mr. Laxness and the scenes of plot twists in Nordic noir, a booming genre.” More here.

The WordPress site Jólabókaflóð.org posted the “founding story,” here.

And if you search on the word “Jólabókaflóð,” you will find lots of other fun articles.

Read Full Post »

Peace on Earth

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 25, 2022| 2 Comments »

“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” is song that really makes you think. Not the usual jolly fare, it speaks solemnly about how humanity has fallen short of the universal ideals the holiday is supposed to represent. Do we make peace our priority?

I myself stand accused of not focusing enough on ending war, given that I want to see Ukrainians triumph over the Russian invasion last February. It’s complicated. Of course I wish the heroic people fighting back didn’t have to die, but I have to respect why they are fighting.

The hymn is also hopeful because it reminds us that there are others who feel as we do and long for peace everywhere.

The carol was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Dec. 25, 1863, in response to the near fatal wound his son, Charles Appleton Wadsworth, received at the Mine Run campaign in Virginia during the Civil War. Now, that’s a heartbreaking war!

Blogger Will McMillan of “A Musical Life on Planet Earth” has a lovely rendition of the carol that you can listen to here. And today I would like to share this version from the group Casting Crowns.

Read Full Post »

At the Boston Pops

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 24, 2022| Leave a Comment »

In spite of living in the Greater Boston area for 40 years, I had never been to the Boston Pops. I decided to check out this year’s holiday concert and go by public transportation.

The Red Line subway track was being repaired and was not in use that Saturday, so the transportation ended up being a problem, but I was glad I went. It was lovely.

One of the pieces featured was the premier of composer Arturo Rodríguez’s Noche de Posadas (The Night of Las Posadas), which was based on a Mexican tradition and tied to a children’s book by the late author/illustrator Tomie dePaola.

Rodríguez, a native of Mexico, wrote in the program about the custom that inspired dePaola’s storybook and about working on the commission from the Boston Pops Orchestra.

“The enduring tradition of Las Posadas in México,” he wrote, “is a representation of Joseph and Mary and their pilgrimage from Nazareth to Bethlehem. The community organizes into two groups, those who accompany the couple while they go from door to door in search of shelter and those inside the houses that reject them. These are done by singing the traditional litany. Finally the couple are welcomed, and a big celebration with food and the emblematic piñata takes place. The piñata, symbolizing the triumph of faith over sin, must have 7 spikes, each of them representing a capital sin. The candy and fruit inside the piñata represent the grace of God. The high point of the celebration is when the piñata breaks and the guests are showered by all the blessings that fall from it.

“When I was asked to compose a work about the Mexican Christmas tradition of Las Posadas, to be premiered by the Boston Pops Orchestra conducted by maestro Keith Lockhart during the Holiday season of 2022, I was delighted and honored, and immediately I had a flashback to my childhood.

“I clearly remember this particular day, growing up in my hometown of Monterrey, México (I must have been around 7 years old), when I had to stay home and skip school because it had snowed, a rare occurrence in that city. Luckily for me, the local TV cultural channel was showing a Christmas concert with the Boston Pops Orchestra conducted by maestro John Williams. The cold weather, the warm blankets, and the beautiful music that came out of the TV set have stayed in my mind and soul all these years.

“Cut to the present: having the opportunity to compose a work through which I can share my Mexican culture with the Boston audience as well as the amazing musicians of the Boston Pops Orchestra and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus at Symphony Hall, that same venue I saw on the TV set as a child, is truly the best Christmas gift I could ever receive.

“The resulting work for orchestra with narrator and choir is also inspired and built around the touching children’s book written and illustrated by Tomie dePaola, The Night of Las Posadas. I hope this music lifts you from your seats and takes you right into the heart of some magical Mexican town and that you are embraced by the flavors, rhythms, and colors of this beautiful tradition of my home country.”

Also in the concert program, I learned about Karina Beleno Carney, who narrated the storybook in between sections of the music. “A Massachusetts-based actor, Karina has appeared this year in Central Square Theater’s Young Nerds of Color, Apollinaire Theater’s Don’t Eat the Mangos, and Huntington Theatre’s Breaking Ground Festival of New Work in Rough Magic. A first-generation Colombian American and mother of three, Karina is thrilled to bring the Latine children’s book The Night of Las Posadas to life with the Boston Pops.”

In the book, the couple playing Mary and Joseph for Las Posadas get stalled by a snowstorm, but the village doesn’t know it because everything goes on as it’s supposed to. How is that possible?

Enjoy this night, wherever you are. Try to find the hidden magic in it.

Read Full Post »

Chinese Food on Christmas Day

Posted in Uncategorized on December 23, 2022| 5 Comments »

Photo:  LauriPatterson/Getty Images.
Eating in Chinese restaurants on Christmas has a particular history in New York.

As a child reveling in the wonders of Christmas, I didn’t think about what friends from other faith traditions did on the big day. Most stores and entertainment venues are closed. Most restaurants, too. But, fortunately, there are Chinese restaurants.

At Mental Floss, Kirstin Fawcett writes, “For Jewish New Yorkers, scoring a seat at one of veteran restaurateur Ed Schoenfeld’s Chinese eateries on Christmas Day could be compared to a holiday miracle. ‘I think on that day we do more business than many restaurants do in three months,’ Schoenfeld told Mental Floss in 2017. ‘We serve all day long, we stay open all day long.’

“Schoenfeld is the Jewish owner-operator of RedFarm, an Asian-fusion dim sum restaurant. … While his expertise lies in Far Eastern cuisine, Schoenfeld grew up in Brooklyn and learned to cook from his Eastern European grandmother. And just like his customers, Schoenfeld and his family sometimes craved Chinese food on Christmas, eschewing homemade fare for heaping plates of chow mein and egg foo yung. The future restaurateur’s grandmother kept a kosher kitchen, but outside the home all dietary laws flew out the window with the single spin of a Lazy Susan. Suddenly, egg rolls with pork were fair game, transfigured into permissible delicacies through hunger and willful ignorance. …

“Jews developed their love for all things steamed, stir-fried, and soy-sauced after leaving the Old Country. Between the mid-1800s and the 1930s, waves of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Germany, and Greece began settling in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a gritty, inexpensive neighborhood teeming with tenements, docks, and factories—and filled with synagogues and kosher butcher shops. ‘You started here, and then moved on,’ Sarah Lohman, author of Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, said.

“While Jewish immigrants found community on the Lower East Side, ‘there was a lot of discrimination against Jews at the turn of the century,’ Lohman added. ‘They were often criticized not only for not dressing like Americans and not speaking the language, but also for not converting to an “American” religion.’

“Right next door to the burgeoning Jewish community on the Lower East Side was the city’s nascent Chinatown. Many Chinese immigrants had initially come to the U.S. to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. After its completion in 1869, these laborers faced violence and discrimination in the western states. They came to New York City seeking new business opportunities, and some opened restaurants.

“By and large, Chinese restaurateurs didn’t discriminate against Jewish customers. Joshua Eli Plaut wrote in his book A Kosher Christmas: ‘Tis the Season to be Jewish that the Chinese, as non-Christians, didn’t perceive any difference between Anglo-Saxon New Yorkers and Jewish immigrants.

They accepted all non-Chinese customers with open arms.

“Jewish customers embraced Chinese food in return. The restaurants were conveniently located and inexpensive, yet were also urbane in their eyes. … According to Yong Chen, a history professor and author of Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America, ‘[Diners] were attracted to Chinese food because, in their mind, it represented American cosmopolitanism and middle class status.’ And they weren’t deterred by the fact that food in Chinese restaurants wasn’t kosher. But they could easily pretend it was.

“Dairy wasn’t a big part of Chinese meals, so Jewish diners didn’t have to worry about mixing meat and milk (a no-no in kosher diets). And non-kosher ingredients like pork or seafood were often finely chopped, drowned in sauces, or mixed with other ingredients, like rice. These elements were well disguised enough that they could pass for more permissible forms of meat. ‘You could kind of willfully ignore that there might be pork in there,’ Lohman said. ‘It’s like a vegetarian eating a soup that has chicken stock. If you’re a little flexible about your Judaism, you would just “not notice” the pork in your fried rice.’

“Chinese food was exotic and new, filled with surprising flavors, ingredients, and textures. But for some Eastern European Jews, it also had familiar elements. Both Eastern European and Chinese cuisines shared an affinity for sweet and sour flavors and egg-based dishes. ‘[Chinese restaurants] had these pancakes, which were like blintzes,’ said Joan Nathan, author of King Solomon’s Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from Around the World, and the wontons resembled kreplach (both are meat-filled soup dumplings).

“The fact that the Chinese and Jews were America’s two largest non-Christian immigrant populations brought them together, Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, told Mental Floss in 2017. Unlike, say, Italian restaurants, Chinese restaurants were open on Sundays and on Christian holidays. They also lacked religious imagery, which may have made them appear more welcoming for Jews. …

“Yet, an unwavering affection for Chinese food wasn’t shared by all Jews. In an example cited by Chen and Lee, a reporter for Der Tog (The Day), a Yiddish daily newspaper in New York City, noted in 1928 that Jewish diners were in danger of drowning their culinary roots in soy sauce. To take back their taste buds, Jewish-Americans should hoist protest signs reading ‘Down with chop suey! Long live gefilte fish!’ the journalist joked.

“But Jewish cookbooks had already begun including Americanized dishes like chop suey and egg foo yung, which Chinese chefs had specially created to appeal to homegrown appetites. And as Lower East Side Jews moved to different neighborhoods, boroughs, and suburbs, Chinese restaurants followed them.

“By the mid-20th century, Nathan said, Chinese restaurants had become de facto social clubs in Jewish communities. Familiar faces were always present, children were always welcome, and eating with your hands wasn’t just encouraged—it was required. …

“Thanks to immigration patterns, nostalgia, and convenient hours of operation, this culinary custom has stuck around. … Schoenfeld, the Manhattan restaurateur, said, ‘It’s become a tradition, and it’s extraordinary how it’s really grown.’ ”

More at Mental Floss, here.

Read Full Post »

Going to the Hospital, At Home

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 22, 2022| 6 Comments »

Photo: Deniz Altindas via Unsplash.
New approaches in health care include meditation exercises and hospital care at home.

A couple of my doctors are convinced that people who are good at daily meditation are building new brain cells. I’m not convinced that I can do it, but I’m giving it the old college try. I go to a weekly class where we just sit and breathe. And I listen to an online meditation I like because it seems to give me permission to be “off duty” in so many ways. Trying to be good at meditation, for example, is out.

In another new approach to improving health care, hospitals are responding to both costs and the understanding that many acute-care patients fare better if they get the care they need at home, in their familiar surroundings.

Paula Span pursues the insights at the New York Times.

“Late last month, Raymond Johnson, 83, began feeling short of breath. ‘It was difficult just getting around,’ he recently recalled by phone from his apartment in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood in Boston. ‘I could barely walk up and down the stairs without tiring.’

“Like many older adults, Mr. Johnson contends with a variety of chronic health problems: arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, heart failure and the heart arrhythmia known as atrial fibrillation.

“His doctor ordered a chest X-ray and, when it showed fluid accumulating in Mr. Johnson’s lungs, told him to head for the emergency room at Faulkner Hospital, which is part of the Mass General Brigham health system.

“Mr. Johnson spent four days as an inpatient being treated for heart failure and an asthma exacerbation: one day in a hospital room and three in his own apartment, receiving hospital-level care through an increasingly popular — but possibly endangered — alternative that Medicare calls Acute Hospital Care at Home.

“The eight-year-old Home Hospital program run by Brigham and Women’s Hospital [is] one of the country’s largest and provided care to 600 people last year; it will add more patients this year and is expanding to include several hospitals in and around Boston.

“ ‘Americans have been trained for 100 years to think that the hospital is the best place to be, the safest place,’ said the program’s medical director, Dr. David M. Levine.

‘But we have strong evidence that the outcomes are actually better at home.’

“A few such programs began 30 years ago, and the Veterans Health Administration adopted them more than a decade ago. But the hospital-at-home approach stalled, largely because Medicare would not reimburse hospitals for it. Then, in 2020, Covid-19 spurred significant changes.

“With hospitals suddenly overwhelmed, ‘they needed beds,’ said Ab Brody, a professor of geriatric nursing at New York University and an author of a recent editorial on hospital-at-home care in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. ‘And they needed a safe place for older adults, who were particularly at risk.’

“In November 2020, Medicare officials announced that, while the federally declared public health emergency continued, hospitals could apply for a waiver of certain reimbursement requirements — notably, for 24/7 on-site nursing care. Hospitals whose applications were approved would receive the same payment for hospital-at-home care as for in-hospital care.

“Since then, Medicare has granted waivers to 256 hospitals in 37 states. … But Medicare’s waivers are not permanent. The public health emergency remains in effect until January; although the Biden administration will likely extend it, state health officials are anticipating its end at some point next year, perhaps by spring.

“What will happen to hospital-at-home care then? Twenty-seven percent of programs that participated in a poll by the Hospital at Home Users Group said that they were unlikely to keep offering the option without a waiver, and 40 percent were unsure; 33 percent said that their programs were likely to continue. …

“Studies have repeatedly documented the risks of hospital stays to seniors, even when the conditions that made the stay necessary are adequately treated. Older adults are vulnerable to cognitive problems and infections; they lose physical strength from inadequate nutrition and days of inactivity, and they may not regain it. Many patients require another hospitalization within a month. One prominent cardiologist has called this debilitating pattern ‘post-hospital syndrome.’

“Had Mr. Johnson remained in the hospital, ‘he would have been lying in bed for four or five days,’ Dr. Levine said, adding: ‘He would have become very deconditioned. He could have caught C. diff or MRSA’ — two common hospital-acquired infections. ‘He could have caught Covid,’ Dr. Levine continued. ‘He could have fallen. Twenty percent of people over 65 become delirious during a hospital stay.’

“Patients must consent to hospital-at-home care. Almost one-third of Brigham and Women’s patients decline to participate because the hospital setting feels safer or is more convenient. But Mr. Johnson was delighted to leave, when an attending doctor told him that his conditions were treatable through hospital-at-home care. …

“At home, a doctor saw him three times, twice in person and once by video. A registered nurse or a specifically trained paramedic visited twice daily. They brought the drugs and the equipment Mr. Johnson needed: prednisone and a nebulizer for his asthma, and diuretics (including one administered intravenously) to reduce the excess fluid caused by heart failure. All the while, a small sensor attached to his chest transmitted his heart and respiratory rates, his temperature and his activity levels to the hospital.

“Had Mr. Johnson needed additional monitoring (to ensure that he was taking medications as scheduled, for instance), food deliveries or home health aides, the program could have provided those. If he needed scans or experienced an emergency, an ambulance could have returned him to the hospital.

“But he recovered well without any of those interventions. About a week after he was discharged, Mr. Johnson said he was ‘much better, much better,’ and that he would recommend hospital-at-home care to anyone. …

“ ‘Are there people who need to be in a hospital?’ Dr. Leff said. ‘Absolutely.’ Surgeries, complex testing and intensive care still require a building and its staff. Nonetheless, he added, hospital-at-home initiatives demonstrate that more care could be provided outside bricks-and-mortar facilities.

“ ‘Hospitals in the future will be big emergency rooms, operating rooms and intensive care units,’ [Dr. Bruce Leff, a geriatrician at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine] said. ‘Almost everything else will move to the community — or should.’ ”

More at the Times, here.

Read Full Post »

An Orchestra’s Dementia Work

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 21, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Photo: BBC.
Carer Beth Forster leads music workshops for seniors with dementia in the UK.

At Thanksgiving, we had the pleasure of meeting Meg, a relatively new member of our family who shared a bit about using music therapy with hospitalized patients suffering from mental illness. So I was interested to read today’s story about a similar music program in the UK, one that focuses on people with dementia.

Sarah Gwynne and Woody Morris had this report at the BBC.

“An orchestra is attempting to bring people living with dementia back into the present. The work being done by Manchester Camerata has never been more important, given that there are about 900,000 people with the condition in the UK, a number that is predicted to nearly double by 2040. …

“People with dementia often find listening to music can reignite old memories from long ago. Much more overlooked, though, is the impact that making music can have on the present.

“While some with dementia can often feel trapped in the past, some researchers believe the act of creating music – as well as listening to it – can help to reconnect them to the here and now.

“A new BBC documentary — Dementia, Music and Us — follows the work of Manchester Camerata and its principal flautist Amina Hussain.

“Amina, who is also a professional music therapist, leads classes across the north-west of England that have been described as life-changing.

” ‘Taking part in the ‘Music in Mind’ workshops has been an enormous privilege for me as a musician,’ she said. …

“Classes for the community consist of improvisation, singing, and writing their own music and lyrics.

“Keith Taylor, 62, was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia when he was 53. … Like many, he really struggled to come to terms with his new reality.

” ‘The best way I could explain it,’ he said, ‘is if you’re in a pine-wooded area and all of the trees are in grids and blocks and you’re walking through that and it’s dark and you can see the mist coming up behind you and you can feel it catching you.’ …

“Keith’s partner of 14 years, Joan, said they had found the sessions to be genuinely life-changing. ‘I think the thing that saved us was the first ever music group we went to because from that group it opened other groups up for us,’ she said. ‘It’s been fantastic.’

“Keith added: ‘I live life every week. Not every day — every week because I’ve got music sessions.’ He said the workshops ‘make him smile, enjoy life and it just brings the best out of you.’

“Researcher Dr Robyn Dowlen is seeking to better understand the ‘in the moment’ benefits of music-making for people with dementia. … She believes the improvisational music workshop experience allows people to ‘create something that is held now in the moment.’

“Keith described how the sessions and being in what Dr Dowlen calls the ‘musical spotlight’ had helped him ‘stand up taller.’

“Dr Dowlen added: ‘Improvisational music-making is particularly important for people with dementia, especially when it comes to building their confidence and their self-esteem.’

“Beth Forster, from Liverpool, started her career in caring as a volunteer two years ago when she found herself furloughed during the pandemic. When a staff position subsequently became available she applied and has never looked back.

“The 28-year-old decided to get involved in the music workshops after news began to spread about the positive impact they could have on those living in care homes. A musician herself, Beth received training from Manchester Camerata’s professional music therapists so she could lead her own workshops.

“Beth said: ‘I feel like I’ve got more strategies to bring residents into the present to help them if they’re distressed… I can’t really believe this is my job. … it is a real privilege.’ “

More at the BBC, here.

Read Full Post »

Photos of the Season

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 20, 2022| 12 Comments »

Photo: Suzanne’s Mom.
One of my granddaughters made this gingerbread house from a kit. The idea for a carrot was her own.

Time for another photo round-up.

Sandra M. Kelly surprised us with a picture of Patrick making a mince pie for Thanksgiving. And, here, we thought Sandra was the only chef!

The hellabore below loves cold weather. You can understand why it’s sometimes called Christmas Rose.

My husband sent me photos of mysterious “ice flowers,” taken by Ned Friedman, director of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. The flowers formed the other day on a herbaceous Chinese plant called Isodon henryi, and even Friedman doesn’t know for sure what conditions cause the phenomenon.

Sandra also sent the photograph of the Christmas cactus. She’s a genius at rescuing cacti that people like me can never get to bloom. I have her instructions if you want to try.

In the next picture, you see our niece, who’s a genius with youth orchestras in North Carolina. She gets pretty worn out with concerts at this time of year.

Stuga40’s snowy image was shot in Stockholm. She is now in New England for a visit with Erik, Suzanne, and our half-Swedish grandchildren. Maybe she’ll have other snowy photos after the family goes skiing in Vermont.

The next snow scene was shot in my own yard. Our first snow this year. The last two photos need no explanation.

PS. 12/22/22. I’m sharing the worn bench at Hannah’s church in Philadelphia, because I love worn benches. I wish I had photographed the really beat-up one I admired on a train platform yesterday.

Read Full Post »

Covid Murals

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 19, 2022| 6 Comments »

Photos: John.

John was in Malden yesterday and saw the Covid murals on the bike path. He was stunned. I tried to find a descriptive article about them online but ended up having to copy lines of poems from the photos on Flickr. I hope I got all the punctuation right. Poets care about such things.

How soon we forget what it was like to be deep in the midst of this! When we thought protecting ourselves meant wiping down the groceries with bleach. When doctors and nurses were having to reuse masks and were sending out pleas for people to find old masks in their garage workshops and take them to emergency rooms. When there were few test kits and no vaccines. How soon we forget it was all about breath and breathing!

The memorial to lost lives in Malden features both art and written words. These are excerpts from the poems.

Terry E. Carter wrote a poem about his mother called “Ventilation.”

“She wouldn’t wear a mask.
“I couldn’t even ask. …
“Said her freedom meant more than anything —
“wasn’t gonna let the liberals win.”

Ten-year-old Elliana J. Shahan’s poem “Because of You” honors farmers, shopkeepers, postal workers, doctors, teachers, and all who kept the world running in the dark times.

Jessica Frazier Vasquez’s is poem about the beep beep beep of her dad’s ventilator showing he was at least still alive: “It tells me that you’re still fighting/Battling to come back.” At least for a while.

Sharon Briner Santillo’s poem noted how one never used to know what was going on behind a neighbor’s windows and how one may feel more connected now.

“I know you
“Your sorrowful heart
“Your beautiful resilience …
“I know you
“And you know me.”

There is another by Dina Stander called “Breath”: “May her memory be for a blessing.” And one by Denise Keating called “A Slow Goodbye” about her father, who had already been paralyzed by a stroke for 10 years.

“We hovered by the window
“Moths fluttering for your voice
“We went away.
“You slipped away.
“And now.
“Guilt-stricken.
“Paralyzed.
“We let you go.
“We didn’t want you to fight.
“But we still struggle
“To remember
“To breathe.

More at MaldenArts, here. Be sure to look at the Flickr pictures, here: you can zoom in to read the words. Most of the poems are not literary, but all are heartfelt.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »