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A Surprising Kind of Moth

August 4, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Lucinda Gibson and Ken Walker/Museum Victoria.
The endangered bogong moth can travel great distances to a place it has never been to before. It uses the stars to navigate.

Some of the least prepossessing critters in nature often have interesting attributes that could teach us a lot if we pay attention.

Ari Daniel reports at National Public Radio (NPR), “The Bogong moths of Australia aren’t much to look at, says Andrea Adden, a neurobiologist at the Francis Crick Institute. ‘They’re small brown moths with arrow-like markings on the wings. They’re pretty nondescript.’

“But these insects undertake an epic migration twice in their lifetime, traveling hundreds of miles in each direction.

“Researchers have shown that the Earth’s magnetic field helps the moths orient, but that alone wasn’t sufficient. ‘They needed something visual to go with it,’ says Adden.

“She wanted to know what that cue might be over such a vast landscape — especially at night when there’s little light.

“In a paper published in the journal Nature, Adden and her colleagues show that the cue comes from the heavens. That is, the starry sky allows the Bogong moths to both orient and navigate.

“Bogong moths follow an annual rhythm. They hatch in their breeding grounds in the spring in southeast Australia where it gets really hot in the summertime. ‘So if they were to reproduce immediately, their larvae would starve because there is not enough food,’ says Adden.

“Instead, the moths migrate over multiple nights more than 600 miles south to the Australian Alps where they settle in cooler caves, entering into a dormant phase called estivation (like hibernation but in the summer), by the millions. …

“In the fall, they return to their breeding grounds, mate, lay their eggs, and die.

” ‘Then the next year, the new moths hatch,’ says Adden. ‘And they’ve never been to the mountains. They have no parents who can tell them how to get there.’ And yet they make it.

“She suspected the stars might offer just the cue they need. To test her theory, Adden, who was doing her Ph.D. at Lund University in Sweden at the time, and her colleagues caught moths in the Australian Alps and ran them through one of two experiments in the dead of night.

“The first was a behavioral test. It involved placing a moth inside what was basically a mini-planetarium that contained a projection of the night sky and no magnetic field. … The result surprised the researchers.

” ‘They didn’t just circle and do twists and turns, but they actually chose a fairly stable direction,’ she said. ‘Not only that, it was their migratory direction.’ In other words, the moths were using the starry sky as a compass cue to orient and navigate.

“Adden’s next question involved what was happening in the moth’s brain. She recorded the electrical activity of individual neurons while rotating a projection of the Milky Way.

“When she looked in the brain regions that process visual information, the majority of neurons were active when the moth was facing south. This specific direction suggests that the moths’ brains encode direction by processing visual cues of the Milky Way. …

“The moths’ ability to use both visual and magnetic information to navigate can be essential for survival — in case it’s cloudy, say, or the magnetic field is unreliable. ‘If one fails, they have a backup system,’ says [biologist Pauline Fleischmann at the University of Oldenburg].

“The Bogong moths are endangered. Adden says her findings could help conserve these insects — and everything that relies on them for food.”

More at NPR, here.

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Hunters Who Refused to Kill a Bear

August 3, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Paulius Peciulis/AP.
This young bear was recorded by a hunter in the forest calmly feasting on baits in Pabradė, Lithuania, in June. 

When I was young, I was surprised when my conservationist mother told me that hunting organizations like Ducks Unlimited were often sollid partners in protecting nature. But when I thought about it, I reaized that, of course, if you’re a duck hunter, you want enough ducks to hunt, and that means protecting their habitat.

Something similar may be the thinking of the Lithuanian hunters in today’s story who refused to shoot a bear.

Bears have started reappearing in small numbers, typically wandering in from neighboring countries such as Latvia and Belarus, where small bear populations still exist.

From the Associated Press in Warsaw via the Guardian: “A young female bear caused a stir after wandering out of the forest and into the leafy suburbs of the Lithuanian capital.

“For two days, the brown bear ambled through the neighborhoods of Vilnius, trotted across highways and explored backyards – all while being chased by onlookers with smartphones and, eventually, drones.

“The government then issued a permit allowing the bear to be shot and killed if it became aggressive and posed a threat to human life.

“That did not go down well with Lithuania’s hunters who, aware that there were only a tiny number of the protected species in the entire country, refused.

“The Lithuanian association of hunters and fishermen said it was shocked by the government’s approach.

“The association’s administrator, Ramutė Juknytė, said the bear was a beautiful young female who was about two years old and did not deserve to be shot. ‘She was scared but not aggressive. She just didn’t know how to escape the city, but she didn’t do anything bad,’ he said.

“The organization tracks the movements of bears. It believes there are only five to 10 bears in the Baltic country but does not have a precise number.

“The drama began [when] the bear entered the capital. It was the first time in many years that a bear had entered the city and it became a national story. The animal came within about 2-3 miles of the city center.

“Since causing a stir with their permit to kill the bear, Lithuanian authorities have been on the defensive. The deputy environment minister, Ramūnas Krugelis, said that the kill permit had been issued purely as a precaution in case the bear posed a threat, according to a report by the Lithuanian broadcaster LRT.

“The hunters proposed a more humane approach: sedation, tracking and relocation.

“As the debate over the bear’s fate unfolded, she took matters into her own paws and wandered out of the city. …

“Brown bears are native to the region and were once common. They were wiped out in Lithuania in the 19th century as a result of hunting and habitat loss.

“In recent years, they have started reappearing in small numbers, typically wandering in from neighboring countries such as Latvia and Belarus, where small bear populations still exist.

“Bears are protected under Lithuanian and EU law as they are considered a rare and vulnerable species in the region.” More at the Guardian, here.

Do you or your family members hunt? Over time, I’ve seen repeatedly that real hunters are supporters of gun-safety laws as well as conservation. They are definitely not the people who buy machine guns and shoot up schools. I hope that more and more, hunters will be the ones leading the charge for safety laws. Their viewpoint probably carries the most weight.

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Vermont Farms Promote Sustainability

August 2, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Riley Robinson/Staff.
Organic farmers Kayleigh Boyle and Doug Wolcik stand in a hoop house at Breadseed Farm in Craftsbury, Vermont.

‘I have long believed this is a bipartisan issue,’ says John Klar, a Vermont farmer who in 2022 ran for a Vermont state Senate seat as a Republican.

One reason I like the Christian Science Monitor is that it’s so good at searching out stories of divided Americans coming together. Today’s example features a diverse group of Vermont farmers promoting sustainable practices and eat-local values.

Stephanie Haines writes, “Kayleigh Boyle and Doug Wolcik knew all the reasons not to farm in Vermont: the short growing season, the hilly terrain, the dirt roads that make it hard to get products to market.

“Even the size of most farms here is a problem. For decades, farms across the United States have gotten larger as agricultural policies pushed growers to consolidate and scale up their operations. Vermont’s farms, however, have stayed relatively small. According to conventional wisdom, that means unprofitable.

“But small was what the couple wanted. Ms. Boyle is from Vermont, and while studying at Emerson College in Boston, she worked an office job connected to the local food movement. But she quickly realized she wanted to be outside with her hands in the earth.

“Mr. Wolcik graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he studied sustainable agriculture and community food systems. He, too, realized he wanted a life close to the soil.

“They met while working at a nonprofit farm outside Boston and soon discovered they shared a dream about buying their own acreage to grow food and flowers. They weren’t interested in a massive operation. Instead, their vision included no-till growing methods, hand tools, and a desire to build a ‘human scale’ production system.

“They also wanted to make their living entirely from their farm – something increasingly difficult to do in New England. Over the past 60 years, the region has lost 80% of its farmland. …

“They spent years saving money and scouring Zillow listings and USDA soil surveys online. They eventually found a 16-acre property at the edge of Vermont’s rural Northeast Kingdom, complete with a house and a flat, 2-acre plot that got a lot of sun. In September 2020, they decided to take the plunge.

“And they’ve thrived. ‘We’ve just far exceeded any expectations that we set for ourselves,’ says Mr. Wolcik. ‘We’re selling everything we can. We can’t even grow enough. There’s such demand for it, from restaurants to retail to wholesale to markets,’ he says. ‘We can’t produce enough product fast enough.’

“Some of this is because of the couple themselves: Ms. Boyle’s sense of marketing, Mr. Wolcik’s attention to detail and innovation, and the experience and high standards they share as growers.

“But it is also because, when they bought these rare flat acres, they joined a community actively building a new storyline around farming, food, and resilience in New England.

“Here, in this part of little Vermont, statewide population 648,000, a coalition of farmers, nonprofits, and residents is eschewing mainstream beliefs about what makes agriculture successful and what it means to create a prosperous economy.

“Instead, they are building a system in which farmers are able to make a living and residents can eat healthy food grown nearby. They are intentionally moving away from a global supply chain vulnerable to market shocks – everything from pandemics to tariffs to natural disasters. …

“Across the country, communities on all sides of the political spectrum are reimagining the way Americans produce and value what they eat, tapping into a simmering belief that something is amiss with how detached, both economically and nutritionally, we have become from this fundamental human sector. …

“Subsistence farming gave way to commercial dairying and gardening for market. Refrigeration, and the resulting large-scale grocery stores, meant individuals didn’t need to spend their time growing food. Urbanization and competition from out-of-region farms followed.

“Still, what we think of as the modern food system is largely a phenomenon of recent decades. This includes a global supply chain, factory farming, and ultraprocessed foods, which now make up more than 50% of the calories in the American diet, according to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. What people tend to think of as the ‘local food movement’ is also relatively new. 

“[Although fascination] with locally grown organic foods became popularly associated with progressives – and was regularly criticized as elitist – there was also an emerging libertarian and conservative desire for a different, more localized sort of food system.

“ ‘I have long believed this is a bipartisan issue,’ says John Klar, a Vermont farmer who in 2022 ran for a Vermont state Senate seat as a Republican, a bid that fell short. ‘If there’s one thing that should bring Americans together, it is local, healthy food.’

“To him, the small farm is inherently conservative – a rejection of what he sees as dangerous globalism. It is a return to self-sufficiency, and far more environmentally and climate friendly, he says, than the traditionally liberal causes of electric vehicles and solar farms. …

“ ‘Both sides have been lulled by modernization of agriculture and the technological sirens,’ says Mr. Klar. ‘But both sides are coming back and coming together. These things don’t lend themselves to the red-blue dichotomy.’ ”

More at the Monitor, here. No paywall. Lots of cool pictures.

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A Pillow Unravels an Art Theft

August 1, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff.
Dutch artist Hendrick Avercamp’s winter scene, stolen in 1978, arrived in May at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. 

As an inveterate reader of mystery novels, I do love a yarn about art thieves, especially if there’s a clever sleuth who figures out what happened. It’s best if the perps end up in jail, but you can’t have it all. These things take time.

At the Boston Globe, Malcolm Gay has a good story about Clifford Schorer, a former president of the Worcester Art Museum’s board as well as “an international art dealer and sleuth who spends his days (and many nights) hunting ‘sleepers’ — lost masterpieces whose true identities have been obscured through the ages.

“Schorer had flown from Brussels [on a day last May] with the painting he now carried in his hands, a winter scene by the acclaimed Dutch Golden Age artist Hendrick Avercamp.

“The artwork was stolen nearly half a century earlier in a sensational 1978 heist from the baronial estate of Helen and Robert Stoddard, a Worcester industrialist. The Avercamp picture, along with numerous other paintings and other valuables taken from the home that night, had not been seen since. Local officials were stumped. So was the FBI. …

“[Schorer] and a conservator carefully unwrapped the package, revealing the aged but unscathed picture of Dutch figures skating in winter.

“ ‘It was nirvana,’ Warner Fletcher, a nephew of the Stoddards, said of the moment. …

“The Avercamp originally disappeared the night of June 22, 1978, when thieves broke into the 36-acre Stoddard estate, hacking open sofa cushions to cart away valuable works by Camille Pissarro, J.M.W. Turner, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others. …

“That night, with Helen undergoing cancer treatment at a Boston hospital, Robert turned in just before midnight. [He] was sound asleep when thieves broke in through the sun porch.

“The burglars ransacked the home, rifling through drawers and closets. They drank the couple’s liquor and ate food from the fridge, according to later news reports. They made their way through each room, snatching paintings from the walls and pocketing collectibles including miniature carvings, silver tea sets, watches, and valuable music boxes.

“When Stoddard awoke the next morning, he realized the house had been robbed when he found his glasses on the floor. …

” ‘We never had a suspect,’ Ralph E. Doyle, a retired detective sergeant with the Worcester Police Department, told the Telegram & Gazette in 2000.

That‘s not to say there haven‘t been breakthroughs.

“The most valuable work in the Stoddard’s collection, Pissarro’s 1902 oil on canvas, ‘Bassins Duquesne et Berrigny à Dieppe, temps gris,’ surfaced at a Cleveland auction house in 1998. …

“The discovery of the Pissarro prompted authorities to look closely at a Springfield-area art dealer named Robert Cornell and his ex-wife, Jennifer Abella-Cornell, who had brought the painting to Ohio. But the estranged couple gave wildly conflicting accounts. [An FBI] spokesperson later told the Telegram & Gazette that reconciling their stories was ‘like beating a dead horse.’ …

“The trail of the Avercamp and other missing works then went cold. Frustrated by the lack of progress and still hoping they might be retrieved, Fletcher, the Stoddards’ nephew, finally turned to Schorer in 2021. He put information about the missing artworks in a manila envelope and sent it to the sleuth.

“Fletcher was by then familiar with Schorer. … He’s renowned in the trade, and he’d recently discovered a previously unknown drawing by Northern Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer that was purchased at a Concord estate sale for $30.

“Schorer was only vaguely aware of the Stoddard theft at the time, but as he looked through the envelope’s contents, he began to concentrate on the works he found most interesting: the Avercamp, the Turner, and an oil painting by 19th-century Dutch painter Johan Jongkind. …

“His search came up empty. But from his years of experience tracking down stolen art, Schorer knew that disreputable dealers will sometimes misrepresent works to evade detection.

“ ‘Finally, I said, “All right, if I had that painting, who would I fence it as?” ‘ Schorer recalled thinking.

“He knew that Avercamp, a mute painter who specialized in outdoor winter scenes, had a nephew, Barent Avercamp, who mimicked the style of his more gifted relative. Schorer turned again to his computer, this time searching for winter scenes by the famed painter’s nephew.

Bingo: Fifteen minutes later, he came across a throw pillow that was selling for $18.40 with a portion of the missing Avercamp scene — including a distinctive arch — printed on its case. …

“Schorer had made a breakthrough. The only known images of the Avercamp were grainy black and white photos from the ’70s. But this image was in color. It could mean only one thing: The photo was taken after the theft.

“ ‘I clicked on that, and it took me to a page trying to sell me a pillow,’ Schorer recalled. There, just above the asking price, he also found the logo of the image licensing company that held the source file.

“Schorer navigated to the site and paid $39 to download the photo. As he parsed its metadata, he discovered the copyright on the image: L.S.F.A.L., an acronym for Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts Ltd., a dealer he’d known for years.

“Steigrad told Schorer he’d taken a photo of the painting for Newhouse Galleries, which had offered the artwork at a fine arts fair in the Netherlands in the mid-90s.

“Working another angle, Schorer discovered the name of the person who’d originally sold the work to Newhouse: Sheldon Fish. Fish told Schorer he’d purchased the painting at the Brimfield Antique Flea Market, a short drive from Worcester.”

Brimfield, Holy Cow! It’s a really famous flea market in our area, where Suzanne found most of the antique lockets she sold. I followed her around as she shopped one rainy weekend before Covid.

I love reading this stuff. The rest of the story is at the Globe, here.

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The Deep Mystery of Hail

July 31, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Sean Waugh.
NOAA’s National Severe Storm Lab has been looking into the hail problem.

Here’s my periodic reminder that cutting out funding for scientific research can affect your life. The important work of the National Severe Storm Lab of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Oklahoma is just one example of what may be lost.

Nick Gilmore at public radio WVTF in Virginia reported recently on NOAA’s research into hail.

“Just picture this – it’s a warm afternoon and a thunderstorm starts to roll overhead. You head indoors and hear rain begin to fall. As the cracks of thunder get louder, you peek out the window to see large chunks of ice on the ground. … Rain makes sense to fall from a storm – but large pieces of ice?

“ ‘Hail is one of those things that we don’t really know how it forms,’ says Sean Waugh, a research scientist at NOAA’s Severe Storms Laboratory.

“We do know some of the basics. Strong thunderstorms have strong updrafts – think like a vacuum cleaner that’s able to lift moisture high up into the atmosphere. It’s cold up there, so that water freezes into a small stone. It collects more water, refreezes as it cycles through the storm – more water, refreezes. … Eventually, the hailstone gets too heavy and tumbles to the earth below. Waugh says wind speed, direction and moisture in the air also play a part in hailstorm development.

We also know hail can be expensive.

“ ‘In any given year, it’s 60-80% of the damage that comes from severe thunderstorms,’ says Ian Giammanco – a meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. He says we’re just getting more hailstorms these days.

“ ‘Rewind the clock all the way back to 2008 – every year since then, we’ve had over $10 billion in damage from hail. This has crept up now to a $20-30 billion problem.’

“Giammanco says that’s why research like what Sean Waugh is doing is so important – finding out what hail looks like before it hits the ground. …

“Waugh says, ‘We don’t know what broke when it landed, how much of that mass, or size or shape have we lost between when it fell and when we find it, right? I’ve seen six-inch diameter stones melt before I can get out of the car to pick them up.’ …

“There are other questions, too: how fast does hail fall? Does it fall in a specific orientation? Does the stone melt while it’s falling to the earth below?

” ‘These are all really, really important questions if you’re trying to ascertain what hail looks like to a radar. And that’s a really critical piece of knowledge if you’re trying to warn for hail in real time, which is obviously the goal! Most people want to know if there’s going to be golf balls falling at their house or softballs.’ …

“Waugh and his team have built a complex rig that observes hail in free fall and in real time. They head out from Oklahoma – typically to the Southern Plains – to get the system in front of a storm producing large hail.

“The rig has high speed and high-quality cameras, and Waugh says there’s another key component.

” ‘But we need a lot of light to do that. Otherwise, the image would just be dark,’ he explains. ‘So, the LED array I have on the back of the truck produces about 30% more light than the sun!’ …

“ ‘We can use that knowledge to improve our forecasts of what storms are likely going to produce hail days in advance. By understanding the type of hail that different storms produce, that increases our ability to model it properly and then forecast that in the future,’ Waugh says. ‘And that way people can take appropriate action to protect life and property.’ ”

More at public radio WVTF, here. Cool video of hail in flight.

I don’t get the funding cuts. The jobs that will be lost at the weather center are in Oklahoma, so it’s not just coastal communities that will be hurt. And anyway, don’t hurricanes damage golf courses in Florida sometimes? Weather is something no human can be the boss of, so it’s just common sense to try to understand it.

Please share your hail stories.

From the University of Oklahoma news site, OU Daily.

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Where Flamenco Flourishes in the US

July 30, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Thais Coy/American Flamenco Repertory Company.
Yjastros, the American Flamenco Repertory Company, performing in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Nowadays people don’t seem to talk much about catharsis in theater: the idea that in suffering along with the actors, the audience can feel a kind of cleansing or relief.

That is what you also get experiencing the controlled rage and sorrow of music like Edith Piaf’s, Portuguese fado, or Spanish flamenco.

Today, as I’m reading about flamenco flourishing in part of the US, I’m thinking what a gift it is to be able to convert rage and sorrow into something like peace.

John Burnett reports at National Public Radio (NPR) that the state of New Mexico is “a global center of flamenco — the passionate dance, song and music of the Roma people of southern Spain.

“The epicenter is Albuquerque. New Mexico’s largest city boasts a world-famous flamenco festival. … The University of New Mexico is the only American university that offers graduate and undergraduate Dance degrees with an emphasis in flamenco. The National Institute of Flamenco is home to a world-class repertory company, and a conservatory that teaches students as young as three, to young adults who want to be professional dancers.

“The popularity of flamenco has exploded in the last four decades. You can find its distinctive percussive footwork from Tokyo to Israel to Toronto. … But what’s different about flamenco in Nuevo Mexico is that it’s homegrown. New Mexico traces its deeply Hispanic identity to the arrival of Spanish settlers 400-plus years ago.

” ‘Here in New Mexico it’s got to sound like us,’ says Vicente Griego, a celebrated singer from northern New Mexico who specializes in cante jondo, the deep song of flamenco. ‘There’s other people who want to do flamenco exactly the way it’s been done in Spain. But what makes us really special here and what keeps us honest, is that we have our own history. We’ve had our own resistance, our own celebration, our own liberation.’

“Says Marisol Encinias, executive director of the National Institute of Flamenco: ‘I like to think that there’s something in our DNA that ties us to the antecedents of flamenco from way back.’ …

“Eva Encinias, Marisol’s mother, learned dance from her mother, Clarita, and is considered the grande dame of flamenco in Albuquerque.

” ‘Even though we present all of this very, very high-end flamenco, the rationale behind that is to inspire and cultivate young people,’ says Eva, sitting in the costume room of the National Institute of Flamenco that she founded 43 years ago. She’s surrounded by racks of extravagantly ruffled dresses. ‘We all started as children and we know the impact that flamenco had on us as young people.’

“Outreach is a huge part of their mission. Between Eva and her children, Marisol and Joaquin, they’ve taught thousands of flamenco students at the Institute and at UNM. …

” ‘We’re gonna clap along to the music, in 4/4 time, which means that we count 1-2-3-4,’ intones Sarah Ward, a Canadian who became enthralled with flamenco and now teaches. She’s leading a class of fourth-graders at the Taos Integrated School of the Arts. Fifteen kids happily stomp their sneakers to the count. …

“One of her bright-eyed students is 10-year-old Cypress Musialowski. ‘I feel an opportunity to let out anger,’ she says. ‘I really like stomping my feet. But I also feel like I can just flow and be me.’ …

Flamenco has been called performed aggression—the pounding wooden heels, the feral singing, the baroque guitarwork.

“The Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca defined duende, the spirit of flamenco, as ‘tragedy-inspired ecstasy.’ …

“And it’s really hard to learn, says Marisol Encinias, who is also an assistant professor of flamenco dance at UNM. ‘It’s a really, really challenging artform,’ she says. ‘I had a guitarist friend who said you spend your whole life trying to be mediocre.’

“Evelyn Mendoza, the 27-year-old education manager at the Institute, says, ‘I mean, you sweat your heart, soul, tears, blood and everything into any dance form that you do. … But flamenco is so different because it’s fierce.’ “

Read more at NPR, here. (Consider supporting this great public resource, here.)

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What the Drone Found

July 29, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Jesse Casana.
Jonathan Alperstein, a researcher, excavates land on an unexpectedly large ancient agricultural site in Michigan.

The other day, my neighbor surprised me with a bunch of aerial photos of my New Shoreham place that were taken by her nephew’s drone. As drones are used more and more in warfare, I sure like thinking about the harmless and often useful things drones do.

In today’s example, a mystery revealed by drone led to a long-term collaboration between Menominee tribal members and non-Indigenous archaeologists in Michigan.

Nell Greenfieldboyce reports at National Public Radio (NPR), “Archeologists studying a forested area in northern Michigan say they’ve uncovered what is likely the largest intact remains of an ancient Native American agricultural site in the eastern half of the United States.

“The researchers used a drone equipped with a laser instrument to fly over more than 300 acres, taking advantage of a brief period of time after the winter snow had melted away but before the trees had put out their leaves.

“This allowed the drone to precisely map subtle features on the surface of the exposed ground, revealing parallel rows of earthen mounds. This is what’s left of raised gardening beds that were used to grow crops like corn, beans, and squash by the ancestors of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, in the centuries before European colonizers arrived.

“The mounds appeared to continue on beyond the surveyed area, the researchers say, showing agriculture at a surprisingly vast scale in a place that wasn’t a major population center.

” ‘We haven’t even been able to locate any significant settlement sites in this region. There’s a couple of tiny little villages,’ says Jesse Casana, a professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College and one of the authors of a new report in Science. ‘So it’s really shocking in this case to see this level of investment in an agricultural system that would require really enormous amounts of human labor to make happen.’

“It’s especially odd given the relatively poor growing conditions that far north, especially during a period of colder temperatures known as the Little Ice Age, as well as the presence of wild rice right nearby, says Madeleine McLeester, a Dartmouth anthropologist who led the research team. …

” ‘This astonishing paper shows how much we’ve underestimated the geographic range, productivity, and sustainability of intensive Indigenous agriculture across North America,’ says Gayle Fritz, an anthropologist with Washington University in St. Louis.

” ‘The study is outstanding in many ways, one being the long-term collaboration between Menominee tribal members and non-Indigenous archaeologists,’ she says — with the other being the combination of new technologies plus ‘old-fashioned, ground-based excavation and survey.’

“While some people may envision historical Native Americans as mostly hunter-gatherers or nomads, ‘that is very incorrect,’ says Casana. ‘By the time colonists arrived, what they were encountering were a lot of pretty sedentary communities all over North America who were practicing various forms of farming,’ he says. …

“The site mapped in this new study is part of Anaem Omot, which means the ‘Dog’s Belly’ in Menominee. It’s an area along the Menominee River on the border between Michigan and Wisconsin, and is of great cultural and historical significance to the Menominee tribe.

“The region contains burial mounds and dance rings. It’s also known to have agricultural ridges, ranging from 4 to 12 inches in height, because previous work back in the 1990’s had mapped some of them.

” ‘These features are really difficult to see on the ground, even when you’re walking around, and they’re difficult to map,’ says McLeester.

“That difficulty, plus concerns about proposed mining activities in the area, is why the research team — which included the tribe’s historic preservation director, David Grignon — wanted to see if new technology could reveal more acres covered with the earthen agricultural rows.

“McLeester says they thought they’d find some more rows, but also expected that others would have eroded away since the last mapping effort. …

“But the drone surveys revealed that the field system was ten times bigger than what had been previously seen. ‘Just the scale, I would say, was unexpected,’ she says. …

“Says Casana, ‘One of the interesting things about this study is that it kind of shows us a preserved window of what was probably a much more extensive agricultural landscape.’ …

“Susan Kooiman of Southern Illinois University, an expert on the precontact Indigenous peoples of Eastern North America, says … ‘To find intact, ancient indigenous agricultural fields in any state, at any level, is very rare. …

” ‘The amount of work, and just how far these fields extend, is beyond anything that I think people suspected was going on this far north in eastern North America,’ she says. … ‘The question now is, what are they doing with all this stuff they were growing?’ “

More at NPR, here. (NPR is struggling since the massive federal cut. Help them out here if you can. No amount too small.)

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Poison Books

July 28, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: University of St Andrews.
Books bound with potentially toxic green covers. 

With all the benighted book banning going on these days, you would think that the vigilantes had learned the written word would land people in the hospital. But reading is not lethal, and thinking about new ideas won’t kill anyone.

Having said that, I admit there is some reading material that may be dangerous to touch. Ella Creamer reports at the Guardian that “arsenic was historically mixed with copper to create a vivid green for book covers.”

“A new tool to quickly identify books that are poisonous to humans has been developed by the University of St Andrews,” Creamer writes. Historically, publishers used arsenic mixed with copper to achieve a vivid emerald green color for book covers. While the risk to the public is ‘low,’ handling arsenic-containing books regularly can lead to health issues including irritation of the eyes, nose and throat along with more serious side-effects. The toxic pigment in the book bindings can flake off, meaning small pieces can easily be inhaled.

“In recent years, many libraries have prevented access to all suspect green books as a precaution, as testing has until now been costly and time-consuming. … The new device can quickly and cheaply detect the presence of toxic pigment.

“ ‘A device used in the School of Earth Sciences to detect minerals in rocks was the starting point,’ said Pilar Gil, who led the research. ‘The Eureka moment was discovering the unique reflectance pattern from emerald green pigment in the visible spectrum. The idea was then to apply this discovery to an instrument which we could use and share with the sector.’

“Two scientists from the university’s astronomy and physics school, Graham Bruce and Morgan Facchin, developed a portable tool. ‘Our device shines different colors of light on to the book,’ said Facchin. ‘The amount of light reflected at each color is like a fingerprint of the pigment in the book.’ …

“The handheld device can screen books to test for the pigment in a fraction of a second. ‘Our team has been asked to look at thousands of books, of which more than 100 have been identified as containing emerald green pigment,’ said Bruce.

“At St Andrews, emerald green books are stored in Ziploc polythene bags. ‘When the books are used, we check first if there are any other copies available which are not bound in emerald green,’ reads the university’s website. ‘If not, the book is handled with special precautions such as the use of nitrile gloves.’ …

“ ‘The retention of green books from public view is not only a matter of safety, but it also restricts access to the information contained,’ said conservator Erica Kotze, who instigated the project. ‘This means that the books which have been tested and found not to contain the pigment can remain available to users.’

“A free exhibition exploring the project, Poisonous books – Dangers from the past, is running at the Wardlaw Museum in St Andrews until the end of July.”

More at the Guardian, here. No paywall, but please consider donating to support factual news.

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Syrian Comedians Test the Waters

July 27, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Ghiath AlHaddad Ayoub/The World.
Comedy is having a moment in Syria as a new wave of artists tests the limits of expression under a new government.

Syria suffered many years of extreme oppression, so the recent overthrow of the Assad government brought hope for change. That doesn’t mean everything is fine, as recent fighting with the Druze ethnic group has shown. Still, it’s time to celebrate any encouraging baby steps.

Shirin Jaafari reports at PRI‘s The World about something that hasn’t been heard in Syria for a long time.

“As the sun set over central Damascus, laughter spilled out from the Karma Café. Inside, a young crowd gathered — some in headscarves, others without. But all were ready to experience stand-up comedy in a free Syria.

“Comedy is having a moment in the country.

“With the fall of the Assad regime, a new wave of artists is testing the limits of expression. Among them is Styria, a stand-up troupe whose name fuses Syria with hysteria, a nod to the absurdity and pain of living under dictatorship. …

“Sharif Homsi, founder of the group, [started] writing comedy long before it was safe. Living under a regime that silenced dissent, he described the past as a kind of suspended state: ‘You’re not allowed to die, but you’re not allowed to live.’

“In 2016, he left for Dubai, trained with Arab comedians, and later returned to his homeland to form Styria. Even then, performing comedy felt dangerous.

“ ‘One wrong word and someone could report you,’ Homsi recalled. ‘You could disappear in a blink.’

“So, the group played it smart, he said, avoiding politics, tiptoeing around religion and carefully crafting jokes about sex and social taboos. But now, with the old red lines shifting, they’re pushing the envelope further.

“At the cafe in Damascus, Homsi took the mic, greeting the audience with humor and ease. His jokes, often about his own frugality or his dad’s job as a dog walker, sparked laughter and a sense of connection. But he didn’t shy away from sharper edges, even referencing the extremist past of Syria’s new leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa. …

“Fellow comedian Ammar Daba, who returned after the regime fell, said the challenge now is not just legal limits, but social ones.

“ ‘It’s exciting and confusing. I don’t know where the lines are,’ he said. 

But Daba thinks comedians have a role to play in this new environment.

“ ‘It is our time, as stand-up comedians, to be the pioneers,’ he said, ‘to tell people that “yeah, you can talk about that! You can talk about that outside of your private rooms and homes. You can say whatever you want even on the streets.” ‘

“The night’s only woman performer, Mary Obaid (aka Meme), steered away from politics, instead poking fun at her own life and body image.

“ ‘Every problem, when spoken out loud, becomes smaller,’ Obaid said. ‘Comedy helps us do that.’

“After the show, a man who only gave his first name, Ibrahim, reflected on the performance.

“ ‘This is what we need here. We need to communicate our fears, our taboos, in a healthy way,’ he said. ‘And this is the best way to discuss those really difficult issues.’

“The crowd spilled into the Damascus night, still laughing and exchanging numbers.

“For Sharif Homsi, the founder of Styria, this is the power of comedy. It can create moments of relief and respite, and it can start conversations that otherwise would not take place.

“ ‘Fifty, sixty people to a hundred sharing a room, laughing about similar things. … If they can laugh together, they can live together.’

“Syrians have been divided for so long, he added. ‘It’s time for that to end.’ ”

More at The World, here.

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Archiving When Nothing’s on Paper

July 26, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Library of Congress.

I have often thought about what we’ve lost in the digital age, when we can no longer scrutinize the thought process of a novelist from seeing her many revisions. Nor can we learn much about the significant people in her life, given that so many of her emails and texts will have been erased.

What will biographers do? How will today’s archivists deal with the challenge?

Michael Waters writes at the Atlantic (via MSN), “It was long the case that archives were full of physical ephemera. Think of Oscar Wilde’s love letters to Lord Alfred Douglas; … Sylvia Plath’s shopping list; Malcolm X’s lost poem; and other scraps of paper buried in boxes. Today, text messages and disappearing voice notes have replaced letters between close friends, Instagram Stories vanish by default, and encrypted platforms such as Signal, where social movements flourish, let users automatically erase messages. Many people write to-do lists in notes apps and then delete them, line by line, when each task is complete.

“The problem for [historians]: On the one hand, celebrities, artists, executives, and social-movement leaders are generating more personal records than ever, meaning a lucky researcher might have access to a public figure’s entire hard drive but struggle to interpret its contents. On the other hand, historians might lose access to the kind of intimate material that reveals the most. …

“The work of history starts with a negotiation. A public figure or their descendant — or, say, an activist group or a college club — works with an institution, such as a university library, to decide which of the figure’s papers, correspondence, photos, and other materials to donate. Archivists then organize these records for researchers, who, over subsequent years, physically flip through them. These tidbits are deeply valuable. They reveal crucial details about our most famous figures and important historical events. …

“Over the past two decades, the volume of these donations has increased dramatically. When Donald Mennerich, a digital archivist at NYU, first started working in the field, 15 years ago, writers or activists or public figures would hand over boxes of letters, notes, photos, meeting minutes, and maybe a floppy disk or a ‘small computer that had a gigabyte hard drive,’ he told me. Now, Mennerich said, ‘everyone has a terabyte of data on their laptop and a 4-terabyte hard drive’ … plus an email inbox with 10,000 messages or more. …

“Now many libraries possess emails that they don’t have the bandwidth to make accessible to researchers. … Even when an email archive is made public … it’s easy to get lost in the chaos. Jacquelyn Ardam, a writer and a literary scholar, was one of the first people to visit Susan Sontag’s archive, which she told me was filled with digital clutter: Sephora marketing emails, files with unlabeled collections of words (rubbery, ineluctable), and lots and lots of lists — of movies she’d liked, drinks she’d enjoyed. …

“Among that mess of information, however, Ardam found emails confirming Sontag’s relationship with the photographer Annie Leibovitz, which Sontag had denied. All Ardam had to do to locate them was ‘search her computer for the word Annie,’ she said. …

“In the past, even a writer of Sontag’s stature would typically have a small-enough correspondence collection that they could plausibly review the letters they were planning to donate to an archive—and perhaps wouldn’t have included missives from a secret lover. But the scope of our digital lives can make it much harder to account for everything (imagine giving up your whole social-media history to a researcher) and much easier for a historian to locate the tantalizing parts with a single search.

“Of course, that’s if historians are lucky enough to access records at all. Many people delete their old texts to save storage space. … Mennerich said he’s been locked out of the email accounts of several deceased public figures because they never shared their passwords. …

“Archivists might be able to sidestep some of these problems by rethinking how they present collections of digital records. Today, after archivists do their initial review of a collection, visitors can typically get a complete box of someone’s letters with no questions asked. With emails, conducting that whole initial review up front would be so much more time intensive that blanket access might no longer be realistic. …

“The archivists I spoke with told me they’re all bracing themselves for the moment when, inevitably, a public figure donates their smartphone. It is in some ways the most personal kind of donation someone can make, offering access to text and WhatsApp histories, photos, Tinder messages, saved recipes, TikTok likes. Such a donation seems both likely to reveal more than a person’s emails ever could and even harder to sort through and interpret.”

More at the Atlantic, here.

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Inmates Making Music

July 25, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Noam Brown.
Bending the Bars artists Kashdatt, Chuckie Lee and ZQ recording in the studio. 

Given that the US leads the world in numbers of people incarcerated (1,808,100), more than even China, that’s a lot of human beings we can’t just forget about. We need to find ways for them to be engaged in the world and not give up hope, for our own sakes as well as theirs.

Monica Uszerowicz writes at the Guardian about an experiment in Florida that was organized by inmate advocates and received no help from the system.

“In ‘Locked Down,’ a song by the San Diego-based poet and rapper, Chance, she sings with both foreboding and care: ‘Every day that you wake up you’re blessed / love every breath, ’cause you don’t know what’s next.’

“Chance wrote the song – originally a poem, its title a callback to Akon’s ‘Locked Up’ – while imprisoned in Phoenix, Arizona, during the beginning of the Covid pandemic and subsequent lockdown (‘six feet apart in a five-by-five,’ she raps in the same song, alluding to the virtual impossibility of social distancing in the American prison system). … She shared with me in a recent phone call, ‘It’s crazy how they maintained control and instilled fear within us. When you’re locked up, you ask yourself … are you going to be angry, or are you going to find what your calling and purpose is?’

” ‘Locked Down’ is also one of 16 tracks on Bending the Bars, a hip-hop album featuring original songs by artists formerly or currently incarcerated in Florida’s Broward county jails (with the exception of Chance, a Florida native). Bending the Bars was organized by the south Florida abolitionist organization Chip – the Community Hotline for Incarcerated People – which was initially founded to support inmates during the early days of Covid.

“Nicole Morse, a Chip co-founder and associate professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, says the organization began fielding calls in April 2020, primarily from Broward, the county just north of Miami-Dade; the calls were primarily about medical neglect, abuse and an atmosphere of abject fear. …

“In 2021, the data Chip had gathered was used to support a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and Disability Rights Florida on behalf of individuals suffering from Covid in the Broward county jail.

“Something more hopeful was emerging from those hotline calls, too: creativity. ‘People wanted to share their latest poetry or a song they were developing,’ Morse said. ‘Art was helping people survive an incredibly desperate time.’

“Noam Brown, a children’s musician and Chip committee member, began dreaming up the idea of an album. … Chip hoped to create a platform for the wealth of talent they continually encountered. The organization began fundraising, applying for grants and putting the word out that they were producing an album; Gary Field, an incarcerated organizer, writer and scholar, became the executive producer, helping to connect the artists with Chip.

“Musicians on the inside used two phones to record their songs – one as the microphone to record their vocals, the other to listen to the beat. ‘The challenges were phenomenal,’ Field shared in a phone call. ‘People couldn’t even talk to their families, never mind collaborate on something as complicated as producing a studio album. We were in the middle of a pandemic. There were four phones and 40 inmates trying to use them.’

“Spaces with two easily accessible phones were limited; the duration of any prison phone call is restricted. But Chip covered the costs of the calls, while Brown’s brother, Eitan, worked as the sound engineer, and the Grammy-winning children’s artists Alphabet Rockers helped create beats. Artists who were already out were able to spend time in the studio, including Chance, who returned to south Florida after her release.

“After reconnecting with a former classmate, the two attended a meeting for Chainless Change, a Lauderhill-based non-profit advocating for those affected by the criminal legal system. ‘It was divine – I don’t believe in accidents; I knew I was being called to go back to Florida’ Chance said. She began working with the group and helped organize a poetry event, where she met Field, Brown and Morse. She asked if they had room on the album for one more.

“The result is nearly an hour of uniquely south Floridian hip-hop and R&B, both of which are constellations of so many genres – Caribbean beats, southern bass, Deep City soul, Miami drill – poetic musings on love, loneliness and hope, and demands for systemic change to the draconian and brutal conditions of the Florida prison system. While Morse noted that the album’s sound quality was impaired by technical limitations, Bending the Bars is polished and clear, an accomplishment owed partly to its production and mostly to the ingenuity of its artists: singers, rappers and collaborators like J4, Corvette Cal and Chuckie Lee, all of whom alchemized the tracklist into a textural tapestry: playful, mournful, educational and intentionally dotted with prerecorded interjections from the prison phone line (‘you have one minute remaining’). 

“Field, whose song ‘Tearing Down Walls and Building Bridges’ closes the album, studied political science at Columbia University and received his master’s from Gulf Coast Bible College, and has contributed 2,000 pages of writing to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology civic media project Between the Bars. He knows, intimately, the significance of the writing process.

” ‘I remember, as an inmate back in 2010, what a profound sense of gratitude the opportunity to write gave me,’ he shared. …

“The system often censored mail or blocked phone calls during the recording process. … ‘We had to develop a set of strategies to overcome those barriers,’ they said. ‘The project was made without the cooperation of any prison or jail. Every strategy we came up with for how to get through to people … we can now share those strategies with loved ones of incarcerated folks who don’t have any additional privileged access.’ “

More at the Guardian, here.

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Is Peace Possible?

July 24, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: It’s Time.
Jewish Israeli singer Achinoam Nini and Palestinian Israeli singer Mira Awad take the stage at the People’s Peace Summit in Jerusalem, May 9, 2025.

You wouldn’t know it from the headlines, but in Israel there are actually quite a few Jewish and Palestinian individuals who refuse to give up on peaceful coexistence.

Dina Kraft reports at the Christian Science Monitor, “For Israelis and Palestinians, May 28 marked 600 days of the most devastating period either side has known since Israel’s foundation. And yet amid it all, there are people trying to build bridges from one side to the other, attempting – together – to create a different reality.

“Some of them gathered recently for a well-attended two-day People’s Peace Summit in Jerusalem, forged by a coalition of Jewish and Palestinian peace-building and coexistence organizations. They sought to demonstrate that a peace movement is a viable and growing notion, and that joint Jewish-Palestinian activism is withstanding the raging war and shattered trust.

“ ‘The way to peace will not be short, but it is better than endless war,’ Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, called out from the Jerusalem stage to an auditorium packed with over 3,000 people. She is a leader of Standing Together, a fast-growing group uniting Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens.

“One outspoken Israeli peace activist is Maoz Inon, whose parents were burned to death in their home near Gaza in Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack that sparked the war. He and his siblings responded with a vow to seek peace, not revenge.

“ ‘Yes, we are devastated from the horrors that are happening in Gaza and the West Bank, and we acknowledge the ongoing trauma both peoples are enduring,’ he says in an interview. ‘But we know the only way to end the bloodshed and the cycle of violence, revenge, and hate is shaping and creating a new reality. We are learning from spiritual and faith leaders, security leaders, and from other conflict areas that were resolved.’

“In the aftermath of Oct. 7, Mr. Inon paired with a fellow entrepreneur, Aziz Abu-Sarah, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem whose older brother died soon after being imprisoned and beaten in the first intifada. Together they have been advocating reconciliation, equality, and justice.

“They say they can see their growing impact in their growing list of invitations to speak, not only at peace-related events but also in public schools, at universities, and at conferences. Their joint TED Talk has gone viral, and their work caught the attention of the late Pope Francis, leading to a Vatican meeting.

“It can be difficult for Israelis and Palestinians to work together openly. Activists are called naive at best, traitors at worst. But, Mr. Abu-Sarah argues, ‘We are offering the only viable answer to the current reality. As Maoz told me after his parents were killed, “Right now, we are in the desert – no food, no water. We’re lost. And when you’re lost in the desert, you call out for water.”

” ‘We are calling out for peace. … In times like these, we must work with Israelis who oppose the bombardment of Gaza and genuinely support peace. [But] bridge-building must be rooted in clear principles: equality, justice, recognition, healing, and safety for all. It’s not just about dialogue. It must lead to real action and tangible change. We do have strong, principled allies on the Israeli side. … They need us, and we need them, because without each other, we’re weaker – and the killing won’t stop.’

“[Standing Together] sees the recent surge in activism as the sign of an awakening among Israeli Jews who view the war as endangering Palestinian civilians alongside Hamas-held Israeli hostages and soldiers. …

“Illustrating both the challenge and the potential for peace activists, throngs of ultranationalist young Israelis swept through Jerusalem’s Old City on May 26, shouting hateful slogans in a sometimes-violent march marking the day in 1967 when Israel captured East Jerusalem.

“Volunteers from Standing Together and the Free Jerusalem collective, a group of predominantly Jewish Jerusalem residents that works with Palestinians in the city, acted as a ‘humanitarian guard’ to prevent violence. In a scene captured on video, a Jewish Israeli volunteer can be seen rushing into a crowd of far-right marchers surrounding a Palestinian man. …

“ ‘We always have something we can do and a way we can do it,’ wrote Rula Daoud, co-director of Standing Together, herself a Palestinian citizen of Israel.

“Mohammad Darawshe, director of strategy at Givat Haviva, Israel’s oldest and largest organization working for a shared Jewish-Arab society, says bridge-building is challenging for Palestinian Israelis. They face systemic discrimination and are often seen as a fifth column in Israel, he says, and while they have an ethnic and cultural affinity for West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, they have limited political influence.

“ ‘As peacemakers they have a very underutilized role. But if empowered by Israel and by Palestinians on the other side, then they could play a significant role in peacemaking thanks to our bilingualism and dual identity,’ he says. …

“Mika Almog, creative director of the It’s Time movement that organized the peace summit, says that it is hard to counter the general Israeli mindset that there are no Palestinian partners for peace, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7 atrocities. …

“She says Israelis have been told that the conflict could be contained through periodic wars, but not resolved. ‘We have been taught that this is a reasonable price,’ she says. ‘In order for Israelis to be able to sustain and build faith [in the prospects for peace] we need to see Palestinian partners within Israel but also partners in Gaza and the West Bank.’

“At the summit, a view of life in Gaza came in the form of a brief video of a Palestinian woman walking through the rubble. She details the difficulties of her life: living in a tent, subsisting on limited food and water.

“ ‘We are living a tragedy,’ she says. ‘Most people in Gaza are against extremism and terrorism. We want peace.’ ”

More at the Monitor, here. No firewall. Subscription prices are reasonable.

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Ancient “New” Ideas in Housing

July 23, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg.
An interior courtyard at the Sunnyside Garden Apartments in Queens, New York. Completed in 1928, it remains a beacon of quality of life.

Growing up on the Copeland Estate in a suburb of New York, I would have been quite isolated from humanity if not for a scattering of nearby homes that had children. Having playmates meant so much to me. But for years, US community designers forgot about the importance of human interaction for both children and adults. One way to build it in, especially in cities, is the classic courtyard.

Alexandra Lange notes at Bloomberg CityLab that the shrinking population of children under five across the US “is bad news for the diversity and stability of cities, which are improved by the amenities that families seek — parks, public libraries, safe streets. It’s also discouraging for families who prefer to live in the city or don’t have the option or desire to move to the car-dominated suburbs. Any effort to retain families has to start with housing, their primary expense.

“That one weird trick for making cities more family-friendly? We’ve known it for decades: It’s the courtyard. …

“While Europe can claim centuries-old courts, America dabbled in them for decades, before the suburbs became the dominant housing type of both government subsidy and political propaganda.

“Courtyards don’t have to belong to the past. While textbook examples in brick and stone are lovely — and still home to thriving communities — contemporary architects are making courts in all sorts of materials, and for all types of housing, from apartments to townhomes.

“One of the first influential figures to advance the idea of the courtyard as the ideal urban type for families was Henry Darbishire, the mid-19th century English architect. His first patron, Angela Burdett-Coutts, was inspired by Charles Dickens and his novels of the urban poor to apply her wealth to reformist housing. ‘Nurturing the family and protecting children from the street was a huge part of the logic — turning the city inward,’ says Matthew G. Lasner, housing historian and the author of High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century.

“Architects and philanthropists quickly embraced an easily replicable courtyard model, with a single entrance on the street and interior vertical access off a planted court. The concept came to America in the 1870s via developers like Alfred Treadway White, responsible for the Cobble Hill Towers in Brooklyn. In the 1920s, more reformist developers — including everyone from the Rockefellers to communist unions — constructed many more of these courtyard projects.

“As architecture critic John Taylor Boyd wrote in 1920 of the Linden Court complex in Jackson Heights, the courtyard’s ‘benefits are apparent when it is remembered that the streets are the only playground of New York children, including the children of the rich.’ …

“When you’re talking courtyards in America, it’s hard to avoid Sunnyside Gardens. Not only does the Queens community remain one of New York City’s best neighborhoods, but it was home to one of America’s best critics, who made his affection clear.

“Lewis Mumford was one of the first residents of Sunnyside Gardens, completed in 1928, and constantly returned to its balance of private and public space, building and garden, in his analysis of other lesser New York City housing options. In “The Plight of the Prosperous,” published in the New Yorker in 1950, Mumford takes aim at the new white-brick residential buildings ‘that have sprung up since the war in the wealthy and fashionable parts of the city.’ While new low- and middle-income housing projects like his own ‘provide light and air and walks and sometimes even patches of grass and forsythia,’ these other private buildings, clustered in uptown rich neighborhoods, lack multiple exposures, outdoor space, cross-ventilation and quiet. …

“Clarence Stein and Henry Wright were the primary architects and planners behind Sunnyside Gardens, with Marjorie Sewell Cautley the landscape architect; all three would subsequently collaborate on Radburn, New Jersey, the ‘town for the motor age’ that in fact applied these communal principles for a result that we would now call transit-oriented development.

“The planners’ primary insight, in both the city and the suburbs, was to prioritize protected, communal open space over private yards or interior amenities. The courts, or courtyards, could be much larger if not subdivided by owner, and even in areas with public parks, having play space (and play companions) directly outside your door was a huge amenity. …

“On the West Coast, the courtyard evolved a little differently: surrounded by lower density, semi-detached houses with, eventually, a swimming pool in the center instead of a lawn. Irving Gill, considered the father of California modernism, designed prototype bungalow court in Santa Monica in the teens, with parking out of sight in the back and doorstep gardens. On tighter sites, U-shaped buildings with Spanish- and Italian-influenced architecture featured tiled fountains at center court. …

“ ‘When people have families with children, the home is important, but equally important are the people who are there with you,’ says Livable Cities president Meredith Wenskoski. “Your neighborhood is crucial. …

“Bay State Cohousing, a 30-unit development outside Boston, has common amenities as part of its charter, including a shared kitchen and activity rooms. But the pastel, clapboard complex, intended to blend in with single-family neighbors, also forms a U around a southwest-facing courtyard, with outdoor circulation providing plenty of opportunities for casual run-ins with the neighbors.

“ ‘The courtyard is a nested boundary that allows interaction with other children, and more importantly, with other adults who become a kind of network,’ says Jenny French, whose firm French 2D designed Bay State. ‘In an urban setting, the barrier that the contemporary parent has to letting their child out the door, thinking about the car-dominated city where they are unable to play in the street – the courtyard is a natural alternative.’

“French, who has also been coordinating the housing studio at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for seven years, can’t help but extend these design observations into the cultural and political spheres. Everyone talks about loneliness in America for people of all ages. For teens and seniors alike, French sees a solution. It’s one we’ve had all along: ‘Could a courtyard house actually be the friendship apparatus we need?’ ”

Lots more at Bloomberg, here.

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Seashells for Sustainable Design

July 22, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Brett Phelps for the Boston Globe.
At her new studio space in Providence, Felicia Neuhof holds a bag of shells she gathered at her sister’s wedding to create new products sustainably.

Today’s story is about a designer who looked around for a way to do her work using more-sustainable materials and found them almost under her nose.

Alexa Gagosz writes at the Boston Globe, “After spending seven years as an art director in New York City working for Fortune 500 brands, Felicia Neuhof grew increasingly frustrated with the unsustainable materials of her industry. She was constantly surrounded by plastic with a single-use lifecycle that would later become landfill waste.

“When she moved to Providence to earn her master’s degree at the Rhode Island School of Design, she started eating a ton of shellfish and wondered what would eventually happen to the discarded shells, which were typically thrown away. That‘s when she set out on a mission. She started by experimenting with the shells being tossed into dumpsters behind her favorite restaurants, and began molding them into building materials.

“Neuhof is now the founder and chief executive officer of Shellf Life, a Providence startup that transforms discarded seafood shells into innovative building materials. She’s also received international praise, winning the Terra Carta Design Lab, a global competition where she was able to place her material into the hands of King Charles III.

“What is Shellf Life and how does it work?
“Shellf Life transforms discarded seafood shells into innovative building materials through a process I developed on my kitchen stove. We take what restaurants throw away — oyster, mussel, clam, crab, and scallop shells — and create architectural surfaces, furniture, and lighting with properties ranging from rigid to flexible to translucent. Since winning the Terra Carta Design Lab competition, I’ve been scaling operations at our 50 Sims [incubator] facility in Providence.

“[We turn] waste into valuable building materials through processes accessible to people from all backgrounds and skill levels.

“How much seafood waste is there in New England?
“The numbers are staggering. One Rhode Island shellfish processor alone generates 7 tons of shell waste weekly — that’s 728,000 pounds annually, enough material for 30,000 square feet of tiling. When combined with restaurant waste across New England, we’re looking at a tremendous resource: Rhode Island could produce enough material for 3,000 kitchen backsplashes annually, Massachusetts enough for 5,000 bathroom floors, Maine sufficient for 20,000 serving bowls that return to the restaurants supplying the shells, Connecticut enough for 1,500 countertops, New Hampshire enough for 1,000 shower surrounds, and even my home state of Vermont contributes. …

“What kind of materials are you creating? Furniture and fixtures? Raw materials?
“Both. I create three product lines: furniture for residential and commercial settings, homeware like bowls and lighting, and architectural materials including tiles and surfaces. I’m also developing specialized applications for marine environments — working with City Island Oyster Reef to create alternatives to concrete currently used in aquaculture farms and coastal defense. …

“Walk me through the process.
“I collect shells from restaurant partners, clean and sanitize them, then crush them into a calibrated material. This is blended with my proprietary binder — much like following a recipe — and molded into form. During curing, the material actually captures CO2. At my facility at 50 Sims [Ave.] in Providence, I’ve scaled this process from my kitchen to a manufacturing microlab. I’ve secured a provisional patent on both the material composition and manufacturing method, which was an important step for commercialization. My goal has been to develop a system so refined that making a tile is as easy as flipping burgers. …

“What kind of seafood waste are you using?
“I primarily use oyster, mussel, clam, and scallop shells — any bivalve shells typically tossed in restaurant dumpsters. Each brings unique qualities: oysters provide strength and texture, mussels offer beautiful color and luminosity, clams contribute creamy hues with flecks of purple, and scallops add structural pattern variability. Like a chef selecting ingredients, I blend these shells in various ratios to customize the material for specific applications.

“What was it like to meet King Charles, and develop Shellf Life as part of the Terra Carta Design Lab?
“Meeting King Charles III was transformative. … He asked thoughtful questions, revealing someone who truly understood the potential, calling the idea ‘genius.’ What struck me most was seeing how Shellf Life made intuitive sense to everyone — from farmers and chefs to a King.

“How can restaurants, consumers, and others direct seafood waste to Shellf Life?
“I’ve made it as simple as recycling. For restaurants, I provide collection buckets and regular pickup that fits into their existing workflow. … For individual consumers, I’m looking to establish community collection points. My goal is to make shell recycling as normal as glass or paper recycling.

“Do you have any investors?
“The Terra Carta award has funded my initial development. Now I’m seeking additional investment to support my two-year growth plan as I move from R&D into commercial production. I’m looking for partners who understand both the environmental opportunity and the social impact — investors who recognize the value of creating accessible manufacturing jobs while addressing environmental challenges.”

More at the Globe, here.

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Swedes Try to Define Their Culture

July 21, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Ola Lewitschnik for the New York Times.
What defines Sweden? A sauna in the cold? Abba songs? Painted red horses? IKEA?

As Suzanne’s family heads off to Sweden to experience Erik’s culture for a few months, I notice that the New York Times has an interest in trying to define that culture. So does the currrent Swedish government.

I guess diversity of opinion is part of the culture as not everyone thinks the initiative is a good idea.

Imogen West-Knights writes, “What is Swedish culture? Some obvious answers might spring to mind: Abba, the films of Ingmar Bergman, Pippi Longstocking, IKEA. It’s an almost impossibly broad question — but one that Sweden’s government is trying to answer.

“In 2023, the government began an initiative called the Culture Canon, with two streams: an ‘experts’ canon and a ‘people’s canon.’ The first involves academics, journalists, historians and other authorities who will decide on 100 works or other items of cultural importance that have played a key role in shaping Swedish culture.

“The second will be made up of suggestions submitted by the Swedish public to the Culture Canon website, which can be drawn from the arts or can include everyday activities like the daily ‘fika‘ coffee and cake break or ideas like ‘Allemansrätten,’ the Swedish right to explore nature, even on private land. So far, suggestions include saunas and the plays of August Strindberg, the 1361 Battle of Visby and Björn Borg’s five straight Wimbledon victories. …

“Yet even the suggestion of such a definitive list is dividing opinion in Sweden. The Culture Canon is a pet project of a party with far-right roots that supports, but is not part of, the government. Many in the arts scene fear that the results will project a narrow view of Swedish culture, glorifying an imagined past and shutting out the cultural contributions of minorities.

“Lars Trägårdh, a historian whom the government appointed to lead the project, said in an interview that the Culture Canon would be particularly useful for helping immigrants integrate. …

” ‘Most of the culture world is against the idea of a canon,’ said Ida Ölmedal, the culture editor of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet: ‘It’s being used as a populist tool to point out what is Swedish and not, and to exclude some people from the concept of Swedishness.’

“ ‘But even if it wasn’t nationalist, it would still be wrong for politicians to point out what is important culture,’ Ölmedal added. ‘We have a proud tradition of the government financing culture without trying to govern culture — and this is an exception.’

Martí Manen, the director of Index, a contemporary art foundation in Stockholm, said the Culture Canon was ‘a tool for a specific political agenda.’

“In the interview, Trägårdh rebuffed such objections. ‘They are not real arguments,’ he said, adding that he had no cultural loyalty to the left or the right. … He is a historian who works on issues of Swedish identity, such as in his 2006 book Is the Swede a Human Being?, which he cowrote with Henrik Berggren. … Trägårdh also rejected the idea that a cultural canon would exclude minorities from the concept of Swedishness. …

“Parisa Liljestrand, a member of the Moderate Party who is Sweden’s culture minister, said the project had been set up to be independent from government influence and was now ‘in the hands of the committee.’ It was the committee’s job, she added, ‘to find out what fields we should have a canon in, and also to establish criteria for selection of works.’

“One criteria the committee has set for the expert part of the canon is that it can only include entries that are at least 50 years old. This has stirred fears that the results will downplay the importance of cultural output by immigrants, most of whom arrived in Sweden after 1975. …

“[Said] Mattias Andersson, the artistic director of the Royal Dramatic Theater, Sweden’s national playhouse, ‘It’s about trying to speak about the Sweden from the ’40s, or the ’50s, when everyone had the same God, the same impression of what the family is, of how to live your life.’ …

“For all the Culture Canon’s critics in the arts scene, there are also those who say it is too soon to judge. Victor Malm, the culture editor of the Expressen newspaper, said he was reserving his judgment until he read the final report.” More at the Times, here.

You know, asking immigrants who have been in Sweden a while to define Swedish culture would be most revealing. I am always surprised when immigrants tell me that a characteristic of the US is that people follow the laws. Relative to where some of them come from, ordinary Americans certainly do if not high-level officials and billionaires. We pay our taxes. We obey traffic directives. I’ve heard Swedes are very law-abiding, too.

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