Photos: Suzanne and John’s Mom. First Jack-in-the-Pulpit I had seen in years.
Today I’m sharing recent photos — mostly of Massachusetts spring flowers. One thing I’m especially enjoying this year is all the wildflowers. After my retirement community built a boardwalk that could accommodate walkers and wheelchairs, the administration and a group of residents started planting (ethically grown) wildflowers. Wonderful! And then we got a trip to the Native Plant Trust’s Garden in the Woods, which is entirely wildflowers.
Below, note a flowering May apple near our boardwalk. It’s followed by yellow Lady slippers at Garden in the Woods. At the same nature preserve, we learned about Golden club, which is found in the wetland area. So unusual!
There are more pictures from Garden in the Woods after that.
Next are a couple photos from our local library. The librarians love fun art projects, often involving child artists. They offer loads of activities for kids. For example: painting book bricks to border a garden.
Next are Jane’s poppies. Jane has a variety of flowers and edibles in one of the raised beds in our community.
Finally, here are some pansies that seemed to sing, reminding me of the pansies in a wacky Disney remix I love.
Photo: Colorado Department of Transportation. A black bear (black bears are sometimes brown) walks through a wildlife underpass at State Highway 9.
In parts of the country where people really value their wildlife, there are increasing efforts to prevent roadkill by building safe crossings for animals. They’re expensive, but the passes also save humans from life-threatening collisions.
In an article at the New York Times, reporter Catrin Einhorn learns that the motivation to build pathways crosses political divides.
She writes, “The aim was to protect motorists and wildlife along an especially grisly stretch of highway. Now, it was time to see whether the investment would pay off.
“Aran Johnson, a wildlife biologist for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe in the southwestern part of Colorado, walked up a bank to a newly constructed overpass crossing Route 160. … It was a cool summer morning in 2022, with mist rising from the ground. Mr. Johnson carried trail cameras. Mule deer and elk wouldn’t be showing up in any numbers until later in the year, when they had to cross the highway to reach their wintering grounds. Still, he wanted the cameras ready to capture the earliest evidence possible of any animals using the structure.
“At the top of the overpass, he could barely believe what he saw: a line of hoof prints pressed deep into the fresh mud, stretching from one side to the other. An elk had already found its way across. …
“Since then, it’s been one successful year after another. Entire herds of mule deer and elk use the structures, as well as bears, mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes and foxes.
“Wildlife crossings are growing in popularity across the country, and in recent years, Colorado has emerged as a leader. Since 2015, it has built 28 new large game crossing structures, according to the state Transportation Department.
“The state is rich in wildlife, and many of its species travel from higher elevations in the summer to lower ones in the winter, oftentimes crossing highways at great peril. In 2022, the General Assembly passed a law creating a cash fund for the department to use for animal crossings. Colorado has also evaluated its highways to create a priority list for future projects.
“Wildlife crossings, when combined with long stretches of fencing to funnel animals to the right location, have been found to reduce vehicle collisions with large animals by more than 80 percent.
“They are expensive, but research has shown they can save money when installed on stretches of highway with at least an average of three collisions between motorists and deer per mile per year. For collisions with elk and moose, which are bigger and therefore cause more damage to vehicles and people, that threshold goes down to less than one collision per mile per year.
“Locals had long known they had to pay close attention when driving along that stretch of Route 160, near the Chimney Rock National Monument. … In the early 2000s, Mr. Johnson, the biologist for the Southern Ute, started collaring mule deer to better understand how they moved over the landscape around the reservation. He analyzed his data and superimposed them on state records of wildlife-vehicle collisions. …
“The Colorado Department of Transportation, which covers the vast majority of the cost for wildlife crossings, agreed to put in an underpass on the reservation. But the Southern Ute also wanted to install an overpass, since certain species, particularly elk, seem to greatly prefer them. The tribe came up with $1.3 million from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to make that happen.
“An added bonus of wildlife crossings is the photos that come from trail cameras, which help to bring attention to the programs, Mr. Lawler said. … [But with cuts in] federal spending, a grant program that helps states and tribes pay for wildlife crossings in collision hot spots is now in doubt, including grants that had already been promised. …
“Wildlife crossings transcend political divisions, said Patricia Cramer, an ecologist who consults with states on wildlife crossings. … Of the two states she sees as national leaders, Wyoming is red and Colorado is blue.”
More at the Times, here, and at Denver7.com, here.
Photo: NASA Worldview, NASA Earth Science Data and Information System. Satellite imagery showing the iceberg calved from George VI Ice Shelf in the Bellingshausen Sea, Antarctica, on 19 January 2025.
Not much of a recompense for ruining our planet, but it’s true that global warming is giving scientists a chance to study previously unknown places.
At Schmidt Ocean Institute, we learn about some unexpectedly vibrant communities of ancient corals and sponges in Antarctica.
“An international team on board Schmidt Ocean Institute’s R/V Falkor (too) working in the Bellingshausen Sea rapidly pivoted their research plans to study an area that was, until last month, covered by ice. On January 13, 2025, an iceberg the size of Chicago, named A-84, broke away from the George VI Ice Shelf, one of the massive floating glaciers attached to the Antarctic Peninsula ice sheet. The team reached the newly exposed seafloor on January 25 and became the first to investigate an area that had never before been accessible to humans.
“The expedition was the first detailed, comprehensive, and interdisciplinary study of the geology, physical oceanography, and biology beneath such a large area once covered by a floating ice shelf. The ice that calved was approximately 510 square kilometers (209 square miles), revealing an equivalent area of seafloor.
“ ‘We seized upon the moment, changed our expedition plan, and went for it so we could look at what was happening in the depths below,’ said expedition co-chief scientist Dr. Patricia Esquete of the Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies (CESAM) and the Department of Biology (DBio) at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. ‘We didn’t expect to find such a beautiful, thriving ecosystem. Based on the size of the animals, the communities we observed have been there for decades, maybe even hundreds of years.’
“Using Schmidt Ocean Institute’s remotely operated vehicle, ROV SuBastian, the team observed the deep seafloor for eight days and found flourishing ecosystems at depths as great as 1300 meters. Their observations include large corals and sponges supporting an array of animal life, including icefish, giant sea spiders, and octopus. The discovery offers new insights into how ecosystems function beneath floating sections of the Antarctic ice sheet. …
“The team was surprised by the significant biomass and biodiversity of the ecosystems and suspect they have discovered several new species.
“Deep-sea ecosystems typically rely on nutrients from the surface slowly raining down to the seafloor. However, these Antarctic ecosystems have been covered by 150-meter-thick (almost 500 feet) ice for centuries, completely cut off from surface nutrients. Ocean currents also move nutrients, and the team hypothesizes that currents are a possible mechanism for sustaining life beneath the ice sheet. The precise mechanism fueling these ecosystems is not yet understood.
“The newly exposed Antarctic seafloor also allowed the international team, with scientists from Portugal, the United Kingdom, Chile, Germany, Norway, New Zealand, and the United States, to gather critical data on the past behavior of the larger Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet has been shrinking and losing mass over the last few decades due to climate change.
“ ‘The ice loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet is a major contributor to sea level rise worldwide,’ said expedition co-chief scientist Sasha Montelli of University College London (UCL), United Kingdom, also a 2019 Schmidt Science Fellow. ‘Our work is critical for providing longer-term context of these recent changes, improving our ability to make projections of future change — projections that can inform actionable policies. We will undoubtedly make new discoveries as we continue to analyze this vital data.’
“In addition to collecting biological and geological samples, the science team deployed autonomous underwater vehicles called gliders to study the impacts of glacial meltwater on the physical and chemical properties of the region. Preliminary data suggest high biological productivity and a strong meltwater flow from the George IV ice shelf. …
“ ‘The science team was originally in this remote region to study the seafloor and ecosystem at the interface between ice and sea,’ said Schmidt Ocean Institute Executive Director, Dr. Jyotika Virmani. ‘Being right there when this iceberg calved from the ice shelf presented a rare scientific opportunity. Serendipitous moments are part of the excitement of research at sea – they offer the chance to be the first to witness the untouched beauty of our world.’ ”
More at Schmidt Ocean Institute, here, and at radio show The World, here. No firewalls.
Photo :A large sponge, a cluster of anemones, and other life is seen nearly 230 meters deep at an area of the seabed. Sponges can grow very slowly, and the size of this specimen suggests this community has been active for decades, perhaps even hundreds of years.
Photo: David Cooper/Shaw Festival. The Shaw Festival’s Royal George Theatre, pictured in this undated file photo, will close at the end of the 2025 season to make way for renovations.
In Ontario, Canada, near Niagara Falls, there is a great summer festival centered around the plays of George Bernard Shaw. I remember a lovely weekend we spent there when Suzanne and John were little. Suzanne had barely started to walk. I think of it every year when I decorate my Christmas tree because a couple crocheted ornaments from China were bought in a shop there.
With two young children, my husband and I had to trade off babysitting. He went to one of the Shaw plays (Arms and the Man? I don’t remember). I took advantage of the opportunity to see the aging concert comedian Anna Russell. I’ll never forget her rendition of an Edith Piaf character: “She vas drinking too much, she vas smoking too much, she vas doing everything too much. And when you do everything too much — even if eet is ni-ice — eet is to-o much!”
Joshua Chong recently reported at the Toronto Star that the province of Ontario is determined that future generations will enjoy the Shaw Festival as much as we did.
“The Ontario government will invest $35 million over three years,” he writes, “to help rebuild the Shaw Festival’s aging Royal George Theatre.
“The proposed theatre that will replace it is expected to honor the original building’s design, the province said, but will also include about 20 per cent more seats, accessible front-of-house areas and new rehearsal space. The project is expected to be completed by the spring of 2029.
” ‘The Shaw Festival is a cultural icon for Ontario and for Canada, and is just one of the many great reasons to visit Niagara-on-the-Lake and the broader Niagara Region throughout the year,’ said Stan Cho, minister of tourism, culture and gaming, in a statement announcing the rebuild. …
“ ‘Rebuilding this beloved venue has been a priority for us, not just so we can continue to deliver outstanding theatre here in the heart of wine country, but to play our part in accelerating the growth of our region as a world-class center for cultural tourism,’ said Tim Jennings, executive director and CEO of the Shaw Festival, in the release.
“The existing Royal George Theatre, which began its life as a vaudeville house in 1915, stands on the site of a former blacksmith shop.
It was initially an entertainment venue for troops stationed in town during the First World War, then served for years as a movie theatre.
“The Shaw Festival acquired the space in 1980, hosting dozens of productions in the decades since. But the venue has become a liability for the organization in recent years. In the 2023 season, a water leak in the building’s clay foundation forced the cancellation of several performances.
“Before it closes, the Royal George Theatre will host four productions this season. Tons of Money, the British farce by Will Evans and Arthur Valentine, will run from April to October in a new production helmed by Eda Holmes.
“In June, Peter Hinton-Davis will direct Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, a social satire about a Salvation Army officer and her estranged father. The play is the sole Shavian offering programmed for the upcoming season. …
“Shaw Festival artistic director Tim Carroll will then close the Royal George Theatre with his production of A Christmas Carol, which has been revived annually since it premiered in 2017.”
Photo: Garcés de Seta Bonet Arquitectes/Marvel. Barcelona is transforming its skyline’s biggest eyestore into a beautiful tech hub.
I have a dear friend who is so keen on the possibilities of artificial Intelligence that she doesn’t seem to care how much energy it takes from other purposes — or whether the energy is clean. She says China uses coal; China is ahead.
I, on the other hand, rejoice to see coal going by the wayside and creative uses for the coal plants that once stained the landscape.
Jesus Diaz has a story about that at Fast Company.
“Tres Xemeneies (Three Chimneys) is a former coal-fired power plant in Sant Adrià de Besòs. … Barcelona’s plant is set to undergo a radical transformation into the new Catalunya Media City — a cutting-edge hub for digital arts, technology, and education.
“The winning design is called E la nave va, a nod to Federico Fellini’s film of the same name, which translates to And the Ship Sails On, a reference to how this long-dead structure that resembles a three-mast ship will keep cruising history in a new era. According to its creators — Barcelona-based Garcés de Seta Bonet Arquitectes and New York-Barcelona firm Marvel — the project promises to honor the site’s industrial legacy while propelling it into a sustainable, community-centric future. The project is slated to break ground in late 2025 and be completed by 2028.
“Three Chimneys looks exactly how it sounds: a gigantic structure dominated by three 650-foot-tall chimneys. The brutalist plant was built in the 1970s and faced controversy even before its opening. Many of the residents of Badalona and Barcelona hated it both for the aesthetics and the environmental implications. Its problems continued in 1973, when workers building the station went on strike. … The company that ran the station was also sued because of the pollution it caused, and the plant eventually shuttered.
“The structure is imposing. Its giant concrete vaults, labyrinthine floors, and towering chimneys presented a unique challenge to preserving its industrial DNA while adapting it for the 21st century. … Rather than force modern elements onto the existing framework, the team used the building’s features to organize its function.
“For instance, the lower floors — with their enclosed, cavernous spaces — will host incubators and exhibition halls, while the airy upper levels with their panoramic coastal views will house vocational training classrooms and research labs.
“ ‘We kept the existing structure largely unaltered,’ [Guido Hartray, founding partner of Marvel] says, ‘retaining its experiential qualities and limiting modifications.’ This approach ensures that the power plant’s raw, industrial essence remains palpable, even as it accommodates immersive media studios and a modern, 5,600-square-meter exhibition hall likened to London’s Tate Modern Turbine Hall. …
“The architects leveraged the building’s robust concrete skeleton — a relic of its industrial past — as a sustainability asset. Barcelona’s mild climate allows the thermal mass of the concrete to passively regulate temperatures, reducing reliance on mechanical systems. Spaces requiring precise climate control, such as recording studios and laboratories, are nested in a ‘building within a building,’ insulated from external fluctuations, according to the studios.
“The rooftop will double as a public terrace and energy hub, with 4,500 square meters [~48,438 square feet] of solar panels generating renewable power. This dual function not only offsets the energy demands of lighting and HVAC systems but also creates a communal vantage point connecting Barcelona, Sant Adrià de Besòs, and Badalona. ‘The rooftop’s role as both infrastructure and gathering space embodies our vision of sustainability as a social and environmental practice,’ Hartray says.
“The project’s most striking intervention — the ‘transversal cuts’ that slice through the turbine hall — emerged from a meticulous study of the building’s anatomy. Marvel and Garcés de Seta Bonet identified natural breaks in the long, warehouse-like structure, using these to carve openings that link the interior to the outdoors. These cuts create fluid transitions between the industrial hall and the surrounding landscape. …
“The north facade’s new balcony, overlooking the Badalona coastline, epitomizes this connectivity. Jordi Garcés, cofounder of Garcés de Seta Bonet Arquitectes, tells me via email that they have designed a proposal that plays with connections and knots — temporal, landscape, and territorial. … ‘The architectural elements at different heights will offer new landscape perspectives, as if it were a land art piece.’ In this ‘shared communal space,’ he says, residents and visitors alike can engage with the Mediterranean horizon.
“The building is the core of Catalunya Media City, which is a project that the regional government says will democratize access to technology and creativity. It claims that it will house educational programs for more than 2,500 students annually, including vocational training; research incubators partnering with universities and corporations; immersive installations and performances in a monumental hall with 56-foot-tall ceilings; and production studios, including an auditorium, soundstages, and UX labs.”
Photo: Wes McRae/Georgia Tech School of Music. Dinosaur Choir is a musical instrument that reconstructs the vocal tract of a Corythosaurus — a type of duck-billed dinosaur with a large, distinctive crest on its head.
Where will the imagination of science-oriented artists take us next? Here’s the story of two imagineers who investigated how dinosaurs might have sounded back in the day.
Verity Burns writes at Wired, “What did dinosaurs really sound like? If you’ve ever found yourself asking that question, a musical project using 3D models of dino skulls could be getting closer to answering it. …
“Dinosaur Choir is a musical instrument developed by artists Courtney Brown and Cezary Gajewski, which reconstructs the vocal tract of a Corythosaurus—a type of duck-billed dinosaur with a large, distinctive crest on its head.
“To make a sound, the user stands in front of a camera while blowing into a microphone. Depending on how hard they blow and the shape of their mouth as they do, the vocalizations that resonate through the dinosaur’s skull will change. In effect, the user’s breath becomes the dinosaur’s breath. The result is not the roar that we hear in the movies, but something that sounds more like a deep wail.
“The instrument has just been recognized at Georgia Tech’s 2025 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, an event that brings together inventors from around the world to discuss ideas on the future of music. …
“ ‘In 2011, we were on a family road trip and we stopped off at a dinosaur museum in New Mexico,’ Brown tells Wired. ‘There I saw an exhibit of a Parasaurolophus, which had crests like a Corythosaurus. There had been many theories as to why this family of dinosaurs had these crests, but researchers have settled on the idea that it could have been for sound resonation. As a musician, I felt empathy with them.’ …
“Brown was inspired and immediately started work on her first project, Rawr! A Study in Sonic Skulls, which is the work that Dinosaur Choir continues. Both projects focus on the Corythosaurus, but at different stages of their lifespan to investigate how changes to the crest in adult maturity affects their sound. However, the biggest difference between the two projects is the way the sound is made — the reimagining of the dinosaur’s vocal box.
“ ‘With Rawr!, we used a mechanical larynx, so people would have to actually blow into a mouthpiece to create the sound. But once we started exhibiting it, we realized it wouldn’t be possible for people to interact with it in a way that was hygienic — and the pandemic solidified that. That’s when I started thinking about something more computational. And as I have a computer science degree, it also made more sense.’
“The work on Dinosaur Choir officially began in 2021, with Brown traveling to Canada, where the Corythosaurus is supposed to have lived, to update her research. She and Gajewski worked with paleontologist Thomas Dudgeon, from the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum, to analyze the most recent CT scans and 3D fabrications. From those, they built a life-size replica of an adult Corythosaurus’ head, right down to its intricate nasal passages.
“ ‘I’m extremely proud of my nasal passages,’ jokes Brown. ‘I learned CT segmentation for about a year to get them as accurate as possible, taking into consideration the effects that being buried for millions of years would also have had on them.’
“With the skull model complete, work then began on imagining the dinosaur vocalizations themselves. Recreating the vocal box in computational form gave Brown much more control to test out new, and perhaps even conflicting research, without having to rebuild everything from scratch.
“ ‘The models are based on a set of mathematical equations that relate to the mechanics of the voice — things like changes in air pressure and a number of other affected variables through time,’ she says. …
“So far, Brown has developed two models for Dinosaur Choir — one based on the syrinx of a raven, and a more recent one based on that of a dove, but she is also working on one of an alligator too. As these models are computational, they can be switched between in real time during a performance, and participants can also experiment with different trachea lengths and vocal membrane widths to hear the effects on the sound. …
“ ‘We [can’t] completely rule out that non-avian dinosaurs maybe didn’t vocalize at all. Soft tissue [like vocal chords] rarely preserves, and the vocalizations are also a type of behavior that leaves no fossils at all. In my heart, I truly believe they vocalized, but feelings are not facts. So much is lost to time.’ ”
Photo: Dina Litovsky. Román Baca leads rehearsal on the deck of the Intrepid, the aircraft carrier turned museum on the Hudson River.
The wars that have been fought in my lifetime sometimes seem to have been necessary and inevitable. Most often, not. As the young people head off, I always think about how their lives will have been warped if they get back. It seems so wrong. And right now the services we’ve promised them are being slashed.
Fortunately, there are efforts at healing that forge ahead. One such program involves ballet.
Brian Seibert writes at the New York Times, “When Román Baca was serving as a Marine in Iraq in 2005, he didn’t tell many people what kind of work he had done before the war. He had tried that in boot camp, and it hadn’t gone well. So when his best friend in the platoon asked him why he seemed so interested in local dance practices, he hesitated before admitting the truth: He was a ballet dancer.
“Baca’s friend wasn’t bothered by the revelation. So Baca told him his crazy idea: to translate their wartime experiences into dance.
“Eventually, that crazy idea became Baca’s life. With his wife, Lisa Fitzgerald, he founded Exit12 Dance Company, which makes and performs works about military experience. What started as a way for Baca to deal with his trauma has expanded into a mission to help other veterans deal with theirs — through dance.
“In recent weeks, a group of veterans and family members of veterans, ranging in age and physical ability, has been gathering in the belly of the U.S.S. Intrepid, an aircraft carrier turned museum on the Hudson River. Using various improvisational exercises, they have been creating a dance work [to] perform on May 30 on the ship (on the flight deck, weather permitting). More important than that performance, though, is the process.
“Baca sees the workshops as a corrective for military training. ‘To make a person respond immediately to orders and commit acts of violence, military training changes your identity,’ he said. ‘It removes everything that defines a person’ — your clothing, your haircut — ‘and then it changes you through physical exercises, repetitive motion and powerful brain-body connections.’
“Baca, who has been leading these workshops since 2011, recalled a moment from one: Everett Cox, a Vietnam War veteran who had kept away from everything military for decades, responded to a prompt of action verbs by expertly stabbing and slashing with an invisible bayonet. His long-unused training was intact in muscle memory.
“Another time, Baca was choreographing a military exercise sequence and directed his dancers to yell ‘kill’ with every motion. When Fitzgerald questioned if that creative decision might have been a bit much, Baca explained that he was only being accurate: Coupling all actions with the word ‘kill’ was part of boot camp.
” ‘That’s absolutely needed when you are in uniform,’ he said. ‘But what do you do with that after you get home?’
“The workshops use physical exercises to help restore what Baca, borrowing a term from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, called narrative identity. ‘You start to tell people who you are and parts of your story and then you listen to others do the same,’ he said.
“ ‘A lot of trauma survivors will say that you never fully heal,’ he added. But as evidence of how the process can work, he pointed to the experience of Cox, who returned from service in Vietnam feeling so guilty and ashamed that he did not consider himself a veteran. ‘I lost my mind in Vietnam’ is how Cox put it to me.
“For nearly 40 years, Cox, who took drugs and attempted suicide, tried to lock away what had happened. He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic; one psychiatrist told him he was incurably insane. Then, in 2010, he attended a retreat for veterans at the Omega Institute, a holistic wellness center in the Hudson Valley. ‘It changed my life,’ he said. For the first time, he began to talk about his wartime experiences, and to write about them, and to cry. …
“ ‘If you’re holding a war in, it takes a lot of energy,’ he said. ‘And if you want to loosen that up, it also takes a lot of energy.’ ”
I so admire Baca, who against what seems to me like very long odds, keeps working hard to bring these damaged veterans back to life.
Using Google searches to analyze which books are most popular in each US state seems about as flaky a brand of research as can be, but it’s kind of fun anyway. I mean: The favorite genre in Texas is fantasy? I need to ponder that for a while.
Kelly Jensen writes at Book Riot, “Are there different preferences for book genres depending on what state you’re in? According to new research from Cloudwards, there are trends in book preferences based on location.
“Utilizing Google Trends data over the last 12 months, Cloudwards explored the most searched genre in each of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia. All searches were limited to Google Trends ‘Books and Literature’ category, and the researchers used a variety of common genre terms to determine the frequency of interest in them by state. Some of the genre categories were a little unconventional for the average reader –- how do you determine the difference between ‘fiction’ and ‘family’ as terms -– but the major genres were included, including romance, fantasy, mystery, and so forth.
“Romance dominated in terms of genre popularity across the US, with 22 states seeing it as their top searched genre. In terms of geographic region, romance was especially popular in the south, with states like Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia ranking it as their top genre.
“Fiction and poetry tied for next most popular genres, each either nine states reporting it as the most searched genre. The researchers note that these findings aren’t surprising, given that fiction is broad and encompassing. As for poetry, it is likely not surprising to see people looking for more information about poetry; the research here isn’t about poetry being the most read genre, but rather, one of the most researched genres.
“The next most popular genres were fantasy (six states), family (3 states), mystery (1 state), and fantasy (1 state).
“The researchers note that their methodology lacks scientific scrutiny but shows a general idea of interest in different reading genres. Among some of the weaknesses of this study are the loosely-defined genres, as well as the lack of nuance when it comes to format of genre. It’s not clear whether or not the researchers looked into genres outside of those which ranked among the top in the US, as there’s no full list of utilized search terms. There is no indication in the research, for example, whether or not science fiction or westerns were researched, and while horror is a mood and not a genre, it is surprising to see zero representation for horror here, either.
“Furthermore, poetry encompasses a wide variety of genres, as it is a format, rather than a genre. It’s also worth wondering where and how graphic novels in their myriad genres fit in with reader popularity.
“If there’s a takeaway, it’s this: no matter how frequently romance novels can be derided or belittled in pop culture, it’s a genre that is thriving, that is growing, and that tops the list of genres readers are interested in in nearly half of the United States.”
This is fun, but I really think that a more useful study would analyze books sales and library book preferences, don’t you?
It’s hard for me to name a book genre that is my favorite. I love fantasy, but I read many more mysteries than fantasies as there are so few good fantasies. I love certain kinds of biography but read more fiction than biography. I live in Massachusetts but hate historical fiction. If asked about your favorite genre, how would you answer?
More at Book Riot, here. See unscientific results for individual states here.
Photo: Dominique Soguel. Rua, a Damascus university student, poses for a photo wrapped in the Syrian flag while celebrating the anniversary of the revolution that led to the toppling of Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, March 15, 2025.
Although we can’t know where Syria is headed in the long run — or how many powerful countries will interfere with what everyday people want — I think we’re allowed a moment of hope at this this time. Certainly, that is what many astonished Syrians felt when the regime of the tyrant Bashar al-Assad was overthrown in a “sudden” uprising that was many years in the making.
Dominique Sequol of the Christian Science Monitor wrote an article in March about what Syrians were feeling. While it focuses on a new freedom to worship, worship is only one example of the change there.
“Alaa al-Saadi, like many Syrian men of his generation,” she says, “once fought to overthrow longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad. Now Mr. Saadi is savoring his first ‘free’ Ramadan in his hometown of Qaboun, a low-income neighborhood and former rebel stronghold on the outskirts of Damascus.
“At sunset, when Muslims rush home to break the fast with the iftar meal, the business owner stands on a street corner pouring out licorice juice from a giant metal pot. …
“Damascus is observing its first Ramadan since the fall of Mr. Assad, who cast himself as a protector of Syria’s many minorities while ruling them all with an iron fist. The Muslim holy month – one of heightened spirituality, and marked by the pursuit of good deeds to help those in need – is observed in Syria and across the Middle East.
“Mr. Saadi, who spent several years in Libya before returning to Syria in 2019, recalls hiding during previous Ramadans to avoid being conscripted into the Syrian army. Now, he is grateful to be in the position to help his community. …
“Families displaced by the conflict are trickling back to Qaboun, although much of it remains reduced to rubble after years of siege and bombardment.
“ ‘This Ramadan, our loved ones have returned,’ says Mr. Saadi, fielding greetings outside his car-painting workshop. ‘We are reunited. Friends, loved ones, and young men are all back. Things will gradually improve.’
“Indeed, Damascus seems to be inching toward greater functionality, with uniformed traffic police on the streets and a steadier electricity supply. The mood in the capital is one of cautious optimism under President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who broke ties with Al Qaeda and led the military effort that toppled Mr. Assad in December.
“This has been a month of prayer but also mixed-gender celebrations that continue late into the night under the glitter of Ramadan light installations. Women in all kinds of Islamic dress – from the niqab to the veil – converged on central Ommayad Square for the March 15 marking of the anniversary of the 2011 Arab Spring-inspired revolution. So did women with no veil. …
“There has been no shortage of individual and collective volunteer efforts inspired by the month of fasting.
“In Douma, another war-ravaged suburb of Damascus, Osama Massaya leads the volunteer group Mulham. Boasting 40 participants, age 14 and up, it focuses on cleaning mosques and distributing meals to worshipers. Such ideas are not new – but the possibility of executing them this freely is.
“In 2024, Mr. Massaya, a history student at Damascus University, tried to obtain a license for a volunteer team to clean up mosques. The request never received the green light from the Ministry of the Endowment. ‘At the time, there was no interest in mosques,’ he explains.
“ ‘The mosques were very neglected,’ adds Mr. Massaya, whose team has helped to clean up a handful in Douma already. …
“The Mulham volunteers aim to distribute 4,000 meals throughout Ramadan. Such efforts are financed by individual donations made by local residents, including some who resettled in Europe and the Middle East during the war and remain abroad. Most donations – including a recent batch of 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of dates – are made anonymously. …
“The activities of mosques were closely monitored in the past. In 2011, they were a springboard for post-Friday prayer protests against the Syrian regime, and long were treated as potential hubs of dissent.
“Rua, a university student in Damascus who gave only one name and whose father died in the notorious Sadnaya prison, reports a similar newfound sense of freedom.
“ ‘It’s the difference between day and night,’ she says of this Ramadan, recalling past years when ‘people prayed quietly and left mosques quickly,’ to avoid regime informants.” More at the Monitor, here.
We don’t choose what country we are born into, and perhaps watching the news since 2011, many of us were glad we weren’t born in a country like Syria. But I think that to witness such a moment of hope after despair is something precious.
Photo: Suwa City. Kiyoshi Miyasaka, a Shinto priest, leads parishioners from the Yatsurugi Shrine onto the frozen Lake Suwa in 2018, the last time the Miwatari, or Sacred Crossing, formed.
Climate change shows up in many ways around the world, especially where humans have kept records for centuries. One such place is in Japan.
Martin FacklerandHisako Ueno report at the New York Times, “For at least six centuries, residents along a lake in the mountains of central Japan have marked the depth of winter by celebrating the return of a natural phenomenon once revered as the trail of a wandering god.
“It would only appear after days of frigid temperatures had frozen Lake Suwa into a sheet of solid white. First, people were awakened at night by a loud rumbling. Dawn broke to reveal its source: a long, narrow ridge of jagged ice that had mysteriously arisen across the lake’s surface, meandering like the spiked back of a twisting dragon.
“This was the Miwatari, meaning the sacred crossing, which local belief held was left by a passing god of Japan’s native Shinto belief. Its appearance evoked feelings of awe but also reassurance among the residents, who ventured onto the ice to perform a ceremony honoring what they saw as a visitation from the supernatural.
In the rare winters when the ice ridge did not appear, the god’s absence was viewed as a warning that the natural world was out of balance.
“So important was the Miwatari that residents recorded whether it appeared, the condition of the lake and what historical events accompanied it. They have loyally written these descriptions every winter since 1443, creating a remarkable archive that attests to centuries of monotonously cold winters.
“But recently, the chronicles of Suwa have told a different, more alarming story. For the past seven winters, the Miwatari has failed to appear because the lake didn’t freeze. While there have been occasional years without ice, an absence of this length has happened only once before in the archive, and that was a half millennium ago.
“In fact, Lake Suwa has not fully frozen over — what locals call ‘an open sea’ — for 18 of the past 25 years. Kiyoshi Miyasaka, the chief priest of Yatsurugi Shrine, which for the past three and a half centuries has borne the duty of maintaining the records, says ice has failed to appear with regularity since the 1980s. He and other locals blame the disappearance of the ancient rhythms on global climate change.
“ ‘In old times, an open sea was regarded as a bad omen,’ said Mr. Miyasaka, 74, whose shrine’s traditional stone gate and tile-roofed wooden buildings stand about a mile from the lakeshore. ‘We hear about melting of ice caps and Himalayan glaciers, but our own lake is also trying to alert us.’ …
“Only parishioners in their 60s or older remember when the Miwatari was still big enough to make a sound that could wake them at night. The last time an ice ridge formed, in 2018, it was barely six inches tall.
“ ‘When I was child, the ice spikes rose higher than my height,’ said Isao Nakazawa, 81, a retired auto company worker. ‘We knew when it appeared because it made a sound like a taiko drum, “Gon-gon-gon!” ‘
“These days, the Miwatari has lost much of its religious significance. Residents in Suwa, a small, sleepy city wrapped along the lake’s edge, see it as a local rite of winter. …
” ‘Carrying on a tradition for 580 years binds our community together,’ said the mayor, Yukari Kaneko, 66. ‘I fear what’s happening now is a warning to rethink how we’re living.’
“Science has also robbed the ice ridges of their mystery by explaining how they arise. When Lake Suwa freezes, its surface hardens into a slab some two and a half miles across. On particularly cold nights, the ice contracts, opening cracks that fill with lake water, which also freezes. As temperatures rise again, the slab expands back into its original shape, pushing the newly formed ice upward into buckled ramparts. …
“While Mr. Miyasaka says he feels discouraged by the failure of the ice ridge to return, he intends to keep updating the archive.
“ ‘You cannot just quit something that has been around for more than 580 years,’ said Mr. Miyasaka, whose family has held the position of chief priest for five generations. ‘I will not be the one who ends it.’ ”
Photo: Roman Pilipey/AFP/Getty Images. The house of culture in the village of Posad-Pokrovske in southern Ukraine was badly damaged in attacks by Russian forces in 2022.
There’s a secret teen book club in occupied Ukraine, where the “official” schools teach Russian propaganda. Confided one student, “They don’t teach us knowledge at school, but to hate other Ukrainians.”
Peter Pomerantsev and Alina Dykhman report at the Guardian, “It must be one of the most dangerous book clubs in the world. Before they can feel safe enough to talk about poetry and prose, 17-year-old Mariika (not her real name) and her friends have to first ensure all the windows are shut and check there is no one lurking by the flat’s doors.
“Informants frequently report anyone studying Ukrainian in the occupied territories to the Russian secret police. Ukrainian textbooks have been deemed ‘extremist’ – possession can carry a sentence of five years. Parents who allow their children to follow the Ukrainian curriculum online can lose parental rights. Teens who speak Ukrainian at school have been known to be taken by thugs to the woods for questioning.’
“That is why the book club never meets with more than three people – any extra members would pose further risk of being discovered.
“Apart from the danger, there is another challenge: finding the books themselves. In the town where Mariika lives, the occupiers have removed and destroyed the Ukrainian books from several libraries – nearly 200,000 works of politics, history and literature lost in one town alone.
“So Mariika and her friends have to use online versions – careful to scrub their search history afterwards. The authorities like to seize phones and computers to check for ‘extremist’ content.
“Among the poems and plays Mariika’s book club likes to read are those of Lesya Ukrainka, the 19th-century Ukrainian feminist and advocate of the country’s independence under the Russian empire.
“In 1888 Ukrainka also formed a book club, in tsarist-era Kyiv, at a time when publishing, performing and teaching in Ukrainian was banned. Ukrainka’s works, in turn, explore the 17th-century struggle of Ukraine for independence from Moscow.
“In the dramatic poem ‘The Boyar Woman,’ the heroine chides a Ukrainian nobleman who has come under the cultural influence of Muscovy and praises a humiliating peace with the tsar that has ‘calmed’ Ukraine: ‘Is this peace,’ she asks, ‘or a ruin?’ …
“Over the centuries, Russia’s tactics have adapted. During the Russian empire, Ukraine was conquered, and its language and literature were suppressed. At other times, the Kremlin used mass starvation and the mass murder of intellectuals, as in the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, when about 4 million people were killed by Stalin’s policies.
“During the later years of the Soviet Union, the approach was subtler: some Ukrainian schools and a small amount of publishing were allowed but if you wanted to prosper, you had to speak Russian. Ukrainian poets and activists who asked for more national rights were sent to the last labour camps as late as the mid-1980s. …
“As it has done for centuries among its colonies, the Kremlin is changing the population on the ground by deporting local people and importing new ones with no connection to Ukraine. Since 2014, more than 50,000 Ukrainians have been forced to leave Crimea and about 700,000 Russian citizens brought in, many of them with military and security service backgrounds. …
” ‘They don’t teach us knowledge at school,’ said Mariika, ‘but to hate other Ukrainians. They’ve taken down all Ukrainian symbols and have hung portraits of Putin everywhere. History is all about “great Russia” and how it’s always been under attack by others.’ …
“Part of what keeps Mariika’s book club going is the desire for people outside the occupied territories to realize that there are people fighting for their right to exist as Ukrainians. Not all the books the club has been reading are overtly political. Sometimes they enjoy reading books that are just about normal life of young women in Ukraine – about dating and shopping.
“These tales take on a greater meaning in the occupied territories – a way to stay in touch with everyday life in the rest of the country. Novels have always helped to make you feel part of the community, of a nation.
“But still there is no getting away from the all-too-relevant ideas of Ukrainka’s writing. One of her main themes was to meditate on the relationship between personal freedom – the freedom of the imagination and to define your life – and the political freedom of the nation. ‘Whoever liberates themselves, shall be free,’ she wrote.
“Mariika’s book club makes those words real every day.”
Photo: Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library. This copy of Wild West was returned more than 35,000 days after its due date of Nov. 23, 1926.
Here’s a fun story for all of us who love libraries. Looking at you, Laurie.
Tana Weingartner writes, “Librarians at the Westwood and Price Hill branches of the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library got quite a surprise late last year. A copy of Wild West, by Bertrand W. Sinclair, was returned after 98 years.
” ‘I’ve been here a while, and I’ve seen books come back that were due in the ’80s and the ’90s and even the ’70s, but this is the first time I’ve come across a book that was almost a century overdue,’ Christopher Smith, genealogy and research services reference librarian, tells WVXU.
“According to the date slip in the back of the book, it was checked out from the Price Hill branch sometime in 1926 and due back on Nov. 23, 1926. …
“The book was discovered by family members cleaning out the home of an elderly loved one who had died. It was found on a bookshelf with other books, though Smith says it’s unclear to whom the book belonged.
” ‘We assume it’s the person who checked it out, but we don’t know that,’ he says, noting the library does have some old records, but it would take a lot of digging to see if it still has lending records going back that far. …
“It was returned to the Westwood branch about five miles away — and more than 35,000 days late. The library no longer charges fines, but it if did, he calculates the fine would have been roughly $730. The average cost of a hardback novel in 1926, he points out, was $2.
” ‘The way I look at it is someone either loved this book — and I think they did — or they just forgot about it,’ says Smith. ‘I assume this person just loved the book and decided, “Nope, I’m going to keep that.” ‘
“After about two years, he notes, the library likely — though he can’t say for certain — sent someone out to look for the book. He says library policy at the time would have been to go after the borrower, so their borrowing privileges would also likely have been affected. …
“The book was clearly well cared for, despite its age. Smith reports it is in decent shape. The library did purchase another copy of the book two or three years after the original went missing, and it remains in circulation. …
” ‘Normally, for a book this old that’s fiction, we wouldn’t necessarily keep a second copy,’ he tells WVXU. ‘But in this case, I felt it deserved a place on the shelf, so I had it re-cataloged — because it had fallen out of our system decades and decades ago — and it’s back on the shelf and can be checked out.’
“A lot of times, library books head to a used book sale or the Friends of the Public Library after they reach their useful lifetime in circulation. Smith says it’s clear this wasn’t a case of someone picking the book up used.
” ‘[There] would have been a stamp that clearly said “discarded material,” and those are clearly visible,’ he notes. ‘But there is nothing in this book to indicate that it was not meant to come back, and there’s nothing in the book to indicate that the library got rid of it.’
“There is a stamp indicating the book was added to the library’s collection on May 14, 1926.
” ‘I just found it fascinating. The fact that it came back in decent shape, considering it’s an almost a 100-year-old book — that’s crazy,’ Smith says. ‘The fact that it made it back to us, and didn’t just make it into the garbage or recycling or getting ground up for paper pulp? It’s just amazing that a book like that made it back to us.’
“As the name suggests, Wild West is a Western-genre work of fiction. Smith notes it was very popular, and Westerns were a big deal at the time.
” ‘It was the books that would lead into the TV programs that were all the rage in the 1950s,’ he adds.
“Here’s the liner description from the library’s catalog: ‘Rustlers had long been stealing from Montana cattle outfits when Robin Tyler, rep for the Bar M during the Block S roundup, saw Mark Steele, the Block S ramrod, hazing cows into a hidden canyon, and learned that Steele was the secret owner of the T Bar S iron, whose cows showed a miraculous increase each year. Trying to catch Steele red-handed, Robin tipped his hand. And Steele, a gunman, trapped Robin, who had never owned a gun, in a line cabin and decided to kill him. Robin pulled through that ruckus and went on the dodge. But he came back-this time with a smoking Colt-to start a wholesale cleanup on the Montana rangeland!’ “
Did you ever keep a book you weren’t supposed to keep? As I child, I kept a story collection from my elementary school and used it for years to teach dolls in my little “school” on the third floor.
Photo: Alex Majoli/Magnum. “Since at least the time of Greek philosophers, many writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing,” says Ferris Jabr at the New Yorker.
Charles Dickens kept few notes about where his plots were headed. From what I’ve read about him, he kept it all in his head, forming and saving his ideas on long walks wherever he was at the time.
In today’s article, we learn a bit about the science of that.
Ferris Jabr writes, “In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.’ He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarlyreconstructed the paths of the London amblers in Mrs. Dalloway.
“Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, ‘making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.’
“Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. … ‘How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!’ Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. ‘Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.’ Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth — whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads — walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.
“What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs — including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.
“The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. … When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down.
Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander. …
“This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight. Earlier this year, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford published what is likely the first set of studies that directly measure the way walking changes creativity in the moment. They got the idea for the studies while on a walk. …
“In a series of four experiments, Oppezzo and Schwartz asked a hundred and seventy-six college students to complete different tests of creative thinking while either sitting, walking on a treadmill, or sauntering through Stanford’s campus. In one test, for example, volunteers had to come up with atypical uses for everyday objects, such as a button or a tire. On average, the students thought of between four and six more novel uses for the objects while they were walking than when they were seated. …
“Where we walk matters as well. In a study led by Marc Berman of the University of South Carolina, students who ambled through an arboretum improved their performance on a memory test more than students who walked along city streets. A small but growing collection of studies suggests that spending time in green spaces — gardens, parks, forests — can rejuvenate the mental resources that man-made environments deplete. Psychologists have learned that attention is a limited resource that continually drains throughout the day. A crowded intersection — rife with pedestrians, cars, and billboards — bats our attention around. In contrast, walking past a pond in a park allows our mind to drift casually from one sensory experience to another, from wrinkling water to rustling reeds.”
Photo: Joanna Detz/ecoRI News. Tess Feigenbaum and Brendan Baba in the hot-composting room at their Providence facility.
At my retirement community, there’s a handful of people who are serious about composting both garden waste and food waste. We have Black Earth bins available for anyone hardy enough to trek to the garden area.
Massachusetts, meanwhile, passed a law that the kitchens of institutions our size must also compost food waste. But no one seems to be enforcing it. Here, the powers that be say it’s too complicated and expensive to reconfigure kitchen processes. Maybe they’d have to knock down a wall to build out the space.
Still, the idea of composting is catching on slowly in New England generally, and more restaurants and institutions are finding it can save a lot in trash-pickup fees.
In a story supported by 11th Hour Racing (get it — we are at the 11th hour with climate), Frank Carini of ecoRI News writes about a particularly dedicated composting couple in Rhode Island.
“Their journey, so far, has been epic, from Pawtucket to Los Angeles and back to Rhode Island. They left for the City of Angels with an idea borrowed from ecoRI News and returned with a business model to help the Ocean State get out from under all its food waste.
“Tess Feigenbaum and Brendan Baba co-founded Epic Renewal soon after landing in Los Angeles in late August 2016. They left three years later, but not before keeping some 23,000 pounds (11.5 tons) of L.A. food scrap from being landfilled or incinerated.
“Their for-profit operation, now run out of a 3,000-square-foot space on Acorn Street [Providence], provides low-cost composting services for events, businesses, and homes. Epic Renewal also offers zero-waste consulting services, products such as vermicompost and red wiggler worms, and software that helps other composting businesses track the amount of organic matter they are keeping out of the waste stream.
“ ‘Our big focus area is zero-waste events,’ Feigenbaum said. ‘We do a little bit of commercial and residential, but we very intentionally lean out of residential because of the density there … we’re not interested in competing with all of our friends. The events are really our fun place. They also let us reach a ton of people who otherwise might not really care about it.’
“Feigenbaum and Baba are part of an unofficial composting collaborative that Michael Merner, founder of Earth Care Farm in Charlestown and godfather of Rhode Island composting, unknowingly started in the mid-1980s. For years, Earth Care Farm went at it alone.
“Now, four decades later, about a dozen composting operations, including Epic Renewal, are helping Earth Care Farm take a bite out of the amount of food scrap being unnecessarily wasted.
“ ‘We had three generations of Merners at the last compost fund bill hearing,’ Feigenbaum said. ‘It was awesome.’
“The bill (H5195) would create a compost fund that would award composting and waste-diversion grants to help reduce the amount of material being sent to the getting-crowded Central Landfill in Johnston. …
“Baba said, ‘We need every single solution at the table, but what we really firmly believe in is hyper local, many sites that are smaller, especially knowing we have the most expensive farmland in the country, and we want those to be farms. It’s pretty critical when we’re thinking about urban spaces and creating a resilient network that we create more sites, not just one or two big ones.’ …
“In November 2024, they experienced a life- and career-changing event: they moved their composting operation from a Central Falls basement — Feigenbaum called the space ‘depressing’ — to a roomy, industrial space in Providence’s Valley neighborhood. Epic Renewal was born in an extra bedroom in the couple’s Los Angeles apartment.
“Their newish Acorn Street workspace includes room to store the operation’s 300 or so containers of various sizes, hot-composting boxes made of wood, and parking for their biodiesel-powered truck, a van, and two trailers. …
“Baba, with help from LA Compost founder Michael Martinez, replicated something similar to ecoRI Earth. By the time the duo left Los Angeles, Epic Renewal had 200 residential and 16 commercial customers. …
“When the couple isn’t collecting food scrap and other organic material and making compost with it, Feigenbaum works part-time at the Social Enterprise Greenhouse in Davol Square and Baba works full-time as a financial technology consultant. He wrote the material-tracking software Epic Renewal is sharing with other composting business for free while he works on putting the final touches on the tech. …
“Epic Renewal diverts about three-quarters of a ton of organic matter monthly from the waste stream. Since 2022, the operation has diverted 35.6 tons. Feigenbaum and Baba work with offices, food service and retail businesses, gyms, cosmetic producers, weddings, marathons, and festivals to reduce their waste.
“All of Epic Renewal’s magic is done indoors, thanks to bokashi composting. This anaerobic process, using a culture of bacteria that thrive in an oxygen-free environment, doesn’t produce off-gassing and is ‘ideal for indoor composting.’
“Feigenbaum noted this method requires less space, offers more input options, and is better suited for an urban environment or anywhere with limited green space. There is no runoff. The little liquid that is produced is recycled back into the process, which avoids the need to add tap water. …
“ ‘The biggest thing is demystifying it for people,’ Feigenbaum said of getting folks to compost. ‘We just need to get people exposed to it.’ ”
Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/CSM. Abe Marciniec is the site manager of Vanguard Renewables, an organics recycling facility in Agawam, Massachusetts. It processes food waste from supermarkets, distribution centers, universities, and residential drop-offs, turning it to fuel.
Today’s story about Massachusetts being the only state to reduce food waste would seem to be a triumph, and in terms of intentions, it is. But I am ambivalent about the value of turning food waste into gas. Methane, after all, is one of the worst. See what you think.
Troy Aidan Sambajon reports at the Christian Science Monitor, “On a recent Thursday, Abe Marciniec unloads two dozen pallets of ice cream – enough to fill 31 refrigerators – into a machine that transforms it into fuel.
“Today’s flavor is room-temperature rocky road, but this facility handles all kinds of food waste from supermarkets, distribution centers, universities, and even residential drop-offs.
“ ‘We get everything you can find in Aisles 1 through 12,’ says Mr. Marciniec, site manager of the Agawam Organics Recycling Facility, owned and operated by Vanguard Renewables. Mr. Marciniec’s recycling facility is one of six in the commonwealth and only one of 25 nationwide.
“As the expired ice cream funnels into a turbo separator, Mr. Marciniec watches the machine strip food from its packaging. The organic waste is then trucked to a dairy farm, where it’s mixed with cow manure and processed into renewable natural gas.
“ ‘It’s really a great circle,’ says Mr. Marciniec. ‘Food starts at the farm, and our farms turn it back into energy. Farm to table, then back to farm.’ …
“Facilities like this one, which can process up to 250 tons of food waste daily, replace manual work typically done by hand or not done at all. That’s a crucial step in diverting waste away from landfills. Americans throw out about 40% of food annually – a waste of both money and natural resources. Reducing food waste can increase food security, promote resource and energy conservation, and address climate change.
“The Bay Sate has become a leader in reducing food waste. In fact, it’s the only state to significantly do so – to the tune of 13.2% – according to a 2024 study. Massachusetts was among the first five states to enact a food waste ban in 2014. (The others were California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont.)
“ ‘The law has worked really well in Massachusetts,’ says Robert Sanders, an assistant professor of marketing and analytics at the University of California San Diego and co-author of the study. ‘That’s due to three things: affordability, simplicity, and enforcement.’
“[Food waste is] the largest category of waste – at 25% – sent to landfills in the United States. In 2019, 66 million tons of food waste came from retail, food service, and households. Around 60% of this waste was sent to landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
“Vanguard Renewables specializes in turning organic waste into renewable energy. The Massachusetts-based company partners with dairy farms to convert food scraps and manure into biogas through anaerobic digestion.
Microorganisms in cow manure digest organic matter, releasing biogas – a mix of methane and carbon dioxide.
“The gas is captured in large steel vats on the farm and refined into renewable natural gas, which can be used to heat homes and power buildings. … Since 2014, Vanguard has processed more than 887,000 tons of food waste in New England, producing enough natural gas to heat 20,000 homes for a year. By 2028, the company plans to have more than 50 systems across the country.
“In western Massachusetts, Amherst College has become a model for limiting food waste at the source. Last year, it was recognized as the winner in the zero waste category in the Campus Race to Zero Waste Case Study Competition.
“ ‘The goal has been to push us aggressively to make sure everything is compostable,’ says Weston Dripps, director of sustainability. To achieve that, the school has phased out single-use plastics, to-go boxes, and even canned water, replacing them with refill stations and compostable materials.
“In 2023, Amherst College generated 238 tons of food waste – roughly 4 to 5 tons per week. But instead of ending up in landfills, Vanguard collected 100% of that waste and processed it at its Agawam facility.
“That total includes both pre-consumer waste – such as kitchen scraps from food prep – and postconsumer waste, like leftovers scraped off plates in the dining hall and campus cafés. ‘To really have a clean waste stream, we have to focus on the front end,’ says Mr. Dripps.
“Amherst’s approach goes beyond composting. Each month, the school donates 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of frozen surplus food to the the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, ensuring edible food reaches those in need.
“Commercial businesses, too, are finding ways to cut down on waste. Maura Duggan, founder and CEO of Fancypants Baking Co., knows firsthand how much food can go to waste in the food industry. Her company produces hundreds of thousands of cookies each week.
“At its Walpole facility, Fancypants has large totes from Vanguard, which collect burnt cookies, food scraps, and anything that can’t be donated or sold. Last year alone, Fancypants diverted about 22 tons of waste. …
“Back in Agawam, Mr. Marciniec passes by 275-gallon totes full of leafy vegetables. Every day, he faces the reality that Americans waste 92 billion pounds of food a year – enough to make 145 million meals.
“ ‘It really makes you think about the things we take for granted,’ he reflects.
“ ‘Millions of people are starving everywhere, and the amount of food waste in this country is substantial,’ says Mr. Marciniec. ‘I’m sure we can do a better job.’ ”
Although I hate to quibble with this effort to at least do something, I know that enforcement has not reached my residential facility yet. Moreover, I’m pretty sure what we really need is not to have so much waste in the first place. What do you think? Is this a good first step?
Note Earle’s comment on my earlier post about this process, here.
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