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Meals on Wheels: A New Angle

April 13, 2017 by suzannesmom

Photo: CivilEats
The rooftop garden at Montreal’s Santropol Roulant, which has a Meals on Wheels program that addresses food waste.

Recent U.S. news stories suggest that Meals on Wheels in this country is about to lose some of its funding, but in Canada, the program for housebound residents has been growing and innovating for years. It now hopes to share its knowledge.

Meredith Bethune writes at CivilEats, “The rooftop garden at Santropol Roulant in Montreal looks like any other at first glance, with 40 self-watering containers and a small greenhouse lining the 1,500-square-foot rooftop. …

“Santropol Roulant—’the Rolling Santropol’ in French, is named after the café at which the founders previously worked. It was originally founded in 1995 to connect youth with seniors, and over the past 20 years it has expanded to include a Meals-on-Wheels food delivery program, a rooftop garden to grow food for those meals, including compost for the garden, a three-acre farm off site, and much more. …

“The Roulant’s Meals-on-Wheels program is staffed by volunteers who cook and deliver about 100 meals per day, five days a week to seniors and other local clients with a loss of autonomy….

“The power of waste reduction became an important part of the Roulant’s work in 2001, before it had established an agriculture program. Kitchen scraps were collected and delivered to a community garden, eventually reducing their waste by 40 percent. Three years later, the group began experimenting with urban farming techniques, growing produce for the kitchen in unused spaces like balconies, patios, and rooftops. …

“The Roulant also supports several collectives that use space in their building, including SantroVelo, a bike collective that began in 1996 as a place to store delivery bikes or fix flats. Today, the building houses beekeepers, worm composters, mushroom growers, and urban fruit-picking collectives, all of which function like autonomous teenagers: They live at home, but operate independently. …

“While the Roulant’s waste reduction methods have come a long way since in 2001—the vermicompost collective now hosts several long tables and towers of soil-making worms in the basement—they can’t compost every type of waste, particularly leftover cooked food and meals. The kitchen aims to prepare precisely as much food as they need to serve their clients each day, sometimes there are last-minute delivery cancellations and other mishaps.

“So in 2014, the Roulant began selling leftover products at what they call their ‘general store.’ … No one staffs the general store. Instead, the Roulant posts a price list and a cash box for customers to make change, and they haven’t lost any money yet. Though this new program generates some extra revenue for the organization, its main purpose is waste reduction.

“Through innovative solutions like the general store … Santropol Roulant is trying to reduce waste as much as possible. They also want to share these strategies with other Meals-on-Wheels programs around North America.”  More here.

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Saving Appalachia’s Plants

April 12, 2017 by suzannesmom

Photo: North Carolina Arboretum
Plant physiologist Joe-Ann McCoy extracts seeds from black cohosh collected in western North Carolina.

A plant physiologist, worried about the future effects of global warming on biodiversity in Appalachia, is not only preserving seeds but working to attract preservation-based economic development. It would be almost like getting a sponsor for one of the plants there, a plant whose roots are used in popular herbal remedies.

At Yale Environment 360, Nancy Averett writes, “When she can spare the time — away from the grant applications, journal articles, and economic reports strewn across her desk — plant physiologist Joe-Ann McCoy laces up her hiking boots and heads to the Pisgah National Forest in western North Carolina.

“Dodging copperheads and black bears, she winds her way deep into the forest, her eyes scanning the lush understory for black cohosh, a native plant whose roots have been used in herbal remedies for centuries, primarily to treat symptoms related to menopause. When she spots her quarry, McCoy gently pulls the plant’s seed pods — tiny brown orbs that rattle when shaken — off the stem and slips them into a paper envelope.

“The seeds inside those pods — which will be cleaned, vacuum-packed, and then stored in a freezer at -20 degrees Fahrenheit — give McCoy hope. As the director of the North Carolina Arboretum’s Germplasm Repository, her job is to preserve native seeds in this highly biodiverse area in southern Appalachia before climate change makes it impossible for some native vegetation to survive there.

“But the black cohosh holds another promise, as well. The plant’s roots are used in top-selling herbal remedies, and, if someone could succeed in growing black cohosh as a crop and manufacturing supplements here [it] could help drive economic development in this job-scarce region. …

“North Carolina [is] special in terms of biodiversity. Studies have documented more than 4,000 species of plants, 2,000 species of fungi, and 500 species of mosses and lichens in the region. Unlike much of the U.S. East Coast, during the last three ice ages the ground in this region did not freeze, which means the plants here have a much longer genetic history and more diversity than in other areas.

‘If I had to pick one place in the entire U.S. for this project,’ McCoy says, ‘it would be here. This is the ultimate spot.’ …

“When she first came to the arboretum, she focused on black cohosh and creating a robust seed collection from the plant’s entire geographic range — she has 22 different strains — and then growing plants from each strain so she would have enough seeds to back up her collection in three different repositories. These include two federal storage sites — in Ames, Iowa and Fort Collins, Colo. — plus the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.”

After cataloging the seeds, McCoy turns her attention to the economic possibilities. Read here about her work with investors. The Yale article also describes her ginseng efforts and her assistance to Cherokees who value plants used in traditional medicine.

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Off-the-Beaten-Path Ballet Hub

April 11, 2017 by suzannesmom

Photo: Danny Lawson/PA
The Royal Ballet gala is part of the programme celebrating Hull’s year as the UK City of Culture. 

Years ago, I read an article in which some famous theater person opined that, with money for the arts always tight, only major centers should be funded, not small theaters and arts programs out in the boondocks. I believed then and still believe that was the wrong way to go. Everyone deserves arts. And who’s to say where genius can be found?

Which is why I liked this story from the UK about the post-industrial city of Hull, where an impressive ballet school has been training talent for years.

Anita Singh, writes at the Telegraph, “A backstreet in Hull might seem a world away from the bright lights of the Royal Opera House. But one unassuming dance school in a converted church has discovered more ballet stars than any other in the UK.

“The Skelton Hooper School of Dance has sent what is believed to be a record 24 pupils to the Royal Ballet School, including the current head of The Royal Ballet, Kevin O’Hare.

“As a tribute to the city’s dance heritage, O’Hare is taking his company to Hull for the first time in 30 years. He will stage a gala performance starring Xander Parish, star soloist with Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet and another former pupil. …

“ ‘For me, Hull-born, bringing the Royal Ballet up to Hull for this special opening performance is fantastic,’ said O’Hare. … O’Hare and his brother, Michael, who is now senior ballet master with Birmingham Royal Ballet, studied at Skelton Hooper. …

“The school was founded by the late Vera Skelton and is now run by her daughter, Vanessa Hooper. ‘My mother trained most of the teachers we have. She was quite extraordinary — the first person to get someone into the Royal Ballet from the provinces,’ said Hooper, who charges just £3.75 a lesson. …

“Hooper said there is something special about the city. ‘Hull’s a difficult place to get to. You’ve got to go there out of curiosity,’ she said. ‘We’ve had to build our own little world on the periphery.’ ”

More here.

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Symphony of the Street

April 10, 2017 by suzannesmom

Composer Tod Machover never stops experimenting. He’s known for music that combines his electronic inventions with traditional instruments, he records street sounds to capture the ambiance of cities, and he works continuously to engage regular folks in the process of creation.

Linda Poon writes at CityLab, “It’s easy to disregard the hum of a city — the incessant honking or indistinct chattering — or to cast it off as noise pollution. … To the likes of Tod Machover, a composer who combines music with technology at the MIT Media Lab, these sounds are what makes a city sing.

“Machover has turned the sounds of Toronto and Edinburgh into symphonies that reflect the characters of each city. His first piece for an American city, Symphony in D, invited Detroiters in 2015 to contribute over 15,000 sounds unique to the city—drumming from the streets, sounds from factories, and spoken words by local poets—that were combined with instruments played by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

‘Like so many things in our culture, there’s a growing gap between experts and ordinary people, and I thought music is such a great laboratory to show how things can be different,’ says Machover.

” ‘So I wanted the project to be a representation of connecting people—no matter what their background was in music—as equals.’

“His latest project, called Project 305 and funded by the Knight Foundation, takes him to Miami, where he’s teamed up with the city’s New World Symphony [NWS] academy to create an audio and visual masterpiece. He’s helping lead community tours to collect sounds and videos, and working with schools to teach students how to do the same. …

“Typical urban noise, like the revving of a car engine, the ringing of a bicycle bell, or the pitter-patter of pedestrian footsteps, can be found in virtually any city. So how do you make an audio portrait feel particular to the town it’s supposed to reflect?

“Sometimes, it’s about incorporating the sounds that reflect a city’s history. Detroit, for example, was famously dubbed the Motor City for being the heart of America’s auto manufacturing industry. So Machover asked the community to send in recordings of different car engines, which he merged with Motown riffs, in homage to the city’s music scene. …

“NWS is also gathering clips of human chatter, a way of capturing the diasporas within Miami. The city is often called the capital of Latin America with immigrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, and other Spanish-speaking countries making up the majority of the population. Spanish has become a dominant language, but ‘you hear the same words inflected with all kinds of different accents,’ says Machover.

“When all is done, the entire performance won’t be confined to the halls of the academy. Instead, it will also be projected onto the facade of the building and simultaneously broadcast in different neighborhoods throughout Miami.” More here.

I have attended two of Machover’s operas. I thought the one based on a story by Tolstoy was lovely, although the one written with former poet laureate Robert Pinsky didn’t work for me. Something about an inventor seeking immortality by entering his electronic system after death.

Photo: Bowers & Wilkins
Endlessly inventive composer Tod Machover is incorporating sounds of the city in his new music.

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A Restaurant Where Immigrants Are Treasured

April 9, 2017 by suzannesmom

Photo: Anna Mindess
One of Ba-Bite’s colorful salads: red cabbage with mung bean sprouts, dried figs, arugula and feta and the creamiest hummus. The restaurant is like a welcoming family for immigrant workers.

Lisa, who lives in Oakland, California, put this nice story about an Oakland restaurant on Facebook. If I ever go to Oakland, I’m going to visit Ba-Bite in person.

Anna Mindess writes at KQED Food, “They’ve won accolades for their silken hummus and rainbow of organic salads, but for the owners of Oakland’s Ba-Bite, the most precious thing the almost two-year old restaurant can display right now may be the Sanctuary Restaurant poster on their front door. …

“Ba-Bite is Hebrew for ‘at home.’ Even though most of Mica Talmor and Robert Gott’s employees don’t speak Hebrew, (besides English, they speak Spanish, Maya, and Arabic) they completely understand the concept. The majority of them — like most food service workers in the Bay Area — are immigrants. After walking across deserts at night, being shortchanged or abused in other restaurants where they could not complain, working at Ba-Bite feels like they have found a family.

“Russell Chable manages the kitchen at Ba-Bite and is responsible for set up, prepping, and cooking. He grew up in a tiny town in Mexico’s Yucatan. … He started as a dishwasher and worked his way up to his lead position in Ba-Bite.

“After eight years away from home, Russell missed his mom. Sure, he would talk to her on the phone every week, but he wanted to see her face. So this determined young man decided to build his parents a cell tower so that he could FaceTime with his mom. Six months ago, he made contact with a man back in Mexico who outlined what would be needed: laptops, cables and a cell tower. Russell had his uncle check out the man and then sent money. Now he uses FaceTime to talk to his mom every week, and his parents have a small business renting out computer and internet time. …

“Fatima Abudamos is from Jordan and works as cashier. She also holds the distinction as Ba-Bite’s best falafel shaper. As she stuffs the green balls with sheep’s milk feta, she says, ‘This is an amazing place, just like a family. I’ve worked here almost two years. Mica is not like a boss, she’s more like a friend. She doesn’t scream if you make a mistake; she explains things. I feel safe here; it’s my second family.’ …

““We pay all of our workers well,” says Gott. “Partly because we know how expensive it is to live here. My experience is that more often than not, immigrants are working multiple jobs or longer hours, and forgo taking time off at all costs, as they want to or need to make money. …

“[Food runner Kasandra Molina says,] ‘This space here doesn’t feel like a workplace, it feels like home. We all get along. They care about our opinions and feelings. They don’t treat us just as employees; it’s more like a family.’ ”

More at KQED, here.

Are you in Oakland? Check out Ba-Bite at 3905 Piedmont Ave. Phone: (510) 250-9526

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College Fund for Small Emergencies

April 8, 2017 by suzannesmom

College is expensive, and for students from low-income families, even a small emergency can throw the whole thing off course.

That is why colleges are beginning to get creative with techniques to keep students’ educational goals from derailing over relatively small but unexpected expenses.

Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker writes about one such college.

“Francis Dillon will tell you that the huge expenses associated with college aren’t necessarily what makes it hard for students of limited means to get through school. Often, it’s relatively small stuff that can have a huge impact.

“Formally, Dillon is a vice president for advancement of Stonehill College. But for years he has been the person those on campus turn to when a student can’t afford a new laptop, or a trip home during a vacation break, or to apply to graduate school — the kinds of expenses that many of their peers take for granted. …

“Tuition, room, and board at the private 2,500-student school in Easton runs about $55,000 a year. That’s not cheap, but it is often defrayed by scholarships and other financial aid. The dealbreakers are much smaller. …

“Two years ago, a benefactor surprised Stonehill with a gift of $117,000 that came with no restrictions. Stonehill officials, including Dillon, had a novel idea for it. They decided to create a small, permanent fund to take care of the little student crises they had been quietly addressing piecemeal. …

“When he thinks about students whose college careers may have been saved by emergency infusions of cash, Dillon can rattle off examples. But one of his favorites is a current Stonehill accounting student named Juan Lopez.

“Lopez grew up in a tough area on the South Side of Chicago called Little Village. He says when he was about 13, some gang members in his math class noticed his facility with numbers and tried to recruit him as a bookkeeper. He avoided getting involved, but school became a constant source of anxiety.

“A teacher encouraged him to enroll in a parochial school across town, from which he graduated as the valedictorian. From there, he was recruited to Stonehill. …

“At one point, he faced an unexpected crisis. His father had lost his job, and with it his family’s health insurance. Stonehill requires all its students to have health insurance.

“Enter Dillon, with a check for the required coverage. Lopez freely admits that it wasn’t the only time he has needed help.

” ‘If it wasn’t for this fund, I probably would [have been] out of here by the end of my freshman year,’ Lopez told me. …

“Instead, he is a junior with a 3.6 grade-point average. He’s been hired as a summer intern at a major Chicago accounting firm.” More here.

For folks struggling to pull themselves out of poverty, any unexpected expense can raise insurmountable barriers. Congrats to Stonehill College for this smart assistance.

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Giant Penguins

April 7, 2017 by suzannesmom

Art: Senckenberg
The discovery of one of the oldest penguin fossils in the world reveals higher diversity of early penguins than previously thought.

Whenever I am tempted to think that everything on the planet has been discovered, a new fossil turns up.

Melissa Breyer writes at TreeHugger that a recently unearthed penguin fossil is responsible for a small but significant adjustment to how we see our world.

“Along the Waipara River in New Zealand’s Canterbury region are sites rich in avian fossils, many of which were entombed in marine sand not long (relatively speaking) after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

“One of the more intriguing fossil finds there of late is that of a giant penguin discovered by ornithologist Dr. Gerald Mayr from the Senckenberg Society for Natural Research and a team of colleagues from New Zealand. The Waimanu penguin had a man-sized body length of 150 centimeters (5 feet) and … is among the oldest penguin fossils in the world.

“But what makes the Waimanu even more interesting is that the bones are significantly different from other penguin fossils from the same time period, revealing that the diversity of Paleocene penguins was higher than previously thought. …

” ‘This diversity indicates that the first representatives of penguins already arose during the age of dinosaurs.’ ” More here.

Pretty funny that in order to illustrate the size of the newly found penguin relative to a grown man, the Senckenberg Society put the man in a “penguin suit.”

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Interview Prep with Help from Actors

April 6, 2017 by suzannesmom

ArtsJournal posted an amusing story from ArtsAtlanta recently. It’s about learning to project the persona you want to project when you go to a job interview.

An arts official at Georgia Tech got the idea that actors could help awkward students who are moving out into the world. She started by contacting actors experienced in the art of drag.

Gail O’Neill writes, “Madison Cario, Georgia Tech’s Office of the Arts director, was walking across campus in the Spring of 2015 when she passed a career fair in progress.

“After noticing how uncomfortable the students looked in their business suits and corporate attire, Cario’s mind flashed to Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. The 40-year-old, all-male, contemporary ballet company — featuring men wearing makeup, tutus and wigs while dancing on pointe — was scheduled to perform at the Ferst Center in the coming weeks.

“Who better, thought Cario, than performers who’d perfected the art of drag to teach millennials how to transition from uniforms of hoodies and flip-flops into young professionals whose wardrobes reflected their career aspirations.

One year later, a half-day seminar titled Drag 101 was offered in anticipation of Tech’s next career day. …

“ ‘As with any performer,’ says Cario, ‘students [preparing for job interviews] are not just putting on a suit. They have to put on a persona and adopt a personality. They must embody the confidence and poise needed to take up space in a room, and engage in conversation.’

“The practice of nonartists turning to actors for guidance on how to adapt to unfamiliar situations and settings is not unprecedented.

“The late-Margaret Thatcher worked with a tutor at London’s National Theatre to help lower the pitch of her voice after she decided to run for Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. …

“The Alliance Theatre has institutionalized a program that teaches business clients how to apply the methodologies and mechanics of the theater to help improve presentation skills in corporate settings. …

“ ‘The skills, which are pejoratively called “soft skills,” are not taught on the job or at university,’ says J. Noble, cofounder of Alliance@Work and communications specialist at the Alliance’s education department. ‘Some people are naturally inclined to be present, empathetic and self-aware, but the majority of us aren’t as much as we should be. And we’re not given opportunities to explore, rehearse and refine those characteristics.’ …

“For Noble, a former director, mining the principles of authenticity, empathy and connection as an Alliance@Work coach is indistinguishable from his work with actors. ‘In both cases, the work is transformational,’ he says.”

Read more at ArtsAtlanta. And you can sign up for the Alliance program here.

I’ve had a couple public speaking classes with groups like that. The lessons haven’t really stuck, though. I’d rather be in a play and perform as someone other than me. But I did learn one thing from the video taken in my last class: I have a tendency to hunch my right shoulder when making a speech.

Who knew?

Photo: The New York Post
For young people starting out, job interviews can be intimidating. Coaching by actors may lessen the stage fright.

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Tea and Hygge

April 5, 2017 by suzannesmom

Photo: Valentyn Volkov /Alamy
Hygge is the word Danes use to express “coziness and comfortable conviviality.” Think good friend, fireside, warm socks, cup of tea.

Upton Tea Imports in Massachusetts leads off its quarterly newsletters with little stories about the joy of tea in different time periods and parts of the world. The latest story offers background on the art of getting cozy, which the Danes call hygge, and which often involves a nice, hot cup of tea.

Upton Tea writes, “Half of the world’s happiest countries are Nordic, all of which have a penchant for hygge. [As of this writing, Denmark is] at the top of the happiness list and, perhaps coincidentally, seems to have the greatest affinity for hygge.

“Michael Booth (The Almost Nearly Perfect People) goes so far as to  claim, ‘Danes prize it more than ambergris and stardust.’ Is hygge the secret sauce to happiness, or is it just something that appeals to countries with few daylight hours during long winter months? …

“Hygge can be described as the appreciation of simple pleasures, enjoyed in a comfortable and esthetic environment in the company of close friends.”

In an article on hygge published in the New Yorker magazine, adds Upton Tea, “Anna Altman states … ‘Danish doctors recommend “tea and hygge” as a cure for the common cold.’

“It’s possible to hygge alone, wrapped in a flannel blanket with a cup of tea, but the true expression of hygge is joining with loved ones in a relaxed and intimate atmosphere.”

Nice. Tea and hygge. We knew this would get around to tea eventually. For more about hygge, check out the New Yorker article, here, and The Year of Living Danishly. And for the rest of the Upton Tea article — plus the impressive catalog — click here.

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Poky Little Puppy

April 4, 2017 by suzannesmom

The Little Golden Book called The Poky Little Puppy, by Janette Sebring Lowrey and Gustaf Tenggren.

Golden Books were a big part of my childhood. What about yours?

My mother especially liked to read us The Poky Little Puppy, I guess because we were all inquisitive — and took too long with everything.

Recently, NPR offered a trip down that memory lane.

From Lynn Neary: “In the 1950s and ’60s, if there were any children’s books in a house, at least one of them was likely to be a Little Golden Book. … Those beloved books celebrate their 75th birthday this year.

“First introduced shortly after the start of World War II, many of them — such as The Tawny Scrawny Lion, The Saggy Baggy Elephant and The Poky Little Puppy — have become classics. …

” ‘Up until then, children’s books were found mostly in libraries or high-end book stores and were meant to be handled with care. They tended to be very expensive. So even if you could find one of these books in a store, only a certain percent of the population could afford to bring them home,’ explains author Leonard Marcus.

“Marcus wrote The Golden Legacy: The Story of the Golden Books. He says the printers, publishers, writers and artists who brought Golden Books to the market had a lofty goal — they wanted to “democratize children’s books,” making them both affordable and accessible. To that end, they were sold in department stores, train stations, drugstores and supermarkets. …

“Golden Books became a kind of totem of the times for baby boomers who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s. George Saunders, author of the bestselling Lincoln in the Bardo, says Golden Books were a highlight of his visits to his grandmother. …

“He says he remembers the pictures best: ‘In those editions there’s some magic between the words and the images. … I could feel in my mental and physical reaction to those books that something really incredible was going on.’ …

“The books are now published by Penguin Random House.” More.

I loved Golden Books. My father preferred to read us books he considered classics. He was certainly amusing when reading Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. But my brother and I found Hans Christian Andersen stories creepy (the children of Dickens found Andersen himself creepy when he visited). The one upbeat tale in our Andersen collection — “The Tinder Box” — we insisted our father read over and over no matter how often he urged us to pick a different one.

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Child Mapmakers

April 3, 2017 by suzannesmom

 

 

 

 

 

One of my grandsons goes to a Montessori school where the four-year-olds make lots of maps. They use templates to trace the continents (above).

Which is why I was intrigued to see a delightful National Geographic article about the map juvenalia of professional cartographers.

Betsy Mason wrote, “So many of the cartographers I’ve gotten to know while writing about maps seem to genuinely love their jobs.

It’s one of those professions with a disproportionate number of people who are really happy to be there.

“I suspect that one reason for this could be that many of them have loved maps since they were kids, and they’ve managed to turn that love into a career.

“This collection of childhood maps made by eight professional cartographers backs up that theory. I interviewed each of them about their early mapmaking, how they found their way into cartography, and what they love about their jobs today.

“Their stories all have their individual quirks, but there are some common threads. Several of them recall spending family trips poring over a road atlas in the back seat, for example. And some can still recall the precise moment when they knew they would make maps for a living.”

Here is Mason’s report on one of the two female mapmakers in the article.

“A class assignment to map out a family fire-escape plan probably seemed like more than just an exercise to young Rosemary Wardley. A couple of years earlier, some sheds behind her house had caught on fire.

” ‘I’m sure that was in the back of my mind,’ she says.

“And that’s likely why none of the paths she drew for her family members went out the back door toward the sheds. On the other hand, she deemed it perfectly safe to direct her oldest sister to jump into a pine tree outside of a second-story window …

“The hallway outside of ‘Rosie’s room’ was covered in U.S. Geological Survey topographical maps, and this wall was often Wardley’s first stop after a drive or a hike.

” ‘I always kind of went back there and had my dad point out where we had gone,’ she says. ‘Thinking back, that’s definitely the biggest thing that influenced me as a cartographer. It just made me have that love of geography.’

“Today, Wardley works at National Geographic, where she says the cartography is very collaborative. She makes maps for stories such as a photographer’s trek across China, but a lot of her time is spent editing and working with the data that goes into the maps. It’s the variety that appeals to her most, she says.”

Click to see maps the cartographers made in childhood.

Thank you for putting the link on Facebook, Asakiyume. I wouldn’t have known about this otherwise.

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Hedge Fund Guy Starts School in Africa

April 2, 2017 by suzannesmom

Photo: Boston Globe
Students at Abaarso, the secondary school that a former hedge fund manager founded in Somaliland. Over the past eight years, the school has placed more than 80 students in international boarding schools or colleges.

Some people in tech start-ups or finance make a lot of money at a young age and then decide to do something for the world. Johnathan Starr is such a person.

James Sullivan has the story at the Boston Globe.

“It was no ordinary test for Mubarik Mohamoud. As the first student from the Abaarso School of Science and Technology to be accepted into an American school, Mubarik could create untold opportunities for his schoolmates with a successful transition to Worcester Academy.

“On the other hand, if he stumbled, his peers’ hopes might be dashed.

“Jonathan Starr, a former hedge fund manager who started Abaarso eight years ago in the breakaway African republic of Somaliland, chuckles as he recalls his demanding expectations for Mubarik. When he learned that his prize student was worried ‘the entire future is on his shoulders,’ he responded, ‘Good! He’s been listening.’

“Starr … has just published a book, ‘It Takes a School: The Extraordinary Story of an American School in the World’s No. 1 Failed State,’ about his rash decision to bring a rigorous education to the former region of Somalia, and the remarkable group of teachers and students who brought that vision to reality.

“By his early 30s, Starr had amassed significant wealth and achievement as a systems savant for Fidelity Investments and later with his own hedge fund, Cambridge-based Flagg Street Capital. But he still felt a nagging desire to do something meaningful with his life. …

“A movie buff, he was drawn to inspirational classroom films like ‘Stand and Deliver,’ the 1988 story of East Los Angeles math teacher Jaime Escalante. And for some time, he writes in his book, he had harbored an idea ‘to start a school for really talented kids who have great potential that will otherwise go wasted.’ …

“When he first arrived in Somaliland, almost all of the republic’s schools had been destroyed or run into the ground by the Somali civil war. Covering grades 7-12, Abaarso, named for the town the school is in, now serves 212 students on its walled, multibuilding campus. Acceptance is competitive. …

“Mubarik graduated from Worcester Academy — Starr’s alma mater — in 2013. This spring, after majoring in electrical engineering and computer science, he’ll graduate from M.I.T. Having specialized in autonomous robotics, he’d like to help engineer driverless cars. It’s an astounding trajectory for a boy who grew up in a world so rural, he mistook the first motor vehicles he saw to be some kind of bizarre domesticated animal.

“ ‘I do not feel exceptional,’ says Mubarik, ‘but I do feel lucky.’ ”

More here.

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Walt Whitman Novel Discovered

April 1, 2017 by suzannesmom

Photo: Library of Congress
Walt Whitman holding a butterfly.

I love reading about the early writings of famous authors. For example, the Brontë children worked on stories about a kingdom they invented called Angria and another kingdom called Gondal, in which the hero was based on the Duke of Wellington.

Sometimes authors do not want anyone to know about their unpolished work, though. Jane Austen convinced her sister to burn letters and other writings after her death. And Walt Whitman wrote an anonymous potboiler that was kept under wraps until a grad student with a knack for finding lost work discovered it last summer.

Rachel Leah writes at Salon, “A new Walt Whitman novel is now available for purchase, 125 years after the author’s death. Previously, the text had only been published anonymously in a six-part series in a New York City newspaper in 1852.

“But last summer the novel was rediscovered by a graduate student deep within the Library of Congress. This is the second Whitman novel that the literary scholar Zachary Turpin has unearthed. …

“Turpin previously uncovered a lengthy newspaper series on fitness and healthy living that Whitman had published under a pseudonym in 1858, CBS reported.

“The novel titled ‘The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle’ was published online on Feb. 20 in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and soon will be in book form, courtesy of the University of Iowa Press. …

“Perhaps most remarkable is the novel’s relevant subject matter.

“According to Whitman expert David S. Reynolds, ‘This is Whitman’s take on the city mystery novel, a popular genre of the day that pitted the “upper 10 thousand” — what we would call the 1 percent — against the lower million,’ he told The New York Times.” Hmmm.

More at Salon, here, and at the Times, here.

I’m always sorry — not only for the sake of researchers, but for those of us who like literary biographies — that early writings are lost. And now that no one uses a typewriter or writes by hand anymore, we are also losing the thought process that was once revealed in cross-outs and scribbled corrections. We have yet to plumb the full cost of that loss.

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Cells That Know Left from Right

March 31, 2017 by suzannesmom

Photo: Steve Atwood
The wrybill uses its laterally curved bill to reach insect larvae under rounded riverbed stones.

I was intrigued by new research showing that some cells in nature have a left or right orientation and, when disrupted, are able to repair themselves. The Quanta Magazine article reposted at Wired is long and technical. I’m hoping to capture the basics here.

Tim Vernimmen writes, “In 2009, after she was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer, Ann Ramsdell began to search the scientific literature to see if someone with her diagnosis could make a full recovery. Ramsdell, a developmental biologist at the University of South Carolina, soon found something strange: The odds of recovery differed for women who had cancer in the left breast versus the right. Even more surprisingly, she found research suggesting that women with asymmetric breast tissue are more likely to develop cancer.

“Asymmetry is not readily apparent. Yet below the skin, asymmetric structures are common. Consider … how our heart, born from two identical structures fused together, twists itself into an asymmetrical pump that can simultaneously push oxygen-rich blood around the body and draw in a new swig from the lungs, all in a heartbeat. …

“In her early years as a scientist, Ramsdell never gave asymmetry much thought. But … after her recovery, Ramsdell decided … to start looking for asymmetry in the mammary glands of mammals.

In marsupials like wallabies and kangaroos, she read, the left and the right glands produce a different kind of milk, geared toward offspring of different ages. …

“Research from [the lab of Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts University] suggests that communication among cells may be an under-explored factor in the development of asymmetry.

“The cellular skeleton also directs the transport of specialized proteins to the cell surface, Levin said. Some of these allow cells to communicate by exchanging electrical charges. This electrical communication, his research suggests, may direct the movements of cells as well as how the cells express their genes.

“ ‘If we block the [communication] channels, asymmetrical development always goes awry,’ he said. ‘And by manipulating this system, we’ve been able to guide development in surprising but predictable directions, creating six-legged frogs, four-headed worms or froglets with an eye for a gut, without changing their genomes at all.’

“The apparent ability of developing organisms to detect and correct their own shape fuels Levin’s belief that self-repair might one day be an option for humans as well.

“ ‘Under every rock, there is a creature that can repair its complex body all by itself,’ he points out. ‘If we can figure out how this works,’ Levin said, ‘it might revolutionize medicine. Many people think I’m too optimistic, but I have the engineering view on this: Anything that’s not forbidden by the laws of physics is possible.’ ”

The original story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Check the Wired reprint here.

Photo: SEFSC Pascagoula Laboratory; Collection of Brandi Noble, NOAA/NMFS/SEFSC
The twospot flounder lies on the seafloor on its right side, with both eyes on its left side.

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The War of the Worlds

March 30, 2017 by suzannesmom

032717-ESL-class-Providence

I volunteer with English Language Learners at two agencies in Providence and one in Boston. The classroom teachers are all quite different in their approach, and I learn from them all. JVS in Boston has a rapid-employment model, so all the English learning is geared toward what you need for a job.

At one Providence agency, I work with a teacher who has brand-new refugees, some of whom, because of war or poverty, have never been to school in their native countries. She keeps the atmosphere friendly and light, but there is an understandable level of seriousness, given how new everything is to the participants.

The teacher I assist at the Genesis Center has a class of immigrants whose language skills are a bit further along and who mostly come from Spanish-speaking countries and are not refugees. I believe the woman in the hat, above, is from Puerto Rico — so, born a US citizen. She wants to improve her English and loves to write.

On Monday, the teacher was following up on the previous week’s discussion of periodic tables, the instability of hydrogen, and the 1937 crash of the German pleasure blimp the Hindenburg in New Jersey. He showed the crash film to the class, one that I’ve seen often enough to know I really can’t take it. I look away.

I said, “What’s interesting is that when Orson Welles did his radio play at Halloween the following year about Martians landing in New Jersey, many listeners were so sensitized to disaster they thought the radio play, presented as real news, was true.

I said, “It might be fun sometime for the class to practice their English by reading the script.”

The next thing I knew the teacher had found the radio play on the web and was passing around copies.

When we were halfway through it, we discussed the ways Orson Welles had adapted the H.G. Wells sci-fi classic to New Jersey, with an authentic-sounding ballroom broadcast that was frequently interrupted by a studio announcer switching to reports of an unusual light burst on Mars and (after some more of the big band concert) a shiny cylinder falling on a farm in Grovers Mills. Details like the boom heard as far as 100 miles away in Elizabeth, New Jersey, added to the verisimilitude. So did the on-the-ground reporter conducting interviews with the farmer and a scientist who didn’t believe in life on Mars, as police sirens wailed in the background. We talked about how panicked some listeners were and how they jammed the lines at the radio station.

The teacher next had people write their own endings to the story. It was a lot of fun. The students don’t speak much English, but they certainly got the point about the panic. One woman, remembering how in her hometown some individuals thought the turn of the millennium was the end of the world and did away with themselves, put that into her story. Others envisioned panicked parents rushing to schools to pick up their children.

It was serious in a way, but we laughed a lot. I felt grateful to work with a teacher who is able to make up a good lesson on the spur of the moment like that.

Photos: David Buchalter

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