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Finding the Kids in the Jungle

August 12, 2023 by suzannesmom

Photo: Mie Hoejris Dahl.
An indigenous leader and indigenous guards and family members of four lost children meet at the office of the National Organization of Indigenous People of the Colombian Amazon, in Bogotá, Colombia, June 15, 2023.

You may have heard about the kids who were in a plane crash in the jungle and survived largely because of their indigenous skills. Today I share a story about how an unusual collaboration among searchers led to their being found.

Mie Hoejris Dahl reports at the Christian Science Monitor, “Few things have united the Colombian population like the recent successful rescue of four young Indigenous children following a deadly plane crash – and their ability to survive alone in the jungle for 40 days.

“The story of Lesly Jacobombaire Mucutuy, Soleiny Jacobombaire Mucutuy, Tien Ranoque Mucutuy, and Cristin Ranoque Mucutuy, who ranged in age from 11 months to 13 years at the time of the crash, grabbed hearts and headlines [recently] for their incredible resilience. The plane wreck killed all three adults on board, but against great odds, the children survived alone in the jungle by tapping into ancestral education about the animals, edible plants, and survival tactics in the wild jungle.

“Their survival is an inspiration, but the saga also put a spotlight on challenges faced by Colombia’s Indigenous populations, who fight to preserve their culture amid historical marginalization. …

“A promising thread has emerged in the days since the children’s discovery, which is the unparalleled, collaborative search efforts by the Colombian military and Indigenous guards that led to their rescue in the first place.

“It has many here looking to what the future of respect and partnership might look like between the government and Indigenous communities.

“ ‘This was a lesson … to look for commonalities’ between the government and Indigenous groups, says Rufina Román, a leader in the National Organization of Indigenous People of the Colombian Amazon, a nongovernmental organization. ‘We are going to need to rely on joint action for many other issues … like climate change’ and environmental protection. …

“On May 15, two weeks after an engine failure caused a flight carrying three adults and the four children to crash in the dense Amazon jungle, rescuers found the front part of the plane stuck between trees in the southern Colombian state of Caquetá. The pilot, an Indigenous leader, and the children’s mother were found dead.

“Although the search team saw signs of life – a baby bottle, half-eaten fruit, and dirty diapers – the children were nowhere to be found.

“The Colombian government deployed search-and-rescue planes and helicopters, as well as land and river teams to the crash site. They scoured for the kids in an area of about 1,650 miles and used sound systems to play a recording of the children’s grandmother speaking in their native language, Huitoto, telling them that people were looking for them and that they should stay in one place.

“The children kept moving, some close to them speculate out of fear of who exactly was looking for them. Armed dissident guerrilla groups are a threat for many Indigenous communities in the jungle.

“But even so, the search was challenging from the start.

“ ‘It’s a very remote zone that requires special capacity,’ says Pedro Sánchez, the general who led the government search operation. Some 16 hours of rain a day, humidity, dense vegetation, and dangerous animals make the terrain hard to penetrate even for the country’s best-trained soldiers. It’s hopeless trying to see anything from the air due to tree coverage, and it’s hard from the ground, too. …

“Eventually, General Sánchez authorized Indigenous volunteers from across the country to participate in the operation: a decision that almost certainly saved the children’s lives.

“ ‘Without them, we still wouldn’t have found the kids,’ he says of the approximately 80 Indigenous volunteers.

“Working with the guard helped multiply eyes and ears on the ground, but also contributed important, deep-seated knowledge about the jungle. Spiritual knowledge, too, General Sánchez says.

“He describes the collaboration as ‘very fluid,’ which stands in contrast to the historical mistrust between Indigenous people and the government’s armed forces. Indigenous communities are often stigmatized as uneducated, violent, and out of touch with modern society. And the absence of the state in many of these remote communities, lack of public services like roads and running water or electricity, and few security measures in a region overrun by armed groups mean that many mistrust and feel abandoned by the state. …

“There’s hope that the unprecedented collaboration that took place between the armed forces and the Indigenous guard in Operation Hope, as the rescue mission was dubbed, can blaze a new path for relations between the government and Indigenous groups here.

“When the soldiers and Indigenous guards were deep in the jungle, on several occasions their technology, like GPS satellites and compasses, stopped working. ‘What do you say?’ General Sánchez asked the Indigenous guards.

“That simple question was ‘something spectacular,’ says Janer Quina, regional coordinator of the Indigenous guard in Cauca … who participated in the search. It contrasts with his experience with non-Indigenous Colombians in the past. Historical knowledge around nature, for example, is often met with skepticism from outsiders, he says. …

“In the long, emotional search, the soldiers and Indigenous guards shared food, personal questions, and survival techniques. Indigenous guards shared ancestral knowledge, like medicinal plants, while soldiers taught them to use their high-tech equipment. … What was perhaps even more surprising was the kids’ ability to survive in such precarious conditions.

“ ‘We taught them how to survive in the Amazon jungle,’ says Eliecer Muñoz, one of the Indigenous rescuers, of the education that children in many remote Indigenous communities are brought up with about plants, animals, and how to construct a shelter. …

“Thus, ‘Lesly [the 13-year-old] knew what to do,’ says Ms. Román, including which plants or insects were edible and how to care for a baby without any of the tools many Westerners rely on, like formula or a crib.’ “

More at the Monitor, here. No firewall.

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Master Art Thief

August 11, 2023 by suzannesmom

Photo: Jef-Infojef/Wikimedia.
Stéphane Breitwieser stole art between 1995 and 2001. Here he is in the “salon du livre de Colmar,” Haut-Rhin, France.

Today’s true story interests me partly as fan of mysteries, partly as a mom. Did the art thief’s mother kid herself about what her son was up to? How clear-eyed are mothers in general when it comes to a child’s malfeasance?

The New York Times reviews Michael Finkel’s book about “the most successful and prolific art thief who has ever lived.”

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich writes, “At first, Stéphane Breitwieser, the subject of Michael Finkel’s The Art Thief, appears to be having an enviable amount of fun. Twenty-five years old and living with his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, in a small set of upstairs rooms in his mother’s home in a ‘hardscrabble’ manufacturing suburb in eastern France, Breitwieser is unburdened by such quotidian concerns as a job, making rent or planning for the future.

“He fancies himself a purer sort of soul, so devoted to beauty he must, in Finkel’s words, ‘gorge on it.’ Over the course of a dizzying 200 pages that are also an effective advertisement for Swiss Army knives (Breitwieser’s only tool), he removes artwork after artwork from museums — a.k.a. ‘prisons for art.’ … He piled all $2 billion worth of artifacts he amassed over eight years into that same attic in his mother Mireille Stengel’s ‘nondescript’ stucco house.

“Finkel includes satisfying evidence of this astounding loot in a color insert that shows a crammed jumble of ‘ethereal’ ivory carvings, shining silver goblets, unctuous oil paintings and more.

All this Breitwieser secreted away in the couple’s lair not to be fenced for money, but for the pair alone to enjoy waking up to in the morning:

“Like George Petel’s 1627 sculpture ‘Adam and Eve’ on the bedside table, next to a 19th-century blown-glass vase and a blue and gold tobacco box ‘commissioned by Napoleon himself.’

“Finkel’s account, based largely on interviews with Breitwieser, is of a romantic hero who disdains practical details as much as security ones, and who is ‘crushed’ when Stengel deigns to buy Ikea furniture. ‘I am like the opposite of everyone,’ he declares … ‘born in the wrong century.’ That Finkel aligns the reader’s sympathies with the point of view of the criminal makes for a heady rush of freudenfreude.

“The romanticized portrait of a complicated male subject is a formula Finkel has found success with before: His best-selling previous book, The Stranger in the Woods, about the Maine hermit Christopher Thomas Knight, was similarly expanded from an article in GQ. Yet despite this book’s slim size, Finkel’s efforts to fill its pages eventually strain, padding them with generic musings on why people make art and head-scratching lines like, ‘Yellow is the hue least harmonious to a banana.’ …

“By the end, we’re left with signs that what we’ve been offered is only a rough sketch, not the more complicated truth. Finkel portrays Breitwieser as a pure aesthete motivated solely by aesthetic passion, but later he’s also arrested for simple shoplifting. [And] in a shocking turn the author brushes past, Kleinklaus says under oath that Breitwieser hit her after learning she’d hid an abortion. ‘He scared me,’ she tells a courtroom; to a detective, she says, ‘I was just an object to him.’

“Finally, did Stengel really never suspect what her son was up to in her home? Was her frenzied ‘attic purge’ — during which she hurled silver pieces into a canal and burned paintings in a forest — really the ‘ultimate expression of maternal love’ Breitwieser interprets it to be? (She herself tells the police, ‘I wanted to hurt my son, to punish him.’) It is by far the most shocking act in the book, but — as with the characters of Stengel and Kleinklaus — Finkel leaves it frustratingly opaque.” More at the Times, here.

To skip the firewall, see what Wikipedia has to say about the art thief, here. You may also enjoy The Art Forger, a novel about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum that was fun. I wrote about it here.

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A Forgotten Black Musician

August 10, 2023 by suzannesmom

Map: Surveyed by Charles Blaskowitz and published by William Faden, 1777.
When the future composer Occramer Marycoo was brought to America as a slave, he landed in Newport, Rhode Island. Today his achievements are getting belated attention.

It isn’t rewriting history to discuss slavery in America or the life of slaves. It’s resurrecting history. As one website admonishes, “To build a more just and equitable future, we must face our history in all its complexity.”

Today’s article, from Early Music America, is about an 18th century African who suffered the horror of slavery and is now being honored as the first published Black composer in America.

Sophie Genevieve Lowe writes, “In January 2023, Sotheby’s held an auction for a Chippendale chest of drawers, estimated to sell for almost $800,000. Part of its unusually high value derived from the original owner, which Sotheby’s advertised as the ‘Important Lieutenant Colonel Caleb Gardner’ — a hero of the American Revolution and friend to George Washington. Sotheby’s omits that Gardner helped enslave some 3,912 human beings, one of whom was Occramer Marycoo, perhaps the first Black African to have music published in America and the first Black musician to be recognized by the white American community as a professional musician.

“Occramer Marycoo’s story commences and concludes in Africa. … Based on the spelling of his name, it is likely that Marycoo was from an Akan language people group from the Gold Coast of Africa, specifically Ghana.

“Marycoo was forcibly transported to the American colonies, possibly on the 1764 voyage of the ship ‘The Elizabeth,’ owned by sea captain Caleb Gardner.  Records from the Transatlantic Slave Database show that the ship left Cape Coast, a prison fort in Ghana, with 120 captives on board. Only 89 survived the crossing.

“Although the majority of enslaved people who were brought to Newport, Rhode Island, were eventually shipped to the Caribbean, Gardner kept Marycoo as his own property, renaming him Newport Gardner. He is thought to have been around 14 years old when brought to America and, throughout his life, he would go by both names. …

“It was not long after arriving in Newport that Marycoo displayed his brilliant intellect. He quickly became fluent in English and French and learned the fundamentals of music. He was said to be composing within four years of his arrival in America. There are several theories as to who taught Marycoo, the most prominent being American composer Andrew Law (1749–1821). Law wrote much about music education. …

“There are numerous references to compositions by Marycoo, but his only known surviving work is the crux of Marycoo’s historical place as the first published musical work by a Black person in the nascent United States. Musicologist Eileen Southern, in her 1997 book The Music of Black Americans: A History, theorized that ‘Crooked Shanks,‘ from a collection called A Number of Original Airs, Duetto’s, and Trio’s [sic], published in 1803, was by Marycoo. The piece is credited to a composer with only the last name given, Gardner.

“However, new research seems to indicate that the music had been composed prior to the 1803 publication date. ‘Crooked Shanks’ was also previously published in London under the title ‘The Sea Side‘ by the publisher Bride in Twenty Four Country Dances for the Year 1768, and in the 1770s, as the ‘The Bill of Rights’ by the publisher Thompson.

“John Fitzhugh Millar identified both these melodies in his book Country Dances of Colonial America. He also believes that Marycoo wrote this melody and goes as far to hypothesize that Marycoo also listed the dance instructions that accompany the melody. Marycoo’s status as a slave would have certainly been a deterrent to properly credit him at the time — if he indeed wrote the piece. …

“We can gather clues to some of Marycoo’s musical influences. As a composer and teacher, Law dedicated himself to forging an American musical style based on European traditions. That element is found in Marycoo’s short but delightful ‘Crooked Shanks.’ Although more scholarship may uncover earlier published compositions by Marycoo, as of now ‘Crooked Shanks’ stands as the first attributed published piece of music by a Black composer in the European style in the United States.

“Many sources point to Law as the most likely teacher to Marycoo. The problem is that the first known time that Law went to Rhode Island was in 1783, when Marycoo was already in his late thirties. By then, Marycoo had already composed his first known work, an anthem based on text from the biblical Book of Jeremiah, on or before 1764.

“An earlier teacher could have been the composer Josiah Flagg (1737-1794). Flagg was also a publisher and, in collaboration with Paul Revere, published a collection of psalm tunes in 1764, the same year as Marycoo’s anthem. Marycoo’s anthem was used in worship until at least 1940 at the Union Congregational Church in Newport, though it now appears lost. In all likelihood, Marycoo probably had a variety of musical teachers in America.

“As Marycoo approached his own musical identity, he would no doubt have been influenced by African musical traditions. West Africa had a rich history of musical instruments, for example the lute had been in West Africa since the 14th century. There is also the possibility he was a part of the jilikea or ‘singing men.’ These men were from an aristocratic family who were used by royalty to recall history, perhaps similar to the troubadours of Europe.”

How difficult it is to puzzle out these lost histories! I have to admire the people who are committed to doing it.

More at Early Music America, here. No firewall.

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No Culture Wars Here

August 9, 2023 by suzannesmom

Photo: Riley Robinson/CSM Staff.
“Day-to-day work building trust in the community set the stage for defusing the culture wars confronting Middletown Ohio’s public schools,” says the Christian Science Monitor.

This is a story about a town that had just enough builders of goodwill to get the majority to focus on the things most people valued, agreeing to disagree about everything else constructively.

Courtney E. Martin reports at the Christian Science Monitor, “The police officer gives Marlon Styles’ driver’s side window two reassuring pats once he’s safely inside. Mr. Styles rubs his freshly buzzed head, takes a deep breath, and then fishes his keys out of his suit pants pocket and drives away from the school board meeting. It’s the latest he’s ever left – nearly 1 a.m. – and this time, unlike all the rest, he is not wondering how to get more community members involved. He is wondering how to grapple with a potentially toxic animus in his fairly harmonious town. The culture wars have just come home, and Mr. Styles, the first Black superintendent of Middletown, Ohio, has to figure out what to do. …

“In America, [many] school board meetings are broken. In cities and towns across the country, the public comment period has morphed into yelling, and sometimes even physical violence, over national hot-button topics like critical race theory (CRT), mask mandates, and basic recognition for transgender students. …

“Some public servants are preparing for more conflict by wearing state-of-the-art bulletproof vests to meetings. But there are others, like Mr. Styles, who seek out the protection of the oldest technology there is: trusted relationships. …

“Marlon Styles was chosen as superintendent of Middletown City Schools in 2017 by a school board that felt its district needed an infusion of innovative thinking. Only 15% of Middletown residents have a college degree. The current public school system serves about 6,100 students, slightly more than half of whom are white; nearly 19% are Black, and roughly 16% are Latino. Almost all of them qualify for the free and reduced lunch program. [Public] schools wind up needing to address a host of basic needs, plus plenty of untreated trauma, on a daily basis, without enough resources or recognition. …

“School board president Chris Urso explains: ‘We knew we needed a change. Trust had really fallen. We wanted a leader who was credible, creative, caring, charismatic, and had content knowledge. All the C words! And Marlon was the whole package.’

“Mr. Styles was born and raised in Cincinnati. … His older sister was the first in the family to go to college, something Marlon aspired to but it wasn’t a given. ‘I was never the smartest kid in class,’ he readily admits. 

“He had a lot of energy, though, which he channeled into sports – basketball, football, and his favorite: baseball. Saturdays were spent at his maternal grandmother’s house; while eating Grandma Watson’s homemade vanilla ice cream at her kitchen table, he studied the art of relationships. Grandma Watson had a way of showing up for people, he says. If a family at the church lost their jobs or got a harrowing diagnosis, she would put out a quiet call and gather what they needed.

She wasn’t the type to give advice or offer life lessons. ‘Her body at work spoke about the heart she had,’ Mr. Styles remembers.     

“When it came time to go to college, Mr. Styles did get in, but he spent two years in remedial classes at Eastern Kentucky University before graduating from Thomas More University. He figured if he taught, then he could coach, so he enrolled in a teacher prep program. 

“He fell in love with the buzz of a classroom. Just like Grandma Watson, he liked sussing out what students needed and making it happen for them, motivating them, building them up. Eventually he earned a master’s degree and became a school principal. But Mr. Styles was rarely behind a desk. …

“His first mission as superintendent of Middletown City Schools was to ‘electrify the culture.’ The city of about 50,000 people has a reputation regionally for economic struggle and heroin addiction – once named one of ‘America’s fastest-dying towns’ by Forbes. …

“As he looked out on his nearly 400 employees during his first convocation, an idea popped into his head. ‘Pull out your cellphones,’ he commanded. ‘No really, pull them out! Now take a few selfies with your favorite co-workers smiling and having fun, and post them online with #MiddieRising.’ 

“The crowd erupted in giddy laughter and threw their arms around one another. Before long, the campaign #MiddieRising became a rallying cry for the whole city. …

“Mr. Styles also formed a committee of community members who volunteered to meet quarterly to hear briefings on Middletown schools. … Mr. Styles thought of them as his ‘positive gossipers.’ He explains, ‘Every time they left a meeting I would say, “Now go out and tell five people in your network something the district is doing to serve our kids.” ‘ …

“The pandemic was a strain on every community, of course, but Middletown City Schools, with Superintendent Styles’ indefatigable optimism and novel strategies for stoking morale, seemed to be mostly sticking together. Until Aug. 23, 2021.”

At the Monitor, here, read how the culture wars broke out in that meeting — first, over the issue of masking, then over everything else. Then read about all the people who came together to help the town find its balance again.

There were dark passages to traverse, particularly for the superintendent. You can’t tell people what to think, and some look at normal history lessons and believe it’s something called Critical Race Theory, actually taught only in colleges. “This woke CRT ideology is not education. It’s indoctrination,” shouted one person.

The Monitor “article was reported with support from University of California, Berkeley Greater Good Science Center for its initiative on intellectual humility.”

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Life Without Cellphones

August 8, 2023 by suzannesmom

Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/CMS Staff.
Andy Saks of Southborough, Massachusetts, says he is concerned about the constant presence of technology and its effect on children’s minds. His daughter Cara got an iPhone only after negotiating limits on social media use with her parents.

Our oldest grandson turned 13 this year and was able to get a phone, the first of our grandchildren to do so. He was already using an iPod for many of the same purposes and took a lot of nice pictures with it, so he wasn’t a neophyte. But as American children seem to get phones at younger and younger ages, his parents decided to go slowly.

Other parents are exercising caution, too, as Sophie Hills reports at the Christian Science Monitor.

She writes, “When Tanvi Chawla got a phone in fifth grade, she wanted access to ‘everything’ – all social media. But her parents said no until she was 13. Now in 10th grade at an all-girls school in Pasadena, California, Tanvi’s views on social media have almost entirely reversed.

“In early 2020, when Tanvi – along with the rest of the world – found herself stuck at home, social media became her ‘entire life,’ she says. ‘I didn’t post much but it was a means of communication with my friends.’ …

“But after a few months of life online, Tanvi deleted Instagram in the beginning of eighth grade. She hasn’t replaced it with any other social media. ‘I just saw how harmful it was to my mental health and I think it was negatively impacting my peers, too,’ she says. ‘So I made that decision for myself to stop using it.’ …

“Many students enter high school with their phones seemingly glued to the palms of their hands. And rates of anxiety and depression, particularly among girls, have skyrocketed since 2010.

“ ‘[Technology] is just so present that it’s impossible to completely disconnect and function for many people,’  says Liz Kolb, a clinical professor of education technologies and teacher education at the University of Michigan. …

“As a teacher, Ms. Kolb understands the inclination to go straight to cellphone bans. But whether a school bans phones or not, it’s worth taking the time to teach students good habits, she says. …

“In May, the U.S. surgeon general issued a public warning about the risks posed by social media to youth mental health. … A new poll found that most Americans, regardless of age, would like to return to a time when society was unplugged. The desire was highest among Americans ages 35-54 (77%), but 63% of 18- to 34-year-olds said they’d prefer to live in a simpler era, too.

In Ireland, parents and schools in the town of Greystones implemented a townwide voluntary cellphone ban for children.

“Rachel Harper, principal of St. Patrick’s primary school in Greystones, has noticed increasing anxiety among her 8-, 9-, and 10-year-old students. Parents report the same, adding that it’s hard to get their kids to sleep at night. Students are concerned about their bodies and self-image in a way Ms. Harper hasn’t noticed in that age group before. …

“Both parents and teachers are concerned for students’ online safety. ‘They’re just not emotionally ready to maneuver everything on a smart device,’ she explains.

“So she reached out to the principals of the other seven schools in Greystones. Together with parents, they started a community-led initiative to shelter children by agreeing that, across the town, students wouldn’t have phones until after primary school.

“The collective effort makes all the difference, says Ms. Harper. ‘From a kid’s point of view, there’s that sense of fairness, that it’s not just them’ without a phone.

“The voluntary ban has attracted positive attention from all around the world, says Ms. Harper. She’s heard from many educators saying they’ve wished to implement a similar approach in their schools, though they didn’t think it was possible. …

“The Buxton School, a private day and boarding school in northwestern Massachusetts, last year banned cellphones entirely during the semester. Buxton offered students an alternative: the Light Phone, which texts, calls, and offers basic functions like a calculator, but has no capacity for email or accessing the internet.

“After one full school year, the experiment appears ‘largely successful,’ says assistant head of school John Kalapos, who also teaches English and wood shop. … Students do say they want to be on their phones less, he says, though not all of them love Buxton’s no-smartphone policy. …

“When students’ whole lives suddenly shifted online in 2020, Mr. Kalapos became much more aware of cyberbullying. It tends to be based on exclusion, which is challenging for teachers to mediate when it takes place in the form of ‘likes’ – or the lack thereof – online.

“It’s countercultural to not have a smartphone, says Joe Hollier, co-founder of Light. And while something like the Light Phone is a useful product, actually cutting back on technology exposure ‘takes user will.’

“Fear of missing out is what prevents most people – himself included – from moving away from smartphones, says Mr. Kalapos of the Buxton school. But once you do it, ‘you realize it’s not as valuable as you think.’ ”

In the anecdote from Ireland, kids were glad that it wasn’t just their school setting limits. All the schools in town did it. The importance of fairness made me think. Real fairness would involve parents agreeing to phone restrictions, too — maybe certain times of day when no one in the family uses their phone. What about that?

More at the Monitor, here. No firewall. Subscriptions encouraged.

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Summer Photos

August 7, 2023 by suzannesmom

Photo: Suzanne and John’s Mom.

Here it is August already and I haven’t even gotten to July photos. Some days it was just too hot to do anything, but as one internet Cassandra has predicted, 2023 will be remembered as cooler than any year to come. Oy.

In the first photo, a little boy pops up from the family car like a turtle to observe the wake of the boat. Next we have Creeping bellflower, sometimes called “Evil Twin” because it is not a true bellflower.

I’m amused by fancy gates that keep nothing in or out.

In the yard beside the orange daylily is Daisy fleabane, or so my app tells me. In the next photo, note the dragonfly trying hard not to be seen.

A comfortable chair sits by the summer-blooming water lilies. A mean-looking bull thistle aims to scare off all comers.

Now take a good look at the foreground of the lotus. This is what is revealed when the flower part dies: its inner self. I like to say that the inner self of a lotus is a shower head.

The next scene is dusk in a New Shoreham yard. Soon the deer will pop up from the other side of the stone wall and go looking for free snacks.

At the island library, where my younger grandson challenged all comers to a game of chess before he went to the nationals in Michigan, you can admire the little tent the librarians set out for quiet pondering and note-taking about books — or anything.

Moving right along, we can check on a few of the summer’s better painted rocks — a surprised-looking octopus, a celebration of sun and sea, and one of my birthday. Pretty much the whole family worked on that last one. My oldest granddaughter did the careful lettering. She also was the photographer for the picture below of her brother fishing at sunset.

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The Race to Map Seagrass

August 6, 2023 by suzannesmom

Photo: Wikipedia.

There are so many things on this beautiful planet that we’ve never given much thought — things that turn out to be important for our future. Insects, for example, fungi, seagrass.

Allyson Chiu , with Michaella Sallu contributing from Sierra Leone, has written about seagrass research for the Washington Post.

“From the deck of a small blue-and-white boat, Bashiru Bangura leaned forward and peered into the ocean, his gaze trained on a large dark patch just beneath the jade-green waves.

“ ‘It’s here! It’s here! It’s here!’ crowed a local fisherman, who led Bangura to this spot roughly 60 miles off the coast of Freetown. ‘It looks black!’

“Bangura, who works for Sierra Leone’s Environment Protection Agency, tempered his excitement. After two unsuccessful attempts to find seagrass in this group of islands, he questioned whether the shadowy blotches were meadows of the critical underwater greenery he and other researchers have spent the past several years trying to locate along the coast of West Africa.

“It was only once he was standing in the waist-high water, marveling at the tuft of scraggly hair-like strands he’d uprooted to collect as a sample, that he allowed himself to smile.

“The wet, reedy plants Bangura held in his hands were unmistakably seagrass, and the green blades stretched past the plastic 12-inch ruler he’d been using to measure specimens. His grin grew even wider.

“The dense grass swaying in the current appeared to be healthy, and the water teemed with schools of small, silvery fish, making it the best site researchers have documented in these islands since the existence of seagrass was first confirmed in Sierra Leone in 2019. …

“Seagrasses — which range from stubby sprout-like vegetation to elongated plants with flat, ribbon-like leaves — are one of the world’s most productive underwater ecosystems. The meadows are vital habitats for a variety of aquatic wildlife.

Sometimes described as ‘the lungs of the sea,’ the grasses produce large amounts of oxygen essential for fish in shallow coastal waters.

“But, long overlooked, these critical ecosystems are vanishing. In fact, researchers don’t know exactly how many exist or have been lost. One recent study estimated that since 1880, about 19 percent of the world’s surveyed seagrass meadows have disappeared — an area larger than Rhode Island — partly as a result of development and fishing.

“ ‘When you lose foundation species like seagrasses … then you lose fisheries really quickly,’ said Jessie Jarvis, a marine ecologist who, until recently, headed the World Seagrass Association. …

“But locating grasses in the world’s vast oceans is a formidable task. While some researchers are using drones and satellite imaging, in countries such as Sierra Leone, where resources are scarce, the search is painstaking and tedious.

“Without these efforts, though, seagrasses would probably be disappearing even faster.

“ ‘What we don’t know, we can’t protect,’ said Marco Vinaccia, a climate change expert with GRID-Arendal, an environmental nonprofit that helped put together West Africa’s first seagrass atlas. …

“Similar to terrestrial plants, seagrasses have roots, leaves, flowers and seeds. Seagrasses have been discovered in the waters off more than 150 countries on six continents. The meadows are estimated to cover more than 300,000 square kilometers, an area the size of Germany. Along with mangroves, kelp forests and coral reefs, these grasses play a vital role in maintaining healthy oceans, Jarvis said. But unlike those other ecosystems, she notes, the meadows can exist in a wider range of ocean environments and tend to be more resilient than most species of seaweed.

“Critters, such as sea horses, crabs and shrimp, along with juvenile fish — some of which are critical species for fishing — often lurk within the thick meadows, seeking refuge beneath the underwater canopy. Other creatures, including sponges, clams and sea anemones, can be found nestled between the blades of grass or in the murky sediment at the base of the plants. And much as mosses coat trees, many species of algae grow directly on the leaves.

“Seagrass beds can in turn attract larger animals, including turtles and manatees, that stop by to munch on the leaves and stems. …

“From the leaves down to the roots, these unassuming plants work as ‘ecosystem engineers.’ Through photosynthesis, they help fill the surrounding water with oxygen. The leaves also absorb nutrients, including those in runoff from land, while their roots stabilize sediment, which helps to reduce erosion and protect coastlines during storms.

“Seagrasses also have the potential to play a significant role in combating climate change. Just as trees pull carbon from the air, seagrasses do the same underwater. Then, as the carbon-filled parts of the plants die, they can wind up buried in the sediment on the seafloor. Over time, this can help create sizable carbon deposits that could remain for millennia.

“But the grasses aren’t showy like coral reefs or immediately recognizable like mangroves, and they’ve become one of the least protected coastal ecosystems.”

Read more about what is being done here, at the Post.

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Walking Soccer for Old Folks

August 5, 2023 by suzannesmom

Photo: Michael Briones via Vancouver Island Free Daily.
Vancouver Island Walking Soccer Alternate’s Rob Jonas (left) and Bob Unwin try to stop Harry Hubbal of UBC Masters.

The second time my neighbor Ralph broke his leg playing pick-up soccer with other old folks, he decided maybe it was time to give it up. But he loved playing the game. Giving it up was going to be hard.

Wait! There’s hope for people like Ralph! Meeri Kim describes the interesting alternative at the Washington Post.

“Aside from his wife, soccer is the love of Gary Clark’s life. He started playing at age 7 and kept it up for more than four decades, even representing his home country Canada at the international level.

“His involvement in the sport, though, was cut short at age 48, following a knee replacement surgery. When Clark asked about getting back on the field, his doctor told him to go ahead — but only if he wanted another knee replaced.

“He dipped his toe in the water by joining a pickup game and tore the cartilage in his other knee.

“ ‘There was a sense of loss at not being able to go out and partake in my passion,’ said Clark, now 68, of Coquitlam, B.C. ‘And I knew that if I tried, I would injure myself again.’ …

“The game requires rapid accelerations, decelerations, turns and stops, which take a toll on players’ knees and ankles. A standard soccer pitch, at 115 yards long and 74 yards wide, is larger than an American football field. Players cover, on average, nearly seven miles, in a single match.

“So when a variant of the sport with no running allowed emerged in 2011, some laughed it off as a joke. Walking soccer, however, has become a global phenomenon.

“In 2011, Chesterfield FC Community Trust launched its walking football program in Derbyshire, England, as part of an initiative for older adults.

“Players can’t run or jog, with or without the ball, and one foot must be in contact with the ground at all times. Other rules also differ from regular soccer, to prioritize players’ health and safety. For example, tackling is only allowed with no contact; all free kicks are indirect; and the ball must never go over head height.

“Walking soccer is played on a smaller field (55 to 65 yards long, and 35 to 45 yards wide) and with six people on each team instead of 11.

“There are about 600 walking football clubs in England alone, for men and women.

“The country is also home to the international governing body for walking football, the Federation of International Walking Football Associations (FIWFA), which includes member organizations from countries such as Italy, Nigeria, Australia, South Korea and India. And the inaugural World Nations Cup — the equivalent of the World Cup for walking soccer — will take place in August in the United Kingdom.

“Clubs have cropped up in Seattle, Chicago, Southern California, Vancouver and a few other cities and regions in the United States and Canada. …

“ ‘I have lost weight playing, so I think that’s a good sign,’ said Clark, who has played with the Tri-City Walking Soccer Club for about a year. He logs up to 13,000 to 18,000 steps in a single game, but notes that most players average around 3,500 to 7,000 steps.

“George Gorecki, 62, started Walking Soccer Chicago in early 2019, after hearing about the sport from a U.K.-based friend. The Chicago resident used to play competitive amateur soccer with a club before arthritis in his left knee and right hip slowed him down. Many older members of Walking Soccer Chicago found themselves in the same boat — unable to play because of medical conditions. …

“ ‘The guys really took to it because they were able to reconnect with their teammates, both on the field and in a social setting after the game,’ Gorecki said. …

“Most studies on walking soccer have small sample sizes, but a 2020 review of research on the sport determined that it may have health benefits and help build social connections. A 2015 study found that 12 weeks of walking soccer, in the form of a two-hour training session per week, significantly reduced body mass and percentage body fat in 10 older men. Participants, with an average age of 66, had various comorbidities, including hypertension, knee osteoarthritis and Type 2 diabetes.

“The researchers concluded that walking football is safe and effective as a public health intervention — for not only healthy individuals but also those with various exercise-limiting medical conditions.

“Other research has focused on the mental and social aspects of the sport. In a 2022 study, seven men with mental health conditions such as depression or anxiety underwent a walking football intervention. It involved up to an hour playing a game, followed by an opportunity to meet and socialize. The men reported several positive effects on their well-being. They enjoyed socializing, developed new friendships and felt a renewed sense of purpose.” More at the Post, here.

I don’t know why I am chuckling my way through this story. I do think it’s a great idea for soccer lovers — maybe even less dangerous than pickleball.

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English Cheese-Rolling Race

August 4, 2023 by suzannesmom

Photo: Dave Farrance at Wikimedia Commons.
An annual cheese-rolling competition is held on Cooper’s Hill near Gloucester in England.

Do any longtime readers of the New Yorker magazine remember the bottom-of-column blurbs called “There’ll Always Be an England?” Although that faith is questioned in some quarters nowadays, a recent article suggests to me that English quirkiness is still going strong.

Jennifer Hassan reports at the Washington Post, “For hundreds of years, people have gathered in Gloucestershire, England, to fling themselves down a notoriously steep hill — in pursuit of a hefty chunk of golden-yellow cheese.

“The annual cheese roll, a race dating back centuries, often results in broken bones and concussions as participants tumble, run and bounce down the 180-meter (590-foot) hillside to become the first to cross the finish line.

“This year was no exception: Delaney Irving was crowned the winner of the women’s cheese-rolling race Monday — but the 19-year-old Canadian apparently did not actually realize she had won the competition until she regained consciousness in a medical tent shortly after.

“ ‘How are you? You took a hell of a tumble,’ one British interviewer asked Irving, shortly after she regained consciousness after bumping her head. Irving replied: ‘Did I?’ …

“The teenager was one of hundreds of racers who chased a cheese — a seven-pound full-fat hard cheese named ‘Double Gloucester. ‘ … The cheese can reach up to 70 to 80 mph as it topples down the hill, according to Gloucestershire outlets. Rugby players wait at the bottom of the hill to catch people as they crash across the finish line.

“Footage recorded of Irving shows her emerging triumphant — with her lump of precious cheese. …

“The tradition, according to a website for the modern-day cheese-roll organizers, is believed to be one of the oldest customs to have survived in Britain. A site for the town says the first written evidence of it is found in a message to the town crier in 1826. It brings spectators from around the world who gather to watch in awe and horror as individuals tumble down the hill.

“A 2020 Netflix documentary — on ‘unique, quirky and bizarre’ competitions people may not know about — dubbed the cheese roll as the ‘world’s most dangerous footrace.’ …

“The rules of the race are simple. Admission is free of charge. Participants must gather at the top of the hill before the race starts. The first person to cross the line wins, and gets to keep the cheese.

But the contest, often labeled an ‘extreme sport’ is not for the fainthearted. Injuries from past races include bruised kidneys, severe concussion, broken bones, sprained ankles and dislocated joints. …

“Irving was not the only overseas visitor to take part in the event. An American man dressed as George Washington attended the contest Monday alongside his friend who also dressed as the first president, local media reported. The pair’s day took a dramatic turn when one of the George Washingtons broke their foot amid the downhill race.

“Aside from the risks to people, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) also expressed concern about the risks to animals. Ahead of the race, they urged organizers of the event to … to ‘switch to a vegan cheese,’ a move they said would be ‘better for cows and the planet,’ while making the race itself ‘more inclusive.’ “

More at the Post, here.

Although it’s not nearly as cool, there’s a parade for a giant cheese in Massachusetts every year. Read about that here.

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Library Card for All US Teens

August 3, 2023 by suzannesmom

Photo: Brooklyn Public Library.
Teens in towns where some books are banned were given access to a card from the Brooklyn Public Library, just like one the New Yorker above enjoys.

It’s hard to imagine, but this is where we are. We don’t ban websites that tell you how to make a lethal weapon, but there are apparently ideas in books young people shouldn’t think about.

In one small step for humankind, the Brooklyn Public Library decided not to be passive about the situation.

I’m sorry to be late with this story, but I only just learned about the initiative and believe you might be interested. On April 13 last year, the library posted the following release on its website.

“Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) is launching a new campaign today, titled Books Unbanned, to help teens combat the negative impact of increased censorship and book bans in libraries across the country. For a limited time, young adults ages 13 to 21 nationwide, will be able to apply for a free eCard from BPL, unlocking access to the library’s extensive collection of eBooks.

“ ‘Access to information is the great promise upon which public libraries were founded,’ said Linda E. Johnson, President and CEO, Brooklyn Public Library. ‘We cannot sit idly by while books rejected by a few are removed from the library shelves for all.’ …

“The card will be good for one year and is designed to complement access to resources for teens in their local communities. The Brooklyn Public Library eCard provides access to 350,00 eBooks; 200,000 audiobooks and over 100 databases. Teens will also be connected to their peers in Brooklyn, including members of BPL’s Intellectual Freedom Teen Council, to help one another with information and resources to fight censorship. …

“To apply for the card, teens can send a note to BooksUnbanned@bklynlibrary.org, or via the Library’s s teen-run Instagram account, @bklynfuture. The $50 fee normally associated with out-of-state cards will be waived. Teens are encouraged to share videos, essays, and stories on the importance of intellectual freedom and the impact that book challenges and bans have had on their lives. 

“The Library will also make a selection of frequently challenged books available with no holds or wait times for all BPL cardholders, available through the library’s online catalog or Libby app. The titles include: The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta, Tomboy by Liz Prince, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison.

“While challenges to books and ideas are nothing new, the initiative was conceived in response to an increasingly coordinated and effective effort to remove books tackling a wide range of topics from library shelves. The American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom counted more than 700 complaints last year, the most since it began keeping records more than 20 years ago.  

“In Texas, Matt Krause, chairman of the Texas House of Representatives General Investigating Committee, has called for public school libraries to ‘account’ for 850 sexually explicit or racially preferential books. The list includes a wide range of titles from National Book Award winner How to be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi to John Irving’s bestselling Cider House Rules. Books which feature LBGQT characters; advice for dealing with bullies; and tips for teens on relationships are all included on the list, along with titles on historical events including the rise of the KKK, the Indian Removal Act and the election of Harvey Milk. …

“Locally, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) removed a tweet by the New York State Librarian after she recommended the book Gender Queer: A Memoir. NYSED said it was not aware of the graphic contents in the book. …

“Said Nick Higgins, Chief Librarian, ‘Limiting access or providing one-sided information is a threat to democracy itself.’ ”

The only one of the books mentioned that I have read is The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, a Nobel winner. There is no doubt it is heavy-duty stuff, but that doesn’t mean people should be bliocked from reading it. The ideas are serious, and, I think, important, and even if they weren’t, I don’t see that any group of people should make decisions about what to read for any other group.

More at the Brooklyn Public Library, here.

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Why We Like Sad Music

August 2, 2023 by suzannesmom

Photo: Tom Pumford/Unsplash.

New research has come out to support something you probably always knew. Sad music can make you feel great.

Oliver Whang says at the New York Times, “This is the paradox of sad music: We generally don’t enjoy being sad in real life, but we do enjoy art that makes us feel that way. Countless scholars since Aristotle have tried to account for it. …

“[Joshua Knobe is] an experimental philosopher and psychologist at Yale University. … In a new study, published in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, he and some colleagues sought to tackle this paradox by asking what sad music is all about.

“Over the years, Dr. Knobe’s research has found that people often form two conceptions of the same thing, one concrete and one abstract. For example, people could be considered artists if they display a concrete set of features, like being technically gifted with a brush. But if they do not exhibit certain abstract values — if, say, they lack creativity, curiosity or passion and simply recreate old masterpieces for quick profit — one could say that, in another sense, they are not artists. Maybe sad songs have a similarly dual nature, thought Dr. Knobe and his former student, Tara Venkatesan, a cognitive scientist and operatic soprano.

“Certainly, research has found that our emotional response to music is multidimensional; you’re not just happy when you listen to a beautiful song, nor simply made sad by a sad one. In 2016, a survey of 363 listeners found that emotional responses to sad songs fell roughly into three categories: grief, including powerful negative feelings like anger, terror and despair; melancholia, a gentle sadness, longing or self-pity; and sweet sorrow, a pleasant pang of consolation or appreciation. Many respondents described a mix of the three. (The researchers called their study ‘Fifty Shades of Blue.’) …

“Some psychologists have examined how certain aspects of music — mode, tempo, rhythm, timbre — relate to the emotions listeners feel. Studies have found that certain forms of song serve nearly universal functions: Across countries and cultures, for instance, lullabies tend to share similar acoustic features that imbue infants and adults alike with a sense of safety.

“ ‘All our lives we’ve learned to map the relationships between our emotions and what we sound like,’ said Tuomas Eerola, a musicologist at Durham University in England and a researcher on the ‘Fifty Shades’ study. …

“Other scientists, including Patrik Juslin, a music psychologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, argue that such findings clarify little about the value of sad music. He wrote in a paper, ‘They simply move the burden of explanation from one level, “Why does the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony arouse sadness?” to another level, “Why does a slow tempo arouse sadness?” ‘

“Instead, Dr. Juslin and others have proposed that there are cognitive mechanisms through which sadness can be induced in listeners. Unconscious reflexes in the brain stem; the synchronization of rhythm to some internal cadence, such as a heartbeat; conditioned responses to particular sounds; triggered memories; emotional contagion; a reflective evaluation of the music — all seem to play some role. Maybe, because sadness is such an intense emotion, its presence can prompt a positive empathic reaction: Feeling someone’s sadness can move you in some prosocial way.

‘You’re feeling just alone, you feel isolated,’ Dr. Knobe said. ‘And then there’s this experience where you listen to some music, or you pick up a book, and you feel like you’re not so alone.’

“To test that hypothesis, he, Dr. Venkatesan and George Newman, a psychologist at the Rotman School of Management, set up a two-part experiment. In the first part, they gave one of four song descriptions to more than 400 subjects. One description was of a song that ‘conveys deep and complex emotions’ but was also ‘technically very flawed.’ Another described a ‘technically flawless’ song that ‘does not convey deep or complex emotions.’ The third song was described as deeply emotional and technically flawless, and the fourth as technically flawed and unemotional.

“The subjects were asked to indicate, on a seven-point scale, whether their song ’embodies what music is all about.’ … On the whole, subjects reported that deeply emotional but technically flawed songs best reflected the essence of music; emotional expression was a more salient value than technical proficiency.

” ‘In the second part of the experiment, involving 450 new subjects, the researchers gave each participant 72 descriptions of emotional songs, which expressed feelings including ‘contempt,’ ‘narcissism,’ ‘inspiration’ and ‘lustfulness.’ For comparison, they also gave participants prompts that described a conversational interaction in which someone expressed their feelings. (For example: ‘An acquaintance is talking to you about their week and expresses feelings of wistfulness.’) On the whole, the emotions that subjects felt were deeply rooted to ‘what music is all about’ were also those that made people feel more connected to one another in conversation: love, joy, loneliness, sadness, ecstasy, calmness, sorrow.

“Mario Attie-Picker, a philosopher at Loyola University Chicago who helped lead the research, found the results compelling. After considering the data, he proposed a relatively simple idea: Maybe we listen to music not for an emotional reaction — many subjects reported that sad music, albeit artistic, was not particularly enjoyable — but for the sense of connection to others. Applied to the paradox of sad music: Our love of the music is not a direct appreciation of sadness, it’s an appreciation of connection.”

More at the Times, here.

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Tiny Dolls Move In

August 1, 2023 by suzannesmom

Photo: Laura Colvin/HometownLife.com.
Don Powell shows off his custom mailbox, where a mystery family moved in last year.

I love kindly stealth projects. If you search this blog on the word “stealth,” you will find several I’ve written about.

Today, Cathy Free reports at the Washington Post that a Michigan man who put up an especially nice mailbox got a surprise one day. Tiny dolls had moved in under cover of darkness and decided to stay.

“Don Powell was sliding the usual assortment of envelopes from the mailbox outside of his home when he noticed something out of the ordinary: A tiny doll couple was sitting on a love seat inside the mailbox. A small sticky note was also tucked inside.

“ ‘We’ve decided to live here,’ the message read. It was signed from Mary and Shelley. …

“Powell and his wife, Nancy Powell, had a custom-designed mailbox installed about four years ago to resemble the contemporary white house they’d moved into in Orchard Lake Village, Mich., about 25 miles from Detroit. …

“ ‘I asked the neighbors whether anybody had left dolls in their mailboxes, and everyone told me no,’ he said. ‘So I thought, “This must just be a joke, and whoever left them here will come back to get them.” ‘ …

“A few days passed and nobody retrieved the dolls, he said, noting that he and his wife soon discovered that the small couple had acquired an end table, a throw rug and a pillow. …

“ ‘I left a note of my own, saying that what the home really needed was a refrigerator stocked with food,’ he said.

“The fridge was never delivered. But over the next several months, additional items mysteriously showed up: a four-poster bed, a painting and a wood-burning stove, to name a few.

“More than eight months later, Mary and Shelley are still living rent-free in the mailbox, to the delight of neighbors who now follow updates by Don Powell on Orchard Lake Village’s Nextdoor page. …

“ ‘A homeless couple has taken up residence inside our mailbox,’ he wrote on Nextdoor. … ‘Some people initially thought that I had planted the dolls myself, but that is definitely not the case,’ Powell said. ‘All I did was provide a mailbox. Somebody else decided to make it into a home for Mary and Shelley.’

“Nancy Powell said she can vouch for her husband. ‘Our two sons even wondered if he was doing it, but it was honestly a surprise to us,’ she said. …

“ ‘Whoever is doing this is obviously somebody who is incredibly artistic and clever,’ [the Powells’ next-door neighbor, Terry Falahee] said. ‘Don has a lot of skill sets, but doing something this detailed with dolls isn’t his forte.

” ‘It’s just somebody out there who is having some fun, giving us all a little community humor,’ Falahee said, noting that there are 25 homes in the subdivision, connected to three other neighborhoods of similar size.

“Powell works as a psychologist and is the president and CEO of the American Institute for Preventive Medicine, an organization that helps hospitals around the country implement wellness programs.

“After he and Nancy moved into their home in Orchard Lake Village about five years ago, he said they decided to pay a local craftsman $250 to design a mailbox resembling their house, with lots of windows on the top and sides to let the light in. …

“The interior of the box is roomy, measuring 26 inches long, 15 inches wide and 10 inches high, Don Powell said, adding that it also has solar-powered ceiling lights to illuminate the mailbox at night.

“Although a person can be fined up to $5,000 for putting items without postage inside somebody else’s mailbox, Powell said he could not imagine alerting the authorities and evicting the dolls.

“ ‘I asked our mail carrier if there would be a problem delivering our mail with the dolls in there, and he told me no — there was plenty of room,’ he said. ‘He also said he got a kick out of seeing what was going on inside my mailbox.’

“Every month or two, particularly around holidays, the Powells find something new tucked inside the box for Mary and Shelley.

“Last Halloween, the doll couple temporarily disappeared and were replaced by two small skeletons, he said, and at Christmastime, a decorated tree was left with tiny presents. Powell said whoever left the gifts took them back right after Christmas before he could open the boxes to see if anything was inside. The doll couple has also acquired a cat, he said.

“ ‘It’s getting a little crowded, especially because their cousin Shirley has also moved in with a service dog named Maggie,’ Powell noted.

“ ‘The note left in the mailbox said they were all grateful to find a one-story, because they’d previously lived in a Dutch-style dollhouse,’ he said. ‘I’m assuming that place had more stairs.’

“After packages were left for the holidays, Powell said he added a tiny addition of his own outside the mailbox: a miniature letterbox.

“ ‘I decided it made sense to give them one, since their tiny letters were getting mixed up with ours and could get lost in the mail,’ he said. …

“ ‘People in the neighborhood are enjoying it and stop by sometimes to ask questions,’ he said. ‘They want to know what we’re charging for rent and who mows the lawn. Some people ask if I’ve thought about installing an outdoor camera, but personally, I like the mystery of it.’ “

More at the Post, here.

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James Baldwin in Turkey

July 31, 2023 by suzannesmom

Photo: Sedat Pakay, Hudson Film Works II.
James Baldwin in Istanbul in 1966.

James Baldwin didn’t kid himself about life in America for a gay Black man in the 1960s. He traveled widely and lived for long stretches in countries he found more hospitable. (A 2016 post, here, addresses an effort to preserve a house he bought on the Côte d’Azur.)

I knew about France but not Turkey, which Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi writes about in the Yale Review.

At the beginning of the “11-minute black and white documentary, James Baldwin: From Another Place, directed by Sedat Pakay and filmed in Istanbul in May 1970, … he turns his back to the cam­era and opens the curtains. A sharp Mediterranean light floods in. Baldwin scratches the small of his back, and we hear him say in voiceover: ‘I suppose that many people do blame me for being out of the States as often as I am, but one can’t afford to worry about that because one does, you know, you do what you have to do the way you have to do it. And as someone who is outside of the States you realize that it’s impossible to get out, the American powers are everywhere.’

“The camera pans over the glittering Bosphorus Strait as American ships glide silently through the passage connecting Asia and Europe.

“Pakay’s film has long been almost impossible to see in the United States, aside from a short clip on YouTube. But in February, it began streaming on the Criterion Channel, and its reappearance is a useful occasion to re-examine one of the most important, and yet relatively unknown, aspects of Baldwin’s career: his time in Turkey.

“At the time Pakay made his film, Baldwin had been living in Istanbul intermittently for almost a decade. He first arrived there in 1961, broke, emotionally spent, and struggling to complete his third novel, Another Country. The Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, who had met Baldwin in New York in 1957 when he was cast as Giovanni in the Actors Studio adaptation of Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin’s sec­ond novel), had given him an open invitation to visit, and follow­ing a demoralizing trip to Israel, Baldwin showed up on Cezzar’s doorstep.

“He quickly made himself at home, and over the next ten years lived irregularly in Istanbul, Erdek, and Bodrum, socializing with the Turkish intelligentsia and a small circle of Black artists and activists who were living in Turkey or passing through.

“Istanbul offered Baldwin a refuge during the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. In a 1970 conversation with Ida Lewis for Essence mag­azine, Baldwin said of his decision to move to the city, ‘It was very useful for me to go to a place like Istanbul at that point in my life, because it was so far out of the way from what I called home and the pressures.’ …

“Baldwin had first left the United States, for Paris, in 1948, and had lived out of the United States for years prior to his arrival in Istanbul. But the clarity and safety afforded by his time there allowed him to more sharply articulate America’s assaultive realities and to give expression to the connections between his personal wounds and the scars of racialized political history. …

“[His] layered inner landscape mir­ror the city’s multifaceted character, with its refusal of neat distinc­tions between tradition and modernity, East and West, Christianity and Islam.

“Istanbul was a liminal space of healing for Baldwin, a writing haven that he saw as having saved his life. As [Magdalena Zaborowska, author of James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade] notes, this may explain why the Baldwin we see in Pakay’s documentary is far more relaxed and at ease than the Baldwin we are accustomed to seeing in American media from that era.

“And yet, Baldwin’s decade in Turkey remains an enigma and a lacuna in our collective imagi­nation. Zaborowska’s is the only book-length treatment of Baldwin’s time there, and even people familiar with Baldwin’s writing are often unaware he ever lived in Istanbul. … What does the warm, vul­nerable, and playful Baldwin captured on film by Pakay tell us about his need to leave America time and again in search of safety?

“The respite Turkey offered Baldwin, combined with Istanbul’s vibrancy and the warmth with which he was received, sparked one of the most prolific periods of his artistic life. In 1961, when he first arrived, he was haggard and exhausted. 

“His trip to Israel had deep­ened his disillusionment with Christianity, and he was still mourn­ing Eugene Worth, a Black socialist and dear friend, who, in 1946, had killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. In addition, Baldwin had been trying without success to complete Another Country, his courageous and groundbreaking exploration of bisexuality and interracial love.

“Worth’s death, which Baldwin memorializes in Another Country, had devastated Baldwin for years, and he had tried and failed again and again to finish the novel until he was delivered from the strain of severe writer’s block in Istanbul. Baldwin wrote the book’s final sentence while at a party at Cezzar’s house in what he described as ‘the city which the people from heaven had made their home.’ …

“The years Baldwin spent off and on in Turkey coincided with one of the country’s most vibrant and expansive periods. The 1950s in Turkey had been a period of economic decline, ruthless author­itarianism, and iron-fisted censorship, a confluence of negative forces that gave rise to mass mobilization and to student-led pop­ular protests. …

“By 1965, free elections had been restored, and liberal constitutional reform had significantly expanded freedom of speech. The nation’s position as a strategic U.S. ally had been salvaged, but its cultural flowering continued, along with anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist move­ments similar to those that were emerging elsewhere around the world. Baldwin’s work and lived experience spoke directly to the political and aesthetic debates of the time. In Turkey, in a context of cultural ferment, Baldwin was revered as a major American and transnational writer, rather than being put in a position of having to prove his legitimacy over and over.

“Still, even in Turkey, Baldwin could not fully escape America. During the Cold War, relations between the United States and Turkey were founded on military collaboration and cooperation; the United States sent ships to Turkish waters to counter the threat of Soviet expansion, making Turkey a source of anti-Soviet mil­itary aid. As Baldwin said to Sedat Pakay, ‘American powers are everywhere.’ His feelings fluctuated between entrapment, the sense that no matter how far he traveled from the violence in the United States he could not, existentially speaking, ‘get out,’ and the feelings of transcendence and revival that Cezzar’s warm hos­pitality and Turkey itself afforded him.”

More at the Yale Review, here. No firewall.

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A Hmong Hearing Test

July 30, 2023 by suzannesmom

Photo: Anthony Camerlo/Unsplash.
Can you get a hearing test if the only language you know is rare?

Where we live now, it’s more common than not for people to need hearing aids. Whether those people actually wear their hearing aids is another issue, but folks around them seem tolerant of having to repeat — or shout.

One thing I never thought about until I read today’s article is the fact that getting an audiology test can be a problem if you speak an uncommon language.

Lina Tran reports at WUWM, “About four years ago, Maichou Lor was living in New York completing a postdoctoral fellowship, when family members back home in Wisconsin kept telling her that her dad’s hearing was getting worse.

“ ‘He wasn’t responding to conversations even though he had a hearing aid,’ said Lor, now an assistant professor of nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ‘I brought him in to see his doctor through the ENT clinic here at UW-Health.’

“Lor and her father are Hmong; she joined him at the appointment as an interpreter, since he doesn’t speak English. At the clinic, his physician told Lor there was a limit to what he could offer him.

“ ‘I told her that there was a limitation in the test,’ said Burke Richmond, an assistant professor in the ear, nose, and throat division [at] the University of Wisconsin-Madison. …

“Part of the evaluation is a word recognition test, which assesses when speech is loud enough for someone to understand. It helps doctors identify the severity and type of hearing loss and come up with a treatment plan, such as whether hearing aids will work or if a cochlear implant is viable.

“During the test, patients listen to a recording of words, with instructions to repeat the words as they hear them. But, for the most part, the test is only available in the most common languages. … Few clinics are equipped to treat Hmong-speaking patients. …

“After Lor and Richmond met, they undertook a years-long, interdisciplinary collaboration that resulted in the first Hmong hearing test of its kind.

“Hearing evaluations typically involve a couple different tests. In one of them, patients listen to beeps and tones and press a button when they hear it. ‘That’s easy enough to explain to someone who speaks a different language,’ said Jennifer Ploch, a clinical audiologist involved with the project, then at UW-Madison. …

“When Lor and her father came through his office, Richmond knew about Lor’s research on health disparities. He asked if she wanted to make a Hmong word test with him. …

“The English test is designed to use everyday words like ‘bat’ and ‘kick’ that anyone would understand. At the same time, it shouldn’t be possible for test-takers to predict or guess what the words are without actually hearing them. Historically, one of the ways audiologists have accomplished that is by writing the word list so that it reflects the phonetic make-up of the language.

“ ‘If the language has a bunch of S’s, you want to have a bunch of S’s in the words,’ explained Lynsey Wolter, an associate linguistics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, who led the writing of the Hmong word list. ‘But not too many because then someone will just guess.’

“But no one had studied how frequent different sounds are in Hmong.

“ ‘And there are a lot,’ Wolter said. ‘There are about twice as many consonant sounds in Hmong as in English. Hmong is also a tonal language. The intonation of the word — whether the tone is higher or lower, going up or going down — can change the meaning.’ …

“Wolter said it was critical to work with native Hmong speakers, so she quickly brought two of her students onboard. … Kao Lee Lor, then a senior, was one of the student collaborators. She always loved languages and grew up hearing many of them at home, reflecting the places her parents had lived before immigrating to Wausau, Wisconsin. They were born in Laos and grew up in a Thai refugee camp. They enjoyed television shows, films, and music in Thai, Hmong, and Hindi. …

“To pick words for the list, the students dug through Hmong texts, entering all the words into a massive spreadsheet.

“ ‘We compiled a bunch of different Hmong folklore and folktales, Hmong kids’ books, anything we could find,’ Lor said. Some of the tales were familiar to her and her collaborator, oral traditions that had been passed down from their grandparents and parents. But there was little time to appreciate the stories in a new light; their focus was gathering as many words as they could.

“ ‘Once we were able to extract these words from these texts, we were able to break these words up into [their] parts, and then count the frequency of how much these consonants, sounds, vowels, and tones occurred,’ Lor said. …

“With numbers on how frequent different sounds are in the language, the linguistics team picked words to meet those targets. They wrote four lists of 50 words each, and sent it back to the UW-Madison researchers.

“Word lists in hand, the researchers asked the Hmong community to nominate clear, fluent speakers. Then, to validate the list, they tested the Hmong test against the English version on a group of bilingual speakers. They published their results in December.”

More at Milwaukee’s WUWM, here. No firewall. And for more on Hmong people in America, read the lovely memoir The Late Homecomer.

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Sweden’s Sustainable Fashion

July 29, 2023 by suzannesmom

Photo: Dominique Soguel.
An employee stands in the industrial-scale plant of textile-to-textile recycling company Renewcell in Sundsvall, Sweden, Feb. 7, 2023.

After my youngest granddaughter toured a recycling facility in Rhode Island, she told me that one thing the state recycles is textiles. But in Massachusetts, where a new law forbids putting textiles in landfills, there are few towns that offer services for recycling worn-out clothes. At least there are plenty of outlets for reusable clothes.

In Sweden, some folks are trying to make all clothes — and the materials that go into them — reusable. That’s according to today’s article from the Christian Science Monitor.

Dominique Soguel writes, “Discarded, sorted clothes arrive by ship on the shores of Sundsvall, in the Gulf of Bothnia inlet of the Baltic Sea. But they aren’t bound for a landfill.

“Rather, they are destined for the city’s Renewcell plant, where they will be dissolved and processed into a new substance: Circulose. This material looks like white cardboard, feels like watercolor paper, and – most importantly – can be spun into yarns for textile manufacturers. …

“Renewcell’s patented technology, now available commercially, and successful launch of the world’s first industrial-scale textile recycling plant in Sweden offer a beacon of hope to brands and consumers who care about environmental sustainability.

“ ‘From an environmental perspective, it means that every year, instead of huge swaths of forest being cut down, millions of old jeans and T-shirts are being used rather than them degrading into methane in landfill,’ says Nicole Rycroft, director of the environmental nonprofit Canopy.

“The fashion industry relies primarily on three fibers – polyester, cotton, and viscose rayon – each of which is problematic for the environment.

“Polyester, made from plastic, takes hundreds of years to break down. … Soft-to-touch cotton is grown on vast, water-intensive monoculture farms using large quantities of fertilizers and pesticides. The Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest lake, dried up almost completely, drained by cotton fields in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. …

“Viscose rayon is made from tree wood, which sometimes comes from ancient forests. Ms. Rycroft points to the 300 million trees cut down yearly to make viscose rayon, among other textiles. That consumption is slated to double within the next decade.

“On top of all this, much of what the fashion industry produces with these materials ends up as waste. Global production of textile fibers and all apparel creates 110 million metric tons of waste. On average, Europeans produce 33 pounds per year per capita, and Americans about 70 pounds per year.

“Solutions for controlling fashion’s consumption rate range from reducing overproduction and overconsumption to making longer-lasting clothes and embedding circularity into product design. But experts consider fiber-to-fiber recycling – converting textile waste into new fibers that can be used to make clothes or other textile goods – as one of the most sustainable and scalable levers available. …

“The Nordics stand out in Europe for their efforts to reduce the fashion industry’s impact on the planet. Copenhagen Fashion Week imposes sustainability requirements on brands before they hit the runway. Multiple Nordic brands offer recycling options and sell used clothes on their shelves at reduced prices.

“Sweden boasts an impressive secondhand clothes market scene; the world’s first recycling mall, Retuna; and innovative companies like Nudie. Nudie offers customers free repairs on their jeans and a 20% discount on new ones if they trade in old ones. It’s a much-loved service.

“ ‘I really like clothes, but I don’t think it’s necessary for me to buy something new to get the kind of clothes that I like to wear,’ says Tomas Persson after bringing his jeans in for repair to the Nudie shop in Gothenburg. Apart from underwear, he says has not bought a new item of clothing in years – not an uncommon claim in Sweden.

“The development of sustainable textiles is also part of Sweden’s national strategy. That keeps the Swedish School of Textiles and Science Park Borås, both part of the University of Borås, abuzz with the development of high-tech prototypes and design experiments focused on recycling, reuse, and upcycling.

“ ‘We have to find more efficient production processes … and ways of consuming garments,’ says Susanne Nejderås, textile strategist at Science Park Borås. ‘The mean use of a clothing item is around two years. We need to add another eight years to that.’ ”

I’ll just add that consumers are not only demanding sustainability these days, but human rights. There is widespread concern about China using Uyghur forced labor for cotton products. That’s why I buy cotton towels at Patagonia and fair trade cotton clothes from Fair Indigo in Peru (thanks to blogger Rebecca).

More at the Monitor, here. No firewall. Subscriptions welcomed.

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