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Art Detective Strikes Again

August 27, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Arthur Brand.
A box given to art sleuth Arthur Brand contained records from the Dutch East India Company. They had been stolen a decade ago from the Hague in the Netherlands.

Everyone likes a mystery, especially one that gets solved in a satisfactory way. Of course, “satisfactory” is in the eye of the beholder. I myself like to have the perp brought to justice. Other people prefer something brutally realistic.

France 24 reported recently on a mystery solved by Arthur Brand, the “Indiana Jones of the Art World.” In this case, the perp is long gone.

“A Dutch art sleuth has recovered a priceless trove of stolen documents from the 15th to the 19th century, including several UNESCO-listed archives from the world’s first multinational corporation. Arthur Brand [ said] the latest discovery was among his most significant.

” ‘In my career, I have been able to return fantastic stolen art, from Picassos to a Van Gogh … yet this find is one of the highlights of my career,’ Brand told AFP.

“Many of the documents recount the early days of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), whose globetrotting trading and military operations contributed to the Dutch ‘Golden Age,’ when the Netherlands was a global superpower.

“VOC merchants criss-crossed the globe, catapulting the Netherlands to a world trading power but also exploiting and oppressing the colonies it conquered. The company was key to the slave trade during that period, with generations of enslaved people forced to work on Dutch plantations. …

“The company was also a leading diplomatic power and one document relates a visit in 1700 by top VOC officials to the court of the Mughal emperor in India.

” ‘Since the Netherlands was one of the most powerful players in the world at that time in terms of military, trade, shipping, and colonies, these documents are part of world history,’ said Brand.

UNESCO agrees, designating the VOC archives as part of its ‘Memory of the World’ documentary heritage collection.

” ‘The VOC archives make up the most complete and extensive source on early modern world history anywhere,’ says UNESCO on its website.

“The trove also featured early ships logs from one of the world’s most famous admirals, Michiel de Ruyter, whose exploits are studied in naval academies even today. …

“No less enthralling is the ‘who-dunnit’ of how Brand came by the documents.

“Brand received an email from someone who had stumbled across a box of seemingly ancient manuscripts while clearing out the attic of an incapacitated family member.

“This family member occasionally lent money to a friend, who would leave something as collateral – in this case the box of documents. …

“Brand investigated with Dutch police and concluded the documents had been stolen in 2015 from the vast National Archives in The Hague. The main suspect – an employee at the archives who had indeed left the box as collateral but never picked it up – has since died. …

“The art detective said he spent many an evening sifting through the documents, transported back in time.

” ‘Wars at sea, negotiations at imperial courts, distant journeys to barely explored regions, and knights,’ he told AFP.

” ‘I felt like I had stepped into Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.’ ” More at France 24, here.

Don’t you love that UNESCO has a category of valuables called “Memory of the World”? Wow, what else belongs to the Memory of the World, and is it being protected for the very reason that we don’t remember it? Is Robert Louis Stevenson in Memory of the World?

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Garden Worms You Really Don’t Want

August 26, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Brittany Schappach/Maine Forest Service.
The dreaded jumping worm.

“Jumping worms” sounds like a circus act, but they are unwelcome garden visitors that have become a menace for parts of the Northeast. I’d be interested to know if you have them where you live and what you can add to today’s report.

Catherine Schneider writes at Providence Eye, “Earthworms are generally seen as improving the structure and fertility of garden soil as they tunnel through the soil, consuming organic matter and leaving behind castings (worm manure) that are rich in nutrients, humus, and microorganisms. 

“Unfortunately, there is a not-so-new worm in town that provides none of these benefits and can actually do great damage to soil structure and fertility:  the so-called Jumping Worm. These worms devour the top layer of soil, leaving behind crumbly soil that dries out quickly, is prone to erosion, and makes poor habitat for many plants and soil dwelling organisms — including bacteria, fungi, and other invertebrates.

“The name jumping worms refers to several similar-looking species of invasives (Amynthas spp.) that originated in East Asia. … They have been in the US since the late 1800s, but pretty much remained underground until recently when their numbers and range have increased dramatically. The reasons for the recent rapid spread are not completely understood, although it may be due to climate change, as well as human activities which unwittingly spread the worms (e.g., gardening, landscaping, fishing, hiking).  They are now found in more than half of US states, including many areas in Providence and Rhode Island.

“Unlike other earthworms that burrow deep into the soil, jumping worms tend to live in the top three to four inches of soil and in leaf litter and mulch. They are voracious eaters and can quickly deplete nutrients found in soil and organic matter. While other earthworms distribute their high nutrient-value castings throughout the soil, jumping worms excrete their castings on the soil surface, where the nutrients are unavailable to plants. The castings are fairly hard, and they frequently erode away in the rain.

“The combination of hard castings and aggressive churning of the soil results in a dry, crumbly soil structure, with large air pockets, which can impact the ability of plants to produce and anchor roots, absorb water, and extract nutrients. …

“Once jumping worms come to inhabit a garden, they rapidly increase in numbers, no mating required, as they reproduce asexually.  Adult worms can have many offspring, and while the adults will die off after the first few hard frosts, the tiny egg cocoons they leave behind (which are virtually impossible to see with the naked eye) will survive the winter, emerging in the spring to start the destructive cycle again.

“Jumping worms can have a profoundly negative effect on forests and woodlands, as well as gardens and crop lands. A thick layer of leaf litter and organic matter (sometimes called the ‘duff’ layer) is essential to healthy forest soil.  Native forest plants and trees have evolved to rely on this duff layer for the successful germination and growth of their seeds. After jumping worms have altered forest soil, native species may start to diminish while invasives move in and outcompete native species. This alteration of the forest floor and decline in forest health also harms wildlife that depend on native plants and trees, like ground nesting birds, amphibians and invertebrates.

“Jumping worms are most easily identified by their behavior.  They move across soil or pavement in a snake-like fashion and when you touch them or pick them up, these worms will thrash around wildly. This behavior has given rise to the names jumping worms, crazy worms and snake worms.

“Adult jumping worms can also be distinguished from other earth worms in Rhode Island by a milky white or pinkish band, called a clitellum, that fully encircles one end of their body (see photo above). … Jumping worms in Rhode Island do not attain adulthood until sometime in July or August. Before then, juvenile jumping worms, which lack the white clitellum, are difficult to identify. Young jumping worms can best be identified by their thrashing behavior when they are touched or handled. …

“If you suspect that you may have jumping worms, you can try this test:  Mix 1/3 cup of dry mustard in a gallon of water and slowly pour this over your soil (it will not harm your plants).  The mustard solution should drive any worms to the surface, where you can inspect and remove them if they appear to be jumping worms. …

“The main step in prevention is to take care with the plants, soil, compost and mulch that you bring on to your property. Purchase soil, compost and mulch from reputable dealers. If you are buying bulk compost or mulch, ask the dealer if the product has been heated to 131 degrees F for at least 15 days, which is the industry standard for killing weed seeds and pathogens and will certainly kill jumping worm cocoons which do not survive temperatures above 104°F.  

“Cocoons can also be present in bagged soil, compost and mulch.  To play it safe with bagged products, you may want to solarize them by placing the bags in the hot sun for three (3) days, with a piece of cardboard or other insulating material underneath them to prevent cooling from the ground below them. If you want to be extra careful, you can use a soil thermometer to ensure that the product has reached a temperature of 104 degrees F.

“When purchasing plants or accepting plants from friends, check for any signs of jumping worms.  Starting from seed or buying bare root plants is safest.  Alternatively, you can carefully wash off all of the soil around any new plants before planting in your garden.”

More advice at Providence Eye, here. No firewall.

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Federal Cuts Hurt Small Farms

August 25, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Mark Stockwell/Boston Globe.
Mohammed Hannan of Hannan Healthy Foods farm in Lincoln, Massachusetts, holds garlic, one of many organic greens grown on his farm.

After the US takes a step forward, it always seems to take two steps back. In today’s story, We learn about federal funds that have been supporting sustainable agriculture. Until now.

Jocelyn Ruggiero reports for the Boston Globe, “It’s dreary, gray, and unseasonably chilly on the first day of Community Supported Agriculture pickups at the Hannan Healthy Foods farm. As CSA members trickle in to collect their bags of produce, they chat with Mohammed Hannan and passersby who’ve stopped to buy green garlic, beets, collards, and various herbs and greens at the farm stand. Hannan’s 11-year-old daughter, Afsheen, sits bundled up at the checkout table, reading a book alongside volunteer and longtime CSA member Tricia Moore. Aside from the weather, the scene looks similar to opening day last summer. But circumstances are vastly different from what they were 12 months ago.

“One person is notably absent. Hannan’s wife, Kaniz Fouzia, died of pancreatic cancer in March. And even as the family grieves, Hannan confronts the practical challenges of running the farm without his primary support.

“He also faces another crisis. Last year, as with every year since it launched, the farm’s biggest buyer was the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project’s Food Hub, which purchased $7,000 in produce, primarily funded by two federal grants: the Local Food Purchase Assistance and Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement programs.

“Since 2021, the Food Hub has bought more than $32,000 of produce from Hannan, supported by these food grants, both part of the 2021 American Rescue Plan. These initiatives enable local schools, food banks, and senior centers to purchase produce from the Hub and, by extension, local farmers and producers. They’ve brought close to $20 million to the Massachusetts economy. Both the LFPA and LFS were originally scheduled to run through December 2025, [but the federal] administration abruptly and prematurely terminated funding for both programs. …

“Established in 2005, the Food Hub aggregates and distributes vegetables grown by more than 35 beginning, immigrant, and refugee farmers in the Boston region. It is an initiative of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, which was founded in 1998 to integrate recent immigrants and refugees with farming backgrounds into Massachusetts agriculture. …

“[The] sudden termination of multiple streams of support disrupted many long-planned efforts and, in some cases, left farmers holding the bill for purchases they had already made based on awards that were withdrawn.

“It’s no coincidence that Hannan is the steward of a successful farm. He’s always had close ties to agriculture. He grew up on his family’s organic farm in Bangladesh, which was both a source of food and income. Hannan went on to earn a master’s degree in wildlife biology, studying the country’s ecologically critical coastal areas. In 2014, he gave up an opportunity to accept a Duke fellowship when his wife received a US Diversity Visa; the family left Bangladesh to settle in Cambridge.

“He eked out a living at multiple minimum-wage jobs — Walgreens, Indian restaurants, and MIT facilities — before landing work in biotech, then as a lab manager at MIT. During the lean years, he yearned for the affordable organic food that was so accessible in Bangladesh. He wondered, ‘How can I change my situation? How can I grow food here?’ …

“Unsure about whether working a full-time job while running a farm would be feasible, Hannan spent the summer of 2017 volunteering mornings, nights, and weekends at White Rabbit Farm in Dracut. … He began the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project farmer training program that winter, leasing a small piece of land through New Entry and growing produce to feed his family. By 2019, he had launched his first 30-member CSA and was selling to the Food Hub. In 2020, he graduated and set his sights on a plot in Lincoln.

“The weeds were chest-high on the 2.5-acre barren plot, and there was no potable water for washing produce. … ‘I came up with a plan: I’ll grow veggies that do not need washing: bottle and bitter gourds, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers.’ As he expanded, Hannan connected with the Lincoln community through an online forum. There, he met Tom Flint, an 11th-generation Lincoln farmer. Flint introduced him to Lincoln Land Conservation Trust trustee Jim Henderson, who let Hannan use his backyard sink and cure garlic in his barn. These were the first of many new friends who welcomed him to Lincoln. …

“During COVID, unsolicited, strangers started contacting Hannan: ‘I had accountants, engineers, doctors. They were helping on the weekends. … We were laughing, harvesting … and eating from the farm. It was really good.’ Town residents later responded to his query on the town’s forum and helped Hannan build a deer fence when he couldn’t afford a contractor. His robust volunteer network has strengthened and extended beyond Lincoln, and today includes such groups as the Boston-based climate justice nonprofit Mothers Out Front. …

“[Today] Hannan’s MIT job subsidizes his farm, and his volunteer community provides supplemental support. However, for many other small farmers affected by funding cuts, the consequences will be existential. As Hannan puts it: ‘Small farmers like me … will definitely choose other options.’ ”

More at the Globe, here.

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Women on Bucking Broncos

August 24, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Jeff McIntosh/Associated Press.
Emma Eastwood stretched before competing in women’s ranch bronc during rodeo action in Alberta.

I’ve mentioned before how interesting it was to me that my husband’s director of manufacturing at the Maple Grove company was a bull rider on the side. We told Craig we’d love to see a Minnesota rodeo, and he sent us off to nearby Buffalo, where we had a wonderful time.

In today’s story, we learn about the rising numbers of women getting a kick out of riding bucking broncos.

The Associated Press (AP) reports, “Sophia Bunney launched the first time she tried ranch bronc riding, landing ‘quite a ways away from the horse.’

“ ‘I’m very stubborn, and I don’t like being defeated,’ said the 18-year-old from Cessford, Alberta.

“In other words, the teenager was hooked on a sport that pits women against bucking horses for eight seconds.

“ ‘I always kind of wanted to hop on a bronc,’ Bunney told the Canadian Press. ‘In Grade 3 … I said I wanted to be a female bronc rider.’

“Unlike saddle bronco riding, a rodeo mainstay, ranch bronc uses a regular western saddle — not a specialized one — and riders hang on with two hands instead of one. A hand is on a rein and the other on a strap wrapped around the saddle horn.

“Pearl Kersey, who won the Canadian women’s ranch bronc title [recently] in Ponoka, Alberta, is president of Women’s Ranch Bronc Canada and teaches it at clinics.

“ ‘I’ve got teenagers, 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds, and this year a woman in her 50s. I was like, “You sure?” ‘ Kersey said. ‘She doesn’t want to compete. She wants to try it before she gets too old. We have bucking machines. She doesn’t necessarily need to get on a horse’. They can go through all the drills and the bucking machine, and if they’re comfortable enough, they can get on a horse.’ …

“It took a while for 19-year-old Blayne Bedard, who grew up cow riding in the Canadian Girls Rodeo Association, to master keeping her feet forward toward the horse’s shoulders.

“ ‘If they come back, I’m like a pendulum and I just go head over teakettle,’ Bedard said. … She’s improved to the point where Bedard has competed in the last two Canadian championships.

“ ‘I like the look of it, too,’ Bedard said. ‘You get cool pictures.’

“One of the lessons Bedard picked up at a Kersey clinic had nothing to do with riding form — and everything to do with what goes inside a boot.

“ ‘I put baby powder in my boots every time before I ride, and I wear my mom’s boots that are a size too big for me, because if you get your foot stuck in a stirrup — which I’ve had a few times — you need your boot to be able to come off so you’re not being dragged by the horse,’ she said. …

“Kersey, 36, has qualified for the world finals July 19-20 in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where she won in 2019 and has twice finished second. Kersey intends to retire from competition after this year, but continue teaching.

“One of her students, Calgary’s Emma Eastwood, picked it up quickly thanks to years of riding horses and a stint as an amateur jockey. She attended Kersey’s clinics last fall and this spring, and won an event in just her third time competing.

“ ‘It is difficult to try and think through your ride and hang on through all that adrenaline,’ said the 27-year-old massage therapist. ‘Things kind of get a little blurry, and it’s hard to process everything going on so quickly.’ …

“Kersey said … ‘Women have come up to me and said, “Thank you for doing what you’re doing.” They might not go into ranch broncs, but it just gave them the power in themselves to go pursue something that they wanted that they didn’t think they could because they were women,’ Kersey said. ‘Other girls tell me, ‘” saw you ride at Ponoka,” and they’re like, “I want to try it.” Sometimes it’s a confidence-booster thing. Sometimes they want to see if they’ll like it and some are like, “Yeah, I’m doing this.” ‘

More at the Associated Press via the Boston Globe, here.

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Authors Fight Back Against AI

August 23, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Steve Johnson.
Real books start with a human, a human with feelings.

Blogger Asakiyume is an activist against AI. And no wonder. She’s an author, and an especially creative one. Believe me, what her brain comes up with, no one else’s brain ever could! AI, however, just copies what has come before.

So right now, as other published authors are uniting against AI robot writers, she’s in good company.

Chloe Veltman reports at National Public Radio, “A group of more than 70 authors including Dennis Lehane, Gregory Maguire and Lauren Groff released an open letter on Friday about the use of AI on the literary website Lit Hub. It asked publishing houses to promise ‘they will never release books that were created by machines.’

“Addressed to the ‘big five’ U.S. publishers — Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan — as well as ‘other publishers of America,’ the letter elicited more than 1,100 signatures on its accompanying petition in less than 24 hours. Among the well-known signatories after the letter’s release are Jodi Picoult, Olivie Blake and Paul Tremblay.

“The letter contains a list of direct requests to publishers concerning a wide array of ways in which AI may already — or could soon be — used in publishing. It asks them to refrain from publishing books written using AI tools built on copyrighted content without authors’ consent or compensation, to refrain from replacing publishing house employees wholly or partially with AI tools, and to only hire human audiobook narrators — among other requests. …

“The letter states, ‘AI is an enormously powerful tool, here to stay, with the capacity for real societal benefits — but the replacement of art and artists isn’t one of them.’

“Until now, authors have mostly expressed their displeasure with AI’s negative impacts on their work by launching lawsuits against AI companies rather than addressing publishing houses directly. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz and the comedian Sarah Silverman are among the biggest names involved in ongoing copyright infringement cases against AI players.

“Some of these cases are already starting to render rulings: Earlier this week, federal judges presiding over two such cases ruled in favor of defendants Anthropic AI and Meta, potentially giving AI companies the legal right under the fair use doctrine to train their large language models on copyrighted works — as long as they obtain copies of those works legally.

“Young adult fiction author Rioghnach Robinson, who goes by the pen name Riley Redgate … said, ‘Without publishers pledging not to generate internally competitive titles, nothing’s stopping publishing houses from AI-generating their authors out of existence. We’re hopeful that publishers will act to protect authors and industry workers from, specifically, the competitive and labor-related threats of AI.’

“The authors said the ‘existential threat’ of AI isn’t just about copyright infringement. Copycat books that appear to have been written by AI and are attached to real authors who didn’t write them have proliferated on Amazon and other platforms in recent years.

“The rise of AI audio production within publishing is another big threat addressed in the letter. Many authors make extra money narrating their own books. And the rise of machine narration and translation is an even greater concern for human voice actors and translators. For example, major audio books publisher Audible recently announced a partnership with publishers to expand AI narration and translation offerings. …

“Audible CEO Bob Carrigan said as part of the announcement, ‘We’ll be able to bring more stories to life — helping creators reach new audiences while ensuring listeners worldwide can access extraordinary books that might otherwise never reach their ears.’

“Robinson acknowledged the steps publishers have taken to help protect writers.

” ‘Many individual contracts now have AI opt-out clauses in an attempt to keep books out of AI training datasets, which is great,’ Robinson noted. But she said publishers should be doing much more to defend their writers against the onslaught of AI.”

More at NPR, here.

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An Enchanted Car Park

August 22, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Connatural Archive.
Surrounded by hills: Colombia’s Parque Prado, no longer abandoned to illegal activity.

What is your first reaction to the words Medellín and Colombia? If you have kept up on the news for a few decades, your associations may include both drug wars and change.

Oliver Wainwright at the Guardian focuses on the change.

“Lilac-flowering creepers engulf an abandoned house on a street corner in Medellín, Colombia, spilling from the roof and smothering most of the upstairs windows. A giant fan palm is visible through one opening, while a knotty tangle of aerial roots cascades down to the pavement from another. Step through the doorway of this overgrown ruin, and you find not a scene of desolation and decay but a sleek steel frame holding up the crumbling facade, which forms an unusual entrance to an enchanting new public park.

“ ‘We behaved more like archaeologists than landscape architects,’ says Edgar Mazo of Connatural, the firm behind the Parque Prado, in the working-class neighborhood of Aranjuez. He leads me through a series of planted terraces; fountain grasses and trumpet trees sprout from where a derelict car park and abandoned homes once stood. ‘You dig up the concrete, water gets into the ground, vegetation grows up, and the people come back,’ he adds, speaking through a translator. ‘That’s natural regeneration.’

“In recent decades, Medellín has been widely celebrated for its astonishing urban transformation. In the 2000s, it went from being one of the most dangerous cities on the planet, riven by murderous drug cartels, to a case study in the miraculous peace-bringing powers of architecture and landscape. Sergio Fajardo, the son of an architect who served as Medellín’s charismatic mayor from 2004 to 2008, was hailed for sprinkling the city’s poorest neighborhoods with dazzling new libraries, stadiums and swimming pools.

“These determinedly ‘iconic’ projects were enthusiastically feted on the pages of glossy design magazines, and their stories recounted in keynotes at international conferences. Impoverished hillsides were connected to a new metro system with an elegant web of cable cars and outdoor escalators, while parks dotted with expressive architect-designed canopies sprang up across the city. The dramatic fall in crime during Fajardo’s term was largely credited to this vision of ‘social urbanism,’ and the increase in the amount of public space per citizen.

“But the Medellín miracle has since lost some of its sparkle. Take the Biblioteca España, one of the flagship projects, designed by Colombian star architect Giancarlo Mazzanti. It stands as a striking cluster of chiseled concrete boulders, rising from the hillside in the formerly no-go barrio of Santo Domingo. But it has been shuttered since 2015, due to structural defects. …

“Mazo’s work takes a markedly different approach from the 00s penchant for spectacle. When he was asked to look at the sloping half-hectare site in Aranjuez, which was home to a rundown car park and six boarded-up houses, abandoned for more than a decade, there was an existing plan to raze everything and replace it with a park traversed by a big zigzagging ramp. It looked like a hangover from the earlier lust for shape-making, something that might photograph well from a helicopter.

“Instead, Mazo and his team decided to keep most of what was already there. Almost 70% of the material on-site remains, albeit in a new form. Walls and floor slabs were chiseled from the two-storey parking structure, and the rubble used to fill the basements of the houses, with soil packed on top. The buildings’ roof timbers were reclaimed and used to make benches, while the landscape was shaped in such a way that rainwater is retained, meaning that no artificial irrigation is needed. The team even collected seeds from the plants that had sprung up on the plot, so they could be scattered around the new park after the project’s construction – allowing the natural colonizers back in.

“The project was built during the pandemic for a cost of just [$1.5m] and the lockdowns allowed time for the plants to establish, without the threat of being trampled by visitors. Five years on, the planting has reached a level of maturity that makes this urban oasis seem like it’s always been there. …

“The former car park’s concrete frame makes for an imposing armature at the centre of the park, supporting a raised steel walkway and framing a series of semi-enclosed spaces beneath it. Reclaimed bricks and stacked roof tiles serve as retaining walls, creating a rugged backdrop to lush clumps of grasses and palms. Gabion cages filled with rocks and rubble line water retention ponds, and provide platforms for seating. A sandy clearing down below makes space for ballgames and events, while park-goers can watch the action from the terraced decks above, and enjoy a grandstand view across the sprawling city and its seven hills.

“ ‘When people first colonized this valley,’ says Mazo, ‘they used to climb up to the top of the hills to communicate with each other. The park now becomes part of that system, giving people an elevated view to connect with others.’ …

“Crucially, there’s a space for everyone here – from elevated walkways, to quiet shrub-lined reading areas, to seating tucked away from prying eyes. The sense of fragmentation, as well as the level changes, allow different social groups to coexist.” 

Read more about this and other pilot projects at the Guardian, here. No paywall, but anything you can donate helps to keep factual news accessible to all.

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The Problem with Goals

August 21, 2025 by suzannesmom

Source: Douai, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 711, fol. 24r.
Illustration from De natura animalium, ca. 175–235 AD. 

I always had a problem with setting goals. Especially in the workplace. The boss would set “your” goal, which always had to be more challenging than last year’s. But how can you be better than doing the best job you can every year? Not all jobs operate the same as sales jobs.

Today’s featured thinker, David Zahl, director of Mockingbird Ministries and editor-in-chief of Mockingbird, launches into a bit of a tirade about the self-help goals many of us are slave to today. He references the New Testament a lot, but I think people of other faiths will be as amused as I was. See what you think.

Zahl writes, “I spend as much time troubleshooting the various homework programs on my sons’ computers, updating the software, and filling out endless two-factor authentications as I do helping them with their homework. It is a crazy-making experience that leaves everyone frustrated, tired, and not remotely in the mood for learning.

“The experience is emblematic of the tyranny of optimization. Peruse the internet or talk to peers at a party, and you’ll hear a dozen new ways to consolidate your energy, maximize your efficiency, organize your priorities, and make life more manageable. …

“French sociologist Jacques Ellul uses the term technique to describe our obsession with streamlining everything under the sun. In The Technological Society, he defines it as ‘the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.’ Technique aims to bring efficiency to everything in life. …

“There’s nothing wrong with conserving our time and resources or with wanting our lives to run more smoothly. What’s wrong, Ellul argues, is that technique doesn’t accomplish these goals. … Each new technique we adopt for the sake of greater control creates problems for which we instinctively look for another technique to allay, and so on. If you want to view your child’s grade on the homework, you’ll need to set up an account with Drumblekick. … Optimization promises to cure headaches, but then it gives them.

“I have another, deeper reason optimization almost inspires me to polemics. The lingo of optimization sneaks the idea that we are machines into our common language and self-understanding. This should go without saying but it bears repeating: you and I are human beings, not machines. … We risk enshrining productivity as the be all and end all of human existence.

Before long, the same parents fumbling with Kracklezam are reluctant to enroll their kids in any afterschool activities that don’t produce measurable growth in their child’s development.

“Fun, play, friendships, faith – also known as the most important parts of childhood – these things soon take a back seat to activities that promise a quantifiable outcome. …

“ ‘Self-optimization’ has become a go-to euphemism for what used to be known as self-help. The word’s evolution foregrounds the perfectionism that was always inherent in more rigorous forms of self-help while deftly leveraging the therapeutic element of self-care, thereby lending the whole operation a moral sheen.

“According to the school of self-optimization there exists an ideal version of you, and your main assignment in life, as an adult of substance and value, is to enflesh that apparition by whatever means necessary. It is time, in other words, to become the person you were always meant to be. …

“The church of self-optimization imprisons us in our skull-sized kingdoms when what we need most is connection. It advocates a very narrow form of self-care, which is really not care for oneself (or others) at all. Vox reporter Allie Volpe laid out the cycle in vivid terms:

” ‘Companies market skin care products, for example, to prevent the formation of fine lines, supposedly a consequence of a stressful life. … Once the anxiety, the exhaustion, and the insufficiency creeps in again, as it inevitably does, the routine begins anew. … Because buying things does not solve existential dread, we are then flooded with guilt for being unable to adequately tend to our minds and bodies. We just have to self-care harder.’ …

“I find one last damning piece of evidence in my case against self-optimization: the despair it instills in those who internalize its goals most deeply. The entire pursuit of optimization implies that our graphs of personal metrics will slope endlessly upward. Therein lies its cruelest delusion. Every one of our life-logging charts will eventually trail off. Age will rob us of our faculties. No matter how many supplements we chug, retreats we attend, or lifestyle coaches we hire, our bodies will break down. Self-optimization is a law without any possible fulfillment, and therefore a recipe for despair. It pits us in a battle against time that no one can win.”

More at Plough, here.

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Indian Cities Fighting Extreme Heat

August 21, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Niharika Kulkarni/AFP via Getty Images.
People fill up their bottles from a water tank on a hot summer day in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India.

We are all experiencing a new level of heat wave.Where I go in the summer, sea breezes used to be enough to cool us down, but no more. Some places, however, are experiencing the new intensity more than others. Parts of India, for example, were pretty hot in the first place, and global warming has made it worse.

Charlotte Steiner, Sameer Kwatra, and Prima Madan write at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) about new Heat Action Plans (HAPs) in parts of India.

“As India grapples with yet another season of intense heat, the cities of Churu, Rajasthan, and Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, are taking action to strengthen local preparedness and resilience. These cities launched their comprehensive Heat Action Plans (HAPs) in May of this year. Developed in collaboration with city authorities, health experts, and [NRDC] partners — Mahila Housing Trust (MHT) and Indian Institute of Public Health-Gandhinagar (IIPHG) — the Churu Heat Action Plan and Varanasi Heat Action Plan represent a significant milestone. …

“For Varanasi and Churu, building resilience to extreme heat is critical. Varanasi, a city of significant cultural and spiritual importance, gets more than 85 million tourists and pilgrims every year and has been grappling with worsening heat waves, year over year. In 2024, the city recorded a scorching 47.2 degrees Celsius (117 degrees Fahrenheit) — the highest temperature in 140 years. Churu, often referred to as the gateway to the Thar Desert, is not only one of the hottest places in India, but it is also particularly at risk for extreme heat events. …

“Historically, HAPs did not include climate projections to highlight the future increase in temperatures to assess risk. However, without concrete data on future projections, it’s hard for city officials and policy makers to move from planning to long-term action. Including robust climate analysis in HAPs strengthens the scientific credibility of the HAP, as well as helping city officials and urban planners to justify budget allocations for long-term heat resilience. It also builds a case for investment in public health and infrastructure to plan for not just saving lives today but reducing the risk over the long run.

“Both the Churu and Varanasi HAPs include tailored climate analysis in addition to a detailed assessment of historical trends (typically included in HAPs), highlighting rising baseline temperatures during both the day and night. The climate analysis for the two cities revealed that, by 2049, the temperatures in Churu are projected to increase by approximately 3.89 degrees Celsius and in Varanasi, by an additional 3.29 degrees Celsius. This could imply more days above 45 degrees Celsius, longer heat waves, and more nighttime heat stress. These HAPs also incorporate the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Heat Index, which combines air temperature and relative humidity to indicate how hot it actually feels to the human body and thereby highlight the human thermal discomfort more realistically.

“Based on hyperlocal analysis, these HAPs also identify specific hot spot areas or account for localized vulnerabilities; they also include ward-level geographic information system (GIS) spatial vulnerability assessments, offering a detailed view of how extreme heat impacts different parts of each city differently. These assessments will help local authorities target interventions more effectively and equitably as they work on implementing each HAP.  …

“Timely early warnings, joint response protocols, and localized capacity building are essential to reducing heat-related morbidity and mortality and maintaining critical services during peak summer months. Keeping up with this expectation, the Churu and Varanasi plans embed institutional accountability by outlining a detailed stakeholder responsibility matrix. This framework defines clear roles, timelines, and coordination mechanisms across state, district, and municipal levels, ensuring that each actor — from government departments to civil society — knows when and how to act.” More at the nonprofit NRDC, here.

NRDC articles are quite technical and full of data charts, but even I can understand the drift, and I hope you find it interesting. I think every town in the world is going to need a HAP.

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Women Prisoners Aid Rare Butterflies

August 20, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Washington State Department of Corrections.
Last year, scientists working with a team of incarcerated women released more than 67,000 larvae of a beautiful, endangered butterfly.

Today’s story about incarcerated women helping scientists reminds me that you don’t have to be in prison to get satisfaction from working for a cause. These women are gaining confidence, self-esteem, and hope for a better future.

Andrew Buncombe reports at the Guardian, “Trista Egli was standing in a greenhouse, tearing up strips of plantain and preparing to feed them to butterfly larvae.

“Of the many things the team here has tried to tempt larvae of the Taylor’s checkerspot [with], it is the invasive English plantain they seem to love the most.

‘The big thing for me is being part of an effort to save an endangered species,’ says Egli, 36. ‘It is a big thrill.’

“Egli is one of seven women incarcerated at the Mission Creek correctional facility, located a two-hour drive from Seattle, who are part of a year-long program that takes captured butterflies, harvests their eggs, and oversees the growth of the larvae before they are released into the wild where they will turn into adults.

“Last year, scientists working with the team released more than 10,000 larvae. The adult butterflies live for just a handful of fabulous, wing-fluttering days. …

“Many of the women speak of their pride working on a project that feels like it is making a positive contribution to the world.

“Lynn Cheroff, 42, said she had been thrilled to talk about it with her two young children when they come to visit. When she telephones her mother about the work, her mother tells her she is proud. Another woman, Jennifer Teitzel, appreciates the sense of order and discipline the program demands and instills.

“Every detail about the eggs and larvae has to be collated and recorded. It is the women’s responsibility, and nobody else’s, seven days a week.

“[While] the program run by Washington state department of corrections (DOC) is part of an effort to prepare the women for life once their sentences are over and to smooth the path to work or college, there is no sugar-coating their predicament.

“Egli, who has three young children, is serving a nine-year sentence for a 2020 drunken hit and run that left a woman with permanent brain damage.

“ ‘I am paying the price for that every day. I can never go back and undo what happened,’ she says. ‘But I can try to make sure the rest of my life is about making the world a better place.’

“The program at Mission Creek has been operating for 10 years. Kelli Bush, the co-director of Sustainability in Prisons Project, a partnership between the DOC and the Evergreen State College in Olympia, says a crucial component are graduate students who visit to offer educational support.

“Bush says in addition to providing the women something to feel proud about as many deal with shame and guilt, the program also gives them confidence about their own capabilities. …

“She says, ‘It’s routine to hear people say “I didn’t think I was smart and I’m realizing I’m doing science.” … Pretty soon people find themselves reading peer-reviewed scientific journals and saying, “I can do this too.” ‘

“The Taylor’s butterfly’s preferred habitat is open grasslands and prairie. For thousands of years, such landscapes were created and maintained by active burning by Indigenous communities. Without such native stewardship, and with ever-increasing threats from developers and town planners, the amount of grassland has drastically diminished. …

“A favored place is Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM), operated by the US army and situated 10 miles from Tacoma. Training with heavy artillery has long kept the prairie free of unwanted vegetation. Yet when the Taylor’s was added to the US Endangered Species Act list in 2013, it presented military officials with a challenge; how could they continue to make use of the base without harming a species now protected by federal law?

“Dan Calvert, of the Sentinel Landscape Partnership, a coalition of federal and state groups that works with landowners to promote sustainable land use around military installations, says JBLM contains ‘90% of the prairie habitat in western Washington.’ …

“One of the efforts to boost the numbers of Taylor’s checkerspot in locations off-base – and thereby allow the military to work unimpeded at the base – led to funding for the Mission Creek project by the Department of Defense (DoD). …

“The collaboration has helped boost the Taylor’s checkerspot. This year could be a record year for releases of adults. In 2024, the program released about 10,900 larvae.

“However, there’s a dark cloud looming over the program. Mission Creek is set to close in October because of budget cuts. There is a plan to transfer the women and the program to a prison at Gig Harbor, located 25 miles away, but there is some concern among current participants it could simply be cut entirely.

“Egli, who is set to become eligible for a work-release program under which she would serve the last 18 months of her sentence working outside the jail and returning to do what’s known as a DOC re-entry facility every night, says the program changed the person she was.”

More at the Guardian, here. No firewall. Donations support his valued news outlet.

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Bird Expert Helps Solve a Murder

August 19, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Chip Clark/Smithsonian Institution/Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Division of Birds.
Ornithologist Roxie Laybourne, originator of forensic ornithology, examining a feather.

I love reading murder mysteries. Not all of them, mind you. I’m a sucker for any mystery from a foreign country or unfamiliar culture, but I recently discarded an Icelandic one that was too noir.

I love mysteries partly for the sense of helping a detective solve a puzzle, and for learning new things. Sometimes it’s a country I’m learning about, sometimes a science. After reading today’s article, I am hoping there will soon be a mystery based on the scientific career of Roxie Laybourne.

Chris Sweeney wrote at the Boston Globe Magazine recently about the “mild-mannered scientist” who created the field of forensic ornithology.

“Murders weren’t Roxie Laybourne’s forte, but she had a job to do. On the evening of April 26, 1972, the 61-year-old ornithologist climbed into the back seat of a detective’s car at Bangor International Airport. … As the car neared the hotel, she noticed a smattering of peculiar structures lining the sides of the road. …

“At her hotel, Laybourne received a handwritten letter from Peter Culley, the young state prosecutor who’d soon be interrogating her on the witness stand. … Culley, a lifelong Mainer who was just a few years out of law school, had plotted an exhaustive case against Henry Andrews, a 35-year-old laborer who stood accused in state court of the brutal murder of Hazel Doak, his elderly former landlord. Laybourne would appear in the penultimate act of the prosecutor’s script, the last witness he’d call before closing arguments. …

“She was an authority  —  perhaps the authority  —  on feathers. Culley hoped that if any embers of doubt were still smoldering in the jury box by the time Laybourne took the stand, she’d extinguish them by offering up scientific analysis showing that feathers recovered from the scene of the crime matched bits of feather that were found on Andrews’s clothing at the time he was apprehended. …

“Build an economy on the back of butchered chickens and life will get messy. As Laybourne observed on her first morning in town, the industry’s leftovers were everywhere. Some residents had to rake feathers off their lawns and others complained of a foul stench that would drift through their yards. Most unappetizing was the steady stream of putrefied byproduct that flowed out of the processing plants and into Penobscot Bay. The bloody, fatty industrial runoff caked the shoreline and congealed into a blanket that bobbed atop the water. At low tide, a rust-colored stain could be seen on the rocks and sand, earning Belfast the unfortunate nickname ‘the City with a Bathtub Ring.’ …

“To showcase the local industry’s might, Belfast started hosting an annual Maine Broiler Day in 1948. What began as a one-day barbecue soon ballooned into a weekend-long bonanza of grilled protein and ice-cold beverages. State and local politicians strutted through the crowds to press the flesh with constituents and the chicken companies sponsored a Broiler Queen contest in which women were judged on ‘poise, personality and appearance,’ according to the New England Historical Society. …

“On the weekend of July 17, 1971, however, the celebration soured. That’s when, according to prosecutors, Henry Andrews blew into town on Friday with two friends who were ready to party.

“Drinks flowed early and the first place Andrews took his buddies was a sturdy white farmhouse a mile outside of town. He had rented a room there a few years earlier while clearing trees on the surrounding property. During the impromptu visit, Andrews found Hazel Doak, a 71-year-old widow who had lived there for more than 20 years. She was Andrews’s landlord during his time in town and the relationship was allegedly rocky.

‘Doak didn’t appreciate Andrews showing up unannounced that Friday: After a tense exchange, she asked the two men accompanying Andrews to remove him from her property and get lost. They complied, shook off the uncomfortable start to the weekend, and made their way into town for dinner and a night of drinking.

“Around 1:45 a.m., an inebriated Andrews reportedly ditched his pals and teetered over to the Main Street taxi stand, where, through droopy eyes and slurred words, he asked for a ride back to the Doak farm. …

“At 10:30 the next morning, Doak’s longtime friend Edith Ladd pulled up to the house. The two women had spoken on the phone the previous night and made plans to head over to the broiler festival together. Ladd went to the back entrance that she typically used and found it still latched shut. She went around to the front of the house, where the door swung wide open. Inside, she found Doak’s lifeless body heaped on a bed, clad in nothing but a nightgown. …

“Ladd called the police and huddled in her car with her daughter, grandson, and other family members, who had been waiting patiently to get to the festival. When the officers arrived, they followed the trail of feathers downstairs and found the cellar door cracked open. The best they could surmise, someone had grabbed Doak’s pillow and smothered her with such force that it burst the pillow open and sent feathers everywhere, including onto the murderer. …

“Near the end of the weekend, a soaking-wet Andrews walked into the Belfast Police Station and, according to police testimony, allegedly declared, ‘I came to give myself up.’ …

“The sheriffs on duty knew exactly who Andrews was and what he was wanted for. They placed him under arrest and collected his clothes  —  and the feathers that were stuck to them. Police sent several bags of evidence to the FBI for careful analysis at the bureau’s crime lab in Washington, D.C. …

“Knowing the murder weapon was a pillow, the agents in Washington understood that the feathers stuck to his clothes might be a key piece of trace evidence, but they had no clue how to analyze them in any meaningful way. Fortunately, they had heard all about a little old lady named Roxie Laybourne over at the Smithsonian.”

Now I’ve done the unforgivable for a mystery! I’ve left you with a cliffhanger. You’ll have to read the rest of the story at the Globe, here. It’s a long one.

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Tribes Protecting Water

August 18, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Navajo Natural Heritage Program via Natural Resources Defense Council.
Diné Native Plants Program members work to restore a headwater stream impacted by livestock grazing.

The more that the US endangers its wetlands, the more we rely on the work that tribes do to protect them. Perhaps today’s article can help us see what the rest of us can do.

At the website for the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, Claudia Blanco Nuñez and Giulia CS Good Stefani describe how “Tribal Nations protect and manage millions of acres of wetlands, which help improve water quality, curb the risk of floods, recharge groundwater, and store large amounts of carbon.”

“Two years ago,” they report, “the U.S. Supreme Court slashed federal Clean Water Act protection of wetlands [with] harmful repercussions for droughts, wildfires, flooding, wildlife, and the drinking water supply. 

“In the absence of federal protection, the imperative to defend our shared waters falls increasingly on individuals, states, and Native American Tribal Nations. … Tribal Nations protect and manage millions of acres of wetlands in the United States, and with commitments made by the U.S. government to Tribal co-management and co-stewardship of federal lands, the amount of clean water safeguarded by Tribal Nations is growing.

“NRDC’s Science Office mapped the wetlands found within and intersecting the boundaries of Tribal reservation lands in the contiguous United States. Across the 294 federally recognized Tribal reservations mapped in this analysis, our scientists found that Tribes steward more than 3 million acres of wetlands. Even typically arid regions like the American Southwest have significant wetlands on Indigenous reservations. …

“In addition to the 56.2 million acres that are part of the Tribal reservation system, many Tribes have reserved or treaty rights on lands outside reservation boundaries, and most Tribes and their members maintain ongoing physical, cultural, spiritual, and economic relationships with their ancestral homelands. These reciprocal land and water relationships extend far beyond the political boundary of any designated reservation.

“This analysis is limited to federally recognized Tribes in the Lower 48 due to the complex Tribal governance systems in Alaska and Hawai’i. For example, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 altered the previous Tribal ownership system to one led by Alaska Native Corporations. This system differs from federally recognized Tribes, which have a government-to-government relationship with the United States that includes eligibility for funding and services from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. That is to say, NRDC’s analysis looked at just a fraction of the total wetlands stewarded by and connected to the lives and well-being of Native peoples today.

“To learn more about Tribal wetland conservation, we spoke with leaders in the wetland management programs of the Navajo Nation and Red Lake Band of Ojibwe. …

“Navajo Nation agency staff are engaged in numerous projects to help restore and protect this essential resource. The Diné Native Plants Program recently submitted a grant application to remove invasive plant species along the Little Colorado’s riverbank. This will make space for native vegetation to grow and help with groundwater recharge for nearby Navajo farmers and families. The Diné Native Plants’ seed program also provides seed mixes for restoration projects that are solely sourced from Navajo plants. 

“Jesse Mike, the Diné Native Plants program coordinator, stepped out of the greenhouse to speak with us. He shared about the history of livestock grazing, trampling, and erosion that have impacted not only the health of the headwater streams on Navajo lands but also the underlying water table. His team is currently working to increase groundwater infiltration and improve the overall ecosystem health of three degraded streams in the Chuska Mountains. …

“The Red Lake Band of Ojibwe’s reservation is in northern Minnesota and has the greatest area of wetlands of any reservation in the contiguous United States. Across the Tribe’s more than 835,000 acres of land — all held in common by the Tribe — the Red Lake Band manages an astonishing 541,000 acres of wetlands. ‘So many wetlands,’ says Tyler Orgon, a biologist and the lead wetland specialist for the Red Lake Band Department of Natural Resources, ‘and we’re very fortunate for that.’ 

“A sizable portion of the Tribe’s wetland acreage north of Upper Red Lake is part of the largest expanse of peatlands in the continental United States. Peatlands cover about 3 percent of the earth and store more carbon than all of the planet’s other types of vegetation, including the world’s forests, combined. 

“One of the most important wetland-dependent plant species for the Red Lake Band — as well as other Anishinaabe and Dakota peoples across the Great Lakes region — is manoomin (Zizania palustris and Z. aquatica), the only wild rice native to Turtle Island. According to an Ojibwe prophecy, their ancestors were instructed to move west to the place where ‘the food floats on water.’

“The University of Minnesota research team We Must First Consider Manoomin (Kawe Gidaa-naanaagadawendaamin Manoomin) works to help protect this essential wetland-dependent plant by combining Western science with Indigenous science and learning from Ojibwe stewardship.

“The scientists have found that an increase in extreme weather conditions (like flooding events and record-breaking snowfall) negatively impact manoomin growth by uprooting the plant or drowning it out in its sensitive early stages. These weather events compound the already present settler-colonial impacts on wetlands in the region, including deforestation and conversion of wetlands into agricultural land use.

“Orgon hopes to restore some of the Red Lake Band’s wetlands that have been impacted by past agriculture.” More at NRDC, here.

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If Your Country Sinks in the Sea

August 17, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Tuvalu Foreign Ministry/Reuters.
Tuvalu’s foreign minister Simon Kofe in 2021 making a point as he gives his address to the international climate convention Cop26.

Climate change has been making itself known to most of us in early blooming seasons and the increased number of wildfires. But we don’t necessarily feel in our guts that this is really a moment that will determine if our country continues to exist.

Unless we live in a place like Tuvalu, an island gradually, and then not so gradually, sinking into the sea.

An article at the Guardian proposes that when the inevitable happens, countries like Tuvalu must find a way to keep their statehood.

Isabella Kaminski writes, “States should be able to continue politically even if their land disappears underwater, legal experts have said.

“The conclusions come from a long-awaited report by the International Law Commission that examined what existing law means for continued statehood and access to key resources if sea levels continue to rise due to climate breakdown.

“Average sea levels could rise by as much as [3ft] by 2100 if climate scientists’ worst-case scenarios come true, and recent research suggests they could even exceed projections. This is particularly important for small island developing states because many face an existential threat. …

“Having waded through international law and scholarship and analyzed state views and practices, legal experts concluded that nothing prevents nations from maintaining their maritime boundaries even if the land on which they are drawn changes or disappears. These boundaries give countries navigation rights, access to resources such as fishing and minerals, and a degree of political control.

“There is also general agreement that affected nations should retain their statehood to avoid loss of nationality. Legal experts say these conclusions are essential for maintaining international peace and stability.

“Speaking at the UN Oceans conference in Nice, Penelope Ridings, an international lawyer and member of the ILC, said the commission’s work was driven by the ‘fundamental sense of injustice’ that sea level rise would be felt worst by the most vulnerable states, which had also contributed the least to the problem. …

“The Pacific nation of Tuvalu has been particularly vocal in its concerns. Sea levels on its nine islands and atolls have already [risen] and are expected to get much higher over the coming decades.

“Australia was the first country to recognze the permanence of Tuvalu’s boundaries despite rising sea levels. In 2023, it signed a legally binding treaty committing to help Tuvalu respond to major disasters and offering special visas to citizens who want or need to move. Nearly a third of citizens have entered a ballot for such a visa. Latvia followed with a similar pledge of recognition.

“At the oceans conference, the Tuvaluan prime minister, Feleti Teo, said his citizens were determined to stay on their land for as long as possible. The government has just finished the first phase of a coastal adaptation project, building concrete barriers to reduce flooding and dredging sand to create additional land. …

“He urged Tuvalu’s development partners to be ‘more forthcoming in terms of providing the necessary climate financing that we need to be able to adapt. And to give us more time to live in the land that we believe God has given us and we intend to remain on.’ …

“Bryce Rudyk, a professor of international environmental law at New York University and legal adviser to the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis), said the ILC had been very responsive to small states, which have traditionally not had their voices heard in matters of international law but are increasingly at the forefront of legal advances on climate change and marine degradation.

“In recent years, Aosis and the Pacific Islands Forum have both declared that their statehood and sovereignty, as well as their membership of intergovernmental organizations such as the UN, will continue regardless of sea level rise.

“The international court of justice [was] petitioned by Aosis to affirm this.”

More at the Guardian, here.

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Tunisians Know the Value of a Book

August 16, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Meriem Belhiba.
Girls explore colorful storybooks in the newly inaugurated library at Bir El Euch Primary School in Tunisia.

Meriem Belhiba wrote this story for the Christian Science Monitor.

“To children in this hilltop village, their school library is a portal to another world.

“Israa Al Trabelsi and five other 9-year-olds barely stifle their giggles as they weave – wide-eyed with curiosity – through the colorful room. They can plop down into cushioned chairs, look at bright wall art, and, of course, browse shelves bursting with books. The transformative space was built for children to dream in.

“ ‘I’ve learned so much,’ Israa says after taking a seat with a book about faraway lands in her hands. ‘It is also helping me improve my vocabulary and my writing,’ she notes, quickly adding, ‘I want to be a judge.’

“That might seem an unusual ambition for a child in Bir El Euch, a rural community of 1,600 people southwest of Tunisia’s capital, Tunis. But it makes sense when one learns that the man behind the library, Omar Weslati, is himself a judge who knows how precious books can be to children. ‘This project began as a way to reconcile with the child I once was, who had nothing,’ he says.

“Economic inequality has long been a challenge in Tunisia, a country of 12 million people. Widespread poverty in rural areas, high unemployment, and poor infrastructure were key triggers behind the 2011 mass protests that toppled a 23-year dictatorship and touched off the Arab Spring uprisings. …

” ‘I grew up in a rural school without a library, without light, without transportation, and without heating,’ Judge Weslati recalls. ‘As a bookworm, I needed to walk long distances to reach the nearest public library.’

“Launched in 2016, the initiative is led by white-collar professionals, most of whom hail from rural communities. These journalists, writers, judges, and teachers have chipped in funding to create a new library every year. Each one serves hundreds of students and takes thousands of dollars to complete.

“The project’s launch could not have been timed better. The first ‘imagination libraries,’ as they were initially called, were built in the aftermath of the violent extremism that accompanied the Arab Spring. Amid the waves of unrest that ensued across the region, Tunisia has been the biggest contributor of foreign fighters in the world – with Tunisians joining extremist groups in Syria, Libya, Iraq, and elsewhere.

“This was a factor behind the library initiative. ‘Where the book doesn’t reach, the extremist arrives first,’ Judge Weslati says. …

“Besides offering books as a source of inspiration, Judge Weslati’s team began visiting remote schools and sharing members’ personal stories. ‘We wanted to show kids that people from their own soil once dreamed, created, and contributed,’ he says.

‘We never saw this as charity; it’s about cultivation,’ he adds. ‘Planting stories where they hadn’t taken root before.’

“Beyond reading, the initiative led to something more: a writing club for rural youths. Teenagers craft short stories together and publish their work. One of the teens, Molka Hammami, credits her former teacher Jamila Sherif for lighting a spark in her.

“ ‘Reading changed my life,’ Molka says. ‘It pushed me to do more. I was published in the [club’s] collective storybook last year.’ Now she helps run a radio show for the club.

“Ms. Sherif, who has since become a school inspector, emphasizes the stakes. ‘Many kids drop out after primary school,’ she says. … ‘We’re trying to change that – one library, one book at a time.’”’

“Reports have shown that, despite declining school dropout rates across Tunisia, the problem is most acute in rural areas. Donia Smaali Bouhlila, an expert on educational inequality at the University of Tunis El Manar, says inadequate schools and infrastructure in rural areas are among the biggest reasons that students drop out.

“ ‘When learning spaces lack comfort, resources, or consistency, they stop being places of growth and become sources of alienation,’ she says. ‘Every small success – helping a child learn to read, keeping a teenager engaged – represents a meaningful step forward.’

“Safahat, a cultural organization whose name translates to ‘pages’ in Arabic, aimed to serve schools when it was founded in 2020 [but] faced logistical and financial hurdles because of the region’s remoteness. This prompted its team to pivot to a more mobile model: public bookcases. …

“Through its Maktabtena (‘our library’) initiative, the group placed red-and-white boxes of books in hospitals, youth centers, and schools, and on street corners. … Readers are invited to take a book, read freely, and donate their own books if they can. ‘We want to make reading a habit, not a luxury,’ [Khawla Mondhri, a university professor and volunteer leading the initiative] says. ‘If someone takes a book and doesn’t return it, that just means it’s being read somewhere else. ‘And that’s enough for us.” …

“So far, the team has installed 35 bookcases in accessible, safe, and visible spots. To ensure a bookcase is never empty, the team has formed partnerships with municipalities, associations, and individuals.

“ ‘We send books as often as needed. We plant small oaks,’ Ms. Mondhri says. ‘But we dream of forests.’ ”

More at the Monitor, here.

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The Books of Our Childhood Speak Out

August 15, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Jeremie Souteyrat for the New York Times.
Steve Mills shows his copy of The Naughtiest Girl Again, by Enid Blyton, with marginalia by a child.

In a fun story from the New York Times, Jonathan Wolfe writes about a children’s-book collector in England who was surprised to discover who did the childish drawings inside an acquisition. It reminded me of some favorite childhood books — and how I loved to draw pictures of girls with pointy noses on any piece of paper I could find.

“In retirement,” writes Wolfe, “Steve Mills began collecting secondhand books that he had read as a child. It was an effort to reawaken lost memories. …

“He was at home in Hockley, east of London, flipping through titles from a recent book haul from a charity shop. Inside the pages of an early hardcover edition of The Naughtiest Girl Again, by the English author Enid Blyton, he found a girl’s handwritten notes from more than 50 years earlier. It took a few moments for Mr. Mills to grasp who the writer was: his wife, Karen.

“At first, Mr. Mills, a 67-year-old former civil servant, simply recognized an address in the town where his wife had grown up, written in a child’s handwriting. He brought the book to Ms. Mills, and said, ‘Oh look, they used to live in the village you came from,’ Mr. Mills recalled.

“The address had been her childhood home, though it was spelled wrong. Ms. Mills couldn’t believe it. …

“ ‘I thought at first that it was him being a silly bugger,’ she said. ‘I actually said to him, “Are you trying to misspell our first address?” But I looked at it again, and I thought, “Oh my word, this is written by my brother and me when we were 9 and 10,” ‘ she said. … There were timetables she had carefully recorded, pages she had folded to save her place and a sketch of little Karen, freckles dotting her face. …

“[Ms. Mills] grew up in Staffordshire, about 170 miles northwest of Hockley. Her parents, Brenda and David Larden, both 87, told their daughter that they must have donated the book to a church or school drive around 1975, when they moved. …

“ ‘For 50 years,’ Ms. Mills said, the book had ‘gone around the country, doing I don’t know what — entertaining children — and then it came back to us.’ …

“But his discoveries weren’t over. A few days after finding his wife’s name in The Naughtiest Girl Again, Mr. Mills suddenly realized that there were other titles in the haul that he hadn’t looked at. Could some of those, too, have been from his wife’s childhood home?

“ ‘I picked up another couple of books and, lo and behold, there was my wife’s name,’ he said.

“He found doodles by Ms. Mills and her brother Mark on two other Enid Blyton books, The Adventures of Pip and The Famous Five: Five on a Treasure Island. The latter was one of Mr. Mills’s favorite books as a boy.

“The find was particularly meaningful for him, he said, because Ms. Blyton’s stories reminded him of boyhood adventures with his mother in Cornwall, on the English coast. …

“In the back of one of the three books, he said, his wife had written, ‘I have got 12 of Enid BLYTONS Books.’

“ ‘So that leaves me with another nine to try and find now,’ he said.”

More at the Times, here. What did you draw in your books — or hide inside? Four-leaf clovers?

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From Stealing Birds to Saving Birds

August 14, 2025 by suzannesmom

Photo: Lindsey McGinnis/The Christian Science Monitor.
Kelik Suparno, a bird-hunter-turned-nature-guide, begins his day by loading fruit onto trees to attract birds to a viewing area near his home in Jatimulyo, Indonesia, March 1, 2025.

As I started to work on this post, I had an uneasy feeling that I’d written before about the birdsong competitions that are mentioned. Alas, yes. Click here to enjoy the charming side of today’s topic. Continue reading for the other side.

Lyndsey McGinnis writes at the Christian Science Monitor, “A decade ago, when Kelik Suparno heard the Javan blue flycatcher’s melodic whistle, he perked up at the promise of a payday. Knowing a single bird could earn him two months’ salary at one of Indonesia’s bustling bird markets, he set off to capture the critically endangered creature.

“Now, when he hears its distinct, high-pitched ‘twee-twoo sounds, he perks up for a different reason. It means he gets to introduce a group of outsiders – researchers, photographers, tourists – to his favorite species.

Photo: Ari Noviyono via eBird.

“Like many other men in the mountain village of Jatimulyo, Mr. Suparno made the switch from bird hunter to nature guide shortly after the village banned poaching. And now, as increasingly popular birdsong competitions across Asia threaten the country’s wildlife, Jatimulyo could set an example for other communities.

“Indonesia is the epicenter of what ecologists describe as the Asian songbird crisis: the rampant, illegal trade of rare and endemic birds to the devastation of their wild populations. The crisis affects at least 26 threatened species within Indonesia, where it’s fueled by the rising popularity of high-stakes birdsong competitions. Everyone wants these species to thrive. The love of native songbirds runs deep, especially here on the island of Java, and many hope to pass that love on to younger generations. But protecting both the country’s biodiversity and its songbird culture will require balance.

“ ‘In Indonesia, all kinds of birds are being hunted, everywhere,’ says Mr. Suparno. ‘The competition accelerates the rate of bird extinction.’

“The practice of keeping caged songbirds originated centuries ago in Java, and among general collectors, competitors, and breeders, up to 84 million caged birds are believed to be kept on this island today.

“Six belong to Emmannuel Tantyo, head of a neighborhood in the heart of Yogykarta – a city about 20 miles away from Jatimulyo, and often described as Java’s cultural ‘soul.’ Here, in the mazelike streets surrounding the city’s historic palace, a kind of perkutut, or zebra dove, reigns supreme.

“For Javanese men, it’s a symbol of prosperity, Mr. Tantyo explains, and a source of calm.

“ ‘When I wake up from sleep and hear the “too too too too” …’ he says, pausing to find the right word to describe the feeling. He taps his fingers to his heart. ‘Peaceful.’

“After Indonesia gained independence in 1945, the Javanese passion for bird keeping spread, spurred further by the introduction of birdsong competitions in the 1970s.

“As the popularity of competitions steadily grew, so did the industry around them – bird markets cropped up in every major city, a network of birder associations flourished, and cash prizes ballooned. Today, Indonesia holds hundreds of competitions annually, drawing thousands of competitors from all walks of life, all hoping to win money and prestige with their champion crooners.

“The competitions help uplift the entire economy, says Susri, a Yogyakarta-based perkutut breeder who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name. …

“He didn’t snag these doves from the forests of central Java. ‘Even a bird like the perkutut has its own role in the ecosystem,’ he says, and that’s where he believes wild birds should stay.

“Competition coordinators generally agree. They are trying to phase out the use of wild-caught birds by requiring competitors to prove the origins of their flock, usually through special bands that are installed by breeders like Susri onto a bird’s leg when they’re young.

“Phasing out wild songbirds would mark a seismic shift. A survey of 24 different songbird markets found that 71.5% of the birds were believed to have been taken from the wild, according to a preliminary study by Birdlife International and the international wildlife regulation group CITES. The study, presented during a 2023 workshop, found that only 2.2% of the birds were believed to be bred in captivity. Conservationists say that lax law enforcement and consumer preferences for wild-caught songbirds (which are often cheaper and, some collectors believe, sing better) help buoy the wildlife trade.

“Ultimately, says Susri, it’s up to all sectors of society to preserve Indonesia’s wildlife. ‘We are all responsible,’ he says.”

More at the Monitor, here.

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