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A Different Kind of Bookshop

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on March 2, 2025| 1 Comment »

Photo: Paul Singer/GBH News.
Ellie Paris-Miranda inside her new bookshop in downtown Brockton, Massachusetts. This shop aims to build social networks as well as sell books.

I am thinking of a friend in Manhattan, a writer who loves books. Currently in her 90s, she passed through a difficult year with her husband’s illness. After he died, she didn’t feel like doing anything. She stayed home. She turned down overtures from friends.

Then one day, she tells me, she decided to go outside and walk a few blocks on Broadway. She had heard that there was a new independent bookstore. When she walked in and felt the literary atmosphere there, she began to cry. “These are my people,” she said.

That’s just one example of what a bookstore can mean to someone.

Paul Singer reports at GBH radio about other kinds of meaning a new bookstore intends to provide: “On a chilly Sunday afternoon in Brockton, Mayor Robert Sullivan sat in a cozy corner of a new bookstore on Main Street and read a bilingual children’s book to a couple dozen patrons and staff.

“The mayor had arrived to celebrate the opening of the Dr. Ellie Paris Social Bookstore and Ice Cream Cafe, a new storefront shop intended to encourage literacy and social networking particularly among Brockton’s large immigrant population.

“The book he read, Tiagu and Vovo, is written in English and Cape Verdean Creole and tells the story of an immigrant family learning the new language. 

“Ellie Paris-Miranda, the owner of the shop and an immigrant from Cape Verde herself, said having the mayor reading this book symbolizes why she wanted to open a bookstore.

“ ‘I really want to foster literacy, education, and upward economic mobility through giving communities access to not only books, but also a network,’ she said. …

“In her other job, Paris-Miranda is a tenure-track assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Wheaton College in Norton.

” ‘There’s this positive correlation between building successful business with the quality of the network, the relationships that you have that can be used as a financial resource,’ she said. ‘Especially for low income people, starting businesses and women who often don’t have all the resources needed.’

“The shop is just a few blocks from city hall and the courthouse, so she hopes her neighborhood customers will rub elbows and get to know city leaders over a sandwich or an ice cream cone.

“True to her own roots, Paris-Miranda’s shop shelves prominently feature books about financial planning and business strategy, as well as books in a variety of languages. She also refers to her customers as clients. …

“ ‘My “clients” are like long-term relationships I am building,’ she said.

“Eventually, Paris-Miranda said, she plans to teach English classes at the shop, as well as other programming on entrepreneurship and personal finance.

“The new bookstore is riding a wave of new interest in local bookshops, said Beth Ineson, executive director of the New England Independent Booksellers Association.

“ ‘We’ve had such a boom in eastern New England since basically 2020 for bookstores opening,’ Ineson said. … ‘We’ve had as many new stores join my organization in the past four years as the previous ten combined.’ …

“Part of the reason for this boom, Ineson said, is that the pandemic left many storefronts vacant, making commercial real estate more affordable. But another part of it is the need for community.

“ ‘It is really on everybody’s mind now how these stores can become places for community and for intellectual engagement,’ she said. …

“In Brockton, the Ellie Paris Social Bookstore replaces an empty storefront with the sound of chatter and a smoothie blender.

“Matt Stanton, a lifelong Brockton resident and member of the city’s Beautification Committee, said he hopes the new bookstore can be an engine for downtown revitalization.

“ ‘To me, this could be a catalyst to just, you know, really bring the downtown back,’ he said. ‘There’s a couple shops right up the street. If somebody comes in here, they walk up to the store in the next block. And it’s just great.’ ”

More at GBH radio, here.

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Thriving at 102

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on February 18, 2025| 8 Comments »

Photo: Jackie Molloy for KFF Health News.
Hilda Jaffe, 102, in her apartment in New York. Jaffe enjoys doing puzzles, reading, volunteering, and attending cultural events.

I have always thought that a city like New York, with many kinds of public transportation and easy walking to whatever you need, is the best kind of place to grow old. The problem for most of us is that we may still need a car to do the simplest things long after we can’t drive.

Here’s a story about a thriving 102-year-old doing her errands without assistance in New York. I’m convinced that part of her good fortune is not having to drive.

Judith Graham writes at the Washington Post, ” ‘The future is here,’ the email announced. Hilda Jaffe, then 88, was letting her children know that she planned to sell the family home in Verona, New Jersey. She’d decided to begin life anew on her own in a one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan.

“Fourteen years later, Jaffe, now 102, still lives alone — just a few blocks from the frenetic lights and crowds that course through Times Square.

“She’s the rarest of seniors: a centenarian who is as sharp as a tack, who carries grocery bags in each hand when she walks back from her local market, and who takes city buses to see her physicians or attend a matinee at the Metropolitan Opera.

“Jaffe is an extraordinary example of an older adult living by herself and thriving. She cleans her own house, does her own laundry, manages her own finances, and stays in touch with a far-flung network of family and friends via email, WhatsApp and Zoom. Her 78-year-old son lives in San Jose. Her 75-year-old daughter lives in Tel Aviv.

“I’ve spoken with dozens of seniors this past year for a series of columns on older Americans living alone. Many struggle with health issues. Many are isolated and vulnerable. But a noteworthy slice of this growing group of seniors maintains a high degree of well-being. …

“Sofiya Milman is the director of human longevity studies at the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She studies people known as ‘superagers’ age 95 and older. ‘As a group, they have a very positive outlook on life’ and are notably resilient, like Jaffe, she told me.

“Qualities associated with resilience in older adults include optimism, hopefulness, an ability to adapt to changing circumstances, meaningful relationships, community connections and physical activity, according to a growing body of research on this topic.

“Jaffe has those qualities in spades, along with a ‘can-do’ attitude. ‘I never expected to be 102. I’m as surprised as everybody else that I am here.’ …

“She credits her genetic heritage, luck and her commitment to ‘keep moving,’ in that order. … Asked to describe herself, she quickly responded with ‘pragmatic.’ That means having a clear-eyed view of what she can and can’t do and making adjustments as necessary.

“Living alone suits her, she added, because she likes being independent and doing things her way. ‘If a problem comes up, I work it out,’ Jaffe said. …

“There are only some 101,000 centenarians in the United States, according to the most recent Census Bureau data. Of this small group, 15 percent live independently or conduct their lives independently while living with someone, according to Thomas Perls, the founder and director of the New England Centenarian Study, the largest study of centenarians in the world. …

“About 20 percent of centenarians are, like Jaffe, free of physical or cognitive impairments, Perls said. An additional 15 percent have no age-related illnesses, such as arthritis or heart disease. …

“Every day, Jaffe tries to walk 3,000 steps — outside if the weather is good, or inside, making laps in her hallway, if the weather is bad. Her diet is simple: bread, cheese and decaffeinated coffee for breakfast; a sandwich or eggs for lunch; often chicken and a vegetable or restaurant leftovers for dinner. She never smoked, doesn’t drink alcohol and sleeps an average of eight hours each night.

“Even more important, Jaffe remains engaged with other people. She has subscriptions to the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic and a chamber music series. She participates in online events and regularly sees new exhibits at four of New York’s premier museums, where she has memberships. She’s in regular contact with family members and friends.

“Jaffe also belongs to a book club at her synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and serves on the synagogue’s adult education committee. For more than a decade, she has volunteered several times a week as a docent at the New York Public Library’s main branch on Fifth Avenue. …

“When I asked about the future, Jaffe said she doesn’t worry about what comes next. She just lives day to day.

“That change in perspective is common in later life. ‘Focusing on the present and experiencing the here and now becomes more important to older adults,’ said Laura Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, who has studied emotional changes that accompany aging for decades. …

“Jaffe certainly understands the value of facing forward and letting go of the past. Losing her husband, Gerald Jaffe, in 2005 after 63 years of marriage was hard, she admitted, but relinquishing her life and most of her belongings in New Jersey five years later was easy. …

“ ‘It was so exciting for me, being in New York,’ she continued. ‘Every day you could do something — or nothing. … In a house in New Jersey, I would be isolated. Here, I look out the window and I see people.’ ”

More at the Post, here.

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Octopus Punches Hunting Partner

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on December 6, 2024| 2 Comments »

Photo: Eduardo Sampaio and Simon Gingins.
An Octopus cyanea, center, hunts with a blacktip grouper on one side and a blue goatfish on the other.

There are trends, I think, in which animals are popular and get the most news coverage. Lately, octopuses seem to be “in.” That is probably because the people who know them best, like naturalist Sy Montgomery, have demonstrated how intelligent octopuses are.

Now we learn that some octopuses hunt with partners from other species and may make the group decisions.

Evan Bush writes at NBC News, “A new study shows that some members of the species Octopus cyanea maraud around the seafloor in hunting groups with fish, which sometimes include several fish species at once.

“The research, published in the journal [Nature], even suggests that the famously intelligent animals organized the hunting groups’ decisions, including what they should prey upon.

“What’s more, the researchers witnessed the cephalopod species — often called the big blue or day octopus — punching companion fish, apparently to keep them on task and contributing to the collective effort.

“Octopuses have often been thought to avoid other members of their species and prowl solo using camouflage. But the study [is] an indication that at least one octopus species has characteristics and markers of intelligence that scientists once considered common only in vertebrates. …

“Said Eduardo Sampaio, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the lead author of the research, ‘We are very similar to these animals.’ …

“To understand the inner details of octopus lives, researchers dived for about a month at a reef off the coast of Eilat, Israel, and tracked 13 octopuses for a total of 120 hours using several cameras. The team followed the octopuses for 13 hunts, during which they observed groups of between two and 10 fish working with each octopus.

“These hunting groups typically included several species of reef fish, such as grouper and goatfish. The octopuses did not appear to lead the groups, but they did punch at fish to enforce social order — most often at blacktip groupers.

“ ‘The ones that get more punched are the main exploiters of the group. These are the ambush predators, the ones that don’t move, don’t look for prey,’ Sampaio said. …

“ ‘If the group is very still and everyone is around the octopus, it starts punching, but if the group is moving along the habitat, this means that they’re looking for prey, so the octopus is happy. It doesn’t punch anyone, Sampaio said.

“The researchers think fish benefit from such hunting groups because an octopus can reach into crevices where prey hides and root out lunch. The octopus benefits, they believe, because it can simply follow the fish to food, rather than perform what the researchers call speculative hunting. …

“After shooting their video, the researchers fed all of their hunting scenes into software that creates a three-dimensional representation, then used another program to track each animal and log its position in relation to others. The data allowed the researcher to measure how close the creatures remained to one another and which creatures anchored or pulled the group in one direction or another.

“The data showed that a particular fish species, the blue goatfish, would roam off and lead the hunting groups in that direction, but the group of fish would linger if the octopus didn’t immediately follow.

“The goatfish ‘are the ones exploring the environment and finding prey,’ Sampaio explained. ‘The octopus is the decider of the group.’

“The researchers did not see evidence that the creatures shared prey. All the species involved are generalists that eat crustaceans, fish and mollusks, but whoever was able to catch the prey got a meal. Questions remain, however, including whether certain octopuses recognize or prefer to hunt with a favorite fish companion. … It’s also not clear if this social hunting behavior is something octopuses learn or if it’s innate.

“ ‘In my intuition, I think it’s something they learn, because the smaller octopuses seem to have a higher difficulty to collaborate with fish than the large ones,’ Sampaio said.

“Jonathan Birch, a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics who studies animal sentience but was not involved in the new research, said he … appreciated that the study’s observations were made outside a laboratory setting, where a lot of animal cognition research takes place. Octopuses can be difficult to study outside their natural setting. …

“ ‘Octopuses were seen as a problem case because they are intelligent and yet solitary, it was assumed, so researchers puzzled for a long time about what’s going on there,’ Birch said. ‘[This study shows that] For at least one species of octopus, there is quite a rich social life.’ “

More at NBC, here. No paywall.

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Public Housing Can Embrace Design

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 23, 2024| 7 Comments »

Photo: Rasmus Hjortshoj.
Dortheavej residence in Copenhagen. Social housing accounts for about 20% of all housing stock in Denmark and is available to anyone, regardless of income.

I’m always interested in housing stories, partly because among the issues that the department I worked in at the Fed addressed was housing. After the mortgage meltdown in 2008, I remember, we had a gigantic event at the Patriots’ football stadium to gather borrowers in danger of foreclosure under one roof with organizations that could help them.

Today’s story looks at new ideas in public housing from around the world. Maddie Thomas reports at the Guardan, “The social housing of last century often calls to mind towering blocks of flats, poorly maintained with dark, pokey and cold units. But alongside a rise in community living, the 21st century has brought quality construction, sustainability, and quality of life to the forefront of social housing design.

“Australia’s commitment to and funding for social housing stock is limited. But by 2037, Australia is estimated to have 1.1 million people seeking social housing. Professor of architecture and head of the University of NSW’s school of the built environment, Philip Oldfield, says that for an investment in social housing to match cosmopolitan cities like Paris or Barcelona, more housing of quality needs to be built.

“ ‘Architects are trained in this … so when they’re given the opportunity to do it well, Australian architects will create as good a housing as anywhere else in the world,’ he says. ‘At the moment, the system, with few exceptions, doesn’t give them that creative opportunity to deliver … the kind of world class social housing we would love to see.’

“While Australian not-for-profits are building design-led affordable housing for low to middle income earners, government-funded social housing for those on waitlists is lacking. Oldfield says organizations like Nightingale Housing are pioneers in built-to-rent housing, with 20% of apartments assigned to community housing providers for those most in need. But examples like Sydney’s Sirius building, previously owned by the state government, show that Australia needs more purpose-built social housing to cater to demand and match international standards.

“ ‘In conventional market-led housing, you build for the people who purchase the house … so you don’t consider as much the energy bills that are going to accumulate over time,’ he says. ‘With social housing, you’re not trying to create a profit so you can consider things like the life cycle costs for housing in a much more significant way.’ …

“Social housing in Denmark is available to anyone, regardless of income. Highly regulated to ensure quality construction, social housing accounts for about 20% of all housing stock in Denmark. In 2013, global architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group was commissioned by Lejerbo, a Danish organization building housing for those in need, to design ‘Dortheavej’ – a social housing block in Copenhagen.

“Bjarke Ingels’ ‘winding wall’ of social housing has 66 units for low-income citizens, with a small balcony and floor-to-ceiling windows in each.

“ ‘The stacking of prefabricated elements consisting of two kinds of stacked modules, which are repeated to create the characteristic checkered pattern,’ says Kai-Uwe Bergmann, partner at Bjarke Ingels. ‘By gently adjusting the modules, the living areas open more towards the courtyard while curving the linear block away from the street to expand the sidewalk into a public square.’

“The stairwells allow for the units to be filled with daylight, and views of the neighboring green space. Pathways through the site give access to the street. The apartments themselves range from 60 to 115 sq m [~646 to ~1200 square feet], but with open plan designs, space within the units themselves is flexible.”

Read housing stories from Mexico City, Paris, Barcelona, Los Angeles, and Vienna at the Guardian, here; no paywall. You’ll appreciate the variety of approaches around the world and enjoy some great photos.

Making Home Home blog, looking at you!

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Rx: Nature

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 15, 2021| 2 Comments »

Photo: Jim Wileman/The Guardian.
Seven of the UK’s National Health Service care groups received [$6.9 million, combined] in government funding for projects harnessing nature to improve mental health.

I’d be the last person to tell any person who badly needed therapy to take a walk in the woods. But as today’s article indicates, nature does have healing properties. If you’re feeling down, you could try it. Like chicken soup, “It wouldn’t hurt”!

Reporter Damian Carrington at the Guardian has been talking to patients.

” ‘It sounds dramatic, but this place saved my life,’ says Wendy Turner, looking out over the Steart salt marshes in Somerset. ‘I am really loving the colours of all the marsh grasses at the moment, and the flocks of dunlin and plover. The light is just so beautiful.’

“Turner was once a high-flying international project manager. ‘But the Covid pandemic resulted in me losing everything – my business and my home – and I had years of abuse in a marriage.’ In July 2020, she attempted suicide and woke up in [the emergency room].

“But then she discovered the Steart nature reserve. …

“Turner is one of the fast-growing number of people using nature to improve their health and wellbeing and she is now helping to boost the rise of ‘green social prescribing,’ where health and community services refer people to nature projects. She has helped co-create a mental health and nature course with the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT), which manages the Steart reserve, and the Mental Health Foundation.

“There is already good evidence of nature’s efficacy, such as a 2019 study showing that a two-hour ‘dose’ of nature a week significantly improved health and wellbeing. The missing link has been connecting health services and nature activities.

“ ‘These activities have being going for years, it’s just that they often have not had that connection into the health systems to enable them to receive the people who need the benefits the most, and to deliver precisely what they need,’ says Dave Solly, at the National Academy for Social Prescribing (NASP), which was launched in 2019 with funding from the Department of Health.

“But things are changing. Seven NHS care groups from the Humber to Surrey received a combined £5m in government funding in December for projects harnessing nature to improve mental health, including tree planting and growing food. There are also now more than 1,000 social prescribing link workers working in GP surgeries and health clinics, helping doctors link patients to nature activities, as well as arts, heritage and exercise groups. A million people could be referred to social prescribing in the next few years.

Among the projects championed by NASP are Wild Being in Reading, an open-water swimming group in Portsmouth, Dorset Nature Buddies, the Green Happy cafe in Northampton, and a Moving in Nature project in Chingford, Essex.

“Back in Steart marshes, NHS rehabilitation physiotherapist Ralph Hammond is setting off on the weekly 30-minute health walk he leads. He started the walk as a volunteer in 2017, having found there was no suitable walking group for recovering patients.

“The flat landscape and good paths on the reserve, which hosts otters and samphire beds, are important, he says: ‘We are trying to break down barriers – the people I am after are not walking at all.’ The group have been following the fortunes of a pair of white swans and their cygnets. …

“Suzanne Duffus tackles the walk enthusiastically with a sturdy wheeled walking frame. She started coming to Steart after her husband died and is now a volunteer, giving support and encouragement to newcomers. …

“Increasing access to such activities requires staff dedicated to connecting nature groups to the health service. The WWT’s Will Freeman is doing this at Steart and says: ‘For a lot of people, it is very exciting, but it can also be difficult as the cultures of organisations may not match.

“A lot of nature reserves have not been that well connected with their communities.’ … The social side is key too, he says: ‘We sometimes miss the simple human side – just having a chat and asking how you are. Nature is an asset that adds to all that.’ …

“Helen Stokes-Lampard, chair of NASP and of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, says: ‘[During the pandemic] we have all become increasingly reliant on our local outdoor space as other activity was restricted. From allotments and parks to walks in the country, being outdoors has been a lifeline for many of us.

“ ‘However, all too often those who would benefit more from time “closer to nature” simply cannot access it. … Social inequalities mean that those in the most deprived areas spend less time outdoors. As a practising GP myself, it is so heartening to see so many projects flourish right across the country, making the most of this approach to health provision.’

“Solly, who is on secondment to NASP from Natural England, hopes that green social prescribing will become routinely offered to those who would benefit: ‘Instead of a prescription for further medicine, your prescription is to go to an activity, with a suggestion of a few options that work for you.’ ”

More at the Guardian, here.

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Making Covid Choral Music Sociable

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 28, 2020| 4 Comments »

Photo: New Music Box
The First Congregational Church of Los Angeles virtual choir.

Online group singing has become a fixture of the coronavirus era, and many of the choruses have given great pleasure to listeners. But how do the singers fare emotionally, considering that part of what they love has always been the proximity of other participants?

Fahad Siadat has a few answers at New Music Box.”While the entire music sector has been affected by the coronavirus pandemic, the choral community has been hit especially hard.

“Singers have been deemed ‘super spreaders’ of the virus, by a study commissioned by a coalition of performing arts organizations. The study has let the national community know they don’t believe there will be a safe way for choirs to safely rehearse until there is widespread testing and/or a vaccine, potentially an entire year or more in the future. Like other musicians, this bleak forecast has prompted panic for professional choristers who rely on group singing for their income, but it has also affected some 40 million people in the United States who rely on choirs for the social community, mental health, and emotional well-being.

“My spouse Cynthia Siadat, a licensed psycho-therapist, recently wrote an article about how choir helps alleviate mental health distress. She writes, ‘73% of singers report that choral singing helps them to feel less lonely. … A 2015 study, found that loneliness has been proven to be just as detrimental to one’s longevity as obesity and smoking 15 cigarettes a day’. …

“The question becomes not only, ‘how do we make a quality musical product?’ But, ‘how can we continue to have meaningful musical and social experiences?’  …

“I have the good fortune of making my living as a chorister in a particular subset of the community deeply interested and invested in innovating and experimenting with choral music, and because of this involvement have had the opportunity to participate first hand in how different groups are handling the crisis and trying to move forward.

“No one group has ‘solved’ the issue of not being able to sing and rehearse together, but all of them have found unique ways forward and are experimenting wildly. …

“Building a virtual choir, once considered a technological marvel, has become astonishingly commonplace in the last few months. The professional choir at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles (led by my long time colleague David Harris), for instance, has recorded 3-4 virtual choir pieces every week since March.

“There are many resources for those interested in getting involved with virtual choirs. I’ve even put my own document of step by step instructions for composers, conductors, and singers.

“(Virtual Choir ProTip: Recording the audio and video separately allows a great deal of editing and ‘punching’ in while recording. It goes much faster than trying to get a single perfect take.)

“(Additional ProTip: Conductor tracks aren’t all that helpful for the singers, use a click instead. Also consider using a ‘section leader’ to create a guide track for each part so the rest of the choir has a voice to follow along with for style and phrasing.) …

“There are some unexpected perks to virtual choirs, namely in terms of how it makes certain kinds of repertoire more accessible than ever before. … The ability to learn and record a piece phrase by phrase allows for the ‘performance’ of music that might have otherwise been out of reach of an ensemble.

“In May, for instance, the FCCLA professional ensemble performed Stravinsky’s 12-tone anthem The Dove Descending, an emotional and mystical work rarely performed by choirs today, especially church choirs, perhaps in-part due to the amount of rehearsal time required. In the virtual choir setting, however, we were able to effectively record the piece in a matter of a few hours. …

“While the end product of virtual choirs can be satisfying, the means by which that product is made can be sorely lacking. The great communal spirit of singing together is completely lost. …

“Luckily, there are some low-latency audio options specifically designed for musicians to re-create some semblance of in-person music making. (Soundjack and Jamulus are two that my community uses, but there are others.) …

“It didn’t take long working with this medium to realize that remote choirs are entirely new kinds of ensembles. … Typical choral values like blend, balance, and uniformity are made that much trickier by every singer’s individual mic set up. Rehearsals started with about an hour of tech adjustments, setting levels, and troubleshooting. …

“And yet, once we finally waded through the tech set up and arrived at our first moment of singing together, just a simple C Major chord, I felt a flood of emotion. After long weeks of isolation, I was finally singing with my friends. It wasn’t the choral experience I was used to, but it was unmistakably live music making, and that taste was enough to keep me coming back every week.”

The author provides a lot of technical detail showing how to approximate the group-singing experience, here, at the New Music Box.

I wonder if the rest of us can find ways to feel more present with friends and family via new internet applications. FaceTime and What’s App and Zoom are way better than a mere phone call, but nothing beats meeting someone in a yard for a chat that feels normal. And how will we manage that in winter?

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Making Plants Happy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 9, 2019| 9 Comments »

04garden1-jumbo

Photo: Mark Baldwin
A dense carpet of woodland perennials. Thomas Rainer, a landscape architect, calls plants “social creatures” that thrive in particular networks.

Today we understand that trees and other plants are the lungs of the planet and that we are losing too many every year, so it behooves us to understand them better and do what we can to help the remainder thrive. Even in our yards.

At the New York Times, Margaret Roach offers some tips from a landscape architect.

“Thomas Rainer and I have both been doing the botanical thing for decades,” she writes. “We know, and use, many of the same plants — and even much of the same horticultural vocabulary. But what he and I see when we look at a butterfly weed or a coneflower, or what we mean when we say familiar words like ‘layering’ or ‘ground cover,’ is surprisingly not synonymous.

“It turns out I’ve been missing what the plants were trying to tell me, failing to read botanical body language and behavior that could help me put plants together in combinations that would solve challenges that many of us have: beds that aren’t quite working visually, and garden areas that don’t function without lots of maintenance. … I asked Mr. Rainer, a landscape architect based in Washington, D.C., to lend us his 3-D vision.

“Roach: You visit a lot of gardens, and probably hear from gardeners like me with beds that just aren’t working. What’s the most common cause?

“Rainier: First, we have to understand that plants are social creatures. Our garden plants evolved as members of diverse social networks. Take a butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa, named this year’s Perennial Plant of the Year by the industry group the Perennial Plant Association), for example. The height of its flower is exactly the height of the grasses it grows among. Its narrow leaves hug its stems to efficiently emerge through a crowded mix. It has a taproot that drills through the fibrous roots of grasses. Everything about that plant is a reaction to its social network. And it is these social networks that make plantings so resilient.

“So if we think about the way plants grow in the wild, it helps us understand how different our gardens are. In the wild, every square inch of soil is covered with a mosaic of interlocking plants, but in our gardens, we arrange plants as individual objects in a sea of mulch. We place them in solitary confinement.

“So if you want to add butterfly weed to your garden, you might drift it in beds several feet apart and tuck some low grasses in as companions, like prairie dropseed, blue grama grass or buffalo grass.

“Start by looking for bare soil. It is everywhere in our gardens and landscapes. Even in beds with shrubs in them, there are often large expanses of bare soil underneath. It’s incredibly high-maintenance. It requires multiple applications of bark mulch a year, pre-emergent herbicides and lots and lots of weeding.

“The alternative to mulch is green mulch — that is, plants. This includes a wide range of herbaceous plants that cover soil, like clump-forming sedges, rhizomatous strawberries or golden groundsel, and self-seeding columbine or woodland poppies.

“Roach: If I want to try to do it more as nature does, what am I aiming for? Where do I take my cues?

“Rainier: The big shift in horticulture in the next decade will be a shift from thinking about plants as individual objects to communities of interrelated species. We think it’s possible to create designed plant communities: stylized versions of naturally occurring ones, adapted to work in our gardens and landscapes. This is not ecological restoration, it’s a hybrid of ecology and horticulture. We take inspiration from the layered structure in the wild, but combine it with the legibility and design of horticulture. It is the best of both worlds: the functionality and biodiversity of an ecological approach, but also the focus on beauty, order and color that horticulture has given us. It’s possible to balance diversity with legibility, ecology with aesthetics.

“And it is a shift in how we take care of our gardens: a focus on management, not maintenance. When you plant in communities, you manage the entire plantings, not each individual plant. This is a pretty radical shift. It’s O.K. if a plant self-seeds around a bit, or if one plant becomes more dominant. As long as it fits the aesthetic and functional goals. We can do much less and get more.” More here.

What do you think? I’m not a gardener, but I have a little yard, and I take Rainier’s point about how every patch of bare soil creates problems. I wonder what the Meadowscaping folks might have to say about combining horticulture and ecology in this way.

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Wild Musical about Electron Physics

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 2, 2019| 4 Comments »

img_6977_custom-cc736ababb2851142350b8484394ed46b6ac9f94-s600-c85

Photo: Matthias Le Dall
Thanks in part to his original songwriting, singing, and guitar-playing, physics doctoral student Pramodh Senarath Yapa won this year’s “Dance Your PhD” contest.

This is such a creative idea: a “Dance Your Ph.D.” contest!

Just as almost any information can be compressed into a haiku, almost any abstract concept can be danced. That’s what my high school dance teacher said when she made us partner with classmates to choreograph scientific principles.  And when Page and I started to choreograph Lavoisier’s discovery of oxygen to the Firebird Suite, Miss Hinney reminded us that we had to give life to the concept, not do a historical reenactment. Hard but memorable.

That’s why I loved this story about dancing your PhD. Emma Bowman writes at National Public Radio (NPR), “Pramodh Senarath Yapa, a physicist currently pursuing his doctorate at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, has been named the 2018 winner of the ‘Dance Your PhD’ contest.

“The competition, sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Science magazine, invites doctoral students and Ph.D. recipients to translate their research into an interpretive dance. The winner takes home $1,000.

“It took Senarath Yapa six weeks to choreograph and write the songs for ‘Superconductivity: The Musical!’ — a three-act swing dance depicting the social lives of electrons. The video is based on his master’s thesis, which he completed while pursuing his degree at the University of Victoria in Canada.

“The 11-minute sing-songy rendition is far less paralyzing than the jargony title of Senarath Yapa’s thesis alone: ‘Non-Local Electrodynamics of Superconducting Wires: Implications for Flux Noise and Inductance.’

” ‘Superconductivity relies on lone electrons pairing up when cooled below a certain temperature,’ Senarath Yapa told Science. ‘Once I began to think of electrons as unsociable people who suddenly become joyful once paired up, imagining them as dancers was a no-brainer!’ …

“John Bohannon, a former contributing correspondent for Science, founded the contest, now in its 11th year. It all started at a party one New Year’s Eve that was heavy on scientist attendees and light on the dancing. ‘I tapped into their competitive spirit,’ Bohannon tells NPR’s Scott Simon. …

” ‘I think in general, they’re exhibitionists. If you’re willing to stand up and defend some crazy obscure research topic that you’ve devoted your life to then there’s probably something in you that wants to dance.’ ”

More at NPR, here.

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