female – Tacacori, Costa Rica
Bird of the Day: Hoffmann’s Woodpecker
female – Tacacori, Costa Rica
The History of Organic Design
Carl Aubock II [Austrian, 1900-1957] Ashtray, Model No. 3597, 1948. Ashtray Model No. 4736, 1947. PHOTO: CoExist
In the 1930s, the central belief of the organic movement was that furniture and architecture should reflect a harmony between people and nature. In furniture design, this meant natural materials like wood, and smooth, rounded forms. The bent plywood furniture of legendary French designer Jean Prouve came out of this period, as did Marcel Breuer and his laminated birch plywood armchair with a calfskin cushion. These designers prided themselves on being dedicated to their craft, and their pieces were painstakingly made and not easily reproduced. “They saw it as a unique work that refers to nature,” says Olshin. “These pieces tend to be unique one-of-a-kind studio work that’s not easily produced in mass quantities.”
Who Dreamed This City into Being?
In the 19th century, George-Eugene Haussmann completely redesigned and rebuilt the French capital. PHOTO: Matt Robinson
“Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets–as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her–and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Literature, history, art, everyday news, talk at a neighborhood cafe – the exquisite and the commonplace are rife with paeans to this city. But how did she come into being?
The Republic Stands
After 26 years, man’s or rather a soldier’s best friend returned to the annual Republic Day parade in India. PHOTO: Getty
5 months and 11 days – that was the last time I felt a surge of patriotism, took a good look at what my country was and is. And what it will be. As the clock hands inched towards midnight and yet another Indian anniversary of independence, I wrote these lines. That day drew to a close. Sadly, the all-consuming, overwhelming love I felt for this land, too. Don’t get me wrong: I love my country. Every single day. All its idiosyncracies with all my heart and soul. But it takes the designated Independence Day or the more recent Republic Day (January 26) for this love to reign over my work-weary being. To remind of this freedom I am bestowed with. Yesterday, it did. And this love left paw prints all over my heart and I sorely missed a friend of mine in the uniform. Made me love my country more. Be thankful, too.
The Alphabets of Assimilation
Teela Magar and Cing Neam prepare roti dough as part of Edible Alphabet, a program in Philadelphia that folds English lessons for immigrants to the U.S into a cooking class. PHOTO: Bastiaan Slabbers, The Salt
Roti is a staple in Indian homes. This unleavened flat bread made of stoneground wholemeal flour links tables in Asia and Africa. With its humble origins, simple spirit, and its versatility in being an economical yet nutritious accompaniment, the roti is a mainstay of an English-as-a-Second-Language class in Philapdelphia. So, how does breaking bread help immigrants pick up basics of English – a skill vital to their rehabilitation, assimilation, and survival in a foreign land? The Salt tells us:
“Food is warmth, it’s comfort, it breaks down those barriers.” Galeb Salman left his native Iraq 25 years ago and most recently lived in Thailand. He says he savors the choices and freedom he feels since arriving here in September with his wife and five kids. “When I think I want to learn, I want to study, I can. When I want to work, I can,” he says. “I feel we have good life now. …This is my new life.”
Bird of the Day: India Robin
Bangalore, Karnataka
Understanding Coal
From the current issue of Economist, a bit of readable geological science to help make sense of the splashier headlines:
The origin of coal
The rock that rocked the world
More than any other substance, coal created modern society. But what created coal?
FOR 60m years of Earth’s history, a period known to geologists as the Carboniferous, dead plants seemed unwilling to rot. When trees expired and fell to the ground, much of which was swampy in those days, instead of being consumed by agents of decay they remained more or less intact. In due course, more trees fell on them. And more, and yet more. The buried wood, pressed by layers of overburden and heated from below by the Earth’s interior, gradually lost its volatile components and was transformed into a substance closer and closer to pure carbon. Continue reading
Fish Fraud Falling
Thanks to Conservation Magazine for pointing us to this bit of scientific evidence that, while fisheries are on the whole in a dismal state, steps are being taken in Europe to address one of the symptoms:
Over the past few years, dozens of studies have documented a global fish fraud epidemic, in which fish are mislabeled as species they are not. It’s a problem with detrimental environmental, economic, and even potential health effects. Continue reading
Constant Signs In Favor Of Vegetarianism
Officers corralled a cow that had escaped a slaughterhouse in Jamaica, Queens, on Thursday. Credit, New York Police Department 103rd Precinct
We are not clear on the meaning of the name given to this cow, but we are sure the story is a sign from the forces of vegetarianism. Anyway, go Freddie, go! As if you needed more reasons, we propose a quick read to get you thinking about giving up meat, from an unexpected angle:
A cow that was captured by the police after escaping a New York City slaughterhouse has been taken in by an animal sanctuary and named for the rock legend Freddie Mercury. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Blue-cheeked Bee-eater
Udaipur, Rajasthan
Can A University Course Change Your Life?
It took graduate school for me to have a life-changing experience with a course. As a literature-focused liberal arts undergraduate I had an entire curriculum of life-forming courses, but not one course that stood out as life-changing. Ironically, the Philosophy of Science course I took in graduate school, the one that set me off in a new direction, was also the one that convinced me to reconsider my commitment to an academic life. And so, while I completed my Ph.D. in part thanks to that course, my life veered toward an applied, practical use of my dissertation, which I comment on from time to time in these pages.
The Atlantic has a story about a course that reminded me of the possibility, and the value, of a life-changing course, and this is worth a few minutes’ read in the interest of continuous learning:
…Puett’s course Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory has become the third most popular course at the university. The only classes with higher enrollment are Intro to Economics and Intro to Computer Science. The second time Puett offered it, in 2007, so many students crowded into the assigned room that they were sitting on the stairs and stage and spilling out into the hallway. Harvard moved the class to Sanders Theater, the biggest venue on campus.
Why are so many undergraduates spending a semester poring over abstruse Chinese philosophy by scholars who lived thousands of years ago? For one thing, the class fulfills one of Harvard’s more challenging core requirements, Ethical Reasoning. It’s clear, though, that students are also lured in by Puett’s bold promise: “This course will change your life.” Continue reading
The Power of Parks
Photographs of Yosemite National Parks composed by Stephen Wilkes. Courtesy: National Geographic
Which side are you on – the one that believes national parks are the past or to the side that sees the future in these stretches? As long as national parks figure on your maps and feature in your scheme of things, you must know that the National Park Service is celebrating its centennial this year. In commemoration, National Geographic looks at how to preserve these wild spaces:
“In March 1868 a 29-year-old John Muir stopped a passerby in San Francisco to ask for directions out of town. “Where do you wish to go?” the startled man inquired. “Anywhere that is wild,” said Muir. His journey took him to the Yosemite Valley in California’s Sierra Nevada, which became the spiritual home of Muir’s conservation movement and, under his guidance, the country’s third national park. “John the Baptist,” he wrote, “was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.” Today around four million people a year follow their own thirst for the wild to Yosemite.”
Bird of the Day: Brown Fish Owl
Yala National Park, Sri Lanka
Inside the Eye
Photo credit: David Liittschwager for National Geographic
Congratulations to science writer Ed Yong, who we know from his blogging in National Geographic‘s “Phenomena” Science Salon (which we’ve been sharing for a while now), for his first full feature story in the magazine he writes for on the web! It’s a fascinating piece on the eye, “nature’s most exquisite creation,” as his subtitle affirms. And indeed, we learned a lot about vision in the animal world thanks to Yong’s story:
Some see only in black and white; others perceive the full rainbow and beyond, to forms of light invisible to our eyes. Some can’t even gauge the direction of incoming light; others can spot running prey miles away. The smallest animal eyes, adorning the heads of fairy wasps, are barely bigger than an amoeba; the biggest are the size of dinner plates, and belong to gigantic squid species. The squid’s eye, like ours, works as a camera does, with a single lens focusing light onto a single retina, full of photoreceptors—cells that absorb photons and convert their energy into an electrical signal. By contrast, a fly’s compound eye divides incoming light among thousands of separate units, each with its own lens and photoreceptors. Human, fly, and squid eyes are mounted in pairs on their owners’ heads. But scallops have rows of eyes along their mantles, sea stars have eyes on the tips of their arms, and the purple sea urchin’s entire body acts as one big eye. There are eyes with bifocal lenses, eyes with mirrors, and eyes that look up, down, and sideways all at the same time.
Bird of the Day: Yellow-throated Euphonia
Photo filtered.
male – Tacacori, Costa Rica
On Food Waste
Oriental Persimmon by Rodrigo Argenton. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
We’ve featured food waste here many times before, since it’s such a global and upsetting problem–an issue that one could call a “wicked problem” for its difficulty in solving, its myriad causes, and its changing nature. Several of our shared stories in just the last year, however, have offered some hope: a food truck chef in Denmark showed that expired or just-expiring products can still be consumed; another foodtrucker in the US helped develop a software to create a more sustainable kitchen by modeling what products are being over- or under-ordered; and two startups worked on different ways of drying food that would otherwise spoil, one because the fruit would go bad but could be dried and powdered, and the other because developing countries don’t always have appropriate storage or energy to refrigerate food, so they came up with a solar food-drier.
The common theme in these posts is the reiterated phrase: approximately one-third of all food produced around the world is wasted, representing about $1 trillion in losses every year. This week, two of our favorite magazines, Conservation (by University of Washington) and GreenBiz repeated these statistics and shared pieces of their own.
Bird of the Day: Sunda Teal
Port Blair, Andaman Islands, India
Sorry, Bolivia!
NASA satellite images show Bolivia’s Lake Poopo filled with water in April 2013 (left), and almost dry in January 2016. PHOTO: NASA/AP
Drying rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. Fancy a list? Here and here, you go. The world’s waters are rapidly running dry, threatening wild habitats and human civilization, exacerbating climate change. In turn, livelihoods, ecosystems, energy generation are all affected. Like in Bolivia, which just lost its second largest lake.
An American Soldier, World War, and India
28 years ago, a Chicago-based couple found a shoebox of photographs of the Indian countryside and they traveled halfway across the world to find their origin. PHOTO: Scroll
Here’s the plot: In 1988, a couple visited an estate sale of a deceased friend and stumbled upon a shoebox of old photographs tucked under a couch. It contained more than a hundred envelopes filled with negatives and contact sheets for photographs depicting India in 1945. The identity of the photographer: unknown.
But only until they set out to discover the man behind the lens. The answer (and the photographs) hang at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts till January 31.
Bird of the Day: Inca Doves
Tacacori, Costa Rica
