Lêkê


"Lêkê are a type of plastic sandals popular in Ivory Coast, including as footwear for amateur soccer games. Lêkê are considered the national shoes of Ivory Coast, worn by people of all ages, including school children and adults. Amateur soccer players wear lêkê for their practicality on sandy pitches and dusty surfaces, citing their lightness, better fit, and comfort. The popularity of lêkê in Ivory Coast extends beyond sports, being worn at parties and other social events. While luxury brands like Gucci and Prada have created their own versions of jelly shoes, lêkê remain popular in Ivory Coast for both stylistic and practical reasons. ... In Ivory Coast, lêkê are not only worn for soccer but also represent a cultural symbol, with specific colors associated with national pride. Sales of Ivorian flag-colored lêkê sandals increased during the Africa Cup of Nations, but they saw a decline after the national team faced losses. 




Young players wearing lêkê in Abidjan, where worn soles and scars from the sandals’ metallic clasps are a point of pride.
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120 Years of New York’s Subterranean Literary Muse

"Within a day of its opening on Oct. 27, 1904, the New York City subway was already inspiring lyricism: The Times marveled at its 'olive-green woodwork, the unfamiliar air, the darkness alongside, and the sudden shooting into beautiful white stations like nothing that the elevated ever had.' That’s just one day. Give novelists 120 years of packed daily commutes, late night rides home from bars and restaurants, early morning trips to the beach, and now the subway isn’t just buried in the bedrock of Manhattan, it’s burrowed deep within New York novels of the last twelve decades, a source of wonder, despair, quotidian boredom. Join us as we ride alongside fictional characters plucked from the works of Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellison, Sylvia Plath, Lee Child, James Baldwin and so many more. ..."


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How George Orwell Paved Noam Chomsky’s Path to Anarchism


"Unlike the many members of the left who captivated him as a young man — such as Dwight Macdonald, George Orwell, and Bertrand Russell — Noam Chomsky himself did not come to left-libertarian or anarchist thinking as a result of his disillusionment with liberal thought. He quite literally started there. At a tender age, he had begun his search for information on contemporary left-libertarian movements, and did not abandon it. Among those figures he was drawn to, George Orwell is especially fascinating, both because of the impact that he had on a broad spectrum of society and the numerous contacts and acquaintances he had in the libertarian left. Chomsky refers to Orwell frequently in his political writings, and when one reads Orwell’s works, the reasons for his attraction to someone interested in the Spanish Civil War from an anarchist perspective become clear. ..."


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In Quebec’s Casse-Croûtes, Fast Food for a Short but Sweet Summer

The daytime line outside La Mollière.

"When newcomers to Canada, the Italian couple had discovered along Quebec’s country roads the joys of the casse-croûtes, the food shacks that lie dormant in the frozen landscape during winter and then burst to life during the all-too-short warm months. And so on a recent afternoon, the couple, Marta Grasso and Andrea La Monaca, sat side by side at a picnic table at one of these shacks, La Mollière, a lobster roll before him and a shrimp roll for her. A large blue sky spread out behind the casse-croûte, built on a promontory over the Gulf of St. Lawrence. ... La Mollière stirs back to life in May. The owners spend the next five months in a trailer behind the casse-croûte, no days off. ..."


A "guédille," or lobster roll, from La Mollière.
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Field Days (The Amanda Loops) - Fred Frith


"14 pieces originally written for dance and other practical situations, here reassigned and reconstructed for choreographer Amanda Miller and the Nederland Dans Theater.These are loop-based, textural, mood pieces, and invocations of spaces and landscapes, with some fine steel guitar playing. Mostly this is Fred multi-instrumenting, with pianist Daan Vanderwalle, percussionist Willie Wynant, the Arte Sax quartet and Lotte Anker, the Arditti Quartet, Kiku Day, occasional shakuhachi, and violinist/nykelharpist Karla Kihlstedt. Hit from the show: Desert Sundown. ..."


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Urban Narratives: Sebas Velasco Connects in Brixton With “A Lasting Place”


"In the dynamic urban landscape of London, Sebas Velasco has left his mark with a mural titled A Lasting Place at 12 Cobbett Street, Brixton. Born in Burgos, Spain, Velasco is renowned for his hyper-realistic style that captures the essence of urban environments. This mural, inspired by British musician Loyle Carner’s track 'A Lasting Place' from the album Hugo, depicts a young Brixton resident standing against the iconic train line. The cool, muted hues of London night are punctuated by the station’s warm glow, creating a dialogue between the individual and the city’s pulse. Velasco’s approach is deeply rooted in his environment. He involves a process of immersion in local culture, photographing the people and places that inspire his creativity. This mural, his first in London, blends his experiences in Brixton with spontaneous encounters that shape his work. ..."


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On Immigration, Harris and Democrats Walk a Delicate — and Harder — Line


"When Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination last week at her party’s convention in Chicago, she sought to strike a delicate balance on the issue of immigration, promising to approach enforcement and security at the nation’s southern border as the prosecutor she once was, without abandoning the country’s values. ... It was the kind of equilibrium on the issue that Democrats had striven for all week — a leveling between calls for more officers and judges at the country’s southern border and a system that treats people humanely, between promises to uphold the law and rebukes of the fear-mongering over 'the other' that has permeated the national immigration debate. But the overall message on immigration from the Democratic Party in the past week, as it has been since Ms. Harris announced her candidacy last month, has been decidedly more hard-line than it has been in decades. ..."

The U.S.-Mexico border in June, as seen from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
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Ray's Pizza

Greenwich Village

"Ray's Pizza, and its many variations such as 'Ray's Original Pizza', 'Famous Ray's Pizza' and 'World-Famous Original Ray's Pizza', are the names of dozens of pizzerias in the New York City area that are generally completely independent (a few have multiple locations) but may have similar menus, signs, and logos. Ralph Cuomo opened the first Ray's Pizza, at 27 Prince Street in Little Italy, in 1959, named after his nickname 'Raffie'. In the 1960s he briefly owned a second Ray's Pizza, but sold it to Rosolino Mangano in 1964.  ... The confusion of various Ray's Pizzas is featured in a gag in the 1997 episode of The Simpsons 'The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson'. ...  In the episode 'The Maid' in the final season of Seinfeld, Kramer gets lost and calls Jerry for help. He tries to use a Ray's Pizza to describe where he is, but there is confusion over which one he might be seeing. ..."

End Nears for a Pizza Landmark
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In search of Monet’s wild landscapes: a glorious art adventure in central France

The ruins of Crozant castle, the loop of the Creuse and junction with the Sedelle.

"... Behind the wire fencing lining the platform lay a handful of industrial buildings alongside nondescript looking farmland. I had arrived in La Creuse – one of the departments the French call la France profonde – deepest, darkest France – and apparently the country’s least-visited region, north of Limoges and 65 miles south-east of Poitiers. Within minutes, however, things started to look up: I found myself driving through rolling hills and strikingly green valleys, with overhanging hedgerows separating fields and pastures where the rust-coloured Limousin cattle were grazing in the sun. I was on a quest to find the landscape that had inspired the painter Claude Monet, a landscape which, unlike his Rouen, Paris and London, which he painted many times, remains relatively unknown. ..."


Rapids on the Petite Creuse at Fresselines, 1889.
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Love More, Judge Less: How Budots Music Informs Understandings of Intersectionality

DJ Ericnem, performing at a Christmas »handugan« or gift exchange, in the town of San Francisco, Agusan del Sur, Philippines. 

"Manila Community Radio volunteers Sai Versailles and Sean Bautista explore artistic influence, individual agency, and community by immersing themselves in the world of budots, a Filipino grassroots dance music genre. We follow them as they undertake a trip to the Bisaya-speaking region in the Philippines to visit and interview one of budots' pioneers, DJ Love, and share their excitement as they prepare for a Boiler Room showcase that also features budots sonics. They ponder questions of mediating local subcultures and genres and transplanting them to middle-class, urban audiences. »Budots is the hardship of Filipinos. It’s one scratch, one peck. It’s the noises you hear in your surroundings,« says DJ Love. »It reflects the state of a person’s life.« ..."


Sherwin Calumpang Tuna, also known as DJ Love, sitting under a table and smoking a cigarette. November 2005. 

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How ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ became a full-circle moment for Stanley Kubrick


"He was hardly one for sentimentality or emotional attachment, but a regular collaborator of Stanley Kubrick at least appreciated how the final film of his career became a full-circle moment for the legendary director. Never one to do things by halves, even by his standards, Eyes Wide Shut evolved into a mammoth undertaking. Kubrick’s precision and meticulousness had been hallmarks for decades, but the lengths he went to to realise his vision for the existential psychodrama pushed his creative partners to the limit. Tom Cruise did at least view it as one of the most important and inspiring productions he’ll ever be lucky to be a part of, but it was taxing nonetheless. Cruise and then-wife Nicole Kidman dedicated years of their lives to the project for the sole purpose of working with Kubrick, and for better or worse, it’s an experience they’ll remember forever. ..."
  




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Scientists Seeking Life on Mars Heard a Signal That Hinted at the Future

In 1924, a radio receiver built for the battlefields of World War I tested the idea that humans were not alone in the solar system, heralding a century of searches for extraterrestrial life.

"At sunset on a late summer weekend in 1924, crowds flocked to curbside telescopes to behold the advanced alien civilization they believed to be present on the surface of Mars. 'See the wonders of Mars!' an uptown sidewalk astronomer shouted in New York City on Saturday, Aug. 23. 'Now is your chance to view the snowcaps and the great canals that are causing so much talk among the scientists. You’ll never have such a chance again in your lifetime. 'During that weekend, Earth and Mars were separated by just 34 million miles, closer than at any other point in a century. Although this orbital alignment, called an opposition, occurs every 26 months, this one was particularly captivating to audiences across continents and inspired some of the first large-scale efforts to detect alien life. ..."


The radio photo message from the continuous transmission machine.
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Why Guardiola, Maresca and Salah love chess: Space, patterns and ‘controlling the centre’


"What do Pep Guardiola and Enzo Maresca have in common? Coaches wedded to a certain style of football? Midfielders who became managers? Worked together at Manchester City? Bald? All of these things are true, but that’s not the answer we have on the card. The answer we’re looking for? Chess. Both men, who meet at Stamford Bridge this afternoon, are keen proponents of the idea that football can learn plenty from chess, and they as coaches can take valuable lessons from it too. After leaving Barcelona in 2012, Guardiola took a sabbatical and travelled to New York, where he met with Garry Kasparov, the Russian grandmaster. He has also studied the methods of the world’s top-ranked chess player, Magnus Carlsen. ..."

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One Way Street - Walter Benjamin (1928)


"How do unifying acts of collection and recollection – our creation of a memory, our recreation of a dream, the construction of our selves – relate to the activity of writing? This is one of the questions Walter Benjamin poses in One Way Street, his semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional work of philosophy. Because One Way Street is such a sprawling, knotty piece of writing, this article aims to focus on the opening section, in which many of Benjamin’s themes and motifs are first established. It begins by focusing on the relationship between conviction and fact, before moving on to consider Benjamin’s approach to psychoanalysis, the act of writing, childhood, memory, and religion. ..."



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Watch One Heartbreaking Scene to Understand Gena Rowlands’s Genius

Gena Rowlands in “A Woman Under the Influence,” one of several collaborations with her husband John Cassavetes.

"Midway through 'A Woman Under the Influence' (1974) — one of a number of astonishing films starring Gena Rowlands, who died Wednesday, and directed by her husband John Cassavetes — the distance between you and what’s onscreen abruptly vanishes. It’s the kind of moment that true movie believers know and yearn for, that transporting instance when your world seems to melt away and you’re one with the film. It can be revelatory; at times, as with Rowlands’s performance here, it can also be excruciatingly, viscerally painful. Rowlands is playing Mabel, an exuberantly alive woman of great sensitivities whose husband, Nicky (Peter Falk), loves her deeply but doesn’t understand her. They’re home and he has just yelled at her in front of some colleagues, who’ve fled. ..."





2010 December: Shadows (1959), 2013 June: Minnie and Moskowitz,  2021 May: A Woman Under the Influence  (1974) , 2021 July: Gloria (1980)

Rowlands as the tough-as-nails title character in “Gloria.”
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Various – Live At CBGB's - The Home Of Underground Rock


"In 1976 Atlantic Records released a double album of performances recorded live on CBGB's legendary small stage at the back of the club. Featuring sixteen songs from eight bands recorded over three days in June 1976 at The Home Of Underground Rock Live At CBGB's is one of those compilations Piccarella mentioned above. The album is sixty-three minutes of music I'd never heard before and need never hear again. The exceptions being the three Mink DeVille tracks as I have been a fan since the mid-'80s. One of those Mink DeVille tracks - 'Let Me Dream If I Want To' - is on Blank Generation, which also features the opening track from the Live At CBGB's album, 'All For The Love Of Rock & Roll' by the Tuff Darts."





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Mockingjays on Morningside


"I was already thinking about Columbia University, where courageous students are calling out the college administration’s support for genocide in Gaza, when I heard Paul Auster had died of cancer at the age of 77 in his home in Brooklyn. Paul Auster was widely celebrated as a Brooklyn writer from the middle of his career to the end, and many of his later novels took place here. Well, bravo to a writer who can capture a sense of place, and bravo especially to a writer who can claim two separate places as his literary home base! I first read Paul Auster in the late 1980s when he had just published three brilliant postmodern pseudo-detective novels known as the New York Trilogy. These stories captured in vivid street-level detail the collegiate uptown neighborhood of Morningside Heights where Columbia and Barnard sit on a cliff overlooking the southern edge of Harlem. ..."


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A Newly Translated Oral History Reveals Krautrock’s Antifascist Roots

Members of the krautrock group Can, who shared decisions and all songwriting credit.

"... Spoken by the saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, the composer Irmin Schmidt and the guitarist Lutz Ludwig Kramer, these assertions from the newly translated oral history 'Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock' explain the high stakes driving Germany’s counterculture in the decades following World War II. After the unthinkable, Germany’s youth inherited a 'country in ruins, and thus a ruined culture' (says Schmidt), a partition between the democratic West and the Soviet Union, a global fear of all things German, an identity crisis and a question: how to respond to the crimes of their parents? All easily forgotten when you’re listening to the buoyant and life-affirming music that generation produced in the 1970s. Kraftwerk, Can, Popol Vuh and their peers — a diverse movement often reductively called krautrock — raised the bar for electronic experiments and collaborative democracy in popular music, and helped set the stage for punk, industrial music and techno. ..."



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At a Russian Border Post, Scenes of Ruin After Ukraine’s Surprise Attack

The body of a dead Russian soldier lay in front of the destroyed Sudzha border control post in Russia on Monday. The body was recovered by the Ukrainian military and later placed in a body bag.

"All that remained of a Russian border post was a tableau of destruction: Sheet metal flapped in the wind, customs declarations fluttered about, and stray dogs roamed under a road-spanning sign that said, 'Russia.' Kicking up dust, Ukrainian armored vehicles rumbled past, unimpeded, as the flow of men and weaponry carried on in the biggest foreign incursion into Russia since World War II, an offensive now nearing the end of its first week since the breach of the border here in Sudzha and at several other sites. At the crossing point, a Ukrainian soldier posted on the roadside waved at the forces passing by, days after Russia’s head of the general staff declared that the attack had been rebuffed. At the border, the detritus of a losing battle — and signs of soldiers caught by surprise — were scattered about: bullet cartridges tinkled underfoot, discarded body armor lay on the asphalt. ..."


Ukrainian Army vehicles passing a sign reading, “Ukraine,” left, and “Russia,” right, on a road near the destroyed Russian border post at Sudzha.
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Racism Is Why Trump Is So Popular - James Risen


"... Trump appeals to white people gripped by demographic hysteria. Especially older white people who grew up when white people represented a much larger share of the population. They fear becoming a minority. ...  Every component of the Trump-Republican agenda flows from these demographic fears. The Trump phenomenon and the surge of right-wing extremism in America was never about economic anxiety, as too many political reporters claimed during the 2016 presidential campaign.  t was, and still is, about race and racism. ..."


NY Times: Trump Wanted to Fire Missiles at Mexico. Now the G.O.P. Wants to Send Troops. (2023)

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Suneil Sanzgiri


"Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South. Sanzgiri’s films offer sonic and visual journeys through family history, local mythology, and colonial legacies of extraction in Goa, India—where his family originates—deftly utilizing and vividly blending together 3D renderings, drone videography, photogrammetry and lidar scanning, 16 mm film and animation, archival footage, and desktop documentary practices. ..."


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"Waterloo Sunset" - The Kinks (1967)


"In terms of a zeitgeist-capturing moment, ‘Waterloo Sunset’ by The Kinks is as fine as they come. The band’s frontman Ray Davies penned the 1967 classic, and it remains the quintessential track from London’s ‘Swinging Sixties’, capturing the spirit of the era when the English capital was moving out of its old state as the centre of the empire into the green pastures of the technological future. A number that toes the line between melancholy and stirring, ‘Waterloo Sunset’ features include the iconic story of Terry and Julie, the sliding riff and the dynamic bassline that underpins the track, as Davies’ tale takes the listener on a tale weaving between the tight side streets of Waterloo. Released on May 5th, 1967, there has always been debate about what influenced the song.  ..."


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What’s So New About the ‘New Right’?


 "Over the last few years, a loose coalition of conservative thinkers, journalists, publications and think tanks have emerged under the banner of the New Right. With Senator JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, as its flag-bearer, this still-disparate group has been hailed as the intellectual heft behind the MAGA movement, and even as the future of American conservatism. Its very name declares a radical break with the Republican past — 'very nascent, very bleeding edge,' is how Vivek Ramaswamy, a former presidential candidate, described it. But how new is the New Right? It is risky to ascribe coherence to a grouping like this, especially when its ranks range from the relatively buttoned-up Vance and his Senate colleague Josh Hawley to a ragtag assortment of self-described neo-monarchists, techno-libertarians and right-wing Marxists. ..."

NY Times

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What Would Studs Terkel Make of ‘Essential Workers’?

In 1973, Jesse Jackson's Operation Push organized a march to protest high inflation and unemployment. 

"It was half a century ago that labor radio broadcaster Studs Terkel published Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. The almost-600-page book was anchored in first-person accounts from 150 Americans, who spoke about their working life in just about every sector of the economy, as well as in several civil-service titles. A mix of labor journalism and anthropology, Working was informed exclusively by the voice of the workers, who demonstrate a disarming intimacy with Terkel (1912–2008), revealing much about each individual but even more about the society they labored in.  Each work/life account is its own universe. There are descriptions of how people came to be in their jobs, as well as what it took to hold onto them. There are names you might know, such as actor Rip Torn and jazz musician Bud Freeman. But mostly, it’s everyday folks that Terkel, who broadcast from WFMT, out of Chicago, brought into the spotlight. ..."

Voice 







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7 Years After ‘Summer of Hell,’ the Subway Is Approaching Another Crisis

New York City’s transit system faces hundreds of millions of dollars in budget deficits in the coming years.

"Seven years ago, after a series of subway failures so severe that a stretch of 2017 came to be known as the Summer of Hell, New York officials came up with a plan to make sure a crisis like that would never happen again. Through a tolling program known as congestion pricing, they would raise enough money to restore the system to competency. This would ward off the kind of meltdowns that had left passengers stranded without service, trapped themin dark, hot cars and injured them in derailments. Now, with congestion pricing on hold, experts warn that a return to hell is inevitable. ..."

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Kurtis Blow: The Prototype


"If you tried to build a rap star in a lab, your result would be something close to Kurtis Blow. Today, it’s commonplace to have a rapper that can also hold a note, but add good looks, charisma, legitimate street credibility, and an encyclopedic knowledge of music and business, and you’d have the perfect ambassador for hip-hop culture, which is exactly what Kurtis Blow came to be. Born Curtis Walker in Harlem, NY, there was no part of the culture that this trailblazer didn’t touch. He started DJing in the early 70s at just 13 years old, and even spent a brief time in one of the notorious Bronx gangs that heavily divided the borough, The Peace Makers, where he befriended fellow pioneer Melle Mel. But his singular focus on becoming an entertainer would guide his steps away from the street life. ..."

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Semiotics of fashion

"The semiotics of fashion is the study of fashion and how humans signify specific social and cultural positions through dress. Ferdinand de Saussure defined semiotics as 'the science of the life of signs in society'. Semiotics is the study of signs and just as we can interpret signs and construct meaning from text we can also construct meaning from visual images such as fashion. Fashion is a language of signs that non-verbally converse meanings about individuals and groups. ... Roland Barthes was a semiotician, who studied the fashion system and how ideologies are transmitted through dress. The semiotic system is formed by social interests and ideologies, and the fashion system is no different. In our society the ideologies in fashion are often implemented by celebrities or the dominant class. Jackie Kennedy was an important style icon for American women during the 1960s, where her style became a symbol of wealth, power and prestige. ..."

W – Semiotics of fashion

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The 10 best Nick Cave love songs


"When it comes to Nick Cave, love might not be the first thing people think of. When he emerged on the music scene in the late 1970s with The Birthday Party, the group were considered a wild card, violent troupe. For a long time, Cave was more interested in rage than romance. But as time wore on and things changed, it became clear that no one could write a love song with such splendour as he could. But these aren’t typical love songs. While others might sing about lust and longing through the lens of relatable scenes, Cave casts the feeling onto a whole other, divine plane. His love songs treat the emotion like an apparition from above or something genuinely otherworldly as he repeatedly uses religious imagery or calls upon the muses for the right words. ..."

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How Does Your State Make Electricity?


"... Overall, fossil fuels still dominate electricity generation in the United States. But the shift from coal to natural gas has helped to lower carbon dioxide emissions and other pollution. Last year, coal was the main source of electricity generation for 18 states, down from 32 states in 2001. But experts warn that a shift to natural gas alone won’t be enough to curb emissions and avoid dangerous global warming. ... We charted every state’s electricity generation mix between 2001 and 2017 using data from the United States Energy Information Administration. Scroll down or skip to your state. ..."
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Seamus Heaney Was a Reluctant Radical


"... (Seamus) Heaney went on to contribute to a literary anthology in support of the Irish antiwar movement at a time when Shannon Airport was in regular use by the US military, despite Ireland’s vaunted neutrality. 'I oppose this war with a mute passion, a pain of deep anxiety that cannot fiend coherent expression,' Brian Friel, the acclaimed dramatist, stated in his introduction to the volume, adding that there was 'something indeed' about the American aggression that 'offends the notion of what it is to be fully human.'  ... If the discernment was characteristic of Heaney, this was perhaps less true of the forthrightness and antagonistic tenor of his political positioning here. ... Beloved by several generations of readers for the human depth and fluent craftsmanship of his poems, Heaney also had a permanent seat at the court of power. ..."



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