The New York Review of Books Turns 50
This year the New York Review of Books, one of the world’s most esteemed English-language journals of literature and politics, turns fifty. To mark the occasion, there have been celebrations in New York and a series of remembrances and essays published online. Sample the latter by clicking here, where you’ll find pieces by (and audio [...]
BREAKING SURF BARRIERS
From NPR’s Morning Edition comes an interesting story about the Black Surfer’s Collective in Santa Monica, which “recently gathered to honor pioneer Nick Gabaldon, a legendary surfer who is remembered as the area’s first documented board man of African-American and Mexican heritag.” Gabaldon, they note, went to great lengths to surf Malibu in the ’40s [...]
Art in Protest
In Portugal, artists and protestors have been using a wide variety of political and artistic signage and design to draw attention to the escalating taxes and austerity measures in their country. Inspired by the May ’68 Paris protests, their call to action is, “It’s the people who call the shots.” The intriguing thing about this [...]
“Upgrade or Die”
New Yorker contributor George Packer offers an “unprovable hypothesis … that obsessive upgrading and chronic stagnation are intimately related.” A little more: It’s almost a tale of two countries—on the same news day, in the same story, in the same sentence, in the violent yoking together of apparent opposites. “Around the country, as businesses have [...]
Waves For Water Relief Statistics
Surfing Magazine recently posted an interview and some uplifting figures from one local organization involved with Sandy relief: Waves for Water. Waves For Water Hurricane Sandy Relief Effort Statistics $1.1 MILLION in monetary donations $3 MILLION worth of essential supplies 250,000 people helped 33,000 Volunteers 5250 Homes and businesses worked on 39 Grants given to families and businesses 18 Homes and businesses currently [...]
Rockaway SHORE Relief Restaurant
An excellent way to get involved with (or continue to work on) Sandy recovery efforts in Rockaway is to join this Kickstarter campaign for an environmentally sustainable, pay-as-you-can community kitchen providing access to healthy, local food. Check it out! Only 24 more days left to help!
SEARCHING FOR THE SEVENTIES: THE DOCUMENTERIA PROJECT
Over the past thirty years, the relationship between the Environmental Protection Agency and the government that created it has been, to be polite, contentious. Born in the early 1970′s and put into implementation by Nixon, it’s often sited by conservatives as being wasteful and econony-stalling. It’s such a hot button agency that it was one [...]
Common Ground for our Common Atmosphere
So often in the debate on climate change and global warming, the focus leans so heavily on the debate aspect, the issue itself takes a back seat. No matter the degree to which one believes in the human impact on the environment, we should be able to find some common ground in the idea that [...]
Wikileaks and Latin America
Now that my colleague has introduced US President Barack Obama to the blog, it seems an opportune moment to point you toward a special issue of The Nation published last month. Its theme: Wikileaks and Latin America. Click through to be taken to the Table of Contents, which features articles on such subjects as how the [...]
Marfa Dialogues
The Ballroom, an art venue in Marfa, Texas, has just announced the program for its annual weekend-long program of talks, called the Marfa Dialogues. This year the events address the issue of environmental sustainability. Keynote speakers include Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, among other books, and Rebecca Solnit, [...]
California State Parks and “The First 70″
Last year, California governor Jerry Brown announced that due to budget constraints the state would be forced to close many of its beautiful state parks. The good news is that a few weeks ago state politicians passed a budget that allowed for most to stay open. Here’s an announcement from the Surfrider Foundation, which had [...]
Tim Jackson: “Let’s Be Less Productive”
An interesting article in the NYT recently argues that we’re “hooked on growth.” An excerpt: At first, this may sound crazy; we’ve become so conditioned by the language of efficiency. But there are sectors of the economy where chasing productivity growth doesn’t make sense at all. Certain kinds of tasks rely inherently on the allocation [...]
Land.
A short and compelling video about the pre-production of the feature film Land. here! “Taha sets out on an epic 600 km journey along the Moroccan Atlantic coast to Europe””on a windsurfboard. More about the film.
Shattered Debris, Sheer Transformation
Creating domestic environments from found objects, resin, latex, lights, and her unique expressionistic process of shattering and re-forming glass, artist Hu Bing’s site-specific installation ‘Shattered Debris, Sheer Transformation’ is now on display at the Flatiron Prow Art Space on the ground floor of the Flatiron Building.
A Sontag Sampler
From the New York Times: Art Is Boring Schopenhauer ranks boredom with “pain” as one of the twin evils of life. (Pain for have-nots, boredom for haves “” it”™s a question of affluence.) People say “it”™s boring” “” as if that were a final standard of appeal, and no work of art had the right [...]
Bigert & Bergström, The Last Calendar
The perfect gift for your favorite prophet! From Cabinet: When the current cycle of the Maya Long Count calendar concludes on 21 December 2012, the world will end. Of course, this is hardly the first time the planet”™s demise has been prophesied. And so Cabinet offers you, doomed reader, a guide to the brief time that remains. [...]
MAKING
World AIDS Day, is December 1, 2011 and this year, it will be 20 years since the start of the red ribbon campaign. In the next two weeks at homes, cafes, subway cars, offices and institutions people will be coming together to MAKE the red ribbons with the updated version that includes a button. The [...]
The Last Mountain
Don’t miss this moving documentary about a passionate group of citizens who are trying to stop Big Coal corporations in Appalachia. Still showing at theaters throughout the U.S. and available for purchase on DVD. “The central front in the battle for America”™s energy future, with enormous consequences for the health and economic prospects of every [...]
Tim DeChristopher Sentencing
Tim DeChristopher, who was convicted by a federal jury in Salt Lake City on March 3, 2011, will be sentenced today. The Utah environmental activist who disrupted a federal auction when he bought almost $1.8 million of oil and gas leases (with no intent to pay) in 2008, was found guilty of disrupting a government [...]
