Live Strong

The Live Strong yellow bracelet has sparked a consumer craze. The bracelet - a round hunk of synthetic silicon rubber stamped with the phrase "Live Strong" - is selling at Niketown outlets, as well as at Foot Locker stores and various independent retailers . . . and on eBay.



Read Yellow Fever, by Rob Walker, NYTimes Magazine, August 29, 2004.

Live Strong is an educational program of the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

Particularly American Phenomena

Fed up with his inability to quell the constant flow of objects into his apartment and determined to be able to fit his life into the trunk of his car, one day John Freyer decided to sell everything he owned on the Internet.



Taken from Allmylifeforsale



Check out John Freyer on his North American adventure to visit his personal belongings in his 1994 White Honda Civic at Temporama.

Summer Reading

For students these days, summer reading means "required" reading. That often means taking notes and even writing essays. Listen to NPR here.

Reading at Risk

In 2002, those who do read and those who do not read literature watched about the same amount of TV per day – three hours’ worth. The Internet, however, could have played a role. During the time period when the literature participation rates declined, home Internet use soared. From "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America," National Endowement for the Arts, June 2004.

"The Risk of Reading: Why books are meant to be dangerous" by Mark Edmundson in today's NYTimes Magazine.

Here are a couple of articles from the NYTimes about reading - one about about diminished reading - Fewer Noses Stuck in Books in America, by Bruce Weber, and the other about book snobs - Books Make You a Boring Person, by Cristina Nehring. And a commentary from today's Sunday Times - What Johnny Won't Read, by Charles McGrath.



Not Funnies, also by Charles McGrath, proposes an emerging, alternate genre.

Modern Library 100 Best Novels and Nonfiction lists.

NYTimes Book Reviews of The Modern Library's Top 100 Nonfiction Books of the Century.

New Poet Laureate - Ted Kooser

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has announced the appointment of Ted Kooser to be the 13th Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress.

Ted Kooser - The Academy of American Poets

Read more here.

Daniel Pennac's Reader's Bill of Rights

1. The right not to read.
2. The right to skip pages.
3. The right to not finish.
4. The right to reread.
5. The right to read anything.
6. The right to escapism.
7. The right to read anywhere.
8. The right to browse.
9. The right to read out loud.
10. The right to not defend your tastes

From Better Than Life, 1999, Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers

Vonnegut: In Defense of Reading

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut speaks to the spiritual possibilities inherent in the very act of reading itself:

…[B]ack in the 1960s[,] . . . I delivered myself to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as had the Beatles, to learn how to do transcendental meditation or "TM." . . . My own impression was that TM was a nice little nap, but that not much happened. . . A pink silk scarf might drift slowly by. That was big news down there. You awoke unchanged from a pleasant state between sleep and wakefulness. But I got more from my TM experiment than naps. . . . I realized that I had done the same sort of thing thousands of times before. I had done it while reading books. Since I was eight or so, I had been internalizing the written words of persons who had seen and felt things new to me. . . . The world dropped away when I did it. When I read an absorbing book my pulse and respiration rate slowed down perceptibly, just as though I were doing TM.

I was already a veteran meditator. When I awoke from my Western-style meditation I was often a wiser human being…. Books came into being, surely, as practical schemes for transmitting or storing information, no more romantic in Gutenberg's time than a computer in ours. It so happens though – a wholly unforeseen accident – that the feel and appearance of a book when combined with a literate person in a straight chair can create a spiritual condition of priceless depth and meaning. This form of meditation, an accident, as I say, may be the greatest treasure at the core of our civilization.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse Than Death (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1991), pp.187-188

What is an American?

What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.

He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the east; they will finish the great circle. The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared, and which will hereafter become distinct by the power of the different climates they inhabit.

The American ought therefore to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born. Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement? Wives and children, who before in vain demanded of him a morsel of bread, now, fat and frolicsome, gladly help their father to clear those fields whence exuberant crops are to arise to feed and to clothe them all; without any part being claimed, either by a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord. I lord religion demands but little of him; a small a small voluntary salary to the minister, and gratitude to God; can he refuse these? The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. --This is an American.

From Letters from an American Farmer - J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur

Terroir: towards a working definition

Terroir: a philosophy of place

Mechanisms of terroir

Where You At?

Where You At? A Bioregional Quiz

Why we'll always need a good story

Top Ten Reasons: Why we'll always need a good story - Scott Russell Sanders
We have been telling stories to one another for a long time, perhaps for as long as we have been using language, and we have been using language, I suspect, for as long as we have been human. In all its guises, from words spoken and written to pictures and musical notes and mathematical symbols, language is our distinguishing gift, our hallmark as a species.

Short Stories

The story has to a large extent been severed from its traditional roots - from popular, large-circulation magazines, that is - and it has been transplanted into the greenhouses of the academy.

"The Short Story Shakes Itself Out of Academe" by CHARLES McGRATH. NYTimes, August 25, 2004.

Leatherman Pocket Survival Tool

The Leatherman Pocket Survival Tool embodies the American values of endurance and ingenuity.

Robert Randolph Poster

My Robert Randolph Family Band poster arrived today. They opened for Clapton this summer.

Honda, Harley or Hummer

"Is it Rolling Bob?"

Reggae Artists Offer Up Tribute to Dylan's Protest-Era Classics

Classic Pictures: LIFE Photographs

Lifemagazine.com: Classic Pictures: LIFE Photographs

Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere

WHY I AM NOT GOING TO BUY A COMPUTER - By Wendell Berry

WHY I AM NOT GOING TO BUY A COMPUTER - By Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry's standards for technological innovation:

1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

Rethinking High School – A Concept Paper

Rethinking High School – A Concept Paper

2004 National Book Festival

The Library of Congress and Laura Bush welcome you to the 2004 National Book Festival. This fourth annual celebration of books and the joy of reading has something for anyone who has ever picked up a book and entered a new world, learned an amazing lesson or discovered a previously unknown fact.

This year we are featuring more than 70 authors who have won countless awards and have countless fans eager to read their favorite writer's next novel, mystery, poem, history or biography. Readers of all ages will have a chance to hear these authors talk about their work and what inspires them to write, in addition to participating in many other activities.

Speaking of books that take us to a new world, the Library is excited to add a new pavilion — Science Fiction & Fantasy — to its ever-popular pavilions dedicated to Teens & Children, Fiction & Imagination, Mysteries & Thrillers, History & Biography, Home & Family and Poetry.

In the Library of Congress Pavilion, our Veterans History Project will be recording personal stories of the men and women who have served in the military during wartime as well as those who actively supported the brave service members on the battlefield.

The stories of another struggle, for equality in America, will also be recorded as part of the Voices of Civil Rights project, which will collect and preserve thousands of personal stories, oral histories, photographs and other artifacts. Also in this pavilion, the Library of Congress's Web sites, which attract millions of users daily, will be highlighted in special presentations. These sites feature extraordinary materials from the world's largest library and its partners.

America's public library system is unrivaled in the world. Libraries play a key role in our communities, and Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Laura Bush encourage you to visit your local library, check out a book and delight in its unlimited possibilities.

Thoreau's Walden at 150 Years

"Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate."
— Excerpt from "Walden" - August 9, 1854.

Walden at 150 - Photographs by Scot Miller

NPR : Thoreau's Walden, Present at the Creation

Richard smith, historical interpreter of Henry David Thoreau for the Concord Museum, W. Barksdale Maynard, author of Walden Pond: A History and Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Open Space of Democracy discuss 150 years of Walden on NPR.

"Still much to learn from writing of Thoreau - book review by Barbara Lloyd McMichael".

On Working

Studs Terkel's interviews Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do reviewed in the NYTimes.



More Terkel links here.

Listen to excerpts from Terkel's other works at HistoricalVoices.org.



Reminds me of Rivethead by Ben Hamper reviewed here.

NYTimes Book Reviews of The Modern Library's Top 100 Nonfiction Books of the Century.

HistoryWired: A few of our favorite things

HistoryWired: A few of our favorite things from the Smithsonian Online.

A Visual Journey: 1965-1971


Ken Kesey's bus, Further.

BrothersJudd.Com Book Reviews

Book Reviews: Sorted by Title

Family of Man 2

In 1955 Edward Steichen launched a photographic project called The Family of Man. The exhibit travelled all over the world, and consisted of over 500 images of humanity taken by over 270 photographers, some famous, and some unknown. Steichen and his helpers had an image datebase of over 2 million photographs from which they selected 10,000 before choosing the final exhibit of just over 500.

The project "The Family of Man 2" will run from 2000 to 2005, with a yearly contest and selection of images for inclusion in an eventual travelling exhibition for the year 2006.


Leica camera links.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Eye of the 20th Century
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG - NYTimes Op-Ed August 6, 2004



Cartier-Bresson, Artist Who Used Lens
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Walden's Ripple Effect

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

"Walden's Ripple Effect", by Robert D. Richardson. Smithsonian magazine, August 2004.

Musicians Banding Together to Beat Bush

Musicians Banding Together to Beat Bush

Springsteen behind Vote for Change Tour

"Chords for Change" by Bruce Springsteen
NYTimes OpEd August 5, 2004

Three Cool Music Toy Sites

New York Times on Education

From the Education Life supplement

"It Takes a Tribe", By David Berreby

"A Sense of Place", by Bruce Weber

And from the Times Learning Network

Young Japanese-Americans Honor Ethnic Roots, by Mireya Navarro

Stirring the Melting Pot: An Exploration of Students' Ethnic Roots

Freedom Amp

electro harmonix: Freedom Amp

Arlo in Akron

Many Children Left Behind

Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools, Edited by Deborah Meier and George Wood.

What does it mean to be well educated?

What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated? And More Essays on Standards, Grading, and Other Follies by Alfie Kohn

A Sense of Place

Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The New York Times Education Life: A Sense of Place by Bruce Weber


Herb Swanson for The New York Times
IN A YELLOW WOOD: Students keep journals and experience the natural ruggedness of Maine.