This week: Spared from the office party / The Pease River massacre / A century of trust / Frank Gehry’s tribute to Eisenhower / What bees need in the apiary
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1. Winters of Discontent
By Matt Hanson | The Baffler | December 2020
“On John Steinbeck’s bleak America”
2. These women dread office holiday parties. They’re glad to be off the hook this year.
By Sydney Page | The Lily :: The Washington Post | December 2020
“‘I definitely am not missing the forced interaction, the small talk, the sizing up’”
3. ‘The Earth and its oceans are finite. We need to show mutual restraint’
By David Attenborough | The Guardian | December 2020
“At 94, what has the world’s most-travelled naturalist learned? He talks garden birds in lockdown, the eerie silence of Chernobyl — and tackling the climate crisis”
4. How to Rename a Street
By Malia Wollan | Tip :: The New York Times Magazine | June 2020
“Choose the street carefully. Roadways with few or no addresses, like highways, are the easiest to rename.”
5. What Happened at Pease River Wasn’t a Battle. It Was a Massacre
By W.K. Stratton | Texas Monthly | December 2020
“How a Texas Ranger’s personal mythology came to be accepted as popular history”
6. The 10 most important things I’ve learned about trust over my 100 years
By George P. Shultz | The Washington Post | December 2020
“When trust was in the room, whatever room that was — the family room, the schoolroom, the locker room, the office room, the government room or the military room — good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details.”
7. What if the Great American Novelist Doesn’t Write Novels?
By Mark Binelli | The New York Times Magazine | December 2020
“Frederick Wiseman’s documentary films offer an unparalleled, panoramic vision of society. His 45th feature, ‘City Hall,’ is on PBS this month — and he’s eager to get back to work.”
8. Frank Gehry sees end to ‘bombastic’ monuments as Eisenhower tribute unveiled
By David Smith | The Guardian | September 2020
“The memorial, in a four-acre park near the US Capitol in Washington, [was dedicated] at a time when racial unrest has prompted the removal of numerous statues of Confederate soldiers who fought to uphold slavery and debate over those commemorating former presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and even Abraham Lincoln.”
9. Aromatherapy in the Apiary Is What Bees Need
By Matt Kaplan | The New York Times | September 2020
“Honeybees were better at pollinating crops after scent training.”
10. Did a Revolution in Latin American Publishing Make One Hundred Years of Solitude the Success It Is Today?
By Álvaro Santana-Acuña | LitHub | September 2020
“For decades, low print runs weakened the circulation of literature in the region and beyond. In Mexico and Argentina, which published more titles than the rest of Latin American countries combined, the print run of most literary books was under five thousand copies. In Spain, it was three thousand.”
Thanks for all the information you share and Happy New Year.