Art Culture Politics
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Happy Birthday, Henry
To my mind, the exemplar of America is Henry David Thoreau, who was born on this day in 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. Christened “David Henry,” he changed the order of his given names when he was twenty. He was closely associated with Concord and didn’t sell many books in his lifetime, but his influence as…
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Sheepshead Bay
Ten piers, ten local creatures of the sea.
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The Nature of Cities
We are living in a time of growing awareness of “the nature of cities.” Since I started blogging in 2010, that awareness has sprouted all over, so I’m very much a part of the Zeitgeist. What’s meant by the pun in “the nature of cities” is, of course, the nature in cities. The wild has…
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Rhinoceros!
I heard a few of the BBC’s History of the World in 100 Objects series on WNYC and later I gobbled up the book. One of the episodes concerned Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1515 print of an Indian rhinoceros. In the episode, I learned that the rhino, Rhinoceros unicornis, a gift to Portugal’s king, had stopped…
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The winter beach, the small house
Two of my favorite things. The blurb on Charlton Ogburn, Jr.’s The Winter Beach (1966) says it’s “timeless,” but no, it’s very much a piece of its era. Ogburn traveled down the east coast in the early 1960s and he was mostly bummed out at what he found of the post-war boom. The environmental movement,…
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Break The Fast
I’m reading Ian Tattersall’s excellent but pretentiously entitled Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Ancestors. It is serious food for thought. But you may not want to read this post during breakfast… Our hominid ancestors of some two million years ago were far from top dog; in fact, they were the prey…
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Ranger Robin Says
Irrepressible Ranger Robin — either just out of hibernation or on a work-release program, she’s vague about details — stopped by after a visit to Prospect Park this week: “The signs have been up since Sunday warning about the take-over of the heart of the park by something called Googa Mugger. The Neathermead and surroundings…
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Just Listen
How do silent movies make their way into a blog about natural history? I was struck by something Geoffrey O’Brien wrote in the May 24th New York Review of Books. Discussing last year’s homage to silent movies The Lover and Hugo, O’Brien notes how differently our minds behave when we watch silent films. Tomorrow morning…
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Tell us again, Granddad, about ice
Today is Climate Impact Day, set up to connect the dots between climate change and extreme weather, effects felt from diatoms to humanity. What is past is prologue, and I think of two years ago when we flew back from Iceland. Our plane crossed over Greenland, and I took a few photographs through the jet’s…
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Two paintings
My mother was a bird-watcher long before I was. She painted the Sanderlings on Nantucket, the Yellow-headed BlackCowbird either on Nantucket, from memory, or when we lived in Calgary, Alberta, where you are more likely to see this western species. I may have seen them then, 35 years ago, but I did not have eyes…
Backyard and Beyond 