Artist Of The Week–Beuford Smith. This obituary contains quite a few of his photographs:
Beuford Smith’s “Boy on Swing, Lower East Side,” from 1970, lends its subject shadowy weight.Credit…Beuford Smith and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Mr. Smith came of age in the early 1960s, when Black photographers had scarce opportunities to be hired by mainstream publications. He joined a collective of talented Black photographers in Harlem called the Kamoinge Workshop, a networking group that offered encouragement to its members, helped nurture their skills and told stories about Black people through their photos. Kamoinge (pronounced KUH-mon-gay) means “people working together” in Kikuyu, a Kenyan language.
Here’s a fantastic brief documentary on the Kamoinge Workshop. Highly-recommended.
Harvard, Slavery, And The Researcher Who Lost Their Job Because They Found ‘Too Many Slaves‘:
Though it contradicts a common perception of colonial New England, enslaved people were brought to work in northern cities in North America as well. In her book New England Bound, the historian Wendy Warren records the remarks of one European traveler who noted in 1687 that “there is not a house in Boston, however small may be its means, that has not one or two [enslaved people]”.
As the country’s oldest and wealthiest university, Harvard’s history is inextricable from the history of transatlantic slavery. The enslaved labored in campus buildings, university presidents and professors owned people forced into bondage, and the school’s wealth grew through a circle of donors intimately connected to the plantation system in the Caribbean, the American south and the trafficking of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.
Granted, this is a lengthy piece. But I think it’s a must-read. You’ll not only learn about how so many educational institutions in the North had close ties to slavery, but you will also see, perhaps unsurprisingly, what happens when genealogical research results in ‘too many slaves.”
Why Is The Early Bird Early? People study this stuff, so I share it. For all you ornithologists out there:
For decades, a dominant theory about why birds sing at dawn — called the “dawn chorus” — has been that they can be heard farther and more clearly at that time.
Sound travels faster in humid air and it’s more humid early in the morning. It’s less windy, too, which is thought to lessen any distortion of their vocalizations.
But scientists from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics and Project Dhvani in India combed through audio recordings of birds in the rainforest. They say they didn’t find evidence to back up this “acoustic transmission hypothesis.”
The researchers didn’t definitively point to one reason for why the dawn chorus is happening, but they found support for ideas that the early morning racket relates to birds marking their territory after being inactive at night, and communicating about finding food.
I often wondered about that. How did birds find out which feeders that had been out of commission for a long time suddenly had food again? (Yes, I overthink things.) Me? I’m buying this new theory.
Farm Waste The Future Of Fabrics? (BTW, my wife is doing a fantastic job digging up some of these really cool stories. W-what? I still have to take the car to the car wash?):
One group of researchers have chanced upon a creative solution for agricultural waste: turning it into fabric.
In a new study, they explain that agricultural waste streams can produce a promising pulp that can be transformed into clothes, whilst simultaneously reducing dependence on water-intensive cotton, and wood fiber, which is in high demand for other uses.
The new study was based in Sweden, where almost one-third of the agricultural area is devoted to cereal crops like oats and wheat. A large portion of the remaining agricultural area is dedicated to potatoes and sugar beet. Considering the steady waste streams that these four crops generate, the researchers saw an opportunity to fill the so-called ‘cellulose gap’ created by increasing demand on the limited global cotton supply.
There are other sustainability reasons to increase the share of waste-derived fibers in fabric-making. For one, wood as a material is already valued for so many other arguably more sustainable applications in society, such as building materials. Using it to fill the cellulose gap may divert it from these other more important uses, the researchers say. And farm waste could relieve some demand for cotton, and thereby reduce the water-intensity of this crop and our clothes.
Finally, while agricultural waste streams are often recycled back into fields as mulch, used to feed animals, or even to make building material, plenty of it also ends up simply being burned. Surely turning this valuable raw material into clothing fiber is the preferable alternative, the study suggests.
My question? If I wear oat underwear, will my craving for oatmeal increase exponentially? Or perhaps my desire to devour my underwear? (Yes, I overthink things and, yes, I took LSD in my youth.)
What could possibly be better to sing us out?:
