Category: Books and Writers

What you need to know about how Covid spreads

October 29, 2020 · Leave a comment ·

Coronavirus isn’t going away soon. The number of cases are rising across the country. El Pais’ visualizations of the ways COVID-19 is commonly spread is an incredibly important resource as we head into winter.

https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-10-28/a-room-a-bar-and-a-class-how-the-coronavirus-is-spread-through-the-air.html

“At present, health authorities recognize three vehicles of coronavirus transmission: the small droplets from speaking or coughing, which can end up in the eyes, mouth or nose of people standing nearby; contaminated surfaces (fomites), although the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates that this is the least likely way to catch the virus, a conclusion backed by the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (ECDC) observation that not a single case of fomite-caused Covid-19 has been observed. Then finally, there is transmission by aerosols – the inhalation of invisible infectious particles exhaled by an infected person that, once leaving the mouth, behave in a similar way to smoke. Without ventilation, aerosols remain suspended in the air and become increasingly dense as time passes.”

October 15, 2020October 15, 2020 · Leave a comment ·

“I feel like I’m supposed to be grateful that I got that job. But it’s not enough for me to just be here anymore. I want more, and I don’t care that that upsets people.” -Sohla El-Waylly, chef

Read more about Sohla El-Waylly’s career in food and her next culinary adventure.

Music feeds the soul

October 9, 2020 · Leave a comment ·

Source: Kelly Marshall. Food and Wine magazine, September 2020.

Chef Alexander Smalls’ playlists for cooking and dining are an inspiration for any culinary experience. We may not be having dinner parties right now (I hope), but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy our meals with great music. Everything is better with music.

“Music is energy, life, love,” Smalls said. “It stimulates my imagination and feeds my spirit, excites the task as well as the sheer pleasure I get from preparing, cooking, and entertaining in my home, especially for friends and family. I couldn’t live, breathe, or eat without music.”

-Alexander Smalls

Happy Birthday, Jimmy!

October 3, 2020October 3, 2020 · Leave a comment ·

On October 1, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter celebrated his 96th birthday. In celebration, here’s Jimmy expressing his thanks to The Allman Brothers for their role in helping him become president.

“Gregg Allman was a very close friend of mine. If it hadn’t been for Gregg Allman and the Allman Brothers I never would have been president. Bill Walden got the Allman Brothers to raise money for me. So they would have a concert in Pennsylvania or New York or New Hampshire and charge 15 dollars but the 15 dollars didn’t go to them the 15 dollars went to my campaign fund.”

https://www.wsav.com/news/video-jimmy-carter-if-it-hadnt-been-for-gregg-allman-i-would-not-have-been-president/amp/

September 16, 2020 · Leave a comment ·

Parul Sehgal’s review of “The Selected Works of Audre Lorde” is a beautiful reflection on the depth and brilliance of Lorde’s work and continued influence.

“Lorde, like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, is vulnerable to selective quotation. Black writers can be treated as oracles, read symbolically, with lazy reverence; their work is flattened into self-help or polemic, the message extracted and all torsions and contradictions (often the very ones that catalyze the writer) smoothed away. It’s the sort of reading that gives us a simplified, neutralized Lorde, deracinated from her radical roots.”

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Links for the Voracious

September 10, 2020September 10, 2020 · Leave a comment ·

A little of this and a little of that from around the internet.

“To be able to have the ability to bring other people in, who I think are massively more talented, it’s something that brings me so much excitement.”

-Issa Rae, creator and star of “Insecure”

“And of course we want an economic recovery! But we’re never going to have it if women can’t return to the workforce. We will not have a full and swift economic recovery without addressing core needs around paid sick leave, paid family leave, and affordable childcare. And my Republican colleagues have not come to terms with the crisis we have in childcare. School reopening is not about sheer force of will, you know?”

-Congresswoman Lauren Underwood, (D-IL)

Calvin E. Simmons. Photo: Mary Morris Lawrence

“This lost generation of African American conductors led major concerts by Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony, gave the Philadelphia Orchestra premiere of the Shostakovich Symphony No. 8, and led the Metropolitan Opera’s celebrated rehabilitation of Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète. Most of them were robbed of that over-60 elder-statesman period when the world was likely to more widely celebrate their accumulation of artistic wisdom.”

A peak into Harriet’s Bookshop, a Black woman owned bookstore celebrating the work of Black women.

The One and Only Yola

August 21, 2020September 9, 2020 · Leave a comment ·

Yola’s “Walk Through Fire” is an album I can’t stop recommending to people. It is gorgeous and generous, entrancing from the first note to the last. Yola’s voice and guitar playing are tender, precise, and powerful. She commands her musical gifts with singular grace. Yola has the rare ability to create the simultaneous and contradictory feeling of sinking deeply into the sumptuousness of her voice and being effortlessly elevated by it, all in the same song. Each song on the album is a perfectly crafted story. “Walk Through Fire” is a testament to Yola’s overflowing talent as a vocal and lyrical storyteller. There are no lulls in this 41 minute treasure.

“Singing was like the air I breathed. I sing to live.”
-Yola, Paper Magazine (January 2020)

“Walk Through Fire” is major. The beauty of the album cannot be overstated. It is an organic mix of genres in harmony- Country and R&B, Folk, Rock, and Soul. Every song on the album should be a huge hit. It’s easy to imagine Yola’s voice floating from car speakers and through ear buds, listeners singing or humming along to one gem of a song after another. The album is timeless. It is familiar and fresh, living in a musical space no one has touched in a long time. The energy is reminiscent of the ways great songs by Joan Armatrading, Roberta Flack, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Bob Dylan make you feel. What puts the album over the top, with all of its beauty and craftsmanship on glorious display in sparkling arrangements is Yola’s intimate love of music that has been tended and treasured to create something uniquely her own. “Walk Through Fire” is a musical blessing.

“Ride Out in the Country” should be a Country radio staple. It’s a song made for road trips and sitting creek side on a hot summer day.