Новости за 16.05.2016

“I’m totally a Henny,” I told my daughter Josie.

“Everyone thinks they’re a Henny,” Josie told me, with the implicit eye-roll only a 14-year-old girl can deliver without actually eye-rolling. “Everyone wants to be the bad girl. But you are so completely a Sarah.”

Continue reading "Strolling Through the Lower East Side With 'All-of-a-Kind Family'" at...

A couple weeks ago we reported the details of an affidavit filed in the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida, supporting a criminal case against James Medina, a Florida man who allegedly intended to detonate a bomb at the Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center in Aventura, Florida. According to the criminal complaint, the FBI, working undercover, foiled his plan. If convicted of attempting use a weapon of mass destruction, Medina could face a life sentence.

May means it’s over—school, that is, for college seniors. The only thing left to do now it pay too much to dress in a colorful robe and funny, flat hat, listen to important people talk from a stage, walk across said stage, take photos with your family, then go out to eat with them. Part of the attraction of these ceremonies, at least for some, is a billing of some celebrity or politician, who uses the pulpit to proffer truths and advice about living life for captive, sponge-minded audiences who, ideally, are eager to soak it up. Читать дальше...

Just after we got married in 1997, my wife Ingrid and I traveled to Ghana on an extended musical honeymoon, to study a style of traditional West African drumming performed by an ethnic group known as the Akan. Four years earlier, while still single, I’d joined a drumming troupe in Toronto made up of Akan immigrants, led by master drummer Kwame Obeng. Before he returned to Ghana, Kwame invited me to train with him there, where he led a royal drumming ensemble in the court of an Akan chief. A few years later... Читать дальше...

Apart from being the 400th anniversary of the deaths of Shakespeare and Cervantes, 2016 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Rubén Darío, who was never a supreme god on the level of those other two, but was, even so, a god, fit to be mentioned in divine company—a god of modern literature, especially in the Hispanic world. In Nicaragua, where he was born, there has always been a custom of celebrating him by composing mini-essays on tiny themes, which decorate the newspapers—essays on Darío’s mastery of classical meter in a dozen forms... Читать дальше...