Culture Watch
New Year's Peeve; Forgetting Self-Improvement Vows
Rose Madeline Mula writes: Am I glad I didn't live in Babylonia 4,000 years ago; the New Year celebration lasted eleven days. By the eleventh day, the Babylonians must have had prodigious hangovers. They probably weren't even fully conscious for the first month of the new year. That's not for me. It would mean missing all those great post-holiday sales. more »
Seeing Nature In Landscape Masterworks and the Artists' Collaboration, Fallen Fruit
Masterpieces spanning nearly four hundred years from Jan Brueghel the Younger's series devoted to the five senses to Canaletto's celebrated views of Venice; landscapes by innovators ranging from Joseph Mallord William Turner, Paul Cézanne, and Gustav Klimt to David Hockney and Gerhard Richter. Paintings by Thomas Moran, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O'Keeffe, and others provide an American perspective on landscapes at home and abroad. more »
My World Interrupted: It Is More Than a Loss of Place, It Is a Loss of Identity
"Over the past 35 years, we've lost 2,500 to 3,000 feet of land to coastal erosion. To put this in perspective: I was born in 1997, and since then, Shishmaref has lost about 100 feet. In the past 15 years, we had to move 13 houses — including my dear grandma Edna's house — from one end of the island to the other because of this loss of land. Within the next two decades, the whole island will erode away completely." more »
Culture Watch Review By Joan L. Cannon: The Social Sex, A History of Female Friendship
This book reminds us how far we have come when there are more highly educated women everywhere than at any other time in history. Still unresolved is the question of friendships between women and men. The difficulty of engaging in this fashion is emphasized by the need repeatedly to declare to doubters that sex is not a component of such a relationship. more »
