Monday, October 19, 2009

“Shopping Website Groupon Launches in Charlotte - Carolina Newswire” plus 4 more

“Shopping Website Groupon Launches in Charlotte - Carolina Newswire” plus 4 more

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Shopping Website Groupon Launches in Charlotte - Carolina Newswire

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 10:02 AM PDT

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A Poetic Tribute to President Barack Obama Dedicated to His Nobel ... - Biloxi Sun Herald

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 07:28 PM PDT

Mance debuts her third book of poetry: Rebirth in Light: Poems for the First Family, honoring the inauguration of Barack Obama. Mance's literary talents are well-recognized and respected by a veritable "who's-who" of artists and intellectuals. Eminent Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree calls her work "powerful, soaring, uplifting and timeless in expressing the excitement of our nation and the world."

Before Barack Obama became the first black president of the United States, Mance began commemorating his role in the historic 2008 election, and was nominated in the Summer of 2008 as a candidate for inaugural poet. Mance's reflection on the inaugural theme "New Birth of Freedom" grew into a collection of poems for President Barack Obama, First Lady, Daughters, Grandmother, and even Bo - the First Puppy. Although inspired by President Obama and his family, Mance sees this work as "a call to the American family and world family for unity, peace, reconciliation and forgiveness."

Earlier works by Mance honor the lives of Harold Washington, first black mayor of Chicago; Nelson Mandela, first black president of South Africa, and Barack Obama's 2004 senate race. Mance is also the author of two books of poetry (An Ancient Fire Burns and A Prayer for Black Men), and a CD of spoken word love poems for which the Hyde Park Herald dubbed her "The Love Poet."

To learn more about Michael Bernard Beckwith, the Agape International Spiritual Center, and Ginger Mance's appearances and booksignings (Early Bird Service: 6:55 am, Second Service: 9:00 am, Third Service: 11:30 am), visit www.agapelive.com.

SOURCE Agape International Spiritual Center

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Miami Marine Stadium makes endangered-places list - Miami Herald

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 07:21 PM PDT

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BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI crline aviglucci@MiamiHerald.com

Supporters of saving the Miami Marine Stadium have scored another coup, landing the iconic but neglected site on the World Monuments Fund's list of endangered places for 2010 -- along with Macchu Picchu and the gingerbread houses of Port-au-Prince.

The listing by the fund, a New York-based organization dedicated to saving world architectural and cultural treasures, follows the stadium's inclusion earlier this year on the National Trust for Historic Preservation's list of 11 most endangered historic sites in the country.

And it comes less than a month after Friends of Miami Marine Stadium, a nonprofit group trying to save it, released an ad spot in which singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett urged his fans to support the shuttered city facility's renovation.

``This is a special and important and iconic place that is at risk,'' Amy Freitag, director for U.S. programs at the World Monuments Fund, told The Associated Press. The city of Miami last year named the 45-year-old stadium, considered a singular feat of architecture and engineering, as a historic landmark. The World Monuments Fund has also funded a $50,000 engineering study to determine the extent of needed renovation work.

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Sustainability Beyond the Lab - Harvard Crimson

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 08:04 PM PDT

By the end of my first year here, I finally had some things figured out. The alphabet soup of campus acronyms had finally resolved into an intelligible language. I no longer got lost on my way to the Quad, and I knew exactly which dishes to avoid in Annenberg.

Nonetheless, as I returned for sophomore fall, one big question mark remained: my academic future. It was already time to pick a concentration, and it didn't seem like Harvard offered one for me. I knew I wanted to study environmental issues—but not geology, plant biology, or the chemistry of the stratosphere. Rather, the questions that intrigued me were social and political, not scientific. I wanted to figure out how humanity's philosophies, cultures, and political structures interact with the natural environment.

Environmental issues have both technical and sociopolitical dimensions. To be sure, we will need to develop new technologies and advance our scientific understanding of the natural world in order to tackle pressing concerns like climate change. Yet global warming arises not merely from chemical reactions and combustion engines, but also from the tangle of institutions, values, incentives, and social arrangements that give rise to these physical phenomena. For example, Americans drive so much not because driving is an inevitable aspect of human life, but because our particular market system prices oil a certain way, because our government favors highways over mass transit, because we inhabit a culture that views casual car use as morally acceptable, and so forth.

Addressing tricky environmental problems requires both scientific and sociopolitical innovation; we're not just going to fix climate change (or any other major environmental issue) in a lab. Yet as I flipped through the Courses of Instruction that sophomore fall, I began to wonder whether I could pursue environmental studies here at all without spending the next few years in the Science Center. Harvard College's environmental concentrations and courses were then, and still are, overwhelmingly scientific. Even this year, as "Green is the New Crimson" banners fly high, the University Center for the Environment's guide to environmental studies lists fewer than 15 undergraduate courses that could be considered environmentally focused but not scientific. Equally significant is the lack of a relevant concentration, or of well-defined subfields and tracks within existing concentrations. In this and other ways, Harvard undergraduates intrigued by the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of environmental issues face steep odds.

As for me, after that demoralizing tour through the Courses of Instruction, I took a leap of faith and enrolled in Social Studies. Over the subsequent semesters, I've combined courses in social and political theory with the sporadic environmental offerings of other social science and humanities departments. In this way, I cobbled together a concentration that more or less worked for me. Now, looking back over my Harvard experience, I'm happy, but I fear I'm an exception. Without sufficient courses, or a clear track or concentration to follow, Harvard students with nonscientific environmental interests sometimes give up, study other issues, or (often unhappily) settle down in science-intensive concentrations like Earth and Planetary Sciences or Environmental Science and Public Policy.

For a school committed to environmental leadership, this is a big problem. Harvard's commitment to institutional sustainability is second to none, and I've been privileged to take part in the university's efforts to "green" our campus. But it's long past time for time for Harvard to ensure that "Green is the New Crimson" rings true not only in its labs and dining halls, but also in Sever and Emerson. We need more relevant courses, better-defined environmental tracks within the social sciences and humanities, and perhaps even a nonscientific alternative concentration to ESPP. For guidance, we can look to programs at peer universities. UC Berkeley's Society and Environment program, for example, offers well-defined focus fields in environmental policy and theory—and a wealth of relevant classes to match. And, of course, existing Harvard courses—like the excellent (if lonesome) environmental offerings in the history and anthropology departments and ESPP's handful of nonscientific seminars—can help inspire the next generation of classes.

My vision of an environmentally friendly Harvard is of a school committed not only to reducing its ecological footprint, but also to producing the next generation of environmental leaders. This vision will never be a reality without big improvements to the College's environmental curriculum. With these reforms, Harvard will not only better serve its discouraged nonscientists, but it will help answer what is perhaps the most pressing sociopolitical question of our time: how to build a more just and sustainable society in the years to come.


Zachary C. M. Arnold '10 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. He is a captain of the Resource Efficiency Program and a former co-chair of the Environmental Action Committee.

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Bright Lights, Big Pity - Harvard Crimson

Posted: 19 Oct 2009 08:04 PM PDT

I don't recall the exact moment that New York City became a part of my cultural consciousness, but for as long as I can remember, it's existed there as a magical possibility. Growing up in Silicon Valley—where computer chips tend to garner far more excitement than "impractical" things like poetry—the idea of a place in which people gather round the ashtray Saturday nights to discuss Kafka's lost manuscripts seemed incredible. Sure, that initial perception may have been laughably idealistic. And yet everything I watched, read, or heard about seemed to bolster it: Columbia-based Jewish literary criticism of the '40s and '50s, left-wing magazines like "Partisan Review" and "Commentary," Strand Bookstore's 18 miles of used and rare books, Beat memoirs of life on the Lower East Side, Woody Allen films like "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan." Even now, movies like "Synecdoche, New York" tap into the mystique of the creative mind in a way that wouldn't transfer if they were set elsewhere—Springfield, say, or Baton Rouge.

On deeper examination, that unshakable faith in New York's cultural supremacy now seems to have had very little to support it. Most of these literary heroes are ghosts of the city's past; no comparable, coherent intellectual movement or community of thinkers appears to exist in New York today. Publications are under threat, writers working in the city are paid little or nothing for their efforts, and the kind of lavish book-signing bashes that made Fitzgerald an alcoholic haven't existed for decades. The question ought to be asked: Can New York still claim to be America's intellectual hub at all?

The late Irving Kristol—intellectual godfather of modern neoconservatism and a pretty sharp cookie—didn't think so. It's why, after living in New York all his life, he decided in 1988 to jump ship. While the worlds of visual media, publishing, and finance were still thriving, he said, the "literary" intellectualism of the Trilling-Sontag variety (definition: "a dinner party can become acrimonious over such issues as Freudian analysis") was extinct, or at least highly endangered. Kristol personally decided to head to Washington, D.C., the nation's go-to location for public policy. But he argued that "if you want an animated discussion of 'large ideas' about God, human destiny, Western civilization, modern art, the future of democracy, etc., you are better served in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Chicago's Hyde Park than in New York."

Well, we're here: And perhaps it's true. The other week, I overheard two suits at 1369 Coffee House in Central frothing over their espressos about linguistics in the Basque region. ("You can't just dismiss the Ligurian substrate hypothesis out of hand!") Gentrification aside, the existence of world-class universities draws people unafraid to engage seriously with ideas large and small.

And yet that very university system may be part of the problem. Despite the city's deep well of potential contributors, over half the pieces in the Nov. 2009 issue of the New York Review of Books are penned by professors, and several of the other writers are "scholars in residence" at colleges scattered across the U.S. The "New York" part of the publication's title refers, I assume, merely to where it is edited, not to where it probes for material. New York-based careers sustained on writing alone—the path of independent-minded fellows like John Updike, Edmund Wilson, and John O'Hara gutsy enough to demand color pieces from magazine bigwigs and lucky enough to actually get them—have fallen off several levels in probability; many of America's brightest minds are now holed up in grad programs, grading intro-level Expository Writing papers and picking away at theses on Milton in the hopes that tenure will nab them those same assignments.

Indeed, would-be writers have it particularly tough. One-time Greenwich studios now house upper-middle-class families; bohemian standby Village Voice has been bought out by New Times Media; college interns willing to work unpaid edge out older degree-holding peers insistent on a wage. Many successful journalists break into the business outside the Big Apple—either cub reporting at small-town papers or finding jobs abroad.

So if the "scene" is no longer in New York, where is it? Some argue that other cities like D.C. or Boston provide thriving alternative intellectual loci. (Legend has it that, challenged thusly in a newspaper editorial, one New Yorker fired off the epistolary missile: "May I suggest that the reason Boston is 'overflowing' with culture is the shallow vessel in which it is contained?") Others propose that the very idea of an intellectual nucleus is outdated, with the collective energy of e-mail, blogs, and Twitter heralding a more diffuse power breakdown—in high-school-chemistry-speak, more plum pudding than Bohr model.

Yet NYC still exerts a pull. "I had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on to me at last," wrote Sylvia Plath's aspiring magazine assistant in "The Bell Jar"; for people passionate about reading and writing, New York is still the place to be. And if the statistics speak the truth, one-fifth of Harvard's graduating seniors will end up there. They'll have no trouble finding culture, from jazz bars to independent film screenings to a booming underground hip-hop scene. But the deeper theorizing about what that art means and why it matters is probably being done at places like Harvard—the place where they've come from, not the place they are now.


Jessica A. Sequeira '11, a Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.

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