We decided to take a trip to Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. It was a chance to see the beautiful fall foliage, the leaves turning vivid yellow, orange, and red. The real goal was to visit a small kayak manufacturer that makes a kayak of Kevlar that weighs only 15 pounds. We’re going to see if it’s just right for my next birthday.

As we were driving along the Taconic State Parkway, where traffic was almost non-existent, we drove past a sign that said DONALD J. TRUMP STATE PARK. I’ve never heard of a state park named for a living person. Curious, I googled and discovered that the “state park” was a tax dodge. Trump bought over 400 acres for $2.5 million with the intent of turning it into a golf course. when he couldn’t get permits to build his golf course, he gave the land to the state…

“Dissent is an American Left intellectual magazine edited by Natasha Lewis and Timothy Shenk and founded in 1954. The magazine is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas. Former co-editors include Irving Howe, Mitchell Cohen, Michael Walzer, and David Marcus. The magazine was established in 1954 by a group of New York Intellectuals, which included Lewis A. Coser, Rose Laub Coser, Irving Howe, Norman Mailer, Henry Pachter, and Meyer Schapiro. Its co-founder and publisher for its first 15 years was University Place Book Shop owner Walter Goldwater. From its inception, Dissent‘s politics deviated from the standard ideological positions of the left and right. Like politics, the New Left Review and the French socialist magazine Socialisme ou Barbarie, Dissent sought to formulate a…

“While New Orleans’ Congo Square is acknowledged as the heart and birthplace of American music, New Orleans’ unique Creole musical community was the engine for what became America’s early civil rights movement. During French and Spanish rule, a combination of rights and opportunities helped Louisiana Creoles and free people of color develop a unique society. Colonial Louisiana under Spanish rule was a society with liberal manumission laws (granting freedom from slavery) and rights determined by birthright rather than the color of your skin. Creoles also enjoyed the right to testify against whites in court, inherit land and buy and sell property and make loans to and receive loans from whites. Louisiana was a multilingual society with inhabitants speaking French, Creole, Spanish and numerous Native American languages such as Choctaw, as well as open relationships between all the races and local tribes. Many Creole men and women were highly educated, skilled…

“The voluminous critical conversation about Sylvia Plath has tended to orbit a few topics: her suicide, of course, and the ways mental illness and madness perhaps predicted her death and marked her poetry; the blazing ferocity of her posthumous masterpiece Ariel; the co-opting of images and metaphors (from the Holocaust, for instance) in those late poems; and the overall relationship of her biography to her supposedly confessional poems, especially when it comes to Ted Hughes, his affair with Assia Wevill, and his curation of Plath’s legacy after her death. These are all compelling topics, and they’ve had a deep and lasting effect on how we read Plath’s poetry. But I prefer to think about Plath’s amazing poems and the creative surges that enabled her to write them. In Plath we have a unique example of rapid, surging development of a poet’s art. In only seven years—from 1956, when the…

“Take someone from 70 years ago, drop them on a city street today. Would their style fit in seamlessly with those surrounding them on the sidewalk? Styles change. The best dressed style icons of almost any era—no matter how respected—wouldn’t fit in to our particular moment without raising eyebrows. However, a small few manage to weather the twists and turns of style history, crafting a personal style that manages to remain relevant across time. For someone like Jack Kerouac, his scrappy mid-’50s style manages to resonate all the way into 2018. Esquire has called Kerouac’s fashion ‘casually elegant.’ GQreferred to the man as the ‘originator of blue collar cool’ and claimed he was one of the first ‘rejecting the notion that class was synonymous with value.’ The Beats presaged the ‘urban rustic’ moment that would happen early in the 21st century that resulted in the resurgence of numerous American…

Nat Hentoff with the clarinetist Edmond Hall in 1948 at the Savoy, a club in Boston.

“Nat Hentoff, an author, journalist, jazz critic and civil libertarian who called himself a troublemaker and proved it with a shelf of books and a mountain of essays on free speech, wayward politics, elegant riffs and the sweet harmonies of the Constitution, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91. His son Nicholas said he was surrounded by family members and listening to Billie Holiday when he died. Mr. Hentoff wrote for The Village Voice for 50 years and also contributed to The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Down Beat magazine and dozens of other publications. He wrote more than 35 books — novels, volumes for young adults and nonfiction works on civil liberties, education and other subjects. The Hentoff bibliotheca reads almost like an anthology: works by a jazz aficionado…

Samizdat copies

“Censorship existed even be fore literature, say the Russians. And, we may add, censorship being older, literature has to be craftier. Hence, the new and remarkably viable underground press in the Soviet Union called samizdat. The word is a play on Gosizdat, which is a telescoping of Gosudarstvennoye Izdatelstvo, the name of the monopoly‐wielding State Publishing House. The sampart of the new word means ‘self.’ The whole samizdat—translates as: ‘We publish ourselves’—that is, not the state, but we, the people. Unlike the underground of Czarist times, today’s samizdat has no print ing presses (with rare exceptions): The K.G.B., the secret police, is too efficient. It is the typewriter, each page produced with four to eight carbon copies, that does the job. By the thousands and tens of thousands of frail, smudged onionskin sheets, samizdat spreads across the land a mass of protests and petitions, secret court minutes, Alexander…

“Gandalf is one of many protagonist in J. R. R. Tolkien‘s novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He is a wizard, one of the Istari order, and the leader of the Fellowship of the Ring. Tolkien took the name ‘Gandalf’ from the Old Norse‘Catalogue of Dwarves’ (Dvergatal) in the Völuspá. As a wizard and the bearer of one of the Three Rings, Gandalf has great power, but works mostly by encouraging and persuading. He sets out as Gandalf the Grey, possessing great knowledge and travelling continually. Gandalf is focused on the mission to counter the Dark Lord Sauron by destroying the One Ring. He is associated with fire; his ring of power is Narya, the Ring of Fire. As such, he delights in fireworks to entertain the hobbits of the Shire, while in great…

The Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 – 1969), who developed the concept of ‘organic architecture’, that a building should develop out of its surroundings. The Guggenheim’s concrete rings allow light into the building to display the exhibits to their full potential.

“The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously expanding collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions throughout the year. The museum was established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, under the guidance of its first director, Hilla von Rebay. The museum adopted its current name in 1952, three…