The Obama administration has decided that it will not issue a permit before Feb. 21 for the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada, according to people with knowledge of the decision.
The announcement, which could come as early as Wednesday, comes in response to a 60-day deadline Congress imposed in late December on the decision-making process for the permit as part of a deal to extend a payroll-tax break and unemployment benefits for two months.
Today’s decision, expected from the State Department, would make official what the administration has said from the outset: that under current law, it cannot accelerate the permitting process, especially in light of the need for additional environmental reviews of a new path for the pipeline through Nebraska.
I caught a bit of a “Here and Now” broadcast on WBUR, an interview with Eleanor Henderson, author of the novel “Ten Thousand Saints,” which depicts the late 80s post-punk “straight edge” movement. It looks like I have found a summer read.
I couldn’t put it down, and I wish it wasn’t “over.”
Read from July 21 to 30, 2011 Henderson manages to take a “scene” and make it universal by populating it with real people whose virtues and foibles become recognizable as our own. This is not simply a story of the straight-edge movement and resistance to gentrification on New York’s Lower East Side, and the desert land of late ’80s exurbia, but a tale of generations, loss and redemption.
Eleanor Henderson’s debut novel, “Ten Thousand Saints,” was hailed in the New York Times as “fierce, devoted and elegiac” in her depiction of teens who reject drugs, sex and meat in favor of Straight Edge punk culture. Jude, the novel’s hero grows up in Vermont in the 1980s as the child of hippie parents.
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Eleanor Henderson’s debut novel, “Ten Thousand Saints,” has been hailed as “fierce, devoted and elegiac” in her depiction of teens who reject drugs, sex and meat in favor of the so-called “Straight Edge” movement.
Books like this don’t come along every day. The characters in this story are so well developed they don’t seem fictional but rather like people you may know, walking among the landmarks and bums of New York and the small towns of Vermont.
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Harvard Book Store is very pleased to welcome acclaimed story writer and essayist ELEANOR HENDERSON for a reading from her debut novel, Ten Thousand Saints.
RT @hereandnow: . @HarvardBooks @10KSaints is on public radio’s @hereandnow at 12:40 eastern- listen live here and read an excerpt http://bit.ly/mLAyJV
On Aug. 6, 1988, a collection of squatters, anarchists and youths took over Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan’s East Village to protest a new 1 a.m. curfew. By the time the fated hour rolled around, the gathering had turned violent as police attempted to shut down the park.
Callie Crossleytalks with three of the original Freedom Riders, in advance ofFreedom Riders, anAmerican Experiencefilm about a courageous band of civil rights activists who in 1961 challenged segregation in the South. The film premieres May 16 at 9pm on WGBH 2.The Callie Crossley Showairs weekdays at 1pm on 89.7 WGBH.
I’m hard-pressed to see how this analysis applies to social movements in general, and Egypt in particular. On DemocracyNow! on Wednesday, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, who reported from Egypt during the uprising, indicates that people flooded Tahrir Square precisely because when the internet was shut off, they couldn’t simply stay at home and check the progress of the rally by Facebook or SMS. This does indicate a separation between digital and material realities.
Moreover, novelist Ahdaf Soueif indicates that the movement has been building for ten years. What we now think of as mediated or augmented reality, for example the locative features of social media, did not exist at the beginning of that time period. Much of the mobilization which appears so novel to the casual Western observer, had as its impetus the unrest of independent Egyptian trade unions dating back to at least 2003. At that time, according to Eric Boehlert, the US blogosphere was still nascent.
Finally, if our system of social stratification is imposed upon the digital, then there are haves and have nots. Are Egyptian street vendors cyborgs? Yet they have been a part of the uprising. I’m not convinced that cyberspace and meatspace are so easily elided, for I think such a view diminishes the latter.
Last week, fellow editor Nathan Jurgenson made a post entitled “Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality” with a call for more concept work surrounding this topic. I…
This interview with Vincent Harding was very compelling, and this story was riveting. I teach about the Mississippi Freedom Summer in my social movements classes, and stories like this promise to make those considerations spring to life.
There are a few moments from behind the glass that stop me dead in my tracks — times during an interview when a wise voice creates a new opportunity to hear something differently. To challenge a conceit. To envelop the listener in the womb of silent storytelling and place one in a position of listening profundity. Vincent Harding did just that.
In the audio above, the theologian and speechwriter for Martin Luther King Jr. creates that vulnerable opening and ever so gently corrects, without admonishment, when the “Kumbaya” is referred to as a soft and squishy moment of song:
“Whenever somebody jokes about “Kumbaya,” my mind goes back to the Mississippi summer experience where the movement folks in Mississippi were inviting co-workers to come from all over the country, especially student types to come and help in the process of voter registration and freedom school teaching and taking great risks on behalf of that state and of this nation. …
In group after group, people were singing:
‘Kumbaya. “Come by here my Lord. Somebody’s missing Lord. Come by here.”’
I could never laugh at kumbaya moments after that. Because I saw that almost no one went home from there. This whole group of people decided that they were going to continue on the path that they had committed themselves to and a great part of the reason why they were able to do that was because of the strength and the power and the commitment that had been gained through that experience of just singing together, Kumbaya.”
I know I’ve used this this reference to a “kumbaya moment” in a slightly pejorative way. This no longer holds true. I can no longer judge using this label. Let Vincent Harding’s story be a lesson for us all.
We’re producing the radio show now and it’ll be released on February 24th.
I was showing this video to Number One Daugther, now 18, and she found a version with English subtitles. It was simply among the related videos today, and I never look there because typically the videos are unrelated. But I have been taught something, and that is fitting, because partly the Egyptian revolution is about the youth. Two-thirds of Egypt’s population is under 30.
So please enjoy this translation of “Sout al Horeya,” “Voices of Freedom,” in which people sing “Our weapons were just our dreams.”
A student protester stands on a barrier in Parliament Square on December 9, 2010 in London, England. Parliament was voting on whether to implement the coalition Government’s proposals to increase university tuition fees in England from 3,290 GBP to 9,000 GBP. (Oli Scarff/Getty Images)
My name is Kari Fulton, and I’m representing Youth for Climate Justice. We are here as young people from North America representing impacted communities. We have seven people on the inside, and we have a whole bunch of people on the outside. And we are here to reclaim our futures, to make sure the voices of young people who will be most impacted by climate change are heard and are respected. There was supposed to be an action today. That action was canceled by—the YOUNGO was supposed to have an action today. They are silencing our voice as we speak. And we are here to say that is not right.
We are also here to say, where will you be in 2050? I know where I will be, and I want to live in a just and clean, sustainable world. And that’s what we’re asking for today as Youth for Climate Justice. We stand here in solidarity with the Global South, in solidarity with impacted people from around the world, in solidarity with La Via Campesina. We stand here today, and we have these signs on their necks that say “No REDD,” because we want people to know that whether you live in the forest, whether you live in the hood, you will be impacted by false solutions. And REDD, REDD-plus, REDD-minus-plus, REDD-plus-plus, whatever you want to call it, is a false solution, because you are creating a market on our forests. You are not protecting our Mother Earth. And we are standing here to say that we want to see the protection of the rights of Mother Earth and the voice of the people to be respected. So thank you very much. Checktheweather.net.
I’m not talking about coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather, I’m talking about @rarefm’s coverage of student protests of proposed hikes in university tuition in the UK. While we in the US unwittingly herald with yawns the shrinking of the public sphere here, students there are raising a holy ruckus. Here, “NUS president, Aaron Porter, visits the UCL Occupation and agrees to all of their demands.”
This is a "tumblog" I created in less than five minutes in class, when I was trying to help students in my "Internet, Society and Everyday Life" figure out what Tumblr is.
It seems to be a microblog.
