Lippard, at eighty-eight, is one of the best-known multi-hyphenate art writers (-curators-critics-activists) of the past half century. Her career has focused on the large realms of feminism, activism, place, politics, and culture. She has also, in recent editions of El Puente, noted “two recent road kills: a deer and a racoon,” summarized local meetings about road signage, and edited an obituary, her name appearing not as a byline, but at the bottom corner of the newsletter’s final page, near the classifieds, some of which have continued to run unchanged since the mid-nineties, when El Puente began. El Puente, which Lippard often refers to as a newsletter (“What’s the difference?” she asked me), is an extraordinary (mostly solo) work of journalism, a map of history in progress, revealing a shifting landscape.
Looking back towards the Earth, Cernan commented: "the clouds seem to be very artistic, very picturesque. Some in clockwise rotating fashion… but appear to be… very thin where you can… see through those clouds to the blue water below."
It is an enduring image of the beauty but also the vulnerability of our planet – adrift as it is in the vastness of the Universe, which hosts no other signs of life that we have been able to detect to date. But ours is also a planet of great change. The tectonic movements that shift the landmasses move too slow for our eyes to notice. Yet another force – humanity itself – has been reshaping our planet at a pace that we can see. Urbanisation, deforestation, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are altering the way the Earth looks. So how, over the 50 years since that iconic image was taken, has the Blue Marble changed?
Whenever I’m cooking with peas, I always prefer frozen over fresh. In fact, I’m an ardent believer that frozen peas are superior to their fresh counterparts. It’s simply more convenient to have a bag of shelled peas ready to use rather than doing the hard work yourself. Frozen peas are also more vibrant in color than fresh peas. And they are sweeter and more crisp in texture — I’ve found that fresh peas are often quite starchy and mushy once cooked.
Efforts to fix that might seem niche, but Shaw is one of many luminaries who have had a go. Charles Darwin, Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt also took up a cause that has left its mark on American and British culture in unexpected ways.
In his amusing and enlightening new book, Gabe Henry traces the history of these efforts, beginning with a 12th-century monk named Orrmin, continuing through the beginnings of American English and the movement’s 19th-century heyday, finally arriving at textspeak.