A C. T U. A L. L Y

Saturday morning started out like most mornings:   I read my email.   Among the messages was one from my husband, who every Friday forwards the Guardian Art Weekly .   It always includes an Image of the Week, and this week’s image is a photograph (above) by Gordon Parks entitled, At Segregation Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama , 1956.   I am a big fan of Parks’ photography.   In fact, my Facebook profile picture, last seen before I deleted my Facebook account last week, is a Parks photo-poem entitled, I Am You , below.   But, apart from Parks’ work behind his camera lens, I knew little about him.   That changed yesterday.     Accompanying the image At Segregation Drinking Fountain, was a review of Gordon Parks: Part One , an exhibition of the photojournalist’s work from 1956 to 1963, which opened at the Alison Jacques Gallery in London on July 1 and runs until August 1.   Given that the pandemic is raging in the U...

Happy Fourth of July!   As American holidays go, this one has got to be the most hypocritical, if not schizophrenic, national self-congratulatory celebration we’ve got.   But before I explain why I hold that view, let me acknowledge that this post draws heavily on Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning essay at NYT Magazine Hannah-Jones published last August 14, 2019, on the 400 th anniversary of the date slavery was introduced to the American colonies.   Her essay is entitled, America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made it One .   If you missed it, I cannot recommend it highly enough, and there isn’t a better day to read it than today, the Fourth of July.  This day, the date the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Second Continental Congress, is called Independence Day, but independence should not be conflated with freedom.   The independence called for in our founding document did not spring from the desire to estab...

Lest you thought the climate crisis had gone away, here’s a quick and dirty to disabuse you of that wishful thinking. OH, NO-O-O-O-(A)!   In early June, NOOA predicted that 2020 was shaping up to be the hottest on record in the lower 48 United States, which is saying something, since each of the last five summers has set a heat record. THE ARCTIC IS ON FIRE!   As the Guardian reported on June 25, There’s an Arctic heatwave: it’s 38° C in Siberia. Arctic sea ice coverage is the second lowest on record, and 2020 may be on course to be the hottest year since records began. The immediate effect is to increase wildfires. Siberia has seen “zombie fires” reignited from deep smouldering embers in peatland. This is bad news, releasing particulate air pollution and more carbon in 18 months than in the past 16 years.   THE CDC FAILS---AGAIN.   Heat kills.   Federal research predicts heatstroke and similar illnesses will claim tens of thous...