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While watching the marvelous movie  Landfill Harmonic  (more on this in a later post), I noticed that a pivotal moment in the lives of the young musicians from the margins of Asunción was the opportunity to bring their music to another country. That the country was Brazil -- and no less an iconic locale than Ipanema Beach in Rio -- made it even more exhilarating for these young people. Photo:  Ipanema Inn Until that moment in the film, I had not really thought about what it means to live in a land-locked country. The Western Hemisphere has only two -- Paraguay and Bolivia -- and I had thought about the disadvantages only in terms of economic and military limitations. But of course it also means that these entire countries are populated by people who can only go to a real beach if they travel internationally. Since most people never leave their home countries, this means that the landlocked might pass their entire lives without the deeply profound experience of standing on the edge of l

Image: Dustin Ranem, New City Times Most coffee fiends (and mavens ) with an internet connection have seen some version of the quote above, perhaps noting the irony of the pejorative reference to the sacred animal associated with coffee's origin myth -- Kaldi's goats . I have always read this as a quote -- perhaps apocryphal -- in the voice of the great composer himself. I can imagine him requiring quite a bit of coffee in order to focus on his great works. I learned only today that the original quote refers to bowls, not cups, of coffee -- and more importantly that it is in the voice of a fictional character, a young woman named Lieschen. She is part of a coffee cantata (or small opera) that Johann Sebastian Bach wrote for friends at Café Zimmerman -- one of at least eight Leipzig coffee shops  that were important to the composer. The full libretto of Cantata BMV 221 is available in English, and various recordings are available on YouTube. My favorite is this version, which

Source: Margaret Crofoot et al by way of NPR Click map to enlarge My title is not exactly correct, but I could not resist. Skilled humans combined art and geotechnology to make the maps based on animal movements in Where the Animals Go , an award-winning collection of 50 maps published by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti.  In her review The Science and Art of Mapping Animal Movements , public-radio journalist Barbara King describes some of the varieties of approaches taken to the maps, and the ways in which they yield results that are at once scientifically valuable and aesthetically pleasing. Lagniappe The combination of art with technology is trending in education circles as "STEM to STEAM," which refers to adding A rt to S cience, T echnology, E ngineering & M ath (STEM -- itself an educational fad that was made necessary by misguided reforms that reduced focus on these subjects). To which geographers back to Ptolemy say, "We were doing STEM to STEAM before it wa

Photo: The Tiffany Curtain Rises , CDMX Last Thursday would have been the 100th birthday of Amalia Hernandez , who established the legendary Ballet Folklórico de México , which my favorite librarian and I had the privilege of watching in 1989 . In my geography of Latin America class that day, I talked about the dance program, and about the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, in which we saw it. We climbed many staircases before emerging into this remarkable theater on one of its topmost balconies. We were stunned by the glass curtain, which we learned years later was made by Tiffany. And I learned just now that it was created in 1912 of a million pieces of crystal. It depicts two of my favorite volcanoes -- Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl -- which would have been visible from the cite of the palace before the city -- and smog -- obstructed the view. The view, I told my students, was unknown to most in Mexico City, because its legendary smog has only lifted fully once in the lifetimes of

In the "Trials of the Free Press" episode of his podcast, journalist Sam Sanders has a meta-meta discussion about the vulnerability of journalism -- and therefore of democracy itself -- to the legal maneuverings of a few disgruntled elites. Fellow NPR journalist David Folkenflik  and filmmaker Brian Knappenberger join Sanders to discuss Nobody Speak: The Trials of a Free Press . Written and directed by Knappenberger, the film starts with Hulk Hogan's legal takedown of the admittedly trashy news site Gawker. It delves deeper, however, into the strategies of those who envision a world with no free press at all -- and who might just have enough money to make it happen.   Image: IMDb Lagniappe I am famous (at least in my own household) for forgetting the names of films and characters, and for simply substituting my own synonyms. I'm like a walking, pointless thesaurus in that way. So when we were looking for this film on Netflix, I first misdirected Pam to the title &qu