Sightings
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Rose Madeline Mula: If You Can’t Stand the Heat
Rose Madeline Mula Writes: “It was with considerable trepidation, therefore, that I entered the kitchen of my hostess, the legendary actress, Joan Fontaine, one long-ago Thanksgiving morning, to offer my assistance. Acting was not Miss Fontaine’s only talent. Not by a long shot. She was also a hole-in-one golfer, a prize-winning fisherwoman, a hot air…
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An Undocumented Childhood by Rose Madeline Mula
Rose Mula Writes: Some people never leave home without their American Express card; I never leave home without a camera. Digitized pictures of the twenty-five countries and forty-plus states of America that I’ve visited since my first tour of exotic New Hampshire constantly flash on my computer monitors and digital frames throughout my home, helping…
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Julia Sneden Wrote: Love Your Library
Julia Sneden Wrote: My mind’s eye can still see the face of the Children’s Librarian, although I have long since forgotten her name. We will be wise to continue to back up our knowledge of history and literature and art and science with hard copy. She kept up with my reading level, suggesting writers and…
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Julia Sneden Wrote: If The Shoe Fits … You Can Bet It’s Not Fashionable
Julia Sneden Wrote: My mother was a mini Imelda Marcos. She kept upwards of 40 pairs of shoes well into her 80’s, and was crushed when she had to give up high heels following a heart attack at the age of 89. Her sole criterion in buying shoes was style, not comfort, and she was…
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Joan L.Cannon Wrote: A Family Inheritance: More Than ‘Things’ … Emblems of Our Lives
Joan Cannon wrote: As one advances in years, one accumulates possessions the way a caddis fly larva accumulates grit. The glue that makes us carry it all along with us is in a way self-secreted as well. However, it’s psychic rather than physical — emotional rather than material. Perhaps the most obvious example is a…
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Julia Sneden Wrote: Old Dogs, New Tricks
Julia Sneden wrote: At the age of 37, I started a new career as a kindergarten teacher. My first day on the job, the lead teacher, who was in her 70’s and scared me every bit as much as she scared the children, watched me writing a note. “You’ll have to change the way you…
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Joan Cannon Writes: Finding the Right Excuse; Committing Words to Paper Because …
Joan Cannon Writes: Think of the poets and novelists and playwrights whose words sink into the consciousness of thousands and even millions and remain there, as emblems, guides, beacons of hope or warnings of disasters, and the excuse (as if one is needed) presents itself. Maybe there’s information or a revelation for some unknown viewer…
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Joan Cannon Asked: What is a Book Club? An Old-Fashioned Book Report? A Program Given By an Author? What Is the Accepted Practice?
Joan L. Cannnon wrote: A year or so ago, I was invited to attend a tea given by the combined membership of all the book clubs in the town where I now live. A presentation was scheduled for the proprietor of the much-loved local independent book store cum gift shop. She is a legend in…
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Trazando la Línea/Tracing the Line: Past, Present and Future of Cross-border Communities
“The border region is thought of as a place of violence, poverty, trafficking and pollution — sometimes and in some places it is — but it is also place of everyday life where both sides work together, shop, get married; it’s a third nation. the third nation will be here when the walls have fallen,…
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Job Hunting: Titles and Salaries of White House Office Employees
Since 1995, the White House has been required to deliver a report to Congress listing the title and salary of every White House Office employee. This report also contains the title and salary details of administration officials who work at the Office of Policy Development, including the Domestic Policy Council and the National Economic Council.
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Beginning with Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears To The Book Thief; A Summertime Book List
The NEH Summer Booklist offers suggestions of 238 books recommended for young readers. The list includes newer works such as Coraline, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and The Book Thief. “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far…
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Youth and Beauty, The Art of the American Twenties
American artists of the Jazz Age struggled to express the experience of a dramatically remade modern world, demonstrating their faith in the potentiality of youth and in the sustaining value of beauty. They took as their subjects nudes and portraits that celebrated sexual freedom and visual intimacy, as if in defiance of the restrictive routines…
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New Deal Numerology: Broccoli Roberts
Tim Price writes: This week’s numbers: 80; 23%; 67%; 6%; 17 million 80 … is an activist number. That’s how many years it’s been since the Supreme Court voted as conservatively as it does now, according to a recent study.
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SCOTUS Blog: The Health Care Law Upheld
We have focused on the blog of the Supreme Court which is written by lawyers and law professors about the Supreme Court. The site frequently hosts symposiums with leading experts on the cases before the Court.
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Floor of the Senate: Harry Reid’s Remarks About Rand Paul’s Proposed Life at Conception Amendment to Flood Insurance Reauthorization
Nevada Senator Harry Reid tells Congress that a Republican’s proposed amendment regarding “when life begins” does not belong on a bill to reauthorize flood insurance programs.
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A Favorite Shopping Source: The National Building Museum
Almost a quarter of a century ago (we tend to round up numbers) we made the first of many visits to the National Building Museum — and its shop — in Washington, DC. Today we eat daily on flatware designed by Robert Venturi for Swid Powell that we acquired on a sale at the shop.
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Artists in France: “It is the loveliest country you ever saw, the red brown roofs, the white houses, and the green fields.”
The ‘impressive Normandy coast proved an artistic crucible for European and American artists during the course of the 19th and 20th centuries’ while Portland-born artist Mildred Burrage, who as a young aspiring painter traveled in the early 1900s to Giverny, France. She trained her eye on the landscape, creating paintings and filling sketchbooks with her…
