a blind flaneur

Marc Chagall. The Couple (A Holy Family). Oil on canvas. 1909. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris. [Source: Wikipaintings]

• Marc Chagall – WikiPaintings.org
• The Couple (A Holy Family) – Marc Chagall – WikiPaintings.org
  Gallery: Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
• Marc Chagall. Red Nude Sitting Up. – Olga’s Gallery
  Marc Chagall. Red Nude Sitting Up. 1908. Oil on canvas. 90 x 70 cm. Private collection.
• Robert Owen – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Robert Owen (14 May 1771 – 17 November 1858) was a Welsh social reformer and one of the founders of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement.
• Frances Wright – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Frances Wright (September 6, 1795 – December 13, 1852) also widely known as Fanny Wright, was a Scottish-born lecturer, writer, freethinker, feminist, abolitionist, and social reformer, who became a U. S. citizen in 1825. That year she founded the Nashoba Commune in Tennessee as a utopian community to prepare slaves for emancipation, intending to create an egalitarian place, but it lasted only three years. Her Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) brought her the most attention as a critique of the new nation.
• Historic Greene County: an … – Catherine Kidd Wilson, Greene County Historical Society (Greene County, Ohio) – Google Books
• Greene County, Ohio History
  History Of Greene County, Together With Historic Notes On The Northwest, And The State Of Ohio. Gleaned From Early Authors, Old Maps Any) Manuscripts, Private And Official Correspondence, And All Other Authentic Sources. By R. S. Dills. Illustrated. Dayton, Ohio: Odell & Mayer, Publishers. 1881.
• Michael Lewis, How The Financial Crisis Created A ‘New Third World’ : NPR 100411
  LEWIS: “I worked on Wall Street and the Wall Street I left you could say a lot of things about it, but the people were doing the complicated stuff, they weren’t stupid. If they constructed a bet, the last thing you wanted to do was be on the other side of that debt. Somehow Wall Street became the dumb money and I didn’t see it coming. Wall Street became the dumb money at the table. The people constructing the bets for the big Wall Street firms constructed bets that you did want to be on the other side of, that ended up being huge losing bets for the Wall Street firms. And that shocked me. I mean I had turned to my eye away from Wall Street to sports when this whole financial crisis got going. And when I saw how much money these smart guys who traded derivatives inside the Wall Street firms had lost for their Wall Street firms it took my breath away because I realized that somehow these big firms had become dumb. And how that happened is in some ways at the center of this whole event.”
• Digital Public Library of America
  The DPLA Steering Committee is leading the first concrete steps toward the realization of a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all. The vision of a national digital library has been circulating among librarians, scholars, educators, and private industry representatives since the early 1990s, but it has not yet materialized. Efforts led by a range of organizations, including the Library of Congress, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive, have successfully built resources that provide books, images, historical records, and audiovisual materials to anyone with Internet access. Many universities, public libraries, and other public-spirited organizations have digitized materials that could be brought together under the frame of the DPLA, but these digital collections often exist in silos.
• MediaBerkman » Blog Archive » RB 185: The Next Generation Library 101711
  What would a digital version of your public library look like? There’s more to it than e-books and digital reading devices. Librarians, scholars, innovators, and techno-wizards are collaborating under the mantle of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to build a next generation public library. Such a thing could incorporate one or more of many different elements: a set of physical buildings; a purely digital archive with an open API layer for coders to play around with; a full fledged digital lending library. And when the DPLA converge on the National Archives in Washington, DC this Friday (you can check out the agenda and tune in to a livestream here) they’ll get to work out just a few of those ideas.
• MediaBerkman » Blog Archive » RB 184: Intellectual Property — Not Just For Lawyers Anymore 101211
  It’s time to stop thinking about intellectual property as something purely for your legal counsel to deal with. That’s the driving idea behind John Palfrey’s aptly titled new book Intellectual Property Strategy. Companies and institutions that have to worry about creative works, trademarks, or brands would be well-suited, Palfrey says, to seize the sword and shield from the attorneys (who tend to be aggressive and/or defensive about IP) and exercise a little more flexibility and creativity with intellectual property on their own. Palfrey sat down with David Weinberger for this week’s Radio Berkman to talk about why.
• Spark 159 – October 23 & 26, 2011 | Spark
  There’s been a sharp decline in the number of young people studying Computer Science. Mark Allemang is a professor at Sault College in Sault Ste Marie Ontario who has seen this decline first hand, as more and more courses are canceled in community college. But why do so-called digital natives lack interest in pursuing careers in tech fields? David Ticoll is the executive director of the Canadian Coalition for Tomorrow’s ICT Skills, and he thinks the key is in not limiting education in computers to a hard category of ‘computer science’, but in thinking of educating young people in hybrid skills. (Runs 10:00)
• Full Interview: Douglas Rushkoff on Program or Be Programmed | Spark 101211
  Nora Young: “Today I interviewed Douglas Rushkoff, an author and keen observer of new media and digital culture. I wanted to talk to him about his most recent book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. He argues that in learning to code, or at least learning a little about coding, we can better understand the biases of digital technology, and the design decisions that go into our digital technologies. In short, we don’t need to be passive consumers of new technology.”
• Full Interview: Rob Spence on Cyborgs, Eyeborgs, and Human Augmentation | Spark 100511
  Rob Spence is a documentary filmmaker. He’s also a self-described cyborg. His latest project, Deus Ex: The Eyeborg Documentary launched in conjunction with the launch of a video game called Deus Ex: Human Revolution. In it, Rob looks at the current state of cybernetics, and asks how far off a Deus Ex-like future might be.
• CFP 2012 ADA: Multiple Perspectives on Access, Inclusion, and Disability
  April 24-25, 2012 | Proposals are due December 5th, 2011 | The theme for the Twelfth Annual Multiple Perspectives, “Experience Understood in Image, Poetry, Narrative and Research” reaches across disciplines, professions and modes of knowing for a fuller understanding of disability. The theme facilitates our twelve year exploration of disability as a reflection of the human condition as seen through the lenses of environmental, theoretical and social constructs as well as personal experience. Preference will be given to presentations that encourage conversations across the typical divisions (medical and social, education and employment, research and practice, business and government, rights and charity …) or focus on the parallels, distinctions and intersections with race, gender and ethnicity.
• Catherine Deneuve | Playboy Cover Archive
  refer link to Catherine Deneuve post
• Browse By Author: H – Project Gutenberg
  See listings for Nathaniel and Julian Hawthorne

• Pacific Standard Time – Home
  Pacific Standard Time is an unprecedented collaboration of cultural institutions across Southern California coming together to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene. Beginning October 2011, over 60 cultural institutions will make their contributions to this region-wide initiative encompassing every major L.A. art movement from 1945 to 1980. Celebrate the era that continues to inspire the world.
• Pacific Standard Time Tells An L.A. Art Story : NPR 100111
  Over the past 10 years, the wealthy L.A.-based Getty Foundation has doled out about $10 million in grants to help launch Pacific Standard Time, an unprecedented collaboration between more than 60 cultural institutions with one grand theme in mind: the birth of the L.A. art scene from 1945 to 1980.
• Sailor Charts Solo Trip Into The Record Books : NPR 100111
  Matt Rutherford is sailing around North and South America. He wants to be the first person to do the 23,000-mile trip alone and without stopping. RUTHERFORD: It’s like “The Odyssey,” except I’m not getting laid at all. GUTIERREZ: We connected when he anchored up in the Aleutian Islands to get a new water purifier and some fuel for his stove. The rules for contact were so strict that I couldn’t get on his boat to interview him, and I had to shout out questions from the supply boat. Rutherford … was more excited for the hot pizza and the cold beer that we ferried over. RUTHERFORD: It’s almost so good and so strange that you can’t even wrap your mind around it. You know, it’s like you’re drinking beer, and it’s great to be drinking a beer, but it’s so great to be drinking a beer that it’s almost like you’re not drinking a beer? [Chesapeake Regional Accessible Boating a non-profit that works with people with disabilities, gave him the boat for the trip. His website: solotheamericas.org.]
• Alibis – Essays on Elsewhere – By André Aciman – Book Review – NYTimes.com 100711
  After this inspiration, “Alibis” exhales into a pursuit of evanescence. Most of its chapters are travel essays, and Aciman is a spirited guide, sensitive to history but alive also to food, sunshine, art and aimless wandering. The pleasure of reading him resides in the pleasure of his company. He knows a lot, and often gets carried away, but he also knows how to doubt himself. If his destinations seem conventional — Paris, Barcelona, Rome — his engagement with them is idiosyncratic. His mission is to “unlock memory’s sluice gates,” and it is a mission he accomplishes through the art of the essay itself: “You write not after you’ve thought things through; you write to think things through.”
• NYT bookreview.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object) 100711
  This week, Stephen Greenblatt on his new book “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern”; Andre Aciman discusses his new collection of travel essays called “Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere”; Jacques Steinberg profiles athletes who compete in the most grueling triathalons in “You Are An Ironman”; Julie Bosman has notes from the field; and Jennifer Schuessler has best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host.
• Misha Glenny: Hire the hackers! | Video on TED.com
  Despite multibillion-dollar investments in cybersecurity, one of its root problems has been largely ignored: who are the people who write malicious code? Underworld investigator Misha Glenny profiles several convicted coders from around the world and reaches a startling conclusion.
• ‘DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You’ – Exploring the World of Cybercrime | PRI’s The World 101011
  Anchor Marco Werman talks about the borderless world of international cyber crime with Misha Glenny, whose new book is called “DarkMarker: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You.”
• Ayesha Khanna on smart cities and the Hybrid Age | Spark
  According to Ayesha Khanna, the end of the so-called “Information Age” is nigh. Ayesha is the the director of the Hybrid Reality Institute, and she says we’re starting to enter a new age — the “Hybrid Age” — which is characterized by pervasive computing, biotechnology and nanotechnology, and “the emergence of technologies as a social actor.” That is, a time defined by our social interactions with the machines around us. This week, Nora interviewed Ayesha Khanna about the hybrid age, and about another of Ayesha’s areas of expertise: smart cities. You can hear the full, uncut interview or download the MP3. [runs 32:15]
• Spark 157 – October 2 & 5, 2011 | Spark
  Psychology professor Jennifer Steeves of York University explains how human beings recognize one another compared to facial recognition software. And Alessandro Acquisti from Carnegie Mellon University reveals some surprising research into how regular recognition tech can identify “anonymous” people. | Jure Leskovec is an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford, and he analyses past human behaviour online to predict future outcomes. And he’s discovered he can correctly predict who your next friends on Facebook will be. | What happens when cities can monitor and respond to the people who live in them? There is no end to the Spark obsession with this question. Ayesha Khanna, director of the Hybrid Reality Institute, talks to Nora Young about the potential, and the challenges of smart cities, and what becomes possible when sensors are embedded everywhere.
• Steve Jobs and Apple’s Innovative Advertising – On The Media 100711
  Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs died this week at the age of 56. Bob remembers the tech giant, and discusses Apple’s iconic “1984″ Super Bowl commercial, which he says is one of the best advertisements ever made.
• Spoilers Don’t Spoil Anything – On The Media 100711
  A recent study from the University of California, San Diego says that, despite what we might expect, spoilers don’t actually spoil our enjoyment of a story—at least not in books. In fact, knowing the ending might even make us enjoy stories more. Brooke spoke to Jonah Lehrer of Wired, who wrote about the study.
• The Loss of a Valuable Journalistic Tool – On The Media 100711
  For years, health care reporters have employed a government database called the National Practitioner Data Bank, containing information on malpractice payouts. The public version of the database hides the names of physicians, but after a reporter was able to identify an anonymous doctor, the public database was taken offline. Bob talks to Charles Ornstein of the Association of Health Care Journalists about why the database is important, and attempts by journalists to regain access to it.
• Occupy Wall Street – On The Media 100711
  The world watches as Occupy Wall Street approaches its fourth week of protests in lower Manhattan and similar demonstrations pop up around the country—but this new-found media attention was slow to catch on. Brooke speaks with Bill Dobbs, a press representative for OWS about what they are doing to generate media coverage. Then Brooke speaks with Michael Kazin, author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, about what needs to happen before protests are transformed into a movement.

• VIDEO: Wanna Live Forever? Become A Noun : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR 092811
  STEVE INSKEEP, host: Now, the average American male lives for 76 years; the average female, around 80, and then slowly we tiptoe out of life and memory until one day nobody knows our name. Unless, says our science correspondent Robert Krulwich, unless we do something so unusual that w
• ‘Retirement Heist’: How Firms Trimmed Pensions : NPR 092911
  Companies have claimed for years that old-style pensions were unsustainable. Author Ellen Schultz tells Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep that there’s another explanation. “The main narrative is that [companies] are struggling to pay both their pensions and these unexpectedly high health care costs for the retirees,” Schultz says. “What isn’t known is that companies were well-prepared for this phenomenon. The plans were in fact significantly overfunded. They had more than enough to pay every dime for every person currently employed and already retired.” Schultz investigated the changes in pension plans as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and has written a book called Retirement Heist.
• The ‘Worm’ That Could Bring Down The Internet : NPR 092711
  As many as 12 million computers worldwide have been infected with a highly encrypted computer worm called Conficker. Writer Mark Bowden details how Conficker was discovered, how it works, and the ongoing programming battle to bring down Conficker in his book Worm: The First Digital World War.
• Cheeseheads Take Issue With Anti-Cheese Billboard : NPR 092611
  A billboard went up near the Green Bay Packers’ stadium showing the grim reaper decked out in a cheesehead hat. A physicians group promoting vegan diets says its new ad simply points out that cheese can be unhealthy. Green Bay’s mayor says this is silly. As he put it, “We love our cheeseheads and we love our cheese.”
• delicious beta status
  Welcome to the Delicious Beta Status blog. During the beta period, this page will serve as the primary source for engineering team updates on migration issues, bugs we’re fixing, and feedback we’re receiving from the community.
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne – Project Gutenberg
• The Scarlet Letter – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  The Scarlet Letter is an 1850 romantic work of fiction in a historical setting, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is considered to be his magnum opus.[1] Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an adulterous affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the book, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.

• The Hacker Toolkit: Social Engineering – On The Media 092311
  Alex Goldman: “There’s an air of alchemy and mystery that surrounds the world of hacking, because it’s perceived as being so technical. That’s part of what makes hacking seem so illicit to non-hackers. But some of the most well known hackers have obtained information using an incredibly low-tech method. That method is called “social engineering.” Put simply, social engineering is the process of fooling people into divulging sensitive information. In a lot of ways, it’s not too far off from calling your high school pretending to be your parents in order to excuse an absence. If you can convince people that you are entitled to access certain information, or even trick them into creating situations where you can get access to it, you’re a successful social engineer.”
• Word Watch: Hacker – On The Media 092311
  This year we’ve heard stories about hacking, from The News of the World scandal to the exploits of groups like Anonymous and Lulzsec. But the way the media uses the word hack diverges sharply from the way it’s used by actual hackers. On the Media Producer Alex Goldman explores the history of the word and how its meaning has shifted over time.
• The Hacker Law – On The Media 092311
  Passed in 1986, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was specifically meant to target hacking. But in recent years it’s been used to prosecute a much wider swath of behavior, some of which has nothing to do with hacking. Marcia Hofmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation talks to Brooke about the perils of having such a vague law on the books.
• Death for Blogging – On The Media 092311
  Last week the mutilated bodies of a man and a woman were found dangling from a pedestrian overpass in the Mexican boarder town of Nuevo Laredo, with notes explicitly warning that those posting the wrong things on the internet will share the same fate. As Drug cartels in Mexico turn their sights on blogs and twitter feeds, the mostly-anonymous social media may have an advantage that eludes mainstream journalism. Louis Nevaer of New America Media discusses the drug wars and the possibility of a newly empowered Mexican social body.
• Mexican Drug Cartels Now Menace Social Media : NPR 092311
  In areas where they are powerful, the Mexican drug cartels silenced the mainstream media by threatening and killing journalists. Now they seem to be extending the practice to social media. Many Mexicans have had to rely on social media to find out what’s going on in their cities after newspapers, TV and radio stations stopped reporting on drug-related violence. But last week, the mangled bodies of a young man and woman were hung from a highway bridge in Nuevo Laredo along with a sign that read: “This is what happens to people who post funny things on the Internet. Pay attention.”
• Neurotic Physiology blog at Scientopia.org
  Scicurious has a PhD in Physiology from a Southern institution. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at a celebrated institution that is very fancy and somewhere else. Her professional interests are in neurophysiology, specifically the interactions of neurotransmitter systems. Having obtained her PhD, she wishes to further her career in science writing, education, and research. She often blogs in the third person.
• Spark 155 – September 18 & 21, 2011 | Spark
  Do you know anyone who staunchly refuses to carry a cell phone? Or simply won’t sign up for a Facebook account? Turns out, there’s a name for that: “technology refusal.” Nora interviewed Alice Marwick, who studies social software at Microsoft Research and recently wrote a blog post titled “If you don’t like it, don’t use it. It’s that simple.”
• ‘The Swerve’: The Ideas That Rooted The Renaissance : NPR 092011
  Stephen Greenblatt chronicles the unlikely discovery of Lucretius’ poem “On the Nature of Things” — by a 15th-century Italian book hunter. “The Swerve” is a masterfully written meditation on the fragile inheritance of ideas. | “As Greenblatt’s story reminds us, there have been other, much grimmer times in history when books as objects very nearly disappeared — without Kindles, Nooks or iPads to take their place. At the center of The Swerve is the forgotten story of a 15th-century Italian book hunter named Poggio Bracciolini, who set out on several expeditions throughout monasteries on the Continent and England, hoping to discover some lost classical texts. Poggio served as scribe and secretary in the Papal Court, a place he cynically thought of as, “The Lie Factory.” But his passion was for books, especially for the ancient authors, copies of whose books, if they survived at all, had been squirreled away in monasteries.” [includes link to book excerpt]
• This Pig Wants To Party: Maurice Sendak’s Latest : NPR 092011
  “Bumble-ardy” is a deeply imaginative tale about an orphaned pig who longs for a birthday party. Sendak, who is 83, wrote and illustrated the book while caring for his longtime partner, who died of cancer in 2007. “I did Bumble-ardy to save myself,” Sendak says. “I did not want to die with him.”» E-Mail This » Add to Del.icio.us
• Freakonomics: Where have all the hitchhikers gone? | Marketplace From American Public Media 092111
  Besides the fear of an axe murderer, there are valid reasons why hitchhiking has died off. Freakonomics Radio’s Stephen Dubner discusses those reasons and tells us why you should care. “If you care even a little bit about transportation, about cost and congestion and accident risk, carbon emissions, all of that, you’ve got to be depressed to learn the following thing — about 80 percent of all passenger-vehicle capacity in this country goes unused.”
• Bioethicist HPV Bet Ends Without Bachmann Acknowledgement – Bloomberg 092211
  Bioethicist Art Caplan said his challenge to Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann for evidence that a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer caused mental retardation ended without Bachmann acknowledging it. Caplan, director of the center for bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, offered to pay $10,000 to a charity of Bachmann’s choice if she could find such a patient by noon today. Bachman claimed in television interviews on Sept. 13 that a woman told her that the shot, usually given at age 12, triggered mental retardation in the woman’s daughter.
• Study: Women’s Memory More Receptive To Low Voice : NPR 092011
  Melissa Block and Lynn Neary learn from researcher Kevin Allan of the University of Aberdeen King’s College in Scotland that women remember better when spoken to in a low-pitch voice. This helps women to pick a suitable partner.

Frank Shay closed his Greenwich Village bookshop during the slow summer months so he could peddle books on Cape Cod using a Ford truck outfitted as a mobile “bookwagon.” [Source: Harry Ransom Center/ University of Texas]

• The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920-1925
  In the early 1920s, noteworthy visitors to Frank Shay’s bookshop at 4 Christopher Street began autographing the narrow door that opened onto the shop’s office. Signed by 242 artists, writers, publishers, and other notable habitués of Greenwich Village, this unusual artifact is now housed at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin. A literal portal to the past, the door reveals the rich mix of innovators—from anarchist poets to major commercial publishers—that defined this slice of Bohemia from 1920 to 1925. This exhibition reconstructs the bookshop and its community. The door is not accompanied by an archive of the bookshop, so this project seeks to create a virtual “archive” on the web. Artifacts gathered from across the Ransom Center’s collections provide audiences with documentation of the shop’s operations and the lives and careers of its customers. This is an ongoing project: we hope that audience participation will enrich the project with further information.
• Essay — A Portal to 1920s Greenwich Village — by Jennifer Schuessler – NYTimes.com 090111
  Jennifer Schuessler: “Three years ago, a most unusual artifact resurfaced in a storage space of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It was a narrow pine door, edged in bright blue paint and covered with some 242 signatures, many of them smudged or adorned with elaborate doodles. It turned out to be from Frank Shay’s bookstore, a popular Greenwich Village establishment that opened for business at 4 Christopher Street in 1920. It was removed by the manager when the shop closed in 1925 and bought by the Ransom Center in 1960, after a dealer spotted an ad in the Saturday Review asking, “Want a door?” A 1972 article in the Ransom Center’s journal identified 50 people behind the signatures before the door fell back into obscurity, as forgotten as most of the characters who had scratched their names on its surface. But now, a new exhibition, “The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920-1925,” identifies some 140 additional signatures…”
• The Mechanic Muse — From Scroll to Screen – NYTimes.com 090211
  Lev Grossman: “Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It’s shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes. We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all. The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was circa 1450, when Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type. But if you go back further there’s a more helpful precedent for what’s going on. Starting in the first century A.D., Western readers discarded the scroll in favor of the codex — the bound book as we know it today. | The codex … created a very different reading experience… you could jump to any point in a text instantly, nonlinearly. You could flip back and forth between two pages and even study them both at once. You could cross-check passages and compare them… You could skim if you were bored, and jump back to reread your favorite parts. “
• Believing Is Seeing – By Errol Morris – Book Review – NYTimes.com 090111
  One of the first things we learn in “Believing Is Seeing” is that its author, the filmmaker Errol Morris, has limited sight in one eye and lacks normal stereoscopic vision — “My fault,” he writes, for refusing to wear an eye patch after being treated for strabismus in childhood. It’s hard to think of another writer who so neatly embodies the theme of his own book. “Believing Is Seeing” is about the limitations of vision, and about the inevitable idiosyncrasies and distortions involved in the act of looking — in particular, looking at photographs.
• Daniel Yergin Examines America’s ‘Quest’ For Energy : NPR
  The ad is part of an intensifying debate over hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” — the process energy companies use to get a certain kind of natural gas out of the ground. Fracking is also one of the many subjects energy expert Daniel Yergin covers in his new book, The Quest. Yergin tells NPR’s David Greene that the type of natural gas obtained through fracking, the gas found in shale, only recently became a serious energy source for the U.S. [Includes link to book excerpt]
• Jon Hendricks: The Father Of Vocalese At 90 : NPR 091611
  Jon Hendricks turned 90 on Friday. The singer and lyricist is best known for his work with Lambert, Hendricks and Ross in the 1950s, putting words to jazz — including insanely complex vocal arrangements of instrumental solos. One of Hendricks’ favorite anecdotes involves a party where the wives of composer Jerome Kern and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II had a little dispute over who wrote “Old Man River.” “Beg your pardon. Your husband wrote, ‘Da da da da.’ My husband wrote ‘Old Man River,’ ” Hendricks recalls, laughing. “And that’s a good illustration of how the lyric brings the song out like a flower blossoms. It’s the lyric that makes the song.”
  Jon Hendricks writes his own songs — words and music — and is also a critically acclaimed jazz singer. But he’s best known for fashioning lyrics to the big-band arrangements of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Woody Herman — not just the melodies, but all of the parts, down to the most technically demanding solos.
• How Can Parents Navigate Children’s TV Shows? : NPR 091511
  Michele Norris speaks with Dr. Dimitri Christakis about how parents can navigate the world of children’s TV programs. A new study done at the University of Virginia with a group of 4 year olds found those who’d watched the fast-paced cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants performed worse on mental function tests than their peers who watched the slower-paced cartoon Calliou or who simply spent their time drawing. Christakis says young children’s brains get over-stimulated by the faster-paced programs, and urges parents to think about what kind of television-watching experience they want their children to have.