We wish everyone a peaceful and safe holiday this week! Here’s what we’ve got from this past week:
Via Indian Country, reading Charles C. Mann’s 1491 tops the American Indian College Fund’s recommended list of ways to observe Native American Heritage Month in November.
Kyle Thiermann’s least-planned youtube video, on the trash epidemic in Bali, has ended up his most popular! At Conscious Connection, on why he started making these videos: “My friends, and surfers in general, are good people, they want to help. But they’re not super amped to watch an hour-and-a-half-long documentary. My original intention with making these videos was to tell these stories in a more bite-sized, digestible way.”
Anticipating his appearance in Syracuse, its Post Standard interviewed Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson on the war-driven policies that expanded the US’ space program in the 1960s. “I joke that I want to go to [a Chinese] leader and say, can you leak a memo that says you want to put military bases on Mars? It doesn’t have to be true. It leaks and then the Pentagon finds it and then we go ballistic and we have humans on Mars in 10 months.”
Buffalo News reviews Richard Rodriguez’ new book Darling, whose essays, in Rodriguez’ words, “are intended to delight the reader with complexity.” The reviewer attests that Rodriguez accomplishes this task with his “lucid writing,” successfully “opening up a complicated issue with clarity.” The Washington Post is similarly impressed with Rodriguez’ “beautiful examples of thinking something through with not just intelligence and verve but wholeheartedness and compassion.”
Kathleen Hanna tells the New York Times that her initial reaction to participating in The Punk Singer, the new documentary about her, was “‘Hell no!’ Every single thing I’ve ever done in my life, I’ve been like, ‘This is the worst possible time I could do this’ — and then I went ahead and did it.” Meanwhile, IFC just posted a 1:32 clip of the film, which explains the role of fanzines and the significance of Hanna’s Valley Girl inflections. xoJane interviews Hanna and finds out, among other things, just how tall she really is!
Cambodia’s Phnom Penh Post reports on Arn Chorn Pond, who “has dedicated most of his adult life to restoring traditional Cambodian arts,” and his new project, wherein “he takes a bus load of musicians to showcase their instruments and talent in remote rural areas.” Musician and genocide survivor, Pond told the Post: “People are so happy about hearing music for the first time in their lives, imagine that, to have for the first time someone to sing for them and someone to come to their village – they feel like God, they feel so important.”