Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the latest news, including how the coronavirus pandemic has taken hold in the U.S., American leadership amid the crisis, whether the $2.2 trillion stimulus package will help those besieged by the pandemic and whether there is a chance for bipartisan political action.
Daily Archives: April 3, 2020
Travel & History Books: “Great Camps Of The Adirondacks” – Gorgeous Updated 2nd Edition (2020)
The foremost guide to the historic camps of the Adirondacks―a unique vernacular style of rustic architecture designed to complement the land. Now available in a 
second and enlarged edition, here is the foremost guide to the historic camps within America’s spectacular forest preserve, the six million acre Adirondack Park.
When first published in 1982, Great Camps of the Adirondacks launched a campaign for the preservation of these architectural treasures while also sparking a trend in great camp-inspired home design, a cohesive approach to building that author Harvey H. Kaiser named Adirondack Rustic Style.
In this second edition, preservationists will find a success story. Designers and builders will discover page after page of inspiration. All readers will see the history of a region unfold as Americans from the mid-1870s to the late-1930s, including the very wealthiest New Yorkers, sought out the wilderness. The camps they built as private seasonal retreats are distinguished both as architectural responses to the Adirondack environment in the use of logs and stone, and as successful examples of buildings blended into the forest and the natural contours of the mountains and lakes―homes built to serve as beautiful complements to the land itself.
Harvey H. Kaiser served as the Senior Vice President for Facilities Administration and University Architect at Syracuse University between 1972 and 1995. His 1982 book Great Camps of the Adirondacks popularized the term “Great Camps” to refer to the grand summer residences that wealthy families built in the Adirondack Mountains in the nineteenth century, and revitalized interest in these sites. Several studies on western national park architecture culminated in his 2008 book The National Park Architecture Sourcebook.
Steven Engelhart is the executive director of Adirondack Architectural Heritage (AARCH) located in Keeseville, New York. AARCH is a private, nonprofit. historic preservation organization for New York State’s Adirondack Park, whose mission is to promote better public understanding, appreciation, and stewardship of the region’s architecture, communities, and historic sites.
Personal Health: “Singing The Praises Of Prevention” (The Scientist Magazine)
From Bob Grant, The Scientist Magazine (April 1, 2020):
Prevention has been playing a growing role in other diseases, infectious and 
otherwise, long before this latest global pandemic. Cancer, the focus of this issue, is ubiquitous, and one would be hard pressed to find a person anywhere on Earth whose life wasn’t in some way touched by the complex and vexing malady.
This cancer-focused issue features a cover story in which we explore one facet of cancer prevention: exercise. In this feature story, Danish researcher Bente Klarlund Pedersen explains that studies have shown frequent exercise to be useful in avoiding cancer as well as in helping cancer patients lessen the side effects of their cancers and treatments. Her research and that of others is seeking to enumerate the molecular and cellular mechanisms that underlie the benefits exercise seems to offer cancer patients.
But when one considers the practical ripples that biology sends through societies—issues of public health and the shared goal of minimizing the impact of diseases on a global scale—human behavior and prevention become vitally important.
Coronavirus (COVID-19): Safe Shopping at Stores and Pharmacies (JAMA)
Food and medicine shopping is essential during the COVID-19 pandemic, but requires getting out and standing close to strangers at a time when social distancing and sheltering-in-place are recommended to slow spread of disease.
David Aronoff, MD, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, explains how to minimize COVID-19 risk while shopping.
Health Study: Older Adults With High Glucose Levels (A1C) Have Greater Cognitive Decline
From a MedPage Today online article (April 2, 2020):
This relationship between higher glucose levels and poorer cognitive functioning extended beyond just CASI z-score, as well, Cukierman-Yaffe noted. Higher HbA1c levels were also tied to significantly poorer performance in other psychological tests, including the clock making test of executive functioning, test of discriminative ability, and for the test of verbal fluency.
Poorer glycemic control was tied to cognitive decline following a lacunar stroke in a prospective cohort study.
Among 942 individuals with type 2 diabetes who had a lacunar stroke, every 1% higher HbA1c was tied to a 0.06 drop in cognitive function at baseline measured by Cognitive Assessment Screening Instrument (CASI) z-score (95% CI -0.101 to -0.018), reported Tali Cukierman-Yaffe, MD, MSc, of Sheba Medical Center and the Sackler School of Medicine of Tel Aviv University in Israel.
Top New Travel Videos: “Days In Georgia” (Eurasia)
Filmed and Edited by: GABWORKS
Filmed in Georgia. Beautiful country, people, food, wine.
Music by Inola Gurgulia ” I’ll come ” and Inola Gurgulia ” Swanella ”
Website
Coronavirus: “Can Masks Stop You From Getting Covid-19?” (April 3, 2020)
William Schaffner, M.D., Professor of Preventive Medicine and Health Policy at Vanderbilt University, answers if masks can stop a person from contracting COVID-19.
Travel & Architecture: Inside The Greek “Villa Kérylos”, French Riviera
From a Cereal Magazine online article
Throughout, the attention to detail is meticulous: mosaic floors of mythical beasts; intricately painted ceilings of interlocking wooden beams. The walls of the Andron, traditionally the male quarters of an ancient Greek household, are streaked with three types of Tuscan marble: ochre Siena, mauve Fleur de Pêcher, and grey-white Carrara. In Mrs Reinach’s bathroom, an immense bathtub weighing one tonne is balanced on two lion paws. Above its ornamental bronze taps, a low-relief frieze depicts the chariot of Demeter. From every window stretches a panorama of glittering blue.
“THE GREEK SPIRIT WAS FOR HIM BOTH DREAM AND REALITY, MEMORY AND PRESENT…”
The descent is steep, winding, and impossibly verdant for mid-winter. It is a clear blue day in the aptly named Beaulieu-sur-Mer, a pastel-hued seaside village on the outskirts of Nice. The road is lined with climbing vines and succulents, the air redolent of pine trees in the heat. Then, after a short drive alongside a golden bay, it appears, perched atop a promontory, jutting defiantly from the Côte d’Azur.
Tribute: Architect-Author Michael Sorkin – “City Air Makes You Free” (1948-2020)
From an Apollo Magazine online article (March 31, 2020):
Ultimately he was a humane critic of the contemporary city, a serious, funny and poetic voice defending the powerless against big capital and an articulator of how architecture should be used as a tool of resistance. He is indelibly associated with New York, a city he loved with a fervour despite its faults, and of which he defended every inch as a public good. Number 210 in his list was the medieval German phrase ‘Stadtluft macht frei’ – ‘city air makes you free’. He will survive through his magical writing, which makes us all a little freer.
Michael Sorkin, who died last week of complications due to Covid-19, gained his reputation as the architecture critic of The Village Voice in New York, which, in the 1980s, was a publication with a formidable reach and impact on a city just beginning to boom again. He launched fierce attacks against the banality of the contemporary city, the rapacity and greed of developers (notably the current president, including in a 1985 piece entitled ‘Dump the Trump’) and the loss of great landmarks. But he was no nostalgist; he revelled in the potential of architecture to catalyse change and excoriated his contemporaries for caving in to big business, for building prisons and being complicit in a denuded public realm.
New Timelapse Videos: “New Zealand Total Isolation” In 4K (Apr 2020)
Filmed and Edited by: Bevan Percival
Watch in 4K, sound on. New Zealand Total Isolation is my latest time lapse show reel of the beautiful New Zealand wilderness landscapes. All sequences shot as full ‘holy grail’ time lapse scenes – that is full sequences from day through night back to day, requiring 3000 to 5000 frames each sequence.
While we are all in lock down isolation here due to the current pandemic situation we can only reminisce at present what it’s like to be out in the wilderness. If your like me and can’t stand being ‘caged up’ maybe watching this show reel unfold in front of your eyes will help ease your soul? I hope so.
So many times over the course of shooting these challenging all night scenes my body, soul, mind and gear were beaten up by the elements and bad luck or other unknown forces, however there is just something about our earth, our land and the time spent in it that just brings you back time and time again. I always seem to have unfinished business, chasing the elusive and beautiful landscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand, and I can’t wait to get back out there, soon, it’s still there, waiting.
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