Posts Tagged ‘video’
In Memoriam: E. L. Konigsburg
April 26, 2013 | by Sadie Stein
E. L. Konigsburg’s death last week, at the age of eighty-three, provoked a special kind of reaction. The loss of a collective piece of our childhood can be hard to articulate, because the connection is primal, the feelings and memories intensely personal. You remember the thrill of hearing From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler read aloud in fourth grade, and reading Father’s Arcane Daughter over the summer under a tree, or Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth in the school library. There is the delight of recalling her strong, interesting characters, many of them outsiders coping with realistic childhood situations. There is the unpreachy inclusion of history and culture. There are the shockingly uncommercial titles. And, of course, the bone-deep weirdness. (To anyone who disagrees, revisit Up from Jericho Tel. I did.) Like all great children’s writers, Konigsburg never patronized her readers. But she did even more than that: she not only encouraged breaking from the ordinary, but modeled it.
A Man Pronounces the Longest Word in the World
December 13, 2012 | by Sadie Stein
If you so choose, watch one Dmitry Glubovskyi pronouncing the longest word in the world, the 189,819-letter chemical name for titin (which is, appropriately enough, the largest protein in the world). Warning: it takes three hours. To quote the Daily News, “It gets really good at the 1:32:54 mark, when a pack of corgis invades.” We’ll take their word for it.
Watch: At the Bindery
August 14, 2012 | by Sadie Stein
As we prepare to send our next issue to press, a reader kindly reminded us of this blast from the past: Reading Rainbow’s field trip to a book bindery! Warning: the stirring theme will be stuck in your head for hours.
[tweetbutton]
[facebook_ilike]
Watch: Kipling on Truth in Writing, 1933
July 26, 2012 | by Sadie Stein
We are grateful to Open Culture for drawing our attention to this rare film of Rudyard Kipling. From 1933, it shows the sixty-seven-year-old author giving a speech to the Royal Society of Literature (and guests from the Canadian Authors’ Association) at Claridge’s. “We who use words enjoy a peculiar privilege over our fellows,” observes the voice of the (already-fading) British Empire.
[tweetbutton]
[facebook_ilike]
Watch: The Mosaic Man of the East Village
July 18, 2012 | by Sadie Stein
Chances are, anyone who has spent any time in Manhattan’s East Village is familiar with the work of Jim Power, aka “The Mosaic Man.” For the past three decades, Power has been on a single-handed quest to beautify an area which, when he started decorating lampposts with beautiful tile work, was far from salubrious. Despite twenty years of homelessness and the city’s destruction of some of his lampposts, Jim has remained undeterred and is a beloved fixture of the neighborhood. Etsy—with whom Power now has a shop—pays tribute with a video.
Jim Power and the Mosaic Trail from Etsy on Vimeo.
[tweetbutton]
[facebook_ilike]
