What would you be willing to do for health care?
Would you take a job you hated? Would you stay in college longer than you needed? What about get married? Or stay married to someone for their health care?
Check in for tomorrow's Beyond the Headlines story that examines new statistics regarding what some people have done for health care in America.
You can now read findingDulcinea Beyond the Headlines on Google News. Our BTH stories provide background and context to news headlines, including historical, academic and local perspectives. So now you can get all of that information along side the stories from The New York Times, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and the other top news sources.
Katie Hartsough
Audience Development
Photo by Vincent Laforet for The New York Times
Last night we attended an event for NYC & Company, the official marketing and tourism partnership for New York. The event was at TheTimesCenter, part of the New York Times Tower. Most of the guests are involved in the NY tourism industry, so a lot of people from hotels, theaters, tour guides, etc.
We are involved in the group primarily because we wrote the ultimate Web Guide to New York City Survival, but also because we are a New York-based company, and it's always good to get involved in the local community and stay informed on what is happening around the city.
Appropriate for Earth Day, the folks from a new Web site called Greenopia.com introduced their concept: a local directory of eco-friendly products and services. The site is in beta, and they've started with listings for New York, Los Angeles, and San Fransisco with more cities to come.
Another person we were excited to meet was from Not for Tourists, the publishers of a series of guides to major cities (of course we link to them in our NYC Survival Guide). If you haven't checked out their Web site recently, I recommend you do. They have some great features, like every single page of their book is available in PDF format, they have a database of recommended business listings, and an Ultimate Web Index for more sites to explore.
Katie Hartsough
Audience Development
Happy Earth Day! The above image is Recycling Yard #6 by photographer Chris Jordan.
I found this article while browsing on Digg yesterday, and thought it would be appropriate to share for Earth Day. Lawrence Solomon of the Financial Post wrote the piece titled Wikipedia's Zealots about how the editorial process can be biased, especially concerning controversial topics.
The subject he was examining was climate change, beginning with a Wikipedia entry on Naomi Oreskes, professor of history and science studies at the University of California in San Diego. Solomon noticed some discrepancies in the entry, and exercising the power of the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, made the changes. A Wikipedia "editor" deleted the changes, and got into an editing war with Solomon. Solomon even confirmed the facts with the scientist they were debating about, Mr. Benny Peiser, but the editor refused to back down.
After doing some research, Solomon learned that the Wikipedia editor had used her power to edit all of the entries on climate change to reflect her own point of view. Just another reason to be careful what you believe when using a site providing user-generated content. For more serious, academic subjects, you're much better off using a more credible source.
For more on using Wikipedia effectively, check out our Web Guide to Wikipedia.
And for some Earth Day reading, the Web Guide to Green Living.
Katie Hartsough
Audience Development
What does Passover mean to me? Passover means a picture of a cow with its legs in the air.
Nearly all Reform Jews have some familiarity with the Maxwell House haggadah , which the Maxwell House (yeah, the coffee company) has been handing out for free since 1934. When I was a child, our family used an edition printed in the early 70s, with a blue cover and an illustrated version of the seder service that bordered on the cartoonish.
During the seder, everyone at the table ritually chants the names of the 10 plagues with which God afflicted the people of Egypt because Pharaoh refused to free the Jews from slavery. The fifth plague is murrain, or cattle disease, and the 1970s edition of the Maxwell House haggadah helpfully indicates this point with a lovely image of a dead cow lying on its back.
As both my grandfathers raced through the
seder, reading the Hebrew so quickly that none of the rest of us could
follow along, my sister and I would quickly grow bored waiting for
dinner to start. We’d leaf ahead in the haggadah, and one or the other
of us would land on the page picturing the 10 plagues, nudge the other
one and point to the picture of the dead cow. That would start off a
chain of giggles and earn us a reprimand from our mother.
Every
year, my sister and I would engage in this ritual, and even though
we’ve both grown up and moved on to other haggadahs, my mother always
makes sure to place a copy of the 1970s Maxwell House haggadah on the
table.
The point is, Passover is all about family and friends getting together and creating their own rituals for celebrating the joys of freedom and spiritual renewal. If you’re interested in developing your own Passover traditions (with or without cattle disease), look no further than the findingDulcinea Passover Web Guide. We’ll point you to sites that will teach you the Passover story, explain how to set up your seder plate, help you choose kosher-for-Passover wine, cook a meal that no one will forget and even design your own haggadah, should Maxwell House’s version not prove to be “good to the last drop.”
Amy Goldschlager
Editor
For many individuals, poetry seems to lack the pop and pizzazz of other
forms of artistic expression and entertainment. While this may be
superficially true, I have come to realize that the energy and drive of
a poem (at least the good ones) become apparent only from multiple
readings and intense interpretation. To extract the soul of a poem, the
reader must first be willing to bare his own. Unlike modern Western
theater and the contemporary cinematic experience (where the viewer is
rather passive, a recipient of expression), the poem requires an active
participant.
While I would love to write for hours on Keats, or Yeats, or Blake, I haven’t the time. However, because it is National Poem in Your Pocket Day (see today’s impressive Netcetera feature), I feel compelled to share a bit of Auden: "Musée des Beaux-Arts." While the poem covers a lot of philosophical and aesthetic territory, I have always valued the continual relevance of its subject matter: our ability as humans to continue our daily routines, our work, and our entertainment (or poetry reading) with the knowledge that tragedy and suffering are occurring simultaneously.
Of course, not all poetry is this somber (see Mark Doty’s "Golden Retrievals").
Anyway, for your reading pleasure:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Devin Felter
Web Production
Last night, a few of us attended our second meeting of Web2NY, a networking group for Web startups. Four Web sites presented their concepts to the group. One of the presenters, a social network called SoSauce for those serious about content creation, coincidentally was featured as our Site Spotlight on Netcetera today. The site is really great for organizing if you're someone who takes a ton of photos, travels frequently, or simply has a lot to say. Check out the below screen shots from a bike trip across the states.
The travel feature will map out your destinations, organize your photos, journal entries and even reviews of each location. This looks like a really appealing way to share your experience with others, and they can get all of that info in one spot.
The other presenters included our friend Jesse of Drawn by Pain, the folks from Tabbery and UK based recruitment site Zubka. I think everyone in the room was pretty mad that they hadn't thought up Zubka themselves. It's the ebay for jobs. You refer friends to jobs and make a lot of money for it. In NY, jobs come and go pretty quickly, so it seems I always have a friend that could use a helping hand. Hopefully, the site will soon become popular in the US.
Katie Hartsough
Audience Development
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