Jim Robbins is a New York Times science writer. Ten years ago he began seeing the dense pine forest surrounding his Montana home die off, killed by the mountain pine beetle infestation. That attack, enabled by warmer winters, is still destroying northern forests. It’s evidence of how global warming is adding to centuries of deforestation. […]
William S. Kowinski
Posted inArts + Scene
Classic Magic
The Tempest is Shakespeare’s last play and in some ways a summation. For one thing it’s a kind of anthology of clips from his greatest hits: there’s the royal treachery of his histories, a romance in a pastoral setting, a philosophical protagonist, spectacle, magic, music and a couple of clowns. It’s rare if not singular […]
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HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years On Earth
In 2005 environmental journalist Mark Hertsgaard began hearing some deeply unsettling news about the effects of global warming called climate change, primarily from scientists in Europe: Climate change was no longer something that might happen in the future. It was already happening, and it would continue getting worse for at least the next 25 years, […]
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40 Years of Astonishment
She was a Humboldt State political science major who took a voice class on a dare. She sang in public for the first time in Amahl and the Night Visitors, the first show produced by the Humboldt Light Opera Company. It was December 1973. Now voice teacher Carol McWhorter Ryder runs the company, and she […]
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America The Possible: Manifesto For A New Economy
James Speth is a veteran environmentalist, and this is the latest book by an environmental veteran about how Americans can successfully address a future dominated by climate change. But his subtitle is not deceptive: He identifies the economy as the crucial element. The book is divided into four parts: what’s wrong now, a vision […]
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Art Miner
A synopsis of The Pitmen Painters, now on stage at Redwood Curtain in Eureka, has a familiar sound: based on a true story, it’s about coal miners who take up painting and astound the art world. But this is not The Full Monty (unemployed British steel workers triumph with a male striptease), Calendar Girls (Yorkshire […]
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How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One
“Surely mankind’s greatest invention is the sentence,” asserts Irish writer John Banville, and he’ll get no argument from me. For writers trying to orchestrate the elements of a novel, story, screenplay, report, memoir or other form, it’s good advice as well as good practice to remember the prime importance of the first construction: the sentence. […]
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Net Smart: How to Thrive Online
Howard Rheingold has a white moustache. He dresses like the prototype of an aging hippie, but he’s been involved in personal computer theory and practice for 30 years. His social network experience goes back to one of the earliest example, San Francisco’s legendary The Well. Younger readers may know him as the author of […]
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To Phrase a Coin
David Mamet’s plays of the 1980s were warily praised as uncomfortably kinetic portraits of mostly white men jostling on the precarious edge of the American dream. His 1984 drama about a cutthroat band of real estate salesmen, Glengarry Glen Ross, won the Pulitzer Prize. But it was his 1977 Broadway debut that first ignited controversy […]
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2312: A Novel
It’s 300 years in the future and planet Earth is predictably hot — “almost an ice-free planet,” with swaths of the northern hemisphere as hot as the equator now, and the oceans 35 feet higher. Florida is underwater and Manhattan is flooded but inhabited: the 24th century Venice. An attempted technological solution to block sunlight […]
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But To Love
Starting Thursday, an ad hoc group of familiar North Coast actors presents the first English language production anywhere of Requiem, a play by Heinrich Liebrecht about his experiences in Nazi concentration camps and afterward. In part — and improbably — it is a love story. Liebretcht’s concentration camp memoir in book form has been called […]
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The Year That Was
“Drama is a mansion with an almost infinite number of rooms,” wrote Michael Billington, the great drama critic for the Guardian. “I see no point in shutting off any of them.” As I’ve noted on other occasions, there are gaps in the North Coast theatrical ecology. But it’s worth noticing the variety that does […]