‘Cover Stories’ Archives
Publisher”™s Jacket Preview “The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable” By AMITAV GHOSH; The University of Chicago Press, 2016
“Ghosh”™s book serves as a great writer”™s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.” “Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations will think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of non-fiction since “In an Antique Land”, Ghosh examines our inability”“-at the level of literature, history and politics””to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. “The extreme nature of today”™s climate events, Ghosh asserts, makes them peculiarly resisitant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross [...]
Dorothy Benson: Daughter”™s Tribute “I guess because they were hungry.”
By MICHELLE BENSON Dorothy Benson, my mother, was a resident of the Phillips Neighborhood since the early 1950”™s. She and my father fought very hard against “Model Cities”** in the sixties which were trying to isolate and divide Phillips Neighborhood by building freeways like what happened to Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul. They were both very immersed in the DFL (Democratic Farmer Labor party), politics, PNIA (Phillips Neighborhood Improvement Association), and Neighborhood activism. Dorothy Benson Philips Neighborhood is where she raised us; a family of six children. While the youngest was in diapers, the oldest was in college. My father worked a day job while my mom had a day care business along with the full time job of raising us, too. However, we were not the only children mom inspired along the way. My sister reminded me of the Christmases when mom took neighborhood kids in, five or six at a time, and they made homemade Christmas cookies from [...]
City Council and Staffs opposing plan ”“ Phillips seeks jobs, food & housing that are green and community-guided
Brief Background by The Alley Newspaper Land and buildings in every sector of Phillips have been challenged by large institutions, smaller non-profits, businesses, public schools, parks, and the City and County since the City was founded. The colonizing of this land and its people centuries ago seems to have set a pattern that is extremely difficult to overcome. Phillips has suffered many losses throughout the large, 21,000 population neighborhood, but the southeast corner of Phillips has had an unequal amount of threats and (a few successes) like the 12-year-long Garbage Transfer Station struggle (with HN County and the City of Mpls.) and a second Incinerator threat (with a private enterprise having “complicated” ownership) a few years later. An arsenic superfund site existed on land connected to the Roof Depot site. The defeat of building a Garbage Transfer Station avoided 750 garbage compactor trucks driving through Phillips every day. Now the City with a different [...]
