Oct 16, 2011
This sign in a store window in a shopping mall isuggests that for the fashion modeled by this mannequin, just like for fashions on mannequins in store windows in malls all over the world, each season brings new styles. Who knew that in Dubai customer interest in clothes like these would wane after a single season?
Oct 15, 2011
. . . while her parents hang out with friends on Saturday morning at a sandwich shop called Betty's Speakeasy.
Oct 14, 2011
This land is your land, this land is my land. From California, to the New York Island.
Oct 13, 2011
Way back behind the beachside hotels and the downtown apartment towers, Rio's notorious favelas cling to the mountainside. The people who live up there–who have no other place to live–have long endured every kind of danger and distress, but they are currently wrestling with a new dimension of difficulty: Rio's real estate boom is spreading all the way back and up to the slopes the moradors da favela have staked out for their dwellings.
The real estate developers moving into the favelas have government backing, as Brazil attempts to clean up the city in preparation for the 2014 soccer World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. The people being displaced don't exactly own the land their shanties are built on, so they aren't cashing in on the redevelopment. And they have nowhere else to go.
Once the favela structures are razed, and the sewer and water and power lines are extended up the mountainside, the new homes and businesses take full advantage of something the former residents long enjoyed for free: the view.
Oct 12, 2011
Oct 11, 2011
Clearly it was too cold for bathing suits when the sisters Strelitz posed before this mural in Rio de Janeiro, but the smiles were warm and sunny. Caroline, at left, is completing a Fullbright fellowship in Brazil; Bonnie joined her there in August for a mid-winter vacation.
Oct 6, 2011
As the sun sets over New Jersey, the Milano's Italian Sausage trucks begin their nightly rounds in Manhattan.
New York City's new High Line Park repurposes an old elevated railroad track along the west side of lower Manhattan for strolling and people-watching high above the bustle of downtown streets. Trees and flowers grow out of the old track bed, blooming between the ties, while in the distance is the river, the skyscrapers, the restaurants and nightclubs, and, along this stretch of the route, the warehouses of the old meatpacking district.
Oct 4, 2011
A tour guide from the Tenement Museum points out features of the neighborhood surrounding the Forward Building at 175 Broadway in New York's Lower East Side.
The Daily Forward was founded at the turn of the twentieth century as a Yiddish-language newspaper for new immigrants from Eastern Europe who were then crowding into the Lower East Side and similar neighborhoods in other American cities. Forward readers were mostly poor people struggling to get a foothold in a new, strange land; the newspaper was active politically as well as editorially in the labor union movement and on behalf of an American Socialist party, and it also promoted cultural Americanization, particularly with respect to Old World Jewish religiosity, which the editors rejected in favor of a more secular and open-minded cultural identity. Among the writers: Isaac Bashevis Singer and Leon Trotsky.
I remember seeing my grandparents reading The Forward on the front porch of their rowhouse in Baltimore in the 1950s. Yiddish was all Greek to me, but I distinctly recall how amusing it seemed that a newspaper called Forward was printed backward.
The irony doesn't stop there, however. The Forward Building in this photo, built by the Socialist publishers in 1917 when circulation exceeded a quarter of a million, was converted to condominiums in the 1990s; I've been told that units in the building start at more than $2 million. The Lower East Side of Manhattan is still a landing place for new immigrants–note the signs in Chinese on the two buildings at the right edge of the picture–but gentrification now attracts rich people to the neighborhood as well. There may still be sweatshops here, but the pushcarts are definitely gone.
The Forward survives today, though just barely, in weekly English and Yiddish editions, each with a circulation of a few thousand.
Sep 29, 2011
A couple of weeks ago, when the International Space Center was looping around the southern part of the globe, heading toward Antarctica from Australia, astronauts used the little digital camera on board to snap this picture.
The fires were intentionally set by farmers clearing fields or pastures to make way for spring growth. The green horizon is the Aurora Australis, bright pulses of electromagnetic energy released when solar pulses are deflected toward the earth's southern magnetic pole. Green is the most common color of auroras, produced when solar energy disrupts the normal spinning of oxygen molecules in the upper atmosphere; auroras can also be red, pink, or orange, depending on the atmospheric gases involved.
The space station itself is visible across the top of this photo and in the lower right corner.
Sep 28, 2011
There's a troll underneath the Fremont bridge in Seattle, with a Volkswagen in its grip. The three billy goats gruff, in rusty cast iron, are grazing on a church lawn a couple of blocks away, at the corner of Troll Avenue and 35th Street.
Sep 27, 2011
Polish photographer Marcin Sacha has recently added the landscapes of Andalusia, Spain, to the range of scenes in his portfolio.
Sep 26, 2011
The USS Ingraham tests its weapons during a recent live fire exercise at sea. Very soon, the 'ham will leave its home port of Everett, Washington, for a six-month deployment in the Pacific; the crew of about 200 enlisted men and women and a dozen or so officers includes Ensign Allen, aka Sparky, the ship's new electrical engineering officer.
Sep 24, 2011
It followed him home.
Sep 23, 2011
"When I graduated from high school in 1974," wrote the gentleman pictured here, "I used a graduation award to buy a $395 (Canadian) Hewlett Packard HP-35 calculator. My mom had to order it from the Vancouver HP office (their pocket calculators - a new line of not-quite-consumer products from a company that had specialized in electrical measuring instruments and desktop electronic calculators for engineers - were not then available in Canadian stores). The first HP programmable had been available for a year or two, but for the impossible price of $795. With the HP-35, I could do trig, logarithms and powers, and my pocket slide-rule was put on the shelf forever. Yes, the family crowded around."
These were the calculators that you could turn upside down to spell cute things with the glowing red numbers. Today's smart phones won't let you turn the answer upside down, but everything else a $395 calculator did in 1974 can be done today with a free app on a cell phone. And $395 Canadian in 1974, I'm told, would be equivalent to something like $1700 today.
However, the real thing is: for a young man just finishing high school in 1974, what made all the difference socially was not the HP-35 but the facial hair, and this kid could grow him some sideburns.
Sep 22, 2011
Say you're riding a bicycle and you want to shoot flame out behind you because, you know. This bike built by Eric Baar of Colorado Springs has a built-in push-button flamethrower.
What looks like a stainless steel water bottle at the bottom of the frame is actually a stainless steel water bottle adapted to serve as the fuel tank. The fuel is racing-car gasoline. Mounted on the fender at the back is a nightlight that's been adapted to serve as a spark igniter.
Why would you want a flamethrower on a bicycle? Baar built this thing to attract attention at a custom-bike show. Your mileage may vary.
Sep 21, 2011
Stein boys doing their brotherly whatever on the street last summer in Seattle. From the bottom: brothers number 4, 1, and 5.
Sep 16, 2011
(Image removed at the request of the photographer, Cris Benton)
This view of Drake's Beach at Point Reyes National Seashore in California is another example of kite photography, one of the oldest applications of the photo arts.
During the American Civil War, kites and balloons were used to hoist cameras, and sometimes also cameramen, for spying expeditions. Kite photography was also used to survey the damage after San Francisco's 1906 earthquake and fire.
Planes and satellites, of course, have relegated kite photography to niche status. On the other hand, modern digital cameras and wireless control technology have become so lightweight and inexpensive that it's a readily accessible niche.
Sep 13, 2011
These ducklings are in Nepal, but they don't know that.
Sep 12, 2011
Once upon a time, about ten days ago, the Carnes family of Cottondale, Alabama, noticed that a llama had taken up residence on a hillside way at the back of their property. It was skittish around people and ran off when they approached, but the next day it was there again.
Meanwhile, at the very same time and less than half a mile away, the Smith family, also of Cottondale, noticed that one of their llamas was missing, and that the chain-link fence around their pasture was damaged. The Smiths had bought three llamas, including a baby, its mother, and another female, just three days earlier, partly because they'd been told that the presence of llamas can discourage predators such as wildcats from attacking other livestock. It was the mother llama that had come up missing.
There had been reports of a cougar in the vicinity, and the Smiths, who raised horses, geese, and ducks, had recently lost a dog to wounds that the vet told them were probaby inflicted by a cougar.
The Smiths feared the llama may have been another cougar victim. A mother llama would not normally abandon her young, they believed. And llamas almost always prefer to hang with their herd; they rarely venture far on their own.
The Smiths asked their neighbors, but nobody had seen anything. The Smiths did not know the Carneses, and apparently the Smith neighbors were not in close contact with people who were in contact with the Carneses, who were also making inquiries.
The Carneses checked with the sheriff's office, but there were no missing-llama reports. They finally called up the Tuscaloosa News, which sent out a photographer and ran a feature story about a mysterious wayward llama. If nobody claimed it, the Carneses told the newspaper reporter, they'd eventually try to catch it and turn it over to the Humane Society, which ran a sanctuary ranch for wayward llamas in Oliver Springs, Tennessee. But so far, the animal had run away whenever they came near.
The Smiths did not subscribe to the Tuscaloosa News, but they had friends who did, and soon enough the two families were able to put the two stories together. They speculated that maybe the cougar or some other terrifying creature had in fact put in an appearance, jumping the fence into the pasture and frightening the llamas. Llamas often freeze when frightened. But maybe a mother llama would behave more protectively, perhaps attempting to chase the intruder even after it left the pasture. And then, because she was so new to the neighborhood, she got lost and could not figure out her way back home.
The Smiths schemed to get her back. They'd bring her baby and some corral panels over to the Carne place and use the baby as a lure to arrange her capture.
At this point, oddly, the newspaper dropped the story. Did the plan work? Or is the llama still on the loose? We just don't know.
Perhaps it's worth noting that this is an old-media story. The Smiths and Carneses didn't tweet about the llama; they weren't brought together by Facebook status updates. But the Tuscaloosa News is letting us down here. We can only hope that now that the weekend is over and the football game is won, the journalists can get back to work and dig up the rest of the story.
Sep 11, 2011
"Some time in the 1950s, probably in Decatur, Illinois." That's the baby boomer, stomping away.
Sep 10, 2011
One of the Love Murals on Market Street in West Philly.
Sep 9, 2011
Way, way out in the country, a million miles away from city lights, on a clear night the sky is lit by stars, as we see above at left, in a photo taken in Glacier National Park in Montana. The few small clouds in this starlit sky show up as black blotches that block some of the stars; a completely cloudy night in remote parts of the world is a very, very dark night, too dark to photograph at all.
In the megalopolis, however, clouds actually light up the sky by reflecting urban light pollution to brighten the night dramatically; an overcast night in a big city like Berlin, shown above at right, can be up to ten times brighter than a clear night.
Sep 8, 2011
The rhododendron that were blooming back in June, when we spent a week at a camp on Little Sebago Lake in Windham, Maine, are just a memory now. Marion P. grew the flowers and cut them for us and arranged them and even supplied the bucket.
Sep 6, 2011
Note to wedding planners: When choosing a date and venue, do take into account the possibility that the city's annual Naked Bicycle Ride will roll past your event just as guests are leaving the ceremony.
Actually, when this wedding let out late Sunday afternoon, the wedding party did have just enough time to hustle into the limo and peel away before hundreds of naked bikers swarmed the street in front of the church. The young man shown here who was dressed to join the bike ride was a few minutes early; he was waiting in Rittenhouse Square for his fellow riders to reach this part of the route.
By the time the main body of naked bikers showed up, the limo was gone, and the wedding guests in their finery were standing around in front of the church with cameras and cellphones trained on the dressed-down action in the street.
The two young women on bicycles near the left side of the picture were friends of the young man's who met up with him here by accident; like the wedding guests, they were not aware that the annual naked ride was about to descend on Rittenhouse Square. By the time the riders arrived, the women had made up their minds; they pulled off their shirts, stuffed them in their backpacks, and joined the parade.
Sep 4, 2011
The bronze leg of the sculpted woman here appears to have graffiti on it. The bronze head of the man appears to have a seagull on it.
The people appear poised to run into the surf near the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey.