Winners of the 2024 Big Picture Nature Photography Contest have been chosen.
My favorite is one of the runners-up, but I'm biased as I recognize the heron, Glinlid, whom I met in the Dominican in 2019:
Check out all the 2024 winners on the Big Picture site.
Winners from years going back to 2014 are also viewable.
Landays (pronounced land-eyes) are 22 syllable, two-line poems composed primarily by Pashtun women who live on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are passed on orally and are anonymous, as these women are usually illiterate and poetry for women — not to mention education — is forbidden by the Taliban. The Harvard Review says, "The landay is a vibrant, clandestine, and ancient tradition."
Eliza Griswold, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, has translated many landays and collected them in a book published by FSG: I Am the Beggar of the World.
Here are a few landays from the book:
May God make you into a riverbank flower
so I may smell you when I gather water.
You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.
Leave your sword and fetch your gun.
Away to the mountains, the Americans have come.
Your eyes aren’t eyes. They’re bees.
I can find no cure for their sting.
When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.
Two years ago the Talibs favored boys and left the girls alone.
A woman then was worth her weight in stone.
You can read more on landays on the Poetry Foundation's page on the form, which was written by Griswold and is excellent.
Griswold also wrote this piece for the BBC: The 22 Syllables That Can Get You Killed, and spoke with PBS NewsHour about the artform (6m30):
Michael Madden is an artist and designer based in Elora, Ontario, with an MA from Yale University. I met him today at the Toronto Outdoor Art Fest. He takes slabs of birch and draws on them with colored pencils, aka pencil crayons. I don't think these pictures do them justice. The texture is so inviting.
Truly wonderful to see in person:
More can be seen on his website.
Luke Muehlhauser's site has a couple good Beginner's Guides:
The Korean Film Archive YouTube Channel has uploaded 100+ classic Korean films from the 1930s onward. Available for free viewing with subtitles.
Black Film Archive is a living register of Black films. In its current iteration, it showcases Black films made from 1898 to 1999 currently streaming.
The Public Domain Review has a nice page on Japanese Fireman's Coats of the 19th Century.
Check them all out on their site:
Some nice street photography and portraiture by Brit, Charlie Kwai.
More in the Projects section of Charlie Kwai's site.
There are numerous sites documenting the ground we walk on, but my favourite has to be MSRY's Archive of Japanese Access Covers (sewer covers).
You can view the entire archive of 2400+ photos on their Flickr site.
Some similar links:
Written In Stone is a gallery of sidewalks and the stamps and seals left by the people who laid them.
Here's another for Oakland, California:
And Denver, Colorado:
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VisitLondon.com's guide to the best galleries in London is a terrific resource that provides names, addresses, hours, and prices of what they consider the best galleries in the city.
Love art? Visiting London? Get it right!
