Cruisin’ down electric avenue
The brave new world is here — and it has me doing all sorts of things I never thought I was capable of. I signed a contract this week on a brand new plug-in hybrid car, the 2017 Prius Prime.
All posts by Lissa Harris
Dear Harvey: Love, Irene
In disasters, there is helpful help, and then there is all the other stuff people do in a well-intentioned spasm of conscience.
You can’t get there from here
Few places on Earth are as unfriendly to the carless as rural Delaware County.
Charlottesville comes home
The statues are in the south, but this isn’t just a question for southerners. Up here — 500 miles north of Appomattox, and more than 150 years after a Virginia farmer wrote that he’d rather “endure all the horrors of civil war than to see the dusky sons of Ham leading the fair daughters of the South to the altar” — Confederate flags wave from porches and pickup trucks.
Tale of two Catskills
In lieu of achieving world peace, or even Catskills peace, I’ve always wanted to write a local parody of “Oklahoma!” Clearly, the Farmer and the Cowman — er, the Local and the Transplant — should be friends. It’s like Aunt Eller says: I don’t say I’m no better than anybody else, but I’ll be danged if I ain’t just as good.
The new, new Catskills
Culturally, the Catskills are a bright mosaic of urban and rural mores and values. But scratch the surface and we have all the problems of rural Appalachia: addiction, poverty, a greying population, a general purposelessness that siphons the brightest of our young people out of our schools and our communities.
Save the bats!
Want to help the local bat population? Put up a bat house. It won’t save the bats from white-nosed syndrome, but it ups the odds that surviving bats will reproduce.
The promise of the seasons
Disaster can strike in a moment, but nature is full of slow-motion letdowns too. You can work with optimism and excitement all season long, only to stand by and watch the slow unraveling of all your hopeful prospects. And here we are getting into metaphor territory at last.
Married to the goo-goos
It’s tempting to get distracted from the boring business of local government by the increasingly terrifying gyrations of the national discourse. It’s even more tempting to dismiss things like bipartisanship, and cooperation, and talking across the political divide, as a chump’s game. But the truth is, with the highest levels of American government throwing off more toxic smoke than a tire fire, we need these things in our towns and cities now more than ever.
Living by the sword
Swordfighting has woken me up to the joy of battle like no sport has ever done. It has given me valuable training in courage — a virtue you don’t hear about nearly often enough, especially in the context of women-people.