Refractions

First published in Huffington Post Jul 1, 2016 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/evidence-of-things-seen-the-art-of-nancy-lu-rosenheim_b_7683040.html Chicago artist, Nancy Lu Rosenheim, was in Cambodia, drifting in and out of the inevitable vortex of travel and timelessness, enervated by Equatorial heat, and frequently ruminating on a site-specific exhibition about swallows that she was planning for the Hyde Park Art Center , when she set eyes on the Ta Prohm temple at Angkor Wat. “I was overwhelmed by the way nature both adhered to and inhabited the architecture,” Rosenheim said, of the eerily stunning ruins built by an ancient king, abandoned in the 15th century, rediscovered in the 20th, and made famous in Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider. “The seeds of the trees had planted themselves inside and outside the walls and stones of the monastery walls, and had become woven into the architecture. They were inextricably linked and any attempt to detach them would have mea...

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gail-hamburg/one-mans-crusade-for-room_b_2657929.html "Perhaps, Sir, you will someday come back with books." The words were uttered in 1998 by the headmaster of a grade school in Bahundanda, Nepal -- that had a library, but no books -- to John Wood, a stressed out American senior executive at Microsoft, who was trekking the area's famed Annapurna Circuit. "...maybe if you went high enough into the Himalayas, you could not hear Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) screaming at you," Wood had told a friend before the trip. The headmaster's remark, less a Jedi mind trick than the formal vernacular of British English spoken in the East, would irrevocably change Wood's life and eventually the lives of impoverished children and girls in Nepal, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Laos, Nepal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Vietnam and Zambia. www.roomtoread.org Wood's just released book, "Creating Room to Read: A Story of Hope...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gail-hamburg/paris-on-the-brain-books_b_569442.html?view=print After a dark, cold, and rainy winter, warm weather has finally come to Paris, brightening its days and turning even the most crabby Parisian's mood sunny. Daffodils are in bloom and the cafés, parks, and banks of the Seine fill with people, animating the city. But whatever the weather, the City of Lights has always inspired writers, and there is a wealth of literature on the subject. With the euro at a recent low, travel to France is now more affordable than it has been in recent months. But whether you're planning a visit or you're an enthusiastic virtual traveler, here's a list of some excellent Paris-related books, from food-related novels to cookbooks to psychological analysis of the cultural differences between Americans and the French. Of course, this is a highly idiosyncratic list, by no means exhaustive--and, fair warning to the wise, though the most obvious ones (...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gail-hamburg/looking-beyond-technology_b_756869.html?view=print I recently attended social enterprise and impact investing summits on both coasts, where social entrepreneurs, impact investors, changemakers and change-agents gathered to discuss new developments in the field. In addition to conventional development initiatives addressing a range of social problems including the building of civil society, there were smart solutions impressive for their specificity. In parts of rural India, where people must frequently wait at home all day for trucks to bring clean water, a social enterprise created by students at Stanford and UC Berkeley, NextDrop.org sends SMS water alerts to neighborhood residents in advance of the trucks, based on computational models and predictions. Other interesting initiatives included the provision of portable housing for slum dwellers in Kenya, the recycling of jeepneys into classrooms in the Philippines, and the use of pets as...

"Kissing" Books Could Have Saved Borders First published in Huffington Post In his essay, "Is Nothing Sacred?" novelist Salman Rushdie examines the importance of literature in society, laments the state of fiction (he penned it during the nuclear fallout from his own novel), and recalls his early relationship with books. "I grew up kissing books and bread," he begins. An enchanting sentence that guaranteed my attention. "In our house," Mr. Rushdie wrote, "whenever anyone dropped a book or let fall... a 'slice,' which was our word for a triangle of buttered leavened bread, the fallen object was required not only to be picked up but also kissed, by way of apology for the act of clumsy disrespect. I was as careless and butter-fingered as any child and, accordingly, during my childhood years, I kissed a large number of 'slices' and also my fair share of books. Devout households in India often contained, and still conta...

First published in Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gail-hamburg/stem-education-_b_1100474.html By page 41 of Walter Isaacson's important biography of Steve Jobs, I wanted immediately to score some LSD to replicate Mr. Jobs experience, which he called, a profound experience and one of the most important things in his life. "It reinforced my sense of what was important -- creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could," he said. Between Jobs' LSD and Proust's petite madeleines, one could surely achieve sartori and self-actualization, I felt. By page 526, after reading Jobs' intention in designing the iPad "I would love to help quality journalism... we need real reporting and editorial insight more than ever," I longed (as a former journalist who left print just before it keeled over and died) for an iPad 3. Who knew the iPad wasn't jus...

First published in Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gail-hamburg/clara-may-band_b_1127227.html Gail Vida Hamburg In 2007, Chicagoan, Nicole Sotelo, a Harvard-trained theologian and author, read a searing account of Congolese rape victims. The women, young girls and grandmothers among them, had suffered extreme sexual violence at the hands of the Inerahanwe and Hutu men responsible for the genocide in neighboring Rwanda, the Congolese army, armed civilians, and occassionally, U.N peacekeepers. Sotelo remembers weeping when she read the experience of one woman identified only as "Nadine," talking to Eve Ensler, writing for Glamour. "She was fleeing her village after her family had been slaughtered and she had been raped, when she saw an infant girl lying on the ground next to her slain parents," Sotelo said. Ensler had written: "Nadine rescued the girl; now having a child to care for gives her reason to keep going. "I can't go back ...