-
Fired with
Finesse
Hewitt could use a modern gas
or electric kiln that would yield predictable results. But
for him the aesthetic rewards of taming the inferno outweigh
the financial gamble. “This is the hard way of doing it,” he
said the day before, during a break. “I feel like the last
of the dodoes.”
Smithsonian
magazine.
-
Getting
High
Climbing
an ancient survivor like the Stagg tree is more emotional
than physical. It’s an indescribable wow, that feeling of
being part of something greater, of stepping into an eternal
moment.
PortFolio
Weekly.
-
The Next Big Thing is
Small
On the surface, Paul is a
folkie, an old-fashioned troubadour, peddling his
storytelling tunes from town to town like his hero, Woody
Guthrie. But a look beyond the façade reveals that he is
representative of a new breed of artist: an entrepreneur
building a career without his 15 minutes in the pop
culture.
American
Way
magazine.
-
Cultivating
Hope.
Scott
is a veteran of places as tough as the Brunswick
Correctional
Center,
where she counseled convicts. At HELP, she's found a way to
combine her love of gardening with her talents as a
counselor. She's tanned and sinewy, tough on the outside and
both tough and soft on the inside when she needs to be.
She
reaches the youth by phone, just to make sure he'll be ready
for the industrial white van that meanders through the
toughest sections of Norfolk, ferrying children
to the garden. And he explains why he won't be coming this
morning -- or any morning soon. He walked in on his sister
Saturday evening lying on the couch. She was dead, the
needle that delivered the numbing, fatal dose of heroin
still dangling from her arm.
PortFolio
Weekly.
Sage
Van Wing was managing a small bookstore when she became
captivated by a book about food, though not just any book of
food. Not Rachael Ray or Bobby Flay but "Coming Home to Eat:
The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods," professor Gary Paul
Nabhan's one-year quest to eat foods only within a 250-mile
radius of his home in Arizona's Sonoran
Desert.
"I thought if this guy can do this in the middle
of the desert we ought to be able to do it in California," she
says.
Why not? She was an enthusiastic customer of
Berkeley's farmer's market
where she'd made friends with several people, including
Jessica Prentice, an author and teacher of local cooking
classes. When Van Wing told her about the idea to eat only
local foods for a month, Prentice signed on, the first of
several enthusiastic
partners.
When Empire High School opened in
July of last year, students weren’t
issued backpack-breaking stacks of
textbooks. They were handed an Apple
iBook with a wireless Internet
connection, because the school eschews
textbooks in favor of laptops and
electronic content. In science class,
they don’t just discuss cell division.
They go online and watch it in real
time. In Michael Frank’s first-year biology class, students access their lab instructions, then organize data and graph
the results of their work. Later, they
will correlate the data from the
experiment in a PowerPoint
presentation.
Southwest Spirit
magazine.
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