The idea of reading different kinds of literature at different times of year dates back centuries — for an early example, see William Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” — but summer reading as we now know it emerged in the United States in the mid-1800s, buoyed by an emerging middle class, innovations in book publishing and a growing population of avid readers, many of them women. And this rise of summer reading coincided with the birth of another cultural tradition: the summer vacation.
A number of local food industry professionals are looking inward to start conversations around the rise of anti-Asian American hate. As more news stories documented both local and national incidents of hate crimes in the spring, the food community quickly rallied to raise money through bake sales, dinners and more to fund initiatives such as placing security cameras on the streets of Chinatown, safety kits for the elderly, and supporting local nonprofits.
Now, some industry folks are wondering how to keep the momentum (and conversation) going. Hanson Li is a founder of Salt Partners Group, a development and investment company that works with some of the biggest restaurants in San Francisco, including Atelier Crenn, Humphry Slocombe and Last Rites. Beyond his restaurant work, Li has been involved with Asian-American professional groups, including Center for Asian American Media (CAAM). He has watched the acceleration of hate crimes toward the Asian American community, culminating in the tragedy of the Atlanta spa shootings in February, and Li was wondering how he can help.
The idea that Black people just don’t do the outdoors developed over time and centuries of dispossession, said Justin Robinson. An ethnobotanist, farmer and cultural historian in Durham, N.C., he rejects the term “foraging” and its practice as anything new to Black Americans and humans in general. He believes the word separates the world into a disturbing cultivated-versus-wild binary that doesn’t reflect reality.
“It’s just what we do,” he said. “It’s life!”
But the design is also apt on a deeper level. While Tange’s design was representative of a 1960s Japan experiencing revolutionary economic growth, the new National Stadium is built for a different era. “The new era isn’t about expansion,” Kuma said. “Intimacy and human experience should be the theme of the new era. My proposal is very intimate and very human.”
About a year later, a woman stopped to say hello, and she said something that changed his perspective on his daily ritual.
“She said, ‘You know, every morning when I see you sitting here, I know that everything is going to be okay,’” Nixon recalled.
Awad has taken Shakespeare’s premise of illness and spiritual rebirth and turned it into an inventive horror-comedy full of altered realities and uncanny weirdness. The book mashes up “All’s Well That Ends Well” with “Macbeth” and “The Tempest” and there are echoes from other plays as well. The result is an omnibus Shakespeare adaptation, simpler than the originals, but resonant with Awad’s own voice. The Bard will probably not turn in his grave. His own mode of operation was to conflate sources.