Thomas Sadler Roberts, gone now for nearly 70 years, left a legacy of appreciation for our state’s natural history and bird life.
If you’ve enjoyed the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum of Natural History, you can thank Roberts as the driving force behind its creation. He was an early conservationist and has been called the father of Minnesota ornithology, not too grand a claim when you consider his landmark work, “The Birds of Minnesota,” first published in 1932.
Roberts was a medical doctor in the late 1800s and early 1900s who treated Minneapolis’ elite, but birds were always his first love. His happiest moments were spent out in the field, observing and collecting birds (this was in the era when ornithology was practiced with a shotgun). However, too often he felt the pull of his medical practice and family obligations, university commitments and especially the founding of what we now affectionately call “The Bell.” (Roberts’ wealthy friends and patients funded many of its popular displays.)
In biographer Sue Leaf’s capable hands, we are drawn into Roberts’ long and worthy life, beginning with his family’s arrival in St. Paul in 1867. As a boy he was free to explore this edge-of-the-prairie region and its wildlife, and Leaf, herself a bird watcher, paints a vivid picture of what the area was like a century ago.
The nature journals he kept from age 16, full of detailed documentation, formed the basis for his important two-volume book. And the Bell Museum is part of his legacy, with its vibrant dioramas and displays depicting our state’s natural heritage.
Anyone with an interest in birds, Minnesota’s natural history and learning about the life of a singular doctor, author, curator, educator, conservationist and bird enthusiast will find this book a rare treat.
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Years after he wrote The Great Gatsby, in the back leaf of another book, F. Scott Fitzgerald scribbled a list of his most famous novel’s nine chapters. Next to each one, he wrote down his sources. There were the old-money, polo-playing Rumsies and Hitchcocks and the impressive parties thrown by movie director Allan Dwan and by Herbert Bayard Swope, the editor of the New York World. There were his own memories, of the ash heaps, of days spent in New York City, and, in particular, of one wedding—the wedding of Ginevra King, his first love. Out of the whole book, he marked only three chapters as “an invention,” “inv,” or “all an invention.”
The FBI recently made Joanne Chesimard the first woman on its list of most wanted terrorists. But the crimes she was convicted of happened 40 years ago. Host Michel Martin talks with sociology professor Alondra Nelson of Columbia University about Chesimard, aka, Assata Shakur, and why she's on the same list as Taliban and Hezbollah leaders.
When we think
I'm always interested in how books sparked. What gave you the idea for Vacationland. Great title, by the way.
Humanity has often looked to the insect world for its technological metaphors, and now for digital inspiration
In 2009, Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, published a special issue dedicated to “the occasion of the forthcoming publication of the English translation of Gilbert Simondon’s L’individuation psychique et collective” (De Boever et al. 2). In the years since, anticipation of this and other translations of Simondon’s work has continued to grow, yet none of his primary texts have been published in their complete form in English (although translations of several excerpts circulate on the Internet). The English translations of Muriel Combes’ wonderful Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (2013) and of the second two volumes of Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time (2009 and 2010), as well as the publication of Simondon: Being and Technology (2012), a collection assembled by the Parrhesia team, have no doubt greatly contributed to this anticipation. Yet there are also several “macro-academic” trends helping to prepare for a (re)discovery of Simondon which Brian Massumi describes in terms of a general reconsideration of the constructivism that dominated academic discourse in the 1990s:
In a terrific new book out today, Cosmic Apprentice, Dorion Sagan argues that it's time we reboot the scientific enterprise — by using philosophy. Sagan is the son of famed scientists Carl Sagan and Lynn Margulis, so he grew up surrounded by speculative ideas about both cosmology and biology — later, he also collaborated on a few books with Margulis. He pays homage to his famous parents here, including memories of his childhood alongside serious scientific and philosophical speculation. It's incredible, and we've got the whole first chapter for you to read.
Tom Crann: I was actually surprised to learn that we have the oldest farmers market, retail market, in continuous operation right here in St. Paul.
Tom Tyler’s trenchant study of anthropocentric and philosophical discourse, part of Cary Wolfe’s impressive “Posthumanities” series, is an important addition to the literature on human knowledge and epistemology, approached here through philosophy’s unsteady preoccupation with non-human animals. The book itself is something of a marvel—modeled on the medieval bestiary, it comes complete with ornamental capitals, eclectic marginal glosses, and around the border of the pages an illustrated menagerie of animal “indices”—many drawn from these earlier bestiaries. There are in fact 101 of these accompanying figures, each part of a running paratextual commentary on the myriad animals cited throughout the text, so that the book doubles as a kind of illuminated encyclopedia.
Interview: Minnesota author Rachael Hanel grew up in Waseca, Minnesota. But hers was not a typical childhood; her father was the town’s only grave digger. Her new book is titled “We’ll be the Last Ones to Let You Down,” which was the motto of her dad’s business. This week on Access Minnesota, Hanel shares her youthful experiences as an observer of death and grief until the sudden passing of her father forces her and her family to confront those issues head-on.
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