A visitor from the East is the latest alga to foul LI waters
Newsday
An invasive alga species native to Asia has been documented in the Great South Bay and elsewhere on Long Island’s shores, turning the water red and creating surreal scenes where it’s washed up along ice-logged waterways.
Ranging in color from orange to pink to reddish brown, depending on its health, the alga has a delicate, branching form that it loses out of water.
It’s not harmful to humans but can reduce oxygen levels in water when it dies out. It can also take in nutrients relied upon by other native species, reducing the diversity of local species.
The alga is usually found in shallow waters 10- to 15-feet deep and can be fragile, dying out and rising to the surface as seasons change, said Craig W. Schneider, a biology professor at Trinity College in Connecticut.
“It’s not toxic,” said Schneider, who was among the first to document the species in the region’s water when it appeared in Rhode Island in 2007. “It’s a pest more than it is a severe problem.”
Native to Asian Pacific waters, the fast-growing and mobile alga known as Dasysiphonia japonica gained a hold in Europe before hitting the Northeast, perhaps hitching a ride in the ballast of a ship or attached to a hull.
“It’s pushed its way all the way down to New York City,” Schneider said. “We got invaded by an invasive.”…

Constellating Queer Spaces
Urban Omnibus (A publication of the Architectural League of New York)
Defining and representing what might be understood as “queer space” is no easy task: myriad sites may be associated with individual and collective histories, but the creation of a shared story sets limits on what’s included. Nowhere is that challenge more richly laid bare than in New York City, and no one knows it better than Jen Jack Gieseking, author of the forthcoming book A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queer Women, 1983-2008. In this interview, Gieseking draws our attention to the ever shifting, often contradictory constellations of LGBTQ+ spaces — urban and rural, destructive and triumphant — asking not only what they share, but also how they might be shared with those interested in the queer spaces that are yet to come…
Jen Jack Gieseking is an urban cultural geographer, feminist and queer theorist, environmental psychologist, and American Studies scholar engaged in research on co-productions of space and identity in digital and material environments. His second book project, A Queer New York, will be accompanied by an interdisciplinary digital project, “A Queer New York: Mapping Lesbian and Queer NYC History.” He is Assistant Professor of Public Humanities in American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Along with Jay Shockley , he contributed to the National Park Service’s 2016 report, LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History.

Christopher Hager: I Remain Yours / Common Lives in Civil War Letters
New Books Network
In I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters (Harvard University Press, 2018), Christopher Hager trains our attention to “the cell-level transfers that created the meaning of the Civl War.” He follows the correspondence of a group of soldiers, and their family members, many of whom had never written letters before in their life. These people were largely illiterate. They had to learn how to spell as they were trying to compose their thoughts on paper. Yet Hager leaves their letters ‘uncorrected.’ In their struggle to put their feelings and thoughts into words—a struggle we also feel in reading those words—the words themselves gain an immediacy and directness. They grow in importance for being chosen. The repetition of phrases throbs with feeling. The emotional dynamics of union and disunion—the fear of being forgotten, the assurance of love, no matter the soldier’s side in the war—congeal around individual words, phrases, even marks on the page. As they write, both soldiers and their family members realize that they’re at war together, tending to the relationships that comprise their everyday lives, and warding off the threats to them…
Christopher Hager has previously explored the lives of ordinary Americans through their writing, including diaries kept by slaves. His first book, Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, won the 2014 Frederick Douglass Prize for the best book of the year on the subject of slavery. Hager is Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut where he teaches courses in American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present.

Seth Markle – A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism 1964-1974 [Podcast]
New Books Network
Today we talked to Seth Markle about his book, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism 1964-1974, published by Michigan State University Press in 2017 as part of the Ruth Simms Hamilton African Diaspora Series. Providing extensive insight into the importance of Tanzania in the emergence of a new form of Pan-Africanism in the 1960s, Markle conveys both the character of modern nationhood in Tanzania as well the activists in the diaspora who shaped and were affected by it. Markle highlights the international connections that defined the African Diaspora and Pan-Africanism throughout the 1960s and 70s. His book is a story about the networks and friendships that tie together Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania to the pivotal figures and ideas of the twentieth century, including Malcolm X, A.M. Babu, Stokely Carmichael, and Walter Rodney…
Seth Markle is an Associate Professor of History and International Studies at Trinity College. He also serves as the Director of the Human Rights Program; Coordinator of the International Studies Program’s Africa concentration and Interdisciplinary Minor in African Studies and is the Faculty Advisor to Trinity’s International Hip Hop Festival.

Opinion: Honoring GIs and veterans who fought for peace in Vietnam – By Paul Lauter
NorthJersey.com
It’s 50 years after the Tet Offensive and the My Lai massacre – a good time to reflect upon the legacies of the Vietnam War. Most of us of a certain age served in Vietnam, know veterans who did, or, like me, worked in the front lines of the peace movement.
I spent eight years during the war, not in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam, but in the troubled streets of America and in the offices of Resist, the American Friends Service Committee, and the United States Servicemen’s Fund. There I helped young men, especially active duty soldiers, find ways to oppose a war that they had come to despise.
Sadly, many Vietnam veterans remain haunted by memories of villages set on fire, civilians burned by napalm and other chemical weapons, or whole territories carpet-bombed. Thousands of our veterans were exposed to Agent Orange, a dioxin that left not only Vietnamese, but many veterans and some of their children, disabled by a neurological disease that mimics severe cerebral palsy…
Paul Lauter, a resident of Leonia, is the Allan K. & Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Literature (Emeritus) at Trinity College Hartford, Connecticut.

Conversation with Samuel Kassow
WMASS Jewish Ledger
The timing could not have been more offensive. On Feb. 2 — International Holocaust Remembrance Day — the Polish Senate passed a bill criminalizing statements linking Poland to the murder of Jews that occurred on its soil during the Holocaust. The move was an attempt to lay blame for the crimes that left more than one million Polish Jews dead during World War II squarely on German Nazis.
The bill states that anyone who uses the term “Polish death camps” or “accuses, publicly and against the facts, the Polish nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich … shall be subject to a fine or a penalty of imprisonment of up to three years.” The law applies to both Polish citizens and foreigners…
For insight into this new law, as well as a look at the complicated relationship between the Poles and the Jews, the Ledger spoke with Dr. Samuel Kassow, the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College and author of several books, including Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto…