Books & Ideas
Emma Goldman was a woman who championed women’s rights to contraception, workers’ rights, homosexual rights, and who spoke against militarism, capitalism and religion.
These days, much of what she stood for is mainstream, or at least within the ambit of mainstream debate. But back in 1919, her views and her philosophy, anarchism, were enough to have her repeatedly jailed and, ultimately, deported from the United States to where she was born in Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire.
A tranquil summer evening in Vineyard Haven may have seemed a strange place for a spine-chilling appraisal of the nation’s security gaps, but on Thursday night at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff sounded a bleak and vigilant tone, warning that we have entered into a new world and our concept of security must change accordingly.
Who’s that doing his down dog at Walden Pond? Same cat rocking his proud warrior of civil disobediance. You guessed it: Henry David Thoreau, laid back dude and early champion of the simple life. According to Stefanie Syman in her new book The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America, Thoreau was also one of the first Americans to experiment with yoga on this soil.
Romance of Oceanography
Chilmark native Conrad Neumann will present a free program titled The Romance of Oceanography: Science, Scenery and Poetry, at the Chilmark Public Library on Thursday, August 5 from 5 to 6 p.m.
Mr. Neumann, of Chilmark and Chapel Hill, N.C., taught geology and oceanography at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill for many years.
Cultural Differences
Cultural anthropologist and University of Chicago professor Richard Shweder will deliver a talk titled Engaging Cultural Differences Without Moral Panic: The Burqa, the Bris and FGM on Wednesday, August 4 at 5:30 p.m. at the Chilmark Public Library.
Charles Ogletree Talk
Professor Charles Ogletree, one of the country’s leading experts on race and a colleague and friend of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., speaks on his new book, The Presumption of Guilt, The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., on Thursday, August 5, 8 p.m. at the Chilmark Community Center.