Joyce Sid­man

 https://avi-writer.com/blog/2026/07/2026_summer_blog_series_joyce_sidman/

Find Your Voice 

The first thing I would say is: if you wish to become a writer, sit down and write. When­ev­er you can. Fit it in around your friends and sports and class­es. It doesn’t have to be every day, but get into the habit of express­ing your­self in writ­ten words. Col­lect words you like and try them out in dif­fer­ent kinds of sen­tences. Write down ran­dom phras­es that come to you out of the blue. Write what you can’t say out loud. Write about what’s both­er­ing you or what you feel proud of. You are find­ing your voice — a voice that will grow and change and strength­en your whole life.

  

Don't take anything personally

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say it's working closely with states on the rising cyclosporiasis cases across the country − but health experts warn previous cuts to food surveillance could hinder the outbreak investigation.

 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2026/07/13/cyclosporiasis-outbreak-parasite-cdc/90900515007/

tzatziki

Whoop Whoop Whoop!

 Read

To trigger osteoblast activity (bone formation), bones must bear your body weight against gravity.

Swimming is a non-weight-bearing exercise that does not build bone density. Because the water's buoyancy counteracts gravity, swimming lacks the skeletal load required to increase bone mass. However, it is excellent for cardiovascular fitness, muscle strength, and flexibility, and is ideal if you have severe osteoporosis or joint pain.

Why Swimming Doesn't Build Bone To trigger osteoblast activity (bone formation), bones must bear your body weight against gravity. High-impact exercises (like walking, jogging, or weight training) create this mechanical stress. Because swimming largely removes the force of gravity, it does not provide the bone loading needed to slow bone loss. In fact, some studies show that athletes who only swim have lower bone mineral density than those who participate in impact sports.

Free Looff Carousel Rides Saturday Free Looff carousel rides are happening on Saturday, July 25 at Summerfest at the historic Crescent Park Carousel (700 Bullocks Point Ave, Riverside, RI), a 30-minute drive from Woonsocket. The event runs from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM and features free carousel rides alongside live entertainment, food, and local vendors

Abdallah Fayyad: I’m a birthright citizen

 I’m a birthright citizen

President Trump wants to destroy America’s greatest promise. The Supreme Court came close to helping him succeed

One of the most consequential facts about my life is that I was born in Reston, Virginia.

Obviously, that wasn’t my decision. I also didn’t grow up there. My parents, who are Palestinian, moved to Jerusalem when I was 2 years old and raised me there until I went off to college. But Reston still had a profound impact on the trajectory of my life because by virtue of being born there, I became a birthright citizen of the United States.

I didn’t always think of myself as an American — not because I didn’t want to but because I didn’t yet understand what American identity meant. After all, I was a Palestinian growing up in Jerusalem, so saying I was Palestinian made more sense to me when I was a kid. Even so, I felt a kinship with America. It wasn’t yet home, but it was where I knew my life began and where I knew I’d like to live someday.

I attended an international school, and our yearbooks always listed people’s nationalities next to their names. Some years the school listed me as Palestinian. Others, I was listed as both Palestinian and American. I remember flipping through the yearbook as soon as I got my hands on it just to see if “USA” was listed as one of my nationalities. In the years that it was, I would smile.

To be sure, I loved growing up in Jerusalem. But there’s a reason I felt so desperate to be tied to America in some way: Living under Israeli occupation includes daily indignities that you can viscerally feel — even as a child — and that make you want to leave. And by the mere accident of the location of my birth, I had what I believed was a one-way ticket to freedom. So when I turned 18, I decided to go to college in Washington, D.C., and I have lived in the United States ever since.

It wasn’t until I moved back to America that I finally understood what makes American identity unique. When I first got to college, I felt shy about saying that I was American in addition to being Palestinian. But early on, one student who lived on my floor had trouble understanding why I didn’t say I’m American. He told me that if I was born here, then I was an American — end of story. I responded by saying that if I’d been born somewhere else, like, say, Switzerland, I wouldn’t be Swiss, and that if he’d been born in Palestine, he wouldn’t be Palestinian. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he was still a little confused and said something along the lines of Well, that’s not how it works here.

I quickly learned that he was right. I immersed myself in the city. I learned about its history and culture. I read more about American history. I never felt like an outsider or a foreigner. I realized that just like Palestine, America was my country too.

I have always admired America for granting birthright citizenship so broadly, not just because I am a beneficiary of it but because I genuinely believe it’s one of the greatest ways to define citizenship — not as something that is earned but something that is inherent. On paper, at least, there’s a promise that everyone is equal at birth. We certainly don’t live up to that promise, but it’s a commitment that more countries should make.

So when President Trump started attacking birthright citizenship in his first term, I didn’t take him seriously. And when he tried to end it by executive order in his second term, I still didn’t take him seriously. Birthright citizenship, enshrined in the Constitution under the 14th Amendment, is so fundamental to American identity that I assumed even a conservative Supreme Court would slap any challenge down.

Of course, there have always been people who challenge my Americanness and people who claim that they are somehow more American than others. But I have never cared. Like it or not, I’m an American no matter what anyone thinks. And in my experience, such rigid, constricted views on American identity have always existed on the political fringes. What’s sad is that Trump brought that fringe idea about birthright citizenship into the mainstream, and what should have been a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court to strike down his executive order ended up being a 6-3 decision. The justices split even more narrowly, 5-4, on the key question of whether the executive order violated the Constitution. That’s a blow not just to birthright citizenship but to American identity itself.

Unlike so many other national identities around the world, American identity transcends bloodlines. It’s malleable, and anyone who is born here can claim it if they choose. America, after all, is a nation made up of people whose roots can be traced back to all corners of the world. People came here under many different circumstances — colonization, enslavement, poverty, persecution, despair — and, over the course of two and a half centuries, they’ve built the country we know today, with many moral failures and triumphs along the way.

So by virtue of being born in Reston, I am now part of that story, too. And that’s something I love about America: I don’t have to publicly profess my loyalty to or admiration for this country to be a part of it. I can criticize it week after week in this very newspaper and still claim it as my own. I don’t have to speak English to be an American, and I don’t have to look a certain way or believe in any particular religion to have the right to live freely here. What America gave me — and millions of others — at birth is the ability to grow up and be my true self, to embrace all of my identities, and still feel like I belong here. And ultimately, no president or Supreme Court justice could ever make me feel any differently.

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Abdallah Fayyad can be reached at abdallah.fayyad@globe.com. Follow him @abdallah_fayyad.

equanimity/ˌekwəˈnimədē/Equanimity is the psychological state of mental calmness, emotional stability, and even-mindedness. It allows you to remain composed under stress, viewing challenges with acceptance and non-reactivity rather than giving in to extreme emotional highs or lows.Rooted in ancient philosophies, the concept encompasses several core elements and distinctions that help clarify what it means in practice:Etymology: Derived from the Latin phrase aequo animo—meaning "with even mind"—it combines aequus (equal/level) and animus (soul/mind).

Stop NOT writing. Just do it, badly. Just write the thing you need or want to write, that you are avoiding. That avoidance is costing you greatly, isometrically, and in general well-being. So can you find one measly hour, to write, badly? ANNE LAMOTT

Doren Robbins DVAYDA

 DVAYDA

 

Always the precise way she put things together, sewed things

together, delight singing in Yiddish and Russian doing it, her wrist pains

doing it—delighting in theirs.

 

And always her offering more, which was her direct madness—sometimes

endearing, sometimes irritating: her "more." Made patches and sewed

more patches more; cooked for you, refused to let you help more, refused

 

to let you refuse more, loved you more than you wanted, more than you

asked, more than you feared.

 

And what a dramatic lover she must've been, whether she meant it or not.

What a liquefying opera she must've surged and spilled over if it was

anything like her singing, and her filling bowls and piling bowls with fruit. 

 

I alternated being welcoming and turning my back to her.

I was never easy, at ease, never the kind of spongy matter I needed to be

to endure or con someone so I might thrive on that attention pouring and

 

pouring. Maybe some lack. Maybe a panel missing someplace in me.

But I don't give a damn, I'm not the available vacuum, there's a floor

underneath what I contain and receive. What a floor.

 

And even as I say it, even as I'm backing away from her again, I'm kissing

the lids and brows of my great aunt's eyes, I'm floored by her "more"

whatever she meant by it, whomever she really sought to fill with it,

 

or empty herself from, keeping her pot roasts and honey cakes flying out

of the oven, her kugels flying sweet enough,

or a little more, "A bisel more?"

 

piled on the table steaming for you, more?

"Ziskeyt sweetness," more? And leaving the table

with her watering can in the middle of serving,

 

in the middle of eating, feeding and also singing to her plants,

watering and dusting them and showing how she used to

cut scraps for her two dogs

 

dead all these years, mimicking the way she pleaded to each

and how they yelped for the brisket dangling from her mouth,

and giving a little more to the smaller, smarter one who

came down from her lap and waited quiet under the table.

Even while she talked about the two dogs, she mixed up nephews

with philodendrons, sister-in-law’s diseases with the purest garlic

and fish broth, mixed up longing and praise for her husband with imported

 

holiday plates, still talking about her dogs. She wasn't just

talking about dogs, it was always her ritual, her overflowing,

she was talking about her code of more, even in her endearments

 

praising dogs, it seeped through, the likeness of something else

connecting one ritual of more with another, more than dogs and tailoring,

more than carefully trimmed meat scraps, more than

 

getting on a downtown bus to find the strongest buttons because you

wouldn't know where to look. More than setting aside more for her

favorite niece, and a little more for the one who hated the favorite.

Poem FOUR FAMILY by Doren Robbins

 FOUR FAMILY

​

We didn't know anything—we were four people

living in a one-bedroom four-plex and they couldn't pay

 

the Seaboard Finance Company again. We didn't know

what was what. My oldest aunt,

 

the communist with a purple-silver perm, showed us

a woodblock print and a drawing of Käthe Kollwitz's mothers

 

and children—the wall the mothers made around their bodies—

we didn't really get it. My own mother's expressions bewildered me.

 

I remember my father washing the dishes and my mother sitting

at the cutting board drying them, crying and talking about Seaboard,

 

"Ralph, how the hell are we going to pay Seaboard next month?"

The dishtowel in front of her eyes bunched into fetal curves.

 

Packets of art reproductions came in the mail. Where did they get money

for that? She kept them in a drawer in the kitchen for my brother: Gaugin,

 

Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Toulouse-Lautrec. Rembrandt

drowned my eyes with that portrait of himself, of the bottom of his eyes,

 

at the end. My brother tried to copy it, he was always drawing.

Ma said she could just give him her eyebrow pencil wherever she took

 

him and he would sit there on the floor and draw people's faces

and women's legs. My brother knew more. When she broke down

 

he took me out of the kitchen, he covered me, I always had reason

to trust him. He saw more misery than I did. My mother and her

 

three brothers raised him during the war and for a few years after.

The faces in the Kollwitz drawing and wood block print scared me—

 

where were the fathers? Familiar mother's big hands

leather covering children.

 

It was the early fiifties. The dieseled ashes of Germany and more than

Germany were still a fresh part of the soot in the eucalyptus in our yard.

 

She feared that the eucalyptus would fall on our bedroom and kill us in our

sleep. She had it cut down. We didn’t say a thing. We were four people

 

living in a one-bedroom fourplex. Years after that—at the old La Brea

Theater—the four of us audibly cried out of our eucalyptus mouths.

 

We were watching the film The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. We didn't know

the book. I read it all in two days when I got it. Kollwitz's mothers showed

 

on the ash mouths and eyelids of those two mute guys in the book, they

struggled to watch over each other.

 

I follow it that way in my mind. I can't separately reason that I'm here

feeling this and not back in the Longwood Avenue kitchen

 

or in the La Brea movie theater lobby with what I felt.

Experience has not nearly increased accuracy enough.

 

Working with my father in the garage I used to make

boats out of scrap wood and metal. My connection

 

to assembling things, my connection to accuracy

began there. But I didn't know anything. Some nails

 

and the hammer, some glue, some blowtorch

did it. We owe a lot to the materials. Every tool lives

 

in a shrine, every shrine stands in for

the other—it all gets mixed up: the mute lovers

 

with the ones at the sink, brothers reborn in a mother's towel

with the fragile wall of mothers, with the reborn

 

eucalyptus, with the ash mouths and eyelids,

with the sheet metal sail.

 Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.”

― Alice Munro, Runaway: Stories

 

“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

 

“The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you're just there, going along easy in the world.”
― Alice Munro, Dear Life

This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we go. Pema Chödrön

Skating

 

Skating (ice, inline, or roller) is an excellent, dynamic weight-bearing exercise that helps build bone density and strengthens the lower body. Because you are constantly working against the force of gravity while balancing on skates, it forces your bones and muscles to adapt, protecting against conditions like osteoporosis. [1, 2, 3]

The reason skating is such a unique and effective weight-bearing workout comes down to the mechanics of the sport:

• Bone Density: High-impact and dynamic sports like speed skating actually stimulate bone formation better than strictly non-impact sports (like swimming or cycling). The rapid weight shifts and directional changes create strong skeletal loading. [1]
• Unilateral (Single-Leg) Strength: Skating forces you to bear your entire body weight on one leg at a time while gliding. Off-ice equivalents, such as single-leg deadlifts, split squats, and lateral lunges, are highly recommended to build this specific type of unilateral strength and balance. [1, 2, 3]
• Joint and Core Engagement: It engages the deep stabilizing muscles in your shins, ankles, and core. While highly effective for conditioning, the forward-bending posture can be tough on the lower back and knees, so proper form and dynamic warm-ups are vital. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

For those looking to supplement their skating with dedicated off-ice regimens, sports medicine professionals often suggest incorporating plyometric training (like jump squats and jump lunges) as well as stability work (like using a Bosu ball). [1, 2]

Heat Wave Ice Rink

 

Departments » Ice Rink

Information and Rates

 

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Rates

Note: All public sessions are Cash or Check only.

Rental Rates

• Ice Time: $260.00/hr.

Public Skating Rates

• $5.00 per person
• $5.00 per skate rental

Public Hockey Rates

• $5.00 per skater
• Goalies are Free of Charge

Note: Full equipment is required for admittance to the Ice surface.

Public Freestyle Rates

• $10.00 per ½ hour
• $15.00 per hour
• $25.00 for 2 hours

Note: All skaters must have completed Basic Level 5 to be eligible for this session. Maximum of 25 skaters on each hour of this session. No Hockey Players allowed.

Public Technical Skating

• $10.00 per ½ hour
• $15.00 per hour
• $25.00 per 2 hours

Note: This session is for Hockey Players only.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Expand/Collapse Questions and Answers

• When do you have Public Skating?

  • Sundays: See the press release above
  • Tuesdays and Fridays: 12:00pm – 1:30pm (for all ages)

• When do you have Public Hockey?

  • Mondays and Thursdays: 11:00am – 12:30pm
  
  

  Must be 14 years of age to participate.

• When do you have Public Free Style and who can skate during this session?

  Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays: 3pm – 5pm (for all ages) – April to November

  This open skating session is a set aside for Figure Skaters of all ages who have completed Basic Level 8 to practice their moves, jumps, and programs in a public session.

• What are the hours the Ice Rink is open?

  • Monday thru Friday: 8:30am - 11:30pm
  • Saturday & Sunday: 6:00am - 11:00pm

• How do I sign up my child for ice-skating lessons?

  Please visit the following websites for further information:

  • Northern Rhode Island Vikings (Ice Hockey)
  • Smithfield Figure Skating Club (Figure Skating)

Volkswagen Coffee Van Elephant Coffee Pot 1956

 

Nancy Wyllie's NEW FILM: The Salt in Our Tears

 https://vimeo.com/1166504724?fl=pl&fe=sh

The core of feminism is the idea that women ought to have agency over their own lives and make their own decisions based on what is right for them.

 

Yes, I’m fully aware of the awful, sexist origins of the tradition. Women long were considered chattel, and if they had any rights at all, they usually were conferred through their fathers or, if married, their husbands. So much of that tradition of subservience and inequality still reverberates today, including the way the coronavirus pandemic economy hit women hardest in part because the burden of inadequate child care access falls disproportionately on them.

But if I rejected every tradition rooted in notions that women are merely the property of men, or at the very least meant to be submissive to them, I couldn’t have married in the first place, for matrimony was traditionally seen as a business arrangement between a bride’s father and her groom.

If I took such a purist interpretation of feminism, I also could not have worn a shade of white on my wedding day, a vestige of the truly gross tradition of signaling a bride’s chastity. I designed my own ivory gown of beaded lace and silk, and sewed it with my own hands. It could not have been more a representation of who I am, and not shaped by notions from magazines or social media of what a bride should look like. What’s more feminist than that?

Kimberly Atkin Stohr Kimberly Atkins Stohr is a columnist for the Globe. She may be reached at kimberly.atkinsstohr@globe.com.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr

 

How film made us passive — and cleared the way for our Trumpian nightmare

A history of the cinema and of us.

The Globe

David Thomson is a film critic, historian, and author of “A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies.”

How did we become such a passive lot, content to watch the spectacle of Trumpian authoritarianism rather than intervene?

There are many factors, surely. But I’d like to focus on one in particular: the movies.

Or actually, what they have groomed us to do.

Let’s begin with a fable.

You are sitting out in the sun on a fine day in India. Not too hot yet. Thoroughly pleasant. You are in a garden with many flowers and a lawn leading to a density of bushes in the distance. It feels good to be there.

You notice an infant playing on the lawn. He or she? It hardly matters. This is not your child, but since you are alone with him or her you recognize a degree of responsibility. You keep your eye on the infant.

Then something stirs in the bushes. Amid the scarlet and mauve of the blooms, a shape slithers into the light. You put on your spectacles to be sure — yes, it appears to be a cobra (I told you, this is India).

The infant is chattering quietly in that lovable way. He or she has not noticed the snake. But the cobra has seen the child, and it is sliding forward across the lawn. There is no one else in sight. You can’t just sit there.

You stand up. You are afraid, but you have to do this. You step onto the lawn. How does one handle a cobra? You hope to find a stick in the grass. No good. You are going to have to defend that child yourself. You can only try to seize the scales and the surging muscle. Your spectacles fall off. God help us.

There is a battle, for a few seconds. You look into the cobra’s black eye and you squeeze until that eye pops out. You seem to have won.

Take 2: Let’s do it a little differently this time. It is still the garden, but the heat is turned off. You are in an air-conditioned movie theater, watching the scene. There’s the kid; here comes the cobra. You know the script by now. Action! You sit there waiting to see what will happen. Maybe the cobra passes by, maybe it attacks?

Isn’t it fun to watch — to just watch — and find out?

What film taught us

Not so long ago, say 130 years, we sat in our darkness watching the light. We saw things we had only heard about. The pyramids in Egypt, the Grand Canyon, the seething infinity of midocean, or Queen Victoria passing by in a carriage, noticing the camera but unimpressed. What a treat and excitement! When Captain Scott went to the South Pole in 1912 (he got the silver medal, you may recall; Norway took the gold), he had a cinematographer with him, Herbert Ponting, who shot exquisite scenes of the white desolation such as no one had seen.

The fact of it all took our breath away. This was nature, without buying a ticket for the ship and the train, without enduring the heat and the cold and surviving in that enormous midocean. It was tourism, and from a comfortable chair in the safe dark. No need for a passport.

For a while, the movies didn’t want to shake our faith in fact. So Fred Astaire really did that dance — in one shot, full figure, no cuts or stand-ins. And Humphrey Bogart simply walked across a room with a noble, unfussy ordinariness.

Yet something was shifting. Bogart’s character was not, actually, ordinary. He was in a cloud-cuckoo-land where the ridiculous witty toughness of his Philip Marlowe in “The Big Sleep” was honored. This was story. This was spectacle.

Some conventions of “decency” were still observed. That meant not just the elimination of indecency but keeping guardrails on fantasy in the name of taste and decorum. (Hold the orgy, delay the apocalypse — not now, not yet.) But we kept clamoring to see more: like the nakedness of pretty women or the knifework of a murder. So a time came in a movie when a decent young woman (no matter that she had had a momentary impulse and stolen $40,000) would walk into a motel shower and be cut to pieces. And we never got up or went into the screen to save her. We waited to see how it was done.

Oh, don’t be foolish, you are saying — how could we invade that screen, or be expected to? That limitation seems definite. But in the blink of 50 years the movie screen would reveal horrors we never saw or dreamed of — things we had never known. And we would accept them. We would enjoy them. We were no longer tourists. We were spectators.

Our passivity

A few decades after “Psycho,” the cinema made another technological leap, bringing the pterodactyl and other impossible monsters into the theater. Creating whatever the geniuses and minions of c??????????

Look, you protest, this can be art; and it’s a legitimate business for anyone who knows the rules of fact and fantasy. God help me, says God, just think of it as fun — don’t you poor bastards deserve a little of that in these times?

But suppose the most profound effect of movies has been to foster a helplessness or passivity in the body politic. Isn’t that the habit that comes from seeing a cobra and becoming a connoisseur of its tricky appearance rather than insisting that cobras need to be dealt with for the safety of our children?

Today we are anxious; we keep checking our phones. In 18 months, our Constitution and law have become toilet paper. But we wait for something to happen. We feel unable to do it ourselves. Because we have become watchers. Is there a movie that might help us now? Is our world an abyss begging to be filled by those fatuous, tired aliens from “Disclosure Day”? Why didn’t that movie take on Trump, who is so much more than an exhausted ET?

The technology continues to evolve. But the tremor we call AI is only the most up-to-date version of the horror stories we like to be frightened by. Distracted by. That tremor has been here 130 years, slithering toward us like a cobra.