Month: January 2017

Word nerds can condense just about anything into a haiku: Disney movies, American history, and even politicians’ speeches. Now, NPR reports, a weekly newspaper in small-town Mississippi is using the ancient Japanese art form to breathe new life into routine community news.

The Enterprise-Tocsin in Indianola, Mississippi is publishing—and tweeting—a new “Crime Haiku of the Week.” The paper’s publisher, Charlie Smith, launched the recurring poem last month to make its police blotter, called “Cops & Robbers,” a little more interesting.

Each Wednesday while on deadline, Smith takes a report and transforms it into three 5-7-5-syllable phrases. He also changed the text-heavy column’s layout so its contents framed the haiku.

Thanks NPR’s @colintdwyer for reporting on our crime haikus. Even a haiku headline: https://t.co/s2GQ8cLDtX

— Enterprise-Tocsin (@IndianolaMSnews) January 26, 2017

At first, the blotter’s playful makeover garnered zero feedback, but Smith’s mom was a fan, and encouraged him to keep it up. The newspaper publisher eventually realized that Twitter was the perfect platform for his micro-poems, and he began posting them to social media this past week.

“In an effort to reach the new era of digital-savvy, poetry-loving Millennials, we have begun publishing a ‘Crime Haiku of the Week,'” The Enterprise-Tocsin newspaper tweeted. Smith’s plan worked: People are now “liking” and retweeting his poems, and some are even submitting their own verses.

Check out a sampling of The Enterprise-Tocsin’s haikus below, and while you’re at it, try taking a stab at the art form yourself. (Believe it or not/it’s actually pretty fun/writing crime haikus.)

Five Greenville women
travel to our Walmart store
with larcenous plans

— Enterprise-Tocsin (@IndianolaMSnews) January 25, 2017

When it gets chilly
warming your car feels cozy
But thieves like it, too.

— Enterprise-Tocsin (@IndianolaMSnews) January 25, 2017

Three shotguns stolen
Owner not smiling one bit
But ducks can relax

— Enterprise-Tocsin (@IndianolaMSnews) January 25, 2017

This weeks’ offering, drawn from the real-life headlines:

She said a ‘dope boy’
stabbed that man Saturday night;
but knife in her house.

— Enterprise-Tocsin (@IndianolaMSnews) January 25, 2017

[h/t NPR]

Museums are great places to learn about history, science, and even math, but if the language arts were your favorite subject in school, there are fewer options. As City Lab reports, philanthropist Ann B. Friedman is hoping to change that with a new institution dedicated to all things linguistics. Washington D.C. officials recently announced that the historic Franklin School building downtown will serve as the home for Planet Word.

At the free museum, visitors of all ages and reading levels will find immersive exhibits and activities meant to inspire a love of language.

“Visitors will hear the hottest spoken-voice poets, listen to authors read from their newest books, and have an opportunity to enroll in classes on songwriting, storytelling, or sign language,” according to the museum’s website. “They’ll create a marketing campaign, listen to themselves give a famous speech, or climb a rhyming word wall. Visitors will solve problems by being forensic linguists or visiting our in-house language research lab. When it’s time for a break, snacks, and meals chock-full of wordplay will be available at the museum café.”

Linguistics is more than just a quirky theme to set Planet Word apart in a city of museums. It’s also a mission that’s close to the hearts of the people behind the project. According to the museum, 21 percent of adults read below a fifth-grade reading level, and according to The Annie E. Casey Foundation, kids who don’t read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school. Planet Word emphasizes that the space is meant for all types of visitors, including non-English speakers. CEO and Founder Ann Friedman says on the website:

“Where would we be without words? We would be less human. Without words we couldn’t communicate precisely and in our own distinctive style. We couldn’t read, write, talk, debate, joke, rhyme, sing, pray, chant, or cheer.”

She goes on to describe some of the activities the museum will offer including climbing a Tower of Babel, crawling through a prepositional playground, and identifying what word you use to describe a “hoagie.” It’s hard to imagine what some of these exhibits might look like in reality, but logophiles will know soon enough: The museum is expected to open to the public by winter 2019.

[h/t City Lab]

It’s hard to imagine that anything literally hanging from utility poles across Manhattan could be considered “hidden,” but throughout the borough, about 18 miles of translucent wire stretches around the skyline, and most people have likely never noticed. It’s called an eruv (plural eruvin), and its existence is thanks to the Jewish Sabbath.

On the Sabbath, which is viewed as a day of rest, observant Jewish people aren’t allowed to carry anything—books, groceries, even children—in public places (doing so is considered “work”). The eruv encircles much of Manhattan, acting as a symbolic boundary that turns the very public streets of the city into a private space, much like one’s own home. This allows people to freely communicate and socialize on the Sabbath—and carry whatever they please—without having to worry about breaking Jewish law.

Along with everything else in New York City, the eruv isn’t cheap. It costs a group of Orthodox synagogues $100,000 a year to maintain the wires, which are inspected by a rabbi every Thursday before dawn to confirm they are all still attached. While wires do occasionally fall, the overall eruv has survived events such as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and Hurricane Sandy. When eruv wires do break, it can cause enough of a stir to make news. Most notably, in 2011 a wire broke near the United Nations building, which caused a problem when repair crews couldn’t get past security to fix it. The issue was eventually resolved, but not before a good deal of panic set in.

Manhattan has had an eruv in one form or another since the early 20th century, but the present-day incarnation began on the Upper West Side in 1994. It has since expanded from 126th Street to Houston Street, and its exact locations can now be viewed on Google Maps (and an intermittently updated Twitter feed). The city does have some rules in place regarding the eruv: The wires can only be a quarter-inch thick, and they must be hung at least 15 feet off the ground.

New York City isn’t the only metropolis in the U.S. with an eruv. They can also be seen (or not seen) in St. Louis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, and numerous other cities across the country. Rabbi Adam Mintz, co-president of the Manhattan eruv, talks more about it in the video below, courtesy of Business Insider: