Wishing you much happiness and good health!
2023 is a year of the Water Rabbit
The sign of Rabbit is a symbol of longevity, peace, and prosperity in Chinese culture.
Monthly Archives: January 2023
The ecstasy of Eskista, an ancient Ethiopian dance
By mastering the Eskista, an ancient Ethiopian dance, TED Fellow Melaku Belay survived a childhood on the streets and became a voice for his country. He shares how traditional dances can connect the wisdom of the past to the energy of the future — and, after the talk, delivers a thrilling performance of Eskista accompanied by a free-jazz ensemble. (In Amharic with consecutive English translation by filmmaker Mehret Mandefro)Read transcript
This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED’s editors chose to feature it for you.
Donate to Fendika Cultural Center to support indigenous Ethiopian performance arts and artists.
Support music and dance making at Fendika Cultural Center by subscribing to Fendika’s YouTube channel and watching weekly live-streamed concerts.
About the speaker
Choreographer, dancerSee speaker profile
TED Fellow Melaku Belay is a choreographer and dancer.
How Successful Has the Endangered Species Act Been in its 5 Decades of Protection? Hint: It’s Very Good News
Jan 14, 2023d (goodnewsnetwork.org)
Reprinted via EarthTalk®, From the Editors of E – The Environmental Magazine
Dear EarthTalk: The Endangered Species Act has been around for five decades. How successful has it been in protecting and restoring threatened and endangered species? – A.J. Munson, Bern, North Carolina
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been successful in preventing the extinction of hundreds of wildlife species and in promoting the recovery of thousands more since its inception in 1973.
Some of the species that have successfully recovered and been removed from the list of threatened and endangered species include American alligators, gray wolves, bald eagles (which soared off the list in 2007), peregrine falcons (the fastest animal on Earth), and humpback whales, which leapt off the list over a decade ago.
According to the Center of Biological Diversity, a leading nonprofit with the simple mission of “saving life on Earth,” the ESA has protected more than 1,600 species in the U.S., preventing the extinction of 99 percent of the species listed under it.
Hundreds of species would have gone extinct
Without the ESA, at least 227 species would likely have gone extinct by now since the law’s passage in 1973. In addition, 110 species have seen tremendous recovery since being protected by the act.
The ESA also supports conservation outside the U.S., as the federal government uses the law to enforce the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a global agreement between nations to regulate trade on species under threat. Examples of the ESA’s reach beyond U.S. borders is in helping save giant pandas as well as several species of tiger.
However, it’s important to note that some species have not recovered as expected, despite being protected under the Act, especially in more recent years. There are many factors that can affect the success or failure of recovery efforts—including habitat loss, climate change, and disease.
But researchers from Columbia and Princeton concluded in their October 2022 study that one threat looms even larger: lack of adequate funding for conservation efforts.
Since 1985, ESA funding has decreased by almost 50 percent when measured on a per species basis. Furthermore, they uncovered that the average wait time for a species to be listed has almost doubled over the decades from 5.9 years during the 1990s to some 9.1 years more recently. The upshot is that by the time a species receives protection, it may have already reached a point where the ESA may be ineffective.
But, the ESA, which is managed by the US Fish and Wildlife agency, has played a crucial role and continues to be a key tool for protecting and recovering these species. This groundbreaking piece of legislation, now in its 50th year, has done incredible things for American wildlife.
It continues to protected precious species of plants and animals, bringing them back to sustainability.
EarthTalk® is produced by Roddy Scheer & Doug Moss for the 501(c)3 nonprofit EarthTalk. See more at emagazine.com. To donate, visit Earthtalk.org. Send questions to: question@earthtalk.org.
Chief Seattle on the web of life
Butterfly Nebula
This image of the Butterfly Nebula was taken by NASA’s Hubble telescope. It has been studied by astronomers who have discovered dramatic changes in the “wings” over the past eleven years. The rare hour-glass shapes are likely formed by the gravitational tug from a second star orbiting the nebula’s parent (an aging red giant star), causing the material to expand into a pair of wings.
Jeffrey (jmishlove@newthinkingallowed.com)
Watching the Films of Weimar Germany to Understand Our Increasingly Fascistic Present
“My dive into Weimar Germany taught me that authoritarianism doesn’t always follow a linear path.”
Near the climax of Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi epic Metropolis, an android in disguise delivers an incendiary speech to a crowd of exploited workers. “You have waited long enough!” she (it?) tells them. “Your time has come—!” To us, the viewers, the robot appears unhinged, her arms flailing wildly and her eyes opened unsettlingly wide. The mob, however, is emboldened by their leader’s fervor. They spill into the streets, plow through barricades, climb walls, and push their way up a great staircase to the city’s power center, the Heart Machine.
I’ve seen Metropolis at least a half dozen times, and this sequence is lodged in my memory—a mental benchmark for images of spectacular chaos and crushing waves of humanity. So when I turned on CNN two Januarys ago to watch thousands of indignant rioters fight their way up the steps to the US Capitol, my movie-addled brain couldn’t help but think, “At least the robot had a point.”
Like a lot of people, I spent the spring of 2020 cycling through a succession of new hobbies that I hoped might distract me from the seemingly imminent collapse of the American project. YouTube yoga. Sourdough. Getting drunk on White Claws and logging onto Facebook to call my high school gym teacher a fascist. (In my defense, Coach —— is, indeed, a fascist.) None lasted. I threw out my back struggling through a yoga lesson cruelly labeled “beginner,” my sourdough starter died cold and alone in the depths of the fridge, and I was no longer welcome on Facebook after somebody (Coach ——? my MAGA cousin in Ohio?) snitched to Zuckerberg that my account was under a name other than the one on my state-issued ID.
Even as each of these anxiety-induced diversions fell by the wayside, there was one interest that stuck: the movies of Weimar Germany. I’m an adjunct professor of film history, so this development wasn’t completely random, but it was an era I didn’t have much knowledge of, let alone expertise. For reasons I didn’t quite understand, the jagged angles and macabre stories of Expressionist directors like F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang were among the few things that could keep me from obsessive doomscrolling. I was still drinking too many White Claws, but doing so while working my way through G.W. Pabst’s back catalog felt healthier than picking online fights with people I barely knew.
Given the pandemic windfall of free time, it wasn’t long before I was reading books with titles like Film Front Weimar and Weimar Cinema and After. I read, I watched, and I built up a very healthy Duolingo streak. Looking back, I think these movies and the lives of the people who made them offered a window into another moment of social instability and political turmoil.
The Weimar Republic was a brief, volatile interlude of democracy between the abdication of the Kaiser in the wake of Germany’s 1918 defeat in World War I and the Nazi capture of power in 1933, and the echoes between then and COVID-era America are certainly there if you’re looking for them: The looming threat of authoritarianism. Ideological battles spilling into the streets. Right-wing politicians drawing ever sharper lines between the patriots who belong and the racial, sexual, and political others who dilute the purity of the body politic. It wasn’t that I was expecting these movies to provide a step-by-step guide for fending off fascism, but I think I was looking for a lens to make the present a little more comprehensible. That lens turned out to be surprisingly literal, and it was attached to an antique Stachow-Filmer camera.
After a few months of aimless research, I decided that I should try to do something with all the stuff I was learning from century-old movies and books about long-dead German auteurs. By turning my interest into a project, I could give myself permission to indulge my new obsession. “Why no, Super-Ego. I haven’t taken any steps to publish my dissertation. And yes, I’m five years out of grad school and still languishing in adjunct hell. But could I interest you in a podcast?”These movies and the lives of the people who made them offered a window into another moment of social instability and political turmoil.
It’s maybe appropriate, then, that as I tried to keep my psychic apparatus in balance, I read From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film by the Frankfurt-born film theorist Siegfried Kracauer. In it, Kracauer argues that film is unique among the arts because since its birth in the late 19th century, its intended audience wasn’t some rarefied class of elites. Movies have always been aimed at the masses—“the anonymous multitude.” The films that resonate with their audience, then, are effectively the dreams and fantasies of an entire culture.
Through his midcentury blend of Marxism and Freudianism, Kracauer put forward the idea that Weimar cinema expressed a fundamentally and intrinsically German desire to be dominated, even hypnotized, by a charismatic leader. Metropolis’s rabblerousing robot is a clear example, but there are others. In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the eponymous doctor employs mysterious powers to create a sleepwalking hitman who has no choice but to kill on his master’s behalf. Dr. Mabuse—the criminal mastermind of two Fritz Lang classics—uses mind control to force his adversaries to take their own lives. The golem in The Golem is, well, a golem. In all these stories of control and submission, Kracauer saw premonitions of the Führer.
It’s an enticingly simple narrative—too simple for most contemporary scholars. Kracauer was writing from New York in the late 1940s, using the clarity of hindsight to process his home country’s descent into fascism, and he tends to dwell on films that support his thesis and gloss over those that don’t. Whether or not the works he highlighted are representative of their era, Kracauer’s influence helped to surface their subtext and enshrine them in the canon of world cinema.
So while it’s a stretch to say that Weimar film writ large was a symptom of some national psychopathology, From Caligari to Hitler helped to ensure that the Weimar films still watched today disproportionately resonate with the emotional and political harmonics of the time and place they were made. Their commentary may be explicit, as when Lang subtitled Part I of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler—a movie filled with urban shootouts and economic chaos—“A Picture of Our Time,” or implicit, as in the antisemitism suggested by the grotesque hook nose of Count Orlok, the vampire in Nosferatu, himself an Eastern European invader with designs on the blood of Aryans.
Kracauer recognized that films aren’t generally made for posterity. They’re commercial products whose makers want to find a contemporary audience. When Pabst directed Kameradschaft—his story of German miners who put their lives on the line to rescue their imperiled French comrades, national animosities be damned—he wasn’t dreaming that his movie might one day be tapped to join the Criterion Collection.
He was looking around at the Germany of 1931, when the wounds of the First World War were still fresh and hypernationalist Nazi chauvinism was on the rise. He made a movie that spoke to his moment—to Weimar audiences—and insisted that a German miner and a French miner share more in common than either does with a mine owner, an army general, or a Führer on their own side of the border. It was a call for solidarity in a time of jingoism that’s made all the more poignant by our knowledge that the two countries would be at war again in under a decade. These are historical connections I likely wouldn’t have made if I hadn’t spent my pandemic reading books like The Films of G.W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema, and despite that book’s eye-glazing title, there was something thrilling about how it helped me imagine my way, however imperfectly, into some approximation of how a Berlin moviegoer may have experienced Kameradschaft nine decades ago.Kracauer put forward the idea that Weimar cinema expressed a fundamentally and intrinsically German desire to be dominated, even hypnotized, by a charismatic leader.
The past, as novelist L.P. Hartley put it, is a foreign country, which I suppose is doubly true if the country whose past you’re examining is foreign to you. I first saw Kameradschaft before I knew much about the finer points of Franco-German relations during the interwar years. The film concludes with a celebration, as the miners from each side of the border come together to affirm the new bonds that they’d forged deep underground. First, a Frenchmen gives a speech, and then a German, played masterfully by Fritz Kampers, replies:
I couldn’t understand what our French comrade just said. But we all understand what he meant. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re German or French. We’re all workers, and a miner is a miner. But why do we only stick together when we’re in trouble? Are we to sit idly by till they fill us with so much hatred that we shoot each other down in another war? The coal belongs to us all… whether we shovel it on this side or the other. And if those above us can’t come to an agreement, we’ll stick together, because we belong together!
Even though I didn’t know much of the context yet, the speech gave me chills. Though I’ve been pumped full of enough postmodern theory that I hesitate to call this or any sentiment “universal,” this rejection of tribal animus sure as hell felt relevant to the Trump era. They’re sending their rapists. The Muslim ban. Build the wall. Shithole countries. Chinese flu. Stand back and stand by. The end of Kameradschaft is sometimes criticized as corny or ham-fisted. Watch it and come to your own conclusions. But for me, at the time I first encountered it, it felt like a celluloid bridge between now and then, here and there, present and past.
2020 became 2021, 2021 became 2022, and I hadn’t recorded a minute of audio. It didn’t feel like I understood enough to speak with any kind of authority. I’d be happily working on an episode script, then I’d run into some question at the edge of my knowledge. If cameras in the early sound era were stationary, I’d ask myself, then how was the camerawork in Westfront 1918’s battle scenes so dynamic?
I’d scour the internet until I found my answer: Ah, of course… they shot the scenes like it was a silent film and dubbed the sound effects in later. It was an afternoon of research that would ultimately add up to maybe 15 seconds of airtime. My therapist asked why that detail mattered to me. Was this information important to the story I was telling? Did I imagine that if I got a fact wrong, some Endowed Chair of Weimar Cinema would expose me as a fraud? Was I afraid to actually finish the project? I didn’t know.
As the work dragged on, these movies and the people who made them became a constant household presence. Thankfully, my wife, Laura, was willing to accommodate me. We joked about how Lil Dagover, the female lead in Caligari, has a name that perfectly positions her for a crossover career in hip hop. Laura tolerated my new celebrity crush: Louise Brooks, the libertine icon of Jazz Age Berlin who died at age 78, two months before I was born. On a trip upstate, Laura called me over to the hammock where she was peeking through a crack in the canvas, her face stiff with mock rigor mortis, à la the undead Count Orlok asleep in his coffin. They say every marriage is a culture, and ours was looking ever more Teutonic.This rejection of tribal animus sure as hell felt relevant to the Trump era.
The more invested I became in these films, the more they—and the era that produced them—became my mental frame of reference. One-hundred-year-old movies and 21st-century discourse increasingly collapsed into one another. The Blue Angel: Professor Rath is pushed out of his job for falling in love with a cabaret singer. The precarity of the academic labor force is truly unconscionable. Die Nibelungen: A romanticized myth that distorts Germany’s past for nationalist ends? I bet Fritz Lang has opinions about the 1619 Project. Metropolis: The best way to stop a mad scientist tech bro from tearing society apart is to throw him off a very tall building.
Early last summer, I marked August 17th on my calendar. “Podcast launch day.” Time to touch grass.
October 2022, a few weeks before Election Day. My six-episode podcast series was out in the world. I felt good about it. Criterion said nice things. I could take a breath, relax, and, yeah, brag a little bit.
For my birthday, Laura got us tickets to Company XIV’s Cocktail Magique. In the American imagination, there are, I think, two archetypal cabarets: Nicole Kidman’s Moulin Rouge and Liza Minelli’s Kit Kat Klub. Despite the French-inflected name, Cocktail Magique leans toward the latter. Gender is gleefully bent. The MC presides over the increasingly debauched festivities with a sense of camp that would impress Joel Grey. A woman in impossibly high heels steps from the top of one upright wine bottle to the next, her hair fashioned into the black bob helmet of Sally Bowles (or is it Louise Brooks?).
On the subway ride home, Laura and I discover we’d had the same thought during the show, perhaps because I’d invited those Weimar ghosts into our home. According to the New York Times, Nate Silver, and Kevin McCarthy, the American brownshirts were poised to decisively seize both houses of Congress, riding a wave of economic rage, racial animus, and a neanderthal disgust at “gender ideology.” And here we were, playing our roles as if scripted by Tucker Carlson: her an organizer with the teachers’ union and me a humanities professor, tossing back our drinks at a self-consciously louche Brooklyn cabaret as the Right clawed its way back into power.The threat may have abated, but it hasn’t disappeared.
Of course, the New York Times, Nate Silver, and Kevin McCarthy got it wrong. I did, too. Some of the scariest candidates lost, albeit narrowly. The post-MAGA reprieve continues, hopefully indefinitely. When you spend a few years mentally living in another time and place, watching the faces of real people who really experienced the collapse of democracy flicker across your screen, your mind starts drawing connections with the world around you. Some are valid, and some aren’t.
But my dive into Weimar Germany taught me that authoritarianism doesn’t always follow a linear path. Like any other political sensibility, it can ebb and flow. The threat may have abated, but it hasn’t disappeared. The House of Representatives is at the mercy of a fascist caucus that is prepared to tank the economy to achieve its ends. Trump is ready for a rematch, and the Florida governor challenging him is no less noxious.
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about Italy’s Years of Lead, the wave of political violence that rocked the country from the late 1960s into the 80s as submerged wounds from the Mussolini era resurfaced. This stretch coincided with the rise of the Giallo film—a genre of highly stylized crime thrillers from directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento that, according to some critics, reflected the tensions erupting in Italian society. I think a second season is starting to come together. Fingers crossed that this one is wholly irrelevant to our here and now.
Travis Mushett
Travis Mushett is a New York-based writer and thing-maker. He hosts The Haunted Screen, a narrative history podcast about international film movements that’s been praised by the Criterion Collection for how it “shapes swaths of cinema’s past into engaging, character-driven stories.” In the name of brand consistency, his Substack newsletter is also called The Haunted Screen. Travis holds a PhD from Columbia University and teaches film and media history at Fordham University and Marymount Manhattan College.
New Documentary Reimagines Policing with filmmaker Matthew Solomon
“When you view another person through the lens of love, you’re going to care about them. You’re going to care about supporting them. It’s a much different perspective than the punishment bureaucracy that we live in. . So love was the thing that, oh, that’s what this thing is about.”
–Matthew Solomon
Jan 28, 2023 We dive into the ‘abolish/defund the police’ movement with documentarian Matthew Solomon on his new film ‘Reimagining Safety’. Visit the website at https://www.reimaginingsafetymovie.com/ This was a clip from ‘The Leftist Mafia’: Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/live/7_NJ33p_kUA All episodes under livestreams playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ…
‘It may never come back’: Rare green comet flies over Bay Area
Amanda Bartlett, SFGATE
A rare green comet is passing through our solar system for the first time in 50,000 years, and over the weekend, Bay Area stargazers could have the best chance of spotting it in the night sky.
Dubbed C/2022 E3 (ZTF), the comet was first discovered in Jupiter’s orbit last March by astronomers Frank Masci and Bryce Bolin at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, and named after the Zwicky Transient Facility where it was identified. The comet made its closest approach to the sun on Jan. 12, and is now on a path that will bring it closest to Earth — about 27 million miles away — on Feb. 2.
Paul Lynam, an astronomer at the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, told SFGATE it’s unlikely that anyone in the Bay Area will be able to see the comet with the naked eye due to light pollution, so a backyard telescope — or ideally, a small pair of binoculars, which offer a wider field of view — will come in handy.
Lynam witnessed the comet from the observatory at about 9 p.m. on Wednesday night, and recommends that people look for it by scanning the northeastern night sky between the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper.
“What I noticed with a cheap pair of binoculars was an extended, diffused object that was more spread out than a star, and slightly brighter,” he said. “It looked like a lady’s hand fan that was open at an angle slightly less than 90 degrees.”
If you can’t see it right away, don’t give up.
“Comets have already been known to change their appearance quite quickly from night to night,” Lynam said. “If you are able to see it, you may recognize that it’s moving relative to the stars in the background, and if you’re lucky, you may see the morphology — the shape and structure of the tail.”
Gerald McKeegan, an astronomer at the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, said the comet may even appear to have two tails — one made of gas and one made of particles. He believes there’s still a chance observers “in very dark sky locations far from city lights” might be able to see it without visual aids from now until the first few days of February. After that, the comet will remain in the night sky, but it will become increasingly difficult to see from the U.S. as it moves over the southern hemisphere.
The comet gets its namesake shade of green from carbon-based compounds that interact with ultraviolet light in the atmosphere, which then break down and produce dicarbon, a molecule that emits the color. However, observers shouldn’t expect the comet to zoom across the sky in a vibrant, shamrock-colored hue, David Prosper, a night sky network administrator with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in San Francisco, told SFGATE.
“The funny part is while it’s called the green comet, the color isn’t really noticeable unless you get some good magnification on it,” said Prosper, who is also an administrator of the NASA Night Sky Network. “It seems folks report a definite green color when looking at it through telescopes that are 6 inches in diameter or greater, but everyone’s eyes are different. Photos do show the green color readily.”
Unfortunately, there are a number of factors at play that could impact the visibility of the comet. Prosper told SFGATE the moon is expected to become increasingly bright over the next week, and Dalton Behringer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said scattered to broken stratus clouds as well as a chance of rain may hinder observers on Saturday and Sunday night.
“If people are really trying to see it, they could go into higher terrain and get above the cloud layer,” Behringer said.
That being said, Thursday and Friday night could be your best bet. Later this weekend, stargazers may have more luck by heading over to the Chabot Space & Science Center, which plans to host free telescope viewing from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday night, and again on Feb. 3 and 4. San Francisco Amateur Astronomers plans to host a public star party this Saturday from 6 to 10 p.m. at the Presidio Parade Grounds.
Lynam and McKeegan also suggested looking out for Jupiter, which will appear as one of the brightest lights in the western sky — you can even take a look at the four moons cycling around the planet if you have a pair of binoculars. Mars will also be visible, emitting a bright orange or red light.
Regardless of what you might find among the stars, it’s worth taking a look up, as the comet’s orbit is unpredictable and thousands of years could pass before it returns, if it does at all.
“We can’t definitively say what the comet’s orbit will be. It could come once and get thrown out of our solar system completely,” Lynam said. “It could take thousands of years, or it may never come back.”
Written By Amanda Bartlett
Amanda Bartlett is a culture reporter for SFGATE. Prior to joining the newsroom in 2019, she worked for the Roxie Theater, Noise Pop and Frameline Film Festival. She lives in San Francisco with her rabbit, Cheeto. Send her an email at amanda.bartlett@sfgate.com.
Lenticular cloud atop Calif.’s Mount Shasta puts on day-long show
Amy Graff, SFGATE
A massive cloud shaped like a flying saucer covered the top of California’s Mount Shasta on Jan. 22, attracting the attention of many, especially shutterbugs who posted images that wowed the social media world.
On this beautiful, clear day, Shasta resident Robert Renick took photographs and a timelapse across three hours of the so-called lenticular cloud across several hours, setting up a camera in a remote area near the Shasta River on the north side of the mountain. Renick said the clouds that famously resemble UFOs appear once or twice a month in winter and the Jan. 22 spectacle was among the best he has ever seen as it started in the morning and continued into the night.
“That was a real cloud show,” Renick, who posts time lapses showing the Shasta area’s natural beauty on YouTube, told SFGATE on the phone. “It was definitely one of the longer and more pronounced lenticular cloud shows that I’ve seen.”
Lenticular clouds can form in a stable atmosphere when wind blows moisture-rich air up and over a mountain. As the air moves up, it cools to a point where it condenses and forms a cloud.
“There’s moisture in the air that’s blowing, and it comes up the mountain and condenses as it gets cooler — that’s where you have the cloud form. Since you have an obstacle in the way, the air goes around the mountain both ways, and you get a saucer shaped cloud,”
To get even more technical, the air blowing up and over the mountains creates what scientists call “gravity waves” and these play a key role in creating these clouds.
“These gravity waves more specifically are orographic (mountain) gravity waves,” Cora Randall, a professor in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, wrote in an email. “As the air ascends, it cools and the water vapor condenses into clouds. But gravity then pulls the air down on the other side of the mountain, causing it to compress and warm up. This causes the clouds to dissipate. Typically, the momentum causes the air to overshoot its equilibrium point (like a slinky continuing to bounce back and forth if you let go of one end), so it begins to ascend again, expanding and cooling, before gravity pulls it back down and it warms up again. This process repeats itself until the momentum has become depleted. The overall result is a wave: the air rises and falls in a wave-like pattern as it moves up, over, and then away from the mountain.”
Randall explained that the cloud above Mount Shasta would have formed from the first gravity wave crest as the air traveled over the mountain.
“The Mt. Shasta video shows what happens when the waves travel vertically – clouds form at the wave crests, so you get what’s often referred to as stacked lenticular clouds,” she wrote. “That’s why the Mt. Shasta clouds appear to be layered.”
Another interesting fact about lenticular clouds is that airplane pilots avoid them because they’re a sign that there’s turbulence in the air.
“Gravity waves transport momentum and energy from the surface up through the atmosphere, even into the ionosphere,” Randall explained. “They generate atmospheric turbulence, which can cause problems for air traffic.”
Written By Amy Graff
Amy Graff is the news editor for SFGATE. She was born and raised in the Bay Area and got her start in news at the Daily Californian newspaper at UC Berkeley where she majored in English literature. She has been with SFGATE for more than 10 years. You can email her at agraff@sfgate.com.
Mind-Body Integration with Ilana Rubenfeld (1934 – 2022)
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove
“It’s like the old joke. How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: One, but only if the lightbulb is willing.”
Jan 27, 2023 This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1993. Ilana Rubenfeld, founder and director of the Rubenfeld Synergy Center in Manhattan, describes how she learned to “listen with her hands” to the language of the body. She developed her unique approach, when she discovered that neither body work nor psychotherapy alone were able to address the whole person. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. New!! Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY.