51吃瓜

As an assistant editor on the desk, I wrote to the nation鈥檚 many state poets laureate鈥攏early every state has one鈥攁nd asked them to provide us with some words of gratitude in a relentlessly difficult year …. The nation鈥檚 poets laureate have a real sense of mission. They aim to encourage an appreciation for poetry, to challenge us, to generate some buzz for the art form.

[Joy] Harjo, Muscogee Creek, has been tapped by the Library of Congress to serve a second term as U.S. poet laureate. She said the appointment is an honor, “especially during these times of earth transformation and cultural change.鈥�

Over the Easter weekend, the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit company鈥揵ased in the heart of London鈥檚 principal jewelery quarter鈥搘as raided. The circumstances of the case have yet to be established, but initial reports speculate that the perpetrators may have abseiled down an elevator shaft and broken through the wall of the vault with heavy-duty cutting equipment, before finally using drills to get into the deposit boxes.

India, China, Russia, Spain and the United States all have deposits of jet, the pitch-black gem that actually is a form of coal. But the jet found along a seven-and-a-half-mile stretch of rugged coastland around Whitby, a remote Yorkshire fishing town, is considered the world鈥檚 best. Jacqueline Cullen, a London designer credited with some of the renewed interest in jet jewelry, gets her supplies from a Whitby resident who abseils down the cliffs to search abandoned Victorian mines, really just small holes chiseled into the rock face.

[Naomi] Cain is part of nine Indigenous sailors, descendants of Indigenous Australians, on the 11-person crew sailing the Beneteau 47.7 Marguerite. She鈥檚 worked alongside boats as a stevedore for nearly 18 years, moving cargo on and off container ships with a forklift. Sailing, however, is uncharted waters.

Around that time in Arles, on the Rh么ne River in what is now southern France, the stevedores did things a bit differently: They threw their empties into the river. Arles in the first century was the thriving gateway to Roman Gaul. Freight from all over the Mediterranean was transferred there to riverboats, then hauled up the Rh么ne by teams of men to supply the northern reaches of the empire, including the legions manning the German frontier.