Category: Acquisition

Acquired Mid-Century 8-Drawer Dresser - Acorn (west elm)

Our Mid-Century 8-Drawer Dresser is a roomy storage solution that's built to last. Made in a Fair Trade Certified™ facility, its sturdy frame is made from kiln-dried, sustainably sourced wood and covered in water-based finishes. Better yet: It's GREENGUARD Gold Certified as being low VOC.

  • Kiln-dried solid eucalyptus wood & engineered wood with an Acacia wood veneer.
  • All wood is FSC®-certified. Your purchase of this product helps support forests and ecosystems worldwide. Learn more.
  • Covered in a water-based Acorn finish.
  • Eight drawers open on solid wood glides.
  • Beveled front edges.
  • GREENGUARD Gold Certified. Meets or exceeds stringent chemical and VOC emissions standards.
  • Made in a Fair Trade Certified™ facility, directly benefiting the workers who make it.
  • Anti-tip kit hardware (included) is highly recommended to provide protection against tipping of furniture.
  • Make sure it fits! See our guide on measuring for delivery.
  • Made in Vietnam.
More furniture has arrived! The room’s starting to smarten up.
Acquired Songlines: The Power and Promise (First Knowledges) by Margo Neale, Lynne Kelly (Thames & Hudson)

Songlines are an archive for powerful knowledges that ensured Australia's many Indigenous cultures flourished for over 60,000 years. Much more than a navigational path in the cartographic sense, these vast and robust stores of information are encoded through song, story, dance, art and ceremony, rather than simply recorded in writing.

Weaving deeply personal storytelling with extensive research on mnemonics, Songlines: The Power and Promise offers unique insights into Indigenous traditional knowledges, how they apply today and how they could help all peoples thrive into the future. This book invites readers to understand a remarkable way for storing knowledge in memory by adapting song, art, and most importantly, Country, into their lives.

About the series: The First Knowledges books are co-authored by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers; the series is edited by Margo Neale, senior Indigenous curator at the National Museum of Australia.

Forthcoming titles include: Design by Alison Page & Paul Memmott (2021); Country by Bill Gammage & Bruce Pascoe (2021); Healing, Medicine & Plants (2022); Astronomy (2022); Innovation (2023).

I bookmarked this earlier in the year, but noticed this afternoon that it had been released yesterday. I bought a copy immediately so I can start reading it this evening after dinner. I’ve got high hopes for it with respect to memory and anthropology. 

It’s only available for shipment from Australia at the moment, so I opted to purchase it from Amazon in digital form so I could start reading it right away.

Acquired The Boneshaker by Kate Milford (Clarion Books)
Thirteen year-old Natalie Minks loves machines, particularly automata — self operating mechanical devices, usually powered by clockwork. When Jake Limberleg and his travelling medicine show arrive in her small Missouri town with a mysterious vehicle under a tarp, and an uncanny ability to make Natalie’s half-built automaton move, she feels in her gut that something about this caravan of healers is a bit off. Her uneasiness leads her to investigate the intricate maze of the medicine show, where she discovers a horrible truth, and realizes that only she has the power to set things right. Set in 1914, The Boneshaker is a gripping, richly textured novel about family, community, courage, and looking evil directly in the face in order to conquer it.
Purchased an autographed copy at Vroman’s for $7.99.
Acquired Two Story Shed Blue Little Free Library (Little Free Library)

The Two Story Shed Blue Little Free Library is handmade by craftsmen in Wisconsin and Minnesota. This little library box is weather-resistant, long-lasting, and would make a great addition to any neighborhood.

$349.95

Key Features:

  • Durable little library design made from pine and plywood with a metal roof for extra water protection
  • Popular two-story design with an adjustable shelf for extra book storage
  • Arrives completely finished, assembled, and ready for installation
  • Handcrafted in America by Amish artisans

Details:

  • Weighs 40 lbs
  • Exterior dimensions: 22.5" tall x 14.5" deep x 17" wide (Roof overhangs 1" on all sides of the library)
  • Interior dimensions: 14.5" wide x 21" tall x 12" deep
  • Installation materials (post, post topper, and installation hardware) not included
  • View our Returns Policy.

Official registration and standard charter sign included with your library ($39 value)! They're your key to our World Map, exclusive Facebook stewards group, and other helpful offers and activities. Choose your sign with the drop-down box above. (Charter sign ships separately. Spanish and French signs available in Silver only.)

Special offer! Save 10% with promo code JULY2020 at checkout. Offer is good through July 14 or while supplies last.

Okay, it’s been far too long since I had to decommission my original Little Free Library. So for my birthday today I’ve ordered a new library. It’ll be about two weeks and we’ll be back in business!

I’ve been tempted to build or up-cycle something like I did last time, but I also wanted to support the mission of the non-profit, so I’m considering the overage on my purchase to be a donation to the cause. Plus, this one looks pretty cute even if it’s a bit smaller than my last library.

Acquired Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939 by Clare CorbouldClare Corbould (Harvard University Press)

In 2000, the United States census allowed respondents for the first time to tick a box marked “African American” in the race category. The new option marked official recognition of a term that had been gaining currency for some decades. Africa has always played a role in black identity, but it was in the tumultuous period between the two world wars that black Americans first began to embrace a modern African American identity.

Following the great migration of black southerners to northern cities after World War I, the search for roots and for meaningful affiliations became subjects of debate and display in a growing black public sphere. Throwing off the legacy of slavery and segregation, black intellectuals, activists, and organizations sought a prouder past in ancient Egypt and forged links to contemporary Africa. In plays, pageants, dance, music, film, literature, and the visual arts, they aimed to give stature and solidity to the American black community through a new awareness of the African past and the international black world. Their consciousness of a dual identity anticipated the hyphenated identities of new immigrants in the years after World War II, and an emerging sense of what it means to be a modern American.

This looks fascinating! 

Total impulse buy.

Acquired Breaker – podcast listening & discovery (Breaker)
Listen to the best new podcast episodes with Breaker. Follow your friends to see what they’re listening to, and discover new shows that you’ll love. Like, share, and comment on your favorite episodes. Join the Breaker community and listen to the best stuff!
Downloaded a copy of this to my Android Phone to test out the functionality. Not much hope for using it as a daily driver, but I’m curious how they handle sharing URLs and if it could be used in creating listen posts.

Reminds me that I should throw a few podcast feeds into Indigenous for Android to see how it might work as a podcatcher and whether it would make a good Listen post micropub client.

↬ IndieWeb.org 2020/Austin/fromflowtostock Session () (#)

Acquired Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster)

America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In this book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us—and how we are polarizing it—with disastrous results.

“The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.”

In Why We’re Polarized, Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.

America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.

Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the twentieth century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis.

This is a revelatory book that will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.

↬ Ezra Klein Why the media is so polarized — and how it polarizes us (Vox) () (#)