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In the current issue of Pointe Magazine, Gillian Murphy and Laura Jacobs try to pin down what it is.

P.S.: Not “pin down,” I should say “explore.”  They’re not attempting to be certitutidinous.

Scientific American describes how radioactive iodine from Fukushima has been found in kelp off the coast of California.

— for morality.

And now someone has: Ronnie Moas of Standpoint Research, who downgrades Apple over the way it treats workers: “For Apple Computers to pay their workers $2 an hour while they have $150 billion in the bank is nothing short of obscene.”

Abbey Zimmet of Commondreams.org reports on the unlikely occurence.

Transcribing in full for the first time my interview with Muriel Stuart from 1981.

About her time spent dancing with Pavlova and her troupe–

Pavlova was “the first Russian that I have ever known who was interested in what was happening in dance. When we were in Germany, she took us to see Wigman’s school.  I was present in this room which was completely orange, not much bigger than this, really.  They were all dressed in black: covered from head to foot. And they danced without music.  They danced to gongs, not any more musical than that, but he varied the tempo.

“We stayed there about an hour and a half.   Pavlova was tremendously interested.  Most of the English girls in the company with me thought it was the most horrible thing they had ever seen.  They didn’t realize how great in a way this was, producing something entirely different that we had never seen before.  And Pavlova said to one of the girls, a very good technician, but very stiff–she got her leg up here, she was the Lilac Fairy, but Pavlova never felt she had any sense of movement.  ‘This is where you should come. . . . Unfortunately life is too short.  It’s too late.'”

At New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker last week, Megan Fairchild was flipping some of the switches.

It’s not like there’s any doubt that Fairhchild has pretty legs and feet.  We know that. But as she balanced in arabesque at the end of the grand pas de deux, I almost thought, WHO is that woman with the gorgeous long legs? Because she wasn’t sitting in the position at all.  Therewas nothing stolid about it.

She can do this–she doesn’t always.  And pretty became energized into gorgeous.

In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Matthew Brandon Wolfson takes on the “sentimental repackaging” of Bush and Cheney attempted by Peter Baker in his new book Days of Fire.

Alla Osipenko once told me that at the opening night gala program given by the Mariinsky (then Kirov) to kick off their London season in 1970 she had turned a triple pirouette in the Black Swan pas de deux. “Alla, it didn’t look like you!” Natalia Dudinskaya complimented her later.

For me, something like that happened at City Ballet at last week’s Nutcracker, but kind of exactly  in reverse, away from technique and toward grandeur, with a completely different dancer.

Thursday night at New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker, guest conductor Raphael Jiminez loosened the reins a bit on Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers, the blooms breathed a sigh of relief, and Sara Mearns and the “girls” took it from there!

Mearns’ arabesque voyages were Whoa!—she didn’t just do them, she DID them. Completely on top of her leg, as she moved backward upstage, she kept some energy going forward as well—nothing like a tombe lean—but she was so aligned, so poised, that her downstage silhouette kept resonating.

In a country like sours, where runaway, unsupervised surveillance by the government has beomce a norm countenanced by most of our elected representatives, including the President, you can be sure that some of that snooping is going to be used for political advantage.

Sentator Bernie Sanders has now asked the question that should be on everyone’s lips: Is the NSA spying on Congress?  We’ll see how the NSA wiggles out of this one. 

Jon Queally at Commondresm.org does a great state-of-play report.

A relative has always played by the rules.  I doubt she’s ever paid a bill late in her entire life. But she’s always been anxious about money, and while she certainly has enough, she asked me how she could get over her anxiety.

I said what is not going to make you feel better is clutching tighter and tighter to what you’ve got.

Now that anxiety has something to do with the way she was raised, and is best dealt with with a shrink. Nevertheless, I also reminded her that when a system has fractured, as ours has, people become atomized. They can’t look at what’s going on structurally, so consumed are they by panic, whether overt or latent.  They’re not able to stand back, not able to take collective, concerted, analytic action. And all that, of course, works to the benefit of the people who have wrecked our financial security.

Anyway, her money’s not safe, no matter how carefully she negotiates, until there is real reform of our financial institutions.  I mean, isn’t another financial crisis being predicted for 2016?

It’s incredible how badly informed even people who make some efforts to be informed are.  She had no idea that effective tax rates on this country’s highest earners were ever higher than 39%–which they were in this country’s greatest period of economic expansion.

The “mainstream” media almost never mentions this fact.