In Other News: Travel guide with 2021 twist: Writers laud American places; Commentary: TV programs, people and channels that rose to the monumental challenges of 2020

Published 12:01 pm Friday, December 25, 2020

Editor’s note: “In Other News” is a list of state, national and global headlines compiled by Daily Citizen-News staff from Associated Press-provided stories. Click on the headlines below to read the full stories.

Travel guide with 2021 twist: Writers laud American places

Sixteen notable writers have created a combined list of places that they believe helped shape and define America, from coastal Oregon and Solvang, California, to Ellis Island and New Hampshire’s Black Heritage Trail. The resulting collection of mini-essays, including contributions from memoirist Cheryl Strayed, novelist Jodi Picoult, humorist David Sedaris and activist Gloria Steinem, was organized by Frommer’s, the travel guidebook company. The collection can be read for free online. The compilation is designed to be food for thought rather than an invitation to hit the road.

Raise your mittens: Outdoor learning continues into winter

PORTLAND, Maine — Cindy Soule’s fourth-graders in Maine’s largest city have studied pollination in a community garden. They solved an erosion problem that was damaging trees. They learned about bear scat. Then came a fresh layer of snow and temperatures that hovered around freezing — but her students were unfazed. Bundled up and masked, they scooted outside with their belongings in buckets. They collected their pencils and clipboards, plopped the buckets upside down in the snow, took a seat and went to work. The lesson? Snow, of course, and how snowflakes are formed.

Commentary: TV programs, people and channels that rose to the monumental challenges of 2020

As the pandemic ripped through almost every aspect of American life in 2020, driving people to isolate in myriad ways, media became more important than ever. Television, which analysts had long compared to an electronic campfire for its ability to bring people together for shared experiences, took on added importance as a central source of information and, in some cases, inspiration, even as production of most entertainment programs was shut down in Hollywood and elsewhere. As always happens in a crisis, some people rose to the occasion, and others folded or tried to exploit it for their own ends.

Review: Pixar’s ‘Soul’ joins mid-life crisis, jazz fantasia

Pete Docter’s “Soul” features stairway-to-heaven visions of the afterlife, a pre-birth “before” realm where souls are glowing turquoise orbs and an in-between spiritual realm trafficked by some kind of psychedelic pirate. And yet, kind of magically, it’s about “just regular old living.” Pixar may have started simple with talking toys, but their concepts have grown increasingly elaborate over the years, giving abstract shape to interior consciousness (“Inside Out”), brightening a peopled world of the dead (“Coco”) and conjuring a mythical suburban land with a father’s half-resurrected body (“Onward”). “Soul” is a step further, again: a grand metaphysical whatsit — a mid-life crisis movie, a New York jazz fantasia and a body-swap comedy, all in one.