Venice faces huge challenges.  When you have an aging population of only 53,000 and you're doing nothing to retain people who are young, you're going in the direction of the city disappearing.  The polemics about Venice always revolve around the same issues:  cruise ships, overtourism and the gradual exodus of locals from the city.  And while the authorities regularly make headlines for mooted initiatives--whether that's an "access contribution" for day trippers or a ban on new fast food stalls opening--many locals say that not enough is being done quickly enough.  Venice has been flooded by visitors for generations, of course, and Venetians have been leaving the city for decade--for ease of life, as well as because of irritation at tourists.  As mass tourism increases, visitors are more likely to pay $3 for a tchotchke made who knows where than $30 for a handmade, marble-papered notebook in a tradition dating back to the renaissance period.  More critically, the rise of Airbnb has transformed the city's housing infrastructure.  Why would a landlord rent their apartment to a Venetian when they can earn much more money by renting it by the night to tourists willing to pay a higher price?  The city authorities have reacted by banning new openings of fast food outlets in 2018.  They have forbidden the planning of new hotels in the historic center (Venice and the islands, other than the Lido) since June 2017.  That's not to say there have been no recent hotel openings.  New hotels for 2019 include Il Palazzo Experimental in Dorsoduro, near the Guggenheim Museum, and Hotel Indigo in the residential district of Sant'Elena.  However, the mayor's office says that anything that has opened since the law came into force, had permission to do so before, and has merely taken time to open.  The only exception: hotels that also offer a "public service."  This explains the current controversy in Venice around a proposed 10-story hotel in the residential district of Castello, one of the few local-centric areas remaining in Venice.  The rise of Airbnb has transformed the streets of Venice.  In August 2019, the city had no fewer than 8,907 listings, according to monitoring site Inside Airbnb.  Three quarters of them were entire properties (rather than a room in a local's house), and 63% of the hosts were advertising multiple properties.  Of course, that's not counting short-term rentals on other sites.  Julia Buckley  Read much more and see graphics at https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/venice-overtourism-situation-flooding/index.html

AGE CLASSIFICATIONS IN THE U.S.-1

World War II Generation (aka depression babies) – Those born prior to 1945

Baby Boomers – Those born 1946 to 1964

Generation X – Those born 1965 to 1982

Generation Y (aka the Millennials) – Those born after 1982  https://drdianehamilton.com/tag/depression-babies/

AGE CLASSIFICATIONS IN THE U.S.-2

Depression babies – born between 1926 and 1935

War babies – born between 1936 and 1945

Early baby boomers – born between 1946 and 1955

Late baby boomers – born between 1956 and 1965

Gen Xers – born between 1966 and 1975  Phillip Moeller  https://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/the-best-life/2013/05/17/gen-x-and-late-baby-boomers-face-bleak-retirements

Charlie Wilson's War is a 2007 American biographical comedy-drama film, based on the story of U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson and CIA operative Gust Avrakotos, whose efforts led to Operation Cyclone, a program to organize and support the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet–Afghan War.  The film was directed by Mike Nichols (his final film) and written by Aaron Sorkin, who adapted George Crile III's 2003 book Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History.  Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Philip Seymour Hoffman starred, with Amy Adams and Ned Beatty in supporting roles.  Some Reagan-era officials, including former Under Secretary of Defense Fred Ikle, have criticized some elements of the film.  The Washington Times reported claims that the film wrongly promotes the notion that the CIA-led operation funded Osama bin Laden and ultimately produced the September 11 attacks; however, other Reagan-era officials have been more supportive of the film.  In February 2008, it was revealed that the film would not play in Russian theaters.  The rights for the film were bought by Universal Pictures International (UPI) Russia.  It was speculated that the film would not appear because of a certain point of view that depicted the Soviet Union unfavorably.  UPI Russia head Yevgeny Beginin denied that, saying, "We simply decided that the film would not make a profit." Reaction from Russian bloggers was also negative.  One wrote:  "The whole film shows Russians, or rather Soviets, as brutal killers."  While the film depicts Wilson as an immediate advocate for supplying the mujahideen with Stinger missiles, a former Reagan administration official recalls that he and Wilson, while advocates for the mujahideen, were actually initially "lukewarm" on the idea of supplying these missiles.  Their opinion changed when they discovered that rebels were successful in downing Soviet gunships with them.  As such, they were actually not supplied until the second Reagan administration term, in 1987, and their provision was advocated mostly by Reagan defense officials and influential conservatives.  The film's happy ending came about because Tom Hanks did not feel comfortable with an original draft which ended on a scene featuring the September 11th Attacks according to Melissa Roddy, a Los Angeles film maker with inside information from the production.  Citing the original screenplay, which was very different from the final product, in Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy Matthew Alford wrote that the film gave up "the chance to produce what at least had the potential to be the Dr. Strangelove of our generation".  In his 2011 book Afgantsy, former British ambassador to Russia Rodric Braithwaite describes the film as "amusing but has only an intermittent connection with historical reality."   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Wilson%27s_War_(film)

Throughout the world, in every culture, people have told stories--at home and at work, when the harvest was taken in, the wood was cut and carted, and the wool was woven.  Today, we still enjoy stories as deeply as did our ancestors, for our lives are bound together with stories; the tales, perhaps ever so ordinary, that seem to catch us up and in some obscure, almost magical way, help us make sense of our world.  In 1973, in a tiny Tennessee town, something happened that rekindled our national appreciation of the told story and became the spark plug for a major cultural movement--the rebirth of the art of storytelling.  It began serendipitously in Jonesborough, Tennessee, a 200-year-old town in the heart of the Southern Appalachian Mountains.  On the second Saturday night in October 1973, Jerry Clower, a Mississippi coon hunter and storyteller, leapt to the stage in a hot, jammed high school gymnasium and told tales to more than a thousand East Tennesseans.  They had come for some side-splitting humor in the tales that had made Clower a household name throughout the Deep South.  The crowd stomped and cheered and didn’t leave disappointed.  The next afternoon, under a warm October sun, an old farm wagon in Courthouse Square served as a stage.  And the storytellers were there—a former Arkansas congressman, a Tennessee banker, a college professor, a western North Carolina farmer.  They told their tales and breathed life into the first National Storytelling Festival.  Every October since 1973, thousands of travelers have visited Tennessee’s oldest town.  They come for one purpose-–to hear stories and to tell them at the National Storytelling Festival.  This celebration of America’s rich and varied storytelling tradition, the oldest and most respected gathering anywhere in America devoted to storytelling, has in turn spawned a national revival of this venerable art.  The National Storytelling Festival is produced by the International Storytelling Center.  https://www.storytellingcenter.net/about-us/our-story/  The International Storytelling Center (ISC) is located in the heart of downtown Jonesborough, at 100 W. Main Street.  Live programming is May through October, with special events scattered throughout the remainder of the year.  Information:  (423) 753-2171

Lisel Mueller (born Elisabeth Neumann, February 8, 1924–February 21, 2020) was a German-born American poet, translator and academic teacher.  Her family fled the Nazi regime, arriving in the U.S. in 1937 when she was 15.  She worked as a literary critic and taught at the University of Chicago, Elmhurst College and Goddard College. She began writing poetry in the 1950s and published her first collection in 1965, after years of self-study.  She received awards including the National Book Award in 1981 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997, as the only German-born poet awarded that prize.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisel_Mueller  Link to poetry by poet and translator Lisel Mueller at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lisel-mueller

Katherine Johnson, a pioneering mathematician who, along with a group of other brilliant black women, made US space travel possible, has died at the age of 101.  Her calculations were responsible for safely rocketing men into space and securing the American lead in the space race against the Soviet Union.  For almost her entire life, her seminal work in American space travel went unnoticed. Only recently has Johnson's genius received national recognition.  NASA announced Johnson's death on February 24, 2020.  Johnson was part of NASA's "Computer Pool," a group of mathematicians whose data powered NASA's first successful space missions.  The group's success largely hinged on the accomplishments of its black women members.  Her work went largely unrecognized until the release of 2016's "Hidden Figures," a film portrayal of Johnson's accomplishments while the space agency was still largely segregated.  Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918.  Her preternatural talent for math was quickly evident, and she became one of three black students chosen to integrate West Virginia's graduate schools, according to her NASA biography.  She was tasked with performing trajectory analysis for Alan Shepherd's 1961 mission, the first American human spaceflight.  She co-authored a paper on the safety of orbital landings in 1960--the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division received credit for a report.  John Glenn requested her help before his orbit around Earth in 1962.  Scottie Andrew  See pictures at https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/24/us/katherine-johnson-death-scn-trnd/index.html

An Underwater Library and Other Hotel Amenities for Determined Bookworms:  From Miami to Cape Cod, 6 hotels and resorts with unconventional book collections and reading programs by

Kelsey Ogletree  The Wall Street Journal  updated February 21, 2020

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2230  February 25, 2020