Learning Skills

Article of the day for September 8, 2020 is The Bread-Winners . The Bread-Winners is an 1883 anti-labor novel by John Hay, who was Assistant Secretary to the President under Abraham Lincoln, and McKinley's final secretary of state. Originally published anonymously in installments in The Century Magazine, the book attracted wide interest and provoked considerable speculation over the author's identity. Hay wrote his only novel as a reaction to several strikes that affected him and his business interests in the 1870s and early 1880s. In the main storyline, a wealthy former army captain, Arthur Farnham, organizes Civil War veterans to keep the peace when the Bread-winners, a group of lazy and malcontented workers, call a violent general strike. Hay left hints as to his identity in the novel, and some guessed right, but he never acknowledged the book as his, and it did not appear with his name on it until after his death in 1905. Hay's hostile view of organized labor was soon...

With a high of 84F and a low of 64F.

By BY DWIGHT GARNER from NYT Books https://ift.tt/35cZ6JE

By BY CORBY KUMMER from NYT Books https://ift.tt/3309txQ

Article of the day for September 7, 2020 is Flora of Madagascar . The flora of Madagascar consists of more than 12,000 species of vascular and non-vascular plants. Around 83 per cent of Madagascar's vascular plants are found only on the island. These include five entirely endemic plant families as well as most of the over 900 orchid species, the traveller's tree, the Madagascar periwinkle, six species of baobab (pictured) and around 200 species of palms. The high degree of endemism is due to Madagascar's long isolation following its separation from the African and Indian landmasses in the Mesozoic Era. Today, humid forests, including the lowland forests, are found on the eastern plateau. Much of the central highlands is grassland. In the west are dry forest and succulent woodland. Unique spiny thickets are in the southwest, and mangroves occur on the west coast. While 10 per cent of the land surface is protected, much of the native flora is threatened, especially through ...

With a high of 83F and a low of 63F.

By BY ELISABETH EGAN from NYT Books https://ift.tt/2R0C6FC