Sylvia Poggioli
Sylvia Poggioli is senior European correspondent for NPR s International Desk covering political, economic, and cultural news in Italy, the Vatican, Western Europe, and the Balkans. Poggioli s on-air reporting and analysis have encompassed the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the turbulent civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and how immigration has transformed European societies.
Since joining NPR s foreign desk in 1982, Poggioli has traveled extensively for reporting assignments. These include going to Norway to cover the aftermath of the brutal attacks by a right-wing extremist; to Greece, Spain, and Portugal reporting on the eurozone crisis; and the Balkans where the last wanted war criminals have been arrested.
February 26, 2021
When Lawrence Ferlinghetti died this week at age 101, nearly one month shy of his 102nd birthday, many of my friends, even writer friends, expressed surprise on social media.
I didn’t even know he was still alive!
Indeed, Ferlinghetti outlived all the younger Beat writers he once published, including Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Greg Corso. When
The New York Times, in a 2005 interview, asked him why, he answered, “Kerouac drank himself to death, and Burroughs, when he was young, thought the healthiest person was one who had enough money to stay on heroin all his life. I really never got into drugs. I smoked a little dope, and I did a little LSD, but that was it. I was afraid of it, frankly. I don’t like to be out of control.”
Join us for a free subscriber Q&A event with Dr. Peter Hotez
Houston Chronicle staff
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Dr. Peter Hotez at his Baylor office in Houston on Thursday, Jan. 28, 2021.Elizabeth Conley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
To mark the one year anniversary of the first COVID case diagnosed in the Houston area, join the Houston Chronicle for an exclusive subscriber-only event.
Senior writer Lisa Gray sits down with pre-eminent vaccine expert and Houstonian Dr. Peter Hotez to take your questions and discuss a wide range of topics, including how we might prevent the next pandemic.
The virtual event will take place at 1 p.m. Wednesday, March 3. Registration is free.
The Dean’s Speaker Series on Anti-Racism and the Disciplines, an initiative of the Tulane University School of Liberal Arts, will continue March 2 with a talk by Mary Pattillo, the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University.
Pattillo, the second speaker in the series, will speak virtually on the topic of “Anti-Racism and Sociology” beginning at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public via Zoom. It will be moderated by Andrea Boyles, an associate professor of sociology and Africana studies at Tulane.
Pattillo is the author of two award-winning books
Lawrence Ferlinghetti on Oct. 8, 1988. Ferlinghetti died on Monday, Feb. 22, 2021 at the age of 101. (AP Photo/Frankie Ziths)
“The world is a beautiful place/ to be born into/ if you don’t mind happiness/ not always being/ so very much fun/ if you don’t mind a touch of hell/ now and then/ just when everything is fine/ because even in heaven/ they don’t sing/ all the time.”
So wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti in “The world is a beautiful place,” from his 1958 poetry collection
A Coney Island of the Mind, one of many well-known poems to come from the pen of this towering figure in American letters over his long lifetime.