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Artist’s Passion for Wildlife is Advocating for Endangered Species

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Artist Irina Pushkareva Paints for a Cause; the Protection of One of Our Greatest Resources

MIAMI (Newswire.com) – Local artist Irina Pushkareva is changing the way we view the landscape of SW Florida with her intricate paintings of the natural world. Through her art, she hopes to drive greater awareness that conserving animals and the natural environment is a foundation for a stable and healthy human society.

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Irina Pushkareva
Hello and welcome! My name is Irina, and I am grateful for the chance to connect with you through my art and love for our Mother Nature.

As an artist who focuses her attention on capturing the beauty of the natural world, Irina Pushkavera wanted to do her part to save it. Her latest collection of paintings showcase SW Florida’s diverse wildlife, with a portion of every print sold going to support the efforts of the Florida Wildlife Federation.

“This project is important to me because I see how fast the state of Florida is being developed, and how negatively this development impacts Florida’s nature and its wild species. People seem to underestimate the importance of nature in our modern society. Today, people struggle a lot with anxiety, chronic stress, depressive moods and even depression. But it was proven that watching animals in the wild brings joy, peace and harmony to one’s mind,” Pushkareva explained.

This project also serves as a reminder that our environment, its animals and humankind are all tied together.

“The reason I chose to paint wild animals thriving in their natural surroundings, is because I wish to bring the feelings of joy, serenity and harmony to people through my art. People often act on emotions, on whatever feels good in the moment. When we do that, we create chaos in our lives, in other people’s lives, and in our surroundings as well. Only when we are calm and peaceful, our rational thinking turns on. Our emotions no longer direct how we act. Instead, we decide what is more rational and effective to do at the moment,” Pushkareva said. “It is important to protect and serve the natural environment we live in, because we can’t flourish as a society without it. But, nature can flourish without us. The more we connect to nature, the more we connect with our true selves.”

Irina’s mission as an artist is to empower others through her art and bring a feeling of serenity and joy.

To learn more about Irina Pushkareva and her work, visit ipushkareva.com.

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Watching animals often helped me to find courage and peacefulness of mind to stay true to myself, and brought me serenity and joy that empowered me to work hard on what I love to do the most – creating. I wish to bring you the same feelings throughout.

About Irina

Irina Pushkareva began to draw and paint as soon as she could hold a pencil at the age of 1 and half. In her teenage years, Irina was trained in traditional ways of painting and drawing, but found it restricting and wanted to break free from traditional art. In 2016, while studying in Parsons, Pushkareva developed her own contemporary oil painting style, which allowed her to create “lines” of oil paint, instead of blending all the shades together like seen in traditional art forms. Since graduating in 2018 from Parsons with BFA in Fine Art, Pushkareva has been creating and showing her work in the United States.

Source: Irina Pushkareva, artist

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‘I were but little happy, if I could say how much’: Shakespeare’s insights on happiness have held up for more than 400 years

The World Happiness Report indicates the U.S. ranks 24th in global happiness, emphasizing that joy arises from societal relationships and care. Shakespeare’s works explore happiness’ duality—both fortune and contentment—highlighting cultural influences that affect individuals’ experiences. Understanding happiness requires recognizing social inequalities, community support, and shared cultural beliefs.

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Joanna Vanderham as Desdemona and Hugh Quarshie as the title character in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of ‘Othello.’
Robbie Jack/Corbis via Getty Images

Cora Fox, Arizona State University

What is “happiness” – and who gets to be happy?

Since 2012, the World Happiness Report has measured and compared data from 167 countries. The United States currently ranks 24th, between the U.K. and Belize – its lowest position since the report was first issued. But the 2025 edition – released on March 20, the United Nations’ annual “International Day of Happiness” – starts off not with numbers, but with Shakespeare.

“In this year’s issue, we focus on the impact of caring and sharing on people’s happiness,” the authors explain. “Like ‘mercy’ in Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice,’ caring is ‘twice-blessed’ – it blesses those who give and those who receive.”

Shakespeare’s plays offer many reflections on happiness itself. They are a record of how people in early modern England experienced and thought about joy and satisfaction, and they offer a complex look at just how happiness, like mercy, lives in relationships and the caring exchanges between people.

Contrary to how we might think about happiness in our everyday lives, it is more than the surge of positive feelings after a great meal, or a workout, or even a great date. The experience of emotions is grounded in both the body and the mind, influenced by human physiology and culture in ways that change depending on time and place. What makes a person happy, therefore, depends on who that person is, as well as where and when they belong – or don’t belong.

Happiness has a history. I study emotions and early modern literature, so I spend a lot of my time thinking about what Shakespeare has to say about what makes people happy, in his own time and in our own. And also, of course, what makes people unhappy.

From fortune to joy

A timber home with lush gardens.
Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
Tony Hisgett/Flickr via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

“Happiness” derives from the Old Norse word “hap,” which meant “fortune” or “luck,” as historians Phil Withington and Darrin McMahon explain. This earlier sense is found throughout Shakespeare’s works. Today, it survives in the modern word “happenstance” and the expression that something is a “happy accident.”

But in modern English usage, “happy” as “fortunate” has been almost entirely replaced by a notion of happiness as “joy,” or the more long-term sense of life satisfaction called “well-being.” The term “well-being,” in fact, was introduced into English from the Italian “benessere” around the time of Shakespeare’s birth.

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The word and the concept of happiness were transforming during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and his use of the word in his plays mingles both senses: “fortunate” and “joyful.” That transitional ambiguity emphasizes happiness’ origins in ideas about luck and fate, and it reminds readers and playgoers that happiness is a contingent, fragile thing – something not just individuals, but societies need to carefully cultivate and support.

For instance, early in “Othello,” the Venetian senator Brabantio describes his daughter Desdemona as “tender, fair, and happy / So opposite to marriage that she shunned / The wealthy, curled darlings of our nation.” Before she elopes with Othello she is “happy” in the sense of “fortunate,” due to her privileged position on the marriage market.

Later in the same play, though, Othello reunites with his new wife in Cyprus and describes his feelings of joy using this same term:

…If it were now to die,
‘Twere now to be most happy, for I fear
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.

Desdemona responds,

The heavens forbid
But that our loves and comforts should increase
Even as our days do grow!

They both understand “happy” to mean not just lucky, but “content” and “comfortable,” a more modern understanding. But they also recognize that their comforts depend on “the heavens,” and that happiness is enabled by being fortunate.

“Othello” is a tragedy, so in the end, the couple will not prove “happy” in either sense. The foreign general is tricked into believing his young wife has been unfaithful. He murders her, then takes his own life.

The seeds of jealousy are planted and expertly exploited by Othello’s subordinate, Iago, who catalyzes the racial prejudice and misogyny underlying Venetian values to enact his sinister and cruel revenge.

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A man and woman hold hands, looking upset, as they sit on a cushion on stage.
James Earl Jones playing the title role and Jill Clayburgh as Desdemona in a 1971 production of ‘Othello.’
Kathleen Ballard/Los Angeles Times/UCLA Library via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Happy insiders and outsiders

“Othello” sheds light on happiness’s history – but also on its politics.

While happiness is often upheld as a common good, it is also dependent on cultural forces that make it harder for some individuals to experience. Shared cultural fantasies about happiness tend to create what theorist Sara Ahmed calls “affect aliens”: individuals who, by nature of who they are and how they are treated, experience a disconnect between what their culture conditions them to think should make them happy and their disappointment or exclusion from those positive feelings. Othello, for example, rightly worries that he is somehow foreign to the domestic happiness Desdemona describes, excluded from the joy of Venetian marriage. It turns out he is right.

Because Othello is foreign and Black and Desdemona is Venetian and white, their marriage does not conform to their society’s expectations for happiness, and that makes them vulnerable to Iago’s deceit.

Similarly, “The Merchant of Venice” examines the potential for happiness to include or exclude, to build or break communities. Take the quote about mercy that opens the World Happiness Report.

The phrase appears in a famous courtroom scene, as Portia attempts to persuade a Jewish lender, Shylock, to take pity on Antonio, a Christian man who cannot pay his debts. In their contract, Shylock has stipulated that if Antonio defaults on the loan, the fee will be a “pound of flesh.”

“The quality of mercy is not strained,” Portia lectures him; it is “twice-blessed,” benefiting both giver and receiver.

It’s a powerful attempt to save Antonio’s life. But it is also hypocritical: Those cultural norms of caring and mercy seem to apply only to other Christians in the play, and not the Jewish people living alongside them in Venice. In that same scene, Shylock reminds his audience that Antonio and the other Venetians in the room have spit on him and called him a dog. He famously asks why Jewish Venetians are not treated as equal human beings: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?”

A sepia-toned photograph of a man with a beard, curly hair and cap staring intently at the camera.
Actor Henry Irving as Shylock in a late 19th-century performance of ‘The Merchant of Venice.’
Lock & Whitfield/Folger Shakespeare Library via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Shakespeare’s plays repeatedly make the point that the unjust distribution of rights and care among various social groups – Christians and Jews, men and women, citizens and foreigners – challenges the happy effects of benevolence.

Those social factors are sometimes overlooked in cultures like the U.S., where contemporary notions of happiness are marketed by wellness gurus, influencers and cosmetic companies. Shakespeare’s plays reveal both how happiness is built through communities of care and how it can be weaponized to destroy individuals and the fabric of the community.

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There are obvious victims of prejudice and abuse in Shakespeare’s plays, but he does not just emphasize their individual tragedies. Instead, the plays record how certain values that promote inequality poison relationships that could otherwise support happy networks of family and friends.

Systems of support

Pretty much all objective research points to the fact that long-term happiness depends on community, connections and social support: having systems in place to weather what life throws at us.

And according to both the World Happiness Report and Shakespeare, contentment isn’t just about the actual support you receive but your expectations about people’s willingness to help you. Societies with high levels of trust, like Finland and the Netherlands, tend to be happier – and to have more evenly distributed levels of happiness in their populations.

Shakespeare’s plays offer blueprints for trust in happy communities. They also offer warnings about the costs of cultural fantasies about happiness that make it more possible for some, but not for all.The Conversation

Cora Fox, Associate Professor of English and Health Humanities, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Bridge is a section of the STM Daily News Blog meant for diversity, offering real news stories about bona fide community efforts to perpetuate a greater good. The purpose of The Bridge is to connect the divides that separate us, fostering understanding and empathy among different groups. By highlighting positive initiatives and inspirational actions, The Bridge aims to create a sense of unity and shared purpose. This section brings to light stories of individuals and organizations working tirelessly to promote inclusivity, equality, and mutual respect. Through these narratives, readers are encouraged to appreciate the richness of diverse perspectives and to participate actively in building stronger, more cohesive communities.

https://stmdailynews.com/the-bridge

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Some ‘Star Wars’ stories have already become reality

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Star Wars Stories
Tatooine’s moisture farming equipment stands in the desert of Tunisia, where parts of the ‘Star Wars’ movie series were filmed. Véronique Debord-Lazaro via Flickr, CC BY-SA
Daniel B. Oerther, Missouri University of Science and Technology and William Schonberg, Missouri University of Science and Technology Just 48 short years ago, movie director George Lucas used the phrase “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” as the opening to the first “Star Wars” movie, later labeled “Episode IV: A New Hope.” But at least four important aspects of the “Star Wars” saga are much closer – both in time and space – than Lucas was letting on. One, the ability to add blue food coloring to milk, was possible even at the time the first film came out. But in 2024, “Star Wars”-themed blue milk became periodically available in grocery stores. And we, an environmental health engineer and a civil engineer, know there are at least three more elements of these ancient, distant Lucas stories that might seem like science fiction but are, in fact, science reality.

Moisture farming

In that first movie, “Episode IV,” Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen was a farmer on the planet of Tatooine. He farmed water from air in the middle of a desert. It might sound impossible, but it’s exactly what experts discussed at the second International Atmospheric Water Harvesting Summit hosted by Arizona State University in March 2025. Each day, a human needs to consume about the equivalent of 0.8 gallons of water (3 liters). With more than 8 billion people living on the planet, that means engineers need to produce nearly 2.6 trillion gallons (10 trillion liters) of clean drinking water every year. Taken globally, rainfall would be enough, but it’s distributed very unevenly – including landing in the oceans, where it immediately becomes too salty to drink safely. Deserts, which cover about one-fifth of the Earth’s land area, are home to about 1 billion people. Researchers at places such as Berkeley have developed solar-powered systems that can produce clean drinking water from thin air. In general, they use a material that traps water molecules from the air within its structure and then use sunlight to condense that water out of the material and into drinkable liquid. But there is still a ways to go before they are ready for commercial distribution and available to help large numbers of people.
Researchers can harvest water from air in the desert, in a process powered only by the Sun.

Space debris

When the second Death Star was destroyed in “Return of the Jedi,” it made a huge mess, as you would expect when blowing to smithereens an object at least 87 miles across (140 kilometers). But the movie’s mythology helpfully explains a hyperspace wormhole briefly opened, scattering much of the falling debris across the galaxy. As best as anyone can tell, a hyperspace wormhole has never appeared near Earth. And even if such a thing existed or happened, humans might not have the technology to chuck all our trash in there anyway. So we’re left with a whole lot of stuff all around us, including in space. According to the website Orbiting Now, in late April 2025 there were just over 12,000 active satellites orbiting the planet. All in all, the United States and other space-faring nations are trying to keep track of nearly 50,000 objects orbiting Earth. And there are millions of fragments of space debris too small to be observed or tracked. Just as on Earth’s roads, space vehicles crash into each other if traffic gets too congested. But unlike the debris that falls to the road after an Earth crash, all the bits and pieces that break off in a space crash fly away at speeds of several thousand miles per hour (10,000 to 30,000 kph) and can then hit other satellites or spacecraft that cross their paths. This accumulation of space debris is creating an increasing problem. With more satellites and spacecraft heading to orbit, and more stuff up there moving around that might hit them, space travel is becoming more like flying the Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field every day. Engineers at NASA, the European Space Agency and other space programs are exploring a variety of technologies – including a net, a harpoon and a laser – to remove the more dangerous pieces of space junk and clean up the space environment.
Dodging obstacles in space is no picnic.

The Force itself

To most Earth audiences, the Force was a mysterious energy field created by life that binds the galaxy together. That is until 1999, when “Episode I: The Phantom Menace” revealed that the Force came from midi-chlorians, a microscopic, sentient life form that lives within every living cell. To biologists, midi-chlorians sound suspiciously similar to mitochondria, the powerhouse of our cells. The current working hypothesis is that mitochondria emerged from bacteria that lived within cells of other living things. And mitochondria can communicate with other life forms, including bacteria. There are many different kinds of mitochondria, and medical professionals are learning how to transplant mitochondria from one cell to another just like they transplant organs from one person’s body to another. Maybe one day a transplant procedure could help people find the light side of the Force and turn away from the dark side. May the Fourth – and the Force – be with you.The Conversation Daniel B. Oerther, Professor of Environmental Health Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology and William Schonberg, Professor of Civil Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The brief but shining life of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a poet who gave dignity to the Black experience

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Paul Lawrence Dunbar, poet.
A 1902 portrait of Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

Minnita Daniel-Cox, University of Dayton

Paul Laurence Dunbar was only 33 years old when he died in 1906.

In his short yet prolific life, Dunbar used folk dialect to give voice and dignity to the experience of Black Americans at the turn of the 20th century. He was the first Black American to make a living as a writer and was seminal in the start of the New Negro Movement and Harlem Renaissance.

Dunbar also penned one of the most iconic phrases in Black literature – “I know why the caged bird sings” – his poem “Sympathy.”

“… When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore, When he beats his bars and he would be free; It is not a carol of joy or glee, But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core, But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings – I know why the caged bird sings!”

Published in 1899, “Sympathy” inspired acclaimed Black writer and activist Maya Angelou to use Dunbar’s line as the title of her seminal autobiography.

But Dunbar’s artistic legacy is often overlooked. This, despite the fact that his work influenced a number of other great African American literary giants, including Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Walker.

In a very real sense, Dunbar is your favorite poet’s favorite poet.

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A blooming life of writing

Born on June 27, 1872, to two formerly enslaved people from Kentucky, Dunbar was raised by his mother, and they eventually settled in Dayton, Ohio.

While there, Dunbar attended the integrated Dayton Central High School. An exceptional writer, Dunbar was the only Black student in his class and became editor-in-chief of the high school newspaper as well as a member of the literary and drama clubs and debating society.

He also became friends with a white classmate who, with his brother, would later invent the airplane – Orville Wright.

A postage stamp bearing the image of a black man resting his chin on his hand.
A U.S. postage stamp of Paul Laurence Dunbar issued in 1975. Lawrence Long/Getty Images

The two knew each other well.

Their friendship led to business as the Wright brothers, who owned a printing press, were the first to print Dunbar’s writings, including the newspaper Dunbar started and edited, the Dayton Tattler, the first Black newspaper in that city.

After high school, the lives of Dunbar and Wright took different turns.

Unable to find consistent pay for his writing, Dunbar worked a variety of jobs, including as a janitor in one downtown Dayton office building and as an elevator operator in another. Not one to miss a business opportunity, the 20-year-old Dunbar sold his first book of poetry, “Oak and Ivy,” to passengers he met on the elevator.

He found another such job after he moved to Washington, D.C., and worked stacking shelves at the Library of Congress. According to his wife, Alice Dunbar, an accomplished writer in her own right, it was there that her husband began to think about a caged bird.

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“… The torrid sun poured its rays down into the courtyard of the library and heated the iron grilling of the book stacks until they were like prison bars in more senses than one,” Dunbar wrote. “The dry dust of the dry books … rasped sharply in his hot throat, and he understood how the bird felt when it beats its wings against its cage.”

A young black man dressed a dark suit sits in a chair with a book and pen resting in his lap.
Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1901. ullstein bild/Getty Images

Dunbar’s first break came when he was invited to recite his poems at the 1893 Worlds Fair, where he met Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist. Impressed, Douglass gave Dunbar a job and called him the “the most promising young colored man in America.”

Dunbar’s second break came three years later. On his 24th birthday, he received a glowing Harper’s Weekly review of his second book of poetry, “Majors and Minors,” from the prominent Ohio-raised literary critic William Dean Howells.

That review came with a mixed blessing. Howells’ praise of Dunbar’s use of dialect limited Dunbar’s ability to sell his other styles of writing.

But that same review helped catapult Dunbar to international acclaim.

His stardom didn’t last long, though.

Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1900, Dunbar died from complications of the disease on Feb. 9, 1906.

But his work survives.

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Dunbar’s musical legacy

In all, Dunbar wrote 600 poems, 12 books of poetry, five novels, four volumes of short stories, essays, hundreds of newspaper articles and lyrics for musicals.

His poetry has been continuously set by composers, from his contemporaries to living composers still living today, including Carrie Jacobs Bond, John Carpenter, Harry Thacker Burleigh, William Bolcom and Zenobia Powell Perry.

Florence Price’s numerous settings of his texts include popular and advertisement music, while William Grant Still’s “Afro-American” symphony features spoken epigraphs of Dunbar poems before each movement.

In this image of a poster for the 1900 musical Casino Girl, a song written by a black man is listed underneath a white women riding a horse.
Image of song written in 1900 by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion Cook. Sheridan Libraries/Levy/Gado/Getty Images

Dunbar’s legacy in apparent not only in the concert hall, but on the theatrical stage as well.

Dunbar was librettist for an operetta by Samuel Coleridge Taylor, “Dream Lovers,” written specifically for Black singers.

Dunbar’s own extraordinary life became the subject for operas as composers Adolphus Hailstork, Richard Thompson, Steven Allen and Jeff Arwady composed works depicting Dunbar’s legacy.

The collaborations of Dunbar and Will Marion Cook produced the first examples of contemporary musical theater.

Without Paul’s contributions with “In Dahomey” and “Jes Lak White Fo’ks,” in my view there would be no “Hamilton,” the modern Broadway musical written by Lin-Manuel Miranda in 2015.

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‘We wear the mask’

Dunbar’s works celebrated all of humanity.

He turned the plantation tradition on its head by using dialect to not only offer critical social commentary, as in his poem “When Malindy Sings,” but also to portray oft-ignored humanity, as in “When Dey ‘Listed Colored Soldiers.”

Dunbar’s works provide historical snapshots into the everyday lives of working-class Black Americans.

None were as poignant as his poem “We Wear the Mask.”

“We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.”

Minnita Daniel-Cox, Associate Professor of Music, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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