Frances D’Emilio

ROME (AP) – Hundreds of remnants of ancient Roman life – including coloured dice, rain gutter decorations depicting mythological figures, and burial offerings 3,000 years old – have long been hidden from public sight. Until now.

For the next few months, a limited number of visitors to the Roman Forum, Colosseum or Palatine Hill can view a tantalising display of ancient statuettes, urns, even the remarkably well-preserved skeleton of a man who lived in the 10th-Century BCE. All the exhibits have been plucked from storerooms in the heart of the Italian capital.

Indeed, so many artefacts are kept in storerooms that “you could open 100 museums”, said archaeologist with the Colosseum archaeological park Fulvio Coletti. Last Wednesday, Coletti stood at the entrance to a “taberna”, a cavernous space which had served commercial purposes in ancient Roman times and belonged to the palace complex of the 1st-Century Emperor Tiberius.

Three such “tabernae” now double as exhibition rooms for once-hidden antiquities. To give an idea of just how many more artefacts are still not on display, curators stacked enormous see-through plastic tubs, chockful of discoveries from some 2,000 years ago and bearing minimalist labels like “Ancient Well B Area of Vesta”, a reference to the temple in the Forum.

One display holds row after row of ancient coloured dice – 351 in all – that in the 6th Century BCE were tossed into wells as part of rituals. Also in the exhibit is a decoration from a temple rain-gutter depicting a bearded Silenus, a mythological creature associated with Dionysus.

Some artefacts are displayed in showcases custom-made by archaeologist Giacomo Boni, whose excavations in the first years of the 20th Century revealed dozens of tombs, including many of children. Some of the tombs dated from as far back as the 10 Century BCE, centuries before the construction of the Roman Forum, the centre of the city’s political and commercial life, when the city’s inhabitants dwelt in a swampy expanse near the River Tiber.

In one display case is the largely intact skeleton of a man who was a good 1.6 metres tall, on the taller side for his time, in the 10th Century BCE. He was buried with some kind of belt, whose bronze clasp survived. Found in his tomb and on display are a scattering of grains, remnants of funeral rites. Layers of mud, formed in Rome’s early days, helped preserve the remains.

The director of the Colosseum’s Archaeological Park said staff were working to make an inventory of artefacts kept in more than 100 storerooms, whose contents up to now have been accessible to academics but few others.

“We want in some way to make objects come to light that otherwise would be invisible to the great public,” director Alfonsina Russo told The Associated Press.

“We’re talking of objects that tell a story, not a big story, but a daily story, a story of daily life,” Russo said.

Every Friday through July, visitors can admire the antiquities pulled out of the storerooms during 90-minute guided tours. The “tabernae” are small exhibition spaces, so only eight visitors can enter during each tour. Reservations are required, and visitors must buy an entrance ticket to the archaeological park.

Annie Tan

CNA – Wan Wai Yee is a singer for hire. Some days, you may find her belting out Celine Dion or Taylor Swift hits at dinner and dances, weddings and birthday parties. To make ends meet, she also busks on the streets.

This may seem like a typical scenario for many aspiring musicians in our city, some of whom have given up stable jobs and regular pay cheques to perform at gigs with dreams of eventually making it big.

But Wan’s case is distinctively different. She was born blind.

Delivered several months before her due date and weighing around one kilogrammes at birth, she had retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), an eye disease affecting some premature babies.

This caused abnormal blood vessels to grow in the retina, and in Wan’s case, led to total blindness.

Because she could not see, Wan found many doors closed to her as a performer. “Even without listening to you or knowing what you do, people already think, you are blind, what can you do?” she said.

“When I was younger, I wished I were different. I wished I weren’t so blind and that people will look at me some other way,” she admitted.

But the 50-year-old told CNA Women that her musical journey has been life-changing.

FROM THE STREETS TO THE STAGE

“Music has made me confident. It took time to find this confidence and to know what you are about. That doesn’t come overnight. But I’ve learned that you don’t have to please everyone. I can have my own form of art and be accepted,” she said. Although Wan had always loved singing, she did not think she would be a singer. In her late 20s however, she chanced upon a magazine article about a vocal coach in the United States.

Wan felt compelled to seek her out, and began learning classical singing techniques from her. Since those were the days before Skype or Zoom, she painstakingly learned via cassette tapes sent by mail.

This crash course set Wan on a path she never expected she would take. She learnt pop music on her own and with the help of friends, and began performing at events organised by ART:DIS (then known as Very Special Arts), a charity that empowers persons of disabilities through the arts.

In her late 30s, Wan also set up a busking band, StrawberryStory, with a fellow visually impaired musician Ivni Yaakub.

At that time, she was a telephone operator and spent her after-work hours and weekends busking on the streets.

Though it was not the ideal performance venue, her love for singing prevailed. Three to four years later, she took a leap and quit her full-time job to busk and perform at gigs.

“I didn’t find any fulfilment in my full-time work and felt quite trapped. I found more joy in singing,” she explained. “But I was very apprehensive because (as a gig singer), you’ve got to make it work on your own, whereas for a full-time job, you just go to it.”

Fortunately, more opportunities came along, and Wan began performing at restaurants and private events.She performed at The Purple Symphony concerts, an inclusive orchestra made up of musicians with and without disabilities.

She also landed roles in three musicals, including My Love Is Blind which ran in 2017 and was based on the life story of a blind businessman and advocate for the blind Tan Guan Heng. Any Singaporean who tells family and friends that they want to quit their job to be a gig performer is bound to come up against some naysayers. In Wan’s case, she faced even more discouragement because of her blindness.

FIGHTING FOR HER BELIEF

“When I told people of my plan, they said I would be better off staying put and that it might be more difficult for me because I could not see. They were worried things would not happen for me,” she said.

These beliefs reflected general stereotypes in society and were self-fulfilling, said Wan.

“There is a misconception about what blind people can do and cannot do, so once people think this cannot be done, there is no room to open up the conversation,” she explained.

She recalled a time her friend tried to introduce her to a producer for a project, but she was flat out rejected without even a meeting because of her blindness.

She also recalled hearing others gossiping behind her back that she would not be able to sing well because she was blind.

“When you get too many rejections, you can’t help but wonder why you can’t be given a chance. You wonder if you are not good enough,” she said.

“I felt pretty beat up,” she admitted. “But then I said to myself, ‘Come on! Are you just going to hold onto the opinion of one person? Even if it’s right, get off your bum and improve yourself.” And that is what Wan did.

In 2019, she underwent her first vocal examination in Musical Theatre Grade Five by the London College of Music, and earned a distinction.

She also performs with a contemporary acappella group and pop choir TAS Voices, strengthens her vocal techniques under a scholarship from the Purple Symphony Award Training Programme and is learning to act with ART:DIS. Today, Wan fully embraces her unique journey and blindness. “I’m myself. My experiences are what I am. Although what I know might be the ‘blind way’, it brings different perspectives to the table,” she said.

However, she sometimes hopes that audiences can look beyond her physical condition when appreciating her performance.

NOT DEFINED BY HER BLINDNESS

“I don’t want to be seen just as a ‘blind singer’. I want to be seen as a ‘singer’,” she stressed. “I want to be seen as myself, an individual.”

“I don’t want the audience to pity me and say, ‘Oh, poor thing, let’s give her a chance’,” she added. “If I’m not good, just say I’m not good, go away. I can take it.”

That is why Wan is constantly working to improve herself.

“I want to set a higher standard for myself and not just give in to the charity models out there,” she said.

She explained that some people have the mentality that persons with disabilities do not need to hone their art because they are just doing charity shows.

“For me and some others like myself, we want more. We want to do the best we can and maybe even be better than others. I think we need to work harder because we cannot see or hear. We need to up our standard,” she added.

All Wan asks is for the same training and auditioning opportunities as sighted people.

“I hope that someday, I will be able to sign up for a class such as a dance class, and people will say, sure, what kind of support do you need? Let’s do it in a way that works you too,” she said.

“Don’t think I can’t do it because I am blind. I believe that if I’m trained properly, if anybody is trained properly, we can do it,” she added.

OXON HILL, MARYLAND (AP) – As the final pre-competition meeting of the Scripps National Spelling Bee’s word selection panel stretches into its seventh hour, the pronouncers no longer seem to care.

Before panelists can debate the words picked for the bee, they need to hear each word and its language of origin, part of speech, definition and exemplary sentence read aloud. Late in the meeting, lead pronouncer Jacques Bailly and his colleagues – so measured in their pacing and meticulous in their enunciation during the bee – rip through that chore as quickly as possible.

No pauses. No apologies for flubs. By the time of this gathering, two days before the bee, the word list is all but complete.

Each word has been vetted by the panel and slotted into the appropriate round of the nearly century-old annual competition to identify the English language’s best speller.

For decades, the word panel’s work has been a closely guarded secret. This year, Scripps – a Cincinnati-based media company – granted the Associated Press (AP) exclusive access to the panelists and their pre-bee meeting, with the stipulation that the AP would not reveal words unless they were cut from the list.

THEY’RE TOUGH ON WORDS

The 21 panelists sit around a makeshift, rectangular conference table in a windowless room tucked inside the convention centre outside Washington, United States where the bee is staged every year.

They are given printouts including words numbers 770-1,110 – those used in the semifinal rounds and beyond – with instructions that those sheets of paper cannot leave the room.

Hearing the words aloud with the entire panel present – laptops open to Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary – sometimes illuminates problems. That’s what happened late in Sunday’s meeting. 2009 champion Kavya Shivashankar, an obstetrician/gynaecologist and a recent addition to the panel, chimed in with an objection.

The word gleyde (pronounced “glide”), which means a decrepit old horse and is only used in Britain, has a near-homonym – glyde – with a similar but not identical pronunciation and the same meaning.

Shivashankar said the variant spelling makes the word too confusing, and the rest of the panel quickly agrees to spike gleyde altogether. It won’t be used.

“Nice word, but bye-bye,” pronouncer Kevin Moch said.

For the panelists, the meeting is the culmination of a yearlong process to assemble a word list that will challenge but not embarrass the 230 middle- and elementary-school-aged competitors – and preferably produce a champion within the two-hour broadcast window for Thursday night’s finals.

The panel’s work has changed over the decades. From 1961 to 1984, according to James Maguire’s book American Bee, creating the list was a one-man operation overseen by a Scripps Howard Editorial Promotions Director Jim Wagner, and then by a then-MIT student who approached Wagner about helping with the list in the mid-1970s Harvey Elentuck.

The panel was created in 1985. The current collaborative approach didn’t take shape until the early ’90s. Bailly, the 1980 champion, joined in 1991. “Harvey… made the whole list,” Bailly said. “I never met him. I was just told, ‘You’re the new Harvey.'”

IT’S NOT JUST PICKING WORDS

This year’s meeting includes five full-time bee staffers and 16 contract panelists. The positions are filled via word of mouth within the spelling community or recommendations from panelists. The group includes five former champions: Barrie Trinkle (1973), Bailly, George Thampy (2000), Sameer Mishra (2008) and Shivashankar.

Trinkle, who joined the panel in 1997, used to produce the majority of her submissions by reading periodicals like The New Yorker or The Economist.

“Our raison d’etre was to teach spellers a rich vocabulary that they could use in their daily lives. And as they got smarter and smarter, they got more in contact with each other and were studying off the same lists, it became harder to hold a bee with those same types of

words,” Trinkle said.
Now, more often than not she goes directly to the source – Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged. That’s easier than it used to be.

“The dictionary is on the computer and is highly searchable in all kinds of ways – which the spellers know as well. If they want to find all the words that entered the language in the 1650s, they can do that, which is sometimes what I do,” Trinkle said. “The best words kind of happen to you as you’re scrolling around through the dictionary.”

Not everyone on the panel submits words. Some work to ensure that the definitions, parts of speech and other accompanying information are correct; others are tasked with ensuring that words of similar difficulty are asked at the right times in the competition; others focus on crafting the bee’s new multiple-choice vocabulary questions.

Those who submit words, like Trinkle and Mishra, are given assignments throughout the year to come up with a certain number at a certain level of difficulty.

Mishra pulls his submissions from his own list, which he started when he was a 13-year-old speller. He gravitates toward “the harder end of the spectrum. They are fun and challenging for me and they make me smile, and I know if I was a speller I would be intimidated by that word”, said the 28-year-old Mishra, who just finished his Master of Business Administration at Harvard. “I have no fear about running out (of words), and I feel good about that.”

HOW THE BEE HAS EVOLVED

The panel meets a few times a year, often virtually, to go over words, edit definitions and sentences, and weed out problems.

The process seemed to go smoothly through the 2010s, even amid a proliferation of so-called “minor league” bees, many catering to offspring of highly educated, first-generation Indian immigrants – a group that has come to dominate the competition.

In 2019, a confluence of factors – among them, a wild-card programme that allowed multiple spellers from competitive regions to reach nationals – produced an unusually deep field of spellers. Scripps had to use the toughest words on its list just to cull to a dozen finalists. The bee ended in an eight-way tie, and there was no shortage of critics.

Scripps, however, didn’t fundamentally change the way the word panel operates. It brought in younger panelists more attuned to the ways contemporary spellers study and prepare. And it made format changes designed to identify a sole champion.

The wild-card programme was scrapped, and Scripps added onstage vocabulary questions and a lightning-round tiebreaker.

The panel also began pulling words avoided in the past. Place names, trademarks, words with no language of origin: As long as a word isn’t archaic or obsolete, it’s fair game.

“They’ve started to understand they have to push further into the dictionary,” said a 20-year-old former speller and a co-founder with his older sister Shobha of SpellPundit Shourav Dasari, which sells study guides and hosts a popular online bee. “Last year, we started seeing stuff like tribal names that are some of the hardest words in the dictionary.”

THERE’S A METICULOUSNESS TO IT ALL

Members of the panel insist they worry little about other bees or the proliferation of study materials and private coaches.

But those coaches and entrepreneurs spend a lot of time thinking about the words Scripps is likely to use – often quite successfully.

Dasari said there are roughly 100,000 words in the dictionary that are appropriate for spelling bees. He pledges that 99 per cent of the words on Scripps’ list are included in SpellPundit’s materials.

Anyone who learns all those words is all but guaranteed to win, Dasari said – but no one has shown they can do it.

“I just don’t know when anybody would be able to completely master the unabridged dictionary,” Dasari said. Since the bee resumed after its 2020 pandemic cancellation, the panel has been scrutinised largely for the vocabulary questions, which have added a capricious element, knocking out some of the most gifted spellers even if they don’t misspell a word.

Last year’s champion Harini Logan, was briefly ousted on a vocabulary word, “pullulation” – only to be reinstated minutes later after arguing that her answer could be construed as correct.

“That gave us a sense of how very, very careful we need to be in terms of crafting these questions,” said the language columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a chief contributor of words for the vocabulary rounds Ben Zimmer.

Zimmer is also sensitive to the criticism that some vocabulary questions are evaluating the spellers’ cultural sophistication rather than their mastery of roots and language patterns.

This year’s vocabulary questions contain more clues that will guide gifted spellers to the answers, he said.

There will always be complaints about the word list, but making the competition as fair as possible is the panel’s chief goal.

Missing hyphens or incorrect capitalisation, ambiguities about singular and plural nouns or transitive and intransitive verbs – no question is too insignificant.

“This is really problematic,” Trinkle said, pointing out a word that has a homonym with a similar definition.

Scripps Editorial Manager Maggie Lorenz agrees: “We’re going to bump that word entirely.”

Lina Bonos

THE WASHINGTON POST – On a typical workday, Haomiao Huang spends most of his time on Zoom calls, perusing spreadsheets and pitch decks, and trying to make smart decisions about which robotics and hardware start-ups to fund and which to skip.

He has also spent months, together with his wife, practicing an ancient woodworking technique where two pieces of wood are meant to interlock seamlessly. After each failed attempt, these amateur woodworkers toss another expensive piece of white oak into their scrap pile.

“We’re patient,” said Lydia The after carefully running a piece of wood through a table saw.

“We’re making the dining table we’re going to die with.”

Huang and The who works in the pharmaceutical industry – could easily walk into an upscale furniture store near the wood shop where they’re toiling on a Saturday, and spend USD4,000 on a table that’s already constructed.

But like many modern workers who are tethered to digital devices all day, Huang and The are hooked on the stress relief – and the sense of connection and accomplishment – that comes from working with their hands.

“It’s tremendously grounding, and it’s meditative,” Huang said of the time he spends in the wood shop. By day, Huang is a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, a powerful Silicon Valley firm that invested early in such tech giants as Amazon, Google, Twitter and Uber.

“When you have a power saw… you can’t think about the financing that isn’t coming together… If I don’t hold it in a particular way, I’m going to lose my hand.”

In tech’s boom times, many sought to “move fast and break things”, a motto Mark Zuckerberg popularised at Facebook and blossomed into a growth-at-all-costs ethos that spread throughout Silicon Valley. Now, in an era of layoffs and cost-cutting, workers feel an urge to slow down and make things.

Woodworking shops have sprung up around the city in recent years, catering to those wanting to work with their hands. Start-ups schedule classes to team-build, and workers for two tech giants say there are places to woodwork on campus (the companies didn’t confirm or deny).

“Tech workers never believe me when I tell them to do it the slower way. They do it the faster way and mess it up,” said a part-time software engineer Jake Klingensmith who runs the wood shop at Clayroom, a large space in the Soma neighbourhood with a ceramics studio in the front.

The interest in cultivating handiwork skills goes beyond wood. The maker movement, where people use do-it-yourself techniques to construct things, has been flourishing in the Bay Area for about a decade. In the pandemic, some tech workers rekindled their Lego obsessions. Glass-blowing, welding, pottery-making and other art forms have also taken off.

Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg recently posted on Facebook about how he learned to sew while helping his daughters construct dresses out of 3D-printed material.

Venture capitalist Arielle Zuckerberg, one of Mark’s younger sisters, and several others recently convened 40 friends at a Lake Tahoe compound for Learning Man. The weekend, complete with custom swag, was a studious play on Burning Man; attendees taught one another how to sew, DJ, whip up the perfect French omelet and more.

“Even tech workers are not just passionate about tech,” said Zuckerberg, who shared her DJ skills with attendees. When Zuckerberg learned how to sew a Learning Man patch onto her Patagonia vest, she “had this deep sense of accomplishment, and it was so incredibly satisfying.” She enjoyed it so much, she bought a sewing machine. That’s also a big part of the attraction of woodworking, said Neil Gershgorn who owns Clayroom. A software engineer, for example, can publish code and then debug it as long as necessary. Whereas, Gershgorn noted that “if you make a mistake with your chisel..it’s completely done”.

However, these hobbies are not cheap – woodworking classes cost hundreds of dollars, a studio membership plus materials quickly balloons into the thousands, further catering to the elite nature of tech world, where engineers draw salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Compared with other pandemic hobbies like bread-baking and racket sports, “woodworking has a slightly higher barrier of entry in terms of tools and access”, Klingensmith said. Huang and The estimate that they’ve spent about USD10,000 on woodworking classes, their studio membership and materials. Working slowly and deliberately can be difficult for people who are trained to focus on speed and efficiency.

A retired software engineer Sharmila Lassen said during a recent class at Clayroom that the experience is as much a lesson in patience as it is in woodworking. When she tried to “optimise” – tech jargon for making a process as efficient as possible – by stacking two pieces of wood on top of one another, she then had to even out her imprecise cuts. Overall, she’ll spend USD300 and 12 hours to construct a small serving tray.

Lassen’s friend a Senior Vice President at an architecture and engineering firm Jake Klingensmith joined her for the serving-tray class. “I came in here with a headache,” Jones said, but working in the wood shop calms her. “I like learning how to be competent at something,” she added. “At the end of it – look, I have this thing,” she said, holding up her tray, “instead of a spreadsheet.”

“When you’re doing woodworking, you’re tapping into a history of human craftsmanship that’s been around for the entire existence of our species,” Klingensmith noted.

Enthusiasts find the hobby to be a good match for a downturn, when many are out of work or are deliberately taking time off.

John Szot who moved from Manhattan to the Bay Area recently, finds woodworking to be a “nice change of pace” while he takes a break from working in finance. He finds opportunities to work with his hands are “increasingly rare”. Szot also came to the wood shop in part to meet people, as he’s new to the area.

While about half of the country’s white-collar workers have returned to the office, tech giants are among the few remaining holdouts, and office vacancies in downtown San Francisco are at an all-time high – so high some offices are being converted to apartments.

As people spend less time commuting, they have more time for hobbies, and more of a need for connection, Gershgorn said. There is “this kinetic energy that happens when you come into the studio post-5 o’clock”, Gershgorn added, when miter saws are whirring and lathes are turning as people work on disparate projects side-by-side.

The owner of Wood Thumb Chris Steinrueck another wood shop in the neighbourhood, finds the hobby to have a certain rejuvenating power for desk workers who spend most of their day staring at electronic devices.

Wood Thumb frequently has groups from nearby tech companies coming by for one-time classes that double as team-building exercises. When people come in for a class, “you can just tell they’re zonked”, Steinrueck said, likening their demeanor to that of a “robot zombie”. By the end of a class where participants have made cutting boards or a small triangle shelf, he noticed that “everybody is just pumped and excited – and there’s life in the room”.

Huang and The got into the wood shop in part because they were looking for a new way to connect. The hobby is “a great bonding experience for us”, Huang said.

The couple has a rule where, if one person gets burned out finishing something, the other takes the project over the finish line.

When The needs a new piece of wood with notches to anchor a nightstand on the wall, Huang jumps in to construct it.

And when Huang feels defeated from trying to master the difficult angles of a bridle joint for the dining table they are making, The swoops in.

Instead of hacking into a piece of wood that could have been a table leg, they are going back to the basics and building a prototype. Making a model with scrap wood is advice Klingensmith gave them that has taken a while to sink in.

“I’m very close,” The told Huang, proudly holding up a mortise and tenon after running the wood through a table saw.

Huang suggested using the power sander to round out the edges til they fit together smoothly.

“Then I’ll end up going too fast,” she reasoned. “It’s so close. Just a little more patience”.