maybealexander | advanced English

KABOOM! The New Yorker spent the Fourth of July with the Gruccis, a family that has been making fireworks for six generations, since 1850, first in Bari and then on Long Island. They fired the Statue of Liberty centennial. They fired the Burj Khalifa. This year, for America’s 250th, they fired a show that covered the entire three-and-a-half-mile Las Vegas Strip. Americans spent an estimated two and a half billion dollars on fireworks this year, and that figure is just the backyard stuff. VOCABULARY: 📌work out the kinks - to fix the small problems in something new before it goes live They gave the team one more week to work out the kinks in the booking system. 📌get derailed - to be knocked completely off course by something unexpected The whole project got derailed by a single missing signature. 📌push something out of mind - to deliberately stop thinking about something unpleasant so you can carry on Everyone knows the risks of the job. Most people just push them out of mind. ❓Quizlet Set What is the biggest fireworks display you have ever seen in person? The full article is in the comments below ⬇️ #reading

Monday Trio Week 14 Write your answers in the comments and make sure you use the spoiler feature 🌞 #vocabulary #mondaytrio

PARTING SHOT The New Yorker tells the story of Stormy Morse, a woman from Maryland who lost two partners to gun suicide. After her second partner died, she discovered he had secretly left his life savings not to her but to the N.R.A., America's most powerful gun-rights organization. The article follows her eighteen-month legal fight to get that money back, and along the way it paints a devastating picture of how guns, masculinity, and politics intertwine in working-class America. VOCABULARY: get the ball rolling - to start something, to set a process in motion We only have an hour for this meeting, so let's get the ball rolling. a means to an end - something you do only to achieve something else, not because you value it in itself He never loved the job. For him, it was purely a means to an end. pool your resources - to combine money, skills, or ideas with other people in order to achieve something together The three families pooled their resources and bought the land together. find solace in something - to find comfort in something during a difficult time After the divorce, she found solace in long walks and old records. 🔗Quizlet Set The full article is in the comments below. #reading

Monday Trio Week 13 Write your answers in the comments and make sure you use the spoiler feature🤫 #vocabulary #mondaytrio

Central Park looks like a piece of wilderness that somehow survived in the middle of Manhattan. That's the illusion. Not one tree there is an accident. In the 1850s this land wasn't idyllic at all. It was swamps, pig farms, and shacks. To build a "natural" landscape, the city cleared out around 1,600 people, including Seneca Village, one of the first communities where Black New Yorkers owned their own land. It was simply wiped off the map. Every pond, every "wild" hill, every winding path was then designed and piled up by hand. The wildness here is an engineering project. And the project came with a double bottom. By day it's the most democratic spot in the city. On Sheep Meadow (the lawn where sheep actually grazed until the 1930s, which is where the name comes from) there are free concerts all summer, and a banker lies on the grass ten feet from a broke student. Democracy by lawn 🍺 By night the same park spent decades as shorthand for urban fear, the kind of place you learned not to wander into after dark. And the reason is the whole point of this post: in the 1970s, a nearly bankrupt city stopped paying for the illusion. Lights went dark, paths went unrepaired, the brush grew over, and a designed landscape with no one tending it became exactly the kind of place crime settles into. The wilderness only stays friendly as long as someone maintains it. Stop, and it turns on you. A private conservancy took the park back in 1980 and slowly pulled it out of that reputation, but the fear lingered for a generation. There's a genuinely surreal detail too. Right by the Metropolitan Museum stands a real ancient Egyptian obelisk, Cleopatra's Needle, roughly 3,500 years old. It has nothing to do with Cleopatra, by the way. It was raised about a thousand years before her time and the name just stuck. Egypt gave it to the U.S. in 1881, and hauling a 200-ton block of granite across the ocean into the center of Manhattan turned into its own saga. Now a pharaoh's monument quietly weathers the New York winters a short walk from the zoo. A manufactured wilderness is what you'd call any "wild" spot that was actually built by people down to the last stone. And Central Park is about the purest example there is. This is the first post in a new rubric I'm trying out — Cultural Snapshots. Is it worth keeping? Tell me in the comments below ⬇️ #americanculture #culturalsnapshots

Monday Trio Week 12 I'm back after my little summer break. I have big plans for the channel and, hopefully, I'll start putting them into action asap. For now, here's our traditional Monday Trio. Drop your answers in the comments, and don't forget to use the spoiler feature 🙂 #vocabulary #mondaytrio

The doors are open again 🌉 We're taking new members this week. Join now and you'll catch the discount before it closes. Drop "I'm in" in the comments below or DM me @maybealexandr1 I'll answer whatever you're wondering and show you what a week inside the club actually looks like. #speakingclub