Wikileaks had only an indirect effect on the revolt in Egypt, says Robert Tignor, the author of “Egypt: A Short History,” published last year by Princeton University Press. It was the Tunisian uprising that spurred the Egyptians to action. “The Egyptians are a very very proud people,” says Tignor. “They regard themselves as at the cutting edge of the Arab world – intellectually, academically, and politically. Much to their chagrin and dismay, they find that Tunisia is leading a revolt against one of their dictators. They were quite amazed that the Tunisians could do it.”

Tignor is on deadline to revise his book, so it can be issued in paperback in September. The book is billed as “an indispensable key to Egypt in all its layers–ancient and modern, Greek and Roman, and Christian and Islamic, a sweeping, colorful, and concise narrative history of Egypt from the beginning of human settlement in the Nile River valley 5000 years ago to the present day.”

The university has a number of “old Egypt hands,” including the former ambassador to Egypt, Daniel C. Kurtzer, widely quoted at this juncture. Tignor is a graduate of the College of Wooster in Ohio, with a PhD from Yale. He and his wife, Marion, lived in Egypt several years, and their three children went to school there. He is an emeritus professor in Princeton University’s history department and writes about modern Egyptian history.

“It’s extremely exciting,” he said in a phone chat just before Mubarak stepped down. “One can only hope that the final results will be beneficial.”

Egypt doesn’t have a good record of peaceful transitions, he pointed out. “Napoleon suppreseed rebellion rather brutally,” he said. In 1919 a rebellion was put down by British troops, and another was put down by the Egyptian army in 1952. “They got the French out, they got some of the Egyptian rulers out in 1882 only to have it supplanted by British, which they thought was worse. In 1919, they got to achieve independence, but the British were going to control foreign policy and stage a large army. In 1952 they got rid of the British and the corrupt old regime.”

Tignor expressed concern about the future of the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord, the anchor of American foreign policy in the Middle East. He predicted that a new government would want to abide with the peace accord but not as rigorously as Mubarak did. “They could be much tougher to deal with than Mubarak and company were.”

Princeton knows about children who sing. The American Boychoir School is here. Westminster Choir College trains children’s choir directors. And the town attracts visiting choristers.

Five youth choirs, including the American Boychoir School Training Choir, will participate in a winter children’s choir festival on Saturday, February 12, at Princeton United Methodist Church, located at Nassau Street and Vandeventer Avenue. Helen Kemp (shown here) is known worldwide as a director, composer, and teacher, and she will direct a free concert, entitled “Celebrate This Happy Holy Day,” at 2 p.m. For information call 609-924-2613 or the church website, www.princetonumc.org. Parking is available in Princeton University Lot 10, off of Williams Street, or in the Park Place lot.

Kemp, professor emerita at Westminster Choir College, has been training singers, teachers and conductors in the art of choral singing for more than 70 years. She is known for her ability to train both volunteer and professional choir directors.

Yvonne Macdonald, who is in charge of the festival, directs two of the choirs participating – the Princeton United Methodist church Upper Elementary Choir and the Schola Choir of Westmisnter Choir College. Choirs coming from New York are from Christ Church United Methodist and Park Avenue Christian Church.

It’s a big weekend for singing children. The following day, Sunday, February 13, an elite group from the Princeton Girlchoir will present “A Girl’s Life: Choral Music For and About Girls of the World” at the Princeton Public Library at 3 p.m. Kelly Ann Nelson Westgate conducts this free concert of diverse music — some written by female composers, some on the subjects of love and marriage. Featured is Vivaldi’s Gloria in D Major, which was written when the composer was working at an orphanage for girls. This concert is also free.

What happens to a child who sings in church. Says one expert: “A predominant number of church workers come out of church choirs. They know scripture, because they sing it.”

He grew up in his father’s nightclub in Buffalo, New York, and at age six he was performing on the Ed Sullivan show. Lucky Peterson, now 46, along with Tamara Peterson, will bring a combo of blues, Delta, roots, and soul music to the Black History Month concert on Friday, February 25, at 7:30 p.m.

The concert will be held at the Princeton Regional Schools Performing Arts Center at Princeton High School, at the corner of Walnut Lane and Franklin Avenue. The Princeton High School Studio Band will open the program. For $10 tickets ($5 for students and seniors) call Mr Highland at 609.806.4280.

Discovered by blues legend Willie Dixon at the age of three, Lucky released
his first record at five and has played behind Little Milton, Bobby “Blue”
Bland and Kenny Neal. He plays everything from the organ and a duolian resonator to the piano and acoustic or electric guitars.

Among his critically acclaimed albums are Black Midnight Sun (2003) and You Can Always Turn Around (2010), billed as “an uplifting portrait of the struggles and salvation of a man with faith.”

In interviews, I always ask, “What did your parents do?” Sometimes the answer is significant, sometimes not. Peterson would have answered, “My father ran a nightclub, the Governor’s Inn. Willy Dixon saw me perform there when I was five and took me under his wing.” As in the business world, it’s often who you know that counts.

A version of this post is also at Not In Our Town Princeton.

The article below, by Scott Morgan, was published in the February 9 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper.

You would think that with all the yelling, all the speeches about what’s best for unemployed Americans, and all the editorializing, people would actually be talking with each other.

Katie DeVito, who is intimately familiar with the realities of unemployment, finds the opposite to be true. Lawmakers are doing what they can about the state’s near-10-percent unemployment rate, she says, but the people who need the situation changed on their behalf usually have no real idea what those lawmakers are doing; much less how it will help them.

But there is plenty being done in New Jersey to get people back to work, and DeVito wants to make sure people know it. DeVito, the founder and president of NJ Unemployed, a jobs and career counseling and advocacy group based in Hamilton, has engineered a first in New Jersey. On Tuesday, February 15, NJ Unemployed will host a town hall meeting that puts the general public in the same room with state legislators in an attempt to let unemployed people know what is being done on their behalf.

To continue

Selling a house involves drama that is usually revealed in bits and pieces — the late-night calls an agent takes from her anxious seller, the tension of waiting to see if the buyer’s bid gets accepted, the terse notes back and forth when a mortgage doesn’t come through.

But at an auction, the drama crescendos quickly and is all over within an hour. That’s how it is expected to unfold on Thursday, February 17, when 17 Hibben Road, a 1927. Rolf Bauhan-designed Colonial Tudor, will be auctioned “without reserve,” meaning with no minimum bid. It could go for much less than its original listing price of $4.2 million. Drama is guaranteed.

But at least it will sell. Remember the Glass House on Canal Road in Griggstown? It too was auctioned, with less happy consequences.

This article is in the February 9 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. To continue, click here. Pictured, Concierge Auction‘s Tom Banner at 17 Hibben.

When a group wants more powers to govern themselves – as in South Sudan and Kosovo — can Christian principles help understand these conflicts and their possible resolution? Anne-Marie Gardner PhD will speak on “Resolving Self-Determination Conflicts” at a breakfast at Princeton United Methodist Church (PUMC) on Sunday, February 13, at 8 a.m.

The author of “Democratic Governance and Non-State Actors,” Gardner is an associate research scholar at the Princeton University’s Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination. Last summer she went to the Democratic Republic of Congo with a PUMC mission team working on behalf of the United Front Against Riverblindness.

The breakfast is sponsored by the United Methodist Men. A $5 donation is suggested; call 609-924-2613 for reservations or email office@princetonumc.o

With a nod to nature-writer extraordinaire Carolyn Foote Edelmann — and a hat tip to a Baltimore-born friend, here is her father’s wonderfully evocative op-ed piece about winter. Zoologist Gairdner Bostwick Moment and his wife, Ann, were among my parents’ best friends and my favorites among their friends. He graduated from Princeton University in 1928.

My friend generally writes with piercing truth about health and nursing issues, but this — reprinted from the Baltimore Sun long ago — is pure pleasure.

BALTIMORE’S BIRDS OF DECEMBER

by Gairdner B. Moment

The first snows of winter dust the roofs and hiss softly as they sift through the fir tree branches or ting as tiny bits of ice hit against the window panes. The time has come to sit around the fire of an evening with a mug of hot chocolate or perhaps of hot buttered rum and discuss weighty issues like vacations past or future.

On one such night the talk turned to birds….To continue click here

The illustration of a kestrel, a sparrow hawk that Gairdner Moment writes about, comes from the website of a University of California at Santa Cruz research project, the Kestrel Parallel Processor.

Mercer County plans to close its youth detention center in Ewing and incarcerate offenders at a larger facility in Middlesex. As quoted in the Times of Trenton, officials say that attendance in the juvenile slammer is low, so closing it makes sense. Supposedly this will save $4.6 million and help solve two problems: “inappropriate detention of youth in detention facilities” and “over-representation of minority youth in detention.”

Is this good or bad for Mercer youth? Who knows? But the experts probably have an opinion, and they will meet at Princeton University next month, Cornel West and Michelle Alexander as keynoters.

Imprisonment of a Race, a one-day conference at Princeton University, will be Friday, March 25, starting at 10:30 a.m. in McCosh Hall, Room 10. Registration is required, but it’s free.

If you have an opinion on moving the juvenile jail, please comment. Supposedly the county will provide transportation, twice a week, so families can see teens who are so violent they aren’t allowed to stay home. Everybody else gets home detention.

Just thinking about it is depressing.

Jonathan Elliott’s review of “The Little Prince” in U.S. 1 sent us down to the Bristol Riverside Theatre last night. We were frankly thrilled to see such a tour-de-force of puppetry and acting. The famous classic, written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and adapted for life-size puppets, was directed by Scott Hitz and had a superb cast.

We stopped off at the Kelch House beforehand. Because we were short on time we just had appetizers, and because it was still happy hour (until 7) the appetizers were all half price so we made out like Flynn. Get there by 6 if you want a regular meal. We didn’t even miss dessert, ’cause gourmet gelato was served at intermission at the theater. A perfect evening.

Which was the best puppet? The snake was wonderful, but we liked the fox best. Of course.

The “Little Prince” continues through Sunday, February 13. Don’t be dismayed if you can get seats only on the side; the sightlines are fine. And it won’t spoil it to read the review beforehand. I also want to add that, given such a strong recommendation I’d better say that we paid for the tickets. I’ll say so if we don’t.

Finally, I finished my 5,500 word account of our “journey to the center of the earth,” our adventures with installing a geothermal system, published in this week’s paper. After using a tripod and self-timer to try to take the cover photo, we enlisted the help of neighbor Kate Newell after the last snow storm to take just one more shot, the best. Thanks Kate! We were supposed to be posing for an “American Gothic” headline but we were smiling too much.