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The FCC updated its definition for broadband to 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up.
The previous benchmark, set in 2010, was 4 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up.
The FCC also released the following stats on broadband adoption:
- 17 percent of all Americans (55 million people) lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps service.
- 53 percent of rural Americans (22 million people) lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps.
- By contrast, only 8 percent of urban Americans lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps broadband.
- Rural America continues to be underserved at all speeds: 20 percent lack access even to service at 4 Mbps/1 Mbps, down only 1 percent from 2011, and 31 percent lack access to 10 Mbps/1 Mbps, down only 4 percent from 2011.
- 63 percent of Americans living on Tribal lands (2.5 million people) lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps broadband
- 85 percent living in rural areas of Tribal lands (1.7 million people) lack access.
- 63 percent of Americans living in U.S. territories (2.6 million people) lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps broadband.
- 79 percent of those living in rural territorial areas (880,000 people) lack access.
- Overall, the broadband availability gap closed by only 3 percent last year.
- Americans living in rural and urban areas adopt broadband at similar rates where 25 Mbps/ 3 Mbps service is available, 28 percent in rural areas and 30 percent in urban areas.
- Approximately 35 percent of schools lack access to fiber, and thus likely lack access to broadband at the Commission's shorter term benchmark (adopted in its July 2014 E-rate Modernization Order) of 100 Mbps per 1,000 users, and even fewer have access at the long term goal of 1 Gbps per 1,000 users.


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One hundred years ago, on August 27 1908, Henry Handel Richardson published her first novel, Maurice Guest, a study of erotic obsession and the nature of genius which continues to have a strange effect on all those fortunate enough to read it. The novelist Antonia White gave it to me in 1978 - and it is her 1909 copy I am looking at as I write this. Quite forgotten, she said it was, but she thought it one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. I republished it as a Virago Modern Classic in 1981, convinced that it would sell in considerable quantities and be accepted as the masterpiece I thought it to be. I was wrong. Maurice Guest continues, now as then, to be always forgotten, always rediscovered. It belongs to so many countries, and so many cultures and traditions, that it sits easily nowhere except in one quarter: as an unequalled exploration of the consuming power of sexual and emotional love between a man and a woman.
This in itself explains why it is a novel that never dies, but if that were all, the novel would only be a curiosity of the early 20th century, a work of fiction born of the psychosexual inquiries of Krafft-Ebing and Freud, of the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg, of Wedekind and his sorceress Lulu, of Heinrich Mann's Rosa, later transformed into Marlene Dietrich's Blue Angel, Lola Lola. Attempts to categorise Maurice Guest always compare it to Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Zola and all the great Scandinavian writers are summoned to the bar. Its author - Henry Handel Richardson was the nom de plume of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson - had indeed read, and on occasion translated, these great European writers and they provided the naturalist style and intellectual inquiry resonant in all her fiction. But the provenance of her first novel is both simpler and more interesting than this. Its inspiration came from a childhood spent in uncharted places unknown to the denizens of Berlin or Vienna, Norway or Russia.
Maurice Guest is a realistic novel in the great tradition. Set in Leipzig in the 1890s, when that city was a centre of music, it tells the story of a provincial young Englishman, Maurice Guest, permitted by his unwilling parents to abandon school teaching and study music there. In one sense Richardson presents her vast novel as an orchestral work, a glorious story about music and musicians. The works of the great German composers, most particularly Wagner, counterpoint each scene and each change of season. The winding streets of Leipzig weave through the churches and concert halls, cafés and restaurants, practice rooms and rooming houses, all alive with music.
Maurice enters the crowded daily life of music students. Lessons, practice and examinations mark their days, ratty landladies and ranting music teachers pursue them, while Maurice's friends and companions fall in and out of love, eat disgusting meals and, mostly, live on the smell of an oil rag - or a rich parent or lover. Talented, or talentless, they strive for musical and artistic greatness. Cosmopolitans all of them - German, English, American - there is just one Australian, Louise Dufrayer, whose face Maurice glimpses by chance at a music lesson. Instantly, and for ever, he is spellbound.
What Maurice feels for Louise is an overwhelming passion, which, of course, he calls love. She belongs, soul, body and heart, to another man, the dissolute Schilsky, violinist and composer, a great artist. When he abandons her, she is saved by Maurice, and their love story proceeds to its extraordinary end, through episodes of heartbreak and sexual encounters which, on occasion, make the hair stand up on one's head. Maurice is English, a man of little musical talent, and also a Romantic, and thus a man of his time. The woman he loves must be a pure soul, her heart and head as one, a mirror image of her beautiful body.
Louise Dufrayer is not of this ilk, she is a new woman, living in a new world. Her long black hair and spellbinding, hooded eyes are the carapace of a quite different emotional being. Love, suffering, sensual abandonment - these are the essence of Louise. She lives in the closed world of an artist of love; Maurice's devastating absorption in love means he must join her there. He has no choice: he must possess Louise, and there lies his tragedy.
This is not to say that other sexual loves were unknown to Henry Handel Richardson: she writes about all of them in Maurice Guest, often in veiled terms in keeping with the sensitivities of the time. But not that veiled. Homosexual love, troilism, sadism, the intense love of sister for sister, of woman for homosexual man, all these passions of the human heart and body are laid bare within the framework of a prodigious narrative.
Maurice Guest is thus many novels in one, encompassing worlds of emotion, thought and feeling. Perhaps one of the reasons critics and academics have always compared it to one or another European literary masterpiece in an effort to explain it - a habit that has done this unique novel more harm than good - is that they knew and understood so little about its author, whose personality remains an enigma to this day.
Ethel Richardson and her younger sister Lilian (who, with her second husband, the remarkable educator AS Neill, was to found Summerhill school in Dresden and then take it to England) were both suffragists. Ethel chose an Irish male relative's name for the usual reasons, and indeed for decades after Maurice Guest's publication, its author was assumed to be male. She was born in 1870 in Melbourne, the elder daughter of Mary Bailey who emigrated from Leicester in the early 1850s. In that sense Ettie, as she was known, was English. Her father, Walter Lindesay Richardson, was a member of a large Anglo-Irish Protestant clan of Dublin, the Richardsons and Lindesays, or Lindsays. Walter Richardson trained as a doctor in Edinburgh and in 1852 set out to make his fortune in the gold mines of Victoria. He did so, and became a prominent figure in the medical world of Melbourne. Philosophy, astrology and spiritualism were his interests. In London, on a visit there in 1873, he lectured to audiences of many hundreds. Five years later he began to present the first signs of cerebral syphilis, probably caught on the ship to Australia, and within four years he was dead.
Mary Richardson, destitute after his death, became a postmistress and took her two daughters to live in a sequence of small Victorian townships. "I can't say we grieved over his death," wrote the elder daughter about her father over 60 years later, in her memoir Myself When Young. But his story, and the Australian bush towns in which the three women lived after his death, were the basis for almost everything she wrote. Ethel was a boisterous, inquisitive and clever young girl, and she and her sister were precocious musicians. Ettie composed songs and cantatas and was a brilliant scholar. In 1888, Mary resigned from the postal service and took her two daughters to Europe. Ettie was to be a concert pianist and for three years, 1889-92, she was a music student in Leipzig - years that provided the vivid social milieu of Maurice Guest
Except for a brief visit in 1912, Ethel never returned to Australia. In Leipzig she met and later married a Scottish student of German literature. After a dozen years spent in Germany, when her husband became the inaugural professor of German language and literature at London University, they moved to England and lived in Harrow-on-the-Hill, then at 90 Regent's Park Road in London. They holidayed in Lyme Regis. Richardson spent her widowhood in a house called "Green Ridges", in Fairlight, near Hastings in East Sussex. There she passed her last years looking out on the English channel and, after 1939, hiding in doorways, as first the Battle of Britain and then Hitler's pilotless V1s blasted the skies above her. She died at 76, having lived almost 60 of those years in Europe, yet the two other masterpieces of her small body of work are both set in Australia, as are most of the short stories she wrote.
Her second novel, The Getting of Wisdom, a subversive account of a boarding school for girls in Melbourne, was published in 1910. Both HG Wells and Germaine Greer - a useful combination - consider it to be her masterpiece. Ultima Thule, the third part of her greatest work, a trio of novels completed in 1929 entitled The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, brought her international acclaim. In this trilogy, Richardson turned her family's tragedy into an epic novel of frontier Australia and a magnificent portrait of one man's soul.
In this sense, the creative imagination of the writer who became Henry Handel Richardson could only function on events that took place in the first two decades of her life. Every inspiration Europe so generously poured into her eager and interested mind seems to have been beside the point. The honesty and authorial detachment that is so remarkable in her work - she is one of the least obtrusive, least judgmental of all the great naturalist writers - seems to come from a distance, almost as though the particularly acute insight of the adult writer could only be seen through the filter of childhood experience.
It was the 12-year-old girl who watched her father go mad and die before her eyes who provided the source and central story of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. It was the lively Australian schoolgirl who experienced an infatuation so intense for a fellow pupil that it was "neither light nor amusing. It stirred me to my depths, rousing feelings I hadn't known I possessed, and leaving behind a heartache as cruel as my first" that inspired The Getting of Wisdom. This first passionate attachment so devastated Ethel Richardson that it "overshadowed her whole girlhood", but it enabled her to understand the elemental force of a love which, agony by agony, she traces in Maurice Guest
When Ethel Richardson was 13, a new vicar, Jack Stretch, gave his first sermon in the township church of Maldon, in Victoria, where her mother ran the post office. Ettie feasted her eyes on a male beauty "the like of which they had never seen - and incidentally, were never to see in a man again". For six years, every moment not spent in his presence was a dagger-thrust in her heart. The last thing Ethel did before leaving Australia for ever was to walk miles to his new parish, to catch a glimpse of him for one last time. The Reverend John Stretch was not preaching on that Sunday. The beauty of Louise Dufrayer, so overwhelming that Richardson returns to describe it again and again through the eyes of the bewitched Maurice Guest, bears the classic features and slender form of an Australian parson and Maurice the heart and passions of the woman who invented him.
Much remains mysterious about Henry Handel Richardson. All that is known of her musical career is that it was abandoned when the public recitals required as a Leipzig student produced a terror of eyes, thousands of eyes, she felt, "fixed like gimlets on my miserable self". This terror never left her. A happy and protective marriage seems to have transformed the dancing, party-going Australian of Leipzig into a shy, withdrawn solitary, subject to constant illnesses and fluctuating moods. Though still capable of playing a stiff game of tennis, once she began to write, Ethel Richardson retired into marital and domestic safety and closeted herself in a silent study for most of the rest of her life.
There are writers who provide clues to the secrets of Henry Handel Richardson. One was Iris Murdoch, whose maternal grandfather, Effingham Richardson, was Ethel Richardson's second cousin. During the years I was Murdoch's publisher, she would, on occasion, talk to me of her literary relative, and when a new Murdoch manuscript arrived - many thousands of pages of illegible handwriting carried in a blue laundrette plastic bag - its passionate inventions and intellectual fireworks made that other writer in the Richardson family of Dublin become clearer to me. Its author coming from a faraway place; set in a German, not English, town; published just before the first of what was to be almost 30 years of continuous war between Germany and the English-speaking world, Maurice Guest was doomed to recurrent oblivion. But it remains a great novel, one that, once it grasps your imagination, is impossible to put down for more than a moment, leading every reader into a dreamtime remembrance of the terrible pain the human heart is heir to.

subset: commoncrawl


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In case you missed it (though I have to confess I did excessively self promote on Twitter & Facebook) I wrote my first blog for The Independent last week.
It was written in response to the publicity surrounding designer Dolores Cortes' decision to feature a young girl with Downs Syndrome in the catalogue for her children's clothing range. In the piece I applauded her choice and discussed the potential positive changes that could occur in society if mainstream advertising acknowledged people with disabilities and their families.


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|Click here to view the item
|Murphy, William P. (William Patrick), 1919-2007
|Devereux, Sean
|Southern Oral History Program
|Oral history interview with William Patrick Murphy, January 17, 1978
|1978 Jan. 17
In the 1950s, lawyer William Patrick Murphy fought what he describes as a relatively understated battle against segregation. In letters, law journal articles, and in his constitutional law class at the University of Mississippi, Murphy argued for the wisdom of the Brown decision and against the states' rights rationale that many white Mississippians were using to delay integration. His support for integration put him under tremendous pressure from segregationist Mississippians, and after a four-year struggle to keep his job, he left the University. He describes that struggle in this interview, all the while downplaying his contributions to racial justice in Mississippi. This reflective interview will be useful for, among others, researchers interested in white southerners who sought to undo segregation.
The Civil Rights Digital Library received support from a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the aggregation and enhancement of partner metadata.
|Transcripts | Sound recordings | Oral histories (document genres) | Text | Sound
|Murphy, William P. (William Patrick), 1919-2007 | Mississippi--Race relations | School integration--Mississippi | Lawyers--Mississippi | College teachers--Mississippi--Oxford | African Americans--Civil rights--Mississippi | Academic freedom--Mississippi | University of Mississippi | United States, Mississippi, Oxford, 34.366495, -89.519248 | United States, Mississippi, Lafayette County, 34.3567578, -89.4849193
|Oral Histories of the American South: The Civil Rights Movement
|Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
|University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project)
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Forms part of Oral histories of the American South collection.
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As a radio talk show host, I have often talked about the incredible passion associated with many topical debates about political and social issues. Since the degree of passion over these issues does not match the actual significance of the issue that has become a controversy, I had to wonder why there was so much passion on the part of those debating the issue.
The answer to that question became obvious to me while I was preparing for a phone interview with actor, comedian and political commentator Dennis Miller. To refresh my memory about the comic genius of Dennis Miller, I went back and watched a few of his stand-up specials from the 90s.
During one of his HBO specials live from Washington, D.C., Dennis Miller asked, "Why do people get so hung up on the little things?" He went on to say that we look at the world around us and we think "it's a madhouse" and feel we have lost control and we are scared. So we take all the little things and make them bigger than they naturally are so we can control them. It was like an epiphany! That's it! The country and the world around us is a madhouse, and we know we can't control so many things, so we try to control the little things that we think we can control.
Currently, the debate over the wall and the government shutdown is one of those topics where passion has reached the tipping point. People have become obsessed with that topic and obsessed with the idea that they may not be able to control much in their lives. However, they feel like they can control illegal immigrants coming across the border; and more importantly, they feel like they can control what others think about the controversy.
I have dealt with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) my entire life, I immediately recognized the tendency of Americans to control debate and to control what others think and how they live their lives. That tendency is a classic symptom of OCD. In the minds of those who have OCD, they are keenly aware that they cannot control so many things they are worried about in their lives so they obsess over little things they can control – like lining things up a certain way or repetitive behavior. That gives the OCD mind a sense of control.
America is suffering from collective obsessive-compulsive disorder!
Americans are aware of the fact that the world is a madhouse that we cannot control; so we seek to control what people think, say and do.
The passionate topic of NFL players kneeling during the national anthem inspired the opportunity to try to control what others do and what they say. The vicious opposition to same-sex marriage was a debate filled with passion and at the root of the debate was an attempt to tell others how to lead their lives and to try to control how others even thought about the issue. Many tried to instill the fear that legal same-sex marriage would destroy the very foundation of our society, and that was founded in a sense of controlling who has a right to be married. The on-going debate over legalized marijuana is based on an attempt to control what others do in their private lives.
While every passionate debate is important to those involved in the debate - in the big picture of life – those are little things that really did not directly impact the lives of so many who made it seem as if these are debates about life and death.
You can argue that kneeling during the national anthem is an important issue, but is it an expression of opinion that does not actually impact the lives of those so desperate to stop it from happening? Legal same-sex marriage has not destroyed our society as predicted and has not directly harmed those who vigorously opposed the idea.
What I have noticed as a radio talk show host is that there always seems to be one topic that sucks all the oxygen out of the room. There is always that one topic that becomes the target of heated controversy. When one controversy fades, there is another to take its place.
When I heard Dennis Miller talk about people focusing on the little things because the world is a madhouse we can't control so we seek to find little things we can control - it became obvious that America is looking for things to obsess over as a distraction from a scary, ever-changing world.
The controversy over the wall and the government shutdown will fade, but there will be another issue that takes its place as the issue America passionately obsesses over.