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Jon Kalish

  • New York's nonprofit bookstore Printed Matter in west Chelsea lost close to 10,000 books and sustained more than $200,000 in damages during Hurricane Sandy. The day after the storm, volunteers were at the store to help - even though some didn't have power themselves.
  • With the rise of the do-it-yourself movement, more groups are springing up to encourage kids to link crafts and science. Modeled on more traditional Scouting groups, kids and their parents meet up in tool-filled "hacker spaces" to build electronics and get creative.
  • The Pentagon's research agency, DARPA, played key roles in developing the Internet and GPS. Now it's investing money in high school hackerspaces, where students gather to come up with high-tech ideas — like a bicycle that generates electricity.
  • Until now, 3-D printers have been something of a novelty. The computer-controlled machines create three-dimensional objects from a variety of materials. Now, they are being discovered by everyday consumers. Jon Kalish reports.
  • Ed Sanders co-founded the legendary avant-rock band The Fugs, and went on to be an important member of the Youth International Party — the Yippies. He's also a classical scholar who's written a new memoir of life on New York's Lower East Side in the 1960s.
  • Do-it-yourselfers have made everything from bamboo bicycles to 3-D printers, but nothing as ambitious as the Open Source Ecology project. On a farm in northwest Missouri, tractors and other industrial machines are made from scratch, with detailed plans on how to do it yourself shared online.
  • As information becomes more and more digital, public libraries are striving to redefine their roles. A small number are working to create "hackerspaces," where do-it-yourselfers share sophisticated tools as well as expertise.
  • Started in 2009, Night Markets use rented box trucks to create a cluster of outlandish art installations and performance venues that last just 24 hours. With attractions ranging from smash trucks to singalongs, they bring a feast of the unlikely and unseen to even the wildest of imaginations.
  • Led by poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, the garage-rock band The Fugs became a pivotal player in the American underground of the mid- to late '60s. The group retired in 1969 but re-formed in the mid-'80s and has performed and recorded regularly ever since. The band is set to release what could be its last album.
  • From the late 1940s to the mid-'60s, Latin music was hugely popular in America's Jewish community. Entire albums were recorded as testaments to the phenomenon. One of them, which put Jewish classics to a Latin beat, has just been reissued. This weekend, it will be re-created in concert at Lincoln Center in New York.