Mitski’s artistic journey tells the story of a songwriter whose emotional honesty and boundary-pushing sound have made her one of the most important voices of her generation. Born Mitsuki Miyawaki on September 27, 1990, in Mie Prefecture, Japan, she spent her early years living across several countries, including Turkey, China, Malaysia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, before settling in the United States. This transient upbringing played a key role in shaping the perspective and depth that would later define her music. Mitski attended the State University of New York at Purchase’s Conservatory of Music, where she studied studio The post Complete List Of Mitski Songs From A to Z appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Long before the invention of the telescope, people have reported odd phenomena on the Moon.

New York police say they are investigating the bizarre death of a Long Island woman by chemical burn as a homicide.Nassau County police said they were called on a welfare check on Friday to the woman's residence on Larch Drive in Herricks at about 3:52 p.m. on Friday.'It is bizarre. It's heartbreaking. I feel so sorry for the woman, even though I don't know her.' Police said they found Aleena Asif unconscious and not breathing. She was pronounced dead at the scene.The 46-year-old was found with burns to her face that were determined to be chemical in nature. A medical examiner determined that she died from asphyxiation from the chemical. Residents from the neighborhood in Nassau County told WABC-TV that the area is very quiet and they were shocked by the incident. "It is bizarre. It's heartbreaking," said Danielle Palermo, a resident in the neighborhood. "I feel so sorry for the woman, even though I don't know her."Neighbors said they rarely saw Asif outside the home, but they believe she had children. RELATED: Body of 6-year-old girl found stuffed in a 10-gallon bucket on her mother's lawn. Police arrest girlfriend of the child's father. "Why? Who killed her?" Barbara Capone asked. "Why? There's gotta be a story behind it."Police said the medical examiner will conduct further testing in the investigation. The investigation is ongoing, and police are asking the public for any information they might have about the woman's death.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Pick up the "latest" kids’ book these days, and chances are you’ll be met with one or all of the following: a feeble storyline, flat illustrations, and little to no moral value.Not so, however, when you choose a children’s book by Dr. Matthew Mehan.'I want the American family to have something beautiful and lasting. I want their witty-wise love of God, country, and family to be helped along, so to speak, by this book.'In addition to his career as associate dean and associate professor of government at Hillsdale in D.C., Dr. Mehan has built a remarkable reputation as a children’s author. Each of his books is years in the making, and it shows. The finished products are lasting works of art that resonate deeply with readers.With this in mind, it came as no surprise when Dr. Mehan was awarded one of just five 2025 Innovation Prizes from the Heritage Foundation this summer. The awards are designed to support “innovative projects … that prepare the American public to celebrate our nation’s Semiquincentennial by elevating our founding principles, educating our citizens, and inspiring patriotism.”Dr. Mehan is putting his prize — as well as a recently awarded NEH grant — toward a collection of fables, tentatively titled "The American Family’s Book of Fables." The book is for all ages, not just kids, and will work through the Declaration of Independence phrase by phrase, supporting and expounding the founding document with an assortment of fables, dialogues, and poems touching on American history, culture, and wildlife.This week, Dr. Mehan was kind enough to sit down with me to discuss his forthcoming book as well as the history of children’s literature in America.Faye Root: Could you start by telling me a bit about your background and what inspired you to write children's and family literature?Matthew Mehan: I've always been interested in creative writing since I was a child. I wrote poetry and short stories, doodled and drew. After college, I published some poems and short stories in a few places.But I also studied a lot of the great writers, and I noticed they were always practicing the rhetorical arts so that they could be good communicators — be of service. Guys like Cicero, Seneca, Thomas More, Chaucer, Madison, Adams. I started practicing different kinds of writing every night after work, and I started writing these poems about different sorts of imaginary beasts — fables in imitation of Socrates from Plato's "Phaedo." At the very end of his life, Socrates was turning Aesop's Fables into poetic verse.And that became the seed of my first kids’ book, "Mr. Mehan’s Mildly Amusing Mythical Mammals." I went back for a master's in English and a Ph.D. in literature. I realized I probably needed to find a genre that doesn't expect this kind of literary public service. Children’s literature seemed like a really great place to do this. And then I started having kids as well, and I didn't like what we were doing in the kid lit space.RELATED: In memory of Charlie Kirk Leigh BrownFR: Couldn’t agree more. My congratulations on your Heritage Foundation Innovation Prize. Your book will be a collection of fables — could you tell me about it?MM: The book is a direct attempt to celebrate the Semiquincentennial and to teach and reteach the Western tradition and the American principles and people. It's folk stories and traditions: “Here's what it means to be an American. Here's what you should love about America. Here — get to know America.”It’s divided into 13 parts and works sentence by sentence through the entire Declaration of Independence. Inside each of the 13 sections are three subsections: one for littles, one for middles, and one for bigs. Each of these are tied to an explanation of what that related portion of the Declaration means. The third engine of each of the 13 sections takes you to a different ecological region of the country.So it's not just the principles of the Semiquincentennial and the Declaration. It's also the people and the stories and the wildlife, the beautiful countryside, and all the animals and creatures God gave us.The whole book follows one particular funny fellow, Hugh Manatee, who starts in the Everglades, and he transports his heavy bulk by all various manners of technological, very American developments around the entire country.I wanted a book that a family can engage with no matter their level. And it's designed to be a big heirloom book for the American family to last a long time — 250 years until the 500th anniversary.FR: Could you talk a bit more about the importance of fables in American history and how the founding generation viewed and used them?MM: The answer is, they used them just constantly. The fable tradition goes as far back as Solomon, who uses it in the Old Testament. It’s part of our Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman Western tradition. In fact, kind of a theme of the book is bringing back Roman Republicanism. The beast-fable tradition is very much a part of that self-governing Republican spirit. The founders knew this.And then you have the fables of the medieval Bestiary, the early moderns, and all the way up to the last major attempt: L'Estrange, whose works were in the library of all the founding fathers. A lot of them also had Caxton. We're talking 1490s and 1700s. So they’re definitely due for an American upgrade. A page from "Mr. Mehan's Mildly Amusing Mythical Mammals." mythicalmammals.comFR: Your book "Mr. Mehan’s Mildly Amusing Mythical Mammals" is an abecedarian. Could you explain what an abecedarian is?MM: An abecedarian is basically just a fancy word for an ABC book where the structure is not complicated. There’s an A-word, and then some kind of poem or story, a B-word, and then a poem or story, etc.I did it as a kind of nod to Chaucer, whose first published work of all time was an abecedarian. It was a good, simple structure. I could do the letter blocks for the little people, and each one of the letter blocks had funny alliterative tricks. These and the illustrations were very fun for littles. But then there was higher matter happening, both in some of the poems and the glossary for the adults. So there was sort of deeper matter for adults to seize on to.For this new book, I've broken it out. I’m being more American, more candid, so it’s clear: This part’s for littles, that part’s for middles, that other part’s for bigs.FR: In your article “Restoring America's Founding Imagination,” you mention that “children's imaginations were not coddled in our founders’ time.” Could you speak more about that?MM: Think, for instance, of "Grimms’ Fairy Tales." In these fables, a stepmother might cut off the hands of a child and put stone hands in place, right? "Fancy Nancy" books can't handle that level of violence. But children had to deal with really rough things then. Rough times called them out of their doldrums to attention.Now, I'm not going to go quite full Brothers Grimm-level gruesome with this book. But there are things, especially in the "Bigs” sections, that go wrong, that are serious. Explorers get burned at the stake. Someone takes an arrow in the sternum. People get shot and killed at Bunker Hill. If you read the school books of the founding period, they're just not messing around. People die because they're foolish, and yes, even kids can die. Illustration from "The Handsome Little Cygnet." John FolleyYou’ve got to be gentle, careful, thoughtful. I try to be measured. But there's got to be ways of introducing these themes to help children be adults. I think a lot of what happens in modern kid lit — why it's not deep, why it's not serious, or rich, or lasting — is because it's so saccharine. It’s not written to call children up to something more.And you can do that in a very fun, wacky, hilarious, enjoyable way. I try to do that. But I'm trying to mix in that there’s a moral here. It's a different mentality than most of children's books today, but it's much more in keeping with our founding generation and the kind of moral seriousness combined with levity that sustains a witty-wise Republican citizenry. And I think the American audience is really starving for this kind of very moral, witty-wise book.FR: You emphasize the importance of wit and wisdom in your work. Specifically, why does wit matter, and what role did it play in shaping America’s early identity?MM: In a certain sense, wit is a virtue. To be witty is to have a certain kind of pleasant humor that can manipulate language, situations — turn them on their head, get people to see something different. And that makes people laugh because mental surprises are actually the source of laughter. Aristotle’s "Nicomachean Ethics" talks about wittiness this way — as playfulness.Wit also means being "quick" in that sense of being adroit. Adroitness is actually a constituent part of the virtue of prudence — that sort of ability to take a problem and think about it in an adroit or adept way and quickly. That's actually required for prudence.In fact, the word “wit” in Latin means genius — to grasp something and see: “That's what we should do.” It’s that sort of clever ability to take care of your business, to be able to say, “No, I can handle this. I can think this through. I can puzzle it out. I can come up with a solution. I can invent a new idea.” Think American invention, flight, jazz, computers.Wit is a creative energy of the imagination and the mind that helps one to rise in this world. Obviously, that has to be wed to principle, to piety, and to the higher things that cannot be compromised, the unchanging things. That marriage of wit and wisdom was something that our founding fathers knew must be done and must be done in each of us.FR: Finally, could you talk about the illustrations in your upcoming book?MM: Yes, my dear friend John Folley is a realist impressionist — a classically trained artist. His work mirrors both the realist classical style with some new techniques in Impressionism — particularly playing with light and the heft and weight that light creates. John Folley at work. Mythicalmammals.comHe makes beautiful oil paintings, which he did for "Mehan’s Mammals." But he also uses a lot of the same principles in watercolor.For this book, he’s going to do a combination of all of the types of art we've done before. We’ll have 13 major oils that introduce the animals and themes and the ecological areas of the country for each of the 13 parts. And probably one other oil: an American image of wit and wisdom and how Americans ought to pursue it.And then we’ll have all kinds of pen and ink, computer color, watercolor, a lot of different little images basically populating the rest of the book. It’s going to be a very beautiful, hardback heirloom book. I want the American family to have something beautiful and lasting. I want their witty-wise love of God, country, and family to be helped along, so to speak, by this book.—"The American Family’s Book of Fables" is planned for release in May 2026 and will be available everywhere books are sold. Dr. Mehan will follow publication with a national book tour, culminating with the July 4 Semiquincentennial celebrations. For more information, keep an eye on his website.Also be sure to check out two of Dr. Mehan’s other beloved children’s books: "Mr. Mehan's Mildly Amusing Mythical Mammals" and "The Handsome Little Cygnet."This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

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