PEOPLE AND CULTURE
When tragedy strikes a community, attention naturally flows to the adults who must manage logistics, make decisions, and keep institutions functioning. But Emilio Parga has spent his career focused on the people whose grief often goes unaddressed: children and teens who experience loss intensely but lack the language to articulate it.
The oversight isn’t intentional. Adults genuinely want to protect young people from pain. But that protective instinct often manifests as silence, euphemism, and exclusion from grief processes. The result is children who feel confused, isolated, and sometimes responsible for deaths they had nothing to do with. Their imaginations fill the silence with explanations more frightening than the truth.
As founder and CEO of The Solace Tree, Parga creates the structured conversations that children and teens desperately need but rarely receive. His work addresses a gap in how American society handles death: everyone acknowledges that children grieve, but few communities have systems to support that grief meaningfully.
The consequences of this gap appear in unexpected ways. Children whose grief goes unaddressed often struggle academically, not because they’re less capable but because their emotional bandwidth is consumed by unprocessed loss. They may act out behaviorally, translating internal chaos into external disruption. They sometimes withdraw socially, believing their sadness makes them different or damaged. Years later, unaddressed childhood grief can manifest as relationship difficulties, anxiety, or inability to cope with subsequent losses.
What makes children’s grief particularly complex is their developmental stage. Young children may not understand death’s permanence, repeatedly asking when the person is coming back. School-age kids might experience guilt, convinced that something they did or didn’t do caused the death. Adolescents face grief while already…
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In the world of self-publishing, credibility and visibility are often the hardest milestones to achieve. With thousands of new titles released each day, independent authors must find ways to stand out beyond strong writing alone. This is why book awards continue to play an important role—and why the Manhattan Book Awards are increasingly regarded as one of the top book awards options for self-published and independent authors.
What Are the Manhattan Book Awards?
The Manhattan Book Awards are a modern literary awards program created specifically to recognize excellence in independently published books. Unlike traditional awards built around legacy publishing models, this program was designed with today’s independent author in mind.
The awards are open to a wide range of fiction and nonfiction categories and operate on a year-round submission model, allowing authors to seek recognition without waiting for a single annual deadline.
Where the Manhattan Book Awards Come From
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Metropolitan Museum deepens global cultural cooperation by returning key artworks to their country of origin
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has transferred ownership of two significant ancient sculptures to Turkey, marking a noteworthy development in international cultural heritage stewardship and museum practice.
The works returned include a Byzantine marble capital featuring the Archangel Michael and a marble head of the ancient Greek orator Demosthenes, both of which had been part of The Met’s collection for decades. The transfer of these works to Turkey followed extensive provenance research and cooperation with U.S. legal authorities, reflecting a growing emphasis on ethical collection management and collaboration between institutions and countries of origin.
In a symbolic gesture of cultural exchange, Turkey temporarily lent the marble capital back to The Met for public display before its departure. This arrangement marked the first direct loan from the country to the museum in more than twenty years and underscored the mutual respect and dialogue underpinning the repatriation process.
The repatriation effort was conducted in coordination with U.S. law enforcement and cultural heritage authorities, as well as Turkish officials. It aligns with broader initiatives at The Met to strengthen provenance research, expand transparency, and foster international partnerships that honor the rightful origins of artworks.
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There is a specific frequency to New York City. You can feel it the moment you step out of JFK or LaGuardia. It is a low hum of ambition mixed with the high-pitched screech of necessity. To the tourist, it is exciting. To the professional trying to carve out a life here, it is a relentless, unforgiving endurance test. I have covered the cultural and business beat of this city for twenty years, and if there is one truth I have learned, it is this: Talent is cheap.
Walk into any coffee shop in Bushwick or any glass office in Hudson Yards, and you will find talented people. You will find brilliant graphic designers, eloquent writers, and charismatic salespeople. But talent alone in New York is like having a fast car in gridlock traffic. It looks good, but it is not going anywhere without a map.
The people who actually make it, the ones who move from surviving to thriving, are the strategists. They are the ones who understand that this city is a system, and like any system, it can be engineered.
I met Ring Fan at a bustling cafe in SoHo, the kind of place where multi-million dollar deals are discussed over oat milk lattes. She does not carry herself with the frantic energy of someone trying to prove she belongs. She possesses the quiet, observant calm of someone who has already done the math. And in her line of work, the math is everything.
Ring Fan is a Marketing Strategist, but that title feels insufficient…
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