On Monday (April 30), Spirits Investment Partnership (“SIP”), in partnership with Bob Dylan, announced the debut of Heaven’s Door, a collection of super-premium craft American Whiskeys.
Bob Dylan’s first and only brand partnership, Heaven’s Door will be an ever-evolving portfolio of handcrafted whiskeys in collaboration with different master distillers and blenders from across the country. The genesis of Heaven’s Door came when spirits entrepreneur Marc Bushala, CEO of SIP, read that Bob Dylan had registered a trademark application for “Bootleg Whiskey” in 2015. Bushala embarked on a mission to connect with the artist and explore ideas.
New York Magazine, Paul Ryan Allegedly Ousted House Chaplain for Disrespecting His Tax Cuts:
New York Magazine, Paul Ryan Allegedly Ousted House Chaplain for Disrespecting His Tax Cuts:
Under the Trump administration, we’ve learned that Paul Ryan is willing to shrug off racist remarks from the president, and has no problem enabling attacks on the rule of law. But one thing that will not be tolerated in Ryan’s House is a man of God suggesting that tax cuts should be fair to all Americans
Hat tip to Stefan Schouts - Record Label Insults Photographer After Stealing Her Photos.
Hat tip to Stefan Schouts - Record Label Insults Photographer After Stealing Her Photos.
Refinery29, Why Some Women Are Getting RBG Tattoos:
While flattered by superfans who get tattoos of her face, the 85-year-old has also said she was "a little distressed that
people are really doing that." It's permanent. She's more traditional
than that. But this hasn't stopped people from commemorating her with
ink.
10 Interesting Blog Trends
The Terrifying Trend of Eyeball Tattoos
All-day cafés
Portraiture and guns
Parini and Borges
Mishra on Peterson
Literature as medicine
Hitler, film fanatic
Teaching creative writing
On Arthur Miller
Art of the big lie
Posh Pen Paradox
Science of fake news
FOR
NEWS NERDS ONLY:
Yesterday we repeated the Chicago Sun-Times’ claim that it dates back to 1844
and is the oldest continually published newspaper in the city. That claim gives
it a few years on its rival, the Tribune. A reader called this into question,
and we checked this Chicago Historical Society entry, which uses these
qualifying words: “IN A SENSE (emphasis ours) the city’s oldest daily.”
What that means: The Chicago Evening Journal Published from 1844 to 1929, then
became the Daily Illustrated Times, and in 1947, the owner of the Sun bought
the Times and put them together. Moving on…
Pictured above is -- or was -- a swimming pool, five feet wide, five feet deep, and eleven feet long. Around it is a lot of sand -- lots of sand -- and maybe a lizard or hare. There are no roads nearby, no showers or bathrooms, and … and, well, nothing else, really. The pool above was located in California’s Mojave Desert, more than two hours outside of Los Angeles and for all practical purposes, in the middle of nowhere. Here’s a satellite view (or take a look for yourself, here).
In one comical example, a reporter from the Huffington Post went to the pool with a few friends through proper channels to find the hidden swim spot and succeeded.
In most places, swimming pools are either heated or left unheated -- because there's no need or because it's too expensive to heat them. Not in Dubai, though. In 2008, the Guardian reported that the Palazzo Versace would offer a chilled swimming pool (and, for good measure, a beach with artificially chilled sand). The reason? Outside temperatures regularly approach 50 degrees Celcius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) and pools, similarly, get too warm to use. The solution: the hotel installed a "chiller" to keep the pool cool and refreshing.
“As a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, many Americans will see more money in their paychecks due to changes that include the increase in the standard deduction and lower tax rates and brackets. Treasury wants to encourage all taxpayers to check their paycheck withholdings to ensure they have the correct amount withheld for their personal tax profile. We urge taxpayers to visit the IRS Withholding Calculator at IRS.gov/withholding to determine how many withholding allowances to claim. If the calculator results suggest a change in withholding, a taxpayer should complete a new W-4 form, downloadable from the IRS website, and submit it to his or her employer. “This is a pivotal and exciting time for American workers,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. “The ‘paycheck checkup’ will allow employees to keep more of their hard earned money, which is why we passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.”
Bloomberg: “Twitter Inc. sold data access to the Cambridge University academic who also obtained millions of Facebook Inc. users’ information that was later passed to a political consulting firm without the users’ consent. Aleksandr Kogan, who created a personality quiz on Facebook to harvest information later used by Cambridge Analytica, established his own commercial enterprise, Global Science Research (GSR). That firm was granted access to large-scale public Twitter data, covering months of posts, for one day in 2015, according to Twitter. “In 2015, GSR did have one-time API access to a random sample of public tweets from a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015,” Twitter said in a statement to Bloomberg. “Based on the recent reports, we conducted our own internal review and did not find any access to private data about people who use Twitter.” The company has removed Cambridge Analytica and affiliated entities as advertisers. Twitter said GSR paid for the access; it provided no further details. The Telegraph earlier reported that Twitter sold data to Kogan, who told the U.K. newspaper that he was in compliance with Twitter’s policies but didn’t elaborate on what level of access he received…”
Big company tax cuts reward the banks and offshore shareholders - OpEd, Sydney Morning Herald
Kevin Roberts - Inspiration from The Past (Part I)
Blog: Holes in the net are weaponising IoT
Tomorrow's technology is already here but we aren't prepared for the consequences, writes Amelia Kallman. In the past few weeks we've seen death by autonomous Uber, warnings about spying toasters, a major US city crippled by a cyber attack, and the beginning of a pivotal conversation ...
$65m plan to establish a National Data Commissioner
A new statutory officer will independently manage the delicate balance between releasing open data from federal agencies for public benefit and risks to individual privacy.
$65m plan to establish a National Data Commissioner
A new statutory officer will independently manage the delicate balance between releasing open data from federal agencies for public benefit and risks to individual privacy.
TELL ME WHY: Rebecca Solnit, writing
in LitHub, asks why some Americans are told to seek out and befriend white
evangelicals if it doesn’t work the other way around? Or if the percentages of
Americans in that category is about the same as Latinos, shouldn’t non-Latino,
non-evangelical Americans expend equal energy seeking out and befriending Latinos?
With whites soon to give up dominant status demographically, shouldn’t the
narrative be about others, too? She concludes: “This country has room for
everybody who believes that there’s room for everybody. For those who don’t —
well, that’s partly a battle about who controls the narrative and who it’s
about.”
Privacy and Freedom of Expression In the Age of Artificial Intelligence – April 2018. Joint Paper by Privacy International and ARTICLE 19 [a global human rights organisation, which works around the world to protect and promote the right to freedom of expression and information (‘freedom of expression’). Established in 1987, with its international office in London, ARTICLE 19 monitors threats to freedom of expression in different regions of the world, and develops long-term strategies to address them.]
Privacy and Freedom of Expression In the Age of Artificial Intelligence – April 2018. Joint Paper by Privacy International and ARTICLE 19 [a global human rights organisation, which works around the world to protect and promote the right to freedom of expression and information (‘freedom of expression’). Established in 1987, with its international office in London, ARTICLE 19 monitors threats to freedom of expression in different regions of the world, and develops long-term strategies to address them.]
All-day cafés
Portraiture and guns
Parini and Borges
Mishra on Peterson
Literature as medicine
Hitler, film fanatic
Teaching creative writing
On Arthur Miller
Art of the big lie
Posh Pen Paradox
Science of fake news
ABOUT THAT BATTLE: Mashable’s
Rebecca Ruiz reports on new data-crunching that show economic anxiety
wasn’t the trigger of voters toward Trump. It was the fear of whites of losing
their dominant status in American culture and politics. "What we find is
this sense of threat," says Diana C. Mutz, a Penn political scientist and
author of the study. Among the perceived threats: Demographic changes that will
put
whites in the minority by 2045. Mutz
found that Trump supporters believed, despite widespread evidence to the
contrary, that white people are more discriminated against than people of
color, and that Christians and men experience more discrimination than Muslims
and women.
DO WE TAKE OURSELVES A WEE BIT TOO SERIOUSLY?: The headline
practically screams: “Inside the Intense, Combative World of Covering the Trump
White House.” Combined with the picture, of a strong, capeless but still
super-powerful trio of presidential reporters, this
Variety profile struck conservative commentators as a tad … precious? “No
one is more impressed with the press than the press,” tweeted the D.C.
Examiner’s T. Becket Adams. “Lmao these fearless courageous heroes,” added
Elizabeth Harrington of the Washington Free Beacon. My $.02: 1. Yes, twee. 2.
These are the weirdest, fiercest times for a reporter in a generation, and at
least two of those three reporters have gotten death threats. So, while the
framing/design might be faulted, the style of the narrative rushed, the topic
itself is solid.
MR. FUSSY: Can anybody write about the seventh planet from the sun with
the proper decorum? Particularly if the planet emits a bad odor, which combined
with the planet’s name, prompts middle-school giggles? Which outlet stifled
themselves appropriately? Probably not Popular
Science, although the subhed — “But the cold would kill you before the
smell did” — had the right just-the-facts tone. A counterpoint comes from Craig
Pittman, who
tweeted: “Greatest
science headline today or greatest one for April?” BGR.com, in its text, exhibited
prudent behavior. At least, until its
seven-word last paragraph.
‘WHO IS SHE?’: CBS News contributor Alex Wagner, the product of an
Iowa-raised dad and a Burmese mom, ended
up learning uncomfortable things about both sides of her family. She writes
about it in her new memoir, “Futureface.”
The author is Nick Chater and the subtitle is The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind. I found this to be one of the most interesting books on the mind I have read. Overall the message is that your hidden inner life ain’t what you think:
According to our common-sense view, the senses map the outer world into some kind of inner copy, so that, when perceiving a book, table or coffee cup. The mind is a ‘mirror’ of nature. But this can’t be right. There can’t be a 3D ‘mental copy’ of these objects — because they don’t make sense in 3D. They are like 3D jigsaw puzzles whose pieces simply don’t fit together. The mind-as-mirror metaphor can’t possibly be right; we need a very different viewpoint — that perception requires inference.
Take that Thomas Reid! By the way:
This perspective has a further, intriguing and direct prediction: that we can only count colours slowly and laboriously…the apparent richness of colour is itself a trick — that our brains seem to be able to encode no more than one colour (or shape, or orientation) at a time. But this is what the data tell us.
Here is perhaps the clincher:
…all of us perceive the world through a remarkably narrow channel — roughly a single word, object, pattern or property at a time.
So much of the rest is the top-down processing function of our minds filling in the gaps.
By the way, if you are told to shake your head up and down, nodding in agreement, while reciting a plausible argument, you will assign a higher truth value to that claim. And emotion is more a “creation of the moment” rather than “an inner revelation.” If you cross a dangerous bridge to meet up with a woman, thus raising your adrenalin levels, you are more likely to develop a crush on her, that sort of thing.
Pictured above is -- or was -- a swimming pool, five feet wide, five feet deep, and eleven feet long. Around it is a lot of sand -- lots of sand -- and maybe a lizard or hare. There are no roads nearby, no showers or bathrooms, and … and, well, nothing else, really. The pool above was located in California’s Mojave Desert, more than two hours outside of Los Angeles and for all practical purposes, in the middle of nowhere. Here’s a satellite view (or take a look for yourself, here).
In one comical example, a reporter from the Huffington Post went to the pool with a few friends through proper channels to find the hidden swim spot and succeeded.
In most places, swimming pools are either heated or left unheated -- because there's no need or because it's too expensive to heat them. Not in Dubai, though. In 2008, the Guardian reported that the Palazzo Versace would offer a chilled swimming pool (and, for good measure, a beach with artificially chilled sand). The reason? Outside temperatures regularly approach 50 degrees Celcius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) and pools, similarly, get too warm to use. The solution: the hotel installed a "chiller" to keep the pool cool and refreshing.
“As a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, many Americans will see more money in their paychecks due to changes that include the increase in the standard deduction and lower tax rates and brackets. Treasury wants to encourage all taxpayers to check their paycheck withholdings to ensure they have the correct amount withheld for their personal tax profile. We urge taxpayers to visit the IRS Withholding Calculator at IRS.gov/withholding to determine how many withholding allowances to claim. If the calculator results suggest a change in withholding, a taxpayer should complete a new W-4 form, downloadable from the IRS website, and submit it to his or her employer. “This is a pivotal and exciting time for American workers,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. “The ‘paycheck checkup’ will allow employees to keep more of their hard earned money, which is why we passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.”
Bloomberg: “Twitter Inc. sold data access to the Cambridge University academic who also obtained millions of Facebook Inc. users’ information that was later passed to a political consulting firm without the users’ consent. Aleksandr Kogan, who created a personality quiz on Facebook to harvest information later used by Cambridge Analytica, established his own commercial enterprise, Global Science Research (GSR). That firm was granted access to large-scale public Twitter data, covering months of posts, for one day in 2015, according to Twitter. “In 2015, GSR did have one-time API access to a random sample of public tweets from a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015,” Twitter said in a statement to Bloomberg. “Based on the recent reports, we conducted our own internal review and did not find any access to private data about people who use Twitter.” The company has removed Cambridge Analytica and affiliated entities as advertisers. Twitter said GSR paid for the access; it provided no further details. The Telegraph earlier reported that Twitter sold data to Kogan, who told the U.K. newspaper that he was in compliance with Twitter’s policies but didn’t elaborate on what level of access he received…”
Big company tax cuts reward the banks and offshore shareholders - OpEd, Sydney Morning Herald