Iconic Sydney Opera House Closes For Two Years
As the building approaches its 50th birthday, in 2023, the interventions are necessary. While its architect, Jorn Utzon, is now widely recognized as a visionary and his creation is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the hall’s construction was troubled, and certain problems have never been solved. Years of testing have produced a new plan for the concert hall’s acoustics — as well as for more basic matters. – The New York Times
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and the implants are tailored to your body.
Just because: New York’s nightclubs in 1946 | About Last Night.
Rosa is a young woman from a small, country town in Australia who longs for mystery, adventure, and the exotic. She is fatally attracted to a romantic image of Eastern Europe, arriving alone in Dubrovnik in the months before the implosion of the old Yugoslavia. Rosa has no idea of the politics, yet she ends up dangerously drawn into a relationship with a young Albanian on his path to becoming a political refugee. Unable to tease apart destiny, reality, and fantasy, she becomes a captive of her heart and the excitement and danger of the unknown.
As an artist and a celebrity, Warhol changed the world. But what really went on behind those shades? Ahead of Tate’s epic show, our writer unleashes his inner Andy
Famous for 15 minutes! My week living as Andy Warhol
Gone are the days of Dickens and Kafka — the novel has been brought low since the 1990s. Are its days numbered?... Novy Kafka
The Library of Congress has acquired the archive of photographer Shawn Walker, who has documented life in Harlem since 1963.
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”
Trailblaizing Blogs
Another philosophy-centric television show? — “Devs,” from the maker of the movie “Ex Machina,” is a show about free will, morality, and “the intersection of philosophical thinking and scientific logic”
What Shakespeare Means Today
Simon Godwin is on a quest for the sweet spot in American Shakespeare: to figure out what stimulates the American psyche and to reconcile traditionalists who want to see “doublets and hose” with those who have to be convinced a 400-year-old play by a white guy could still be relevant. – Washington Post
How Hollywood Fueled William Faulkner
Hollywood became synonymous with increased income and long absences from home. The manna from Faulkner’s work on screenplays and the movie options on his novels was very welcome indeed, but it did not come without cost to his marriage. When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered six weeks at $500 a week in May 1932, the couple was significantly overdrawn and without credit. Faulkner literally spent his last few dollars wiring MGM that he would accept their offer. He then asked his uncle for a five-dollar loan. John Falkner instead offered a $500 loan to cover his nephew’s overdraft, but Faulkner declined and held out for a studio advance. – Los Angeles Review of Books
The world looked pretty fresh to me after 20 years raising three children meant never travelling further than the Woy Woy fish co-op and the list of places people insisted I visit looked even fresher. They hadn’t been on the list when I’d been a footloose tourist in Greenwich Village or sharing the beach with water buffalo and no other tourists in Langkawi in the eighties.
It's the best place I’ve been in my life and Sydney could have one just like it
Late last year, NASA’s Curiosity rover took over a thousand photos of the Martian landscape while exploring a mountainside. NASA stitched the photos togetherand recently released this 1.8 gigapixel panorama of Mars (along with a mere 650 megapixel panorama, pictured above). Here’s a version you can pan and zoom
The Disposables – the Washington Post sent disposable cameras to 25 women around the country and here's what they captured. "This transported me to a time before instant gratification
The economics of buffets.
When everything is 'curated,' what does the word even mean?"Everyone’s a Curator Now?"
The Disposables – the Washington Post sent disposable cameras to 25 women around the country and here's what they captured. "This transported me to a time before instant gratification
The economics of buffets.
How have your reading tastes changed over time?I was a book-a-day child, a pretentious teenager. I read hugely in my 20s and 30s — all the good stuff, nothing very odd or esoteric. As I started getting published, I read my contemporaries in a way that was not entirely pure. Then, after I had children, I stopped. It is possible more books were written than read by me, in the years when they were small. I don’t think I am a recreational reader. I am always looking for something and I am not sure what it is. These days, I am increasingly restless. I throw books aside. I blame the internet. I blame the chair. I yearn for books not published yesterday or next week. I stick to nonfiction. And then suddenly, I can’t leave a book out of my hand. This happened most recently with “Where Reasons End,” by Yiyun Li.
The Irish Photographer Who Won A Pulitzer Prize, Was Banned By India, And Quit
Cathal McNaughton was returning to Delhi after winning a Pulitzer Prize for his photography of desperate Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar. “Without explanation, the Indian authorities escorted him back to the plane he’d flown in on and marched him down the aisle to his seat. Before he was fully aware of it, he found himself flying back to Toronto. His job, his apartment, his friends, his possessions: all were left behind in Delhi. McNaughton’s life, as he had known it up until then, had disintegrated.” Now he doesn’t even own a camera. – The Irish Times
For his Cartoon Fossils series, Filip Hodas used 3D modelling software to create fossilized skulls of cartoon characters like Scrooge McDuck, Tweetie Bird, Minnie Mouse, and Goofy.
These remind me of Michael Paulus’s Character Studies, drawings of the skeletons of the likes of Lucy from Peanuts, Betty Boop, Marvin the Martian, and Pikachu. I have his Hello Kitty drawing hanging in my living room, purchased afterLeslie Harpold pointed me towards his work back in the day
*The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life* the new forthcoming book
by Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Richie Poulton,
which will prove one of the best and most important works of the last
few years. Imagine following one thousand or so Dunedin New Zealanders
for decades of their lives, up through age 38, and recording extensive
data, and then doing the same for one thousand or so British twins
through age 20, and 1500 American children, in fifteen different
locales, up through age 15. Just imagine what you would learn!
You merely have to buy this book. In the meantime, let me give you just a few of the results.
The traits of being “undercontrolled” or “inhibited,” as a toddler are the traits most likely to persist up through age eighteen. The undercontrolled tend to end up as danger-seeking or impulsive. Those same individuals were most likely to have gambling disorders at age 32. Girls with an undercontrolled temperament, however, ran into much less later danger than did the boys, including for gambling.
“Social and economic wealth accumulated by the fourth decade of life also proved to be related to childhood self-control.” And yes that is with controls, including for childhood social class.
Being formally diagnosed with ADHD in childhood was statistically unrelated to being so diagnosed later in adult life. It did, however, predict elevated levels of “hyperactivity, inattentiveness, and impulsivity” later in adulthoood. I suspect that all reflects more poorly on the diagnoses than on the concept. By the way, decades later three-quarters of parents did not even remember their children receiving ADHD diagnoses, or exhibiting symptoms of ADHD (!).
Parenting styles are intergenerationally transmitted for mothers but not for fathers.
For one case the authors were able to measure for DNA and still they found that parenting styles affected the development of the children (p.104).
As for the effects of day care, it seems what matters for the mother-child relationship is the quantity of time spent by the mother taking care of the child, not the quality (p.166). For the intellectual development of the child, however, quality time matters not the quantity. By age four and a half, however, the children who spent more time in day care were more disobedient and aggressive. At least on average, those problems persist through the teen years. The good news is that quality of family environment growing up still matters more than day care.
But yet there is so much more! I have only scratched the surface of this fascinating book. I will not here betray the results on the effects of neighborhoods on children, for instance, among numerous other topics and questions. Or how about bullying? Early and persistent marijuana use? (Uh-oh) And what do we know about polygenic scores and career success? What can we learn about epigenetics by considering differential victimization of twins? What in youth predicts later telomere erosion?
I would describe the writing style as “clear and factual, but not entertaining.”
You can pre-order it here, one of the books of the year and maybe more, recommended of course.
You merely have to buy this book. In the meantime, let me give you just a few of the results.
The traits of being “undercontrolled” or “inhibited,” as a toddler are the traits most likely to persist up through age eighteen. The undercontrolled tend to end up as danger-seeking or impulsive. Those same individuals were most likely to have gambling disorders at age 32. Girls with an undercontrolled temperament, however, ran into much less later danger than did the boys, including for gambling.
“Social and economic wealth accumulated by the fourth decade of life also proved to be related to childhood self-control.” And yes that is with controls, including for childhood social class.
Being formally diagnosed with ADHD in childhood was statistically unrelated to being so diagnosed later in adult life. It did, however, predict elevated levels of “hyperactivity, inattentiveness, and impulsivity” later in adulthoood. I suspect that all reflects more poorly on the diagnoses than on the concept. By the way, decades later three-quarters of parents did not even remember their children receiving ADHD diagnoses, or exhibiting symptoms of ADHD (!).
Parenting styles are intergenerationally transmitted for mothers but not for fathers.
For one case the authors were able to measure for DNA and still they found that parenting styles affected the development of the children (p.104).
As for the effects of day care, it seems what matters for the mother-child relationship is the quantity of time spent by the mother taking care of the child, not the quality (p.166). For the intellectual development of the child, however, quality time matters not the quantity. By age four and a half, however, the children who spent more time in day care were more disobedient and aggressive. At least on average, those problems persist through the teen years. The good news is that quality of family environment growing up still matters more than day care.
But yet there is so much more! I have only scratched the surface of this fascinating book. I will not here betray the results on the effects of neighborhoods on children, for instance, among numerous other topics and questions. Or how about bullying? Early and persistent marijuana use? (Uh-oh) And what do we know about polygenic scores and career success? What can we learn about epigenetics by considering differential victimization of twins? What in youth predicts later telomere erosion?
I would describe the writing style as “clear and factual, but not entertaining.”
You can pre-order it here, one of the books of the year and maybe more, recommended of course.