Irena, Nicole with Christian over Slovenian Slivovica 

Tony and Tyson inside Little Italy 

Going Backwards to Bethlehem : The flight of the poet who gave wings to the human spirit.

I have never forgotten Joseph de Maistre’s admittedly bitchy line, “Voltaire, who touched upon every subject without ever penetrating the surface of any.”

Saturday’s good reading and listening for the weekend

By IAN MCAULEY | On 13 February 2021

What people in other forums are saying about public policy Continue reading →

NEWS YOU CAN USE:  Our top 13 delightful hedgehog facts.

A biography paints Tom Stoppard as unfailingly kind. The playwright’s reaction? He is “not as nice as people think”

Mend and make new — how the pandemic reignited a repairs revival 

From darning socks to upcycling Carrara marble, more and more of us are ‘reassessing imperfection’

Around the world, the rigours of lockdown seem to have awoken our urge to fix things. In the US and the UK, hardware retailers reported bumper sales figures last year, as homeowners finally got around to tackling long-postponed chores. Bike-owners, wary of using crowded public transport, rushed to repair old models unused for years. Even darned and patchworked clothes are having a moment, especially following a celebrated show by Dolce & Gabbana at Milan Fashion Week. Repair has been very much part of the pandemic zeitgeist, and not just for frugal economic reasons, but because of the emotional — perhaps sentimental — power that kept and mended or repurposed items can have.

A new exhibition in Singapore celebrates this renewed interest. R for Repair — running until February 6 at the National Design Centre — encourages the idea of rummaging through your closets to turn up those items that broke or broke down some while ago. “Repair is a forgotten activity,” says Hans Tan, the exhibition’s curator. “It’s something we used to do 50 years ago. You had a hole in your shirt, you mended it.”

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The organising of R for Repair called for items from the public. Those selected were handed to young, local designers to come up with something that would give them new life. Submissions included a watch with a snapped strap, a damaged tote bag and an old, broken Singer sewing machine. Each of the items on show has its own story: memories of a first date, perhaps, a gift from parents some years ago and, in one case, something bought on a family trip overseas. The young Asian professional classes have begun to reassess the objects they have and what goes into them, says Hunn Wai, of designers Lanzavecchia+Wai. His job was to reconfigure the watch, which is now a clock in a walnut frame. In the case of the tote bag, originally from Calvin Klein, the owner, Arnold Goh, bought it in 2007 with his first pay cheque. Textile weaver Tiffany Loy turned it inside out, strengthened its new exterior with cotton cord, and re-presented it as a relatively classy grocery bag.

Six More Houston Cops Involved In Deadly Drug Raid Are Now Facing Criminal Charges

Legal Issues

from the looks-like-'judged-by-12'-it-isdept

Mon, Feb 1st 2021 8:06pm — Tim Cushing

We still haven't seen an end to the fallout resulting from a botched (and bogus) drug raid in Houston that ended with two residents killed by police officers. It also ended with five officers wounded -- one of them paralyzed.

A Historic Union Vote Gets Underway at Amazon Wired 

Orthodoxy of the Elites New York Review of Books 

It’s Easy to Fix Inequality: Tax the RichCounterpunch

What Jeff Bezos Hath Wrought New York Times 

In Praise Of The Most Underrated Punctuation Mark

“That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied. And there are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways; semicolons are the rare instance in which you can; there is absolutely no downside.” – The New York Times Magazine