There’s arguably nothing more romantic than a picnic with a view. Overlooking Sydney Harbour, with views towards the Sydney Harbour Bridge and beyond, you really can’t go wrong with a picnic at Observatory Hill. For a particularly romantic setting, plan your picnic to coincide with sunset and watch on as the waters of Sydney Harbour are coloured with dazzling fiery hues.
Daylight drinking allowed in 18 Sydney parks as ‘thank you’ to fully vaccinated
Choose your own picnic adventure at these iconic Sydney gardens
The Twelve Best Outdoor Swimming Pools in Sydney
The Twelve Best Outdoor Swimming Pools in Sydney
SLAP ON THE WRIST: Twitter to Pay $809.5 Million to Settle Lawsuit Alleging Jack Dorsey, Others Misled Investors.
FASTER, PLEASE: New nano particles suppress resistance to cancer immunotherapy.
Little Bay house sells for $9.3 million, breaking suburb record
A house can be a manifesto. But would you want to live in a manifesto? Architects often confuse houses with books, filled with ideas and iconography, in-jokes and references, details designed as much to be photographed as enjoyed. Or could, perhaps, a house be an appendix to a book? A three-dimensional illustration of an idea, a critic’s design rather than an architect’s statement? That is the question I’ve been pondering, enjoying and occasionally struggling with since Charles Jencks, one of architecture’s most influential critics and a landscape designer, asked in 2019 if I would become the “keeper of meaning” at his Cosmic House in its next incarnation as a museum and cultural space. “Keeper of meaning” is an eccentric-sounding position tailored, perhaps, to seduce me into accepting. I’d written a book titled The Meaning of Home and have always been intrigued by ideas of meaning in architecture. So here I am, a critic who once was an architect, trying to wrap my mind around a house designed by a critic, the first postwar house in Britain to be listed as Grade I.
The Pest Who Shames Companies Into Fixing Security Flaws
In March of 2021, Rome planned to go to Masai Mara, Kenya for three months and work for the Governors’ Camp — a safari organization with several camps — as a resident photographer and to explore more of the East African country. Unfortunately, just two weeks after his arrival, Kenya went into lockdown as a result of the Coronavirus Pandemic and Rome has been unable to go back home since.
Sally Rooney’s New Book Hits Weird New Benchmark
Shakespeare still matters. A new book reminds us why.
Brookings - Five charts that reveal the geography of the AI economy: “Earlier this month, Brookings Metro published a data-driven snapshot of the growth and geography of the emerging artificial intelligence (AI) economy in the United States. Artificial intelligence R&D and commercialization are on the rise. The AI industry is growing rapidly, with AI-related projects accounting for a substantially larger share of federal research and development expenditures at U.S. colleges and universities. Similarly, newly founded firms that provide AI solutions of all tech startups expanded to more than 5%, from less than 1% a decade ago…”
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Maspeth HS diplomas ‘not worth the paper’ they’re printed on.
Maspeth High School created fake classes, awarded bogus credits, and fixed grades to push students to graduate — “even if the diploma was not worth the paper on which it was printed,” an explosive investigative report charges.
Principal Khurshid Abdul-Mutakabbir demanded that teachers pass students no matter how little they learned, says the 32-page report by the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools, Anastasia Coleman.
“I don’t care if a kid shows up at 7:44 and you dismiss at 7:45 — it’s your job to give that kid credit,” the principal is quoted as telling a teacher.
Abdul-Mutakabbir told the teacher he would give the lagging student a diploma “not worth the paper on which it was printed” and let him “have fun working at Taco Bell,” the report says.
The teacher “felt threatened and changed each student’s failing grade to a passing one.”
The SCI report confirms a series of Post exposes in 2019 describing a culture of cheating in which students could skip classes and do little or no work, but still pass.
We’re really seeing just how little public schools have to do with learning. And how little they care.
- The Guardian published an interview with Judith Butler but then deleted paragraphs of it — Why?
- “Whataboutism” and “that’s not who we are” — John Martin Fischer (UCR) on how to understand these common political moves
- “We are bodily beings, whose bodily existence has intrinsic worth, yet for whom dependence and disability are natural” — What this implies for medical care is the topic of an interview with Christopher Tollefsen (South Carolina)
- That sound you heard was thousands of philosophy professors whispering to themselves, “yes!” — Students will once again know what we’re talking about when we reference The Matrix in class. Check out the trailer for “The Matrix Resurrections”
- “There is no monolithic ‘women’s experience’… Feminist theory is riddled with disagreement” — “Today, the most visible war within Anglo-American feminism is over the place of trans women in the movement, and in the category of ‘women,'” writes Amia Srinivasan (Oxford)
- It’s sometimes asked “why the Islamic world never experienced something like the European Enlightenment” — according to Peter Adamson (LMU), part of the answer may be that it did, just a few hundred years earlier
- “To litigate Boxill’s guilt or innocence is to miss the point entirely” — the real scandal is the “wide chasm between Chapel Hill’s squeaky-clean reputation and the contortions that so-called amateurism demanded”
