Elvis review – Baz Luhrmann’s squeaky-clean King is shaking no one up | Cannes 2022
Passing the port from left to right at the Science Fiction Writers of America dinner
Photographer Carved Banks was flying his drone above Sydney's Maroubra Beach on Tuesday when he saw something that stopped him in his tracks – a humpback whale with a very unusual tail.
As the large black and white mammal broke through the waves, nothing seemed amiss.
Then the drone operator caught sight of its tail, which curls in on itself, forming a heart-like shape.
'Rare' whale with curved tail spotted off popular Sydney beach
Sydney whale watching 2022 season
FASTER, PLEASE: A synthetic antibiotic may help turn the tide against drug-resistant pathogens
Bribe-Switching
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) prohibits US firms from paying bribes to foreign public officials. We show that FCPA enforcement has no positive effect on the GDP per capita of the countries of these officials but, rather, increases their countries shadow economy. When public officials take bribes both from legal and illegal markets, corruption enforcement in legal markets induces them to make up for lost rents by taking more bribes from illegal markets. In equilibrium, they enforce less against illegal producers, thereby increasing the size of illegal markets. We find that one case of FCPA enforcement alone increases the shadow economy by as much as 0.25 percentage points (pp), homicide rates by 0.02 pp, and trade misinvoicing by 0.5 pp.
That is a new paper by Jamie Bologna Pavlik and Desiree Desierto. I am very pleased to now have Desiree as my colleague at George Mason University
Music and memories
The lost soundtracks of Fire Island (via MeFi) / also via MF, Bartosz Ciechanowski delves into the workings of the Mechanical Watch / illustrations by Varguy / a large collection of live gigs at East London venue Biddle Bros. Many of these could do with having the band’s name added for a start / radio shows broadcast and archived at Amateurism / the story of the Amiga’s contribution to dance music / an AI-driven beat loop generator / music by the Human Hand Band / Ztxtz, a tumblr / now due to open on 24 May 2022, one indication of how long Crossrail (the Elizabeth Line) has been in the making is that the project’s press gallery is hosted on Flickr / modernist books for sale / at 87 years old, John Outram gets his overdue revival. History will show that his radical plan for Battersea Power Station would have been the best thing to happen to the site / art by Hubert Arthur Finney / the world’s smallest two-storey caravan / were crop circles great art? / a 1am stroll through south London.
Shaun Whiteside Q & A
At New Books in German Helen Nurse has an Interview with translator Shaun Whiteside.
Among his observations:
This is part of the problem of being a translator. You’re not necessarily the kind of personality that wants the limelight all the time. And maybe that’s why, speaking personally to some extent, you got into translation rather than something else in the first place. However, on behalf of all other translators, I think it’s probably one of those things that you have to take on board. You have to say, I’m not just doing this for me, I’m doing it for my colleagues as well.
Philosophy’s gentle giant New Statesman
The animals with an artistic eye BBC
F.B.I. Investigates Basquiat Paintings Shown at Orlando Museum of Art NYT
Turkish archaeologists discover subterranean city of Matiate Qantara