How People Romanticize Their Childhoods

 But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hyper-educated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day.

— James Joyce, born  in 1882

Rustic Art: The trick to making someone else’s trash look great in your garden

How People Romanticize Their Childhoods

February 1, 2023

Considering the aspirations of so many people to return to it, you’d think the answer was a place, a spot in the world, with an address, much easier to locate than a time, though times have dates to identify them as precisely as street names and numbers identify places. - American Scholar

After decades of painting fakes, falsifying evidence and diligently covering their tracks, it was a single act of carelessness that brought the Beltracchis' deception to light.

The husband-and-wife forgers who fooled the art market — and made millions

Hemingway had four wives, Bellow five, Mailer six. Not all literary marriages are alike; each is unhappy in its own way ... Tale of Sanctity of Four Weddings 

The work of Edward Hopper presents an enigma: Why is a great city like New York both a cause and a cure of loneliness?... Loneliness  

 Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, February 4, 2023 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week:

 Have a Conversation (Not a Lecture) About Fraud With Older Adults; List of consumer reporting companies; Cybersecurity High-Risk Series: Challenges in Securing Federal Systems and Information; and NIST debuts long-anticipated AI risk management framework.

Supreme Court justices used personal emails for work and ‘burn bags’ were left open in hallways

CNN: “Long before the leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, some Supreme Courtjustices often used personal email accounts for sensitive transmissions instead of secure servers set up to guard such information, among other security lapses not made public in the court’s report on the investigation last month. New details revealed to CNN by multiple sources familiar with the court’s operations offer an even more detailed picture of yearslong lax internal procedures that could have endangered security, led to the leak and hindered an investigation into the culprit. 

Supreme Court employees also used printers that didn’t produce logs – or were able to print sensitive documents off-site without tracking – and “burn bags” meant to ensure the safe destruction of materials were left open and unattended in hallways…

The report and the new revelations of weak protocols come as the court is trying to protect its own legitimacy after an embarrassing leak and allegations (prompted by the recent rash of high profile cases breaking along familiar ideological lines) that it has simply become another political branch.

 The 20-page report and its still secret “Annex A” raised some questions as to whether the entire investigation should have been outsourced to someone without close ties to the court…employees who had VPN access could print documents from any computer, making it difficult to track copies. 

Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley made an important concession in the report that some locally connected printers only logged the last 60 documents printed. A look at the timeline of the leak reveals how such a system would be problematic for investigators. 

That’s because the initial draft was distributed internally on February 10, 2022. But the leak investigation only started in May when Politico published the draft opinion. Some of those print logs would almost surely no longer exist because the 60-document threshold had been reached…”