Animal sounds in most nature documentaries are made by humans. How they do it and why it matters PhysOrg
Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in Wellington in 1888 to parents who had both been born in Australia but for whom ‘home’ would always mean England. She died 34 years later in France. Much of what happened in between is up for grabs: no two biographies seem to be describing the same person.
She thought of herself as containing ‘hundreds of selves’, and often went by different names depending on which self was on top: ‘Katherine Mansfield’, her usual favourite, jostled for prominence with Käthe Schönfeld, Matilda Berry, Elizabeth Stanley, Julian Mark, Mrs K. Bendall, Kass, Katharina, Katoushka and Kissienka. The stories she told about herself often didn’t add up – biographers pick and choose which to believe, and hope for the best.
Her handwriting was close to illegible, so quotations from Mansfield’s letters and diaries tend to be all over the place too. The title of Claire Harman’s biography, All Sorts of Lives, points to the volatility of her subject and the difficulty of her task. But at least some facts are incontrovertible.
The Beauchamps had five children who survived infancy; Kathleen was in the middle. Her father was chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. Her mother was a socialite.
I behave like a fiend London Review of Books
Carl Zimmer: Why are some mushrooms “magic”? “I like to imagine them sprouting in dark, dying forests littered with the corpses of tyrannosaurs.”
Seven years ago David and Kylie Pollard moved their family from Sydney’s Northern Beaches to Port Stephens. They were sick and tired of the traffic and wanted the opportunity to own their own home.
Saltwater Restaurant is one family's dream come true
Tom Shales, Pulitzer-winning TV critic of fine-tuned wit, dies at 79.
Tom Shales, a Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The Washington Post who brought incisive and barbed wit to coverage of the small screen and chronicled the medium as an increasingly powerful cultural force, for better and worse, died Jan. 13 at a hospital in Fairfax County, Va. He was 79.
The cause was complications from covid and renal failure, said his caretaker, Victor Herfurth.
TV critics in New York and Los Angeles traditionally had greater show business clout than one in the entertainment backwater of Washington, but Mr. Shales proved a formidable exception for more than three decades.
As The Post’s chief TV critic starting in 1977, he worked at a newspaper still basking in the cachet of its Watergate glory, his column was widely syndicated, and his stiletto-sharp commentary on TV stars, trends and network executives brought him national attention and influence.
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“No one believes this when I tell them, but after writing a column that’s been particularly mean to one poor helpless fabulously overpaid filthy-rich celebrity or another, I always ask editors if I’ve been ‘too mean’ and if the column should be ‘toned down,’” he wrote in a 2002 essay for Electronic Media.“Nine times out of 10 over the years the answer has been along the lines of, ‘No, it’s not too mean. If anything, it’s not mean enough.’ I have almost always been encouraged to be meaner. See, it’s really all the fault of editors.”
With some limits: Tom Shales: I’m Shocked To Be Told I Minimized Roman Polanski’s Crime. Here, Let Me Do It Again! “In Hollywood I am not sure a 13-year-old is really a 13-year-old.”
Related: Shales and his NPR interviewer try to make sense of a new movie called Star Wars, this strange new “complete science fiction fantasy with absolutely no redeeming moral values or moralistic values either” that’s “taking the country by proverbial storm.” Are the special effects any good?, Shales is asked at one point. “Gee, it’s kind of hard to describe the whole universe blowing up in your face.”
Lev Rubinstein (1947-2024)
Russian poet Lev Rubinstein has passed away; see, for example, the BBC report.
(Updated - 17 January): See now also Benjamin Ivry reporting Russian authorities are calling the death of a prominent Jewish poet an ‘accident’ — his compatriots say it was an assassination at Forward.
Ugly Duckling Presse have brought out several of his works in English translation.
