Wednesday, November 06, 2019

How To Search Books By Color and Paintings by fraudster’s names


ON THIS DAY 80 YEARS AGO, NAZI GERMANY BEGINS ‘SONDERAKTION KRAKOW’: Sonderaktion Krakau was the codename for a Nazi German operation against professors and academics of the Jagiellonian University and other universities in Nazi occupied Kraków, Poland, at the beginning of World War II. It was carried out as part of the much broader action plan, the Intelligenzaktion, to eradicate the Polish intellectual elite especially in those centres (such as Kraków) that were slated by the Nazis to become culturally German.



Are reputations like sandcastles, all washed away sooner or later by the tides of fashion?
The death of the great cultural critic

From its first pages, Scripture treats finitude as part of the creation God calls “very good.” On the first day of the creation week, God summons light into existence. Light dispels the original darkness, but God doesn’t eliminate darkness—not yet. Instead, he sets light and darkness in a rhythmic dance of day and night, which forms the evenings and mornings of every day since. That temporal rhythm is good, and when God delegates governance of day and night to the heavenly lights, he says that’s “good” too (Gen 1:14–16).

Life is nothing if not an adventure


Prince Charles is hit by a major counterfeit art scandal: Royal sends back £105m Monet, Picasso and Dali paintings lent by bankrupt businessman James Stunt as an American forger claims HE painted themMail on Sunday


Essay Daily: Talk About the Essay: Susannah Q. Pratt: How Zadie Smith Saved My Book
I knew, rather than pouting, I had to face facts. Simply put, I’d been scooped. Smith had beaten me to the analysis and stated it better than I ever could. Plus, with her fame and excellent writing and all, she’d had the jump on me from the start. I was clearly not going to be writing my way into some literary life. In the quiet heat of the afternoon I closed my eyes and fell asleep


RT’s Reviews & Marginalia : Award for Flannery O’Connor film brings new attention to Catholic writer


The heart and place of prayer – Catholic World Report.
There are so many aspects to prayer, both external and internal, that the heart of prayer is often best glimpsed through indirect means, such as parables.

Jenny Sabin Studio’s “Ada” Embeds AI in Architecture at Microsoft Architect

Silicon Valley should take Josh Hawley’s big war on big tech seriously ReCode

Maybe It’s Not YouTube’s Algorithm That Radicalizes People Wired

Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours Alex Danco







Come to the cabaret aux Crazy Coqs



How often do we go to cabaret or a jazz club in London? In truth, not often. But I’ve been twice in the last year, to catch an autobiographical musical gig by the veteran movie, tv and stage star, Anita Gillette. – Paul Levy


Dancing After 60: Peeling Back The Years


Of course, age creates physical limitations. But there is artistry in their dancing and musicality, in the way they hang a fraction behind the beat to create the lilting sensation of floating. It’s soulful. By the end of their sessions, which do involve breaks — cookies and coffee are essential for recharging the body — they seem to transform into lighter, younger versions of themselves. – The New York Times


Education of an architect. Aspiring to greatness is now conflated with aspiring to novelty, bolstering the field's affinity for what’s ugly... What is Ugly like Tom Ugly Bridge 

Financial incentives and social incentives



The Game’: The Game — In Which The Dangers You Dodge Are Pick-Up Artists


Artist Angela Washko spent four years studying Neil Strauss’s notorious womanizing instruction manual The Game, along with other materials of its kind, to develop The Game: The Game, a video pastime in which the player is a young woman in a dive bar being hit on by a series of men on the hunt. Each line of dialogue and “seduction technique” is taken directly from PUA (pick-up artist) books and how-to videos. – The Nation



Opinion: 50 years ago, I helped invent the internet. How did it go so wrong? LA Times




VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY HAS PASSED AWAY. SEE  Judgment In Moscow







How To Search Books By Colo


BookRiot – Anna Gooding-Call – “One of the most annoying things about my job (I am a librarian) is that most people remember what they liked about a particular book rather than its metadata. That means that they may have read a book that they know is about dragons, but know nothing about its title and author. There are literally thousands of books about dragons. (You can read about a few of them right here and right here.) It’s almost impossible to narrow them down based on vague plot information. But you know what makes an impression on almost everyone who picks a book up off a shelf? That’s right: cover color. It was red, it was yellow, it had a circle on it. I must have gotten thousands of reference questions about blue books alone. If you’re a librarian, you have too. That’s why I’m going to show you how to search books by color right now…”

Confucius as Sage 

How do public servants deal with the outside world: is there any truth to the stories we tell ourselves?

U.K. to Destroy Commemorative 50p Coins in Brexit Meltdown Bloomberg 


OLD WHITE GODS, NOT YET DEAD: Why Architectural Elites Love Ugly Buildings.

In large parts of post-World War II Europe, the bombs of war were followed by a three-decade-long blitz of dogmatic Modernist social engineering and megalomaniac town planning, most of it taking inspiration from the then hugely fashionable theories of the Swiss architect who called himself Le Corbusier. The most forgiving thing one can say of it all was that the trauma of the war had given rise to a widespread mood of alienation from all things past. But the consequences of this alienation from the past and an intelligentsia intoxicated with utopian dogma were a tragedy, and one that unfolded on a vast scale.