Saturday, March 02, 2024

Mourners defy riot police at Navalny’s funeral

You weren’t afraid’: Mourners defy riot police at Navalny’s funeral

Hundreds of Russians braved riot police and the threat of arrest to attend the funeral of opposition leader Alexei Navalny after his death in a prison camp.

Putin foe Alexei Navalny is buried in Moscow as thousands attend under heavy police presence



Culprits is the latest heist thriller to land on a streaming service. This one is from J Blakeson, who previously dabbled with high-octane amorality in the hugely enjoyable 2020 film I Care a Lot. It is the sort of TV that will inevitably be called “slick”: it is highly stylised and whips along at a pace; it looks great and the cast is fantastic. In all its glossy richness, though, it also manages to sneak in a few intriguing horror-adjacent ideas that offer greater depth than you might expect.

Culprits


Rough Diamonds is a Flemish-language Netflix Original series by Rotem Shamirabout the Wolfson family, their diamond company, and the trials and tribulations of keeping it and their personal reputations afloat. Kevin Janssens plays Noah who left his Haredi family behind for a life in London. But when he returns home to Antwerp with his son Tommy (Casper Knopf) for a funeral for the first time since basically being excommunicated for leaving the community, he can’t help but step in to try and support the family business he was, in part, running from.

Rough_Diamonds


New Books

Dictators need storytellers to maintain their grip on power. Good thing there’s no shortage of literary accomplices... more »


      Parliamentary Book Awards 


       They've announced the winners of this year's (British) Parliamentary Book Awards -- voted for by parliamentarians ! -- with MP Jesse Norman winning the award for Best Non-Fiction/Fiction by a Parliamentarian, for his novel, The Winding Stair. (Norman had already won a Parliamentary Book Award in 2018.) 

SELF-DEFENSE TIPS:  Plan For The Worst: It’s okay, we tell ourselves, that sort of thing rarely happens.


The Atlantic [read free] – “My KitchenAid stand mixer is older than I am. My dad bought the white-enameled machine 35 years ago, during a brief first marriage. The bits of batter crusted into its cracks could be from the pasta I made yesterday or from the bread he made then. I learned to make my grandfather’s crunchy molasses gingersnaps in that stand mixer. In it, I creamed butter and sugar for the first time. Millions of stand mixers with stories like mine are scattered across the globe, sitting on counters in family homes since who knows when. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History displays Julia Child’s cobalt-enameled mixer in its re-creation of her kitchen; when Julia traveled for a cooking demonstration, she demanded that a KitchenAid be provided. If you buy the popular Artisan model today, your new appliance will look quite similar to the 1937 model designed by Egmont Arens: solid zinc base, enamel coating, arched overhang, a little cap for attachments on the face, room for a bowl to slot into its cradled arm. Inserting a dough hook or a whisk requires a simple click and turn, and adding an attachment to the front face uses the same motion. Arens, who edited the art section at Vanity Fair and designed objects such as aerosol cans, baby carriages, and beach chairs, once said in an interview that a machine’s parts should be “organized into a trim, sleek, streamlined shape—for in addition to lowering wind-resistance, streamlining also lowers eye-resistance.” The KitchenAid’s exterior design is a perfect example of that theory, not only functional but aesthetic: The contained, smooth lines of the casing and the glossy enamel make it easy to put away, satisfying to clean, and decorative on a countertop…”




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