From a The Italian Eye Magazine online review:
Blindfold Travel offers a complete package with flights and overnight stays in a European city. The customer is only asked to choose the budget and fill out a questionnaire to indicate wishes and preferences. Blindfold Travel organises your holiday from the starting point to the end by providing all the useful information to travellers, who reach the airport completely unaware of their destination. Before leaving, a package containing the various directions arrives at home, and a series of numbered envelopes guide you step by step to the discovery of the journey as in a treasure hunt.
https://www.blindfoldtravel.com/
The only important elements to know are the departure date, time and some hints about what to bring with you; but it’s only shortly before leaving that boarding passes are sent by email. The surprises continue with other offers already included in the package, such as guided tours, museum tickets and many other activities. If you are already curious and want to find out more, you will be amazed!
To read more: https://www.theitalianeyemagazine.com/en/alternative-travels-3-websites/2
While all of the works on exhibit hold special interest, Aurisch identifies several gems. For example, Van Gogh fans will enjoy his spectacular perspectival rooftop view from the window of his room in The Hague in 1882. Maurice de Vlaminc’s 1906 Dancer at the “Rat Mort” (La danseuse du “Rat Mort”) is a delight with his Fauve treatment of the figure; through color and gestural line, it’s as though we are witnessing a shift into the 20th century. And Henri Matisse’s 1943 still life titled Lemons against a Fleur-de-lis Background (Citrons sur fond rose fleurdelisé) vibrates with lively pink patterned wallpaper and a stacked brick platform, charged with Japonisme energy.
Today’s edition features Harvard professor Steven Pinker. As an experimental psychologist, Steven has written extensively about violence – and for his choice from the gallery’s collection he has selected two of Pablo Picasso’s most gruesome depictions of man’s inhumanity, Charnel House and Guernica, now housed in Madrid.

There’s a sense among a majority of Americans that parents are doing too much for their young adult children these days – 55% of all adults say this, while only 10% say parents are doing too little for their young adult children. About a third (34%) say parents are doing about the right amount.
Among adults ages 18 to 29, 45% say they received a lot of (24%) or some (21%) financial help from their parents in the past 12 months. About one-in-five (21%) say they received only a little financial help, and 34% say they received none.
One way to understand American cuisine is through its regions — and the regional traditions that underlie the history of American cuisine. New England, the South, and New Orleans Creole are the regional cuisines of America. Examples of New England cuisine are “Yankee Pot Roast,” the lobster roll, and clam chowder. Southern favorites include grits, collard greens, okra, fried tomatoes, and sweet potato pie. Louisiana’s signature creole dishes are jambalaya, gumbo, and étouffée.
The current study points to the role of norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that signals arousal and stress in the central nervous system. This chemical is present in low levels in the brain while we sleep, but when production ramps up it arouses our nerve cells, causing us to wake up and become alert. The study showed that norepinephrine also acts on a specific receptor, the beta2 adrenergic receptor, which is expressed at high levels in microglia. When this chemical is present in the brain, the microglia slip into a sort of hibernation.
“Abbey Road” was the Beatles’ last word—the final recordings by the most popular and influential artists of the nineteen-sixties. Now, on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, “Abbey Road” has been expertly remixed by Giles Martin, George Martin’s son and protégé, and reissued in a super-deluxe edition that comes with an archive of studio outtakes and a hundred-page book of essays and liner notes that chronicle how the recordings were made. “The Beatles are good even though everybody already knows that they’re good,” the classical composer Ned Rorem observed in 1968, alluding to how the band’s immense popularity confounded the usual notions of discriminating taste. If anyone needs to be reminded of this, this new edition of “Abbey Road” should do the trick.
Masterpieces of Painting surveys more than one hundred of the most exquisite and significant paintings displayed in the museum’s famed, daylight-suffused galleries. Vibrant full-color illustrations and engaging descriptions of these masterworks reveal their fascinating histories and cultural, social, and religious meanings. Sure to enchant and edify all art lovers, this book is a spellbinding tour through the history of Western painting.
Rooted in a passion for the Italian Renaissance as well as Dutch and Flemish Baroque works, the original collection of J. Paul Getty (1892–1976) has been transformed over four decades to include seminal pieces by celebrated masters such as Masaccio, Titian, Parmigianino, Cranach, El Greco, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Poussin, Canaletto, Fragonard, Turner, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, van Gogh, Cézanne, and Ensor.
Listen to the latest from the world of science, with Nick Howe and Shamini Bundell. This week, a milestone in quantum computing, and rethinking early mammals.