The twentieth-century styles such as neo-gothic, art nouveau, and modernism that characterize Gaudí’s designs are reflected in the AI-generated images through vivid colors and free-flowing coral-like shapes. The digital art series are illustrated through the process of combining popular text-to-image software, Midjourney, and Photoshop for additional editing.
@nytimesbooks December 11, 2022 features:
The books they read this year that have stayed with them.
At this time of year, the best-selling books for children are all Christmas, all the time. And they’re not even new!
“Ghost Town,” a novel by Kevin Chen, recounts the overlapping — and hotly contested — memories of a Taiwanese family.
December 11, 2022: A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week features ‘The End of Cheap Money’, Britain’s Second-Tier Cities & The Age of ‘Boring AI‘.
But farmers are struggling. They’re under constant pressure to produce more, at lower prices and can no longer hold out against the stiff competition. Most European farms are still family-run businesses, but it’s the large-scale enterprises that benefit from EU subsidies. These companies practice intensive farming, which we now know has a detrimental effect on biodiversity and human health.
This kind of agricultural system is also very bad for soil quality and is now seen as obsolete. With every crisis that occurs, its shortcomings become more evident. The pace of climate change now requires rapid responses to crucial questions: How to sustainably feed more than 500 million Europeans? What steps can be taken to stem the catastrophe resulting from the dramatic rise in meat consumption (up 60 per cent in 60 years) and its associated intensive production of cereal crops?
Solutions are presenting themselves, and many farmers have already seized the initiative. Throughout the European continent, they are the main drivers of a vital 21st century agricultural revolution: a return to traditional farming methods, intelligent or urban agriculture, fewer mass imports, research into in-vitro meat and meat substitutes. These are just some of the approaches being explored by European farmers in a bid to protect biodiversity, the landscape and the health of human beings.
An illuminating and moving personal account of how Hong Kong descended into the mass street unrest of 2019, and of the pandemic-abetted repression that has crushed it since. The author speaks powerfully for a desperate generation of young Hong Kongers conscious that their home city has lost what made it home.
A look at why Americans are so much more likely to suffer violent “accidents” than people in other rich countries. The author shows how poor road design, rather than bad driving, explains the persistence of car crashes and how factories use rule books and disciplinary procedures as a cheap substitute for real safety improvements.
A chronicle of the life and lies of the 45th president of the United States, from outer-borough brat to White House bully. This portrait of a master scammer is by a New York Times journalist who covered Donald Trump for decades. He learned early, she notes, that celebrity was power.
A meticulous narration of the efforts to bring to justice the killers of Munir, a prominent Indonesian human-rights activist murdered in 2004. It reads like an enthralling legal-procedural whodunnit, as evidence is slowly unearthed from telephone records, lost documents are retrieved from deleted computer files and intriguing new witnesses emerge.
In 2016 the author, a Canadian journalist, went undercover to accompany an Afghan friend on his perilous journey to a new life in Europe—always knowing that, if push came to shove, he could fall back on his Western citizenship, while his friend would have to rely on his luck. The result is a devastatingly intimate insight into the refugee crisis.
It is striking how many of today’s leaders fit the strongman mould, notes a columnist for the Financial Times (formerly of The Economist). His subjects, including Xi Jinping and Prince Muhammad bin Salman, are a threat not only to the well-being of their own countries, he says, but to a world order in which liberal ideas are increasingly embattled.
A fortuitously timed history of the use of economic sanctions during the interwar period of the 20th century. Their mixed success cautions against hoping that the West’s sanctions against Russia can bring about an end to war in Ukraine.
@barronsonline December 12, 2022 issue:
“Nobody budgets this kind of inflation.” How retirees are responding to the fastest-rising prices in 40 years.
High inflation and the volatile stock market have wreaked havoc on people’s retirement plans. Cash—handled correctly—can provide some relief.
The company’s big bet on primary care hasn’t yet come to pass. Should investors be worried?
Investors are punishing Regal Rexnord for acquiring Altra Industrial Motion as the economy weakens. Those concerns are overblown.
The firm’s nontraded real estate income trust, BREIT, was a big success until the turmoil of 2022. When redemption requests mounted, the firm limited them, raising a raft of issues, from fears of outflows to regulatory scrutiny.
@ObsNewReview December 11, 2022 – Those we lost in 2022:
The Swedish abstract artist who conversed with the dead is described as a woman years ahead of her time in this scholarly, sympathetic study
The gifted science writer’s lyrical collection doesn’t always flow smoothly between reverie and fact, but remains intriguing
Boomers Daily 