Category Archives: Reviews

Health: “Digestion And The Brain” (Harvard Podcast)

Most of the time your digestive tract toils silently in the background, routinely taking in nourishment and expelling waste. But here’s a key takeaway: Your brain is a critical part of maintaining this smoothly running system. 

Here to explain is Harvard professor Dr. Lawrence S. Friedman, faculty editor the special health report Sensitive Gut.

Classic Cars: RM Sotheby’s “Paris 2020” New Catalog

RM Sotheby’s is set to start its European calendar in spectacular fashion with a return to Paris on 5 February at the highly popular Place Vauban during the world-famous Rétromobile show week. With thousands of automotive enthusiasts from all over the world in the heart of Paris, we are thrilled to offer an exciting roster of 75 automobiles led by a spectacular and historic Jaguar D-Type.

1946 Delahaye 135 Cabriolet RM Sotheby's Paris 2020 auction

1954 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing RM Sotheby's Paris 2020 auction

1937 SS 100 Jaguar 3.5 - Liter Roadster RM Sotheby's Paris 2020 auction
1937 SS 100 Jaguar 3.5 – Liter Roadster RM Sotheby’s Paris 2020 auction

View online catalog

New Books: “You’re Not Listening – What You’re Missing and Why It Matters” By Kate Murphy

You're Not Listening What You're Missing and Why It Matters Kate Murphy Celadon Books January 2020“When you listen and really grasp what another person is saying, your brainwaves and those of the speaker are literally in sync. By looking at brain scans, neuroscientists have found that the greater overlap and similarity of neural impulses between speaker and listener, the greater the understanding. It’s observable, measurable proof of listening, comprehension, and connection. You know it’s happening when you have that “Oh I get it” moment or sense of clarity when someone else is talking. You’re on the same wavelength, even if you don’t necessarily agree.”

In her new book You’re Not Listening, Kate Murphy draws attention to the worldwide epidemic of not listening, exposing the profound impact that it is having on us all and showing what we can do about it.

In this always illuminating and often humorous deep dive, Murphy explains why we’re not listening, what it’s doing to us, and how we can reverse the trend. She makes accessible the psychology, neuroscience, and sociology of listening while also introducing us to some of the best listeners out there (including a CIA agent, focus group moderator, bartender, radio producer, and top furniture salesman). Equal parts cultural observation, scientific exploration, and rousing call to action that’s full of practical advice, You’re Not Listening is to listening what Susan Cain’s Quiet was to introversion. It’s time to stop talking and start listening.

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History Podcasts: 100 Years Ago Charles Ponzi And His “Scheme” Were Arrested (Podcast)

Nearly 100 years ago, Charles Ponzi stumbled across a loophole in the international postal system and turned it into one of the most infamous scams of all time. This time on Sidedoor, we follow Ponzi from his early days until his epic downfall, and hear from a postal investigator trained to catch swindlers like Ponzi who continue to use the U.S. mail for nefarious purposes.

Smithsonian Podcasts

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Art History: World War I Surrealist War Artist Paul Nash (1889 – 1946)

Paul Nash (11 May 1889 – 11 July 1946) was a British Surrealist painter and war artist, as well as a photographer, writer and designer of applied art. Nash was among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the twentieth century. He played a key role in the development of Modernism in English art.

Paul Nash The Ypres Salient at Night, 1918.
Paul Nash: The Ypres Salient at Night, 1918.
Paul_Nash_woodcut_CONTEMPORARY_BRITISH_ARTISTS_1923 Wikipedia
PAUL NASH in a woodcut self-portrait (1923)

Born in London, Nash grew up in Buckinghamshire where he developed a love of the landscape. He entered the Slade School of Art but was poor at figure drawing and concentrated on landscape painting. Nash found much inspiration in landscapes with elements of ancient history, such as burial mounds, Iron Age hill forts such as Wittenham Clumps and the standing stones at Avebury in Wiltshire. The artworks he produced during World War I are among the most iconic images of the conflict. After the war Nash continued to focus on landscape painting, originally in a formalized, decorative style but, throughout the 1930s, in an increasingly abstract and surreal manner. In his paintings he often placed everyday objects into a landscape to give them a new identity and symbolism.

Paul Nash:  Ruined Country - Old Battlefield, Vimy, near La Folie Wood, 1918.
Paul Nash: Ruined Country – Old Battlefield, Vimy, near La Folie Wood, 1918.

Official World War I Artist – In November 1917 Nash returned to the Ypres Salient as a uniformed observer with a batman and chauffeur. At this point the Third Battle of Ypres was three months old and Nash himself frequently came under shellfire after arriving in Flanders. The winter landscape he found was very different from the one he had last seen in spring. The system of ditches, small canals and dykes which usually drained the Ypres landscape had been all but destroyed by the constant shellfire. Months of incessant rain had led to widespread flooding and mile upon mile of deep mud. Nash was outraged at this desecration of nature. He believed the landscape was no longer capable of supporting life nor could it recover when spring came. Nash quickly grew angry and disillusioned with the war and made this clear in letters written to his wife. One such written, after a pointless meeting at Brigade HQ, on 16 November 1917 stands out,

I have just returned, last night from a visit to Brigade Headquarters up the line and I shall not forget it as long as I live. I have seen the most frightful nightmere of a country more conceived by Dante or Poe than by nature, unspeakable, utterly indescribable. In the fifteen drawings I have made I may give you some idea of its horror, but only being in it and of it can ever make you sensible of its dreadful nature and of what our men in France have to face. We all have a vague notion of the terrors of a battle, and can conjure up with the aid of some of the more inspired war correspondents and the pictures in the Daily Mirror some vision of battlefield; but no pen or drawing can convey this country—the normal setting of the battles taking place day and night, month after month. Evil and the incarnate fiend alone can be master of this war, and no glimmer of God’s hand is seen anywhere. Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man, only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds all though the bitter black night is fit atmosphere in such a land. The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered in inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease. They alone plunge overhead, tearing away the rotting tree stumps, breaking the plank roads, striking down horses and mules, annihilating, maiming, maddening, they plunge into the grave, and cast up on it the poor dead. It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.”

Paul Nash  Void of War, 1918.
Paul Nash: Void of War, 1918.

Nash’s anger was a great creative stimulus which led him to produce up to a dozen drawings a day. He worked in a frenzy of activity and took great risks to get as close as possible to the frontline trenches. Despite the dangers and hardship, when the opportunity came to extend his visit by a week and work for the Canadians in the Vimy sector, Nash jumped at the chance. He eventually returned to England on 7 December 1917.

From Wikipedia

The 1980’s: Science Center Construction Boomed – New Age “Museums”

From a CityLab.com online article:

The first of these urban amenities arose in the 1960s, but it was in the 1980s and ‘90s that the construction of science centers truly boomed. Inspired by historic World’s Fair exhibitions, industrial and natural history museums, and the sci-fi dreams of their early founders, science centers had a hands-on mission distinct from that of most museums—to engage rather than display. They offered levers you could pull, gyroscopes you could spin, lab experiments you could conduct. 

Citilab logoThe science center is an adolescent among museum types, one whose main growth spurt was in recent memory. Over the past 40 years, they went from a sparse to a ubiquitous presence, now found in almost every major city. Their emergence stretched the ontological essence of the museum: They present not objects, but concepts. Many science centers define themselves explicitly this way and possess slim to no permanent collections.

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Medical Technology: “Digital Health Trends” At CES 2020 Show (Podcast)

January 8, 2020 – Digital health is one of the hottest and fastest-growing tech categories, not just at CES but throughout the entire tech industry. Join us for a roundtable with media experts discussing health innovations at CES 2020, the growth potential for the health care market and more.

Guests Amy Roberts, Managing Editor, Reviewed Dana Wollman, Editor-In-Chief, Engadget Neil Batra, Principal—Life Sciences & Health Care Strategy, Deloitte

Electric Cars: “Fisker Ocean SUV 2021” Unveiled At CES 2020 (Video)

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Exhibitions: 74-Year Old Artist John Alexander – “Landscape And Memory” (Berggruen Gallery)

JANUARY 9 – FEBRUARY 15, 2020

 

John Alexander The Temptation 2019 Landscape and Memory Berggruen Gallery January 2020Berggruen Gallery is proud to present John Alexander: Landscape and Memory, an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by Texas-born, New York-based artist John Alexander. This show marks Alexander’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view January 9 through February 15, 2020. The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Thursday, January 16 from 5:00 to 7:00pm.

John Alexander’s most recent body of work presents a detailed collection of landscapes, botanicals, sea life, and animals – each subject an emblem of the artist’s own mind and memory. Alexander grew up between the bayous and the wooded wilderness of East Texas, enjoying camping and fishing trips within the lush, diverse landscape that would ultimately become so influential to him. Moreover, Alexander’s understanding and appreciation for the natural world was fortified by his father’s environmentalism. For Alexander, developing an environmental acuity, especially for his native Texas, was familial. Today, the artist creates work in reference to the nature-based consciousness he developed in his youth.

Berggruen Gallery San FranciscoThe introspective nature of Alexander’s work is revealed through the artist’s keen observations of his surrounding environment and the vivid way in which he paints it. Employing bold, painterly strokes, Alexander maintains an acute sensibility of his subject matter – whether it be the detailed rendering of the spiny lobster, an expressive portrayal of grackles and ibises perched in branches, or more expansive, floating florals. The artist also injects elements of whimsy; the playful monkeys he paints peer out of their canvases to almost directly engage the viewer. And thus each work is imbued with an authentic, raggedly pristine, emotional sense of the earth we all inhabit. In this way, Alexander creates scenes that are deeply personal, yet also shared…nostalgic yet ongoing…exotic yet familiar…of the world yet otherworldly. Saturating his landscapes with humor, sentimentality, and veneration, Alexander reveals as much about himself as he does about nature.

John Alexander: Landscape and Memory is comprised of nine paintings and four drawings, work that comes together in reverence for the formal tradition of landscape painting. Paying homage to an Impressionist Master, Claude Monet, Alexander paints dreamy hollyhocks. Invoking the more recent Hudson River School, Alexander carefully creates bucolic scenes of both reality and idealization. Perhaps most unexpectedly, Alexander also nods to the Abstract Expressionists, applying thick strokes of paint in a gestural, emotional meditation. In turn, Alexander’s work pays tribute to the long and varied legacy of landscape painting before him while simultaneously remaining true to his own, very personal, connection to nature. Through the amalgamation of art historical context, environmental conservation, and the integration of a more intimate narrative, Alexander produces a body of work that is raw, compelling, and perhaps above all else, natural.

John Alexander was born in Beaumont, Texas, in 1945. He received his B.F.A. from Lamar University in Beaumont in 1968 and his M.F.A. from the Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1970. Following graduate school, Alexander taught at the University of Houston. Though the artist’s Texas roots influence much of his work, to solely categorize Alexander as a “Texas” artist would be inaccurate. In 1979, having established himself in Houston as a prominent local artist, Alexander moved to New York City. Today the artist divides his time between his SoHo studio loft and home in Amagansett, East Hampton. Alexander’s work has been widely exhibited at such prestigious institutions as the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, both in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His work is featured in the permanent collections of several leading institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; as well as many other public and private collections worldwide.

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Technology Review: AI Camera & Sensor Systems At CES 2020 (WSJ Video)

Two new smart systems use cameras, artificial intelligence and an assortment of sensors to keep watch over you—Patscan looks for threats in public spaces, while Eyeris monitors the driver and passengers in a car. WSJ’s Katherine Bindley visits CES to explores their advantages, as well as their privacy costs.