After Republicans passed a bill that pairs spending cuts and fossil fuel support with raising the nation’s borrowing cap, the president must decide when and how to negotiate
The state seemed poised to take the first meaningful action in decades to address its deep housing shortage. But the plans fell apart, in yet another indictment of dysfunction in Albany.
On tiny farms they’re testing creative ideas to stay ahead of the cascading threats — heat and drought, cyclones and floods — transforming their world.
Science Magazine – April 28, 2023 issue: Mammals come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, here represented by some of the least well known and most unusual—clockwise from top left: a fossa, a Hoffmann’s two-toed sloth, a lesser hedgehog tenrec, two tree (or white-bellied) pangolins, and an aye-aye.
Mammals are one of the most diverse classes of animals, ranging both in size, across many orders of magnitude, and in shape—nearly to the limit of one’s imagination. Understanding when, how, and under what selective pressures this variation has developed has been of interest since the dawn of science.
The 240 mammals sequenced through the Zoonomia project include the famous sled dog Balto, who was reported to have led a team of sled dogs in the final leg of the race to carry a life-saving serum to Nome, Alaska, in 1925. His genome, in conjunction with others, was used to reveal his ancestry and adaptations, as well as predict aspects of his morphology, including his coat color.
Researchers deploy a wave glider to measure seafloor displacement associated with earthquakes.PHOTO: TODD ERICKSEN
The destructive behavior of great earthquakes in subduction zones, such as in Japan in 2011, depends on details of the earthquake slip. A slip at shallow depth is the dominant driver of tsunami. Using recently developed seafloor geodetic instrumentation, Brooks et al. found that the deeper slip of the July 2021 magnitude 8.2 Chignik, Alaska earthquake was followed 2.5 months later by a second stage of (aseismic) slip. This approximately 2 to 3 meters of “silent” slip allowed the shallow fault to catch up with its deeper portion, reducing its future earthquake potential.
The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
By Jonathan Rosen | Penguin Press
A young man’s ife of brilliant promise was overtaken when his struggle with mental illness took a turn into delusion and nightmare. Review by Richard J. McNally.
A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South
By Peter Cozzens | Knopf
The most consequential Indian war in U.S. history didn’t take place on the prairie but among the forsts and marshes of the Deep South. Atrocities were committed by both sides. Review by Fergus M. Bordewich.
The names and dates of battles that changed history are well-remembered. But what about storms or volcanic eruptions? For eons, human civilizations have shaped—and been shaped by—the natural world. Review by Tunku Varadarajan.
The country needs a new political settlement that diminishes the power of extremists
As israel marks its 75th anniversary, take a moment to admire how it has triumphed against the odds. Before it declared independence in 1948 its own generals warned that it had only a fifty-fifty chance of survival. Today Israel is hugely rich, safer than it has been for most of its history, and democratic—if, that is, you are prepared to exclude the territories it occupies. It has overcome wars, droughts and poverty with few natural endowments other than human grit. It is an outlier in the Middle East, a hub of innovation and a winner from globalisation.
Or Russian fighter jets may win control of Ukrainian skies
As Ukraine prepares its forces for a crucial counter-offensive, the argument among its Western allies about what equipment to provide chunters on. Having finally received the tanks it had been pleading for since last year, Ukraine has increased the intensity of its demands for fighter jets. Yet its pleas are falling on largely deaf ears.
François Ghebaly Gallery, New York City (April 27, 2023) – François Ghebaly is proud to present Station by Matt Bollinger. Ithaca-based artist Matt Bollinger works from a complex interdisciplinary base: as painter, draftsman, animator, and elegist, he creates work that straddles the projects of both visual art and narrative fiction.
His stories, by and large, are of America’s rural working class–each is told through a bricolage of memory, family history, direct observation, art-historical research, and literary invention. For his latest exhibition, Bollinger chronicles the semi-fictional inhabitants of a rural central Missourian community, offering in the process ruminative, disillusioned vignettes of the real ‘American Dream.’
Matt Bollinger, Brothers V, 2022.
Spanning the far wall, Uncle Dave (2023) is the most ambitious work in Bollinger’s show–with its impressive vertical dimension, some eight feet-tall, the painting acts as an anchor to the New York gallery space, drawing the eye in and upward. The work depicts three sanitation workers surrounding the bright yellow cab of a dump truck. Framed by wildflowers underfoot and the scintillating glare of another truck’s headlight, the men are shown in progressive life stages.
Matt Bollinger, Cape Hollow II, 2022.
At the far right, the youth holds a rake and stares listlessly out of view. The middle-aged man, partially obscured, gestures forward with a lighter and a yellow traffic flag, while the eldest is positioned above the other men and descends from the cab, directly confronting the viewer’s gaze. The work’s triadic symbol of labor, class, and the passage of time ––alongside compositional affinities, somewhere between Courbet and religious genre painting ––underscores many of the themes latent both in the exhibition title and in the artist’s work at large.
National Trust (April 27, 2023) – Based on the bestselling novel by Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry starring Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton is exclusively in cinemas from April 28 2023.
Recently retired, Harold Fry is an unremarkable man who is content to fade quietly into the background of life, until one day he learns that an old friend is dying. He sets off to the post office to send her a letter and decides to keep walking: all the way to her hospice, 450 miles away.
The Bath Skyline in Somerset and Minchinhampton Common in Gloucestershire were both used as locations for the film, which was shot sequentially across the UK over several weeks, mirroring Harold’s own pilgrimage through England’s many varied landscapes – from bustling cities to wild moorland.
Here Jim and Rachel tell us how being on location helped bring to life story’s themes of reconnecting with the land and embracing the unknown. Filming at National Trust places helps provide our charity with income which we use to keep those houses, gardens and landscapes in good condition for everyone to visit and enjoy.
MIT Technology Review – May/June 2023: How AI is transforming the classroom. Surveilling students. Teaching the biliterate brain to read. What we’ve learned from “learning to code.” Plus keyboard obsessions, wildfire resilience, and shroom speak.
The historians of tomorrow are using computer science to analyze how people lived centuries ago.
It’s an evening in 1531, in the city of Venice. In a printer’s workshop, an apprentice labors over the layout of a page that’s destined for an astronomy textbook—a dense line of type and a woodblock illustration of a cherubic head observing shapes moving through the cosmos, representing a lunar eclipse.
Monocle Magazine (May 2023 issue) – As the canny, optimistic winners of this year’s Monocle Design Awards all demonstrate, staying on top of your game in any field requires the instincts of a true detective – and a curiosity to find out what makes the world tick, writes our editor in chief, Andrew Tuck.
A former waterside inn in a quiet fishing village north of Amsterdam is now a cosy hotel and restaurant where good food, nice design and big views all entice you to linger. Monocle takes a first look.ByJosh FehnertPhotographyJulie Mayfeng
For the third annual Monocle Design Awards, we’ve scoured the globe for the best in architecture, furniture, graphic design and more, to celebrate projects improving our lives – while looking good.Edited byNic MonissePhotographyBenjamin Swanson
“I was a motorcycle hater,” says Stefan Ytterborn. That is, before the Swedish entrepreneur tried a few electric ones and got so hooked that he decided to design his own. Cake’s first model, Kalk, put competitors to shame with a design weighing 40 per cent less than the average motorbike. In 2021 Cake started shipping out Kalk &, an upgrade engineered for both commutes and off-road escapades. “During the week you ride the bike from home to work, and during the weekend you bring it out to the countryside,”…
The Globalist, April 27, 2023: China pushes ahead with the largest-ever expansion of its nuclear arsenal, while Asean nations discuss a nuclear-free zone. Men in Belarus are summoned for military training and tensions are rising between Serbia and Kosovo.
House Republicans narrowly passed a bill to raise the debt ceiling while cutting spending by nearly 14 percent over a decade. President Biden has vowed to veto the measure.
Private messages sent by Tucker Carlson that had been redacted in legal filings showed him making highly offensive remarks that went beyond the comments of his prime-time show.
A new $500 million women’s cricket league is offering the kind of opportunities that never existed before in India. The girls of one Punjab village are ready.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
Boomers Daily 