BALBEK BUREAU ARCHITECTS (AUGUST 2023) – Relogged is a private residential house located in Ukraine, in the green zone on the riverbank. Constructed using log cabin technique, it was redesigned by our studio to better align with the client’s style and way of living.
Near the fireplace area, there are vertical metal shelves for a substantial library and a cozy reading chair. For convenience, the shelves are equipped with movable metal stairs.
To the left of the entrance is a home theater. There is a step at the entrance since there used to be a garage with a different floor level, making the theater area recessed.
National Geographic Traveller Magazine (October 2023): This issue features Thailand – Idyllic Tropical Islands, a Bangkok Food Tour, and a visit with Northern Hill Tribes; A road trip along the Dalmatian Coast; Morocco – Hiking in the High Atlas Mountains and more…
Marty Flanagan spent 18 years as Invesco’s CEO. During that time, he transformed the assets manager by expanding operations in Asia and acquiring the PowerShares ETF brand.Long read
The company has been a consistent and successful innovator in small appliances, an industry that has been marked by slow growth and few exciting new products.4 min
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (August 27, 2023) The new issue features: James McBride’s Latest Is a Murder Mystery Inside a Great American Novel; The First Chinese American Movie Star and the Cost of Glittering Fame, and more…
“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” opens with the discovery of a skeleton in a well, and then flashes back to explore its connection to a town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.
By Danez Smith
A few weeks ago, around the same time I was working on this review, I visited the Guggenheim with my fiancé. The exhibition on display as we trekked up the museum’s famous spiral was “Measuring Infinity,” a marvelous retrospective on the work of the great Venezuelan artist Gego. A German Jew who fled Nazi persecution in Europe, Gego arrived in Venezuela in 1939 and went on to become one of the most important artists to emerge from Latin America in the 20th century. Her work speaks to a deep curiosity about the interrelation of shapes, things and the dimensions created by those relationships.
It was, according to the film historian Kevin Brownlow, “one of the most racist films ever made in America.” “Old San Francisco” (1927) featured a white actor playing a Chinese villain passing as a white man (got that?) who plans to sell an innocent white girl into white slavery until he is conveniently crushed by an earthquake. Before his grisly end he is aided in his nefarious scheme by an Asian character identified only as “a flower of the Orient,” played by an ingénue named Anna May Wong.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (August 27, 2023) – In this week’s cover story, Jen Percy reports on what people misunderstand about rape. Plus, the case that could unravel an art dynasty and a Harvard professor who is also an alien hunter.
Sexual assault often goes unpunished when victims fail to fight back. But investigators, psychologists and biologists all describe freezing as an involuntary response to trauma.
By Jen Percy
There’s a lingua franca that women use, a repeated vocabulary to describe what they experience and think during a sexual assault. Variations of “freezing” are often part of that vocabulary. But the word has so many referents in its colloquial usage that it’s hard to know precisely what it means to each person saying it.
“I just absolutely froze,” Brooke Shields said in the documentary “Pretty Baby,” describing how she felt when being raped. “And I just thought, Stay alive and get out.”
How a widow’s legal fight against the Wildenstein family of France has threatened their storied collection — and revealed the underbelly of the global art market.
By Rachel Corbett
Twenty years ago, a glamorous platinum-blond widow arrived at the Paris law office of Claude Dumont Beghi in tears. Someone was trying to take her horses — her “babies” — away, and she needed a lawyer to stop them.
Science Magazine – August 25, 2023: This image depicts whole chromosomes, some with structural abnormalities that might be found in cancer. The idea that cancer cells have aneuploidy—abnormal numbers of chromosomes and chromosome portions—has been known for decades.
Scientists and philosophers are proposing a checklist based on theories of human consciousness
In 2021, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made headlines—and got himself fired—when he claimed that LaMDA, the chatbot he’d been testing, was sentient. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, especially so-called large language models such as LaMDA and ChatGPT, can certainly seem conscious. But they’re trained on vast amounts of text to imitate human responses. So how can we really know?
HISTORY TODAY MAGAZINE (SEPTEMBER 2023) – This issue features Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore story, conquistador Hernán Cortés’ on trial, the fascist plot to kill the king, the fascinating fusion of Old English names, and sharpshooter Marjorie Foster’s battle with the War Office. Plus: reviews, opinion, crossword and much more!
Faced with a jumble of bewildering ruins, modern visitors to Hisarlik in northwest Turkey, the site of ancient Troy, may find themselves perplexed and sometimes disappointed. The wide bay where the Greeks so famously beached 1,000 ships is gone, buried in silt from a local river, while beyond the fine sloping walls, a palimpsest of settlements spanning 4,000 years lies scarred and disfigured by the deep trench gouged by Heinrich Schliemann, its first archaeologist, during two decades of digging in the 19th century. Schliemann had been drawn to Hisarlik, and also to mainland Greece, by his passion for the Homeric poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, and his conviction that they described or reflected real societies and events, not least the decade-long Trojan War.
Balen Shah, the 33-year-old rapper and mayor of Kathmandu, is a man on various missions. Since his unlikely victory in 2022, he has waged war on government ministries, landlords, Nepal’s civil aviation authority, roadside hawkers and landless slum dwellers. Now he is taking on Bollywood because of a supposed historical slight.
An increasingly autocratic government is making bad decisions
Whatever has gone wrong? After China rejoined the world economy in 1978, it became the most spectacular growth story in history. Farm reform, industrialisation and rising incomes lifted nearly 800m people out of extreme poverty. Having produced just a tenth as much as America in 1980, China’s economy is now about three-quarters the size. Yet instead of roaring back after the government abandoned its “zero-covid” policy at the end of 2022, it is lurching from one ditch to the next.
A healthy country uses justice to restore order. Mr Putin uses violence instead
As we published this editorial, it was not certain that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private jet was shot down by Russian air-defences, or that the mutineer and mercenary boss was on board. But everyone believes that it was and that his death was a punishment of spectacular ruthlessness ordered by Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. And that is the way Mr Putin likes it.
In a rapidly urbanizing world, what happens in cities matters — and sustainability success stories show what can be achieved when researchers and policymakers work together.
More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and that proportion is set to grow. By 2050, another two billion people will be urban dwellers, the United Nations estimates. Cities lie at the nexus of all aspects of human development, from building thriving economies to coping with climate change.
The planet has warmed 1.2 ºC on average, but that’s enough to produce big extremes.
From wilting saguaros in Arizona and hot-tub-like temperatures off the coast of Florida to increased heat-related hospitalizations in Europe and agricultural losses in China, last month felt unusually hot. It was: several teams have now confirmed that July 2023 was the hottest month in recorded history. And there’s more to come.
July is typically the hottest month of the year, and this July shattered records going back as far as 1850 by around 0.25 °C. Overall, the average global temperature was 1.54 °C above the preindustrial average for July, according to Berkeley Earth, a non-profit group in California that is one of several organizations tracking global warming. It’s a seemingly small increase, but what many people across the world actually experienced was a bout of long and often brutal heat waves.