A swim class at Latitude Margaritaville.Photograph by Tobias Hutzler for The New Yorker
The first person I met at the Bar & Chill was a bald guy in a black T-shirt, black drawstring shorts, and flip-flops, with a Harley-Davidson tattoo on his right arm and a claddagh ring on his left hand.
He was drinking and laughing with a few friends. He gestured to the empty stool next to him and said, “We don’t bite.”I offered an expression of if-you-insist, and he said, “Bring it.”
His tone was cheerful, as you might expect at the Bar & Chill, the principal drinking-and-dining establishment that looks out on the town center of Latitude Margaritaville, an active-living community for Jimmy Buffett enthusiasts, aged “55 and better,” in Daytona Beach, Florida.
The Bar & Chill was open to the evening. A gentle breeze fanned the lanai. On a flat-screen, the Providence Friars led the Vermont Catamounts by a few buckets. A bartender brought a Perfect Margarita in a plastic cup.
Updated: Mar. 18, 2022, 11:42 a.m. | Published: Mar. 18, 2022, 5:00 a.m., By Kathi Inman Berens | For The Oregonian/OregonLive
Multnomah County Library patrons sit in a reading room in the Central Library in downtown Portland in 2019. Michael Lloyd/The OregonianLC-
As more than 3,300 U.S. librarians flock to Portland for the Public Library Association conference March 23-25, they’ll witness up close Multnomah County Library’s groundbreaking work in diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice.
The pandemic, and social justice work after the 2020 protests, have permanently influenced how the library delivers services. There is now more in-person, on-site dialogue between community members in multiple languages and from various cultures. The library has also significantly expanded who can access its digital services, and made it easier to get a library card.
How did one of history’s greatest writers — Ernest Hemingway — get going with his craft, develop his indelible style, and infuse his narratives with memorable life and compelling tension?
Today we delve into the answers to those questions with Hemingway scholar Mark Cirino, who is a professor of English, the editor and author of half a dozen books on Hemingway — including Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action — and the host of the One True Podcast which covers all things related to Papa.
Mark and I our begin our conversation with how Hemingway cut his teeth with writing as a journalist, how the “iceberg theory” underlay his approach to writing as a novelist, and how his years in Paris — and the books, people, and art he encountered there — influenced his work and the trajectory of his career.
We then discuss how his travel and recreational pastimes allowed him to write with a vivid firsthand understanding of certain places and pursuits, what his writing routine was like, and how the characters in his novels explore the tension between thought and action. We end our conversation with Mark’s recommendation for where to start reading Hemingway if you’ve never read him or haven’t read him in a long time, and what Mark thinks was Hemingway’s “one true sentence.”
Government documents from microfiche are coming to archive.org based on the combined efforts of the Internet Archive, Stanford University Libraries, and other library partners.
The resulting files will be available for free public access to enable new analysis and access techniques.
Microfiche cards, which contain miniaturized thumbnails of the publication’s pages, are starting to be digitized and matched to catalog records by the Internet Archive.
Once in a digital format and preserved on archive.org, these documents will be searchable and downloadable by anyone with an Internet connection, since U.S. government publications are in the public domain.
On the brink of greatness with Curse of the Spider Woman, William Hurt struggled to get free of his web.
By Jack Kroll, Mar 14, 2022
With Blair Brown in Altered States, 1980 Moviestore/ShutterstockEsquire
This article originally appeared in the October 1986 issue of Esquire. You can find every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.
“Look, I’m not a talented man,” says William Hurt. “You know it and I know it.”
“I don’t know it,” I say.
“Well, you should know it,” says Hurt.“You’re not a talented man?” I press him.“Well, I’m not that talented a man,” he says.“Well then, what are you?” I ask.“I’m a focused man,” he says.
We are sitting in an Italian restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side, and Bill Hurt is engaged in one of his favorite pastimes—putting himself down. Few who have seen him act would agree with his estimate of his ability. And as for being “focused,” well, that’s the last word many people would use to describe Hurt.
The actor is a walking paradox: the owner of one of the cleanest, clearest, least self-indulgent acting styles in the business, Hurt is legendary for the far-out, labyrinthine, metaphysical flights of fancy that have driven interviewers on several continents into a state of mumbling meemies. WILLIAM HURT: ACTOR WITH THE ATOM BRAIN! blazed a headline in one English magazine.
Another interviewer succinctly summed up the experience of listening to Hurt: “He sounds like a man who has just smoked his first joint.”
“Slow travelers” are drawn to this glamorous, old-world mode of exploration, but there’s also something to be said about the perspective found onboard a train–you’re really experiencing a landscape in a way that you can’t experience any other way.
A train trip often brings you where everyday roads cannot, whether it’s through untouched Malaysian jungles or high into the Canadian Rockies.
For our 34th annual Readers’ Choice Awards, we called on all of you to rank the world’s best train journeys–here are the 15 you loved most.
15. Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, Europe
Year after year, the world’s most iconic locomotive continues to be a standard-setter in luxury. Of course, the decadent interiors are a fantasy of 1920’s Art Deco design, but it’s the impeccable service that keeps this train firmly ensconced in a class of its own.
Bags are whisked off from the platform and magically reappear in your cabin, no glass ever runs empty, and the beds seem to make themselves anytime you step outside of your cabin.
By day you can revel in the scenery of French countrysides and Swiss mountain scenes, and by night, the formal dress code feels anything but stuffy—in fact, playing dress up and making your way to the art deco Champagne bar is, we think, one of the coolest experiences anyone could have on a train.
Yesterday we learned of the passing of William Hurt, and today, internet, cable and even broadcast news will be filled with stories of his award-winning career spanning over 50 years and over 100 credits.
Hurt holds a respected place in cinema for being nominated for the best actor Oscar for three consecutive years; “Kiss of the Spider Woman” in 1986, “Children of a Lesser God” in 1987 and “Broadcast News” in 1988.
“Broadcast News” was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2018.
In honor of William Hurt, we look back on “Broadcast News” with an essay from Brian Scott Mednick. Ask anyone that’s ever worked in a newsroom, especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and they will tell you that the performances by William Hurt, Holly Hunter, Albert Brooks and Jack Nicholson are flawless.
Broadcast News (1987
With the 24/7 news cycle we’ve become accustomed to over the last several decades, the 1980s seems like a lifetime ago with respect to how television news was both reported and consumed. “Broadcast News,” released in December 1987, is a time capsule of that period, which was a simpler, less volatile era when we trusted three guys named Dan, Tom, and Peter to give us a half-hour recap of the day’s pivotal events at dinnertime.
“Broadcast News,” written, produced, and directed by James L. Brooks, is one the smartest films ever made about show business and the media, a savagely funny, sophisticated, and poignant story about three people who are as ambitious and determined as they are diffident and vulnerable.
Writer-director Lawrence Kasdan, a four-time Oscar nominee, worked with Oscar winner William Hurt, who died March 13 at age 71, on “Body Heat” (1981), “The Big Chill” (1983), “The Accidental Tourist” (1988) and “I Love You to Death” (1990).
William Hurt and I came into the movies together, and Bill had a huge impact on the way I thought about the process.
We met when I was casting “Body Heat,” the first movie I directed. On our initial meeting, we talked for hours about movies and life. We were trying to guess what it would be like to take that journey together.
I was still looking for my cast and eventually tested four couples for the two leads, but that first conversation with Bill stayed with me.
Bill immediately brought a seriousness to the whole process that I carried forward from that night. We did everything with the knowledge that what we were doing commanded our greatest effort.
William Hurt, who died Sunday at 71, had a look and an aura that appeared, at first, to fit all too snugly into Hollywood’s conception of what a movie star should be.
Tall and broad-shouldered, with a silky shock of wheat-colored hair, his handsome features set off by a cleft chin and a faraway gaze, he was, at a glance, the quintessence of the old-fashioned WASP he-man ideal.
(In hindsight, he looked like a blond Jon Hamm.) In movies, this sort of fellow was generally presented as a paragon of rectitude, a “strong silent type.” But there was nothing silent about William Hurt.
The first time audiences encountered him, he was floating in a sensory-deprivation tank in the loony-tunes acid-head psychodrama “Altered States” (1980), and the moment he climbed out of that tank, suffused with the visions he had seen, he couldn’t stop jabbering about them.
Movie fans spent Sunday night mourning the death of William Hurt — and celebrating his remarkable career.
The Oscar-winning actor, cemented into film history for roles in “Broadcast News,” “Body Heat,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and “The Big Chill,” among others, died March 13 at 71.
“It is with great sadness that the Hurt family mourns the passing of William Hurt, beloved father and Oscar winning actor, on March 13, 2022, one week before his 72nd birthday,” his son Will said in a statement obtained by Deadline and reported by other outlets. “He died peacefully, among family, of natural causes. The family requests privacy at this time.”
Marlon Brando in the film The Godfather (1972). Producers worried that at 47 he was difficult, and past his prime, but he won (and then declined) an Oscar for Best Actor. Allstar Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo
When The Godfather premiered 50 years ago, people knew it was sensational, controversial, precedent-shattering, a masterpiece even.
But they couldn’t know what we know now: It was a bridge between old Hollywood and new.
The film industry had been struggling all through the 1960s, a rough decade for big-screen entertainment as color television siphoned off much of what was left of the moviegoing audience.
Cinemas had tried everything they could think of to compete. They’d widened screens, adopted stereophonic sound, even experimented with 3-D glasses, but American moviegoing, having peaked in the 1930s, had dropped precipitously with the advent of home viewing.
Originally an almighty test of strength and stamina, and now a jovial summer gathering and a chance to celebrate all things Scottish, Highland games have been a traditional part of Scotland’s culture for hundreds of years, though their modern-day popularity is owed to the Victorians.
The roots of the games date as far back as the 11th century when King Malcolm III called a foot race to the summit of Craig Choinnich to find the fastest runner in the land to become his personal courier.
The games then evolved to include events that tested not only muscles and speed of the strongest clan members, but also creative dance and music skills to keep kings and queens and clan chiefs entertained.
Highland games as we know them have been celebrated around Scotland since the 1800s, when they were formally reintroduced as part of the revival of Tartan and Highland Culture encouraged by Sir Walter Scott and given a royal seal of approval by Queen Victoria.
Taking place in summer between May and September, every event has its own unique character and traditions. Here are four of the best events happening this summer for you to get a taste of this most Scottish of celebrations.
Old woman living in slum house in Bridgewater, Pennsylvania. Photo by Jack Delano, 1940. //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8c04463
Being a woman of a certain age myself, I recently began to wonder how and where older women are depicted in Prints & Photographs Division collections.
Naturally, even in embarking on such an exploration, one has to acknowledge certain caveats: “Older” is a relative term in any culture and, unless original captions indicate how a person’s age was regarded, it’s hard to know whether an individual was considered older in their own time.
Moreover, minus captions that give ages in years, one can only estimate on the basis of certain physical traits (wrinkles, white hair, stooped posture, to the degree these are visible, particularly in black-and-white pictures) that a person had lived many years, while recognizing that some of those characteristics might be determined by genetics and the rigors of work and living conditions.
Nevertheless, my odyssey through three collections (Popular Graphic Arts, Panoramic Photographs, and the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection) produced some interesting finds and stimulated plenty of questions about the visibility of older women in pictorial representations of various types and in their communities, in general.
That’s been Chef Martin Yan’s signature saying since the early ’80s when the chef and cookbook author appeared on television sets across the country bringing Chinese food to American tables.
Since then, he’s written more than 30 cookbooks and starred in more than 3,500 episodes of “Yan Can Cook.”
It is still one of the longest-running cooking shows in the world.
–from article
Now Yan is bringing his delicious flavors from hand-pulled noodles to Peking duck to the Las Vegas Strip. Chef Martin Yan is opening M.Y. Asia at the new Horseshoe Resort very soon. He says it will be like nothing you’ve seen before.
When George Saunders went out to his writing shed to start a Substack newsletter last fall, for the first time in a long time, the Booker Prize-winning novelist, famous for such works as Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December, didn’t know what he was doing.
“I’ll just write 80 posts and then take a vacation,” he thought to himself.
But upon hitting publish, something surprised him: the comments section exploded, with thousands of readers chiming in on his inaugural post (that still-growing comment count currently sits at 3091).
Everywhere from Scotland to India to Australia, devoted followers and aspiring writers wrote in with passionate messages, eager to connect with one of their literary heroes.
Suddenly “don’t read the comments,” that old digital age chestnut, felt like the worst advice in the world. There was nowhere else Saunders would rather be than here, chopping it up with commenters young and old, near and far, longtime fans and first-time callers.
We’ll walk you through some easy things you can do to get better Wi-Fi speeds at home now.
By Ry Crist, March 9, 2022 5:20 a.m. PT
From article…
You likely know all about it: Work from home.
For two years, we’ve been adjusting to the new normal of remote work brought on by COVID-19. The situation isn’t likely to change any time soon, considering many employees want to continue remote work at some level even as offices begin to reopen and health metrics begin to improve across the globe.
With more and more of us opting to work from home these days, your home’s Wi-Fi networks are more important than ever. The last thing anyone wants to have to deal with is spotty internet and a Wi-Fi signal that isn’t up to snuff.
Fortunately, you’ve got options. Even if you don’t know much about your router’s settings or the best way to change them, there are still some easy steps you can take to ensure that your speeds are as fast as possible. Let’s walk through them and see if we can’t speed things up for you.
In 1915, the ship Endurance became trapped in ice during Ernest Shackleton’s failed expedition to cross Antarctica. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
An expedition that set out in search of the lost ship of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton has found it — 106 years after the vessel sank off Antarctica.
The wooden ship Endurance has been located remarkably intact about 10,000 feet underwater in the Weddell Sea.
The Endurance was located by an expedition this week, 106 years after it sank into the Weddell Sea. Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust & National Geographic
The find is “a milestone in polar history,” said Mensun Bound, a maritime archaeologist and the director of exploration on the expedition, called Endurance22.
Every few years, I go through entries of my now-defunct Livejournal: a journaling website I used with obsessive regularity throughout my teenage and college years.
And I believed, with childish conviction, that books—and only books—could teach me how to live. I remember once patiently explaining to a classmate that I planned to spend my semester working on an erotic novel set in fin de siècle Paris.
–From article…
Invariably, my attention turns to my earliest entries on the platform; largely written during the three years I spent in somewhat feral isolation at a red-brick, ivy-trellised boarding school in New Hampshire. They are, of course, what we might now call cringe: agonizingly earnest, intellectually rapacious, emotionally overrwrought. But they are also, in their way, beautiful.
Back then, I believed that everything I ever learned in class applied directly, and exactly, to the life I would one day live. I would write thousands of words after Latin class, meditating on whether I was more like pious, self-controlled Aeneas or the passionate Dido: her heart constantly aflame. (The answer was, naturally, the latter, although I often wished I could develop the capacities of the former). I would write about reading Antony and Cleopatra in my senior Shakespeare seminar, and wonder aloud—to a “friendslocked” audience of ten or twenty strangers—whether all human relationships demanded performative artificiality.
My emotional life and my academic life were intertwined, as they had never been before, and never would be thereafter: in college, in grad school, in adulthood. What I read—whether in class or sequestered away on my school library’s third-floor mezzanine, sufficiently ill-attended that it doubled as an infamous campus hookup joint—mattered to me.
By Lianne Kolirin and Tim Lister, CNN, Updated 9:05 PM ET, Wed March 9, 2022
From article…
(CNN) Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine, posted an open letter addressed to the world’s media on Tuesday, detailing what she described as the “mass murder of Ukrainian civilians.”
In recent weeks Zelenska has repeatedly used social media to highlight the plight of her nation, yet none have been quite as direct as her recent post, which ends with the rallying cry: “We will win. Because of our unity. Unity towards love for Ukraine. Glory to Ukraine!”
As her husband, President Volodymyr Zelensky, has emerged as the face of Ukrainian defiance of the Russian invasion, Zelenska has become increasingly vociferous online as a means to support him and bolster international awareness of their country’s plight.
When Russia first invaded Ukraine on February 24, Zelensky declared in a video statement that he believed “enemy sabotage groups” had entered Kyiv and that he was their number one target. His family, he said, was the second target.
Hilary Mak was at home in Surrey, England, on Thursday afternoon when her daughter shared an Instagram post about a way to send money to Ukrainians.
The idea, the message said, was to book Airbnbs.“It captured my imagination,” Mak, 59, said in an interview with The Washington Post.
“I have donated to charities, but I thought maybe this was a way to connect to people in an individual way … and to let them know that people are behind them and want to do whatever they can to help.
”Mak found a rental in Kyiv and messaged the host telling her she wanted to help. The host responded immediately, Mak said.
Editor’s Note — For more about Anthony Bourdain, don’t miss the premiere of the documentary “Roadrunner” on CNN this spring. You can stream all the seasons of “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown” right now on HBO Max.
(CNN) — Feelings about Anthony Bourdain are no less raw, nearly four years after his shocking death.
Director Morgan Neville’s poignant documentary chronicles Bourdain’s trajectory from New York chef to celebrated author to beloved globe-trotting TV personality, and tries to shed some light on the mystery of his 2018 suicide at age 61.
“I feel like his death was such an unexpected thing to the public, that there’s just like this cultural rip in the paper for people,” Neville said.
Anthony Bourdain worked for decades in New York restaurant kitchens. Courtesy of Dmitri Kasterine/Focus Features
“Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” from HBO Max and CNN Films and released by Focus Features, examines the brash culinary traveler’s passions and inner struggles and combs through his final months with deeply personal recollections from Bourdain’s friends and family.
Editor’s Note: LibGuides is a great resource for searching keywords, topics, to find experts, scholars, academics, resources, researchers for interviews, or to read and research their information on your topic. 864,639 total guides 231,458 librarians 5,716 institutions 106 countries
Rail is on a roll, thanks to a new emphasis in Washington on infrastructure and the environment. These efforts are boosting not just Amtrak’s fortunes, but those of private sector high-speed rail projects across the U.S.
But will American travelers reap the benefits—as in, better and more reliable trains? Train journeys have long been viewed as more sophisticated than traveling by either road or air, but train travel in the U.S. has long lagged behind Europe and Asia, where intercity trains are both high speed and high quality experiences. In contrast, Amtrak has been plagued by aging rolling stock (some of its rail cars date back almost to its inception 50 years ago) and sagging on-time performance. That’s because the quasi-public company has spent much of its history battling congressional critics who’ve periodically voted to slash the line’s federal funding, arguing it’s a waste of taxpayer money.
But sophisticated travelers are voting—with their wallets, at least—in favor of rail, and they’ve been doing so in greater numbers since the pandemic struck, experts say. A recent poll by Virtuoso travel agency consortium found that 69 percent of respondents prefer to travel closer to home. That sentiment is fueling interest in high-end train travel in the U.S., says Misty Belles, Virtuoso’s vice president of global public relations. “[Train travel is] a way to enjoy the beauty of the U.S. and its diverse landscapes without having to drive,” she says. “More spacious seating and ability to roam appeal to those looking to avoid chaotic airports, crowded flights, or cramped cars.”
Christopher Nolan will finally make his biopic. The famous director had a stunted attempt to mount one two decades ago when he penned a screenplay about aviator Howard Hughes, which he later described as the best screenplay he’s ever written. The project died when Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator went into production first. Now, Nolan is working on a film about the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
However, Oppenheimer may very well break conventional biopic expectations. Nolan took his script to Universal after a rift with longtime collaborators Warner Bros. regarding the studio’s new policies of distribution via streaming, and Universal is describing the film as an epic thriller about an enigmatic man.
Cast in the lead role, Cillian Murphy has stated that “the story is there, everybody knows what happened, but Chris is telling it in a different way, as with Chris you would expect. That’s all I can say.”
The picture has amassed a formidable cast and crew. The script is by Nolan, adapted from the Pultizer-winning book American Prometheus. Ludwig Goransson will write the music, Hoyte Van Hoytema will work as the film’s cinematographer, Emily Blunt will play Oppenheimer’s wife, Matt Damon will be the director of the Manhattan Project, which was responsible for the bomb’s development, and Robert Downey Jr. will be the chairman of a commission that questioned Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the United States.
In further casting news, Florence Pugh was announced as a Communist Party member who had an affair with Oppenheimer that alarmed U.S. officials, Benny Safdie was cast as Edward Teller who worked with Oppenheimer and was later the father of the hydrogen bomb, Rami Malek joined in an unknown scientist role, and Kenneth Branagh and Dane DeHaan were recently added to the star-studded list.
10,000 steps might not be the perfect number for everyone to maximize their lifespan according to research from UMass Amherst.
In an analysis of 15 different studies across four continents published in The Lancet this month, researchers found that adults younger than 60 can benefit from anywhere between 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day for improved longevity.
Adults older than 60 saw longevity benefits stabilize around 6,000 to 8,000 steps a day.
Researchers found a 40-53% lower risk of early death in study participants who walked an average minimum of 5,800 steps a day compared to participants who averaged 3,500 steps.
Another interesting finding: walking speed didn’t make much of a difference either, researchers note. As long as you’re within the step range, your risk of premature death was decreased.
Editor’s Note: Bill is an online friend, News Researcher; Writer.
Ukrainians desperately trying to board trains at Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi Central Station. Photo Credit: Pete Kiehart/The Guardian/BuzzFeed
Over a week into Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, turmoil and continued bloodshed remains, with residents of Kyiv rushing to the train station to escape Russia’s wrath.
More than one million Ukrainians have been displaced, adding to the humanitarian crisis.
Russian troops, according to a Human Rights Watch report, have fired cluster munitions into at least three residential neighborhoods.
More threatening still, Russia has captured Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe after shelling the part of the complex on fire, raising fears of a nuclear disaster, others equate it to a “war crime.” For now, the power plant’s six reactors reportedly remain intact and undamaged.
Challenges to books like ‘Maus’ and ‘New Kid’ have more than doubled. Here’s what parents, teachers, and librarians have to say about the issue.
By Cassandra Spratling, Published February 28, 2022
A bookstore in Alameda, California, displays books that have been banned or censored. Photograph by Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images
When award-winning author and illustrator Jerry Craft learned last October that his virtual visit to a school in Katy, Texas, was canceled and his popular book New Kid had been removed from the library’s shelves, he was shocked.
A mom had complained that his humorous graphic novel—about his childhood experience as a Black student attending a mostly white school—gives students a distorted view of race.
“I couldn’t imagine what someone would find in it that was offensive,” says Craft, whose book won the Newbery Medal and a Coretta Scott King Book Award.
But some 400 people had signed a petition supporting the actions. After a 10-day review from the school district, his visit was rescheduled and the book put back on the shelves.
This 1648 map is one of the first to use “Ukraine” as the name for the region. Geography and Map Division.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the latest violent development in a long and turbulent history in the land of the steppes, and the Library has international resources on the region that go back for hundreds of years.
You can learn a lot here, from one of the first maps that used the name “Ukraine” for the area (in 1648), to the poetry and writings of national hero Taras Shevchenko in the 19th century, to up-to-the-minute news and analysis from the Congressional Research Service.
You can also watch an hourlong seminar, Putin, Ukraine, and What’s Likely to Happen, hosted by the Library’s Kluge Institute and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recorded just before Russia invaded.
This article is a brief summary of the Library’s holdings regarding the region.
Shevchenko statue in Washington, D.C. Photo: Carol Highsmith. Prints and Photographs Division.
Some descriptions are from official Library documents.
First, it helps to know that Ukraine roughly translates as “frontier” and its location between Europe and Asia has meant that human beings have traipsed through it, going east or west, for thousands of years. It has been included in any number of empires, divided into many different configurations and called by any number of names before it declared independence in its current boundaries in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Our primary documents thus refer to the region by the name (or names) it was known at the time. The maps, lithographs, books and manuscripts shine through with illuminations and hand-coloring from centuries long past.
Writers are preoccupied with memory. They have to be: a story is, at its most fundamental level, a sequence of memories. You can’t have a plot without memory. Endings need a middle. A middle has to have a beginning. Effect follows cause. Consequences follow actions.
Even if a story has a disordered timeline, the fun is in how our brains put it right. We read on, waiting patiently to find out the explanation, what the nasty thing was that was seen in the woodshed, and how that led to what came after.
We humans also tend to see ourselves in terms of story. We look back through our memories to make sense of our personalities. For example, we might tell ourselves, “I’m hard working because my mother abandoned me.” Or maybe, “I steal things because my mother abandoned me.”
But what happens if there’s a gap in the story? Say you pick up a book and it turns out that an error at the printers has erased a paragraph. Or a whole chapter.
You’d worry—correctly—that the whole thing may no longer make sense. And when it comes to us humans—well, we don’t actually know if the self is really built on memory and story. But we like to believe it. So what happens to that belief—to us?—when there’s a part of the story missing?
It almost seems hard to believe that it was 80 years ago in 1942 that “Casablanca” was first released, and the world fell in love with its tale of courage, sacrifice and redemption.
On March 2, 1944 at the 16th Academy Awards, “Casablanca” took home the Oscar for Best Picture, Best Director (Michael Curtiz) and Best Screenplay (Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch).
In total, the film was nominated for eight Academy Awards including Best Actor in a Leading Role (Humphrey Bogart); Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Claude Rains); Best Cinematography, Black-and-White; Best Film Editing; and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.
From article…
As time goes by (I couldn’t resist), the film’s memorable lines still make “Casablanca” one of Hollywood’s most quoted and beloved films of all time.
“Casablanca” was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1989, one of the first 25 films added in the Registry’s inaugural year.
Today, we look back at “Casablanca” with a thought-provoking essay from Jay Carr given to the Library of Congress from “The A List: The National Society of Film Critics’ 100 Essential Films, 2002.” He touches on the film’s backstory, the cast, those famous lines, and why we still watch it every time it’s on.
Here’s looking at you, kid…
Casablanca By Jay Carr
It’s still the same old story. Maybe more so. “Casablanca” was never a great film, never a profound film.
It’s merely the most beloved movie of all time. In its (now 80 year) history, it has resisted the transmogrification of its rich, reverberant icons into camp. It’s not about the demimondaines washing through Rick’s Café Americain – at the edge of the world, at the edge of hope – in 1941.
Ultimately, it’s not even about Bogey and Ingrid Bergman sacrificing love for nobility. It’s about the hold movies have on us. That’s what makes it so powerful, so enduring. It is film’s analogue to Noel Coward’s famous line about the amazing potency of cheap music. Like few films before or since, it sums up Hollywood’s genius for recasting archetypes in big, bold, universally accessible strokes, for turning myth into pop culture.
By David Morgan, February 28, 2022 / 1:31 PM / CBS News
An anti-war protest in Moscow, February 24, 2022. (The banner reads “No war. Freedom for political prisoners.”) Thousands have been arrested across Russia for protesting President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. EVGENIA NOVOZHENINA / REUTERS
As Ukraine continues to fight off Russian invaders, the sanctions imposed on Russia by the West are already having a devastating impact on that nation’s economy.
But they have not stopped President Vladimir Putin yet. Over the weekend he put his nuclear forces on high alert, raising new fears of an escalation.
On Monday retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who served as the European affairs director for the National Security Council, told “CBS Mornings” that this latest development is familiar to Kremlin watchers.
“Vladimir Putin is hoping through his nuclear saber-rattling that he’ll put us back on our heels, get us to be deeply concerned about the potential for nuclear escalation. But of course, for those in government, they understand that … we’ve had to deal with this threat throughout the Cold War, throughout the Soviet period, for generations,” Vindman said, “and that we had to respond to Russia’s belligerence and stay firm in supporting our national security interests. That’s part of it, is just not to bend because of the nuclear saber-rattling, because we’ve seen it before.”
A new year means a whole slew of new book releases to look forward to, especially when it comes to the best thriller books.
2022 is set to bring plenty of highly anticipated new titles to shelves from across all genres, including sci-fi and fantasy, romance, nonfiction, and of course, thrillers. Whether you love pulse-pounding murder mysteries, locked-room thrillers, or gripping family sagas, you’re sure to find something that suits your interest on this list.
While it’s still early in the year, several of these buzzy novels are already in stores and waiting to be added to your nightstands and bookshelves — and many more are on the way in the coming months. From a YA novel set in a small town to a captivating dive into the world of classical music, these engrossing page-turners will keep you hooked until the very end (and if your top picks are still a few months away from their release, you can also get your suspense fix by checking out the most under-the-radar mysteries of 2021 in the meantime.)
I was born in Lithuania to a half-Russian family just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. You can’t escape politics when you live in Eastern Europe.
Mine and my family’s fragmented history is inextricably linked to Russia’s looming presence and revanchist tendencies. I lived in both Lithuania and Russia before coming as a teenager to London where I studied history, specializing in Modern Eastern European History and the Cold War.
I work as book buyer for the largest bookstore in the country, mostly specializing in nonfiction. In my role, I am responsible for curating the range of books to order and highlight. Sometimes I am asked to consult the overall book-buying for the company in my areas of interest.
Many articles have been written in the last few days about whether the Russians will stop when they reach the combat lines between the rebel-held territory and Ukraine.
We now have our answer. It always seemed doubtful that 200,000 Russian troops had been mobilized and brought from as far away as the Pacific simply to apply pressure on Ukraine; of course, nobody can ever really know what is in the mind of Vladimir Putin. What I do know, however, is that people in London know little about Ukraine and its people.
Occam’s razor is a figure of speech and fundamental idea that helps us remember the value of simplicity.
It specifically states that “when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.”
It’s used a lot in the humanities realm as a thought exercise, but its roots—and most important applications—are in science.
The concept comes from a real person, William of Ockham, an Englishman who studied and worked in the early 14th century, a time we’ve only recently begun to emphasize was not, so to speak, the “Dark Ages.”
It’s well known that getting a good night’s sleep becomes more difficult as we age, but the underlying biology for why this happens has remained poorly understood.
A team of US scientists has now identified how the brain circuitry involved in regulating sleepfulness and wakefulness degrades over time in mice, which they say paves the way for better medicines in humans.
“More than half of people 65 and older complain about the quality of sleep,” Stanford University professor Luis de Lecea, who co-authored a study about the finding published Thursday in Science, told AFP.
German Chancellor Adolf Hitler and his army parade in Prague on March 15, 1939, the day of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Wehrmacht. (AFP/AFP/Getty Images)
By 1939, parts of Czechoslovakia had already been carved off and taken over by Nazi Germany, which claimed that millions of ethnic Germans were being persecuted there.
The previous September, European powers, seeking to avoid war, had acquiesced and done nothing.But six months later, German troops were massed on the Czech border, as Nazi leader Adolf Hitler railed and threatened the country with destruction.
On March 15, 1939, the sickly Czech president, Emil Hacha, was in Hitler’s study surrounded by the Führer’s henchmen.
A woman holds an image depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin as Adolf Hitler during a demonstration of Ukrainian citizens in front of the Russian embassy in Paris on Feb. 24. (Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images)
“Hitler was at his most intimidating,” historian Ian Kershaw wrote in his 2000 biography of the Nazi leader. “He launched into a violent tirade against the Czechs.” The Nazis needed to take over Czechoslovakia to protect Germany. Hacha must agree or his country would be immediately attacked and Prague, its capital, bombed.
A new, enormous family tree for all of humanity attempts to summarize how all humans alive today relate both to one another and to our ancient ancestors.
To build this family tree, or genealogy, researchers sifted through thousands of genome sequences collected from both modern and ancient humans, as well as ancient human relatives, according to a new study published Thursday (Feb. 24) in the journal Science.
These genomes came from 215 populations scattered across the world. Using a computer algorithm, the team revealed distinct patterns of genetic variation within these sequences, highlighting where they matched and where they differed.
Based on these patterns, the researchers drew theoretical lines of descent between the genomes and got an idea as to which gene variants, or alleles, the common ancestors of these people likely carried.
In addition to mapping out these genealogical relationships, the team approximated where in the world the common ancestors of the sequenced individuals lived. They estimated these locations based on the ages of the sampled genomes and the location where each genome was sampled.
Given its underlying business themes, The Gilded Age, which premiered on HBO in January 2022, quickly caught my attention.
The show’s first season, which is set in 1882 in the rapidly changing New York City landscape, revolves around the clash between the mores of old New York society and the emerging world of newly rich industrialists and financiers.
The show’s title, Gilded Age, references the period in American history from approximately 1870-1900, but where did the phrase itself come from, and what is so special about this time in American history?
KU Leuven Libraries, KBR (Royal Library of Belgium) and Google signed agreements to share a large portion of important digitized documents reflecting the rich cultural and historical heritage located in the libraries. This entails several thousand works, some dating back to the 15th century, that will be made freely accessible in the coming years via Google Books and the institutions’ own library catalogues. Highlights are the printed works by professors of the University of Leuven published before the abolishment of the Old University in 1797, several thousands of works from the world’s largest collection of books printed in Brussels (15th-18th century) and recognised unique pieces such as the first work in Western literature dedicated exclusively to biographies of women.
The selected books have been previously scanned at the libraries and the digital versions will be sent over to Google’s data centers to be further enriched with data allowing the text to be searchable and machine readable. After this process is complete, Google will make the digital copies available on Google Books. “The KU Leuven Libraries and KBR will also keep a copy of the enriched data which will be incorporated into their own catalogue. The books that are part of this project are no longer subject to copyright”, explains Stefano Reccia, Partner Manager at Google for the digitisation project.
Among the selected documents are:
Printed works by professors of the Old University of Leuven (1425-1797), digitised in the framework of the Lovaniensia project.
Corble collection: collection of the British fencer Archibald Corble (1883-1944), one of the world’s most extensive collections on the history of fencing.
A unique collection of 25,000 books printed in Brussels in the 17th and 18th centuries: the largest collection of old and rare books from the capital of the (Southern) Low Countries, with a strong emphasis on government publications in French, Dutch, Spanish and Latin.
The most complete collection in the world of pamphlets and leaflets from the time of the Brabant revolution that led to the independent United States of Belgium (1789-1790), comprising nearly 7.000 items.
The declaration adds, “Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.” This professional stance is known as “neutrality.”
By Stanley Kurtz, Feb. 24, 2022 Dr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank.
Javier Jaén
Recent news stories covering clashes over what books students should read in class and have access to in their school libraries have overlooked a major player in our unfolding scholastic drama.
We’ve been reading about traditionalist parents, progressive teachers and politicians of various stripes. Missing, however, has been the figure of the woke librarian.
What in the world is a woke librarian?
After all, through venerable proclamations like the Library Bill of Rights, America’s librarians have long pledged to “provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues.” The declaration adds, “Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.” This professional stance is known as “neutrality.”
In the next year, researchers should expect to face a sensitive set of questions whenever they send their papers to journals, and when they review or edit manuscripts. More than 50 publishers representing over 15,000 journals globally are preparing to ask scientists about their race or ethnicity — as well as their gender — in an initiative that’s part of a growing effort to analyse researcher diversity around the world. Publishers say that this information, gathered and stored securely, will help to analyse who is represented in journals, and to identify whether there are biases in editing or review that sway which findings get published. Pilot testing suggests that many scientists support the idea, although not all.
The effort comes amid a push for a wider acknowledgement of racism and structural racism in science and publishing — and the need to gather more information about it. In any one country, such as the United States, ample data show that minority groups are under-represented in science, particularly at senior levels. But data on how such imbalances are reflected — or intensified — in research journals are scarce. Publishers haven’t systematically looked, in part because journals are international and there has been no measurement framework for race and ethnicity that made sense to researchers of many cultures.
“If you don’t have the data, it is very difficult to understand where you are at, to make changes, set goals and measure progress,” says Holly Falk-Krzesinski, vice-president of research intelligence at the Dutch publisher Elsevier, who is working with the joint group and is based in Chicago, Illinois.
Nearly every weekday morning one of Moscow’s central arteries, the Kutuzovsky Prospect, empties out suddenly, and an eerie, otherworldly silence takes hold. This means that police have sealed all the on-ramps to Kutuzovsky, an eight-lane avenue that cuts through the city from the west straight through to the Kremlin.
Traffic backs up on the ramps for miles, but Kutuzovsky is quiet. Then a low hum can be heard, which quickly builds to a roar. Spread across the 60 yards of Kutuzovsky, a convoy of motorcycles and S.U.V.’s moves at breakneck speed, like fighter planes in tight formation.
In the middle of it, veiled from onlookers by moving vehicles and densely tinted glass, rides Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, in a custom-made black Audi with the license plate 007. He is commuting from his residence in Novo-Ogarevo, a country home that the Russians coyly refer to as a dacha but that a Westerner would recognize as a villa.
My Own Illustration of a Dead Soul…
He races along an avenue lined with enormous Stalin-era apartment buildings constructed for the Communist Party elite, then through the Arc de Triomphe, erected in celebration of Russia’s victory over Napoleon, in 1812, and finally across the Moscow River. In years past, when the title Putin held was that of Russia’s president, the formation would have headed for the Kremlin.
Now the cars roar off toward the Moscow White House— the high-rise building that once housed the Russian parliament, where pro-Yeltsin Russians erected barricades against an attempted coup by hard-liners in 1991. Once, it was the symbol of a nascent Russian democracy. Now it’s the command center of an entrenched Russian autocracy. An entire floor was redone before Putin moved in, claiming the title of prime minister and bringing the power of the Kremlin along with him.
If you love to read, podcasts may not be your first choice of medium; however, there are a number of incredible book podcasts out there.
So just for literature lovers looking to step outside the book, we rounded up our favorite podcasts—from a grown-up version of Reading Rainbow to conversations recorded live from the most famous bookstore in Paris to a project centered on immersive poetry reading.
There are podcasters who only read celebrity memoirs, interviewers who only speak with debut authors, and Harry Potter super fans who are rereading the series, one chapter at a time.
Without further ado, here are 27 recommendations for book podcasts spanning genre (fantasy! romance! classics!) and location (books in translation! Indigenous authors! books from the Middle East!). There’s something for everyone here—just as long as you love to read.
The following is a select list of sources on the Russian armed forces and the military situation in eastern Europe since 2014. The focus is on material produced by the US federal government, though useful non-government and international resources are also provided.
Sport & General Press Agency, Ltd. Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall with their dachshunds Fitz-John Wotan and Fitz-John Thorgils of Tredholt at Crufts Dog Show, 1923. Gelatin silver print. Radclyffe Hall and Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge Papers, 25.5, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
The Ransom Center houses the papers of British author Radclyffe Hall, author of the 1928 lesbian landmark novel, “The Well of Loneliness,” and partner, artist Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge. The archive includes notebooks, draft typescripts, correspondence, photographs and scrapbooks that document Hall’s career as a writer, Troubridge’s work as a sculptor and translator, and their personal and creative partnership. The archive offers insight into a broad range of subjects including gender identity, lesbianism and sexuality, spiritualism and religion, and sociopolitical movements spanning the two world wars.
“This project is an opportunity to observe a multidimensional perspective of what queer life looked like for people in the time they lived, which is indispensable for any researchers interested in the full breadth of queer history,” said Hall-Troubridge Librarian Alejandra Martinez, who led the project to digitize and make accessible thousands of images from the archive.
Martinez said the couple’s leanings toward fascism and other far-right ideologies complicate their legacy as groundbreaking queer writers today, and digitizing their papers offers an opportunity to shed light on the lives they led.
Using photographs, personal possessions, sound recordings and even motion picture stills, Pushcart Prize-nominee, writer and cartoonist Coyote Shook, a doctoral candidate in American studies at UT, worked with a team to create a companion online educational resource. The guides offer students and educators primary resources for the immersive study and teaching of LGBTQIA+ history and culture, human rights, censorship and free speech, social movements, and women’s and gender studies.
“The guides offer a rich array of historical documents for reconstructing complicated and historically nuanced LGBTQIA+ lives through archival materials,” Shook said. “This resource invites students to form their own hypotheses of how they would determine queer themes in a text and provide a ‘queer reading.’”
The project was supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources. The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The Ransom Center’s digital collections portal makes available more than 225,000 digital images and audio-visual recordings to a worldwide audience.
The Association for Computing Machinery’s global Technology Policy Council (ACM TPC) today released, “ACM TechBrief: Facial Recognition,” a concise overview of an increasingly-used application which relies heavily on artificial intelligence. The brief includes a primer on facial recognition, key statistics about its growth and use, as well as important policy implications.
This latest edition highlights that the use of AI-driven facial recognition is “increasing despite its fundamental limitations, creating profound ethical and privacy concerns.” The TechBrief’s “By the Numbers” chart puts key statistics about its growth and use in high relief. For example, well over 80 million Americans (nearly 25% of the nation’s population) now live in jurisdictions that have banned or heavily restricted the use of facial recognition systems largely due to privacy and civil liberties concerns.
A key concern outlined by the ACM TPC is that bias (including racial and gender bias) is both pervasive and profound in facial recognition systems. The TechBrief cites several research studies demonstrating that errors often fall disproportionately on minority populations, particularly people of color.
“This new TechBrief complements a 2020 statement issued by the Association for Computing Machinery’s US Technology Policy Committee (ACM USTPC), which urged an immediate suspension of the private and governmental use of facial recognition technologies,” added James Hendler, Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Chair of the ACM TPC. “In theory, the deployment of facial recognition technologies could offer societal benefits. But, in practice, unregulated facial recognition use has the potential to cause harm to the fundamental human and legal rights of individuals in areas including privacy, employment, justice and personal liberty. We hope that by providing people with an accessible overview of facial recognition technology they will understand why it must be carefully regulated before it is even more widely adopted.”
This TechBrief is the second in a series of short technical bulletins by ACM TPC that present scientifically-grounded perspectives on the impact of specific developments or applications of technology. Designed to complement ACM’s activities in the policy arena, TechBriefs aim to inform policymakers and others about the nature and implications of information technologies. The first ACM TechBrief in the series focused on climate change. Topics under consideration for future issues include election security, smart cities, and encryption.
A prize competition is designed to engage underrepresented academic institutions in helping NASA make advancements in machine learning, AI, and developing of autonomous systems.
Through a new prize competition, NASA is engaging minority serving institutions (MSIs) to bring ideas for new information technologies that will help address climate change.
The prize competition, the MSI Space Accelerator, comes from a new partnership between NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, the Minority University Research Education Project within the Office of STEM Engagement, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, and Starburst Accelerator in Los Angeles.
The MSI Space Accelerator competition is designed to engage underrepresented academic institutions and help NASA make significant advancements in the areas of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the development of autonomous systems. The best ideas will be awarded up to $50,000 in prize funding to each institution.
The USF Institute on Black Life (IBL) has created a new web portal to better document Tampa Bay’s historic and contemporary African American communities.
The African American Neighborhood Project portal offers a multitude of resources accessible to the community, including oral histories, heritage sites, archival photographs and research addressing anti-Black racism.
“There has never been a centralized database where people can find out about the rich history and contemporary culture of African American communities in Tampa Bay,” said Fenda Akiwumi, director of the IBL. “We are excited to launch this portal with the type of information that can help students with projects, while linking together those engaged in research and community work in these neighborhoods.”
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The new web portal grew out of the Institute’s ongoing African American Neighborhoods Project. The project was the theme of this year’s conference and explores diverse perspectives and current conditions of Tampa Bay’s African American communities.
Initiated in 2012, the project chronicles the lives of people who live in historically Black communities. It focuses on residents’ historical relationships to these neighborhoods and how people feel about the future of life in Black communities. Data collected from the decade-long project will now be easily accessible through the portal to local residents and to an interdisciplinary body of scholars interested in these issues locally and nationally.
