On the night artist Anna Weyant’s work debuted at Christie’s, the 27-year-old painter was too nervous to attend or even watch the livestream. Instead, Ms. Weyant holed up in her small Manhattan apartment and listened to a calming app on her cellphone until a friend texted with news.
“Summertime,” Ms. Weyant’s portrait of a woman with long, flowing hair that the artist had sold for around $12,000 two years before, resold for $1.5 million, five times its high estimate.
It has been a rocket-fueled rise to the top of the contemporary art world for Ms. Weyant—and far from her unassuming start in Calgary, Canada. Spotted on Instagram three years ago and quickly vouched for by a savvy handful of artists, dealers and advisers, Ms. Weyant is now internationally coveted for her paintings of vulnerable girls and mischievous women in sharply lit, old-master hues. Imagine Botticelli as a millennial, whose porcelain-skin beauties also pop one leg high like the Victoria Beckham meme or sport gold necklaces that read, “Ride or Die.”
Ms. Weyant’s oeuvre of roughly 50 paintings has already filtered into the hands of top collectors such as investor Glenn Fuhrman and plastic surgeon Stafford Broumand. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently exhibited her work in a group show, and former Venice Biennale curator Francesco Bonami said he predicts she will make her own Biennale appearance soon, which would be another career milestone.
As is, demand for her art outstrips her supply: The waiting list to buy one of her paintings, dealers say, is at least 200 names long. And last month she teamed up with the biggest art gallery of them all, Gagosian. … Read the rest of this entry »
The Verge gleefully reported yesterday on an “open letter” written by SpaceX employees and circulated on the company’s internal chat system, criticizing Elon Musk’s public statements and urging “the company to better address executive leadership behavior as well as sexual harassment complaints.”
An open letter to SpaceX decrying CEO Elon Musk’s recent behavior has sparked open discussion among the company’s employees in an internal chat system. Employees are being encouraged to sign onto the letter’s suggestions, either publicly or anonymously, with a signed version of the letter to be delivered to the desk of SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell.
The letter, reviewed by The Verge, describes how Musk’s actions and the recent allegations of sexual harassment against him are negatively affecting SpaceX’s reputation. The document claims that employees “across the spectra of gender, ethnicity, seniority, and technical roles have collaborated on” writing the letter. It’s not known which SpaceX employees wrote the letter; the employees who posted the letter in the internal chat system have not responded to requests for comment.
“Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us, particularly in recent weeks,” the letter states. “As our CEO and most prominent spokesperson, Elon is seen as the face of SpaceX — every Tweet that Elon sends is a de facto public statement by the company. It is critical to make clear to our teams and to our potential talent pool that his messaging does not reflect our work, our mission, or our values.”
SpaceX fired several employees involved in a letter that criticized Chief Executive Elon Musk and the way the company applies internal rules, according to an email to staff from SpaceX’s president and people familiar with it.
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, said the company conducted an investigation and decided to terminate a number of employees who participated in the effort, according to the email, a copy of which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Her email didn’t say how many people the company let go, and that number couldn’t immediately be determined.
I can tell you that the twisted mind behind this one is never visiting me.
Some years ago I was visiting an old friend in Florida. This pal (A large man who is actually “a sensitive little forest flower.”) loves boats and boating and maintained two, count ‘em, two homes in Florida set up for boating.
The first home was his main base in Ft. Lauderdale. It was a three-bedroom two-bath operation with a swimming pool, an office, and a long boat dock where he kept “the Big Boat.”
The second home was a smaller house set up on stilts down in the depths of the Florida Keys twenty miles above Key West with two bedrooms, one bath, and a boat dock on a canal where he kept “the Little Boat.”
Since he used the Keys house only now and again throughout the year he decided at some point to rent it out. After careful, cautious advertising he did rent it out for a year to a well-vetted man. When I visited him that lease was up and he and I went to the Keys house to check it out. A day or so before we arrived my pal had a house cleaner go in to change all the bedding and spiff up the rest of the house.
When we got there I went into the guest bedroom to unpack my things into the chest of drawers. …
Since the foundation of LYX Arkitekter company it became a pioneer in the architectural field doing awesome projects in various concepts starting from the lofty designs, passing with the Islamic styles in decoration combining it with the modern design making outstanding artistic whole.
Today the new concept is estimated from the brutalism concept created by the genius engineer le Corbusier in 1952.
The new project is designed in Iceland on the form of flipped container but the sides of it replaced with a panoramic glass guaranteeing 360 degrees view on the beach in the ground floors. Moreover, the total space of the project is 750 sq.m [8073 sq. ft.] with two floors.
The ground floor contains living, and dining room attached with a bathroom and a kitchen. The creativity of design is manifested in the terrace where you can see the whole view in front of you while you are enjoying your coffee in the first hours of morning. Last but not least, the third floor that contains the fascinating master bedroom and a separate door for jumping into the spectacular panoramic pool at hot summer days making it invaluable place to stay at in the vacations all of that is ensured and taken into consideration from the moment it was designed by the company experts.
This is the sort of house an elite university like Yale might build. It looks very chic right now, brand new and nearly empty, but Brutalist-designed buildings are notorious functionally impractical and incredibly expensive to maintain.
I bet it cost many multiples of the conventional per-square-meter price to build. It is clearly intended for human mannequins to pose in elegantly. We see no room for books or other media, and no closets.
When I was a boy, I walked to school every day, and the daily morning walk featured human landmarks.
On the 400 block of West Lloyd Street, a fierce old man with long white hair (at a time when no men wore long hair) and a white beard would be found standing high on a second floor porch. He stood there, as if at attention, and greeted passing schoolchildren with a grave nod and never a smile.
Turning north on Chestnut Street, at the corner house just before the alley, we would find Henry Walukewicz, the undertaker, standing on the sidewalk level porch of his house waiting for us. He subscribed to weekly humor magazines, and thus armed himself with a repertoire of corny riddles, which he would dispense daily to an appreciative audience of schoolkids. After the chilly reception we got from “the wild old man” back on Lloyd Street, Henry the comedian provided a refreshing dose of human warmth.
All this was in the late 1950s.
I lived much of my adult life in Newtown, Connecticut. Our house was built in 1712 and I had a great deal of fun researching our home’s history and the history of the town itself.
At the intersection of Church Hill Road and the Boulevard, there is a stately Victorian house (now law offices, alas!) on one side of the Boulevard and a splendid large barn right across from it. An old, old man who’d grown up in Newtown told me that, long ago, when he was a boy, as the schoolkids passed by that barn, the farmer would stop feeding his cows, come out in front of the barn and do a dance for them. This would have been back in the 1920s.
(I went to Google Earth, thinking that I’d grab an image of that impressive old barn and post it here. It and the Victorian house were both gone! Tempus fugits.)
The entire Dr. Forcier Interview has to be seen. This woman is a classic example of the abundantly-credentialed, comfortably-ensconced-in-the-cushiest-parts-of-the-National Establishment incredibly demented nincompoop.
Michelle Forcier is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Assistant Dean of Admissions at the Brown University Alpert Medical School. She received her medical degree from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, Pediatric residency at University of Utah, obtained a Master’s in Public Health and completed a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars fellowship and Preventive Medicine residency at the University of North Carolina. She has been providing adolescent health services, specializing in sexual health care since 1997.
Her professional background has focused on sexual health issues including: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning youth with a focus on gender nonconforming youth, puberty blockers and hormones; contraception and advanced family planning; pediatric and adolescent gynecology; and transition medicine for older youth with complex medical problems. She has been involved in medical education and training at Brown University, Northwestern University and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill for over 15 years.”
Agatha Christie became famous in the 1920s as a mystery writer.
For younger generations, she’s the next hot thing.
Shashwata Roy, a 17-year-old fan of space and computers, tweeted in March that Ms. Christie’s 1926 novel “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” is an “absolute must read…review coming up.”
The student in Kolkata said he planned to read all her novels. “The unique way of storytelling is something I think is very rare nowadays,” he said.
The British author may be long gone, but her fictional whodunits—often solved by an elderly British lady or a fussy Belgian detective—have made her a star with fans more used to streaming Marvel movies or scrolling through TikTok—where videos labeled with the tag #AgathaChristie have racked up more than 26 million views.
“Agatha is sparking with younger readers, and I don’t see that with any other writer from her period,” said Devin Abraham, owner of the Once Upon A Crime mystery bookstore in Minneapolis. Customers who ask for books by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett—both contemporaries of Ms. Christie—are generally in their 50s or 60s, said Ms. Abraham.
“Who’s that? I have never heard of Raymond Chandler,” said Ari DiDomenico, a 17-year-old Christie fan in San Diego. She said classic novelists, such as Jane Austen, didn’t hold her attention since the “language was too old-timey[! -JDZ].”
“Agatha Christie’s writing style is more to the point, and the pacing works really well,” she said.
Philip Wasielewski at the Foreign Policy Research Institute looks at where things are after 100 days, and discusses future probabilities.
The Russian military is expending thousands of lives in Donbas to make incremental, almost World War I–style, advances over terrain that has no real strategic value. Russia is fighting a war of attrition. In the past, Russia and the Soviet Union had the manpower to make this an effective strategy. However, Russia today no longer has the mechanisms to recruit, train, equip, officer, and deploy substantial new military formations.
In early April, I estimated Russia had suffered approximately 10,000 soldiers killed in action (KIA) and a total of 35,000–38,000 casualties. It is still hard to estimate losses, but if Russian killed-in-action figures are now, per British intelligence estimates, roughly 15,000, then total casualties by early June could be approximately 50,000 men.
Who will replace them? The 130,000 Russian conscripts called up on April 1, 2022, are not supposed to go to a war zone (but many will). Putin, probably fearing social unrest, passed up the opportunity on Victory Day on May 9 to declare war and announce a general mobilization of Russian manpower.
Without a general mobilization, how can the Russian army meet wartime requirements and replace its losses? As word of horrible combat conditions reaches the population, recruiting of contract soldiers will suffer. It probably already has, based on the extreme decision to allow up to 50-year-old men to volunteer. Many contract soldiers are already announcing their intention to leave the army or refuse to serve in the “special military operation” that Moscow claims is not a war. Increased conscription cannot make up for recruiting shortfalls in a country where evading military service is practically a national sport.
If enough soldiers are found, who will lead them? Even before the war, Russia was having a difficult time retaining junior officers. In this war, officers of all levels have borne an extraordinary brunt of casualties. Many officer cadets have graduated early to participate in the war. Furthermore, who will train the new soldiers? Basic and advanced training in Russia’s army is done at the individual unit level, but many training officers and noncommissioned officers have already deployed with their units to Ukraine. This leaves limited cadres at home to instruct new conscripts. Metaphorically speaking, the Russian army is eating its seed corn.
If enough enlisted men and junior officers can be found to serve as replacements for the tens of thousands of casualties, can Russia equip them with modern weapons? Equipment losses are catastrophic. The Oryx website, using conservative, thoroughly documented confirmation techniques, estimates that as of the end of May 2022, Russia had lost 741 tanks, 1,342 armored/infantry fighting vehicles, and 27 fixed-wing combat aircraft. Actual losses are likely higher.
Besides these losses, vehicles, airplanes, and helicopters involved in three months of nonstop fighting require major refitting, which is unlikely to happen while combat operations are underway. War can exhaust machines as well as men, and without proper maintenance, existing hardware will become incapable of supporting operations. New replacements for destroyed equipment will not be coming. Russia’s main tank factories have shut down due to sanctions, which have also hobbled its aircraft industry. T-62 tanks have been pulled out of reserve, but half-century-old tanks are no answer to modern anti-tank weapons.[24] Decades of munitions production have been used up in three months, and the decline in the use of guided and cruise missiles indicates that precision-guided weapons are in short supply.
Ukraine is also facing serious military difficulties. It has not concentrated enough forces in Donbas to match Russia’s current quantitative edge, and it too is suffering high casualties. The previous article in early April estimated that Ukraine had suffered approximately 3,100 killed in action and 16,000–18,000 casualties of all types. On April 16, President Zelensky announced that Ukraine had suffered between 2,500 and 3,000 killed in action and an additional 10,000 wounded. Extrapolating from these figures to the present, Ukrainian military KIA figures could be approaching 6,000 men and approximately 25,000 total casualties due to the high intensity of the battles of the Donbas and Mariupol. Per Oryx, Ukraine has lost 186 tanks, 276 armored/infantry fighting vehicles, and 22 fixed-wing combat aircraft, but these again are conservative figures. Attrition warfare is cutting both ways. The winner may be the side that lasts just a moment longer than the other.
There are strategic differences between Russian and Ukrainian losses. Ukraine is in a better position to replenish its losses of men and materiel. It can afford to trade some territory for time to assimilate Western supplies. With incoming weapons from the West and the training of new volunteers, the Ukrainian army will grow in numbers and capabilities, while the Russian army is unlikely to. When ready, Ukraine will have the forces to counterattack. The Croatian army did the same after losing territory in 1992 to Serbian forces. By 1995, with Western tutoring and supplies, Croatia had rebuilt its army and counterattacked, forcing the Serbs out of the Krajina region within a week. Ukraine could play a similar “long game.”
AOC was teary, saying on Instagram she was “so angry” having to “relive that footage.” Her Instagram post said, “I’m shaking all over again.” “We were trapped on the campus with no way out.”
“On a personal level, I wasn’t expecting it to feel like this,” AOC had written out on her Instagram video. “But that’s how trauma works, right? You think you’re good. But now so many of the sensations from that day are roaring back into my skin, my muscles, my bones. Whole body is CLENCHED. But we all have tools to handle moments like these: breath, mindfulness, etc.” …
Except, as we know, there’s a small problem with all this — that she wasn’t in the Capitol building at the time, she was in her office, in the Cannon Office Building, about a half a mile away. Her “experience” allegedly consisted of claiming she was frightened by a police officer who came to evacuate her to another building. She wasn’t “trapped” by anyone, much less with “no way out.” She even smeared the officer who came to help her, claiming he was dealing with her with all this “anger and hostility.” As Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) who had a nearby office noted, there were no rioters near their office hall. AOC then had a meltdown that Mace dared to bust her narrative.
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The ugly truth the beltway can't grasp, it isn't that regular America doesn't care about Jan6. It's that they hate you for making their lives miserable, so when they saw you cowering, they thought good, now they know how it feels to be afraid.
