There are hundreds of dog breeds around the world, from the teensy chihuahua to the massive Saint Bernard—all thanks to centuries of selective breeding by humans. With such a wide range of canine sizes and temperaments, it’s no surprise that, in the process, we have reshaped their brains as well as their bodies.
“The biggest wow moment for me was just looking at the scans,” says study leader Erin E. Hecht, an evolutionary neuroscientist at Harvard University. “It’s really cool in science where you have a result where you don’t have to do any fancy statistics to be able to tell there’s something going on.” (Read more how humans have reordered dog brains.)
Sid Haig, a legend of the horror genre from films like House of 1,000 Corpsesand The Devil’s Rejects, died Saturday following an unspecified “accident” two weeks earlier. He was 80.
In a statement shared on the actor’s Instagram account, wife Susan L. Oberg wrote, “My light, my heart, my true love, my King, the other half of my soul, Sidney, passed from this realm on to the next. He has returned to the Universe, a shining star in her heavens. He was my angel, my husband, my best friend and always will be.”
Haig got his start in horror with 1967’s Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told. He was then cast in Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses as Captain Spaulding and its sequel The Devil’s Rejects. Haig was meant to have a larger role in this fall’s third installment, 3 From Hell, but Zombie told EW that health issues prevented him from doing so.
EXCLUSIVE: “When a reluctant bare-knuckle boxer and his older brother rack up a hefty debt, they are forced to chaperone an unexpected travel companion cross-country for one last fight in search of their fortune.”
That is the simple one-liner description for Jungleland, which has its world premiere Thursday night at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s pretty accurate because that is the plot, but what really works about this compelling character study from director Max Winkler, who co-wrote the script with Theodore B. Bressman and David Branson Smith, is the journey of these three people in a movie that for me harkens back to some of the great actor-driven movies of the 1970s. It has smart dialogue, a terrific trio of stars and a familial sensibility that also makes you care deeply what happens to these three on their journey. Oh and their dog too. I see lots of movies, obviously, and I have seen a ton at this year’s TIFF, but this one — even viewed in rough-cut form in a screener, which is how I saw it — has stuck with me. Watch an exclusive clip above.
Leonardo da Vinci’s mechanical lion goes on display in Paris
The original automaton, long since lost, was designed by da Vinci on a commission from Pope Leo X to amuse French king Francois I (AFP Photo/Thomas SAMSON)
Paris (AFP) – Leonardo da Vinci’s famous mechanical lion on Wednesday went on display in Paris for a month, in a tribute to the Renaissance master 500 years after his death.
The lion, which is two metres (six feet, seven inches) high and three metres long and made of wood with a metal mechanism, is a reconstruction based on a rudimentary sketch left by da Vinci.
The original automaton, long since lost, was designed by da Vinci on a commission from Pope Leo X to amuse French king Francois I.
Twenty one years ago, in 1998, French filmmaker Olivier Meyrou filmed Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Berge for a documentary that was never released.
Now “Celebration” is coming to New York’s Film Forum on October 2nd after much wrangling. It’s been shown twice in the last two decades, the last time in the fall of 2018. A version premiered at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival, but Berge shelved it.
In the interim two narrative films about Saint Laurent appeared, but neither one of them captured the mercurial designer. Some filmmakers have seen the documentary including Paul Thomas Anderson, whose “Phantom Thread” is said to have been greatly influenced by it. (There are said to be similar scenes.)
A bronze plaque honoring painter Georgia O’Keeffe is embedded in a sidewalk in front of the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images.
Quick—what’s the correct spelling, “Georgia O’Keefe” or “Georgia O’Keeffe”? And before you say anything, know this: How you answer may literally depend on which reality you live in.
For the record, the art-historically correct answer is the one with two “F”s. Nevertheless, some people still really, really believe that the famed American painter, pioneer of abstraction, and icon of the Southwest is “Georgia O’Keefe.” And not only that: They believe that the co-existence of the two names is evidence of parallel dimensions, or a sinister conspiracy of mass mind-control. Or something.
The “O’Keefe/O’Keeffe” question has recently bubbled up in internet chatter as a cardinal example of the “Mandela Effect,” a term coined in 2009 by Fiona Broome, an author of several “how-to books about ghost hunting.” After a speaking engagement at the annual sci-fi convention Dragon Con, she realized that several people in her circle had similar memories of South African political leader Nelson Mandela having died in prison. He was, at that time, still very much alive. (He passed away in 2013.)
The “Mandela Effect” became, in Broome’s use, the name for “what happens when someone has a clear memory of something that never happened in this reality,” as her official website dedicated to the phenomenon puts it. Online communities have sprung up around documenting examples where collective memory seems to disagree with recorded fact.
The Angel Foretelling Saint Catherine of Alexandria of Her Martyrdom by Tintoretto at the Sotheby’s Bowie auction. Wolfram Kastl / picture alliance via Getty Images
David Bowie‘s long and multifaceted career redefined how audiences interpreted the boundary between musical and visual art, so it stands to reason that The Man Who Fell to Earth cultivated a big collection of landmark works during his lifetime. Bowie was a prolific fan of contemporary art, but one of his most treasured pieces was much older: an altarpiece made by the dramatic Italian master Tintoretto entitled The Angel Foretelling Saint Catherine of Alexandria of Her Martyrdom, which Bowie bought from a dealer in London in 1987. This week, Saint Catherine is going on display in Venice after having recently been purchased by Marnix Neerman, a Belgian collector who elected to place the altarpiece in a show devoted to Flemish and Italian Old Masters that will open at the Palazzo Ducale on September 5.
The altarpiece was purchased by Neerman for 191,000 pounds at a record-breaking Sotheby’s auction held in 2016 that featured a vast array of Bowie’s collection. The musician had pieces by Winifred Nicholson, Peter Lanyon, David Bomberg, Frank Auerbach, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alan Davie, Marcel Duchamp and many others; he even collaborated with some famous stars like Damien Hirst on original works that were both kaleidoscopic and psychedelic.
The Albert Sperisen Library at the Book Club of California. | Photo: Molly Fosco
When I pick up a new book, I try to decide if the story is worth reading. Are the characters relatable? Is the plot exciting? Typically, I’m not checking whether the book was printed on a letterpress or if the end papers are hand-tipped. At the Book Club of California, however, it’s a very different story.
No longer the exclusive members-only club it once was, the Book Club of California is a non-profit open to the public. It supports the art of bookmaking, typography, design, and literature about California history and the American West. Located in San Francisco’s bustling Union Square neighborhood, the club is housed inside the World Affairs Council Center, a place where people gather to discuss global issues.
The rather unassuming building facade is easy to miss, but walking through the entrance of the wooden double doors on the fifth floor transports visitors back to early 20th-century San Francisco.
Books as art
Thousands of books in glass-doored cabinets line the walls. Victorian-era couches, lamps, and dark wood tables decorate the room, and there’s even a working 19th-century Columbian printing press. A swanky bar that looks like it belongs on the Titanic sits in the corner. This isn’t a coincidence—the club was founded in 1912, the same year the ill-fated ship ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Luckily, the Book Club of California has fared much better.
On January 29, 2016, Prince summoned me to his home, Paisley Park, to tell me about a book he wanted to write. He was looking for a collaborator. Paisley Park is in Chanhassen, Minnesota, about forty minutes southwest of Minneapolis. Prince treasured the privacy it afforded him. He once said, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, that Minnesota is “so cold it keeps the bad people out.” Sure enough, when I landed, there was an entrenched layer of snow on the ground, and hardly anyone in sight.
Prince’s driver, Kim Pratt, picked me up at the airport in a black Cadillac Escalade. She was wearing a plastic diamond the size of a Ring Pop on her finger. “Sometimes you gotta femme it up,” she said. She dropped me off at the Country Inn & Suites, an unremarkable chain hotel in Chanhassen that served as a de-facto substation for Paisley. I was “on call” until further notice. A member of Prince’s team later told me that, over the years, Prince had paid for enough rooms there to have bought the place four times over.
My agent had put me up for the job but hadn’t refrained from telling me the obvious: at twenty-nine, I was extremely unlikely to get it. In my hotel room, I turned the television on. I turned the television off. I had a mint tea. I felt that I was joining a long and august line of people who’d been made to wait by Prince, people who had sat in rooms in this same hotel, maybe in this very room, quietly freaking out just as I was quietly freaking out.
A few weeks earlier, Prince had hosted editors from three publishing houses at Paisley, and declared his intention to write a memoir called “The Beautiful Ones,” after one of the most naked, aching songs in his catalogue. For as far back as he could remember, he told the group, he’d written music to imagine—and reimagine—himself. Being an artist was a constant evolution. Early on, he’d recognized the inherent mystery of this process. “ ‘Mystery’ is a word for a reason,” he’d said. “It has a purpose.” The right book would add new layers to his mystery even as it stripped others away. He offered only one formal guideline: it had to be the biggest music book of all time.
Hector Osorno is the Kraft Heinz Ketchup Master, whose job it is to make sure around 70% of the ketchup sold in America tastes the way it should. Dan Charles/NPR
My search for the secrets of American ketchup began in a sun-baked field near Los Banos, Calif.
The field didn’t look like much at first. Just a wide, pale-green carpet of vines. Then Ross Siragusa, the head of global agriculture for the company Kraft Heinz, bent over, lifted up some of the vines, and revealed a mass of small, red fruit, too many to count.
Each acre of this field, Siragusa tells me, will produce about 60 tons of tomatoes. That’s up from about 40 tons per acre just 15 years ago. The tomatoes themselves are a mix of tomato varieties that are specially bred to produce red, thick ketchup.
A mechanical harvester approaches at the pace of a brisk walk. It’s a giant machine, a factory on wheels. It collects a swath of tomato plants, shakes fruit loose from the vines, and sends a stream of bright red tomatoes into a big truck driving alongside. The scale and speed of the operation boggles the mind.
Within a day, a processing plant in Los Banos will turn these tomatoes into paste. Weeks or even months later, the paste will become the central ingredient in ketchup.
To live in Los Angeles means forever catching glimpses of your street or favorite restaurant staged as a stand-in for someplace else. Moving around town becomes an exercise in avoiding those film shoots, a constant reminder that we reside on a giant soundstage, where at any given moment, a beloved block or building is being carefully snipped from the surrounding context.
In the last few years, however, shows have been set in actual LA neighborhoods, with characters referencing real places, sometimes with stunning geographic accuracy. There’s the show Love, which takes place in a well-known apartment complex in the Valley. In Transparent, the neighborhoods where the family members live, from Silver Lake to Marina del Rey, provide cues about their characters. LA’s noir past intersects with present-day addresses in the thriller Bosch. Issa Rae’s Insecure is probably the best example of the genre, offering a look at everyday life in South LA with locations as mundane as a Rite-Aid pharmacy.
But BoJack Horseman—the animated Netflix show bywriter Raphael Bob-Waksberg and artist Lisa Hanawalt, who were high school friends—is the first show to create an entire Los Angeles universe that feels like it was made for people in LA.
For people who don’t live here, BoJack Horseman might appear to be an endless string of cliches: a narcissistic washed-up sitcom star (who is also a horse) voiced by Will Arnett, colonnades of palm trees, candy-colored convertibles, and jabs at celebrity culture. But tucked into the narrative are disarmingly familiar glimpses of actual Los Angeles—well, Los Angeles if it were mostly occupied by animals.
Pedro Bell in 2009. His psychedelic album covers for the pioneering band Funkadelic featured topless women, space imagery and mutants and, as one curator put it, “placed African-American reality in the context of a science fiction future.” Credit: Jean Lachat/Chicago Sun-Times
Pedro Bell, whose mind-bending album covers for the band Funkadelic gave visual definition to its signature sound in the 1970s and ’80s, died on Tuesday in Evergreen Park, Ill., near Chicago. He was 69.
George Clinton, the brains behind Funkadelic, announced his death on his Facebook page. Mr. Bell had been in poor health for many years.
Mr. Bell created his first cover for Funkadelic, the pioneering band that merged funk and psychedelic rock, in 1973. The album was “Cosmic Slop,” and it featured a topless woman, space imagery and mutants. Though Funkadelic and its sister act, Parliament, had been around for several years, Mr. Bell’s artwork and the liner notes he wrote under the name Sir Lleb (“Bell” spelled backward) helped define Funkadelic and its elaborate mythology.
If you’re like me, maybe you’re thinking: ‘Forest bathing? Sounds like a bunch of hippies skinny-dipping in the woods.’
Wrong. Contrary to my own initial reaction, forest bathing has nothing to do with bathing and it doesn’t even have to take place in a forest. Rather, the Japanese practice of Shinrin-Yoku, which translates to “forest bathing” or “taking in the forest atmosphere,” emphasizes the importance of slowing down to connect with nature. It was developed in Japan during the 1980s and has become a cornerstone of preventive health care and healing in modern Japanese medicine.
My first “forest bath” was in Colorado, a much slower (and less exhausting) alternative to the hiking, mountain biking, and skiing the region is best known for. The practice has gotten so popular in the Rocky Mountain state that guides are available in half a dozen cities and a forest therapy guide training program in Colorado this September filled up many months in advance. Forest bathing is growing in popularity around the world and guides can even be found in major metropolitan cities like London and New York City. That said, the blue spruce, Ponderosa pine, white fir, quaking aspen, and other stunning and aromatic trees native to Colorado make it an excellent place to get your nature bath on.
A French nightclub has caused a stir after it exhibited pole-dancing robots donning high heels.
The gyrating robots had CCTV cameras for heads and were interspersed among their human counterparts at the Strip Club Cafe (SC-Club) in Nantes on Friday night.
The androids moved their hips in time to the blasting music while on elevated platforms, in front of a male-dominated audience.
Arnold Schwarzenegger stands next to Franco Columbu, hanging upside down, in this image from 1977.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is mourning the loss of the man he called his best friend — Italian bodybuilder Franco Columbu.
The 78-year-old Columbu was the best man at the wedding of Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver in 1986. He was also an actor.”
From the minute we met in Munich, you were my partner in crime. We pushed each other, we competed with each other, and we laughed at every moment along the way,” Schwarzenegger wrote in his tribute Friday. “I am devastated today. But I am also so, so grateful for the 54 years of friendship and joy we shared.”
EXCLUSIVE: James Cameron understands better than anyone that revisiting the past to alter the course of history is a dicey proposition at best, but that hasn’t stopped the Hollywood titan from taking on his latest cinematic mission: returning to The Terminator franchise that gave him the first signature success of his history-making career.
“It’s special,” Cameron said of the Terminator success that propelled him toward ever-grander spectacle projects like Aliens, The Abyss, Titanic, and Avatar. Sci-fi’s greatest showman moved on from his Skynet series in 1991, but now he’s reunited with his first great cinematic brand through Terminator: Dark Fate, the Skydance Productions and Paramount Pictures release that hits theaters November 1.
It takes a boat ride, in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, to get me to finally feel offline. Which makes me feel pretty sad. But it reminds me of the impossible goal I keep failing to attain: staying away from screens. Or, more accurately, the internet.
It feels impossible to disconnect because I work in tech. I review phones. I wear headsets (sometimes on vacation). I have watches on my wrists. What absurdity am I discussing, me being disconnected from tech? It’s more that I’ve realized my attention being sapped away. Or my kid saying to me, hey, spend less time on the screen. Which only proves that I’ve become known as the Person With a Phone on Their Face.
I’ve tried screen-time limitations, cutting off notifications and being in the present moment like Sherry Turkle, who’s studied online behavioral psychology for years, wrote about back in 2015 in her excellent book Reclaiming Conversation. I’ve never found screen timers to work. Not for me. They feel like fitness trackers without the coaching.
What has worked? Spending a week and a half, roughly, where I go as offline as I ever can. It’s become a tradition each summer: I’ve joined my in-laws to go across the Atlantic. I’ve done this, now, six times.
I didn’t expect to be this person who cannot unplug. And you don’t need to be this person, either. But I’ve come to realize, the more I take this trip, that I love being forced to live without the internet.
Getty Images From left: Lena Waithe, Daniel Kaluuya, Melina Matsoukas
Universal’s Queen & Slim is set to open AFI Fest 2019, it was announced Tuesday.
The drama hails from Emmy-winning writer Lena Waithe and director Melina Matsoukas, who helmed Beyoncé’s “Formation” and the Nike “Equality” campaign, and stars Daniel Kaluuya and newcomer Jodie Turner-Smith, along with Chloe Sevigny.
Waithe wrote the script based on an original idea by best-selling author James Frey. Waithe also produces via her company Hillman Grad Productions, along with Matsoukas via her production company De La Revolución Films. Frey produces via his production company 3BlackDot, alongside Andrew Coles and Michelle Knudsen. Makeready’s Brad Weston and Pam Abdy also are producers.
Queen & Slim was financed by Makeready and will be distributed by Universal Pictures worldwide, with eOne handling distribution in select territories including the U.K. and Canada.The pic is slated to hit theaters Nov. 27.
Stories about Pop’s misbehavior are lewd, captivating, and plentiful. In recent years, his work has grown more interior. Photograph by Ryan McGinley for The New Yorker
In late July, in a brief window between professional appointments, Iggy Pop drove to the mouth of Biscayne Bay, so that he could bob in its tropical waters. In 1995, he had bought what he described as “a very seedy condo” in Miami, and he has had a home in the city ever since. The extremity of the place—it is both environmentally tenuous and aesthetically vulgar—seems to suit Pop, who, in the late nineteen-sixties, as a member of the Stooges, helped invent and refine punk rock, a genre of music so menacing and physically savage that it is sometimes shocking that Pop has made it to the age of seventy-two. After he moved to Miami, he started swimming every day. “I didn’t know anybody,” he said. “I’d go to the beach and come home, go to the beach and come home. I tried to build myself back up from twenty years in harness—New York City, the modern American record industry, gruelling economy touring. I quit smoking here.”
From afar, Pop resembles a bronze statuette. He is lithe, sinewy, and deeply tanned, with a torso that, for decades, has appeared so exquisitely and minutely muscled that an onlooker might reasonably assume it was painted on. In recent years, his midsection has relaxed a bit, but he assured me, while patting it, that it remains quite firm. His hair is blond, shoulder length, pin straight, and parted in the middle, and his eyes are an oceanic blue. Though he has had Lasik surgery—“In Colombia, before it was legal here”—his vision is still imperfect, a malady he chalks up to doing too much intravenous cocaine. He has retained a bit of a round, Midwestern accent from his upbringing, outside Detroit. In conversation, he is nearly guileless, and he listens intently and carefully. Periodically, his face will collapse into a benevolent grin.
Since leaving the art world to become a film-maker, Sam Taylor-Johnson has shown impressive range. Her debut feature film, Nowhere Boy (2009), was a tender depiction of John Lennon’s childhood. She followed it with the less tender Fifty Shades of Greyin 2015. Now she’s back with A Million Little Pieces, an adaptation of James Frey’s scandalous semi-memoir about his rehab after years as an alcoholic and drug addict. Taylor-Johnson co-wrote the screenplay with her husband, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who also stars in the film. They live, most of the time, in Los Angeles.
You read A Million Little Pieces when it came out in 2003. It obviously stayed with you? Yeah, it did. I remember reading it and being really overtaken by it; I think is the right word. I was in the world with him and on the journey. Then when it got optioned by whatever studio it was and it was going to be made into a big movie and there was this director and that director, I’d always have a tinge of jealousy. Even though I wasn’t a film-maker then, I’d be like: “What an amazing piece of material to have.” So I tracked it for a long time and I’d always keep my ear to the ground.
Earlier this week, several videos shared to social media claimed to have broken the official Guinness World Record for the most cars to perform a simultaneous burnout. The video’s creators claimed that it was an “official world record attempt,” but now it turns out Guinness has reportedly denied the claim simply because there wasn’t an official judge present at the event.
The videos seen below show the record attempt at the KBPI Rock & Roll Car Show this past weekend at Bandimere Speedway in Jefferson County, Colorado from both the air and from spectators on the ground. An alleged total of 170 cars lined up along the base of a hill next to the Speedway’s main dragstrip. As the videos depict, a huge plume of white tire smoke can be seen from the line of cars as they all perform a stationary burnout.
Musician, style icon and provocateur Kim Gordon is practically inextricable from the art world. As the vocalist, bassist and guitarist for Sonic Youth, she helped solidify a streak of 1990s’ cool into an instantly legible visual aesthetic. Now, with the release of her debut solo album on the horizon, this week Gordon released a music video directed by the German experimental artist Loretta Fahrenholz that adds a fascinating new layer of nuance to her combative, bruising body of work. Fahrenholz, who is represented in New York by the gallery Reena Spaulings and in Berlin by Galerie Buchholz, may not be as well known as one of the biggest rock stars in America, but her perspective is just as demandingly intense.
Vogue sat down with James Frey, author of the infamous 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces, and his friend Sam Taylor-Johnson, who has directed her husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson in a hotly-anticipated film adaptation hitting cinemas next week.
The response to James Frey’s 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces is the stuff most authors only dream of. His unflinching retelling of his alcoholism, drug addiction and subsequent rehabilitation, aged just 23, spent 15 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Three years later, in 2006, controversy hit when it was revealed that Frey had embellished certain details. Yet, while he was publicly criticised for this – in particular by one of his most ardent supporters, Oprah Winfrey; at the time, A Million Little Pieces was the fastest-selling book in her television books club’s 10-year history – his captive audience only grew, and to date it’s sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.
Frey sold the film rights to A Million Little Pieces in the early 2000s, however, the movie was never made. Until now. Directed and co-written by Sam Taylor-Johnson, a friend of Frey’s and director of Nowhere Boy and Fifty Shades of Grey, the film debuted at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. Taylor-Johnson collaborated on the script with her husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who stars as Frey, and he’s joined on screen by Charlie Hunnam, Juliette Lewis and Odessa Young as Frey’s fellow patient and girlfriend Lily.
Vogue sat down with Frey and Sam Taylor-Johnson to hear about the making of the long-awaited big screen adaptation.
The first Popeyes tweet seemed innocent enough — a photograph of the chain’s new fried-chicken sandwich (chicken breast, brioche bun, pickles, sauce) beneath an artfully garbled caption: “So. Good. Forgot. How. Speak.”
But as a social media battle has captivated the internet this week and generated long lines at Popeyes locations across the country, that tweet from last week now has the feel of an opening salvo. Things grew heated on Tuesday, when Chick-fil-A tweeted what appeared to be a coded response to the Popeyes announcement, extolling the virtues of its “original” chicken sandwich.
Soon, the “passive-aggressive chicken sandwich debate,” as one news article put it, had escalated into a Twitter battle royal, as other fast-food companies started promoting their own sandwiches. Shake Shack tried to rise above the fray, promising a chicken sandwich “without the beef.”
As the Twitter commotion intensified, the Popeyes chicken sandwich reportedly sold out at some locations.
Sam Taylor-Johnson would never want to repeat Fifty Shades directing experience
Sam Taylor-Johnson
Sam Taylor-Johnson says she had an “intense and maddening” experience while working on the first instalment of the Fifty Shades of Grey’ film series
Sam Taylor-Johnson would “never want to repeat” the time she spent working on ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’.
The 52-year-old filmmaker, who is married to Aaron Taylor-Johnson, 29, confessed that her intense experience directing the first instalment of the erotic drama film series, based on the novel trilogy by E.L James, is not one she wishes to repeat.
In an interview with the Sunday Times’ Stella magazine, she said: “Making that movie taught me so much that I didn’t want to learn and I would never want to repeat those lessons, but it did make me focus on what I do want to do.
“It was an intense; maddening experience – but then, would I have made this movie had not gone through that? It’s that thing of never looking back.”
The ‘Nowhere Boy’ director recently worked on 2018 drama film, ‘A Million Little Pieces’ – based on the novel by James Frey – which follows a young drug-addled writer coming to the end of his time at a detox facility.
Sam’s husband Aaron plays James and Sam revealed that after reading the book originally following its publication in 2003, she knew immediately that she wanted to transform the story into a film.
In the summer of 1987, I graduated from a public high school in Austin, Texas, and headed northeast to attend Yale. I then spent nearly 15 years studying at various universities—the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford, Harvard, and finally Yale Law School—picking up a string of degrees along the way. Today, I teach at Yale Law, where my students unnervingly resemble my younger self: They are, overwhelmingly, products of professional parents and high-class universities. I pass on to them the advantages that my own teachers bestowed on me. They, and I, owe our prosperity and our caste to meritocracy.
Two decades ago, when I started writing about economic inequality, meritocracy seemed more likely a cure than a cause. Meritocracy’s early advocates championed social mobility. In the 1960s, for instance, Yale President Kingman Brewster brought meritocratic admissions to the university with the express aim of breaking a hereditary elite. Alumni had long believed that their sons had a birthright to follow them to Yale; now prospective students would gain admission based on achievement rather than breeding. Meritocracy—for a time—replaced complacent insiders with talented and hardworking outsiders.
The “Easy Rider” himself, Peter Fonda, has died – the famed actor passing away at 79 from lung cancer.
Fonda had an interesting childhood – a difficult and distant relationship with his famous father Henry Fonda, he accidentally shot himself in the stomach and nearly died on his 11th birthday,
He made his Hollywood debut in 1963 with “Tammy and the Doctor” co-starring Sandra Dee along with WW2 drama “The Victors” the same year followed by Robert Rossen’s “Lilith” in which he received acclaim. He turned biker for Roger Corman in 1966’s “The Wild Angels” and a role in the Jack Nicholson-penned “The Trip”.
Fonda and Dennis Hopper then conceived, co-wrote with Terry Southern and raised the finance for counterculture hit “Easy Rider” which made over $60 million worldwide over three years from a $400,000 budget.
Inside student fight night where young men box unlicensed in front of glamorous women
EXCLUSIVE: Boxing’s governing bodies are deeply concerned about the lack of control surrounding white-collar events – but for ungrads in Cardiff, it is the night of the term
Actor Danny Trejo of ‘Machete’ fame pulls young boy from overturned car
LOS ANGELES, Aug 7 (Reuters) – Hollywood actor Danny Trejo, known for his tough-guy roles in such films as “Machete,” helped rescue a young boy who was trapped in a car that overturned in a Los Angeles traffic collision on Wednesday.
Trejo, 75, told television station KABC-TV he was on his way to an auto mechanic in L.A.’s Sylmar neighborhood when he saw a motorist run a red light and crash into another car, which flipped over onto its roof in the intersection.
The boy, strapped into his car seat in the back of the car, and his grandmother, who had been driving, were both trapped in the overturned, partially crushed vehicle.
“He was panicked, and I said, ‘OK, we have to use our superpowers,’ and so he screamed, ‘Superpowers!’ and we started yelling, ‘Superpowers,'” Trejo recounted. “We got kind of, like, a bond, I guess.”
Robert DiGregorio, known in the Fulton Fish Market as Bobby Tuna, possesses a blend of discernment and arcane fish knowledge that, so far, computers have yet to replicate. Photograph by Mike Segar / Reuters
Fish: the final frontier in food delivery. At this point, you can get warm cookies, vodka, and locally grown rutabaga brought to your doorstep in minutes, but try getting a fresh red snapper. Until recently, if you could obtain the fish, it would likely have been pre-frozen and shipped in from overseas. (Such is the case with at least eighty-five per cent of the seafood consumed in this country, both from grocery stores and in restaurants.)
A new tech startup is aiming to remedy this situation. The company is based not in a Silicon Valley lab but inside the Fulton Fish Market, a two-hundred-year-old seafood wholesale market that was once situated in lower Manhattan and is now at Hunts Point, in the Bronx. It is the second-largest fish market in the world, after Tsukiji market, in Tokyo. Historically, it has served restaurants and retailers in the New York City area, operating at night so that chefs and fish-store owners can get there. The startup, called FultonFishMarket.com, allows customers in the rest of the country, both restaurants and individuals, to buy from the market, too, cutting out a chain of regional seafood dealers. The fish is shipped fresh, rather than frozen, thanks to an Amazon-esque warehousing-and-logistics system. Mike Spindler, the company’s C.E.O., said recently, “I can get a fish to Warren Buffett in Omaha, Nebraska, that’s as fresh as if he’d walked down to the pier and bought it that morning.”
There is one thing, however, that the sophisticated logistics system cannot do: pick out a fish. If Warren Buffett orders a red snapper, the company needs to insure that his fish is fresh, fairly priced, and actually an American red snapper—and not some other, day-old red fish that a vender is trying to pass off. (According to the ocean-conservation organization Oceana, more than twenty per cent of the seafood in restaurants and grocery stores in America is misidentified.) For this task, the company has enlisted one of the old-timers: Robert DiGregorio, a forty-seven-year veteran of the business, known in the marketplace as Bobby Tuna. DiGregorio, sixty-eight, is the author of “Tuna Grading and Evaluation,” an industry standby. He possesses a blend of discernment and arcane fish knowledge that, so far, computers have yet to replicate. Over the years, he said recently, “I’ve bought and sold literally millions of pounds of fish.”
‘It’s not like I’m getting bombarded with filth’ … Jackie Hong, who has not used soap for nine years. Photograph: Jerome Couture
David Whitlock has not showered or bathed for 15 years, yet he does not have body odour. “It was kind of strange for the first few months, but after that I stopped missing it,” he says. “If I get a specific part of my body dirty, then I’ll wash that specific part” – but never with soap. As well as germs, soap gets rid of the skin’s protective oils and alters its pH level. Although Whitlock appreciated gaining an extra 15 minutes a day from soap-dodging, his primary motivation was to encourage friendly microbes to live on him in symbiotic harmony. The bacteria get to feast on the ammonia from his sweat and he gets low-maintenance, balanced skin.
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