Black Hole Stun
A New Era of Black Holes Is Here
Astronomers have discovered a black-hole treasure trove that is changing our view of the cosmos.
by THOMAS LEWTON AND QUANTA MAGAZINE
When the first black-hole collision was detected in 2015, it was a watershed moment in the history of astronomy. Using gravitational waves, astronomers were observing the universe in an entirely new way. But this first event didn’t revolutionize our understanding of black holes—nor could it. This collision would be the first of many, astronomers knew, and only with that bounty would answers come.
“The first discovery was the thrill of our lives,” says Vicky Kalogera, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University and part of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) collaboration that made the 2015 detection. “But you cannot do astrophysics with one source.”
Now, Kalogera and other physicists say they’re entering a new era of black-hole astronomy, driven by a rapid increase in the number of black holes they can observe.
The latest catalog of these so-called black-hole binary mergers—the result of two black holes spiraling inward toward each other and colliding—has quadrupled the black-hole merger data available to study. There are now almost 50 mergers for astrophysicists to scrutinize, with dozens more expected in the next few months and hundreds more in the coming years.
Reddit Mechanics
The Physics of Reddit’s Spinning Solar System Icon
If the dots on the loading screen were planets, is their motion realistic? And can we actually model it?
by RHETT ALLAIN
PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES
WHILE WAITING FOR Reddit to load on my phone, I wondered if I could do some physics with the loading icon. Maybe you’ve seen it. It looks like a mini solar system with four planets (two inner planets and two outer planets). Let’s model it!
We should start with some data. I can do a screen capture of the loading screen and then use my favorite video analysis program (Tracker Video Analysis) to get position and time data. Of course, the screen shows distance in units of pixels and that’s not very useful. I don’t know the actual size of this “planetary system” (or whatever it is), so I will just set the scale size to 1 outer orbital diameter unit. This is the distance across the whole orbit of one of the outer “planets.”
In order to see if this figure moves in some type of realistic way, I need to look at the motion of the planets. One of the simplest things would be to look at the angular position as a function of time. What is the angular position? If you were to draw a line from the middle of the center sun to one of the orbiting planets (in a flat plane), the angle between this line and the x-axis would be its angular position. This is the same as if you were using polar coordinates instead of Cartesian coordinates. By using the angular position instead of x and y coordinates, I can still map out the motion, but I don’t have to worry about the orbital size. Then I can see if different orbital distances have different orbital speeds.
“Mom, are we OK?”
How a Burst of Light in the Sky Illuminated Something Primal
by Brooke Jarvis
At around 9 o’clock on the night of March 25, the sky above my house in Seattle lit up with an astonishing display. I know this not because I happened to see it — I was inside, as I am too often, working at my computer — but because my Twitter feed was suddenly full of different versions of the same, uncanny video. The earliest clips captured what looked like a single streak of light, fracturing outward into a shimmering cascade. What came next looked like the world’s largest and longest-lasting firework, or a huge shower of comets hitting all at once, or a waterfall of light falling sideways.
It was golden, spectacular, alarming, otherworldly, indecipherable, unknown. While the cameras rolled, I could hear the voices of the people pointing them upward. Again and again, in tones ranging from rapturous to fearful (and using a variety of expletives, depending on the personality of the videographer), they looked to the sky and asked, “What is that?”
Machiavelli
The Florentine
The man who taught rulers how to rule.
One method of torture used in Florentine jails during the glorious days of the Renaissance was the strappado: a prisoner was hoisted into the air by a rope attached to his wrists, which had been tied behind his back, and then suddenly dropped toward the floor as many times as it took to get him to confess. Since the procedure usually dislocated the shoulders, tore the muscles, and rendered one or both arms useless, it is remarkable that Niccolò Machiavelli, after reportedly undergoing six such “drops,” asked for pen and paper and began to write. Machiavelli had nothing to confess. Although his name had been found on an incriminating list, he had played no part in a failed conspiracy to murder the city’s newly restored Medici rulers. (Some said that it was Giuliano de’ Medici who had been targeted, others that it was his brother Cardinal Giovanni.) He had been imprisoned for almost two weeks when, in February, 1513, in a desperate bid for pardon, he wrote a pair of sonnets addressed to the “Magnificent Giuliano,” mixing pathos with audacity and apparently inextinguishable wit. “I have on my legs, Giuliano, a pair of shackles,” he began, and went on to report that the lice on the walls of his cell were as big as butterflies, and that the noise of keys and padlocks boomed around him like Jove’s thunderbolts. Perhaps worried that the poems would not impress, he announced that the muse he had summoned had hit him in the face rather than render her services to a man who was chained up like a lunatic. To the heir of a family that prided itself on its artistic patronage, he submitted the outraged complaint “This is the way poets are treated!”
da Vinci
Biographer Walter Isaacson Gives AD an Exclusive Interview on Leonardo da Vinci
On the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, AD speaks with Walter Isaacson on the innovator’s best creations, what he might be designing today, and more
By Nick Mafi
There is perhaps no one more fascinating in history than Leonardo da Vinci—or more elusive. Leonardo left us no real diary of his personal experiences. Sure, there are thousands of pages from his legendary notebooks, but between those covers were no accounts of his upbringing, or the life he led in his later years. Instead, we see a mind at work in the moment, unconcerned with the ways in which history would remember him. In the more than 7,000 remaining pages of his notebooks, there are casual doodles next to precise anatomical drawings, models for new weapons alongside a sketch of how a fetus is positioned within a womb, portraits or geometric patterns coupled with proposals for city redesigns. And it’s because of this restless search for knowledge that Leonardo has become known as the quintessential genius, a man who likely made the most significant link between science and the humanities.
Society’s fascination with Leonardo seems to have grown with each passing generation. Every year there seems to be a new revelation about his life as biographers have pursued the clues Leonardo left us: He was a vegetarian, ambidextrous, bisexual, unfazed by deadlines, etcetera. Which is why so many rushed to read the most recent biography about Leonardo, courtesy of master biographer Walter Isaacson, who has previously written about other luminaries: Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs (who handpicked Isaacson to write his biography).
3BlackDot & BavaMedia
Digital Studio 3BlackDot Inks Deal With Management Firm BavaMedia (Exclusive)
The Los Angeles-based company will provide content services to Bava’s talent roster, comprised of live-streamers and YouTube personalities.
Entertainment studio 3BlackDot has signed a one-year partnership with gaming talent management company BavaMedia.
The exclusive deal will see the Los Angeles-based company provide BavaMedia’s talent — comprised of live-streamers and YouTube personalities — with content-related services such as brand partnerships and original programming deals, as well as e-commerce opportunities designed to expand their potential for revenue in the marketplace.
BavaMedia’s talent roster includes YouTuber GhostNinja, who has over 4 million subscribers on the video-sharing platform; and PackAPuncher, who is nearing 3 million; as well as Bucks, FreshPanda, Ahrora and Nerpah, whose YouTube subscriber counts are also climbing.
The Long-tail Rising
What Year Is It? Oldies Take Up 8 of the Top 20 on iTunes Including 1994 “Zombie” and 1970 “Spirit in the Sky”
What year is it again? While Lil Nas X’s “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” is number 1, and Justin Bieber is in the top 10, the iTunes chart continues to be rife with Oldies. Oldies!
It’s comfort food for the pandemic, I guess.
On the iTunes Top 20, 8 of the entries are oldies but goodies. They include Norman Greenbaum’s unintentionally spiritual “Spirit in the Sky” from 1970 and the Cranberries’ “Zombie” from 1994. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” a song with with 9 lives, is number 4. The late 70s hit already had a massive run on the charts last year after going viral from a fan video. “Dreams” won’t go away.
Critic Declares Warhol Not Lame
Warhol a Lame Copier? The Judges Who Said So Are Sadly Mistaken.
An appeals court ruled that Andy Warhol violated a photographer’s copyright by appropriating her image for a silk-screen he did in 1984. Our critic disagrees.
By Blake Gopnik
A few years back, a bevy of art critics declared that Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 sculpture called “Fountain” — a store-bought urinal he had presented, unchanged, as art — was the most influential work of the 20th century. Andy Warhol’s 1964 Brillo Boxes — copies of scouring-pad cartons presented as art — could easily have come a close second. The philosopher Arthur Danto built an illustrious career, and a whole school of thought, around the importance of those boxes to understanding the very nature of artworks.
Last month, three federal appellate judges in Manhattan decided they knew more about art than any old critic or philosopher: Whether they quite meant to or not, their ruling had the effect of declaring that the landmark inventions of Duchamp and Warhol — the “appropriation” they practiced, to use the term of art — were not worthy of the legal protection that other creativity is given under copyright law.
Giant Crab Radio
Mysterious Radio Blasts From Space Just Got a Whole Lot Weirder, Somehow
Scientists discovered that so-called “giant radio pulses” coincide with X-rays, suggesting they are hundreds of times more energetic than previously thought.
In the year 1054, skywatchers in China and Japan witnessed light from an exploding star reach Earth, creating a dazzling bright spot in the sky. More than a millennium later, scientists have now revealed amazing new details about the powerful and unexplained radio signals that eerily emanate from the remains of this ancient supernova.
For years, scientists have been baffled by extremely loud radio signals, known as giant radio pulses (GRPs), that can be traced to a special type of dead star known as a pulsar. Pulsars are compact, rapidly rotating remnants of supernovae that get their name from the clockwork pulses of radiation they emit from their poles, which have made them useful natural timepieces for astronomers who use their regular bursts to measure other celestial phenomena.
Almost da Vinci
World’s priciest painting not a full da Vinci, claims doc
A French documentary has cast fresh doubts over the world’s most expensive painting, the “Salvator Mundi” credited to Leonardo da Vinci, revealing a resulting diplomatic tussle between France and its Saudi owner.
The painting of Jesus Christ, nicknamed the “male Mona Lisa”, was sold at a 2017 Christies auction in New York for a record $450 million.
Its secret buyer was later revealed to be Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, though this is still denied in Riyadh.
Vampire Valley
Can Blood from Young People Slow Aging? Silicon Valley Has Bet Billions It Will
BY ADAM PIORE
The Spanish firm Grifols helped set off a kerfuffle last year when it, along with other firms, offered nearly double the going price for blood donations for a COVID-19 treatment trial. Brigham Young University in Idaho had to threaten some enterprising students with suspension to keep them from intentionally trying to contract COVID-19. The trial failed, however, and now the Barcelona-based firm is hoping to extract something far more valuable from the plasma of young volunteers: a set of microscopic molecules that could reverse the process of aging itself.
Earlier this year, Grifols closed on a $146 million-deal to buy Alkahest, a company founded by Stanford University neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, who, along with Saul Villeda, revealed in scientific papers published in 2011 and 2014 that the blood from young mice had seemingly miraculous restorative effects on the brains of elderly mice. The discovery adds to a hot area of inquiry called geroscience that “seeks to understand molecular and cellular mechanisms that make aging a major risk factor and driver of common chronic conditions and diseases of older adulthood,” according to the National Institutes of Health. In the last six years, Alkahest has identified more than 8,000 proteins in the blood that show potential promise as therapies. Its efforts and those of Grifols have resulted in at least six phase 2 trials completed or underway to treat a wide range of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Alkahest and a growing number of other geroscience health startups signal a change in thinking about some of the most intractable diseases facing humankind. Rather than focusing solely on the etiology of individual diseases like heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and arthritis—or, for that matter, COVID-19—geroscientists are trying to understand how these diseases relate to the single largest risk factor of all: human aging. Their goal is to hack the process of aging itself and, in the process, delay or stave off the onset of many of the diseases most associated with growing old.
Baby Satting
Satellite technology puts into orbit swarms of spacecraft no bigger than a loaf of bread
Christian Davenport, The Washington Post
The avalanche was a stunning disaster, 247 million cubic feet of glacial ice and snow hurtling down the Tibetan mountain range at 185 mph. Nine people and scores of animals were killed in an event that startled scientists around the world.
As they researched why the avalanche occurred with such force, researchers studying climate change pored over images taken in the days and weeks before and saw that ominous cracks had begun to form in the ice and snow. Then, scanning photos of a nearby glacier, they noticed similar crevasses forming, touching off a scramble to warn local authorities that it was also about to come crashing down.
The images of the glaciers came from a constellation of satellites no bigger than a shoe box, in orbit 280 miles up. Operated by San Francisco-based company Planet, the satellites, called Doves, weigh just over 10 pounds each and fly in “flocks” that today include 175 satellites. If one fails, the company replaces it, and as better batteries, solar arrays and cameras become available, the company updates its satellites the way Apple unveils a new iPhone.
A Fifth Force
Muons: ‘Strong’ evidence found for a new force of nature
By Pallab Ghosh
IMAGE COPYRIGHTREIDAR HAHN / FERMILAB
From sticking a magnet on a fridge door to throwing a ball into a basketball hoop, the forces of physics are at play in every moment of our lives.
All of the forces we experience every day can be reduced to just four categories: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force.
Now, physicists say they have found possible signs of a fifth fundamental force of nature.
The findings come from research carried out at a laboratory near Chicago.
The four fundamental forces govern how all the objects and particles in the Universe interact with each other.
For example, gravity makes objects fall to the ground, and heavy objects behave as if they are glued to the floor.
The UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) said the result “provides strong evidence for the existence of an undiscovered sub-atomic particle or new force”.
Wheelmaker
Who Invented the Wheel? And How Did They Do It?
The wagon—and the wagon wheel—could not have been put together in stages. Either it works, or it doesn’t. And it enabled humans to spread rapidly into huge parts of the world.
by CODY CASSIDY
ILLUSTRATION: CASEY CHIN
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of years before the invention of the wheel, some unlucky hominin stepped on a loose rock or unstable log and—just before they cracked their skull—discovered that a round object reduces friction with the ground.
The inevitability of this moment of clarity explains the ancient ubiquity of rollers, which are simply logs put underneath heavy objects. The Egyptians and the Mesopotamians used them to build their pyramids and roll their heavy equipment, and the Polynesians to move the stone moai statues on Easter Island. But rollers aren’t terribly efficient, because they have to be replaced as they roll forward, and even if they’re pinned underneath, friction makes them horribly difficult to move. The solution—and the stroke of brilliance—was the axle. Yet despite the roller’s antiquity, it doesn’t appear that anyone, anywhere, discovered the wheel and axle until an ingenious potter approximately 6,000 years ago.
The Death Hole
A Visit to the World’s Deadliest Dive Site
It doesn’t have the nicest coral formations nor the most fish. But the Blue Hole in the Gulf of Aqaba is a magnet for divers, primarily because of its reputation. Dozens of adventurers have lost their lives here over the years and, when they do, Tarek Omar pulls them back to the surface.
by Von Maik Großekathöfer
Tarek Omar says that he doesn’t know exactly how many bodies he has recovered. “I stopped counting at some point,” he says. But he can still remember the names of the first two he pulled up from the depths of the Red Sea, bringing them back onto the Egyptian shore.
“They were Conor O’Regan and Martin Gara. Irish. They were considered cautious divers. Both died here on Nov. 19, 1997. They were only 22 and 23. Sad.”
Omar is sitting under an awning on the edge of the desert, drinking tea with milk and looking out over the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba, which wash against the east coast of the Sinai. The nearest settlement, the resort town of Dahab, is 10 kilometers (six miles) to the south.
“I found the bodies at a depth of 102 meters (335 feet),” says Omar. “They were holding each other in an embrace. This is how it must have happened: One of them had problems and kept sinking deeper down. The other wanted to help him. And then both of them lost consciousness. What can you do? Their memorial stone is up there.”
The Cetaceans Are Coming! The Cetaceans Are Coming!
Video shows 1,000-dolphin ‘stampede’ off California coast
‘Super-pod,’ ‘mega-pod’ or a ‘dolphin stampede,’ whatever you want to call it, the sight of 1,000 dolphins swimming alongside you is a rare and mesmerizing spectacle.
Tourists on a charter boat off Dana Point in Orange County were treated to that very sight for four hours last week, and the footage released of the marvel is breathtaking.
The Invisible NFT
People’s Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing. This Is Why
“There was no history of my ever purchasing it, or ever owning it,” said one confused NFT buyer. “Now there’s nothing. My money’s gone.”
By Ben Munster
Last month, Tom Kuennen, a property manager from Ontario, coughed up $500 worth of cryptocurrency for a JPEG of an Elon Musk-themed “Moon Ticket” from DarpaLabs, an anonymous digital art collective. He purchased it through the marketplace OpenSea, one of the largest vendors of so-called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, in the hopes of reselling it for a profit.
“It’s like a casino,” he said in an interview. “If it goes up 100 times you resell it, if it doesn’t, well, you don’t tell anyone.”
He never got the chance to find out. A week later, he opened up his digital “wallet,” where the artwork would supposedly be available, and was faced with an ominous banner reading, “This page has gone off grid. We’ve got a 404 error and explored deep and wide, but we can’t find the page you’re looking for.”
Alien Talk
Alien Languages May Not Be Entirely Alien to Us
Evolution should favor some universal traits in the emergence of any form of communication on any planet
By Arik Kershenbaum
Human contact with alien civilizations may be more likely than we think. A recent NASA study estimated that there should be at least four habitable planets (and probably more) within about 32 light years of Earth—a cosmic stone’s throw away. Those planets could just now be receiving (albeit faintly) our television broadcasts of the 1989 inauguration of President George H.W. Bush. But would aliens understand those broadcasts? Would we understand aliens? Could we ever interpret their languages?
The 2016 movie “Arrival” portrayed scientists frantically scrambling to decode an alien language. Although the on-screen aliens communicated—and even thought—in a completely different way from humans, the hero played by Amy Adams of course eventually succeeded. But off-screen, alien language may be so, well, alien that we could never understand anything about it. How do we approach dealing with something so completely unknown that it may also be completely different from anything we might expect?
In fact, questions about the nature of possible alien languages are tractable. Language remains the lone thing that appears to separate humans from other animals on Earth. The comparison of human language with animal communication can help, should we ever frantically need to decode an alien signal. After all, aliens will have evolved their language on a planet that is, like Earth, also full of non-linguistic species. But what really is the difference between language and non-language?
Blog University
Death By Giant Vending Machine
Death of a Car Salesman: How Soon Will We All Be Buying Our Cars Online?
Carvana — one of the tech world’s biggest pandemic winners — is applying lessons from Tesla and Amazon in the used-car market
BY ALEX LAUER
You probably know Carvana for their car vending machines, but they’ve got much bigger plans. Gabe Serrano for InsideHook/Carvana/Getty
In the history books, the car story of the pandemic will be, without a doubt, Tesla. Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker captured the attention of financial leaders, other automakers and the general public due to the company’s meteoric stock market rise (as well as the CEO’s dangerous, brainless Twitter rhetoric). When we tried to figure out how a relatively small automaker became the most valuable in the world, one expert summed it up like this: Tesla is not a traditional car manufacturer, it’s a tech company, and as such it has much greater potential.
Carvana certainly isn’t as sexy as Tesla, but it’s the other car story you need to know from the pandemic, one with potentially more immediate impacts on your life. And it has many of the same hallmarks: the company’s business model seems simple — an online used car retailer you probably know from their distinctive “vending machines” — but it’s their proprietary tech that’s important. They’ve gained prominence in a short time, becoming the second largest used car retailer in the U.S. in eight years, and the stock price has been on a tear this year, hitting a high in March 2021 that was almost triple the company’s high before the pandemic was declared.
It May Never End
A Year Into Remote Work, No One Knows When to Stop Working Anymore
Workers are exhausted from nonstop working from home; many managers want to get everyone off the treadmill and breathing again
By Chip Cutter
The daily alarm Katie Lipp sets isn’t meant to wake her up. It reminds her to go to bed.
The employment attorney in Fairfax, Va., said she has tried a range of techniques to set boundaries while working long days from home running her law practice during the pandemic. Few measures work as well as the 9:45 p.m. alarm she started setting last month, though she admits to snoozing it occasionally to fire out one last email.
“You never feel like what you’re doing is good enough, so you get stuck in a trap of overworking,” Ms. Lipp, the mother of a 5-year-old, said. “Sleep is the difference. If I get like eight to nine hours, I can take on the world. If I have six hours of sleep, it’s like the walking dead.”
A year into the Covid-19 era, many can relate. Employees say work-life boundaries blurred, then vanished, as waking life came to mean “always on” at work. Experts warn that working around the clock—while slipping in meals, helping with homework and grabbing a few moments with a partner—isn’t sustainable, and employers from banking giant Citigroup Inc. to the software company Pegasystems Inc., are trying ways to get staff to dial back.
Warhol Loses
US court sides with photographer in fight over Warhol art
By LARRY NEUMEISTER
NEW YORK (AP) — A U.S. appeals court sided with a photographer Friday in a copyright dispute over how a foundation has marketed a series of Andy Warhol works of art based on one of her pictures of Prince.
The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the artwork created by Warhol before his 1987 death was not transformative and could not overcome copyright obligations to photographer Lynn Goldsmith. It returned the case to a lower court for further proceedings.
In a statement, Goldsmith said she was grateful to the outcome in the 4-year-old fight initiated by a lawsuit from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She said the foundation wanted to “use my photograph without asking my permission or paying me anything for my work.”
Beverly Cleary Gone
Beverly Cleary, beloved and prolific author of children’s books, dies at 104
By VALERIE J. NELSON
With witty yet economic prose and a gift for recalling the inner emotions of childhood, Beverly Cleary wove timeless tales that took young readers back to the Portland, Ore., of her youth.
Her stories served as a collective touchstone for the childhoods of many baby boomers, and succeeding generations, who saw themselves in the pages of her work.
Cleary died Thursday in Carmel, where she had lived since the 1960s. She was 104.
The grande dame of children’s literature, she wrote both humorously and realistically about the anxieties of childhood in such enduringly popular books as “Henry Huggins” and “Beezus and Ramona.”
The Good Ol’ Days of Movies and Mosquitoes
The 25 Most Charming Drive-In Movie Theaters Left in America
Forget Netflix, of the roughly 350 remaining drive-in theaters in the U.S., these establishments are quintessential Americana
When it comes to midcentury design, boomerang tables and walnut credenzas get all the love. But what about drive-in movie theaters? Although many succumbed to the popularity of indoor cinemas, followed by the rise of Netflix, about 350 remain in operation today, a steep dive from the 4,000 or so that once served as after-dark entertainment during summer. One is even opening in Nashville in next month or so: the August Moon Drive-In, a re-creation of a 1960s drive-in—complete with burgers, shakes, and classic cars—as well as the largest non-IMAX theater in the country. From New York’s Hudson Valley to Southern California, here are 25 of the most charming from coast to coast, folding in ambiance and décor from a bygone era (complete with vintage cars). Bring a soft blanket, lawn chairs, and bug spray, plus some cash for popcorn, and you’ve got all the goods for the perfect summer evening.
Just In Time Disaster
Shipping losses mount from cargo vessel stuck in Suez Canal
By JON GAMBRELL and SAMY MAGDY
ISMAILIA, Egypt (AP) — Dredgers, tugboats and even a backhoe failed to free a giant cargo ship wedged in Egypt’s Suez Canal on Thursday. More than 150 vessels are now backed up, with hundreds more headed to the vital waterway, and losses to global shipping are mounting.
The skyscraper-sized Ever Given, carrying cargo between Asia and Europe, ran aground Tuesday in the narrow, man-made canal dividing continental Africa from the Sinai Peninsula. Even helped by high tides, authorities have been unable to push the Panama-flagged container vessel aside, and they are looking for new ideas to free it.
Madnfts In The Housing Market
World’s first digital NFT house sells for $500,000
by Lianne Kolirin
Having spent so much time at home over the last year, many people are craving a change in their surroundings. But if a coat of paint or some creative renovations fail to do the trick, there is now a more extreme alternative: The digital house. Mars House, the world’s first digital NFT (non-fungible token) home, has recently sold for more than $500,000.
NFTs have made headlines recently, allowing digital art and other musings such as drawings or music to be sold online.An NFT is a unique digital token which effectively verifies authenticity and ownership. It is encrypted with the artist’s signature on the blockchain, a digital ledger used in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.
The new owner paid digital artist Krista Kim 288 Ether — a cryptocurrency that is equivalent to $514,557.79 — for the virtual property. In exchange, the buyer will receive 3D files to upload to his or her “Metaverse.”Metaverse is a virtual extension of our world, Kim told CNN Tuesday, where plots of virtual land are purchased and traded, and digital homes and business are built.
1925
Was 1925 Literary Modernism’s Most Important Year?
By Ben Libman
“An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking & ultimately nauseating.” So goes Virginia Woolf’s well-known complaint about “Ulysses,” scribbled into her diary before she had finished reading it. Her disparagement is catnip to those many critics who like to view “Mrs. Dalloway” — that other uber-famous, if more lapidary, modernist novel that spans the course of a single day — as Woolf’s rejoinder to Joyce. More than that, though, it tells us something important about our literary history. Nineteen twenty-two, the year of “Ulysses,” may well be ground zero for the explosion of modernism in literature. But the resultant shock wave is better captured by another year: 1925, that of “Mrs. Dalloway” and several other works, all now in the spotlight in 2021, as they emerge from under copyright.
If many an English-majored ear perks up at the sound of “1922,” it’s mostly because of the two somewhat ornery men who published their masterpieces that year: Joyce and T. S. Eliot. “Ulysses” and “The Waste Land” are taught everywhere and almost without exception as “signifying a definitive break in literary history,” to quote the critic Michael North from his book “Reading 1922.” Both the novel and the poem are notoriously challenging, obscurely allusive and highly uneasy about their modern time and the rubble of tradition astride which it stood. Both are also often distressing, egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and (depending on one’s mood) ultimately nauseating. And it is precisely these qualities that account for their hold on our literary imagination. They represent everything that literary modernism is meant to: rupture, difficulty and, of course, making it new.
Yet 1925 is arguably the more important date in modernism’s development, the year that it went mainstream, as embodied by four books whose influence continues to shape fiction today: Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” Ernest Hemingway’s debut story collection, “In Our Time,” John Dos Passos’ “Manhattan Transfer” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Compared with the masterpieces of 1922, these books — all slated for reissue in new editions this year — entered our culture in relatively unspectacular fashion. But it’s precisely their unassuming guise that allowed them, by osmosis rather than disruption, to diffuse their modernist conceits throughout the literary field, ensuring their widespread adoption.
Mouse Plague in Oz
‘You can’t escape the smell’: mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia
Locals who have endured months of mice and rats getting into their houses, stores and cars are praying heavy rain will help wipe them out
Warning: graphic images may disturb some readers
Drought, fire, the Covid-19 pestilence and an all-consuming plague of mice. Rural New South Wales has faced just about every biblical challenge nature has to offer in the last few years, but now it is praying for another – an almighty flood to drown the mice in their burrows and cleanse the blighted land of the rodents. Or some very heavy rain, at least.
It seems everyone in the rural towns of north-west NSW and southern Queensland has their own mouse war story. In posts online, they detail waking up to mouse droppings on their pillows or watching the ground move at night as hundreds of thousands of rodents flee from torchlight beams.
Lisa Gore from Toowoomba told Guardian Australia her friend stripped the fabric of her armchair when it began to smell, only to find a nest of baby mice in the stuffing.
Dubbo resident Karen Fox walked out of the shower on Friday morning to see a mouse staring at her from the ceiling vent. There’s nothing she can do, she says, because the stores are sold out of traps.
The COVID Seas
from The Daily Beast via Yahoo! News
Coronavirus Nightmare at Sea for the World’s Most Essential Workers
by Charissa Isidro
“We were out of sight and out of mind,” says Second Officer Jaisal Bhati. “Everybody forgot about us (and) everyone turned a blind eye.” Behind the scenes of the coronavirus pandemic, an invisible workforce of about one million seafarers has continued to toil on bulk carriers, oil tankers, fishing vessels, cruise ships, and more. These people have crisscrossed the world, many working seven-day weeks with no holidays or even sick days delivering medicines, grain, coal, fuel—and now vaccines. “They wanted our services but they did not want us.”
Even in normal circumstances, weathering the perilous seas with limited personnel is a tough, dangerous job. A regular cargo ship might be crewed by only 20 people, each with designated duties—a ship at sea, like a plane in the air, requires constant attention so one cannot simply “down tools” and leave it unattended without risking catastrophe. On top of their daily tasks, each seafarer has emergency responsibilities for fire, health, defense, come what may. There are no separate firemen, doctors, or policemen on board. It’s just the crew, where every worker is essential and any delay is unthinkable.
Big Brother Pollock
Jackson Pollock’s Older Brother Charles Was the Family’s First Artist. Now, an Exhibition Brings Their Work Together for the First Time
Their careers diverged, but the brothers remained devoted to each other.
by Katie White
Did Jackson Pollock become an artist because he was copycatting his older brother? Believe it or not, the pugnacious Abstract Expressionist was the baby brother in his family—the youngest of five sons born to Leroy and Stella Pollock. What’s more, he wasn’t his family’s first artist. That title belonged to Charles, the eldest of the Pollock brood and a decade Jackson’s senior.
“Charles started this whole damn thing,” said Sanford McCoy, the Pollocks’ middle brother, once in an interview. “Charles was the fellow who had the intellectual curiosity all along.”
Now, “Charles and Jackson Pollock” an exhibition at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, Florida, (through March 28) marks the first time that works by the two brothers have been shown side by side.