Read The Classics!
WHAT THE FRESHMAN CLASS NEEDS TO READ
It is no small part of a liberal education to show students the broad range of meaningful lives they might aspire to lead.
By Niall Ferguson and Jacob Howland
You’re in. You’ve been admitted. And soon your parents will drop you off at your new university. It’s thrilling. It’s daunting. But what will you actually be studying in your freshman year?
All universities claim to provide some kind of intellectual foundation for their students. Sadly, the reality of what freshmen and sophomores are required to study usually belies the admissions-office propaganda.
In our view, liberal education requires that students, like rowers, face backward in order to move forward. If they are to become active and reflective individuals, they must learn to regard the past not merely as the crime scene of bygone ages, but as the record of human possibilities—an always unfinished tapestry of admirable and shameful lives, noble and base deeds. They must develop an ear for the English language and the language of ancestral wisdom as well as the various languages of intellectual inquiry, including mathematics. They need a good grasp of modern statistical methods. But they must also allow themselves to be inwardly formed and cultivated by the classics—what the English critic Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.”
A classic is an exemplary instance, a work with imperishable cultural vitality. The Hebrew Bible is a classic, as is Homer’s Iliad. They are taproots of the great branching oak of Western civilization. A liberal education must begin at the beginning, where strange, beguiling voices of the distant past speak with authority of what it means to be human.
Oops!
After 4-year-old accidentally smashes ancient jar, museum invites him back.
The 3,500-year-old artifact, on display in a museum in Haifa, Israel, predated the Biblical kings Solomon and David.
By Charlotte Kwan
A 4-year-old accidentally knocked over and shattered a 3,500-year-old Bronze Age jar during a visit to the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa in Israel on Friday.
The museum said the artifact, which is dated from 2200 to 1500 B.C.E., was designed to store and transport goods, such as olive oil and wine, and was characteristic of the ancient Canaan region. The jar, the museum said in a statement, predated the Biblical kingsSolomon and David.
Though similar jars have been discovered in archaeological excavations, many are found in pieces or incomplete, making this jar rare for having been unearthed intact, and for its size.
Laura Dern Dissed
Laura Dern was forced to quit college over ‘Blue Velvet’: “You are no longer welcome”
“Pisses me off”
Laura Dern has revealed she was forced to drop out of college after landing the role of Sandy Williams in David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet.
Appearing on a recent episode of Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, Dern remembered being told she would no longer be welcome at UCLA film school if she took the part.
“I was 17, so excited to get into UCLA,” Dern said. “I was there for two days, and I had auditioned and got offered the role in Blue Velvet.”
Dean said she was “ecstatic” about landing the role as she “worshiped” Lynch, who had already won an Oscar for directing 1980’s The Elephant Man. However, when she went to ask to head of her college department about getting a leave of absence, she was told “absolutely not”.
Rawdogging
Young Men Have Invented a New Way to Defeat Themselves
Rawdogging is a search for purity that cannot be achieved.
By Ian Bogost
It was time to buckle up and face the void. I was going to “rawdog” this flight, a new trend in extreme air travel. Rawdoggers, according to the dubious lore of social-media virality, overcome the longest of long-haul flights (New York to Hong Kong, say, or London to Sydney) by means of nihilism. They claim to spend the entire journey, perhaps as many as 18 hours, doing nothing other than staring at the flight map on the seat-back screen—no movies, no books, and, for the rawdoggiest, not even any meals.
My flight was an embarrassingly modest 78 minutes long, but I didn’t last even 15. A purebred rawdogger might call me weak—unable to endure even the length of one Perfect Strangers before leaning on the artificial crutch of Spotify downloads, Fast & Furious films streamed via in-flight entertainment, young-adult fiction inhaled from an e-book reader, the lure of laptop work, or the foaming head of a Diet Coke poured from the rolling cart. Such is the sorry state of contemporary culture, they might lament, that these temptations of the flesh cannot be relinquished even temporarily.
Avoid Bad People
World’s oldest person, Maria Branyas Morera, dies at 117 in Spain
Story by Adela Suliman
She was dubbed a “supercentenarian” and the world’s oldest person. She celebrated her 117th birthday earlier this year with a small cake with candles, and credited “staying away from toxic people” among the reasons she lived so long.
María Branyas Morera an American-born Spaniard, died in her sleep this week, her family said in a post on X. Having lived to be 117 years and 168 days, she was the eighth-oldest person in history, the Guinness World Records said. The cause of her death was not made public; Guinness said that beyond hearing and mobility issues, she had no major health issues.
Branyas attributed her longevity to “luck and good genetics,” according to Guinness. She also cited “order, tranquility, good connection with family and friends, contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no regrets, lots of positivity, and staying away from toxic people.”
Why Dad Jokes Are Cool
Funny parents raise happier kids
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Perhaps “dad jokes” are more powerful (and important) than we’ve realized all along. An exciting new study for parents concludes that humor could be the missing ingredient in the recipe for effective child-rearing.
Picture this: It’s a typical weekday morning. You’re trying to get your kids ready for school, but your five-year-old is adamant about wearing her princess costume to kindergarten, while your seven-year-old has suddenly decided he’s allergic to breakfast. As the clock ticks and your blood pressure rises, you have two choices: lose your cool or find the funny. According to this groundbreaking research, choosing the latter might not only save your sanity but could also build stronger, more positive relationships with your children.
The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, reveals that a whopping 71.8% of participants agreed that humor can be an effective parenting tool. However, it’s not just about cracking jokes or pulling silly faces. The research suggests that parental humor could be a secret ingredient in fostering cognitive flexibility, relieving stress, and promoting creative problem-solving and resilience in both parents and children.
[ from StudyFinds ]
It’s All Going To End Someday
MAJOR EARTH SYSTEMS ON TRACK FOR COLLAPSE, SCIENTISTS FIND
THAT’S GONNA LEAVE A MARK.
Imagine this dire scenario: the Atlantic Ocean’s sea currents which bring warm water to Europe collapses, making large swaths of the continent as cold as the Arctic Circle.
In a grim turn, that’s just the scenario that a team of European scientists are warning about in a new study in the journal Nature Communications: that this catastrophic collapse — along with the ruination of the Amazon rainforest and the melting of polar ice — is on track to actually happen if we continue along our current path.
Specifically, the scientists say these major Earth systems, important for keeping the global climate stable for human civilization, face a 45 percent or greater chance of collapsing in the next 300 years, even if we temporarily bring back global warming below the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. Worse, the collapse may be irreversible.
[ from Futurism ]
No Cel Phones (and the kids don’t mind)
East Jackson High School students ‘relieved’ after cell phone ban
Superintendent initially expected the phone ban to result in a ‘battle,’ but found that wasn’t the case
At East Jackson High School, “engagement is up, and drama is down – exponentially” after school officials last year banned cell phones in class, according to Principal Joel Cook.
“When you take away the compulsion to address Snapchat and TikTok, kids find themselves having to concentrate and participate in some of these debates in the classroom,” he told MLive. “Students, staff and parents have appreciated it.”
The district’s PowerSchool data center shows that since school officials required students to stash their phones in their lockers during class beginning last school year, behavioral referrals have declined by 40%.
Damn these berries are good!
Why America’s Berries Have Never Tasted So Good
Driscoll’s had to figure out how to breed, produce and sell its most flavorful strawberries and raspberries. Now the strategy is starting to bear fruit.
By Ben Cohen
WATSONVILLE, Calif.—The strawberries of America’s future are as rich and juicy as the story of how they came to be.
They look resplendent. They taste like candy and fruit punch. They’re just firm enough to hold their shape when you bite into one and soft enough that it will melt in your mouth. They’re also related to a blueberry halfway across the world that was nearly lost to history.
It’s a typically cool morning in Northern California, before the fog makes way for yet another sunny day, when Soren Bjorn grabs, twists and snaps a perfectly ripe strawberry right off the plant. As the chief executive of Driscoll’s, the world’s largest berry company, he knows everything about the luscious hunk of fruit in his hands—and he knows that it’s something of a miracle.
Every year, the company develops and studies 125,000 strawberry varieties in search of the handful that Driscoll’s will sell across the country and around the world. But until recently, one type of strawberry never actually made it to the grocery store.
“We threw out the absolute sweetest, best-tasting berries that we had in our whole gene pool,” Bjorn said.
Cooling Old Style
This Ancient Technology Is Helping Millions Stay Cool
Cheap, low-energy evaporative cooling devices are keeping water, food, people, and even whole buildings cool across India.
by NADEEM SARWAR & SHREYA FOTEDAR
This summer, India has endured possibly its worst ever heatwave. The capital, Delhi, logged a record high of 52.9 degrees Celsius (127 degrees Fahrenheit) on May 29, while India’s northern states have baked at sustained temperatures of more than 42 degrees during the daytime. Only now, as the rainy season starts, are temperatures cooling. But in the coming years, things will only get worse.
For many, respite from the relentless heat has come from an improbable source: the earth. Special pots made from clay, when combined with water, can be used to chill drinking water and the surrounding air. They are helping millions of households that don’t have air conditioning and refrigerators stay cool. Companies are also creating earthen building materials that are better at keeping out heat than bricks and mortar, drawing on knowledge that has helped keep people cool for thousands of years.
“We have lost track of traditional systems that have worked for us in the past,” says Monish Siripurapu, the founder of CoolAnt. His company is working to revive these preindustrial cooling techniques at scale, creating clay-based cladding and cooling units that can be installed in both homes and businesses.
The Original Macro
The Puzzle of How Large-Scale Order Emerges in Complex Systems
With a new framework, researchers believe they could be close to explaining how regularities emerge on macro scales out of systems made up of uncountable constituent parts.
by Philip Ball
THE ORIGINAL VERSION of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.
A few centuries ago, the swirling polychromatic chaos of Jupiter’s atmosphere spawned the immense vortex that we call the Great Red Spot.
From the frantic firing of billions of neurons in your brain comes your unique and coherent experience of reading these words.
As pedestrians each try to weave their path on a crowded sidewalk, they begin to follow one another, forming streams that no one ordained or consciously chose.
The world is full of such emergent phenomena: large-scale patterns and organization arising from innumerable interactions between component parts. And yet there is no agreed scientific theory to explain emergence. Loosely, the behavior of a complex system might be considered emergent if it can’t be predicted from the properties of the parts alone. But when will such large-scale structures and patterns arise, and what’s the criterion for when a phenomenon is emergent and when it isn’t? Confusion has reigned. “It’s just a muddle,” said Jim Crutchfield, a physicist at the University of California, Davis.
“Philosophers have long been arguing about emergence, and going round in circles,” said Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in England. The problem, according to Seth, is that we haven’t had the right tools—“not only the tools for analysis, but the tools for thinking. Having measures and theories of emergence would not only be something we can throw at data but would also be tools that can help us think about these systems in a richer way.”
Dr. Ruth Gone
Ruth Westheimer, the Sex Guru Known as Dr. Ruth, Dies at 96
Ruth Westheimer, the grandmotherly psychologist who as “Dr. Ruth” became America’s best-known sex counselor with her frank, funny radio and television programs, died on Friday at her home in New York City. She was 96.
Dr. Westheimer was in her 50s when she first went on the air in 1980, answering listeners’ mailed-in questions about sex and relationships on the radio station WYNY in New York. The show, called “Sexually Speaking,” was only a 15-minute segment heard after midnight on Sundays. But it was such a hit that she quickly became a national media celebrity and a one-woman business conglomerate.
At her most popular, in the 1980s, she had syndicated live call-in shows on radio and television, wrote a column for Playgirl magazine, lent her name to a board game and its computer version, and began rolling out guidebooks on sexuality that covered the field from educating the young to recharging the old. College students loved her; campus speaking appearances alone brought in a substantial income. She appeared in ads for cars, soft drinks, shampoo, typewriters and condoms.
Mystery Sleepidemic
An epidemic caused people to fall asleep for months – we still don’t know why
One hundred years ago, across the world, people were falling asleep uncontrollably.
Not from a hard day’s work or a late night, but a disease known as ‘sleepy sickness’.
Victims fell into a slumber so deep that those who caught it often didn’t wake for weeks, or even months, at a time. It was also deadly, killing 30 to 40% of those affected, usually from respiratory failure.
An epidemic, it emerged from northern France in 1916, spreading first across Europe, and then to North America, Central America and India, before disappearing almost entirely by 1930.
Dietrich’s Throw
Shelley Duvall At Peace
Shelley Duvall, star of ‘The Shining,’ ‘Nashville,’ dies at 75
She starred in several Robert Altman films, including “Thieves Like Us,” “Nashville, “Popeye,” “Three Women” and “McCabe & Ms. Miller”
By Jake Coyle | Associated Press
Shelley Duvall, the intrepid, Texas-born movie star whose wide-eyed, winsome presence was a mainstay in the films of Robert Altman and who co-starred in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” has died. She was 75.
Duvall died Thursday in her sleep at her home in Blanco, Texas, her longtime partner, Dan Gilroy, announced. The cause was complications of diabetes, said her friend, the publicist Gary Springer.
“My dear, sweet, wonderful life, partner, and friend left us last night,” Gilroy said in a statement. “Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away beautiful Shelley.”
Duvall was attending junior college in Texas when Altman’s crew members, preparing to film “Brewster McCloud,” encountered her as at a party in Houston in 1970. They introduced her to the director, who cast her “Brewster McCloud” and made her his protege.
Duvall would go on to appear in Altman films including “Thieves Like Us,” “Nashville, “Popeye,” “Three Women” and “McCabe & Ms. Miller.”
“He offers me damn good roles,” Duvall told The New York Times in 1977. “None of them have been alike. He has a great confidence in me, and a trust and respect for me, and he doesn’t put any restrictions on me or intimidate me, and I love him. I remember the first advice he ever gave me: ‘Don’t take yourself seriously.’”
Dead Alive Again
How Dead & Company found new life at the Las Vegas Sphere
By Mikael Wood, Pop Music Critic
LAS VEGAS —
Four hours or so before they’re due beneath the massive wraparound video screen at Sphere, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and John Mayer amble into a backstage production office like three guys showing up — again — for the work of blowing 17,000 minds.
“Nice to meet you,” Mayer says, grinning as he extends a hand. “John Mayer, Mayer Industries.”
As original members of the Grateful Dead, guitarist Weir, 76, and percussionist Hart, 80, are jam-band royalty; Mayer, 46, is the singer and guitarist known for pop hits like “Gravity” and “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” Together they represent the nucleus of Dead & Company, which on this recent afternoon has just passed the halfway mark of a 30-date summer residency at Sphere, the state-of-the-art dome-shaped venue behind the Venetian resort on the Las Vegas Strip.
Astronaut Robots Coming
A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything From Smartphones to Missiles
Labor-intensive manufacturing has limited the use of lighter, stronger composites but that may change with emerging techniques
There have been only a handful of ages of new materials in the history of humankind—ceramics, steel and plastics come to mind—and we are now on the cusp of the next one: composites.
When we talk of composites, we’re speaking about such things as the carbon-fiber ones in wind turbines, race cars and the Boeing 787. Such materials have the advantage of being far lighter than the metal parts they typically replace, while being just as strong, and requiring fewer resources to make.
Materials scientists have had limited success making composites affordable and accessible for decades, or possibly millennia—technically, they were invented by the Mesopotamians. The labor-intensive nature of their manufacturing has made them expensive, which has limited their application to a handful of areas where their advantages outweigh their costs, such as the aerospace industry.
Now, thanks to new manufacturing techniques that can churn out composite parts quickly and cheaply, all of that is changing, and the results could be both profound and exciting.
Our Slowing Core
Earth’s core has slowed so much it’s moving backward, scientists confirm. Here’s what it could mean
By Mindy Weisberger, CNN
Deep inside Earth is a solid metal ball that rotates independently of our spinning planet, like a top whirling around inside a bigger top, shrouded in mystery.
This inner core has intrigued researchers since its discovery by Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann in 1936, and how it moves — its rotation speed and direction — has been at the center of a decades-long debate. A growing body of evidence suggests the core’s spin has changed dramatically in recent years, but scientists have remained divided over what exactly is happening — and what it means.
Part of the trouble is that Earth’s deep interior is impossible to observe or sample directly. Seismologists have gleaned information about the inner core’s motion by examining how waves from large earthquakes that ping this area behave. Variations between waves of similar strengths that passed through the core at different times enabled scientists to measure changes in the inner core’s position and calculate its spin.
First Draw
World’s oldest cave painting is at least 51,200 years old, scientists say
The cave painting in Indonesia is also the world’s oldest known evidence of storytelling in art, according to an international team of researchers who used a new dating technique.
A cave painting in Indonesia is the oldest such artwork in the world, dating back at least 51,200 years, according to an international team of researchers who say its narrative scene also makes it the world’s oldest known evidence of storytelling in art.
While it is unclear exactly what the painting depicts, it most likely shows three small human-bird hybrids surrounding a massive wild pig, “which they were probably hunting,” said Renaud Joannes-Boyau, a co-author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
It’s that storytelling that has captivated scientists.
“That is something new, something very important, something that happened much older than we thought,” said Joannes-Boyau, who is also a professor at Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia.
L’Excalibur est parti!
French ‘Excalibur’ sword vanishes after 1,300 years as the sword in the stone — literally
By Patrick Reilly
An ancient sword known as the French version of King Arthur’s legendary “Excalibur” has mysteriously vanished from the town where, according to local lore, it had remained lodged in a rock for 1,300 years.
The Durandal sword appears to have been taken by a thief from its stone in the tiny medieval town of Rocamadour, where it was one of the town’s main attractions, The Telegraph reported.
For centuries it’s been believed the sword once belonged to Roland, a semi-legendary knight who bravely fought for Charlemagne in the eighth century.
Officials in Rocamadour have launched an investigation into the disappearance of the sword, which was yanked from its spot in a cliff wall some 100 feet off the ground.
The Joy Of Shifting
Baby, Can You Drive My Car? Not If It’s a Stick Shift
Manual transmissions are increasingly rare in America, foiling teenage carjackers and frustrating valet parking lots
Mary Sampietro got the scare of her life five years ago. It left her disappointed in America’s young people.
The mental health professional was in her stick-shift 2016 Jeep Patriot in a rough neighborhood in her native Houston when she rolled down the window to smoke a cigarette. Suddenly, a teenager stuck a gun in her face, ordering her out of the car. He got in but only made it to the next traffic light before stalling the engine and running away.
“I was like ‘How can you be a carjacker and not know how to drive a manual?’”
For Sampietro, who learned to row her own gears in a 1970s Datsun pickup truck with no power steering, the skill’s increasing rarity is a frequent source of annoyance. Her husband’s career requires her to attend events with mandatory valet parking. The job often attracts college students. One particularly bad experience convinced her that they often lie about being able to handle the odd stick shift like hers.
“This young man ground my gears in a way that made me want to throw up,” she says. “I turned around and parked way down the street and walked. I did not tip.”
Happy Independence Day!
New Manu!
Manu Chao will release ‘Viva Tu,’ first new album in 17 years
Latin alt and reggae musician Manu Chao is releasing his first studio album in 17 years. The French-Spanish singer-songwriter is following 2007’s La Radiolina with Viva Tu, out this fall. Following the release of “Viva Tu,” he dropped another single from the LP, “São Paulo Motoboy.”
Though Manu Chao’s sound is upbeat and beachy, he uses this single to bring awareness to couriers in cities like São Paulo and the dangers they face daily, from traffic to the weather. Chao himself was a courier in Paris for a time. In a translated statement, Chao said, “São Paulo is a living monster. And the couriers are the blood which comes and goes through its veins, allowing the city to function.”
Viva Tu drops September 20th and will include collaborations with Willie Nelson and French R&B singer Laeti. Watch the video for “São Paulo Motoboy” below.
Robert Towne Gone
Robert Towne Dies: Oscar-Winning ‘Chinatown’ Screenwriter Was 89
Robert Towne, who won an Oscar for his Chinatown original screenplay and was nominated for his The Last Detail, Shampoo and Greystoke scripts, died Monday at his home. He was 89.
Towne also earned BAFTA, Golden Globe and WGA awards for Chinatown, the L.A.-set 1974 thriller starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It was one of three Writers Guild Awards he won during his career, along with Shampoo and the drama series Mad Men. He also was nominated for The Last Detail (1973) and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1985). He was honored with teh guild’s Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement in 1997.
Centenarian Sun Ra
The Sun Ra Arkestra’s Maestro Hits One Hundred
Marshall Allen, the musical collective’s sax-playing leader, is celebrating with a deep-spacey video installation during the Venice Biennale.
The Sun Ra Arkestra, the musical collective founded in Chicago in the mid-fifties, moved out of the Lower East Side in 1968, and wound up in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, on a very green side street along the edge of a hill that feels a million miles from anywhere. An old row house became the Sun Ra Arkestral Institute, a place to practice at all hours, in order to be ready. “One day it will happen,” Sun Ra said at the time. “It could be happening now—that a voice from another dimension will speak to earth. You might as well practice and be prepared for it.” The Arkestra practiced and eventually toured the world, the row house filling with gig posters, its plaster walls soaking up decades of music from a band that, under Sun Ra’s leadership, had set out on a course of inter-dimensional travel, using chords and time signatures and equations rather than rocket fuel. Sun Ra died in 1993, and his saxophone players replaced him as director—first John Gilmore, and then Marshall Allen, who last month turned a hundred.
Allen bounded down the stairs to greet a visitor the other day, in between birthday celebrations near and far—near being Philadelphia, where a public performance of the Arkestra was followed by a party for family and friends at a club called Solar Myth, named for a Sun Ra-ism. Across the Atlantic Ocean, during the Venice Biennale, a celebration occurred in the form of a site-specific video installation in an abandoned sixteenth-century church and hospital; it is directed by Ari Benjamin Meyers, a Berlin-based composer, who met Allen in person in 2022, in Philadelphia, and was, like a lot of people, “blown away.”
AI Michaels Born
“It Was Astonishing”: How NBC Convinced Al Michaels to Embrace His AI Voice for Olympics Coverage
The network will use an artificial clone of the legendary broadcaster’s voice to narrate its daily recaps of the summer event. “It was not only close,” he says of the technology, “it was almost 2% off perfect.”
BY TOM KLUDT
ew voices in American life are more recognizable than the one belonging to Al Michaels—play-by-play announcer for nearly a dozen Super Bowls and the source of perhaps the most famous line in sports history.
For generations of sports fans, Michaels has been a near-constant presence, providing the soundtrack of last-second field goals, ninth-inning walk-offs, and fourth-quarter buzzer-beaters. He was the voice of Monday Night Football for 20 years, then Sunday Night Football for 16. When the 1989 World Series was disrupted by an earthquake, Michaels’s voice was the one viewers heard just as the broadcast went static. And when a plucky United States hockey team pulled off an upset for the ages against the Soviet Union at the 1980 Olympics, Michaels channeled the prevailing sense of disbelief with a call as iconic as the game itself. (“Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”)
Skinbots
Robots keep getting creepier
by Jaures Yip
It’s not just nuts and bolts keeping robots together — now they can be made with living skin. Skin that can be made to smile.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo revealed on Tuesday a rather unsettling humanoid robot covered with lab-grown skin. The team said it was able to mimic human skin ligaments by bonding skin tissue to perforated 3D facial molds and 2D robots.
A press release said the team hoped the advancement would be “useful in the cosmetics industry and to help train plastic surgeons.”
While the development could prove helpful, some people online reacted to the robot’s fleshy skin and facial movements with jokes or said they found it disturbing. One person on X wrote, “You will live to see man-made made horrors beyond your comprehension.” Another said: “We don’t want this. Nobody wants this. Stop it.”
The researchers said that, unlike other materials, biological skin granted these robots self-healing capabilities without requiring triggers such as heat or pressure.
Kinky Friedman Gone
Kinky Friedman, provocative musician, author and one-time politician, dies at 79
The satirical country and western iconoclast ran for governor of Texas in 2006 with campaign slogans like “My Governor is a Jewish Cowboy.”
By Variety
Kinky Friedman, the satirical and often provocative musician, author and one-time politician, has died at the age of 79.
“Kinky Friedman stepped on a rainbow at his beloved Echo Hill surrounded by family & friends,” read a post on his social media. “Kinkster endured tremendous pain & unthinkable loss in recent years but he never lost his fighting spirit and quick wit. Kinky will live on as his books are read and his songs are sung.”
Throughout his career, Richard Samet “Kinky” Friedman developed a cult following for his unique, quirky approach to country and Western music. The self-proclaimed “governor of the heart of Texas” released a robust number of albums starting with 1973’s “Sold American,” often considered his foundational record, and in addition to touring with Bob Dylan on his “Rolling Thunder Revue,” he became the “first full-blooded Jew” to appear at the Grand Ole Opry.
Outside of his music career, Friedman was a prolific writer, penning detective novels and serving as a columnist for Texas Monthly. He dabbled in politics, running for Governor of Texas in 2006 with campaign slogans like “My Governor is a Jewish Cowboy.” In the end, he received 12.6 percent of the votes among six candidates.
Next To Heaven (Summer 2025)
Authors Equity’s First 100 Days
Since Readmagine, Authors Equity has issued a list of the first 10 authors and books it has named for publication—a list released on the new company’s 100th day in business, which may be a record for a new publishing house.
You can read the list and some of the rationale around each selection here at Authors Equity’s Substack. We’ll run through the simplest listing of books, authors, and projected publication dates here:
- This is Strategy by Seth Godin (October 22)
- Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The Expanded Edition by Joseph Nguyen (October 29)
- New book by Rachel Hollis (December)
- Superagency: Empowering Humanity in the Age of AI by Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato (January 28)
- We Hold These “Truths” by congressional staffer turned George Washington University legislative affairs professor Casey Burgat (February 4)
- Kweli Journal’s 15th Anniversary Short Story Collection (spring 2025)
- Next to Heaven by James Frey (summer 2025)
- New series from Kyle Mills (summer 2025).
- Pregnancy Personalized by Rachel Swanson (fall 2025)
Assange Down Under
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returns to Australia a free man after US legal battle ends
BY RICK RYCROFT AND ROD MCGUIRK
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to his homeland Australia aboard a charter jet and raised a celebratory clenched fist as his supporters cheered on Wednesday, hours after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that concludes a drawn-out legal saga.
Assange told Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in a phone call from the capital Canberra’s airport tarmac that Australian government intervention in the U.S. prosecution had saved his life, Assange lawyer Jennifer Robinson said.
Assange embraced his wife Stella Assange and father John Shipton who were waiting on the tarmac, but avoided media at a news conference less than than two hours after he landed.