Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Tom Danehy: Tom is worried about teenage girls and their smartphone addictions (Tucson Weekly)
The kid might get a kick out of a quote from a 16-year-old girl who said that she wished she "lived in the 'olden' days when kids hung out with friends and boys and girls went out on dates." Yeah, like a million-or 12-years ago.
Helaine Olen: CEOs don't want to be blamed for inequality - or do anything about it (Washington Post)
Don't start hailing a recent Business Roundtable statement quite yet.
Spencer Lee Lenfield: A World of Literature (Harvard Magazine)
[David Damrosch] remains confident that the study of literature has a role to play in understanding and mending the world: "Literature is not a simple mirror reflecting; rather, it refracts the culture from which it comes. But it provides a way to think deeply-it's a little bit like the slow food movement in a world of fast foods. To read deeply and attentively a rich work of literature gives us a unique way of thinking about ourselves and our place in the world."
Nell Painter: Constant Evolution (The Nation)
Romare Bearden's art.
Kristen Radtke: "Body of work: how the graphic novel became an outlet for female shame" (The Guardian)
The artform has allowed many female illustrators to confront how they see their bodies and how their bodies are seen by the man around them.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
said:
is celebrating another trip around the sun. HB, Robert!
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• Stevie Wonder's father was a joker. He told his children, who spent the early part of their life in Saginaw, Michigan, which was very cold in the winter, that Saginaw was located only 12 miles from the North Pole. Mr. Wonder said, "I believed that for a long time." Mr. Wonder himself is a joker. Although he is blind, he once told Jet magazine that he wanted to judge a beauty contest. Once, when he entered someone's living room he moved his head from side to side and said, "Wow, really nice place you got here." When he was young, his friends and family played a game with him. They would throw a coin on a table, and he would listen to it and identify it: "That's a dime" or "That's a quarter." He did have difficulty distinguishing between the sound of a nickel and the sound of a penny. When he was young, another joke he played was on his friend Dionne Warwick, who had a red dress that the Shirelles hated, so the Shirelles enlisted Mr. Wonder's help. He was able to identify her by the perfume she wore and so he would greet her. She asked him, "Hello, baby, how are you today?" He replied, "Dionne, I don't like that red dress." Ms. Warwick said, "It scared me, because I know he's blind and there's no way in the world this kid can see this dress, but if he didn't like it I'm takin' it off. I never wore that dress again. It took two or three years before the Shirelles finally broke down and told me what they'd done." Mr. Wonder once said, "Being physically blind is no crime, but being spiritually blind is a serious handicap."
• The father of piano prodigy Clara Wieck, who married composer Robert Schumann in 1840, was Frederick Wieck, and he could be a hard man to deal with. When Clara was a child, he once thought that she had played a piano piece poorly, and he tore up the music and called her "lazy, careless, disorderly, stubborn, and disobedient." He also refused to let her play her favorite pieces of music for weeks and returned the music to her only after she promised to be good. She had high standards for piano playing. When she was still a 10-year-old child but playing concerts professionally, she once was given a poor piano to play at a concert. After she had finished, the members of the audience applauded, but she stood up and told them, "Now you are clapping, and I know that I played badly." As she said that, some tears ran down her cheeks. When she was 12 years old, the famous German writer Johann von Goethe said about her, "She plays with as much strength as six boys." She was born in 1819 and lived in a sexist age. In 1879, when she was a widow, she taught at an important music conservatory in Frankfurt, whose director wrote about her, "With the exception of Madame Schumann, there is no woman and there will not be any women employed in the Conservatory. As for Madame Schumann, I count her as a man."
• When Joan Oliver Goldsmith, a volunteer singer in a chorus, was around seven years old, her younger sister made a 25-cent bet with her that she would not be able to go an entire day without singing. (In 1958, 25 cents would buy two Superman comic books.) In the afternoon, Joan forgot the bet and started to sing, "Thumbelina, Thumbelina, tiny little thing." The adult Joan decided to switch from singing soprano to alto in the chorus. When other people in the chorus asked her about the change, she replied, "Yes, I've switched from soprano to alto. I've also moved from St. Paul to Minneapolis. I can't think of any more fundamental changes short of a sex-change operation." By the way, this is a joke that singers sometimes tell among themselves: "How many sopranos does it take to screw in a light bulb? […] Three. One to screw it in. One to pull the ladder out from under her. And one to say, 'I could have done it better than that!'"
• Country singer LeAnn Rimes' father, Wilbur, learned early not to underestimate her talent. When she was six years old, she entered a talent contest, at which she sang the song "Getting to Know You" well. However, her father saw that the other contestants were twice as old as LeAnn, so he figured that the judges would not vote for her. Therefore, he went hunting instead of waiting for the results of the talent contest. When he got home, LeAnn was carrying into their home the first-place trophy. Obviously, LeAnn started singing early in her life. Her mother, Belinda, remembers her sleeping in the family car, waking up and singing a song and then going to sleep again. And as a professional singer, the young LeAnn would play with her Barbies in her dressing room until it was time to go on stage and sing.
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University of Texas
Matthew McConaughey
Matthew McConaughey will become a professor of practice at the University of Texas from September, where he will teach a class of students about his own films.
The role of "professor of practice", which is traditionally filled by individuals without PhDs but otherwise useful knowledge about a specific subject, will see McConaughey teaching in the Department of Radio-Television-Film.
McConaughey had previously been serving as visiting instructor at the school for the last four years, co-teaching and developing the curriculum for a class called "Script to Screen".
McConaughey's own films, including Harmony Korine's The Beach Bum and the forthcoming Guy Ritchie comedy The Gentlemen, have previously been used by the Oscar-winner as case studies, used to track the journey of a film from its early conception to completed movie.
In a statement, the university said that McConaughey had been appointed as a professor due to his "outstanding work as a teacher and mentor," adding that he is respected on campus for his "willingness to work with students beyond the classroom".
Matthew McConaughey
Gabrielle Carteris Wins Re-Election
SAG-AFTRA
After one of the most openly hostile guild elections in recent Hollywood memory, SAG-AFTRA President Gabrielle Carteris pulled out a victory over challenger Matthew Modine, ensuring the continued control of Hollywood's actors guild by the Unite For Strength party for at least the next two years.
The "Beverly Hills 90210" star won 44% of the 30,837 votes cast (or 13,537), the union said, while Modine won 35% (or 10,682), SAG-AFTRA reported early Thursday. Jane Austin followed with 5,048 votes, Queen Alljahye Searles with 1,096 votes and Abraham Justice with 367 votes.
Following the bitter campaign, the Carteris-led guild will face a major crossroads in 2020. SAG-AFTRA, along with the DGA and WGA, is due to negotiate a new film and TV contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, with pensions, health care and wages all on the line. The current agreement between SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP expires on June 30, 2020.
Unite For Strength has been in control of the Screen Actors Guild since 2009, with Carteris becoming president in 2016 after the death of then-guild chief Ken Howard. The party oversaw the guild's merger with AFTRA in 2012, but the group's pragmatic, closed-doors approach to negotiations with studios and networks has been criticized by the Membership First party, on which Modine campaigned with a slate that included actors Ed Asner, Neve Campbell, Elliott Gould and Rob Schneider.
Modine and Membership First accused Carteris and UFS of not being transparent enough on contract negotiations and details, as well as not addressing a disparity in pensions between SAG members and AFTRA members. Modine supporters like Rosanna Arquette also accused Carteris of not adequately acting on demands to change the guild's sexual harassment policies and improving communication with members who come forward with complaints about sexual abuse.
SAG-AFTRA
Layoffs Affect National Geographic
Disney
Walt Disney has laid off employees of the National Geographic unit it acquired from the former 21st Century Fox, according to two people familiar with the matter, as it seeks to more fully combine the companies it purchased with its existing business.
As many as 70 to 80 National Geographic employees could be affected, according to one of these people. Disney has elected to take some operations of National Geographic - including its live-event, travel and publishing operations - and move them to parts of the company that already handle those businesses.
National Geographic's famous flagship magazine will still continue to operate, one of these people said, but the company will no longer publish the U.S. editions of National Geographic Traveler, which has been available since 1984. Some of its content is likely to be folded into the main publication, this person said.
Disney has been working to absorb the former Fox operations for weeks after closing a $71.3 billion deal for the Fox cable-programming and studio operations.
The move would appear to leave National Geographic as more of a TV-centric operation, focused on its U.S. and overseas cable networks.
Disney
Warming Faster Than Models Predicted
Europe
Over the past seven decades, the number of extreme heat days in Europe has steadily increased, while the number of extreme cold days has decreased, according to new research. Alarmingly, this trend is happening at rates faster than those proposed by climate models.
For most Europeans, this new study will hardly come as a surprise. This summer, for example, temperatures in southern France reached a record 46 degrees Celsius (114.8 degrees Fahrenheit), with similar temperature extremes happening at other locations on the continent.
Indeed, Europe is getting progressively hotter, and the data bears this out. What's disturbing, however, and as new research published today in Geophysical Research Letters points out, this warming trend is occurring faster than the projections churned out by most European climate models. And as the new paper also notes, the observed increases in temperatures "cannot be explained by internal variability." In other words, this warming trend is the result of human-caused climate change.
Ruth Lorenz, the lead author of the new study and a climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, and her colleagues analyzed temperature extremes in Europe from 1950 to 2018. On average, the number of days with extreme heat across Europe more than tripled during the timeframe analyzed, while the temperature of heat extremes went up 2.3 degrees Celsius (4.14 degrees Fahrenheit) on average.
Meanwhile, days featuring extreme cold temperatures are now on the decline, decreasing twofold or threefold depending on the location. Temperatures during extreme cold days have gone up by more than 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F), according to the new study.
Europe
Hundreds Sickened In 19 States
Mumps
Mumps has swept through 57 immigration detention facilities in 19 states since September, according to the first U.S. government report on the outbreaks in the overloaded immigration system.
The virus sickened 898 adult migrants and 33 detention center staffers, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in its report Thursday.
New cases continue as migrants are taken into custody or transferred between facilities, the report said. As of last week, outbreaks were happening in 15 facilities in seven states.
In response to the report, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Bryan Cox said medical professionals at detention facilities screen all new detainees within 24 hours of their arrival to ensure that highly contagious diseases are not spread.
The CDC report said more than 80% of patients were exposed while in custody. Mumps is a contagious virus that causes swollen glands, puffy cheeks, fever, headaches and, in severe cases, hearing loss and meningitis.
Mumps
Napoleon's Lost General
Charles Etienne Gudin
Archaeologists are set to unveil the answer to a 200-year-old question over the remains of a French general who died during Napoleon's 1812 campaign in Russia.
Charles Etienne Gudin was hit by a cannonball in the Battle of Valutino on August 19 near Smolensk, a city west of Moscow close to the border with Belarus.
His leg was amputated and he died three days later from gangrene, aged 44.
The French army cut out his heart, now buried at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, but the site of the rest of his remains was never known, until researchers found a likely skeleton this summer.
"As soon as I saw the skeleton with just one leg, I knew that we had our man," the head of the Franco-Russian team that discovered the remains in July, Marina Nesterova, told AFP.
Charles Etienne Gudin
'Frozen In Time'
HMS Terror
Archaeologists have obtained unprecedented footage of an Arctic shipwreck "frozen in time" for more than a century and a half.
Video from inside HMS Terror reveals china plates and bottles still stacked on shelves, eerily well-preserved officers' cabins and weapons still in their racks.
Tantalisingly, scientists believe that paper and photographic records of the ship's last years may still be intact inside cupboards and desks aboard the wreck.
Terror was one of two ships in a doomed expedition to complete the navigation of the Northwest Passage, which left England in 1845 and was led by Sir John Franklin.
She and her partner vessel HMS Erebus were former warships, made state-of-the-art with upgrades including heating systems, iron-reinforced hulls to resist the pressure of Arctic ice and steam engines taken from railway locomotives to drive their screw propellers.
HMS Terror
16,600 Years Ago
Idaho
Artifacts including stone tools and animal bone fragments found in Idaho dating back about 16,600 years represent what may be the oldest evidence of humans in the Americas and offer insight into the routes people took as they spread into the New World.
Scientists on Thursday said they used a technique called radiocarbon dating to determine the age of artifacts unearthed at an archeological site called Cooper's Ferry along the Salmon River in western Idaho near the town of Cottonwood.
People were present there at a time when large expanses of North America were covered by massive ice sheets, and big mammals such as mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, the giant short-faced bear, horses, bison and camels roamed the continent's Ice Age landscape.
"The Cooper's Ferry site contains the earliest radiocarbon-dated archaeological evidence in the Americas," said Oregon State University anthropology professor Loren Davis, who led the study published in the journal Science.
Based on this evidence, people first lived at the site, which was situated south of the continental ice sheets present at the time, between about 16,600 and 15,300 years ago and returned to live there multiple times until about 13,300 years ago, Davis added.
Idaho
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