​Café A Brasileira

“The Café A Brasileira ([kɐˈfɛ ɐ brɐ.zi.ˈlɐj.ɾɐ]; ‘The Brazilian Lady Café’) is a café at 120 Rua Garrett (at one end of the Largo do Chiado in the district of the same name), in the civil parish of Sacramento, near the Baixa-Chiado metro stop and close to the University. One of the oldest and most famous cafés in the old quarter of Lisbon and constantly active, the shop was opened by Adrian Telles to import and sell Brazilian coffee in the 19th century, then a rarity in the households of Lisbon. Over time the space became the meeting point for intellectuals, artists, writers and free-thinkers weathering financial difficulties and finally a tourist attraction, as much as another coffee shop. ...”

Wikipedia

YouTube: The oldest cafe  in Lisbon, Portugal | Café A Brasileira

2010 September: Espresso, 2013 April: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2013 May: Coffeehouse, 2015 June: Barista, 2015 August: Coffee Connections at Peddler in SoHo, 2015 November: The Case for Bad Coffee, 2016 January: 101 Places to Find Great Coffee in New York (2014), 2017 June: How Cold Brew Changed the Coffee Business, 2017 September: Our 7 Favorite Literary Coffee Shops, 2017 October: Clever Literary Coffee Poster, 2017 October: Coffee as Existential Statement: A Crisis in Every Cup on Valencia Street, 2018 February: The Trencherman: A Tale of Two Coffee Shops, 2020 April: Unfair trade, April 2020: A (Very) Brief History of NYC Espresso, 2020 May: The Islamic History of Coffee, 2021 January: The Life Cycle of a Cup of Coffee: The Journey from Coffee Bean, to Coffee Cup, 2021 June: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard, 2021 July:  The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?, August 2021: The Birth of Espresso: How the Coffee Shots The Fuel Our Modern Life Were Invented, 2021 October: Brew: A Brief History of Coffee, 2021 November: Coffee and Climate Have a Complicated Relationship, 2022 January: The Bialetti Moka Express: The History of Italy’s Iconic Coffee Maker, and How to Use It the Right Way, 2022 April: All Espresso Drinks Explained: Cappuccino, Latte, Macchiato & Beyond, 2022 June: How to Make the Perfect Cup of Italian Coffee

​Studio One Music Lab

“This new release delves deep into the unique melting pot sound of reggae, funk and dub created throughout the 1970s at the Studio One music lab situated at 13 Brentford Road, Kingston, where the intense experiments and collaborations of crack musicians, singers, DJs and engineers under the guidance of producer Clement 'Coxsone' Dodd produced the most forward-thinking music ever to come out of Jamaica. Here you will find some of the deepest and rawest cuts to emanate out the Studio One factory - truly hypnotic rhythms, powerful funk guitar and bass, soaring horns and more interspersed with occasional vocals and toasting as musicians reach for the highest heights and deepest roots of reggae music. ...”

Holland Tunnel Dive

Discogs (Video)

amazon

The Children of War

“... No victim of war emerges without suffering some kind of loss: A home eviscerated. A loved one vanished. A life snatched away.Yet no one loses as much to war as children — scarred by its ravages for a lifetime. In Ukraine, time is dwindling to prevent another ‘lost generation’ — the oft-used expression not only for young lives taken, but also for the children who sacrifice their education, passions and friendships to shifting front lines, or suffer psychological scars too deep to be healed. The online ticker at the top of a Ukrainian government page, ‘Children of War’ flickers with a grim and steadily rising tally: Dead: 361. Wounded: 702. Disappeared: 206. Found: 4,214. Deported: 6,159. Returned: 50. ...”

NY Times

Guardian - ‘Absolute evil’: inside the Russian prison camp where dozens of Ukrainians burned to death

NY Times: Fighting Around Ukrainian Nuclear Plant Heightens Safety Fears

New Yorker: A Ukrainian Music Obsessive Parts with His Record Collection

Young lives cut short. Families separated. Futures clouded by pain and loss. The trauma of war hangs over a generation of Ukrainian children.

​Henry Kaiser: The Great Explorer

“His decades of globetrotting collaborations have yielded more than 300 albums—and many sonic breakthroughs—yet electric guitar innovator and world-class improviser Henry Kaiser continues his relentless pursuit … of everything. Henry Kaiser bought his first guitar and slide the day he heard Sonny Sharrock, and immediately set off on his 45-year career as an improviser—playing on more than 300 albums, performing and recording around the world, and establishing musical and deep friendships with such fellow lions of creative music as Derek Bailey, Richard Thompson, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, David Lindley, D’Gary, Wadada Leo Smith, Sang Won-Park, and John French. ...”

Premier Guitar - July 26, 2018  (Video)

André Fougeron (1913–1998)

“At a time when modern art was moving toward abstraction, the French artist André Fougeron remained firmly anchored in social realism, assiduously chronicling the history of his day in figurative paintings that can be appreciated at an exhibition now showing at La Piscine, a museum in the northeastern French city of Roubaix, near Lille. Until recently, Fougeron had been more or less forgotten in France, although, perhaps surprisingly, the Tate Modern in London dedicated a whole room to him at its opening in 2000. The show at La Piscine aims to remedy that neglect, offering a retrospective of his entire career from its beginnings in 1937. ...”

The Paradoxes of a Committed, Electric Artist

TATE: Atlantic Civilisation,1953

ART UK

vimeo: Bailey N: André Fougeron, ‘Atlantic Civilisation’, 1953

Atlantic Civilisation, 1953

​Zaporizhzhia: Russian rockets damaged part of nuclear plant, Ukraine says

“Ukraine's nuclear agency says Russian rockets have damaged part of a giant Russian-controlled nuclear power plant, but there has been no radiation leak. Enerhoatom said a nitrogen-oxygen unit and a high-voltage power line had been damaged at the Zaporizhzhia plant - Europe's largest - in southern Ukraine.Local Russian-appointed officials blamed Ukraine for shelling earlier. Ukraine also accuses Russian forces of firing rockets at civilian areas from the site, employing ‘terror tactics’. ‘Every morning we wake up and see that they have hit only residential homes,’ a local businessman told the BBC. The BBC was unable to verify the reported damage at the nuclear plant. Enerhoatom says there were two rounds of Russian rocket fire on Friday, which prompted the site's operators to disconnect a reactor from the power grid. ...”

BBC (Video)

NY Times: Facing Energy Crisis, Germans, Warily, Give Nuclear a Second Look

Aljazeera: ‘Before Bucha in Ukraine, there was Abkhazia in Georgia’

ARTFORUM: Politics by Other Means

“I Pity the Poor Immigrant” - Bob Dylan (1967)

“’I Pity the Poor Immigrant‘ is a song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. It was recorded on November 6, 1967, at Columbia Recording Studios, Nashville, produced by Bob Johnston. The song was released on Dylan's eighth studio album John Wesley Harding on December 27, 1967. ... Accompanying Dylan, who played acoustic guitar and harmonica, were two Nashville veterans from the Blonde on Blonde sessions: Charlie McCoy on bass guitar and Kenneth Buttrey on drums. ...”

Wikipedia

YouTube: I Pity the Poor Immigrant (Official Audio), I Pity the Poor Immigrant (Live with The Band, Isle Of Wight), I Pity The Poor Immigrant (Take 4)

​Pat Thomas, the tireless golden voice of highlife

“It is in the western part of Accra, in a house with no address, next to a dirt road, that we meet ‘Ghana’s First Rock Star’, the highlife legend Pat Thomas. We cross a smoky room and a home studio and find ourselves in the middle of a hot rehearsal. Sitting on a sofa opposite his newly reunited Kwashibu Area Band, Pat Thomas is listening, attentive and focused. Suddenly, he gets up and, dancing with eyes closed, lets forth his perfectly recognizable voice, the famous ‘Golden Voice of Africa’. The years have passed but Pat Thomas is undoubtedly still a star. Let us look back on more than 50 years of a musical career and a life of opportunity and improvisation, guided by music and by the destiny of Ghana....”

PAN (Audio)

W - Pat Thomas

YouTube: Pat Thomas and Kwashibu Area Band live at Africadelic Festival

​What Do We Know About the Ukrainians Being Forcibly Deported to Russia?

“Amid massacres, rapes, execution-style murders, reported torture, and now an apparent on-camera sexual mutilation and murder of a prisoner of war perpetrated by Russian troops in Ukraine, the deportations of Ukrainian civilians to Russia almost pale as a human rights violation. Nonetheless, as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted in a press statement last month, such forcible transfers are ‘a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians’ and constitute a war crime. While the exact numbers are difficult to assess, the scope of the problem is horrific. And, especially in the case of children, Russian actions seem to be an ominous part of a deliberate—if haphazard—strategy aimed at destroying Ukrainian national identity.Reports of the deportations began fairly early in the war. In late March, about a month after the February 23 invasion, authorities in besieged Mariupol began to say that civilians were being forcibly relocated to Russia under the guise of evacuation from the war-torn city. ...”

The Bulwark

NY Times: Russia’s Shortfalls Create an Opportunity for Ukraine, Western Officials Say

GRID: Keys to Ukrainian victory? Logistics, heavy weapons and the ‘test of will’

FT: Ukraine: can Russia still win the war? (July 14)

A picture taken on April 8, 2022 shows children toys in the rubble of a collapsed building in the town of Borodianka, northwest of Kyiv.

Cuban sugar economy

“The Cuban sugar economy is the principal agricultural economy in Cuba. Historically, the Cuban economy relied heavily on sugar exports, but sugar production has declined since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. ... The boom collapsed shortly thereafter, however, and the banks took over the defaulting Cuban sugar producers. ... Cuban sugar producers were able to protect the national production after the Revolution, but Cuba did not reenter the US market or grow its annual production level past five million tons. ... After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Fidel Castro's government sought to end the mono-production of sugar and shift the Cuban economy towards self-reliance through industrialization and economic diversification. ...”

Wikipedia

NPR: 'The Sugar King Of Havana,' Cuba's Last Tycoon (Audio)

Constellations in Sugar

YouTube: Sugar cane fields Cuba 1960's

​Why I Drive 5 Miles Under the Speed Limit

“Getting behind the wheel of my 2013 Subaru turns me into a bit of a troll—just not the kind you might think. I’m not a tailgater, and I don’t honk. I’ll always let you merge, likely with one of those two-fingered courtesy waves ubiquitous on country roads where I live in Vermont. But I am slow. I often drive five under the speed limit on the interstate, cruising through the Green Mountains at an unhurried 60 miles per hour. I take it pretty easy through towns. In a country where more than 70 percent of drivers admit to exceeding legal speed limits, that makes me an outlier. (Probably a little annoying too; that’s where the troll part comes in.) I have good reasons for being poky, ranging from safety concerns to environmentalism. ...”

Sierra Club

 

A Soldier’s Life: Conversations Inside Ukraine’s Defense Force

“Kydrava did not expect to be stationed on the frontlines of the war. She did not expect that, for five months, she and her unit would be facing constant combat, or that she would never have a chance to catch her breath. The idea of Russia launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the 21st century did not seem to her like something that could really happen. But then that unthinkable scenario became reality—Kydrava has spent the time since the first attacks living at the forefront of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Before the war began, Ukraine’s military was estimated to consist of 500,000 total military personnel, according to data collected by Statista. ...”

Voice

GRID: Ukraine turning point? The offensive against Russia that may decide the war (Audio)

NY Times - Germany to Gazprom: Your turbine is ready, let us deliver it.

BBC: Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant is out of control, says IAEA (Video)

“Since the first day of the full-scale invasion, my unit has been engaged in combat. The warfare intensity has never decreased.”

​Investigation: Barcelona’s financial crisis and what the rest of football thinks of it

“As the football industry shuddered from the reverberations of the COVID-19 pandemic, the bright minds in the Barcelona boardroom concocted a plan. With the club beset by financial angst, one of their executives approached UEFA, the organiser of the Champions League, with a proposal. Barcelona required loans to ease the pain caused by years of poor decision-making in the transfer market and extravagance on player salaries, all of which was exacerbated by a pandemic that shattered commercial and matchday income.  The idea, therefore, was to apply for a loan from a bank and use anticipated future broadcast revenues from playing in the Champions League as the security for the loan. ...”

The Athletic (Video)

​Eva Hesse’s ‘Expanded Expansion’ Has Aged at Human Scale

“Like visiting an aging parent after years away, going to an Eva Hesse show puts mortality on the mind. The materials of her late career—latex, fiberglass, rubber—decompose, becoming more brittle each time we see them. Her forms themselves evoke bodies. Ringaround Arosie (1965), a Masonite relief mounded with electrical wire and cloth, resembles a large areola. Dangling in nets, the polyethylene spheres of Untitled or Not Yet (1966) suggest the gonads of an unknown species. In artificial chemical compounds, Hesse found a volatile, pangender, even posthuman fleshiness, marking a distinct territory in the crowded field of 1960s artists. ...”

Voice

W - Eva Hesse

artnet

YouTube: Eva Hesse on Painting, Eva Hesse

Expanded Expansion. Installation view, Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 19–July 6, 1969

The Prosecution of Russian War Crimes in Ukraine

“Before the war, one could have used the western suburbs of Kyiv to study the history and aspirations of modern Ukraine. Bucha, Irpin, and smaller towns and villages formed alongside a railroad constructed in the early twentieth century. During the Soviet period, Bucha, which had a glass factory that manufactured canning jars, became a minor industrial center. In neighboring Irpin, where century-old pines dominated the landscape, the Soviets built sanatoriums and a writers’ resort. Boris Pasternak wrote in a 1930 poem, ‘Irpin is the memory of people and summer, of freedom, of escape from oppression.’ In this century, the suburbs became a site of bourgeois ambition. Entrepreneurs and high-ranking officials built houses with forest views and in-ground pools. Developers erected high-rises that appealed to young families who were priced out of Kyiv. Traffic jams started to clog the bridges connecting the suburbs to the city. Big-box stores and tiny espresso bars popped up around the towers. ...”

New Yorker (Audio)

Don’t Look Away from the War Crimes in Ukraine

NY Times: Living Side by Side, Ukrainian and Russian Sailors Are Tested by War

POLITICO: American-made rocket launchers not used in Ukraine prison strike, U.S. assesses

Satellite photos of the site released by Maxar Technologies on July 30 appear to show damage only to the section of the detention center housing Ukrainian prisoners, with no collateral damage to surrounding buildings.

​As Latin America Shifts Left, Leaders Face a Short Honeymoon

“In Chile, a tattooed former student activist won the presidency with a pledge to oversee the most profound transformation of Chilean society in decades, widening the social safety net and shifting the tax burden to the wealthy. In Peru, the son of poor farmers was propelled to victory on a vow to prioritize struggling families, feed the hungry and correct longstanding disparities in access to health care and education. In Colombia, a former rebel and longtime legislator was elected the country’s first leftist president, promising to champion the rights of Indigenous, Black and poor Colombians, while building an economy that works for everyone. ...”

NY Times

Students taking part in an anti-government protest in June in Santiago.

​Why don't Jupiter's rings look like Saturn's?

“Nature has given the biggest planet in the solar system an anemic set of rings. Saturn’s rings have been marked as one of the solar system’s splendors since the invention of the telescope, but no one even noticed Jupiter had its own much smaller set until the Voyager 1 spacecraft flew by on March 5, 1979. Why should the rings of Saturn, which has a third of Jupiter’s mass, so outshine the feeble ones around the larger, more massive planet? ...”

Sky & Telescope

Astronomy: ​Why don't Jupiter's rings look like Saturn's?

​Using Nuclear Reactors for Cover, Russians Lob Rockets at Ukrainians

“NIKOPOL, Ukraine — Along most of the front line in Russia’s war in Ukraine, when one side lets loose with an artillery attack, the other shoots back. But not in Nikopol, a city deep in southern farm country where the Ukrainian military faces a new and vexing obstacle as it prepares for a major counteroffensive: a nuclear power station that the Russian Army has turned into a fortress. Nikopol, controlled by the Ukrainians, lies on the west bank of the Dnipro River. On the opposite bank sits a gigantic nuclear power plant — Europe’s largest — that the Russian Army captured in March. The Russians have been firing from the cover of the Zaporizhzhia station since mid-July, Ukrainian military and civilian officials said, sending rockets over the river at Nikopol and other targets. It is, in effect, a free shot. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: - ‘One miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation’: The U.N. chief issues a grim warning, citing war.

BBC: Reality of Ukraine war hidden from Fortress Russia

Guardian: Food prices soaring in developing world amid Ukraine crisis, World Bank finds

NY Times - War, Climate Change, Energy Costs: How the Wheat Market Has Been Upended

A dummy dressed as a soldier sat at a Ukrainian military checkpoint on the edge of Nikopol.

​The blissful Upper West Side garden hiding on top of a condo garage

“Neighborhood gardens planted on vacant lots and between buildings are magical places. Walking around the city, I’ve stumbled upon many of these, each with their own enchanting landscape and walkways, sitting areas, and koi ponds. The Lotus Garden, on 97th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue on the Upper West Side, has these delights as well. What sets this lovely green space apart, however, is that you can’t really stumble upon it from the sidewalk. ...”

Ephemeral New York

​Black Mountain, Intermedia, Deep Image, Ethnopoetics

“Among the several streams which made up the New American Poetry was a group known as the Black Mountain poets, so named for the experimental college in North Carolina where many of them taught or attended classes in the 1950s. The most prominent of these poets were of course Charles Olson, rector of the college in its last five years, and Robert Creeley, who edited The Black Mountain Review. The work of both has exerted an extraordinary influence on the course of American poetry in the latter half of this century. ...”

from a secret location

Robert Creeley and Dan Rice at Black Mountain College, 1955.

​Financial Incentives May Explain the Perceived Lack of Ransomware in Russia’s Latest Assault on Ukraine

“In early May 2022, a state of emergency was declared in Costa Rica following a ransomware attack against government systems. The hacking group linked to the attacks–Conti–is thought to work from Russian territory. In a dramatic message, the gang even encouraged Costa Ricans to overthrow the government if officials do not transfer the ransom. In Italy, a ransomware attack that security officials believe is linked to Russian actors disrupted railway ticket vending machines. In Austria, Russian hacking group Black Cat demanded $5 million to unlock encrypted servers and refrain from leaking sensitive information. What about Ukraine? Ukraine has, in recent years, not suffered large financially motivated ransomware attacks. This might have been because, Ukraine has been historically more a provider of ransomware operators (e.g. Maksim Yakubets) rather than a target. In 2020 and 2021, Ukraine suffered less than 1 percent of ransomware attacks globally. This aligns with a trend where criminal groups avoid attacking systems on territories of the former Soviet Union.  ...”

Council on Foreign Relations (July 26)

BBC - Oleksiy Vadatursky: Ukraine grain tycoon killed in Russian shelling of Mykolaiv (Video)

NY Times: One of Ukraine’s richest businessmen is killed in the port city of Mykolaiv.

“In sight of surrender”: Critical Analysis of the 2022 Sanction Regime on Russia (July 13)

​A Brief History of George Smiley by John Le Carré

“George Smiley OBE is a fictional character created by John le Carré. Smiley is a career intelligence officer with ‘The Circus’, the British overseas intelligence agency. He is a central character in the novels Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley’s People, and a supporting character in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War, The Secret Pilgrim and A Legacy of Spies. The character has also appeared in a number of film, television, and radio adaptations of le Carré’s books. …“

Wikipedia

Penguin: Explore Smiley’s London

BBC: How fact met fiction in Le Carré’s secret world

Guardian: A Brief History of George Smiley by John Le Carré

2019 November: ‘Point me and I’ll march’: Mick Herron re-reads the novels of John le Carré, 2020 December: John le Carré, Best-Selling Author of Cold War Thrillers, Dies at 89

​How to Decolonize a Museum? Try an Ax.

“El Museo del Barrio has had its own internal struggles, concerning whether to focus on its Nuyorican roots or represent the Latin American diaspora more broadly. But “Raphael Montañez Ortiz: A Contextual Retrospective” proves that at its best it can do both. The ambitious exhibition turns the spotlight on the museum’s founder, who continues to make radical and compelling work at the age of 88. With this show, Montañez Ortiz’s legacy should be cemented both for his art as well as for the museum he started. ...”

NY Times

Raphael Montañez Ortiz: A Contextual Retrospective (Video)

Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s “The Memorial to the Sadistic Holocaust Destruction of Millions of Our Ancient Arawak-Taino-Latinx Ancestors Begun in 1492 by Columbus and His Mission to, With the Conquistadores, Colonize and Deliver to Spain the Wealth of the New World No Matter the Human Cost to the New World’s Less Than Human Aborigine Inhabitants” (2019-20)

​Zelenskyy calls POW bombing ‘deliberate Russian war crime’

“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of a ‘war crime’ for bombing a jail containing Ukrainian prisoners of war in the eastern Donetsk region. ‘It was a deliberate Russian war crime, a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war,’ Zelenskyy said in a video-message Friday night. More than 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war died in the shelling in the town of Olenivka, in territory controlled by Moscow-backed separatists since 2014, according to authorities in the Donetsk People’s Republic. Ukrainian authorities accused Russia of bombing the building to hide tortures happening in the prison. ‘I call on all partners to strongly condemn this brutal violation of international humanitarian law and recognize Russia a terrorist state,’ Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said. Russia’s defense minister argued, without providing evidence, that Kyiv was responsible for the ‘provocation.’ ...”

POLITICO

NYPL - From Odessa to New York City: The Unique Legacy of America’s Soviet Jewry

NY Times: Europe’s Race to Secure New Energy Sources Is on a Knife’s Edge

Jacobin: We Should Have Listened to Bernie Sanders About Ukraine

LitHub: I Once Wrote—and Spoke, and Thought—in Russian… No More

Antonio Guiteras, Eduardo Chibás, Corruption in Cuba

“Antonio Guiteras y Holmes (22 November 1906 – 8 May 1935) was a leading politician in Cuba during the 1930s. ... He was a proponent of revolutionary socialism and participated in the radical government installed after the overthrow of the autocratic right wing Cuban President Gerardo Machado y Morales in 1933. In 1931, Guiteras established the Unión Revolucionaria. Guiteras' political beliefs were nurtured in the volatile political climate of the 1920s. He first became widely known as a student leader and associate of Julio Antonio Mella, a young Communist revolutionary. He believed that the liberation of the people would be achieved through violent confrontation with the established authorities; he did not hold firm to the ideal of democracy. Antonio Guiteras was named Minister of the Interior under President Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín. ... After the ‘government of 100 days‘, Guiteras became even more radical and founded Joven Cuba, a proletarian political organisation inspired by anti-capitalism and the nationalism of José Martí. ...”

W - Antonio Guiteras, Imperialism and Revolution Episode #23, W - Eduardo Chibás, W - University of Havana

W - Corruption in Cuba, W - Cuban Revolution of 1933, W - One Hundred Days Government

Jacobin: Cuba Before the Revolution Dictator Fulgencio Batista, W - Fulgencio Batista

The Batista-Lansky Alliance

The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling, and Gambling in Cuba from the 1920s to the Revolution

Slum ("Bohio") dwellings in Havana, Cuba in 1954, just outside Havana baseball stadium. In the background is advertising for a nearby casino.

​Saype Takes “Beyond Walls” to the Shore in Brazil

“Thank god Saype finally gets to go to the beach! – after hanging around in those dreadful Swiss Alps painting on the side of a grass-covered mountain, he can finally get some surf. The ‘Beyond Walls’ project takes him now to Rio de Janeiro, where his tenth stage of the campaign addresses those who take treacherous journeys via oceans, and some never return. ‘To feel again the desperate embrace of those who saw them drift away forever… from African origin to American destination, from light to night, from freedom to slavery,’ he says. The multi-stage global artwork is revealed in pieces as the land/street artist travels the globe. He recognizes the divisions between people and actively proposes a message of unity through his biodegradeable paintings. ...”

Brooklyn Street Art

​Russia Is Making Heaps of Money From Oil, but There Is a Way to Stop That

“The United States and its allies are leaning heavily on economic sanctions to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. But a key element in that strategy, restrictions on Russian oil exports, mostly appears to be causing pain for ordinary people in other countries. European nations, in particular, are causing considerable damage to their own economies without reducing Russia’s oil revenue. Nations seeking to help Ukraine are aiming at the wrong target. They have focused on reducing Russia’s energy exports instead of reducing Russia’s earnings from energy exports. Russia is exporting less oil but, in a perverse twist, it is earning more money, according to the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, based in Finland. The sanctions have raised prices, more than offsetting the decline in exports. In May 2022, Russia earned 883 million euros per day from oil exports, up from 633 million euros per day in May 2021. ...”

NY Times: Opinion

VOX: What think tank drama tells us about the US response to Russia’s war

NY Times: Opinion | I’m Ukraine’s Foreign Minister. Putin Must Be Stopped.

NY Times: Dry Fountains, Cold Pools, Less Beer? Germans Tip-Toe Up the Path to Energy Savings

People playing in an outdoor pool in Augsburg, Germany. The city has lowered the temperature of outdoor public pools by one degree to save energy.

​Mario Vargas Llosa: Fiction and hyper-reality

“When Mario Vargas Llosa, the precocious star of the 1960s ‘boom’ in Latin American fiction, ran for president in 1990 in his native Peru, many of his most avid readers prayed he would lose. As his friend, the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, observed: ‘Peru’s uncertain gain would be literature’s loss. Literature is eternity, politics mere history.’  That may have been scant consolation to the vanquished Vargas Llosa when the dark-horse victor, Alberto Fujimori, seized dictatorial powers in 1992 and fell only in 2000 in one of the most bizarre corruption scandals in Latin American history. ...”

Guardian

New Yorker: Restless Realism

2015 March: Mario Vargas Llosa, 2019 April: The Metamorphosis

​Metafiction

“Metafiction is a form of fiction which emphasises its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the audience to be aware they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story-telling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art. ... Metafiction became particularly prominent in the 1960s, with works such as Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth, ‘The Babysitter’ and ‘The Magic Poker’ by Robert Coover, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, and Willie Master's Lonesome Wife by William H. Gass. ...”

Wikipedia

Top Twenty One Metafictional Works: The Story That Swallows Its Tale

​The Ukraine War in data: 869 attacks on healthcare facilities

“On the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces attacked a hospital in the eastern Ukrainian city of Vuhledar, killing four people and wounding 10 others. The next day, a children’s hospital and cancer center were hit in other parts of the country. Perhaps the most memorable attack on the country’s healthcare infrastructure came in March, when a Russian missile struck a maternity hospital in Mariupol. Seventeen hospital workers and patients were wounded; a pregnant woman died from her injuries. This week, as war entered its sixth month, the Ukrainian government gave an assessment of the toll war has taken on the nation’s healthcare system — caregivers and facilities both. ...”

GRID

NY Times - Crops ‘Stored Everywhere’: Ukraine’s Harvest Piles Up

Aljazeera: Russian forces launch missile attacks on northern Ukraine (Video)

BBC: Cold showers as German city of Hanover reacts to Russian gas crisis (Video)

BBC - Ukraine war in maps: Tracking the Russian invasion

The Art of Turntablism

“Three different albums that explore the art of experimental, free-improvised playing on turntables by three wizards of this unique art - Viennese dieb13 (aka Dieter Kovačič), Swiss and Berlin-based Joke Lanz and Barcelona-based Ferran Fages. This 10’’ vinyl-only solo album was recorded live at the SmallForms series at Château Rouge in Vienna in August 2020 under the title interlockdown kleptosonics, as a reference to hacking essence of turntablism. It was the 1044th live set of dieb13, and apparently a rare opportunity to play live between the Covid-19 lockdowns. ...”

The Free Jazz Collective (Video/Audio)

​The mystery of the mermaid on East 23rd Street

“At the northeast corner of Third Avenue and 23rd Street—a busy intersection at the border of Kips Bay—stands a squat, two-story building. With a tan-brick facade and cookie-cutter rectangular shape, the building is empty of ground floor tenants, which not long ago included unglamorous neighborhood shops like a mattress outlet and cell phone store. The one distinguishing factor of this building is how undistinguished it is in a neighborhood where restored cast-iron commercial spaces share the streets with low-rise walkups, tenements, and modern high-rise residential towers. ...”

Ephemeral New York