An excerpt from CBS Evening News -
He was reading at 1 and doing fractions by 2. At 13 years old, he's majoring in aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech.
By Mark Strassmann
Monday, August 19, 2024
The 360 Degree Revolving, Titling House
An excerpt from designboom -
alex schweder + ward shelley's 'ReActor' house rotates atop a concrete column
the house has been conceived as a piece of performance architecture
video courtesy of art OMI / © richard barnes
‘ReActor’ is the latest work in an experimental, performative series of ‘social relationship architecture’ designed and built by artists alex schweder and ward shelley. this summer, for a total of five days, the architect-artist duo lived in the rotating house, located in upstate new york. the habitable sculpture measures 44-foot by 8-foot (13.4 x 2.4m) and rotates a complete 360-degrees atop a 15-foot (4.5m) concrete column.
https://www.designboom.com/architecture/reactor-house-alex-schweder-ward-shelley-omi-international-arts-center-new-york-08-21-2016/
The Valley of the Dolls
An excerpt from AllThatsInteresting -
Haunting Photos Of Nagoro, The Japanese Village Where The Dead Are Replaced With Life-Size Dolls
Artist Tsukimi Ayano has made at least 400 dolls to repopulate the dwindling village of Nagoro
By Erin Kelly | Edited By Jaclyn Anglis
The streets in the tiny village of Nagoro, Japan are far from bustling. In fact, things are remarkably still. Then, through the corner of your eye, you see a figure — then a group of figures huddled together.
Then you realize they're everywhere you look.
But these aren't people. They're actually life-size dolls — and they make up most of Nagoro's population. The dolls outnumber humans by a ratio of more than ten to one.
The handmade dolls are one woman's attempt to fill the loneliness that exists in Nagoro. This small village becomes increasingly void of people as time goes on. The elderly die and the young people leave for city jobs. Not even a local grocery store remains open.
The village, also called Kakashi No Sato, or Scarecrow Village, is not unlike other rural areas in Japan facing this depopulation trend. Since 2010, the nation has lost about 1.4 million of its people — and it's having a major impact on both the economy and society.
However, here in Nagoro, it's like no one has left; each doll seems to contain the soul of a departed villager. A local official told one tourist that "the figures have even been added to the census records of the village, with detail descriptions of each figure."
In this way, it really does seem like the dolls have a larger-than-life presence in the village of Nagoro.
 |
| Several dolls sit lined on a bench. KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images |
BACK-TO-SCHOOL
It’s BACK TO SCHOOL time in America. And if we don’t trust Trump with our kids, we can’t trust him with our country.
— Eric Swalwell (@ericswalwell) August 14, 2024
🎬WATCH my new ad pic.twitter.com/2qGmeWAPm7
Time Magazine's 2024 Kid of the Year
An excerpt from Time -
Heman Bekele Is TIME’s 2024 Kid of the Year
Dreaming of a cure
By Jeffrey Kluger
Heman Bekele whipped up the most dangerous of what he called his “potions” when he was just over 7 years old. He’d been conducting his own science experiments for about three years by that point, mixing up whatever he could get his hands on at home and waiting to see if the resulting goo would turn into anything.
“They were just dish soap, laundry detergent, and common household chemicals,” he says today of the ingredients he’d use. “I would hide them under my bed and see what would happen if I left them overnight. There was a lot of mixing together completely at random.”
But soon, things got less random. For Christmas before his 7th birthday, Heman was given a chemistry set that came with a sample of sodium hydroxide. By then, he had been looking up chemical reactions online and learned that aluminum and sodium hydroxide can together produce prodigious amounts of heat. That got him thinking that perhaps he could do the world some good. “I thought that this could be a solution to energy, to making an unlimited supply,” he says. “But I almost started a fire.”
After that, his parents kept a closer eye on him. As it turned out, having adults watching what he does is something that Heman, now 15, would have to get used to. These days, a whole lot of people are paying him a whole lot of attention. Last October, the 3M company and Discovery Education selected Heman, a rising 10th-grader at Woodson High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, as the winner of its Young Scientist Challenge. His prize: $25,000. His accomplishment: inventing a soap that could one day treat and even prevent multiple forms of skin cancer. It may take years before such a product comes to market, but this summer Heman is already spending part of every weekday working in a lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, hoping to bring his dream to fruition. When school is in session, he’ll be there less often, but will continue to plug away. “I’m really passionate about skin-cancer research,” he says, “whether it’s my own research or what’s happening in the field. It’s absolutely incredible to think that one day my bar of soap will be able to make a direct impact on somebody else’s life. That’s the reason I started this all in the first place.”
It’s that ambition—to say nothing of that selflessness—that has earned Heman recognition as TIME’s Kid of the Year for 2024.
Facts About the US Black Population
An excerpt from Face2Face Africa -
8 facts about the U.S. Black population you should know
BY Kofi Oppong Kyekyeku
 |
| Facts about Black people in U.S. - Original photo credits: Pew Research Center and ABC News |
Population
The U.S. Black population in 2022 can be categorized into four distinct groups:
- The total U.S. Black population
- Single-race, non-Hispanic Black people
- Multiracial, non-Hispanic Black people
- Black Hispanic people
Geography
Geographically, the majority of Black Americans reside in the South, with more than half (56%) living there in 2022. Meanwhile, 17% live in the Midwest and Northeast, and 10% reside in the West. Texas is home to the largest Black population among the states, with approximately 4.2 million Black residents. Florida follows with 3.9 million, and Georgia ranks third with 3.7 million.
The New York City metropolitan area, which includes parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, is the preferred metropolitan area for Black Americans, with 3.6 million residents. The Atlanta metro area is the second most popular, with 2.2 million Black residents, followed by Chicago, which is home to 1.7 million Black residents.
Daddies and Daughters
An excerpt from The Daily Beast -
Why Every Father Needs to Watch the Netflix Film ‘Daughters’
The new documentary is about a father-daughter dance at a prison. As one dad of two girls writes, it’s a must-see film that brings all of parenthood into perspective.
By Andrew Crump
Reams of data exist that highlight the range of effects a father’s absence can have on his daughters. They’re likely to struggle with trust issues. Their confidence might flag. They may wrestle with feelings of abandonment, low self-esteem, and rejection, or develop aggressive or otherwise antisocial behaviors, or risk-taking behaviors; they may become depressed, detached, or anxious. Fathers shape their daughters’ relational lives—the foundation and maintenance of meaningful relationships, with family, with friends, with romantic partners, with communities—and spur their creativity.
Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s Daughters, the Festival Favorite and Audience Choice: U.S. Documentary Competition winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival—now available to watch on Netflix—side steps statistical analysis and instead strives for emotional impact.
I have two daughters myself. For their privacy’s sake, I’ll refer to them by their nicknames: Brontosaurus, my eldest, and Elephant, my youngest. I love them more than anything I’ve loved in my forty years on this Earth.
On behalf of that, I intentionally avoided Daughters in my remote coverage of Sundance, knowing full well a movie with that title, focused on the subject of barriers forced between young girls and their incarcerated dads, would likely break me in two; the idea of being separated from my girls is the stuff of my nightmares, as unlikely as it is that we’ll ever be separated. (Sending them off to summer camp and, soon, back to school is hard enough.) I am not a statistic. Brownie and Elephant aren’t, either. All the same, my reality didn’t blunt Daughters’ effect on me.
This is not a film about the numbers: How many girls grow up fatherless in the U.S.; how many of those girls end up in bad partnerships; how many of them become teen mothers; how many are burdened by mental health problems; how many attempt suicide. Frankly, that wouldn’t be a film at all, had Patton and Rae chosen these details as their subject. It would be an academic paper instead, dry and sans any human sensation.
Sensation is what Daughters is all about, of course, a front row seat to an overwhelming reconnection between a cadre of girls and their fathers, each behind bars for reasons Patton and Rae refuse to detail. (Those reasons are neither our business nor relevant to the film’s thesis.). At the same time, it’s an elegant condemnation of America’s love affair with crime and punishment, exhibited through varied atrocities carried out within its prison system.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/netflixs-daughters-the-movie-every-father-needs-to-watch
Sunday, August 11, 2024
August 13 is Left Handers Day!
Celebrate the lefties in your world!
Did you guess? I'm a lefty, too!
Who Decides Who's Black Enough?
An excerpt from the LA Times -
Opinion: Denigrating Drake, and Kamala Harris, as ‘Not Like Us’
By Michael Eric Dyson
 | |
Arguments that question the racial identity of the hip-hop artist and the presidential candidate deny the complexity of Blackness. (Los Angeles Times photo illustration; photos by Carmen Mandato / Getty Images, Matt Rourke/ Associated Press) |
On the same day that former President Trump claimed before a national gathering of Black journalists that Vice President Kamala Harris “was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she became a Black person,” his running mate Sen. JD Vance accused Harris of being a “phony” who “grew up in Canada” (she attended high school in Montreal) and used “a fake Southern accent” at a rally.
Both men’s accusations sound eerily like those leveled against the rapper Drake by his fellow hip-hop titan Kendrick Lamar (and many others) in a rap beef whose effects linger. Drake has been accused of being a “colonizer” whose Canadian identity and eager embrace of various aspects and accents of a wide range of Black culture make him racially suspect.
Such arguments, whether made by racially troubled white men or Black icons, deny the complexity and diversity of Blackness.
~~~~~
Ironically, that cosmopolitan vision of Blackness is at the heart of the Lamar and Drake dustup. Their kerfuffle — playing out fiercely this spring in a series of releases — is a battle over cultural cachet, racial authenticity and group pride. And it exposes a provincialism that undercuts the global currents of hip-hop.
In his hit “Not Like Us,” Lamar accuses Drake of being a “colonizer” because Drake supposedly “run[s]” to Atlanta to partner with some of the paragons of its trap music to bolster his Blackness. Lamar’s argument echoes long-standing criticisms that Drake’s biracial Canadian roots render him suspect as a bona fide Black artist. Drake’s artistic experimentation with different accents and musical genres has prompted many to claim, as Vance did with Harris, that Drake is a phony.
Lamar’s beef with Drake is rooted in a parochial, claustrophobic vision of Blackness.
Drake grew up in Toronto the son of a Jewish Canadian mother; he spent summers in Memphis, Tenn., with his Black American musician father. His artistic tastes were deeply influenced by a wide swath of the Black diaspora — Afro-Caribbeans, Londoners, American Southerners, especially Memphians, and Torontonians. The multicultural makeup of Toronto, with its sizable Italian, Portuguese, Jamaican and Filipino immigrant populations, also fed his musical appetite.
Comparing Crowd Size
Meanwhile at @realdonaldtrump’s rally... https://t.co/uZ73w1de7D pic.twitter.com/lhCZvG4KxF
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 10, 2024
Saturday, August 10, 2024
An Obamacare Convert
My apologies. I couldn't figure out how to post this other than just linking the page. I promise. It's worth the watch. It is one minute long.
A Teacher's Profound Impact on Her Student
@ms.e_hustla Teacher's life is saved by the very student she never gave up on#fy #cupcut #cupcuteditvideo❤️✨ #foryou #fypシ゚viral #fyppppppppppppppppppppppp #wow #fypシ #fypツ♡❦࿐foryoupageシ༄🖤💕💙stay #fypツ♡❦࿐foryoupageシ༄🖤 #yppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppシ #CapCut #husbandwife #trending #beautifull #new #viral #friends #viral_video #women ♬ Emotional - Bang Nono
Friday, August 9, 2024
THE Arizona Turnout for VP Harris & Gov Walz
I've been to dozens of campaign rallies this cycle: Trump, Biden, Haley, DeSantis, etc. This Harris rally in Glendale, AZ, is — by far — the biggest crowd (and biggest venue) I've seen. pic.twitter.com/o8r0tz9nb3
— Samuel Benson (@sambbenson) August 9, 2024
Thursday, August 8, 2024
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