There was good news Monday night for New York Times Southern correspondent Campbell Robertson, who is based in New Orleans. Executive editor Dean Baquet told a local audience at Loyola University that as long as he is in charge, the paper will always have a physical reporter presence in the city.
Baquet’s speech, the sixth annual Ed Renwick Lecture put on by the school’s Institute of Politics, was titled “From the Big Easy to the Big Apple” and contained another major shout out for his hometown. In the Q&A that followed, moderator Lee Zurwick, a news anchor with local TV station WUVE, asked Baquet to name the best news cities in the U.S. Per the Times-Picayune, the executive editor’s reply:
“Pound for pound, it’s New Orleans and Miami.”
It’s also fitting that Baquet was preceded last year on the Ed Renwick Lecture stage by a panel that included former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards. Because for years, Baquet has beentalking about making sure the famous quote Edwards gave him during his Times-Picayune days leads his obituary. Now, apparently a done deal:
Baquet noted that he’s made sure his obituary in the New York Times will give him “sole and full credit for the best political quote of all time,” when Edwards told him on a campaign bus that “the only way I can lose (a coming gubernatorial election) is if I’m caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.”
During the lecture, Baquet also made an interesting correlation between a critical New Orleans high school experience and his decision not to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
When the Sydney Morning Herald quoted former Australian youth center employee Furkan Derya for a March 10 article, they did so without making any jokes. It was part of an ISIS-related news item.
Tim Powell’s March 15 piece for Sydney’s Daily Telegraph was, on the other hand, an an opinion column and, as such, took some humorous liberty. Post-publication, many Twitter users were slack-jawed and conspiracy theorizing about this particular sentence:
I furkan derya to find a better name than Furkan Derya.
Those familiar with Powell’s writings immediately recognized the humor. Nevertheless, the journalist decided to jump back into the fray today with a blog post ridiculing the related news coverage and explaining that this was no oversight:
I meant it to be published by my editor. That’s why I wrote it…
The sentence was also posted right here on my website. Evidently nobody knows how to run a simple Google search these days.
Among those far-off commentators coming out of this much better: actor Kyle MacLachlan.
Lee Wen est un artiste singapourien qui réalise des performances sur les thèmes de l’identité sociale. Son oeuvre « Ping Pong Go-Round » est une installation totalement décalée et humoristique d’une table de ping-pong ronde permettant de jouer à plusieurs dizaines de personnes. Elle a été récemment exposée à l’Art Basel de Hong Kong.
Paweł Bajew est un photographe et illustrateur polonais basé à Pulawy. Parmi ses nombreux projets, l’artiste a réalisé une série de portraits étranges mettant en scène différents personnages à la fois drôles et dérangeants. Une collection intrigante à découvrir dans la suite de l’article.
Perforated wooden shutters allow the residents of this São Paulo apartment building by Studio MK27 to control the levels of daylight in their living spaces (+ slideshow).
The Vertical Itaim building was designed by local firm Studio MK27 for a site in the city’s upmarket Chacara Itaim neighbourhood and contains 10 apartments. Most of these are 144 square metres, with a larger penthouse occupying the top of the structure.
The timber shutters are covered in a grid of square holes that reference traditional Arabian mashrabiyas – carved latticework screens that were first used in Brazil by Portuguese settlers. These recently featured in the design for a São Paulo family house by architect Guilherme Torres.
This window treatment is applied to the building’s north facade, where the most sun-shading is required. Dappled sunlight is able to enter the interiors through the perforations, and the holes also allow air to circulate and cool the rooms when sliding windows behind the screens are opened.
“The wooden elements have perforated squared patterns and do not block the wind, just like the Arabian mashrabiyas,” said the firm, which is led by architect Marcio Kogan. “This solution results in very pleasant temperatures.”
When all the shutters are completely closed they form a dense surface, with a slight opacity that becomes evident when the lights inside are on.
When the shutters are fully opened, they extend outwards to the edge of the projecting concrete floor plates.
Along the east facade, where the main living spaces of the apartments are located, horizontal bands of glazing provide expansive views across the city.
The north-east corner of each apartment features a terrace accessed through sliding doors from the living room.
A sliding screen – with the same pattern of perforations as the shutters on the adjacent facade – can be pulled across to provide privacy for the terrace without impairing the open-air feel.
The tower’s south and west facades sit close to neighbouring buildings. These are concrete, but have a textured surface created from wooden formwork.
The choice of concrete references the Brutalist architectural style that is common in the city, while its uneven composition creates shadows that intensify as the direction of the sun shifts throughout the day.
“The texture of the slats – when lit by the sun – produces a surprising and poetic effect for the larger gables,” added the firm.
The thickness of the concrete facades is visible at the ends where they meet the glazed walls. The textured surface also continues through to the inner walls of the residence.
A core containing lifts and a staircase is positioned slightly off-centre to maximise the floor area of living rooms and bedrooms that can be arranged in different configurations, depending on the owners’ requirements.
Bathrooms, a kitchen and an entrance hallway are positioned around this circulation and service core.
The ground floor contains a communal reception hall, storage space, technical services and access to the lifts. Steel columns supporting the floors above give this level a more transparent feel that enhances its connection with a small garden outside.
Remember those cool non-pneumatic tires that we saw first on Humvees, then ATVs? We’d wondered if the unique tires, which are not prone to punctures and accidental deflation, had any commercial potential beyond military and recreational vehicles. I figured it’d just be a matter of time before I saw some yahoo driving around with them on his Tahoe, especially after Michelin released photos of their NP tire design, called the Tweel. If Michelin was getting into the game, surely a partnership with a major automaker couldn’t be far behind?
Late last year, automotive blog Torque News speculated that BMW might be adding Tweels to their future SUVs. It made for an exciting headline, but closer inspection revealed the rumor to be based on just one thing: The fact that Michelin’s Tweel factory was located 40 miles away from BMW’s South Carolina factory. In other words, the rumor was thinner than the spokes on the Tweel.
Well, turns out Michelin has partnered up with a vehicle manufacturer…but it’s not the one we expected: It’s John Deere.
I love how they laid action-movie music over the video, as if to make us forget that we’re looking at groundskeeping.
In any case, you can shortly expect to see Michelin’s X Tweel Turf on a massive lawn near you, provided the groundskeepers are rocking John Deere’s ZTrak Z900 Series. The Tweels ain’t cheap—they’re a $750 upgrade, and the Z900s are aimed at fleet owners, not homeowners—but John Deere reckons buyers will make the money back by eliminating flats, downtime and replacement tires; the Tweels are expected to last three times as long as a pneumatic tire.
New York graphic designer Adrian Kinloch has worked with a number of literary clients including Random House, Simon & Schuster and John Irving. This month, he unveiled his latest such website creation: salmanrushdie.com.
The image at right is part of the handsome tiled navigation greeting visitors on the home page. Inside, there is all sorts of exciting recent news to be found, from Rushdie’s selection as the next Commencement speaker at Emory University to his five-year Writer in Residence commitment to NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, which will begin in the fall.
There is also a tantalizing glimpse of Rushdie’s tenth novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. The book will be released September 28, right around the time that Rushdie is settling in to his NYU duties:
Louise Dennys, executive publisher of Random House of Canada, said of the new novel: “Salman Rushdie is our preeminent storyteller, but he has outdone even himself in his spellbinding new novel – his most entertaining, most moving and, given the novel’s powerful moral vision, his most deceptively lighthearted… It is absolutely gripping. The characters we meet here, with their dreams of love, their hopes and ambitions for themselves and the world, their battles for survival and for power, will live in our imaginations for years. The novel is sometimes such fun you will laugh aloud, but you will also be moved to tears.”
By the way, there’s something oddly comical about the idea of a man of Rushdie’s stature, who mans his own Twitter account, having to deal with the social network’s silly side. To the 67-year-old’s credit, he’s keeping that part of his busy year in perspective.
.@TheatreOfHums@RushdieExplains Please don’t feel sorry for me. I have an excellent, creative life. It’s Twitter that sucks on occasion.
Kendrick Lamar’s new album has been hotly anticipated ever since he closed out the final episode of the Colbert Report with the anthemic line, “We don’t die, we multiply.” The wait is over a week earlier than expected, with Lamar dropping To Pimp a……
Instead of being born from whimsical illustrations or landscape photography, each of Paige Russell’s scarf designs from her brand Eloi started out as a collage of construction paper cutouts. On silk, the stiff, two-dimensional artworks become fluid……
Conservationists are urging park-goers to stop feeding ducks bread—and for good reason. While it may seem like an innocent activity, it’s wreaking havoc not only on the health of the ducks, but their habitats and surrounding ecosystem too. Processed……
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
