Philosophy Now Magazine (June/July 2023) – The ‘Meta Ethics Issue’ featuring Back to the Sophists: Nana Ariel corrects the record and the modern application of Sophistry and Will the Real John Locke Please Step Forward?Hilarius Bogbinder shows how Locke’s intellectual identity changed over time.
Times Literary Supplement (June 2, 2023): The Last Days of Weimar – Lesley Chamberlain on German culture before the catastrophe; Michel Houellebecq in the buff; Death by Dementia; The Art of Sex and Champagne socialist guilt.
CNBC (May 30, 2023) – From floods to droughts, CNBC Marathon explores the water crisis in the U.S. Today, one out of three people don’t have access to safe drinking water. And that’s the result of many things, but one of them is that 96.5% of that water is found in our oceans. It’s saturated with salt, and undrinkable.
Chapters:00:00 — Introduction 00:30 — Can Sea Water Desalination Save The World? (Published October 2019) 14:00 — U.S. Farms Waste A Lot Of Water — But This Tech Could Help (Published September 2022) 29:56 — How The West Coast Drought Could Cause More ‘Water Wars’ (Published July 2021) 40:07 — Why Flood Insurance Is Failing The U.S. (Published November 2020)
Most of the freshwater is locked away in glaciers or deep underground. Less than one percent of it is available to us. So why can’t we just take all that seawater, filter out the salt, and have a nearly unlimited supply of clean, drinkable water? The western U.S. is experience a megadrought so severe, it is the driest two decades in at least 1,200 years. And no sector has felt the impact more than agriculture, which takes up about 70% of the world’s freshwater.
With water resources becoming more scarce, several companies are working to improve irrigation efficiency and help sustain food production in a future where extreme climate may be more common. Water is a cornerstone of economic activity, and when it runs low, communities face tough choices. The extreme drought conditions in the U.S. West are straining water resources and providing a fertile ground for wildfires. How will the West Coast face this climate challenge? And 2020 was the busiest hurricane season on record. Flooding is one of a storm’s most devastating consequences.
FEMA estimates one inch of flood water can cause up to $25,000 in damage. The U.S. began offering national flood insurance in 1968 but the program, called the NFIP, is now over $20 billion in debt. Private companies are starting to offer flood insurance as well. However, flood insurance is more complicated than it may appear. Watch the video to better understand how flood insurance works, and doesn’t work, in the U.S.
Monocle Magazine (May 2023 issue) – Ever dreamed of ditching the rat race for a life on the land? We meet the new Mediterranean farmers doing just that in the latest edition of Monocle.
Issue 164 also includes an Art Special that puts collectors, galleries and this year’s Art Basel in the frame.
Plus: a guide to the Venice Architecture Biennale and a rare venture into Syria.
Ever dreamed of ditching the rat race for a life on the land?
ABC News In-depth (May 29, 2023) – On Easter Saturday, 95-year-old artist John Olsen made the final touches to four paintings and feeling unwell, laid down his paintbrush for the last time. A stroke had finally felled the old master.
On the day of his state funeral, Australian Story revisits the Olsens, a family forged by their father’s passion and drive for painting. As John became a darling of the art world in the 60s and 70s, his obsessive focus on dedication to his work often cast a long shadow on those around him.
Months after his death, the Vivid festival of light will pay tribute to John Olsen, projecting his art onto the “greatest blank canvas on earth” — the sails of the Sydney Opera House. His children, Tim and Louise Olsen, will be there to marvel at his achievements and celebrate the life that has shaped them.
The New Yorker – June 5, 2023 issue: Masha Titova’s “The Music of Art”. The magazine publishes its first synesthetic, collaborative, and interactive cover. By Françoise Mouly.
The pop singer’s trial for copyright infringement of Marvin Gaye and Ed Townsend’s “Let’s Get It On” highlights how hard it is to draw the property lines of pop.
When the critic Joanna Biggs was thirty-two, her mother, still in her fifties, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “Everything wobbled,” she recalls. Biggs was married but not sure she wanted to be, suddenly distrustful of the neat, conventional course—marriage, kids, burbs—plotted out since she met her husband, at nineteen. It was as though the disease’s rending of a maternal bond had severed her contract with the prescribed feminine itinerary. Soon enough, she and her husband were seeing other people; then he moved out, and she began making pilgrimages to visit Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave.
Once a hunting lodge for the Bourbon monarchs, the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples is now home to one of the world’s most significant collections of Italian painting. This exhibition at the Musée Louvre in Paris (7 June–8 January 2024) brings more than 60 masterpieces from the museum to France. Highlights of the paintings on view include Parmigianino’s Portrait of a Young Girl (or Antea) (1524–27) and Guido Reni’s Atalanta and Hippomenes (1620–25).
Kirsten Dirksen Films (May 28, 2023) – Caspar Schols built his first shapeshifting house in his mother’s backyard as her writing cabin that, by sliding a room-on-rails, could convert into a place to sleep under the stars.
He has since perfected his expandable home with 10 prototypes: his most recent model is robust enough to serve as a primary residence and has a bathtub and guest bed hidden in the floor. The house can be opened up – on sunny days, for nature-watching or just to sleep directly under the stars – with just a push.
The entire walls and ceiling of the house move, but anyone can propel this 3,000 kilograms (over 6000 pounds) room-on-rails because Schols created a system that is “super low friction”. To create a well-insulated home that has walls that move, Schols and his team designed the rails with wind labyrinths to trap the air and added brushes to any moving surface to prevent airflow.
Wall Street Journal (May 27, 2023) – Their ties to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte, N.C. inspired Dorlisa and Peter Flur to custom-build their forever home. The 5,354 square-foot, three-bedroom house on Lake Wylie features a similar cantilever design by architect Toby Witte.
Video timeline:0:00 Background on the home 1:47 Piano room and great room 3:12 Office and courtyard 5:10 Primary bedroom 6:44 Budget and cost
Tour this custom $2 million lakefront home designed to feel like it’s floating in mid-air, with unique features including a swimming pool and museum-like details.
ABC News In-depth
Kirsten Dirksen
