WINDSOR, ON — A stoned man attending Catholic mass this past weekend appeared to particularly enjoy the Communion wafers on offer. Jon Talbot, 34, popped an edible prior to attending mass with his family for the first time since leaving home at 18. Like many new gummy users before him, Talbot experienced a spiritual awakening. […]
The post Stoned guy at mass really enjoying Body of Christ appeared first on The Beaverton.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
My mom, who I have written about here before, died peacefully yesterday.
Diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer two years ago, she’s been struggling with abdominal pain since June, and it had worsened in the last few weeks. She was ready to go, and was relieved that she was able to use legalized Medical Aid in Dying (prescription medication that lets you die peacefully) to keep her suffering to a minimum. She had fought for years to get terminally ill people access to Medical Aid in Dying, long before she knew she would need to use it herself, and my family is deeply grateful for the peace and control it brought her.
She died exactly the way she wanted to, on her own terms, on a day she picked, with my sister and me at her side.
Below is something I wrote for her six years ago on Mother’s Day. I hope it tells you something about who she was.
Here are some things about my mom:
* She is an extrovert’s extrovert, but somehow ended up with two introverted daughters. She makes up for this by talking to random strangers as much as possible when we are out in public. Whenever she travels (which is frequent), she comes back with detailed stories about the lives of all the strangers she met.
* Her need to talk is so strong that she once called me from the woods during a silent yoga retreat.
* She thinks that yoga is the cure for all ills. Whenever I get sick — even if it’s just a cold — she tells me I need to do yoga. When I once pointed out that she’d had the exact same cold as me a few weeks earlier, despite daily yoga, she denied ever getting a cold and changed the subject.
* Some of my happiest childhood memories are of watching “Dallas” with her and heatedly discussing JR Ewing and Cliff Barnes. In retrospect, it wasn’t an appropriate show for an eight-year-old, but it was our Friday night thing and we were super into it. We were also heavily into Benson.
* She becomes a superhero when someone is ill or injured. She was never an especially demonstrably affectionate mom — she is too no-nonsense for that — but when you are sick, she tends to you like you are a baby kitten.
* Years after divorcing my dad in a not especially amicable split, she was sometimes found driving him to chemotherapy appointments.
* When I was about 12, I told her that I figured adults stopped having sex around 26 years old, because after that point they’d be too old and gross. About a decade later, when my then-boyfriend turned 26, she sent him a sympathy card. She is still immensely pleased with herself for this.
* She was once convinced she had shingles and was Very Upset about it, but it turned out to be a bug bite.
* She’s normally very careful not to give me unsolicited advice (I think as a reaction to having parents who gave her waaayyyy too much), but every once in a while she feels strongly about something and swoops in to tell me to do something. She’s nearly always right (aside from the yoga). Most of the really excellent advice I’ve received in my life has come from her.
* Things she has never pressured me to do: get married, have a wedding, have kids. Things she did pressure me to do: buy property, invest money, return library books.
* She is an excellent grandmother. She is constantly flying across the country to see my nieces, who love her.
* She likes to cook extravagant things, like a baked Alaska, just to see if she can, but she’s also unflappable about food issues. When I went vegan in my 20s and my vegan friends all had families who were varying degrees of unsupportive, my mom calmly started holding vegan Thanksgiving dinners. When my sister went kosher, my mom found kosher stores and restaurants. When my sister’s diet then got really complicated for medical reasons, my mom learned the 500 new rules my sister had to follow, hunted down obscure ingredients and recipes, made sure they were all kosher on top of it, and to this day calmly juggles myriad people’s varying dietary preferences without seeming in the least put out. I think she actually likes it.
* She stayed in a bad marriage for years because she thought it would be better for my sister and me. She was wrong — so, so wrong — but she sacrificed years of her life because she thought it would be good for us.
* She taught me to speak up when something is wrong in the world — whether it’s an unjust law or a silly company policy — and she has always supported me in doing that, even when she didn’t like what I said.
* She isn’t one to tell you she loves you, but if you pay attention, she’s saying it.
I miss her and love her. I will be taking some time off so content will be re-runs until I’m back.
In Canto 20 of Inferno, Dante confronts a pit where the sinners have had their heads twisted around backwards; they trudge, naked and weeping, through puddles of cooling tears. Virgil informs him that these are the fortunetellers, who tried to look forwards in life and now must look backwards forever.
In a completely unrelated subject, how about those election pollsters, huh?
Writing for The American Prospect, historian Rick Perlstein takes a hard look at characteristic failure modes of election polling and ponders their meaning:
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-09-25-polling-imperilment/
Apart from the pre-election polling chaos we're living through today, Perlstein's main inspiration is W Joseph Campbell 2024 University of California Press book, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in US Presidential Elections:
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/lost-in-a-gallup/paper
In Campbell's telling, US election polling follows a century-old pattern: pollsters discover a new technique that works spookily well..for a while. While the new polling technique works, the pollster is hailed a supernaturally insightful fortune-teller.
In 1932, the Raleigh News and Observer was so impressed with polling by The Literary Digest that they proposed replacing elections with Digest's poll. The Digest's innovation was sending out 20,000,000 postcards advertising subscriptions and asking about presidential preferences. This worked perfectly for three elections – 1924, 1928, and 1932. But in 1936, the Digest blew it, calling the election for Alf Landon over FDR.
The Digest was dethroned, and new soothsayers were appointed: George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossler, who replaced the Digest's high-volume polling with a new kind of poll, one that sought out a representative slice of the population (as Perlstein says, this seems "so obvious in retrospect, you wonder how nobody thought of it before").
Representative polling worked so well that, three elections later, the pollsters declared that they could predict the election so well from early on that there was no reason to keep polling voters. They'd just declare the winner after the early polls were in and take the rest of the election off.
That was in 1948 – you know, 1948, the "Dewey Defeats Truman" election?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman
If this sounds familiar, perhaps you – like Perlstein – are reminded of the 2016 election, where Fivethirtyeight and Nate Silver called the election for Hillary Clinton, and we took them at their word because they'd developed a new, incredibly accurate polling technique that had aced the previous two elections.
Silver's innovation? Aggregating state polls, weighting them by accuracy, and then producing a kind of meta-poll that combined their conclusions.
When Silver's prophecy failed in 2016, he offered the same excuse that Gallup gave in 1948: when voters are truly undecided, you can't predict how they'll vote, because they don't know how they'll vote.
Which, you know, okay, sure, that's right. But if you know that the election can't be called, if you know that undecided voters are feeding noise into the system whenever you poll them, then why report the polls at all? If all the polling fluctuation is undecided voters flopping around, not making up their mind, then the fact that candidate X is up 5 points with undecided means nothing.
As the finance industry disclaimer has it, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." But, as Perlstein says, "past performance is all a pollster has to go on." When Nate Silver weights his model in favor of a given poll, it's based on that poll's historical accuracy, not its future accuracy, because its future accuracy can't be determined until it's in the past. Like Dante's fortune-tellers, pollsters have to look backwards even as they march forwards.
Of course, it doesn't help that in some cases, Silver was just bad at assessing polls for accuracy, like when he put polls from the far-right "shock pollster" Trafalgar Group into the highly reliable bucket. Since 2016, Trafalgar has specialized in releasing garbage polls that announce that MAGA weirdos are way ahead, and because they always say that, they were far more accurate than the Clinton-predicting competition in 2016 when they proclaimed that Trump had it in the bag. For Silver, this warranted an "A-" on reliability, and that is partially to blame for how bad Silver's 2020 predictions were, when Republicans got pasted, but Trafalgar continued to predict a Democratic wipeout. Silver's methodology has a huge flaw: because Trafalgar's prediction history began in 2016, that single data-point made them look pretty darned reliable, even though their method was to just keep saying the same thing, over and over:
https://www.ettingermentum.news/p/the-art-of-losing-a-fivethirtyeight
Pollsters who get lucky with a temporarily reliable methodology inevitably get cocky and start cutting corners. After all, polling is expensive, so discontinuing the polls once you think you have an answer is a way to increase the enterprise's profitability. But, of course, pollsters can only make money so long as they're somewhat reliable, which leads to a whole subindustry of excuse-making when this cost-cutting bites them in the ass. In 1948, George Gallup blamed his failures on the audience, who failed to grasp the "difference between forecasting an election and picking the winner of a horse race." In 2016, Silver declared that he'd been right because he'd given Trump a 28.6% chance of winning.
This isn't an entirely worthless excuse. If you predict that Clinton's victory is 71.4% in the bag, you are saying that Trump might win. But pollsters want to eat their cake and have it, too: when they're right, they trumpet their predictive accuracy, without any of the caveats they are so insistent upon when they blow it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jDlo7YfUxc
There's always some excuse when it comes to the polls: in 1952, George Gallup called the election a tossup, but it went for Eisenhower in a landslide. He took out a full-page NYT ad, trumpeting that he was right, actually, because he wasn't accounting for undecided voters.
Polling is ultimately a form of empiricism-washing. The pollster may be counting up poll responses, but that doesn't make the prediction any less qualitative. Sure, the pollster counts responses, but who they ask, and what they do with those responses, is purely subjective. They're making guesses (or wishes) about which people are likely to vote, and what it means when someone tells you they're undecided. This is at least as much an ideological project as it is a scientific one:
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-09-23-polling-whiplash/
But for all that polling is ideological, it's a very thin ideology. When it comes to serious political deliberation, questions like "who is likely to vote" and "what does 'undecided' mean" are a lot less important than, "what are the candidates promising to do?" and "what are the candidates likely to do?"
But – as Perlstein writes – the only kind of election journalism that is consistently, adequately funded is poll coverage. As a 1949 critic put it, this isn't the "pulse of democracy," it's "its baby talk."
EFF to Federal Trial Court: Section 230’s Little-Known Third Immunity for User-Empowerment Tools Covers Unfollow Everything 2.0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/09/eff-federal-trial-court-section-230s-little-known-third-immunity-user-empowerment
Calif. Governor vetoes bill requiring opt-out signals for sale of user data https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/calif-gov-vetoes-attempt-to-require-new-privacy-option-in-browsers-and-oses/
#15yrsago D&D camp, circa 1982 https://web.archive.org/web/20091001142940/http://rpg.brouhaha.us/?p=925
#10yrsago Why #gamergate is bullshit https://www.cracked.com/blog/7-ways-gamergate-debate-has-made-world-worse
#10yrsago Eric Holder: creator of the “Too Big to Jail” bankster https://memex.craphound.com/2014/09/26/eric-holder-creator-of-the-too-big-to-jail-bankster/
#5yrsago The DoJ’s corporate “diversion” program is supposed to change bad corporate culture, but really, it enables repeat offenders https://www.citizen.org/article/soft-on-corporate-crime-deferred-and-non-prosecution-repeat-offender-report/
#5yrsago After the passage of the EU Copyright Directive, Google nukes Google News France https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-25/google-to-change-french-news-results-under-copyright-rules
#5yrsago Sleuths discover the source of $28m in dark money lobbying in favor of emergency room “surprise bills”: private equity firms that own doctors’ practices https://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2019/09/who-advocates-for-surprise-medical.html
#5yrsago Wework, Uber, Lyft, Netflix, Bird, Amazon: late-stage capitalism is all about money-losing predatory pricing aimed at creating monopolies https://web.archive.org/web/20190927033958/https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-is-a-prime-example-of-counterfeit-capitalism-2019-9
#5yrsago Bruce Sterling on Boris Johnson’s bizarre, cyberpunk dystopia address to the UN https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2019/09/visionary-high-points-recent-boris-johnson-speech-united-nations/
#5yrsago Christopher Brown talking legal thrillers, dystopia, and science fiction https://narrativespecies.wordpress.com/2019/09/25/christopher-brown-rule-of-capture/
#1yrago Brian Merchant's "Blood In the Machine" https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen
“Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza” (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12
https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/
SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22
https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn
TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10
https://tusconscificon.com/
International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24
https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme
Annie's Book Stop Of Worcester
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYM3WOPOMC0
DEF CON 32 – Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025
Latest podcast: Anti-cheat, gamers, and the Crowdstrike disaster https://craphound.com/news/2024/09/15/anti-cheat-gamers-and-the-crowdstrike-disaster/
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
Abby Rapoport has the rare distinction of having served as a Texas Observer staff writer, publisher, and board chair. Perhaps equally rare, she can claim a first appearance in the Observer’s pages at the tender age of “2 years and 9 months.”
In September 1987, Bernard Rapoport—Abby’s grandfather and a man once described by Molly Ivins as “the only Jewish, socialist insurance millionaire in Waco”—penned a short essay about taking his granddaughters to an “animal safari” in which he lamented the high cost of admission and the pernicious effects of poverty in America. The piece was ostensibly an advertisement for Bernard’s insurance company, though he often used the space to share essays by himself or others. He was long “the Observer’s principal advertiser and financial mainstay,” as founding editor Ronnie Dugger wrote in 1996, and by all accounts the publication would have died long ago without his support and that of his wife, Audre. After the Observer became a nonprofit in the ’90s, Bernard served on the board until his death in 2012, and the family has continued its financial support.
Abby—today the publisher of Stranger’s Guide, an award-winning travel magazine—was raised in Virginia, but she chose to go into the field of Texas muckraking journalism herself. After editing her college newspaper, she did stints at Texas Monthly and the newly founded Texas Tribune before coming to the Observer, where she covered education and politics from 2010 to 2012. Her father, Ronald, also served on the Observer’s board (for a brief time, three Rapoports appeared on the masthead). In 2016, Abby returned as a board member and soon, in a moment of organizational and financial peril for the publication, stepped in to steer the ship as acting publisher. The Observer spoke with her about family history, rural reporting in the blog era, and hope.
TO: You first appeared in one of our issues before you were forming memories. Do you have a first memory of the Observer?
Well, I remember Molly [Ivins] from a pretty young age, because I would spend a few weeks a year with my grandparents in Waco. And they wouldn’t adjust their lives for it. They were a weird blend of completely besotted with me but also we just went with their schedules. So most nights there was a political dinner or a meeting. So I remember we would go to Austin a lot, when my grandfather was chairman of the board of regents of [the University of Texas], and we would see Molly and [former Observer editor] Lou Dubose. Those memories are really strong.
Did Molly’s personality come across to a kid your age?
Oh, Jesus. Yeah. I mean, she was larger than life. She was this crazy storyteller, she swore a lot, which my grandparents didn’t swear. And it was a funny thing because we’d see political figures a lot. We’d see labor figures. We’d see business figures. But Molly was from this sort of messy, wild journalism world which my grandparents didn’t really fit.
Your grandfather lived to see Texas pass into total Republican control. Do you get the sense he kept hope about Texas politics?
He was like the world’s most optimistic person. He always saw possibility, and I think a lot of that had to do with his own experiences, and, even though Democrats were in power, the causes he most cared about were always uphill battles. And, you know, there were always these tremendous points of pride for him like the University of Texas. That it was public and great, and the feeling he had that there was a path forward for a kid like him, immigrant parents and poor and didn’t come from an English-speaking home. His parents spoke Yiddish and Spanish [he was raised in San Antonio] and Russian. He was a tremendous believer in education being accessible to anyone, and that it was a place where you could have radical beliefs and different kinds of thinkers. And I think watching this sort of assault on higher ed [by Republicans today] would have been particularly painful for him.
How did you decide to go into practicing journalism yourself?
I always liked journalism, in part because I was raised in a pretty Southern home where there was an emphasis on politeness, and I felt like journalism was where you got to ask nosy questions, and I liked that.
Then I ended up, in college in Iowa, co-editor-in-chief [of the Scarlet & Black Grinnell College student paper] in 2008. And it was like the first internet journalism election where suddenly news was breaking on the internet before it was getting in the paper. And we had this little college newspaper website and we could actually write stuff that people read. And I just loved it. I loved the rush.
A couple years later, you found your way to the Observer as a writer. What was your time here like?
It was crazy. But it was fun. It was an exciting time because it was the first big transition of the Observer away from being sort of a newsprint, newspaper magazine. It was moving to monthly. And online we each had our own blog with our name on it. So the Observer was sort of experimenting with multimedia, new formats, and new ways of telling stories.
Also there was too much work and not enough people, so the expectations were crazy. But I was with people who were amazing, Forrest [Wilder], Dave [Mann], and Melissa [del Bosque] were all such pros. It was quite intimidating, but I was allowed to, like, just leave [on reporting trips], and what I discovered was that if you showed up in rural Texas, even if you were coming from a liberal magazine, just showing up there meant a lot to people. And then the [legislative] session was amazing. But it was also ridiculous.
So you went through that whirlwind, then to The American Prospect as a writer, then you came back to join the board and later be acting publisher. What motivated you to help the Observer in these other ways?
I’d become increasingly interested in the business side of journalism. And then, [my daughter] Bina had just turned one when I joined the board, and my grandmother [Audre] had just died, so I think there was something really meaningful about going back to this place that held this promise and hope that certainly my grandparents had and, I’m being all mushy, but it was a weird time. The rise of Trump. I found out I was pregnant with [my younger daughter] Tova like two days before the 2016 election.
It felt natural to join the board. It felt a little more scary to come in as acting publisher, but, I mean, I tried to hire people and we were not successful. It was a pretty scary time at the Observer, so I didn’t have a good vision for what would happen if I said no. And it felt so important.
The Observer made it through that time, and a couple years later you started Stranger’s Guide. It’s a fairly different kind of publication. What led you to it?
I’ve always tried to do things I’m interested in and learn new things. But also, I really think place is such a critical piece of storytelling. Place provides the contours and the constraints of every story. When the Observer‘s at its best, Texas is almost this character in it. It’s like, what is this weird, messy state we all love in spite of ourselves, right? And we want it to be better because we see its possibility. And I felt that perspective was sort of missing, particularly internationally. It’s so important for there to be space for people to tell their own stories and define these complicated places. So in some ways, it’s really different, and in some ways it’s very related.
Things look pretty bleak right now for this weird, messy state. We’re still here at the Observer plugging away at this idea that investigative journalism, and stories that kind of bind together the progressive community in Texas, will play some part in some change at some point. Basically, do you still see a path forward?
Going back to the earlier part of the conversation, I was raised in this family whose story is pretty improbable. This Russian-Jewish communist who winds up in San Antonio, it’s a very weird thing. I think you just gotta keep moving forward and see possibility—and stories are critical to imagination, and to have a different future you have to imagine it.
The thing that’s always been special about Texas, I think, is that there has been this strong sense of community, even though people are from very different places with different perspectives. It means something to be Texan, regardless of what part of the state you’re from. And I think the great hope of a place like the Observer is, can we question our myths, can we rewrite and challenge ourselves, but also maintain that sense of possibility and of us being bound together? And, you know, this is where I’ve kind of put my chips. So I’m hoping that’s true.
This interview, which is part of the Observer’s 70th anniversary coverage, has been edited for length and clarity. Support for our 70th anniversary interview series has been provided by KOOP Radio in Austin, which permitted its studios to be used for recordings.
The post ‘This Weird, Messy State We All Love in Spite of Ourselves’ appeared first on The Texas Observer.
The University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas) has announced the opening of The Crow Museum of Asian Art’s second location, as the anchor space for a 12-acre cultural district.
North-facing view of “The Sweepers” by Wang Shugang at the O’Donnell Athenaeum Phase I
Museum
The district, named the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum, has a multiphase plan that also includes the construction of a performance hall and music building, a grand plaza, and a parking structure. This first building that is now open to the public will be known as the UT Dallas Art Museums and will be home to The Crow Museum of Asian Art as well as other galleries, and a conservation studio. It is a two-story, 57,000-square-foot building designed by the Morphosis architectural firm. This secondary location for the Crow Museum more than doubles the organization’s current gallery space at its downtown Dallas Arts District location.
In a press release, Dr. Inga H. Musselman, the UT Dallas Provost, Vice President for Academic Affairs, and the Cecil H. Green Distinguished Chair of Academic Leadership, commented, “This complex, like our entire campus, will be a place of learning and growth. I envision students walking through the museums during their class breaks or taking notes about pieces of art that are displayed here. The performance hall and music building will provide even more opportunities for students.”
Landing Gallery of Phase I, The O’Donnell Athenaeum
The new Crow Museum on the UT Dallas campus is the first major art museum to be built north of I-635. This location puts the museum in close proximity to Collin County and the north Dallas County suburbs. The museum’s inaugural exhibition, Ancient Echoes, Modern Voices: The Crow Collection Goes Beyond, is intended to introduce the permanent collection to new audiences. The show will span eight galleries and present hundreds of artworks, including textiles, ceramics, sculptures, paintings, and an immersive multimedia installation. The additional four galleries will showcase UT Dallas’ Latin American art collection, which includes donations from The Roger Horchow Family Collection and The Laura and Dan Boeckman Collection of Latin American Folk Art.
Installation view of the Crow Museum of Asian Art at the Phase I Museum, The O’Donnell Athenaeum
Performance Hall and Music Building, The O’Donnell Athenaeum at UT Dallas. Image credit: Morphosis
Alongside the opening of the new building, UT Dallas has broken ground on the second phase of the project, a two-story 680-seat performance hall and music building. The space will include an outdoor performance area, rehearsal rooms, practice rooms, teaching studios, a percussion studio, a recording studio, administrative offices, classrooms, a multifunctional lobby space, study spaces, and a student lounge. The building is expected to open in Fall 2026.
Performance Hall and Music Building, The O’Donnell Athenaeum at UT Dallas. Image credit: Morphosis
The museum offers free admission and will be available for field trips and other educational programs for school children. Learn more about The Crow Museum of Asian Art at UT Dallas via the museum’s website and learn more about the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum via the university’s website.
The post The Crow Museum of Asian Art Opens UT Dallas Location appeared first on Glasstire.
Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.
For last week’s picks, please go here.
Antonio Lechuga, “St. Christopher, Patron Saint of Travelers Guiding River Crossers,” 2024, applique textile, cobija (fleece blanket), thread, 14 1/2 x 7 1/2 feet
1. 2024 Texas Biennial: The Last Sky
Blaffer Art Museum (Houston)
September 27, 2024 – March 9, 2025
Opening September 27, 6-8 p.m.
From the Blaffer Museum:
“Texas is constructed territory, therefore unstable borders and occupations shape communities and their participants. Systems and structures rise and fall. The collapse produces dust and dirt, yielding material histories written in detritus and debris. In its eighth iteration, the 2024 Texas Biennial, The Last Sky, looks to the still-lingering dust to ask: What happens after the last line in the sand is drawn?
Through a collaborative and non-hierarchical approach, Erika Mei Chua Holum, Ashley DeHoyos Sauder, and Coka Treviño co-organized the eighth iteration of the Texas Biennial through friendship, reciprocity, and mutual support. With trifold dreams and visions, the co-curators selected works and artist projects through the 2024 Texas Biennial Open Call.”
Eileen Maxson, “Parent Trap,” three-channel video installation
2. Eileen Maxson: Parent Trap
Keijsers Koning (Dallas)
August 24 – September 28, 2024
From Keijsers Koning:
“Parent Trap is a three-channel video installation where Maxson puts her parents through a polygraph exam. Blurring the lines between experimental documentary, family banter, and the American Zeitgeist, in this unscripted, anti-avoiding-the-topic-family-stress test, Maxson and her parents use the absurdity of the situation to engage in serious dialogue across generational, political, and ideological divides. The installation, presented on three distinct screens, each dedicated to one true-life character, immerses the viewer in the dynamic of this table conversation.”
Moll Brau, “Mid-Air,” 2024, acrylic on linen, 60 x 48 inches
3. Moll Brau’s: Solo exhibition Deliverance
Martha’s Contemporary (Austin)
September 14 – October 5, 2024
From Martha’s:
“What does it mean to be delivered? One may be delivered by a god, delivered by a mother. It seems to entail a springing forth from nothing — as Athena did from Zeus’ head — but the delivery in childbirth happens at the end of pregnancy, not the beginning, an emergence that occurs after forty long weeks of gestation, the mother, delivered too — from pregnancy — in the process.
In her solo show Deliverance, Moll Brau exhibits work related to the gestation and birth of her daughter, showing images that came to her during her pregnancy — her first. The visions and imagined landscapes evoke Brau’s feelings of transition, liberation, dread, and salvation.”
A work from Sarah Fox’s “The Woman Under the Water”
4. Sarah Fox: The Woman Under the Water
Mercury Project (San Antonio)
September 6 – 28, 2024
From Mercury Project:
“Artist Statement: This body of work explores fairy tales, ecology, and healing. Humans have lost our connection to the Earth we are a part of, a Mother that has valuable knowledge to share with us.
My studio practice for the last few years has started with almost daily walks along the San Antonio River. I found myself getting to know her, her cycles, the wildness she displayed before a rainstorm, the hum of new bugs in the spring, her sparse silence on cold days… I could hear her screaming during last summer’s 110 degree days. Yet, she continues — her long hair strung with trash and algae after a heavy rain. Those that feel her irritation, endlessly comb out the bottles, cigarette butts and Styrofoam trying to comfort her.”
A work by Miki Rodriguez
5. Miki Rodriguez: Transitions
Laredo Center for the Arts
September 6 – November 1, 2024
From Laredo Center for the Arts:
“I am drawn to discarded materials, throw-ways, and unnecessary one-use objects. They are telling of human life. I consider who these materials belonged to and why they were discarded. These materials reflect human identities. A glimpse of someone’s private story is reflected in a broken key that used to open a door, a piece of costume jewelry is reminiscent of someone’s mother, and a torn child’s t-shirt that has an image of SpongeBob SquarePants speaks of innocence. I am striving for the exclusive use of materials and objects that reflect humanity’s existence. I look for the story because within this story is mine and yours.”
The post Top Five: September 26, 2024 appeared first on Glasstire.
The post Food Used As Napkin appeared first on The Onion.
This week marks Banned Books Week, an annual effort promoted by the American Library Association to bring awareness to literary censorship. In recognition of the event, The Onion takes a look at the history of book bans in the United States.
1788: The forward-thinking founding fathers preemptively crack down on socialist subversion by banning The Communist Manifesto 60 years before its publication.
1891: The state of Missouri bans all books that could clue children in to the fact that Missouri pretty much sucks.
1920: James Joyce’s Ulysses banned for graphic depictions of Irish people.
1942: L’Étranger is unabashedly published in French.
1989: Iowa Gov. Ruhollah Khomeini bans Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
1996: Librarians are pressured to take Harry Potter books off the shelves due to the nation having a bad gut feeling about J.K. Rowling.
2005: Kama Sutra banned from the house following dad’s back injury.
2011: Americans from all across the political spectrum agree that banning Fifty Shades Of Grey is fine.
2024: The New York Times releases “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century” to help streamline book-banning efforts.
2189: The AI Senate threatens to wipe the skull drive of anyone allegedly distributing ancient human knowledge archives.
The post Timeline Of Book Bans In The U.S. appeared first on The Onion.
In brief: Houston’s second cool front of the season has arrived and it will take our temperatures down a little bit. Long-time residents will know the primary benefit of September fronts is that they knock down humidity levels, rather than temperatures. And we should see drier-than-normal air through the weekend despite warm days. Enjoy!
Typically, we designate the day after Houston’s first nighttime temperature of 65 degrees, or lower, as Fall Day. The coolest night of the season, so far, came on September 9, when low temperatures reached 67 degrees at Bush Intercontinental Airport. Low temperatures there tonight will get close, so there’s a chance that Friday will be Fall Day.
A few readers have asked whether we are going to have another Fall Day celebration this year. The answer is no, because we’re going to wait a year so that we might have a bigger event in 2025. Why? Because that will be the 10th anniversary of this website. I know, I can’t believe it either. If you have ideas for the celebration, let us know in the comments below. We’re working with our partner Reliant to do something special. Speaking of Reliant, be sure and stay tuned for a message from them at the end of the post.
Skies will be sunny today, with a northerly wind at 10 to 15 mph, which may occasionally gust up to 20 mph or a bit higher. Those winds are bringing in drier air that will help dewpoints drop into the 50s later this morning or by the afternoon hours. Drier air warms more quickly, so air temperatures are likely to get into the upper 80s. But it will feel noticeably drier, and temperatures will cool more quickly this evening as the Sun sets. Lows tonight will drop into the upper 60s in Houston, and low 60s for most outlying areas away from the coast. It’s going to be delightful, and I can’t wait.
Another day with nice, dry air and plenty of sunshine. Expect highs to reach about 90 degrees as a result. Winds will be less, probably about 10 mph. Lows on Friday night will likely be a degree or two warmer than Thursday night. Still pleasant. (Note: Tomorrow’s post may be an hour or so late due primarily to my desire to take a long run with the drier air in the morning. It won’t matter, since the forecast for the next several days is not going to change much. In fact, you can pretty much ignore us tomorrow and that wouldn’t hurt my feelings.)
Expect plenty of sunshine, with highs in the low 90s. The dry air is going to modify somewhat, but we’re still going to see fairly low humidity levels all things considered. Low temperatures will reach about 70 degrees. There are zero weather concerns this weekend beyond the potential for a sunburn.
The first half of next week will see continued sunny weather, with high temperatures mainly in the low 90s. Dewpoints will recover into the 60s, so the air will feel more humid, but it’s likely going to be less humid than typical summer conditions in Houston. Nighttime temperatures will probably reach the low 70s. Some chance of a front, with our next real shot of rainfall, arrives by Thursday or Friday, but that part of the forecast remains hazy.
Hurricane Helene is on the way to likely become a major hurricane today before striking the northern coast of Florida tonight. It is similar to Hurricane Ike in that, due to its large size, Helene is likely to pack a broad and very damaging storm surge. Another factor with this storm is the potential for heavy rainfall far inland, in such areas as northern Georgia and western North Carolina. We’ll continue tracking the system on The Eyewall.
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(11 PM ET update): The 11 PM ET advisory is out with few changes. No forecast changes have been made, and no intensity changes have been made.
Helene is still organizing, and it seems that the size of Helene is acting to keep that intensification steady for now. As the system hits the ultra warm water in the Gulf and a more favorable environment internally, it will likely strengthen at a steady, faster pace tomorrow before making landfall tomorrow night.
There have been no notable changes to the surge or rainfall forecasts unfortunately. We’ll have an update in the morning.
Previous post follows…
This blog is committed to no-hype because of storms like Helene. This one merits your full attention and full preparedness if you are anywhere in the area that will be affected by the storm. This includes all of Florida except the far western Panhandle, all of Georgia, eastern Alabama, almost all of South Carolina, western North Carolina, and Tennessee. We cannot stress this enough. Follow the advice of local officials. This is almost certainly going to be a major storm, and most of the data suggests that this will be a catastrophic storm in several places.
There’s no way we can cover all the elements of this storm, but we’ll try.
Storm surge
The storm surge forecast is, frankly, hideous. The forecast surge values, should they verify, will be worse than any modern storm has brought to the area between Tampa Bay and Apalachee Bay.
The surge will be worse than Idalia all across the Big Bend Region, Apalachee Bay, the Nature Coast, and Tampa Bay. It will probably be the new benchmark for modern storms in this region. The surge will drop off dramatically to the west of where the center comes ashore, so folks in Panama City and Mexico Beach will only see a minor surge from this, with a huge escalation near and to the east of where the eye comes ashore. If these forecasts verify, this will be unsurvivable type surge in the region east of Carrabelle through about Cedar Key. I cannot stress enough how serious the storm surge from Helene may be.
Wind
Obviously with a cat 4 hurricane expected, there will be catastrophic wind at the immediate coast. But with Helene’s acceleration north, the wind will spread far inland.
We expect hurricane force winds to get deep into Georgia. The exact track will be critical in determining if Tallahassee sees catastrophic damaging winds or something more manageable. It will be close. It will probably be less close in Valdosta, GA which could see gusts in excess of 100 mph. Those winds will slowly decelerate deeper into Georgia, but hurricane force winds could get as far north as Macon. Strong tropical storm winds will impact metro Atlanta, especially on the south side and perhaps creeping close to Athens. Tropical storm force winds will be an issue deep into South Carolina and western North Carolina, as well as eastern Tennessee. There will be widespread wind damage and widespread, likely significant power disruption. This is a very bad looking storm.
Rain & flooding
We continue to see a high risk of excessive rain leading to flash flooding, possibly catastrophic flash flooding in two areas tomorrow. First is where Helene comes ashore in Florida, which will see substantial rain — what you would expect from a landfalling category 4 storm.
The storm will dump heavy rain and produce widespread flash flooding across Georgia, eastern Alabama and portions of South Carolina as well. But when the storm interacts with the Appalachians, that’s when severe flooding issues could creep up. The high risk was expanded south into metro Atlanta, especially north and east of the city. And it continues through Asheville, NC, including much of Upstate South Carolina north and west of Greenville-Spartanburg. Portions of the Smokeys will also be impacted.
The interaction of terrain with a hurricane can produce copious amounts of rain leading to destructive flooding and landslides, and that’s the concern in Appalachia. Again, I cannot stress enough how serious an event this may be in those areas. It’s a much different hazard than storm surge but extremely dangerous just the same.
Tornadoes
Isolated tornadoes are likely anywhere east of Helene’s center, so be aware of that risk in the Florida Peninsula, the Jacksonville area, and much of eastern Georgia and the Carolinas.
Again, we strongly encourage you to follow local officials, follow local media, and do everything possible to get out of harm’s way. This is not a storm you want to roll the dice on. We’ll update this post later this evening with any relevant new info. Look for a full post again in the morning.
HARTFORD, CT—Telling her to close her eyes and turn inward as he gently guided her positioning, local yoga teacher Vincent Diaz reportedly placed his hand on the small of student Ellie Cruz’s back Thursday, but in the parking lot. “It’s okay to get a little tense, but don’t resist too much because that’s how you hurt yourself,” said the instructor who gently whispered to Cruz as he gripped her thighs just 10 yards from the strip mall’s nail salon. “Just lose yourself in your heavy breathing, focus on that and just let what needs to happen, happen. It’s okay to sweat, it just shows that it’s working. You’re a natural, Ellie, but you really should be doing this more regularly so you get more comfortable. It gets better with experience.” At press time, Cruz received a request for $150 from her yoga teacher for providing a private lesson.
The post Yoga Teacher Puts Hand On Small Of Student’s Back, But In Parking Lot appeared first on The Onion.
(6:50 PM ET Update): Helene is now a category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of at least 130 mph. Helene is pretty clearing undergoing a rapid intensification cycle at present, and the only question at this point is if it will level off before it makes landfall. The track continues to wobble a bit, perhaps on the right side of the specific track, but in general, the forecast remains steady.
For Tallahassee, it remains really a question of whether it’s really bad or terribly bad. So, neither outcome is great. Looking at satellite imagery this evening, the west side of this thing is no picnic either. Yes, the “dirty” side is living up to its name, but the thunderstorms in the northwest quadrant are going to cause significant wind and rain, and even if this tracks east of Tallahassee, it’s going to be a really bad night.
Landfall is expected later this evening, probably close to midnight.
Rainfall will continue to lead to severe flooding well north of where Helene comes ashore. Flood warnings extend in broken fashion from just west of Tallahassee through Atlanta to Charlotte, into far southwest Virginia. Catastrophic flooding remains a strong possibility in the mountains.
Water levels continue to rise on the Florida coast, and the expected catastrophic storm surge north of Tampa through Apalachee Bay will proceed apace in the coming hours. Avoid the coast, do not go see it, it will be deadly. More to come later this evening.
(2:45 PM ET Update): Hurricane Helene is now a 120 mph major hurricane.
(11:25 AM ET Update): The 11 AM ET advisory is out with Helene up to 105 mph. Its structure and organization have improved since earlier. The track forecast has not shifted much in the new advisory, but it’s noteworthy that there have been a few wobbles to the east side of the track forecast.
Wobbles are normal with hurricanes of this size and intensity. The question is whether or not they fundamentally alter the track, particularly at this angle of approach. For most folks in the path of Helene, this has minimal impact on the end result. But for a place like Tallahassee, ending up on the west side of the storm would be immeasurably less impactful than the east side. Still bad to be sure, but not quite as bad as it could be otherwise. This would also impact the western fringe of the surge forecast a bit too. So it’s something to monitor through the day today if you have interests in Tallahassee or along Apalachee Bay.
Whatever the case, nothing has appreciably changed, and a major hurricane is still expected at landfall tonight around Midnight, give or take.
Tropical Storm and Hurricane warnings still extend almost absurdly far inland, but they will almost certainly verify.
A couple other notes: We already have additional numerous flash flood warnings near Tallahassee, between Macon and Augusta, just north of Greenville, SC, south of Asheville, near Johnson City, TN, and up into Virginia. The inland flooding component will continue to worsen as the day continues.
Tornado warnings have been numerous, and we currently have 3 warnings as I write this in Georgia and South Carolina. This system has the potential to be a prolific tornado producer from Florida into southeast Georgia, South Carolina, and parts of North Carolina. Please ensure you have a way to receive warnings, even if you’re 250 miles from the center of the storm.
Previous post follows…
Larger storms tend to be a little more unruly in terms of how they organize. Helene meets that bill today. Reports of “concentric eyewalls” in the storm, almost as if the system is trying to figure out how large it wants to be.
We’ve seen bursts of thunderstorms wax and wane near the center, but we’re currently in an uptick. Recent reports from NOAA flights into Helene suggest surface winds have increased to close to 100 mph. We’ll see what the new advisory shows just after I publish this. (Editor’s note: It has. Now a cat 2 with 100 mph winds). Basically, Helene continues to intensify, and there’s no reason to think the dire forecasts we and everyone else discussed yesterday have changed.
The surge forecast is basically unchanged from last night, with a 15 to 20 foot, unsurvivable peak surge in Apalachee Bay and the Big Bend.
Tampa Bay continues to see a 5 to 8 foot surge, which will be some of the worst surge experienced in modern times there.
The track of Helene is virtually unchanged as well. The most likely landfall point is between Apalachicola and Steinhatchee right now. There remains at least some risk that wobbling of the track could force it closer to Cedar Key in an extreme scenario. I would not rule that out, but I would be absolutely preparing for the worst between Apalachicola and Homosassa and for very bad outcomes south of there to Tampa Bay. Landfall should occur late this evening.
A Tornado Watch is in effect for most of the Florida Peninsula today.
That watch goes til 8 PM ET, and additional watches could be required to the north later today. Isolated tornadoes seem to already be a bit of a threat and this should escalate some through the day and into tonight.
The heavy rainfall threat continues to look very, very bad for both areas near landfall and interior locations in the Appalachians in North Carolina, Upstate South Carolina, and North Georgia.
After heavy rain yesterday, we continue to see the risk for 10 to 16 inches of additional rainfall with the storm today, tonight, and early Friday before things slowly ease up a little tomorrow. Catastrophic interior flooding, especially in that high risk area northeast of Atlanta remains a high likelihood.
Real quick tangent here. One of the reasons Helene is going to be such a monster storm as it comes inland is because it’s essentially “phasing” with a massive upper cutoff low over the mid-South. A cutoff low is a storm system in the upper atmosphere that has essentially cut itself off from the jet stream. When this happens, the system tends to just meander around until something changes to kick it out. In this situation, you can see the animation below with the big upper low north of Memphis, and then Helene surging in on the right side of the image.
This complex merger is something we don’t usually think of with a hurricane. Hurricane Sandy was a good example of this happening with tropical systems and showed why its winds and size caused so much damage despite “not technically being a hurricane” when it hit New Jersey in 2012. The whole process extends the life cycle of the winds of the hurricane and it’s why tropical storm warnings extend so far inland. The rain element is related as well. With Helene being pulled northeast, then suddenly hooking back northwest “into” the upper low, it will continue to produce rain on the windward side of the Appalachians, leading to additional rain tomorrow and further flooding.
Anyway, that explains some of what’s going on behind the scenes with Helene after it moves inland. We’ll update this post with any notable changes throughout the day.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
I’m off today, so here’s an older post from the archives. This was originally published in 2019.
A reader writes:
I started a new position recently and was promoted quickly to a management position. Great, I have a long supervisory background, looking forward to helping in a wider capacity.
One of my direct reports is a very conscientious and ambitious young man named “Scott” who I have found pleasant to work with.
Last week, during a normal conversation about a project, Scott brought up that he had done a background search on me and then asked me about an arrest on my record — an insurance snafu that led to a driver’s license snafu and when I was pulled over for a normal traffic stop in a rather conservative county, I spent a night in lock-up. Which was both humiliating and illuminating.
This is not immediately googleable. I gave it a try myself after he brought it up, and some of the specificity of the details he used leads me to believe he went to one of the publicly available background report sites and paid the nominal fee to obtain a detailed report.
His question was framed as that he “had been doing some research and wanted to clarify what happened in X state, because it wasn’t clear if it (the arrest) was in X or Y state.” I lived in Y state more recently, but there’s nothing easily found that links the two without paying for it.
In the moment, I answered truthfully that these items were from more than a decade ago and were the result of a particular set of circumstances. I then excused myself from the conversation and returned to my office.
The longer I think about it, the more weirded out I am. Scott would like to advance and I feel like a follow-up conversation is definitely warranted, but I’m struggling with an approach aside from “hey, you super violated a boundary for me and that will go over like a ton of bricks if you do it with future managers.”
To be fair, this is an overtly aggressive office culture and asking to explain your professional background in a fair amount of detail to coworkers/employees is par for the course. But while I understand having a background check run by the company during the hiring process, I’d like to keep my personal background personal.
(And while I’m not wild about discussing this embarrassing incident, my reaction was more of a “how and why did you obtain this information?” than a deep, dark secret that I’m worried might come to light.)
How do I let go of my weirded-out feeling and how do I best address this in a follow-up conversation?
WHAT?
You are being way more chill about this than I would be.
It’s an incredible overstep to run a paid background check on your new manager — but what’s really weird here is that he thought he somehow had standing to (a) make it clear to you that he did this and (b) ask you to clarify what he found.
The way he asked you about this sounds like he genuinely thought it was appropriate. He was “doing some research and wanted to clarify what happened”?? Because he didn’t feel he had sufficient details? About something that’s none of his business whatsoever?
Have you seen anything else weird about his judgment? Because this is such a bizarre thing for him to approach you with that I’ve got to think there’s a bigger issue with him. Maybe it’s just incredible naivete — but regardless of what’s at the root, this is just wildly inappropriate and I suspect it’s part of some broader pattern.
And as you note, it’s not that this is a deep, dark secret. It’s just that it’s personal and spectacularly irrelevant to anything he would ever have cause to “research.”
So I don’t think you need to let go of your weirded-out feeling. Your weirded-out feeling is warranted and appropriate.
I would say this to him: “I was taken aback last week when you asked me about a traffic incident in my background. Frankly, I was too taken aback to address it in the moment, but I’m not clear on why you were undertaking that kind of background search on me in the first place — and especially on why you decided to inquire with me about it.” And then, depending on his answer, you could say, “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn’t realize you violated a work boundary here. But I want to make sure that going forward you know that this was inappropriate, everyone you work with deserves privacy, and this is not something you should do again to anyone here.”
And I’d keep a very close eye on his judgment after this, especially around interpersonal stuff — and be prepared to swiftly shut down anything else inappropriate.
The Food and Drug Administration authorized at-home use of the nasal spray vaccine FluMist, opening the door for needle-shy people to access the potentially life-saving inoculation with a prescription. What do you think?
“But I need that small amount of human contact more than I need the vaccine.”
Adam Smedberg, Formula Deviser
“Hopefully this gets more Americans sticking things in their noses.”
Kendrick Conway, Cardboard Specialist
“I’m still gonna treat myself to ice cream for being a brave little girl.”
Robin Torre, Tome Duster
The post FDA Approves Nasal Flu Vaccine For At-Home Use appeared first on The Onion.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
LinkedIn has a new practice of sharing your personal data to train AI — unless you specifically opt out. That includes your profile, your posts, and your videos.
Without announcing it, LinkedIn apparently added a new data privacy setting last week that covers this, and they turned it on for everyone.
If you want to opt out, here’s how:
In your LinkedIn account, open “Settings & Privacy.” Select “Data privacy” and turn off the option under “Data for generative AI improvement.”
Be aware that turning this off will be not retroactive. LinkedIn has already begun training its AI with your content, and there’s no way to undo whatever they’ve already used.
ALEXANDRIA, VA—Delighting in the opportunity to make use of the tool he carried with him everywhere, local father Kevin Ballard reportedly insisted on using his pocketknife Wednesday to open a can of chili. “Hang on, there’s no need to go looking high and low for the can opener—I’ve got this covered right here,” said the marketing manager and father of three, fishing out the small item from his pocket and struggling for several seconds to open the one-inch blade. “Luckily, I never go anywhere without this baby, so I’m totally equipped for a situation like this one. It’s so much better to have a knife with you and not need it than it is to not have a knife and be in one of these tight spots where you do need it. See? All I need to do now is jam the blade into the side here and…no. Well, what if I sort of saw it, like this? Then—aw, shit, that hurts!” At press time, the man’s daughter, Jennifer Ballard, was said to have thrown out the partially opened can of chili after determining it had too much blood on it to be edible.
The post Dad Insists On Using Pocketknife To Open Can Of Chili appeared first on The Onion.
WASHINGTON—After paramedics used a scalpel to open an airway and keep him from asphyxiating en route to the hospital, President Joe Biden was reportedly rushed into surgery at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Wednesday to remove a sock that had become lodged in his throat after he tried to eat it. “While it’s true President Biden partially ingested a striped dress sock earlier today, I want to assure everyone that this is a routine surgery, and the president is expected to be back home enjoying his favorite treats in just a few hours,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who confirmed the commander-in-chief had stolen the sock from a partially open drawer in the Executive Residence while Secret Service agents weren’t looking and had gnawed on it in a corner of the room for five minutes, eventually attempting to put the entire thing in his mouth. “There are longstanding protocols against leaving out anything a president could pick up and choke on, so we’ll be investigating the security lapse that allowed a drawer to be open at a height that President Biden could easily reach. But I would like to categorically deny the rumor that a game of tug-of-war between the Secret Service and the president led to this hospitalization.” At press time, Jean-Pierre told reporters the president was out of surgery but warned Americans to stay away from him for a little while as he was still logy from the meds.
The post Biden Rushed Into Surgery After Eating Sock appeared first on The Onion.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
I’m off today. Here are some past letters that I’m making new again, rather than leaving them to wilt in the archives.
1. Giving extra time off to people who get married
My friend got married this weekend, and she mentioned to me that her office gives her an extra week of PTO to use in the year which she got married. (The idea behind it being that she’ll use it on her honeymoon, although I doubt that that’s enforced.)
I was thinking today about the fairness of this policy. I’m not married and have no prospects (lol). If I worked at her office, I would get a week less of PTO — just because I’m single.
Ultimately, this doesn’t affect me because I don’t work at her office, but, what do you think?
Yeah, it’s lovely that they want to support their employees, but a policy of giving people a full extra week of paid vacation upon marriage is destined to cause resentment among people who aren’t married, or who were married before they were hired and would really like an extra week off to spend with their ill parent, or so forth. It’s prioritizing marriage above all other life events in a way that isn’t fair or equitable (although it reflects our culture’s tendency to do the same). I don’t think anyone would begrudge, like, a congratulatory fruit basket, but an extra week of vacation is a huge thing to only be giving to some.
An alternative would be to offer an extra week of PTO for anyone with a major life event, which they could define loosely (and they could cap it at one-time usage, or only every X years, or only after X years of employment) — or even remove the “major event” requirement and just let people have it after three years of employment or so forth.
– 2019
2. Approaching a manager in public for an impromptu chat about a job
Let’s say I visit a cafe close to my office every day at 3 p.m. for a cup of coffee. I also see a manager whose team has an opening, and it just so happens that I possess the qualifications required to join his team.
Are managers in general open to being approached by potential candidates in a public setting such as a cafe, and having a 5-10 minute chat if they genuinely had time to spare? What if the manager works for a company that is different from the candidate’s? Would they still be willing to talk to the candidate for a few minutes? They may stumble upon a very talented individual for their team.
Don’t do it! There are some managers who are always in recruiting mode and are happy to talk to potential candidates any time, anywhere. But there are far more managers who would be annoyed to be interrupted while they’re trying to have a quick coffee (and who may be doing something else they don’t want to stop).
And it’s not like interrupting someone in public is the only way to reach them and you have no other options. If you’re interested in approaching a hiring manager, you can do it over email or LinkedIn, where they can respond when it’s convenient for them and where you can include a copy of your resume, so they can figure out right from the start if it even makes sense to talk. (And if you’re really just interested in applying for a specific job with them, go ahead and apply, following the application instructions, since otherwise you’ll come across as if you’re trying to circumvent their process.)
The one exception to this is if the person works for your company. In that case, it’s reasonable to talk to them informally — but I still wouldn’t do it when they’re trying to relax.
– 2017
3. Interviewer rejected me because I was late for the interview
I had a job interview that got rescheduled because they had a snow day that closed their office. The rescheduled date was last week on Monday. I was really excited for the position and felt it was a great match for my experience and skills, and I had killer reference letters to attest to this.
It was hard to find parking and was still icy and snowy from the week before. After it was clear I wasn’t going to be as timely as I had hoped, I texted the manager I had been communicating with that I was just parking and would be there in a few minutes. (It was 1:07 pm, with our interview scheduled to start at 1:00 pm.)
I arrived about 1:10 and she and two other staff were waiting for me in a room. I apologized briefly (but didn’t want to focus on that) and what I heard in reply was. “Oh, it’s okay.” The interview went well and was well organized, thorough, and professional. I followed up two days later with a thank-you email.
But I heard back that being late had more or less eliminated me and clouded my other great qualities and that timeliness was very important for the position. I’m surprised and thought it was weird they didn’t bring that up in the interview. What do you think?
I don’t think it’s weird that they didn’t bring it up in the interview because it’s not necessarily something that requires discussion (and a lot of people wouldn’t know how to address it on the spot in a way that didn’t feel uncomfortably confrontational). Plus, they might have wanted time to think about it and decide how much it mattered to them first.
I do think penalizing you for being 10 minutes late if it was very icy and snowy was excessive; even when people plan for bad roads, they can’t always predict the weather impact with perfect precision. But I suspect not texting until you were already seven minutes late was the issue (as opposed to pulling over to contact them before the interview was scheduled to start, so they weren’t sitting there waiting and wondering if you were going to show).
– 2019
4. How do I politely end conversations at networking events?
Your recent post about conversation starters at industry events got me thinking: once you’ve got talking to someone at a networking event, and both people have got what they needed out of the conversation, how do you politely move on?
I’m on the board of the association for a charity that pays for me to attend various networking events. I want to get the most out of the event both for myself and my charity, meeting people who may want to collaborate, engaging industry leaders, and chatting to a good cross-section of the community so that they feel heard. But sometimes I get stuck — it’s not that I don’t want to talk to the person, I just need to circulate!
I know a few people who are networking ninjas. They are so good at extracting themselves from conversations without fuss that I don’t even notice them moving around. While I’m happy to say “I must circulate” to people I know well, it seems rude to just cut off the flow of conversation with someone you’ve only just met (especially if this is their rare chance to give input into our charity). In that situation, I usually say something awkward like, “I must pop to the toilet” which … isn’t that elegant…
I don’t want anyone to think I don’t value their conversation. Do you have any scripts I could use to move on without causing offense (or having to use the bathroom as a hideaway)?
“Well, it was great meeting you!” is an easy way to signal the conversation is coming to a close. You can dress it up by adding things like “I’m going to pass on your advice on X to our board,” “I hope we see each other at next month’s event,” and so forth. But the basic idea is to start saying those wrapping-up phrases.
Another way to do it is to offer your card and ask if they have one, and use that as your closing ceremony. Do the card exchange and then go straight to, “Wonderful! Hopefully we’ll stay in touch. It was great meeting you.”
If it still feels too abrupt to leave after those phrases, it’s fine to add, “I’m going to grab a fresh drink” or “I’m going to go check out that buffet!” or any other phrase that politely announces your intentions.
– 2019
In brief: Houston will see another warm and humid day, but there will be a twist this afternoon as a broken line of showers and thunderstorms pushes through the area from northwest to southeast. Drier air will follow overnight, leading to sunny days with lower humidity. It’s a weak front, but in September, who’s complaining?
Most of the area will be warm and humid again today, with high temperatures in the low-90s. Skies will be mostly sunny this morning, but then we should see some clouds building up this afternoon with increasing levels of moisture in the atmosphere. By later this afternoon we should see a broken line of showers, perhaps with a few embedded thunderstorms, moving from northwest to southeast across the area. This line should reach from Sugar Land to downtown Houston to Kingwood by around 4 to 6 pm, and push down to the coast by around 7 to 9 pm.
As it nears the coast, this boundary should gradually run into more moisture, and this could help fill in the gaps. There is a slight threat of some briefly damaging winds in any of the stronger thunderstorms that develop. Unfortunately, I don’t think the frontal passage is going to bring widespread, drenching rains, which the area needs after a fairly dry September. Some locations may pick up 0.5 inch of rain, but most of the region, and especially areas inland of Interstate 10, are likely to see little to no rain. Lows tonight will drop to around 70 degrees.
Drier air starts to filter in overnight, and we’ll see a couple of slightly cooler days. High temperatures on Thursday and Friday will reach the upper-80s, with lots of sunshine. Thursday may be a bit gusty in terms of northerly winds, but these will settle down somewhat by Thursday night. Lows, for the most part, will reach the upper 60s in the Houston area and drop down a little further outside of the city and away from the coast. Mornings and evenings will feel lovely.
Sunny weather continues, with daytime highs in the low 90s and nighttime lows around 70 degrees. The humidity will recover some, but not get back to really sticky dewpoints. So again, mornings and evenings will be fairly pleasant outside.
Expect more sunshine and highs in the low-90s. There is some support for a front arriving by Thursday or Friday of next week, but it is far from universal in the weather model ensembles. What does seem clear is that, after today, rain chances are very low for awhile for our area. That’s one reason why I’m hoping for today’s showers to overperform expectations.
Now entering the Gulf of Mexico, Tropical Storm Helene is approaching hurricane strength with 70-mph sustained winds. It is expected to become a powerful Category 3 hurricane before striking the northwest Florida coast on Thursday evening. This storm will have widespread, myriad effects. We’ll have continuing coverage today on The Eyewall.
Installation view of “Seeding Soil.” Photo: Liz Kim
An inkjet print of a butterfly rests on a piece of worn concrete the size of one’s palm. Shaped like a miniature concrete divider, or a small ancient granite stele, the piece of concrete is nestled among translucent road safety beads, like a small construction site, or a grave. The butterfly is reminiscent of insects pressed into the grills of cars over long drives, especially with the audio component, which is a slowed-down field recording of highways. Pulled into simultaneously macabre, sparkly, transient, and archeological directions, Adelaide Theriault’s Vicarious Memory (sonic-geo-ecologies of concrete), Sediment and Erosion (1-8 of 8) (2021/2024, 2022) represents the contrasting sentiments, and the sediments, of this exhibition.
Adelaide Theriault, “Vicarious Memory (sonic-geo-ecologies of concrete), Sediment and Erosion,” 2022. Photo: Liz Kim
A theme of imagination and play emerges. Hollis Hammonds’ Carbon Collectors (2023) is a mass of semi-transparent drafting films drawn with brown ink, looking like gnarly coffee drips. One can practically smell the musk of decomposing leaves from these mixed media drawings, interwoven with painted branches, and I suddenly recall my own childhood, weaving through sunken piles in the woods. Preston Gaines has created in Rust Garden: A Triad (2023-24) oxidized steel flowers that in their outlines, open up like butterfly wings. His Untitled (2023) takes up a corner space in the gallery, with birchwood that has been malleted to a puzzle-like fit as an architectural partition that reminds me of the playground of my youth.
Alexis Pye, “Found II,” 2024. Photo: Liz Kim
Alexis Pye’s Found I and II are a diptych, comprising banners of beautifully textural heavyweight paper washed with gouache, with details filled in through bold applications of oil pastel scribbles. She depicts Black neighborhoods, two women’s gravitational chat along a sidewalk during the daytime, and people standing next to shopping center signage during evening hours, seemingly waiting and wanting, with their West African cloth spiraling into sumptuous contrast against electric billboards. Angela Chen has created an odyssey through a series of quilted inkjet prints on cotton muslin, dyed with acorn ink and showing Houston’s Buffalo Bayou, unfurling as a huge banner in the middle of the installation space. The textile conveys warmth and softness, with delicate and minute wrinkles like veins on skin. The images at the top depict the skyscape and industrial steel and concrete, and move into a middle section weighed down by scrap metal piles at the waterfront. The piece ends by way of pipes, puddles, and moist, green meadows that run down along the floor. My inner child imagines running down, over, and across the barriers and structures toward the greenery.
Across the gallery is an entrance to Alexandra Robinson’s immersive installation, Mi Tierra (2023-24). The work is a two-channel video projected onto a pile of Texas limestone with a flag of multi-colored quilted strips rising out of the rubble. The two projections cycle through the same videos in different timeframes, sliding past one another with scenes of fields, of dry grass, wildflowers, and green windswept plains. At certain points, the camera moves past these fields in high motion, causing vertigo, and inflicting upon the visitor a sense of displacement and uprootedness. The assembled flag and the strewn limestone speak to a sense of tattered land and identity.
Alexandra Robinson, “Homeland #2 (Tlaltecuhtli),” 2023. Photo: Liz Kim
Back outside, Robinson’s ink and graphite drawings speak to the same themes: “homeland: slumberland,” “motherland: fantasyland,” “badland: no mansland,” and “my land.” For Homeland #2 (Tlaltecuhtli) (2023), amongst blocks of these contrasts and pairs, the Aztec earth goddess opens her mouth, claiming all these forms of her making, abstract or concrete, into her belly. Comparatively, in Homeland #3 (map of 1830 US) (2023), Robinson’s initial graphite sketches of these words were haphazardly erased, the traces of which could be seen more clearly, after they were overwritten with pen and ink. Her homeland is a land encompassing historic Mexico and the US, as a place of her origin combining both regions. Robinson’s uprootedness arises from her identity crisis as Mexican and American.
Jean Shon, “A Little Heartbroken”
Jean Shon’s work is made up of walls of text written over photography, in dual layers. One can see the original photograph’s colors refracted through like magnifying lenses. There are three photographs in the set, showing a building standing and then being torn down. Some legible excerpts state, “Reconstruction-era Black freedmen’s community in Galveston county,” “Greater Bell Zion Missionary Baptist Church, across the street from the auditorium, burned to the ground.” Searching these excerpts, one finds the story of the Historic Lincoln High School auditorium being decommissioned after a fire broke out at the church across the street, which was established by the descendants of the 1867 Settlement Historic District in Galveston County. After the text has been overlaid with the photograph, the image is barely recognizable, representing the dissolution of material history, overtaken by language.
Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, “Objects in The Mirror: Notes for a Houston Road Movie,” 2022. Photo: Liz Kim
Finally, at the far end of the gallery, Sindhu Thirumalaisamy’s two-channel video greets visitors, inviting them to let go of geographic attachments. The left side projection displays close-up views of the earth, roaming over shells and sedimentary rocks, and the right side flashes by in highway overpasses, cars, bridges, walkways, and roads. As she enacts a deconstruction of Houston as a physical and conceptual place, the ground beneath suddenly seems complicit in hiding the traces of place.
Why are there no artists from the Coastal Bend or Rio Grande Valley represented in this year’s biennial? A lingering thought, in an otherwise wondrous exhibition.
The Texas Biennial: The Last Sky: Seeding Soil and Mi Tierra will be on view at K Space Contemporary in Corpus Christi through October 4.
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This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
I’m off today, so here’s an older post from the archives. This was originally published in 2017.
A reader writes:
I started working at my job eight months ago, not long after I completed college (thanks in part to your write-ups about cover letters, resumes, interview questions and job searching). A few months ago in the elevator, my manager’s manager and someone from upper management in another department were talking about an upcoming conference. The idea of the conference sounded interesting and at our next departmental meeting I asked my manager’s manager about being able to attend the conference. She said the company couldn’t send me to this conference.
I really wanted to go. This was for several reasons: (1) what I heard about the conference in the elevator sounded interesting, (2) I was trying to show initiative, and (3) It would be good for my career to attend something like that. I was bummed out about the company not being able to send me.
But a week later I was asked to assist someone from a different department. He had a broken foot and needed help carrying paperwork and laptops up to one of the meeting rooms on another floor. He told me he was swamped with trying to get everything ready for the meeting on top of signing up people for the conference and making all the arrangements. I offered to do all the conference so he could get the meeting set up.
I signed myself up for the conference along with everyone else. But I only signed up as an attendee from my company. I paid for the conference fee, the airline tickets, and the hotel room out of my own pocket. I didn’t charge anything to the company for myself, even though all of the other attendees had everything paid for using a company credit card. I also booked vacation time so I could go.
I was excited to go to the conference. But when my manager’s manager saw me there the first day, she was upset at seeing me there, even after I explained I had paid the sign-up fee and everything else out of my own pocket and had used my own vacation time. I admit now that I made a mistake because I didn’t know the conference was for directors and executive management in my industry, not for entry-level people with less than a year like me. My manager’s manager had to get special permission from the company to go because she isn’t a director yet but is next in line for a promotion when someone retires. After the conference organizers found out from my company that I am not in upper management, they asked me to leave and said my fee would be refunded.
I already paid for the hotel room and return flight, so I ended up staying there even though I couldn’t go to the conference. My first day back at work was my last one ever because I got fired. My manager’s manager was furious and so were her bosses. I know I messed up, but when I asked about going to the conference she didn’t say I couldn’t go; she only said the company couldn’t send me. I also had no idea it was a conference for upper management only. If I had known, I obviously would not have signed up, but she didn’t tell me and it wasn’t clear at registration.
I know I made a mistake and it was a huge embarrassment for the company when word of what I did got around the conference, but I never had any write-ups or trouble and I was a model employee. I don’t think it was a fireable offense and I was shocked they fired me. Did I mess up that badly or were they wrong? I want to know if there is anything I can do to fix this.
Well, you definitely overstepped. I can understand your logic in thinking that if you paid for yourself and made all your own arrangements, it would be fine for you to attend … but this was a business event that your company only invited select people to. It’s sort of like if your company was sending all the senior directors to Vegas for a retreat, and you booked your way out there and showed up too and figured it was okay because you paid your own expenses.
That said, you’re new to the work world and clearly didn’t understand how this worked, and firing you over it is a pretty extreme reaction.
That makes me wonder if anything else had happened previously to make them worry about your judgment. If this was one in a string of concerns, then their decision would be more understandable. Complicating matters, you wouldn’t necessarily know if that were the case; sometimes managers notice iffy things about someone’s judgment but decide that it doesn’t quite rise to the level of needing to address it, especially if the person is entry-level. So it’s possible that something like that was at play here.
I don’t think there’s anything you can do to fix this situation now, unfortunately. But there might be things you can learn from it. If you had pretty good rapport with your manager, one option would be to reach out to her now and say something like this: “I want to apologize again for my error in judgment in attending the conference without anyone’s okay. I genuinely didn’t understand that it would be a problem, but I do realize now that I erred. The experience has made me wonder if my judgment may have been off in other areas too since this was my first post-college job, and if so, I’d be so grateful for any feedback you can give me. I’m at the start of my career and I want to make sure that I learn from this, so if you noticed any other areas for improvement while I was working for you, I’d love your feedback.” That might not produce anything useful — but it also might, and it’s definitely worth a shot.
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