WASHINGTON—In the latest study on how the existential threat of global warming is affecting mental health, the Environmental Protection Agency revealed Wednesday that climate anxiety had increased now that rising sea levels were expected to force more people to wear swimsuits. “As glacial ice melts and coastlines move…
We are going to talk about Otis today because of the hurricane’s dramatic intensification on Tuesday, and overnight landfall along the Southern Pacific coast of Mexico.
Otis made landfall on Tuesday night, near Acapulco, with maximum sustained winds of 165 mph. This was a worst-case scenario for this region. Why? Because no storms had been recorded in this area, this strong, before. On top of that, local residents and business owners had less than a day to prepare for the worst hurricane of their lives. So not only was this storm unexpected, there was no institutional memory about what to expect from a major hurricane.
With this startling burst in intensity, Otis has nearly set a record for rapid intensification within 24 hours. The system strengthened from a 50 mph tropical storm at 1 am CT on Tuesday to 165 mph just 23 hours later. That is 115 mph in 24 hours. It is second only to Hurricane Patricia, a Pacific storm in 2015 that saw its maximum sustained winds increase by 120 mph during a similar period.
This morning, as it moves inland, Otis is weakening. As of 7 am CT the storm had 110 mph winds, and will continue to lose intensity as it interacts with mountainous terrain. Nevertheless, Otis will continue to bring damaging winds into Southern Mexico today, along with dangerous storm surge. Heavy rains will remain a problem later this week, through Thursday, for much of Southern Mexico. They are likely to produce significant flooding and mudslides.
Let’s wind things back to Monday night, and have a look at the model forecasts for the intensity of Hurricane Otis. At the time this was a tropical storm, and largely expected to remain so before its landfall into Mexico. None of our ‘best’ models for predicting tropical system intensity anticipated Otis growing beyond tropical storm-strength. In two decades of forecasting I do not recall a whiff like this one.
As a meteorologist, these kind of moments are humbling. Otis will be studied in the coming months and years to understand why it blew up so quickly, and so powerfully, in such a short period of time. In moments like these, forecasters utterly failed the people of Southern Mexico. We must do better.
Over in the Atlantic Ocean, Hurricane Tammy continues to dance around the Atlantic Ocean. This storm would be a curiosity given its meandering track, but for its potential to come near Bermuda this weekend. As of Wednesday morning, Tammy has sustained winds of 100 mph, and there is a chance for some slight strengthening today.
However, after today it is likely to interact with a cold front, and begin a transition to a non-tropical storm. There is a fair amount of uncertainty in track and intensity. But for now it looks like Tammy will remain far enough south, and just weak enough, to not bring anything more than garden-variety like storminess to Bermuda this weekend.
Beyond Tammy, happily, the Atlantic tropics look quiet.
OLYMPIA, WA—Noting that it would be the perfect opportunity to practice shading, color, and light, local courtroom artist Allen Jansen told reporters Wednesday that he hoped his next defendant was a bowl of fruit. “I’ll be honest, the figure work is great and all, but I’d give anything for the bailiff to escort a…
WASHINGTON—After the nation’s vast stretches of countryside were replaced almost overnight by sprawling, futuristic cityscapes, government officials confirmed Wednesday that programs aimed at bringing high-speed internet to underserved areas had turned rural America into a cybernetic metropolis. “As soon as they had…
Michigan State University apologized for displaying an image of Adolf Hitler on its stadium video boards as part of a pregame trivia quiz before Saturday’s football game. What do you think?
Google says Samsung Wallet is spying on you! (It isn't.) [credit: User 7072490759456883590 ]
Most Android users have probably never seen Google Play Protect in action. The malware-scanning service is built into every Android device and is supposed to flag malware that users have installed. Recently it flagged some popular apps that are very much not malware: Samsung Wallet and Samsung Messages.
As spotted by 9to5Google, Samsung users have been getting hit with Play Protect warnings since earlier this month. Users on the Google Support forum have posted screenshots of Play Protect flagging the Samsung system apps, and even Samsung responded to the issue, explaining (in Korean) how to fix any damage caused by the bug. Samsung says (through translation) the issue was caused by "a temporary failure of the Google server" and should now be fixed.
Samsung Wallet and Samsung Messages both come bundled with most Samsung phones as system apps, so they have a wide install base. When Play Protect flags an app as harmful, it pops up a message suggesting users remove the app, but since these are both system apps, users can only disable them.
If you go browsing through the Win32 API (a common pastime back in the old days), you may run into the RegOverridePredefKey function, which lets a process redirect one of the predefined keys to a separate registry key. What’s the idea behind this function?
It’s explained in the Remarks in the documentation. The idea is that you have a self-registering DLL, and you want to capture the registry changes made by that DLL’s DllRegisterServer function, so that you can take the captured registry changes and add them to your product’s main installer. This allows you to simplify your installer to just “Copy these files to these locations, and then set these registry keys to these values.” You took the DllRegisterServer step out of the equation, which speeds up installation and also simplifies auditing.
That was the idea, but it pretty much never worked in practice.
The trick assumed that all the DLL’s DllRegisterServer did was set some registry keys in well-known places (specifically, under HKEY_) to hard-coded values. That may have been true in simpler times, but DLLs quickly took advantage of the fact that the DllRegisterServer function was code, so you can add whatever other logic to the function you like. You can look around the system and decide to write different keys depending on what you find. You don’t even have to limit yourself to writing registry keys! You can create files, call networking APIs, reconfigure the system to your heart’s content.
The dream of being able to capture the output of a function call into a list of registry keys was too naïve. Real life is more complicated than that.
The post On the failed unrealized promise of <CODE>RegOverridePredefKey</CODE> appeared first on The Old New Thing.
A customer found the byte sequence ba7816bf8f01cfea414140de5dae2223b00361a396177a9cb410ff61f20015ad in the Windows cryptographic libraries. This is the SHA256 hash of the notoriously insecure password abc. (See pages 14 through 16 of the NIST Computer Security Resource Center, Cryptographic Standards and Guidelines, SHA examples document.) Why does the Windows cryptographic library use such a ridiculously weak password, and what is this password used for?
While it’s true that abc is a horrible password, it’s also the case that the Windows cryptographic libraries aren’t using it as a password. The value is part of a self-test that the libraries perform to verify that nothing obvious has gone wrong with the standard providers.
You can find this hard-coded “well-known SHA256” in the sha256.c module, with the “plaintext” in selftest.c. The values are used by the function SymCryptSha256SelfTest to verify that the algorithm produces the expected answer.
The fact that an insecure password appears in the cryptography libraries doesn’t mean that the library is using them as passwords. In this case, they are just test data.
Bonus chatter: I bet you can find insecure passwords in a lot of binaries if you set your mind to it. Just scan for the bytes 61 62 63 in any binary, and if you find it, you can get all excited: “Hey, your binary contains the insecure password abc!”
The post Why is there a hash of a weak password in the Windows cryptographic libraries? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
HALIFAX – Following a stretch of above-average ocean temperatures and earlier-than-usual storm formation, meteorologists at Canada’s national weather service have officially updated the hurricane season forecast from “gosh golly” to a record-setting “holy cannoli.” “We’d hoped for a quieter year this year, maybe just an ‘ain’t that somethin’’ or even a ‘huh’, but we knew […]
The post Maritime Weather Service updates hurricane season forecast from “gosh golly” to “holy cannoli” appeared first on The Beaverton.
The post Sloshed appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.
Hovertext:
Sometimes the votey panel is better than the comic and I simply have to accept it.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
My brother in law was laid off in March. He was part of the mass layoffs in the tech industry. Since then, he has applied to a lot of jobs. Like, A LOT. As of one week ago, he has applied to exactly 700 jobs. I know the exact figure because of his LinkedIn activity, which is what I am writing about.
Basically I am wondering if his LinkedIn activity is affecting his chances of getting a job. Every week or so, he posts an image saying something like this: “200 days of searching, 700 applications, 27 recruiter screens, 292 rejections, 76 referrals, 46 interviews, and 1 offer.” (Those are real numbers. He turned down the one offer.)
Now, I’m not in tech, nor do I hire people. I’ve neer been subjected to layoffs, and I’ve never interviewed around for a position. But, if I were hiring people and I looked through his LinkedIn I would be … let’s say surprised to see all that data.
On the one hand, it shows he is driven and clearly committed to finding a job. On the other hand, it looks like there must be some red flags if he’s been rejected nearly 300 times — not to mention that I would feel like I’m his 700th choice! I might pass on him based on that alone.
On top of the regular images of job-search data, his LinkedIn also contains a lot of posts — upwards of five or so each day. It just seems like too much activity and too much information that could hurt his chances.
So, what do you think? He’s clearly getting some interviews and he consistently gets good feedback. I know tech is rough right now, but is the LinkedIn stuff hurting or helping?
It’s definitely not helping! At best it would be a neutral — but a lot of recruiters and hiring managers are going to have the exact same reaction that you did, which means it’s going to hurt him.
There’s nothing shameful about a long job search, but I’m curious about what his goal is with posting the weekly data. If he just wants to keep track for his own sake, I could understand that — but why is he posting it?! What does he hope to accomplish with it, other than sowing doubts about him in potential employers’ minds? I assume he’s not looking to generate sympathy (since sympathy doesn’t get you hired). Is it a commentary on the state of tech hiring? Hiring in general? What’s the end goal in doing this? It boggles my mind.
And separately, yes, five posts on a LinkedIn a day is a lot and, especially combined with the weird data dumps, will make him look like he doesn’t have great judgment about where to invest his energy.
Any chance he’d be open to feedback from you about it? If you’ve got the sort of relationship that allows for it, you’d be doing him a favor if if you can suggest he pull back on some of this and see if that changes his results.
REGINA, SK – Local school teacher Max Hammond is concerned that if one of his students doesn’t start focusing more in class, they will miss out on being forcibly led to adopt a more left-wing viewpoint. “I’m just trying to do my job, namely shaping these impressionable young minds into considering ideas and feelings they […]
The post Teacher struggling to indoctrinate child who never pays attention appeared first on The Beaverton.
The former president's lawyers are arguing that the Justice Department is criminalizing "core political speech" protected by the First Amendment and selectively targeting him for prosecution.
(Image credit: Charles Krupa/AP)
Attorney Jenna Ellis has entered a guilty plea in the Georgia election interference case. The former Trump lawyer is now the fourth co-defendant to plead guilty.
(Image credit: John Bazemore/AP)
After a talk by Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen was "postponed," some authors also pulled out of future events. The writer had signed an open letter criticizing Israel and calling for a ceasefire.
(Image credit: Luca Bruno/AP)
Though Día de los Muertos, or The Day of the Dead, is traditionally observed on November 1 and 2, with those dates falling squarely in the middle of the work week this year, many organizations will begin celebrations this weekend. Texans looking to mark the holiday will have opportunities over the next week to attend performances, participate in events, and see Día de los Muertos-inspired art. Find a list of upcoming events, separated by city, below.
Viva la Vida Festival & Parade
Austin
Mexic Arte Museum
Viva la Vida 2023 Festival & Parade
Saturday, October 28, Noon to 6 p.m.
100-200 blocks East and West 4th St.
Mariposa Plaza will be filled with hands-on art activities and artist demos, traditional foods, a Muertos Mercado with local artists and retail booths, a low-rider exhibition, live performances and more! At Noon, the parade will gather on 6th St. between I-35 Southbound Frontage Rd. & Red River St and it will travel on West 6th St. to the festival location on 4th St. and Congress Ave.
Corpus Christi
Día de los Muertos Festival Corpus Christi
Saturday, October 28, 3 p.m. to Midnight
Now in our 16th year, the Día de los Muertos Festival has become one of Corpus Christi’s most popular events. We present live entertainment on three stages: Latin-influenced rock & pop music, Mariachis, Ballet Folklorico and cultural dancers, youth performers, local DJs, and regional up-and-coming bands. The event also includes an Hecho a Mano Art Expo, Kids’ Activities, Ofrenda display in the Ritz Theater, art exhibitions and demonstrations, food, drinks and more. K Space Contemporary hosts a fine art exhibition of thematic works, a Youth Art Exhibition and youth piñata contest for area K-12 groups called Extravagancia de Piñatas.
Dallas
Latino Cultural Center
Saturday, October 28, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Join us for our Annual Día de los Muertos Festival. Stop by for craft workshops with Semillitas Book Club, face painting, performances on the stage, our altares exhibition, a vendor market including food vendors and more. Vendor Market curated by Hecho con Amor.
Fort Worth
Artes de la Rosa Cultural Center for the Arts at the Rose Marine Theater
Día de los Muertos Parade and Festival
Saturday, October 28, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Come join us for a day filled with Hispanic culture and family fun at the Artes de la Rosa Cultural Center for the Arts 20th Anniversary Día de los Muertos – celebración de vida y cultura. The community parade kicks off at 10 a.m. at the intersection of north Main St. and Central Av. and heads north towards the Historic Rose Marine Theater.
Bring lawn chairs and find a spot at Marine Park for all the Festival activities which begin at noon and close at 5 p.m. Visit the vendors, enjoy great food, and treats and experience wonderful performances from the Fort Worth Opera, the Cliburn in the Community, Ballet Folklórico Azteca, Ballet Folklórico de Fort Worth, Baraja de Oro Band, Mariachi’s, and our own Artes Academy.
MECA’s Día de Muertos Festival
Houston
MECA’s Día de Muertos Festival: Honoring Our Past, Celebrating Our Future
Saturday, October 28 and Sunday, October 29, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
1900 Kane St.
Join us on our tree-lined and art-filled campus of the historic Dow School, in the Old Sixth Ward–the historic part of the Washington Avenue Arts District.
For 23 years, MECA’s Día de Muertos Festival has been a public celebration of community folk-art traditions that commemorate family and community ancestors. In the spirit of the popular Latin American holiday, we invite each and all of you to partake in this joyful celebration of the family, friends, and loved ones who passed away, as well as rich traditions and customs surrounding the Día de Muertos and similar practices in other cultures.
La Vida de los Muertos at Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center.
San Antonio
Briscoe Western Art Museum
Community Ofrenda and Crafts: Celebrating Día de los Muertos in the West
Ofrenda: October 5 through November 2
Art Sessions: October 28, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
In celebration of Día de los Muertos, the community is invited to participate in the Briscoe Museum’s Community Ofrenda honoring influential figures in Western art and the American West, as well as the museum’s late namesakes, Gov. Dolph Briscoe Jr. and his wife, Janey Slaughter Briscoe. Everyone is welcome to add photos of lost loved ones and personal offerings to help celebrate their lives.
Learn about the art traditions behind papel picado, then create and paint a calaverita – “little skull” – with local artists at the Briscoe’s Día de los Muertos celebration. Artist Renée Letapi-Gamez will lead painting calaveritas while artist Kathy Trenchard will lead an informal discussion and work with two classes to demonstrate the craft of papel picado.
Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center
Community Altars
Thursday, November 2 through Friday, December 2
Galeria Guadalupe, 723 S. Brazos
An exhibit of altars, decorated with ofrendas, lined up with bright yellow marigold flowers and photos of the departed, created by San Antonio community members and area school students.
La Vida de los Muertos – A Día de los Muertos Community Celebration
Thursday, November 2, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Plaza Guadalupe, 1327 Guadalupe St
This dance performance brings to life various characters that explain the tradition and significance of Día de Los Muertos through music and dance. The performance features the Guadalupe Dance Company, Dance Academy and Mariachi Academy. The public is encouraged to bring their own lawn chairs to enjoy this outdoor, free performance. The dance performance is free, funded by the City of San Antonio Department of Arts and Culture, Texas Commission on the Arts and AARP.
The post A Roundup of Día de los Muertos Events Across Texas appeared first on Glasstire.
At a time when the world of sculpture was dominated by men, Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), a Ukrainian immigré in New York City, made a name for herself with her configured wall sculptures of painted boxes composed from scrap wood. A determined artist, Nevelson was in her sixties before the media recognized her work. A new exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury, seeks to reclaim the artist’s contribution to American art history.
Curated by Shirley Reece-Hughes, the show of over fifty sculptures and works on paper is divided into five thematic sections: choreographer, visionary, printmaker, community builder, and environmentalist. Visitors travel through Nevelson’s artistic journey, from her earliest wooden black boxes in 1950 to her site-specific installations that situated her within the avant-garde circles of that time period.
Louise Nevelson, “Lunar Landscape,” 1959–60, painted wood. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Purchase with funds from the Ruth Carter Stevenson Acquisitions Endowment, 1999.3.A-J
Nevelson is best known for her monochromatic sculptures in black paint. However, as she progressed, the artist experimented with white, such as her 1959 installation for the Museum of Modern Art, Dawn’s Wedding Feast, a few pieces of which are included in the Carter’s exhibit. Later, beginning in 1960, Nevelson experimented with gold, as seen in three works featured in the exhibit’s last gallery. Recent scholarship has suggested that Nevelson’s foray into gold-coated sculptures potentially has ties to Texas.
Louise Nevelson, “Royal Tide I,” 1960, painted wood. Peter and Beverly Lipman, Photo Courtesy Storm King Art Center by Jerry L. Thompson, © 2022 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Louise Nevelson, “Golden Odyssey,” 1961, painted wood, Amarillo Museum of Art, 39 ½ x 39 ½ x 4 ¾ inches. Bequest of Vera Beth Hicks, © 2022 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
It was around this time that the artist first showed at the Dord Fitz Gallery in Amarillo. On display in the spring of 1960, The Women: Tops in Art was an all-women group exhibition of 57 works by an impressive roster of 18 female modernists, mostly New York-based, including Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Ethel Schwabacher, Hedda Sterne, and Miriam Schapiro. And, of course, Louise Nevelson. During the show, a group of Fitz’s students pooled their money together and collectively purchased Nevelson’s Moon Garden (1958-60). It was this show and sale that cemented the artist’s decade-long relationship with the Panhandle community, which she visited at least seven times between 1960-1972, showing art, giving talks, and leading workshops.
Fitz describes one of Nevelson’s first visits to the High Plains:
“We took the visiting artists to Stratford, Texas. Then we all got in an old school bus and went out twenty rough miles to the center of the Durr Ranch. There, in the middle of a level cow pasture, six cowboys, in their cowboy work clothes, were preparing a lunch for us over an open fire… That evening the Stratford art students prepared a great feast for us which we ate at the County Barn on the fairgrounds. After dinner, the community came to meet the artists and to enter into a discussion of art conducted by the visiting artists.”
Catalog for “The Women: Tops in Art,” 1960, Dord Fitz Gallery, Amarillo, Texas. Courtesy of the Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma and the Family of Dord Fitz.
Women artists from New York at the Durr Ranch near Dumas, Texas, Spring 1960. (Photographer unknown.) From the collection of Carolyn Fitz. Third from left, Elaine de Kooning; third from right, Louise Nevelson; seated to the left of Nevelson is Martha Jackson.
In 2022, Amy Von Lintel and Bonnie Roos published Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West, which features Nevelson and explores her relationship with the arts community in Amarillo in the 1960s. It’s her ties to the Lone Star State that, as a Texan, make Nevelson’s story that much richer for me.
I recently talked with Von Lintel, professor of art history at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, to discuss Nevelson’s connection with the Panhandle town, the artist’s impact on the local art scene, and the influence Texas had on Nevelson and her work.
Leslie Thompson (LT): How did Louise Nevelson first develop connections with Amarillo?
Amy Von Lintel (AVL): Amarillo gallery owner Dord Fitz would make regular visits to New York City, where he was affiliated with the Burr Galleries that artist Patricia Bott was running. When he came into town, he met Elaine de Kooning and Jeanne Reynal [the other two artists featured in Lintel and Roos’s book] with his group of students from the Panhandle, who always wanted to do studio visits. Somehow Nevelson felt coerced into dealing with this person until she met him. And then she was kind of like, “Oh, wow. Ok.” And by 1960, Fitz was doing an all-woman show, and it included all these women. But Nevelson was kind of the showpiece.
The Amarillo community ended up buying that showpiece, Moon Garden. It had been part of the 1958 installation Moon Garden + One. All of the bits and pieces were reorganized when she deinstalled that. It made it into MoMA with the famous Sky Cathedral. That’s another part of it. Our part that came to Amarillo was a reorganized part that she decided to bring to this 1960 all-woman show in Amarillo, and she came, too. She didn’t just ship the thing. So somehow, Dord convinced her that it was worthy to one, send a piece, and two, come. And he paid her bill to come.
In the 50s, Nevelson was struggling to get sales. She started getting shows in 1958 that were well-received and critically acclaimed. But to sell the stuff was hard. So the 1960 show and sale in Amarillo was of financial significance to her.
Louise Nevelson, “Moon Garden,” ca. 1959, painted wood, 8’ 7 3/4” x 8’ 18 inches. Amarillo Museum of Art, Gift of the Area Arts Foundation in honor of Dord Fitz
LT: During your research, did you find any evidence of what the town thought about Nevelson, both the artist and her artwork? And did you gain any sense of Nevelson’s perspective? What were her impressions of Texas?
AVL: We have more statements about Nevelson from fans and students than we do from Nevelson about them. It’s because she wasn’t a letter writer.
What we only have is that Dawns + Dusks book — her assistant Diana MacKown recorded her and then transcribed the interviews. There’s a note between Diana MacKown and Dord Fitz that says, “Dord, I can’t wait to put the section in the book on Amarillo.” And then it doesn’t show up. I don’t know who cut it. I don’t know if it was cut by a publisher or if MacKown never got the stuff from Fitz in time, or if she deemed it unworthy in the end. But there was intended to be a whole section in that bookabout Amarillo, and it got dropped out. So it’s missing that voice of hers about Amarillo. We have a few letters, but not a lot.
_____________________________________________
Dear Dord, I am coming closer to the conclusion of the book on Louise that I have been working on. She has mentioned how important the years in your relationship with her have been and the placement of your beautiful wall in Amarillo. I know that she gave several talks in Amarillo over an extensive period of time and would be most grateful if you could send me, and of course you would get full credit, copies of the tapes. Louise and I feel it would be such value in the project. It was fun to see you in New York and I guess you will see Louise soon again in the West.
– Diana MacKown to Dord Fitz, October 24, 1973
_____________________________________________
But mostly it’s write-ups in the paper, or people who talked about how flamboyant she was when she came to town. There’s lots of witnesses about that — what Texas thought of her. They treated her like a princess. She was so interesting and seemed so exotic, and they ate it up and loved it.
But then she would get down to business. There are these wonderful photographs of her getting rid of all of this exotic clothing, and in the studio with a stocking cap on and at work. She’s with this woman, who to me looks like a frumpy housewife, and they’re making a box. Nevelson is teaching them to make boxes. So this is the other story of her as an educator. Even when she was getting all the acclaim and making money and showing in Germany and Paris, she still made it back to Amarillo to teach these classes. At that point in her career it wasn’t a financial necessity. I think she actually enjoyed it.
LT: In your book, you speculate about how Nevelson’s gold work — which she began in the 1960s — may have some ties to Texas. Can you talk about that? How did Texas influence Nevelson?
AVL: We don’t have her saying that directly. What we have is that both of her biographers note that Nevelson’s sister discloses that she talked about her gold pieces as being inspired by the faucets in Texas ranch houses. Because they were gilded. This is an idea of showiness, and also surface coating. Nevelson never gilded her boxes, she just spray painted them, kind of like cheap gold. She was always talking about how “it might look like I’m put together but underneath I’m held together by safety pins.” Or she talked about how when she was an immigrant child they told her the streets in America are paved with gold. And then she showed up and they weren’t.
LT: Gilded faucets. That’s so Texas. The flash! Especially in the 50s. You’ve also pointed out that in some of her work around this time we begin to see Nevelson using stocks of wooden rifles. Those aren’t New York handguns. They’re the kind of rifles one would find on Texas ranches.
AVL: Right! She knew Texas. Not from afar, but from within. I think she was perceptive about that flashiness. But also, she was flashy. She found this familiarity with Texas. She would wear big jewelry and so would Texas women, even if they weren’t dressing like she did. And they embraced her for that. That flamboyancy is that gold work coming through.
If you look at the buyers of the gold work, New Yorkers were not buying them. Texans were. There are several pieces that stayed in the Panhandle because people were not rejecting the gold like people in New York, who couldn’t figure out what she was up to. Why are you so flashy? Maybe because she’s been exposed to Texas flash.
LT: What impact do you think Nevelson had on Amarillo?
AVL: I think she befriended many people. I-40 came through town in the 1960s, at the time that Dord Fitz had his first gallery, so he had to move it for the highway. Betty Bivins Childers, one of the founders of the Amarillo Museum of Art, allowed Nevelson’s Moon Garden to live in her house while Fitz was rebuilding his gallery. Bivins and Nevelson became friends, and when Moon Garden was reinstalled in Dord’s new gallery, Nevelson came back to help with the reinstall. Her presence was not just that of a teacher who sweeps in and out.
The people who bought her work knew her well and loved her. And we have lots of witness of that. She made an impact on the students she was teaching. These students were not young kids, but well-to-do adults. They were so open to abstraction, open to her philosophy. They just loved her.
We conducted lots of interviews. So many people in this area have stories. There was this one woman who was a little girl when she met Nevelson. And all she remembered was her caterpillar eyelashes. Nevelson would put on fake eyelashes and so much mascara that her eyelashes were like worms to this girl. People remembered her.
Student entertains Louise Nevelson, photographer unknown. Clipping from the Dord Fitz Collection. Image courtesy of the Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma and the Family of Dord Fitz.
LT: During your research on Nevelson, of the scholarship that’s published, did you see any mention of Nevelson’s connection to Texas?
AVL: Yes, because people knew that she came to Amarillo. But they didn’t know the references that we do. So it’s not this hidden thing that Nevelson came to Texas. It just wasn’t interesting to them. The thing about the faucets is a footnote in the back of a book. So Texas isn’t totally missing, it just wasn’t a focus.
LT: What was it that sparked your interest to dive deeper into this?
AVL: The sheer number of pieces by these women [Louise Nevelson, Elaine de Kooning, Jeanne Reynal] in our area in private collections and the people who would talk to us about these experiences. It was a community story.
We were surprised by how rich the stories were once we started scratching the surface. There was enough there to make a whole book out of it — we didn’t have to stretch them.
My interview with Von Lintel merely scratches the surface of one part of the story. If you want to learn more about Nevelson’s relationship with Amarillo and the Panhandle community’s connections to the New York art scene, I highly recommend checking out Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury is on view through January 7, 2024 at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas.
The post When New York Visits the High Plains: Louise Nevelson in Amarillo appeared first on Glasstire.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
Can you help me tell my employee that I am not harassing him as he stated by telling him to do his job and also to cut the snarky, un-professional comments?
For background, I am a mid-level manager for clinicians who go into patient homes and provide very essential, highly skilled needs.
“Ross” is an overall good clinician; however, he has a lot of personal drama that he brings to work, as well as somehow always managing to see less patients than everyone else in his territory. He also has a lot of sick calls and sudden short medical leaves of a few days and missed the last two mandatory meetings. Ross has a history of thinking if he says he doesn’t feel comfortable with a certain type of patient he can indefinitely get out of these types of home visits. He has been told at his previous annual reviews that these are things he needs to work on to feel confident. It is a common occurrence for the patient scheduler, “Monica,” to have an urgent need come up in the day, send a group Teams message to the clinicians working that day to see if any clinicians had something fall through/can pick up an extra visit/ would like overtime, etc. It is common for Ross to respond with comments like “Type X patients are scary and I don’t know how to do them.” Or “Oooh gross, I would vomit if I ever had a Type Y patient.”
Ross’s annual review is coming up and my plan had been to meet up with him prior and have him give me a list of patient types he doesn’t feel comfortable with, put it in the goals section of his review, and help him find patients to do co-visits for on-the-job training. He will also be getting more clear “needs improvement” marks in his attendance and assignment management/patient load sections.
Monday evening, as Monica was finishing scheduling, she sent Ross a Teams message as a courtesy letting him know she had to assign him a new rural “assessment” patient and that if he needed to offload some of his four other patients due to drive time for the rural patient, the clinicians’ assistants had a lot of room in their schedule for Ross to pass his non-assessment visits that are within their scope. His response was that he just emailed the on-call scheduler to remove the rural assessment patient because he would NOT be going, “Nice try tho.” I was cc’d in the response from the on call scheduler. Ross’s email subject heading was, “I will not be going to ‘Timbuktu.’” I responded early Tuesday morning, stating, “Sorry, we can’t remove the rural assessment but the clinician assistants will help with the four other non-assessment visits.”
What followed still blows my mind. Ross continued to respond via email/Teams with different excuses just refusing. First it was because Tuesday, Wednesday, and Fridays are difficult for him to be too far from home. I ignored that and repeated that this rural one was most urgent. Then he said he had already confirmed times with his other patients. I politely reminded him that in our line of work, certain patient care is a priority and we have to change things at a moment’s notice sometimes and I would be happy to call those patients and reschedule to different times to make room for his drive time to the rural patient. He then responded that he just couldn’t make it work because he had to be in his home town by 2 pm to pick up his child from school. I gently told him work days don’t typically end at 2 pm and we needed him to see this patient and repeated my other offers of help. When I reiterated he needed to go, he then responded, “Please stop harassing me.” And he again refused to go. I stopped contacting him at that point, removed the patient from the day’s schedule, and forwarded it all to HR and my boss.
They were also blown away and HR told me that I was in the right by expecting him to do his job and that he was using scary words to try and get out of the rural patient. HR said to have a sit-down with him this week after emotions calm down and make sure he understands that refusal is not acceptable and all the clinicians take turns with rural patients and our job is to take care of patients, no matter where they live. She also said to tell him there are no guarantees that he will be done by patient visits by 2 pm every day. She said let’s try for a coaching session but if ends up being belligerent, then it might end up a write-up.
Ross has since sent me a very long email titled “a little background” explaining about a lot of his personal drama and needing to always be close by his child’s school for … reasons. I did his job for years in the field before being a supervisor and had three young children myself when I did so, and I can say the reasons should have zero impact on seeing any patients, even rural. I haven’t replied yet but sent him a separate message stating we need to meet this week to discuss this situation.
I feel fairly comfortable being straightforward and matter of fact in that area. What I’m not sure how to tell him is how snarky and unprofessional his other communications are — the “nice try tho” and when he talk about patients being scary and gross. (Honestly I don’t know why Ross is in this profession if he feels that way about it.)
Whoa. Your HR person just thinks this warrants a write-up?
I’d say it warrants a clear and final warning about the requirements of the job, and a clear statement that if he’s not willing to meet those requirements, you’ll need to part ways.
Is this really the guy you want serving your patients? A person who calls their medical conditions “gross” and calls sick people “scary” and says they make him want to vomit?
Everything Ross is saying and doing says this isn’t the right job for him … and he is not the right person for you to employ.
To be clear, if it was just the thing about him insisting he needed to be back by 2 pm to pick up his kid, that would be different. Emergencies happen, and miscommunications happen. That might call for a conversation where you explain that while you can accommodate occasional emergencies, in general he should assume you’ll need to schedule him for the entire workday and can’t plan around a school pickup schedule unless that’s something that’s worked out in advance.
But that’s the least of this! The bigger problems are Ross being so adversarial with your scheduler (“nice try though”? what the hell?) and disrespectful in the way he speaks about patients (so basically just … a jerk).
Even before this latest incident, it sounds like you were being way too accommodating with him. You were on the right track with insisting he train for the patients he says he doesn’t know how to handle, but instead of that just being something you address in the “goals” section of his annual review, it needs to be accompanied by a serious conversation explaining that the job includes treating patients with the conditions he’s spoken pejoratively about, that you expect him to speak respectfully of patients at all times, and that not doing that is a firing offense … because it needs to be. Sample language: “It is a non-negotiable requirement of your job that you speak respectfully of patients at all times. Saying that certain patients are ‘gross’ or make you want to vomit is fundamentally out of sync with the values we expect you to display as a clinician, and it calls into question your ability to treat patients respectfully and empathetically. Can you tell me how you align that sort of comment with your responsibilities as a care provider?” … and then, “I need to make it clear that we will not tolerate any further occurrences of that way of speaking.” You can add that it’s a requirement of his job to speak respectfully to coworkers too.
But even if he stops because he doesn’t want to get fired, you’ve got to give some serious thought to whether it’s fair to your patients to saddle them with a clinician who was comfortable speaking that way about them. If you have to force Ross to handle their cases, are they going to get the type of empathetic and respectful care you presumably want them to receive?
In fact, the deeper I get into this answer, the more I question whether you can responsibly keep him on at all, even with a warning in place — not because he was a jerk about scheduling, but because the way he talks about patients is so unacceptable.
So I think the real conversation you need to have here is with your boss and HR about that piece of it. This is well beyond write-up territory.
Enlarge / The 2023-2024 US Winter Outlook map for precipitation. (credit: NOAA)
As its name implies, the jet stream is essentially a river of fast-moving air in the atmosphere at about the altitude where airplanes fly. It is typically a few hundred miles across, and jets can indeed save a lot of fuel if they can fly within this air current, generally from west to east.
Jet streams also have significant implications for our weather on the ground, as they more or less steer storm systems that affect the mid-latitudes. That is, they in large part determine whether parts of the United States—which lies almost entirely in the mid-latitudes between the tropics and poles in the Northern Hemisphere—will see stormy or serene weather.
As always with weather, the situation is complex. But one of the more useful signals in a forecaster's arsenal is the El Niño–Southern Oscillation in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which vacillates between warmer sea surface temperatures (El Niño), cooler ones (La Niña), and neutral conditions. This broad pattern has widespread weather implications, including the location of the jet stream.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Can my resume list company awards I didn’t actually get — if I secretly won them but my manager rigged the results?
After graduating, I worked for a small start-up company where my manager was underqualified, sexist, a pathological liar, and extremely stubborn. He was always let off the hook due to being a close family friend of the company director. Although the CEO liked me and maintained a friendly relationship with staff, I did not feel comfortable expressing my concerns to him. After being passed up for a promotion in favor of my less qualified male coworker (Rick), I began job searching. I did ultimately receive the same promotion six weeks later, but by then I already had a promising lead for a new position at a more established company in our industry. I ended up getting a wonderful offer, which I accepted.
My last day fell on the same day as the company’s annual award ceremony. Award winners are chosen by employee votes across all departments. To the surprise of myself and many of my colleagues, Rick won two or three out of the four awards designated for my team, including department MVP. Following the event, my manager asked to meet with me. He informed me that I had actually gotten more votes than Rick and was the true winner of the awards he was given. However, he and company director decided that it wouldn’t be a “good look” for the team to have the person leaving that day win most of our department’s awards. While disappointed that I didn’t get to receive recognition for my hard work that year, I understood their point and wanted to make sure I left on good terms.
It’s been nearly two years since this all transpired and, due to reduced hours, I have decided it’s time to update my resume. I did not have much I could add to the “awards / recognition / accolades” section, which made me realize that they didn’t just take away recognition I earned, but also what could have been a helpful resume boost. My field is competitive and in the current market the competition is fierce. I considered just putting the awards on my resume anyways. However, I cannot remember what the other awards were aside from the MVP!
I recently learned that my former manager was fired due to consistent conflict between him and the CEO. The CEO and I haven’t spoken since my departure, but parted on good terms. Would it be inappropriate for me to contact him about this? I would love to know what these awards were and be able to add them to my resume. I’m certain they have records of what the awards were. If it is okay for me to contact the CEO, what should I say? Is there a script for a situation like this? Do awards on resumes even matter?
Don’t contact the CEO, and don’t list the awards on your resume. Regardless of whether you should have won them, they didn’t actually award them to you so listing them would be a misrepresentation — and if a reference checker ever tried to verify it, they could get told that no, your name is not listed as winning those. Trying to explain the facts (“I had enough votes, but they didn’t give me the awards, and I only have the word of my now-fired manager to prove that…”) would be messy. It also would come across strangely to ask the CEO for help with it now.
Most importantly, it doesn’t matter that much. Internal company awards aren’t a huge deal on resumes; in fact, you really don’t need a section for awards at all! If you had them, you could list them if they were impressive-sounding, but they won’t carry so much weight that you should pursue it under these circumstances. But what you should do is think about why your colleagues would have voted for you to win, and then make sure those reasons are reflected on your resume (meaning, for example, if your coworkers appreciated that you were great at X, make sure your resume includes evidence that you were great at X — completely separately from the question of awards).
2. Why am I interviewing people I know I’m not going to hire?
I manage a newly created department at my company. I inherited one employee, Lisa, and after about a year, have been approved to hire for a more senior position on the team. Lisa is well positioned to promote into that role, and in anticipation of getting this position approved, I have been coaching her on skills she will need for a few months.
Current company policy is to interview at least two outside candidates for any open position in addition to internal candidates. My only internal candidate is Lisa and since I’ve been working with her on preparation for this role for months now, I have doubts that I’ll get an external candidate who is better positioned. Besides which, I have always prioritized promoting from within.
Here’s my question: promoting Lisa will create an opening at her current level on the team. I have asked HR to focus on the lower end of the qualification range for applicants, in the hopes that I can knock out the required interviews and do some stealth recruiting for Lisa’s backfill in the process. I’ve gotten push back that this is sandbagging the process for an internal candidate, but I don’t feel great about bringing people in to waste their time interviewing for a role that they are vanishingly unlikely to be offered. The situation would be different if I had multiple internal candidates, but I work with a specialized team and the other members in the department are all in their first three months and not angling for promotion yet. Am I doing anything unethical here?
Yes. Employers that require you to interview at least two outside candidates for any open position have that rule because they want you to make sure you’re hiring the most qualified person for the job — and in a lot of cases, because that kind of rule increases the diversity of your staff, particularly if your existing employees are relatively homogenous and mostly come from similar networks or demographics. If Lisa is truly the best person for the job, you’ll see that when you interview outside candidates. But if you close your mind to that possibility before you’ve interviewed anyone else, you’re violating the spirit and intent of your company’s policy. And that will end up wasting candidates’ time far more than someone else ending up better qualified than them will.
You really do need to consider the other candidates with an open mind, not look at their interviews as boxes you have to check off before you can hire Lisa … and definitely don’t try to rig the process for Lisa by asking for less qualified candidates! Your mindset should be that you’re looking for the best person for the job — and maybe that’s Lisa, but maybe you’ll find it’s someone else. (You should be transparent with Lisa about that, so you’re not wrongly raising her expectations that it’ll definitely be her.) If you’re absolutely convinced that no one could be a better hire than Lisa, you could try making that case to your company — but it’s pretty common for managers to assume that prematurely.
Now, that’s not to dismiss the benefits of promoting from within! There are lots of benefits to that — but you can’t unilaterally decide to prioritize it on your own if your company’s policy says otherwise. And in this case, it sounds like it’s not just the policy, but the input of others involved in the process too (since you’re getting pushback about how you’re going about it).
3. Going to a conference with a cold
In the post (ish) Covid world, what are the professional best practices around having a cold? My boyfriend has a cold and I feel like I might be coming down with it in the next few days.
This weekend, I have a conference in another city about an hour and a half away, where I will be traveling via Amtrak and then sharing a hotel room with another attendee (who I don’t know personally). In the pre-Covid world, I would have planned on going and just powering through and maybe just declining to shake hands, but now we’re all a lot more mindful about spreading respiratory illness. And given that I’ll be sharing a room with a stranger, just masking the whole time isn’t really feasible because I can’t reasonably mask while sleeping. But at the same time, it feels silly to miss out on a major opportunity for professional development and networking for what is ultimately a minor illness. What is my best move here?
At a minimum, I think you’ve got to make different plans for the room share. Even taking Covid off the table, it’s not fair to make a stranger who hasn’t consented ahead of time share a hotel room with someone with a high chance of a contagious illness. (Alternately, you could contact them now and pose the question to them; maybe they won’t care, but they should have a chance to say if they do.) And then beyond that, be vigilant about not spreading it to others — so an N95/KN95 mask whenever you’re around other people and definitely don’t shake hands. (If you hear all that and decide it’s not worth it to go, that’s fine too. It’s a good development if we come out of the last few years more cautious about not spreading infections around, even non-Covid ones.)
4. How do I get my coworker to stop replying to an automated reminder?
My team uses a system that has a setting where it will send a user an automated reminder based on different circumstances. Because I’m the one who set up the automation, when this reminder email is sent to a teammate, it says that the email is from “me via the system” and any replies are sent to my inbox. I have one teammate who responds to these reminders with quick answers like “Done!” and “Thanks for the heads up!” and “On it!” This irks me because I already have enough email traffic without these little unnecessary acknowledgements. I think this teammate doesn’t realize these reminders are automated and I’m not doing anything personally to trigger them. Is there a kind way to point this out that doesn’t sound rude or will unintentionally embarrass my coworker? Or do I just need to suck it up and ignore the replies?
You could say, “These are automated reminders sent by the system without any involvement from me — I’m not involved in them going out at all, so need to send any response.” Or even, “Since these are automated reminders sent by the system, please don’t respond to them — they tend to stack up in my inbox and I have to look at them to make sure my involvement isn’t needed. Thank you!”
But yeah, if it continues after that, you need to just delete and ignore. Alternately, if it’s really annoying, you could look into setting it up so the reminders come from a different email address, like a no-reply@ address.
5. Salary when moving from a part-time contractor to full-time employee
Since being laid off from my full-time job a few months back, I’ve been doing some contract copywriting work for a company for several weeks. I’m currently getting 20 hours a week at a rate of $100/hour. I let them know in the beginning I’d prefer full-time work, and they seemed open to that possibility after a few weeks.
Last week, they checked in with me on if I was still wanting full-time work. I said I was still learning in that direction, but thought it made sense to continue the contract work for the rest of the month so I can get a better feel for the work, and they can get a feel for me. They seem interested in hiring me full-time. I’d prefer the stability and benefits of full-time work.
One thing we haven’t brought up is salary and since this is my first time doing contract work, I’m not sure what I should ask for if I decide to transition to a full-time role. At my current rate I’d be bringing home $104,000 a year. Do I ask for more money than that because they’ll be getting double the work from me at 40 hours a week? Less because they’ll be providing me with health benefits, PTO, and so on? I’m not sure what’s normal or fair when you transition from contract to full time work.
Typically you’re paid more per hour as a contractor than as an employee, because as a contractor you don’t get benefits (health insurance, paid time off, etc.) and you’re responsible for paying the payroll taxes that your employer would be paying for you if you were an employee. A typical rule of thumb for people coming at this from the other side — moving from employee to independent contractor — is to expect at least double their employee rate when they become a contractor. So flipping that for you, it would mean expecting your hourly employee rate might be roughly half of what you’re getting now.
But that’s just a general guideline, not an exact formula. You can use it to inform your thinking generally, but the main driver should be the market rate for the sort of work you’ll be doing. And if you can, get them to name a number first — because who knows, if they’re anchoring it in their head to what they’re paying you now, it could come out pretty high.
SAG-AFTRA issued new guidance for “strike-friendly” Halloween costumes, advising its members to dress up as generalized characters, such as zombies and spiders, over specific characters featured in content from companies the union is striking against. What do you think?
ARLINGTON, VA—Feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of options, local defense contractor Erick Yardley told reporters Tuesday he was unsure if he wanted to cook or just have dinner delivered by a politician on their hands and knees. “It’s been a long day, and I told myself I’d make something tonight, but it’s so…
CARMEL, IN—Addressing a group of reporters dressed mostly in long-sleeved shirts, suit jackets, and full-length pants, the nation’s big guys in shorts held a press conference Tuesday to announce that while the autumn weather may seem brisk to others, they tend to run hot. “We run pretty hot, so this doesn’t feel cold…
BOSTON—Taking time during his group meeting Tuesday to reflect upon how his life got to where it is now, local alcoholic Steven DeWitt reportedly recalled the day he sat down and decided to have a debilitating addiction. “I’ll never forget: I was 15 years old, some friends from school were drinking vodka at a party,…
EDMONTON – Following yet another scheduling conflict, local couple Gregory and Alexia Carter have once again had to postpone their threesome with mutual friend Taylor Long. “We’ve been trying to make this happen since mid-May, but one thing after another came up, and not in the sexy way,” Greg said. “First I was exhausted by […]
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Last week we put up a post on Facebook, Instagram and Mastodon asking for some sciency ideas to cartoon. We asked because first off we wanted to draw the things you want to see and secondly it’s always important to make sure there are not areas that are missing some well-deserved cartoons.
You all responded very enthusiastically and filled the comments sections (and replies) with a whole host of sciencey ideas to choose from! So many in fact that it felt like far too much for one cartoonist, so we had to put up some kind of strange cartoon-style bat signal (it projects a poorly drawn stylus in the sky).
Isla the friendly and helpful illustrator answered that call!
You can read more about Isla here but the quick summary is that she’s a brilliant field scientist that somehow finds time to draw cartoons.
So armed with a collection of cartoon idea comments we spent 2 hours cartooning and managed to make six new cartoons based on those suggestions. Check out below what we managed to come up with!
Thank-you to all of you who commented and sorry we didn’t manage to do more of them. If we find time to do more of them we’ll be sure to let you know and credit your ideas.
