Grandin Donovan

@jzellis Thanks! Was worried I was missing out on some hidden gems. Though there are some leftish mags here in France I should probably my stick my nose into a bit more. Bon weekend!

@grandin I found that one by searching. Mostly I read the NYT and the Guardian, al Jazeera, etc. for news and a bunch of tech and music feeds. I get all the news I need from the weather report, as Paul Simon said. 😂❤️

Specifically Hilary Clinton, as SecState. And it wasn't even from 31 cents to a whole dollar, it was 27 cents to 61 cents. The cost to the *entire garment industry* would have been something like $2M a year total and it would have transformed Haiti.

@jzellis Didn’t know this mag. Curious what else you recommend, as a fellow expat that doesn’t get to lay eyes on whatever is left of anglophone periodical newsstands…

That year, the CEO of Hanes' bonus was more than what the pay rise would have cost, again, the *entire garment industry* with factories in Haiti. (One source, but not the only one, nor the first place I read about this: currentaffairs.org/news/2016/11/w…)

Haven't had the time to watch all 14 hours of Project 2025 training footage obtained by @ProPublica and @ItsDocumented? Here are some highlights:

@CBCOlympics This video is not available… in France.

Merci, Paris 🇫🇷 With love, Canada 🇨🇦

@CBCOlympics guys, I’m in France. Kind of a ridiculous bummer your “Thank You” video… to Paris… is geoblocked in France.

🚨 #BREAKINGNEWS Now this is how you debunk the false claims about Governor Tim Walz. Veterans are pissed that JD Vance and MAGA are attacking one of their own. This won't end well for Trump. 🚨

I found the migrant who is actually ruining America.

In case you haven't seen this yet. This is how an organization can speak like a person, just as the Internet wants. Brilliant.

The people who deny other people's right to live as they choose and love who they love and be who they are, who deny science, whose only program is hate and fanaticism... those people are absolute freaks, and not the awesome kind. And the world is finally waking up to it.

@LaurenElkin Get a subscription to Max. Totally worth it you can watch everything live that is live and plenty of replay.

@jzellis @Richard_Kadrey Is this the one that @GreatDismal read when researching for Neuromancer?

Sitting at the cafe listening to Steel Pole Bathtub's The Miracle Of Sound In Motion and reading this on @Richard_Kadrey's suggestion. They go weirdly well together.

Don’t forget guys, you can be user first all you want, but if it doesn’t work for business too, there will NOT BE a user! @uxcampeurope #ux&i @ux&i

@jzellis Where do I start? Do you have any compiled resources? I’m American living in France and I’m trying to understand how to best prepare for possible and probable scenarios…

And now I'm learning the same things but in a humid temperate island climate: how to grow food, catch rain and filter it clean, how to forage for nettles and blackberries. I don't think I'm Rambo or anything, but I just wanna improve my odds of surviving what's coming.

Almost 25 years ago, I moved to Las Vegas. The next year, I got a job briefly as a web designer for the Southern Nevada Water Authority. (I was not a good fit. 😂) I took tours of the water system from Lake Mead to take pictures for the website. I was confused.

@mitchelldwilson @culturaltutor I bet there were enough people in Florence, especially those with means, who the unfinished facade drove mad, that it helped conjure the resources. Unfinished business is rarely a point of civic pride. I’m sure Siena would have preferred to finish their extension.

@culturaltutor What surprises me most is how a project such as this can be tended for hundreds of years. What keeps people motivated? How did they pass along the plans and continuing inspiring people with the vision?

People often say that Florence Cathedral shows the beauty of Medieval and Renaissance architecture. Maybe, but here's the thing: that famous façade you've seen so many times before is actually the same age as the Eiffel Tower. For 500 years it was just an unfinished brick wall. In the year 1296 construction on Florence's new cathedral started under the leadership of the great sculptor Arnolfo di Cambio. After him the project was overseen by several legendary figures including Pisano, Giotto (who built the bell tower), and Orcagna. By 1418 everything was structurally complete except the dome, and so a competition was held for its design. Filippo Brunelleschi won and his astonishing dome was finished in 1436. This was a landmark achievement which helped to start the Renaissance and marked a decisive shift away from Gothic architecture and Medieval culture. But the western façade, started under di Cambio, was still only one-third complete. Whereas churches in northern Europe were built with stone, Italian churches were made from brick and then covered with slabs of decorative marble. And so two-thirds of the façade of the great Duomo of Florence was... just a brick wall. And that's how they left it. Francesco de Medici had di Cambio's work entirely removed in 1588. He didn't like Gothic architecture and wanted it to be redone in the Renaissance style. But this project went nowhere and so the façade of Florence Cathedral was left as a plain brick wall for three hundred years. Until the 19th century came along, an age dominated by architectural historicism. People in Europe were obsessed with old styles of architecture, whether Neoclassical or Renaissance or Baroque or Gothic. For example, when the British Houses of Parliament burned down in the 1840s they rebuilt it in the "Perpendicular Style", an unusual version of Gothic architecture unique to Britain between the 14th-16th centuries. This also explains where Art Nouveau came from in the 1890s — it means "New Art" and that is quite literally what it was: the creation of a new artistic and architectural style after a century of looking only to the past. In any case, the Gothic Revival also rejuvenated interest in actual Medieval buildings. They didn't merely repair them, however: architects all over Europe started adding to and remodelling architecture from the Middle Ages. In England countless churches that had survived untouched for centuries were suddenly pulled down, redesigned, and rebuilt. And, in Florence, swept along by the exuberance of the Gothic Revival, they decided that it was time to finally finish the Duomo. So a competition to design its façade was announced. The winning architect was Emilio de Fabris, whose design was a modified version of the one collectively created by Arnolfo di Cambio, Giotto, and Orcagna. By 1887 it was finished — the same year that construction on the Eiffel Tower began. That brick wall was gone forever and it is de Fabris' 19th century façade that is now so famous and beloved around the world. This raises the broader and still relevant question of how to deal with old buildings. Should we treat them like museum pieces to be preserved exactly as they are, or should we add to them if it seems appropriate? Well, what about Florence Cathedral? Is it inauthentic? That depends on your point of view. Its famous façade certainly isn't Medieval or Renaissance, even though to the casual observer it will seem just as old as the rest of the cathedral. In that way it feels like a deception. Perhaps it would have been better to leave the Duomo unfinished, in its pure and original state. The brick wall may have been jarring, but at least it was honest and truthful to the building as it had been passed down from one generation to the next. Then again, it is a relatively faithful reimagining of Gothic architecture which works in harmony with the rest of the building and the intention of the original architects. Giotto and di Cambio would surely have wanted their great cathedral to be finished. Such projects inevitably took centuries anyway — it's strangely appropriate that the Duomo's façade took nearly six hundred years to be put together. And, besides, in one thousand years the 19th century additions will have themselves become ancient. Any accusations of inauthenticity will certainly have faded by that point. So... was finally completing the façade of Florence Cathedral the right thing to do, or not?

@PeterClifford1 I’d like to thank you for your daily threads on Ukraine. I follow a lot of great commentators, but the firehose is hard to manage. Your daily synthesis is valuable and appreciated.

@danbenjamin Big Wheel Doubledare

Show that you were a kid in the 80s using a single term. I’ll start: Dustbuster

@mulegirl Way too heavy! Keep it for the long nights of winter.

@mulegirl That’s some light beach reading. Enjoy!

@juliendorra Pretty much agree, though I think it’s more a computer than a tablet replacement.

Think about the Vision Pro as an iPad and MacBook competitor, not a Quest competitor. Apple is, once again, attempting to confront the innovator’s dilemma, by trying to create the new product that best their existing product. Vision Pro isn’t designed like a ‘segment’, it seems…