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Briefly Noted Book Reviews
Mon, 29 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0000
“Knife,” “A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages,” “Neighbors and Other Stories,” and “Butter.”
Match ID: 0 Score: 68.57 source: www.newyorker.com age: 3 days
qualifiers: 38.57 travel guide(|s), 30.00 travel(|ing)
Schools should bond communities: faith schools divide them. Why are ministers making that worse? | Simon Jenkins
Thu, 02 May 2024 16:44:11 GMT
The government wants to scrap England’s 50% cap on ‘faith admissions’. It will just lead to religious discrimination
To gain admission to the local church school near my home, parents were always advised to attend church. Otherwise, they were told, they should try elsewhere. The result was local antagonism: cars and buses filled with local children were ferried to more distant schools. It was a bad system in every sense.
In 2010, in an attempt to stem the growth of sectarian free schools, the Cameron government imposed a 50% cap on “faith admissions” where schools were oversubscribed. Now Rishi Sunak is proposing to end that cap. To encourage their creation, new faith-based schools – Anglican, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, whatever – can be as exclusive as they want. Since most faith schools tend to become socially selective and thus enjoy parental preference, the move has been welcomed by church leaders. They have something to sell. Anything will do to counter plummeting church attendance.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
From excessive travel to food waste, weddings can have a huge carbon footprint. Here’s how to plan an eco-friendly celebration
A wedding is a couple’s big day. Unfortunately, it can also have a big carbon footprint.
The average American wedding creates around 60 metric tons of CO2 – the carbon equivalent of 71 round-trip flights from New York to LA. You’d need to plant roughly 60 trees and let them grow for 100 years to sequester that amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And with more than 2m marriages taking place in the US alone in 2022, the wedding industry’s environmental impact adds up.
Continue reading...Individuals could win £25,000 or more if they are successful in claim Uber broke taxi booking rules
More than 10,500 of London’s black-cab drivers have launched a £250m legal case against Uber, accusing it of breaking the capital’s taxi booking rules and deliberately misleading authorities to secure a licence.
The case, which has been filed in the high court in London by the litigation management firm RGL, resurrects a claim first raised five years ago, related to the way the ride-hailing app operated in London between 2012 and 2018.
Continue reading...We would like to hear from people who have been affected by postponements and cancellations at the Co-op Live arena
The Co-op Live arena has postponed or cancelled several of its music and comedy shows in recent weeks due to technical problems at the venue. Olivia Rodrigo, Peter Kay and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie are among the performers whose gigs have been disrupted.
We would like to hear from people who have been affected by the disruptions at the Co-op Live arena. Had you planned to travel to see the show? Will you make it to a rescheduled show?
Continue reading...Met Office says storms may cause travel disruption and flooding, leading to difficult driving conditions
Heavy thunderstorms could give way to the warmest day of the year so far in Britain.
The same storm caused mudslides in northern France, which started around midnight and killed at least one person, a 57-year-old woman, and injured her partner.
Continue reading...The Egadi isles are said to have inspired the mythical islands in the Odyssey. Today, the largest of the group is a quiet place of blissful beaches, fresh fish, neon seas and ice-cream breakfasts
I cycled into birdsong, into colour, the light glimmering against the white of the low stone walls. There was a spaciousness as I cycled, a lateral stretching of soundscape, big skies, birds fluting. I didn’t meet anyone else on the narrow lanes and had a sense of being completely alone on an island of 2,000 people. Is there anything happier than being on a bicycle early in the morning, heading to the sea?
The Egadi archipelago off the north-west coast of Sicily is a well-kept secret. Italians come here on holiday, but the islands are relatively unknown to international tourists. And an even better-kept secret is that these magical islands inspired the fantastical lands of the Odyssey, Europe’s oldest travel story. There are a total of five islands and it’s possible to visit three of them.
Continue reading...Her family have been threatened and her team faces increasing risks in Afghanistan, but Zahra Joya knows she must keep reporting from exile
On the nights that she manages to fall asleep, Zahra Joya always returns to Afghanistan in her dreams. On good nights she travels back to Bamyan, her home province, with its green mountains and bright blue lakes, or to her parents as they looked when she was a little girl.
Increasingly though, her dreams are full of roadside bombs or men with guns. Some nights, memories of her last hours in Afghanistan play over and over on a loop: the panicked crowds outside Kabul airport, people being whipped and beaten, the sound of her sisters crying.
Continue reading...Councillors, mayors and police commissioners across England and Wales are facing voters this week. What’s at stake?
This week voters in more than 100 local authorities in England and Wales are heading to the polls. And Labour are predicted to win big. Helen Pidd travelled to Accrington in Hyndburn, where the local authority has an equal number of Labour and Conservative councillors, to see what people there thought about the local elections.
What she found was a more complicated picture than predictions of a Labour landslide suggest. She found the Conservative council leader in a surprisingly confident mood – and the local Labour politicians unwilling to speak to her. She also met voters in the town who told her of their discontent with Labour over its approach to the conflict in Gaza and that it was the Green party who would be picking up their votes.
Continue reading...The far right are on the march in Germany and the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany has become the most popular party in several states. Immigration and a sense of being economically left behind have been driving factors in the rise in popularity but the Green party and the federal government’s climate policies have also borne the brunt of public anger. The Guardian travelled to Görlitz, on the German border with Poland, to find out to what extent Germany’s green policies are fuelling the far right
• How climate policies are becoming focus for far-right attacks in Germany
Continue reading...For years, the political establishment opportunistically railed against sex trafficking. Then came Pizzagate.
The post QAnon Was Born Out of the Sex Ad Moral Panic That Took Down Backpage.com appeared first on The Intercept.
A measure passed by the House seeks to block Americans from traveling to Iran on U.S. passports.
The post House Responds to Israeli-Iranian Missile Exchange by Taking Rights Away From Americans appeared first on The Intercept.
The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an internet connection.
But all of this is coming to an end. The advent of AI threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences.
To understand why, you must understand publishing. Its core task is to connect writers to an audience. Publishers work as gatekeepers, filtering candidates and then amplifying the chosen ones. Hoping to be selected, writers shape their work in various ways. This article might be written very differently in an academic publication, for example, and publishing it here entailed pitching an editor, revising multiple drafts for style and focus, and so on...
The White House brushes off accusations of hypocrisy, courting TikTok while seeking to ban it.
The post As Biden Cheers TikTok Ban, White House Embraces TikTok Influencers appeared first on The Intercept.
The state says EMTALA, a law barring discrimination in emergency medical care, interferes with its abortion ban.
The post Idaho Goes to the Supreme Court to Argue That Pregnant People Are Second-Class Citizens appeared first on The Intercept.
From biking adventures to city breaks, get inspiration for your next break – whether in the UK or further afield – with twice-weekly emails from the Guardian’s travel editors. You’ll also receive handpicked offers from Guardian Holidays.
From biking adventures to city breaks, get inspiration for your next break – whether in the UK or further afield – with twice-weekly emails from the Guardian’s travel editors.
You’ll also receive handpicked offers from Guardian Holidays.
Continue reading...When police attacked student protesters, a lone trash can was the only damaged property I saw around City College of New York.
The post I’ve Covered Violent Crackdowns on Protests for 15 Years. This Police Overreaction Was Unhinged. appeared first on The Intercept.
The famed scholar on why reducing Hamas to a terrorist label sanctions Israel’s war on Palestinians.
The post Judith Butler Will Not Co-Sign Israel’s Alibi for Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.
The Department of Education is probing claims that the school discriminated against Palestinian and Arab students amid Israel’s war on Gaza.
The post “Kill All Arabs”: The Feds Are Investigating UMass Amherst for Anti-Palestinian Bias appeared first on The Intercept.
The blanket suspension of student protesters casts “serious doubt on the University’s respect for the rule-of-law values that we teach,” 54 law professors wrote.
The post Columbia Law School Faculty Condemn Administration for Mass Arrests and Suspensions appeared first on The Intercept.
As teenagers, the New York brothers swiftly rose to become retro pop darlings – until they weren’t. Now older, wiser and taking inspiration from the travails of their family, they’re making their best music yet
The Lemon Twigs are deep in one of the great songwriting grooves of the 21st century. Or is it the previous century? Their new album, A Dream is All We Know, is a fabulous pop confection that magically transports the listener to the idyll of Abbey Road studios in 1966, if the Beatles were actually two brothers in their mid-20s from Long Island, New York. However, Brian and Michael D’Addario are reluctant to write off their music as nostalgic escapism.
“Yes, we record on analogue tape, and we don’t think being on phones all day is a good way to live our lives,” sighs Michael at their Brooklyn studio. “But it’s not like we’re rejecting ‘contemporary life’. And I don’t know what we’re really excluding from our lives by not using social media or recording on Pro Tools, anyway. Who wants to stare at a computer when they’re doing something that’s supposed to be fun?”
Continue reading...Since the millennium, there is substantially less erotic content on our screens – with changing audience tastes and ‘intimacy coordinators’ to blame
The advent of explicit films such as Poor Things, Saltburn and All of Us Strangers has been heralded as marking a revival of sex on screen – in the face of a reported lack of interest from Gen Z audiences. However, a new report suggests that in fact the Hollywood sex scene is declining fast: there is almost 40% less sexual content in major films than there was at the start of the millennium.
Commissioned by the Economist from data analyst Stephen Follows, the report assembled data on the 250 highest-grossing films each year since 2000, and found movies released in 2023 had just over 60% of the erotic content found in the top 250 in 2000. Broken down by genre, the decline was steepest in action movies (a drop of approximately 70% over the same period) – while romantic films recorded much less change, with a drop of just under 20%.
Continue reading...As Challengers gives us a viral spin on the T-shirt poached from a former flame, we share our stories about clothes that survived long after the relationship ended
• Don’t get Fashion Statement delivered to your inbox? Sign up to get the full article here
“It’s such a cheeky T-shirt,” the actor Josh O’Connor recently told Rolling Stone. “Just so cheeky, and I really liked wearing it because it was just a bit like [raises shoulders and winks], ‘Told ya.’”
He was talking, of course, about the T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “I Told Ya” that has become the most-talked-about garment from Luca Guadagnino’s new tennis film about love, lust and (torn) ligaments, Challengers.
Continue reading...Nezouh, a dreamlike story of a family under siege in Damascus, seeks to portray the difficult decision of all refugees as to whether to stay or leave the country they love
When Soudade Kaadan embarked on the journey to make a film about her war-torn home city of Damascus, she was burdened by “certain expectations as to how a Syrian film should look”.
“They want us to simplify the complexity of the Syrian war for western audiences,” she says. “I refuse to do that. They want films from Syria to be explanatory and informative and not a film with storytelling, with a personal point of view.
Continue reading...Gosling does the dirty work in this entertaining action film, which has moments of tenderness with Blunt among the crashes, leaps and fireballs
You might need to get your indulgent smile firmly in place for this colossal action comedy – not unlike the adorable smirks on the faces of its male and female leads, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, who play the daredevil movie stuntman and the stern director with whom he is in love. It’s a goofy summer crowd-pleaser (and you can never have too many of those) that is very far from the edgier and more satirical mien of Richard Rush’s 1980 movie The Stunt Man, in which a Vietnam draft evader hides out on a movie location, doing dangerous stunts in return for anonymity. Actually, this one is loosely inspired by a 1980s TV show, also called The Fall Guy, about a stuntman with a parallel career as a bounty hunter – starring Lee Majors, a legend who puts in a tongue-in-cheek cameo here along with his co-star, Heather Thomas.
Gosling plays seasoned stunt maestro Colt Seavers, utterly unafraid of any physical challenges, self-effacingly doubling for insufferably conceited star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who outrageously claims to do all his own stunts. Colt is having a passionate affair with beautiful, talented camera operator Jody Moreno (Blunt), but when he is involved in a catastrophic and career-ending failed stunt, he is overwhelmed with macho shame, thinking the accident was his fault because his infatuation with Jody made him take his eye off the ball.
Continue reading...For years, the political establishment opportunistically railed against sex trafficking. Then came Pizzagate.
The post QAnon Was Born Out of the Sex Ad Moral Panic That Took Down Backpage.com appeared first on The Intercept.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the most popular digital assets today, capturing the attention of cryptocurrency investors, whales and people from around the world. People find it amazing that some users spend thousands or millions of dollars on a single NFT-based image of a monkey or other token, but you can simply take a screenshot for free. So here we share some freuently asked question about NFTs.
NFT stands for non-fungible token, which is a cryptographic token on a blockchain with unique identification codes that distinguish it from other tokens. NFTs are unique and not interchangeable, which means no two NFTs are the same. NFTs can be a unique artwork, GIF, Images, videos, Audio album. in-game items, collectibles etc.
A blockchain is a distributed digital ledger that allows for the secure storage of data. By recording any kind of information—such as bank account transactions, the ownership of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), or Decentralized Finance (DeFi) smart contracts—in one place, and distributing it to many different computers, blockchains ensure that data can’t be manipulated without everyone in the system being aware.
The value of an NFT comes from its ability to be traded freely and securely on the blockchain, which is not possible with other current digital ownership solutionsThe NFT points to its location on the blockchain, but doesn’t necessarily contain the digital property. For example, if you replace one bitcoin with another, you will still have the same thing. If you buy a non-fungible item, such as a movie ticket, it is impossible to replace it with any other movie ticket because each ticket is unique to a specific time and place.
One of the unique characteristics of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is that they can be tokenised to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought, sold and traded on the blockchain.
As with crypto-currency, records of who owns what are stored on a ledger that is maintained by thousands of computers around the world. These records can’t be forged because the whole system operates on an open-source network.
NFTs also contain smart contracts—small computer programs that run on the blockchain—that give the artist, for example, a cut of any future sale of the token.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) aren't cryptocurrencies, but they do use blockchain technology. Many NFTs are based on Ethereum, where the blockchain serves as a ledger for all the transactions related to said NFT and the properties it represents.5) How to make an NFT?
Anyone can create an NFT. All you need is a digital wallet, some ethereum tokens and a connection to an NFT marketplace where you’ll be able to upload and sell your creations
When you purchase a stock in NFT, that purchase is recorded on the blockchain—the bitcoin ledger of transactions—and that entry acts as your proof of ownership.
The value of an NFT varies a lot based on the digital asset up for grabs. People use NFTs to trade and sell digital art, so when creating an NFT, you should consider the popularity of your digital artwork along with historical statistics.
In the year 2021, a digital artist called Pak created an artwork called The Merge. It was sold on the Nifty Gateway NFT market for $91.8 million.
Non-fungible tokens can be used in investment opportunities. One can purchase an NFT and resell it at a profit. Certain NFT marketplaces let sellers of NFTs keep a percentage of the profits from sales of the assets they create.
Many people want to buy NFTs because it lets them support the arts and own something cool from their favorite musicians, brands, and celebrities. NFTs also give artists an opportunity to program in continual royalties if someone buys their work. Galleries see this as a way to reach new buyers interested in art.
There are many places to buy digital assets, like opensea and their policies vary. On top shot, for instance, you sign up for a waitlist that can be thousands of people long. When a digital asset goes on sale, you are occasionally chosen to purchase it.
To mint an NFT token, you must pay some amount of gas fee to process the transaction on the Etherum blockchain, but you can mint your NFT on a different blockchain called Polygon to avoid paying gas fees. This option is available on OpenSea and this simply denotes that your NFT will only be able to trade using Polygon's blockchain and not Etherum's blockchain. Mintable allows you to mint NFTs for free without paying any gas fees.
The answer is no. Non-Fungible Tokens are minted on the blockchain using cryptocurrencies such as Etherum, Solana, Polygon, and so on. Once a Non-Fungible Token is minted, the transaction is recorded on the blockchain and the contract or license is awarded to whoever has that Non-Fungible Token in their wallet.
You can sell your work and creations by attaching a license to it on the blockchain, where its ownership can be transferred. This lets you get exposure without losing full ownership of your work. Some of the most successful projects include Cryptopunks, Bored Ape Yatch Club NFTs, SandBox, World of Women and so on. These NFT projects have gained popularity globally and are owned by celebrities and other successful entrepreneurs. Owning one of these NFTs gives you an automatic ticket to exclusive business meetings and life-changing connections.
That’s a wrap. Hope you guys found this article enlightening. I just answer some question with my limited knowledge about NFTs. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to drop them in the comment section below. Also I have a question for you, Is bitcoin an NFTs? let me know in The comment section below
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