October 26, 2023

Dean Dyson Architects uses perforated brickwork to create "private oasis" for Melbourne home

https://www.dezeen.com/2023/10/20/dean-dyson-architects-cloud-house-melbourne/







Australian studio Dean Dyson Architects has used an outer layer of perforated brickwork to create a sense of privacy and calm at this home in Melbourne, which turns inwards to overlook a central swimming pool. Named Cloud House, the five-bedroom home in the suburb of Malvern, occupies a long, narrow site that is surrounded by neighbouring properties. The overlooked nature of the site informed the approach of creating a "private oasis", with the home wrapped in grey, perforated brickwork and divided by a series of voids and gardens that provide views out while maintaining privacy.







"We fused together a combination of design techniques to create a private world for our clients," Dean Dyson Architects founder Dean Dyson told Dezeen. "The strategic placement of physical barriers and use of internal gardens help create a sense of privacy within the home," he continued. "Adopting to wrap the whole first floor in the solid brickwork prevents direct sight lines from surrounding buildings and public areas to private bedroom & bathroom spaces."







Split across two levels, the ground floor of the home contains an open living, dining and kitchen area alongside a music room, guest bedroom and swimming pool. Above, the first floor is designed to be more private, containing three bedrooms at the rear of the home and the main bedroom at the front, separated to create a "private, parents-only sanctuary."





Behind the outer skin of perforated brickwork, sliding glass windows can be opened to provide ventilation to this upper level. Voids between the two floors crossed by small bridges help to provide natural light as well as visual connections through the interiors, framing views over the central courtyard. "We wanted the home to have a wonderful sense of connection across multiple levels with moments of pause that allowed the homeowners areas of visual engagement and connection," explained Dyson. "We used the voids as natural markers to define the moments of spatial transition as you flow down through the home."

October 26, 2023

Field Architecture clads flowing Sonoma Valley house in copper

https://www.dezeen.com/2023/10/20/field-architecture-sonoma-house-copper/









California studio Field Architecture designed this Sonoma Valley house out of a trio of fanning copper-clad pavilions with butterfly roofs. Named Madrone Ridge, the 4,920 square-foot (460 square-metre) house sits within the watershed of northern California's Russian River.











Dry in the summers with heavy rainfall in the winter, the area's geography informed the design, as did the client's desire to co-inhabit the land with the region's plants and animals. "We looked to the bush – those forested, undeveloped areas of nature that surround the house – while allowing the built structures to adapt to the natural terrain," the studio said.











"By simultaneously folding the house inward on itself and reaching outward to the land, we established a homestead in a transitional space that sustains human activity as well as wildlife." Palo Alto-based Field Architecture designed the home around the presence and absence of water in the unique microclimate, with the project completed in 2021.











"The cyclical presence of water metaphorically carves a path through the house and captures the poetic experience of falling and flowing water, rejoicing in this precious resource." the studio said. "By surrendering the manmade environment to the same natural forces that shape the land, the house collaborates with the natural hydrological systems that nurture the landscape." Tucked among trees on a hill overlooking the valley's vineyards, the house welcomes residents and visitors along a gravel and stone pathway.

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October 26, 2023

Drinkar till halloween (Drinks for Halloween)

https://www.ica.se/artikel/drinkar-till-halloween/









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October 26, 2023

One of the last lesbian bars in the US was set on fire in California this weekend

https://www.reckon.news/lgbtq/2023/10/one-of-the-last-lesbian-bars-in-the-us-was-set-on-fire-in-california-this-weekend.html



One of the few queer-women bars left in the country was a victim of arson on Friday, and the owners are stressing that it wasn’t a hate crime. As stated on their Instagram bio, Gossip Grill is a “women-forward safe space,” with the trans flag to signal that it is trans-friendly on top of being queer-friendly. The bar is based in Hillcrest, known as the center of the LGBTQ scene in San Diego, Calif.

The fact that there are just 27 lesbian bars left in the US today makes the incident even more significant. Since their peak in the 1980s, when there were around 200 in the country, lesbian bars have been on the decline, according to The Lesbian Bar Project, which chronicles the few remaining spaces focused on queer women, trans and nonbinary people.

Gentrification and rising rent has been a major issue for lesbian bars, according to Krista Burton, author of Moby Dyke, an investigation of the disappearance of America’s lesbian bars. In an interview with the Washington Post, she opens up about struggling to keep track of the lesbian bars that kept closing, especially given the pandemic’s financial impact on queer and trans-owned businesses. “It is incredibly sad when a place closes, because what ends is that time in our lives,” Burton said to the Washington Post.

Lesbian bars still matter to the LGBTQ community – they’re important community spaces where people of marginalized genders can gather to socialize, support each other, and feel safe and accepted. The destruction of a lesbian bar can feel like a huge loss to the entire LGBTQ community. “[Lesbian bars] are community centers, they’re fun places to meet other lesbians and/or bisexual women. And they can be sexy spaces,” said feminist writer Roxane Gay in The Smithsonian in 2021. “I think that they’re vital.”

So what exactly happened to Gossip Grill?.......

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October 26, 2023

The EU and the inevitability of immigration

Climate change and socio-economic trends will make large-scale migrations inevitable in the coming decades.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-eu-and-the-inevitability-of-immigration


Asylum-seekers arrive at Lampedusa: the EU has opted for a policing, not a humanitarian, response

For two years, every day, as I walked my daughter from the parking lot to the kindergarten of the European School in the Kirchberg district of Luxembourg City, I strolled past the street sign of the Rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and often found myself wondering idly who he was. To my shame, it was only by the time my daughter was well into her high-school years that I found out that Richard Nikolaus Eijiro, count of Coudenhove-Kalergi, had co-founded the first movement for a united Europe (the Pan European Union) in 1922, proposed Schiller’s Hymn to Joy as united Europe’s anthem, proposed a Europe Day in May, received the Charlemagne Prize from the city of Aachen—and supposedly served as a model for the character of Viktor Laszlo, the resistance hero and Humphry Bogart’s romantic rival played by Paul Henreid in Casablanca.

Coudenhove-Kalergi also wrote several books, one of which deserves mentioned not so much because of the largely aristocratic vision it extols but rather a tiny paragraph about the future of the European population. The book is entitled Praktischer Idealismus and the paragraph in question has inspired one of the longest enduring right-wing conspiracy theories: the so-called ‘Kalergi plan’. I mention this brief text as a paradoxical counterpoint to Hans Kundnani’s recent book, Eurowhiteness, where the author argues that pro-Europeanism is ‘analogous to nationalism—something like nationalism but on a larger, continental scale’, and that the EU itself has ‘become a vehicle for imperial amnesia’ defining itself in terms of culture and religion, in other words, ‘whiteness’, especially following the refugee influx of 2015. It is difficult not to sympathise with this perspective when the Italian prime minister and the president of the European Commission talk about the ‘borders of Europe’ after their visit to Lampedusa.

Fleeing poverty or danger

Over the first three quarters of 2023, around 85,000 migrants reached the coast of Italy with their own precarious means, while almost 40,000 were rescued at sea and more than 5,000 arrived on boats operated by various non-governmental organisations. While these numbers of people, either fleeing poverty or physical danger, should hardly make a country of 50 million people—let alone a continent of 450 million—lament a siege or invasion, at the same time across Europe immigration is more and more perceived, and played up, as a crisis of our identity and a threat to our way of life. No political party, national or supranational authority, NGO or opinion-maker seems able to look beyond the ‘immigration crisis’ frame, according to which we are witnessing a temporary surge in unlawful entries driven as much by conflict and poverty as by human traffickers—in other words, a combination of unfortunate political-economic circumstances and criminal actions, to be addressed through larger foreign aid and stricter coastguard patrols.

It is usual at this point to observe that paradoxically almost every EU country has been experiencing labour shortages, population ageing and birth rate decline—all of which, barring a revolution in that same way of life we are so eager to protect, can only be balanced through an increase in immigration. Kalergi’s vision of a cosmopolitan and hybrid Europe will eventually come to pass not because of any conspiracy but simply due to an irresistible combination of culture, geography and climate, as poignantly explained in Gaia Vince’s book Nomad Century. Combating the threat of climate change, and specifically the increase in temperatures, with all its deadly consequences of extreme weather, droughts, floods and desertification, is now the official priority of national governments and supranational entities. The threat of climate change is fundamentally affecting economic policies as well as financial strategies. Regardless of whether we believe (and many already do not) that it will eventually be possible through appropriate transition policies to avert a ‘hothouse’ planet, growing parts of today’s world are however already too hot, too arid or too low-lying against an impossible-to-contain body of water and people are already leaving those regions in search of a better future.

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October 26, 2023

Official Swedish dictionary completed after 140 years

One hundred and thirty-seven full-time employees have worked on Swedish Academy Dictionary over the years since 1883

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/25/official-swedish-dictionary-completed-after-140-years



The definitive record of the Swedish language has been completed after 140 years, with the dictionary’s final volume sent to the printer’s last week, its editor said on Wednesday. The Swedish Academy Dictionary (SAOB), the Swedish equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, is drawn up by the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel prize in literature, and contains 33,111 pages across 39 volumes.

“It was started in 1883 and now we’re done. Over the years 137 full-time employees have worked on it,” Christian Mattsson told AFP. Despite reaching the major milestone, their work is not completely done yet: the volumes A to R are now so old they need to be revised to include modern words.

“One such word is “allergy” which came into the Swedish language around the 1920s but is not in the A volume because it was published in 1893,” Mattsson said. “Barbie doll”, “app”, and “computer” are among the 10,000 words that will be added to the dictionary over the next seven years.

The SAOB is a historical record of the Swedish language from 1521 to modern day. It is available online and there are only about 200 copies published, used mainly by researchers and linguists. The academy also publishes a regular dictionary of contemporary Swedish. The Swedish Academy was founded in 1786 by King Gustav III to promote the country’s language and literature, and work for the “purity, vigour and majesty” of the Swedish language.

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October 25, 2023

Gang violence: Sweden breaks record for number of bomb attacks

https://www.thelocal.se/20231024/sweden-breaks-yearly-record-for-explosions



As of October 15th, 138 blasts had been recorded across the country. Taking into account a further blast on October 23rd in Enskededalen, southern Stockholm, Sweden has seen 139 attacks using explosives this year, six more than the previous record year in 2019. Sweden has been hit by a wave of bombings over recent years, which police have linked to gang conflicts in major cities. The police have kept a record of bomb attacks since 2018.

Another change for 2023 is that Stockholm had more explosions than anywhere else (45). In previous years, the highest number of blasts occurred in the southern police region, which covers Skåne, Blekinge, Kalmar and Kronoberg, with Stockholm usually in second place. An ongoing gang conflict, between Foxtrot leader Rawa Majid and his former right-hand man Ismail Abdo, has resulted in a recent spate of violence particularly in Stockholm and Uppsala, targeting even relatives who are not themselves involved in gang crime – or in some cases killing the wrong target entirely.

The conflict has already led to September being Sweden’s deadliest month in terms of fatal shootings since December 2019. Eleven people were shot dead in September. "There have recently been murders and explosions on an unprecedented scale," police chief Anders Thornberg told a press conference in mid-September. After a government crisis meeting on September 27th, Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer called for a number of measures to cut the supply of explosives to criminals.

"This spring, the minimum penalty for illegal handling of explosives will be doubled, but more needs to be done to prevent explosions," he said. "That is why we are meeting with all the relevant groups to identify what can be done in the short and long term." "Not a single stick of dynamite will end up in the wrong hands," Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin said.

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October 24, 2023

The Roots of Today's Republicans: It all goes back to Nixon.

https://prospect.org/politics/2023-10-23-roots-of-todays-republicans/



“The whole secret of politics,” Kevin Phillips told Garry Wills in 1968, is “knowing who hates who.”

For a time—particularly during the 1960s—Phillips was likely the nation’s foremost expert on who hated who. As a young scholar of what we might call political demographics, Phillips had noted that the states of the Deep South had forsaken the Democratic Party to vote for Barry Goldwater in the presidential election of 1964, largely due to Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act on the Senate floor earlier that year. Phillips had also noted the votes that George Wallace, Alabama’s segregationist governor, had racked up against President Lyndon Johnson in that year’s Democratic presidential primaries in Wisconsin and Maryland, pulling down a third or more of the votes, chiefly from white working-class voters.

In a memo to 1968 Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon, on whose campaign he worked, Phillips wrote, “The fulcrum of re-alignment is the law and order/Negro socio-economic revolution syndrome, and [Nixon] should continue to emphasize crime, decentralization of federal social programming, and law and order.” Republicans had generally written off the South since the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870s. But in his memo to Nixon and in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority, Phillips, who died earlier this month at age 82, called upon Republicans to pursue a “Southern strategy” by pandering to the region’s anti–civil rights backlash. In time, this not only turned the white South into the Republicans’ base but also, decades later, turned Northern state Republican parties into bastions of Southern white values, such as they were.

While Goldwater had run on those themes in 1964, it’s important to realize that at the time the Republican mainstream had yet to embrace them, and in many cases, even consider them. Unlike Goldwater, nearly every other Republican senator had voted for the Civil Rights Act, in keeping with its image as the party of Abraham Lincoln. When Nixon, the very personification of the Republican mainstream, embraced Southern values as well, managing to capture some Southern states and win more Northern Democratic white working-class votes than a Republican normally captured, the template was set for the party’s future strategy, which in many ways is also the party’s current strategy.

But not in all ways. Nixon wasn’t an enemy of government as such; he was, after all, the man who signed the Environmental Policy Act into law and indexed Social Security benefits to changes in the cost of living. He did, however, try to implement “the decentralization of federal social programming” (i.e., give the white South and other white communities a way to curtail Black advancement), which under Ronald Reagan morphed into opposing federal social programming altogether. At which point, Phillips got off the train.

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October 24, 2023

The Corporate Capture of DEI

https://prospect.org/power/2023-10-24-corporate-capture-of-dei/



The DEI movement is a mixed blessing for the long-term project of advancing civil rights and tolerance. On the one hand, it’s clear that traditional affirmative action is not the same as genuine welcome, inclusion, and power-sharing. And while demands for alertness to microaggressions and language policing can sometimes border on self-parody, the casual insensitivity among the privileged to the feelings and needs of non-whites, non-males, and non-straights is all too real. But on the other hand, it seems as if some of the left is focusing on rarified realms of hypersensitivity when the house is burning down. While the DEI movement has been gaining ground among progressives, dozens of states are explicitly repressing the more fundamental right to vote. Police violence against Black people continues unabated. Censorship of books and class curricula is increasing. The Supreme Court has invalidated even basic affirmative action and is close to holding that discrimination against gays is itself a civil right.

Meanwhile, the more precious versions of DEI turn the progressive community against itself and give ammunition to the right to ridicule liberals and the Democratic Party for “wokeism.” For Ibram X. Kendi, now at the center of a hot mess at Boston University, the core idea is that one is either a racist or an anti-racist. But surely there are gray areas. Don’t progressives have more urgent things to do than argue about that? A lot of this argument goes on in the rarified precincts of the elite academy and serves as a distraction from more effective ways to advance equity. Stanford, one of the nation’s wealthiest universities in terms of endowment per student ($5,969 million) ranks number 133 in the percentage of Pell grant–eligible (i.e., low-income) students in its freshman class, well below far less affluent universities.



The same Stanford was recently flamed last December for publishing one of the sillier guides to politically acceptable language, called the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative. It gives hundreds of examples of words or phrases to avoid and suggests preferred euphemisms. Under the heading of “Ableist,” we are supposed to drop the word “addict” in favor of the circumlocution “person with a substance use disorder.” But the next edition will likely warn us against the value-laden word “disorder.” It would do far more for true diversity, equity, and inclusion if Stanford accepted and subsidized more low-income kids. Among well-meaning white liberals, policing language can be a form of what Protestant theologians call cheap grace.

Even worse, DEI can serve as a camouflage for corporations that are responsible for more fundamental forms of inequity. One sector of our society that knows all about cheap grace is corporate America. For instance, Vertex Pharmaceuticals pledged $1.5 million to Kendi’s center. Before Kendi’s high-profile struggles forced a cancellation, a Vertex symposium at Boston University this week was to explore “how communities, advocates, scholars, and policymakers are working at the intersection of abolition and public health to create an antiracist future.” Sounds great, but this is the same Vertex that has been widely criticized for the astronomical list price ($322,000 per year) for its Trikafta drug treatment for cystic fibrosis, a drug that nets Vertex $17 billion in annual sales, and is estimated to cost less than 2 percent of its list price to manufacture. The drug is not available in the (non-white) Global South at all.

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October 24, 2023

Sanders Seeks Investigation of NIH Licensing Practices

https://prospect.org/health/sanders-seeks-investigation-nih-licensing-practices/



Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has asked for an investigation into a story first reported by the Prospect about the National Institutes of Health’s proposed exclusive patent license for a cancer drug it developed. NIH proposed that the license, which could be worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, go to Scarlet TCR, an obscure company with no website or Securities and Exchange Commission filings that was either created by or is affiliated with a former NIH employee, Christian Hinrichs, who worked on inventing the drug at the National Cancer Institute. Advocates are concerned that licensing the potential blockbuster drug to a private company, instead of offering a nonexclusive license to multiple drug manufacturers, would increase the price and restrict access for patients, while making the former employee fabulously wealthy.

“I am growing increasingly alarmed that not only has the NIH abdicated its authority to ensure that the new drugs it helps develop are reasonably priced, it may actually be exceeding its authority to grant monopoly licenses to pharmaceutical companies that charge the American people, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs,” Sanders wrote in his letter to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Cabinet agency under which NIH is housed. The proposed license was made public on September 21 with an NIH filing in the Federal Register. Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), an advocacy and research organization, raised an objection to the license on October 6. The matter has not been resolved; “NIH has not negotiated or finalized a license for this technology in this field of use,” an NIH spokesperson told the Prospect.

NIH paid for the early development of the drug, which could treat cervical cancer, and funded the Phase I and Phase II clinical trials. Hinrichs, a former senior investigator and research scholar for immunology at the National Cancer Institute from 2003 to 2021, was involved in the development and those studies. He disclosed a financial relationship with Scarlet TCR at a recent American Association for Cancer Research meeting. Sanders, who held a hearing for NIH director nominee Monica Bertagnolli last week, pointed out in his letter that the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 stipulates that exclusive licenses to private companies for government-invented drugs should only be provided as a “reasonable and necessary incentive” to bring the drug to market. “There does not appear to be anything reasonable and necessary about granting a monopoly for a treatment that was invented, manufactured and tested by the NIH, is already in late stage trials and could potentially enrich a former NIH employee who was one of the major government researchers of this treatment,” Sanders wrote.

The Vermont senator wants the HHS inspector general to investigate whether NIH properly determined that the exclusive license was a “reasonable and necessary incentive,” whether NIH routinely explores granting nonexclusive licenses that would be more affordable for patients, and whether any ethics rules were violated by proposing an exclusive license to a company tied to a former employee. “The NIH should be doing everything within its authority to lower the outrageously high price of prescription drugs,” Sanders wrote. “It should not be granting a monopoly on a promising taxpayer-funded therapy that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for cancer patients in a way that appears to exceed its statutory authority.” The Phase II trial for the drug is active, and results are expected in 2025. A Phase III trial would still be needed before Food and Drug Administration approval. Advocates say this further brings into question why NIH would offer the exclusive license now.

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