A Notting Hill Townhouse

 
From House and Garden:

Bryan’s name is synonymous with hotel design; he’s worked on many of the most glamorous properties across the world – Claridge's, The Connaught and Kenmare to name a few – and imbued their private and public spaces with his deft blend of neutrals, pastels, artful furniture and craft. This style translates wonderfully to this house, where Bryan has in his own words “experimented with colour more as a studio than we have before.” Bryan is known more for his soft approach to colour, creating serene spaces with splashes of pale coral, light blue or washes of pretty pinks. “It’s really important to explore and experiment with colour,” he says, “because the outcome can be really powerful but still calm and enveloping. It can have a positive effect on you when you walk into these rooms.” (Read more.)

 

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DEI Conquers Stanford

 From City Journal:

DEI’s growth at Stanford has been fast. In 2021, the Heritage Foundation counted 80 DEI officials at the university. That number has more than doubled since then. Sophie Fujiwara, a recent graduate, explains that DEI has become “unavoidable” for students, with “mandatory classes” and “university-sponsored activities.” Left-wing students increasingly believed that this wasn’t enough. Following the George Floyd revolution of 2020, these students “demanded more initiatives and funding from the university for DEI-related subjects.”

Stanford’s DEI initiatives are not limited to humanities departments or race and gender studies. The highest concentration is in Stanford’s medical school, which has at least 46 diversity officials. A central DEI administration is led by chief DEI officer Joyce Sackey, with sub-departments throughout the medical school. Pediatrics, biosciences, and other specialties all have their own commissars embedded in the structure.

In the sciences, DEI policies have advocated explicit race and sex discrimination in pursuit of “diversity.” The physics department, for example, has committed to a DEI plan with a mandate to “increase the diversity of the physics faculty,” which, in practice, means reducing the number of white and Asian men. Administrators are told to boost the representation of “underrepresented groups,” or “URGs,” through a variety of discriminatory programs and filters. (Read more.)

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Men and Women as They Are: Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro”

 Marie-Antoinette loved Beaumarchais and performed The Barber of Seville at her miniature theater at Petit Trianon. From The Imaginative Conservative:

Not only was it, of course, a safer course in eighteenth-century Western Europe to castigate women rather than aristocrats, but Mozart surely found more humor and irony in this aria, which was in keeping with the comic spirit of the piece as a whole. In a story that centers on the serial infidelity of a nobleman, and which the lead female characters are faithful to their lovers, Mozart has a manservant sing of the untrustworthy nature of women.

Moreover, it is likely that Mozart found a blanket condemnation of the wealthy an empty indictment, for he knew that wealth did not change the nature of men. But women were in their essence different from men—at least in some respects—in all times and places; indeed, the idea that women “all do the same” provided the title of the third of the Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy (Così fan Tutte). Thus, it was the battle of the sexes that Mozart found much more interesting and more primal than the battle of the classes.

And yet, Mozart and Da Ponte did not entirely shy away from class antagonisms; they added a soliloquy—the aria “Se voul ballare”—to the libretto, in which Figaro sings to the absent Count of his intention to allow him “to go dancing,” but promising that he himself “will call the tune.” Keeping in mind that Figaro‘s libretto is in Italian, the language of the Viennese nobility, it can be argued that Mozart was here speaking directly to aristocrats, warning them to behave themselves. This is true, but the aria should be seen more as a stinging admonition to an individual rather than a revolutionary clarion call, in that Figaro here—and throughout the opera—implicitly accepts his lower station. Had the Count been an entirely honorable man, Figaro would have no need to try to foil his master’s designs through manipulation. (Read more.)

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4 Sisters Kabob and Curry

 

From The Easton Gazette:

Now in Easton we are blessed to be able to taste the flavors of the Indian subcontinent in two places, The Bombay Tadka and more recently the 4 Sisters Kabob and Curry. 4 Sisters is a food truck with delicious traditional Pakistani and Indian cuisine, with the most fresh ingredients. I discovered it when my daughter won eight chickens, including three roosters, in a raffle. Since we wanted eggs that we could eat we had to look for homes for the roosters. I put "Free Roosters" messages all over Facebook and one of the ladies from the food truck responded, so we dropped them off there. I loved to see the words "American Dream" painted on the side of the truck. I had to know the story behind the family, and here it is:

The family’s story is one worthy of a novel and begins in Kashmir when owner and chief cook Shahida Perveen was a child, preparing food for her seven uncles. The family’s journey to the Eastern Shore began in 2001 when they left their native Kashmir, Pakistan to come to the United States. Like many immigrants seeking better opportunities, Shahida worked various jobs, including a 7-Eleven on Kent Island, while learning a new language and how to drive a car, and did some catering on the side. Ann created a contact list and every Thursday night they would text the menu for Friday pickup. Soon their list grew to over ninety customers and the family started looking for restaurant space in Easton but found nothing to suit their needs.

The women opened 4 Sisters Halal Meat & Groceries on Park Street in Easton selling spices and frozen foods. Realizing that most people couldn’t cook authentic Indian and Pakistani food, even with the seasonings, the daughters encouraged their mom to follow her passion of cooking her own food and started exploring the idea of a food truck affiliated with the store.

(Read more.)

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Stop Importing Foreign Hatred

 From City Journal:

After the October 7 attacks, thousands took to American streets to celebrate. Some explicitly praised the heinous acts of rape, beheading, and kidnapping of civilians. Among these demonstrators were many noncitizens, including those on student visas. Universities such as MIT refrained from suspending students who neglected their classes in order to protest, seeking to protect those students’ immigration status.

Policymakers can fight imported anti-Semitism by safeguarding American Jews from foreign threats, while reinforcing the value of American citizenship. The United States has a long-standing tradition of defending itself against perilous foreign ideologies. George Washington once expressed his hope that America might become a “safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.” Washington’s emphasis on virtue is critical. Some of the earliest immigration restrictions aimed to ensure that only virtuous actors were admitted—excluding prostitutes, anarchists, and Communists.

Following World War II, these restrictions broadened to prevent members of totalitarian parties and violators of human rights from immigrating. Terrorists and their affiliates are barred from entering the U.S.; so are their supporters. Even today, such laws continue to result in the denaturalization and deportation of former Nazi officials who managed to enter America under false pretenses. (Read more.)

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The Most Powerful Queens in History

 Marie-Antoinette is mentioned in this list although during her lifetime she had little or no personal power except what went along with being the royal consort. She was perceived by her enemies as having much more power than she actually had. Part of the reason she dressed in fashionable and flattering gowns is that she wanted people to think she was her husband's mistress as well as his wife and therefore had power like a Pompadour. She did on many occasions try to influence the policies of her husband Louis XVI but he always did what he thought was best. He listened to her more during the Revolution when they were abandoned by so many family and friends. From MSN:

The great Nefertiti was married to the monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten. Immortalized by a famous bust, she set the standard for beauty in the ancient world. Her importance in ancient Egyptian history is not limited to her physical appearance, however. Frequently represented in works of art, Nefertiti wielded an omnipresent influence in public and religious life on par with the pharaoh. Artists also portrayed the couple’s close relationship. Together, they initiated an unprecedented cultural revolution by establishing the god Aton, represented by a solar disk, as the sole deity. (Read more.)

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Klimt’s Idyllic Landscapes

 

From ArtNet:

Gustav Klimt, a Viennese Symbolist painter and co-founder of the Viennese Secession movement, first came to prominence as a mural painter. Later, he became known for his paintings of women, including those prominent in Viennese society around 1901–09. This period in the artist’s career was dubbed the “Golden Phase,” and was characterized by striking portraits adorned with glistening gold leaf, which have captured the public’s imagination for decades. Now however, the Neue Galerie is focusing on a significant part of Klimt’s oeuvre that has been overshadowed by the artist’s famed late portraits, with the exhibition “Klimt Landscapes.”

In the winter of 1903, around 20 landscapes featured in the artist’s only substantial one-man show in Vienna before his death. Known for their innovative square format, which betrayed the artist’s interest in photography, and produced en plein-air (outside), an approach also favoured by the Impressionists, these bucolic works were praised by contemporary critics and were highly sought after by collectors. (Read more.)

A legal heir of a lost Klimt comes forward, HERE. 

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Restorative Discipline: Crippling Children's Mental Maturity And Validating Violence

 From Jan Greenhawk at The Easton Gazette:

I remember the first time I heard about "restorative discipline." I was in one of my last years of teaching and we were being told that kids no longer needed consequences to correct their behavior but a strategy called restorative discipline. Having been a teacher for almost thirty years, I was suspect of the phrase. You see, education administrations have a way of naming new trends so that they sound really good even when they are really bad. Or worse, ineffective.

When I first heard the term I was mentoring some new teachers at the local high school. The school had just implemented a new strategy that included creating a "ninth grade academy" in our school, a wing dedicated just to 9th grade classes and students. The idea was that 9th graders would adjust better if they were kept out of the 10th, 11th and 12th grade populations and therefore cause fewer incidents and problems. Like most ideas, it didn't work out the way they thought it would. Discipline referrals went up so much that the administrator in charge of the 9th grade academy would hide them in his desk drawer and not log them into our local, state and federal discipline stats. By halfway through the year, his drawer was overflowing. That was a violation of COMAR (State policy).

It was then the onslaught of counselors, psychiatrists, and mental health personnel started showing up to take kids out of class. It was usually the students who were behavior problems. They were glad to leave class because they got free pizza. It didn't matter to administration if these students were missing class time or content because the most important thing was for them to discuss their lives with someone who would then help them learn how to control their emotions. They called it "restorative discipline." (Read more.)

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