Building the Wall

Michael Ramirez

The Great One

Even Wayne Gretzky shoots wide once in a while.

Currency Playoffs

View post on imgur.com

The Queen - 90 and $28.8B

This photograph of Queen Elizabeth with several of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren was shot by Annie Leibovitz in the Green Drawing Room at Windsor Castle, celebrating the Queen's 90th birthday. Little Mia's holding of "Gan-Gan's" £1,000 Launer handbag is, um, priceless.

So is Leibovitz's deft lighting which makes it look like a royal portrait oil painting.

Meanwhile, the Queen's other assets are doing very well, thank you.

Queen Elizabeth and Family ~ Annie Liebovitz

SNL's Tasteless Heroin Commercial

Last December, NBC News reported that the Center for Disease Control said 47,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses in 2015, up 14 percent over 2014. Regrettably, I know two families who lost sons to heroin overdoses last week.

Yet NBC's Saturday Night Live broadcast this faux commercial over the weekend. Did they think it was funny? The speedball reference was especially hard-hearted given John Belushi's overdose in 1982.

Wealthy Lives Matter!

The New Yorker ~ David Sipress

Revenge of the High Line

A few years ago I read Eric Sanderson's Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, which described the natural island now known as Manhattan before Henry Hudson's arrival on September 12, 1609.

This new Vimeo short film, Wrapped, by Crave takes the trip back to Mannahatta's "prodigious abundance and resplendent diversity" another way.


Wrapped from Crave on Vimeo.

Rembrandt and Artistic License

Is this "next Rembrandt" really "data for the soul" or a high-tech forgery? And what are the longer-term implications?

Advancements in color printers and copiers gave rise to currency counterfeiting a few years ago until the manufacturers devised ways like tracking dots to thwart and prosecute such crimes. Even now authorities concede it's a challenge.

According to Electronic Frontier Foundation technologist Seth Schoen, "the strategy of the government agencies that have worked on this technology - - both U.S. and foreign governments - - is mainly to keep it as quiet as possible and hope that as little information as possible gets out."