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What Is Lost When a Museum Vanishes? In Brazil, a Nation’s Story
By Michael Kimmelman

Ash is still blowing through the park surrounding Brazil’s National Museum, which continues to tally its losses. According to the deputy director at the museum, a 200-year-old Rio de Janeiro institution, the fire that burned down much of the building two weeks ago may have consumed 90 percent of the collection.

That’s thousands, maybe millions, of objects — incomprehensible numbers.

It’s always easier to think in smaller terms, specific examples. The museum preserved documentation of indigenous languages for which there are no longer any living native speakers, as The New York Times has reported. Every one of those records apparently went up in smoke, taking with it a culture, a civilization, the story of a life, a chapter of us.

Because that’s what museums like the National Museum ultimately do. They piece together the narrative of who we are, where we come from, where we belong — in the universe, on this planet, as nations, communities, individuals.
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But during recent years, residents have watched government officials funnel billions toward the Olympics, the World Cup and projects like Santiago Calatrava’s Museum of Tomorrow, ignoring public services and bedrock institutions like the National Museum, whose cash-starved curators, even before the fire, became so desperate that they took to crowdsourcing funds to repair tattered displays.

Writing in the newspaper El País, Washington Fajardo, an architect and planner from Rio, described Brazil as “a happy prisoner of modernity.” His point: The country’s political and business leaders, grasping and reckless, have fixated on projecting Brazil as a global front-runner and neglected the country’s cultural patrimony.
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McDonald’s New Ad

Leading fast food restaurant, McDonald’s created another new and innovative advertisement to convey their latest offering to their customers. This time, the advertisement collection features a box of fries, carved directly out of the very ingredient from which they are made.

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The Last Dalai Lama?

[1] On a wet Sunday in June at the Glastonbury Festival,
more than 100,000 people spontaneously burst into a
rendition of ‘‘Happy Birthday.’’ Onstage, Tenzin Gyatso, the
14th Dalai Lama, blew out the solitary candle on a large
[5] birthday cake while clasping the hand of Patti Smith, who
stood beside him. The world’s most famous monk then poked
a thick finger at Smith’s silvery mane. ‘‘Musicians,’’ he said,
‘‘white hair.’’ But ‘‘the voice and physical action,’’ he added
in his booming baritone, ‘‘forceful.’’ As Smith giggled, he
[10] went on: ‘‘So, that gives me encouragement. Myself, now 80
years old, but I should be like you — more active!’’
Taken from www.nytimes.com. Acessed on 14/12/15.

Match the definitions to the words:

1. clasp (line 5)
2. poke (line 6)
3. giggle (line 9)
4. booming (line 9)

( ) a loud and deep sound.
( ) to laugh in a childlike way.
( ) to hold someone’s hand firmly.
( ) to push someone or something with the fingers.

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Does a lipstick threaten the future of one of our closest living relatives?

Pizza, biscuits, and beauty treatments are some of the thousands of products that contain palm oil, which threaten iconic species through deforestation. And a new study says that planting alternative oils could pose an even bigger danger to living things.
Palm oil is the most widely used vegetable oil on the planet and is believed to be in about 50% of products found in supermarkets and shops. It is important for lipstick for example because it holds colour well, has no taste and doesn’t melt at high temperatures. It’s found in shampoos, soaps, ice cream and instant noodles amongst thousands of others.
Over the past 20 years, growing demand has seen thousands of hectares of old, tropical forests chopped down to make way for the oily palm tree plantations. But these forests are home to some of the most threatened species in the world, including the orangutan. “Orangutans are a lowland species on Bornean Sumatra and that’s where palm oil is grown. The two often clash, palm oil displaces orangutans, they are pushed into gardens where they generate conflicts with locals and that’s where you get the killings. They are incredibly versatile, but what an orangutan can’t deal with is killing. Because they are such slow breeding species, the killing has a really big impact”, the report’s lead author Erik Meijaard, told BBC News.
Palm makes up 35% of the world’s vegetable oil supply but only takes up 10% of the world’s land allocated to producing the greasy stuff. To replace it with rapeseed, soy or sunflower seed oil would take far larger amounts of land, in fact up to nine times the amount needed for palm. It’s likely that such a move would see a displacement of diversity loss, with many more species in different places under threat. “If palm oil didn’t exist you would still have the same global demand for vegetable oil,” said Erik Meijaard.

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Human like me? Avoid looking too perfect to those you hope to aid

While people in helping professions, such as doctors, might understandably try to lead by example and model a healthy lifestyle, research suggests this approach could have drawbacks.

In a recent study, both healthy-weight individuals and overweight people with concerns about their fitness reviewed the written profiles of several physicians, some of whom explicitly mentioned having personal habits like biking or maintaining a healthy diet. Overweight subjects tended to think such doctors would be more disapproving and were less inclined to see them, researchers found.

"I think we often have a false assumption that projecting as perfect an image as possible is the best way to fill the role of expert," says lead author Lauren C. Howe, a psychologist at Stanford University. "This fails to take into account the concerns people may bring into the mix, like worrying that an expert will look down on them for some quality they possess." She suspects this expert/novice dynamic plays out in other domains, such as in teacher/student relationships and mental health care.

Encouragingly, participants anticipated less disapproval from fitness-conscious physicians who also conveyed a nonjudgmental sentiment such as, "Everyone has their own definition of a healthy life" – and acknowledged that different people have diverse but worthy goals.

Rather than a stable set of features, physical beauty is an ever-morphing construct. But female beauty ideals tend nevertheless to have outlines. These have been most visible throughout history in the pictures drawn by those self-elected gods we call artists. History provides us a record, and from it one basic truth stands out: the ideals women are asked to embody, regardless of culture or continent, have been hammered out almost exclusively by men.

Consider, for instance, the ways that figure shaping has altered over the centuries. Some 150 years ago, women in Europe began wearing bustles beneath their dresses that greatly enlarged the profile of their buttocks. More recently, the notion of sculpting has been applied directly to the body. In the 1960s, it took the form of dieting, which produced the sort of extremely skinny figure we associate with such models as Twiggy. Her thinness connoted vitality, an escape from the matronhood idealized by earlier generations, as well as an innocent, insouciant sexuality that was not dissimilar to a Roman-era depiction of the Three Graces.

Consumerism, of which diet fads are certainly a part, has significantly expanded the range of off-the-shelf options for bodily enhancement. In the 1980s and ’90s, women frequently turned to surgery – breast or buttocks augmentation, nose jobs – and other non-surgical interventions such as Botox and tanning.

It’s worth noting that if art holds a mirror up to culture, it has with rare exception failed to reflect a manifestation of female beauty of the last decade: the high-performance, muscled athlete. Popular magazines like ESPN The Magazine’s “Body Issue” have made gestures in this direction, by putting women like Serena Williams on the cover. But, in large part, art seems not to have taken account of the fact that the athlete has become a figure of everyday life, not just a pro.

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Italian children have been told not to turn up to school unless they can prove they have been properly vaccinated. The deadline follows months of national debate over compulsory vaccination. The new law came amid a surge in measles cases - but Italian officials say vaccination rates have improved since it was introduced. Children must receive a range of mandatory immunisations before attending school. They include vaccinations for chickenpox, polio, measles, mumps and rubella.

Children up to the age of six years will be excluded from nursery and kindergarten without proof of vaccination under the new rules. Those aged between six and 16 cannot be banned from attending school, but their parents face fines if they do not complete the mandatory course of immunisations.

Italian media report that regional authorities are handling the situation in a number of different ways. In Bologna, the local authority has set letters of suspension to the parents of some 300 children, and a total of 5,000 children do not have their vaccine documentation up to date. In other areas there have been no reported cases, while still others have been given a grace period of a few days beyond the deadline.

The new law was passed to raise Italy’s dropping vaccination rates from below 80% to the World Health Organisation’s 95% target.

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High-flying ideas?

A camera-equipped drone flies around the outskirts of Seoul, South Korea, hovering near an industrial plant and capturing video of pollutants. Below, on the crowded, litter-covered streets, residents wear white and black masks that cover their noses and mouths. A gray haze hangs in the sky.

The unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, is part of a pilot program by South Korea’s Ministry of Environment. Tasked with inspecting factory emissions in the capital’s greater metropolitan area, it’s the latest in a series of tech solutions aimed at solving Seoul’s dust dilemma. In fact, the fine dust has South Koreans so concerned they’ve cited it as their No. 1 stressor in life – more distressing than the country’s economic stagnation, its rapidly aging population and even North Korea’s erratic dictator and nuclear weapons program.

Their worries are well-founded. The World Health Organization (WHO) advises exposure to fine dust, or PM10, of no more than a daily average of 50 micrograms per cubic meter, and to ultra-fine dust, or PM2.5, of no more than 25. At one point in 2017, Seoul’s PM10 hit 179. In late March 2018, Seoul’s PM2.5 soared to over 100. PM2.5 is of greatest concern. So small it can get lodged into the lungs and penetrate the lining to enter the bloodstream, PM2.5 is comprised of black carbon, nitrates, ammonia and other harmful compounds linked to respiratory diseases and cancer. The WHO has classified fine and ultra-fine dust as carcinogenic since 2013.

Developed by the government-run National Institute of Environmental Research, the drone is the first of what the environment ministry intends to be a fleet deployed nationwide. Some South Korean tech companies, too, are stepping in with their own innovations. Although much of the new tech appears promising, Greenpeace’s Seoul office stresses the importance of addressing the root of the problem. Part of the solution is getting residents to recognize their own role in curbing carbon output. So, even though the new fixes may do a good job of measuring dust, what about actually busting it? That’s where the technology hasn’t quite caught up yet.

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Looking for Alaska by John Green

Before. Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even more (Francois Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young. She is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart. Then ...

After. Nothing is ever the same.