James Frey's Blog, page 8

Art Dick

from CNN

Forgers and fraudsters trusted him for decades — but he was an undercover FBI art detective

By Oscar Holland

A founding member of the FBI’s Art Crime Team, Ronnie Walker’s elaborate sting operations often saw him posing as a dealer, authenticator or buyer of stolen paintings. Illustration by Leah Abucayan/CNN/Adobe Stock

Winning the trust of convicted burglar Jerry Christy was the kind of challenge undercover FBI investigator Ronnie Walker had spent years preparing for.

A founding member of the bureau’s specialist Art Crime Team, the Oregon-based agent was well-versed in art history — and trained to pose as a would-be buyer, authenticator or dealer of stolen works. Christy, meanwhile, was being covertly investigated in 2007 over the theft of several artworks, including a 17th-century etching by Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn.

“That etching that was my entrée into his ring,” recalled Walker, who recently retired from the FBI after almost 29 years, allowing him to speak more openly about his career exposing fraudsters, forgers and traffickers in elaborate sting operations.

“At the time, I was really hyper-focused on learning about fine art prints,” added the former agent, who met Christy through a confidential source in 2007. “And I made him believe I was the kind of person who could sell a Rembrandt.”

But things got trickier for Walker, he said, when Christy’s expert accomplice got in touch.

[ click to continue reading at CNN ]

Moonprank

from How Stuff Works

Ridiculous History: The Great Moon Hoax of August 1835

By: Bryan Young

This 1838 French print by the Thierry brothers imagines the landscape and inhabitants of the moon. The stories that ran in The New York Sun would inspire multiple artists. Notice those moon beings kibitzing in the foreground.  SCIENCE & SOCIETY PICTURE LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGES

On Aug. 25, 1835, The New York Sun ran the first in a series of newspaper articles describing scientific findings from the moon. Known as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles were supposed to have been reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science and written by Dr. Andrew Grant, a colleague of the famous astronomer Sir John Herschel. The series featured some of the most popular articles the New York newspaper had ever printed at the time, and people clamored to read about the breaking scientific news of the day.

The articles describe Herschel, who had traveled to Capetown, South Africa, in January 1834 to set up an observatory with a powerful new telescope. Grant’s writings suggested that while in South Africa, Herschel had found evidence of life on the moon, including unicorns, two-legged beavers and humanoids that “average four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly on their backs.”

The articles also described the moon’s geography as having massive craters, amethyst crystals, flowing rivers and lush vegetation.

[ click to continue reading at How Stuff Works ]

SuspiciousGPT

from Study Finds

Is Anything Real Anymore? AI Making Americans Suspicious Of Everything Online(Image by feeling lucky on Shutterstock)In a nutshellAmericans believe only 41% of online content is accurate and created by humans, with three-quarters reporting their trust in the internet is at an all-time low.When tested, only 30% of people could correctly identify AI-written content, showing how difficult it’s become to distinguish between human and artificial writing.82% of Americans want businesses to be legally required to disclose when they use AI in marketing, customer service, or content creation.

[ click to continue reading at Study Finds ]

Umm, duuhhh… devices….

from VOX

When did people stop dancing at the club?

DJs, club owners, and patrons alike say there’s way too much standing around.

by Alex Abad-Santos

Typically, if one is on a dance floor, they should be dancing!Simon Wohlfahrt/AFP via Getty Images

Clubs are, first and foremost, for dancing. One could theoretically do other things there — drink, meet strangers, conduct important and possibly illicit business deals, anything really — but likely everything but dancing could probably be done more efficiently somewhere else. At the same time, while no one’s stopping anyone from dancing in other places that are more accessible and less expensive to shake and shimmy, from the gym to the bar to your own home, there isn’t a better place to dance to loud music than a club. 

But what happens if the dancing stops?

According to DJs, nightclub owners, frequent club-goers, and a number of front–facing camera complaints over social media, a growing frustration at the dancery is a growing number of people not dancing. These nondancers are threatening to turn the club — a place where jumpin’ jumpin’, dancin’ dancin’, and maybe even love have all been promised — into one of those other places where no one dances. 

On the surface, the divide seems split between movers and non-shakers (with a little sprinkle of generational warfare), but it speaks to the very tenets of nightlife. The puzzling act of not dancing at a place designated for dancing is one of those mysteries that raises questions, if not calls for a full-blown investigation. Why did people stop dancing? What are they doing at the club if they’re not dancing? Who’s sitting out and who can we blame? Who’s complaining?

[ click to continue reading at VOX ]

Isle Royale

from National Geographic

Escape the crowds at the lower 48’s most remote national park

Lake Superior’s Isle Royale, an archipelago of 400 islands, is one of the least visited national parks. Here’s why you should see this little known island wilderness.

By Stephen Starr

At a time when record crowds are seeing visitors to some U.S. national parks , Isle Royale National Park, an archipelago of around 400 islands on western Lake Superior, is the very definition of off the beaten track.

Its main island is about 50 miles long and nine miles wide—19 times the size of Manhattan—and sees less than one percent of the average number of visitors to Yosemite National Park when it opens to the public on around April 15 every year.

As the least-visited national park in the continental U.S.,  is only reachable by ferry, private boat or seaplane from mainland Michigan and Minnesota.

It’s a place where the only vehicles are canoes and kayaks, and moose, wolves, beavers and smaller animals are the sole year-round residents. For many, its attraction—centered on its 36 campgrounds and 165 miles of back country trails—lies in the fact that it’s one of the few national parks with no instant Instagram gratification; cell phone coverage is patchy at best.

[ click to continue reading at Nat Geo ]

Pax Lauren

from COMPACT

The Meaning of Ralph Lauren Nationalism

by Samuel Goldman

PHOTO: RALPH LAUREN

If you follow a certain kind of account on Twitter (I refuse to call it X), you’ve likely seen the posts. An image of a particular type of model—blond, blessed with prominent cheekbones and expensively tousled hair—rides a horse or sails a boat or plays croquet in warm golden light. Befitting the rustic settings in which they’re worn, the clothes are generously cut in muted colors. There’s a lot of tweed, tartan, and perfectly faded denim.

The caption is “Ralph Lauren Nationalism.” Presented without further comment in most cases, the posts belong to a genre that laments the world we have ostensibly lost. Remember an America, they imply, when this fantasia on WASP themes could be found in every glossy magazine and shopping mall in the country. Even if Ralph Lauren’s world was never exactly real, it expressed an ideal of wealth, tradition, and beauty that’s been replaced by gender non-conformists wearing hoodies and yoga pants. 

[ click to continue reading at COMPACT ]

CreepyGPT

from SFGate

Business Insider co-founder roasted over creepy blog post about AI workers

If a boss posted openly about swiping right on a human employee’s dating profile, that would constitute sexual harassment

By Stephen Council

FILE: Henry Blodget speaks onstage at a media conference held by Business Insider on Nov. 29, 2017, at Time Warner Center in New York City. / Roy Rochlin/Getty Images

Henry Blodget, a famed-then-disgraced Wall Street investor who went on to co-found the news site Business Insider, has a brand new venture. It’s off to a creepy start: He immediately hit on his artificial intelligence-generated first “employee.”

In February, Blodget fired up a Substack newsletter called Regenerator. He’s the CEO, the editor-in-chief and currently the lone employee, promising the outlet will “analyze the most important questions in innovation — tech, business, markets, policy, science, culture, and ideas.” But in a Monday post, things took a turn for the extremely weird — to the extent that Blodget has since made several edits to its most eyebrow-raising passages, and turned off the post’s comments. Still, a few people got in their roasts, with one commenter writing, “The best time to delete this post was immediately after posting it. The second best time is now.”

[ click to continue reading at SFG ]

Madame X…?

from artnet

How John Singer Sargent’s ‘Madame X’ Turned Paris High Society Upside Down

John Singer Sargent’s most iconic portrait ‘Madame X’ is the star of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s forthcoming exhibition ‘Sargent and Paris.’

by Katie White

[image error]John Singer Sargent, Madame X (Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau) (1883–84). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

She was the sensation of Paris—known for her dramatic patrician looks, a Roman nose, and a famously cinched waist, as well as her numerous extramarital affairs. But the biggest scandal of American-born socialite Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau’s life happened not in the boudoir but the salon—when, in 1884, celebrated portrait painter John Singer Sargent unveiled his daring vision of the alabaster beauty, a portrait only thinly veiled in anonymity, now known simply as: Madame X.  

Now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Madame X (1883–1884) is today regarded as Sargent’s most iconic portrait. The daring composition will soon star in the museum’s forthcoming exhibition “Sargent and Paris,” which traces the years from Sargent’s arrival in Paris at 18 in 1874 to Madame X’s unveiling and aftermath.

[ click to continue reading at artnet ]

Mary X…?

from The New Yorker

Mistaking Mary Magdalene

The subject of numerous controversies, she is defined by ambiguity, welcoming outcasts to the Church and provoking more imaginative approaches to faith.

By Eliza Griswold

An ancient depiction of a naked woman hung on the wall of my father’s study. Skeletal, stupefied, and wildly bedheaded, she contemplated distances across time and space, as saints and mystics do. As with many of the unsettling religious tchotchkes scattered around the rectory where I spent my childhood, I didn’t give much thought to the unkempt icon, until more recently, when I grew curious about Mary Magdalene and began to read into the controversies swirling around her.

[ click to continue reading at The New Yorker ]

NEXT TO HEAVEN Author Talk w/ James Frey

from Bedford Playhouse

Next to Heaven with James Frey click to pre-order at Audible

Wed, Jun 25

7:00 pm

Run Time: 60 min.

James Frey, the literary force hailed as “America’s Most Notorious Author” (TIME) and the “Bad Boy of American Literature” (The New York Times), returns with his latest tour de force:  Next to Heaven, a darkly funny, razor-sharp thriller that peels back the gilded surface of America’s wealthiest enclaves. This incendiary novel delivers an addictive and voyeuristic plunge into a world where privilege, scandal, and moral decay intertwine, culminating in betrayal, chaos, and murder. 

Moderated by best-selling author (and owner of Bedford Books) Fran Hauser.

[ click to read and get tickets at Bedford Playhouse ]