Latest news with #Vesuvius
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Below The Clouds' Trailer: Gianfranco Rosi's Naples Documentary To Debut In Competition in Venice
EXCLUSIVE: Venice Golden Lion director Gianfranco Rosi returns to the festival in Competition this year with black-and-white documentary Below The Clouds, and Deadline can unveil the first trailer. After his exploration of life on the island of Lampedusa in Oscar-nominated and Berlin Golden Bear winning work Fire at Sea, and the outskirts of Rome in Venice winner Sacro GRA, Rosi trains his eye on Naples and life in the area between Mount Vesuvius and the Gulf of Naples, where the threat of seismic activity is ever present. More from Deadline Venice Film Festival Lineup Announcement - Follow Live Venice Critics' Week Line-Up Features Julia Jackman's '100 Nights Of Hero' Starring Charli XCX & Emma Corrin Venice Juries: Fernanda Torres & Mohammad Rasoulof Set For Main Competition Jury; Julia Ducournau & Charlotte Wells Named As Horizons & First Film Presidents The synopsis reads: 'The ground shakes periodically and the fumaroles of the Phlegraean Fields taint the air. From the traces of history, memories of the subterranean world, and the concerns of the present, in black and white, a lesser-known Naples emerges and fills with voices, with lives. 'Below the clouds lies a territory crisscrossed by locals, worshippers, tourists, and archaeologists excavating a past that in museums will give new life and meaning to statues, fragments, and ruins. The train that rings Vesuvius makes its rounds as racehorses train along the shore. A teacher runs a makeshift afterschool for children and adolescents. Firemen in their command center calm the fears of the locals who call in, law enforcement tracks down tomb robbers, while in the port of Torre Annunziata, Syrian tankers unload Ukrainian grain. The land that skirts the gulf is a vast time machine.' The documentary is by Rosi's Rome-based company 21Uno Film and Stemal Entertainment with Rai Cinema. International sales are handled by The Match Factory. [youtube Best of Deadline Everything We Know About 'The Devil Wears Prada 2' 2025 TV Series Renewals: Photo Gallery 2025 TV Cancellations: Photo Gallery
New York Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Corrections: July 18, 2025
An article on Thursday about the return of a looted mosaic to the city of Pompeii referred imprecisely to some of the volcanic matter Pompeii was buried in when Mount Vesuvius erupted. It was buried in ash and rock fragments, not lava. A video game review on Thursday about Donkey Kong Bananza misidentified the actress voicing Pauline. She is Jenny Kidd, not Kate Higgins. Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions. To contact the newsroom regarding correction requests, please email nytnews@ To share feedback, please visit Comments on opinion articles may be emailed to letters@ For newspaper delivery questions: 1-800-NYTIMES (1-800-698-4637) or email customercare@
Boston Globe
5 days ago
- Sport
- Boston Globe
The Red Sox start the second half riding a 10-game winning streak. How much — or how little — of it can be contributed to no longer having Rafael Devers?
It wasn't. Even though it meant cutting ties with their best hitter, the Sox — incensed by Devers's unwillingness to prioritize team needs by considering a position change, and eager to find a trade partner for the 28-year-old rather than risking the possibility of an injury eroding his market before the deadline — made the determination that they'd rather move forward without Devers than with him. In discussing the trade, chief baseball officer Craig Breslow offered a hard-to-fathom assessment. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'I do think that there is a real chance that at the end of the season, we're looking back, and we've won more games than we otherwise would have,' said Breslow. Advertisement The idea seemed far-fetched, particularly as the Red Sox offense spiraled in the initial weeks without Devers. But shockingly, on the heels of a 10-game winning streak leading into the All-Star break, the before-and-after comparison is now quite flattering to the Sox. Related : With Devers, they were 37-36 (.507). Since the trade, they're 16-9 (.640), the third best mark in the majors behind the Brewers (17-6) and Blue Jays (17-8). Their record is better without Devers. Does that mean they're now a better team? Members of the Sox weren't eager to explore the subject. Advertisement 'I'm not going to touch that,' said starter Walker Buehler. 'I'm not going to give a definitive answer on that,' said shortstop Trevor Story. 'I do know we're a different team,' allowed outfielder Rob Refsnyder. 'But I don't know.' The reluctance to offer a yes-or-no assessment is understandable. Players didn't want to come across as disrespectful of Devers as a person or player. They also understand that correlation is not causation, and that it's usually misleading to attribute collective performance to the presence or absence of one individual. So, a different framing might be more productive: What's changed to allow the team to succeed, and were those changes related to Devers? The biggest change has been starting pitching. A group that — outside of Garrett Crochet — struggled to deliver five solid innings has dominated opponents over the last month. How the Red Sox have compared since trading Rafael Devers to the Giants. Amin Touri What about the lineup? Surprisingly, what had been a good offense with Devers (4.8 runs per game, fifth in MLB) has been better since the trade, averaging 5.5 runs per contest (second). Much of that production came during a six-game Vesuvius against the woebegone Nationals and Rockies, but there's more to the surge than the opponents. First, while Devers was as impactful a run-producer as there was in baseball before the trade, during the five-game Red Sox winning streak that immediately preceded the deal, the Rays and Yankees had identified ways to limit his impact. Advertisement He'd gone 3 for 18 with six strikeouts and two walks in 21 plate appearances over that stretch, driving in just one run – a solo homer in his final at-bat with the Sox. The two teams beat him repeatedly with fastballs (47 percent whiff rate) over that stretch. 'Teams were pitching around him a little bit,' said Refsnyder. Related : Meanwhile, Devers's struggles in San Francisco — he's hitting .202/.330/.326 with a 31 percent strikeout rate for the Giants — make it difficult to say what he'd be contributing in Boston, particularly given that he's been 'I can't really judge anybody on [that small sample],' said Giants pitcher Logan Webb. 'It's a guy that had to pack up his stuff and move across the country. I think these things take time. He's here for the next eight years, nine years, so no one's really worried about anything like [him struggling].' Rafael Devers is batting just .202 with two home runs while striking out 34 times in his 109 plate appearances since joining the Giants. Jeff Chiu/Associated Press Even so, it's interesting to contemplate how Devers's departure impacted the rest of the roster. At the time of the trade, Had Devers not been traded, might Anthony — 2 for 27 at the time Abreu was activated — have been optioned to Triple A once Abreu came off the IL? Or, would the team have kept him in the big leagues but limited his at-bats against lefties? Advertisement And if they'd kept Anthony in the big leagues, might Ceddanne Rafaela have started bouncing between center field and second base while occasionally losing starts? Had that happened, would Rafaela have made the same two-way impact that he did this month? '[The trade] has done some things and opened some things for some people who we know deserve it to have opportunities,' said Buehler. Related : Star-level production by Rafaela and Story has likely more than offset the loss of Devers. But the lineup's improvement goes beyond just those two. First, the team's collective approach has improved dramatically. While Devers had been a force with men in scoring position, the same couldn't be said of his teammates. The Sox had been less productive and more strikeout-prone with runners in scoring position through mid-June than they had been with the bases empty. That's flipped. Since the trade – and particularly of late — the team has hit a remarkable .317/.366/.546 with runners in scoring position, and its strikeout rate has dropped from 22 percent overall to 19 percent with runners on second or third. There's been a concerted effort to put the ball in play. Moreover, the anchoring of Devers in the two-hole behind fellow lefty Jarren Duran gave opposing managers a clear path to managing the Sox lineup in the late innings. Without Devers — and with Jarren Duran increasingly being moved to the bottom half of the order against lefthanded starters — the Sox have become comfortable employing platoons and pinch hitters to create headaches for opponents. The combinations of Abreu and Refsnyder as well as Romy Gonzalez, Marcelo Mayer, and Abraham Toro have created a succession of strong matchups. Advertisement 'Our lineup is a little bit more shape-shifty. There's different pieces and parts, and we're able to cover a couple different pitch shapes now. It's a different lineup,' said Refsnyder. 'It definitely doesn't feel like there's pockets of good matchups.' 'We've just been a very versatile team that's winning in a lot of different ways,' added Crochet. Related : Might all of this have happened with Devers? Sure. Again: The Sox were amidst a five-game winning streak that signaled their best stretch of the season when they traded their DH. That said, they've played well enough to at least make Breslow's suggestion of potential improvement post-trade plausible — with plenty of time remaining to seek a more definitive conclusion. 'The truth is, we won't know for a long time,' said CEO/president Sam Kennedy. 'That's the honest answer.' Alex Speier can be reached at
Irish Times
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Queer romance at the end of the world: the best new young-adult fiction
The title gives it away, to a certain extent. Vesuvius (Atom, £9.99), the debut from Cass Biehn, is set in Pompeii just before that fateful eruption. For modern readers who may feel as if our own world constantly teeters on the brink of disaster (or has perhaps toppled over), there's an immediate appeal here in this tale of two star-crossed boys – one thief, one temple attendant – whose paths cross when the former steals a sacred relic. Mercury's helmet is said to contain tremendous power, but when Felix steals it, he's mainly concerned with its monetary value. In a reverse Pascal's wager, he holds fast to one rule: 'magic isn't worth the cost of belief'. Loren, on the other hand, is all too aware the supernatural exists – all his life he has seen flashes of the future, though he's been cautioned not to share them publicly. When he encounters Felix, he instantly recognises the boy from his apocalyptic visions – 'the living counterpart of the nightmarish ghost who caused the destruction' of the city. There's adventure, political intrigue, and reflections on what it means to be a hero – all wrapped up in a love story that reminds us, as Biehn notes in their preface, 'queer people existed in ancient times as they exist today'. The umbrella term is useful here, acknowledging the historically and culturally specific ways in which sexuality is conceived of and spoken about, and Biehn pleasingly resists the urge to impose modern labels. Loren confesses he is 'not… for women', a certainty that comes 'as a bright shock' to Felix, who understands the fluidity when one wants a 'dalliance' but is all too aware that settling down involves a woman. A wealthy man may have 'a boy on the side', but never an equal; to want a 'companion' is impossible. Other concepts are slightly shakier for the period; there are conversations about virginity, historically policed for women but not men, that don't quite ring true, and there's a fuzziness over what 'childhood' might mean. These are nitpicks, of course, and more forgivable is the dialogue that moves between faux-archaic and contemporary idiom – if we are to be relentlessly purist, we would not be reading this text in modern English, after all. READ MORE This gripping adventure is part of a wave of classical-myth-inspired YA fiction and pop culture more generally, and one suspects the generation of kids who grew up on the Percy Jackson books and are now writing their own novels have more than a little to do with this. There are tropes and indeed some phrases that will be too familiar to readers – within two lines we have 'Loren's thudding heart skipped' and 'Felix's copper curls tangled like a storm-tossed ocean' – but if you are inclined to swoon over a queer romance at the end of the world (raises hand) you'll let it slide. That sense of queer history, and a historical Italian setting, is also at play in Brian Selznick's Run Away With Me (Scholastic, £19.99), albeit a tad more recent. Rome, the summer of 1986. Danny wanders the streets while his mother works on old books, and meets a strange, beautiful boy. 'Angelo and I expanded and contracted across the city, a murmuration of two that shifted and changed shape but always felt complete and alive, no matter how big or small the space between us.' It is like being in a myth, though he is aware how unhappily most end – 'People were usually transformed against their will into trees or constellations or deer killed by their own hounds'. Angelo is 'all sweat and cherries and rain', and together they will uncover the secret of the Monda Museum and its founders. Selznick, best known for his illustrated children's novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret , bookends the lyrical text with charcoal drawings, lending to the dreamy, delirious first-love feeling of it all. Gorgeous. Abdi Nazemian Slightly later in the 1980s we might move to New York and find ourselves in the world of novelist and screenwriter Abdi Nazemian's Like A Love Story (Little Tiger, £8.99), featuring three teenagers in a quasi-love triangle against the backdrop of the Aids crisis. Reza has just moved to the city, and is sure of two things – he is gay and it will kill him. He will not let his mother bandage a minor wound: 'Just in case my blood is toxic. Just in case you can get it from having too many thoughts of boys in locker rooms.' Meeting Art, out and proud at school, is a jolt, but even Art sometimes wonders: 'I don't know how I'll ever begin to live while this disease is raging. Who will love me when all they'll see when they look at me is the possibility that I may kill them?' The terror, which may feel melodramatic for contemporary readers – as I write this there is news of yet another medical breakthrough in the prevention of HIV transmission – is legitimate, as we learn when we meet Judy (Art's best friend, who falls hopelessly for Reza) and her dying, fiercely activist uncle Stephen. It's hard not to veer toward cliche when writing about truly awful historical moments, but Nazemian earns every single activist slogan, every entreaty to both fight and celebrate. There is nuance and care here, as various issues are explored; novels offer space beyond the simple binary of with us/against us that is so prevalent in our polarised society. Stephen noting, 'there's a difference between denying sick people access to life-saving drugs and expressing an opinion about how to define queer film' is a particularly welcome line. Thoughtful, emotional, haunting – I loved it. Josh Silver British author Josh Silver is always good on sideways glances at contemporary treatments for mental health, approaching the topic with tremendous empathy and knowledge but unafraid to squint a little at panaceas. In his latest, Traumaland (Rock The Boat, £8.99), the new silver bullet is 'optogenetics', a 'cutting-edge neuro modulation' that is 'a quick, effective and innovatory new therapy, set to revolutionise mental healthcare'. Eli is unaware of all this at first – but he does know he has been through something traumatic, and it's left him unable to feel anything. Seeking out dark thrills at an underground club leads him into a tangled web of conspiracies (don't go clubbing, kids), and makes him determined to uncover the truth of his alleged accident. Silver's pacy writing and twisty plot makes this a delicious read as well as providing much food for thought. Finally, sometimes one just needs a sapphic rom-com involving a princess and a scholarship student at a boarding school in a tiny fictional European country. This premise, too, is part of a broader trend in YA and romance – glamorous escapism, but make it gay. It's a little bit progressive and a little bit conservative, a repackaging of old ideas with a rainbow ribbon, often with little reflection, but in the best hands, it's tremendously pleasing. And we are in good hands with the always-reliable Sophie Gonzales, whose Nobody in Particular (Hodder, £9.99) offers a sharp eye on public scrutiny – 'The media has been writing incessantly about me since six months before my birth,' Princess Rose recalls – while also providing a sweet, hopeful love story.
Forbes
30-06-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Enjoy TikTok Explainers? These Old-Fashioned Diagrams Are A Whole Lot Smarter
In the aftermath of Hiroshima, many of the scientists who built the atomic bomb changed the way they reckoned time. Their conception of the future was published on the cover of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , which portrayed a clock set at seven minutes to midnight. In subsequent months and years, the clock sometimes advanced. Other times, the hands fell back. With this simple indication, the timepiece tracked the likelihood of nuclear annihilation. Although few of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project are still alive, the Doomsday Clock remains operational, steadfastly translating risk into units of hours and minutes. Over time, the diagram has become iconic, and not only for subscribers to The Bulletin. It's now so broadly recognizable that we may no longer recognize what makes it radical. John Auldjo. Map of Vesuvius showing the direction of the streams of lava in the eruptions from 1631 to 1831, 1832. Exhibition copy from a printed book In John Auldjo, Sketches of Vesuvius: with Short Accounts of Its Principal Eruptions from the Commencement of the Christian Era to the Present Time (Napoli: George Glass, 1832). Olschki 53, plate before p. 27, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Firenze. Courtesy Ministero della Cultura – Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. Any unauthorized reproduction by any means whatsoever is prohibited. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze A thrilling new exhibition at the Fondazione Prada brings the Doomsday Clock back into focus. Featuring hundreds of diagrams from the past millennium, ranging from financial charts to maps of volcanic eruptions, the exhibition provides the kind of survey that brings definition to an entire category of visual communication. Each work benefits from its association with others that are manifestly different in form and function. According to the exhibition curators, a diagram as 'a graphic design that explains rather than represents; a drawing that shows arrangement and relations'. In other words, a diagram is a picture with a purpose, and its purpose is at least one degree removed from the image presented. It can be understood only through transposition. If it corresponds to reality, it never does so literally. These qualities, which show how complex diagrams are as a mode of expression, are evident even when you look at some of the earliest examples in the exhibition. For instance, many of the anatomical charts from Medieval times and the Renaissance are inscribed not only with parts of the body but also with constellations. Astrological signs were believed to influence bodily functions. (Aries was typically associated with the head, Taurus with the neck, Gemini with the lungs, Scorpio with the groin.) The influences of the stars were physically invisible. Fitting the signs to anatomical features, diagrams depicting the so-called 'zodiac man' provided pictorial guidance to medical practices such as bleeding, while simultaneously reenforcing the animating idea of man as the cosmos in microcosm. The practice of superimposing disparate information has outlasted scientific acceptance of zodiac men. In fact, juxtaposition has advanced many disciplines by testing the explanations the graphics purport to illustrate. Diagrams give specificity to hypotheses, subjecting them to collective scrutiny. Presenting correlations across multiple dimensions, they expose meaningful patterns as well as false associations. The Fondazione Prada exhibition provides several compelling examples from epidemiology, including one of the most famous maps in the history of medicine: the diagram that revealed the cause of a cholera. In 1854, Dr. John Snow charted cholera cases in relation to the locations of London's neighborhood water pumps, showing a geographic overlap that revealed cholera to be a waterborne disease spread through contamination. His theory – now accepted as scientific fact – ran contrary to the medical consensus that cholera was a poisonous vapor, an illness contracted by breathing. The older hypothesis, known as miasma theory, had also been charted. One especially impressive diagram was prepared by Dr. Henry Wentworth Acland, who showed British cholera cases in relation to temperature, precipitation, and barometric pressure. Although Acland's bar chart did not disprove the theory he sought to bolster, it provided little explanatory power, far less than was conveyed by Snow's famous map. Attempting to show that cholera was modulated by climate, Acland inadvertently contributed to the miasma's demise. The contrast between Acland's graph and Snow's map demonstrates both the value of data and the significance of format. Explanations are aesthetically experienced. Snow could have reached his conclusion with bars of different lengths instead of geographic coordinates, but the cause of cholera probably wouldn't have been as readily apparent, and the presentation certainly wouldn't have been as compellingly persuasive. Of course, persuasion isn't always felicitous. When data are carelessly used or callously manipulated, persuasiveness can be downright dangerous, the crux of political propaganda. Assessing a diagram requires critical thinking. But the Prada exhibition presents at least as many instances in which diagrams have advanced political principles and positions with incisiveness generally lacking in political discourse. W.E.B. Du Bois. Conjugal condition of American Negroes according to age periods, c. 1900. Exhibition copy of a statistical chart illustrating the condition of the descendants of former African slaves now in residence in the United States of America, Atlanta University. Ink and watercolor on paper. Daniel Murray Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C., Daniel Murray Collection Library of Congress, One of the greatest practitioners of the 20th century was the sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. In a set of diagrams prepared for the 1900 Paris Exposition, Du Bois showed the fortunes of Blacks in the United States since emancipation. What is most striking about this series is the impact of the work as a whole. This is all the more surprising given that each diagram is highly particular, practically sui generis . One shows the 'assessed value of household and kitchen furniture owned by Georgia Negroes'. Another shows 'race amalgamation in Georgia based on a study of 40,000 individuals of Negro descent'. There are charts tracking literacy, migration, and taxation. These charts do not overlap in the way that Snow superimposed cholera and water pumps. They could not comprehensibly be assimilated into a single diagram. Instead they use a shared visual language to connect different dimensions of the African-American experience, constructing a multifaceted reality with novelistic acumen. Each chart is descriptive. The explanatory power of Du Bois' project emerges as the eyes move restlessly between them. The Doomsday Clock is also political, picturing conditions that collectively contribute to the irreducible reality of a world in peril. In recent years, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have added factors ranging from climate change to artificial intelligence into their temporal calculus. All of these explain present conditions and must inform political decisions. Yet there is an important difference between the cover of the Bulletin and Du Bois's contribution to the Paris Exposition. If the former has the expository breadth of a graphic novel, the latter has the semantic compression of a concrete poem. Our command of apocalyptic technologies necessitates a new kind of relationship with history, a responsibility for all possible futures that is visually expressed in the restless movements of the clock's hours and minutes. What the Doomsday Clock lacks in mechanistic explanation of risk, the graphic makes up for by exposing our influence over the end of time. Each and every person is an existential threat in microcosm.
