All posts tagged: Ambitious

Great Scott! A Close Read of MacKenzie Scott’s Ambitious Substack Novel

Great Scott! A Close Read of MacKenzie Scott’s Ambitious Substack Novel

Long before she became one of the most fiscally generous people in history, Scott wanted to write fiction. She attended Princeton, drawn in by the prospect of studying with Toni Morrison; the vaunted author would advise Scott on her thesis project, a novel-length manuscript titled The Fathering Water. Morrison later told Vogue that Scott was “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative-writing classes…really one of the best.” Morrison continued to champion Scott following graduation, introducing Scott to her own agent, Amanda “Binky” Urban. Urban signed Scott as a client. (It’s not clear whether Urban’s agency, CAA, still represents Scott; a representative for the company didn’t respond to a request for comment.) In 2005, Fourth Estate published Scott’s debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, a quiet, emotionally exacting character excavation that unspools the life of the titular Luther—an engineer whose copper piping system begins to fail in the wake of an earthquake. (His inability to plumb his own emotions also causes a rift between him and his family.) The novel won …

Aspen’s Ambitious AIR Festival Turns the Rocky Mountains into a Stage

Aspen’s Ambitious AIR Festival Turns the Rocky Mountains into a Stage

Aspen, Colorado, stands at an elevation of just under 8,000 feet, enough to wonder what the atmosphere there might do differently to the eye, the ear, and all the rest of the bodily apparatus that we marshal throughout the day. Certainly the question was high in mind when the Aspen Art Museum reconvened AIR, an ambitious festival of art, performance, and talks whose second edition took over the mountain town last week. Last year’s inaugural edition of AIR added considerable intelligence and allure to the more traditional fundraising and market-minded aspects of Aspen Art Week, and the reprise returned the favor with a program that connected certain dots while sketching new shapes with others. Opening night revolved around Matthew Barney’s ZONE DEFENSE: Old Snowmass Parallax, a new sculptural installation in sublime ranch environs that last summer played home to a related performance (involving sled dogs and a sharpshooter, among other things) that engaged the dark fantasias of football and the American West. The new work is quieter and stock-still, in the form of what appears …

Leonardo DiCaprio and Lauren Sánchez Bezos Launch an Ambitious Passion Project

Leonardo DiCaprio and Lauren Sánchez Bezos Launch an Ambitious Passion Project

The Phoenix Species Project will collaborate with Indigenous peoples, local communities, scientists, governments, and over 100 partner organizations to implement a customized recovery plan for each species. Initiatives will include breeding programs, habitat restoration, and the removal of harmful invasive species—all under the supervision of the IUCN. As reported by Hola!, Sánchez Bezos and DiCaprio issued statements to present the initiative and explain the reasons behind their commitment to it. While the entrepreneur emphasized the need to ensure a better world for future generations, the actor and philanthropist highlighted biodiversity: “For decades, scientists, Indigenous peoples, local communities, and conservation leaders have been on the front lines of protecting nature, and what has been made clear through research is that species on the brink of extinction are often the ones that anchor some of the world’s most important ecosystems.” DiCaprio then continued, looking ahead to the initiative’s potential developments: “The Phoenix Species Project has the potential to drastically shift how we approach conservation and combat the climate crisis at a global scale…. The goal is for …

The most ambitious Linux alternative in years isn’t Linux at all

The most ambitious Linux alternative in years isn’t Linux at all

There have been several Linux distros promising to replace Windows, and I’ve tested a lot of them. Some are often the same kernel with the same trade-offs, just with a new wallpaper. I was intrigued to hear about Redox OS, an operating system that tries to solve Linux problems without being Linux. It’s a Unix-like system developed in Rust, and even though it’s rough and unfinished, it seems to be one of the most interesting developments in operating systems. Related I tried 4 lightweight Linux distros on a 4GB laptop, and one surprised me It’s always the one you least expect. Redox OS didn’t start with Linux Why rebuilding a Unix-like operating system from scratch is such a radical idea Afam Onyimadu / MUO Redox OS isn’t a Linux distro, and it certainly isn’t an OS design that merely bolts on a fresh skin and package manager. It comes with a distinct kernel, or more accurately, a microkernel, with many drivers and system services moved out of the kernel and into userspace. This contrasts with …

Young, ambitious and out of work: ‘I’ve gone from Oxford to zero jobs. It’s a bit of a fall’ | Unemployment

Young, ambitious and out of work: ‘I’ve gone from Oxford to zero jobs. It’s a bit of a fall’ | Unemployment

Thomas doesn’t leave the house much. Apart from walking his dog, the only other excursion the 24-year-old regularly makes is a “humiliating” weekly trip to Iceland, where he stocks up on seven £1 frozen meals, usually an assortment of bland curries with the occasional garishly sweet, takeaway-style Chinese meal. “You’re going in and buying seven and the cashier is 100% thinking: oh, that’s one a day,” he says. Half the time, he doesn’t bother eating them. “You just sit there and go: I don’t want it again. I’ve had it for two days on the trot.” Like all of the young people interviewed for this piece, Thomas has been unemployed for more than a year. He is one of 82,000 16- to 24-year-olds in England in the same grim predicament. Thomas, who lives in Warrington, gets £311 a month in universal credit. After his bills are paid and his dog’s food is accounted for, he has about £25 for the month. He is hardly lazy, having worked since he was 16. But this changed in …

Barron Trump unveils ambitious new venture with hefty price tag

Barron Trump unveils ambitious new venture with hefty price tag

Barron Trump’s drinks brand, SOLLOS, has launched its new product, Pineapple + Coconut Yerba Mate, in the latest move for the 20-year-old NYU business major. The product contains organic Brazilian yerba mate, pineapple and coconut flavoring, cane sugar, raw honey and monk fruit extract, and retails for $39 for a 12-pack.  The youngest son of Donald Trump started the company with “a group of close friends ages 19-23,” all hailing from southern Florida, where Barron grew up. The group worked to create a drink that “actually complements life in the Sunshine State,” as they shared on the SOLLOS website, adding that “there was no clean, functional, and great-tasting beverage that truly fit how people in Florida actually live,” despite the state’s “outdoor, sun-driven lifestyle”.  © Getty ImagesBarron’s beverage company launched their product The company claimed that their drink was “something refreshing after a surf session, energizing enough to carry you through a tennis set, and crafted with organic ingredients”. SOLLOS’ drink comes in just one flavor, which the team had been “obsessing over…until it was flawless”. The brand …

Land by Maggie O’Farrell review – an ambitious story of mapmaking in Ireland | Fiction

Land by Maggie O’Farrell review – an ambitious story of mapmaking in Ireland | Fiction

‘His father was ever a man of few words,” begins Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, a lengthy and ambitious story set in the aftermath of the Irish famine. Land opens in 1865 on a rainswept Irish peninsula and takes us to Dublin, Rome, Quebec and Kerala as it tells the story of two generations and gestures backwards and forwards at two more. The opening line came to O’Farrell on a train journey from Belfast to Dublin, and became the way in to a story based in part on that of her great-great-grandfather, who worked for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland not long after the great hunger. “What, I wondered, would it have been like to be revising the maps at that time,” she writes in a short introductory note; “to be recording and setting down the devastation that had occurred?” In bitter weather, Tomás and his 10-year-old son Liam are mapping a peninsula – perhaps Dunmore Head in County Kerry, though O’Farrell doesn’t specify – using surveying poles and measuring chains. Tomás is in the pay …

We Took An Ambitious Swing With A Controversial Family Holiday. It Taught Us A Lot

We Took An Ambitious Swing With A Controversial Family Holiday. It Taught Us A Lot

Over the past few years, both my husband and I have felt increasingly bummed that we don’t have closer (geographically and emotionally) relationships with our families of origin. No family members live in our state, and none of them are as comfortable travelling as we are, so it often falls on us to visit them if we want to spend time together. But we’ve also become burned out packing up the kids and schlepping to see extended family on their home turf. So this year, we decided to do something about it.  We cherry-picked family members from both sides – including multiple total strangers who had never met each other – and dropped a pin on the map, kinda-sorta-not-really in the middle. We booked a couple of campground lodgings. We promised no cost to our families; all they had to do was drive there and get along. It was the biggest multigenerational travel gamble we’d ever taken. But we hoped it would be worth it. Planning an intergenerational trip can mean trying to balance a …

National Trust announces winner of Sycamore Gap artwork competition with ambitious ‘soundscape’ set to go on display

National Trust announces winner of Sycamore Gap artwork competition with ambitious ‘soundscape’ set to go on display

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter The National Trust has announced the winner of a competition to design an artistic tribute to the illegally felled Sycamore Gap tree, praising the winner for aiming “to reimagine the tree’s legacy as something shared and living”. For at least 150 years, the sycamore had stood at a viewpoint over Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, but the much-loved tree was cut down in an act of vandalism in September 2023. The competition has been won by arts charity Helix Arts and George King Architects, whose winning design is The People’s Tree. A UK-wide participation programme will see members of the public invited to record reflections on their relationship with nature. Alongside these spoken-word pieces, the artists will create a digital soundtrack by scanning the tree rings, transforming its history into sound. Some of the seasoned wood recovered from the tree will be …

Campfire Audio has built its most ambitious IEMs yet, packing them full of features and feeling

Campfire Audio has built its most ambitious IEMs yet, packing them full of features and feeling

We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Learn more › Sign Up For Goods 🛍️ Product news, reviews, and must-have deals. Portland, Oregon’s Campfire Audio launched in 2015 as the logical continuation of founder and lead engineer Ken Ball’s ALOaudio. ALO, or Audio Line Out, was a company obsessed with the signal chain. And Campfire Audio emerged to produce hand-assembled in-ear monitors capable of transforming what the bespoke cables and boutique portable amps were transporting. With the 2016 introduction of the Andromeda [an IEM whose 10th anniversary edition we’ll have more to say about in the future], Campfire Audio’s distinctive industrial enclosures were established alongside a layered and lucid house sound, the result of acoustic chamber experimentation focused more on overall organic timbre than eking out every millimeter of transients. However, that all changes with the introduction of the Chimera—a summit-fi statement that sets out to add all possible technicalities and physicality to the spaciousness-first foundation. Campfire Audio The Chimera is a $7,500, nine-driver platform for …