Designers say that as well as offering a degree of protection from surveillance, their clothes make a powerful fashion statement about the importance of privacy
As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend.
Companies have started incorporating “adversarial patterns” in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems.
Continue reading...The former poet laureate on growing up with Lawrence Durrell, rereading Henry James and getting to grips with the genius of Alexander Pope
My earliest reading memory
My parents were country people who thought that looking after or chasing animals was more fun than reading: my father used to say that he’d read half a book in his life (The Lonely Skier by Hammond Innes), and while my mother got through three or four novels a year, she didn’t expect me to do anything equivalent. But I do remember enjoying something my grandmother gave me – My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett. I must have been seven or so, and thought it was amusing and ingenious.
The books that changed me as a teenager
At my first school, I somehow got my hands on White Eagles Over Serbia by Lawrence Durrell, which my parents thought was unsuitably violent. I never finished it, but enjoyed carrying it around as proof of how grown-up I was. Then, at my secondary school, my history teacher read us some Wilfred Owen (we were studying the first world war), and the poetry-lights in my mind immediately flickered on. When I subsequently bought Owen’s Collected Poems it became a kind of sacred text for me (it still is).
In HBO’s four-part series The Man Will Burn, the psychedelic, uber-expensive festival is granted a deep dive
In 1986, a group of starving artists seeking release amid a devastating economic downturn built an oversized wooden stick figure, hauled it on to a San Francisco beach and set it ablaze as police officers and passersby looked on in disbelief. Forty years later, Burning Man is the festival to end all festivals – a sprawling spectacle of music, art and self-expression that draws tens of thousands to the Nevada desert every summer for community, catharsis and spiritual connection. It is a pilgrimage for Bohemians and billionaires, a byword for a particular strain of woo-woo hipsterism, a countercultural institution wrestling with the contradictions between its libertine ideals, corporate reality and the regular presence of lightning-rod figures such as Grover Norquist, the conservative strategist, and Elon Musk’s brother.
The only way to truly grasp the meaning of the place, it seems, is to take the trip –figuratively at first, then literally once fully immersed in Black Rock City’s psychedelic, anything-goes culture. “It’s such an immersive experience that it seems that it would be impossible to capture on film or convey what it feels like to be inside a city that exists for a week, that’s imagined, built and sustained entirely by the people inside,” says Jehane Noujaim, co-director of The Man Will Burn, a new docuseries that premiered on HBO this month on the festival.
Continue reading...Only a handful of FAs have not declared their support
Uefa has made its opposition clear on number of issues
Gianni Infantino has the formal endorsement of more than 200 countries for re-election as Fifa’s president despite the climate of unrest that has swirled since the scandal surrounding Folarin Balogun’s reprieve from suspension.
The Guardian understands only a handful of Fifa’s 211 member associations are still to send letters of support for Infantino, who is on course to be voted into a fourth term by a landslide at its congress in March. A small number of European countries are among the outliers, with Germany the highest-profile FA yet to provide official backing.
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Wij zijn even de vis o nee de draad kwijt hoor: in het eerste halfjaar van vorig jaar o nee dit jaar zijn minder o nee meer meldingen gedaan van goed functionerende o nee verwarde personen: "Ruim 96.000 keer ontving de politie in de eerste helft van dit jaar meldingen over personen met verward gedrag. Dat is 17 procent meer ten opzichte van dezelfde periode vorig jaar." Niemand o nee iedereen kan in principe verward of onbegrepen gedrag vertonen. Zo heb je onbegrepen zangeressen, verwarde acteurs en zelfs onbegrepen en verwarde ministers zoals Hans Wiegel o nee Elanor Boekholt-O'Sullivan. Misschien hebben zelfs wij ons weleens verward o nee normaal gedragen het afgelopen halfjaar. Duidelijk o nee verwarrend allemaal! Zin om ergens midden op een plein te gaan gillen als een baby o nee als een varken nu.
Tatjana Almuli (35) schrijft over hedendaagse schoonheidsidealen, Brankele Frank (39) houdt zich bezig met burn-outs en overprikkeling. Beiden zien: we gaan ten onder aan de hoge eisen die we aan onszelf stellen. „Zelfverbetering kent geen eindpunt.”