Tuesday, September 8, 2020

Wikipedia article of the day for September 9, 2020

The Wikipedia article of the day for September 9, 2020 is Michelle Williams (actress).
Michelle Williams (born September 9, 1980) is an American actress. Her accolades include two Golden Globe Awards, and she has been nominated for four Academy Awards and one Tony Award. She made her feature film debut in Lassie (1994), and starred in the television teen drama series Dawson's Creek (1998–2003). She earned her first Academy Award nomination playing the wife of a gay man in Brokeback Mountain (2005). Williams played troubled characters in the independent dramas Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), and Manchester by the Sea (2016). For portraying Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn (2011) and Gwen Verdon in Fosse/Verdon, she won two Golden Globe Awards. Her highest-grossing releases came with the thriller Shutter Island (2010), the fantasy film Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), the musical The Greatest Showman (2017), and the superhero film Venom (2018). She was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the role of a sexually abused woman in Blackbird.

Computers Can’t Cut Red Tape


By BY SHIRA OVIDE from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/35hgT2v

Monday, September 7, 2020

Wikipedia article of the day for September 8, 2020

The Wikipedia article of the day for September 8, 2020 is The Bread-Winners.
The Bread-Winners is an 1883 anti-labor novel by John Hay, who was Assistant Secretary to the President under Abraham Lincoln, and McKinley's final secretary of state. Originally published anonymously in installments in The Century Magazine, the book attracted wide interest and provoked considerable speculation over the author's identity. Hay wrote his only novel as a reaction to several strikes that affected him and his business interests in the 1870s and early 1880s. In the main storyline, a wealthy former army captain, Arthur Farnham, organizes Civil War veterans to keep the peace when the Bread-winners, a group of lazy and malcontented workers, call a violent general strike. Hay left hints as to his identity in the novel, and some guessed right, but he never acknowledged the book as his, and it did not appear with his name on it until after his death in 1905. Hay's hostile view of organized labor was soon seen as outdated, and the book is best remembered for its onetime popularity and controversial nature.

Chess (Yes, Chess) Is Now a Streaming Obsession


By BY KELLEN BROWNING from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/3jZfEZJ

Sunday, September 6, 2020

Wikipedia article of the day for September 7, 2020

The Wikipedia article of the day for September 7, 2020 is Flora of Madagascar.
The flora of Madagascar consists of more than 12,000 species of vascular and non-vascular plants. Around 83 per cent of Madagascar's vascular plants are found only on the island. These include five entirely endemic plant families as well as most of the over 900 orchid species, the traveller's tree, the Madagascar periwinkle, six species of baobab (pictured) and around 200 species of palms. The high degree of endemism is due to Madagascar's long isolation following its separation from the African and Indian landmasses in the Mesozoic Era. Today, humid forests, including the lowland forests, are found on the eastern plateau. Much of the central highlands is grassland. In the west are dry forest and succulent woodland. Unique spiny thickets are in the southwest, and mangroves occur on the west coast. While 10 per cent of the land surface is protected, much of the native flora is threatened, especially through dramatic deforestation.