ARTnews Tuesday December 21, 2021
Currently, major companies like Google and Amazon own the data clouds where the majority of our information is stored. That, notes Art News, has become a sore point for NFT collectors, who are increasingly worried about storing these valuable assets on clouds owned by those companies. But three years ago, Fred Jin and Kenzi Wang had an ambitious idea: What if they created a decentralized data cloud? “It was obvious that a consumer-focused data ecosystem was needed,” Jin said. “We believed that people should own their data and choose which applications to connect that data with.” Read the full Story >>
The New York Times Tuesday December 21, 2021
For the past several years, The New York Times has included obituaries of historical figures the newspaper had previously overlooked. Recently The Times told the story of Frances B. Johnston, who defied genteel norms by becoming one of the first women in the United States “to enjoy a long and fruitful career” as a professional photographer. “Undaunted by obstacles faced by others of her gender and happy to rattle the easily shocked, she demonstrated her character early on with an 1896 self-portrait titled ‘The New Woman,’” notes The Times. Read the full Story >>
NBC News Tuesday December 21, 2021
A federal court in New York has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a wedding photographer who refused to photograph same-sex weddings. The photographer, Emilee Carpenter, filed the federal lawsuit in April, arguing that New York's nondiscrimination laws forced her to choose between going against her Christian faith by photographing same-sex weddings and paying fines of up to $100,000. U.S. District Judge Frank P. Geraci Jr. of Western New York said in his ruling that exempting Carpenter from the law would relegate [same-sex couples] to an inferior market than that enjoyed by the public at large, notes NBC News. Read the full Story >>
The Washington Post Tuesday December 21, 2021
Photographer David Butow’s new book Brink (Punctum, 2021), which looks at American politics during the Trump era, will go down as an essential photographic record of a time of upheaval, notes The Washington Post. Butow moved to Washington, D.C. to document what would turn out to be the beginning of a sea change in politics. “As revisionists seek to trivialize or downplay these events, it’s critical to maintain a record of just how close the presidency of Donald Trump brought U.S. democracy to the brink of dysfunction,” he writes. Read the full Story >>
