Fire Island, three miles off the shore of New York's Long Island, has long been a haven for the Northeast's LGBTQ community. The Pines were developed in the 1950s, making the enclave one of the youngest on the island. In the '60s, The Pines quickly went from a clothing-optional beach with a few coastal shacks to a clothing-optional beach flanked by impressive, architecturally assertive homes. In The Pines, design talent of the era found a primed audience, and the area rapidly became exceptionally rich in significant modernist residential architecture.
For many, the tour of "Nude Men from 1800 to Today" — an exhibit of 300 paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures focused on the bare male — was a goose-bump-raising instance of life imitating art. "I can't say I'm sweating," said office worker Herbert Korvas as he stood waiting in the atrium with other young men, wearing only socks, sneakers and a smile. Despite the cold, he said he was drawn to the idea of naked museum viewing "because it was something different."
Francisco Toledo, the celebrated Mexican artist and cultural philanthropist who drew on his indigenous pre-Colombian heritage to create striking works suffused with shamanistic animal imagery, died on Thursday. He was 79. Mr. Toledo was regarded by many as Mexico’s greatest living artist, one who could trace his lineage to the Zapotecs, who flourished before the 16th-century Spanish conquests in what is now the southern state of Oaxaca, his native region. His paintings, drawings, prints, collages, tapestries and ceramics were largely inspired by that heritage.
There are several characteristics of the changing climate that are helping to increase the risks of damage from Hurricanes, even though global warming is not directly causing such a storm to spin up. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate researcher at Texas Tech, put the relationship between climate change and storms such as Florence as follows: "Hurricanes are absolutely being affected by our changing climate, in many ways. As the world warms, the rainfall associated with hurricanes is becoming more intense; they are getting stronger, on average; they are intensifying faster; they are moving more slowly; and, as sea level rises, the storm surge from these events can be more damaging."
