Author: EasyReadHeadlines.com

SlitherStephen S. HallGrand Central Publishing, $30 Snakes don’t often get to be the protagonists. From the biblical tempter in the Garden of Eden to the eponymous snakes on a plane, your stereotypical serpent often gets cast as a villain — cunning, treacherous, cruel, deadly. But human views of snakes are full of contradictions. In mythology, snakes whispered secrets about the healing arts to the Greeks and established the concept of linear time in Mesoamerica. In the real world, they continue to inspire scientists in fields as diverse as pharmacology, reproductive biology and disaster relief. Sign up for our newsletter We…

Jean Marsh, the striking British-born actress who was both the co-creator and a beloved Emmy-winning star of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” the seminal 1970s British drama series about class in Edwardian England, died on Sunday at her home in London. She was 90.The cause was complications of dementia, the filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg, her close friend, said.“Upstairs, Downstairs” captured the hearts, minds and Sunday nights of Anglophile PBS viewers decades before “Downton Abbey” was even a gleam in Julian Fellowes’s eye.The show, which ran from 1971 to 1975 in England and from 1974 to 1977 in the United States, focused on the elegant…

Branford Marsalis has traveled the world over, but one trip back to his hometown, New Orleans, still stands out. He was visiting from Los Angeles, where he was the bandleader on “The Tonight Show” in the early 1990s, and was invited on a local talk show that was being broadcast from the Superdome.Marsalis, now 64, knew the building well. An avid sports and music fan, he saw many Saints football and Jazz basketball games there, as well as concerts and other events. He also sold programs at Saints games. The joy of those days hit him when he walked into…

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More The race to expand large language models (LLMs) beyond the million-token threshold has ignited a fierce debate in the AI community. Models like MiniMax-Text-01 boast 4-million-token capacity, and Gemini 1.5 Pro can process up to 2 million tokens simultaneously. They now promise game-changing applications and can analyze entire codebases, legal contracts or research papers in a single inference call. At the core of this discussion is context length — the amount of text an AI model can process and also remember…

That might sound a little mushy — that the point of A.D.H.D. treatment is to help you build relationships and improve your self-esteem, rather than the more scientific-sounding goal of repairing your malfunctioning brain. But think back to that controversial statement in Martine Hoogman’s 2017 paper. She wrote that it was important to interpret the Enigma data as confirmation that A.D.H.D. patients “have altered brains,” because that biological explanation would “help to reduce the stigma of A.D.H.D.” But does portraying A.D.H.D. as a “disorder of the brain” actually reduce its stigma? Might it not, in fact, increase a young person’s…

Brad Holland, an idiosyncratic artist who upended American illustration in the 1970s with his startling imagery for Playboy magazine and The New York Times’s opinion page, spawning a generation of imitators, died on March 27 in Manhattan. He was 81.His brother, Thomas Holland, said he died in a hospital from complications of heart surgery.Mr. Holland was in his late 20s and contributing to Playboy and a few of New York City’s underground papers, including The New York Review of Sex and Politics and The East Village Other, when he was invited to be part of an experiment at The New…

The Israeli military struck and destroyed part of a hospital in northern Gaza early on Sunday morning, shortly after telling patients and staff to evacuate the site. The attack came hours after the Israeli government announced that its troops fighting elsewhere in the territory had expanded their occupation of the southern Gaza Strip, severing links between two strategically located Palestinian cities.No one was killed in the attack on the Ahli Arab Hospital, but a child being treated for a head injury died because of the rushed evacuation, according to a statement released by the Anglican Church in Jerusalem, which oversees…

Rapper packed his set with special guests like Playboi Carti and Don Toliver as the main stage crowd turned into a giant mosh pit. Source link

Hank Steinbrecher, a soccer evangelist from Queens whose passion as a top United States official in the sport helped usher it into the American mainstream and who, in a previous career in marketing for Gatorade, helped popularize the ritual in which victorious players douse their coaches with coolers of sports drinks, died on Tuesday at his home in Tucson, Ariz. He was 77.His death, from degenerative heart disease, was confirmed by the United States Soccer Federation, of which Mr. Steinbrecher was secretary general from 1990 to 2000.Sunil Gulati, who was president of the federation from 2006 to 2018, said in…

Why it matters: The Trump administration has granted a reprieve to global technology manufacturers by exempting smartphones, laptops, CPUs, memory chips, and electronics to make semiconductors from its sweeping tariffs on imports – a move that could ease pressure on companies like Apple and Nvidia while offering relief to consumers. The exclusions, published late Friday by US Customs and Border Protection, narrow the scope of Trump’s aggressive trade measures by sparing these products from the 125 percent China-specific tariff and the baseline 10 percent tariff imposed on nearly all other countries. The exemption list includes popular consumer electronics such as…