MacKenzie Nicholson is a non-profit professional working in the health advocacy space. She has a bachelor's degree in family studies: child advocacy and public policy and a master's degree in public policy, both from the University of New Hampshire. She lives in southern New Hampshire with her husband and two children. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN. (CNN) Between July 2020 and April 2021, I applied for more than 30 positions, had dozens of interviews and nearly made it past the finish line a handful of times. During each interview, I would sit anxiously in front of the screen and camera, hoping that the kids would uphold their end of their deal to be quiet and not come into my home office. I would quickly mute myself at the sounds of them fighting over snacks and toys, praying that no one could hear them. Despite the best planning, a few interviews ended with the kids on my lap, waving and making faces at the interviewers. … [Read more...]

BALTIMORE — “I’m just going to pretend it’s not a big deal,” said the artist Amy Sherald, speaking in her spare studio in the neighborhood known as Station North. “I paint paintings of people. And I’m painting a painting of another person.” But it is a big deal, since the person Ms. Sherald happens to be painting is Michelle Obama. Earlier this month, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery announced that it had commissioned Ms. Sherald, 44, for the official portrait of the former first lady, and tapped Kehinde Wiley, 40, for the likeness of former President Barack Obama — the first time black artists have been selected to paint a presidential couple for the Gallery. Mr. Wiley already has international renown — a painting of his sold for $143,000 at auction and his work is in major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After a late start, Ms. Sherald is just taking off. The Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture … [Read more...]

LONDON — Early next year, a portrait of Barack Obama will go up on the walls of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, produced by an artist who was chosen by Mr. Obama himself in the closing months of his presidency. The artist, Kehinde Wiley, is known for picturing young black people in stylized portraits that are deliberate throwbacks to earlier traditions of painting. His “ Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps ” (2005) shows a young man in hiking boots and camouflage riding a rearing stallion the way the French emperor does in an early-1800s painting by Jacques-Louis David. In the 2010 “ Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II (Michael Jackson) ,” the pop superstar Jackson, in a cape and elaborate armor, mimics the monarch in the Rubens work it references . So will Mr. Obama be depicted on horseback, wearing breeches and a plumed hat? Mr. Wiley said he had been sworn to secrecy by the National Portrait Gallery. “I wish I could say more,” he … [Read more...]

‘Super-Rough’ Through June 27. Outsider Art Fair, 150 Wooster Street, Manhattan, (212) 337-3338, outsiderartfair.com . As befits the ongoing pandemic recovery, “Super-Rough” is a streamlined, tabletop version of the Outsider Art Fair. Selected by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami , in collaboration with the fair’s owner, Andrew Edlin, this year’s version is medium-specific: Everything is sculpture, plus some wall reliefs. Most of its 250 works are crowded onto a hip-high pedestal 60 feet long and 7 feet across. Kambel Smith’s large painted cardboard model of the Capitol Building and Tom Duncan’s miniaturized mechanized panorama of Coney Island have been granted their own floor space. The result is close to stupendous, like the cream skimmed off an average art fair and presented undiluted, no booths or aisles and not much walking. The 28 participating dealers are mostly from the New York area; the artists themselves hail from far and wide. On the pedestal, … [Read more...]

Social media giant Twitter is reportedly exploring new ways to prevent the “unwanted attention” that users may receive when mentioned in a tweet by another user. Their answer seems to be an “unmention” feature to let them drop out of a thread. Engadget reports that Twitter is currently looking into new ways to prevent “unwanted attention” that can result in harassment on its platform. The company is reportedly working on tools that would allow users to prevent people from mentioning them in tweets without the block or mute button, whether this feature ever goes live is debatable as it is still currently just in testing phases. Twitter product designer Dominic Camozzi described the features as “early concepts,” that would give Twitter users the ability to “unmention yourself” and control who can tag them in future tweets. Similar to untagging yourself on Facebook, unmentioning would unlink your Twitter handle from a tweet and prevent you from being tagged in future replies. … [Read more...]

Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology, which eliminated cashiers in its Amazon Go convenience stores, has now been integrated into a full-size 25,000 square foot Amazon Fresh grocery store for the first time. The system uses camera surveillance, pressure-sensitive shelves, and biometric data to charge customers for items they put in their carts. The Verge reports that e-commerce and tech giant Amazon is integrating its Just Walk Out retail shopping tech in a full-size grocery store for the first time. According to an announcement from Amazon , the new 25,000 square foot Amazon Fresh store is significantly larger than the 10,400 square foot Amazon Go Grocery store it opened last year, or its standard 1,200 and 2,300 square feet Go convenience stores. The new store will be Amazon’s fourteenth Fresh location in the United States when it opens on June 17 in Bellevue, Washington. When Amazon previously opened a 35,000 square foot Amazon Fresh store last year using its Dash Carts, … [Read more...]

3 Chances are, many of the 7,500 homeless men and women living on San Francisco streets and in shelters began life poor. They may have been born addicted or premature — and they may have mental or physical problems as a result. Three decades ago, Martha Ryan understood the pattern: a tragic, costly cycle affecting multiple generations and absorbing millions of taxpayer dollars. But as a shelter volunteer in San Francisco then, Ryan had no idea of the role she would play in halting that cycle and improving the lives of thousands of people and their descendants. The nurse practitioner planned to spend her career in the developing world. She’d already worked in far-flung regions — Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda — teaching, nursing and training women to be public health leaders in their villages. She wanted to keep doing it. But in 1988, Ryan paused to earn her master’s degree in maternal and child health from UC Berkeley and to volunteer at the … [Read more...]

0 This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own. Schools With more than 21 years of leadership experience, Greg Schulz, Ed.D., was selected to serve as superintendent/president of Citrus College. Doug Schultz/Citrus College Posted Reply Greg Schulz, Ed.D., has been selected to serve as the eighth superintendent/president of Citrus College. His appointment was made official during the June 15, 2021, meeting of the Citrus Community College District Board of Trustees. With more than 21 years of leadership experience in the California community colleges system, Dr. Schulz is known for being an enthusiastic and student-centered administrator. He has served as the president of Fullerton College since 2016. Prior to that, he held the same position on an interim basis for 10 months. Dr. Schulz has also served in a variety of other educational leadership roles, including provost of … [Read more...]

BOAZ WEINSTEIN didn’t know it, but he had just hooked the London Whale. It was last November, and Mr. Weinstein, a wunderkind of the New York hedge fund world, had spied something strange across the Atlantic. In an obscure corner of the financial markets, prices seemed out of whack. It didn’t make sense. Mr. Weinstein pounced. As the financial world now knows, what was out of whack was JPMorgan Chase & Company. One its traders, Bruno Iksil, the man later nicknamed the London Whale for his outsize trades, was about to blow a multibillion-dollar hole in the mighty House of Morgan. But the resulting uproar, in Washington and on Wall Street, has largely obscured a simple truth of the marketplace. Yes, Morgan lost big — but, as Mitt Romney has pointed out, someone else won. And that someone or, rather, those someones, turn out to be Boaz Weinstein and a wolf pack of like-minded hedge fund managers. In the London Whale, these traders saw a rich opportunity, and they … [Read more...]

Maggie VandenBerghe, a conservative filmmaker whose videos attacking the political left have gained millions of views and have been featured on Fox News and the Blaze, was banned from Facebook-owned Instagram earlier this week after reposting a tweet from journalist and author Jack Posobiec. In a comment to Breitbart News, an Instagram spokeswoman confirmed that VandenBerghe’s account had been blacklisted for “exceeding the number of violations we allow.” Instagram did not say precisely which rules the conservative filmmaker, who had over 220,000 followers on the platform before being banned, broke. Vandenberghe (also known by her online name “Fog City Midge”) said she had been banned after reposting the following tweet from Posobiec, a Washington Examiner story about the recent death of Christopher Sign, a journalist who broke the news of Bill Clinton’s meeting with attorney general Loretta Lynch in 2016. In a comment to Breitbart News, VandenBerghe said Instagram was … [Read more...]