Opera’s greatest composers wanted us to understand the words. English, please!

The right allows people to legally challenge their detentions by the government and is guaranteed in the Constitution.

© Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Administration officials have suggested suspending a legal principle that protects against unlawful detention, and struggled to accurately define it.

© Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

The conservative movement has always had a soft spot for despots of various stripes.

Stephen Miller said on Friday the administration is looking into suspending habeas corpus. But don’t forget: The Trump administration keeps losing in court.

Can a small Massachusetts start-up perfect a battery that would make electric vehicles cheaper and more convenient than conventional cars?

A discussion about Pope Francis’ pontificate and who will be elected the next pope.

We asked six horticultural experts to debate and ultimately choose the places that’ve changed the way we look at — and think about — plants.

Following the apotheosis of Aeneas, Ovid lists a succession of rulers of Latium and Alba, the city founded by Aeneas, until he reaches King Proca, who prompts his next stories of transformation, starting with the delightful cautionary tale of Pomona and Vertumnus, who lived during that king’s reign.

Pomona is a devoted and highly capable gardener, who cares for her plants with passion; shunning male company, she has no interest in the many men who seek her love. One, Vertumnus, god of seasons, gardens, and plant growth, loves Pomona more than any other, but is no more successful in attracting her. He is able to change his form at will, and in his quest for Pomona’s love he has posed as a reaper, a hedger, and in various other gardening roles. Through these he had been able to gain entry into her garden, but made no progress in winning her hand.

One day Vertumnus comes up with a new disguise as an old crone with a bonnet over her white hair, leaning on her walking stick. This too gets him into the garden, and he is able to engage the beautiful Pomona in conversation. Vertumnus almost gives himself away when he kisses her over-enthusiastically, but manages to control himself and tries giving Pomona some womanly advice about marriage by encouraging her to wed Vertumnus.

The Roman god Vertumnus was most famously painted by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, in his idiosyncratic portrait of Rudolf II of Hamburg from 1590. Given the nature of the god, Arcimboldo’s choice of fruit and flowers couldn’t have been more appropriate.

Most paintings of this story show Vertumnus in his disguise as an old crone, chatting up a beautiful, and quite fleshly, Pomona.

Francesco Melzi’s Vertumnus and Pomona (c 1518-28) follows Ovid’s account carefully, giving Vertumnus quite masculine looks to ensure the viewer gets the message. In the background is a wonderful Renaissance fantasy landscape with heaped-up hills similar to those seen in ancient Chinese landscapes.

Hendrik Goltzius gets close up in his Vertumnus and Pomona from 1613, and arms Pomona with a vicious-looking pruning knife. There is a wonderful contrast between the two women’s faces and hands here, making this a fine study of the effects of ageing.

Abraham Bloemaert’s Vertumnus and Pomona (1620) uses gaze to great effect: while the persuasive Vertumnus looks up at Pomona, her eyes are cast down, almost closing their lids.

Anthony van Dyck and Jan Roos collaborated in painting Vertumnus and Pomona in about 1625, which is remarkable for its rich symbolism and visual devices. Pomona has her left arm around Vertumnus, but in her right hand holds a silver sickle. She gazes wistfully into the distance, as if in a dream. Vertumnus is again looking up, pleading his case with the young woman, and his left hand (on a very muscular and masculine arm) is behind Pomona’s left knee, between her legs. At the right, Cupid grimaces at the deception, his back turned, pointing at what is going on with apparent disapproval. Then at the lower left corner is a melon cut open to reveal its symbolic form, with its juice and seeds inside as an overt anatomical allusion.

Adriaen van de Velde’s fine Vertumnus and Pomona from 1670 has been marred by the fading of the yellow he used to mix some of his greens, turning some of its foliage blue. He avoids any dangerous allusions, and returns to a more distant view of the pair talking together.

Jean Ranc’s startlingly contemporary Vertumnus and Pomona (c 1710-22) clothes the pair in the fashion of the day, but loses all reference to Pomona as a passionate gardener. At least Vertumnus’ hands are those of a man.

Seemingly influenced by the earlier painting of van Dyck and Roos, François Boucher puts the pair into an embrace in his Earth: Vertumnus and Pomona (1749), and Cupid’s mask play alludes to the deception.

Having cunningly promoted his own cause, Vertumnus tells Pomona the cautionary tale of Iphis and Anaxarete to press his case.

Iphis was a young man of humble origins, and unfortunately fell in love with the high-born Anaxarete. Knowing the hopelessness of his love for her, Iphis told her nurse, and persuaded her maids to take notes and flowers for her. Anaxarete’s response was iron-hearted and cruel: she laughed at him, and shut him out. Iphis was broken by this, and after a brief soliloquy, he hung himself from her door. Her servants cut his body down, but it was too late, he was dead. They carried his body to his widowed mother, who led it in funeral procession to the pyre. As she watched this from a window in an upper room in her house, Anaxarete was transformed into the cold stone of a statue.

Antonio Tempesta’s etching of Anaxarete Seeing the Dead Iphis (1606) condenses the story into a single image, in which Iphis hangs dead, and Anaxarete has just been transformed into stone in front of him, in what is really a form of multiplex narrative.

Virgil Solis adheres more rigorously to Ovid’s account, in his Iphis and Anaxarete, which must have been engraved before Solis’ death in 1562. His multiplex narrative incorporates two separate scenes: in the left foreground, the body of Iphis has been discovered hanging outside the door to Anaxarete’s house. In the right distance, Iphis’ corpse is carried to his funeral pyre, with his mother in close attendance, as Anaxarete looks on from her balcony, and is turned to stone.

Having tried trickery and his cautionary tale, Vertumnus is still getting nowhere with Pomona, so he transforms himself back into his own form, as a young man, which finally wins her heart. This brings Ovid’s conclusion that deception will fail, and success can only come through honesty.

It’s that outcome that Peter Paul Rubens hints at in his late oil sketch of Vertumnus and Pomona of 1636. There is now no pretence that Vertumnus is a woman: he lacks breasts, and even has heavy beard stubble. However, the embrace of his right arm still brings Pomona to push him away with her left arm.

Perhaps the outstanding depiction of this wonderful story is Rubens’ earlier and finished Vertumnus and Pomona from 1617-19. Vertumnus has assumed his real form, that of a handsome young man. Pomona looks back, her sickle still in her right hand, and her rejection of his advances is melting away in front of our eyes. Rubens even offers us a couple of rudely symbolic melons, and provides distant hints at Vertumnus doing the work in the garden while Pomona directs him, at the upper left.

Few nineteenth century novels were featured in as many paintings and prints as Victor Hugo’s story of Quasimodo and Esmeralda, told in his Notre Dame de Paris, most popularly known as the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Hugo’s book has a curious origin. In the 1820s, the great cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, probably the city’s most visible and distinctive building, underwent restoration to repair the damage that had occurred during the Revolution. One of the foremen of the stonemasons working on the building was a ‘hunchback’ with a spinal deformity. Hugo became greatly interested in the cathedral’s Gothic architecture, and was keen to raise awareness of its importance and beauty. In 1829, he started work on this novel.

After an intense final few months of writing, Notre Dame de Paris was published in early 1831. It became enormously popular, and has been the basis for over a dozen movies since 1905, TV series, plays, operas and musicals, and ballets. As a result, its hunchback hero Quasimodo has developed a life of his own in modern legend.

Set in Paris in 1482, its central characters are Quasimodo, the bell-ringer of the cathedral who not only has a spinal deformity, but is nearly blind and largely inarticulate, and Esmeralda, a beautiful young dancer, thought (incorrectly, it turns out) to be a gypsy, who is the object of much male lust, and has a pet goat Djali who performs tricks.

Quasimodo’s guardian, the Archdeacon Frollo, lusts after Esmeralda and orders the bell-ringer to kidnap her for him. Quasimodo’s attempt fails, and the following day he is punished by a flogging and being put in the pillory. While there, he is badly dehydrated and calls for water, provided by Esmeralda. She’s later arrested and falsely charged of attempted murder, for which she is sentenced to death by hanging.

As Esmeralda is being led to the gallows, Quasimodo swings down on a bell-rope and carries her off to sanctuary inside the cathedral. However, the court of parliament then decides to remove her right of sanctuary, making her liable to arrest. Local gypsies rally to this, and charge the cathedral to rescue her.

When Quasimodo sees the gypsies, he assumes that they want to hurt Esmeralda, so drives them away; when the king’s men arrive, he misunderstands their purpose, and tries to help them. Esmeralda is then ‘rescued’ by the Archdeacon, who tries to seduce her, then to betray her when she rejects him.

Esmeralda is finally taken to the gallows, where the Archdeacon laughs as she is killed. Quasimodo gets his revenge by pushing the Archdeacon from the height of the cathedral, then goes to the cemetery where he dies of starvation while hugging Esmeralda’s corpse. Much later, they are discovered still in their embrace; when their bones are separated, Quasimodo’s turn to dust.

Probably one of the earliest paintings to show Victor Hugo’s story is this undated work by a Mademoiselle Henry who is claimed to have lived between 1790-1873. It shows Quasimodo Saving Esmeralda from the Hands of her Executioners: the bell-ringer has just swept the young woman from the gallows, and she has swooned away on his shoulder. He carries her in through the main entrance of the cathedral, to claim sanctuary for her. Her pet goat Djali is at the top of the steps. The rope running down the steps is the bell-rope on which Quasimodo swung down onto the gallows.

The strange Belgian narrative painter Antoine Wiertz painted a pair of portraits in 1839 showing the novel’s male and female leads. This is his Quasimodo, who resembles the figure in the painting above. Wiertz doesn’t appear to have been happy with this work, and labeled it a bad study.

For his portrait of Esmeralda, Wiertz used his favourite model, and an affectionate goat. The letters on her lap spell Phɶbus, the name of the captain of the King’s Archers, who she is convicted of attempting to murder.

Louis Boulanger painted this fascinating and painterly group of Six of Victor Hugo’s Characters in 1853, apparently for a friend. Clockwise from the top left they are Don Ruy Gomez, Don César de Bazan, Don Salluste, Hernani, Esméralda and De Saverny, but there’s no goat.

Jozef Van Lerius’ portrait of Esmeralda and Djali, which must have been completed before the artist contracted meningitis in 1875, is startlingly realist and gently erotic. Djali is shown with gold horns and hooves, and in front of the girl are, once again, the letters forming the name Phɶbus.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Little Esmeralda from 1874 conforms less to Hugo’s character. She is fair and would never be taken for a ‘gypsy’, and is seen carrying wild flowers out in the country, perhaps on the coast of Normandy. She does, though, have Djali as her companion.

There have been many illustrated editions of Notre Dame de Paris, in its original French, English and other translations. Among them is an edition published in 1889, with engravings based on a series of drawings made by the Naturalist Luc-Olivier Merson between 1881 and 1889, three of which I show here.

This shows Esmeralda taking pity on Quasimodo when he had been flogged and put in the pillory, by giving him a drink of water. Naturally she is accompanied by Djali.

Esmeralda and Djali are here seen with Phɶbus, I think.

This is Merson’s treatment of Quasimodo carrying the swooning Esmeralda from her first brief visit to the gallows up into the sanctuary of the cathedral.

免责声明（Disclaimer）：本博文纯属博主自我学习的总结，不构成任何投资建议。股市有风险，投资需谨慎！ […]

In the first of these two articles tracing the first century of railways in paintings from the early 1840s, I had reached Claude Monet’s views of the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris before 1880. By this time few countries in Europe had no railways, and trains frequently conveyed artists from their studios in the cities out to the beaches and mountains, journeys that a few years earlier could have taken days rather than hours.

Although Norway was a greater challenge for the railway engineers, Frits Thaulow seized the opportunity to show the results in The Train is Arriving from 1881. The country’s first public steam-hauled railway was developed by the son of George Stephenson, whose Rocket locomotive had inaugurated the first steam railway in the world. Norway’s line opened in 1854, and during the 1870s progressively made its way to Trondheim.

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh gave us The Blue Train (Viaduct in Arles).

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s undated Steppe shows a river in summer, with water levels at their minimum. Cattle are taking the opportunity to drink and cool off in the water. In the distance is the plume of smoke from a railway train, probably carrying grain and other produce from the Ukrainian countryside to one of the growing coastal cities for export.

The twentieth century brought the beginning of the end of the power of steam, marked in an unexpected twist of history. Between 1898 and 1900, a new railway station, initially known as the Gare d’Orléans, was built on the bank of the Seine at Quai d’Orsay, Paris. The first electrified urban railway terminal in the world, it was a star of the Exposition Universelle in 1900, where many Impressionist paintings were exhibited.

Victor Marec’s painting shows construction work being progressed in 1899, with a steam locomotive hauling construction trucks.

The Gare d’Orsay, as it became, started to suffer physical limitations in 1939, and its upper levels closed from 1973. In 1986 it re-opened as the most extensive collection of Impressionist art in the world, the Musée d’Orsay.

Maximilien Luce was one of the most expressive artists, who wasn’t an official war artist, to show scenes relating to the First World War. In his La Gare de l’Est (1917), a collection of wounded and battle-weary soldiers are shown at the entrance to this large Paris railway station.

The Gare de l’Est in Snow (1917) is even better-known, and a classic painting of falling snow in a large city.

Lesser Ury’s Nollendorfplatz Station at Night from 1925 shows the brilliant electric lighting around this busy railway station to the south of the Tiergarten, in one of Berlin’s shopping districts.

By this time, painting trains was becoming something of a sub-genre, particularly as steam trains were being replaced throughout Europe.

Eric Ravilious is one example of a twentieth century artist who painted motifs deeply embedded in the railway, in his Train Landscape from 1940.

A few narrative artists, including Joaquín Sorolla, set their stories inside railway carriages. My favourite among these is Berthold Woltze’s Der lästige Kavalier (1874), rendered into English as The Annoying Bloke, from 1874.

This is set in a railway carriage where there are two men and a young woman. She is dressed completely in black, and stares towards the viewer with tears in her eyes. Beside her is a carpet-bag, and opposite is a small wooden box and grey drapes.

Leaning over the back of her seat, and leering at her, is a middle-aged dandy with a brash moustache and mutton-chop whiskers, brandishing a lit cigar. He appears to be trying to chat her up, quite inappropriately, and very much against her wishes. Behind him, and almost cropped off the left edge of the canvas, is an older man with a dour, drawn face.

The young woman has apparently suffered a recent bereavement, and may even be travelling back after the funeral. She looks too young to have just buried a husband, so I think it more likely that she has just lost her last parent, and is now living alone, prey to the likes of this annoying and abusive bloke.

Not content with adorning the walls of their mansions with paintings, some of the nobility covered them with tapestries, for which artists like Francisco Goya were employed to create cartoons. They were expensive, and those who still aspired to fortunes used wallpaper instead. That could be hand-painted, or more usually printed, and became sufficiently popular by the time of Oliver Cromwell in the middle of the seventeenth century to be a bone of contention with his Puritan government.

During the eighteenth century, Britain became the largest manufacturer of wallpaper in Europe, largely because it lacked the tapestry factories that had been established for other royal courts, and for the period 1712-1836 England even had a wallpaper tax.

Because paper could only be produced in relatively small sheets, early wallpaper had to be assembled from many of those. For example, Albrecht Dürer’s woodblock print of The Triumphal Arch for the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I in 1516-1518, required a total of 195 woodblocks printed onto 36 separate sheets of paper.

Wallpaper came of age and appeared on the walls of many more homes when paper could be produced in long rolls using the Fourdrinier process in the early nineteenth century.

The first of Augustus Egg’s narrative series Past and Present from 1858 shows an ordinary middle-class drawing room, with a deep-coloured heavily patterned wallpaper typical of this Victorian setting.

In Edgar Degas’ famously enigmatic Interior from 1868-69, the wallpaper is lighter and floral, matching the pattern on the lampshade, and making an association with the woman.

This exquisite wallpaper designed by Édouard Muller in 1854 is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, its five long rolls forming a trompe l’oeil of this enchanted garden from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Jerusalem Delivered. Trompe l’oeils like this became popular, and have their origins in frescos painted on the walls of Roman villas in classical times. While a fresco was a costly one-off, improvements in printing made such wallpapers more widely available in the later nineteenth century.

Camille Pissarro painted a few delightful still lifes, among them this Still Life: Apples and Pears in a Round Basket from 1872, which ingeniously adds floating flowers from the wallpaper in its background.

Gustave Caillebotte’s portrait of Mademoiselle Boissière Knitting from 1877 is one of the first in which he might be said to be painting in Impressionist style. Its east Asian inspired wallpaper is typical of increasingly popular designs of that period.

Harold Gilman’s early Edwardian Interior from about 1907 shows the drawing room of his family home in the Rectory at Snargate, with the artist’s youngest sister as model. This wallpaper has a more complex design to make it appear less regular.

Wallpapers in the home of Pierre Bonnard make cameo appearances in several of his paintings, and usually feature bold stripes of colour, as seen in his famous Bowl of Milk from 1919. Although it looks informal if not spontaneous, this painting is the result of deliberate compositional work, and attention to details such as the form of the pillars on the balcony outside. In its informality is formality, in the model’s pose, the layout of the table settings, and the echoing verticals in the window and wallpaper.

When Édouard Vuillard painted his mother Madame Vuillard Sewing in 1920, he returned to a more Nabi style, and a wallpaper with a simple and bold pattern.

Further into the twentieth century, even bolder patterns appear in some of Eric Ravilious’ interiors, such as this Farmhouse Bedroom from 1939.

Elon Musk 真是个讲故事的好手。

The future should look like the future.

虽然看着有些冰冷，虽然还有一段时间，但把这么激进的设计落地，真的令人佩服。

尤其那只手，和那辆大车。

我要收回之前的话，Tesla 不是下一个丰田，丰田太小了。

它更像「通用」，即是 GE，也是 GM。

经过了持续大半年的劝导，太太终于同意我给她换一台新手机，用来替换掉手上这台已经被生活摧残得不灵光的旧手机。一开始她很不愿意，一来觉得还能勉强接着用，其他开销的优先级都远高过于她自己；二来也是从小到大被上一代人灌输的那种「自己不配」的心态，总说算了算了。直到最近聊到自我能量的进出，她才终于把自己的优先级往前挪了挪，我也才有机会给她换新。

挑型号的时候，为了避免她有价格上的心理压力，也因为她多次强调不要高配置，加上她大部分的使用场景里没有很明显的电量焦虑，所以我推荐了 iPhone 13 mini 给她。她之前也在店里上手试过，小巧的手感和屏幕尺寸都很合适。尤其是把 mini 和现在用的 7P 放在一起时，mini 这个与 6s 相当的体型里装着和 7P 一样尺寸的屏幕，平衡的尺度是拿捏得相当好的。

于是她同意了。

上周一看了下取货信息，显示深圳益田店里没有现货，要从广州寄过来，于是我就计划周五再下单，周六可以直接寄到家里。但周五我再看的时候发现，已经变成了店内有现货，于是我果断下单，趁着中午休息的时间直接去店里提了。

为什么选白色？

其实一开始也看了别的颜色，曾经犹豫过红色、粉色和绿色。但实际看下来以后，一是觉得这一款的红色不够正，绿色又偏黄有军绿色的感觉，粉色又太淡了，质感不足；二也是觉得为什么女生非得是红和粉呢？所以最后，按照实际的颜色表现，挑了她觉得真机表现最好看的白色款。

其实她之前的 7P 也是黑色款，并没有选那些所谓的女性颜色。

这也是我多年来对一些数码厂商的做法表示高度质疑的点：女性一定得被特殊处理么？

如果女性就得用女性手机，那么从逻辑上来说就应该有所谓的男性手机。可是，我们从来没有见到过哪个厂商会这么做产品和宣传，唯独把女性作为一个单独的点拿出来营销。当我们习惯了「女生是粉色，男生是蓝色」的时候，其实忽略了在一百年前，蓝色是女性的颜色，而男性是拥有红色的。颜色和性别的关系，完全是被文化构建出来的，是纯属虚构的产物。

任何人选择一款产品，应该是基于自己的需求，而不是被文化构建，更不该被消费主义用概念绑到某个象征的座位上。设计师在考虑产品的时候，重点的也该是产品如何满足场景中人的需求。人与人之间客观的差异应该被看到和重视，但为了细化市场而刻意构建差异以降低设计的包容性，这是不该鼓励的。

至少我们可以从挑选颜色开始，把「粉色适合你」换成「你喜欢哪个颜色」。