A relatively subdued edition of New York Fashion Week commenced last Thursday before being upstaged over the weekend by a star-studded Tom Ford show and the 92nd Academy Awards, both in Los Angeles. The clash with the Oscars followed the Academy’s contentious decision to move its annual awards ceremony to early February, and Ford followed suit, opting to eschew New York for proximity to the red carpet and a flurry of celebrity guests, from magnates Anna Wintour and Jeff Bezos to musicians Jennifer Lopez and Little Nas X, from style icons Tracee Ellis Ross and Jon Hamm to the impending Best Actress winner Renéé Zellweger.
New York Fashion Week kicks off a month of autumn/winter womenswear, as fashion’s leading designers traverse the hotspots in Europe and North America. With London, Milan, and Paris still to come, at New York Fashion Week Gabriela Hearst led the sustainability charge by way of upcycled cashmere, Michael Kors languoured in equestrian chic and cozy sportswear, and Area offered a collaborative collection of draped suits, cut-outs, and patterned leather in a show held at the still-under-construction Africa Center. There were appearances from fashion week regulars like Carolina Herrera, Proenza Schouler, and Oscar De La Renta and from acclaimed upstarts like CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund winner Christopher John Rogers. Rodarte got nostalgic in the Byzantine Revival interior of St. Bart’s church, Longchamp ascended Hudson Commons, and at the climax of the week on Wednesday afternoon, Marc Jacobs brought a party atmosphere to Park Avenue Armory. Amid the highs and lows of the runway shows there was the usual hustle and bustle of both practical and extravagant streetwear.
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Paleontologists in Alberta have discovered a new species of tyrannosaur, and it’s a big one, standing 8 feet tall at the hips, stretching 26 feet from snout to tail, with wide serrated teeth extending to a length of 2.7 inches. What makes this tyrannosaur particularly unusual is its age, as the species has been dated at around 79.5 million years old, preceding the Tyrannosaurus rex and other tyrannosaurids which dominated North America towards the end of the Cretaceous period. Previous discoveries of large tyrannosaurs around 80 million years old have centred on areas like Utah and New Mexico: this is the oldest member of the tyrannosaur family to have been discovered in northern North America, and the first new species of tyrannosaur uncovered in fifty years in Canada.
Parts of the dinosaur’s skull and jaw were discovered in 2010 by John and Sandra De Groot, a couple out walking on the banks of the Bow River in southern Alberta. The De Groot’s passed their find on to the Royal Tyrrell Museum, but it was only recently that Jared Voris, a PhD student at the University of Calgary, stumbled across the fossils and noticed some unusual subtleties. Like the Daspletosaurus, which inhabited the same area, this tyrannosaur possessed a long snout, unlike the snub-nosed snouts of large tyrannosaurs native to North America’s southern regions. In contrast to the closely related Daspletosaurus however, which is believed to have lived at a later date, these fossils showed atypical cheekbones and a distinctive set of ridges running along the upper snout. Voris and colleagues from the University of Calgary and Royal Tyrrell, including Darla Zelenitsky, François Therrien, and Caleb Brown, subsequently published a paper in the journal Cretaceous Research giving the dinosaur the name Thanatotheristes degrootorum. While the species name honours the find of the De Groots, the title Thanatotheristes combines Thanatos, the Greek personification of death, with ‘theristes’, which is Greek for ‘reaper’. The new tyrannosaur is therefore the ‘reaper of death’, a fitting title for ‘the only known large apex predator of its time in Canada’.
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New Horizons launched back in 2006, and after flybys of Jupiter and Pluto and long spells in hibernation, NASA’s interplanetary space probe continues to furnish us with new insights in the realm of planetary formation. New Horizons spent the outset of 2019 in the proximity of 486958 Arrokoth, an object that lies in the Kuiper Belt 4.1 billion miles from earth and has been nicknamed Ultima Thule, marking the farthest flyby in the history of space exploration. Now scientists busily parsing the flyby data have published three new papers in the journal Science, with principal investigator Alan Stern characterising the research as a ‘major advance’ in our understanding of planetesimals and planet formation.
Planetesimals are solid objects believed to have formed 3.8 billion years ago out of cosmic dust grains, particles of dust, rock, and other material circulating across the solar system. One widely accepted theory of planet formation maintains that as cosmic dust collides at high speed, these planetesimals grow, eventually becoming large enough to attract one another by way of their mutual gravity, forming protoplanets. These planetary embryos continue to collide until by a process of accretion and elimination they form fully-fledged planets. Arrokoth however does not appear to have been formed by this process, which is termed hierarchical accretion. Instead the object, which is composed of two round, closely-aligned lobes and shows an unusually smooth surface, appears to have been formed by a collapsing cloud of dust and gas, in a slower and significantly gentler process called pebble accretion. Hailing a discovery of ‘stupendous magnitude’, Stern said:
‘There was the prevailing theory from the late 1960s of violent collisions and a more recent emerging theory of gentle accumulation. One is dust and the other is the only one standing. This rarely happens in planetary science, but today we have settled the matter. This is completely decisive. In one fell swoop, the flyby of Arrokoth was able to decide between the two theories.’
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Roman Polanski continues to make films and win acclaim for his filmmaking despite renewed awareness around his rape of a thirteen-year-old girl in 1977. Polanski drugged and raped the thirteen year old Samantha Geimer in Los Angeles and was subsequently arrested, accepting a plea bargain after he agreed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse. He fled the United States when the presiding judge in the case allegedly decided to upturn the plea bargain and sentence him to prison, and he has been based in Europe ever since. Films including Tess (1979) and The Pianist (2003) have won multiple awards, while Polanski has scrupulously avoided extradition to the United States, despite requests from the authorities and a highly publicised arrest and extradition case in Zurich from 2009 to 2010. Polanski has resolutely denied additional accusations of sexual assault.
While Tess won Academy Awards for cinematography, art direction, and costume design and The Pianist won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the BAFTA for Best Film, and Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay, Polanski has enjoyed most of his success at the César Awards in France. The César Awards are France’s highest film honour, equivalent to the Oscars, hosted at a lavish ceremony each February in Paris. Polanski already held four César Awards for Best Director, for Tess, The Pianist, The Ghost Writer (2010), and Venus in Fur (2013), with Tess and The Pianist both recipients of Best Film, before his latest picture An Officer and a Spy began courting controversy after winning another slew of nominations for this year’s awards. In response to the backlash, on Thursday the twenty-one-member board of the César Academy announced that they will resign following this year’s ceremony, scheduled for later this month. The Academy had already received criticism for barring the attendance of feminist filmmakers Virginie Despentes and Claire Denis at a dinner party in January, and on Tuesday a petition to overhaul the awards, signed by four hundred prominent film figures, was published in Le Monde. After winning the Grand Jury Prize in Venice last September, An Officer and a Spy leads the 45th César Awards with twelve nominations.
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A plethora of warning signals for the environment sounded this week, as studies showed an existential threat to bees, the hottest January on record, and soaring temperatures across the Antarctic. A study by researchers at the University of Ottawa, published on Thursday in the journal Science, showed that bumblebee populations have declined by 46% in North America and by 17% across Europe compared to the base period of 1901 to 1974. While pesticide use, habitat destruction, pathogens, and the release of non-native bees for commercial pollination all factored in the decline, the researchers found that the driving force was temperature extremes as a result of climate change. Meanwhile the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that last month was the hottest January in 141 years of data collection, with temperatures 1.14 degrees Celsius above the twentieth-century average. And the Antarctic registered a temperature of more than 20 degrees Celsius for the first time on record, as experts warned that in the worst case, ice melt could prompt sea levels to rise by as much as 1.5 metres come the year 2100.
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The first trailer for the fourth season of Stranger Things dropped on Friday, a peculiar sort of valentine. And while last season the Russians came to Starcourt Mall and the small town of Hawkins, this time Stranger Things is headed to Russia, to the Kamchatka Peninsula, a place even beyond Siberia, and a forced labour camp in the wintry depths. There we find a group of prisoners engaged in the arduous task of railroad construction, overseen by several gun-toting guards, and – major spoiler alert – among the labourers is the indomitable Jim Hopper, played by David Harbour, last seen sacrificing himself in an explosion and widely presumed dead. The fourth season of Stranger Things currently has no release date, and is expected on Netflix sometime in late 2020 or early 2021. The Duffer brothers, series creators, said in a statement:
‘We’re excited to officially confirm that production on ‘Stranger Things 4’ is now underway – and even more excited to announce the return of Hopper. Although it’s not all good news for our ‘American’; he is imprisoned far from home in the snowy wasteland of Kamchatka, where he will face dangers both human…and other. Meanwhile, back in the states, a new horror is beginning to surface, something long buried, something that connects everything…’
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When Olympic gold medallist Renaud Lavillenie set a pole vault world record at the Druzhba Palace of Sports in Donetsk in February 2014, he was breaking a mark that was almost twenty years old, set by the founder of that meet, the Ukrainian athletics icon Sergey Bubka. Bubka broke thirty-five pole vault world records over the course of his career, while for all of his success Lavillenie achieved the feat just once, and his record stood for nearly six years until last weekend in Toruń, the twenty-year-old Swedish star Armand Duplantis raised the bar by one centimetre. Having gone tantalisingly close in Dusseldorf, at the Orlen Copernicus Cup in Poland Duplantis jumped a height of 6.17 metres.
The world of athletics hopes that in Duplantis it has found a new icon, or an idol, someone with a bit of marketability and reach. And ‘Mondo’, as we’re all going to have to affectionately call him, more than lived up to his billing on Saturday at the Glasgow Indoor Grand Prix. With Sam Kendricks and Ben Broeders topping out at 5.75, Duplantis stuttered at the same height then found himself free to raise the bar as he wished. He sailed over at 5.84 and 6.00 metres, and needed only one attempt at 6.18 to break the world record of the previous week. In other athletics news, at the USATF Indoor Championships in Albuquerque, Christian Coleman won the 60 metre sprint in the joint-second fastest time in history, 6.37 seconds, marginally behind his own world record of 6.34 from 2018. And a day later on Sunday, 10,000 metre world champion Joshua Cheptegei set a new world record on the road, with a time of 12:51 in Monaco over 5 kilometres.
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Ahead of the NBA All-Star Game at the United Center in Chicago on Sunday evening, NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced that the All-Star Game MVP award is to be renamed in honour of Kobe Bryant. Beyond his twenty professional seasons, five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers, and two Olympic gold medals as part of the United States national team, Bryant was an 18-time All-Star and won a record-tying four All-Star Game MVP awards in 2002, 2007, 2009, and 2011. Along with his thirteen-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others, he died on 26 January in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, at the age of forty-one years old.
The climax of the annual NBA All-Star Weekend, the All-Star Game on Sunday saw Team LeBron triumph by two points over Team Giannis, as the starting quintet of LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Kawhi Leonard, Luka Dončić, and James Harden beat Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid, Pascal Siakam, Kemba Walker, and Trae Young by 157-155. Earlier over the course of the weekend, Bam Adebayo swept the skills challenge, Buddy Hield swished the three-point contest, and Derrick Jones Jr. snatched the slam dunk contest after narrowly edging out Aaron Gordon. With ten points, five rebounds, and five assists, the rapper Common emerged as the celebrity MVP before his fellow musicians Chance the Rapper, Lil Wayne, Quavo, and DJ Khaled performed during the halftime show of the All-Star Game.
