#Tishman | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

girljeremystrong · 2 years

Photo

COMING OF AGE

YOUNG MUNGO by Douglas Stuart

Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars (Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic) and they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends. (TW abuse)

LAST NIGHT AT THE TELEGRAPH CLUB by Malinda Lo

Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.

RAINBOW MILK by Paul Mendez

At the turn of the millennium, Jesse seeks a fresh start in London, escaping a broken immediate family, a repressive religious community and his depressed hometown in the industrial Black Country. But once he arrives he finds himself at a loss for a new center of gravity.

HISTORICAL FICTION

THE GREAT BELIEVERS by Rebecca Makkai

In 1985, Yale Tishman is about to pull off an amazing coup. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. The AIDS crisis and how it affects a group of Chicago friends and the survivors who meet decades later in Paris.

STILL LIFE by Sarah Winman

A sweeping portrait of unforgettable individuals who come together to make a family, and a richly drawn celebration of beauty and love in all its forms. A group of english outcasts used to meeting in a London pub end up in Florence.

SWIMMING IN THE DARK by Tomasz Jedrowski

Set in early 1980s Poland against the violent decline of communism, a tender and passionate story of first love between two young men who eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide.

A TIP FOR THE HANGMAN by Alison Epstein

Christopher Marlowe, brilliant aspiring playwright, is pulled into the duplicitous world of international espionage on behalf of Queen Elizabeth I. A many-layered historical thriller combining state secrets, intrigue, and romance.

TELL THE WOLVES I’M HOME by Carol Rifka Brunt

A moving story of love, grief, and renewal as two lonely people become the unlikeliest of friends and find that sometimes you don't know you've lost someone until you've found them.

CONTEMPORARY FICTION

THE GOLDEN SEASON by Madeline Kay Sneed

A love letter to the places we call home and asks how we grapple with a complicated love for people and places that might not love us back—at least, not for who we really are.

JUST BY LOOKING AT HIM by Ryan O’Connell

A darkly witty and touching novel following a gay TV writer with cerebral palsy as he fights addiction and searches for acceptance in an overwhelmingly ableist world.

REAL LIFE by Brandon Taylor

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses.

SKYE FALLING by Mia McKenzie

Told in a fresh, lively voice, this novel is a relentlessly clever, deeply moving portrait of a woman and the relationships she thought she could live without.

FUTURE FEELING by Joss Lake

An embittered Trans dog walker obsessed with social media inadvertently puts a curse a young man—and must adventure into mysterious dimension in order to save him—in this wildly inventive, delightfully subversive, genre-nonconforming novel about illusion, magic, technology, kinship, and the future.

GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER by Bernardine Evaristo

Follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.

MEMORIAL by Bryan Washington

Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston, and they've been together for a few years -- good years -- but now they're not sure why they're still a couple.

THIS IS HOW IT ALWAYS IS by Laurie Frankel

Change is always hard and miraculous and hard again, parenting is always a leap into the unknown with crossed fingers and full hearts, children grow but not always according to plan. And families with secrets don’t get to keep them forever.

ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS by Ocean Vuong

a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born.

DETRANSITION, BABY by Torrey Peters

A whipsmart novel about three women—transgender and cisgender—whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex.

EVERYONE IN THIS ROOM WILL SOMEDAY BE DEAD by Emily Austin

Gilda, a twenty-something lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death. Desperate for relief from her panicky mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic church, and is abruptly hired to replace the recently deceased receptionist Grace.

SHORT STORIES

FILTHY ANIMALS by Brandon Taylor

It’s a tender portrait of the fierce longing for intimacy, the lingering presence of pain, and the desire for love in a world that seems, more often than not, to withhold it.

THE SECRET LIVES OF CHURCH LADIES by Deesha Philyaw

Explores the raw and tender places where black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good.

NON FICTION (MEMOIRS)

IN THE DREAM HOUSE by Carmen Maria Machado

About the complexities of abuse in same-sex relationships. (TW abuse)

ALL BOYS AREN’T BLUE by George M. JohnsoN

Weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.

THRILLERS & MYSTERIES

WHERE THE TRUTH LIES by Anna Bailey

When a teenaged girl disappears from an insular small town, all of the community’s most devastating secrets come to light in this stunningly atmospheric and slow-burning suspense novel.

BATH HAUS by P.J. Vernon

Oliver Park, a young recovering addict from Indiana, finally has everything he ever wanted: sobriety and a loving partner. With everything to lose, Oliver shouldn't be visiting Haus, a gay bathhouse. But through the entrance he goes, and it's a line crossed.

DEAD DEAD GIRLS by Nekesa Afia

Set in 1920s Harlem featuring Louise Lloyd, a young black woman caught up in a series of murders way too close to home.

#THESE ARE ALL REALLY REALLY GOOD BOOKS #would love for you to read them and then come screaming at me #books #book recs #book recommendations #bookblr #lgbt #young mungo #last night at the telegraph club #in the dream house #brandon taylor #on earth we're briefly gorgeous #ocean vuong #swimming in the dark #the great believers

323 notes · View notes

infjtarot · 4 months

Text

King of Cups. Golden Art Nouveau Tarot

In the Waite-Smith depiction, the King of Cups—Air of Water—sits on a throne that floats on the ocean. What does it mean to rule over the waters? Can we find an Emperor-like stability in the middle of uncertainty and unfathomable mystery?

If anyone can do it, it is this King. He takes the responsibility of his rule deeply to heart. He sets his dais on the watery flows and makes his realm the province of the Moon and the High Priestess. This is the world of the unconscious, of the soul, of submerged and abject emotion, past traumas, unknowable shadows. The King of Cups manages to find his balance amid the waves and currents. He knows buoyancy but is a master of the dive as well, able to take on the weight he needs when it’s time to go deep. Few can surf like this King, and even fewer can—like him—withstand the almost unimaginable pressures on the ocean floor. This King also reminds us of the prismatic quality of water. Light can indeed penetrate the shadowy depths, although it will be bent and refracted as it does so. The King of Cups finds his true calling as a bender of light. He translates what cannot be said into clarity and meaning. He is a healer, a counselor, a philosopher, a poet, a saint—or simply a kind neighbor who listens with gentle eyes and firm discipline. Lisa Freinkel Tishman

#King of Cups #cups #court cards #Golden Art Nouveau Tarot

9 notes · View notes

haveyoureadthispoll · 4 months

Text

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

#polls #book: the great belivers #author: rebecca makkai #genre: contemporary #genre: historical fiction #genre: lgbt #year: 2010s

9 notes · View notes

dotglobal · 10 months

Photo

Tishman Building

15 notes · View notes

dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 1 year

Text

The unsolicited proposal from Elon Musk’s tunnel-building venture arrived in January 2020. To the local transportation authority, it felt like finding Willy Wonka’s golden ticket.

Officials had started planning for a street-level rail connection between booming Ontario International Airport and a commuter train station 4 miles away, with an estimated cost north of $1 billion. For just $45 million, Mr. Musk’s Boring Co. offered to instead build an underground tunnel through which travelers could zip back and forth in autonomous electric vehicles.

Dazzled by Boring’s boasts that it had revolutionized tunneling, and the cachet of working with the billionaire head of EV maker Tesla Inc., red down pointing triangle the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority dumped plans for a traditional light rail and embraced the futuristic tunnel.

When it came time to formalize the partnership and get to work, Boring itself went underground—just as it has done in Maryland, Chicago and Los Angeles. Boring didn’t submit a bid for Ontario by the January 2022 deadline.

The six-year-old company has repeatedly teased cities with a pledge to “solve soul-destroying traffic,” only to pull out when confronted with the realities of building public infrastructure, according to former executives and local, state and federal government officials who have worked with Mr. Musk’s Boring. The company has struggled with common bureaucratic hurdles like securing permits and conducting environmental reviews, the people said.

“Every time I see him on TV with a new project, or whatever, I’m like: Oh, I remember that bullet train to Chicago O’Hare,” said Chicago Alderman Scott Waguespack. Boring had backed away from its proposal for a high-speed tunnel link to the airport there.

Mr. Musk and Steve Davis, president of Boring, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Boring’s only tunnel open to the public is a 1.6-mile “loop experience” under the Las Vegas Convention Center. There, Teslas with hired drivers ferry convention-goers through neon-lit white tunnels at speeds of about 30 miles an hour.

Boring has yet to make good on its most ambitious pitch: that it can design tunnel-boring machines that are so fast to operate that they will drive down costs and shake up the industry. Tunneling industry veterans question some of Mr. Musk’s claims.

The company has believers. This spring, tech-focused venture-capital firms Sequoia Capital and Vy Capital led a $675 million fundraising round that valued Boring at $5.7 billion. Major real-estate firms including Brookfield, Lennar and Tishman Speyer are among the investors.

“Their technology is now past the state-of-the-art, and improving at an exponential rate,” Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire wrote in a post on the firm’s website, announcing the round.

Mr. Maguire declined to comment and the other investors didn’t respond to detailed requests for comment.

Mr. Musk has frequently criticized government regulation, calling it an impediment to building new infrastructure. At a WSJ CEO Council event in 2020, he said he had moved from California to Texas, where Tesla was building a new factory, in part because of government regulations. Government should “just get out of the way,” he said.

The Boring Co., based in Pflugerville, Texas, occupies an odd place in Mr. Musk’s business empire, which includes Tesla, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, and most recently Twitter Inc. He launched the tunneling venture with a tweet in December 2016 that many took as a joke. “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…” Mr. Musk wrote.

“I am actually going to do this,” he added in a second tweet.

At Boring’s helm is Mr. Davis, a longtime lieutenant to Mr. Musk who came from SpaceX. Some of the space contractor’s investors have complained about Boring soaking up SpaceX’s resources, including employees and equipment purchased with SpaceX funds.

Mr. Musk’s leadership style—he recently told his Twitter employees they must be “extremely hardcore” or resign—pervades Boring, too, several former senior executives said. Boring employees work long hours and weekends, and the company has struggled to retain employees, particularly in technical positions such as engineering, they said.

For years, the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority had sought a solution to an enviable problem: Freight-focused Ontario International was steadily gaining passengers. Airport officials decided a link to a nearby commuter rail station would help it grow even more.

The authority issued a request for proposals for a light rail line, estimated to cost between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, when Boring’s pitch showed up.

The authority struck a preliminary deal with Boring in February 2021 for a narrow-diameter tunnel filled with autonomous EVs for $45 million.

“When I went to the public and shared this, the enthusiasm was overwhelming, just for something new and different,” said Janice Rutherford, a county supervisor and transportation authority board member. “And it’s the Boring Company, so Elon Musk brings that kind of sexiness to it, if you will.”

Over time, the company and the transportation authority dropped references to autonomous vehicles. By late 2021, cost projections rose to almost $500 million, agency documents show.

The authority asked for a third-party environmental review, required by state law, of the Boring proposal’s impact, records show. That’s when the process came to a halt.

“We tried to reach agreement with them,” said Carrie Schindler, the authority’s deputy executive director. “We went through the standard request for proposal process. And ultimately at the end of that process, they decided not to propose.”

Boring had powerful boosters from the time Mr. Musk declared his war on traffic in late 2016. Trump administration officials counseled the billionaire on how to pursue his stated goal of building an underground Hyperloop from New York to Washington. The Hyperloop, a concept Mr. Musk revived based on a proposal from the 1970s, calls for moving passengers through vacuum tubes at around 700 miles an hour. Despite an influx of investor interest, no commercial system has ever been constructed.

Mr. Musk tweeted in July 2017 that he had “verbal govt approval” for Boring to begin building the Hyperloop. Besieged by calls from the media and government officials, White House staff helped come up with a follow-up tweet, according to former government officials. “Still a lot of work needed to receive formal approval, but am optimistic that will occur rapidly,” Mr. Musk later tweeted.

That fall, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan was standing at a fenced-off site affixed with Boring signs near Fort Meade and telling a videographer to “get ready” for a high-speed train from Baltimore to Washington. Mr. Hogan declined to comment.

An aide to Mr. Hogan toured a parking-lot test site at the company’s then-headquarters near Los Angeles International Airport, getting a look at a tunnel-boring machine the company purchased secondhand. Boring named it Godot, the title character in Samuel Beckett’s play about a man who never shows up.

The Republican Hogan administration sped up the bureaucratic process for Boring, granting a conditional permit in October 2017 and an environmental permit a few months later.

All Boring had to do was bring its machine and start digging, former Maryland officials said. But months, and then years, passed. Maryland was waiting for Godot.

Boring deleted the Maryland project from its website last year.

The company also captured the attention of Chicago’s then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who wanted a high-speed rail link between O’Hare International Airport and the downtown business district.

In 2017, Mr. Musk proposed a Hyperloop-like solution, in which 16-passenger pods would be propelled through an underground tunnel on electric “skates” moving up to 125 miles an hour. Mr. Musk said he could do it for less than $1 billion, and that Boring would finance the job and keep the fare revenue for itself.

Mr. Emanuel’s Democratic administration selected Boring to develop the system. At a press conference with Mr. Musk, the mayor dismissed “doubters,” who he said also would have questioned other landmark projects, like the 1900 reversal of the flow of the Chicago River.

Mr. Waguespack, the alderman, and other elected officials challenged the cost estimates as absurdly low, warning that taxpayers would be on the hook if Boring couldn’t build as cheaply as it proposed. “It was a lot of flash and dash and not any kind of public discussion about whether it was even necessary or not,” Mr. Waguespack said.

Mr. Emanuel said in an interview that the company had promised to assume financial risk for building the proposed tunnel. The proposal didn’t go any further after Mr. Emanuel decided not to seek a third term.

Other Boring projects announced with fanfare, including a 3.6-mile underground high-speed transportation link from the Hollywood subway line to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, also have failed to materialize.

Some sites where Boring once courted public attention are now abandoned. The entrance to its first demonstration tunnel sits behind a chain-link fence in a lot near SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. In the California desert town of Adelanto, where city leaders once hailed the arrival of a Boring research operation, stacks of concrete lining segments sit alongside a short U-shaped section of tunnel partially blocked off with plywood amid rattlesnake warning signs.

For the past year, Boring has been directing potential clients to its work in Las Vegas as a showcase for what systems in their cities could look like.

“We’re fans of the Boring Company,” said Steve Hill, chief executive of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “We’re fans of clean transportation systems that are great. So we want to help.”

The convention authority paid Boring about $50 million to build two 0.8-mile single-direction tunnels connecting different wings of the sprawling convention center. It opened in the spring of 2021. This year, Boring completed a short offshoot between the facility and Resorts World casino and hotel.

The Clark County and Las Vegas city government councils have approved a 34-mile loop of tunnels that Boring will finance. Private casino and resort owners are being asked to pay for stations. The company plans to break ground soon on segments, Mr. Hill said.

Boring signed a 50-year contract to operate the Vegas loop and will collect revenue from ticket sales, sharing a small percentage with the city and county after crossing a quarterly revenue threshold.

To get a permit to begin operating the convention loop, Boring had to run a demonstration showing that it could move 4,400 passengers an hour.

Boring passed the test and received its permit, in a category called ATS, for Amusement and Transportation Systems—the same one that local officials award to roller coasters.

Crowds strain the network of individually driven cars far more than mass transit like light rail, according to some of the former executives. In social media postings, visitors have documented the loop’s Teslas sitting, underground, in traffic. The fleet of required accredited drivers adds to labor and administrative costs.

At the convention’s jam-packed auto products show this month, visitors queued in 10 lines in a subterranean station, waiting to hop into Teslas that drivers steered through a pair of tunnels just inches wider than the sedans themselves.

Boring employees directed attendees into cars. Mr. Davis, in a safety-orange sweatshirt, paced among them and talked to convention officials who later said he often manages operations on site. When approached by a reporter, he declined to comment.

Mr. Musk has lately tweeted videos of a Boring-designed machine, nicknamed Prufrock after the title character of the T.S. Eliot poem, digging test holes in the Texas dirt. Boring says Prufrock is designed to dig at one mile a week, and that a succeeding version will be able to dig 7 miles a day.

Boring says it can improve tunneling speeds with fully electrified machines and by digging continuously, rather than stopping to assemble sections of the tunnel wall. The company also says angling machines in from ground level will help avoid the cost of first digging a shaft to launch the machine.

Veterans of the tunneling industry note that tunnel-boring machines have been electrified for decades, and that neither continuous construction of the tunnel lining nor digging in from aboveground is new.

Boring’s speed claims are “totally unrealistic,” said Lok Home, president of the Robbins Co., a leading maker of tunnel-boring machines. “There’ll be improvements here, for sure, but there’s not going to be a revolution.”

Industry veterans said that in terms of cost, factors like property acquisition, permitting and engineering work, and the sheer complexity of digging through rock or soil matter far more than tunneling speed.

As for most of the tunneling Boring has done, in the desert soils of Las Vegas, Mr. Home said, “That’s about as easy as it gets.”

Public officials across the country remain eager to land Boring projects, and some are eyeing the roughly $1 trillion federal infrastructure law as a source of potential funding.

In Fort Lauderdale, Democratic Mayor Dean Trantalis is pointing to the availability of the funding as he tries to sell the public on a $100 million pair of Boring-built tunnels that would ferry beachgoers back and forth from downtown. Mr. Trantalis said that he was awe-struck by Boring’s Las Vegas project, which he toured last year.

North Miami Beach officials want to use federal infrastructure money to pay Boring for a tunnel project to reduce traffic.

On a lark, Vice Mayor Michael Joseph tweeted at Boring and Mr. Musk in February 2021. Company officials quickly expressed interest. “They just called me out of nowhere and said, ‘Hey, this is Boring,’” Mr. Joseph said. “I was very surprised they responded to my tweet.”

In Ontario, the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority hasn’t abandoned its tunnel dream. The authority is seeking bids from other construction companies to build tunnels, and from operators to run electric vehicles inside.

Ms. Schindler credited Boring with introducing local officials to the possibility of subterranean transportation that might cost less than more conventional aboveground systems.

“While I’m disappointed we’re not in design at this point and headed towards construction, I’m grateful for the disruption that I think got us going in a really viable direction,” she said.

The authority said it would still welcome a bid from the Boring Co.

12 notes · View notes

rockislandadultreads · 9 months

Text

NoveList Combos: Character Driven & Thoughtful

Did you know NoveList is a database you can access with your library card to find reading recommendations? Find your next favorite read with this fantastic readers tool! Check it out on our website here.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, about what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.

Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them. Moving from northwest London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music of time.

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own ceremony-- a celebration that ultimately never took place.

Unfurling the history of Melody's parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they've paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives--even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.

Monogamy by Sue Miller

Graham and Annie have been married for nearly thirty years. A golden couple, their seemingly effortless devotion has long been the envy of their circle of friends and acquaintances.

Graham is a bookseller, a big, gregarious man with large appetites—curious, eager to please, a lover of life, and the convivial host of frequent, lively parties at his and Annie’s comfortable house in Cambridge. Annie, more reserved and introspective, is a photographer. She is about to have her first gallery show after a six-year lull and is worried that the best years of her career may be behind her. They have two adult children; Lucas, Graham’s son with his first wife, Frieda, works in New York. Annie and Graham’s daughter, Sarah, lives in San Francisco. Though Frieda is an integral part of this far-flung, loving family, Annie feels confident in the knowledge that she is Graham’s last and greatest love.

When Graham suddenly dies—this man whose enormous presence has seemed to dominate their lives together—Annie is lost. What is the point of going on, she wonders, without him?

Then, while she is still mourning him intensely, she discovers that Graham had been unfaithful to her; and she spirals into darkness, wondering if she ever truly knew the man who loved her.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

#fiction #literary fiction #novelist #book recommendations #book recs #reading recommendations #reading recs #tbr #tbr pile #to read #library books #booklr #book tumblr #book blog #library blog

4 notes · View notes