When you get asked to a private audience with the Pope
From Patricia Lockwood at the LRB: "The invitation said ‘black dress for Ladies’. ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason, instructs. ‘He has to be the whitest. And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.’ We are discussing the pope, who has woken one morning, at the age of 86, with a sudden craving to meet artists. An event has been proposed: a celebration in the Sistine Chapel on 23 June with the pope and two hundred honoured guests, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the contemporary and modern art collection at the Vatican Museums. I am somehow one of these two hundred; either that, or it is a trap. Uneasily, I pack a suitcase. My black dress for Ladies might be a swimsuit cover-up; it looks like what a nun who is also a widow would wear to the Y."
Former Playboy model turned Italian princess is evicted from her 16th century mansion
From Christopher Parker for the Smithsonian: "A Roman villa bearing a priceless, one-of-a-kind Caravaggio ceiling painting. A bitter dispute between a Texas-born princess and the Italian son of her deceased husband. And now, a public eviction on the streets of Rome, complete with reporters and a quartet of bichon frise dogs. HRita Boncompagni Ludovisi, born Rita Carpenter and formerly Rita Jenrette, was escorted out of her home of 20 years last Thursday by police. The move followed a January eviction order by an Italian judge, who cited her failure to maintain the 600-year-old house. The house, situated just off Rome’s Via Veneto, has been in the family since its construction. The Boncompagni Ludovisi clan includes Pope Gregory XIII, who established the Gregorian calendar during his papacy. Rita Jenrette married Prince Nicolò Boncompagni Ludovisi in 2009."
Scientists detected an extremely high-energy particle coming from an empty region of space
From Hannah Devlin for The Guardian: "Astronomers have detected a rare and extremely high-energy particle falling to Earth that is causing bafflement because it is coming from an apparently empty region of space. The particle, named Amaterasu after the sun goddess in Japanese mythology, is one of the highest-energy cosmic rays ever detected. Only the most powerful cosmic events, on scales far exceeding the explosion of a star, are thought to be capable of producing such energetic particles. But Amaterasu appears to have emerged from the Local Void, an empty area of space bordering the Milky Way galaxy. The Amaterasu particle has an energy exceeding 240 exa-electron volts (EeV), millions of times more than particles produced in the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built. It comes only second to the Oh-My-God particle, another ultra-high-energy cosmic ray that came in at 320 EeV, detected in 1991."
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