Day: May 8, 2024

An Australian modern art museum featured a lavish, green velvet-ordained room—for women’s use only—to make a statement about discrimination. Then it got accused of being discriminatory.

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After a male ticket-payer last year complained of being denied entry to the Ladies Lounge, which opened in 2020, a local tribunal last month ordered the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania to make the space accessible to all.

But the exhibit artist and curator, Kirsha Kaechele, who is married to MONA’s founder and owner, has vowed to fight the order, which she calls the “verdick,” saying she plans to challenge the ruling before the state supreme court and, in the interim, pursue a workaround to ensure the Ladies Lounge remains off limits for men—except for male butlers who serve guests refreshments.

“Men need to be discriminated against,” Kaechele said in a post on Instagram on Tuesday, adding that she believes, with a few tweaks, the Ladies Lounge could qualify for various exemptions to Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act. “The Ladies Lounge will become a toilet, a church and a school,” she told local newspaper the Mercury.

One loophole Kaechele says she’s planning to exploit is installing a toilet in the gallery, which holds some of the museum’s most high-profile artworks, including a Picasso. “It would be the Ladies Room, in fact, under this new designation,” Kaechele said in a blog post this week on the museum’s website. She explained that the toilet could be, while technically functional, a piece of art, such as Fontaine by Marcel Duchamp, a urinal that she says she’s in talks to potentially borrow from the Centre Pompidou.

“Bringing this iconic art object from Paris for display in the Ladies Lounge would reignite the debate: what is art? The inevitable controversy would serve as an excellent art history lesson for a new generation, introducing one of the most important moments in twentieth-century culture—the origins of conceptual art—to a wider, non-art audience. In this sense, the Ladies Lounge would effectively become an educational institution,” Kaechele explains, adding that doing so would then satisfy another exemption.

(Kaechele told the Mercury on Tuesday that a toilet is on the way, to be installed within 45 days, but MONA tells TIME that it is not Fontaine. While the Ladies Lounge was closed this week until further notice, Kaechele told the Mercury that its key artworks will be temporarily moved to the women’s restroom to ensure uninterrupted viewing.)

Lastly, Kaechele says she could transform the Ladies Lounge into a religious institution, to satisfy another exemption. “The Lounge would be a safe space for women to come together and learn about the Bible and ask questions,” she said in the blog post, noting that she’s not Christian and likes to “poke fun” at Christianity.

Overall, Kaechele insists the legal challenge has only enhanced the exhibit, which was meant to evoke “in men the lived experience of women forbidden from entering certain spaces throughout history,” the museum said in a press release on Tuesday.

“Thanks to the ruling, we have no choice but to open ourselves to a whole range of enriching experiences—spiritual, educational …” Kaechele said in MONA’s blog. “To discover fascinating new possibilities, and to become better.”

“Ladies love the Lounge—a space away from men—and given what we have been through for the last several millennia, we need it!” she added in the press release. “We deserve both equal rights and reparations, in the form of unequal rights, or chivalry—for at least 300 years.”

Social strategy games are having a moment. Among those competitions, which challenge contestants to outwit and out-charm one another in hopes of winning a grand prize, international franchise The Traitors (whose stateside version streams on Peacock) has become reality TV’s biggest success story of the past few years, in the U.S. and abroad. Netflix is fully in the fray with The Trust, Surviving Paradise, and its revival of ABC’s The Mole. Recent dating shows, from Perfect Match to FBoy Island, have social strategy elements; players use their savvy to manipulate rivals, suss out their love interests’ true intentions, and win a small fortune. Even decades-old incarnations of the format (Survivor, Big Brother) are seeing their ratings spike.

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But, with apologies to the great Traitors U.S. host Alan Cumming, it was The Circle that reignited the social-strategy fire, back in the pre-pandemic winter of 2020. Billed as a reality competition for the age of social media, the consistently popular series moves approximately eight players into the same building… and isolates each one in their own separate apartment, where they vie to become the most well-liked poster in what amounts to a cast-wide Slack channel. The Circle’s sixth season, which dropped an extremely satisfying finale on Wednesday, might be its best yet. Fans who’ve worked their way through all the imported versions of Traitors on Peacock would do well to give it a try. (If you’ve yet to watch The Circle Season 6, beware: spoilers lie ahead.)

Many great reality shows have taken a while to perfect, and in the case of The Circle, that meant a few early, freewheeling seasons of experimentation. Producers cast a wide net, catching catfish who posted fake photos and bios in their profiles as well as extroverted contestants playing as themselves. There was a young guy secretly getting help from his mom, a 58-year-old writer portraying an idealized 24-year-old version of himself, the obligatory flirtatious bisexual woman who was too enticing to be real. Lisa Del Campo, the girl Friday to Lance Bass of NSYNC, impersonated her boss (with his blessing). The gimmickry peaked in Season 4, when Spice Girls Mel B. and Emma Bunton posed as a random 20-something dude. 

Early casts mostly took the connections they forged at face value. For genuinely single (and mostly heterosexual) players, the exchange of eggplant and peach emojis signified the possibility of an actual romance outside The Circle. And each season’s amateur detectives expended a lot of energy trying to unmask catfish, as though inventing a persona automatically made a castmate a weaker ally. Never mind that many shades of gray separated “real” profiles from “fake” ones; some contestants pretended to be single to make themselves more approachable, while others were posting authentically behind borrowed photos. With the exception of a handful of calculated “gamers,” no one seemed to realize that an ally’s true identity was less important than the trustworthiness they proved in challenges and eliminations.

By Season 6, however, the series was attracting a more competitive class of player. For the most part, this cast seemed to have studied previous seasons and deduced, correctly, that it was more important to build solid alliances that would keep them safe from the so-called “blockings” that take players out of the running for the cash prize than it was to catch catfish. Consistency, strategy, discretion, and skillful navigation of the show’s many socially oriented challenges thus became more important than authentic love connections and pseudo-familial bonds. (I can’t be the only viewer who cringes when middle-aged women—or people playing as them—on the show get shunted into the role of everyone’s mom or buddies who’ve been exchanging messages for less than 24 hours declare themselves Circle siblings.)

There must be some sadistic Circle fans who tune in for the awkwardness of certain encounters between strangers who aren’t the people they say they are. For them, Season 6 did offer an uncomfortably steamy exchange of scantily clad photos between Kyle, a married pro basketball player competing as a single basketball trainer, and Olivia, the beautiful female avatar of a self-conscious gay man named Brandon. (Kyle apologized, hilariously, to a photo of his wife, who’d approved his charade, before every interaction.) But for Traitors devotees and other fans of social strategy games for whom strategy is the operative word, Season 6 really delivered.

Sure, the producers couldn’t resist the timely gimmick of throwing an AI contestant into the mix—one that wasn’t entirely believable as such, in light of everything we know about the many deceptions of reality TV. Thankfully, if also anticlimactically, the algorithm known as Max was abandoned early in the season, after easily flying under its opponents’ radar. Yet The Circle also made several great, subtle changes. This season featured fewer blockings than its predecessors, which allowed relationships and strategies to develop over longer timelines. That also meant fewer late additions to the cast, whose lack of established connections and knowledge of what transpired before their arrival have historically made them weaker contenders. Meanwhile, a twist that split players into secret “ride-or-die” duos with linked fates shook up existing alliances, forcing them to square their commitment to those organically cultivated loyalties with the possibility that an unpopular ride-or-die could mean elimination.

By the finale—and, again, you should really stop reading now if you’ve yet to watch it—six very different, mostly compelling contenders remained. Faux couple Kyle and Olivia/Brandon were still in the game, propelled by their relative sincerity as well as Kyle’s longstanding #TresFuego alliance and Olivia’s popularity among castmates outside that trio. One of the latter was Lauren, the least game-oriented finalist, who seemed to have lasted as long as she did mainly because she posed a minimal threat. The perennially high-rated Circle superfan and #TresFuego co-conspirator Quori-Tyler, by contrast, was the season’s most powerful competitor. Latecomer Jordan, who quasi-catfished as a cuddly, pre-weight loss version of himself in a bid to appear unthreatening, connived his way into the finale after leading a risky rebellion against the manipulative third member of #TresFuego, AI engineer and self-described f-ckboy Myles.

In a big twist at the beginning of the episode, Brandon was secretly given the power to unilaterally block someone. Swayed by Jordan’s campaign, he picked Myles, who had been Olivia’s ride-or-die earlier in the season and with whom she’d previously had a pretty good relationship. It was a brilliant—and, because the blocking was anonymous, consequence-free—decision that broke up #TresFuego and led to Brandon’s ultimate victory. 

It couldn’t be more appropriate that the fishiest of catfishes is the winner of The Circle’s most strategic season to date. But the finale should satisfy fans’ hearts as well as their minds. Brandon is a kind, sensitive, underpaid nurse who struggles, relatably, with confidence and body image; the real Olivia is his work friend. Even Kyle—who was shocked at his pseudo-paramour’s reveal but soon recovered upon learning that Brandon had been telling the truth about himself when they bonded over having lost their fathers—couldn’t help but be happy for him. My favorite round of The Circle might’ve been cutthroat to the core, but it ended with well-deserved tears of joy. Here’s hoping the producers use it as a model for seasons to come.   

The UK Ministry of Defense disclosed a data breach at a third-party payroll system that exposed data of armed forces personnel and veterans.

The UK Ministry of Defense disclosed a data breach impacting a third-party payroll system that exposed data of approximately 272,000 armed forces personnel and veterans.

The Ministry of Defence revealed that a malign actor gained access to part of the Armed Forces payment network, which is an external system completely separate to MOD’s core network.

Defence Secretary Grant Shapps told House of Commons that the impacted system is not connected to the main military HR system.

The UK Ministry of Defense is reviewing the operations of the impacted contractor and announced that appropriate measures will be taken.

The compromised information includes the personal data of regular and reserve personnel and some recently retired veterans. The malicious actor gained access to names and bank details, and, in a smaller number of cases, addresses of the impacted personnel.

The UK government did not publicly attribute the attack, however, the BBC reported that UK ministers suspected China was responsible

“Grant Shapps told MPs the government had reason to believe the hack “was the suspected work of a malign actor” – and the BBC understands that ministers suspect China was responsible.” states the BBC.

Mr. Shapps publicly criticized the contractor, stating there was “evidence of failings” in the management of the breached system.

“For reasons of national security, we can’t release further details of the suspected cyber activity behind this incident,” Mr. Shapps added.

China denied any involvement in the attack and labeled the accusation as a “fabricated and malicious slander”.

“We urge the relevant parties in the UK to stop spreading false information, stop fabricating so-called China threat narratives, and stop their anti-China political farce,” a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in the UK said.

Labour’s shadow defence secretary John Healey speculated that the external contractor operating the breached system was Shared Services Connected Ltd (SSCL).

SSCL is a joint venture between the British government and a private tech firm, it provides services to the Home Office, Cabinet Office and Ministry of Justice.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, UK Ministry of Defense)