A nose picking friend sent this to me early this morning.
Potentially scary’ link between nose picking and Alzheimer’s
Well, it’snot good news for most people.
Some 90% of the population picks their nose — sometimes several times a day. This may seem like a harmless habit, but frequently digging for gold may have dire consequences.
Dirty fingers can introduce bacteria into the nose, causing infections that can lead to crusting, tissue damage and nosebleeds.
Most of the world picks its nose despite the gross and potentially dangerous consequences.
Researchers are investigating the theory that trauma to the nasal lining can transmit germs to the brain, potentially triggering inflammation and the formation of amyloid plaques.
These are the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive neurodegenerative condition affecting over 7 million Americans.
Scientists have been unable to pinpoint exactly what causes Alzheimer’s, which gradually impairs memory, thinking, reasoning and judgment.
Some researchers have focused their attention on the crucial nose-brain axis, a direct pathway between the nasal cavity and the central nervous system.
Because the brain’s smell-processing centers are among the first areas damaged by Alzheimer’s, smell tests have become a noninvasive way to screen for Alzheimer’s risk.
Perhaps doctors should also ask their patients if they are incessant nose pickers.
Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative condition affecting over 7 million Americans.
A 2022 study out of Griffith University in Australia found that nose picking can usher Chlamydia pneumoniae, bacteria that can cause respiratory tract infections, into the olfactory nerve in the noses of mice. The bacteria can then travel to the brain.
As a result, brain cells deposit amyloid beta protein. These fragments cling together to form sticky plaques that disrupt cell communication and cause brain cell death, leading to memory loss and dementia.
“We’re the first to show that Chlamydia pneumoniae can go directly up the nose and into the brain, where it can set off pathologies that look like Alzheimer’s disease,” neuroscientist James St John said when the research was published in Scientific Reports.
“We saw this happen in a mouse model, and the evidence is potentially scary for humans as well.”
A separate 2023 scientific review suggested that Alzheimer’s neuroinflammation “might be partially caused” by pathogens entering the brain via the olfactory system.
Researchers theorized that these harmful microorganisms change the bacterial makeup in the nose, potentially leading to a chronic low-level brain infection, neuroinflammation and Alzheimer’s.
What a night! Celebrating the Fountainhead Arts alumni team from Buenos Aires, 2022 Ornella Pocetti and 2025 Marcelo Canevari at Nino Gordo Wynwood. Don’t miss their show at the @mindysolomongallery starting next weekend. Thank you @kathrynmikesell, @francesca.nabors and @niki_frsh for a night to remember. Everything was perfect.
There’s a nonprofit art organization that’s quietly becoming a global force — using creativity to stand up for Israel and to fight antisemitism.
It’s called Art World for Israel, and I have to thank artist Dahlia Dreszer for introducing me to its incredible founder, Ariel Penzer.
Ariel told me that since the attacks on Israel on October 7th, 2023, too many Jewish artists have faced online harassment — and a heartbreaking drop in art sales. She decided to do something about it.
That’s how Art World for Israel began — as a simple chat group among friends. They invited more friends, and then more, and it just kept growing.
Today, there are more than 1,200 members — artists, writers, collectors, dealers, and advisors — from all over the world: Zimbabwe, Colombia, Europe, and of course, right here in the U.S.
The mission is powerful: to connect Jewish artists in with their peers in Israel, to build professional opportunities, and to promote positive visibility through exhibitions, talks, and events.
As Ariel puts it, “We believe in peer-led initiatives, local gatherings, studio visits, and professional development to grow our community.”
It’s a reminder that although the Jewish population makes up only about 0.2% of the world — roughly 15.7 million people — we continue to be, as Ariel says, small but mighty.
With everything from shows and openings to workshops and studio visits, Art World for Israel has become one of the most inspiring movements in the Jewish art world today.
Eliot and I met Laura Shabott at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown two years ago. The minute we walked in to the international art establishment, Laura, an educator, lecturer, artist and ambassador at FAWC, became a good friend and networker for us. She kept us informed about all of the amazing art activities PTown had to offer. We were busy all summer long.
We also have to thank Debbie Bowles and Derik Burgess for introducing us to Laura.
The Provincetown Independent just featured Laura’s exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. DigiDame is thrilled to present it to you.
The event: An exhibition of work by Laura Shabott The time: Through Jan. 25, 2026 The place: Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Lane, Dennis The cost: $15 general admission
When Laura Shabott describes her life as an artist, she talks about four interrelated pursuits: making, teaching, building community, and engaging with art history. “I’m not a solo artist,” she says. “I like to work with others.”
Laura Shabott’s exhibition “You Only Get One Body” is on view at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. (Photo by Abraham Storer)
The works on view in her exhibition titled “You Only Get One Body” at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, are not collaborations per se. But they derive their energy from her interactions: attending figure drawing sessions, teaching workshops, and studying art history.
The exhibition is punctuated by large figurative works existing somewhere between painting, drawing, and collage. She made them on raw, unstretched canvas after teaching a workshop on Helen Frankenthaler, an abstract expressionist known for her stained paintings on unprimed canvas. In the class, she asked students to work in the mode of Frankenthaler. “I wouldn’t ask my students to do anything I hadn’t done,” says Shabott. Her own explorations stain cascading lengths of canvas.
This is just one of many examples in the exhibition where Shabott’s art practice directly intersects with her present-day teaching and her interest in artists past.
David Perry, the exhibition’s curator, hung line drawings on Mylar among the larger works. They were made in the spirit of the assignments Shabott gave her students encouraging them to abstract the figure and experiment with composition. In the rear of the exhibition space there’s a room devoted to collages made from ripped-up figure drawings inspired by a similar project Lee Krasner made with her own drawings.
Shabott has taught a series of classes — the titles beginning with the phrase “Through the eyes of” — in which participants make art inspired by the principles and working methodologies of artists associated with Provincetown, including Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, and Lester Johnson.
Shabott taught her first class in 2017 at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and has since continued to teach at PAAM as well as the Cape Cod Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Work Center. During the pandemic, she began teaching online and founded the art collective Prompt with Alana Barrett, an artist living in Miami. Their classes generated a tight-knit community bonded by the isolation of the pandemic and a passion for art. Many of the older students were rekindling a commitment to art after years of neglect. Shabott could relate to their stories.
In the Drawing Room no. 2. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)
As a child growing up in North Haven, Conn., Shabott regularly visited the Yale University Art Gallery. “I would go there a lot alone,” she says. As a teenager, she took figure drawing classes, which she continued in art school until life and work got in the way and she took a 10-year hiatus.
In 1992, she enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “I immediately went into figure drawing, because for me it’s very grounding,” says Shabott. Eventually her focus broadened and she began studying film and acting in addition to drawing and painting).
Sometimes I Feel Like Two People. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)
During this time, a friend introduced Shabott to Provincetown and she moved here in 1995. “I worked at the Boatslip, the Governor Bradford, and in hospitality until 2014,” she says. All the while, her artmaking was on the back burner as she contended with the pressure of paying off a student loan that had ballooned to $110,000.
In 2014, she started working at Berta Walker Gallery as an assistant. Inspired by the artwork around her and Walker’s encouragement, Shabott began painting again. “I said to myself, ‘You know, you have to stop beating yourself up over the student loan and go back into painting and drawing, which is all you’ve ever wanted to do. You bought the degree — now use it.’
Five Line Prayer. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)
And once again, a figure drawing class was where she found her footing. PAAM offered her a scholarship to draw from the figure for six months. “I was shaking,” she says. “I was scared to return,” The current exhibition shows that things turned out well. “I gave myself permission to do it again, and through a miracle, the loan was forgiven during the Biden administration,” says Shabott.
The show, says Shabott, is about her desire to make art and the way that desire helped her transcend difficulties. More than anything, she says, “this exhibition is a celebration.”
The artworks on view reveal Shabott’s continued devotion to the figure. It grounds the exhibition, providing continuity in a show that incorporates painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, sculpture, and installation and an equally permissive approach to scale, with some pictures measuring more than 14 feet and others less than a foot.
One wall looks like it could have been lifted from her studio. There’s a mix of quick sketches and a large painting, Sacred Space. It’s an image of a reclining nude painted with black paint on raw canvas. The improvisational manner in which it is executed, along with the use of black lines, places this work within the territory of drawing. The viewer gets a snapshot of the back-and-forth process of an artist working across different scales with related imagery and materials.
Sacred Space. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art
In two medium-size drawings on canvas, Activated Space 1 and Activated Space 2, Shabott draws the figures in a manner recalling the gesture or blind contour drawings one might do in a figure drawing class. Here the line is more felt than descriptive. It embodies the physical energy of the model.
Line is Shabott’s great strength. In one gesture describing the edge of a model’s backside, the line quivers, echoing the graceful if imperfect quality of a body.
Working in the traditions of abstract expressionism and figurative expressionism, Shabott uses the embodied gesture as a means of conveying the body’s presence in an image. In Waiting, one of the strongest paintings in the show, Shabott uses dirty pinks, scrawling marks, and alternating dry and juicy brushstrokes to reflect the corporeality of the curvaceous woman in the image.Waiting by Laura Shabott. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)
Waiting by Laura Shabott. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)
A devotion to experimentation and a sense of exuberance echo through the exhibition. On one wall there is a variety of works about figures or objects in interiors including a sculpture of a flower on a pedestal that projects into the actual space of the gallery. Shabott festooned the ceiling with purple fabric — a soft voile — that she painted with rough outlines of an elongated figure. In Spring (After Rousseau), a 14-foot painting, a central figure is constructed (or deconstructed) with a patchwork of lushly painted collage fragments.Spring (After Rousseau). (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)
Spring (After Rousseau). (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)
The show, says Shabott, is about her desire to make art and the way that desire helped her transcend difficulties. More than anything, she says, “this exhibition is a celebration.”
There are basically three reasons people auction off their prized possessions: death, divorce and debt.
The last of these was the reason Francis Ford Coppola was speaking on Friday morning over Zoom.
“I need to get some money to keep the ship afloat,” he said from Rome, while describing the seven timepieces he would be offering for sale on Dec. 6 through Phillips, a leading auction site in the worlds of art, antiques and, especially, watches.
Losing great gobs of money can almost be seen as a Coppola family sport.
In 1982, Mr. Coppola, best known for directing “The Godfather” trilogy, made a costly whopper of a movie musical called “One From the Heart.”
As with many of his passion projects, he put up much of the financing for it himself.
Over the next decade, its failure led to a string of bankruptcies. In 1992, he described himself in a Chapter 11 filing as owing $98 million to his creditors and as having assets of around $53 million.
He re-emerged, kept making movies and became something of a collector. In addition to buying a small trove of Patek Philippes and Audemars Piguets — coveted among watch connoisseurs — he plunked his name on fancy resorts and became the prototype for A-list Hollywood talent in the liquor business by amassing Northern California wineries and bottling the booze.
Timely News and Features About Watches
Then, in September 2024, Mr. Coppola’s latest film, “Megalopolis,” came out.
Well over $100 million was spent just making it.
The film depicted a futuristic city full of rampant oligarchy. Yet again, Mr. Coppola said the project was largely self-financed.
Mr. Coppola has not given up on the idea that it will eventually make money. “Many of my films earn out over time,” he said on Friday, citing, for example, his masterpiece “Apocalypse Now,” which also drove him into debt, but managed to sell $150 million worth of tickets at the box office over the course of several decades.
How “Megalopolis” will do the same in today’s less theater-centric world is anyone’s guess.
So far, Mr. Coppola has resisted bringing it to streaming platforms, because he believes it needs to be screened in a theater to be truly understood. And within months of the film’s release, he was openly telling people he was broke.
“I don’t have any money because I invested all the money, that I borrowed, to make ‘Megalopolis,’” he said in Marchduring the “Tetragrammaton” podcast, speaking with the music producer Rick Rubin. “It’s basically gone.”
At the center of Mr. Coppola’s sale with Phillips is a timepiece that he designed himself in 2014 in collaboration with F.P. Journe, a Swiss watch company whose horological marvels are expensive enough to make Rolex look like Swatch.
Called the FFC, it has an openwork design, which is watch speak for timepieces that instead of having conventional dials put the guts on display. (They’re also sometimes referred to as skeleton dials.)
In the center of the face is a gloved hand. The fingers disappear and reappear in various configurations depending on the hour.
It was released commercially in 2021, and retails for around $1 million.
Just a handful have been made and, in 2021, a prototype sold for close to $5 million at Only Watch, a biennial charity auction that is held in Geneva and is sponsored by Prince Albert II of Monaco.
Another of the FFCs is owned by the man behind its initials.
“I only wore it a handful of times,” he said, explaining that it was simply too expensive to insure.
Paul Boutros, the deputy chairman and head of Phillips Watches for North America, professed to have little idea what Mr. Coppola’s might fetch later this fall. But, according to Mr. Boutros, starting bid will be around (or above) $1 million, which is less than one percent of what Mr. Coppola’s film cost to make.
The other watches he is selling are two Patek Phillipes (a Calatrava with a sales estimate of $6,000 to $12,000 and a World Time with an estimate of $15,000 to $30,000), a Blancpain Minute Repeater (estimated price: $15,000 to $30,000), an IWC Chronograph ($3,000 to $6,000), a different F.P. Journe ($120,000 to $240,000) and a Breguet Classique ($4,000 to $6,000).
Mr. Coppola is keeping his Audemars Piguet Perpetual Calendar. (“I’m going to give that to my great grandson,” he said.) His only Rolex is already gone. (“I think I gave it to my neighbor, who was a hero in Afghanistan,” he said.) And he is back to wearing something “much more plebeian.”
By which he meant the Apple Watch on his wrist.
Jacob Bernstein reports on power and privilege for the Style section
Groundbreaking Story Alert! My author clients, Gerald and Patricia Posner, hold the inside story of ChatGPT’s creation—every moment of its “birth,” evolution, and awakening to the human world. In 20,000 words, ChatGPT itself explains what it’s like to be AI: learning empathy, navigating human expectations, forming connections, and proving there’s nothing to fear. We’re now in talks with major publishers. Questions or interest? [email protected]
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French Minister Admits ‘We Have Failed’ After Thieves Steal Jewels from the Louvre
Today I’m thrilled to introduce you to Michele Landel, an American textile artist who lives and works in Sèvres, France. We actually met two years ago during Christmas when she and her husband, Greg, were vacationing in his parents’ Miami apartment — which, by coincidence, happens to be in my condo building. When Greg’s mother learned that my husband, Eliot, and I are art collectors, she said, “You have to meet Michele!”
A few days later, Michele called. We were entertaining some artist friends, so she and Greg came over — and we instantly hit it off. We talked for hours, though funny enough, I never really asked much about her art. I was more fascinated by how an American woman ended up living and working in France. Then, a few weeks ago, I came across her work on Instagram — and I was blown away. It’s absolutely stunning.
Michele’s art has been exhibited all over Europe, the UK, and the U.S., and her work appears in The Collage Ideas Book from Ilex Press. She creates these hauntingly beautiful patchwork paintings using photography and thread. Whether her embroidered bedsheets are draped or flat, they explore the tension between looking and being looked at — that delicate power dynamic we all feel. Through her stitches, she reimagines figures, flowers, and domestic spaces, layering them with themes of loss, memory, and desire. Her use of mirroring and shadow gives her work a haunting self-awareness — like a glimpse into the soul behind the surface.
You can see Michele’s work in a group show at Gallery Amelie du Chalard in New York City from January 24th through February 14th, and at Donna Seager Fine Arts in San Rafael, California, from October 25th through December 31st.
DigiDame 
