Duke

• CHAI today also announced partnerships with the patient advocacy group, the National Health Council, and health standards organization, HL7.
• To implement this commitment, CHAI established a governance structure extending beyond the Board of Directors to include a small number of strategically defined advisory boards.
• I am excited to be a part of the Coalition for Health AI to help create a future where responsible AI practices are the cornerstone."
• – Michael Pencina, board member
  "Decades of research have brought us to a transformative moment for AI and the applications in medicine are unbounded.

• In November 1975, Truman Capote, the proudly gay author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, unveiled the hotly anticipated second instalment of his unpublished novel, Answered Prayers.
• Capote ended his days a social pariah in his former New York society circles, incapacitated by a lifetime of prodigious substance abuse.
• The story to blame, La Côte Basque, 1965, takes its title from its setting: an achingly fashionable French restaurant in Manhattan.
• However, Mrs. Hopkins was une autre chose: a sensation to unsettle the suavest Côte Basque client.
• Mrs. Kennedy and her sister had elicited not a murmur, nor had the entrances of Lauren Bacall and Katharine Cornell and Clare Booth Luce.
• However, Mrs. Hopkins was une autre chose: a sensation to unsettle the suavest Côte Basque client.

The real-life ‘Mrs. Bang-Bang’

• There was talk of the spate of burglaries that had recently occurred in the area.
• Ann, who suffered from insecurity and social anxiety, drank more than usual.
• Returning home with her husband, she washed down some sleeping pills and went to bed, not long after midnight.
• At two in the morning, Ann was woken by the sound of her dog growling.

‘What I’m writing is true’

• Regardless of whether he truly appreciated this, it seems fair to say Capote’s encounter with Ann Woodward made quite the impression on him.
• Capote’s conception of Answered Prayers, which he struggled with and talked about for decades, developed over time.
• In his monumental novel-cycle Remembrance of Things Past, Proust scrutinised the social machinations of the Parisian upper classes at the turn of the 20th century.
• Capote conceived of his project – which took shape as a roman à clef – in equivalent terms.
• What I’m writing is true, it’s real and it’s done in the very best prose style that I think any American writer could possibly achieve.
• […] If Proust were an American living now in New York, this is what he would be doing.
• What I’m writing is true, it’s real and it’s done in the very best prose style that I think any American writer could possibly achieve.
• as is generally conceded, a beautiful girl of twelve or twenty, while she may merit attention, does not deserve admiration.

Masturbation, misogyny, murder

• At the start of January 1966, Capote signed a contract with Random House for a novel titled Answered Prayers.
• However, by the time he actually sat down to write the book, he was already under a great deal of pressure.
• Masturbation, menstruation, misogyny, murder.
• Readers who thought they were getting a finely wrought piece of social critique were left scratching their heads in bemusement.
• Read more:
  In Killers of the Flower Moon, true crime reveals the paradoxes of the past

Was the book any good?

With the benefit of hindsight, I think the overwhelming majority missed the memo when it came to Answered Prayers.

• By the same token, it is clear Answered Prayers responds to (and even builds on) advances made in his earlier work.
• Gossip can serve a positive, even joyous function: it is a “social activity which produces and maintains the filiations” of community.
• To put this another way: if used in a strategic and appropriate fashion, gossip can bring people together.
• It can help to build and sustain social groupings predicated on the basis of shared knowledge (of sexual matters).
• Consider Unspoiled Monsters, the first chapter in the posthumously published book.
• If he had been absolutely factual, it would have been less believable but […] it might have been better.

Settling scores

• In part, he was looking to settle scores.
• Try as he might, Capote, who claimed his intentions had been misunderstood, couldn’t win the swans back over.
• As chance, or maybe fate would have it, he died at exactly the same age as Ann Woodward.
• Given how much they despised each other, I can’t help but wonder what Capote and Woodward would have made of such dismal symmetries.

Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Great American Family, the company's premiere flagship linear network premieres episode one on Monday, February 26 (8 p.m. ET/PT), and will premiere a new episode every Monday for the five-week first season run.
• These are the everyday heroes who make communities across America great," said Bill Abbott, President & CEO, Great American Media.
• "The series is about discovering oneself and who we are each meant to be while working alongside those who care about us.
• As Duke tells the team he is going on leave to get help, Chief Scotty also has news.

• While dragon parades are popularly viewed as displays of Chinese or Cantonese tradition and culture, their history demonstrates how deeply Australian they also are.
• Our historical research shows that until relatively recently Australia’s dragon parade tradition was closely associated with Chinese-Australian philanthropy and engagement with Australian civic life, rather than with Chinese spiritual practice.

The earliest dragon arrivals

• The first dragon, nicknamed the “Duck Bill” dragon, was imported from Southern China to Bendigo more than 100 years ago and paraded from 1892 to 1898.
• Nearby, Ballarat’s first dragon – also the oldest surviving dragon – was purchased in 1897.
• The “Moon Face” dragon was Bendigo’s second dragon, paraded for just one year in 1900.
• Read more:
  It's the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac − associated with good fortune, wisdom and success

A valued part of local fundraising

• Chinese communities were as keen as everyone else to assist with fundraising, display their culture and participate in festivities.
• Historian Pauline Rule has shown that Chinese communities have contributed to public fundraising displays in rural cities since at least 1866.

The popularity of dragons

Dragons were expensive and valued, and as such were also loaned to other communities for fundraising displays. In 1897, Bendigo’s Duck Bill dragon travelled to Sydney to participate in the Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee fundraiser. Then, both Bendigo’s Moon Face and the Ballarat dragon, as well as costumes from Bendigo, Beechworth and Castlemaine, were loaned to raise funds for the Melbourne Women’s Hospital in May 1900.
That so many Victorian communities could purchase dragons demonstrated their prosperity and joint commitment to Australia philanthropy and public life. It perhaps also encouraged a friendly intercity rivalry. Processional dragons were so popular that some communities that couldn’t access one would make their own imitation ones.

Royal welcome

• Of the five Chinese dragons brought to Victoria in the 19th century, three participated in Federation celebrations.
• As John Fitzgerald shows, many Chinese Australians were as excited about the possibilities of Federation as other Australians.
• To mark the royal visit, welcome arches were constructed in Melbourne, Ballarat and Perth.

Only a few long-distance photographs of the other dragon survive.

• According to a 1903 newspaper article, Melbourne’s Chinese Bo Leong Society had specifically purchased this dragon for the 1901 celebrations, at a cost of 250 pounds.
• The third dragon involved in the festivities, the Ballarat dragon, was used to decorate the Chinese arch that welcomed the royal couple during their visit to Ballarat.

A legacy in Australia

• Astoundingly, these three Federation-era dragons – three of the five oldest surviving imperial dragons in the world – still survive today.
• Traditionally, when dragons reach the end of their life they are ritually burned.

Sophie Couchman has undertaken research work for the See Yup Society on a voluntary basis and formerly curator at the Museum of Chinese Australian History. Leigh McKinnon is the Research Officer at Bendigo's Golden Dragon Museum, the home of the world's oldest complete processional dragon Loong.