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Starting a new hobby is exciting, especially when that means buying new gadgets and tools! However, when you are new to sewing, searching for a beginner machine can be a bit overwhelming. A few helpful questions to ask yourself: What is my budget? How likely am I to stick to sewing? What kind of fabrics will I be sewing with? Will I need to move my machine around? And who will be using it? Our suggestions below are suitable for complete beginners and include both manual and computerized machines, at a range of price points. 

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Note that when buying a machine, you can buy online or through a dealer. Online you should be able to find better deals, which is great if you don’t mind learning new skills on your own through blogs, YouTube, and books. If you prefer to learn things in person, a dealer could be the way to go. Dealers usually offer classes, will help you set up your machine, and can troubleshoot any issues that come up along the way.

How we pick each product:
Our mission is to recommend the most appropriate artists’ tool or supply for your needs. Whether you are looking for top-of-the line equipment or beginners’ basics, we’ll make sure that you get good value for your money by doing the research for you. We scour the Internet for information on how art supplies are used and read customer reviews by real users; we ask experts for their advice; and of course, we rely on our own accumulated expertise as artists, teachers, and craftspeople.

If you’re looking for a very affordable and cute sewing machine, the Janome New Home is for you. As a beginner, you’ll want to start with a machine that sews smoothly and doesn’t leave you frustrated, and this adorable little machine fits the bill. It is compact and light—weighing only five pounds—so you can easily carry it around, and it sews well for its size. You can pick from a variety of bright color combinations too. It has 11 built-in stitches, but no buttonhole stitch. You wouldn’t want to start with a smaller machine than the New Home because the smaller or toy machines are actually harder to use.

The ruins of an Ancient Roman temple dating to the 1st century BCE have been discovered on the outskirts of Sarsina, an Italian rural town. Under Roman rule, the area was a strategic defensive outpost. It was also the birthplace of playwright Plautus.

Workers first stumbled upon the ruins in December 2022 during the construction of a development project that was intended to bring a new supermarket, a fitness center, and a playground to the town.

There, they found a sandstone block structure and marble slabs that measured 6,211 square feet wide. Researchers have identified this as the podium on which the temple was constructed.

“We have unearthed three separate rooms, likely dedicated to the triad of gods Jupiter, Juno and Minerva,” lead archaeologist Romina Pirraglia told CNN. 

“The excavations are still underway,” she continued, “and we have already identified an older, deeper layer of ruins dating back to the 4th century BC, when the Umbrian people (an ancient Italic tribe who predated the Romans) lived in the area. The entire temple could be even larger than what we now see.”

A pickup truck careened off a road in Chicago, slamming into the facade of Andrew Rafacz Gallery in West Town, destroying a large-scale ceramic work by the artist Roxanne Jackson, and damaging the building, according to a report from Block Club Chicago.

The collision happened at 2:45 a.m. on Sunday. Video from the time of the incident shows the truck charging down Chicago Avenue toward the gallery before crashing through the gallery’s glass windows. When police arrived a few hours later, half of the vehicle was still inside the gallery.

Rafacz told ARTnews the gallery was presenting a solo show of Jackson’s work called Candleholders for the Underworld, much of which had been made during her residency at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at California State University Long Beach. 

“It’s still not settling in. We are all in shock. And there is no easy way to tell an artist you admire that their work has been destroyed,” Rafacz told ARTnews.

Jackson’s sculpture, Sweet Leaf Twilight (2023), a 94-inch-tall work comprised of six pieces stacked on top of one another to form a modern, totem pole-like figure, was her largest work to date. The work, which was for sale for $22,500, has been completely destroyed. Multiple other works were damaged because of the incident.

Who is Sharon Olds? Sharon Olds is an American poet, born in San Francisco in 1942. She has a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and made her debut as a writer in 1980 with the poetry collection Satan Says. Since then, she has established herself as one of the most read, most decorated, and most controversial North American contemporary poets. “Sharon Olds’s poems are pure fire in the hands,” Michael Ondaatje has said. She became particularly well known after she refused to take part in a National Book Festival dinner organized by Laura Bush, then First Lady, in 2005, and wrote in an open letter: “So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.”

The way I discovered her was through a poem on a particular penis, which came as a recommendation from a Finnish Swedish colleague: “Read Sharon Olds’s ‘The Pope’s Penis’!” How reading this little poem about the Pope’s sexual organ became contagious, I don’t know, but the fact is that at almost the same time, I got a text message from another colleague, who wrote that she was sitting in a waiting room somewhere reading Sharon Olds’s “The Pope’s Penis.” And here I must grab hold of you, reader, and shout, as though by international chain letter: Read Sharon Olds’s “The Pope’s Penis”! Let’s quote it in its entirety:

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat—and at night
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

The poem is an introduction to certain motifs—the body, darkness, the desire to confront, imagery, et cetera—which often appear in other equally unsettling, gripping variations and combinations elsewhere in her poetry. For example, here, in this extract from “Self-Portrait, Rear View,” in which the poem’s narrator is standing in a hotel room and, in another mirror and another light, catches sight of her fifty-four-year-old backside, “once a tight end”:

It was big news when Rudy Giuliani, once hailed as America’s Mayor, was indicted last month by a district attorney in Atlanta for allegedly being part of a criminal enterprise led by Donald Trump that sought to overturn the 2020 election results. Giuliani was back in headlines this week when he lost a defamation suit filed against him by two Georgia election workers whom he had falsely accused of ballot stuffing. Giuliani’s apparent impoverishment, caused by his massive legal bills, and even his alleged drinking have been fodder for reporters. But another major Giuliani development has drawn less attention: An FBI whistleblower filed a statement asserting that Giuliani “may have been compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as a lawyer and adviser to Trump during the 2020 campaign.

That contention is among a host of explosive assertions from Johnathan Buma, an FBI agent who also says that an investigation involving Giuliani’s activities was stymied within the bureau. 

In July, Buma sent the Senate Judiciary Committee a 22-page statement full of eye-popping allegations, and the document leaked and was first reported last month by Insider (after a conservative blogger had posted it online). According to Buma’s account, Giuliani was used as an asset by a Ukrainian oligarch tied to Russian intelligence and other Russian operatives for a disinformation operation that aimed to discredit Joe Biden and boost Trump in the 2020 presidential race. Moreover, Buma says he was the target of retaliation within the bureau for digging into this.

The FBI declined to comment on Buma’s claims.

Buma’s revelations may only be the start. A source familiar with his work tells Mother Jones that other potential FBI whistleblowers who participated in the investigation involving Giuliani have consulted the same lawyer as Buma and might meet with congressional investigators in coming weeks. That attorney, Scott Horton, declined to comment.

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, ARTNews may receive an affiliate commission.

A leather cover on your notebook makes what is otherwise an everyday object luxurious, a big boost on your first day of fall classes. And high-quality leather will weather over time to show off just how much you’ve loved it. These days, it’s easy to find a range of designs and price points, as well as vegan options. Whether you are using your notebook as a diary, for jotting down notes, or for sketching, our picks below will make the task more enjoyable. A note: The nicest notebooks and covers usually come in European sizes, like the useful A5, which is 5 7/8 by 8 1/4 inches. A4 (8 1/4 by 11 3/4 inches) is also handy if you are looking for a larger size.

How we pick each product:
Our mission is to recommend the most appropriate artists’ tool or supply for your needs. Whether you are looking for top-of-the line equipment or beginners’ basics, we’ll make sure that you get good value for your money by doing the research for you. We scour the Internet for information on how art supplies are used and read customer reviews by real users; we ask experts for their advice; and of course, we rely on our own accumulated expertise as artists, teachers, and craftspeople.

ARTnews RECOMMENDS
Traveler’s Company Traveler’s Notebook Starter Kit

Traveler’s Company, formerly a division of Japanese brand Midori and now an independent entity, makes a sumptuous and superslim leather notebook cover. It comes in several colors, including camel and blue, and in two sizes: a regular size, which measures about 4 3/4 by 8 3/4 inches, and a smaller passport size. Covers come prefilled with a notebook featuring blank Midori MD paper that is satisfyingly smooth and bleed-resistant (even with fountain pens), and refills are available for both sizes in a range of sheet styles, including lined, graph, and calendar. The notebook is held in place with a simple yet sturdy elastic band; another band goes around the cover horizontally to keep it closed. Each cover is handmade and develops a beautiful patina as you use it, making this a lightweight, indulgent option that still lands on the lower price of the leather notebook price spectrum. 

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The Headlines

NOT FOR SALE. After facing intense pressure in some corners, Christie’s is canceling its planned sales of late collector Heidi Horten’s jewelry, Artnet News’s Katya Kazakina reports. Some Jewish groups claimed that Christie’s had tried to hide information about Horten’s husband, Helmut Horten, who was a member of the Nazi Party during World War II. The controversy mounted and mounted over the past few months. Christie’s moved forward with one sale in May, netting $200 million in the process; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art called off a conference hosted by the house amid the fallout. Now, there will be no more auctions of the sort. “The sale of the Heidi Horten jewelry collection has provoked intense scrutiny, and the reaction to it has deeply affected us and many others, and we will continue to reflect on it,” Anthea Peers, President of Christie’s EMEA.

MAKING RETURNS. The lawyer David Rowland, who worked to bring Nazi-looted artworks back to their Jewish heirs, has died at 67, according to the New York Times. One of the many cases he worked involved an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting held by New York’s Museum of Modern Art; it was returned after a decade-long period to the heirs of collector Max Fischer in 2015. Meanwhile, a New York judge has ordered the seizure of an ancient Roman sculpture from Ohio’s Cleveland Museum of Art, per Cleveland.com. The judge said the work may be related to an investigation into the trafficking of antiquities in Turkey. The sculpture is said to be worth $20 million.

The Digest

The 2024 election cycle looks like it will feature not one, but two late-30s contrarians who got their start rapping about libertarianism on elite college campuses. The first is Vivek Ramaswamy, the self-funder now enjoying a “breakout moment” in a presidential primary completely dominated by Donald Trump. The other is Blake Masters, who is reportedly planning another run for US Senate in Arizona after losing to Sen. Mark Kelly by five points in 2022. 

Masters’ reasons for running again are not altogether obvious. His hard-right Senate campaign last year, which was bankrolled by his mentor and former boss Peter Thiel, defined how Republicans squandered the 2022 midterms by nominating candidates far out of step with voters. Masters called abortion “genocide,” repeatedly responded to news about gay people by saying “not everything has to be gay,” and published unsettling clips of himself shooting guns in the desert. The campaign deeply disturbed former close friends from his private day school and Stanford, who didn’t recognize the man they saw in the ominous videos. (Masters said he was inspired by the aesthetics of Terrence Malick, a director best known for a film about a sociopathic killing spree.)

This is not to say Masters had no fans. Last year, I reported that Masters had once written an email to his vegetarian coop at Stanford in which he called democracy “that miserably peculiar American diety [sic].” In another, he recommended an article that advocated for “the abdication of democracy” and replacing it with a world in which the masses accepted a “natural order” led by a “voluntarily acknowledged ‘natural’ elite—a nobilitas naturalis.” 

A poster named Pedro Gonzalez responded to those revelations on Twitter by writing, “This actually makes Blake Masters look great.” Less than a year later, it was reported that Gonzalez, who’d become one of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ biggest boosters online, had sent countless racist and antisemitic text messages. (A representative sample: “whites themselves are too cucked to preserve their own civilizations.”) 

Another Masters fan was Nate Hochman, the twentysomething DeSantis staffer who was fired after it came out that he’d secretly made a pro-DeSantis video featuring the sonnenrad symbol used by Nazis and neo-Nazis. Yet another supporter was Curtis Yarvin, the self-identified absolute monarchist blogger who gave the first and only campaign donation of his life to Masters.

Marcus, Jim and Luke are back to look ahead to the Premier League weekend and react to an England squad with some familiar faces. Yeah, maybe a little too familiar…

Plus, we ask what medieval structure Kenilworth Road will be this season and there are unconfirmed reports that Andy Brassell is a monster. Join us to kick off the weekend!

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The California African American Museum in Los Angeles said on Thursday that it could not reopen for the time being due to heavy rains that struck the city earlier this month.

“As we survey and repair the damage to our building, we now know we must remain closed at least through October,” the museum wrote in a statement. “Public programs slated to happen at CAAM in September and October are postponed.”

No other major Los Angeles museums have been quite as severely impacted by Tropical Storm Hilary, which hit California on August 21. By some estimates, it was the first time that a tropical storm had made landfall in the region since 1939.

Although the storm’s damage was expected to much more severe—it was called a hurricane at first, and then was downgraded—it still brought around 5 inches of rain to some coastal areas and more than double that to ones in the mountains. There were no fatalities in California as a result of the storm.

A spokesperson for CAAM told the Los Angeles Times that “water intrusion occurred in some areas of our building.”