Kask launches the new Utopia Y road helmet – Cyclingnews

Kask has launched a new version of its popular Utopia helmet, the Utopia Y. The Utopia was released in 2018 in collaboration with Ineos Grenadiers and the new Utopia Y picks up where the original model left off. The Kask Protone helmet also features in our best road bike helmets guide.

Kask says the Utopia Y pushes the boundaries of aerodynamics and ventilation in a restyled design. Both were key considerations for the design of the original Utopia and Kask says these elements continue to feature. The brand says this makes the Utopia Y an essential helmet for road races and triathlons, where speed is key.

The Utopia Y also features what Kask calls Resistex carbon padding. A breathable material that will move moisture to the outer helmet shell. This has been fitted to the front of the helmet to help produce an optimum fit.

The Utopia Y also receives a new OCTOFIT+ adjustment system, which Kask says will guarantee greater comfort and stability. A new, larger rotation dial that is coated in a special rubber features, which the brand says will increase grip and ergonomics. This new retention system is also said to envelop a wider area across the nape of the neck.

There are also reflective graphics to aid visibility whilst cycling in traffic and a Kask logo on the side of the outer shell replicating the helmets being used by current professional athletes.

The Utopia Y, as is standard for all Kask helmets, complies with their rotational impact WG11 test, which is an internal test to measure a helmet's performance against rotational impacts.

The Utopia Y is available in a range of colours including gloss and matte white and black options as well as oxford blue, red and grey.

The Utopia Y weighs in at a claimed 260 grams for a size Medium and is on sale worldwide priced at 245 / $300 / 275 / AUD$410.

For more information head to http://www.kask.com (opens in new tab)

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Kask launches the new Utopia Y road helmet - Cyclingnews

First look | Kask bids to improve on Utopia with new Y aero helmet – BikeRadar

Kask has updated its Utopia aero helmet with a successor, called the Utopia Y.

When the Utopia aero road helmet was launched in 2018, it was designed to balance aerodynamics and ventilation, sitting alongside the Protone Icon and Valegro as Kasks pro-level options.

From the outset, Kask does not make any aero or ventilation claims with this updated version.

The Utopia Y uses a new arrangement of Resistex Carbon padding at the front of the helmet, which Kask claims improves comfort. This padding is said to be a breathable material that allows the dissipation of moisture to the outer shell.

The Resistex padding now forms a brow around the front of the head. Oscar Huckle / Our Media

The Utopia Y weighs 258g in a size medium on our Scales of Truth (2g lighter than claimed).

Kask is also debuting its new Octofit+ adjustment system, which replaces Octofit.

According to the Italian brand, the new retention system envelops a wider area across the back of the neck. It also relies on a larger rotation dial coated in a special rubber to improve grip and ease of use. The result, it says, is improved comfort and stability.

Has Kask reached Utopia? Oscar Huckle / Our Media

Kasks faux leather chin strap design remains. Its purported to improve comfort and reduce irritation.

Kask continues to forgo using MIPS technology in its helmets; the Utopia Y passes its own WG11 internal testing protocol, which sees the helmet impacted at five different points at a velocity of 6m/s. This includes impacts to the front, front lateral, side, rear and rear lateral points of the helmet.

The Utopia Y is available in an array of colours White Matt, White Shine, Black Matt, Black Shine, Oxford Blue, Red and Grey, with a modified application of its branded graphics.

The helmet will retail for 245 / $300 / 275 / AU$410 and is available in sizes S to L.

The Utopia Y has a sleek profile. Oscar Huckle / Our Media

Senior technical editor Ashley Quinlan has spent some time with the helmet ahead of its launch. These are his first impressions:

The Utopia Y would appear to be a case if it aint broke, dont fix it.

The outer shell remains practically identical to the old Utopia. The vents are in the same place and the same size, too.

Visibly, the only obvious change is to the graphic placement, along with the inclusion of two small reflective tabs under the rear vents.

The Black Shine colour scheme is certainly shiny. Oscar Huckle / Our Media

Perhaps indicatively, Kask doesnt claim any improvements in aero or cooling performance, but under the hood theres more going on that so far would seem to improve the overall package.

The internal padding now forms a brow around the front of the head (much like the Mojito 3, moving away from the design still used for the Valegro), which is said to improve fit. In reality, this could also improve comfort, as well as avoid excess sweat rolling down the face when the weather heats up.

Perhaps the biggest improvement will prove to be the inclusion of Octofit+, which is said to offer a wider range of adjustment.

Certainly, it can pull down further over the back of the head, while the adjustment dial adjusts very competently with positive clicks to bring a secure (and comfortable) cradling fit.

While the Octofit+ system undeniably improves the fit, the dial feels a little cheap compared to the competition. Oscar Huckle / Our Media

The dial looks and feels a little cheap compared to, for example, the comfortable leather chin strap and sleek lines of the overall design but this is a niggle that probably wont matter to the vast majority of riders.

Well continue to test the Utopia Y over the coming weeks and deliver a full review soon.

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First look | Kask bids to improve on Utopia with new Y aero helmet - BikeRadar

Kask Utopia Y – we test the aero model’s latest iteration – Yahoo Sports

Side view of the Kask Utopia Y bike helmet

Today Kask has launched the Utopia Y, which is a substantive redesign of the highly acclaimed Utopia model, combining aerodynamics with aesthetically pleasing looks.

There are no claims that it's faster than the outgoing model, though. What we do know is that it's claimed to pack in some useful user-friendly features, with revamped ventilation ranking highly amongst those.

Looking every bit the part in the new Utopia Y, I put the helmet through its paces on my daily training to see what all the fuss is really about with this new performance orientated lid.

Rear of the Kask Utopia Y bike helmet

At the back of the helmet you will find a bigger dial with grippers to make tightening up the helmet much easier: at first I wasnt convinced but it actually turned out to be a really great feature, especially for clumsy hands like mine.

Internally you will find generous padded inserts which are incredibly soft, helping to achieve very high levels of comfort. Not to mention, with my very sensitive skin, the helmet strap (which is made from synthetic leather around the chin) or padding neither irritated my skin nor caused a break-out - which is something I find often occurs from helmets.

Internal padding of the Kask Utopia Y bike helmet

The Utopia Y has also passed the Kask Rotational Impact Test, which is its own testing protocol to ensure that the helmet effectively protects the brain during rotational impacts. This is something I admittedly didnt actually try out as luckily I stayed upright during testing.

Female cyclist wearing the Kask Utopia Y bike helmet

I found that the Utopia Y fitted pretty well, especially regarding the straps which were really easy to adjust: not fiddly at all. However, I did feel that in size M the helmet felt somewhat roomy after fully tightening the ratchet at the back.

This was something which surprised me, given that my M size Kask Protone fits like a glove. Therefore I would definitely suggest trying on the helmet before splashing out, but other than that I didnt have any issues and found it very comfortable and lightweight.

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If you didnt already check yourself out in windows while riding past, you certainly will once you pop this lid on your head, wow. Undoubtedly this looks the part, its really a great design and feels both fast and lightweight.

I also enjoyed having fewer vents in torrential downpours as I found my hair stayed much drier and thus kept me a lot more comfortable than when I wear more vented helmets. Still, on warmer days when doing efforts, I didnt overheat which I was pleasantly surprised about.

Overall, I really like this helmet. I felt that it performed well in a range of weather conditions and rides, making it a great all-round option for performance-focused road cyclists who are willing to fork out more for a high-end helmet.

I also think it looks really great. Something I feel other aero road helmets seem to struggle with: often looking a bit mushroom-like and bulky. But the Kask Utopia Y is genuinely a really good looking helmet, which is of course important for style conscious riders.

But, as mentioned, it certainly isnt the cheapest helmet on the market with an RRP of $300.00 / 245.00. But when compared to its competitors, namely the Lazer Vento KinetiCore which is $299.99 / 259.99 and the Specialized S-Works Prevail 3 at $300.00 / 275.00, Id say its pretty fairly priced given the quality and performance. With the Lazer coming in at 291g for a size M and the Specialized being 280g in size M, the Utopia Y is also lighter than both at 260g, which is rather impressive for an aerodynamic road helmet.

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Kask Utopia Y - we test the aero model's latest iteration - Yahoo Sports

The Professional Utopians: On J. Bradford DeLong’s Slouching … – lareviewofbooks

DURING THE PAST 150 years, the human race grew fabulously rich. This was an accident. The notion that ordinary people could be made prosperouslet alone that this could become a conscious projectwould have, for most of history, seemed daffy. Yet it happened, and today a guild of specialists argues over how to keep the process going. They are called economists, but that term is overbroad. The subset Im describing are the ones advising, and in some cases deploying, government power.

J. Bradford DeLongs new book, Slouching Towards Utopia, is subtitled An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. But it is not really a history of the economy so much as a history of economic policymaking, what worked and what didntwhere work means not only further enriching the already rich but also making the lives of average people better. Its heroes are the professional utopians, the policymakers who have figured out how to deliver on that project. DeLongs polemical aim is to show that the process has recently stalled, and to review what weve learned so we can get back on track. The book is comprehensive, beautifully written, and fun to read. DeLong has a gift for filling out abstract concepts with memorable stories. One only wishes that his history had a happier ending.

The narrative ought to be one of triumph: [L]ess than 9 percent of humanity lives at or below the roughly $2-a-day living standard we think of as extreme poverty, down from approximately 70 percent in 1870. Today, [t]here are more than enough calories produced in the world, so it is not necessary for anybody to be hungry. There is more than enough shelter on the globe, so it is not necessary for anybody to be wet, and [t]here is more than enough clothing in our warehouses, so it is not necessary for anybody to be cold. Yet utopia has not arrived.

Sometimes blunders by officials made tough times tougher. When he was chancellor of the Exchequer in 1925, Winston Churchill returned England to the gold standard, which caused deflation and widespread unemployment. In the United States, the Federal Reserve clamped down on the money supply in 1929 after the stock market crashed, a decision that only deepened the Great Depression. The Soviet Union was a decades-long study in mismanagement, whose pathologies DeLong concisely anatomizes. China under Mao Zedong was even worse. For a long time, governments had little clue as to how to regulate the un-self-regulating market to maintain prosperity, to ensure opportunity, or to produce substantial equality. But were more sophisticated now. We managed to avoid complete disaster in 2008. Surely we can do better?

The deeper problem is twofold: [M]aterial prosperity is unevenly distributed around the globe to a gross, even criminal, extent, and material wealth does not make people happy in a world where politicians and others prosper mightily from finding new ways to make and keep people unhappy.

DeLong has some intriguing ideas about what has driven the process of economic growth, which he presents with tantalizing brevity. For instance, he claims without much elaboration that the source of the great spurt in prosperity was the arrival in 1870 of full globalization, the industrial research laboratory, and the modern corporation. The result, he estimates, is that the annual growth in the global stock of useful ideas about manipulating nature and organizing humans [] shot up from about 0.45 percent per year before 1870 to 2.1 percent per year afterward, truly a watershed boundary-crossing difference. One of the books great strengths is its mapping of the big things we still dont understand, such as why industrialization took so long to spread to South America and Africa. DeLong offers some representative sketches: the sad stories of underdevelopment in India, Egypt, and China; the luckier fate of Japan in the 19th century; and the postWorld War II failures in Nigeria, Argentina, and Iran.

DeLongs portrait of modern capitalism is admirably balanced, recognizing both the spectacular innovation it has produced and its spectacular failings. These aspects, he observes, are unavoidably intertwined. Innovation has casualties. He cites Joseph Schumpeter, who famously wrote, in his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, that capitalism is characterized by creative destruction, driven by the new consumers goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. This process incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.

As a result, growth does not benefit everyone. With the Reaganite move toward neoliberal free trade, economic risk in the United States has been shifted to workers and their families. As Jacob Hacker details in the 2019 expanded edition of his book The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, jobs have become less secure, and a college degree no longer reliably guarantees middle-class status. Lane Kenworthy reports in Social Democratic Capitalism (2019) that 15 to 20 percent of Americans, in any given year, will experience a 25 percent drop in income, and about one-third do not recover to their prior income level even a full decade later. While the country is indubitably richer, many Americans are worse off than their parents were.

The obvious solution is to figure out how to redistribute the gains without slowing the growth. DeLong observes that the neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek had a Jekyll-Hyde aspect: he understood the productive potential of the market while resisting any attempt to ameliorate its distributive pathologies, and he has, alas, been influential on both counts. The market economy is pretty good at giving those who own propertythat is, property with market valuewhat they think they want. It cant even do that without a robust state, because it cannot by itself deliver enough research and development, for example, or environmental quality, or, indeed, full and stable employment. The 20th centurys big success stories always had the state as a backstop. Hitler stumbled upon the macroeconomic benefits of deficit spending years before Roosevelt didin both cases, as it turned out, on the military. After World War II, the Marshall Plan didnt do much to boost investment in Europe, but it gave European countries a pool of resources that could be used to cushion the wealth losses sustained in restructuringand to soothe disappointed expectations from groups of labor and capitalists and landlords who thought they were not getting their proper shares of the pie.

The book is particularly good at explaining abstruse macroeconomic concepts. For instance, DeLong makes a persuasive case that what happened from 2007 to 2009 was a Minskyite depression (named for economist Hyman Minsky), in which a shortage of safe assets creates a crisis of confidence. It is a technical problem with a technical fix (which he describes but which is too complicated to elaborate here). The fix wasnt handled well, and the effects of that bungling persist. In the United States, over the entire decade of 20062016, measured real GDP per capita grew at a pace of only 0.6 percent per yeara shocking falloff from anything that had been seen earlier in the long twentieth century. Western Europe similarly stagnated.

The core promise of what Deirdre Nansen McCloskey calls, in her 2016 book Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, the Great Enrichment is that it can provide a better life for everyone. (McCloskey dates its beginning to 1800, but DeLong shows that it was only in 1870 that rates of poverty began to plunge.) It turns out that in order for that to happen, ordinary people have to somehow form an alliance with the professional utopians.

The inadequate response to the 2008 recession demonstrates the difficulties of developing such an alliance. The stimulus staved off absolute disaster, but it was not big enough to prevent long-term damage that continues to this day. DeLong does not grasp the political reasons for that failure. He blames Barack Obama for not pursuing deficit spending more aggressively: Starting in 2009, the US government could borrow for thirty years at a real interest rate of 1 percent per year or less. [] Yet Obama seemed completely uninterested. Actually, Obama was quite interested and fought to enact as large a stimulus as he could get. But the votes werent there for more, especially in the Senate. Joe Biden, then vice president, told a reporter: I love the left saying, well, we couldve gotten more. Okay, you go get it. You tell me how to get the sixty votes. Obama knew he was talking nonsense by calling for austerity when unemployment exceeded nine percent: Just as families and companies have had to be cautious about spending, government must tighten its belt as well. Extensive polling and focus groups had persuaded the White House that voters had imbibed the idiotic story that deficit reduction was the path to more jobs.

DeLong acknowledges that, after the Republicans took the House of Representatives in 2010, it promptly turned off the spigot of fiscal stimulus. Its not clear whether this is because they didnt understand macroeconomics or because they understood very well and hoped to deny Obama an economic recovery before 2012 election. Either explanation depends on popular incomprehension of how a Keynesian stimulus works. Obama decided that there was no hope of fixing that, so instead he pandered to it. This might have been his best option.

Genuinely democratic control over the economy wont be possible until the lower classes whom the economists want to help have some defense against quack remedies. Trump, whose electoral victory crucially depended on working-class votes, offered tax cuts for the rich, climate-change denial, and random regulatory rollbacks, largely uninformed by technocratic calculation of benefits and costs. The institutions that used to mediate between the least educated citizens and their government have become weaker and smaller than they once were. As a result, many of those citizens end up getting their information from Fox News. Workers were once clearer about their interests. During the New Deal, one mill worker declared: Mr. Roosevelt is the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a son-of-a-bitch. Today, many of those workers vote for Republicanspoliticians who work for that mans boss.

As Jake Rosenfeld details in his 2014 book What Unions No Longer Do, the decline of labor unions over the past several decades has only served to accelerate economic inequality, promoting the growth of new monopolies and exacerbating the disproportionate political power of the rich. That skewing of politics will persist until new centers of information and political organization develop that represent the interests of people who are not rich. The professional utopians need institutions that are invested in promoting clarity, in order to counter all the institutions that are mere factories of confusion and rage. DeLongs book is a small step in that direction. Its target audience is not the working class, but it isnt the professional economists either. Rather, it aims at a broad, curious publicprecisely the readership for whom economics needs to become less mysterious.

Andrew Koppelman, John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University, is the author of Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed (St. Martins Press, 2022). Follow him on Twitter @AndrewKoppelman.

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The Professional Utopians: On J. Bradford DeLong's Slouching ... - lareviewofbooks

Pagani Shows Off The New Utopia In Mantua, Italy – duPont REGISTRY News

Mar 27, 2023 at 12:50pm ET

The new Pagani Utopia is the latest stunning hypercar from the celebrated manufacturer, known for combining the futuristic use of carbon fiber, performance technology, and advanced engineering with avant-garde looks, traditional craftsmanship, and classic performance car ethos into vehicles that are truly one-of-a-kind. With an available manual transmission and Paganis amazing signature V12 engine, the Utopia is not just a true Pagani but one of the best yet.

With just 99 examples of the car being made, its a rare and incredible sight, almost like the hypothetical Utopia its named after, and its appearance in the idyllic and historic location of Mantua, Italy made for the perfect backdrop for the monumental exotic car. With centuries of Italian history, Mantua features beautiful locations and scenes for the Utopia, and while the Utopia and Pagani have much less history, the inspirations behind both the car and the brand span across decades and centuries, which is what makes Pagani and the new Pagani Utopia such special parts of the automotive world.

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Source: Pagani via YouTube

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Pagani Shows Off The New Utopia In Mantua, Italy - duPont REGISTRY News

The smart city is a perpetually unrealized utopia – MIT Technology Review

What is interesting about both early and current visions of urban sensing networks and the use that could be made of the data they produced is how close to and yet how far away they are from Constants concept of what such technologies would bring about. New Babylons technological imagery was a vision of a smart city not marked, like IBMs, by large-scale data extraction to increase revenue streams through everything from parking and shopping to health care and utility monitoring. New Babylon was unequivocally anticapitalist; it was formed by the belief that pervasive and aware technologies would somehow, someday, release us from the drudgery of labor.

The apocalyptic news broadcast from Mariupol, Kharkiv, Izium, Kherson, and Kyiv since February 2022 seems remote from the smart urbanism of IBM. After all, smart sensors and sophisticated machine-learning algorithms are no match for the brute force of the unguided dumb bombs raining down on Ukrainian urban centers. But the horrific images from these smoldering cities should also remind us that historically, these very sensor networks and systems themselves derive from the context of war.

Unbeknownst to Constant, the very ambient technologies he imagined to enable the new playful citywere actually emerging in the same period his vision was taking shapefrom Cold Warfueled research at the US Department of Defense. This work reached its height during the Vietnam War, when in an effort to stop supply chains flowing from north to south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the US Army dropped some 20,000 battery-powered wireless acoustic sensors, advancing General William Westmorelands vision of near 24-hour real- or near-real-time surveillance of all types. In fact, what the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) would later call network-centric warfare was the result of multibillion-dollar funding at MIT and Carnegie Mellon, among other elite US universities, to support research into developing distributed wireless sensor networksthe very technologies now powering greater lethality for the militarys smartest technology.

MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES

It is well known that technologies originally developed by DARPA, the storied agency responsible for catalyzing the development of technologies that maintain and advance the capabilities and technical superiority of the US military (as a congressional report put it), have been successfully repurposed for civilian use. ARPANET eventually became the Internet, while technologies such as Siri, dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), and the micro hard drive are by now features of everyday life. What is less known is that DARPA-funded technologies have also ended up in the smart city: GPS, mesh networks for smart lighting systems and energy grids, and chemical, biological, and radiological sensors, including genetically reengineered plants that can detect threats. This link between smart cities and military research is highly active today. For example, a recent DARPA research program called CASCADE (Complex Adaptive System Composition and Design Environment) explicitly compares manned and unmanned aircraft, which share data and resources in real time thanks to connections over wireless networks, to the critical infrastructure systems of smart citieswater, power, transportation, communications, and cyber. Both, it notes, apply the mathematical techniques of complex dynamic systems. A DARPA tweet puts this link more provocatively: What do smart cities and air warfare have in common? The need for complex, adaptive networks.

Both these visionsthe sensor-studded battlefield and the instrumented, interconnected, intelligent city enabled by the technologies of distributed sensing and massive data miningseem to lack a central ingredient: human bodies, which are always the first things to be sacrificed, whether on the battlefield or in the data extraction machinery of smart technologies.

Spaces and environments outfitted with sensor networks can now perceive environmental changeslight, temperature, humidity, sound, or motionthat move over and through a space. In this sense the networks are something akin to bodies, because they are aware of the changing environmental conditions around themmeasuring, making distinctions, and reacting to these changes. But what of actual people? Is there another role for us in the smart city apart from serving as convenient repositories of data? In his 1980 book Practice of Everyday Life, the Jesuit social historian Michel de Certeau suggested that resistance to the celestial eye of power from above must be met by the force of ordinary practitioners of the city who live down below.

When we assume that data is more important than the people who created it, we reduce the scope and potential of what diverse human bodies can bring to the smart city of the present and future. But the real smart city consists not only of commodity flows and information networks generating revenue streams for the likes of Cisco or Amazon. The smartness comes from the diverse human bodies of different genders, cultures, and classes whose rich, complex, and even fragile identities ultimately make the city what it is.

Chris Salter is an artist and professor of immersive arts at the Zurich University of the Arts. His newest book, Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape Our Everyday Life, has just been published by MIT Press.

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The smart city is a perpetually unrealized utopia - MIT Technology Review

The Swansea bar that’s re-opening as an LGBT+ venue – Wales Online

Swansea's LGBT+ scene has had its ups and downs with a number of venues coming and then quickly going again. But one re-opening is hoped to change that. Utopia - a cocktail bar familiar to many - has come under new management and wants to be a colourful home for LGBT+ communities to thrive.

Utopia opened in October last year in Little Wind Street, but was not specifically catered towards the LGBT+ community. It featured large neon lights, a penny piece bar counter and large artificial trees 'growing' out of the bar in a space uniquely designed to be a social media hub for party-goers at the start or end of their nights out. The new bar was labelled a bar "with a difference" at the time.

The new management are aiming to make sure that all LGBT+ people can feel at ease there. They are providing sensitivity training to security staff to improve the treatment of trans and non-binary people, and employing various queer acts. You can get more what's on news and other story updates by subscribing to our newsletters here.

READ MORE: Welsh LGBT+ filmmaker nominated for Digital Broadcast award

General Manager, Matthew Thom, told WalesOnline he was hoping the space would become a place for the LGBT+ community to feel safe.

"I was given the opportunity to re-open as a drag bar. I wasn't keen to do just that, I wanted to open up a completely LGBT+ friendly venue. I wanted to do this from the get go as there's really not anywhere people can go when it comes to an LGBT+ venue in Swansea," he said.

"I'm not reinventing the wheel or anything. But I'm doing things at the moment that add to it becoming a safer space. For example, we're making our toilets all gender neutral, because I don't see the need to have male and female toilets. Our door staff have had elements of sensitivity training when it comes to checking people's IDs if they're trans.

"We're looking to get a lot of queer performers and artists in, not just drag queens, because I'm really interesting in getting people like queer poets. I want [Utopia] to be actively involved with the community. I want to try and actually give back to the community in Swansea." You can read more stories about Swansea here.

Utopia bar is now open, and more information can be found via its social media here.

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The Swansea bar that's re-opening as an LGBT+ venue - Wales Online

Opinion | Technology and the Triumph of Pessimism – The New York Times

One of the best-selling novels of the 19th century was a work of what wed now call speculative fiction: Edward Bellamys Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Bellamy was one of the first prominent figures to recognize that rapid technological progress had become an enduring feature of modern life and he imagined that this progress would vastly improve human happiness.

In one scene, his protagonist, who has somehow been transported from the 1880s to 2000, is asked if he would like to hear some music; to his astonishment his hostess uses what we would now call a speakerphone to let him listen to a live orchestral performance, one of four then in progress. And he suggests that having such easy access to entertainment would represent the limit of human felicity.

Well, over the past few days Ive watched several shows on my smart TV I havent made up my mind yet about the new season of Westworld and also watched several live musical performances. And let me say, I find access to streamed entertainment a major source of enjoyment. But the limit of felicity? Not so much.

Ive also read recently about how both sides in the Russia-Ukraine war are using precision long-range missiles guided by more or less the same technology that makes streaming possible to strike targets deep behind each others lines. For what its worth, Im very much rooting for Ukraine here, and it seems significant that the Ukrainians seem to be striking ammunition dumps while the Russians are carrying out terror attacks on shopping malls. But the larger point is that while technology can bring a lot of satisfaction, it can also enable new forms of destruction. And humanity has, sad to say, exploited that new ability on a massive scale.

My reference to Edward Bellamy comes from a forthcoming book, Slouching Towards Utopia, by Brad DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The book is a magisterial history of what DeLong calls the long 20th century, running from 1870 to 2010, an era that he says surely correctly was shaped overwhelmingly by the economic consequences of technological progress.

Why start in 1870? As DeLong points out, and many of us already knew, for the great bulk of human history roughly 97 percent of the time that has elapsed since the first cities emerged in ancient Mesopotamia Malthus was right: There were many technological innovations over the course of the millenniums, but the benefits of these innovations were always swallowed up by population growth, driving living standards for most people back down to the edge of subsistence.

There were occasional bouts of economic progress that temporarily outpaced what DeLong calls Malthuss devil indeed, modern scholarship suggests there was a significant rise in per-capita income during the early Roman Empire. But these episodes were always temporary. And as late as the 1860s, many smart observers believed the progress that had taken place under the Industrial Revolution would prove equally transitory.

Around 1870, however, the world entered an era of sustained rapid technological development that was unlike anything that had happened before; each successive generation found itself living in a new world, utterly transformed from the world into which its parents had been born.

As DeLong argues, there are two great puzzles about this transformation puzzles that are highly relevant to the situation in which we now find ourselves.

The first is why this happened. DeLong argues that there were three great meta-innovations (my term, not his) innovations that enabled innovation itself. These were the rise of large corporations, the invention of the industrial research lab and globalization. We could, I think, argue the details here. More important, however, is the suggestion from DeLong and others that the engines of rapid technological progress may be slowing down.

The second is why all this technological progress hasnt made society better than it has. One thing I hadnt fully realized until reading Slouching Towards Utopia is the extent to which progress hasnt brought felicity. Over the 140 years DeLong surveys, there have been only two eras during which the Western world felt generally optimistic about the way things were going. (The rest of the world is a whole other story.)

The first such era was the 40 or so years leading up to 1914, when people began to realize just how much progress was being made and started to take it for granted. Unfortunately, that era of optimism died in fire, blood and tyranny, with technology enhancing rather than mitigating the horror (coincidentally, today is the 108th anniversary of Archduke Ferdinands assassination).

The second era was the 30 glorious years, the decades after World War II when social democracy a market economy with its rough edges smoothed off by labor unions and a strong social safety net seemed to be producing not Utopia, but the most decent societies humanity had ever known. But that era, too, came to an end, partly in the face of economic setbacks, but even more so in the face of ever more bitter politics, including the rise of right-wing extremism that is now putting democracy itself at risk.

It would be silly to say that the incredible progress of technology since 1870 has done nothing to improve things; in many ways the median American today has a far better life than the richest oligarchs of the Gilded Age. But the progress that brought us on-demand streaming music hasnt made us satisfied or optimistic. DeLong offers some explanations for this disconnect, which I find interesting but not wholly persuasive. But his book definitely asks the right questions and teaches us a lot of crucial history along the way.

A bit harder than my usual tastes, but you have to love a song whose chorus is partly in binary code.

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Opinion | Technology and the Triumph of Pessimism - The New York Times

How to get the Raft Temperance code – PCGamesN

Looking for the Raft Temperance code? This snowy island is a new landmark in the ocean-based survival game Raft. The vast, icy region becomes an important location near the end of the main storyline, but in order to reach it, you have to find the coordinates. As the location code is randomised, we cant just give you a number; you have to find it yourself. No worries, this Temperance guide will lend you a hand.

And its not just about getting to the island, once there youll likely find yourself searching for a Raft Temperance code in order to finish the islands main story and reach Utopia. The Temperance coordinates are hidden in the previous landmark location: Varuna Point. This note is inside the lower building, but you need to use the large crane to create an opening. Since the crane is missing its Crane Key, your first task is to explore the larger building until you find it. Dive into the water and look for the colourful jellyfish to find the entrance.

Once youve got the Crane Key, climb up the Crane and throw the boulder. Then use a zip line to land on the smaller island, where youll find the Temperance coordinates laying on top of a desk in one of the lower rooms. Time to go back to your Raft and set sail for the Temperance!

Fair warning: it will take some time to clear Temperance island. Besides watching out for ice bears, heres a general overview of everything else you should do:

And thats it! Open the Reactor Room to find the Utopia coordinates, the Electric Smelter blueprint, and a new playable character: Shogo. Off to Utopia then! Looking for a different type of indie experience? Check out our list of the best indie games to find something unique to play. If you want to unlock new people for your crew, read our Raft characters guide to get some more.

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How to get the Raft Temperance code - PCGamesN

Supply Chain Issues Are Creating A Food America Environmentalists Want – And That’s Bad – Science 2.0

In the 1960s and '70s, population apocalypse stories were popular. Movies like "Soylent Green" and books like "The Population Bomb" and "Ecoscience" provided dystopian views of the future, where science would fail and government would be forced to get drastic, with forced sterilization and abortion needed until the number of people got down to a limit farming could sustain.

That never happened. Progress did. Companies created new agricultural tools, herbicides were created that avoided resistance. Then we got GMOs. First in insulin, then they saved the papaya in Hawaii, and then we got common products like corn, soybean, and cotton. Food got more plentiful and more affordable.

Environmentalists and their media allies railed against progress every step of the way. One group even monetized that scaremongering. Non-GMO Project sells stickers for 70,000 products despite the number of actual GMO products being countable on your fingers. They claim their food is 'natural' despite including food made using mutagenesis while competitors of organic are "Frankenfood."

The Utopia they sell to wealthy elites just failed in Sri Lanka, which listened to White Saviors in foreign activists groups and abandoned common sense for the organic manufacturing process, and the US is also about to have higher costs for food due to supply chain shortages. Supply shortages that will lead to food shortages and higher costs like we'd have if we also adopted the organic food mantra.(1)

The signs are already there. The cost of generic glufosinate (Liberty) is up 300 percent while glyphosate(Roundup) is up about the same amount. It's not like farmers can switch to dicamba because a few farmers who applied it incorrectly got a whole new wave of regulations tacked onto it.(2) California, which practically has lobbyists for Environmental Working Group and others living in their Sacramento offices, even got it banned in the wilderness using a sympathetic San Francisco Court and the argument that the state did not do individual studies in dozens of different areas of California. 'Needs more testing' is a common refrain of anti-science activists. And it works when no science evidence is needed for a court decision.

Labor, supply shortages, distribution shortages, it was all avoidable but will take years to recover from, because weeds take years to kill. Farmers know that. Activists do not. The glib response from politicians and people who work in offices and spend too much time on Twitter is always some form of 'greedy companies need to pay more' but most farmers have contracts. They can't just tell grocery stores prices are going up 300% without members of Congress making them travel to DC to get yelled at while cameras are rolling. And 2 million farms are only companies in the strict sense of the word. They are instead family-owned farms whose only shareholders are members of the immediate family and an alarming number of them make just enough in profit to pay the taxes on their land.

What environmentalist would work if they paid 100 percent taxes on their income? Yet because their only tractor has been a keyboard playing Farming Simulator 2019 they can confidently tell farmers and companies supplying crop protection tools they need to do more with less.

We can hope this turns around but mismanagement by the Treasury Department, and Federal Reserve, and the White House to-date make the pro-science community hope they just get out of the way.

Companies, for their part, are trying to lock in raw materials now. They will still need trucks and boats to deliver products so that will be a bottleneck but they know they have to try something. Though critics will claim higher profits are a good thing, the same can be said for states that make more money in taxes when gas prices are high - the difference is that companies know a lot of demand means a company could come along and replace them. Just like politicians worry voters will do in November.

NOTES:

(1) Centralized control politicians are learning that economies are not knobs they can turn without impact. While it is great political theater to tell oil companies to cut supply - "or else" - telling them two months later they need to increase supply - or else - looks ridiculous. No CEO at any company is going to spend money on new plants when the party controlling both Congress and the White House summoned them to Washington, D.C. three times in four months to suggest they were going to jail if they didn't produce less oil. Such political theater costs House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY 12th District) nothing, she'll get 80 percent of the vote in her district because she'll brag about hating corporations - but it costs the public billions of dollars when she gets her way.

(2) California practically has lobbyists for Environmental Working Group and others living in their Sacramento offices and even got it banned in the wilderness - using a sympathetic San Francisco Court, the most overturned at the Supreme Court in the entire US - because the state did not do individual studies in dozens of different areas of California.

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Supply Chain Issues Are Creating A Food America Environmentalists Want - And That's Bad - Science 2.0

The Real Dangers of Conspiracy Fiction CrimeReads – CrimeReads

On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh, a former Army soldier, parked a Ryder rental truck outside the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. The truck was loaded with a two-ton ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel bomb. McVeigh lit two timed fuses and stole away in a getaway car. At 9:02 A.M., the bomb exploded, obliterating the buildings faade and pancaking nine floors of office space. One hundred and sixty-eight people were murdered and over five hundred were injured. Until 9/11, it was the most destructive act of terrorism on American soil. It remains the deadliest homegrown terrorist attack in the U.S.for now.

Later, when McVeigh was arrested on a weapons charge during a traffic stop, clippings from the 1978 novel,The Turner Diaries, were found in his car. The real value of our attacks today, one clipping read, lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties. For one thing, our efforts against the System gained immeasurably in credibility. More important, though, is what we taught the politicians and the bureaucrats. They learned today that not one of them is beyond our reach. They can huddle behind barbed wire and tanks in the city, or they can hide behind the concrete walls and alarm systems of their country estates, but we can still find them and kill them.

The Systemrefers to the U.S. Government, which, in the novel, is run by Jews and white race traitors who seek to destroy the white race. Written by William Pierce, a former physics professor at Oregon State University, under the pseudonym, Andrew McDonald,The Turner Diaries is a lurid story of genocidal violence meant to cleanse America of ethnic minorities to create a utopian white ethno-state. The book is a sort of white supremacist thriller and is considered the Bible of the white nationalist movementand a blueprint for revolution. Early in the plot, Earl Turner, a member of The Order and the hero of the book, blows up the Federal Bureau of Investigation building in Washington DC with an ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel bomb hidden in the back of a rental truck. Seven-hundred people are killed.

Just as McVeigh did in real life, Jacob Clay, the troubled teenage antagonist in my novel,The Recruit, finds homicidal inspiration inThe Turner Diaries. Set in 1987 Southern California,The Recruitdramatizes the rise of a new kind of anti-US government white supremacy as it clashes with the growing Vietnamese refugee population. Jacob, a fifteen-year-old who is abused by his Vietnam veteran father, is indoctrinated into a racist terrorist cell bent on attacking people of color. As part of his indoctrination, the leader of the cell gifts JacobThe Turner Diaries, allowing Jacob to vicariously experience an act of violence he wishes to commit.

A more sinister fiction, though, one presented to him as fact, gives Jacob intellectual justification for his hatred. Around the time ofThe Turner Diariespublication, the term Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG) began to get traction among the extreme-right. In this conspiracy theory, the US Government is run by a cabal of rich Jews and race traitor whites who control the banks, media, and levers of government and seek to destroy America and the white race. Racist bulletin boards on the fledgling internet, such as Aryan Nations Liberty Net, spread the theory in the early 1980s. In 1984, a group called The Order, driven by hatred of this fictional government and fear of white extinction, murdered a Jewish radio talk show host on his driveway in Denver and then committed a string of violent robberies to fund a revolution to topple the U.S. Government. It is this fear of white extinction, this imagined white genocide, that convinces Jacob that he is a soldier defending the white race.

You may hear echoes of older fictions inThe Turner Diariesand the Zionist Occupational Government. These conspiraciesthat a secret society of rich Jews control the world and are trying to destroy white Europeansharken back to the greedy Jewish merchant stereotype and the blood libel lies of Middle Ages Europe.The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Russia around 1903, which purports to reveal a secret Jewish plan to take over the world, coincided with the worst of the pogroms in Russian held territories of Eastern Europe. Later, the Nazi party published dozens of editions of theProtocolsin Germany between 1919 to 1939, helping to set the stage for the Holocaust.

There are other fictions white supremacists use to justify their hatred.The two-seed theory tells us that Satan, in the form of the serpent, slept with and impregnated Eve.Satans child was Cain, while Adam and Eves was Abelthe first white child. The Jews, according to the theory, are literally descended from Satan, and have been trying, from the very beginning, inside Eden no less, to destroy white people. The great replacement theory tells fearful whites that they are experiencing a slow genocide and will be replaced by non-white immigrants to the United States. No doubt some will read my novel and think these theories are fictions I created, but my imagination is not that vast. Many reading this article will be shocked that anyone can believe such fictions, yet the Anti-Defamation League estimates that as many as 50,000 followers of the Christian Identity movement, a conglomeration of Christian churches who preach the two seed theory, are active in the United States. And the Buffalo shooter, before murdering ten people in a grocery store in a mostly Black neighborhood, left a manifesto railing about white people being replaced.

I finishedThe Recruit a few weeks before the January 6 attack on the Capitol. If you look closely at the videos from that day, among the symbols youll find on the attackers clothing and tactical gearthe Confederate flag, the Proud Boys Punisher face, the Three Percenters III, the Kekistan flagis the Q of QAnon. The conspiracy theory internet phenomenon repackages the older fictions that motivated Hitler, McVeigh, and The Order, and declares that the world is run by a cabal of liberal globalist cannibalistic pedophiles who control US and Global politics, banks, and the media. Q, the anonymous insider whistle blower, tells us that President Trump is secretly fighting this deep state and will bring about the Storm in which he will arrest thousands of liberal elites, destroy the pedophile ring, and usher in a new utopia in America. When President Trump lost in 2020, QAnon followers felt the election was stolen by the deep state, a conspiracy President Trump stoked for months, right up to the Stop the Steal rally on January 6. On Twitter the night before the rally, Ashli Babbitt, the former Air Force soldier who was fatally shot while trying to break into the Speakers Lobby, wrote, They can try and try and try, but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours.dark to light!

Fiction can be a powerful thing, sometimes more affecting than the truth. As a writer of thrillers, it is my job, in part, to entertain readers. Beyond entertaining, I construct my fictions in hopes of understanding larger truths about people and the world. Good writers, I believe, at least the ones I love, act out of such generosity and honesty when they craft their stories.

Malevolent writers understand the power of fiction, too. These writers craft their narratives to obscure the truth about people and the world, to create dehumanizing libels. When fictions are created to amplify destructive lies, they become propaganda used as a tool to destroy. The first person in medieval Europe to utter the blood libel lie did so in hopes of causing destructive action. The same holds true for the author and publishers of theProtocols of The Elders of Zionand for William Pierce.

Whoever the QAnon author is, they are not motivated to find truth. They use their fictions to cause divisions that compel people to take ugly actionto turn fiction into reality. A hint to the power of such fictions is evidenced in the fact that some of the many law enforcement officers who stormed the Capitol on January 6, men and women bound by the thin blue line, brutally attacked other police officers that day.

InThe Recruit, Jacob Clay carries these fictions with him and makes them into a terrible realityjust as Timothy McVeigh did, just as the Buffalo terrorist did. Nearly every week in America, it seems, we are forced to bear witness to the lies malevolent fiction writers tell.

***

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The Real Dangers of Conspiracy Fiction CrimeReads - CrimeReads

It Was a Feat I Thought I Couldnt Handle: Artist Jacolby Satterwhite Dissects His New Video Collaboration With Musician Perfume Genius – artnet News

Earlier this month, the multimedia artist Jacolby Satterwhite was mingling at the Guggenheim Young Collectors Party. Hes perhaps best known for his maximalist 3D animations, and a preview of his latest video project was to be projected on the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda. Hed been doing final edits up until the event.

Its the biggest labor of love Ive had by far, he said. The magnitude and dynamism in the piece was a feat that I thought I couldnt handle.

Jacolby Satterwhite has a maximalist vision. Photo by Andreas Laszlo Konrath.

Pygmalions Ugly Season is Satterwhites 27-minute symbiotic companion to Ugly Season, the just-released album by Mike Hadreas, who performs and records under the moniker Perfume Genius. The collaboration grew out of mutual fandom; after the two were introduced and embarked on a yearlong phone relationship, the project germinated organically.

The video features the artist, Hadreas, and an all-male coterie in a metaverse-modern dance recital. What begins as ananimated queer fantasia segues into a live-action fire-escape throwdown. Far from MTV fodder, Satterwhites epic digital maelstrom pits crashing and careening utopian visions against a meditation on the human condition. As with his previous works, the video conjures a fever-dream universe that is as visually compelling as it is challenging to decipher.

Jacolby taps into pure chaos, says Hadreas. Theres a million competing ideas about the future, and then theres a lot about family, memory, and the pastall this stuff all at once. But in the end, its harmonious and elegant, even though there are so many elements.

On June 1, the night of the Guggenheim party, Hadreas was in the basement dressing area. He seemed calm before his performance. The day had been auspicious. Earlier, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs released their first song in nearly a decade, Spitting Off the Edge of the World, for which he had supplied guest vocals and a video cameo. But Perfume Genius has moved well past traditional indie-rock stylings. For his sixth album, he traded pop hooks for a compellingly weird amalgam of ambient, soul, dub, electronics, and stringsthe perfect experimental backdrop to inspire his collaborator.

Jacolbys animation and the way that he makes things is very physical and spiritual, Hadreas noted.

Later that night, Satterwhite was beaming as his dreamscape illuminated the room. Party guests danced beneath a towering image of a shirtless man cradling Hadreas as lava churned around them.

Satterwhite took a break from adapting the video into a longer, two-channel installation for next months Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (opening July 16) to chat about the Perfume Genius project and other endeavors.

Pygmalions Ugly Season is a huge undertaking. Where will it live beyond YouTube?

I actually dont know. The concept of the piece is rooted to something Ive been working on for two years, Dawn, a public commission and artwork I did in Cleveland. I spent the lockdown commissioning drawings from homeless people, teachers, students, and essential workers in this Black neighborhood.

I would exchange Amazon and Netflix gift cards [with the public] for drawings. The prompt was, What is your prospect for utopia? I got a range that represented different ideals and capitalism, whether it was city infrastructure or Cadillacs and Rolexes. Some were rooted in family and motherhood. Some were poetry, some were philosophy. Some were about nature and pets. I kind of turned this city into Pygmalion during their darkest hour. I had to mediate: What is utopia for them?

The dancer Boy Radio cradles Mike Hadreas of Perfume Genius during filming of Jacolby Satterwhites Pygmalions Ugly Season. Photo by Bryan Ling, courtesy of Matador.

I took these drawings and I traced them for half a year, and built all the wonky objects you see in that video. It relates to Perfume Genius because Ugly Season lyrically promotes and investigates the same ideas, about utopianism and finding a partner and a man and idealizing him so much that he is unachievable.

There are themes that thread throughout the album: songs about health, the human body, and healing. The album is existential, experimental, and atmospheric, and it coincided with what I was doing. Our friendship thrives on the synchronicity of where we were going conceptually. I thought it would be interesting if the narratives and lyrics of Ugly Season were put into this world that I built.

The film begins with you seated, almost nude, before your body fades into symbols.

You see maps on my chakras, basically dissecting my body. The camera zooms into each chakra, and you are basically going into different portals of capitalist desire. At the end of the video, they shape me back to being whole, returning me to the secular space.

Are all of the visuals in your work representational, or are some things purely aesthetic?

Everything I do has meaning and purpose. Well, formalism comes first. Im a painter; I come from painting. You cant really communicate without knowing what shape, color, line, space, and light can do to achieve meaning. I make things by myself. Im working with lighting and rigging and rendering forms and coding things, so the gravitational liquids can fall on the surface in a convincing way. Or Im working with the way a light system can make fog and atmosphere and dust appear on a body while youre using the camera to create depth of field, and you have to use a certain kind of code to make the depth the field happen.

I wake up at 7:00 in the morning and I work from 8:30 or 9 at night, figuring out, How do I make this come together like a Hieronymus Bosch or Peter Paul Rubens or a Modernist painting? The biggest way to seduce and manipulate the viewer to enter your conceptual terrain is to be a master of color, light, and shape, and thats my thing. Im a colorist.

Your work also often relates to dance. Perfume Genius based this album after a dance project, and the two of you dance together in your collaboration. Can you tell us about the influence of dance?

Movement has been a large part of my practice for over a decadeoriginally it was because I had no one else to perform [in my videos]. I went to the University of Pennsylvania for my MFA after the Maryland Institute College of Art for undergrad. I studied painting, but started making video animation and experimental art after school. In a way, I entered it with a very back-door, experimental process. But I was a big art-history nerd and I have people I looked up to. My devices were regimented through late Modernist artists.

When it comes to dance, I was inspired by [the choreographers] Pina Bausch, William Forsythe, and Anne Teresa De Keersmakertheir Modernist movement styles and how they were able create interesting shapes compositionally for a still or a moving image. It felt like these movement styles were kind of object-oriented, and that allowed me to do my ownon a green screen with composite objects on top. I can actually do interesting time-based narratives with image composites and 3D animations. It was sort of about composition and interactivity.

I sent Mike [Hadreas] hours of footage of my movement. When we came together in person, I gave choreographic gestures. My instructions were open-ended, but there was a structure, because I knew what I wanted to animate.

Language is restricting and language has limits. Movement is universal, and can also act as a Rorschach test that leads to more open-ended narrative-building. It allows me to delve into visual abstractions that are iterative and constantly inventive.

Behind the scenes of Pygmalions Ugly Season, with Jacolby Satterwhite and Perfume Genius. Courtesy of Matador.

Its remarkable you did this project in such a short timeframe.

I was just wrapping up a painting show for MoMA PS1 and getting ready for my show at Lincoln Center. There was so much on my plate. We were shooting by February, while I was teaching at Yale and doing stuff at the University of California, Los Angeles.

But I squeezed in the time, and it was quite a muscular feat. I didnt leave the house, except occasionally, and I was crazy. It was very painful, but it was rewarding. I love what I do. It makes me really happy. Even though I might have depression spells about it, or anxiety, nothing feels better than executing something that pushes you forward.

Anxiety and depression are often part of the creative process.

The key to happiness is to have a mixture of dystopianism and utopianism, because its so relative. You dont understand light without having dark.

We all longed for utopia during the pandemic lockdowns. We needed escapism. Its why nightclubbing is so great.

But even nightclubbing is dystopian, in some regards, the politics within nightlife. Theres lots of glee and theres lots of transgression and self-destruction. Its sort of like Dantes Inferno: if the world was utopian, we wouldnt have a happiness index.

The Guggenheims rotunda became a screen for Satterwhites video. Courtesy of Matador.

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It Was a Feat I Thought I Couldnt Handle: Artist Jacolby Satterwhite Dissects His New Video Collaboration With Musician Perfume Genius - artnet News

A24s Marcel The Shell With Shoes On Makes A Splash Specialty Box Office – Deadline

The big screen debut of Marcel The Shell With Shoes On opened at $170K on six screens in New York and LA, the highest PSA of the weekend at $28,267 for the iconic lonely snail voiced by Jenny Slate.

The mock documentary about the loveable anthropomorphic mollusk hails from distributor A24, a distributor that manages to hit pay dirt more often than not, and is based on the popular YouTube series and illustrated kids book.

It takes at least 20 shells to have a community, Marcel says in the film. My cousin fell asleep in a pocket and thats why I dont like the saying, everything comes out in the wash.; Because sometimes it doesnt. He loves 60 Minutes because Leslie Stahl is absolutely fearless. Its a combination of stop-motion and traditional animation and live action with Slate, Isabella Rossellini, Rosa Salazar, Thomas Mann and Stahl.

Once part of a sprawling community of shells, Marcel and his grandmother now live alone as the sole survivors of a mysterious tragedy. When a documentary filmmaker discovers them amongst the clutter of his Airbnb, the short film he posts online brings Marcel millions of passionate fans, as well as unprecedented dangers and a new hope at finding his long-lost family.

The film by Dean Fleischer-Camp and Slate (100% with critics, 91% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes) expands into five more top markets Austin, San Francisco. Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Boston next weekend and will be in the top ten July 8 with a slow platform rollout building throughout the summer.

Marcel grossed$169,606 (Fri. $82,188; Sat. $47,253; Sun. $40,165).

Also in specialty: Neon opened Beba to a debut of $5,428 in three locations in NY and LA for a PTA of $1,809. This is Rebeca Beba Huntts self-reflection on her upbringing in NYC and lingering generational trauma.

Flux Gourmet from IFC Midnight opened in 19 locations to $5,000 for a PTA of $263. The offbeat Berlin Film Festival Encounters feature by writer-director Peter Strickland follows a fictional culinary performance collective.

(IFC Films Official Competition with Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz grossed an estimated $50,250 on 26 screens in week two, up from four for a per-theater average of of $1,932 and a cume of $92,690.)

Utopias Facing Nolan, the documentary about Major League Baseball and Texas icon Nolan Ryan that premiered at SXSW and at the Texas Rangers stadium before a nationwide one-night-only special event in May with Fathom (that grossed $320K). Utopia played it on 69 screens Friday, primarily across TX, with support from AMC, Regal, Studio Movie Grill, LOOK and other exhibitors, taking in another estimated $40K for a cumulative gross to date of $366K to date. The film expands to more screens next week ahead of a PVOD release July 19.

Theres a bit of wide-release crush at the box office this weekend including Top Gun: Maverick, which passed $1 billion, and Elvis and The Black Phone strong. The good news for specialty is that the first two films are drawing the older demos that are key for arthouses.

JugJugg Jeeyo, a Hindi-language family comedy-drama directed by Raj Mehta, from Moviegoers Entertainment, grossed an estimated $725K at 318 theaters coming in at no. 7 at the North American box office.

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A24s Marcel The Shell With Shoes On Makes A Splash Specialty Box Office - Deadline

Gordon Ramsay is looking for chefs for new ITV show find out how to apply – Lancashire Telegraph

Gordon Ramsay is bringing his amazing hit US series Next Level Chef to ITV and theyare currently looking for chefs and home cooks to take part.

Not only would you feature on TV, but you could win a whopping 100,000 and a mentorship package.

The eight-part series, broadcasting in 2023, is set in an iconic TV studio like no other, with three unique kitchen spaces set across three storeys and almost 50ft high.

Each floor will test the contestants culinary creativity, agility, flare, and expertise, as they vie to progress to the Next Level.

From the top-level state-of-the-art kitchen utopia to the gloomy basement level scraps only surroundings, Next Level Chef will task its chefs to prove they can thrive in any environment.

(Studio Ramsay Global)

The contestants will be under the watchful eyes of the panel across all three floors as they battle it out to produce the most mouth-watering dishes and avoid elimination.

Casting is currently underway in a bid to find the UKs very best in cookery, from home chefs to social media stars, with budding chefs urged to apply on the website here.

Gordon Ramsay said: Next Level Chef is off the chart Next Level everything! A culinary competition that is epic on every level. From the size of the enormous structure to every challenge, every moment of jeopardy is huge.

I want to see our chefs, social media stars, home cooks whatever their level, whatever their experience, show me what they can do. Whether theyre at the top cooking in the dream kitchen with every gadget and the finest ingredients or in the middle kitchen, good equipment, good ingredients but nothing fancy or, and this is where it gets really interesting, down in the basement kitchen.

Super basic, minimal ingredients and left-over scraps then show me what youre really made of! Talent and tenacity will absolutely shine through, and someone will walk away with an equally Next Level prize, I cant wait to get started!

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Gordon Ramsay is looking for chefs for new ITV show find out how to apply - Lancashire Telegraph

What To Do in Portland June 29-July 5, 2022 – Willamette Week

SEE: Rent

There are still a few weeks left to catch Portland Center Stages production of the late Jonathan Larsons musical masterpiece. A terrific cast (including Kailey Rhodes, Ashley Song and Charles Grant) populates Larsons epic of love, loss and laughs in Lower Manhattans East Village. Portland Center Stage, 128 NW 11th Ave., 503-445-3700, pcs.org. 7:30 pm Wednesday and Friday, 2 and 7:30 pm Saturday-Sunday, 2 pm select Thursdays, through July 10. $25-$105.

PCS - Rent (Jingzi Zhao/Jingzi Zhao)

DRINK: Portland Craft Beer Festival

The festival that aims to bring as many Portland breweries together as possible in one place returns this week after a two-year hiatus. The event, established in 2015, kicked off what was then Oregon Craft Beer Month (it has since been moved to February), a busy time for festivals both big and small. PCBF managed to carve its own niche by showcasing only beer from producers within Portland city limits. This year, you can expect to find a handful of newly established breweries along with the celebrated beer/cider slushie machine. The Fields Park, 1099 NW Overton St., portlandcraftbeerfestival.com. Noon-10 pm Friday-Saturday, July 1-2. 21+. Noon-6 pm Sunday, July 3. All ages. $30 in advance includes a cup and 10 beer tickets; $40 at the gate.

GO: Waterfront Blues Festival

The largest celebration of blues, soul, funk and R&B west of the Mississippi is also back in full force following a scaled-back version in 2021. Now in its 35th year, the dance party will be held at its traditional venueWaterfront Park. Highlights include a lineup of Grammy Award-winning artists, food vendors (Horn of Africa, Bates BBQ & Burgers, Phils Bento Bar, Nicos Ice Cream), and adult beverage brands (Widmer, 10 Barrel, Union Wine). Dont miss the expanded artisan marketplace in between sets, then stick around for fireworks on the Fourth: The pyrotechnics are choreographed to a soundtrack of classic and new blues songs. Tom McCall Waterfront Park, 98 SW Naito Parkway, waterfrontbluesfest.com. 11 am-10:30 pm Friday-Monday, July 1-4. $35-$3,340.

DRINK: Cellar on the Road

Road trips became even more popular during the pandemic due to their relative safety. The American pastime is still going strong this summer, and now a Portland wine club packs its bags and hits the highway. Cellar 503 hosts a pop-up in Hood River out of a modern, redesigned camper where youll get pours straight from a window cut in the side of the vehicle. The selection of bottles changes daily, and winemakers from the Columbia River Gorge are scheduled to be on hand to meet guests. The rig will be parked in Ferments lot, so head to the brewery for dinner after your tasting. Ferment Brewing, 403 Portway Ave., Hood River, 503-897-8013, cellar503.com. 4-8 pm daily, through Friday, July 1. $10 for a flight of four wines, $8 for a glass.

Cellar 503 (Courtesy of Cellar 503)

WATCH: Demolition Man

It would take an infinite amount of revisionist film-bro logic to argue that Demolition Man is good. Yet somehow, director Marco Brambillas brain-dead 1993 film about Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes fouling up a futuristic utopia manages to be delightful and endearing in its stupidity. Highlights include Sandra Bullock (as a perky police officer) and Stallone chowing down on a rat burger. Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton St., 971-808-3331, cstpdx.com. 7 pm Friday, July 1. $8.

Demolition Man (Warner Bros.)

WATCH: The Lady Eve

In 1941, screwball mastermind Preston Sturges pitted Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda against each other in one of the zaniest (if not the zaniest) romantic comedies in Hollywood history. Per the title, the film has fun with its quasi-biblical inspiration, but by the end, it descends into sheer, mind-twisting madness. Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org. 2:30 pm Saturday-Sunday, July 2-3. $7.

The Lady Eve (Turner Classic Movies)

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What To Do in Portland June 29-July 5, 2022 - Willamette Week

How the court just hurt cops and the communities they serve – New York Daily News

In September of 1997, as a newly minted officer, the New York City Police Department handed me a Glock 19 and gave me the authority to carry it concealed on the citys streets. Born and raised in Brooklyn, it felt like an extraordinary privilege. In my rookie days, I would feel it on my hip and had to remind myself I was actually allowed to carry it. I needed it because I had promised to defend the lives of New Yorkers.

Since New York State passed the Sullivan Act in 1911, that was the bar for lawfully carrying a concealed weapon in New York City: a demonstrated need for it. Few people had one. So, in a city of more than 8 million people, only 3,000 private citizens are presently licensed to carry a concealed pistol in public. Anyone else is guilty of a felony. The signal this sends is clear: A heavily-armed society is a dangerous and unpredictable one, and it is the governments responsibility to regulate carrying guns in public.

(Shutterstock/Shutterstock)

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this bar was too high. Being armed with a gun in public is a constitutional right, they declared, and a person doesnt have to prove any special need, beyond a general need for self-defense, to exercise that right. The dangers of a city armed to the teeth with handguns were explicitly left out of the calculus.

There is evidence that the more guns a city has on its streets, the more shootings there will be, the more road rage incidents will turn deadly, the more guns will be stolen from cars and homes, the more people will commit suicide, and the more we will accidentally kill our own children.

To the court, this wasnt what mattered. With this ruling, people who are not specifically excluded for reasons of insanity or criminal history shall be permitted to carry concealed handguns on New York Citys streets if they want to. Apart from the toll this will take on our citys poorest and most vulnerable communities, it turns the NYPDs work environment on its head in a way that will make policing more confusing and dangerous for everyone.

There are four things New York City police officers are taught about guns from their first day in the academy: Legal guns on the street are a rare exception; any gun makes a situation more dangerous; your job is to take control of situations where a citizen is armed with a gun; and your mission is to keep guns off the street. This is why officers demand to see a persons hands to be sure there isnt a gun in play. If you think someone is armed, you draw down on them first, seize their pistol, and then sort it out. Its not that a person is armed and dangerous, but that armed is dangerous. For decades in New York City, believing that a person was armed with a gun in public offered police enough criminal suspicion to justify stopping and frisking them.

The first time I saw this thinking in action, I was in field training in the Bronx. As I filled out paperwork at the scene of a routine car accident, senior officers suddenly drew down on a motorist who had the barrel of a pistol barely visible below his shirt. It turned out the man was a city correction officer, he had just done a poor job of keeping his pistol concealed. The officers holstered and apologized, but the man understood what had happened and why: Once a situation became an armed encounter, New York City cops would act.

I never forgot that lesson. In a city like New York, the police were the bulwark against the gun violence that comes from an overly armed populace. As we relentlessly enforced the citys gun laws and watched the murder rate consistently sink, we felt like we were onto something. For all its size and complexity, New York City became remarkably safe for everyone because guns in public were so rare, with progress especially felt in communities of color.

The NYPD didnt pull this rationale out of thin air but took it from the Supreme Courts 1968 decision in Terry vs. Ohio. It set the precedent for how police relate to an armed populace. In affirming the courts decision to empower police to stop and investigate people who may be armed, Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote, If the State of Ohio were to provide that police officers could, on articulable suspicion less than probable cause, forcibly frisk and disarm persons thought to be carrying concealed weapons, I would have little doubt that action taken pursuant to such authority could be constitutionally reasonable. Concealed weapons create an immediate and severe danger to the public, and though that danger might not warrant routine general weapons checks, it could well warrant action on less than a probability. To Harlan, the simple presence of weapons out in public was the danger, not just unlicensed ones, and that gave police cause to investigate.

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One thing we can be sure of is that the citys police and attorneys are resourceful, and they will find ways to continue to regulate guns in public. The city may define sensitive places very broadly, to include so many prohibited public areas that legally carrying a gun becomes very impractical, for example though if they do, prepare for court challenges that may succeed.

Officers may continue to act on the presumption that armed is dangerous, even if lawful, and stop armed people to investigate. One of the biggest ironies is that todays Supreme Court, which has been more sympathetic to police officers than any in decades, may be inclined to support these approaches. The day of its concealed carry ruling, the court also ruled on Vega vs. Tekoh, a striking 6-3 decision that effectively concludes police have no constitutional duty to read people their Miranda rights. As New York City finds loopholes in the courts decision and empowers officers to use them, the cases that make it to the Supreme Court will be heard by a sympathetic ear.

But loopholes are still a far cry from the sensible law that kept New Yorkers comparatively safe for so long. If there is any sign that this decision put ideology ahead of public safety, it is that attorneys for the left-wing Bronx Defenders and the Brooklyn Defender Service filed briefs in support of the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, the right-wing plaintiffs in this case affiliated with the National Rifle Association. If liberal public defenders siding with the NRA strikes you as dogs and cats living together, you are not wrong. One saw an opportunity to put more guns on the street, and the other saw an opportunity to hamstring the police, both disregarding the public safety of the communities affected. As they say, the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

The rise in violence that accompanies a heavily armed city wont convince the ideologues on either side to change their views. For its part, the NRAs answer to gun violence will always be more guns. It is a perverse logic: If you are worried about other peoples guns, you should just get one yourself and be prepared to use it. Meanwhile, the Bronx and Brooklyn Defenders who filed their brief will always resist arrest and prosecution as part of the solution for gun violence. If gun violence rises, they will defend shooters from prosecution while gesturing toward a utopia where nobody uses guns or needs police because there is no reason to commit a crime. They will blame the government for not creating this world for people.

Stuck in the middle of all this, as usual, will be the poor, the vulnerable and the police, left to sort it out amongst themselves. With this ruling, the Supreme Court put its imprimatur on the public health and safety tragedy that continues to unfold in our major cities. Gun ownership rose dramatically in 2020, it was accompanied by historic increases in homicide, and the toll of these deaths were overwhelmingly borne by the nations minority communities. Now, New York Citys police, who know the danger of guns and who rely on the law to keep them off the streets, will be deprived of one of their most important tools.

I left policing at the end of 2019 and havent carried a gun since. Its not because I cant, but because I dont want to live in a place where I need to. Every developed nation that has taken New Yorks approach to gun control and kept firearm carry rates low are much safer places than the United States. People thrive in well-governed communities where few people carry guns in public and the law makes it clear that they are the exception rather than the rule. This idea, which is a reality in so many other countries, now seems as nave a fantasy as cities where everyone has guns so nobody dares use them, or nobody wants guns because they have everything else they need.

Del Pozo is a policing, public health and criminal justice researcher. He served in the NYPD for 19 years and for four years as chief of police of Burlington, Vt.

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How the court just hurt cops and the communities they serve - New York Daily News

Mumbai Couple Use Traditional Knowledge to Build Eco-friendly Farm Stay of Dreams – The Better India

Speaking to the founders of Nashiks Utopia Farmstay, husband and wife duo Adwait and Uttara Kher, one learns a lot. They both worked in the hospitality industry and met when employed at the Taj. They were also both working as models, with Uttara being crowned Miss India World in 1982. But what stands out most, even during the Zoom interview, is the couples warmth as they shared details about their work with this writer.

Its with this familiarity and curiosity that they greet each new visitor to their farm stay, located five minutes away from the Sula Vineyards, Nashik, it is flanked by the Gangapur Lake and the Sahyadri mountains on the other.

Leaving the harsh weather and concrete jungles of Mumbai, the couple had first moved to Nashik to raise their daughters Saiyami and Saunskruti in a small town amid nature. The mountains, treks and especially the waterfalls during the monsoons are factors that gravitated me away from Mumbai, says Adwait. They soon opened three restaurants in Nashik Aangan, Tandoor and The Bombay Talkies.

Much later, they started work on the farm stay and opened Utopia Farmstay in February 2018.

Adwait spent months visiting nearby villages on his motorcycle to learn about rural architecture and then spent two months planning out the project before starting work. But they soon ran into their biggest challenge. They were using black cotton soil, which expands during the monsoon and contracts during summers, leading to a pull and push to the construction every time, and requires a solid foundation to stand. Because of this, no architect was willing to take on the project. That was motivating enough for me to do it myself, he says, about the property thats still standing strong.

Besides being the 2-acre propertys architect, Adwait also served as a carpenter, working with one other professional to build all the furniture.

With every aspect from the foundation stone to the bricks and from the soil to the interiors, this farm stay is built with the intention of being as eco-friendly as possible. We have a basaltic rock foundation and have used fly ash bricks. Weve used very little cement and our plaster is a cow dung recipe of the past, says Adwait.

Fly ash bricks dont erode the topsoil and need lesser cement and water for binding. Compared to cement bricks, theyre also less prone to breakage and therefore create lesser waste. These bricks also absorb less heat which keeps the room cool, so carbon-emitting ACs are not a necessity. Using only a negligible amount of poisonous latex-oil paints, rooms have primarily been coated with a mix of cow dung and mud, an age-old, sustainable technique. Also, the building boasts only mud tiles and none of the ceramic tiles that require high kiln temperatures with higher carbon footprints.

Used Bisleri bottles wrapped in gunny sacks are supplemented as lampshades. The property also boasts old, reclaimed pieces like windows (jharokhas) sourced from Adwaits travels over the past 30 years. He collected these from Rajasthan, Cochin, Maharashtra, and more. Weve been collecting a lot of stuff from all over the country which we could incorporate into our designs, he says.

Theres a well for the farm and a bore well for drinking and bathing water. The grey water from the farm stay is used in the fields. The farm stay also runs on solar power. Everything is as eco-friendly as possible and we intend on keeping it that way, says Adwait.

The farm itself grows a variety of vegetables and fruits that are harvested and fed to the guests, including onions, garlic, bananas, coconuts, mangos, drumsticks, and spinach, among others. Right now, part of the farm is blooming with sunflowers that were planted primarily to attract birds.

Today, over 42 species of birds flutter around the property and the sunflowers give about 100 litres of sunflower oil. I will use it for food because I do the cooking at the farm stay. We will also sell the cold-pressed sunflower oil, says Uttara.

All of this is aided by the fact that the couple has been longtime crusaders for the environment, from filing PILs to clean the Godavari to making sure trees arent being cut down around Nashik. We managed to save nearly 3,000 trees from being cut down because they were randomly cutting trees to widen roads, says Uttara.

On their farm stay, which charges between Rs 5,000 and Rs 7,000 per night, Uttara and Adwait offer a variety of activities, including yoga workshops and clay moulding classes. Adwait teaches carpentry workshops, leads monsoon treks and hikes, walks around the property, and organises architectural appreciation walks and old city walks of Nashik.

Enjoying these pleasures is an eclectic and wide-ranging bunch of guests. There are small children from big cities whove never seen vegetables growing on trees, so we teach them a bit of gardening, says Uttara with a laugh.

One of their guest, a 72-year-old, wanted to go running, and they pointed him to the 2-kilometre distance to Sula. He was an ultra-marathoner who was once a scientist at NASA. Another guest was working on electromagnets at CERN, Switzerland.

Its so life-enriching to talk to these guests from across the globe, says Adwait. Theres always a nice mix of people that they meet in the evenings in the common area, says the couple who doesnt live on the property but visits often. They exchange ideas with people from different walks of life and learn new things every day. People who stay in farm stays or homestays are people who dont like the 5-star culture, says Uttara. When they come to us they dont have their guard up. Theyre just simple people, she adds.

Most of the guests are now like family to the couple. They keep in touch and receive regular updates about the big moments in the lives of their former guests. Its been a nice experience for us, adds Uttara.

As the couple continue their journey of constant growth and innovation, theyre now looking at ways of teaching and inspiring villagers to imitate their model and earn better incomes. And with their sustainable model, one wouldnt mind if several more homestays bloomed across the country.

Location: Nashik, MaharashtraBeds and baths: Four cottage suites, each with two bedrooms and two bathroomsSize: 2 acresTime it took to build: Seven months

Learn more about Utopia Farmstay on their website.

Edited by Yoshita Rao

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Mumbai Couple Use Traditional Knowledge to Build Eco-friendly Farm Stay of Dreams - The Better India

New European Bauhaus Festival and Prizes 2022: a showcase of European ingenuity – European Commission

22/06/2022

Imagine a broad movement of European citizens entirely committed in making our living spaces more beautiful, liveable and climate proof. It would not be a dream, as this is already happening around you.

Launched by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in her 2020 State of the Union speech, New European Bauhaus (NEB) is a creative and interdisciplinary initiative that connects theEuropean Green Dealto peoples living spaces and experiences.

Brussels and many other locations across the continent hosted NEB to celebrate all the vibrant ideas and projects that shaped this second year of the initiative. This includes the ceremony awarding the 2022 NEB Prizes.

As noted by Elisa Ferreira, Commissioner for Cohesion and Reforms, during the awards ceremony that Europeans enthusiasm for the NEB initiative this year could be measured by the 1100 applications received, with finalists hailing from all the EU member countries.

Faced with the challenge of reinventing modes of production, lifestyles and public spaces that are fit for the climate crisis, the NEB represents the heart and soul of the European Green Deal.

It translates the European Green Deal into a tangible, positive experience in which all Europeans can participate and progress together. The NEB, in this sense, is a way to connect with European citizens and invite them to share their vision of the future.

In fact, the initiative is co-designed with citizens, professionals and organisations across the EU. It is about positive change and building a sustainable, inclusive and beautiful future.

Appealing values

This set of values appeals to the many organisations that applied for the NEB prizes. For instance, representatives from the Robida Collective said: We fully recognise ourselves and our project in the three core topics of the New European Bauhaus the idea of beauty beyond functionality, with ethical dimensions; the idea of sustainability, which goes beyond the mere materiality, but also questions our lifestyles and our idea of future; and, last but not least, the idea of togetherness, inclusivity and community, the goal of building projects, ideas and commitments together, beyond individualism.

The Robida collective won a prize for bringing forward an innovative approach in revitalising the abandoned village of Topol/Topolove, on the border between Italy and Slovenia, by living in it as if it were one house.

This is an approach that imagines a different future for younger generations and a different destiny for rural mountain places which are continuously losing inhabitants but also imagining lives away from cities, but without renouncing on being contemporary.

Critical role for cohesion policy

EU cohesion policy will play a crucial role in making a reality the core values of the New European Bauhaus initiative through concrete investments co-funded by the EU at the local level.

In an ongoing effort to mainstream the guiding principles of the NEB for the 2021-2027 funding period, the European Commission will facilitate the embedment of the initiative in cohesion policy programmes and in innovative actions.

It is in this spirit and in line with the principle of inclusivity that the European Commission launched the NEB Prizes. The competition invites European citizens, organisations, public authorities and private firms to pitch their ideas, visions, innovations and established projects that already enshrine the guiding principles of the NEB.

This way, the Prizes set out to showcase the ideas in development at the grassroots level, to shape and materialise the vision of the NEB. However, the Prizes also show to administrators and policymakers that innovative projects already exist and the NEB is not just a utopia.

Challenges and solutions

Our society is facing unprecedented challenges. Disruptive and innovative projects need support, resources and backing from private capital.

For this purpose, DG Regio is committed to assisting managing authorities in setting up financial instruments to support NEB projects and leverage private resources. These measures, aimed at facilitating access to support and at assessing the projects viability, will match the NEB territorial development model financial instrument.

New initiatives connected to the NEB will not stop there, as the second half of 2022 will entail the first call of the European Urban Initiative dedicated to the New European Bauhaus, the first of many yearly calls for projects that will test new solutions to urban challenges.

The call will provide EUR 20 million to 4-5 municipalities over 50,000 inhabitants, financing infrastructure elements contributing to the New European Bauhaus projects.

Moreover, DG REGIO has recently closed the call Support to New European Bauhaus Local Initiatives addressed at municipalities below 100,000 inhabitants. Up to 20 municipalities will receive expert support to develop their proposals of New European Bauhaus projects. Based on their experience, a Toolkit will be created to promote the knowledge on how to prepare the NEB-like investments.

Inspiration and commitment

Such concrete steps that take inspiration from the visionary NEB initiative and the Prizes in particular, mark the Commissions commitment to the core principles of this initiative.

Alexandra Mitsotaki, President of World Human Forum, noted that the NEB has an added value not only in the framework of the climate policy agenda, but in its opening up the narrow technocratic approach to tackle the crises ahead by kick starting a bottom-up social and cultural movement.

The festival, which assembled all the NEB prize finalists, represented the opportunity to celebrate and display all the innovative ideas that are already circulating throughout the EU.

Connecting with grassroots organisations

More importantly still, the NEB is an example of how to connect policies with grassroots organisations, and finding the laser beam between government and bottom-up approach as stated by Jan Vermuelen, designer for the winning project De Korenbloem.

The projects were divided in four categories: Reconnecting with nature; Regaining a sense of belonging; Prioritising the places and people that need it the most; and Shaping a circular industrial ecosystem and supporting life-cycle thinking. In each category, the prizes would go to completed projects and to young (under 30 years old) rising stars.

An expert jury was tasked with selecting 16 winners and runner-ups, while, in the spirit of openness that characterises the NEB, two additional winners were selected by the peoples vote.

Among the projects participating in the Prize ceremony, many revolved around the idea of restructuring, re-appropriating, refurbishing public spaces through people-centred approaches.

Others looked for ways to strike a balance between human activity and the environment while using resources ethically. Many other initiatives focused on citizen participation, promoted social cohesion, learning and training or challenged the current system of excessive consumption by finding innovative ways to upscale, recycle and repurpose waste.

Initiating a wider change

Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, highlighted the transformative power of rethinking what surrounds us, telling the audience that the places we live in shape us and their physical transformation holds the power to initiate wider change, and this is an opportunity to rethink the purpose of a place.

The representative for Zero Waste Lab, the winning project for the category Shaping a circular industrial ecosystem and supporting life-cycle thinking, quickly echoed the Commissioners words by saying the worst kind of waste is wasted opportunity, which sums up two of the overarching themes of the festival.

The evaluation of the projects verified that the submissions were enriching, in being inspired by art and culture or responding to needs beyond functionality, sustainable, in harmony with nature and the environment, and inclusive, and hence conducive of dialogue across cultures, disciplines, genders and ages.

In her closing remarks, Commissioner Ferreira thanked all the contestants for giving shape to their ideas and said: Your projects, your ideas and the embodiment of our values are the proof and inspiration that the excellence we celebrate in Brussels today can be replicated all across Europe, all across our regions and villages and that can be called a cultural movement and thats what we are achieving all together.

The Commissioner added: We all know that the green and digital transition implies a profound change to our economies and to our life you example shows that this is possible, and that this transformation is in fact already happening.

Shared responsibility

What emerged at the prize ceremony through the words of the speakers and many of the winners acceptance speeches is a sense of shared responsibility and collective commitment in collaborating for the same ideals and triggering structural changes.

The representative of the project Gardens of the future, winner of the popular vote said Gardens of the future is planting seeds to grow a new mind-set of how life should be experienced from now on and still we have a lot of way to go towards healing. Healing the planet and healing ourselves. And I think New Bauhaus is here, to speed up the process, and we will do this together.

For many contestants, the NEB Prizes meant acknowledging and rewarding those people and communities that act locally to address global challenges, and showing that local realities and issues can be exemplary.

Between the inspirational ideas brought on stage by participants and the Commissions commitment to a just response to climate change, the NEB is becoming a network of dedicated citizens, innovators and local communities dreaming of and acting for a sustainable, beautiful, inclusive future. In short, the NEB is mutating from an initiative into a real movement.

Visit the NEB website for a summary of winner and runner-up projects link

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New European Bauhaus Festival and Prizes 2022: a showcase of European ingenuity - European Commission

BGF’s North West team leads on deals with an EV of 450m – Insider Media

Neil Inskip

Growth capital investor BGF has led on deals with a total enterprise value of 450m in the North West in six months.

In the same period, BGF's North West team has achieved a stand-out run of exits which has seen 150m of capital returned from 72minvested.

Highlights include the sale of Liverpool-based Sentric to Swiss music fintech company, Utopia Music, PTSG's acquisition of NSS, and CurrentBody's sale to eComplete.

This is in addition to the outstanding exit of Kids Planet, having accelerated the nursery group's rollout from 17 to more than 80 sites during its investment period. BGF also retained minority stakes in Kids Planet and Utopia Music as it continues as a long-term partner to both companies.

The firm completed a total 42m of investment in growing businesses based in the North West in six months. These entrepreneur-led companies span several sectors including tech, manufacturing, professional services, healthcare and training, and are based across all corners of the region.

The North West team backed apprenticeship training provider, Apprentify, with a 5m investment to execute an ambitious buy and build strategy in the apprenticeship and adult education market.

Wigan-headquartered manufacturer, Evolution Aqua, received a 12m BGF investment to capitalise on growth opportunities in core markets and drive international expansion.

Alongside Gresham House Ventures, BGF also announced a 10m investment into Panthera Biosciences to further grow its network of dedicated clinical trial sites across the UK and Western Europe.

The combined EV across these investments and exits at the time of completion reached 450m.

Neil Inskip, head of BGF in the North West and Midlands, said: "We consistently meet quality business owners in the region looking to scale their businesses and work towards long-term growth and a successful exit. Our recent run of investments has unlocked opportunities for innovation and product development, international and vertical market expansion, investment in tech and talent, as well as boosting balance sheets for management teams looking to capitalise on growth opportunities such as M&A.

"Alongside positive new investments, were also seeing a strong performance across our portfolio in the region as we continue to work with management teams to deliver growth. Weve experienced an exceptional period of returns from recent exits in the region, which is testament to the strength of the businesses we back in the North West and BGFs investment model."

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BGF's North West team leads on deals with an EV of 450m - Insider Media

To build the metaverse start creating metaspheres – Metaverse – Digital Nation – Digital Nation

Business leaders are very excited about the Metaverse.

Media speculation and vendor hype have whipped them into a frenzy of anticipation over an immersive digital utopia that does not yet exist. Luminaries like Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt and Satya Nadella are promising a complete transformation of digital experience and unprecedented opportunities for those who get on board.

In response, executives are scrambling to secure their place, spending over US$120 Billion in Metaverse-related ventures in the first half of 2022 alone. This mad rush puts technical leaders in a difficult position. They are being tasked with preparing the enterprise to participate in and profit from something that has yet to be fully defined, much less realised.

Even so, certain Metaverse enabling components are available. Platforms for immersive streaming are available for collaborating in a shared virtual space. Design tools for creating three-dimensional and even immersive environments are now within the financial and skill level reach of even casual content creators.

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User experience hardware, such as VR headsets and haptic gloves, is moving from gaming curiosity to business necessity. Each of these tools and the emerging standards they are based on can be used now to prepare and position the enterprise to take full advantage of the fully realised metaverse as it emerges. If done well, these efforts can actually help the metaverse come into existence.

The idea of the metaverse originated with science fiction author Neil Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash where it is an all-encompassing, immersive, virtual environment. In this fictional world, people use avatars to interact with the metaverse to work, play and commit various cyber-crimes.

Much like the internet of today, in the novel, if a business wants to thrive or an individual wants to interact with society in any way, a presence in the metaverse is mandatory. This is not the metaverse we have today. Nor is it likely to be the metaverse to come.

Gartner defines the Metaverse as a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality. The metaverse is persistent; providing enhanced immersive experiences. This definition introduces subtle but important features often missed when considering the Metaverse.

First, the Metaverse is not necessarily a fully immersive, virtual reality environment. Rather it consists of both enhanced physical and digital reality. While some experiences may indeed be fully synthetic, immersive virtual reality experiences, others may simply overlay digital information on the users current physical environment as viewed through Metaverse-enabled glasses or goggles.

Secondly, the Metaverse is a collective space, not a single monolithic environment. It will consist of numerous, perhaps even innumerous, independent but interoperable applications and experiences. The Metaverse itself will be a diverse ecosystem encompassing all of these enhanced-experience applications which can be thought of asmetaspheres. These experiences should be able to interact more or less seamlessly across both hardware and software platforms. While the Metaverse itself may not yet exist in its fully realised form, a wide variety of metaspheres are already in place and delivering value.

What is a metasphere?

A metasphere is simply an application that exhibits the characteristics of the Metaverse, but largely in isolation. Realised use cases range from fully immersive training routines to unintrusive process instructions projected into the lenses of safety glasses.

These applications are being realised with both industrial and consumer-grade tools. While larger enterprises often develop their own solutions in-house, system integrators and software development firms are emerging in this space to create custom metaspheres for companies without sufficient resources or expertise to go it alone. The metaspheres currently being utilized all fall into one of three categories: augmented reality, mixed reality, and virtual reality.

Numerous manifestations of all three types of metasphere are already in production use across a wide variety of companies and industries. Some use cases are more successful than others. Public facing, consumer-oriented applications, in particular, continue to struggle.

Among the most spectacular failures was a fully VR concert of the pop band Foo Fighters hosted by Meta, the rebranded Facebook parent. The much-hyped concert intended for Meta Quest 2 VR gear owners succumbed to a plethora of technical issues. Of the 61,000 registered attendees, only 13,000 were able to access any portion of the event. Those that were able to view at least some of the concert were savage in their reviews of the experience. As one technology writer commented, Metas Horizon Worlds platform fumbles at the first hurdle.

While not all public-facing metaverse ventures fail to the extent of the Foo Fighters concert, they are without exception difficult, expensive, and risky to stage. In addition, outside of gaming and promotion few practical and monetisable, consumer-oriented use cases have been identified, much less implemented and deployed. In time, such use cases and consumer metaspheres will emerge, mature, and converge into a fully realised metaverse. We just arent there yet.

So where are Metaverse technologies bringing value? Within the walls, virtual or otherwise, of the enterprise. Companies are preparing for the Metaverse by exploring how these tools can benefit their employees, their operations and ultimately their bottom line.

Creating internally facing metaspheres has many advantages over attempting to field public-facing services. First and foremost, the enterprise is a controlled environment. Even when leveraging services hosted outside the enterprise data centre, you control who has access, when and to what extent.

Most of the failures with public-facing metaspheres involve scalability and capacity issues with services, such as the Foo Fighters concert, being overwhelmed and crashing. Keeping the metasphere in-house allows you to throttle demand and scale computational resources as necessary and as desired to achieve your goal.

Employees are also somewhat of a captive audience. You can select a specific pool of users to provide a particular metasphere that will benefit both them and the enterprise. You can have those users test various approaches to a solution and provide feedback in a way that is not possible with the public. This has the added advantage of keeping your mistakes and failures out of public view while you gain competence and expertise in what is decidedly a new discipline using new technologies.

This experimentation is perhaps the biggest benefit of starting with internally facing metaspheres. It allows you to learn both the tools and how they can most effectively be applied and to do so at the enterprises own pace. While the market sorts out how to monetize public Metaverse offerings, internal metaspheres can provide immediate, practical benefits to the enterprise and potentially identify services that can indeed be made public and monetised.

As more and more of these repurposed metaspheres emerge, they will converge and coalesce. From this network of interconnected and interoperable metaspheres, the Metaverse proper will emerge. But this can only happen if the use cases are selected wisely and implemented properly.

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To build the metaverse start creating metaspheres - Metaverse - Digital Nation - Digital Nation