Game Details Developer: Paradox Development Studio Publisher: Paradox Interactive More Info: Stellaris Utopia

DLC for Paradox-developed titles has traditionally been based around a particular region or theme. If you wanted to set up in India in Crusader Kings 2, youd buy Rajas of India. Europa Universalis IV players who wanted more depth to trading could pick up Wealth of Nations. Utopia, the first major expansion forStellaris, follows the thematic route (idealised forms of space empire; whether from the perspective of enlightened psychics, or purge-happy space fascists), but in a looser manner than its predecessors.

Thats partly because the ahistorical sci-fi subject matter lends itself better to abstract themes of power than specific regional histories, and partly because Paradox are still bolstering some of the weaknesses lingering from the games May 2016 launch.

Every piece of DLC for Paradoxs main developed titles is released alongside a free (usually substantial) update which adds features to the base game too. Where Utopia is concerned, the studio has tried to strike a balance between including unique, enjoyable features in the DLC, without withholding other key mechanics from the main game.

Ship colours now correspond to those of your empire, which is handy (and thats a freebie).

Two of the features which I think will do most to revitalise Stellaris are actually free ones coming with the 1.5 Banks update. The addition of proper political factions and Traditions (more on those later) provide that familiar Paradox feeling of having to wrestle with your own internal problems as much as external threats; something the game had definitely been missing.

Several of the paid Utopia features are extensions of a free Banks feature, and even those which arent can be difficult to talk about in complete isolation. Ill do my best to keep it clear which things are exclusive to the expansion, and what parts will be in all versions of Stellaris after 6 April.

The DLC features can be divided broadly into three categories: greater depth to species customisation and roles (which in part overlaps with the free stuff), expanded mid-to-end game species evolution options, and the building of Megastructures (both separate and unique to Utopia).

Everybody, for example, will get access to Civics. These are additional perks and quirks you add to your created race to make them feel a little more specialised. Things like Cutthroat Politics (+1 influence) or Mining Guilds (10% Minerals boost), and some of which (Imperial Cult) can only be picked with certain ethical pre-requisites. But only owners of Utopia have access to the unique Hive Mind government type and its special civics, or to Fanatical Purifiers; available only to those who really love genocide, and despise diplomacy.

As part of Utopia, you can now also Indoctrinate the hell out of pre-spacefaring race.

The difficulty presented to a reviewer by a DLC which is focused quite heavily on divergent and distinct species customisation is that running a full game with every new option is pretty much impossible. I settled for covering as many angles as I could by creating a race of deeply spiritual (for potential psychic powers) and overtly authoritarian (because slavery has been expanded to include distinct types in Utopia) bird people, who would beeline for the chance to build the new Megastructures and/or pierce the veil of reality. Preferably while cawing in triumph and preening themselves in a ritualistic manner.

Species customisation adds more flavour to what was already a pretty superb early game experience, but what Stellaris tended to lack was a compelling mid-to-late-game period. Unless you were poking at the edges to make your own entertainment (which usually just meant starting a war with somebody), that central era could often stagnate. Political factions and the Traditions mechanic (again, free features) help to mitigate this issue, giving you potential internal strife to deal with and further mid-term goals to achieve, respectively.

My spiritualist, authoritarian bird race ultimately liberated their domestic servants (the polite way to frame slavery) and ended the associated caste system. I did this partly for role-playing reasons (a new imperial ruler had taken the throne, and I decided hed be a reformer) and partly for practical ones (full citizens made better, happier workers and my economy was shifting). Immediately, the two existing political factions, a set of authoritarian traditionalists and some ultra-spiritual devotees of the imperial religion, were joined by a third, left-leaning, group desiring even greater policy reforms.

Looks like the Hierarchical Union are heading the way of the Whigs.

Throughout the next few decades, any policy or edict decisions I made had to be weighed against pleasing or irritating one or more of these factions. Juggling those choices, along with the impact it might have on the productivity of my colonies (which in turn made me delve into the murky world of government propaganda, and covert support for a favoured party), kept that period of time vibrant and captivating.

Traditions, meanwhile, are a reflection of your galactic priorities. Funded by a new Unity resource, which has its own buildings you need to plan around, Traditions are divided into seven categories with headings like Expansion, Diplomacy, or Domination. Each category has five associated aspects to unlock with Unity points, tied to buffs and benefits (the Expansion set, for example, make it easier and swifter to colonise new planets). Though not as immediately compelling as the faction system, Traditions and their attendant resource are another aspect of internal management around which to strategise.

With Utopia, they gain another layer of relevance. For every Tradition category you complete in the DLC, your species gains an Ascension Perk. Some are powerful benefits like being able to clear almost any tile blocker on a colony world (bypassing a lot of research time). Others are intriguing and unique evolutionary goals for your species, like unlocking latent psychic abilities (very helpful for admirals who get a sizeable evasion bonus, or governors, who get a bonus to quelling unrest) or embracing a synthetic singularity.

Forget battleships, were going to Zen our way to supremacy.

My birdman psychic race eventually became so powerful that they were able to peer into the cosmic realm itself. That in turn enabled a little espionage-based revenge on a Fallen Empire who had previously beaten my fleets into submission and killed a former ruler. Gazing for too long into this Shroud, however, seems as if it may attract the unwelcome attention of unknown entities.

When theyre not turning your Stellaris species into mighty telepaths, Ascension perks are also used to unlock the secrets of Megastructures. Like a lot of this DLC they have both practical and flavourful elements. I wasnt able to experiment with every different type, but the Habitats (which can be constructed a great cost around most planetary bodies) proved to be a terrific way of sticking another readily-colonisable planet in a nearby orbit. What you lose in Habitat mineral investment costs, you probably can make up from other resources. Their solar plants can generate great amounts of energy, and the science labs give three of each science resource across the board.

Ringworlds (for which, sadly, I didnt reach the necessary requirements) are such feats of engineering that they require an Ascension perk all of their own. Again though, as well as a sense of pride in your species achievement, the structures reward your investment. When complete, Ringworlds provide the equivalent space of a whopping four maximum size habitable planets.

My beautiful Birdman Sanctuary Habitat, ready to prosper.

The division of mechanics between the free Banks 1.5 patch and Utopia itself feels pretty much correct. Banks is doing the heavy lifting on features vital for a more dynamic Stellaris mid-game (radically reworked factions, Traditions), and adding quality of life tweaks like ship colours which match those of your species. That leaves Utopia to delve into areas of more optional luxury; specialised role-play options like Hive Minds under the new government system, new late game event chains linked to Ascension perks, and vast engineering projects to expand or consolidate your empire in ambitious ways.

At $20 its not exactly cheap, so to get full value youre going to have to be interested in a significant majority of the DLC-specific additions. I had a fine time with everything I saw in Utopia, but its difficult to claim anything included in the paid expansion is as essential as the new (free) faction mechanics. Thats as it should be, really; and if youre keen to mercilessly dominate the galaxy, enslaving all before you as consumable livestock, before uploading your species minds to synthetic bodies, then this expansion has all the tools you need.

7/10

Rating: 9.2. From 10 votes.

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Stellaris Utopia DLC Review - Paradox's spacefaring grand strategy ... - PC Invasion (blog)

The Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) is a new exhibition space created for EDP, a Portuguese foundation in Lisbon. The building opened in October of 2016 and just created its first curated exhibition. I had an opportunity to visit its exhibit Utopia/Dystopia: A Paradigm Shift in Art and Architecture and it provided an opportunity to see how the new structure functions and is being programmed.

Designed by British architect Amanda Levetes firm AL_A, The MAAT operates as a Kunsthalle, with no permanent collection of artifacts, but as a space to promote and stage cross-cultural or interdisciplinary experimentation. The building has several functional exhibition galleries, but its focus is an enormous, 13,000-square-foot, centralized elliptical space, ringed with steep inclined viewing ramps made for theatrical performances and temporary installations. The ramps are meant as viewing platforms but the steepness of the slope propels viewers down and then up and around the central ellipse. This constant movement by viewers can allow themif curated properlyto be part of the action or to become the event itself. Its an interactive public space for an age more familiar with digital and VR images on a screen than in a physical gallery.

(Courtesy MAAT)

The low, long profile of The MAATs exterior appears like a slightly opened oyster shell set in the mud along the facing Tagus river and estuary. If one imagines the shell opened ever so slightly, this is where Levete has placed the entrance into the building. Up a curving set of long, narrow steps, with a hovering deep overhang meant to capture the dappled reflection of the river, the public is pulled in a short entrance into the lobby and then into the grand open performance ellipse. Its facade is covered in 15,000 crackle glazed three-dimensional tiles that give it a fish scale like dimension on the cityscape and honors the citys many tiled facades. When these ceramic rectangles catch beams of natural dappled or artificial light the building magically glows like a light bulb.

But it is not simply the facade of the building that comes alive through refraction. This is a building meant to perform on every surface. It is, in some ways, as much landscape as it is anenclosure and thus a structure meant to perform. The term performative architecture stands for several older and newer ideas in architecture and the design of urban public space. If by the term one means buildings created to encourage active public engagement and themselves actively participate like Roman baroque urban experiments or even worlds fairs, then Levetes building is an unqualified success. It becomes a pedestrian promenade and visitors areg meant to walk along, onto, or over its tiled sloping roofscape like Foreign Office Architects 2003 Yokohama terminal.

(Courtesy MAAT)

Last weeks opening programmed performances to take place on every surface of the structure. It started with a musician playing the ceramic tile facade with a vibraphonists soft mallets and group of musicians dancing and singing on the top step of the covered front entry platform. The central oval space featured an opening night performance by Mexican artist Hector Zamora that featured crews of migrant laborers destroying a fleet of old unusable (but beautiful) fishing boats as a protest against the disappearance of a way of life represented by the small craft. The highlight of the first-day performance featured O Terceiro Paraiso, choreographed by Italian Michelangelo Pistoletto on the sloping roofscape public space. The Italian arte povera and action artist theorized a potential new utopiain accordance with the exhibition opening in the galleries downstairsthat asked several hundred participants to hold hands in three labyrinths made of a single line that would create a new third utopia from the two earlier ones that he theorized as an everyday Gesamtkunstwerk. The performance was pushed along by the large sloping facade of the roof that stands as an open space above the riverside promenade and facing back to the city in the distance.

It should be pointed out that the Levete renderings show the roofscape with a whiplash-like tail flying over the adjacent freeway to the roof of The MAAT. This freeway acts as a wall that cuts off Lisbon from its waterfront as if it were lifted out from any number of American cities. When (and if) this tail ramp is finished it will bring the city across the freeway and onto the roofscape and be the performative space the museums want to be for their home city.

(Courtesy MAAT)

Levette has delivered a potentially valuable new focus and hub for the Portuguese capital but it remains for the MAAT director Pedro Gandhao and his curatorial staff to realize the spatial and performative qualities of the museum. They have the opportunity to make this one the most exciting venues in the world that programs architecture and technology alongside art.

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Portugal's MAAT could become the world's most exciting venue for art and architecture - The Architect's Newspaper

At one point during our trip to New Zealand, I pedaled next to Carol along the 84-mile long West Coast Cycle Trail near Kumara, New Zealand, and took in the scenery. The grade wasnt awful but since wed been climbing for the past 10 miles we were wondering if wed ever make it to the crest of the hill. Just then a man whizzed past us on the downhill and shouted Free Cake at the Top! Curious, and knowing there was a caf ahead, we redoubled our efforts.

New Zealand was like that. Always something around the corner. We knew New Zealand would be cool. Thats why we decided to go to New Zealand because it would be summer for the first leg of our 5-month overseas adventure, and it was far, far away. We were also cutting the rubber band, that invisible force that keeps small children close to their parents at playgrounds and airports, and adults from getting too far out of our comfort zone.

I expected to be wowed by the beautiful, exotic country and I was. There is no other country Ive seen that packs such sweeping vistas, exotic geology, such a kind people in so small a space. But as much as I was continually stunned by the views that greeted me each day, or warmly welcomed by the Kiwis; the two-island country is not where Id want to live.

The U.S. is my country and despite her flaws, I love everything about her. Others leave for a myriad of reasons, some political and some practical. Last year, 5,411 people voluntarily gave up U.S. citizenship, according to numbers from the U.S. Treasury. Many were already living overseas and became tired of negotiating U.S. bank and tax regulations. But, over 50,000 people in the U.S. looked at the Immigrate New Zealand website the day after the US general election in November. Hopefully, some of those who looked at New Zealand as a harbor in a storm will benefit from our experience.

Before chucking it all and moving to New Zealand, here are a few things everyone should know.

Auckland, New Zealand is 7,623 miles from the center of the U.S. It is tomorrow, today, as we crossed the international dateline just west of American Samoa and east of Tonga near 180 degrees longitude to reach New Zealand. The flight can take as little as 16 hours and as much as two days. The first thing the customs officer asks is, When are you leaving?

New Zealand is split into two islands, about the area of Colorado, and is located along the Ring of Fire upon which most of the active volcanoes lie. The geology is young since the country continues to rise from the ocean due to frequent earthquakes. The 2011 earthquake in Christchurch damaged 100,000 homes, destroying 10,000. The 2016 Christchurch earthquake damaged thousands more and raised the seabed about 18 feet around parts of the coastline. In neighborhoods and along the roads are blue signs indicating tsunami evacuation routes. Tip: If youre threatened by a tsunami climb up.

New Zealand is expensive, even factoring the 18 percent discount we get with the U.S. dollar. While we were riding in Bar Harbor, Maine, we met a man who had planned on biking about eight weeks in New Zealand but left after four.

The beer was too expensive, he said. I ran out of money.

Carol and I cooked most of our own meals while in New Zealand. We found the prices are higher than in the U.S. by a pretty good margin. A can of Old El Paso refried beans cost $5 USD. A can of Libbys pumpkin $4.50 USD. We were surprised that many staples, like peanut butter, $4 USD for 16 ounces, are processed in and imported from China. At the PaknSave (like an Aldi) streaky bacon is $5 USD per pound; ice cream $4.20 USD half-gallon; ground beef $4.20 USD per pound; and boneless chicken breast $3.40 USD per pound.

Carol and I also planned to Wild Camp on public lands to save money during our trip. Wild camping is free. Unfortunately, due to a small percentage of campers who left messes wherever they camped, most districts recently restricted tent camping on public lands and require campers to go to private holiday parks. Those parks charged tent campers $32 USD to $56 USD per night for a spot. Granted, most of those had common kitchens we used, but we found out that an AirBnB, with a soft bed and shower, instead of cold, wet, hard ground, only cost a few dollars more and sometimes less.

New Zealand also promotes bicycle touring, which we did. The infrastructure is not yet there to help the touring bicyclist. We cut our touring short because of four things: We did not agree with the guidebooks characterizations of multiple daily 1,000 foot ascents as rolling hills; there are no shoulders on the roads to protect us from large trucks, tourists in RVs not used to driving on the left side of the road, and our timeline. We simply did not have enough time to ride the distances, safely, that we needed. A bicycle tour in New Zealand should be solely on the bike trails, and there are many and the views are better without the smell of diesel. The rub is that to get from trail to trail the cyclist needs vehicle support, and that drives up the cost.

Even with the expense and remoteness of New Zealand, a reason to move to New Zealand is the people. We were treated with kindness and curiosity about Trump everywhere we visited.

Among the many kindnesses we received was from a bike shop owner. Our last day on Waiheke Island we toured an outdoor art show and Carol got a flat tire, literally the only day we rode without a patch kit. I removed the tire and rode the 3 miles into town to eCyclesNZ. In the back door came Carol and the owner of the shop, Darleen Tana. She and her family had given Carol and her bike a ride into town. We rented the bikes from another shop on the mainland.

I saw the bike missing the wheel and wandered over, Darleen said. I thought maybe it was stolen.

As Andrew, the shop mechanic, put aside his work and fixed the flat, Darleen told us her husband is an automotive engineer by trade but is currently developing the Onya Electric bike. She said they moved to the island to have a better life.

We wanted the children to be able to go to school barefoot, she said.

We thanked them for all their help.

Just tell people to use their local bike shop. Use their local bike shop.

Our expectation of New Zealand as a utopia were unmet, but the generosity and kindness we received from everyone, made the first stage of our trip enjoyable. We biked hundreds of miles, ran a half-marathon midway through for a good cause, and camped by rivers, mountains, and lakes with absolutely stunning views.

As for the free cake at the top there was no free cake or any cake at all. There was just a small American western/cowboy themed resort where we bought sandwiches and ate them.

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Whole of It: 'Free Cake at the Top' - Scottsbluff Star Herald

MARCH 11, 2017

THE FLOODS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY revealed a salient fact that wasnt very important before: lower Manhattan is indeed much lower than upper Manhattan, like by about fifty vertical feet on average. In Kim Stanley Robinsons New York 2140, out this month, this now extremely important fact has combined with rising sea levels to transform the city into what its inhabitants have come to call a SuperVenice: a hacked-together improvisation they navigate via water taxis, skybridges, airships, and private boats they store in the ruined lower floors of skyscrapers. The world has recovered from two massive economic depressions following the two Pulses two decades-long periods of rapid sea level rise following major ice-sheet collapses in Antarctica and is now mostly soldiering on again as normal. In fact, New York becomes something of a frontier city again, in its own way a boom town. Flooded with squatters, climate refugees, and other persons rendered undocumented by the midcentury loss of huge swaths of paper and digital records, the city may have lost its crown as the capital of global finance to Denver, but its still one hell of a town. Its doing so well by 2140, in fact, that some of those fantastically rich Denverites, 124 years from now, are even starting to see New York real estate as a buying opportunity, the next great target for re-gentrification.

Where most contemporary histories of the future imagine climate change as either an annoying irritation or else the end of history the disaster that will end civilization in New York 2140 Robinson cuts more of a middle path. Climate change does indeed prove utterly catastrophic in this novel, laying waste to the coastal cities where a startling percentage of the worlds population currently lives, and devastating a huge amount of infrastructure and fixed capital, costing trillions of dollars but humans are incredibly versatile problem-solvers, and we adapt. Technical solutions like sea walls and skybridges are really only the start of what would be necessary in a flooded Manhattan. Think of the immense social changes, the legal, economic, and architectural structures that would need to be innovated when huge areas of major cities are permanently underwater, or indeed become part of the intertidal zone. Even by 2140, nearly 100 years after the start of the crisis, the long work of retrofitting civilization to rising sea levels goes on, and not all of it is even that unhappy; its no secret that the capitalists use the same phrase to denote both crisis and opportunity, creative destruction. Theres even an investment fund keyed to up-to-the-minute oceanographic data, which you can buy, sell, or short based on your predictions of sea level change from tsunamis, storm surge, and other ecocatastrophic fluctuations.

Befitting its setting, the eco in New York 2140 is as much economy as ecology; climate disaster becomes just another black-swan market event no one could have predicted, with winners (mostly rich people) and losers (mostly the rest of us). And true to Robinsons famous political orientation toward utopian speculations, it falls to his 2140 characters to disrupt the cycle of bubble, crash, and bailout that has run nearly uninterrupted across multiple economic depressions since we all got it wrong the first time, way back in 2008. His protagonists are an unlikely group: a couple of homeless hackers, a YouTube-style celebrity, a hedge fund manager, an NYPD detective, a city organizer, a super, some kids all living in the abandoned Met Life building, to which they have somewhat dubious squatters rights. But ingenuity and accident give them an unexpected opening to make a real difference in the larger world, and they decide to grab it.

Unlike seemingly everyone I knew in high school, college, and graduate school, Ive never actually lived in New York City, though I did grow up in New Jersey, and have spent enough time there that I still feel the usual sort of warm glow about the place. To the extent that the East Coast/West Coast divide replicates in science fiction as it does across most contemporary pop cultural genres, Robinson is a Californian sojourning in New York, but to this Jersey kid he got the details impressively right, even down to a sidelong glance at my beloved Meadowlands. At times, the book actually felt a bit over-researched to me, with too many characters talking about what used to be at this site or that, before the flood, but I came to understand that this was not simply as-you-know-Bob overexposition; it was also a token of the immense trauma they and everyone in Future New York is still living through. What else would you think about, as you flew through a strange web of skybridges and ziplines crisscrossing the ruins of what used to be the greatest city in the world? Of course they talk and think often about how things used to be, back when the world was normal. They live with that temporal confusion every day. (I will concede, however, even as an unrepentant Robinson booster, that the people of 2140 seem awfully well informed about nuts-and-bolts details of the 2008 financial crisis.)

It is undeniably clear that Robinsons project has become the construction of a huge metatextual history of the future, not unlike those sagas imagined by Asimov or Heinlein in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, distributed across overlapping but distinct and mutually irreconcilable texts. Each new Robinson book comments on and complicates the vision of the future espoused by earlier ones, typically by refocusing our attention on some heretofore overlooked component of the problem. Here, for instance, an event that featured in the background of his other future histories including the Mars books ice sheet collapse moves to the foreground, while the question of outer space exploration and colonization is now bracketed entirely. Likewise, the question of animals in an era of mass extinction (what one character in New York 2140 calls not the Anthropocene but the Anthropocide) which was a major theme in Robinsons novel 2312 returns here in unexpected ways, some more optimistic but most rather less so. There are decent people trying to make a positive difference by working for government, like in Science in the Capital, and even some hope somehow squeezed out of the United Statess necrotic political process, if you can imagine such a thing. If the narrative situations in these books sometimes coincide, if sometimes the starting points for these stories seem a bit similar, this shouldnt be altogether shocking or offensive to us; to whatever extent the future flows out of physical, biological, and historical law it will be largely path-dependent, and with only so much variation among possibilities.

This formal similarity of possible futures, all branching out from a single history, has often been an explicit concern of Robinsons. He once published a companion to the Mars trilogy in The Martians, which contains stories in which some aspects of the Mars narrative go different ways; he also published an essay, Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions, which spells out several possible futures that might have come out of his alternate history story The Lucky Strike (many of them strongly undercutting the optimism of the original story). This fascination with theme and variation turns out to be unexpectedly manifest in New York 2140 as well, whose opening chapter appeared in modified, alternate-universe form in Fredric Jamesons An American Utopia last summer as Mutt and Jeff Push the Button. Whereas it was oriented toward Jamesons discussion of universal conscription as a vision of a classless anticapitalist utopia in that book, here Mutt and Jeff set the table instead for the revolutionary financial hacks of New York 2140.

Like Galileos Dream, 2312, and Aurora before it, New York 2140 remixes many of Robinsons key futurological themes, once again with a significantly more pessimistic orientation. One of the many competing narrative voices in New York 2140, a historian (or at least history-minded amateur) who is only referred to as a citizen, seems to exist in metafictional relationship with the rest of the text, living in 2140 New York along with the others but simultaneously understanding himself to be part of a constructed and perhaps somewhat tunnel-visioned narrative. The a citizen narrator seems to understand himself to be in a sort of ongoing argument with interlocutors who dont want him to be too pessimistic, who dont want to hear a bunch of boo-hooing and giving-upness, but who also need to be made to understand that there arent actually happy endings in history, just people coming together to make choices that can make things better or make them worse (and so we should strive to make them better). Like most of the recent Robinson novels in what I would call his postScience in the Capital Middle Period and remixing, in different ways, the ends of both 2312 and Aurora New York 2140 ends on a note of strong ambiguity. The heroes have achieved many of their goals but there was no guarantee of permanence to anything they did, and the pushback was ferocious as always, because people are crazy and history never ends, and good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear. And out there of course, forever hovering over everything like the sword of Damocles, is the rest of the ice sheet, the climatological monster weve summoned and can neither control nor banish, which could slide into the ocean at any time, and throw everything theyve built into utter chaos once again.

Ive taken the highly unusual and possibly ill-advised step of quoting from very late in the book here because of something that I feel must be said: written before Trumps election and released just after his inauguration, New York 2140 stands as the first major science fictional artifact of the Trump era, anticipating even in its articulation of the conditions of victory the fragility of progress and the likelihood of reversal. The story ends at a moment of upswing (like the pie-in-the-sky optimism of November 2008, which felt at the time like an exhilarating moment of liberation) but how can we not hear in those words not only the disappointing and broken struggle of the actual Obama years but also the screeching, lunatic backlash of the Trump era to which we have now all been condemned? Dont be nave! the a citizen narrator implores us. There are no happy endings! Because there are no endings! And possibly there is no happiness either! I felt for a bit reading New York 2140 that perhaps it was no longer right to call Robinson our last great utopian visionary, as he is so often described; maybe even Stan has finally wised up and realized were all doomed. When the misanthropic voice of H. G. Wells pops up in one of the epigram pages that periodically punctuate the novel, to announce, upon first seeing the Manhattan skyline, What a beautiful ruin it will make! it really felt to me, when reading the novel in the bleak, miserable December of 2016, like the piercing stab of the truth, the real truth. We are going to take this beautiful place and make it a ruin, make everything a ruin until everything is dead. In fact, speaking realistically rather than utopically, we probably already have. Climate change is an intensifying feedback loop we cant interrupt and cant reverse; even if we stopped burning carbon tomorrow, itd probably already be too late to stop most of it, and we wont stop burning carbon, especially not post-11/8. Some version of New York 2140 maybe better, likely much worse seems to be the actual future of our civilization, the one our political leaders and titans of industry and artificially intelligent high-speed-trading algorithms driving the invisible hand of the market have, in their infinite wisdom, chosen for us.

So maybe New York 2140 is a genuinely utopian text after all, insofar as it puts the start of the worst of the disaster in the 2050s, when the crooks who did this to us will all be dead, and Ill be in my 70s, even more bitter and dyspeptic about the state of the world than I am now, if thats possible. In 2052, when Robinson imagines the first Pulse starting, assuming of course Trump doesnt kill us all first, my kids will be 40 and 38, both of them just a little older than I am today. Too bad for them, I guess! Too bad for any kids they might want to have, or any kids those kids will have, or any kids theyll have, or

But of course this isnt the full story either, not all of it. New York 2140 has actually clarified for me my previous misunderstanding of Robinsons intellectual project in his Middle Period, where (it has always seemed to me) we keep getting utopia-but-worse, -and-worse, -and-worse-yet. What is actually happening, I realize now, is more complicated than that. In Benjamins Theses on the Concept of History, he writes of the work of historical materialism as a bid to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Robinsons project since the Mars books has been to attempt to seize hold of the future as it flashes up at a moment of danger and say a better world is possible yes, even here, and even here. After all, every second of time, Benjamin says in that same essay, is a gate through which the Messiah might enter.

The passage that solidified this new understanding for me was ironically one in which two characters (the aforementioned Mutt and Jeff) find themselves trapped in a Waiting for Godotesque situation with nothing but time, discussing the past. Once upon a time, the Vladimir says to the Estragon, there was a country across the sea, where everyone tried their best to make a community that worked for everyone.

Utopia?

New York. We then see the Vladimir describe the founding of this New York as a place where everyone could be whoever they wanted to be, where who you were before you got there didnt matter a free place, a beautiful place, a gift. Of course its a place that never fully existed in our bad history, but from time to time we saw its glimmers, and in any event its a place we might have had.

Why didnt anyone live there before? the Estragon asks.

Well, thats another story. Actually there were people there already, I have to say, but alas they didnt have immunity to the diseases that the new people brought with them, so most of them died. But the survivors joined this community and taught the newcomers how to take care of the land so that it would stay healthy forever. Oh oh well. So this is all just another utopian dream, a lullaby, a tale for children, an alternate history not all that unlike the one Robinson himself crafted in his own The Years of Rice and Salt. But despite its what-if nature, its really not so far out of the realm of the possible. The lullaby simply imagines people who are just like us, except they chose to seize hold of utopia, together, in their shared moment of danger. It could have happened! It didnt, alas the colonists chose to accelerate the wretched work of genocide instead but it might have. Even in the world-historical disaster that was first contact between the New World and the Old, even in a time of horrific, unthinkable mass death, we can still find seeds for the utopia that might have been founded then instead. Every moment has those seeds, Benjamin said; ours does too. In this way,New York 2140 truly is a document of hope as much as dread and despair. And its a hope well dearly need in the Anthropocene, the Anthropocide, the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene, postnormality, whatever you want to call the coming bad years that, with each flood and drought and wildfire and superstorm, we have to realize have already begun our own shared moment of danger, as it now begins to wash up over our beaches, breach our levees, flash up at us in an ever-rising tide.

Gerry Canavan is an assistant professor of 20th- and 21st-century literature at Marquette University and the author of Octavia E. Butler (University of Illinois Press, 2016).

Read more from the original source:

Utopia in the Time of Trump - lareviewofbooks

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Why Canada will come to regret its embrace of refugees New York Post Each illegal crossing represents one less headache for us, one more headache for them sorry, one more beautiful soul to bask in Trudeau's utopia. To those fleeing ... That isn't exactly how things work in the non-Twitter world, of course: The March ... and more »

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Why Canada will come to regret its embrace of refugees - New York Post

In the final gallery of Adios Utopia, theres a video of a march through Havana. The marchers are dressed for carnival, but in black instead of in colorful costumes, and they are marching backward, to the music of a brass band. The performance, Irreversible Conga (2012), a work by artists called Los Carpinteros, is suggesting that Cuba is going backward.

The gesture fits the title of the exhibition which will be at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston through May 21. Some artists simply fled the island utopia. Some left after persecution for their work. Some stayed and expressed their views about life on the island through their art. Some are still being persecuted. That experience has kept the artists in this show from preserving a sense of humor.

Discredited for many as a utopia, Cuba is hot as a destination now, and as a source of art, although probably not as hot in Houston as in New York or Miami. Like it or not, youll have to travel to Houston to see the most comprehensive exhibition of Cuban contemporary art on view today.

Adios Utopia will win plenty of friends for these intrepid Cuban artists, but not many for the Cuban government. Not a single work from a Cuban state institution is here. Cuban officials are well aware that any state property can be seized to satisfy outstanding U.S. legal judgments against Cuba. (This explains why the Bronx Museum of Art was not able to host its ambitious plan for loans from the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana. A substitute show of Cuban art from other sources is now on view there.)

Most of the works in Houston come from collections outside of Cuba, or from Cuban artists themselves, who can bring their work into the US. Some if it was painted over to avoid problems with Cuban Customs.

A major funder of the exhibition is the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), which is also a major lender and the publisher of the shows massive catalog.

Before you enter the galleries where the exhibition is on view, you see a mournful row of flags mounted on the wall separating the galleries from the rest of the interior. The flags, called Apolitical (2001) by Wilfredo Prieto, are in black and white, bearing witness to a community of nations of which Cuba has always wanted to be a part. The island is isolated today, and not just because of the US embargo.

Isolation is a theme in Adios Utopia, but its a condition that varies in its intensity. In the first galleries, we see abstract works that seem inspired by the paintings of Fernand Leger and Kasimir Malevich. Nothing too political here, but abstract artists went in and out of favor, depending on the politics of the time.

Cuban artists have always had some room to go their own way, as long as their government didnt perceive them to be rocking the boat. Photographs by Raul Corral Varela from 1959 show bearded commandantes sleeping in official buildings. These barbudos, as they were called, were representatives of a peoples army, and they were portrayed that way.

Another style typical of the Castro regimes early days blended Pop Art with Cuban modernism. On the wall is Raul Martinezs group portrait of revolutionary leaders, with Che Guevara in the back row. Also there is the hero from the era of Cuban independence, Jose Marti. In front of them is a self-portrait of Martinez, with his male lover, depicted as two citizens of a new Cuba. Any suggestion of a bond between the two was a risk in a society that persecuted homosexuals. Think of dont ask, dont tell, Havana style.

That honeymoon, if we can call it that, would be over soon enough, and Cuban artists would take on the obvious targets, like the countrys leadership and official rhetoric that they found empty at its core.

Theres a video, Opus, by Jose Angel Toirac, that just shows numbers quoted by Fidel Castro, whose voice declaring those numbers comes over the audio. One painting nearby is of a pot being emptied, and theres a tongue coming out of it. You can guess whose tongue it is.

For America (1986), a small installation by Juan Francisco Elso, is a statue of Jose Marti, standing, covered in dirt. Little red barbs are stuck into his body and into the ground.

Marti (1853-95) is a central figure for Cubans. Hes a martyr to Cuban independence, yet war and martial symbols were not glorified in Cuban art after 1960. Cuban official media did plenty of that. Later, war would be a more complicated subject.

A work of four video frames shown together by Carlos Garaicoa, Four Cubans (1997), shows veterans of Cubas Angola campaigns standing silently in what look like ruins. (Bear in mind that there are a lot of places that look like ruins in Cuba.) The figures are mute because the Angola wars toll on Cubans who fought there is not a subject that Cubans discuss publicly.

Landscape and architecture are themes of choice for Garaicoa, an artist now based in Madrid who travels and exhibits widely. In Adios Utopia, landscape is also a subject for Los Carpinteros, who constructed a lighthouse laid on its side, using scale rather than subtlety to make its point. The lighthouse is not just symbol of vision. Its phallic shape is an unmistakable reference to Cuban machismo.

And theres more landscape. A painting by Alejandro Campins, Born on January 1st (2013), shows the gateway to what was supposed to be a school in a rural setting. Nothing but the gate is there, and the surface of the relatively recent painting has scratches that seem like the scars of age. The legacy of unkept promises? The toll of scarcity?

The isolation of an island nation and sheer scarcity have made recycling a medium in its own right in Cuban art, a kind of arte povera by necessity. An early work in the show is a shrine by Raul Martinez to his father, with a picture of a fisherman in a found frame, with net slung over part of it. The Spanish word for shrine is altar, like the English altar, and Martinezs father has the look of a humble saint.

In Estadistica or Statistics (1995-2000)), a later work by Tania Bruguera, an artist who has been arrested and detained recently, an enormous Cuban flag is assembled of human hair. The suggestion is that scarcity eventually forces its victims to give up parts of themselves.

Sometimes the recycling is of themes rather than materials. A series of cartoonish drawings appropriates the slogans from billboards all over the country, like DEFENSA or PRODUCTIVIDAD.

In Fight, Resist, Win (1989-90), Carlos Rodriguez Cardenas parodies three would-be inspirational words, starting with heroic figures and ending up with some very kinky sex. Thats not what the government had in mind when it asked its citizens to repeat those watchwords.

Thats not the only grotesquery on view, but theres no more than you would find in any exhibition of 100 works of contemporary art.

Adios Utopia, which travels next to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, was originally planned to be shown at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, but the Hirshhorn pulled out, citing budgetary constraints. The shows organizers, among them the collector Ella Cisneros, say they were also turned down in Miami, for political reasons, but that theyll take the show there eventually. I wish them luck. Theyll be more welcome than in Havana.

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Hello Cuba, Adios Utopia: Cuban Art in Texas - Observer

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Just how pathetic is the contemporary Republican Party?

So pathetic that it voted dozens of times to repeal the Affordable Care Act without having any coherent idea of, or consensus about, what it wanted to pass as an alternative (despite repeated claims to the contrary).

So pathetic that it committed itself to passing a replacement bill on an arbitrary deadline that ensured the end result would be filled with flaws that experts on its own side could identify within a few hours.

So pathetic that it appears not to have realized that an army of conservative activists and right-wing health-care wonks, along with a bevy of Republican politicians, would respond to the American Health Care Act with open disdain.

So pathetic that some liberal commentators have speculated (in a half-serious way) that House Speaker Paul Ryan must have intended for the AHCA to go down in flames, since he couldn't possibly be inept enough to oversee such a debacle of a rollout. (For the record, I don't think Ryan is anywhere close to being clever enough to pull off something of that scope.)

On health care, Republicans know one thing: They despise the ACA with a blinding fury. But beyond that, they have no idea what to do.

How do we know that? Because the AHCA is a sloppy, muddled mess of a bill that's seemingly designed to please no one, except for rich people who want their taxes lowered. (In which case it's hard to understand why the House didn't simply pass a deficit-financed tax cut for upper income families and leave the ACA alone.)

Aside from the perfunctory tax cut, there's really nothing in the bill to satisfy the desires of the hardcore libertarian faction of the GOP that very clearly does know what it wants namely, a "free market" system of health care for everything except bare-minimum catastrophic coverage. That's been the notional goal of Republican reformers at least since the ACA passed in 2010.

The only problem is that the transition to a more market-based system would inflict enormous pain on many millions of Americans who carry forms of insurance that are made available and affordable by the heavily regulated and subsidized system we currently have. Now, some of the Ayn Rand-quoting libertarian true believers who make up the House Freedom Caucus would undoubtedly vote for a such a bill, no matter how much suffering it imposed. Ideologues are like that. But most politicians are far too self-interested to willingly die for a cause.

And so we have the bill unveiled Monday, which, as several commentators on the right have pointed out, keeps the general architecture and assumptions underlying ObamaCare intact while merely fiddling with a lot of the details. Don't get me wrong: Those adjustments will likely hurt plenty of people, though probably a lot fewer than a switch to a genuine market-based approach would have done. But it's hard to estimate precisely what the AHCA's real-world costs or fiscal effects might be because Ryan has decided to move ahead with marking up the bill without first getting it scored by the Congressional Budget Office.

So this is where the Republicans find themselves: trying to pass a bill that's unpopular with the right for compromising too much with ObamaCare and unpopular with moderates for inflicting too much pain on voters. And they're doing all of this while groping around in the dark because Ryan wants to keep the CBO out of the loop (no doubt partly out of fear of provoking even more opposition from the party's deficit hawks, for example).

It's a mess and a completely self-inflicted one.

And that's without even mentioning the extra-large serving of Republican mess that is Donald Trump.

The president described the bill as "wonderful" in a tweet, but he can't possibly be happy with how the rollout has unfolded so far. That's not just because he craves praise and bridles at bad press. It's also because, in the scheme of the contemporary Republican Party, Trump is a radical leftist when it comes to health-care policy.

One reason many rank-and-file Republicans and conservative-movement intellectuals originally denounced Trump as a closest liberal is that he once supported a single-payer system an option so far out in the direction of outright socialism that even Barack Obama and his Democratic majorities didn't dare seriously consider it back in 2009. Trump doesn't explicitly advocate such a radical reform today, but he alone among leading Republicans still talks in terms of providing "insurance for everybody." Trump and the Freedom Caucus may agree, for utterly mysterious reasons, that ObamaCare is an unmitigated "disaster," but they agree about very little else. Bridging that gap may well prove impossible.

The really interesting question is what Trump will do if the AHCA collapses (as it already appears likely to do). Will he encourage the writing of and play a bigger role in drafting a new "replacement" bill that cuts coverage for millions of Americans? Or will he turn on Ryan and much of the rest of his party, demanding that they scrap ObamaCare, not for a free-market utopia but for a single-payer system that provides open access to health care for all Americans?

Such a move would likely tear the GOP apart, while gaining Trump many surprising new allies in the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.

Will it happen? When a party becomes as incoherent as the Republican Party is today, anything is possible.

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Why everyone hates the GOP's new health plan - The Week Magazine

Brit + Co

Father John Misty Explained The Taylor Swift Sex Line In 'Total Entertainment Forever' UPROXX ... where like, the internet was supposed to be this new democracy, a utopia of information where everyone had a voice and we were all interconnected, and we would experience true democracy and it turned into pornography, followed only by outrage. Taylor Swift Got a NSFW Shout-Out on SNL But You Probably Missed ItBrit + Co Father John Misty Explains Taylor Swift Line From Total Entertainment ForeverPitchfork all 61 news articles »

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Father John Misty Explained The Taylor Swift Sex Line In 'Total Entertainment Forever' - UPROXX

TIME AFTER TIME Pilot Using the 1979 novel and movie as a launching point, Time After Time chronicles the adventures of a young H.G. Wells, as he travels through centuries, decades and days in the time machine he created. In the pursuit of the charismatic (yet secretly psychopathic) Dr. John Stevenson, better known as Jack the Ripper, Wells arrives in modern day New York City, searching for Stevenson after the doctor escapes authorities in Wells London home. But instead of the Utopia he imagined, Wells finds a world more aligned with Stevensons temperament in a series charged with danger and adventure, and centered in thrills, satire, humor and most of all, an epic love story, SUNDAY, MARCH 5 (9:00-10:00 p.m. EST), on the ABC Television Network. (ABC/Sarah Shatz) FREDDIE STROMA, JOSH BOWMAN

What: Premiere of series based on 1979 film about the novelist H.G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper into the future to stop him from killing, starring Freddie Stroma and Josh Bowman.

When: 9 p.m. Sunday. Two episodes air back to back.

Where: ABC.

After Once Upon a Time, ABC is airing back-to-back episodes of its new series Time After Time.

Its the sixth time travel series this season, although to be fair the new show is a reboot of the 1979 movie from Nicholas Meyer, which starred Malcolm McDowell as the novelist H.G. Wells, who wrote The Time Machine. The premise is that the writer had really invented a time machine, but that his friend Dr. John Stevens (David Warner) steals it to go to the future when it is discovered he is the real Jack the Ripper. The movie worked as a charming escapist romantic thriller as Wells meets a bank teller (Mary Steenburgen) looking for an old-fashioned guy.

The reboot from Kevin Williams (Scream) isnt quite so charming. It begins very much the same with Wells (Freddie Stroma) in pursuit of Stevens (Josh Bowman) in present-day New York City.

The Ripper takes off into the city, where he finds after watching the news, including President Trumps dark vision of America hes in a world where he belongs, even calling himself an amateur when it comes violence.

Wells, however, meets Jane Walker (Genesis Rodriguez), an assistant museum curator, who eventually helps him after he is hit by a car. The first episode is much like the movie, but by the second episode the new show stakes out new territory.

Wells, we find, travels to other points in history. We meet his descendant Vanessa Anders. Shes an heiress who owns the museum housing the time machine and has a number of security men to aid Wells. The plan of the series is to explore other of Wells creations, including The Invisible Man and The Island of Dr. Moreau.

The original movie worked because Wells was played as a man out of time and Steenburgens character longed for a gentleman while still wanting to be a modern woman.

The new series doesnt let that relationship ripen enough; so it ends up diving too quickly into violence and sci-fi fantasy to get its grounding. There is little chemistry between the principals, though that is not really their fault. They need a little more time together in less frantic moments for that. There is a hint at the end of episode two all that was available to review that would happen. Otherwise, Time After Time is too much repeat and rinse.

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'Time After Time' delivers Jack the Ripper to modern-day New York - The San Gabriel Valley Tribune

EW.com

Father John Misty references Taylor Swift in new song, 'Total Entertainment Forever' EW.com ... where like, the internet was supposed to be this new democracy, a utopia of information where everyone had a voice and we were all interconnected, and we would experience true democracy and it turned into pornography, followed only by outrage. Father John Misty Explains Taylor Swift Line From Total Entertainment ForeverPitchfork Why are we cool with Father John Misty singing about sex with Taylor Swift, but not Kanye?FasterLouder Father John Misty Explains Taylor Swift Line On Total Entertainment ForeverStereogum Consequence of Sound (blog) all 56 news articles »

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Father John Misty references Taylor Swift in new song, 'Total Entertainment Forever' - EW.com

"I recorded it in Auckland with Jonathan Pearce at the end of December 2014, so Ive been sitting on it quite a while," former Dunedin student Christopher Bull says of his EP on a whirlwind visit from the United Kingdom.

"I basically recorded it, then moved out of the country. I planned to release it in London, but I didnt quite plan on how hard London was."

Called The Utopia EP, the songs cover the slightly arrogant struggles of a middle-class 20-something in a big city. Theyre actually having loads of fun, but they kind of see it as a facade.

"The thing that Im almost more shocked by is how things havent really changed, not that I necessarily thought they would get better," Bull says, looking back at the material.

"My version of dissociation was just watching Auckland house prices go insane, and the whole city just fall into this rapture led on by the New Zealand Herald and its calling of the house prices like a horse race, which was just surreal.

"Its 2017 and its still happening and now its taking Wellington too. I wasnt prophetic, but whatever I was writing about hasnt changed at all and if anything, has gotten worse."

The opener is my personal favourite. Called Pile it all on (a toast to the optimists), it is built on a gorgeously soaring and deeply resonant electric guitar that you can feel in your bones and that makes me think of devastating Blur heartbreaker No Distance Left to Run.

As Bull sings of having no money, aspirations to burn, and wondering if he can make it through student loans, it comes across like a plaintive funeral march that just happens to be really, really beautiful.

Later, things turn more abstract and experimental. Utopia, written in a fit of anger after watching John Pilgers film of the same name (and where the EP also gets its title from), is rousing and sad with its psychedelic vocals and swirling distortion.

"Living in London right now is both fascinating and terrifying," Bull says preparing for his return.

"In the two years that weve been there, a lot of what we thought we knew to be true about the world has been upended in the Brexit vote and Trumps election.

"Its especially telling as the divide between winning cities and the rest of the world now feels so stark. London may as well be a different country in the UK. Its providing a rich vein of both anxiety and material, watching in real time as men like Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and Steve Bannon actively try and take apart a lot of things that we took for granted in the world.

"Its also an inspiration for action though; we went to a demonstration against the travel ban on a Monday after work which attracted 30,000 people."

New York pop songwriting sensation Greta Kline, aka Frankie Cosmos, is visiting Dunedin next week, in what is sure to be one of the years most anticipated indie rock shows.

Utilising the spartan, wooden beauty of a band like Beat Happening, and the deceptively simply melodies of the likes of Kimya Dawson, Kline and her band deftly explores life, love, and death in earnest and poetic personal detail.

With dozens of Bandcamp demo releases, and two critically acclaimed albums to her name, she is one of the leading lights of the US indie scene, and it is fantastic to see her visiting Dunedin, especially in the post Chicks Hotel era!

- Sam Valentine

Christopher Bulls The Utopia EP is available now for pay as you like from Bandcamp. christopherbull.bandcamp.com/album/the-utopia-ep

Frankie Cosmos, Wednesday, March 8, at Maori Hill Coronation Hall, 8pm. Tickets $30 plus booking fee, presales available from undertheradar.co.nz

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A taste of 'Utopia' - Otago Daily Times

Everyone is bored of being made to be happy all the time Rutger Bregmans book Utopia for Realists. Illustration: Matt Blease for the Guardian

Lets start with a history lesson. In the past, everything was worse. Look, I know you may not be happy that there is famine in large parts of Africa, that Islamic State is in control of a large part of the Middle East, that North Korea could nuke someone for a laugh and that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are bound to make things even more unstable. But count yourself lucky that you are still alive. If you had been born 600 years ago, theres a fair chance youd be dead by now.

What weve all got today would have been seen as a utopia in the middle ages. Thanks to medical advances, only a few of us are really deformed, most people have fresh water, somewhere warm to sleep, enough money to get by and internet access. Some scientists think it wont be long until someone lives to be 1,000.

All this comfort has made us lazy. People used to dream of utopias because their lives were so miserable. But now utopias have become dystopias, with everyone bored of being made to be happy all the time. Weve lost the will to change society for the better. So lets play utopia!

Its May 2009 and an experiment is under way in London. Its subjects: 13 homeless men. These men rack up 400,000 a year in court costs and social services. So what did a charity do? It gave each one 3,000 to spend as they liked. Within a year, theyd all turned their lives around and were productive members of society, apart from some of them.

Giving people free money works. They live longer, they contribute more and are less of a burden on the state. They tried it in Canada and it worked. President Nixon almost pioneered a universal basic income of $1,600 in 1969, before he was persuaded it wasnt such a good idea after all.

We can end poverty for good by just giving people money. Try it. Next time you see a poor person, give them a decent wedge of cash and see how it transforms their lives. But dont just give them a spare fiver, because that will change nothing: nudge economics only increases dependency and keeps people in poverty.

Imagine a world where everyone was a millionaire because the state had given them lots of dosh. Then we wouldnt need to spend money on the NHS, because everyone would be eating and looking after themselves so well that no one would ever get ill. And the few people who did get ill could afford private healthcare. Sorted. Its just a shame there will be no nursing staff as everyone will be too rich to bother with a job that doesnt pay very much and involves long hours.

Have I mentioned that Nixon almost introduced a universal basic income in 1969? Oh, I have. But it was the main point of this book, so I had better repeat it. By the way, the only reason it didnt go ahead was because someone told Nixon lies about what would happen if he were to do it. Only saying.

Heres some other things Id like to happen. We all work far too many hours, except for people who dont work at all. The ideal should be for everyone to work 15 hours a week and spend the rest of the time watching TV. And that is perfectly possible, though I agree it might be rather annoying to find that everywhere you wanted to go with your new time off was closed because staff are on a 15-hour week. Our kids might also be a little thicker because the schools would only be open for three hours a day, but at least theyd happier and I have a case study of a primary school in Amsterdam to prove it.

GDP is another downer. Countries swear by it, forgetting it never existed before the 1930s. So lets get rid of it and measure things differently. Lets do away with robots and bankers, too, as they have all proved more trouble than theyre worth. Cast your mind back to a time when your boss couldnt email you with a pointless query at 10.30 at night. Wasnt it so much nicer to get a good nights sleep? Ignorance is utopian bliss. And as for immigration, if there was free movement of labour, all the worlds problems would be sorted. Everyone who is starving in South Sudan could come over here to do the jobs the rest of us dont have time to do as were only working 15 hours a week. Win-win!

Digested read digested: Living the dream.

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Utopia for Realists and How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman ... - The Guardian

Utopia/Dystopia A Paradigm Shift March 22August 21, 2017

Hctor Zamora Order and Progress March 22April 24, 2017

MAAT Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology Lisbon Portugal

http://www.maat.pt

Following its official opening on October 5, 2016, the new MAAT kunsthalle reopens to the public on March 22, 2017, with two major exhibitions that take up the whole building: Utopia/DystopiaA Paradigm Shift, curated by Pedro Gadanho, Joo Laia and Susana Venturaand Order and Progress by Mexican artist Hctor Zamora, curated by Ins Grosso.

Utopia/DystopiaA Paradigm Shift is the first manifesto exhibition to be held in the kunsthalle designed by Amanda Levete (AL_A). Installed in three of MAATs galleries, this key-inaugural project will be a large group show featuring more than 60 works by a range of international artists and architects, some appearing for the first time in Portugal. The show will reveal how the two fields have represented ideas of utopia, or anticipated emerging notions of dystopia, since the early 1970s, with a strong focus on work produced over the last five years. Participants include architects such as Archigram, Archizoom, yr, Didier Faustino, Yona Friedman, Aldo Rossi, Superstudio, and artists such as Kader Attia, Jordi Colomer, Tacita Dean, DIS Collective, Cao Fei, ngela Ferreira, Cyprien Gailard, Jonas Staal, Ryan Trecartin, and Wolfgang Tillmans.

The preview opening will be held on March 21 with special performances by Michelangelo Pistolleto and Allard van Hoorn which will take place outside the new building.

Hctor Zamora presents a new version of the performance/installation Order and Progress, in which the remains of traditional Portuguese fishing boats from different coastal regions temporarily occupy MAATs Oval Gallery. The performance, previously presented at the Palais de Tokyo in 2016, will take place in the Oval Gallery on March 22, at 6pm, coinciding with the museums opening to the public.

The opening programme continues in the galleries at the Central Power Station with a new exhibition from the EDP Foundation Art Collection. What I Am is the thirdin a series of thematic surveys from this collection of Portuguese Contemporary Art. Curated by Ins Grosso and Luiza Teixeira de Freitas, the show examines the autobiographical and self-referential dimension of artistic creation. With Helena Almeida, Jos Barrios, Sara Bicho, Mauro Cerqueira, Miguel Faro, Jorge Molder, Julio Sarmento, Antnio Sena, Joo Queiroz and Joo Pedro Vale, amongst others.

Other exhibitions on view at MAAT include Liquid Skin, by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Joaquim Sapinho, curated by Alexandre Melo (Boiler Hall), the group showVariable Dimensions - Artists and Architecture, curated by Gregory Lang and Ins Grosso(Central 1), and Archive and Democracy by Portuguese artist Jos Mas de Carvalho, curated by Ana Rito (Ashpit 8).

Exhibitions opening in May with ARCOLisboa 2017 Coinciding with the second edition of ARCOLisboa, on May 17 the museum will open three new exhibitions: a large-scale project by Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa, which will occupy nearly 1000 sq. m of the kunsthalles Oval Gallery; and two exhibitions in the galleries of Central Power Station, both by Portuguese artists: a site-specific work by Joo Onofre at the monumental Boiler Hall, and APQHome, an art installation by Ana Prez-Quiroga.

ARCOLisboa takes place between May 18 and 21 at Cordoaria Nacional, just a few meters from MAATs new building.

Open call:APQ HomeAna Prez Quiroga We are looking for:Artists, curators, critics, art historians, architects, filmmakers, performers, theater practitioners, choreographers, writers, musicians, textile designers, food artists, interdisciplinary collectives, & other related areas.

APQHome is a project consisting in a domestic spacea house and its objectsand a garden, inside the MAAT exhibition space. It is a total work of art that requires the participants intervention in an immersion that, in a 48-hour period, aim to perform the everyday life, in a total art/life fusion experience.The participants will have the opportunity to spend two nights at the museum, occupying this domestic space in a program taking place between May 16and July 30, 2017.

Open call: Starting on March 8, registration forAPQHomeis open until June 8, 2017.

More info here.

The kunsthalle AL_As kunsthalle, which contains four distinct gallery spaces, captures the essence of the exceptional 38,000 m2 riverside site and its extraordinary light. Blending structure into landscape, and conceived to create significant new public spaces, it is designed to allow visitors to walk over and under, as well as through the building, while the undulating roof offers panoramic views towards the river and across Belm. The building creates a constantly changing place filled with aquatic reflections that interplay with the overhanging faade covered in 15,000 three-dimensional tiles, a reference to Portugals rich tradition of ceramics.

The completion of the architectural project will also include a park designed by Vladimir Djurovic Landscape Architecture, as well as an elegant pedestrian bridge, also designed by AL_A (both set for May 2017), that will land on the new kunsthalle roof, making the campus and waterfront more accessible to the city.

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March 4, 2017 - EDP Foundation - Utopia/Dystopia / Hctor Zamora: Order and Progress - E-Flux

As liberal democracy seems to be crumbling under the weight of widespread despondency, some hardline opinions are in danger of becoming received wisdoms. In the global market, we are told, we must work harder andimprove productivity. The welfare state has become too large and we needto cut back on benefits. Immigration is out of control and borders need to be strengthened.

The choice seems to be either to accept this new paradigm or risk the likes of Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders gaining power. The centre ground is being dragged to the left and right, and collapsing down the middle. Meanwhile progressive politics has returned to its comfort zone, busily opposing everything and offering almost nothing. Where is the vision, the ambition, the belief?

Yet into this bleak picture drops a book and an author bristling with hope, optimism and answers. Rutger Bregman is a 28-year-old Dutchman whose book, Utopia for Realists, has taken Holland by storm and could yet revitalise progressive thought around the globe. His solutions are quite simple and staunchly set against current trends: we should institute a universal basic income for everyone that covers minimum living expenses say around 12,000 a year; the working week should be shortened to 15 hours; borders should be opened and migrants allowed to move wherever they choose.

Ive heard for years that my ideas are unrealistic. You want to stick to the status quo? Hows that working out?

If that all sounds like fantasy politics, then Bregman has assembled a wealth of empirical evidence to make his case. Better than that, though, it is not a dry, statistical analysis although he doesnt shy from solid data but a book written with verve, wit and imagination. The effect is charmingly persuasive, even when you cant quite believe what youre reading.

Bregman lives in Utrecht, arguablyHollands most progressive city, where cycling is almost obligatory and motorists are effectively deemed guilty until proven innocent. His house is a few yards from the pretty canal that cuts through the centre of a carefully thought-out town.

Thin, with a pallid complexion and a wispy rumour of a beard, he looks even younger than 28, but he speaks with impressive authority on his subject. Bregman does something very smart and mature in his book. Instead of just attacking capitalism and post-enlightenment liberalism, at the outset he celebrates its achievements. He shows the incredible improvements in life expectancy, health, wealth, education and freedoms that have been achieved in the last couple of centuries.

As for much derided globalisation, he credits it with lifting 700 million Chinese out of extreme poverty hugely more than communism ever achieved. But whereas idealists in the 60s extolled Maoism, regardless of the death and destruction it wrought, no one gets too misty eyed about what the international market has done for China. Why, I ask, are the progressive-minded so reluctant to acknowledge this remarkable turnaround?

I think the big problem on the left, says Bregman, is that it only knows what its against. So its against austerity, against the establishment, against homophobia, against racism. Im not saying Im not against those things, but I think you should be for something. You need to have a new vision of where you want to go.

Bregman has a vision. And its a pretty clear one. But, wait a second. Universal benefit, a 15-hour working week, open borders, really? How?

Ive heard for three years that many of my ideas are unrealistic and unreasonable and that we cant afford them, he says, by way of preamble to a more comprehensive reply. And the simple answer is Oh, you want to stick to the status quo? Hows that been working out?

In Bregmans Holland the status quo has taken quite a bashing of late, and as a result the white-haired Wilders, who wants to stop Muslim immigration and ban the Quran, has emerged as the countrys most powerful politician. The debate in what used to be Europes most tolerant nation has become increasingly toxic. But as bad as that situation is, it still doesnt explain how a universal basic income would be paid for. The first thing we should acknowledge, says Bregman, is that poverty is hugely expensive. It varies from country to country, but most of the time its around 3, 4 or 5% of GDP. If you look at what it would cost just to top up the income of all the poor people in a country, it would cost about 1% of GDP.

Perhaps, but hes talking about paying everyone rich and poor around 12,000 a year. Thats a vast amount of money. How could that be achieved? Youd have to tax the middle class so much that what theyd receive would be wiped out, and then try to tax the very wealthy at a much higher rate which has not proven a successful policy, because the rich are very good at protecting their money.

Bregman gets a little bit vague at this point. He says that even neoliberal economists such as Milton Friedman were keen on universal basic income (UBI), although they tend to call it negative income tax. He also notes that the country that has come closest to implementing a UBI is the US, under President Nixon. It was only because the Democrat-controlled Senate thought Nixon wasnt offering enough money in the basic income that the policy was ditched at the last moment.

He acknowledges that a genuinely universal system would involve a massive overhaul of our tax system and that it would require an enormous amount of public and political support. But youve got to start somewhere, is his outlook, and the best place to start is in redefining what we mean by work.

There was a poll in the UK that showed that 37% of British workers think that their job doesnt need to exist. Well, its not the bin men, and the care workers and the teachers that say that. Were talking about consultants, bankers, accountants, lawyers etc. The implications of that are radical. We could cut the working week by a third and be just as rich. Probably richer!

Well, I say, just because someone doesnt value their job, doesnt mean that it doesnt have value. These things can be part of an invisible network of jobs that keeps everything else going. They cant just be excised like that.

Thats the best we can come up with nowadays? he asks, shocked at my dull pragmatism. People are saying: I feel alienated, I think my job is useless, and the only answer we have for them is No, no, its really useful. You know the invisible hand knows best. Were paying you so much money, it has to be useful!

I say I was thinking more of the film Its a Wonderful Life, which, after all, is about a banker. He thinks his life is worthless and yet we see the depth of his effect on others when his input is stripped away. Anyway, I take his point. We should reconsider much of what society through the inequality of financial payment deems important.

One of the basic lessons of history, says Bregman, is that things can be different. The way weve structured our economy, our system of welfare, its not natural. It could be different.

Bregman is the son of a small-town Protestant preacher in the south of Holland. He studied history at university and thought of becoming an academic, but found that life too cloistered. Instead he began working as a journalist, but realised the news was a distorting way of viewing the world. Its about exceptions terrorism, corruption, crisis rather than the everyday means of how things actually work.

So he found a job at a new newspaper, the Correspondent, that enabled him to write in a way that brings together journalism and a more academic approach to the world. The result is a hybrid thats reminiscent of the New Yorkers Malcolm Gladwell: lots of compelling anecdotes, backed up with information from an array of surveys and research papers delivered in a tremendously readable style.

But theres also an extra layer of idealism with Bregman, a belief that people are essentially good and that all it requires is a rational analysis of the facts and good governance to make the most profound and lasting changes. As he repeatedly points out, democracy, equal rights for men and women, the abolition of slavery these were all once deemed the preserve of utopians.

He quotes approvingly the famous Oscar Wilde formulation: A map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out and seeing a better country sets sail. Progress is the realisation of utopias.

But utopias also have a habit of turning out to be dystopias. Bregman is alive to this threat, and is scathing in his assessment of the communist experiment, but also argues that the unintended consequences of massive change can sometimes be virtuous too. I mention that in his book he suggests that universal basic income will enable the low-paid to study and then get the kinds of jobs they want to do. In which case, I wonder, who will be a cleaner?

He smiles at the question.

I think one of the most important facts of basic income would be that its not only a redistribution of income, but also of power. So the cleaners and bin men would have a lot more bargaining power. If you look at a university, for example, the cleaners will get paid more than the professors, which I think is an entirely good thing. Professors love their jobs, they dont need additional money for it. The cleaners dont like their jobs well, they get rewarded for it!

I suggest that someone suffering through a PhD might not share that particular conviction. But he answers with a conviction that has triumphed over doubt. Basic income would give people the most important freedom: the freedom of deciding for themselves what they want to do with their lives.

I can imagine many old heads questioning the wisdom of a young man who has barely experienced the stubborn complexity of the world. But Bregman is clearly on to something. Following his advocacy, Utrecht and several other Dutch towns are conducting trials on basic income. Finland has implemented a trial, but only with the unemployed. Two Scottish councils, Fife and Glasgow, are looking at a scheme and the Swiss are also interested. The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has said that it might be an idea whose time has come, and Benot Hamon, the French Socialist candidate in the forthcoming elections, has included it in his manifesto. Even visionary US tech billionaire Elon Musk is in favour.

One reason why Musk supports a basic income is that work is likely to become much more scarce in the near future of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence and thats also a reason for a much reduced working week. In a way Bregman has less of a hard sell with shorter working hours. History is moving that way and has been for some time. Its just a question of when and how were going to acknowledge the inevitable.

However, there are still problems to iron out, some of which Bregman doesnt tackle in his book. For instance, expertise tends to be gathered over intense periods of study and practice. Who wants to fly on a plane piloted by someone with limited flying hours, or be operated on by a surgeon who hasnt done much surgery?

Bregmans answer is to point out that overworked pilots and surgeons are a danger. Yes, but that doesnt mean a lack of work is not also a potential menace. Now he gets really fuzzy, saying that there would be a paid 15 hours, and then if pilots and surgeons and other experts wanted they could also work in their spare time. When I try to pin him down on what that would mean, he says we need to redefine work as contributing to society in your own way.

This sounds a little too utopian to my ears. Yet if you step back and examine where we are, there is undoubtedly a rational cause to rethink work, especially the well-remunerated jobs that dont appear to create anything of tangible value. Its impossible to read Utopia for Realists without wondering at the efficacy of advertising executives, management consultants, speculative currency investors and, yes, perhaps even feature writers.

Probably Bregmans weakest argument is for open borders not because it isnt viable long term, but because he doesnt really examine the drawbacks. Three obvious problems are 1) population density if millions more arrived in an already cramped Holland, it would create a great deal of tension to say the least. 2) Cultural conflicts the large-scale movement of people from one culture into another does present genuine difficulties of assimilation, many of which Holland and other European countries are already contending with. 3) If it is the better-off in poorer countries who are most likely to leave, it robs those nations of a much-needed middle class.

Bregman listens to all these points and says that for him, open borders are not something he believes will happen tomorrow. Its an aspiration, something to work towards. The same could be said for all of his arguments. However, the critical thing is that he has pointed towards a destination, somewhere that in these embattled times the progressively minded can aim towards, and hes provided some well-researched evidence to support his contentions.

Yes, he is a utopian, but a practical one. He knows there are many problems to overcome, but the first and toughest is the belief that things can change. In that he has made a major contribution. Listen out for Rutger Bregman. He has a big future shaping the future.

Utopia for Realists And How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman is published by Bloomsbury on 9 March (16.99). To order a copy for 14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99

Rutger Bregman will be speaking at Londons How to: Academy conference on 7 March, Second Home, London on 8 March and Bristol Festival ofIdeas on 9 March

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Rutger Bregman: 'We could cut the working week by a third' - The Guardian

Its the latest extreme reality show designed to place participants in mortal danger.

But Channel 4s attempt to replicate the gruelling journey after the Mutiny on the Bounty added trench hand and hallucinations to the roll call of injuries sustained in the name of entertainment.

A hardy crew of nine men crammed into a rickety 23ft wooden boat and recreated the 3,600 mile journey of Bligh, who was cast adrift in the Pacific Ocean and somehow navigated a path to Indonesia with 18 of his men.

Living off dried beef and biscuits and squatting over the side of the boat for calls of nature, the crew relied on the nautical skills of their skipper Anthony Middleton, a former special forces soldier who tests the physical and psychological fitness of contestants on the Channel 4 series SAS: Who Dares Wins.

The weakened sailors soon fell vulnerable to illness. Youve heard of trench foot? Well I had trench hand, said crewman Sam Brown..

He added: Both my hands had huge chunks of flesh dropping off them. I couldnt undo my fly. I couldnt hold a rope. I couldnt operate a camera.

If it had rained for one more day, I think Id have had to have been medevac-ed. My hands were literally falling apart. I still have scars on them now.

When a fearsome storm lashed the ship five days in, even a bruised and dehydrated Middleton, who led Special Boat Service operations in Afghanistan, feared for his life.

Luke Kane, the boats doctor, said: In the middle of these huge waves, in the pitch black, with torrential rain coming down, I was hallucinating.

Ive never been that scared. Youre totally powerless. All you can do is sit there.I really did think we were going to capsize and die.

Kane, who lost four stone during the journey, treated his fellow seasoned survivalists for dehydration. He said: I couldnt sit down without being in pain. I couldnt lie down. And Im a doctor, I know that the sort of weight loss I was showing was very, very unhealthy.

A rescue boat tracked the replica Bounty but was too far behind to pull anyone out of the water had the storm forced a man overboard.

Middleton said: I made it very clear from the beginning that I only wanted to be involved if it was going to be as authentic as possible, down to the rations, the boat, the islands.

Basically keeping the health and safety team at bay as much as possible so we could remain in our bubble.

Although he did not quite inspire a mutiny among the crew, Kane said of their demanding captain: Its quite weird. Im getting better now, but I couldnt talk about Ant for quite a long time without crying, which is really weird.

The modern-day Bountineers may have got off lightly.

A contestant fell 20ft off a cliff edge in the last series of The Island with Bear Grylls and was aiflfted from the camp.

Channel 4s most recent survival series Eden, a ground-breaking social experiment in which a group of volunteers attempted to create a new utopia within the wilds of the Scottish Highlands, failed to live up to its billing when a third of the 23 volunteers walked out within months.

:: Mutiny, Monday March 6, 9pm on Channel 4

@adamsherwin10

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Extreme Channel 4 reality challenge Mutiny makes its sailors suffer - iNews

Bratislav Milenkovic

A great deal has been written in recent years about the perils of automation. With predicted mass unemployment, declining wages, and increasing inequality, clearly we should all be afraid.

By now its no longer just the Silicon Valley trend watchers and technoprophets who are apprehensive. In a study that has already racked up several hundred citations, scholars at Oxford University have estimated that no less than 47 per cent of all American jobs and 54 per cent of all those in Europe are at a high risk of being usurped by machines. And not in a hundred years or so, but in the next twenty. The only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame, notes a New York University professor. But a century from now, nobody will much care about how long it took, only what happened next.

I admit, weve heard it all before. Employees have been worrying about the rising tide of automation for 200 years now, and for 200 years employers have been assuring them that new jobs will naturally materialise to take their place. After all, if you look at the year 1800, some 74 per cent of all Americans were farmers, whereas by 1900 this figure was down to 31 per cent, and by 2000 to a mere 3 per cent. Yet this hasnt led to mass unemployment. In 1930, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes was predicting that wed all be working just 15-hour weeks by the year 2030. Yet, since the 1980s, work has only been taking up more of our time, bringing waves of burnouts, stress, and work-related depressions in its wake.

Meanwhile, the crux of the issue isnt even being discussed. The real question we should be asking ourselves is: what actually constitutes work in this day and age?

In a 2013 survey of 12,000 professionals by the Harvard Business Review, half said they felt their job had no meaning and significance, and an equal number were unable to relate to their companys mission, while another poll among 230,000 employees in 142 countries showed that only 13 per cent of workers actually like their job. A recent poll among Brits revealed that as many as 37 per cent think they have a job that doesnt even need to exist.

They have, what anthropologist David Graeber refers to as bullshit jobs. On paper, these jobs sound fantastic. And yet there are scores of successful professionals with imposing LinkedIn profiles and impressive salaries who nevertheless go home every evening grumbling that their work serves no purpose. Lets get one thing clear though: Im not talking about the sanitation workers, the teachers, and the nurses of the world. If these people were to go on strike, we'd have an instant state of emergency on our hands. No, Im talking about the growing armies of consultants, bankers, tax advisors, managers, and others who earn their money in strategic trans-sector peer-to-peer meetings to brainstorm the value-add on co-creation in the network society. Or something to that effect.

So, will there still be enough jobs for everyone a few decades from now? Anybody who fears mass unemployment underestimates capitalisms extraordinary ability to generate new bullshit jobs. If we want to really reap the rewards of the huge technological advances made in recent decades (and of the advancing robots), then we need to radically rethink our definition of work.

It starts with an age-old question: what is the meaning of life? Most people would say the meaning of life is to make the world a little more beautiful, or nicer, or more interesting. But how? These days, our main answer to that is through work.

Our definition of work, however, is incredibly narrow. Only the work that generates money is allowed to count toward the GDP. Little wonder, then, that we have organised education around feeding as many people as possible in bite-size flexible parcels into the employment establishment. Yet what happens when a growing proportion of people deemed successful by the measure of our knowledge economy say their work is pointless? Thats one of the biggest taboos of our times. Our whole system of finding meaning could dissolve like a puff of smoke.

The irony is that technological progress is only exacerbating this crisis. Historically, society has been able to afford more bullshit jobs precisely because our robots kept getting better. As our farms and factories grew more efficient, they accounted for a shrinking share of our economy. And the more productive agriculture and manufacturing became, the fewer people they employed. Call it the paradox of progress. The richer we become, the more room we have to shovel shit. Its like Brad Pitt says in Fight Club: too often, were working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we dont need.

The time has come to stop sidestepping the debate and home in on the real issue: what would our economy look like if we were to radically redefine the meaning of work? I firmly believe that a universal basic income is the most effective answer to the dilemma of advancing robotisation. Not because robots will take over all the purposeful jobs, but because a basic income would give everybody the chance to do work that is meaningful.

I believe in a future where the value of your work is not determined by the size of your paycheck, but by the amount of happiness you spread and the amount of meaning you give. I believe in a future where the point of education is not to prepare you for another useless job, but for a life well lived. I believe in a future where jobs are for robots and life is for people.

And if basic income sounds utopian to you, then Id like to remind you that every milestone of civilisation from the end of slavery to democracy to equal rights for men and women was once a utopian fantasy too. Or, as Oscar Wilde wrote long ago, Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

Rutger Bregman is the author of 'Utopia For Realists: And How We Can Get There', published by Bloomsbury on 9 March. This article has been translated from Dutch by Elizabeth Manton.

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Want utopia? Start with universal basic income and a 15-hour work week - Wired.co.uk

All my bags are packed. Im ready to go.

Oh, let me tell you where were going:

Yeah,that2MASS J23062928-0502285, the only-39.5-light-years-away dwarf star that NASA technically revealed in 2016 but re-revealed last week.

Its a dwarf star, but not just any stupid regular-type dwarf star.

Its classified as an ultracool dwarf star. Like,so dope.

And not dope like Dopey, Dwarf Star 1-of-7. Like, dope likeultracool.

I bet youll find 2MASS J23062928-0502285 kicked back against the bleachers after school.

Leather jacket. Motorcycle.

Wait, thats not ultracool. Thats retrocool.

Ultracool like a modern tech kid with good hair and rolled skinny jeans and high-tops.

Yeah, like someone who used to shop at American Apparel before they became woke and spoke out against the companys practices.

Now theyre concerned about political issues, butnot like, political, you know?

That kind of ultracool dwarf star.

2MASS J23062928-0502285 even goes by an ultra-cool name: TRAPPIST-1, in all-caps like its an acronym, but it isnt an acronymcause thats its name, man, but technically it is the telescope they used to find it is the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope ... I dont know where the I comes from.

There is an I in Planetesimals, so maybe there.

But anyway, thats where Im going.

Well ...nearTRAPPIST-1. You cant live there.

Its a star, dummy. Youd get all burnt up.

But it does have seven planets orbiting it. Four of those seven were just found a couple weeks ago, and five of those seven are roughly the same size as Earth, and three of those seven might be able to support life.

See, weve effectively destroyed our planet, because humans are jerks.

And Earth is actively trying to shake us off. We are absolute parasites, killing our host.

So more and more, globes are warming and earths are quaking and canes are hurriing and nadoes are toring and Im looking to get out while the gettins good.

Where better than TRAPPALACHIA-1 itself?

There arent any planets other than Earth in our solar system that we know can support life.

Maybe Mars, but Mars kinda sucks. I sawThe Martian. Thats a lot of red dust to deal with.

So maybe the right planet for me and us is TRAPPIST-1f or maybe TRAPPIST-1g or maybe TRAPPIST-1h. One of those three Earth-like spots. We can start fresh (First up? Changing those lazy names).

Well gather up the best people (who I havent gathered yet) to load up the space shuttle (which I havent acquired yet) with gear and supplies (which havent acquired yet) and well ship out.

Based on our current tech, itll only take us 1,469,400 years to get to TRAPSVEGAS-1.

Drops in the bucket of time, am I right?

Thats actually a butt-ton of time, so maybe we need a loophole.

Look, Ive seenInterstellar. AND Ive seenGravity.

So you can just shut up. I know what Im talking about.

But even with all of this figured outtechnically, theres still the issue of the hardest part of all of this:

How do we manage the humans heading for the new utopia?

Ive seen enough science fiction movies to know that human nature is the worst part of nature, because either someone gets spacecrazy and stabs someone else or someone gets infected by some extraterrestrial somethingorother and then bites a face off or someone decides they can fix the ship and gets snatched out into nothingness or someone lets an alien monster onto the ship by accident which then proceeds to just eat everyone, and thats just a short list.

These are all things that could or could not happen on our trip to NEWTRAPCITY-1.

Not to mention all the problems thatll come up once we get there, like deciding what form of government we should use, or what the best way to grow food is, or how we plan to hunt, or how to avoid being killed by the people or creatures already living there, and you know what this seems like a ton of work after a million-and-a-half years of traveling.

Mars doesnt look so bad now.

Justin Johnson is content editor at the Morning News.

He hopes Reeses Peanut Butter Cups exist elsewhere in the universe.

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JUSTIN JOHNSON: It's a TRAP! - SCNow

Dr John performing during the NOLA, Texas Food & Music Festival at Cedar Park Center on April 3, 2016. Suzanne Cordeiro for American-Statesman, 2016.

New Orleans music legend Dr. John has been tapped to headline this years Utopia Fest, a small-scale music and camping festival that kicks off its ninth year on September 24, 2017. Afrobeat all-stars Antibalas and funk band Lettuce also share top billing on a lineup that also includes excellent Austin artists Matthew Logan Vasquez, Capyac, Mobley, the Deer and Suzanna Choffel.

From its onset, Utopia Fest, located at the idyllic Four Sisters Ranch , seven miles outside Utopia, Texas and a little less than three hours from Austin, has differentiated itself from other outdoor music festivals by keeping the event deliberately small, with a capped attendance of 2000. This years event will be the final go round at the ranch before the festival relocates for next years tenth anniversary.

On Wednesday, festival reps said the reason for the move was to ease the strain on the land and the family and open up some new opportunities for the festival in year 10.

In 2018, we will begin the next phase in a place that will preserve the UTOPiAn spirit and vibe, and will foster long term sustainability, fest founder Travis Sutherland said in a statement. The core values and elements of the fest: quality, affordability, interaction with nature, and intimacy, will never change.

Three-day passes to the fest are on sale now for $159.

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Dr. John to headline Utopia Fest in final year at Four Sisters Ranch ... - austin360 (blog)

We recently learned that Paradox Interactives Stellaris would be getting its first gameplay expansion called Utopia soon, and today the developer has announced the official pricing and release date. The Utopia expansion will launch on April 6th and costs $19.99.

This expansion is set to add many things to the game, which centers around the new Utopia that vastly improves your tools to develop your empire. Utopia is the first major expansion for Stellaris, the critically acclaimed science fiction grand strategy game from Paradox Development Studio. As the title suggests, Utopia gives you new tools to develop your galactic empire and keep your people (or birdfolk or talking mushrooms) happy. Push your species further out into the galaxy with new bonuses for rapid exploration or stay closer to home before striking out against all who would challenge you.

The following is a rundown of the changes that will be coming to the game as a result of the Utopia expansion:

Megastructures:Build wondrous structures in your systems including Dyson Spheres and ring worlds, bringing both prestige and major advantages to your race.

Habitat Stations:Build tall and establish space stations that will house more population, serving the role of planets in a small and confined empire.

Traditions:Collect Unity points and adopt ideas and bonuses that will ease your species expansion across the stars, unlocking special perks for completing a set.

Rights and Privileges:Set specific policies for which of the many species under your thumb will have the rights and privileges of full citizenship.

Stellaris is available exclusively for PC, and you can check out the new Utopia Path to Ascension release date reveal trailer below. The game has been very successful for developer Paradox Interactive so far, with the developer revealing last year that it had the most successful launch out of any game they have ever developed.

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Stellaris Utopia Gameplay Expansion Out In April - Attack of the Fanboy

Utopia Frozen Yogurt and Coffee House offers delicious bagels, fresh-made salads, frozen yogurt, warm coffee drinks and refreshing smoothies. Whether you are looking for a new morning routine or a place in Ellensburg, Washington to study, Utopia is the place for you. At Utopia we offer an extensive self-serve frozen yogurt bar. Choose from our rotating flavors, including sweet and tart, and load your cup up with your favorite toppings for a delicious sweet treat. For the latest flavors on the frozen yogurt taps click here. You can expect to find the very best coffee and espresso drinks at Ellensburgs Utopia Frozen Yogurt and Coffee House. Ourpremium coffee comes from a local roaster and is filled with flavors that will appeal to many palettes. Whether you are looking for bold flavors to wake up your palette or a rich chocolate flavor with a hint of sweetness, we have the perfect blend for you at Utopia. We serve hot and iced drinks all day long. Choose from our traditional lattes, mochas, breves, americanos and cappuccinos or customize your very own drink. Our coffee specialists will help create the perfect coffee drink for your taste buds. We also sell our delicious coffee beans by the pound. In addition to coffee, Utopia offers made-to-order smoothies with 100% crushed fruit. Choose a smoothie blend from our menu or create your own concoction. We also offer a variety of boosts for your smoothie or blended drinks including protein, vitamin, and antioxidant blends. Pair your favorite coffee drink or smoothie with a hand-crafted sandwich, a fresh salad or a yummy dessert. Choose from a variety of bagels and smears, custom-made salads or freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, brownies and cinnamon rolls. If you have an event coming up, Utopia is a great option for bagel baskets and pastry trays. Visit us today for lunch on the go and a cup of joe at our convenient university location, or give us a call at 509-933-1400! We have a great selection of fun merchandise as well take a look!

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Utopia Frozen Yogurt and Coffee House | Ellensburg, WA