Its time to get very, very serious about shooting your pals with rockets. Rocket Arenas first season takes off today, bringing a heap of newness to EAs bouncy battle arena a new battle pass, new ranked season, a series of new limited-time events thatll bring in new maps, and a dorky new hero who blows up baddies by tossing interdimensional cat-heads at them.

Rocket Arenas headline addition is Flux, a child prodigy who reckons getting punted by high explosives is a small price to pay for extracurricular curiosity.

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Annoyingly, the Season One update post doesnt give us much on Flux beyond her being excitable, effusive, and easily distracted by anything that tickles her scientific fancy. At least the video gives us a look at some of her abilities, with largely appear to involve robot cat heads at folks to blow them up / compress them into a horrifying singularity. She can also dimension shift to sneak about, sorta like Wraith off of Apex Legends. Importantly, you wont have to pay a penny to play as Rocket Arenas nerdy murderchild.

Season 1 also brings in Rocket Arenas first battle pass (sorry, Blast Pass), your standard affair with 117 levels of rewards split across free and paid tiers. But itll also feature two time-limited events, permanently adding new maps along with brief, themed gamemodes to show off the new locales. The first, Blast In Paradise, kicks off on August 12th by adding Grand Harbor and Lagoon of Doom to the games map pool.

Rocket Arenas core premise wot if Super Smash Bros but with rocket launchers is a goodun, though Ill admit I havent heard much buzz around the game since its release two weeks ago. If youre up for giving it a bash, Rocket Arena is currently available on Steam and Origin for 25/$30/30.

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Rocket Arena's first season fires off with new hero Flux - Rock Paper Shotgun

Anyone who grew up watching animated films can relate when Studio Ghibli is brought up to the conversation. Who can ever forget Howl's Moving Castle? Spirited Away? Princess Mononoke? The Cat Returns?These are only some of the masterpieces produced by one of the criticallyacclaimed studios in the world, which is home to some of the most revered and beloved animated works to have ever graced the screen.

Check out ther site:

http://www.ghibli.jp/

Studio Ghibli's animated works have their distinct visual characteristicsand drawing style,spearheaded by the founder Hayao Miyazaki, who is famous for mostly hand-drawing his animations. This, however, didn't hinder the spirits of BTS fans, who recently displayed their talents in drawing their favorite subject, BTS V, whom they call the LIVING ANIME, by drawing him as their favorite Studio Ghibli characters which recently went viral on Twitter.

Fans can't get enough of the likeness of the characters' drawings to BTS V himself, shown by the intricate details put into the fan arts. This is not the first time, however, that fans have pointed out BTS V's similarity to anime characters, andnot limited to Ghibli alone. Fans have realizedhe resembled a real-life anime and manga characterhighlighting his structured and proportioned face, to his shojo-like expressions, and sometimes his "tsundere"( anime term that depicts a character that's somewhat cold in the beginning but later manifests a warm, sincere,friendlier side over time)aesthetics.

Even the official Twitter account of Anime on Comic Book Com posted that V is the best Muzan incarnateas agreed byDemon Slayer fans.

Notably, this was also highlighted by variousoverseas and Koreanmedia when BTS V performed Singularity in the last leg of their Love Yourself tour,dressed in black feathers with netizens and fanscalling him different names likeBlack Swan, Howl, Evil Prince, Hades for his beauty & charisma on stage. NME, a famousBritish music journalism website wrote rave reviews as "Vhas the entire stadium in the palm of his hand in Singularity, each move as he acts as if hes just woken up in bed wearing a raven-feathered cloak so precise and deliberate, each stare to the camera smouldering and intense" while KBS, one of the major broadcasting networks in Korea, called BTS V's Singularity stageas the highlight of the tourwhichhas taken away the hearts of many viewers.

The global star is not only known for his anime-like and mysterious, princely appearance.V continues to create records inglobal music charts as the First and Only Artist in History who recently dominatedthe iTunes top song charts in 109 countries with his self-produced and composed unpromoted track "Sweet Night" . .

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BTS V, THE LIVING ANIME, GOES VIRAL AGAIN AS MUSE TO FANS WHO RE-IMAGINED THEIR FAVORITE GHIBLI CHARACTERS - allkpop

A few months ago, at a time when it was still safe to have strange experiences in unusual places, I was handed a mysterious document. ALLIANCES AND TRAITORS WITHIN THE TRUTH & UFO COMMUNITIES, it read.

The document was a single, bright red sheet of paper, crowded with close-set black type. Different kinds of lines and arrows connected in wild formulations, linking George Soros with the Illuminati, various stars of the UFO community with their alleged handlers, the CIA with Alex Jones. The Pleidiansa race of tall, blue-eyed Nordic alien beingsconnected with both Tesla and the president in ways I couldnt quite parse.

This paper was created and handed to me by Dylan Louis Monroe, a player in the QAnon world and the creator of the Deep State Mapping Project, a one-man operation where Monroe creates dense visual maps of the supposed alliances he sees between various major players and world events. Monroe was at the New Age expo Conscious Life selling Q-branded t-shirts and promoting a YouTube show, I was there reporting, and both of us were thinking about the strange alliances and friendships that had begun to surface in various conspiracy communities.

BE CAREFUL WHO YOU FOLLOW, the document warned, in bold, at the bottom, just above a large black Q.

In the months that followed our chance meeting, the world buckled under the weight of the novel coronavirus pandemic, and the alliances got stranger still. Conspiracy communities that have previously only brushed past each other like schools of fish borne along on different currents are suddenly, abruptly, swimming in the same direction.

Take Larry Cook, whose evolving belief system has been playing out in a remarkable way on Facebook. Cook is the man behind the largest anti-vaccine group on the platform, Stop Mandatory Vaccination, which, along with his personal Facebook page, serves as a central clearinghouse for anti-vaccine misinformation.

In the months since the pandemic began, Cook has begun to claim that its a pretext for the mandatory testing, tracking, and vaccination that hes feared all along. (There is no evidence that the U.S. government will impose mandatory vaccination for the coronavirus, even though it should.) Hes also started to turn towards people who can provide some explanation for whats really going on, and some measure of hope: Cook is promoting QAnon ideas, sometimes dozens of times a day. (QAnon is an ur-conspiracy theory which, broadly, holds that Donald Trump and his allies are bravely fighting back on a number of fronts against a shadowy, Satanic Deep State.)

I AM A DIGITAL SOLDIER, Cook posted recently, along with two Q-related hashtags, part of an oath that the mysterious Q had recently requested that his followers post. (Disgraced former Trump advisor General Michael Flynn was among those who posted the oath.) Linking to a webpage that shares Qs missives, Cook added, in another post, Discover why we have a lockdown and mask requirements for the healthy. (Cook didnt respond to an email from VICE News.)

Cook isnt an outlier. As Mother Jones recently noted, coronavirus and the general uncertainty of the times were living in have aided the spread of QAnon specifically.

But its not just QAnon. The strain of living in this particular time, with a dragging, devastating pandemic and a global uprising against police brutality and racial injustice, crashing together at the highest speed, has accelerated something thats been going on for years. Call it the conspiracy singularity: the place where many conspiracy communities are suddenly meeting and merging, a melting pot of unimaginable density. UFO conspiracy theorists and QAnon fans are advocating for drinking a bleach solution promoted by anti-vaxxers. QAnon groups and Reopen America groups alike promoted Plandemic , a film clip jam-packed with conspiratorial claims about the causes and spread of COVID. The Freedom Angels, an anti-vaccine group based in California, are among the many such groups joining anti-lockdown protests, using language that feels heavily drawn from the Patriot movement: They're calling stay-at-home orders tyranny, addressing their followers as Patriots, and positioning themselves as a new civil rights movements. (They urged people to burn their facemasks on July 4th, adding, floridly: Join millions of Americans on Independence Day as we show all these BLUE STATE GOVERNORS, SWAMP DOCS, and DEEP STATE RATS how we feel about their latest ORDERS, DICTATES and MANDATES to wear our muzzles again.)

More mainstream internet stars, as several outlets have noted, have also been drawn in: Lifestyle influencers are promoting COVID conspiracy theories, while the virality-seeking teens of TikTok are discovering a new obsession with Pizzagate. Sex trafficking conspiracy theoriesall of which are tinged with Pizzagate and QAnon influencesseem to have an especially broad appeal: Recently, a pair of Arizona influencers promoted a baseless rumor that the furniture company Wayfair was trafficking children.

The trend towards a kind of disturbing unity is distilled in the hashtag #Covid911, backed by a lot of powerful players in both anti-vaccine and QAnon circles. It holds that what were living throughthe pandemic and the protests against police brutality alikeis all a massive hoax, designed to sway not just the 2020 elections but usher in the New World Order. Not long ago, Joe M., a major QAnon promoter, released a video, which is still up on multiple platforms even as its marked as false information, calling the pandemic, the protests, and, of course, the push for nationwide mail-in voting all part of a coordinated irregular warfare insurgency with multiple aims, perpetrated by the Deep State. The nine-minute clip throws in a dizzying cocktail of claims touching on virtually every conspiracy theory of the current moment, managing to claim that the murder of George Floyd was mysterious and not what it seemed, that social distancing was perhaps a pretext to halt grand juries so that President Obama couldnt be investigated for spying on the Trump campaign, and, of course, that violent paramilitary group Antifa had been given free rein by Democratic mayors to wreak havoc on city streets.

COVID-19 is being sold as a natural event, Joe M. intoned, over grim violin music and a shot of Nancy Pelosi taking a knee in kente cloth. But we see now it is an attempt by enemies of humanity to hold onto power. After November, they stand to lose it all. But they will do everything to keep the crisis alive, and the people in fear.

The last minute of the clip features shots of news reports about a feared second wave of coronavirus. The implication is that that, too, is part of the program to keep us afraid, and shouldnt be acknowledged or believed.

People contain multitudes, and our ability to believe in several conspiracy theories at once is nothing new. Weve seen hints of a conspiracy singularity before, most memorably in the worlds of Milton William Cooper, the author of the dense, chaotic, and totally unreadable conspiracy classic Behold a Pale Horse.

Cooperbefore he died in a shootout with sheriffs deputy trying to arrest him for aggravated assaultwas successful in assembling a broad coalition of anti-government zealots. Behold a Pale Horse claimed to draw on his military service in the Vietnam War to expose a variety of evil deeds perpetrated by those who wanted to bring about a New World Order.

But Cooper also successfully weaved in UFO conspiracy theoriesthat the U.S. military shot down mysterious craft to capture alien technology, for instanceas well as medical ones, including claims that both AIDS and Hepatitis B were bioweapons loosed on the public by the CDC. As Cooper biographer Marc Jacobson noted, some of these theories gained a lot of credence among Black Americans and in the hip-hop community.

Behold a Pale Horse became a surprising mainstay across a lot of different communities, one of the only things youd be just as likely to find in an Afrocentric bookshop in New York as at a militia rally merch table. It showed that UFO researchers and heavily armed self-proclaimed patriots had some kind of common language and view of the world, or at least places where their worlds overlapped. One devoted fan of Coopers radio show was Timothy McVeigh, who went on to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Author and political scientist Michael Barkun notes in his book 2003 A Culture of Conspiracy that McVeigh also developed a fascination with UFOs around the same time, visiting Area 51 a year before he perpetrated the bombing. On death row, Barkun writes, McVeigh obsessively watched the film Contact, about a brave government scientist chosen to make contact with extraterrestrials.

Conspiracy theories that the government is hiding what it knows about aliens, or the existence of a secret strawman bank account assigned to each U.S. citizen, live in the same place, theoretically speaking. In his book, Barkun referred to these realms as the domain of stigmatized knowledge.

That domain, as we have seen, he wrote, Is made up of rejected, outdated or ignored knowledge claims, regardless of subject matter. It contains material drawn from revisionist history, pseudoscience, alternative medicine, occultism, new and alternative religions and political sectarianism. Despite these differences of focus, all share certain overarching similarities: the disdain or disinterest of mainstream institutions, along with the common outsider status conferred by that disdain or disinterest, and a consequent suspicion of the institutions that have excluded them.

Barkuns book is broadly about the approaching conspiracy singularity, focused especially on the places where far-right, anti-government, and UFO circles had started to merge. And the same fusions Barkun observed in the late 80s and early 90s, between far-right conspiracy theorists and UFO believers, could also be seen within the 9/11 truth movement. Conspiracy theories about 9/11 brought together the military-industrial complex-critical left and the Alex Jones-tinged right, as well as what Barkun called the prophecies of Nostradmus, UFOs and conspiracy theories about the Illuminati. The bedfellows were strange indeed: As a profile of Alex Jones from 2011 observed, It turns out that the world of paranoia is round, and 9/11, with its billowing smoke and miles of video and a cast of thousands, is the terra incognita where left and right meet, fusing sixties countercultural distrust with the dont-tread-on-me variety.

In other words, alliances and overlaps are common, and not new. Theres always been cross-pollination, Michael Wood told VICE News. Wood has a PhD from the University of Kent and is an expert in conspiracy psychology. Along with his co-authors Karen Douglas and Robbie Sutton, he published a 2012 paper exploring the phenomenon of people who simultaneously believe in conflicting conspiracy theories: that Princess Diana is alive and was killed by MI6, for example, or that Osama Bin Laden both died before the U.S. military raided his compound and is still alive after those same military forces supposedly killed him.

The ability to believe two things at onceeven completely contradictory thingsis based on an underlying level of "higher order thinking, the paper argued, an overriding belief that can make even conflicting ideas make sense. Simply put, it's the centralized belief that conspiracies and hidden deceptions underpin the world and guide human events.

The idea that authorities are engaged in motivated deception of the public would be a cornerstone of conspiracist thinking due to its centrality in conspiracy theories, the authors wrote. Someone who believes in a significant number of conspiracy theories would naturally begin to see authorities as fundamentally deceptive, and new conspiracy theories would seem more plausible in light of that belief.

This being so, it's still true that conspiracy communities used to have some degree of separation. Their conventions were held in different hotel ballrooms, and targeted different audiences geographically and socially. Conspiracy theories were spread in newsletters and in-person meetings; they were narrowly targeted and often somewhat underground, part of a legitimately fringe and countercultural narrative.

But now the internet is the largest hotel ballroom of them all, and the novel coronavirus pandemic has forced a lot of people into a set of universalizing life circumstances. Were all trying to make sense of the same massive global event, which seems to drive an urge towards a grand unified theory of suspicion. And with everyone using the same global platforms, conspiracy communities seem to influence and inflect each other far more rapidly. What we have today is more of a mass, a merge of conspiracy theories combining in ways that make their individual contours harder to make out.

For some people invested in multiple conspiratorial beliefs or communities, Wood said, the evidence youve based your beliefs on is more like a negative argument, what you believe didnt happen. The actual conspiracy theories themselves arent that important, he added; they are really just manifestations of this underlying suspicion and mistrust.

That can take on some odd forms. In a 1954 study cited by Wood, Theodor Adorno found that German anti-Semites tended to believe that Jews were both too withdrawn from mainstream society and overly eager to participate in it. The higher order thinking at work was anti-Semitism and every negative belief derived from that, even when they didnt logically cohere.

Similarly, Wood wrote, in more modern conspiracy theories, distrust of official narratives may be so strong that many alternative theories are simultaneously endorsed in spite of any contractions between them.

Today, alternative theories abound: that the coronavirus pandemic is both a hoax and a dangerous bioweapon unleashed by China; that Tom Hanks is deadexecuted for being part of the pedophile Deep Stateand alive in witness protection; that he is dead and replaced by a body double. All these theories have been promoted by the same guy, a QAnon fan named Tommy G.

At the same time that the conspiracy singularity starts to take shape, were seeing a distinct collapse between the fringe and the center. Nowhere is that more visible than in the increasing prominence of QAnon in relatively mainstream Republican politics. As of July, the left-leaning organization Media Matters has found 63 current and former Congressional candidates who are open and enthusiastic Q fans, some of whom, like Mary Joe Rae Perkins in Oregon and Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia, have already won their primaries. (To make it to Congress, Greene still has to defeat the second-place winner, John Cowan, in an August 11 runoff election, and is facing significant condemnation from the state GOP.)

Another useful idea referred to by Barkun, the author of Culture of Conspiracy, is the cultic milieu, a term coined in the 1970s by the British sociologist Colin Campbell, a sort of cultural underground, Barkun wrote, thats made up of a variety of rejected knowledge disdained by the mainstream. The cultic milieu, Barkun wrote, is wary of all claims to authoritative judgment, and receptive to all forms of revisionism, whether in history, religion, science or politics.

Its not a stretch to see how that domain of stigmatized knowledge extends to how people process current and ongoing events, how groups of people with seemingly nothing to bind them together on the surface might find themselves seeking explanation, order and meaning in the same places.

In fact, theres been language for this phenomenon for a long time. People deeply embedded in the overlapping worlds of conspiracy theory tend to refer to themselves as being part of the truth community. And as its members come to a new and mutually reinforcing view of just what that truth is, the rest of us would do well to pay attention to just what it is.

Follow Anna Merlan on Twitter.

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The Conspiracy Singularity Has Arrived - VICE

The sequencing of the human genome was one of the greatest scientific feats of the past century, but its a little-known fact that its still a work in progress with considerable gaps. New research suggests we could be just months away from finally finishing the job.

Nearly two decades after the Human Genome Project released the first map of our DNA, there are still large sections that are a mystery to us. Scientists have been slowly filling in the gaps, but certain portions that feature repetitive sequences going on for millions of base pairs have long been seen as intractable.

Thats because most common gene sequencing technologies create short snippets of DNA that then have to be stitched together. When applied to these highly repetitive sections it becomes almost impossible to distinguish the pieces, so putting them back together in the right order is extremely difficult.

Imagine having to reconstruct a jigsaw puzzle, senior author Adam Phillippy, from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), said in a press release. If you are working with smaller pieces, each contains less context for figuring out where it came from, especially in parts of the puzzle without any unique clues, like a blue sky. The same is true for sequencing the human genome. Until now, the pieces were too small, and there was no way to put the hardest parts of the genome puzzle together.

But that is now changing. In a paper published last week in Nature, the researchers describe how they used a cutting-edge approach known as nanopore sequencing to tackle some of the previously inscrutable sections of the genome and produce the first-ever gapless sequence of the X chromosome.

Nanopore sequencing works by passing DNA molecules through a tiny hole and measuring the change in an electric current running across the holes surface to work out the sequence of base pairs in the molecules. Unlike previous approaches, its able to create ultra-long DNA sequences.

That was enough to fill many of the gaps in the genome, but a region known as the centromere that encompasses roughly 3.1 million base pairs of highly repetitive sequences still presented a problem. Fortunately, the team was able to find idiosyncratic sequences that could act as markers to link together multiple long reads to span the entire centromere.

To ensure that the X chromosome was as accurate as possible, the researchers combined nanopore sequencing with results from a further two gold-standard sequencing technologies and approaches for mapping the genome. The result is more than 99.9 percent accurate, which is considered enough to call the sequence finished.

Filling the gaps in the human genome could prove invaluable for biomedical research. Were starting to find that some of these regions where there were gaps in the reference sequence are actually among the richest for variation in human populations, so weve been missing a lot of information that could be important to understanding human biology and disease, lead author Karen Miga, from the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, said in a press release.

And while the complete X chromosome is the pice de resistance of this paper, the team reports that they have applied their approach to the full genome and theyve managed to reconstruct several other chromosomes. They are aiming to produce a complete human genome by the end of this year.

What secrets lie in store in these hidden parts of the human genome remains to be seen, but uncovering them will be a major step towards humankind truly mastering our own biology.

Image Credit: vrx/Shutterstock.com

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For the First Time, Scientists Fully Sequenced the Human X Chromosome - Singularity Hub

Chris Cowart, the longtime IDEO product designer, Singularity University faculty member and consultant to a variety of venture firms and tech projects, is joining the food preservation technology developer Treasure8 as its new chief innovation and strategy officer, according to a post on LinkedIn.

In the last three years food has come to the fore as a theme, said Cowart in an interview with TechCrunch. Cowart, who previously spent the majority of his time consulting on healthcare companies, became interested in food through a year spent as an advisor to X, the Alphabet subsidiary that develops technologies and companies focused on sustainability, connectivity and new computing paradigms.

At X, Cowart was looking at projects that would use artificial intelligence to accelerate circular economy projects and it was there that he began to focus on food waste. The gravity of the situation around Americas food waste and food insecurity in the country was driven home through Cowarts research, he said. We overproduce by double and we throw away 30% of our food, said Cowart. And in Santa Clara county one-in-six families are food insecure.

After completing his project at X, Cowart went to Treasure8 and was immediately pulled into strategy conversations, which led to him coming on board in June.

Unlike Apeel Sciences or Hazel Technologies, which have developed new preservative technologies to keep food fresh on store shelves (and raised several hundred million dollars), Treasure8s technology is a new spin on freeze-drying, which lets perishable foods hold their nutritional value while theyre used as ingredients, supplements or powders.

Brands can reform it with rehydration, or put it into their products or reuse pieces of the vegetables and fruits in their products. There are byproducts that you can break down and start to use to pull out their nutrients into probiotics and nutraceuticals, said Cowart.

He also thinks that Treasure8 could use its process to become a provider of biochar that can be applied in more sustainable agriculture techniques.

Treasure8 initially launched with a focus on food preservation, but quickly pivoted into working with hemp companies that wanted to work with the company to use more parts of the hemp plant in products. For now, Treasure8 is operating off of its pilot facility on Treasure Island, the man-made island in the San Francisco Bay which is currently the site of a multi-billion-dollar development project.

With its new innovation officer in tow, Treasure8 is now heading to market to raise a new round of financing, Cowart said. Targeting less than $50 million, the new round could help the company as Cowart starts to think longer term about ways that Treasure8s treatment process could contribute to the development of more functional foods.

Taking food waste streams to make products and ingredients and letting it be something useful rather than something that harms the environment, thats the interesting part, Cowart said of his role at the company. [And] if youre able to go from food security to nutritional security If you can powder vegetables, and make them into bits and food that are stable and affordable All of this nutrition feeds into the food as medicine and functional food. Were going to want to fight immunity and recover from viruses and were going to have to rebuild our food supply.

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Treasure8 adds Chris Cowart to its executive team as it renews pushing its tech to reduce food waste - TechCrunch

Tempo Automation, the leading manufacturer for quick-turn prototyping and low-volume production of printed circuit board assemblies (PCBA), today announces the addition of Jeff Kowalski to its Board of Directors.

"We are pleased to add Jeff to Tempo's Board of Directors. His legacy in creating breakthrough products that directly impact customer and business value precisely aligns with Tempo's vision for software-driven PCB manufacturing in 2020 and beyond," said Joy Weiss, President and CEO of Tempo Automation. "Jeff's knack for critical thinking and problem-solving, and his unique ability to identify and incubate novel ideas, will add to Tempo's impressive momentum in reinventing electronics manufacturing."

Jeff Kowalski most recently served as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Autodesk, a global leader in design, construction, manufacturing, and entertainment software, with over 200 million customers. Kowalski's work has included pioneering real-time graphics, cloud-computing, 3D scanning, additive manufacturing, and generative design. In his most recent 12 years as CTO at Autodesk, he led a global team responsible for next-generation research and development for complex design challenges and corporate strategy, shaping Autodesk's long-term technology vision and driving innovation across the company. Kowalski also held board positions at Singularity University and Genome Compiler.

"Jeff Kowalski is a valuable addition to Tempo' Automation's Board of Directors," said Matthew Granade, Tempo Board Member and Managing Partner of Point72 Ventures. "With his long-standing position as both a seasoned entrepreneur and an innovative leader in the engineering community, Tempo's board and the entire team will benefit from his contributions."

To learn more, please visit http://www.tempoautomation.com

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Tempo Automation Welcomes Jeff Kowalski to Board of Directors - Embedded Computing Design

This is a guest blogpost by Jason Kingdon, Chairman & CEO of Blue Prism

And its raining RPA[Robotic Process Automation] IBMs announcement that they are acquiring a Brazilian Robotic Process Automation company comes just months after Microsofts acquisition of a Greek RPA vendor, and a period on from SAP acquiring a French RPA capability. If you have not spotted the pattern, you will.

Every single platform provider will need to offer automation out-of-the-box alongside their core offerings, for the simple reason that the product class offers the highest ROI of any business technology ever created. Now, that is not me from Blue Prism saying this, it is the London School of Economics and MIT.

The robotics revolution in manufacturing was said to have increased productivity in the 20th century by something like 50-fold; that is, by the year 2000 one person in manufacturing was achieving the work of 50 people.

Imagine employing 50 people for every one person you currently employ? How does that change your world? How do you think differently about what you do? Could you even imagine assigning that amount of work?

A new way of working

The same automation revolution is well under way in white-collar jobs and the service industry. It will have the same impact as the invention of the Internet; if you dont see that youre already out-of-date. It changes every aspect of the way work will take place in the service industry, the types of services that are offered, and the way technology is consumed. Work life will probably change more in the next 10 years than it has for the last 100 years. What does this look like?

The clich would be that all jobs are wiped out and there is nothing left for humans to do; in other words, Apocalypse Now (and then Brexit).

But, it wont be like that. For the businesses that have made the strategic commitment to Blue Prisms enterprise class automation platform, you see a similar pattern as to the one that occurred in manufacturing: expansion of services, higher rates of service quality, greater flexibility in working (effortless coping with Covid-19 lock-down and remote working) and most of all speed and scalability

The arrival of digital workers

Our Blue Prism Digital Worker is software that attempts to get as close to a human worker as we can. In other words it is a software robot an autonomous processing unit. It is not a script or a bot in fact the digital worker runs multiple scripts or bots marshalling these kinds of capabilities in large scale so as to automate any business processes (which may or may not include routine mundane tasks, and equally, may include sophisticated diagnostics that humans struggle with; like spotting money laundering, KYC [know your customer], or early signs of diabetes in a retina scan).

Like a human worker, the Blue Prism version of this concept is trained by a business user; and so the digital worker makes use of any tools and third-party technologies as it needs.

People ask is this intelligent systems or AI? Of course it is. In a very direct way. Just like a human, this technology aims at versatility at its core, and the abilities to use all technologies as they become available is crucial to its design. And by choice, necessity, or taste, the digital worker makes use of any novel, routine or classic machine learning or AI algorithm as is required for the task in hand. The whole point is that all of these technologies can be clipped together (with no code) according to what they are being trained to do.

A digital singularity

At the heart of this automation revolution is the fact that all systems can be made to interoperate through digital workers. It means that ancient systems from the birth of computing, to technologies just born, are now in scope. This imposes a post-legacy reality; everything that exists is legacy; or in our terms, a component or tool to be made use of.

This offers a form of digital singularity as an echo of technology singularity (the point at which humans can make a machine as smart as a human). The digital singularity refers to the point where all technology can be combined, as through a prism (if you will).

If all software becomes interoperable think how this changes the R&D landscape? And how business will start to consume technology. And the implied pace of change we are about to hit. The acceleration will be rapid and mind altering; propelling winners, in many cases companies you have never heard of, to fame and fortune, because the whole consumption profile is flexing and re-ordering.

Look at technology service businesses (like IBM), and they are akin to a giant form of human middleware, or mechanical Turk. It is like a digital sedan chair, a business carried by humans as it plods its progress this, in the age of the self-driving automobile. These are the areas that will change the fastest, as IBM has noted. The large human powered business service companies also look old fashioned in this new context, and these have only just been invented. They will need to pivot, as do all the main service providers, and this new revolution will make them better. Covid-19 and the current economic crisis will likely accelerate all these changes.

I should say, I already claim that any business processes worthy of the name (i.e. you want it to be repeatable and predictable) can be automated. So, buckle up.

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The automation revolution is happening now - ComputerWeekly.com

It is increasingly apparent in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic that we are living in the digital era, as we enter the age of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Singularity. The digitized world is using social media, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to reimagine the future of communication and work.

Automation of transportation such as drones and electric vehicles are becoming much more necessary given the accelerated rate of innovation. Quantum Computing is the next generation of supercomputers that will change everything, and will accelerate how we use data to make the decisions that once seemed impossible possible.

As we move into a post-Covid world, can these technological innovations help save humanity and the planet?

Heres how these exponential technologies can help humankind identify, measure, track, and sustain the natural balance of non-renewable resources on our planet.

1. Life-saving drones: Drones that were once used to take lives by the military, can now be used to save lives while protecting the world's wildlife and forests.

By delivering medication in hard to reach places affected by natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, and saving wildlife by monitoring poachers that hunt and kill elephants, drones can track illegal activities.

Forest conservationists can monitor wildfires and retard the collateral damage these fires cause, and even replant trees to help negate the negative effects of climate change.

2. Remote sensors: Remote sensing tech can help a great deal in arranging, observing, and assessing the environmental impact on the ground with extraordinary accuracy.

For example, sensors have given WWF access to the development of extractive industries in environmentally delicate territories, including some of the world heritage sites to help protect such monuments as the Taj Mahal.

3. Thermal imaging and LIDAR: Thermal imaging cameras can give you virtual control to let officers for example get hold of poachers that hunt endangered species at record rates and dissuade a lot more from even entering the territory given they have a way to capture them in the act.

4. Blockchain for commodity markets: The advances in blockchain innovation have the potential to be game changers given the ledger technology and transparency of tracking every moment of the source of a transaction. For instance, it can inform buyers about the sourcing journey of their fish and other horticultural produce.

5. Quantum computing: This is probably the most disruptive technology in the next decade as it has the potential to solve any problem with extraordinary solutions and revolutionize how computers operate with 10x ability to do anything from find solutions to seemingly impossible diseases to creating a whole new way in which humanity experiences civilization.

While scientists and environmentalists are in search of new cutting-edge technologies to help save the planet, it is the next generation and youth that will make this new reality come to fruition.

Digital biology is growing enormously and so is the demand for professionals with knowledge in data science and disruptive technology.

The increasing importance of a career in the future of innovation and technology is witnessing billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett invest their money in companies generating employment related to science and the environment for the next 10 years while companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google invest in research and development around AI and AR/VR technology.

Several future professions that could help us protect and save the planet?

1. Conservation Scientist: Taking care of life on land including the quality of forests, national parks, ranges, and other natural resources will serve a vital role in society.

Securing the wild forests, improving natural surroundings for wildlife, promoting biodiversity, encouraging public recreation, and controlling wild-fires are all critical roles for the future of our world.

2. Geoscientist: This profession includes the study of the planets structure, history, and natural resources. Geoscientists work with environmental researchers and carry out their responsibilities both from the lab and in the field.

Travel can take these professionals to some wonders of the world like active volcanoes or the top of Mt. Everest.

3. Hydrologist: Water will be more valuable than oil in the future. Using their skill of water quality and accessibility, hydrologists study water development.

Their time is commonly spent between working in the field where they may wind up swimming into lakes and streams to gather water samples or observing the monitoring equipment, and research labs where they break down the information and model their discoveries to protect our water sources and life in the rivers and under the sea.

4. Environmental Scientist: Their expertise in physics, chemistry, and biology help them progress in the direction of understanding the planets ecological issues.

Research in the field to examine the contamination of the earth brought about by humans can promote measures to create a sustainable way of life for the future.

---

Whether it is to save an endangered species or master a renewable resource or protect the planet from the adversities of production and supply, a career in these fields can rightfully use innovation and technology for the greater good in order to transform our world for a better future.

- Article by Kunal Sood, Founder of WeThePlanet and X Fellows

Read: 6 jobs every environment lover will enjoy

Read: How you can save the world with a career in sustainable design

Read: 5 ways to create an environment-friendly office to increase productivity

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5 technologies and 4 job roles that can help save humanity and the planet - India Today

-Analysis-

PARIS Is the longest European summit in history also historic? The answer is yes.

Indeed, the European Union is now a state. Not a so-called superstate replacing the 27 member states that make it up, but a state that includes them. We could say that the EU is now 28 states: the 27 separately plus the 27 together as one. Finally, the European state represents Alexandre Dumas' famous saying from The Three Musketeers: "One for all, all for one." The novelty that allows us to recognize Europe as a state comes from the fact that the EU will issue treasury bonds to finance a brand new part of its budget, which it calls the "recovery plan," amounting to 750 billion euros.

This historic development of issuing European debt corresponds to a social demand with weak signals that have existed for several years. Even though European power and its leaders are the subject of mistrust as national powers and leaders have also been for the past 15 years Eurobarometer surveys indicate that Europeans want a European solution to the economic and geopolitical challenges that threaten us. And while the euro is the subject of permanent and legitimate debate, Europeans are now particularly attached to their common currency: In just 20 years, the euro has won the confidence of citizens and investors large and small and has established itself as the world's second reserve currency. In fact, the national recovery plans adopted in response to COVID-19, the colossal sum of which amounts to 2.3 trillion euros, are only possible because of the guarantee of the European Central Bank and its worldwide credibility.

The advent of the European state is part of the evolution of the state in Europe. This history is often reduced to the rise of European nation-states following the French Revolution. However, this story spans more than 10 centuries. It includes many forms of statehood, and a plurality of states, each with its own singularity, as specific and different as, for example, the Holy Roman Empire, the Republic of Venice, the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom, Portugal or the United Provinces.

During the EU summit in Brussels Photo: Xinhua/ZUMA

The still-young EU could be described as a "baroque state." Baroque, the great European artistic movement, is set in opposition to classicism through its circumvention of rules and subverting of forms, mixing genres and resorting to the exception. This is the case of the EU, which escapes the traditional classification of political systems as territorial state entities and is distinguished by its novel singularity. Based on state cultures inherited from a long history and a fragmented political geography, contemporary Europeans are inventing the "mutuality" of sovereignty.

Europeans can now shelve the ideological debate on whether the existence of the EU is relevant.

Negotiations on the terms and conditions of the plan are thus not limited to discussions between heads of government at the European Council. The agreement will then have to be voted on by the 27 national parliaments, themselves networked with the European Parliament and the parliaments of local states, such as the Belgian or Spanish communities and the German Lnder. This "mutualization," or exchange of reciprocity of sovereignty, is democratic: It is deliberate, voluntary and negotiated, in contrast to the empires and conquests by kings and then nations of the past two millennia. Europeans do not form a nation but a society. For the past few decades they have been building a state that corresponds to this one: pluralist, unprecedented and forward-looking.

By this metric, the four-day, four-night series of debates are the manifestation of national governments becoming tremendously civilized in building this European state. They have become, together with the European Parliament, which is the direct expression of European society, actors of a deliberative democracy with its majority, its opposition (the so-called 'frugal' countries) and its compromises. From now on, Europeans can shelve the ideological debate on whether the existence of the EU is relevant, and focus on the citizen's debate that confronts the real issue: Are we satisfied with the political choices and public policies made by the European "government?"

*Sylvain Kahn is a historian, geographer and professor at Sciences Po. He is the author of Histoire de la construction de l'Europe depuis 1945 (PUF, 2018), winner of the Mieux comprendre l'Europe book prize.

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Why The European Union Has Changed Forever - Worldcrunch

John Boyega shared with fans on social media that he is putting the Star Wars franchise behind him and eager to move on from his character Finn. Responding to fan demand to see Finn pop up in the next Star Wars movie (via Variety), Boyega wrote, Lol no thank you. Ive moved on. The actor added to another fan, Im not into playing one role for too long. I have more to offer than that. Thats all. Boyega played Finn in three Star Wars films between 2015 and 2019.

While Boyega has been outspoken about his issues with the Star Wars franchise, he stressed the only reason hes disinterested in returning as Finn in the future is because hes played the character for so long. The actor said hes not against reprising characters as long as theres been enough time in between playing the role. One role hed be keen on returning to is Moses in Attack the Block. As Boyega told a fan, I havent played Moses in over a decade. Id love to revisit him. Now he is a badass.

With no more Star Wars being planned for his future, Boyegas work in last Decembers The Rise of Skywalker will be his final outing in the franchise. While critical reviews for the tentpole were largely negative, Boyega stood by the film on social media amid backlash. Writing to one fan who called The Rise of Skywalker an embarrassment, the actor responded,Embarrassing? LOL you wish. Very fulfilling, some disappointments but yet not that big of a deal. Everyone has moved on.

That Boyega found Rise of Skywalker to be a fulfilling experience suggested he liked the project more than his previous Star Wars movie, the Rian Johnson-directed The Last Jedi. In an interview with Hypebeastjust before the December 2019 release of Rise of Skywalker, Boyega said he disagreed with many of the choices Johnson made in The Last Jedi script.

The Force Awakens I think was the beginning of something quite solid, The Last Jedi if Im being honest Id say that was feeling a bit iffy for me, Boyega said. I didnt necessarily agree with a lot of the choices in that and thats something that I spoke to Mark [Hamill] a lot about, and we had conversations about it. And it was hard for all of us, because we were separated.

With Star Wars behind him, Boyega has several new projects lined up for the future. Not only does he have a role in Steve McQueens Small Axe anthology, but Boyega also has a leading role in the new film Naked Singularity.

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John Boyega Says No Thank You to More Star Wars Because Three Movies as Finn Is Enough - IndieWire

Photo by Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA (Sipa via AP Images)

Surprisingly, Q didnt see this one coming.

Twitter announced on Tuesday night that it was taking the unprecedented step of removing or downgrading content and accounts linked to the conspiracy theory known as QAnon.

Twitter said that it had already removed over 7,000 accounts belonging to QAnon adherents and taken actions to stop the spread of the conspiracy theory that will impact some 150,000 accounts.

Weve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm. In line with this approach, this week we are taking further action on so-called QAnon activity across the service, Twitter announced.

The company says that it will permanently suspend accounts that post about QAnon and are engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attempting to evade a previous suspension.

Twitter said it has seen more of this activity in recent weeks.

As well as suspending accounts, Twitter will no longer push QAnon accounts and content in its trending topics and recommendations. It will downgrade QAnon content in search results and block URLs associated with QAnon from being shared.

QAnon accounts that have not been suspended at already looking at ways of circumventing the ban, using hashtags like #CueAnon or #17Anon to avoid detection.

The Qanon conspiracy theory originated on the imageboard 4Chan, and broadly holds that President Donald Trump is waging a war against a shadowy deep state cabal. It also posits that members of the global elite, such as Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton, are running an underground child sex trafficking ring.

The theory is based on postings from a purported mysterious deep state operative known as Q who has made a series of predictions, like a 2017 post that claimed that Trump was days away from unsealing 25,000 indictments against deep state officials, a move that would trigger a state of temporary military control.

READ: The conspiracy singularity has arrived

While it began as a fringe conspiracy theory, in recent years Qanon has gained more mainstream attention, particularly in Trumpworld, where supporters regularly show up at rallies wearing QAnon t-shirts and waving Q flags.

QAnon followers have also been implicated in armed standoffs, attempted kidnappings, and at least one killing. This has led the FBI to designate the group a potential domestic terrorism threat.

But it is QAnons online harassment campaigns that have led to Twitters drastic action.

Recently, major QAnon accounts have begun harassment campaigns against celebrities perceived to be opponents of Trump. These accounts then direct their followers to harass the celebrities with coordinated attacks.

TV presenter Chrissy Teigen, who has been repeatedly targeted with harassment by swarms of QAnon followers, hit back at one Twitter account holder who said the move amounted to censorship.

You dont have a right to coordinate attacks and make death threats. It is not an opinion to call people pedophiles who rape and eat children, she tweeted.

Despite the negative coverage of QAnon, it has gained support among lawmakers. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn who many supporters believe could be the mysterious Q gave the conspiracy credence recently when he posted a video on July 4 showing him and his family swearing allegiance to QAnon.

There are currently 66 current or former 2020 congressional candidates who have endorsed or given credence to QAnon, according to a list kept by Media Matters. Trump has also retweeted multiple QAnon accounts to his 83 million followers.

But Twitter told CNN that for now, politicians wont be subject to the new rules.

Currently candidates and elected officials will not be automatically included in many of these actions broadly, a Twitter spokesperson said.

As the QAnon conspiracy theory moved from the obscure corners of the internet, social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube have helped propel its popularity far beyond what would have been possible otherwise.

The Q keyword has brought together a networked faction, aided by automation, that continuously spreads misinformation and inspires dangerous behaviors, Joan Donovan, a disinformation expert and director of technology and social change research at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center, tweeted.

While Reddit banned QAnon two years ago, most social media platforms have been too slow to act, Donovan says, pointing out that some companies are not even trying.

Twitter is late out the gate. Facebook and YouTube arent even in the race.

Cover: A woman holds a QAnon sign as reopen protesters demonstrate at the capitol in Salem, Ore., on May 2, 2020. Governor Kate Brown announced a plan yesterday that could see some parts of the state reopen by May 15. (Photo by Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

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Twitter Just Deleted Thousands of QAnon Accounts - Vice Impact

Isaac Hamlet, Iowa City Press-Citizen Published 12:07 p.m. CT July 22, 2020

One of the sketchs by Brandon Drew Holmes done for PromptPress' forthcoming Afrofuturist collection. The images includes a picture of slave trade routes out of Africa.(Photo: From PromptPress)

The unfurling ofpossible futures froma year agohassynthesized as futures do into a presentmomentequal parts unpredictable and inevitable. In this moment, anAfrofuturistcollection, the product of collaboration between PromptPress and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS), in its final phase of cultivation.

"Afrofuturism is a really exciting area of art to explore," said Kalmia Strong, the Book Arts Editor on this collection,a year ago. "What does it mean to try to create a future world where people of color are equally sharing in a positive way, which has not been the history of this country?"

The text planned for anAugust release,but not yet officially titled collectseight artists, largelyof the African diaspora. Visual artist Brandon Drew Holmes provided the illustrated images in the text to which the writers responded.

"I love Brandon's work because it lives in poetry and visual art at the same time, a divide I'm always trying to straddle myself," Anas Duplan, the founder of CAS,told the Press-Citizen in an email. "These particular drawings make such efficient use of space and reference a rich pop cultural world and imagination."

Allfour of the illustrations depict multiple subjects sometimes seemingly disparate. One includes two pop animations above the image of an apparently gay Black man across from another faintly realized image. Another shows the tracks of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade out of Africa above a pair of Black hands, a sign reading "Whites Only" and the text "A man people becomes invisible."

The works created in response are primarily poetic in form and vary in topics from a socialized sense of "otherness"to Black femininity.

"One of my former students dee(dee) Redd has a poem in this collection and I believe it's their first print publication,"Duplan said."I was impressed with their work when I taught them and thought it was only a matter of time before they started publishing more work. Their work is steeped in Black radical theory and, like Brandon's drawings, make really elegant and innovative use of space.

Most includedcreators were selectedby Duplan, but the publication was open to outside submissions, which is how Andrew David King came to be included.

Past issues are displayed on shelves, Wednesday, June 19, 2019, at Prompt Press along Iowa Avenue in Iowa City, Iowa.(Photo: Joseph Cress/Iowa City Press-Citizen)

"I became aware of PromptPress through my friend, who was interning there last summer," recalled King, who graduated from the University of Iowa with an master's degree in poetry last year. "I would come by and visit him in the press's reading room. I found the call for submission on Instagram and started looking at (Holmes') work. The pieces stayed with me; not long after, I began a poem in response to them."

King is the only white contributor to the publication, but still derived broader systemic issues he could speak to in the margins of the racial focus of the prompts.

"Although Holmes' drawings are 'about' race and racial violence, they also see to be 'about' a peculiarly American form of trauma, one with partial origins in prosperity-gospel Protestantism and capitalism," notedKing.

His hope is that his own poem "earns its presence" in the collection.

King's submission, "Theory of Regeneration," is a poem the author sees as growing from out of his ownsense of loneliness and displacement.

More: Iowa City center's visiting muralist hopes to build a virtual Black mythology

While the text and interior images have been determined,the design that contains these items is still being determined.

A sketch by Brandon Drew Holmes done for PromptPress' forthcoming Afrofuturist collection. This picture features portraits of Black girls and women.(Photo: From PromptPress)

PromptPress is an ekphrastic journal with an emphasis on book art, with many of its publications challenging how a text is physically presented and thus examining how that presentation can amplify the text.

As for the future of this Afrofuturist collection, Duplan gives the impression that thisforthcoming effort is a singularity rather than a recurrent thing.

"PromptPress does a lovely job of seeking people out to guest-curate their issues," Duplan said."We'll be having a reading of the issue we put together on Montez Press Radio in August, and I hope folks tune into that."

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PromptPress to release Afrofuturist collection in collaboration with CAS in August - Iowa City Press-Citizen

Britton Braggin Rights Braggs noticed Darnell, 14, and James, 11, sitting on their bikes in front of Winchester Avenues B&K Grocery.

You heard about these people getting hurt out here with guns? the Newhallville-raised rapper asked the boys. They nodded. Were walking because we want kids like you guys to be safe, Braggs said.

Bragg, 29, was walking Newhallville Monday night along with dozens of other adults issuing a call to stop the violence.

After running into the store for an Arizona to share, Darnell and James joined a crowd of walkers on their bikes, mostly sticking by Braggin Rights side. And the quest continued to spark a community response to the rise in gun violence on New Haven streets.

I know what its like. Sometimes these kids just need someone to talk to, Braggin Rights said.

We came because we want the killing and violence to stop, said Darnell.

Black lives matter. We shouldnt be killing each other, said James.

The gathering began around 6 p.m. at Bassett Street Park. Former Alder Carlton Staggers (pictured) issued a call to parents and residents of Newhallville to come together to figure out a strategy for addressing the spike of sometimes deadly shootings in town over the past month.

Fifty people responded to Staggers call.

Staggers came with no script or agenda for the rally besides talking with adults about how to engage the youth.

We dont want the police or mayor involved. This has to be a message coming from the people, our kids need us, Staggers said.

Staggers also has five kids of his own for whom he fears every day. I wanna see my kids. I want my kids to bury me, he said.

We need to get our kids. What do we do? Staggers asked the crowd.

A conversation ensued followed by the group taking to the streets.

One audience member suggested the group collaborate with community organizations in the future to increase their impact.

Reeves said in his experience with todays youth he has learned they are most interested in entrepreneurship. They dont all want to be trained in trades like we were. They want to be entrepreneurs, Reeves said.

Reeves also said Newhallville needs to have a dedicated spot for meeting up as a community.

Newhallville native Brother Born stopped by the gathering in passing to share with the crowd that a Saturday breakfast program will start up this week from 10 to 11 a.m at the Newhallville Learning Corridor on the corner of Hazel Street and Shelton Avenue.

Devin Avshalom-Smith founder of the Newhallville Community Action Network, encouraged the crowd to attend the Newhallville Equality and Empowerment Rally on July 26 from 2 p.m to 5 p.m at Lincoln Bassett Community School. Books, groceries, masks, and gloves will be distributed. There were also be census and voter registration, blood pressure checks, and Covid-19 testing.

The city has taken away our Covid testing site, so were bringing it right back, Avshalom-Smith said.

In order to rebuild a community village, Reeves said, neighbors must hold each other accountable. I gotta be able to talk to your kid when they doing wrong, he said. We have to get off singularity thinking if were going to save these kids.

Staggers and others agreed.

We need to change the culture of resolving beef, Jahad said.

Before beginning their walk the group chose when and where they would meet next with the goal of walking in every New Haven neighborhood to engage youth directly. West Hills Alder Honda Smith suggested Westville Manor. The group agreed and decided they will walk around Westville Manor on Wednesday at 6 p.m.

So which way are we going? Staggers asked.

About 30 walked through the neighborhood streets stopping at residents sitting on their porches, cars, and bikes.

Were walking out here today to let people know were tired of all these young kids getting killed. Its time to put the guns down, said Staggers to a family hosting a gathering in their backyard. And if you support us were walking Westville Manor on Wednesday, tell friends. Or you could come walk with us right now.

Retired Police Sgt. Jacqueline Jackie Hoyte was amongst the walkers. On Shepard Avenue, Hoyte and neighbor Lakeisha Williams stopped in front of a white two-family house.

On the front porch sat Manualynn King. Come walk with us. Were trying to talk to these kids out here, said Hoyte.

Oh yes. Let me get my shoes, said King who ran inside to get shoes and her mask then joined the crowd.

God put this opportunity in front of me today, said King. These kids dont know love, hope, and peace so we need to help them.

Jahad passed out his card to neighbors during the walk telling people of all ages he can help out anyone from entrepreneurs who need help writing grants or getting funding to youth who just need someone to talk and care about them. If you have some young heads send them my way, I got some jobs for them, Jahad told neighbor as he passed them his card. We need to change the culture of resolving beef, he said.

I feel like Im doing my job especially because I know I have influence and platform, he said. Braggin Rights shared videos of the walk on his Facebook and Instagram where another 12,000 people could follow along.

Thank you to all the wonderful community members stepping up, speaking out and working to change peoples lives by engaging young people, organizing others to work towards stopping the violence, and providing services where the city has dropped the ball. You give me more hope than ever before in my lifetime that a change is going to come. Young people will only listen to the community-members in the community they live in. Its been proven that the police arent the answer to stopping the violence, they can only react after the violence has already happened. Only when the community stands up and pulls together and works for a change, and shows the young people that they matter, that they are loved, will the violence end. Only love conquers hate. Thank you! NHI- can you post daily in a section where these type of events will happen and how to contact anti-violence groups, volunteer groups in the community, social service organizations and other organizations where people can contribute their time, money and services? Could the city of New Haven and towns of Hamden, East Haven and West Haven coordinate a website similar to See, Click, Fix where people can connect with services and organizations and volunteer or donate? If we all work together to connect services and organizations with communities and community members in need, we could become stronger together.

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Adults Walk The Anti-Violence Talk - New Haven Independent

A lot of the predictions we hear about the future involve a hot, crowded planet, one where we need some serious science to figure out how to feed everyone and control rising global temperatures. The UNs population forecast of almost 10 billion people by 2050 is widely quoted, and with it has come much conjecture about what such a world will look like. Where will all those people live? What kind of jobs will they have? What will they eat?

But before we invest too much into preparing for an impending population boom, we should consider some factors that, though often overlooked, could have a massive impact on the worlds population 20, 30, and even 80 years from now. A paper published this week in The Lancet explores the impact on population of factors like fertility, mortality, and migration, and details potential deviations from a heavily-populated future Earth.

On top of forecasting the populations of 195 countries, the study looked at age demographics and the impact they could have on national economies and the global power structure.

Continued global population growth through the century is no longer the most likely trajectory for the worlds population, said the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) Director Dr. Christopher Murray, who led the research. This study provides governments of all countries an opportunity to start rethinking their policies on migration, workforces, and economic development to address the challenges presented by demographic change.

Here are some of the papers key findings, and what they could mean for the future of our countries, economies, and planet.

The study predicts that the global population will peak at around 9.7 billion, but not until 2064. By the end of the century in 2100, that number will plummet by almost a billion people, to 8.8 billion.

Its a pretty huge fluctuation in 35 years time, especially barring events that would take out a big chunk of people at once, like world wars, natural disasters, or pandemics. According to the research, though, 23 countries will see their populations shrink by more than half, including Japan, Thailand, Italy, and Spain.

The US would reach its projected peak of 364 million people in 2062, then fall to 336 million by 2100. This would make the US the worlds fourth most populous country after India, Nigeria, and China, in that order, followed by Pakistan in fifth place. Chinas population is expected to shrink to 732 million by 2100, while Nigerias is set to explode, more than tripling from its current 206 million to 791 million by 2100. Sub-Saharan Africas total population is also forecast to triple, reaching 3.07 billion by 2100.

The percentage of a countrys population thats of working agedefined by the OECD as 15 to 64has a significant impact on its economy. Its part of why China was able to spur such a massive change in its GDP and poverty rates in just 30 years; high birth rates before the countrys one-child policy meant the opening of Chinas economy coincided perfectly with a huge working-age population. Its also why Japans aging population could be called a demographic time bomb.

The IHME study predicts major shifts in the global age structure, with far more old than young people by 2100; it estimates therell be 2.37 billion people over 65 and only 1.7 billion under 20. Moreover, the countries with the most young people will be those that are currently poorer, and their large working-age populations should accelerate their GDP growth.

IHME Professor Stein Emil Vollset, first author of the paper, said, Our findings suggest that the decline in the numbers of working-age adults alone will reduce GDP growth rates that could result in major shifts in global economic power by the centurys end.

At the moment, tensions between China and the West seem to be mounting, with multiple countries recently moving to ban Chinese companies like Huawei and TikTok; meanwhile, China is steadily advancing in technologies like AI and genetic engineering. The US and China are, in a sense, vying for global dominance, and the international leadership vacuum left by the current US administrations foreign policy isnt helping.

The study predicts China will overtake the US economically by 2035, but if the US maintains a liberal immigration policy, it will go back to having the worlds biggest economy by 2098.

The emphasis on immigration as an economic bolster here is critical. Countries that promote liberal immigration, the paper says, are better able to maintain their population size and support economic growth, even in the face of declining fertility rates.

For high-income countries with below-replacement fertility rates, the best solutions for sustaining current population levels, economic growth, and geopolitical security are open immigration policies and social policies supportive of families having their desired number of children, said Murray.

Its crucial, though, that countries put womens rights, education, and healthcare ahead of population growth; we already saw what happens when a government tries to force women to have as many children as possible, and it wasnt pretty.

According to the paper, the UN uses trends from the past to predict how fertility and mortality will evolve across countries in the future. But it leaves out one huge influencer: the fact that theres not only room for improvement, but improvement is likely.

Though it may not seem like it right nowCovid-19 has thrown a big wrench in all kinds of statistics regarding both the present and the futurehuman well-being has been on a steady upward trajectory for the past couple decades. Infant and maternal mortality are down. Life expectancy is up, and gender equality is progressing. The widespread dissemination of technologies like smartphones, combined with government policies aimed at helping the most vulnerable, are lifting people out of poverty.

These trends are likely to continue and even accelerate, and as further gains are made in gender equality and access to education, one of the biggest knock-on effects well see is fewer babies.

At present, women in poor countries are far more likely than women in rich countries to start having babies young, and to have a lot of them. This is due to cultural factors, like marrying young, as well as lack of education and access to contraceptives. The IHME research accounted for the likelihood that women will continue to have greater access to education and reproductive health services, and as a result will delay childbirth and have fewer kids.

The difference between this studys projections and UN forecasts, then, come mainly from the associated decline in fertility rates. The team predicts that in sub-Saharan Africa there will be 702 million fewer people by 2100 than UN forecasts predict, and over 1 billion fewer in south and southeast Asia.

Despite advances in technology that include bigger agricultural yields, cheaper manufacturing, and closely-linked global supply chains, the resources available to us do have a limit, and fewer people means more resources per person.

Looking again to Chinas example, the country was in part able to achieve its astounding economic growth and decline in extreme poverty due to its one-child policy. The Chinese population grew just 38 percent from 1980 to 2013, while Indias grew by 84 percent and Sub-Saharan Africas by 147 percent in the same time period. Fewer mouths to feed means more food per mouth, more wealth per capita, and more people having their needs met.

This applies on a global scale, too, and the papers authors point out that their forecasts have positive implications for the environment, climate change, and food productionthough they acknowledge the predictions could have negative implications for labor forces, economic growth, and social support systems in the countries with the biggest fertility declines.

Humans are pretty good at adapting, though. Whether learning to stay inside for three months straight to curb the spread of a disease or figuring out how to cope with a smaller working-age population, odds are, well manage. A lot can change between now and the year 2100, but from our current vantage point, having fewer than 10 billion people on Earth doesnt sound too bad.

Image Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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This Century Will See Massive Shifts in the Global Population, Economy, and Power Structure - Singularity Hub

A twig snaps in the dark woods near my camp. In the stillness of a calm night in the wilderness, its as loud as a gunshot. My ears are attuned to the slightest sound.

Something scratches around in the duff near the fire ring. Wavelets gently lap the shore of the lake. A faint whisper of a breeze stirs the spruce tops. Im fully in the moment and appreciate Ed Abbeys Nature Prayer.

Beyond the wall of the unreal city, beyond the security fences topped with barbed wire, beyond the asphalt belting of the superhighways, beyond the cemented backsides of our temporarily stopped and mutilated rivers, beyond the rage of lies that poisons the air

I am there, in Abbeys sacred place, alone and away from it all. I have found what Ed prescribes: the true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it.

Such was my goal in setting off last week from a trail head half an hour drive from my home on a three-day wilderness solo where Abbey set the tone.

May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and slightly uphill. May Gods dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie. May the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the great Bear watch over you by night.

I dont see anyone for three days, yet I have plenty of company with my restive mind. In stillness, the brimming subconscious issues a flood of thoughts that bubble up randomly. Solitude affords communion with something bigger, as Thoreau discovered at Walden Pond: How could I be lonely; is not our planet part of the Milky Way?

John Muir became an accomplished soloist during his thousand-mile walk. Muir exulted while clinging ant-like to the swaying top of a 100-foot tree during a raging storm. He displayed his singularity by dancing a jig before President Teddy Roosevelt on the rim of Yosemite Valley after they had ignited a tall snag into a tower of flame.

Epiphanies of the ages have been instilled in wilderness through Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Elijah. Each had a distinctly personal relationship with solitude in the most profound sense, to which I humbly aspire.

My campfire is the burning bush. My mystic sprites buzz about me in the form of mosquitoes. My animal spirit is in the guise a chattering squirrel scolding this wayward member of the human race.

The rising trout make circles on the lake and remind me of the food chain: Mosquitoes eat me. Trout eat mosquitoes. I eat trout caught with my fly rod. A complete cycle.

I dont fish for fun; I fish for food. As two rainbows simmer in my pan, I give thanks, not to the bounty of nature, but to the fish and game folks who stocked the lake that morning while I ascended the high ridge above the lake. From the tundra, I watched their low-flying plane execute a bombing run with a live slurry of fingerlings.

My ridge hike takes me to a 13,000-foot knob with a 360-view that encompasses one-quarter of Colorados Fourteeners. After a scramble down a couloir to the tundra basin, I rest in the shade of a krummholz stand where I find a wad of wooly white down shed by a mountain goat. I press the soft wool to my nose for an earthy scent of the goat.

That night, I hear the snap of the twig. Within the flimsy shield of my tent I humbly offer myself to whatever night marauder visits my camp. Surrender comes from trusting the benignity of Mother Nature. As her loving son, Im in a place thats far safer than the tumultuous and volatile human world against which Abbey inveighed.

In the bright and sunny morning, I lean back against a log and compose bad poetry. I lift my gaze to watch the lake change complexion and texture as wind/light/shadow alter it from a smooth plate of green glass into corrugations of gray steel.

Im fully in the moment and alive!

Paul Andersens column appears on Mondays. He may be reached at andersen@rof.net.

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Paul Andersen: 'Beyond the wall of the unreal city ' - Aspen Times

You won't regret adding these bras to your life

Adding to the essentials in your wardrobe is never done in singularity. You can never own only one t-shirt or pair of jeans. The same goes with cotton bras. They are worn day in and day out, so it's only natural for you to own them in pairs, triplets or even more. Cotton is a breathable fabric for lingerie and when you find a bra that's comfortable and supportive enough, what should you do? Buy an entire pack of them, of course. That way, you can ensure your lingerie collection is filled with pieces that work well for you.

Grab these cotton bra packs right away - you'll regret it if you don't.

The bras included in this 6-piece set are made of poly cotton material, do not have padding or wires and come in 6 muted solid toned shades of oranges, browns and purples.

The bra pack of 3 pieces are seamless, non-wired and made of stretchable cotton fabric in pink, blue and grey.

The pack of 3 cotton sports bras have a camisole pattern with narrow straps in front and cutout horizontal strap designbehind.

The pack includes 6 bras of hosiery cotton material. They come in a mix of colour blocked shades with a contrasting panel below the cup and S-shaped adjustable straps.

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Grab These Cotton Bra Packs Because Owning One Is Never Enough - NDTV Swirlster

Published on July 20th, 2020 | by Chanan Bos

Tesla has announced that its earnings call for shareholders will take place on July 22 at 2:30pm PST/5:30pm EST. While it might not be the most important investor call in the history of Tesla for the success of its mission, it for sure could be considered the most important investor call in Teslas history in terms of the stock market, as the outcome could decide whether Tesla enters the S&P 500.

As always, CleanTechnica will be there to stream it live with all the bells and whistles you have come to expect from our previous livestreams, and maybe even some new ones. Here is the link to our livestream, and its also embedded below. Just make sure to click that Set reminder button, and if you havent already subscribed to our channel, we recommend it. We will also be publishing an article tomorrow with all the analysts that might show up on the call, so keep an eye out for that, as its a critical report for anyone who owns shares or is interested in the company, and no one else publishes anything comparable.

Tags: Tesla, Tesla financials, Tesla S&P 500, Tesla stock

Chanan Bos Chanan grew up in a multicultural, multi-lingual environment that often gives him a unique perspective on a variety of topics. He is always in thought about big picture topics like AI, quantum physics, philosophy, Universal Basic Income, climate change, sci-fi concepts like the singularity, misinformation, and the list goes on. Currently, he is studying creative media & technology but already has diplomas in environmental sciences as well as business & management. His goal is to discourage linear thinking, bias, and confirmation bias whilst encouraging out-of-the-box thinking and helping people understand exponential progress. Chanan is very worried about his future and the future of humanity. That is why he has a tremendous admiration for Elon Musk and his companies, foremost because of their missions, philosophy, and intent to help humanity and its future. He sees Tesla as one of the few companies that can help us save ourselves from climate change.

Read more here:

Tesla Q2 Earnings Call On July 22 Heres The Best Way To Watch It (Not Just Listen) - CleanTechnica

"The 1619 Project" from The New York Times refers to the year that the first enslaved people were brought to the U.S. and looks at how slavery continues to shape every aspect of American culture.

When it was first published last August, the magazine created a sensation, and this past May, "The 1619 Project" won a Pulitzer Prize. Now, Oprah Winfrey and Lionsgate have teamed up with creator Nikole Hannah-Jones to bring the work to an even wider audience through multiple platforms.

"The 1619 Project" continues to resonate during ongoing Black Lives Matter protests because it contributes to the lexicon of how America reached this current period of racial reckoning, Hannah-Jones says.

"I think it has allowed many Americans, particularly white Americans, to connect dots that they werent connecting before," she says, "that this police violence and inequality, that these arent just unrelated incidents, but have a long and deep legacy that has to be confronted."

The project is also inspiring changes to school history curriculums in Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Buffalo, New York. This marks the latest push for more accuracy in American history textbooks, which have been under scrutiny for being "highly politicized" and embodying a "nationalistic agenda," Hannah-Jones says.

Teaching a history "that speaks to American exceptionalism" downplays the role of slavery, she says, and "all of the other ways that America has not lived up to those ideals of exceptionalism."

"That has robbed Americans of the ability to properly assess their country and why things are like they are," she says.

What many parents have recognized is that "The 1619 Project" offers a counter to that narrative, which Hannah-Jones hopes will prompt people to question other narratives in U.S. history.

"There are many different stories that really need to be told so that we can have a fuller version of the American project," she says, "and not just one that seeks to glorify us, but really one that seeks to challenge us."

On if this period of racial reckoning will lead to reparations

"I dont think that there is enough of an appetite for it right now. I just was looking at some polling on this yesterday and it showed among white Democrats so, you know, the party that the vast majority of Black Americans vote for that only about 30% of white Democrats support the idea of reparations. So clearly, there is a lot of work to do on that. But at the same time, I think, again, its related to the work of 'The 1619 Project.' There is such a visceral response that many of white Americans have to the idea of reparations, and I think thats really based on the fact that they actually have no understanding of this history. They have no understanding of the singularity of Black suffering, of the dragnet of laws and policies that have created the generational disadvantage that Black Americans face. And part of what I try to do with my piece on 'What Is Owed' is really lay that history out and really show that there is nothing that Black Americans can do on our own to erase a 350-year system of racial segregation and economic exploitation.

"So no, were not ready for that yet. But part of the work that Im doing and that so many others are doing is trying to move that conversation forward so that we can maybe get to the point where we can be serious about addressing that. And we have seen movement. So when you look at the fact that in ... the Democratic primary debates, reparations was treated as a serious question by journalists and by people on that stage. Five years ago, you wouldnt have seen that. When you look at H.R.40, which is the bill to study the issue of reparations, its been introduced every year for 30 years and has never made it out of committee. But a few years ago, it had just three co-sponsors. Now it has well over 100 co-sponsors. So we are seeing some traction, and like many things, when it comes to racial justice, its a decades long struggle, not a months, a years-long struggle."

On the racial reckoning also happening in newsrooms

"Yeah, I think there is a reckoning happening right now. And of course, when you are a Black journalist, youve never bought into this idea that your identity is unrelated to your coverage. And weve known that thats not true for ourselves, and weve certainly known that thats not true for white journalists either. Of course, white journalists identity in a white-dominated society plays a role in how they cover stories, what they choose to cover and what they dont.

"So its always been interesting to me that our role as journalists is to explain the world to itself. And so here we are reporting on these national reckonings a racial reckoning is happening across all of these different institutions and all of these different organizations and private companies yet we dont fully understand this ourselves, and we have not dealt with these issues ourselves. So how can we explain to the world that which we dont fully understand? So I think this is a very interesting time that were in where Black journalists are speaking out and are really pushing our news organizations in a public way, which is more unusual. And I hope that the only reckoning that comes out of this time of protests, that it also comes to our industry as well. If we see ourselves as really the linchpin, the free press as a lynchpin of democracy, then we have to democratize our own institutions."

On if she is optimistic that this moment will lead to change

"No. No, Im not. I think Im realistic, and realistically, if you study history, then you know that massive transformation is very rare and only comes after very sustained periods of resistance, and then it never fully transforms society and is often faced by a backlash and a retrenchment. So Im already looking at how little news coverage the protests are getting, how little coverage were seeing in media around if theres actually going to be police reforms or not. Were already seeing this narrative because of a rise in shootings that, you know, we cant defund police because look at all this violence in these communities. So I think that what were fighting against is so deeply entrenched that its hard to be hopeful that were going to see that real necessary transformation. With that said, I am hopeful that people will keep fighting, because even if we dont think that were going to see that, we are, I think, obligated to fight for it."

Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Tinku Ray. Samantha Raphelson adapted it for the web.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

The rest is here:

Bringing The Pulitzer Prize-Winning '1619 Project' To A Wider Audience - WFAE

(Delphian)

THE performances by adventurous and original chamber quartet The Hermes Experiment were a stand-out of Matthew Whitesides The Night With . . . concerts in Glasgows Hug & Pint and elsewhere, in a season that was full of highlights. This debut album was recorded, for Scotlands dynamic Delphian label, in Edinburghs Greyfriars Kirk over three days in October of last year, and it will surely be representing Delphian, alongside guitarist Sean Shibes Bach set, on many best of lists come the end of this one.

There are many startling things about The Hermes Experiment, beginning with the groups line-up of soprano voice, clarinet, harp and double bass, which blends so well its singularity ceases to be relevant.

Nonetheless, commissioning new music has necessarily been central to the experiment, and ten of the 60 pieces written for them over the past six years are included here, alongside examples of the skills of the players themselves in arranging works for their particular combination of instruments.

That latter category includes bassist Marianne Schofields treatment of Anna Merediths Fin like a Flower, one of the shorter tracks, alongside the two by Emily Hall that give the disc arresting ways to start and finish.

Freya Waley Cohens We Phoenician Sailors, Josephine Stephensons Monteverdi companion-piece Between the war and you and Giles Swaynes Chansons devotes et poissonneuses are more substantial, and there are fine contributions from the catalogues of Errollyn Wallen and Misha Mullov-Abbado as well.

Crucially, however, it all sounds of a piece, and that is down to the collective, with Oliver Pashley on clarinets and Anne Denholms harp, in which frontwoman and vocalist Heloise Werner has no monopoly on exuding an irresistible charm.

KEITH BRUCE

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'Adventurous and startling' Album review: The Hermes Experiment, Here We Are - HeraldScotland

The Dior Men designer joins fashion's favorite masked cowboy to discuss ego, David Bowie, and finding queerness in country music

Canadian musician Orville Peck and British fashion designer Kim Jones are singular talents, but in their singularity lies a profound connection: Both have established their careers by pushing against the grain, drawing inspiration from a countercultural, and often counterintuitive, approach to established ideas. Joness fanboy appreciation of punk and queer subcultures, and his extensive travels to Africa in his youth, have blossomed into one of the most distinctive talents in fashion. After earning his spurs revitalizing the staid British luxury brand Dunhill, where he was hired in 2008 as the first creative director in the companys history, Jones set about electrifying Louis Vuitton with his refined streetwear aesthetic. His focus on collaborationincluding with BritArt bad boys Jake and Dinos Chapman and, more spectacularly, James Jebbia at Supremehelped change the parameters of luxury fashion. Hes now doing thatand moreas creative director of Dior Men, using his obsessive and completist approach to pop culture as a springboard for a deep dive into the brands history. Not for nothing did the industry journal Business of Fashion exclaim, in a review of Diors Fall 2020 collection, The Future is Now at Dior. Jones has paid tribute to the brands extraordinary lineage through creative directors past including Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, and John Galliano, while injecting it with his enormous enthusiasm for contemporary culture. Its not only his collaborations with Kaws, Raymond Pettibon, Daniel Arsham, and Shawn Stussy that have marked his still-fresh tenure at the brand, but also his ardent appreciation for music, particularly in his ongoing work with DJ Honey Dijon, who develops the soundtracks for his shows.

Given all that, its hardly surprising that Jones was drawn to the pseudonymous singer-songwriter Orville Peck who has co-opted country music as a soundscape for his playful meditations on gay identity and desire. On the lush ballad, Turn to Hate, for example, Peck croons about heartache like the gorgeous offspring of a union between Roy Orbison and Lloyd Cole. Like Jones, what makes Peck exciting is the broad palate of influences that elevate his work into a league of its own. You can hear his early enthusiasm for punk in his debut album, Pony, but you also hear his love of camp, his fierce understanding of theater and performance, and an abiding love for country musics torch song tradition. For Document the two artists got together to talk about the beauty of collaboration, the enduring legacy of David Bowie, and Pecks head-turning Dior moment in Miami last December.

Jacket and pants by Dior Men PF20. Boots Orvilles own.

Orville Peck: Thank you for waiting. I just scratched my eyeball last night, and I woke up with a crazy inflamed eye. So I had to go to the doctor this morning, and it took forever because Americayou know how it is.

Kim Jones: Where are you?

Orville: Im in LA.

Kim: Youre skyrocketing at the moment, arent you?

Orville: [Laughs] Its so bizarre.

Kim: Yes, but you should enjoy it.

Aaron Hicklin: How did you come to work together?

Kim: I heard Orvilles music and found the album and put it on repeat and really admired his approach in terms of image and the music. So I contacted him because when I admire someones work, I like to work with them.

Orville: It came through really casually. I remember thinking it was fake at first. I was completely flattered and excited and thrilled by it. As a musician, Ive never really been involved in the fashion world, but Ive been a fan of it my whole life and, lets be honest, Dior is not too bad.

Kim: We met up in London and then worked out how many different connections we had.

Orville: It speaks a lot to who you are, Kim, as well. Everybody loves working and dealing with you because when you like something, it doesnt matter if its approved across the board, or if its even going to be advantageous to you. Youre the kind of person who reaches out and wants to work with people who inspire you, and I think its reciprocated.

Kim: If I like a persons work, I think its important to support it, especially in this day and age when everything gets segregated. To build a community of talented people who inspire people is important.

Aaron: Kim, youve referred to the role of the fashion designer in many ways being not dissimilar to the pop star. Music and fashion are handmaidens; they go together. I wonder if youve given much thought to where that comes from? Does music give rise to how you dress or does how you dress give rise to your musical taste?

Kim: I think it used to. Everything has blended together now. Subcultures have become more homogenized, just because of people seeing things. And when you see someone doing something on their own, distinct from the crowd, you pay attention to it, which is what Orville has done.

Orville: The older Ive gotten, the more I think of art with a capital A. For me that includes music, fashion, visual art, cinema. All of those things feed and inspire me to create. Whether thats a song or a look, I think those things go hand in hand. I think about an artist like David Bowie, who was a musician first and foremost, but he created so much more art than you could ever just call music.

Kim: He was an inspiration to a huge generation of people, and still is. When you think about how forward-thinking and shocking that must have been to the world. I was very lucky to have worked with him before he died, and he was absolutely the sweetest. He had all these books piled up. There was a massive pile of [cinematographer] Derek Jarman books and [British playwright] Joe Orton books. He was reading about all these different things, and telling me about when hed come up with different ideas, and how. It was mind-blowing.

Aaron: What is the relationship between musical mentors and heroes and your understanding of yourselves? What was it that helped you understand your evolving identities when you were younger?

Orville: The best creators, in any medium, draw inspiration from different places. My music is definitely inspired by fashion and cinema. Everyone has their personal mood board in their head. I grew up listening to punk and obviously country. It makes sense to find inspiration from all those different places. If you have a taste level, that has to be fed by interesting things. Youre not going to find that purely in your medium.

Kim: Yeah, the thing for me is that my eyes are always open; I cant not look at stuff. I like doing different things all the time. Thats probably why Im good at fashion, because Im on to the next thing straight away, hopefully not in a superficial way. I like to be moving forward always.

Orville: I think evolution is such an important part of being an artist because you understand that evolution is a crucial part of art.

Aaron: Kim, youre well known for collaboration and really valuing the exchange of ideas with artists as part of your creative process.

Kim: I collaborate with a studio full of people, and I respect their tastes, their ideas, and they know what I want. Youre the maestro leading an orchestra, so to speak, when you work in these big companies. Its not about sitting down and doing everything by yourself because thats not a feasible thing now. I like working with different people with different ideas. Its a conversationit makes me think of things in different ways.

Orville: I came out of a place where collaborating was a necessity because you couldnt do it alone. I would have to reach out and work with people. I come from a world of everybody making something out of nothing together. I have really tried to keep that collaborative spirit through my career, even though its not a necessity anymore. Ego and stubbornness kill art. I have no time for them, so I love collaborating on a creative level, a visual level, a sonic level. I love meeting someone who I can continue collaborating with because building those relationships, thats where magic happens, at least historically. Sometimes it comes out of an unlikely pairing, which I like even more.

Orville Peck wears jacket and coat by Dior Men PF20. Custom hat (worn throughout) by Dior Men. Ring Orvilles own.

Kim: I like things to feel authentic. Its not because its someone cool and I want to use them, it comes from respect and loving what they do.

Orville: I think it really shows in the diverse people you have around you. Its not even just fashion peopleif anything, fashion people feel like theyre in the minority, and that really speaks to who you are. When I was at [your show in] Miami, I sat next to the Kardashians, and Travis Scott and James Blake and David Beckham and Detox were there, such an incredible group of diverse people, and its really a testament to your collaborative nature and the fact that its how you like to work.

Kim: At the end of the day, theyre my friends, you know? I get blown away by that sometimes. Its actually funny thinking about music. Honey Dijons my main collaborator in music. Ive known Honey since 2001. We bonded because Im really into music, and Im into collecting club memorabilia. I dont think Ive kept everything, but Im a hoarder. I was thinking of all the people Ive worked with, like Giorgio Moroder, Nile Rodgers, Drake, Michael Stipe, Diplo, A-Trakyou know, its a privilege to be able to do that.

Aaron: Orville mentioned that theres no place for ego in the creative process. The New York Times said about Kim that he is a designer who never aspired to have his initials on his clothes. Orville, your presentation seems designed to sublimate your ego to your craft. Does that make your creativity more fruitful?

Orville: Its not that ego doesnt creep into my lifeI think for everybody, its something to keep in checkbut especially someone like me, who doesnt have loads of self-confidence, to be honest, I have to fake a bit of an ego to give me a bit of a boost at some point. But I would rather have the work speak for me. When youre passionate and confident in what youre making, and you have a vision, the idea of desperately trying to validate yourself through it becomes secondary because youre so focused on something that youre passionate about because you love it.

Kim: I just wish Id been as clever as you and worn a mask from day one so I could have some privacy! Thats a stroke of genius: Youre anonymous, but youre famous, and thats a weird thing to be.

Orville: Its definitely a little bit of comfort.

Kim: Im sure you get some stalkers who see you out and about and recognize your tattoos.

Orville: It happens more these days than not, but its fine.

A lot of the themes in classic country were about loneliness and disappointment and heartbreak and isolation, so it made complete sense that country music would appeal to a gay audience even more so than to a well-adjusted straight white man.

Aaron: Can we talk about the Dior pieces that Orville wore as part of the F/W Dior Collection?

Kim: It was the cowboy version of Dior, with the beaded fringing on the mask. It was fun to do just for one person. Even the fringe boots are a luxury for me because I dont really do that very often.

Orville: Ive always been so flattered and grateful that Kim respects that I have a certain look, and I think the kind of genius of it is that instead of trying to figure out how to work that, he just knows thats my aesthetic. And he does Dior for me, and it looks and works like a perfect collaboration.

Aaron: Orville, youve talked about the challenge of being a gay country musicianthe bullying and the discrediting that you have to deal with. How do you use your craft to disrupt the conventional associations we make with country music?

Orville: Sadly, to be quite honest, like any genre, if you go far enough to the top, its generally dominated by old white straight men, like most things in this world. But country, particularly, has been associated with very little diversity through the years. Its funny because I grew up loving country music, and I was always obsessed with cowboys. I grew up in Africa actuallyKim and I have that connection as well. My connection to cowboys was very pastiche; the idea of a cowboy was the Lone Ranger. A lot of the themes in classic country were about loneliness and disappointment and heartbreak and isolation, so it made complete sense that country music would appeal to a gay audience even more so than to a well-adjusted straight white man, which is a funny stigma about country. Its this really heartbreaking music that should be made for people whove experienced those things, and thats what I connected to when I was younger. When I knew I wanted to be a country musician, I wanted to portray that connection with country music that I had growing up. I saw that there was something missing from it, and when you see something missing, its usually good to jump in.

Aaron: Kim, growing up in Africa was a seminal thing for you in terms of your aesthetic, and the way you perceive dress and color.

Kim: Im so grateful for that experience. It made me realize and appreciate that all over the world, everyone was very different. One thing that my father really instilled within me is that everyones equal. It doesnt matter about money; it doesnt matter about skin color. You have to be around different people. So my group of friends was a real mix of all these different people. And then my love of nature. One of the most amazing powerful images was in Ethiopia, seeing these super tall people wearing all this jewelry, and with these amazing wraps around them, and then these huge Kalashnikov machine guns. Just seeing that and thinking, Wow, these are the coolest people you are ever going to see.

Orville: Kims hit the nail on the head. I feel so proud and grateful to have grown up there. You experience so much culture and life that I think a lot of people in the West dont necessarily get to. The nature element is a really big one. I feel so clearly connected to the natural world around me, and I dont think of myself as separate from that, whereas a lot of the mentality in the West is that nature is something to look at rather than to be a part of. Kim and I have that in common. Oftentimes, we will send each other pictures of animals because both of us love wildlife so much, and I attribute that to our upbringing.

Aaron: Which animals did you send to each other?

Kim: It was a possum last time. Orville put it on Instagram, so we got talking about different marsupials.

Orville: Kim sent me some sharks recently.

Aaron: Kim, as well as your love of animals, youre a collector of books.

Kim: The books Im collecting right now are related to the Bloomsbury set, particularly Virginia Woolf. They lived their lives the way they wanted to live them in a time when it wasnt really possible, and yet they were still respectable in society. My two favorite books are both copies of Orlando: One is inscribed to [Woolfs lover and subject of Orlando] Vita Sackville-West by Virginia, and Vita has written in it as well. Then, I have a copy inscribed to [Woolfs sister] Vanessa Bell, inscribed from your slave and sister. Im very into stuff like that, of historic importance.

Orville: I love hearing Kim talk about things that he likes because he gets so into it. I think its so important these days because a lot of art is made from a place by people who arent fans of other things. You have to be a fan of art to make it, and its actually less prevalent than it should be.

Kim: When Im at home, Im like a librarian, organizing everything, rearranging books until theyre perfect. My friend came over to help me, and I said, People must wonder what a designers life is like, and there I am in my pajamas on a Saturday night organizing books.

Stylist Assistant Myles Xavier. Photographed at the New York EDITION.

Original post:

Kim Jones and Orville Peck talk art with a capital A - Document Journal