The image of John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their fists at the 1968 Olympic Games is burned into the American zeitgeist. It is a symbol of the civil rights movement that will always be remembered for the subtle yet powerful message that Black folks were not okay in this country.

The Stand: How One Gesture Shook The World, by Becky Paige and Tom Ratcliffe, is a documentary that chronicles the backstory leading up to that famous moment. Racism was rampant in America, with Jim Crow laws and segregation being in full force in the South. 1968 was also the year Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F Kennedy were assassinated. The Vietnam War had been raging for thirteen years. And to add to all of that, the Mexico City Olympics were on their way.

The image of John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their fists at the 1968 Olympic Games is burned into the American zeitgeist.

The film focuses not just on the lives of John Carlos and Tommie Smith, but the lives of those who helped the two men get to that special moment, including Martin Luther King himself before he was murdered. It brings to light the obstacles Black athletes faced, especially on the world stage. Post-Jackie Robison, Black players were still not welcomed by the fans of certain teams or even their White teammates.

The Stand: How One Gesture Shook The World does an exceptional job showing how complicated the road to the Mexico Olympics was.Black Olympic athletes that qualified considered boycotting the games to send a message to the country and the world. They were even threatened, along with their families, for trying to stand up. It took not only the Black athletes but also the help of White allies to get Carlos and Smith to Mexico. The Harvard crew team were some of the partners that played a big part in this. Then when things couldnt get worse, disaster struck when Smith pulled a groin muscle that threatened to take him out of competing all together.

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The Stand: How One Gesture Shook The World - Film Threat

On February 13, 2011, Barbra Streisand stood on stage at Staples Center in Los Angeles, ready to announce the winner for the Album of the Year category at the 53rd annual Grammys. Pulling the slip from the envelope, she announced Arcade Fire as the winner from a field that included Lady Antebellum, Eminem, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga, seemingly utterly confused as she stammered through the first consonant of the word suburbs.

The Canadian indie-rock collective made their way to the stage; vocalist Win Butlers first words as the band accepted the award were What the hell?, seemingly as caught off guard as the audience watching at home, many of whom were hearing the name Arcade Fire for the first time. He went on to thank the city of Montreal and the band members families, adding a holy shit, before saying, Were going to go play another song because we like music. The then-septet kicked into Ready to Start, the second track off of their third album, The Suburbs, which turned 10 on Sunday.

At the time, the win felt unlikely: Indie rock artists seldom gained recognition at the Grammys, let alone the Album of the Year category. Taylor Swift, U2, and the Dixie Chicks all won the award in the decade leading up to the Arcade Fires victory, so when a band more popular on blogs than on the radio won Album of the Year, many took to the internet to express their confusion. A Tumblr blog titled Who is Arcade Fire??!!? surfaced. Rosie ODonnell tweeted that she had never heard of them (though she knows who they are now). Kathie Lee and Hoda merely shrugged at the mention of Arcade Fires name. But while this discourse about the band was transpiring, The Suburbs climbed from no. 52 to no. 12 on the Billboard 200 two weeks following the ceremony. Alongside this sudden attention, Arcade Fire simultaneously sparked confusion and experienced commercial success. And the increased exposure marked an inflection point not only for Arcade Fire, but the changing landscapes of both indie music and the Grammys ceremony.

Some people still equate Grammys with good or valuable, Eric Eidelstein, author of the 33 1/3 book on The Suburbs, says. Its good when people are honored for their work and their artistry. Its not just the same commercial outputs winning everything.

Arcade Fires victory was the big bang for other similar victories at the ceremony. The following year, the Wisconsin-based indie outfit Bon Iver took home Best New Artist. Indie-pop songwriter Gotye won Record of the Year for that one song in 2013 before vanishing into obscurity once again. Alternative polymath Beck won Album of the Year in 2015 for the folk-influenced, earnest Morning Phase. The Black Keys, despite not winning many of the Grammys biggest awards, have made countless appearances at the ceremony from 2010 onward. These wins signified a larger cultural shift: In many ways, indie music had become mainstream.

Thats partially due to the fact that indie music was selling incredibly well in 2010. Both Vampire Weekends sophomore effort Contra and Arcade Fires The Suburbs debuted at no. 1 on Billboard. The genre had also reached an artistic zenith; Sufjan Stevenss sprawling The Age of Adz, Deerhunters psychedelic and hazy Halcyon Digest, and Beach Houses majestic Teen Dream were all released that year. Indie music had more cultural cachet than ever: LCD Soundsystems famous farewell show at Madison Square Garden in April 2011which followed their 2010 album, This Is Happeningsignified the genres import, particularly for that era of artists.

The bands win helped pave a path to the current zeitgeist, even in pop music. A decade ago, it was doubtful to think that an artist like Billie Eilish could have swept the Grammys, although thats exactly what the young songwriter did this year, taking home the prizes for Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best New Artist, among other categories. An indie band with more than four members won Album of the Year in 2011, and that moment cemented what could be Grammy-worthy and popular.

Weird and different is suddenly mainstream, Eidelstein says. People are into concept albums, and people are into thinking about music even on a very base level. Im not saying that Arcade Fire did that for everyone, but it just seems like a turning point.

Indie music had certainly undergone a change of sorts. Even the indie moniker at this point seemed contradictory. Bands once known as indie in the mid-aughts, such as Interpol and Bloc Party, were now signing to major labels. Death Cab for Cutie made the move from the Seattle-based Barsuk Records to Atlantic. The Shins subsequently moved from Sub Pop to Columbia. Arcade Fire went from Merge Records to Columbia.

Its no coincidence that artists such as LCD Soundsystem, Vampire Weekend, Bon Iver, Arctic Monkeys, and, of course, Arcade Fire, were listed as some of the biggest names on the biggest festival bills in recent years. Just one album cycle after The Suburbs, Arcade Fire were selling out notably larger venues when they toured in support of their 2013 record, Reflektor. They had three nights at Barclays [Center], and they were all sold out, Eidelstein says. Its hard to think that the Grammy win wasnt part of that.

With bigger sounds came bigger rooms. Indie music in the early 2010s had moved from its post-punk ethos to embrace synthesizers, drum machines, and pop-centric sensibilities. Bands such as Phoenix, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Vampire Weekend began relinquishing their rigid grips on their guitars to yield more synthetic approaches. What emerged was a blend of the two styles, a by-product rooted in a rock essence that didnt shy away from traditional features of dance music.

Take a song such as the penultimate Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains), an arena-sized indie-pop song replete with glittering synthesizers, a four-on-the-floor percussive backdrop, and an infectious hook. This wasnt the same Arcade Fire fans were familiar with from 2004s Funeral or 2007s Neon Bible, a band who crafted guitar-led rock songs with very few dance elements in sight. This was an Arcade Fire that you can dance to. During this era, their concerts evolved into more eventful, theatrical productions. The lighting was flashier, the stage production was more elaborate, and the venues were larger. The band took the stage at Madison Square Garden for the first time while touring The Suburbs. Emily Mackay, who reviewed the album for NME, giving it 4.5 stars out of 5, describes Arcade Fire as the perfect live band at that point.

It was so exhilarating to watch them at festivals, Mackay says. I think when people get to that point and they nail it, its so satisfying because its so easy to get to that point and completely fluff it. It takes some nerve to get that balance where youve got one foot in the indie world and one foot on the Bono [of U2] stage and make a really good record that doesnt betray what you are.

The songs on The Suburbs sound as though Arcade Fire were confident they would soon perform them in arenas, rather than the smaller venues and ballrooms they had become accustomed to. With the massive choruses of songs like the ones on Half Light II (No Celebration), Ready to Start, and Rococo, these songs were written to reverberate in large settings and take up as much space as possible. They arent domineering or ostentatious; rather, they showcase Arcade Fire in an even more grandiose light. The Suburbs highlights the indie rockers at their most resplendent.

I remember being so grateful that they came out with that record that seemed like, Hello! We would like to play in stadiums now, Mackay says. At the time, summer festivals got to a stage where it was the same bands headlining all the time, like Foo Fighters, Blink-182, Muse, or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and they just seemed to rotate. It seemed like there wasnt a next generation of bands that was stepping up to the point where they could headline and sell the number of tickets required. Then it seemed that they were going to be that band.

The Suburbs also marked the beginning of Arcade Fires foray into multimedia endeavors. The music video for We Used to Wait used the then-new map-tracking technology to lend a more personal note, asking the viewer to enter the address of the home in which they grew up. The indie-rock collective also collaborated with filmmaker Spike Jonze, which resulted in the short film Scenes From the Suburbs.

The visual component is very striking to me, Eidelstein says. It felt like they were really playing with multimedia for the first time in a way I think they [hadnt] yet. I was in awe of that record feeling like it was a larger project, and there was this Jonze film.

Over roughly 30 minutes of footage, five suburban teenagers ride bikes throughout their neighborhoods, talk about sex, and attend house parties, all while a steadily burgeoning police-military force occupies their small town. Its a poignant exploration of loss of innocence, war, nostalgia, youth, and friendship. Win Butler and former member Sarah Neufeld make cameos.

Similar to that film, The Suburbs as a whole feels like some of Arcade Fires most personal work. Whereas Neon Bible was a critique of modernism, technology, and religious hypocrisy, The Suburbs is a rumination on Win and Will Butlers experiences growing up in the Woodlands, a suburb of Houston. Although the album isnt without its moments of corporate and technological finger-wagging (Modern Man, Deep Blue), Win Butler, Rgine Chassagne, and Co. spend most of the albums 64-minute running time reflecting on the deeply personal narratives of their youth. Despite its sonic size, The Suburbs emphasizes individual storytelling.

Those songs just carry so much weight and memory, Eidelstein says. Its that intimacy for me that really distinguishes it.

Leah Greenblatt, who reviewed The Suburbs with an A rating for Entertainment Weekly, says that this sense of earnestness and nostalgia has helped the album hold up well a decade later.

At the time that Arcade Fire started, there was a lot of ironic remove and winkiness happening in indie rock, Greenblatt says. At that point, I felt like it wasnt super cool to be that ambitious and that earnest, and I think that has aged well for them because sincerity usually does in a way that irony doesnt.

Wasted Hours tells a story of longing for meaningless time spent doing nothing: Wasted hours before we knew / Where to go and what to do, Win Butler croons in the songs chorus. Now our lives are changing fast / Hope that something pure can last, he laments in We Used to Wait. The Suburbs ultimately centers on looking at youth with nostalgic hindsight, and how those wasted hours are sorely missed when our lives are changing fast.

It leads you back to this moment where youre looking at your hopes and dreams of 10 years ago and your innocence, Greenblatt says. They were singing about what it means to be young in 2010.

But these songs are not merely tales of innocence, as the suburbs are not a purely innocent location. They are intrinsically nefarious, as their inception was the direct product of white flight and redlining. In Suburban War, Win Butler confronts some of those ideas head on, signing, This towns so strange they built it to change / And while we sleep we know the streets get rearranged. Its a subtle reference to perpetual construction and gentrification and the suburbs role in that. They build it up just to burn it back down, Butlers voice wavers in Rococo. In the potent final stanza of Sprawl I (Flatland), the frontman sulks: The last defender of the sprawl / Said, Well, where do you kids live? / Well, sir, if you only knew what the answers worth / Ive been searching every corner of the Earth.

In a July 2010 interview with NME, Win Butler described the album as neither a love letter to, nor an indictment of, the suburbsits a letter from the suburbs. Arcade Fire present the suburban upbringing as a multidimensional experience. The suburbs are not purely rosy, but the Butler brothers still have fond memories of them. Its where they grew up. Its their home.

The perfect encapsulation of this can be found in the third track, Modern Man. Although it scarcely touches on the suburban experience, its steady 4/4 time signature is occasionally interrupted by a measure of 5/4. This turns a relatively straightforward rock song into something tripping over itself, something slightly uneasy. The suburbs, on a superficial level, appear safe and welcoming to all, but on a deeper inspection, they possess myriad disquieting traits.

The Suburbs also remains the centerpiece of the bands discography and history. Before 2010, Arcade Fire were an established cult favorite, known for their emotional reminiscing on Funeral and their political, technological cynicism on Neon Bible. Their songs were anthemic but never pretentious, and their music had an unpolished production to it that lent it some of its charm. The Suburbs kept their exceptional songwriting intact while expanding upon it with glossier production and grander ideas, a bigger-budget mentality that would go on to pervade their next two records. They demonstrate how they grew as songwriters with the piano-led shuffle of the title track, the unabashed, emo-esque Empty Room, and the evocative ballad We Used to Wait. The Suburbs ushered in a new era of Arcade Fire.

They were aiming to make a real start-to-finish album, Greenblatt says. It seemed like they put a lot of care into the track sequencing, instrumentation, and epicness of it.

They followed The Suburbs with 2013s Reflektor, a double album featuring collaborations with David Bowie and LCD Soundsystems James Murphy and a wealth of songs running over six minutes. The band returned in 2017 with the polarizing Everything Now, which relied far too heavily on gimmicks, such as a $109 fidget spinner, a fictitious corporation, and a clunky social media campaign, instead of compelling songwriting. Though both of these albums reached dramatically different consensuses among fans and critics alike, these records share one trait: The album cycles were events. Both of those tours featured coordinated outfits (they asked fans to dress up too for the Reflektor tour), cryptic promotion, and gimmicks. Reflektor saw the band introduced as the Reflektors, in lieu of Arcade Fire, on The Colbert Report. For Everything Now they created a parody website, Stereoyum, and they reviewed their own album in a Premature Premature Evaluationa play off of one Stereogums signature columnsas well as a handful of secret Twitter accounts.

The launches for their albums have become more flamboyant and more of an ordeal, Eidelstein says. Maybe The Suburbs is a launching point of that Arcade Fire I think of now.

Arcade Fire was becoming part of a new era of indie music that was about more than just four-piece, guitar-led bands. Artists such as the XX, Dirty Projectors, LCD Soundsystem, and Panda Bear were part of a movement that widened the scope of what indie music meant. It could be something colossal, danceable, and unafraid of risks. Bon Ivers Justin Vernon abandoned his folk-influenced origins to embrace ambient synthscapes. Vampire Weekend expanded their sonic palette to incorporate drum machines and vocal samples. Tame Impala eventually swapped psych-rock for pop beats. The Nationals Aaron Dessner recently worked with Taylor Swift to create her latest record, Folklore (as did Vernon). Arcade Fire and their famous Grammy upset played a role in that cultural development toward a commercial acceptance of indie music.

Theres a reason these guys won the Grammy for best album, Eidelstein says. I know people were like, Who the fuck is Arcade Fire?, but Im sure they listened to Arcade Fire after that, realizing you dont have to just listen to the outputs of Billboards Top 10. And as a result of doing that, they become Billboard Top 10s. I think indie music in all its forms is being taken seriously not just by critics anymore.

In an interview shortly after the event, Win Butler said he believed the band won the award because they were going up against some of the larger names in music. People love underdog movies, he said, but Arcade Fire are no longer the underdogs. That transition to a big name started with The Suburbs win at the Grammys.

Grant Sharples is a writer based in Kansas City. He has written for MTV News, Consequence of Sound, Paste, and others.

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Arcade Fires The Suburbs and Its Notorious Grammy Win, 10 Years Later - The Ringer

As proclamations of supremacy go, its not quite Jesus walking into the temple and declaring himself the messiah, but for an indie rocker in the summer of 2010, anointing yourself king of the beach was an act of extreme confidence. Lo-fi guitar bands like Beach Fossils, Best Coast, and Real Estate had helped to steer the zeitgeist into the surf. The previous years chillwave movement was still going strong. Within indies more NPR-friendly chambers, the Beach Boys had emerged as a dominant influence for the likes of Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, Animal Collective, and even some groups without creature-inspired names. So when Nathan Williams metaphorically strode out onto the sand and planted his flag, it was a loaded gesture, especially coming from a guy whod spent much of his brief stint in the spotlight as a pariah and a laughingstock.

Wavves, Williams one-man recording project turned rock band, emerged out of San Diego in 2008 and by early 2009 had become one of the most polarizing forces in underground music. Some rejected Wavves music as poorly recorded, simplistic, and overly repetitive (titles on sophomore album Wavvves included Beach Demon, Beach Goth, Surf Goth, Summer Goth, California Goths, Sun Opens My Eyes, and Gun In The Sun). Fellow druggy lo-fi rockers Psychedelic Horseshit made WAVVES SUXX T-shirts and dismissed Williams as a fraud presenting a generic take on a trendy sound. Our own report from SXSW 2009 identified the band as a divisive presence who everyone at the fest had strong opinions about. Yet Wavves had earned the support of influential record labels like Woodsist and De Stijl, and in the weeks leading up to SXSW, Wavvves elicited raves, including Best New Music honors from Pitchfork and a grade-A review from The A.V. Club.

All this positive and negative attention propelled Williams to instant infamy, and by the end of May he was melting down on stage at Primavera Sound after ingesting several of the substances from Josh Hommes Feel Good Hit Of The Summer recipe. Honest truth is this has all happened so fast, he wrote at the time, and I feel like the weight of it has been building for months now with what seems like a never ending touring and press schedule which includes absolutely zero time to myself. Williams seemed to have been chewed up and spit out by the hype machine within the span of less than a year, potentially washed up before his 23rd birthday. Instead, by July he was on the comeback trail, to the extent that can be said of an artist just one year into his career.

With King Of The Beach, released 10 years ago today, Williams bounced all the way back and then some. The album was a massive leap in every respect, one that erased his reputation as a cautionary tale and left no doubt about his talent. Wavves were now a proper rock n roll band, with Williams backed by drummer Billy Hayes and bassist Stephen Pope guys whod recently played with the late Jay Reatard and thus had experience infusing poppy guitar songs with snotty punk energy. Theyd recorded in a proper studio, too, decamping to producer Dennis Herrings Sweet Tea Recording in Oxford, Mississippi. Over the years Herring had worked with a random assortment of artists including Modest Mouse, Buddy Guy, Jars Of Clay, Counting Crows, Mutemath, the Innocence Mission, and Camper Van Beethoven. Hed also done a record with the Hives, so he knew something about how to produce shit-kicking rock songs with pop appeal, i.e. exactly the kind of colorfully visceral music Williams was writing at the time.

King Of The Beach just bursts from the speakers, gleefully loud and catchy as hell despite exploring the same depressive subject matter that defined Williams previous albums. Although still emphatically on-trend, he was channeling a timeless continuum of influences: Brian Wilson and his rival Phil Spectors 60s pop classics multiple songs borrowed the iconic Be My Baby drumbeat but also a lineage of pop-punk icons from the Ramones and Buzzcocks to Nirvana and Green Day. The second half of the tracklist suffers from dated attempts to re-create Merriweather Post Pavilion and similar quirky detours that represent a moment in blog-rock better left in the past. Fortunately, King Of The Beach mostly comprises power chords crashing in from every direction and hooks galore, an approach that has endured through the decades and the mode that has always suited Wavves best.

Williams was clearly in a deflated but defiant state of mind when he wrote the album. Youre never gonna stop me! he announces on the title track, a rejoinder to his haters delivered with so much oomph it can hardly be denied. My own friends hate my guts, he laments on the droning, drum-machine-powered gem Green Eyes before concluding, So what? Ah, so what? Who gives a fuck? On Super Soaker he delves a little deeper into self-pity I still feel stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid! but the bashed-out accompaniment is such a breathless rush that the song comes off like a triumph. Ditto Take On The World, on which Williams posits I hate myself, man, but whos to blame? and I still hate my music, its all the same. Both that one and the self-explanatory Idiot are essentially Shins songs with the levels pushed up into the red and energy to match.

And then theres Post Acid, King Of The Beachs magnificent lead single, on which Williams giddily retreats into a drug trip and/or romantic fling without turning down the dynamic intensity. Although haunted by misery on its fringes, its one of the most purely joyous moments on the album, a milestone single in this era of endless chemically altered seaside reverie. Im just havin fun, Williams repeats calmly, readying listeners for the beachy indie-rock equivalent of the EDM drops that were becoming a mainstream sensation at the time. When it hits, it really hits: With you-ou-ou-ou-ou-ouuuu! stretched out into a runaway-rocket melody while the rhythm section races along. Whereas so much music from this milieu dissolved into vapor upon impact, songs like this one exploded like fireworks over the ocean celebratory shows of force from a fuckup turned conquering monarch.

Link:

Wavves' "King Of The Beach' 10th Anniversary Review - Stereogum

Joss Whedon has created myriad iconic female characters throughout his career and yet, besides Buffy, I would defy anyone to find a Whedonverse character more beloved than Willow Rosenberg. Shes the ideal friend and sidekick; shes loyal, loving, intelligent, and physically strong in her own right. Its easy to fall under the spell of this red-haired lesbian (or bisexual?) Jewish witch.

Its been seventeen years since Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended, and still, fans obsess over the nerdiest member of the Scooby Gang. While the enduring conversation about Willow revolves around her addiction storyline and gayness, an understated yet key aspect of the character is her Jewishness.

In the new spin-off series from BOOM! Studios, the creators can and should mine Willows Jewish identity. Mining her identity would not only bolster representation but broaden the character, taking her in a new direction.After all, Buffy was not created in a culturally-unaware vacuum. It was both sub-textually and textually feminist in correspondence with political movements of the period.

Furthermore, the series premiered during a new epoch of Jewish representation on television. Comedies like Seinfeld and The Nanny exposed folks from all over the world to Jews and Judaism. So, with or without the influence of producer and Jew Gail Berman, Willow Rosenbergs Jewishness was most likely a deliberate response to the zeitgeist.

Similar to television, the world of comics has always had a prominent Jewish presence behind the scenes. Unfortunately, this presence did not transfer to the comic book characters themselves until around ten years ago when writers such as Dan Slott (The Thing) and G. Willow Wilson (Ms. Marvel) created religious Jewish heroes.

Whedon himself said that Willows Jewishness and sexual orientation werent big issues. Ive interpreted this statement as expressing a desire to normalize queerness and Jewishness on TV. But Willow is not presented as a religious Jew either in the show or the comic books. Can one normalize or even claim to represent a culture or belief without showing a character practicing and otherwise participating in it?

As Lisa Liebman noted in her article for Vanity Fair, a recent trend in Jewish television grew in response to a rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes across America. Whats interesting about the trend is that while there are shows representing secular Jews (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), we have more shows than ever before representing religious Jews (Unorthodox, Shtisel). I dont know whether the creators of these shows had any specific intent to normalize Orthodox Jews, but they found a way to make whats singularly Jewish [into something] broadly appealing. Comic book writers have the same opportunity.

Willow does not necessarily need to be ret-conned as a Chassid or a committed socially-conscious Reform Jew to check off some representation box. Nonetheless, her Jewishness must go beyond a few quips about not worshiping Santa. Consider this: there is a movement called Semitic Neopaganism made up of Jewitches. According to Witchipedia, Jewitchery is either the practice of witchcraft by a Jewish person or the integration of Wiccan spirituality with Jewish culture. What if Willow took to some Jewitchery, or met a self-described Jewitch?

Witchcraft and Judaism go way back, anyway. Parts of the Bible unequivocally condemn witchcraft (mahashefah), yet Moses and Aaron do some things that would qualify as spells or magic. Thus, an exploration of Judaism and witchcraft could yield plenty of conflict and questions about identity.

Willow isnt at peace in England.

As Willow #1 is the beginning, no Jewishness or much witchcraft has been brought up. Willow has left Sunnydale to study abroad in England, a move motivated by the heartbreaking events of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Hellmouth arc. Shes on a solo journey of self-discovery and freedom from literal hell. Will her journey lead her to a discovery of Jewitches? Only Mariko Tamaki and Boom! Studios creative team can tell.

By incorporating the religion and culture in Willows arc in some way, the writers can normalize a certain kind of Jewishness without compromising other aspects of the character. Religious folklore, ritual, and holidays may also serve the plot.

For example, in Issue #8 of The Things Idol of Millions arc, Ben Grimm gets the bar mitzvah he never had. Errors in representing the tradition notwithstanding, the issue uses Judaism to explore emotional backstory that perhaps previously wasnt addressed. Most importantly, this coming-of-age ritual connects his adaptation to life as The Thing to a religious transition. Whats more, none of this comes at the expense of the characters trademarks. Slott proves here that religion can bolster storytelling and identity, to use the words of G. Willow Wilson.

I believe that many non-Jewish or simply non-religious creatives are too scared even to try developing anything seriously religious because they dont think such a story is universal. They may also fear their project being labeled Jewish/Christian/Muslim, which would then somehow beholden them to cater to that demographic.

But these concerns prevent comic book creators from interpreting religion for plot and character. Even in the Year of Our Lord 2020, when politics and fiction have entered into a toxic Spike/Buffy relationship, Willow can be made Jewish (or a Jewitch) without the burden of social commentary.

Read the original:

HaKashaph: The Witchy Jewish Potential of BtVS: WILLOW #1 - Monkeys Fighting Robots

EDITORS NOTE: Were making some of our coronavirus pandemic coverage free for nonsubscribers. You can read those articles here and subscribe to our newsletters here.EDITORS NOTE: Were making some of our coronavirus pandemic coverage free for nonsubscribers. You can read those articles here and subscribe to our newsletters here.

We all know the Chernobyl script. A badly designed reactor suffered a meltdown. The decrepit Soviet regime tried to hide the disaster. Millions of citizens were put at risk. And the truth came out. The regime paid the price. Its legitimacy was in tatters. Collapse followed.

For liberals it is a pleasing morality tale. Dictatorship fails when faced with the challenges of modernity. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

When COVID-19 struck, we wondered whether it might be Chinese President Xi Jinpings Chernobyl. But after initial prevarication driven by Wuhans local politics, Chinas national leadership reasserted its grip. The worst moment was Feb. 7, when hundreds of millions of Chinese took to the Internet to protest the treatment of whistleblowing doctor Li Wenliang, who had died of the disease. Since then Beijing has taken control, both of the disease and the media narrative. Far from being a perestroika moment, the noose of party discipline and censorship has tightened.

By the spring it was White House staffers who were likely watching the HBO miniseries Chernobyl and wondering about their own boss. Lately, the historian Harold James has asked whether the United States is living through its late-Soviet moment, with COVID-19 as President Donald Trumps terminal crisis. But if that turns out to be the case, it will not be because of a botched cover-up; Americans are living neither in late-Soviet Ukraine nor in the era of Watergate, when a sordid expos could sink a president. Of course, Trump was culpably irresponsible in making light of the disease. But he did so in the full glare of TV cameras. The president reveled in flouting the recommendations of eggheaded public health experts, correctly calculating that a large swath of his base was not concerned with conventional norms of truth or reason.

But the fact that neither Xis China nor Trumps United States are a good match for the late Soviet Union doesnt mean that Chernobyl is not relevant to our COVID-19 predicament. What should interest us is not so much the downfall of the Soviet Union as the more mundane preoccupations of the Western Europeans who in 1986 found themselves in the path of the Chernobyl radiation cloud. As the news leaked out of the disaster, they faced many of the same questions that have haunted us in 2020. Which tests were to be trusted? Was it safe to go outside? Should children play in sand pits? What types of food were safe? How long would it last? What were the trade-offs? What exactly was a becquerel? How many were safe? Which of the vast array of reports, data, and recommendations should one read? Which should one trust?

There is no HBO series about life under the fallout cloud that summer. (In terms of curies per square kilometer, the radiation was worst in two belts: one stretching northwest across Scandinavia, the other to the south across Slovenia, Austria, and Bavaria.) What we do have is a book, Risk Society, published by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck with exquisite timing in the spring of 1986.

Beck argued that the omnipresence of large-scale threats of global scope, anonymous and invisible, were the common denominator of our new epoch: A fate of endangerment has arisen in modernity, a sort of counter-modernity, which transcends all our concepts of space, time, and social differentiation. What yesterday was still far away will be found today and in the future at the front door. The question, so vividly exposed by the crises such as Chernobyl and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, is how to navigate this world. The relevance of Becks answers are even more apparent in our day than they were in his own.

Beck was in many ways an emblematic figure of postwar Germany. Born in 1944 near the Baltic coast in the Pomeranian town of Stolp, now Slupsk in Poland, Becks family fled the Red Army to settle in the booming industrial city of Hanover. He studied sociology not in the famously radical Frankfurt, or at the Free University of Berlin, but in Freiburg and Munich. By the early 1980s he was comfortably ensconced as a professor of sociology upriver from Frankfurt, in picturesque Bamberg. Following the success of Risk Society, Ulrich Beck would emerge as perhaps Germanys most widely recognized social scientist after Jrgen Habermas.

Not for nothing Beck has been dubbed a zeitgeist sociologist. The intellectual world he was responding to in the early 1980s in West Germany was one of considerable uncertainty. The reform momentum of the 1960s and 1970s had ebbed. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohls government had little of the energy of U.S. President Ronald Reagan or British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Habermas characterized the period in intellectual and political terms as die neue Unbersichtlichkeitthe New Obscurity. The most common move was to refer to the period as an age of post-post-industrial, postmodern, postcolonial. But as Beck put it, the use of the term post- was a marker of our helplessness, the intellectual equivalent of a blind mans stick probing in the dark. Facing up to the challenge of providing a positive definition, Beck chose risk society.

In the early 1980s, the theme of risk was in the air. The escalation of Cold War tension created a pervasive sense of threat. The campaign against DDT, given huge prominence by Rachel Carsons bestselling Silent Spring, had heightened awareness of invisible chemical pollution. The Three Mile Island incident of 1979 brought home the danger of nuclear accidents. In the United States in 1982, Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky had outlined their cultural theory of risk, elaborating on Douglass earlier anthropological work. Charles Perrow warned that in living with massive complex systems such as air traffic control systems, dams, and nuclear reactors, accidents must be accepted as normal.

Becks contribution in Risk Society was to offer a compelling sociological interpretation of this pervasive sense of undefined but omnipresent threat, both as a matter of personal and collective experience and as a historical epoch. But more than that, Risk Society is a manifesto of sorts, proposing a novel attitude toward and politics for contemporary reality.

The Wests first wave of modernization had been carried forward by an enthusiastic overcoming of tradition and a confident subordination of nature by science and technology. The disorienting realization of the late 20th century was that those very same energies, those same tools were now the source not only of our emancipation but also of our self-endangerment. To retreat would be to put the gains of modernization at risk. We could not deny the benefits of modern medicine. But nor could we deny its risks and side effects, intended and unintended. What was required was, for want of a better description, a scientific approach to science. In this age, which Beck dubbed second or reflexive modernity, the challenge was to find ways to employ the tools of modernityof science, technology and democratic debatewithout succumbing to the ever-present temptations of glancing backward to a more familiar age or engaging in denial.

This is not easy to do. There is no familiar liberal formula for coping with the contemporary risks created by modern technological development. It was not a matter of denouncing dictatorship or know-nothing populism. Indeed, there is every reason to think that the problems of risk society will be most acute precisely for those who fancy ourselves as particularly reasonable and modern, because they cannot evade the dilemmas and paradoxes that it generates.

Beck shared with the environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s the dawning awareness of the gigantic risks produced by modern economic development. It was the nuclear question that catapulted risk society into public consciousness. But the 1980s also saw the emergence of widespread awareness both of climate change and the emerging diseases paradigm. If climate change was the result of carbon emissions, the emergence of viruses such as HIV, and the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 could be traced to the intrusion of humans into delicate forest ecosystems and the vast animal incubators of the agro-industrial complex. As citizens of successful modernizing societies, we face all-pervasive risks that fundamentally blur the distinction between the social and the natural. Beck could rightly claim to be one of the first thinkers of what we know today as the Anthropocene.

But Beck goes a step further. If it is true that we are now faced with pervasive risks generated and brought upon us by the forces of modernity and yet not accessible to our immediate senses, how do we cope? Until you start suffering from radiation poisoning, until your fetus suffers a horrific mutation, until you find your lungs flooding with pneumonia, the threat of the radiation or a mystery bug is unreal, inaccessible to the naked eye or immediate perception.

In risk society, we become radically dependent on specialized scientific knowledge to define what is and what is not dangerous in advance of encountering the dangers themselves. We become, as Beck puts it, incompetent in matters of our own affliction. Alienated from our faculties of assessment, we lose an essential part of our cognitive sovereignty. The harmful, the threatening, the inimical lies in wait everywhere, but whether it is inimical or friendly is beyond ones own power of judgment. We thus face a double shock: a threat to our health and survival and a threat to our autonomy in gauging those threats. As we react and struggle to reassert control, we have no option but to become small, private alternative experts in risks of modernization. We take a crash course in epidemiology and educate ourselves about R zero. But that effort only sucks us deeper into the labyrinth.

The normal experiential logic of everyday thought is reversed. Rather than starting from immediate experience and abstracting from there to general claims about the world, the news of the day starts by reference to mathematical formula, chemical tests, and medical judgements. The more we rely on science, the more we find ourselves distanced from immediate reality. Every encounter with our fellow citizens as we go about our normal business is shadowed by a calculation of virtual risks and the probability of contamination. The result is paradoxical. The path of science leads us into a realm in which hidden forces, like the gods and demons of old, threaten our earthly lives. A strange mixture of fear and calculation pursues us into our very dreams. Whereas animistic religion once endowed nature with spirits, we now view the world through the lens of omnipresent, latent causalities. Dangerous, hostile substances lie concealed behind the harmless faades. Everything must be viewed with a double gaze, and can only be correctly understood and judged through this doubling. The world of the visible must be investigated, relativized and evaluated with respect to a second reality, only existent in thought and yet concealed in the world.

As we have learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the main functions of a face mask is to remind oneself of invisible dangers and to signal to others that one is taking those risks seriously. In the United States they have become something like an article of faith, a way of indicating publicly that one belongs to those who take the science seriously.

Like the gaze of the exorcist, the gaze of the pollution-plagued contemporary is directed at something invisible. Omnipresent pollutants and toxins take the role of spirits. In our effort to cope we develop our own evasion rituals, incantations, intuition, suspicions and certainties. Of course, we insist, this isnt exorcism. This is about science, medicine, engineering, technology. But references to those authorities dont actually solve our problem. Because on most matters we care about, it turns out that science speaks with many voices. Science is, at best, a rowdy, self-willed choir with many people with different ideas of the tune they should be singing. As we have discovered to our horror in 2020, anyone who professes to believe that medicine, science, and public health expertise will by themselves tell us how to act is either naive or in bad faith. Though overwhelmed and underinformed, we cannot escape the responsibility of both personal and collective political judgment.

Furthermore, the more we know, the more we realize that we are not the only ones judging. Every interested party is picking and choosing its sources. It is an enlightening but also shocking exposure to how the sausage of modern knowledge is truly made. And as Beck reminds us, it would not be so dramatic and could be easily ignored if only one were not dealing with very real and personal hazards.

This is clearly a deeply modern world, saturated with technology and expertise. But it is not a cookie-cutter image of modernity in which scientific reason marches to victory over superstition and censorship. Would that it were so clear-cut. Instead we find ourselves in a world in which rationalism and skepticism are turning on themselves. Knowledge comes not neatly packaged in the form of clearly recognizable truth but in admixtures and amalgams. It is transported by agents of knowledge in their combination and opposition, their foundations, their claims, their mistakes, their irrationalities, all of which all too obviously go into defining the possibility of their knowing the things they claim to know.

As Beck remarks, this is a development of great ambivalence. It contains the opportunity to emancipate social practice from science through science. We gain a far more realistic understanding of how scientific results are generated and vaccines are produced. But the resulting disillusionment and skepticism also has the potential to immunize prevailing ideologies and interested standpoints against enlightened scientific claims, and throws the door open to a feudalization of scientific knowledge practice through economic and political interests and new dogmas.

So, not only is technological progress churning up nature and generating massive and dangerous blowback, but at the moment when we need it most to orient ourselves, science and the governments decisions based on it forfeit their basis of legitimacy. And as the full extent of this shock sinks in, it unleashes a third process of destabilization: We begin to wonder about the broader narratives of progress and history within which we understand our present.

It is Becks openness to the ambiguity and complexity of global development, his insistence on the multiplicity and surprising quality of potential reactions to risk society, that helps to keep his book relevant as a map for reading our current situation. If we go back to 1986, Beck anticipated three ways in which societies might deal with the risks he identified.

What Beck himself hoped for was what he called a cosmopolitan micropolitics. This was a logical extension of his model of reflexive modernity, in which not just science has been dethroned, but also the previously demarcated sphere of national politics, dominated by parliaments, sovereign governments, and territorial states. What Europe witnessed starting in the 1980s was a double movement which, on the one hand, dramatically reduced the intensity of political conflict between parties in the parliamentary sphere and, at the same time, politicized previously unpolitical realms such as gender relations, family life, and the environment, spheres which he dubbed sub-politics or micropolitics. For Beck this was no cause for lament. The challenge was to invigorate subpolitics at whatever scale they operated. This could be intensely local, as in struggles over road projects or airport runways. But it could also be global in scope.

When SARS was revealed in China in 2003, it was for Beck a demonstration of a global micropolitics in action. New networks of risk actors led by doctors, researchers, and independent public health experts overcame the initial efforts at secrecy by the Chinese state. If the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has had a Chernobyl moment, this was it. Bottom-up environmental politics and social-justice activism was for Beck the model of a new mode of politics. But one might also think of the remarkable effort involved in stabilizing an institution such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a global authority in mapping the climate emergency. It involves a tireless and massive effort of scientific politics. Again and again climate scientists from all over the world, using different models, starting from different assumptions, paid for by governments with oppposing interests have struggled to reconcile their differences and define reasonable bands of agreement. The reality of this kind of science is more like the workings of a complex system of legal arbitration than the pristine image of the lab bench.

But, as Beck acknowledged, there were also at least two other possibilities. One was a retro politics of going back to the future. This would be a politics that aimed to restore the certainty of social development and the rule of organized politics and scientific reason that had guided the first modernity. The United States war on terror was one such attempt. It turned a 21st century security risk into a conventional war against Saddam Husseins regime in Iraq. It was a disaster. The most successful effort to control risk society within the framework of a classic industrial modernity is China. Its response to the COVID-19 crisis has put that on full display. COVID-19 was contained and CCP rule ensured by a full-bore mobilization of societal discipline, targeted deployment of medical spending, and state power, all of it clad in the guise of what the regime calls 21st-century Marxism, a self-confident narrative of modernization and progress. There is no room for questioning the modern epic of the China dream. The lack of a positive attitude is enough to trigger suspicion.

Another response with which we have become all too familiar in the contemporary United States is a retreat from the vertiginous whirl of self-reflexive rationality toward new taboos, superstition, rigidification, and denial. This for Beck was not to be understood as a hangover from traditional folkways, but as a new superstition raised in response to new threats. Given the spiraling uncertainty of risk society, it was hardly surprising that some might react this way. During the response to COVID-19, it was all too easy to find oneself torn between two camps described by Beck in his article on Chernobyl: Some refuse to perceive the dangers at all, while others energetically insist on blanket condemnations in the name of self-protection or the preservation of life on this earth. How was one to decide between these positions? The polarization of views in the eddying arguments of risk society could easily extend to science itself. If, by an honest fallibilistic account, science is only a disguised mistake in abeyance then where does anyone derive the right to believe only in certain risks? A realistic skepticism about scientific authority all too easily shaded into a general obfuscation of risks. It was, Beck admitted in Risk Society, a knifes edge, in which debates about invisible risks mutated into sort of modern seance with the dial on the Ouija board being moved by rival scientific and counterscientific analyses.

Once the invisible has been let in, Beck wrote, it will soon not be just the spirits of pollutants that determine the thought and the life of people. This can all be disputed, it can polarize, or it can fuse together. New communities and alternative communities arise, whose world views, norms and certainties are grouped around the center of invisible threats. How can one not think of our ongoing struggle over face masks?

And then there is denial. Outside a totalitarian setting, a social problem such as a labor dispute cannot easily be settled by denial. But perceived risks can always be interpreted away (as long they have not already occurred). Barring the actual disaster, mounting anxiety may be relieved simply by pushing the danger out of mind. Risk is a matter of perception; therefore, it originates in knowledge and norms, and they can thus be enlarged or reduced in knowledge and norms, or simply displaced from the screen of consciousness. The awareness of modern risks was not a one-way street. It was reversible. Troubled times and generations can be succeeded by others for which fear, tamed by interpretations, is a basic element of thought and experience. Here the threats are held captive in the cognitive cage of their always unstable non-existence. Later generations would look back and mock the fears that had once so upset the old folks. A recurring refrain in the response to COVID-19, notably from the populists of the Americas, whether in the United States, Mexico, or Brazil, has been essentially this: We will just have to get used to it. After all, we live with flu. It will blow over.

As Beck warned more than 30 years ago, we may be at the beginning of a historical process of habituation. It may be that the next generation, or the one after that, will no longer be upset at pictures of birth defects, like those of tumor-covered fish and birds that now circulate around the world, just as we are no longer upset today by violated values, the new poverty and a constant high level of mass unemployment. The word out of the White House in the summer of 2020 is that Trumps strategists are looking forward to the day when news of tens of thousands of new cases per day no longer ruffles the headlines.

Beck was at heart a sociologist more than a critical theorist or normative political theoretician. He did not denounce the development of denial or unreason so much as chart and explain it. In dealing with risk society, one had to reckon with its basic motive force: the powerful emotion of fear. This was the basic question it posed:

How can we cope with the fear, if we cannot overcome the causes of the fear? How can we live on the volcano of civilization without deliberately forgetting about it, but also without suffocating on the fearsand not just on the vapors that the volcano exudes?

In 2020, that question is even more pressing than it was in 1986.

Beck is no longer with us to help us with the answer. He died suddenly of a heart attack on New Years Day in 2015 while walking home from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Risk Society had made him into one of the emblematic figures of European social science of his day. It had been translated into 35 languages. There are no fewer than 8,000 articles in Chinese academic journals that refer to Becks work. Somewhat surprisingly, Risk Society did not appear in English until 1992 and, relative to his standing in Europe and Asia, Becks impact on the academic scene in the United States was slight. For the United States social-scientific mainstream, he lacked rigor. Starting in the 1980s, behavioral economics and experimental social science came ever more to the fore as ways of accounting for how people form judgments under uncertainty. For intellectual entrepreneurs of the American left, who trade in exotic continental imports, Beck was not radical enough. They preferred their theory French. In political terms, Beck, like his friend and collaborator Anthony Giddens, was associated during the 1990s and 2000s with the Third Way of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the red-green coalition in Germany.

But it is not just academic politics that accounts for Becks muted reception in the United States. One must also ask how far Becks sketch of the contemporary cultural condition actually extended across the Atlantic. Beck himself clearly drew inspiration from the American environmental politics of the 1960s and 1970s, which led the world in turning scientific research to critical purposes. Silicon Valleys hybrid of tech and New Age religion could be cited as a classic instance of Becks second modernityimmensely wealthy tech wizards unafraid to seek enlightenment wherever they might find it, whether in yoga, outlandish diets, or shamanic outings to Burning Man. But the United States national politics presented a very different picture. What was one to make of a political system convulsed by arguments over the interpretation of an 18th-century constitution, the merits of teaching the biblical version of creation, and the veracity of climate science? There was plenty of opposition to climate politics from self-interested fossil fuel businesses in Europe, but few if any mainstream voices questioning the laboriously established scientific consensus. And in the United States all this came cloaked in a quasi-theological nationalism, embodied in the countrys sacrosanct way of life.

In the United States of 2020, faced with the confluence of evangelical religion, the Trump presidency, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon, it is tempting to conclude that Becks announcement of a second modernity was premature. It is tempting to rally the liberal troops and to announce that in the United States today it is not the struggles of reflexive modernitythe self-generation of uncertainty and riskthat need to be fought so much as the battles of the first modernity, against superstition, atavism, and obscurantism.

This may be appealing. But it ignores the obvious fact that the vortex of televangelism, a reality-TV presidency, and viral Internet memes is itself a product of our high-tech capitalism, unimaginable in an earlier era. To answer them with a retreat to rationalism is to indulge in what the British sociologist Will Davies has recently termed Enlightenment kitsch. What we are living through is indeed Becks second modernity, just in a more conflicted and catastrophic version than he ever imagined. Hence, perhaps, the attraction of the Chernobyl scenario. How pleasant to imagine that our problems are those of the late Soviet regime and that what we need is simply a dose of liberty and perestroika, when the real path of progress is both more ambiguous and more sweeping, because it implicates the country as a whole.

If Becks readership in the United States was thin, the same was not true in East Asia, where since the 1980s the German sociologist cultivated a devoted following. Beck was attractive notably for progressive Korean social scientists dedicated to the critique of their national model of authoritarian modernity. For Beck, the eagerness with which his concept of second modernity was adapted by Asian social scientists was living proof of the dynamic open-endedness of the reality he was trying to describe. In such collaborations a process was set in motion that provincialized European concepts and history without consigning them to irrelevance. Japan, South Korea, and China were undergoing an industrial revolution more rapid than anything experienced in the West. They were huge laboratories of the Anthropocene and the churning appropriation of nature.

In July 2014, Beck visited Seoul and laid out the implications of his model of risk society for thinking about crises such as the Japanese nuclear accident at Fukushima in 2011, the Sewol Ferry Tragedy in Korea in 2014, and Chinas plague of air pollution. Beck was particularly keen to suggest ways in which East Asia might creatively overcome the bitter legacy of 20th-century history, if not at the level of national politics, then through the subpolitics of cooperation between the megacities of the region that were fast emerging as global hubs. The progressive administration of the city of Seoul launched a city lab to incorporate Becks ideas into their urban planning. Shocked by his sudden death in the spring of 2015, his South Korean collaborators staged a Buddhist commemorative service at which the mayor of Seoul, at the time one of the leading lights of the Korean opposition, gave a funeral oration.

Beck would no doubt have appreciated the syncretic gesture. Five years later, he would have been even more pleased to see the entire world taking lessons from a progressive South Korean government on how to handle the COVID-19 crisis. In the face of bitter opposition from medical interest groups, the South Korean government effectively mobilized coalitions of businesses and scientists to deliver fast and effective testing and tracing. Rather than relying on clichs about Confucian conformity to collective norms, they set out to build trust through transparency and effective delivery. Not only did the Democratic Party government contain the epidemic, but it even managed to hold a national election in the midst of the crisis and win it handsomely. The country offers an example, in what remains of this pandemic, of how to get risk society right.

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Ulrich Beck Is the World's Most Important Pandemic Intellectual - Foreign Policy

The Center for Generational Kinetics and WordPress platform WP Engine recently released a study looking at the digital habits of Europeans born between 1996-2015.

It shows that Generation Z has become the most internet-dependent generation, but what does this mean both for the Gen Zers themselves and the wider digital community? We spoke to Fabio Torlini, EMEA MD at WP Engine to find out.

BN: Why is Gen Z such an important generation?

FT: 2020 has taught us the stark importance of the digital world. Billions of people were forced to go online to work, study, and stay in touch during the COVID-19 pandemic. After years of knowing they needed to adopt digital transformation strategies, the pandemic forced organizations to not only accelerate those plans but put them into immediate action. Gen Z was born into a world that was already online, where the foundation of today's digital ecosystem was already visible. As such, this generation sees the web as the starting line, it's an intrinsic part of their everyday lives. Given this omnipresent role of connected technology, Gen Z's expectations for the digital world far exceed those of any generation that has come before them.

As members of this generation graduate from college, join the workforce, and increasingly realize their colossal buying power, they are changing the way we all identify with and are influenced by the internet and the larger digital world.

BN: This group of people seem to spend all day online -- what are the trends you have seen from this study?

FT: Based on their strong connection to the web, Gen Z's identity is deeply intertwined with the digital world. Because the internet plays such a strong role in their lives, it's not surprising that Gen Z views what they do online as their digital identity, and to a greater extent, their identity overall.

This is clearly reflected in Gen Z's prodigious content creation, but it's also apparent in the way Gen Z feels direct and personal involvement in activities, even if they only occur online. For example, 74 percent of Gen Z believe they can be part of a social movement even if they only participate through social media.

Equally compelling, 51 percent of Gen Z is friends with someone they only know online and have never met in person, and stunningly, almost a quarter of Gen Z (22 percent) trusts someone they meet online more than someone they meet in person.

BN: What are the key differences in the way different generations access and use the internet?

FT: Gen Z also represents a shift when it comes to what they depend on the internet for, which is primarily entertainment and access to their friends. This is a huge divergence from Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers, who all rely on the internet primarily for access to information. 59 percent of Gen Z primarily use the internet for entertainment, unlike Boomers where 67 percent use the internet for information.

BN: It's a challenging time right now for everyone. How do you think this has affected Gen Z's use of the internet?

FT: It has only accelerated trends we've seen within Gen Z, and the other generations. People are becoming more reliant on the internet and the tools of communications with one another, businesses, and the greater world. Our study found that 60 percent of Gen Z cant go more than four hours without accessing the internet. Considering school going virtual and cancellation of public gatherings, Gen Z's entire social life has been forced online, likely increasing the number of Gen Z who can't stay offline. It took the pandemic for other generations to finally catch up to Gen Z online.

BN: Given their digital native position among other generations, are Gen Z the best placed group of people to prosper during this global lockdown?

FT: The pandemic is the defining moment for this generation, much like 9/11 was for Millennials. As such, they are still adapting to its far-reaching implications, both socially and economically. That said, they were already used to a digital world, so the adjustment wasn't as severe for them.

BN: Given how quickly the tech world moves, what are companies doing to stay relevant for Gen Z?

FT: 61 percent of Gen Z think that in the next 10 years, all shopping will take place online. If you're not providing Gen Z with the entertaining, engaging digital experiences they expect, someone else most certainly is -- the endless amount of choice available on the internet is not lost on this generation.

If 2020 has taught us anything, it's that Gen Z's version of a digital-first world is the new digital paradigm. The only real choice you have is to get on board and meet this generation where they are, digital is the new front door.

Gen Z has also stressed the importance of brands taking a stand on global issues. 76 percent of Gen Z say they would buy from a company that contributes to social causes, with 37 percent saying they would stop buying from a company contributing to causes they disagree with. The act of taking a stand is enough to show you care.

BN: What does the future look like for the internet as its increasingly adapted and designed for Gen Z?

FT: Young people have always embodied the zeitgeist of society, profoundly influencing trends and technology adoption alike. As we forge ahead in our lives, working from home, shopping for groceries online, and learning in front of our screens, Gen Z will increasingly take their place in the driver's seat of society.

Their influence -- as the first generation of true digital natives -- is now radiating outward at a faster pace than other generations of youth in their time, precisely because it is digitally-based. They've never drawn a distinction between the physical and digital worlds. For them, whether online or offline, the critical element is that they can seamlessly move between both of them.

As weve seen in past studies, if this generation of pragmatists, self-starters, and entrepreneurs, finds it doesnt exist, Gen Z won't wait around for something to happen. They will build it.

Image credit: Dmyrto_Z/depositphotos.com

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Why Generation Z are the fully digital pioneers [Q&A] - BetaNews

This year's NBA champion will never be forgotten. (Photo by Bill Baptist/NBAE via Getty Images)

This quarantine has done nothing but fuel my existentialism. Not mad at it though I like the process of having a seemingly enigmatic thought and dismantling it until I unearth an answer that Im satisfied with. I dont have to like it, but I would like to understand it. Lately, I sometimes find myself wondering what the point of sport is. Since going without for months now, it's expected we have these musings. My brain has been smoothed by superficial notions of productivity (we learn, we work, we die), so when I witness passion through music, sports and art, I hold my breath in a display of reflex. Whats the catch?

There is no traditional quarterly goal with the mentioned modes of cultural production in order to be well regarded. It's all about the outcome the creation itself. People create and add immeasurable contributions to the global zeitgeist. So, when we look back in time and attempt to walk in the shoes of those existing in that specific moment of the past, we look to music, sport, art and film as a way to gauge what the societal atmosphere was like. What did these people watch? What did they hear? Value? Enjoy? Cheer for or against?

These are the thoughts that swam through my head when I pondered whether the 2020 NBA championship would possess the weight and value of years past. There are several rules in the basketball world that define the value of a championship win. Losses due to extenuating circumstances, such as injury to star players, are stricken from the record, to an extent.Wins are devalued if they come at the expense of injury to the opposition or lockout years. Its the way we satisfy our inherent need to rank, quantify and legitimize talent or success.

On the one hand, there are too many intrusive variables bleeding into current play in the bubble to document a championship winner without the dreaded asterisk. Players are bearing the weight and the psychological toll of being separated from family for months on end. This is all within the hurricane of the largest civil rights movement since, well, the civil rights movement, not to mention a global pandemic ravaging the state of Florida particularly harshly.

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Although many may be able to maintain the mamba mentality required to succeed in such an environment, to expect all players to do so is myopic. Trauma exhausts us. It triggers fight or flight responses and cultivates stress reactions. It occupies our minds and throws us into a pit of anxieties. How it manifests itself on the court we have yet to see, but absent-mindedness and reduced court awareness shouldnt be a shock to viewers.

Another variable to consider is the high probability of an outbreak of the virus within the bubble. The NBA itself acknowledged, and seems to be bracing for, the chance of this occurrence. A sick rotation player, let alone superstar, can challenge the integrity of the most balanced egalitarian systems. The race to the Finals and Larry OBrien trophy will be a question of what organization has retained peak physical and mental health. If theres anything we learned over the course of the last few months, its that these things are often times not in our control.

Players that experience a sort of stage fright before thousands of bombastic fans in packed arenas are sure to find themselves easing into shots they may not have otherwise attempted, and the same goes for those who struggle with free throws. Subsequently, professional shooters are already excited at the prospect of flexing their skillset in empty arenas. Orlando Magic sixth man and former Toronto Raptor Terrence Ross has already expressed such, commenting on an Instagram post that the depth perception in these gyms are perfect. Dont let a shooter get hot.

On the other hand, one can substantially argue that this may be the most memorable championship win in recent memory. Considering the ultimate value of sport as a contribution to the collective consciousness and culture, the winner of the trophy during a time of widespread unrest and epidemic will be bookmarked in history forever. The bubble, and all of those within it, will be a relic and reflection of the desperation of fans to see sports again and the desperation of investors to see profits again. Under the best circumstances, the awarded team and their treacherous journey may be viewed as a demonstration of durability and will. Whether people like it or not, the 2020 NBA champions will exist in a realm of perpetuity. Whatever happens, well never forget it and that is worth something.

There have been thorough debates regarding the ethics of resuming the NBA, and sports in general today. There is a pressure to play and there is a passion to play. More frequently than not, the line between the two is blurred. Regardless, the bubble experiment has commenced and Ive found myself hoping for the most organized and safest of executions.

It seems, for observers, that most players themselves see this as a valuable moment in history to use their platform as a means to amplify protest and liberating rhetoric, so perhaps there isnt a need to separate the postseason champion from this larger quest.Ultimately, the team to hoist the Larry OBrien may be dealt with an asterisk to accompany their title for years to come, but any attempt to devalue or erase their contribution to the zeitgeist will be fruitless because, guess what? Youll always remember it.

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Asterisk or not, the 2020 NBA champions will be one to remember - Yahoo Sports

Donald Bonk interviews Richard Florida, influential professor, author and urban theorist, as part of the Pittsburgh Tomorrow podcast series. This is the first part of a three-part interview. The transcript is abridged and edited for clarity.

View the episode archive here. Read Richard Floridas Creative Class bio here. Read his University of Toronto bio here.

weve studied the location of industries and firms for a century, but we really havent studied from an economic geography point of view, from an urbanist point of view, the location decisions of people. That was my motivating question. Why do we as people choose to live in the locations we do? Richard Florida

Donald Bonk: Welcome to a very special edition of Pittsburgh Tomorrow with Richard Florida, influential professor, author and urban theorist. Welcome, Richard.

Richard Florida: Its great to be with you, Donald. Thanks for having me. And its great to be back in Pittsburgh, if only virtually.

Bonk: Well, were happy to have you here. You know what Pittsburghs going through (COVID-19), as is the rest of the world right now, but we really want to focus first on the city of Pittsburgh and also your background; what youre doing and your connection to Pittsburgh.

Florida: Well, I moved to Pittsburgh in 1987 and I was 29 years old at the time. And its an interesting story. I was teaching at Ohio State (Im originally from Newark, N.J.). I got enough money to do a lecture series. I invited all of the eminent urbanists of the time, and they agreed for very small honoraria, to come give a talk in my lecture series.

There was a very eminent urbanist at Carnegie Mellon at the time, in what was then called SUPA, the School of Urban Public Affairs (now the Heinz School); his name was Gordon Clark. As it turns out, Gordon is now the Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford University. He went to graduate school in Canada, was at Harvard, was at the University of Chicago and moved from the University of Chicago to SUPA at Carnegie Mellon.

At the time, Carnegie Mellon was looking to hire a professor jointly between SUPA and Architecture, and they had had many eminent people out, that the two departments couldnt agree on. Very famous people. But Architecture and SUPA are very different places. Gordon said, Why dont you come out and interview for this position? I always heard a lot about the so-called Pittsburgh Renaissance and the comeback of Pittsburgh as an innovative center, artistic center, a great city of neighborhoods.

I went out, and lo and behold, people liked me, even though I was I was different than anyone because the people in SUPA were very technically quantitative. And the people in architecture were architecturally good. Im a qualitative researcher; Im not a quantitative researcher. Im not very numeric or mathematical, but they sort of liked me.

They offered me a job and I said, yeah. Dick Cyert was president of Carnegie Mellon. I forget who else was involved in it; but Dick (President Cyert), for sure, I know (Angel) Jordan was the provost. My dean was Alfred Blumstein.

Anyway, they had a major gift from John Heinz II, who was still alive, and Senator John Heinz III, to establish a center for economic development. Carnegie Mellon had all this capability in science, technology, computer science, electrical engineering, metallurgical engineering and material science. And the idea was to think about the ways to connect that to the economic future of Pittsburgh. I was brought in to help build that, as this young 29-year-old assistant professor.

I was thrust into a vortex of forces that were acting on Pittsburgh in the late 1980s. My growing up in Newark, N.J., and experiencing the civil rights movement and racial unrest, convinced me to be an urbanist as a young boy. I got a college degree at Rutgers (and later a Ph.D. at Columbia in urban studies). Those things and my life in Pittsburgh, where I lived for nearly 20 years, really shaped me as an urbanist.

Bonk: Very interestingthe power of serendipity in many cases.

Florida: Yeah. As a young single guy living in Shadyside, I could walk or bike or take a car to the university. And remember, at that time, this is really interesting; well before I wrote The Rise of the Creative Class, SUPA (CMU School of Urban and Public Affairs) was not in the building in Hamburg Hall. SUPA was in a second or third floor, up the stairs in Margaret Morrison Carnegie College. We were embedded with the arts and dance students.

I still remember my secretary. We had secretaries at the time and my office was lined with file cabinets because we still had paper centric offices.

My secretary, Mary Joyce, was this wonderful woman who supported a half dozen of us. She would say she was always hesitant to go to the restroom because there would not only be girls from the arts and dance program changing in there but there would be boys. Everybody is in the arts. They didnt care; they were artists.

But the point is that SUPA wasnt in computer science or electrical engineering. Our department was actually, literally in the creative hub of Margaret Morrison Carnegie College. Quite an introduction for me to Pittsburgh.

Bonk: It obviously played a role in your later theory. Its just interesting that your foundational experience on a physical level was exposure to the other side of Carnegie Mellon.

Florida: It was a long evolution from when I came to Carnegie Mellon to Rise of the Creative Class. It was a dozen years that I was at Carnegie Mellon before I even began to think in that way, shape or form. It was a long intellectual evolution shaped by my experience in Pittsburgh and at Carnegie Mellon, for sure.

Bonk: That gives us a deeper insight into your career that followed. You had this transformational insight around the turn of the century. Can you tie that to what youve been doing since then? So you were at Carnegie Mellon at the time. The Rise of the Creative Class became an international New York Times bestseller.

Florida: First of all, I had written several other books that were international non-sellers, and I fully expected The Rise of the Creative Class to not sell, other than my parents buying it, my brother and some relatives and friends. I didnt write that book to be a bestseller; I just got really lucky.

As any musician will tell you who has had a hit, they just wrote a lot of other good songs and got lucky. The timing was right. The mood was right. Something happened. Somebody wrote a story on it. I got lucky. And I had written a bunch of other books since and that havent done as well, so I think Ive got a great stroke of luck, but shaped by Pittsburgh.

When I came to Carnegie Mellon, I was thrust into the Center for Economic Development. I had been researching high tech industry complexes like Silicon Valley and Boston Route 128 and what happened in the Research Triangle (North Carolina). I had been studying at Carnegie Mellon with a brilliant economist named Wes Cohen, whos now at Duke.

We had been studying university industry partnerships and had a big grant from the Ford Foundation. University Industry Centers, National Science Foundation Centersall the stuff that Carnegie Mellon does spectacularly well.

At the same time, I was immersed in Pittsburgh. I was literally talking to the mayor. The mayor tells funny stories about me. Former (Pittsburgh) Mayor Murphy says he often introduced me by saying, Richard came to our office talking about the role of universities, and the knowledge and innovation in these research centers. We thought he was from the moon; we thought he was just completely bonkers.

But I was puzzling over what Id call the Pittsburgh paradox. Why, when I looked at Stanford, M.I.T. and Carnegie Mellon, did they look like analogous institutions? Why was Carnegie Mellon producing fantastic research? It was actually, at that point, not (yet) spinning off as many companies into the local environment at the rate of M.I.T. in Boston and Stanford in the Silicon Valley.

The people I was meeting at Carnegie Mellon were going to lead those companies. The head of research at Microsoft was a Carnegie Mellon guy, and the head of research at Apple was a Carnegie Mellon guy. People who were going to what ultimately became Google were from Carnegie Mellon. I see all this flow of people, but Pittsburgh hadnt developed that high tech industry complex. Why?

So I went off to do a sabbatical at Harvard. By this time, I had gotten notorious enough. I hadnt written The Rise of the Creative Class, but I was a young scholar, about 38, 40, and I was invited by a very eminent guy named Harvey Brooks. Harvey was the Benjamin Franklin Pierce Professor of Physics and Applied Engineering, who had really established that unit at Harvard. He was a scientist and engineer and had gone off to establish the Program for Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Kennedy School at Harvard.

He had recruited the former head of NASA to join him. He had recruited the former head of science at IBM, Lewis Branscomb, whose father, Harvey Branscomb, was the president of Vanderbilt. I mean, it was like a Whos Who of America. There were Nobel Prize winners that were populating this, and they brought me up there because they looked at Pittsburgh. Plus, Florida is an interesting guy. But look at whats happening in Pittsburgh and the rise of Pittsburgh around Carnegie Mellon. Is that a case that we could use to talk about the role of science and technology university research, to revitalize an older Rust Belt industrial city?

I was writing up my book chapter when I got to the story that I told in The Rise of the Creative Class. I read a story in The Boston Globe which said Lycos (a Search Engine), one of the startups out of Carnegie Mellon, founded by two Carnegie Mellon people, was moving to Boston. I said, Whoa, why?

A lot of us had paid attention, a lot of people in the Office of Technology Transfer and Commercialization (at Carnegie Mellon); I, and others, had paid a lot of attention to Lycos. When we began to really dig into it, Lycos was moving to Boston to get access to a talented pool of people that they said were already living in Boston, not just techies.

There were marketing people and management people and all the people that they needed for the businessthe whole ecosystem necessary to grow a company. Thats what tipped me off. I went back to my students in the fall and said, How many of you will live in Pittsburgh when you graduate? Only one hand went up.

Well, (I asked the students), where do you want to go? I want to go to Silicon Valley. I want to go to New York. I want to go to Austin. I want to go to the North Carolina. I dont like Pittsburgh. Its not for me, it doesnt fit meblah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but you know all that stuff. But then, why? Why do you want to go there? Well, because its a place I can make friends. I could have friends if there were more people like me. And that started the train of thought.

Nobel Prize winner Herb Simon had always told me, If you find a question nobody else asked, if youre lucky enough, go with that freaking question, Richard. So the question I said is, weve studied the location of industries and firms for a century, but we really havent studied from an economic geography point of view, from an urbanist point of view, the location decisions of people. That was my motivating question. Why do we as people choose to live in the locations we do?

And what are the factors that bear on this? And out of that, out of like three or four years of really horrific hard work, I came up with what we now know as The Rise of the Creative Class. It really was steeped by my experience with Pittsburgh and trying to answer that question.

What happened since? I can never get away from the heartland. I went off and I lived in Washington, D.C. for three years. That was fun. I developed my relationship with Brookings, with The Atlantic, which ultimately led to the formation of CityLab. George W. Bush got elected, an opportunity happened in Toronto.

I always liked Toronto. Its close to my wifes family in Michigan. My wifes family is in the Detroit suburbs. It came with a big research budget to move up to the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. By the way, there were Carnegie Mellon people who had been clueing me in about Rotman.

They had a dynamic young leader named Roger Martin. They had hired a few people, not from SUPA, not from the Heinz School, but from what was then GSIA, the business school, now the Tepper School at Carnegie Mellon. So it came with a $10 million dollar funding program for ten years. And I couldnt turn it down. So I ended up in Toronto, which is where I am now.

Bonk: Just a sidebar: Marshall McLuhan was always a big influence on me. He had mentioned in some of his books that Canada was a great place to look at the United States in particular and look at ideas because its involved in a big part of things, but its also removed.

Florida: Ill tell you right now that the middle of the COVID-19 crisis, it is surreal. It is. Ive always said, quoting McLuhan, that moving to Toronto has helped me learn more about the United States than I ever thought I would because of exactly what you said. You see the two countries in sharp relief.

But, boy, when you look at the dysfunction in our country now and you look at the way we pulled apart compared to the Canadians and Torontonians that have pulled togetherI just want to say this: Canada is a very divided country. It has a very liberal Prime Minister who would be very, much further left than Clinton or Obama. We have a Premier, which is our equivalent of a Governor, whos a kind of a Trumpist populist. His brother was Rob Ford, the crack mayor of Toronto. And we have a mayor in John Tory who wouldnt be elected in Pittsburgh. He would be a Republican. Hes a conservative. But he is a business conservative, kind of like Mike Bloomberg. Some of them literally hate one another. Yet everyone has worked together and now weve almost eliminated the virus.

One other thing Ill say: Theres another Pittsburgh-Toronto connection that bears mentioning on this podcast in the times we live. Toronto is now known alongside Pittsburgh as one of the great artificial intelligence capitals of the world and in many respects, maybe now in some segments more than Pittsburgh, even though Pittsburgh was the birthplace, with Raj Reddy and Herb Simon and Alan Newell.

Theres a fellow named Geoff Hinton. Geoff was at Carnegie Mellon as a professor. Hes a Brit who is pretty left-leaning as many Brits are. In 1980, he saw the United States going off on a wrong track. It elected Ronald Reagan, rightly or wrongly, and more than that, he saw defense funding becoming the principal source of funding for artificial intelligence.

He said, before the University of Toronto was what it is today, Im leaving the United States. Im moving to Toronto. This one guy, Geoffrey Hinton, moving from Carnegie Mellon to the University of Toronto, created the artificial intelligence scene there. Hes an expert in machine learning and deep learning. He and his students who now are all over Canada. Some in Montreal. Some in Edmonton, Winnipeg City, Calgary. When you hear about Canada or Toronto, and artificial intelligence, it all goes back to one guy, Geoffrey Hinton, who moved from Carnegie Mellon to the University of Toronto.

Toronto shows you what the heartland could be. Its a mosaic, not a melting pot. More than half the population was born offshore. It has a similar geography. By the way, the neighborhood that I live in looks like a Pittsburgh neighborhood, except the neighborhood I lived in Pittsburgh was more beautiful because Pittsburgh had more money at the time.

But, it does really feel like home. Even though I would have said as a kid, Ill probably end up staying in New York or living in Boston, or maybe Ill try San Francisco, Ive ended up living, when you think about it, from Ohio State and Columbus, to Pittsburgh for 17 years, thats 20. And now another 13 years in Toronto. Thats a big numbermore than three decades of my life in the Great Lakes region of the world. Its kind of amazing to me.

Bonk: And you found it to be a place where reinvention is taking place. Now, Toronto has an extraordinary urban reputation. Pittsburgh has also benefited from its rethinking, the 2009 G20 being held in Pittsburgh, and acting as a model. Youve been in all these places, so it seems in a way, that youre a leading indicator. It seems youre always ahead of the curve.

Florida: The funny thing about this is, if you looked at the Amazon HQ 2 list, which I did with some criticism, I thought Amazon should look for a great city. I just didnt like the subsidy packages, the incentive packages mayors were giving out.

Every city Ive lived in was on the list. I went to graduate school in New York Cityon the list. Taught at Ohio StateColumbus was on the list. Taught at Carnegie MellonPittsburgh was on the list. Taught at George Mason and lived in Washington, D.C.Washington, D.C. was on the list. Was a visiting professor at Harvard and M.I.T.Boston was on the list. And finally, because I live in Toronto, we have a winter place in Miami Beach, and Miami was on the list as well as Toronto.

Pittsburgh has been the most formative of all of them. Of all the places Ive lived, Pittsburghs transformation underpinned it all.

Although I think many Pittsburghers would disagree with me on this, I think that my work has been most influential on Pittsburgh of any place Ive ever lived. Now people say Florida; thats not true. When I was talking about the need to focus on talent, Pittsburgh was building giant convention centers and stadiums, focusing on industrial incentives and not really thinking about talent.

And when I was saying with my students. And this was really driven by students at that time, like yourself and others, saying, what would make me want to stay in Pittsburgh is, if the neighborhoods were brought back, and if Oakland was an exciting place. If the neighborhoods around the university were a second downtown and there was this quality of place or amenities, I was really channeling them.

I think Pittsburgh has delivered on that. Toronto had the wind at its back economically. But when I look at the expansion of bike lanes and green space, the transformation of Pittsburgh has been bigger. One of the best cities for bikes. One of the best cities for open space. One of the best cities for X. We were all pushing for that. But were all saying it would never happen, right? In many ways, I think I was lucky to be in Pittsburgh and lucky to develop those ideas. They were part of the Zeitgeist. In many ways, Pittsburgh has delivered on a lot of what I was trying to talk about and think about.

Bonk: Thats why this conversation is so important. When we were thinking about Pittsburghs future, you have probably spent more time thinking about Pittsburgh on so many different levels, that to have this opportunity is to almost take this time machine to look back at it from 2020.

I have to admit, having been in Pittsburgh the last 13 years, I didnt think it was going to make as much rapid progress as it has. Its been gratifying to me personally. My question now, though, is where we go from here.

Pittsburgh has made this extraordinary progress. You were a driver. Your ideas affected you and Pittsburgh in ways that even you didnt anticipate. But now were at a jumping off point.

I always said Pittsburgh was going to make a comeback. I knew in my bones growing up in western Pennsylvania that all those base elements you talked about were there. It was only a question of, if they could be catalyzed. The question I have is, how high of a bounce?

Weve made this bounce to Pittsburgh in 2020, which is much better than it ever was. Things are going well. Obviously, COVID is a challenge. Well touch on that. But the question is, how much further can it go and how is that put in the context of other great cities? So with that, maybe I can segue into this question about what would make Pittsburgh the most ideal city in the world, or the best city. If you can, put that in context with your other urban experiences, not only in America, but internationally.

Florida: I think Pittsburghs transformation is remarkable. Its more than either of us would have expected. And I think thats noted in the United States and globally. The fact that it was an Amazon HQ 2 finalist, whether or not it would win. I didnt think it would win; its too small and it didnt have the air connections. But whether or not it won, it was recognized as one of the 20 most important headquarter cities in the United States, if not the world.

So, its back. Its attracting people. Its attracting innovators. Its attracting artists. Pittsburgh, to my mind, is in the same group of cities where, when I was writing The Rise of the Creative Class, you might have said Boston was an up and coming city at that point, where 10 years ago you said Nashville. Pittsburgh is like that now, but better because its in the Midwest; its not in this kind of Sunbelt.

So I think its back at baseline. And I think it has a big upside. What I would pose for Pittsburgh is be the best smaller city in the world. Bar nonethe best, most innovative, most inclusive, most resilient, healthiest.

Back to COVID-19. Pittsburgh Medical Center, UPMC, the incredible medical complex. The focus on Health Technology, Urban Technology, surveillance technology, artificial intelligence technology coming out of Carnegie Mellon. The affordability of this city, the social cohesion, the way it pulled together in the wake of numerous tragedies, including the terrorist attacks on the temple in Squirrel Hill.

Look, Pittsburgh should pose the goal to be the best small city in the world. Its not going to be London or New York or Paris. It doesnt have to be. But it could be the best smaller city. Whats the population of the metro now? About 2, 2.5 million. Thats what it should be. It should be the best small metro in the world. There shouldnt be a better one. That scale should be wonderful because once you get the 5 million, you have to grow differently. You need to really grow around transit and trains and highways. Cars dont work and you get congested and you need much higher density in terms of multifamily, tower living.

I think Pittsburgh could be the best, the most livable, the most sustainable. And I would echo the most racially and economically inclusive. Mayor Peduto is an old friend of mine from my Pittsburgh days. Hes put an emphasis on inclusive innovation. I think this idea of a shared prosperity, harking back to the union movement, the steelworkers, to people who struggle, who literally fought pitched battles in the streets of Homestead in along the Monongahela River. I think Pittsburgh should be the model of the best, the most equitable, the most inclusive, the healthiest, the safest and most resilient small city in the world.

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Pittsburgh Tomorrow Podcast: Richard Florida, Author, The Rise of the Creative Class - pittsburghquarterly.com

It was the late 1970s, and the burgeoning gay rights movement had become too important for Hollywood to ignore. A decade earlier, the Stonewall riots had led to a wave of political progress sexual orientation was becoming a new factor in anti-discrimination laws across the United States; pride marches and grassroots gay and lesbian organisations were born; and collective demand for equality reached fever pitch. In tandem with the real world, cinema got queered, too. In 1980, three major movies were released that featured openly queer leads. They also happened to be murderers and psychopaths.

In William Friedkins erotic thriller Cruising, Al Pacino is a rookie cop who ventures into New Yorks leather scene to catch a gay killer targeting other gay men. In Brian De Palmas Dressed to Kill, a transgender psychiatrist embarks on a series of sordid murders, with two plucky straights tasked with unravelling the mystery. And in Gordon Williss Windows, a vulnerable young woman is stalked by her lesbian best friend, who secretly watches her through a telescope and pays a man to sexually assault her.

All three are sleazy metropolitan nightmares, with naive heterosexuals terrorised by the queer unknown. They were also picketed during their respective productions, before being engulfed by controversy upon release. At a time when positive representation was most needed, these movies were awash in negative portrayals of queerness. But in the intervening decades since their release 40 years ago, its possible to view them in another light. Theres a strange power to these films, primarily because depictions of deliciously evil and unambiguously queer villainy are so rare. Two have been reframed as cult classics: Cruising and Dressed to Kill are today typically regarded as transgressive queer thrillers awash in deliberate luridness, their modern appreciation speaking to the ebbs and flows of queer acceptance. They also showcase how stagnant queer representation in the mainstream has tended to be in the decades since.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

In 1979, months after the assassination of Harvey Milk, Californias first openly gay elected official, this trio of movies were seen as a matter of life and death. Cruising is not a film about how we live, it is a film about why we should be killed, wrote Arthur Bell in New Yorks Village Voice newspaper. He would urge gay New Yorkers and allies to disrupt production of the film and play loud music during the shooting of street scenes. A San Francisco-based activist group known as Women Against Violence in Pornography and the Media similarly called for a boycott of Dressed to Kill and Windows, with both films accused of glorifying violence against women and demonising the lesbian and transgender communities.

Considering all three films were written and directed by straight men, and the idea of queer equality was at the time so frightening to conservative America, few of their narratives were particularly surprising. After all, the country was built on a rigid understanding of sex and gender, and anyone existing outside of a repressed value system tended to be feared. If the cinema of the 1970s, from Dirty Harry to Death Wish, had instructed audiences to fear the black, working-class male, the 1980s seemed to pick the LGBT+ community as the new boogeyman.

This demonisation, says Dr Jon Mitchell, senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of East Anglia, was a continuation of the instincts hardwired to the American psyche. The US has a long history of constituting itself against otherness, he explains. Whether its the Puritans with the devil and witches, the US against the Soviets, or militia groups against the new world order. The sexual psychopath was just one in a long cast of villains.

Sexual bohemia: Al Pacino in Cruising (Lorimar/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Elements of the outrage channel the times. At a moment in which the most vocal opponents of gay rights would talk of the leather-clad deviance of queer sex, Cruisings exclusive focus on gay kink which would serve as an introduction to queer sex for many viewers at the time wasnt a particularly everyday depiction. The terrible screenplays for both Windows and Dressed to Kill also meant their respective villains were confused creations. In Windows, its sole lesbian character seems to believe a straight womans sexuality would change if she is assaulted by a man. And Dressed to Kills ignorance reduces transgender identity to a kind of split-personality disorder, the films villain being at the mercy of male and female psychological personas who are fighting for control.

They traffic in problematic tropes, says Mitchell of the trio of films. Theres the dead gay, the sexual psychopath, the pervert, the paedophile. This isnt to say that the film-makers were doing it deliberately but theyre there to appease the cultural sensitivities of the conservative zeitgeist.

Of the three films that appalled queer audiences in 1980, only Cruising could be considered a genuine work of art. While theres a detached, almost anthropological quality to Friedkins dramatisation of gay sexuality, theres also something richly empathetic about his approach, too. The leather bar at the centre of the film is presented as a space of sexual bohemia, with a freedom to dance and drink and explore that is cruelly absent from the rigid confines of the heterosexual world depicted elsewhere. The spectre of Aids on the horizon the first reported case was declared just over a year after Cruisings release adds to the films unexpected sense of melancholy, even if only in hindsight.

Hacky: The original theatrical poster for Windows (United Artists)

Theres also a curious subtext to Pacinos character, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the killers victims, and who immediately returns home to have sex with his girlfriend at the end of each undercover shift. When he articulates to a superior his concern about being in too deep while undercover, it can easily be read as a sexually confused man shocked to discover what gets him off. The films famously ambiguous ending, with Pacino appearing to transform into what he most fears (either metaphorically or literally), only accentuates his characters potential queerness.

While their hacky scripts prevent them from being genuinely great movies, Windows and Dressed to Kill have their virtues. The former is visually gorgeous, as Willis, a celebrated cinematographer whose work includes The Godfather, Manhattan and Klute, filled the screen with vivid blacks and crisp shots of autumnal Brooklyn. The latter, meanwhile, is nicely aware of its own griminess, its narrative failings eclipsed by De Palmas stylish showmanship. Its arguably the filmmaker in his aesthetic prime, full of OTT split screens, killer trans women in designer shades and porn star body doubles. Not a single person involved seems to take it seriously, which entirely rescues it.

Despite many of their failings, what is shared by all three movies is their embrace of outwardly queer villainy. Dangerous in 1980, its almost novel today. Queerness has always existed in horror genre antagonists, but historically it has been buried in the subtext. James Whale, one of Hollywoods first openly gay directors, imbued his films with subtle queer themes, notably the zany flamboyance of Bride of Frankenstein. Few could argue that Rebeccas Mrs Danvers, a tyrannical housekeeper fixated on the beauty of her former mistress, was anything other than a coded queer villain, while Psychos Norman Bates, a fey murderer who dresses up as his dead mother, was a gay, Freudian nightmare.

Cruising, Dressed to Kill and Windows are upfront about it all. Their villains are villainous literally because theyre queer, individuals pushed into madness by rejection and hostility from objects of affection, from family or society at large. Viewed in 2020, theyre like something out of an alternate universe. Only Dressed to Kill still seems potentially destructive. One of the great sadnesses of its 40th anniversary is that many of its baffling misunderstandings of trans identity are suddenly relevant again. Even a decade ago, when trans people werent being so regularly villainised in the mainstream press, Dressed to Kill could have been described as harmless, its messaging so obviously ludicrous. That no longer seems the case.

Coded: Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson in Rebecca (United Artists/Kobal/Shutterstock)

It is, of course, for the greater good that American cinema shifted away from this kind of representation. By 1982, a year into the Aids crisis, major studios were producing films like the forgotten coming-out comedy Making Love, as well as the lesbian track-and-field drama Personal Best. More sensitive portrayals of queer life came later, via the moving Longtime Companion (1989) or the heavy-handed Philadelphia (1993), about a homophobic lawyer taught the error of his ways by a kindly gay man dying of Aids. Instead of being demonised, queer characters were humanised by their physical and emotional proximity to straight ones the message evolved into we are all the same, ironing out much of the complexities or nuance.

It was progress, but also a vague form of assimilation. The queer sitcoms of the 1990s followed suit, with gay characters almost indistinguishable from their straight counterparts be it the upper-middle-class domesticity of lesbian couple Carol and Susan on Friends, or Will of Will & Grace, a gay man depicted as respectable and elegant, whose relatable neuroses were so often contrasted against the loud, delusional queeniness of Sean Hayess Jack. Complex depictions of queerness, of a kind that could be sexy, violent or difficult, were confined to the fringes of film-making, via indie pioneers like Gregg Araki, Cheryl Dunye, Rose Troche and Todd Haynes.

On-screen queerness has become more nuanced in recent years, particularly via queer storytellers from Lena Waithe and Mae Martin to Jeremy O Harris. It remains elusive, though, to see queer villains of overt evilness in something that would ever touch a multiplex, studios often fearful to present queerness as anything other than resolutely good.

Even something as woeful as Windows seems radical as a result, awash with such extreme levels of ill-judged bad taste that it becomes glorious. Like Cruising and Dressed to Kill, it is offensive and shocking and deeply trashy. And nothing could be more queer.

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Scream queens: Remembering the short-lived queer villains of horror - The Independent

Rado has unveiled a limited edition of the True Thinline Automatic, made using olive green high-tech ceramic.

When it comes to watchmaking, Rado is known to dominate the entire industry as the most innovative when it comes to ceramic watch cases. Reputed for designs that unabashedly celebrate high-tech materials, the brands various timepieces also manage to be impeccably light, flat, and elegant all-round. True to its love for new design codes, Rado has recently unveiled a new limited edition of the True Thinline Automatic, made using olive green ceramic. High-tech, lightweight, and scratch-resistant, the timepiece itself offers wearers with a watch that is at once transparent, and highly complex in its mechanisms.

Bringing together some of Rados most important advancements in materiality, the watch comes housed in a super thin monobloc case, and is presented in a wholly new hue a colour that has been achieved through an elaborate development process.

A closer look at the timepiece, and youll see that the bridges and plates of its movement have been created using black anodised aluminium, which is a large part of why it manages to be so lightweight. The term Anima originates from the Latin word for air, breath, and soul, and likewise, the Thinline Anima proudly reveals its core. Extensively skeletonised, wearers get a close look at its inner workings the same is true of the date window, which rests at 6 oclock.

To find out more about the Rado Thinline Anima, visit rado.com.

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Quick-Take: A Look at the Thinline Anima, the New Rado Zeitgeist - Prestige Online

The writerJames Baldwinstated in 1962, It is, alas, the truth that to be an American writer today means mounting an unending attack on all that Americans believe themselves to hold sacred.

It is the truth that to be a person of faith in America todayis to recognize that America desires Jesus slogans over morally grounded Jesus-inspired action.

America as a nation stands on the precipice of what Rev. William Barber II refers to as the third reconstruction, a moment in history when the zeitgeist of the nation clashes with the myth of our history. The nationwide unrest, witnessed from Maine to California, is part of Americas reckoning with a lie this nation has refused to acknowledge. As a nation, racialized thinking and white supremacy is part of not only our history, but saturates all of our institutions. I will not bore you with historical details, but scholars such as Michelle Alexander, Ibram X. Kendi, Carol Anderson, and Richard Rothstein make the case powerfully that America has a spiritual malady supported by institutions that either aggressively promote these ideals or willfully ignore their reality. Our national reckoning and possible reconstruction rest at the epicenter of this myth many today courageously seek to exorcise from our body politic.

Portland and cities such as Chicago, where I live, work, and serve, offer an additional challenge to people who want to be free of the lie that comes with loving whiteness over ethnicity and power over democracy. One must understand whiteness is a socially constructed identity, created in reaction to Blackness. Ethnicity, on the other hand, is a culturally rooted identity of shared story, music, and usually, good food. One quickly sets up a hierarchy. The other sets a table and tells stories enabling people to struggle to find common chords in the collective human enterprise.

Federal troops being sent to Portland, and possibly Chicago, complicates the movement for Black lives. The case of Portland serves as a map to help us avoid marginalizing Black voices: In a city that is 77 percent white, where a coalition organized and led by Black activists is speaking directly to Americas lie of equality, we witness the stories Black anguish quieted by those on the Left and the Rightalong with media commentators. Federal troops in camouflage, without insignia, have engaged white protesters in a manner Black people have screamed about to this nation since the early formation of policing, modeled after southern slave patrols.

White protesters in Portland were given a glimpse of how Black lives do not matter in the face of state-sanctioned violence. As a result, protests swelled in Portland and news coverage increased not to highlight racial inequity, Black pain, or the racialized deployment of the police, but instead to highlight the horrific federal transgression of constitutional authority. The heightened sensitivity was again connected to Americas historical lie reasserting itself. White citizens were being treated as three fifthsof a person. The outrage shifted from policy, defunding the police, reparations, courageous conversations on race, repentance, and what does justice look like in America to legitimate constitutional questions that again failed to acknowledge Black suffering. Republicans using the Lee Atwater and Karl Rove handbooks seized upon this moment to speak of outside agitators to frame an alt-right interpretation of the protests. This strategy is not unlike the propaganda deployed against Martin Luther King Jr. by George Wallace in Alabama. Americas racial lie has an undercurrent that does not believe that three-fifths semi-citizens have the intellectual capacity for free agency and must be under some sinister influence from the Left.

Again, Black suffering was silenced and white discomfort and pain was lifted up in the process. People of faith, those who claim Jesus, have a moral obligation and spiritual call to resist participation in this complicated social sin. How people of faith answer in this moment will determine the future of the American church. Will believers in Jesus decide to be chaplains for the empire orprophets to the nation?

Chaplains are in a position to advise those in power, but the proximity to power recuses them from the call to resist, rebel, and join revolutionary movements. The prophet, on the other hand, seeks to disrupt power and has a heart that holds the memory of Rachels tears, the orphans death, and the poors exploitation as sacraments for a faithful journey. People of faith, in this moment, must decide: Shall we follow a dark-skinned Palestinian Jew, who cast his lot with those who had their backs against the wall, or will we march with the advisers of Herod, hoping our presence is enough to keep an arrogant Herod from harming all the Hebrew children?

The deployment of federal troops as a Roman legion seeking to posses the streets of Portland and Chicago must be resisted by people of faith, who have been baptized by the radical notions of Jesus who lived, loved, and ministered with and to the disinherited. How we respond to this moment will determine the future of the American church. Shall we be chaplains or prophets? The question is upon us. What shall be your answer to this moment of history?

The rest is here:

How Will Christians Answer This Moment in History? - Sojourners

Band leader Shabaka Hutchings sets out what the Black Lives Matter movement means to him and how we must all engage in an honest discourse to build a more equal society free of racism

Black Lives Matter. We will keep saying it until the injustices of the past are reconciled to the inequalities of the present. George Floyds death traumatised us. If you fully comprehend the systemic rot that enabled this violence to exist then it is impossible to return to a normality that centres the facilitation of half-truths and justifications which disengage us from the reality of a racial structure that is literally killing black people. This stands true in America as it does in the UK.

A myth is an idealised conception in which people/events are decontextualised and meaning is reassigned. The power to dictate what myths society sees as central to its narrative is at the heart of political control. We saw the weaponisation of myths surrounding immigration in Britain used to secure a Brexit vote, for example. The structure of white supremacy aims at dictating the parameters of the real. Its insidiousness lies in an ability to promote myths of its own making as objective reality. Bandleader and composer Sun Ra was raised in Birmingham, Alabama during the horrors of a segregated America. He famously proclaimed There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of) while claiming to be from Saturn and aligning his spiritual ontology with that of ancient Egypt. By subverting the process of societal self-identification and claiming a mental position outside the narrow spectrum of potential assigned to him as a black man in America, Sun Ra was performing a radical act of decolonialisation. His work in this regard must be built upon as the Black Lives Matter movement challenges us to see beyond structures that society proclaims to be self-evident. Art must inspire us as we build new legacies from the ruins of the Empire.

DID YOU KNOW

If you pay for the magazine you should always take it. Vendors are working for a hand up, not a handout.

A proclamation that Black Lives Matter is the first step. This rallying cry must be made with such force that society cannot choose to ignore the fundamental changes that the slogan implies. Support for organisations on the ground that have been active in campaigning for racial justice and equality must be sustained. Our school curriculums must be updated to reflect the voices, perspectives and narratives of historically oppressed communities. We do not need a black history month, we need full integration of black perspective in the current telling of British history. Moral justification for the trail of brutality left by British imperialism arises from cognitive skills conditioned in childhood to function within a self-affirming binary framework. The simple tenet of comic book/cartoon characters presented as either good guys or bad guys is doggedly maintained in adult life and applied to geopolitical and historical formations. The remedy is the promotion of a multiplicity of perspectives detached from the hierarchical bias ingrained into the fabric of our society that those with the most money deserve power and that this power is in itself reflective of intelligence, and the right to rule. If the telling of history doesnt centre multiple perspectives in any given sequence of events then it is not history, it is propaganda. History must be seen as a fluid construct engaged in a continual process of gathering insight as to how the past relates to the present. When the contextual development of public monuments is stagnated under the pretext of historical preservation we give precedence to the zeitgeist of eras past in which racism wasnt called racism, it was called racial logic. We allow ourselves to be blinded to what it means to celebrate the brutal logic of the victor. All these statues must all fall ideologically, if not physically.

If we are to change what skin colour signifies in our society then an honest discourse must occur embodying the meaning of race in the present

The black diaspora can be conceived of as a singular unit engaged in a struggle that has spanned centuries. It is important to recognise that though the struggle for equality and self-actualisation is manifested with the particularities of specific societal histories, the struggle is against the same root ideology white supremacy. Across cultures, darker people suffer most. Why? This proclamation by OutKasts Andre 3000 depicts a truth that serves as a backdrop to every first advancement achieved by a black person in the UK, to every black person who works to have their accomplishments regarded as at least equal, to every black person who has to engage in the exhausting work of debating the truth of their lived realities and to every black person who strives to have the life that their grandparents could only dream of when they came over on the Windrush. The great thinker Stuart Hall defines race as a floating signifier and one of those major concepts that organise the great classificatory systems of difference which operate in human societies alongside gender, class, sexuality and age. If we are to change what skin colour signifies in our society then an honest discourse must occur embodying the meaning of race in the present, a thorough and ongoing examination of how we got here, and utopias must be depicted which further the imaginative scope of an equal future.

Shabaka Hutchings leads the bands Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors

Read more here:

We need full integration of black perspective in the telling of history - Big Issue

LeBron James has been among the most vocal of those calling for change

When fans tuned in as the NBA season resumed at Disney World on Thursday, they were watching a game with a different feel.

On gleaming courts refashioned from ballrooms, in a basketball 'bubble' protected from coronavirus at the Florida resort, three words were stencilled alongside the enormous NBA logo: 'Black Lives Matter'.

Jerseys ordinarily emblazoned with well-known surnames - prized products sold to fans around the world - instead carried activist slogans: 'Justice Now', 'See Us', 'Hear Us', 'Respect Us', 'Love Us'.

The stands were empty and silent, but one message is already echoing loudly: the NBA wants to talk about racism.

Even before the shocking death of George Floyd triggered a national reckoning, sport had long been a vehicle for protesting against what has been called America's Original Sin.

Big moments - like the raising of a fist by Tommie Smith and John Carlos in a black power salute as the 'Star Spangled Banner' played at the 1968 Olympics - have become iconic images.

More recent gestures, like those sparked by Colin Kaepernick's refusal to stand for the national anthem, have become a contentious point of political debate in the United States.

Race, as the respected San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich puts it, is the "elephant in the room in our country" - one that has come charging into the locker room on many occasions.

Of all sports, basketball is arguably the most obvious place for an unvarnished conversation.

From its earliest days of being popularised as entertainment by the Harlem Globetrotters, to a sport still primarily played by black athletes and, in the US, watched largely by ethnic minority fans (two-thirds of those who tuned in during 2016-17 on US TV were non-white), race has figured prominently in the NBA.

The league says it will embrace the conversation head-on this time. But will it be any different than in the past - and will it make a difference?

Black players have always been aware of the thin line that separates them from a life of professional success and a far different fate.

As the youngest of three sons of a single mother growing up in inner city Philadelphia, Rasheed Wallace realised early that it would be hard going, as did everyone around him.

"The stakes are high, the stakes are real high," Wallace - who played for 2004 champions the Detroit Pistons - tells the BBC. Growing up poor and with few opportunities, sports are one of the few ways young black men, especially, can conceive of success.

"You see a lot of black parents getting on their kids, no matter [whether] it's football, basketball, baseball or any sport. It's like, 'look - this could be our ticket out of here'," he says.

"There's a standard you have to live up to. And for us, being black kids in the ghetto, we know that. That if I can make it, I got a chance to make it better for my family."

But that success does not change how the world views a black man when he is out of team uniform, Wallace believes.

Stephen Jackson was sitting on his living room sofa in late May when his phone began to light up with messages.

"I opened one from a close friend and it said: 'Do you see what they did to your twin in Minnesota?'," Jackson, a former San Antonio Spurs shooting guard, tells the BBC. He knew immediately what it meant.

George Floyd had been a close friend for more than 20 years.

Floyd, an imposing Texan of over 6ft 8in who was 46 when he was killed, and Jackson, 42, looked so much alike they called themselves twins.

Today, one has an NBA championship ring and network sports podcast, and the other is dead.

"That could have been me," Jackson says. "I see myself down there because we look so much alike. I definitely see myself getting murdered in the same fashion by a cop."

Wallace agrees. "For sure, it could have been me. Especially with my attitude, the way I am."

He adds: "Now I think [race] is even more of a bigger burden. It's almost like it's a danger to stand up, to be black. It's a danger for you to be jogging in a neighbourhood. It's almost to the point where black men, we're the targets."

Floyd had been a star athlete in his younger days, and was recruited to play basketball for a university team. Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter in relation to his death. Three other officers were also charged with aiding and abetting murder. A tentative trial date has been set for March 2021.

For those like Jackson and Wallace, talent has kept misfortune at bay, but it is no guarantee of a happy outcome.

Asked who he would call basketball's greatest of all time, the legendary Kareem Abdul Jabbar did not name Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain or some other household star but Earl Manigault, a street ball player he knew in Harlem, New York as a youth.

Manigault is little known, for he never made it into the professional ranks. Seen as a prodigy on street courts, he instead went from an impoverished youth to difficult adulthood, becoming addicted to heroin and serving time for drug possession.

"For every Michael Jordan, there's an Earl Manigault," Manigault once told the New York Times. "We all can't make it. Somebody has to fail. I was the one."

This is the realisation the rest of the country has been waking up to in 2020 - that the cards are stacked this way in black America. The NBA says it wants to bring it into further focus.

According to the league's 2020 handbook, a "central goal" of the season will be to use the NBA's platform "to bring attention and sustained action to issues of social injustice, including combating systemic racism, expanding educational and economic opportunities across the black community, enacting meaningful police and criminal justice reform and promoting greater civic engagement".

Some, including Jackson, are sceptical. This is not the first time the league has made public statements on racial justice.

In 2014, the league allowed players to wear T-shirts bearing the words 'I can't breathe' before matches. Eric Garner, a black man from New York, had uttered the words before he died in a police chokehold during an arrest.

The same year, commissioner Adam Silver ejected Donald Sterling, then owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, from the league after racist remarks he made about black players emerged.

The league publicly condemned Sterling and the team was sold.

But critics say that on the metrics that matter, nothing much has changed. Three-quarters of players in the NBA are black, but only one of the 30 teams has a black majority owner - Michael Jordan of the Charlotte Hornets. As recently as 2017, there were only three black general managers. Now there are six.

After retiring from playing, Wallace served as an assistant coach for the Pistons for a season. There were not many like him in the league.

"We don't get the quote-unquote 'white opportunities' - to be that GM, to be that head coach, assistant GM or partial owner, whatever. That's always up to the white people," he says.

It is another closed door yet to be fully opened - but needs to be, he says, so that youngsters in neighbourhoods like the one he grew up in can see they "don't have to just play basketball or football or baseball to become someone, to become a significant person in my community, or to even make a lot of money".

He adds: "That's the only outlet that we see as young black men: I gotta make it in basketball or football or baseball. And that's all that we're offered."

It would be hard to argue there has not been any progress.

The arc of basketball history has bent toward a bit more justice since the 1920s - when black athletes were forced to stay in segregated hotels while travelling through the American South - or even the 1980s, when white players were paid $26,000 more on average, despite poorer performances on the court.

Black players today have far greater power and command greater respect as public figures, plus the earnings to match. Playing for the Harlem Globetrotters in the 1930s was worth as little as $7.50 a game - $144 (111) today - according to basketball historian Doug Merlino, but it was often a choice between that or a life of menial labour.

The current top five NBA players, all of whom are black, will make a collective $192m (147m) on salaries alone over 2019-20.

There are those - fans, commentators and players themselves - who will see the limits of sports activism, or reject it altogether.

"Shut up and dribble" was the response from Laura Ingraham, a right-wing news anchor, when in 2018 LeBron James gave an ESPN interview criticising President Trump's attitudes on race.

That Ingraham did not have similar advice more recently for Drew Brees, a white American football player, to keep out of politics have, in many people's view,external-link lent her previous comments a racial tinge. (Brees had made remarks rejecting the take the knee protest in his sport.)

But the sentiment is not unique to conservative news figures. On plenty of forums and comments below sports talk shows, are complaints from fans decrying the forays of their favourite court stars into politics.

Others see a heavy dose of hypocrisy in how players, former players and the league handle divisive political issues.

Jackson, for example, was engulfed in controversy after making anti-Semitic comments on social media.

He said his comments were taken out of context, but the episode extinguished a measure of sympathy for his racial activism among many. For some others, it nullified all goodwill entirely.

In a column for the Hollywood Reporter,external-link Jabbar said Jackson's comments "undid whatever progress his previous advocacy may have achieved" by himself committing "the kind of dehumanising characterisation of a people that causes the police abuses that killed his friend, George Floyd".

He wrote of "a very troubling omen for the future of the Black Lives Matter movement," adding: "So too is the shocking lack of massive indignation."

More recently, Houston Rockets star James Harden drew fury when he was photographed wearing a mask with an emblem supporting 'Blue Lives Matter', a counter-organisation to Black Lives Matter that backs police.

Harden said he was not trying to make a statement - he just thought that the design 'looked cool' and covered his beard.

Detractors will say it proves sportsmen may not be the best agents of political messaging, and that it distracts from the experience fans are paying for with their time and money - a reprieve from politics.

And if politics should be allowed to enter in, where should the line be drawn? Another row was stirred up after Josh Hawley, the Republican Missouri Senator, wrote to Silver to complain the NBA is allowing Black Lives Matter-themed slogans, but not those supporting US troops, or backing free speech in Hong Kong.

The senator accused the NBA of "excusing and apologising for the brutal repression of the Chinese Communist regime".

"Free expression appears to stop at the edge of your corporate sponsors' sensibilities," he chided.

But even if thorny questions remain, there is no doubt that the zeitgeist in America has shifted more broadly.

Poll after poll in 2020 shows that, unlike in the past, Americans are largely accepting the idea that racism exists and plays a part in the many social ills black people face in the country.

The "myth" that America's problems with race are largely overcome is being challenged, whether in basketball or in the greater society, believes Popovich, the 71-year-old Spurs coach.

"You can't go on and enjoy your life if you don't understand what has happened to so many," he says.

As for the league's race campaign, he is realistic about the prospect of influence.

"Fans are like any other group of people - some will get it, some will understand, some will just enjoy the games and move on," he says.

"Others will hopefully get involved in being part of the solution of being anti-racist, but that's a pretty individual thing."

After all, sport - as much a cultural product of the times as any entertainment - can only reflect the realities of its era. In 2020, the reality is that to be black is in itself to be political, and that position is not a choice, whether you are a basketball star or a bouncer.

The slogan stencilled beside the NBA logo is a reminder. The lives of so many of the men dribbling, jumping, performing feats of athleticism are black ones - and they matter not just on the court.

Read more:

NBA: Black Lives Matter and basketballs role in discussion on racism - BBC Sport

Bonnie Whitmore's upcoming album, Last Will and Testament, releases on 2 October and it's a powerful and thought-provoking follow-up to 2016's Fuck With Sad Girls. There's a danger with topical songwriters that their material will become dated and although Whitmore tapes into the zeitgeist here, the material full transcends the moment in which it arrives. The subject matter ranges from a friend's suicide (the title track), to the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris ("None of My Business) to rape culture ("Asked for It"). There's also a breathtaking rendition of Centro-Matic's "Flashes and Cables" that may very well supplant the original. In all, Last Will and Testament is a confident, necessary statement from an artist whose time has come.

Also included on the LP is "Right/Wrong", which Whitmore co-wrote with co-producer Scott Davis. "He has two kids, [under ten], and I asked him how he discussed divisions in our country with them," she notes. Her mind turned to a television icon of the past, though she realized her view didn't necessarily jibe with his. "I was actually thinking about Mr. Rogers when we were writing the song. But I don't think I'm a nice enough person to be Mr. Rogers."

Another familiar figure from her childhood ultimate provided some inspiration: Miss Frizzle from The Magic School Bus. "Miss Frizzle had this magic school bus, and the kids would go on these field trips. In order to learn about the anatomy, she would shrink the bus, and it would go into one of the kids, through the nose. You'd follow it around the body and learn about all kinds of stuff: Science and she'd tell kids, 'Go out there and experience life. Make messes!'" Whitmore recalls. "She always had this attitude of, 'Don't be afraid of adventure.' She wasn't necessarily just love and kindness like Mr. Rogers was, but she really would push boundaries, take something that might have seemed scary and turn it into something to be enjoyed. I always found her inspirational in that regard."

"So, in writing that song, we thought about what questions we wanted to ask people when things are so divided. The first verse starts with 'Who do you want to be?' Then, 'Where do you want to go' and 'What do you want to say?' I'm asking my audience. I'm not preaching to them. I'm genuinely asking them the question because I want them to try to answer it."

"Right/Wrong", like much of Last Will and Testament feels like one of those songs that have always existed. Taking a page from classic music of the 1960s and 1970s, it sinks its hooks into the listener early, not letting them go until well after the last notes have floated into the ether. But its lyrics ask much more of the listener than the average song, and they are ultimately one of the reasons we find ourselves returning to the track, to seek answers to the questions which it asks, and to bask in the comforting glow it provides. It is anthemic without being bombastic, thought-provoking without being didactic.

* * *

What was the process for writing this album?

This record is a kind of sequel to Fuck With Sad Girls. When I went in to make that record, I wanted to have songs that were personalized stories of mine. I'd been trying to write songs that seemed sellable, and I feel like with the first two, I was trying to make the perfect Americana records. I wasn't necessarily getting where I wanted to. I had this epiphany that if I was going to continue making music, I wanted to include songs that included some of my vulnerabilities. I wanted to be more upfront with my depression and things of that nature.

It seemed to go really well for me. Writing a song like "Fuck With Sad Girls" is the reason I ended up going on tour with James McMurtry, who is a personal hero of mine. That gave me a push to put out this record with these kinds of songs. A lot of them are ones that I've had for a long time, "Asked For It", especially.

That's a good one.

I wrote it back when [former US Representative from Missouri, Todd Akin] was talking about "legitimate rape" [in 2012]. That was what inspired the song. When I tried to perform it, it was like the air was being sucked out of the room. People just weren't ready for a pop song about rape culture. With the #MeToo movement and the culture being more open about discussing these kinds of things, with people speaking up about what they think is wrong, broken, or needs to be fixed, [it seemed like the right time to release it].

One out of four women has been sexually assaulted or raped. That's a hard number to get through to yourself, especially when you have a society that doesn't want to talk about it. I've gotten a lot of inspiration from people like Bren Brown, who talks about shame and vulnerability and not being ruled by the fear that you have those things because that just gives it power.

Yeah.

I always felt that if I could write songs that helped the conversation start, then I was doing my part to try and help heal.

That strong really struck me because I don't know that I've heard what you're saying there said in that way on a record before.

It's one thing to think something. It's another to say it out loud. It becomes a totally different thing when you are being heard saying it. I make it an audience participation song at my shows. I ask people to repeat the phrase, "asked for it". By the end of the song, I feel like a lot of people who hadn't thought about it before don't want to say it anymore. That was the point. You understand that we shouldn't be blaming the victim. We should be able to allow the victim to communicate with us, even though it's really painful to hear it. It's the only way that we can get past these things.

I'm so delighted that the Chicks have a new record out. I've always been a huge fan of theirs, and when I first heard "Gaslighter", tears came out of my eyes. I hadn't heard their voices on the radio for so long. I didn't realize how detrimental that was for me. I play in Texas, I grew up here, and when I would go and play these podunk shows in rural places, I'd have a whole bunch of redneck, good ol' boys to shut up and sing and "Don't play that fucking Dixie Chicks music" and all that stuff.

I thought, "If you don't want me to talk about stuff, I'm going to sing about it." That's what I really try to do with these songs, which is to be able to have a conversation within the song.

I was also really struck by the song "Fine".

That's the first co-write I did with Jaimee Harris. She's an incredible singer-songwriter. We had this shared tendency to be non-committal sometimes. I had just gotten out of a relationship, and she was in a different place, but we discovered that we had similar approaches in terms of how we approach relationships. To me, it's about wanting to check in and see where you are and have some sort of understanding instead of having some things left unsaid.

As a woman, I'm always checking to see if everyone's OK. "What's going on? Is there something you need? Are you happy right now?" [Laughs.] It was such an easy co-write. Once we wrote it, we said, "This is pop gold." And I always like to say that there's a difference between "I am fine" and "I will be fine."

There's a thing that's been going on in the pandemic: I enjoy the solitude, but I have to check in with myself so that I don't become a total mess.

I remember having a day, I think, in April, where it was starting to set in, what this was and what it really meant. I was having one of those days where I meant to wash my face, and I grabbed hair conditioner. "What's wrong with you, Whitmore?" I did another thing that seemed really dumb, and then there was a click in my head, "Oh, that's your depression right there. It's OK."

Once I can call it out, then it's a lot easier. I think a lot of depression is just picking at yourself and tearing your self down so that no one else has to do it for you. "That's why I'm feeling angry right now. That's where this is coming from." Once you can identify it, see where it's coming from, it's not the villain that it was.

Tell me about covering Centro-Matic's "Flashes and Cables".

I grew up in Denton, and Centro-Matic was the band that I was in love with in high school. We used to have a thing called the Fry Street Fair. I wasn't old enough to get tickets because I think you had to be over 18. We would crawl onto the roof of this art supply store and see behind where the band was. You could watch the show outside of the festival but still be part of it. That was the first time I saw Centro-Matic play.

I saw them in Austin on their farewell tour. Then I also went up to Denton for their final show at Dan's Silverleaf. That's my original church. Music venues are churches to me, more so than just places to get drunk. It was just such an amazing, surreal moment, just being around these people who were completely in love with this band. There was so much joy, so many tears. It was such a beautiful thing.

"Flashes and Cables" seemed to be the perfect added thing to put on there. I did want to have a cover song on the album like I did with Fuck With Sad Girls. I was so glad that Will [Johnson, formerly of Centro-Matic] sang on it.

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Bonnie Whitmore Searches For Perspective With "Right/Wrong" (premiere + interview) - PopMatters

A hero crawls across the ground, exhausted beyond endurance. A vicious storm rages around him, and hope seems lost. Suddenly, a ghost appears; an apparition of someone this hero loved. The hero reaches out his hand, croaking, Ben...Ben

Hoth this is not. Though reminiscent of The Empire Strikes Back, this scene happened on the Toronto set of The Umbrella Academy season 2. The hero in question is Klaus Hargreeves (Robert Sheehan), and he and his siblings are once again trying to prevent disaster. Nothing theyve tried has managed to calm the super-storm raging around them. Thats when Ben (Justin H. Min) appears. Ben died years ago, so Klaus, whos a medium, is the only one of the surviving siblings who can see and talk to him. It's caused a lot of bickering between them, and Klaus is increasingly annoyed at being Bens only translator to the living. But now, at a moment of crisis, maybe Ben is the only one with the power to save the world.

But wait. Theres another urgent question, and filming temporarily stops so that the producers and crew can debate it: Would a ghosts hair move in stormy wind?

There are arguments for both sides. Some think Bens hair should move in the wind so it looks consistent with the other characters in the scene. Others argue that a ghosts body is inherently intangible, and therefore would not be affected by mortal winds plus, Mins hair is so perfectly coiffed that its hard to imagine any force on Earth moving it. Because Umbrella Academy showrunner Steve Blackman isnt on set to mediate this debate, they decide to film it both ways (some takes utilize a giant fan blowing in the background; other takes dont) so he can pick later.

I'm on set a lot, but I have to go back and forth to L.A., and so I get those questions, Blackman tells EW months later. Sometimes I'm like, Are you really calling me about this? But then I realize it's a really good point. There is a logic we have to make true because if we don't, someone's going to call us out on it. It was a long debate about whether a ghosts hair can be moved. In the final version, I opted not to have the hair move. But I welcome them to call me for any of those questions. They're always fun to figure out.

Would wind blow a ghosts hair? was only one of many dilemmas that had to be worked through by Blackman and the other writers of the Netflix series as they went about constructing season 2. First, and most pressing: Where the hell did the Hargreeves siblings go when they blinked out of existence at the end of season 1 just after one of them blew up the moon, sending a bunch of lunar asteroids on a fatal collision course with the Earth? Even more importantly, when did they go?

Years before it was a Netflix show, The Umbrella Academy was a comic book written by My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way, illustrated by Brazilian artist Gabriel B, and published by Dark Horse. It first landed in 2007, a year before the one-two punch of Iron Man and The Dark Knight gave birth to a new, streamlined 21st-century superhero zeitgeist. By contrast, The Umbrella Academy was unafraid to be weird, colorful, and unique. It wore distinct cultural influences proudly on its sleeve while also using them in new ways. If you were a 2000s emo kid brought in by the MCR connection, The Umbrella Academy might also send you off looking for Wes Andersons film The Royal Tenenbaums or writer Grant Morrisons cult-favorite 90s Doom Patrol comics to find the sources for these flavors.

In his introduction to the first collected edition of Umbrella comics, Apocalypse Suite, Morrison himself coined the delightful term necrodelic to describe the aesthetic overlap with MCR music videos like Welcome to the Black Parade. Imagine making a debut so impressive that your biggest inspiration is immediately one of your first fans. Thats what a kick in the teeth The Umbrella Academy was, fresh and fully-formed right from the get-go.

The series further distinguished itself from Marvel and DC superhero fare by being self-contained a new, original universe born just as so many comics and their spin-off TV and projects became limited to just two major worlds. You only had to read a few comics to get the scope of Way and Bs world, which of course created a huge thirst for more. A year after Apocalypse Suite came the second arc, Dallas, which put the JFK assassination through the Umbrella Academy filter (one representative scene finds a monkey dressed as Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday JFK-style). Dallas deepened character relationships, gave more texture to the world of the Umbrella Academy, and sprinkled many hints at future story lines. But then it was followed by... silence.

Way returned to music, making two more MCR albums (leading to a blizzard of tour dates that made writing comics on the bus way harder than before) and then a solo record after the bands 2013 breakup. B teamed up with his brother Fbio Moon for beautiful non-superhero comics like Daytripper, which won a prestigious Eisner Award in 2011. A full decade passed from the release of Dallas to Dark Horses 2018 announcement that the long-anticipated third volume of The Umbrella Academy, titled Hotel Oblivion, was finally on the way... at just about the same time Netflix was announcing a long-awaited TV adaptation.

Season 1 landed on the streaming platform at the zenith of MCU superhero culture, just a few short months before Avengers: Endgame smashed box office records. Way and B were on board as executive producers, which reassured devout readers. And by exchanging Joss Whedon-style quips for intimate character moments and focusing on family dynamics more than world-saving shenanigans, The Umbrella Academy has carved out its own space and a giant fandom. The second seasons release this week seems fueled by its own galaxy of hype and excitement no Comic-Con launch required.

At its heart, Umbrella is about a dysfunctional family of misfit superheroes, trained to exploit their powers in service of justice, but all a little underdeveloped when it comes to basic love and kindness.

Each member of the Umbrella Academy was born with extraordinary powers at the exact same moment across the world to women who mysteriously hadnt previously been pregnant. Forty-three such children were born this way, but these seven were the ones adopted by Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore in the show), an eccentric billionaire industrialist who is also probably a space alien (the fates of the other 36 children have not yet been revealed). As a sign of how cold and results-oriented their childhood was, the kids go by three different naming systems. When they were young, Hargreeves gave them numerical designations to signify a chain of command and their relative importance to him: Numbers One (the leader and golden child) through Seven (the supposed mediocrity, the spare). As they grew, they also each got superhero monikers and civilian names, except for Number Five (Aidan Gallagher), who time-traveled away from home as a kid so never got past the numerical stage. The comic favors their superhero codenames: Spaceboy, Kraken, Rumor, Seance, Horror, and (eventually) the White Violin. The show prefers their human names Luther (Tom Hopper), Diego (David Castaeda), Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman), Klaus (Sheehan), Ben (Min), and Vanya (Ellen Page) signifying a preference for their relatable familial dramas over some of the book's more surreal superhero spectacle.

Season 1 of the TV show mostly followed the arc of Apocalypse Suite reunited after the death of Sir Reginald, the grown-up Hargreeves siblings have to put aside their differences in time to stop Vanya from bringing about a prophesied ragnarok but made important changes.

Casting was a big part of this, of course. Gallagher was 14 years old when filming began. Now 16 and growing fast, he displays maturity and wisdom beyond his years. The kind of person your grandma might call an old soul, Gallagher has the uncanny ability to believably inhabit Number Five, a character who looks like a young teen but carries the weight of decades spent alone in an apocalyptic wasteland. Sheehan, a hypnotic speaker whose sentences are peppered with unexpectedly enlightening references and asides, often arrived at seemingly on the spot, was already an online fan favorite from Misfits, another unique take on superhero TV. They make it seem like Number Five and Klaus walked right off the page as three-dimensional characters. Castaeda played Diego less like a cranky vigilante and more like a romantic hero (it helped that his police partner, Patch, was changed from a monkey to a human, played by actress Ashley Madekwe), while Raver-Lampman and Page brought out new sides of Allison and Vanya, not least their complicated sister relationship.

Music was another way that the show honored the comic while taking full advantage of the TV medium. The Umbrella Academy has always been imbued with music thanks to Ways experience and sensibilities. Allison is a celebrity whose voice can compel other people rumor them a power that can easily backfire and causes deep ambivalence about her fame and influence (perhaps that explains why Way, with his pop singer background, told EW in 2018 that Allison is his favorite character to write). In the premiere episode, each Hargreeves sibling dances to the same song (Tiffanys version of I Think Were Alone Now) in their own childhood bedroom, unaware that the others are doing the same. The season ends with an apocalypse triggered by Vanyas furious violin playing. In season 2, each fight is soundtracked by a different pop song, ranging in time from early Backstreet Boys to a cover of Billie Eilish. Blackman tells EW that he would shuffle through his music library before writing scenes, looking for the perfect soundtrack to a battle or an intense emotional exchange.

The biggest difference between the show and comic, though, came at the end of season 1. In the original story, the team manages to avert disaster at the last minute when Klaus uses his telekinetic powers to stop debris from shattering the planet. No such thing occurred in the adaptation. The team came together (including Bens ghost!), but it wasnt enough. The world did, in fact, explode, and the Hargreeves siblings were only able to survive thanks to Number Five activating his time-travel powers at the last moment but that also didnt go quite according to plan.

The opening scene of season 2 shows where the family ended up: 1960s Dallas. While the Dallas arc of The Umbrella Academy comic sent the team to JFKs time for a couple issues, the show expands it into a season-long period piece. Each character is dropped out of the time vortex at a slightly different date in the early part of the decade; Five is the last to materialize, and immediately discovers that his siblings actions in the past have brought about a new apocalypse way ahead of schedule.

In Gallaghers words, The opening shot is just like, Okay, where the hell did we end up? Where are my siblings? Why is there a tank here? Oh s---, I'm in the '60s and there are nukes falling from the sky! So it's a wonderful way to launch into our season.

Gallagher continues, Everyone's got this new and really interesting arc for their characters. [Hes] becoming a lot more personable, but coinciding with that, he's got this huge problem of a completely new apocalypse happening several decades before an apocalypse even naturally occurred in the timeline. So yeah, in season 2, he just crawls out of that insanity and more into his anxiety.

As his first step in figuring out how to avert this disaster, Five seeks out Luther. But the one-time Number One isnt much interested in being a leader anymore. He failed in his lifelong mission to save the world (and, by extension, fulfill his dads expectations of him), on top of learning that his years-long mission to the moon was a ruse concocted by Sir Reginald to keep him occupied. He lost his human body and replaced it with a gorilla one all for no grand purpose.

Luther's holding a lot of weight, says Hopper, who previously headed up Starzs Black Sails. The fact that the world ended, and he did bad things in the process of getting there like locking Vanya up, thats all weighing on him. He's taking out all that angst into the role he now has in the past, which is, he's ended up basically working as a henchman, an underground cage fighter.

Luthers found a new father figure in the form of a local nightclub owner (John Kapelos) who's all too happy to have a strapping superman fight for him. He and his siblings are inserting themselves into history and stepping on all kinds of butterflies. They might end up destroying the world before America can even get to the moon at the end of the decade. They're going to ruin the f---ing timeline, Castaeda says, and only Five seems concerned about getting them all together while keeping time and space intact.

As classic time travel hypotheticals go, Would you stop the JFK assassination? is like the light-side counterweight to Would you kill baby Hitler? Diego is certainly tempted to try to change history for the better, from the moment he lands in 1962 and sees Kennedy speaking on television. According to Castaeda, this experience reminds Diego of a memory from his childhood when he noticed Sir Reginald react emotionally (a rare occurrence) to a mention of the JFK assassination. Just as Luther is turning away from the memory of their father, Diego is trying to find a connection.

Diego doesn't actually want to leave, Castaeda says. He wants to stay in this timeline to fix some things. He has a clear thought of, You're not taking us back. You left us here. Great. Stay away. I'm going to fix some things here. I think all of us are in that mindset.

To be fair to the Umbrella Academy, its not that theyre entirely cavalier about the fate of the world. Its just that many of them were thrown into the deep end of the past by themselves and have to find ways to survive. This is especially challenging for Allison, who gets dumped in the Jim Crow South, still lacking her powerful voice (damaged by Vanya at the end of season 1), and now made a target because shes Black. This is a significant change from the comic, where Allison is depicted as white and even goes undercover as Jackie Kennedy at one point.

She has suddenly found herself in a Southern state in the '60s and she's a woman of color, Raver-Lampman says. The rules are very different for her than they have been her whole life. She is now not allowed to do certain things or be seen in certain places with certain people. That is the rudest of awakenings for her.

Fortunately, the 60s were not just a time of oppression, but revolt as well. Shortly after running afoul of a whites only sign and the racist cops who enforce it, Allison is taken in by civil rights activists, and even finds love with local movement leader Raymond Chestnut (Yusuf Gatewood). While Diego sets out to use his abilities and knowledge to save the president, Allison cant help but wonder if her own powers (once recovered) might help the cause.

Allison knows... the ability to change people's minds and opinions is a huge power. The outcome of the civil rights movement could be completely different, but she knows how tricky her power is and what the backlash of that could be on that kind of a scale, Raver-Lampman says. In the immediate moment she might be saving someone's life, but what's the backlash of that for [her daughter] Claire in the 21st century? There is so much more at risk than there ever has been for her.

Vanya doesnt even remember the apocalypse she kick-started due to a bout of amnesia. Thanks to the help of Sissy (Marin Ireland), who takes her in after accidentally hitting her with a car, Vanya also falls into an anachronistic affair. As Vanya and Sissy grow closer, they develop a relationship much more powerful than the emotionally abusive one Vanya found herself in last year with Harold (John Magaro), but also run up against a culture of homophobia.

She's a very different person, Page says of season 2 Vanya. You see someone who's much more comfortable in their skin. I think in many ways, what happened at the end of the season with Vanya, I guess that was not great for the world, but for her, it was the ultimate release a way of coming to terms with so much in her life. This is the step after that, where she goes on a journey discovering and exploring who she is in a whole new way.

For Klaus, finding himself a few years ahead when he time-traveled to the Vietnam War in season 1 means his lover, Dave (Cody Ray Thompson), is still alive he hasnt yet signed up to fight. Maybe Klaus can save him. Klaus and Ben arrive first of all their siblings, in 1960, and while he waits for a moment of opportunity, when he knows where Dave will be and might be able to intervene Klaus ends up leading a proto-hippie cult.

We all have a kind of a nostalgic facsimile of what the 60s were. All of the iconography that has survived the 60s, we all put that into a hodgepodge in our brains and go, 'This is what the 60s was.' Thats what Klaus sort of does, Sheehan explains. He goes back and embodies that thing to a bunch of people who don't understand what that is, but he kind of gets the jump on it. He takes credit for it. He takes credit for a lot of things.

One thing Klaus keeps taking credit for is Bens presence. An invisible ghostly brother sure helps Klaus prove his mystical bona fides to his new cultish followers. But as Klaus luxuriates in his newfound popularity, Ben strains against his restrictions.

This season it was really important for us to try and establish the agency and independence of Ben as a character, Min says, even though he is still tethered to Klaus.

Min continues, I think there are things that Ben has always wanted to do and has always wanted to pursue.

After all the individual journeys the siblings go on this season, finding out things about themselves and their history, it eventually comes time to stop the apocalypse again. Theres that nuclear disaster Number Five walks into at the beginning of the season, and also that super-storm that perhaps only Ben can stop. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, but that doesnt stop the Umbrella Academy from trying to save the world because only if they succeed in doing so will it be possible for them to go back to the future.

Motion and still photography byBrent Mata, BrandonMata, Evangelos Polychronopolous & Zexi Qi/Neer Motion for EW. Color by Dante Pasquinelli for EW.

Styling: Castaeda - Michael Miller/Stella Creative Artists; grooming: Tara Hickman; Jacket: Valstar; Top: 3Sixteen; Pants: AMI Paris; Belt: Levis; Boots: DSquared2. Hopper - Michael Miller/Stella Creative Artists; grooming: Katya Thomas/Carol Hayes Management; Jacket: Valstar; Knit: King & Tuckfield; Pants: Reiss; Belt: Grenson; Shoes: Tods; Watch: Omega. Min - Avo Yermagyan/Forward Artists; Grooming: Sonia Lee for Exclusive Artists using Alba 1913. Page - Samantha McMIllen/The Wall Group; Hair: Brian Magallones; Makeup: Frankie Boyd; Polo: Theory; jeans: AG; boots: Doc Martin; White shirt: Officine General; Tie: Vintage; Jeans: Hudson. Raver-Lampan - KJ Moody/The Only Agency; Hair: Neeko/Tracey Mattingly; Makeup: Joanna Simkin/The Wall Group. Sheehan - Michael Miller/Stella Creative Artists; Blouse: Vivienne Westwood; Bodysuit: Vivienne Westwood; Jeans: Neuw Denim; Sunglasses: Linda Farrow.

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The Umbrella Academy cast teases time-bending season 2 | EW.com - Entertainment Weekly

If you're anything like us - and the majority of fashion lovers - then you likely have a slight soft spot for designer bags. Sure, beautiful high-end dresses, sweaters and coats have their appeal, but nothing quite compares to the thrill of finally snapping up that bag you've had your eye on for months. Not least because you can wear it every single day without so much as a glance at the washing machine.

But there is a downside to their wearability. If you've got a bag that you love and use endlessly, chances are that it looks a little worn out after a while.

You can be super careful and even put it in the dust bag every night, but even the most cautious amongst us can spill a coffee, brush up against a dirty wall or, well, live in a smog-filled city with dirty pollution tarnishing your beloved bag every time you take it outside.

But far from a lost cause, the possibility (probability) of putting your beloved bag through a little wear and tear is no reason to avoid using it, or you may as well have never bought it in the first place. Instead, it's wise to learn about restoration options.

Cheaper, more sustainable and perhaps even more satisfying than buying a replacement, the world of upcycling has made major strides over recent years, with Handbag Clinic providing some of the most impressive restorations.

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"The loudest noise in fashion right now is the sustainability movement" acknowledges the brand, "and the last year has seen something of an awakening for the fashion industry at large as well as consumers."

"Sustainability has graduated from peripheral issue to central concern of the cultural zeitgeist. The more recent emphasis has been on the circular movement, which is concerned with the entire lifecycle of a product which must be considered at the design and sourcing stage."

"For consumers, circularity means not putting an end to the things they use."

Whether its spillages, tears, or merely general signs of wear, Handbag Clinic's before and after images not only showcase the level of transformation that can be achieved, but are also strangely addictive whether or not you have a bag that needs restoring.

And don't get us started on the videos - Are they the most captivating things you've ever seen or do we need to get out more? We're blaming the ASMR...

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If you decide that you want your bag to have an *entirely* new look, the brand also offers a transformative service that includes changing the colour, adding chains, editing straps and other forms of customisation to any leather handbag.

But Handbag Clinic don't only restore or transform your bags, they also provide a reselling service too. And you know what's more lucrative than reselling your beloved designer bag? Reselling your beloved designer bag once it's been restored to nearly-new.

"Handbag Clinic's resale service is simple and easy to use. Clients can drop into store, complete a form online for a quote and to have a bag collected from home, or London clients can book a home consultation service."

"Handbag Clinics dedicated team of experts can audit, authenticate, value, clean, restore, and sell client's designer handbags through their nationwide chain of stores and e-commerce platform. Clients will be paid instantly if they accept a cash offer, or receive up to 80% of its original value selling on consignment."

"With restoration at the heart of its business, customers can also sit back with the peace of mind that their beloved handbag will fetch its best possible price after being restored to its former glory."

Charlotte Staerck, co-founder and retail director at Handbag Clinic, has provided us with her top tips for both looking after your handbag and recognising when it's time to call in the professionals...

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Designer Handbag Restoration Before And After Pictures And Videos - GLAMOUR UK

New Indie

We heard you liked Parasite, so weve got a lot seriously, a LOT of films to recommend by British auteur Ken Loach, starting with Sorry We Missed You (Kino Lorber Zeitgeist). Hes been digging deep into the class war for years now (hes on the side of the poor, by the way; sorry, billionaires) and his movies champion the dignity and communal power of people struggling to get by in a capitalist system designed to crush them. Sorry We Missed You is both furious and exceptionally relevant right now, telling the story of a family hanging by a thread as both parents work in precarious jobs that could disintegrate with the slightest hiccup. Then come the hiccups. Let it radicalize you.

Also available: Brian Cox stars as an independent man with Parkinsons who gets The Carer (Corinth), a caretaker he didnt ask for but who just might change his life; The Other Lamb (IFC Midnight) tells the chilling tale of a young woman who rebels against the cult she was born into; and Queen of Hip-Hop Soul Mary J. Blige stars as the only cop on the force who can see the supernatural entity wreaking havoc in the creepy Body Cam (Paramount).

New Foreign

Sometimes escapism is about watching someone else make their own literal escape. Chinese import The Wild Goose Lake (Film Movement), unfortunately timed for what turned out to be a truncated arthouse rollout earlier this year, is an elegant, suspenseful thriller from filmmaker Diao Yinan. Its about a small-time gangster on the run with a price on his head and a suspicious femme fatale along for the ride. The follow up to his breakthrough film Black Coal, Thin Ice, its an inventively shot, stylishly violent trip into deep dark noir.

Also available: Samurai Marathon (Well Go USA) has director Bernard Rose (Candyman) taking a feudal lord challenging a samurai to a punishing marathon and then adding a dizzying Philip Glass score to ramp up the action; 19thcentury Germans struggle against poverty and oppression in Home From Home: Chronicle of a Vision (Corinth), a four hour black-and-white arthouse odyssey; the Romanian New Wave gets an injection of sunshine, crime, and sexiness with Corneliu Porumboius stylish Cannes hit The Whistlers (Magnolia Home Entertainment).

Acclaimed filmmaker Kleber Mendonca Filho (Aquarius, Neighboring Sounds) joins forces with JulianoDornelles for the staggering Bacurau (Kino Lorber), a wild revenge tale about a rural Brazilian village thats mad as hell and not going take it anymore, starring Sonia Braga and featuring Udo Kier;The Prince (Artsploitation Films) is a downcast but still homoerotic Chilean prison drama that won Venice Film Festivals Queer Lion Award in 2019.

New Doc

Is Paul Verhoevens 1995 box office fiasco Showgirls a masterpiece? Or is it shit? Or is it a masterpiece of shit? This is the question explored in You Dont Nomi (RLJE), a provocative and utterly entertaining new documentary from director Jeffrey McHale. A wildly divergent variety of opinions and critical voices compete for the truth, and all of it is mixed with footage from the source material, vintage interviews, and corroborating evidence from Verhoeven films before and after Showgirls. You Dont Nomi takes a every stance about Showgirls all at once its feminist, its queer, its garbage, its brilliant, its camp, its an evisceration of everything hideous and banal about American life, its all of the above and makes you decide for yourself whos right. Just remember, its pronounced Ver-SAYSE.

Read: Interview with You Dont Nomi director Jeffrey McHale

Also available: Hands of God (Film Movement) chronicles the agonizing journey of the Iraqi Olympic Boxing Team when their gym is blown up; in 1985,Philadelphia police dropped a military-grade explosive on a residential building occupied by the Black liberation group MOVE, killing 5 children and 6 adults, and that shameful bit of U.S. history is explored in Target: Philadelphia (Indiepix Films).

HandMade Films, the George Harrisonbacked production company that gave us modern classics like Brazil and Withnail & I, is the subject of An Accidental Studio (RLJE Films), featuring interviews with Terry Gilliam, Neil Jordan, Michael Palin, Richard E. Grant and more; gerrymandering is one of the reasons American politics is currently such a nightmare, and Slay the Dragon (Magnolia Home Entertainment) explains what it is and how we can fight against it.

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (Kino Lorber/Adopt), from Marie Losier, details the last stages in the lives of Throbbing Gristle founder Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and performance artist Lady Jaye, as their love story grew to involve intense physical transformations; Joseph Hillels City Dreamers (First Run Features) chronicles a quartet of influential mid-century female architects who forever changed the concept of urban living; the subject of female ejaculation gets overdue attention in Sacred Water (Icarus Films), when radio host and sex educator Dusabe Vestine goes on a mission in Rwanda to promote womens sexual pleasure.

New Grindhouse

Enter the Fat Dragon (Well Go USA Entertainment) is a remake of Sammo Hungs 1978 martial arts comedy classic, which was itself a parody of Bruce Lees 1972 film, The Way of the Dragon, which makes this update a meta-reboot-tribute-spoof. Donnie Yen stars this time as a police officer whose reassignment to the evidence room and a concurrent love of snack cakes makes him into a more plush version of himself. Does this stop him from fighting crime and using his martial-arts skills to regulate all the bad guys? It does not, which is something of an achievement in the cinematic representation of fat dudes existing and successfully delivering kicks to the throat. Its always better to tell the joke rather than to be the joke.

Also available:Have you seen The Room (Shudder/RLJE)? No, not that one, the one about people stuck in a Room. No, not that one, either. This is a horror film about a room that turns your wishes into trouble, and its got a title designed to confuse; little baby demons make the Vatican unhappy in Belzebuth (Shudder/RLJE), starring Saws Tobin Bell.

Kiss of the Vampire: Collectors Edition (Scream Factory) serves up classic 60s Hammer horror and all the lurid color-story that implies; in Inferno of Torture (Arrow), Japanese exploitation master Teruo Ishii (Horrors of Malformed Men, Orgies of Edo) sees to it that lots of young women are tattooed and tortured in the sixth film in his Abnormal Love series.

Indonesias most well-known comic book superhero, named Gundala (Well Go USA), goes up against a disfigured mob boss and his band of deadly orphan assassins; filmmaker Dietrich de Velsa, who later collaborated with Joseph Losey on Mr. Klein, directed exactly one movie: Equation to an Unknown (Altered Innocence), and its a masterpiece of downbeat French, queer erotic cinema. If you know, you know.

New Classic

Legendary producer Arthur Freed meets legendary choreographer Busby Berkeley (the guy who invented immaculate and elaborate musical production numbers that were shot overhead for maximum wow) meets legendary singer Judy Garland and her most enduring screen partner Mickey Rooney in Strike Up the Band (Warner Archive), a wild romp about high-school kids determined to make it big in the world of music. Spoiler: They succeed. Watch the big Conga number for a taste of what kind of taskmaster Buzz Berkeley was with his exhausted-yet-smiling-through-it-all young stars. Pairs well with another new-to-Blu Mickey and Judy hit, Girl Crazy (also Warner Archive).

Also available: Eco-thriller The Day the Earth Caught Fire (KL Studio Classics) is an eerily prescient 1961 British doomsday shocker, the godfather of all 70s disaster films, from director Val Guest; Go Go Mania aka Pop Gear (KL Studio Classics) is another 60s Brit artifact, a splashy concert affair with The Animals, Hermans Hermits, The Spencer Davis Group, and, oh, The Beatles.

Airplane! (Paramount Presents) is 40 years old, and heres the Blu-ray. Now you feel old, too; same goes for Clueless (Paramount) celebrating its own 25thanniversary with a loaded-up Blu-ray. Yes, the 90s are that far away. Deal with it.

Even older is the 1936 Buck Jones: The Phantom Rider (VCI) cowboy serials, restored and compiled on one very lengthy Blu-ray; meanwhile W.C. Fields 1941 Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (KL Studio Classics), the comedy legends last starring role, also gets the Blu-ray treatment; pre-code cult classic The Sin of Nora Moran gets revived from the folks at The Film Detective; andMdchen in Uniform (Kino Classics), a landmark in the history of lesbian cinema released back in 1931, remains powerful enough to stay relevant almost 90 years later. And if you really want to fire up the wayback machine, theres a new Blu-ray of the very first submarine feature ever made, the 1916 silent 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Kino Classics). (If youre only aware of the later Disney adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, note that the remakes star, Kirk Douglas, was born in 1916.)

Kino Classics presents three new Blu-rays spotlighting the work of director Istvan Szabo: Mephisto won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film of 1981 for the story of an actor in World War II whose career benefits from Nazi rule; Oscar nominee Colonel Redl stars Klaus Maria Brandauer as a counter-intelligence expert whose secret gayness threatens to compromise his safety; and Confidence, another Best Foreign Film nominee, spins a love story between two Resistance fighters, each married to someone else, in the waning days of WWII.

Whoopi Goldberg won her own Academy Award for Ghost (Paramount Presents) now celebrating its 30th anniversary the monstrously popular supernatural drama where Patrick Swayze is the ghost of a murdered man who has to save lover Demi Moore from the same fate. Whoopi helps.

Thirteen Ghosts: Collectors Edition (Scream Factory) is the 2001 remake you never knew you needed, starring Matthew Lillard, Shannon Elizabeth, Rah Digga, and F. Murray Abraham; Pride and Prejudice (Warner Archive), another story that enjoys regular remakes, delivered a classic version with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier; Esther Williams does all the elaborate swimming in the sparkly treat Million Dollar Mermaid (Warner Archive); and long before Guardians of the Galaxy, James Gunn wrote the 2000 cult comedy The Specials (La La Land Entertainment), which introduces the sixth-greatest superhero team in the world including Thomas Haden Church, Judy Greer, and Rob Lowe none of whom are million-dollar mermaids, alas.

Among the more sober offerings this month are Lorenzos Oil (KL Studio Classics), an exceptionally moving true story starring Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon as parents who fought to find a cure for their childs mysterious and fatal illness; Keith Gordons acclaimed 1992 drama A Midnight Clear (Shout Select) depicts an attempted surrender during World War II that goes terribly wrong, featuring a stunning ensemble that includes Ethan Hawke, Gary Sinise, Arye Gross, Kevin Dillon, and Frank Whaley; and legendary filmmaker Luchino Viscontis last feature, the 1976 historical drama LInnocente (Film Movement), starring Giancarlo Giannini, Laura Antonelli, and Jennifer ONeill, finally gets a Blu-ray release.

New TV

Stephen Kings domestic creepshow The Outsider (HBO) begins with what appears to be an open-and-shut case of child murder. Theres a suspect. Theres camera footage. And yet theres also an ironclad alibi, and quite possibly a supernatural boogeyman at work. Simultaneously chilling and heartbreaking, its a miniseries about what happens when a town is torn apart by forces beyond its control, and how people go on living in the midst of rampant, inexplicable death. In other words, its about the United States. Cheers!

Also available: James Camerons Story of Science Fiction (AMC/RLJE) is a miniseries that wrangles the heavy hitters of sci-fi, including Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, to talk about their bodies of work;Castle Rock: The Complete Second Season (Warner Bros Home Entertainment) features Miserys Annie Wilkes (Lizzie Caplan) as she gets stuck in Castle Rock while an epic feud between warring families is underway.

For completists: Hawaii Five-O: The Final Season (Paramount) brings the hit reboot to a close; Murdoch Mysteries: Season 13 (Acorn/ITV) is here to refill your cozy mystery cup; and one of the shows that first taught audiences how to stream comes to a climax with Orange Is the New Black: The Final Season (Lionsgate).

The Birth of Ultraman (Mill Creek Entertainment) gathers seven classic episodes from the original series, as well as the very rarely seen Birth of Ultraman, a live stage show that aired on Japanese television in July of 1966 one week before the premiere of the original series; shot in black-and-white, it was the introduction of the character and has never been released in the US until now.

Alonso Duralde is a former editor for TheWrap and has written about film for Movieline, Salon, MSNBC.com. He also co-hosts the Linoleum Knife podcast and regularly appears on Who Shot Ya? and Breakfast All Day. Senior Programmer for the Outfest Film Festival in Los Angeles, he is also a consultant for the USA Film Festival/Dallas, where he spent five years as artistic director. A former arts and entertainment editor at the Advocate, he was a regular contributor to FilmStruck and to "The Rotten Tomatoes Show" on Current. He is the author of two books, "Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas" (Limelight Editions) and "101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men" (Advocate Books).

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July DVD Releases: Sorry We Missed You, You Dont Nomi - The Spool

Turns out, predicting the future can offend people. In 2017, I asserted in an article in Quartz that, Learning to code will eventually be as useful as learning Ancient Greek. I argued that later this century coding as we know it would become irrelevant for most purposes. Meanwhile, learning to code is being over-promised as a silver bullet for long-term career success.

A couple of Greek gods chat... likely in Ancient Greek. As the No Code Movement advances, later this ... [+] century knowing how to code will eventually become like knowing Ancient Greek.

Many of the tech industrys best minds agreed. (Shoutout to Vivek Wadhwa!) Others hated the notion. In addition to some well-reasoned pushback and caveats, I received a few foul retorts to my LinkedIn re-post of the article. (A reliable metric of success.)

One response for which Im grateful came from Gary Hoberman. Youre right on, and were doing exactly that, stated his out-of-the-blue LinkedIn message. Turns out provocative statements about the future also provoke the people who are creating it.

Gary Hoberman soon after founding Unqork. The smile on his face reflects his approach to life... ... [+] curious, engaged and eager to make life better.

In 2017, Hoberman had just departed his role as CIO of MetLife and founded Unqork. At that time, Unqork was just a vision of what has today become a completely visual, no-code application platform that helps large enterprises build complex custom software faster, with higher quality and lower costs all without a single line of code. (My emphasis.)

Thats right enterprise quality applications without writing any code. Hoberman and team were launching the No Code Movement alongside pioneers such as iRise and Webflow. (See my interview with iRise founder Emmet Keeffe, now a partner with global venture firm Insight Partners.)

Unqork hit the Zeitgeist. Since founding in 2017, theyve raised nearly $160 million from investors such as Goldman Sachs and Alphabet investment fund CapitalG, with revenues up 320% in Q1 2020 alone. Then the pandemic accelerated digital transformation initiatives economy-wide.

Mark my words Unqork will be a unicorn IPO of the next couple of years. (Solely my prediction... no indications from Unqork leadership.)

Last month, Hoberman and I caught up via a pandemic-inspired Zoom call.

Unqorks purpose, he told me, is not to displace engineers but to render software invisible and seamless. To enable software engineers to do what they really aspire to do. Unqork seeks to enable the art and practice. Many coders get into the game out of fascination regarding what they can create with technology. Instead, they often end up turning cranks in virtual sweatshops.

Hoberman reframes the role of software engineers. Im an engineer. Its a skill. Its an art form. If you look at engineers as chefs, right now many of them are flipping burgers instead of creating Michelin-star meals.

Unqork's Halloween Party, 2019. Hoberman is the one in the front without a costume... riding the ... [+] unicorn.

Visions Faster To Reality

Indeed, we are all at an inflection point. If we re-envision our roles with respect to technology not just users or victims we see the promise of platforms like Unqorks and visions like Hobermans.

The No Code Movement promises to bring anyones ideas closer to reality. Individuals with little to no coding experience will increasingly be able to manifest their ideas via IT systems without the time, cost, complexity and layers of miscommunication that often arise during traditional software development. Imagine generating new workflows supported by software in a matter of days.

Hobermans approach at Unqork is to render app development and business workflows as seamless as possible, without touching code at all. Coding melts into the background.

Platforms like Unqork might help us and not just software engineers level up from short order cooks to sous chefs.

Software In Days Rapid Covid-19 Response

Covid-19 hit New York hard in early 2020. Unqork had already been working with the City of New York on automating workflows, so the City asked Unqork if they could help. Within 72 hours, the company provided the NYC Covid-19 Engagement Portal. Theyve since rolled out other systems to help with donations of medical supplies and food to at risk populations all within the first month of the crisis.

A dashboard from New York City's pandemic response Food Services Delivery Program created within ... [+] days by Unqork.

Compare that to traditional enterprise software development, where a month gets you a rough draft business requirements document at best and thats typically before any coding occurs.

Germaine to the moment, Hoberman and team are rolling out Unqork Forward, a philanthropic digital resilience program to support small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) battling Covid-19. Theyre offering grant recipients licenses to the Unqork platform and access to technical resources capable of helping them digitalize their operations, return employees to work and drive revenue.

While Unqorks clients are generally large corporations and governments from Goldman Sachs and Liberty Mutual Insurance to the cities of New York and Washington, D.C. Unqork Forward focuses on sectors where SMBs have been hardest hit: restaurants, for example. Restaurants must develop no-touch delivery and pickup while their workforce navigates awkward cultural battles over masks and sanitation.

Unqorks all-in approach to supporting businesses and governments with crisis response reflects an epiphany Hoberman shared with me during our chat. For years Ive looked forward to giving back in big ways, perhaps in retirement. When the crisis hit, Hoberman recalled, I realized one morning we should give back right now, when people need it most and Unqorks platform lets us do it in a big way.

Gary Hoberman with members of the Unqork team at their Union Square HQ in Manhattan, January, 2020. ... [+] He's the one in the Unqork hoodie barely visible in the middle of the photo. Leading from the front!

The right technology in the right place at the right time can be life-changing. What I want is for us as engineers to get back to Michelin-star meals instead of flipping burgers. That would be an amazing place to be.

Never Leave Serendipity To Chance

Because of entrepreneurs like Hoberman and team, our no-code future advances faster than even I predicted. While its early days, imagine the power to which well all have access in a few years. Or in a decade.

One of the reasons I publish articles is to discover others exploring the future. As we say in our innovators connective, TWIN Global, Never leave serendipity to chance. With this in mind, Hoberman and I agreed to gather a group for dinner in-person after the pandemic subsides, and hell speak for TWIN Tech 2020, Digital Rubicon, in September online, of course.

Sharing visions for the future attracts criticismsome helpful, some knee-jerk but it can also light up like minds, expand your horizons and lead who-knows where?

Hoberman will speak for TWIN Tech 2020, September 22 - 24 online, worldwide.

See the original post:

2021 Unicorn IPO: Unqork, The No Code Movement & Offending People With The Future - Forbes

Jagged Little Pill made Alanis Morissette an icon of female rage and 25 years later, with a brand new album, theres still plenty to be angry about

In the video for her new single, Reasons I Drink, Alanis Morissette appears in a group addiction meeting. The song, set to stabbing piano, traces the difficulty of being in recovery when succumbing to addiction feels so freeing. Im such an addict, says the 46-year-old Grammy-winning firebrand, howling down the phone from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Morissette ticks off her top three addictions: Work addiction, love addiction and food addiction, she says. She traces her work addiction back to when I was single digits (she was always a driven performer) and her eating disorders to her teenage years and 20s, during which she was always yo-yoing. In the video she portrays herself as multiple characters: a businesswoman; the 1990s MTV star in the same scarf and hat she wore in the video for her biggest hit, Ironic; a mother; the chairperson holding space for others.

Recovery is a complex, lifelong endeavour, and lockdown has been triggering, says Morissette, who is juggling life at home as a mother of three with promoting her ninth album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road. At 3pm I might feel: Wow, this is a huge gift, Im so overwhelmed with gratitude. By 3.15pm Im raging. By 9pm Im despondent. Isolation is the lighting of the match.

Medication has helped. Most recently she has been dealing with postpartum depression. Her youngest child, Winter, was born last August, a brother to her nine-year-old son, Ever, and three-year-old daughter, Onyx, her children with the rapper Souleye, whom she married in 2010. She has endured the condition after every birth. Previously, she delayed dealing with it; this time she sought to expose it as it happened, appearing on TV after the birth to tell viewers it is like being covered in tar and underwater.

She also headed to the studio for the first time in eight years to record her new album. Songwriting is an exercise in letting the unconscious out, she says. I live my whole life, then I take 10 minutes to write the story of it. The songs are rooted in guitar and piano-based rock; sometimes anthemic (Smiling, Ablaze), often gentler and pensive (Diagnosis, Her). They are not as abrasive as her definitive early songs, but just as she travelled novel ground back then, foregrounding a young womans anger, she is still covering topics that rarely appear in mainstream rock. The song Nemesis documents the mental gymnastics she faced with an unplanned pregnancy. Im excited yet Im filled with despair, she sings. This metamorphosis closed the door and opened a window.

The album also tackles what Morissette terms financial abuse in the music business. In 2017 her former business manager was sentenced to six years in prison for stealing $7 million, or about 6 million, from her, a violation that factors in the songs Pedestal (You grabbed my crown and got everything you wanted) and Reckoning (I hope you enjoy these drawings in your jail). They hark back to Right Through You, from her seminal third album, Jagged Little Pill, particularly the frequently cited verse in which she addresses a man who took me out to wine, dine, 69 me / But didnt hear a damn word I said.

Alanis Morissett lyrics quiz

Morissette has been singing about being leeched off by men, economically and sexually, for 25 years. Thats the most depressing thing in the entire world, she admits, laughing. The themes of pain and division, trust, exploitation, misogyny, lack of integrity, sociopathic personality disorder and narcissism. These are themes I cut my teeth on as a child. To this day, she says, she is still healing from the theft, and from past sexual trauma that she doesnt detail. She feels she could still fall victim to abuse; it is a pattern she wants to break. She is disarmingly fluent in psychology, including the work of Carl Jung and more contemporary academics. If I didnt have a whole team of therapists throughout my life, I dont think Id still be here, she says.

Morissette, who is from Ontario, started a record label by the time she was 10. After a teenage pop career as the Debbie Gibson of Canada, she ran off to Los Angeles in 1995 and cowrote the rockier Jagged Little Pill. No label would sign her, then Madonnas imprint Maverick did. The album sold more than 33 million copies worldwide, making her the youngest artist to achieve diamond-certified status in the US. She moved the needle but felt the drag. I couldnt even leave my hotel room, she says of the claustrophobic spotlight. If I walked by the window and my shadow hit the drapes, people would be screaming outside because they saw movement. She recalls fans rummaging through her room when she wasnt there. Theyd take my underwear. Theyd know it was under my pillow. It was invasive.

When Morissette appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in November 1995, at the age of 21, the magazine billed her as the Angry White Female. Her songs were misinterpreted as combative and pretentious in their fury. She recalls radio DJs looking at her entering stations like they thought I was going to bite their heads off. Her success meant she was treated as an industry saviour, yet one manager shamed her for asking about money. Oh, youre one of those clients, he responded. Today she stands her ground. Youre not going to gaslight crazy-make me when Im on a journey of empowerment.

Two decades before a whimper of the #MeToo movement had even been heard, Morissettes voice allowed listeners to wail louder. But that also backfired as she became a vessel for others projections. If they had issues with an ex-girlfriend, or unfinished stuff with their mom or a horrifying divorce, I became that person theyd show resistance to, she says. The discourse around her felt almost physical, as if it was being thrown at her. Even the solace she offered appreciative fans became burdensome. She equates the loss of anonymity to grief. I used to sit on park benches and watch people. But when I became the watched it was debilitating.

Her isolation deepened when she found herself pitted against other women. I was sold that fame would be a panacea to solve all problems, that Id be singing Kumbaya with my celebrity friends, she says. Morissette was rejected by her peers. I thought I was going to phone Bjrk and Tori [Amos] and all of us were going to love each other. I reached out to a lot of people. Often I was met with: Why are you calling me? She doesnt want to stoke division by naming names.

After Jagged Little Pill, Morissette returned to Canada to work on the follow-up, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, with the producer Tim Thorney. There, supermarket checkout staff would ask her when the album was coming. I wanted to cry, she says. I remember saying: I dont want to make music any more. When Thorney replied, Sounds good! and took her for dinner, she returned to the studio feeling revived and began writing immediately: His freedom took the pressure away.

Released in 1998, that album debuted at No 1 in the US and broke first-week record sales by a female act, a record previously held by The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Yet the 1990s wave of unadulterated female-fronted rock would soon be crushed by teen pop. By 2000 Britney Spears had broken Morissettes diamond record and almost tripled her sales. It was a relief. The white-hot heat of fame waned, which is what made everything okay, actually, she says. Fame is not a circumstance I want to sustain.

Not that Morissette disappeared. Her 2001 single Hands Clean from fifth album, Under Rug Swept, was an international hit, although her next single failed to match its success. She began acting, cropping up in Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and in the movie Dogma, in which she played God. She even had a short stint as an agony aunt for the Guardian. There has been a steady cultural reclamation of the kind of female anger that Morissette was vilified for in the 1990s. Seven years in the making, a Broadway musical inspired by Jagged Little Pill has been a huge success. It includes a character who is raped at a high-school party and later gaslit over the experience. The actor Kathryn Gallagher recalls Morissette reminding her that the character was meant to be angry: The thing that Ive taken away from her in her guidance is the importance of feeling everything and going through every single emotion, even the sticky spots, she says.

Queer artists, including Halsey and Perfume Genius, have cited Morissettes importance in their own self-emancipation. This year Morissettes 1990s peer Fiona Apple similarly demonised as an angry girl back then received acclaim for a new album that delved into those formative industry traumas. Curiously, Morissette hasnt heard about it. Shes focused on her own efforts. Having my worth dictated by how relevant I am in the zeitgeist pop culture is a recipe for disaster, she says. I dont ride that roller coaster.

Despite this cultural course correction, Morissette remains sceptical: she worries about the enduring vapidness that plagues the entertainment world and thinks its foolish to consider that talented women are favoured for reasons beyond marketability. The patriarchy only pays attention when theres a financial shift, she says. It became bankable to have a female artist so it was embraced, and then, off to the races! Yet she acknowledges that some things have improved. In the past Morissettes desire to understand the human condition was a source of mockery by press and public. I used to feel like a freak in every room I was in, she says. Now I dont feel strange. Guardian

Such Pretty Forks in the Road is released by RCA on Friday

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Alanis Morissette: Fans would take my underwear. It was invasive - The Irish Times

The Australian Jewish communitys frustration with the State of Israel reached near boiling point in late February.

The breakdown centered around one woman, former high school principal Malka Leifer, who is wanted in Australia on 74 charges of child abuse. Many in the community saw Jerusalem as dragging its feet on an extradition process that has long been in the works. Some felt the Jewish state was even protecting Leifer from facing the charges against her in Australia.

In 2008, the 53-year-old Israeli mother of eight fled to Israel as allegations emerged that she had sexually abused pupils at Melbournes Adass Israel ultra-Orthodox girls high school. Police complaints against Leifer were submitted by three sisters in 2011, Australia filed for extradition in 2013, and Israel arrested her in 2014.

But in the four years that followed, Leifer managed to convince Israeli courts that she was too mentally unstable to even leave her bed, let alone remain in jail or be sent back to Victoria to stand trial.

Adass Israel ultra-Orthodox girls school headmistress Malka Leifer (left) with her students, among them Nicole Meyer (center) in 2003. (Courtesy)

In 2018, after being filmed appearing to lead a fully functional life, Leifer was rearrested, and shes remained behind bars since. But in the two and a half years that followed, no decision has been made to extradite her, as the Jerusalem District Court despite the damning footage has delved repeatedly into the question of the former headmasters mental fitness.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court is slated to hear an appeal against the Jerusalem District Court decision that found Leifer fit for the extradition hearing that took place last week. The district court wont hand down a decision on extradition until September 21, at which point Justice Minister Avi Nissenkorn will have to sign off on the move. While both a ruling in favor of extradition and a subsequent signature from Nissenkorn are likely, they too can be appealed to the Supreme Court, further extending the Sisyphean six-year process.

For the staunchly pro-Israel, Jewish community in Australia unaccustomed to openly criticizing Israeli authorities the 69 (going on 70) court dates have seen it dragged into largely uncharted waters.

The newly combative position taken by the Australian Jewish leadership as a result has had some onlookers concerned that the Jewish state might be souring a relationship with one of its closest friends in the Diaspora for good.

There are some donors who will halt their donations, Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) president Jeremy Leibler told The Times of Israel in late February.

Leibler was one of nearly a dozen prominent members of the Australian Jewish community who spoke to The Times of Israel regarding the broader impact of the Leifer trial. They compared the case to several other crises believed at the time to be equally ground-shaking and explained why the alleged abusers trial resonated with so many.

When Leibler first spoke to this reporter at the start of the year, President Reuven Rivlin was on his way back from a visit to Australia, during which he declined a request to meet with Leifers alleged victims. This refusal underlined the uneasy relationship between Canberra and Jerusalem over the case.

A private investigator tagged Malka Leifer as she did some shopping in Bnei Brak on December 14, 2017. (Screen capture/YouTube)

The apparent snub came weeks after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to reappoint Yaakov Litzman as health minister. Police in July 2019 recommended that Litzman, who represents the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, be indicted for allegedly pressuring psychiatrists in his office to deem Leifer mentally incompetent. The bombshell development presented an explanation for the drawn-out proceedings, which included the Jerusalem chief district psychiatrist changing his diagnosis of Leifer three times.

The ZFAs Leibler had sent a letter to Netanyahu after the reappointment, calling it a slap in the face to the Australian Jewish Community, the Australian people, the community of Australian immigrants in Israel and most shockingly, the survivors of Malka Leifers alleged abuse.

Its really just an embarrassment because we want to go out and celebrate Israels successes, but this puts us in a very difficult position, Leibler said.

It was attitudes such as Leiblers that has led some familiar with the 120,000-strong Australian Jewish community to speculate that the Leifer case represented a fundamental shift in its relationship with Israel that would lead to a willingness among members to openly criticize the government over other issues as well.

Benjamin Netanyahu, right, listens to Yaakov Litzman at the start of the the weekly cabinet meeting at the prime ministers office in Jerusalem, January 6, 2019. (Gali Tibbon/Pool via AP)

That theoretical willingness to openly criticize Israel was put to the test several months later in the lead-up to July 1, which Netanyahu had vowed would mark the start of his governments plans to annex large parts of the West Bank. But despite what one Australian official described to The Times of Israel as near unanimous opposition to annexation in the countrys Jewish leadership, none of the umbrella groups issued statements warning against the move akin to the condemnations publicized by various self-described pro-Israel groups in the United States and Britain.

In a follow-up interview with ZFAs Leibler the day after Netanyahus annexation target date, with Leifers extradition now appearing to be set for approval, his tone has softened. He called the affair a chance for Israel and Australias Jews to find a way forward while agreeing to disagree on some matters.

Regarding annexation, Leibler said his organization largely refrains from commenting on the matter because the Israeli government had yet to announce what exactly it plans to annex and how.

The ZFA president also sounded less concerned regarding the long-term ramifications the Leifer case might have on his communitys relationship with Israel. In the four months that had passed since he first spoke with The Times of Israel, a judge had found Leifer fit for an extradition hearing (which took place last week), and Leibler described a feeling in Melbourne that this part of the proceedings against her was finally close to wrapping up.

Jeremy Leibler (Courtesy/Zionist Federation of Australia)

While Leibler stopped short of referring to the case as a watershed moment in the communitys relationship with Israel, he maintained that it had signaled new territory of strained relations.

There were many in the community who had an image of Israel as this perfect little country that defies reality. With Leifer, a little bit of that naivet was shattered, Leibler said. He added that he viewed the change in perspective as a positive development.

Australian Jews are quick to point out that their community is unlike many others.

Israel is seen as a home away from home, and you dont criticize it because you might eventually need to go there, said Ittay Flescher, who taught English at Adass boys school and is now the Israel correspondent for Plus61J a progressive Australian Jewish news outlet.

Leibler described a community that was heavily influenced by a post-Holocaust wave of immigration, which expanded its size significantly and also led to a fundamental shift toward Zionism.

An Australian delegation meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu (4th from L) at his office in Jerusalem on October 28, 2019. (Amos Ben Gershom/PMO)

Australian Jews saw their safety and well-being as tied to the success and survival of the Jewish state, even though they werent living there, he said.

That outlook has been passed on to the younger generation, 50 percent of whom are enrolled in Jewish day schools, according to Leibler.

Contrary to many other communities where Zionist sentiment is more strongly felt among older generations, a 2017 survey in Australia found that more Jews between the age of 18-29 identified as Zionists (75%) than any other age range.

Australian Jews saw their safety and well-being as tied to the success and survival of the Jewish state

ZFAs communications director Emily Gian acknowledged that todays Jewish youth are definitely more critical than their parents, but were probably a generation behind America in that sense.

J Street does not exist here, Leibler added, referring to the progressive pro-Israel lobby in the US that has not shied away from criticizing the Israeli government. There isnt an overwhelming amount of support among Jews for one [political] party in Australia. Its traditionally more conservative, but it has never been overwhelmingly so.

J Street U students march on the White House on February 25, 2017, the eve of J Streets annual conference. (J Street via JTA)

However, the ZFA president clarified that the strong connection to Israel does not mean the community has refrained from criticizing the Jewish state entirely. Among the issues denounced by his organization, he cited the Israeli governments reneging on an agreement that would have created an egalitarian prayer space near the Western Wall, the passage to the so-called Nation State Law and the treatment of African asylum seekers.

There has been an unwritten rule: everyone is free to express their views, but we dont criticize Israel on security issues, as were not living in Israel or serving in its army. But that does not extend to all other issues, Leibler said.

But others argued that even that criticism is rather limited.

Former Executive Council of Australian Jewry vice president Manny Waks recalled that in 2010, he had raised the idea of having a meeting to discuss the main umbrella bodys role in Israel advocacy while speaking with another member of the group. The other member quickly shot the idea down.

I was immediately told straight out not to make such a proposal, said Waks, who now lives in Israel and serves as the chairman of Kol VOz, an international group that supports victims of child sex abuse.

Things have changed since then, but only to a degree, he said. The general mainstream attitude is that the establishment [groups are] an additional mouthpiece and defender of the State of Israel and the government of the day.

Victims rights advocate Manny Waks (right) holds up a phone from which Malka Leifers alleged victims Dassi Erlich, Nicole Meyer and Elie Sapper speak to reporters at the Jerusalem District Court on May 26, 2020. (Jacob Magid/Times of Israel)

Many of those who spoke to The Times of Israel acknowledged that the Leifer case brought the community to voice a degree of criticism that until recently hadnt been heard.

They said that much of the fury had to do with the timing of the proceedings, which unfolded against the backdrop of the Australian governments Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The commission was established in 2013 and its findings were published in 2017.

The inquiry exposed massive failures in the Catholic Churchs handling of abuse, and Jewish institutions such as Melbournes Yeshiva Center and Sydneys Yeshiva Bondi were also revealed as having covered up decades of sex crimes perpetrated by faculty against their students.

Thanks to the Royal Commission, the issue of child sex abuse became front and center in Australia, said Waks, who testified before the inquiry.

Sexual abuse and institutional cover-ups have been the zeitgeist of the time, said Flescher. The Royal Commission made it acceptable to talk about the issue, which then made it okay to talk about the Leifer case, despite its rather intimate and gruesome details.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, center, delivers a formal apology to Australias victims of child sex abuse as a result of the findings of his governments Royal Commission, in the House of Representatives at Parliament House in Canberra on October 22, 2018. (Mick Tsikas/AAP Image via AP)

And yet, one of Leifers alleged victims, Dassi Erlich, recalled facing quite a bit of resistance from Jewish communal leadership when she launched the Bring Leifer Back campaign with her sisters Nicole Meyer and Elly Sapper in the beginning of 2017, calling for their former principals extradition.

At that point, her alleged abuser was a free woman living in the ultra-Orthodox settlement of Emmanuel, after a judge concluded that Leifer was too mentally unstable for extradition.

There were a lot of organizations that paid lip service to my cause, but werent really willing to do much beyond that, said Erlich, naming the ZFA (pre-Leibler ) among others.

At one point, Erlich was asked to address an event organized by a pro-Israel group she requested not to identify, whose organizers repeatedly reminded her beforehand to stress to the audience that she does not pass judgment on the entire State of Israel, despite the repeated delays in the Leifer case.

(From L-R) Dassi Erlich, Ellie Sapper and Nicole Meyer pose for a photo in Jerusalem on November 29, 2018. (Jacob Magid/Time of Israel)

It felt like they, in a way, were using me to raise money, she said.

Erlich described a general hesitancy from various groups, which didnt want to be seen as publicly criticizing the Jewish state, to honestly address the issue and Israels role in it.

I was very naive when I started the campaign and could not understand why I was encountering so much resistance, she said. Growing up in the [ultra-Orthodox] Adass community, which is strongly anti-Zionist, I had no idea of the extent to which the wider Jewish community was in a completely different place.

Erlich said some advised her to join forces with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, as such activists would be able to amplify her message regarding ongoing injustice taking place in Israel.

But that wasnt what the campaign was about, Erlich said, explaining her decision to resist such advice. Combating sexual abuse is its own issue and we didnt need another platform to hang ours on.

Australian sisters Nicole Meyer (L) and Dassi Erlich (R) take part in a demonstration on March 13, 2019, outside the Jerusalem District Court after an extradition hearings for Malka Leifer, a former girls school principal wanted for sexual abuse in Australia. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Erlich recalled meeting with former Australian politician Ted Baillieu, who recommended starting her outreach at the national level and leaving the Jewish community aside for the time being.

As he predicted, the Jewish communitys support eventually followed, she said, citing a late 2017 meeting held by community elder Mark Leibler (Jeremys father) with then Israeli justice minister Ayelet Shaked. Leibler stressed the importance of bringing Leifer back to Australia, which Erlich said effectively gave permission for others in the community to make the same demand.

As for Erlich herself, she admitted that she hasnt been able to make that separation between the case and the state in which it is currently unfolding.

My sisters buried in Israel, so thats the only reason I would go back there after this, she said. The place just holds too much trauma for me right now, and I cant ever imagine feeling like Id ever want to go back there.

Its easy to look at the Leifer case in a vacuum, but in conversation with The Times of Israel a number of the elder statespeople in Australian Jewry were quick to point out that the communitys relationship with Israel has faced other crises that many believed would be no less damaging.

Former ZFA president Ron Weiser asserted that nothing has affected the Australian Jewish community vis-a-vis Israel more negatively and deeply than the deadly bridge collapse that took place at the 1997 Maccabiah Games during his tenure.

Israeli rescue workers evacuate members of the Australian Jewish athletic team from a bridge at the Yarkon River in Tel Aviv on July 14, 1997. (AP/Jeremy Feldman)

Four Australian athletes were killed and roughly 70 others were injured when the makeshift overpass above the Yarkon River gave way as they were making their way to the Ramat Gan stadium during the opening ceremony of the Jewish Olympics.

Subsequent investigations in Israel found that the Maccabiah organizers had taken negligent shortcuts in constructing the bridge, leading to the eventual conviction of five. The Maccabiahs president and chairmen were forced to resign and a Haifa court ordered the insurance company for the event, along with the Israeli government, to pay $20 million in damages to over 50 victims.

The fallout took seven years to subside. Fundraisers for Israel were feeling the effect, Weiser said. People who had sent their kids to Israel on programs during wars either were reconsidering sending them or indeed did not send them.

During that time, Australia boycotted the Maccabiah games. This step, Weiser stated, is something we havent seen during the Leifer process.

Israeli rescue workers evacuate members of the Australian Jewish athletic team from a bridge at the Yarkon River in Tel Aviv on July 14, 1997. (AP/Jeremy Feldman)

The Leifer case is terrible, but you have to take into account that the bridge collapse resulted in death, and thats just not comparable, Weiser said. Anyone over the age of 45 or 50 would tell you the same thing.

He also added that Israel could not be solely blamed for all the missteps in the Leifer case, as the Adass Israel school employing her was responsible for booking the red-eye flight that whisked her out of the country in the first place.

But others did not see the bridge collapse as having as deep an impact.

The community was mature enough to understand that in the bridge collapse, it wasnt the government that was in charge of the games, said one of Weisers successors at the ZFA, Philip Chester.

Likewise, the era in which it occurred made for a different response. It happened during the pre-social media era when we were getting our Jewish news once a week on Thursdays, as opposed to now when everything is instantaneous, said Leibler.

Another tragedy that tested the communitys relationship with the Jewish state was the so-called Prisoner X affair, in which Israel was found to have secretly held Australian-Israeli Ben Zygier before he reportedly killed himself in 2010.

Zygier was allegedly a Mossad agent said to have inadvertently leaked names of other agents in the Middle East resulting in their arrest, imprisonment, or death. He was held under a strict media blackout and became known as Prisoner X.

Ben Zygier. (Screenshot ABC TV via Youtube)

Chester, who was serving as ZFA president at the time, said it caused major uproar in the community he represented. However, because details coming out of Israel were so scarce, the address of blame was never clear. Was it the prisoner authorities? Was it the Shin Bet? Was it the Mossad? We didnt really know.

Waks argued that as opposed to the Leifer affair, Prisoner X was seen as a security-related matter. As a result, many in the Australian Jewish community were more willing to give Israel the benefit of the doubt that it hadnt acted inappropriately, he said.

As for the Leifer case, Australian Jewish leaders are now confident that they will be able to weather the damage significant as it might be to the communitys relationship with Israel. That is, of course, dependent upon the July 29 Supreme Court hearing, and the September district court decision.

At the end of the day they still wrote that check because Israel as a whole is far bigger than one issue

I think there are many in the Australian Jewish community who certainly feel that Israel has and continues to take their support for granted, and for them, this has been a very sobering experience, Waks reflected.

Leibler expressed a more optimistic outlook and argued that the crises proved just how sustainable his communitys relationship to Israel has become.

People who picked up the phone called to say how mad they were about this, but at the end of the day they still wrote that check because Israel as a whole is far bigger than one issue, Leibler said.

Here is the original post:

Australian Jews' Israel ties sorely tested by saga of alleged sex abuser Leifer - The Times of Israel