Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution is a new documentary on Netflix about a summer camp for disabled kids in upstate New York. Founded in 1951, by the early 70s it was run largely by hippies. Some of those counterculture-era campers went on to become high-caliber activists who teamed up to bring about big changes in civil rights laws, notably the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

The 108-minute film is worth viewing on its own merits it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it won the audience favorite award but it also features a number of local ties.

It was co-directed by Bay Area filmmakers Jim LeBrecht (a former camper) and Nicole Newnham, and produced by them along with Sara Bolder of Oakland. LeBrecht and Newnham will take part in a live discussion of the film sponsored by the Jewish Film Institute on May 7 at noon.

Among those prominently featured in the film are Neil Jacobson and Denise Sherer Jacobson, an Oakland Jewish couple who met at Camp Jened as teens in 1968. Denise, now 70, served as a consultant on Crip Camp and was the person who came up with the provocative title (crip being the disability communitys reclaiming of the historically derogatory term cripple).

The documentary profiles a summer of love at Camp Jened in the Catskills. But the campers connections and thirst for their civil rights extended beyond their summer idyll, as many went on to become architects of the disability rights movement.

The film follows them staging the 1977 national protests known as the 504 Sit-in, demanding enactment of Section 504 to put teeth in federal legislation that had been passed in 1973 to end discrimination against disabled people. In San Francisco, the Black Panthers fed the protesters and the Salvation Army provided them with mattresses. By 1990, theyd achieved passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The documentary includes interviews with LeBrecht (who attended the camp at age 15), disability rights pioneer Judy Heumann (a counselor at the camp), and Neil and Denise (native New Yorkers, each with cerebral palsy).

Years later, Neil and Denise came to the East Bay as graduate students, got married and adopted a son (chronicled in Denises book The Question of David). They became successful professionals and career activists; theyre also members of Temple Sinai in Oakland, where Neil serves on the board of trustees.

The son of Holocaust survivors, Jacobson, 67, said in an interview for this story that having a boy with a severe disability was devastating to [my parents]. In the Holocaust, disability equated to death. They were determined that I be independent in order to survive.

Denise, an oral historian in addition to having a career as an educator, recounted how the film and its title came about. Part of the story has to do with her recently completed but yet-to-be-published book, My Camp Jened Summer: A Teenage Misfits Tale of Love, Heartache, and Belonging.

In 2011, Jim [LeBrecht] and I bumped into each other in Berkeley, she said. I was working on my memoirs of camp, and Jim had always dreamed of making a film about camp. Wed get together from time to time to discuss it. One day we were bantering [about] titles and I threw out Crip Camp. It was an off-the-cuff thing, but it stuck. I had second thoughts later because I wasnt sure how the disability community or the public would receive it.

For starters, her now-husband was taken aback that is, he said, until I realized what a great eye-opener it is. It shows that theres a disability community with its own culture, that enjoys life.

The camp closed in 1977, but reopened at another New York location in 1980, before succumbing to financial difficulties once again in 2009 and shutting its doors for good.

Jened was transformative, Denise recalled. Outside camp, we lived in a world all too ready to label, stereotype and exclude us because of our disabilities. At Jened, we could escape the restrictions and stereotypes society had ascribed to us as people with disabilities since the time we were children.

In addition, she continued, Jened fostered my sense that I could be of help to others. As a camper, I was expected to assist my bunkmates. Before I went to Jened at age 16, I always got the message that I would always be the one needing help.

No less important than the camps emphasis on individual potential was the exposure it afforded campers via its mostly college-age staff of ex-campers, hippies and anti-war activists to the revolutionary zeitgeist of the civil rights movement and Vietnam War protests. Campers and staff were there to have fun together, as equals, Neil said.

The film includes a tour of the camp, captured some 50 years ago by a teenage LeBrecht, that shows the secluded places where campers would go with their girlfriends or boyfriends at night.

If you have any doubts about what we did, Neil said as a bit of teaser, watch the film. One of the women counselors taught me how to kiss. One of the best physical therapies ever!

That was part of the magic of Camp Jened. Rather than treating its disabled campers with kid gloves, it recognized them as the boisterous, hormonal teenagers they were.

Denise and I have spoken at a few Crip Camp Q&A sessions, Neil said. Im surprised that the focus [of the questions] has been mainly on [the films] advocacy aspects and little on the camaraderie and social aspects. Disability isnt always heavy. Having fun, fully living life, enjoying family and friends are just as important.

The rest is here:

'Crip Camp': two disability rights activists and their summer of love - The Jewish News of Northern California

Review of Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, Searching for Socialism: The Project of the Labour New Left from Benn to Corbyn (Verso Books, 2020)

With Jeremy Corbyn having now departed from the leadership of Britains Labour Party, the postmortems have begun in earnest. For bien-pensant liberal and conservative pundits a ubiquitous presence in the British media Corbynism could only ever have ended in a historic election defeat. Such accounts usually erase the memory of the 2017 general election, when, under Corbyns leadership, Labour came close to unseating the Conservatives on an ambitious left-of-center manifesto.

But with Labour having now lost four consecutive general elections in a decade, under party leaders from its right, center, and left wings respectively, its clear that more fundamental factors underlie the partys current crisis.

Searching for Socialism, a fresh study of Labours New Left by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, thankfully provides the kind of historical context so commonly absent from mainstream discussion. A follow-up to their earlier volume, The End of Parliamentary Socialism, the book condenses and reprises the thesis of its predecessor, while taking stock of the turbulent Corbyn era and Labours heavy loss in Decembers general election.

Panitch and Leys explore the contentious relationship of Labours New Left to social democracy, working to defend its gains while aiming to go beyond them. They trace the story of this current from its initial origins in the second half of the 1960s through its efforts to transform Labour beyond recognition in the 1970s and 80s, and the myriad controversies flowing from those struggles.

They then conclude by assessing Corbynism which marked the first time that the Labour New Left had won the party leadership and the furious, scorched-earth counteroffensive with which it was met by Labours entrenched old guard.

Labours New Left first started to take shape under the leadership of Harold Wilson. Having led Labour into government in 1964, Wilson initially inspired considerable enthusiasm among British socialists. He had a seemingly radical past: a former confrere of Aneurin Bevan, Wilson had resigned from Clement Attlees government along with his mentor in 1951, in protest at the introduction of charges for some NHS services.

Wilson also had a notable talent for double-talk, as Panitch and Leys note, and came to office promising to unleash the white heat of a technological revolution, shaking up Britains decrepit class structure and marching boldly into a new era of change. But Wilson had the misfortune to govern just as the long postwar capitalist boom was showing signs of faltering. A generation of trade unionists had grown up in an acquisitive, affluent society, and many realized that the reality of their own lives didnt measure up to the images with which they were bombarded by television and advertising.

Simultaneously, a new intellectual ferment was taking hold in the universities, as movements oriented toward anti-imperialist, feminist, and anti-racist causes similarly tested the boundaries of the social-democratic consensus. Forging unity between the two strands of this New Left would prove onerous, but they shared a disdain for the traditional parties of social democracy.

In spite of this tension, there was a drift of New Left activists into the Labour Party after Wilsons government fell in 1970. The limitations of fragmented and often localized activity had become apparent to these activists through experience, and they turned to Labour in the hope of scaling up their campaigns.

Their goal was to turn Labour into a pole of attraction around which social movements could coalesce, and to make it a vehicle for raising socialist consciousness as well as an electoral machine. The consequences for the party over the following decade both at the national level and in local government would be profound.

Tony Benn provided the burgeoning Labour New Left with the leadership it had hitherto lacked. By the mid-1970s, it had proven itself as a force to be reckoned with, both in the party and in the trade unions. Previously a modernizing and broadly centrist Labour technocrat who seemed to be in tune with the Wilson zeitgeist, Benn had been radicalized by the frustration of his experience in government, and he saw more clearly than most the threat posed by the emerging New Right. To preserve the gains made by social democracy in the postwar period, Benn argued, it was essential to go beyond them.

Panitch and Leys are quick to debunk common stereotypes that claim the Bennites failed to come to terms with the inexorable rise of globalization. In fact, it was precisely because they recognized the threat a more mobile regime of capital movement would pose to the postwar social compact that they felt it necessary to respond by subordinating capital movements to popular needs. Labours 1974 manifesto, which famously contained Benns ringing call for a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families, bore the unmistakable stamp of the New Left.

Though Labour returned to government in 1974, the Bennite left had imposed a left-wing program on a party leadership that essentially didnt believe in it. Benn himself sought to use his new position as industry secretary to pursue experimental new models of worker ownership and economic democracy. In doing so, he faced opposition from an uncomprehending Labour leadership, the mainstream press, and his own civil servants, all at once. After the 1975 referendum on membership of Europes common market, in which Benn had campaigned unsuccessfully for Britains withdrawal, Harold Wilson took the opportunity to demote the troublesome minister.

After Wilson stood down as prime minister in 1976, his successor, James Callaghan, took to the rostrum at the Labour Party conference to signal a final abandonment of Keynesianism, in a speech that would be warmly received by none other than Milton Friedman. We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending, Callaghan informed delegates and media onlookers. I tell you in all candor that that option no longer exists.

The focus of the Bennites thus turned to democratizing the Labour Partys constitution so that, in future, party leaders could not disregard rank-and-file opinion so casually. The reforms they sought included mandatory reselection of sitting Labour MPs (in effect, forcing them to seek a renewed endorsement from their local party before each general election), and granting ordinary party and union members the right to vote in Labour leadership elections.

Democratizing the Labour Party was, in the eyes of the Bennites, a necessary precursor to the future democratization of the British state. Favorable political changes in the trade unions greatly assisted their campaign: many unions were moving leftward at this time, depriving party leaders of the iron control they had previously exerted over Labour conferences.

Tony Benns concern with party democracy was neither an opportunistic way of boosting his own leadership prospects nor a fetish. For him, democracy was a prerequisite for building mass popular support for and involvement in radical social change. Benn saw himself primarily as a tribune and a teacher, raising the sights of the exploited and oppressed. A future socialist Labour government was to serve, in Benns words, as the liberator unlocking the cells in which people live.

He recognized that neither the Labour Party nor the trade unions had offered any serious program of political education, satisfying themselves instead with a reformed capitalism. As the 1970s wore on and the crisis deepened, the diminishing value of this approach, and the impossibility of continuing in the same vein, became ever clearer.

However, this campaign for party democracy met with aggressive pushback from Labours main power holders. As a result, the Bennite New Left was forced to devote huge amounts of energy to overcoming the internal resistance it encountered inside the party. As Panitch and Leys observe, it became preoccupied with that intraparty struggle and was left with little energy for doing anything else outside it.

By comparison, the Thatcherite takeover of the Conservative Party only faced half-hearted opposition. While the Bennites were bogged down in internecine warfare, the Thatcherites were able to quickly get on with addressing their doctrine to the wider public.

Some Labour MPs compounded this problem by peddling lurid tales of hard-left sectarianism and intolerance to a media that was only too eager to consume them. Attempts by constituency parties to replace right-wing Labour MPs saw the targets swiftly elevated to martyr status in newspaper and broadcast coverage.

Although the Bennites succeeded in extending the franchise for Labour leadership elections and securing mandatory reselection of sitting MPs, it proved to be a step too far for some and split the party. Twenty-eight Labour MPs decamped to the breakaway Social Democratic Party after it was formed in 1981.

This fissure in the anti-Tory vote proved to be devastating, and the Thatcher government having come through a fraught early period, including a sharp recession was well placed to take advantage.

Before the new system for leadership elections could be introduced, however, Labours parliamentary party installed Michael Foot as leader under the old arrangements. Foot was another acolyte of Bevan, about whom he had written a poignant two-volume biography. But Foot was no longer the radical hero of the Labour left, having served as one of the key mainstays of the unpopular WilsonCallaghan governments of 197479.

While Foot did pursue some left-wing policies as Labour leader, including unilateral nuclear disarmament, he sought above all to play the role of unifier, ensuring that his leadership would be defined by its bumbling incoherence, trying to placate all sides and satisfying none. In any case, the first beneficiary of the electoral-college system for electing Labour leaders was Neil Kinnock, who greatly accelerated the counterrevolution against the Bennite New Left.

Elected leader after Labours colossal defeat in the 1983 general election, Kinnock was confronted by a divided, demoralized Left that was unsure of how to approach him. As a protg of Foot, Kinnock had his own left-wing credentials. Previously supportive trade unions, now suffering badly under the Thatcherite assault, had abandoned the Bennites. The all-consuming priority in Labour was ending Thatcherism, without any clear idea of what to replace it with.

The Labour New Left split in two: some regrouped around Marxism Today, house journal of the Eurocommunist wing of Britains Communist Party, while others formed the Socialist Campaign Group, a parliamentary faction of Bennite die-hards. As Marxism Today gravitated toward a new radicalism of the centre and (in some cases, inadvertently) laid the foundations for New Labour, the Campaign Group retreated to a more workerist position, devoid of much of its old creativity, and hunkered down for hard times ahead.

With the Bennite left all but vanquished, the advent of New Labour saw the party reconcile itself (seemingly for good) with neoliberal capitalism. Tony Blairs giddy embrace of light-touch financial regulation, privatization, and imperialist wars of aggression made him a hated figure on what remained of the Labour left.

That left faction was, however, ill-equipped to resist as Blair did away with timeworn Labour shibboleths, most notably Sidney Webbs 1918 Clause IV, with its commitment to state ownership. In any case, few seriously believed by the mid-1990s that Labour was committed to reversing the privatizations of the Thatcher years, let alone doing anything more radical.

Blair led Labour to three election wins, but the music finally stopped for New Labour when the global financial system went into meltdown in 2008, and Gordon Brown led the party to a bad defeat two years later. The financial crisis and the austerity that followed under David Cameron largely erased the modest gains of thirteen years of social reform under Blair and Brown, as Panitch and Leys point out. A reluctant rebellion against Labours long rightward drift finally began to crystallize, first in the trade unions and then in the party itself.

Ed Miliband became Labour leader in 2010, promising to move on from New Labour, but he was elected on the back of the votes of trade unionists, not those of party members. His brother, die-hard Blairite David Miliband, won 44 percent of the Labour membership vote, compared to just under 30 percent for Ed. The constituency Labour parties, for so long strongholds of the Left, had been hollowed out.

Lacking organized support, either within the Parliamentary Labour Party or in the constituencies, Miliband was browbeaten into adopting an uninspiring austerity-lite platform as the ToryLiberal Democrat coalition government tore chunks out of Britains welfare state. The result was another Labour defeat in 2015, including a near-total collapse in Scotland a canary in the mine for the partys near future.

Miliband immediately resigned, and the Labour leadership election that summer started in bleak fashion, as candidates from the partys right and center competed to disown Milibands allegedly excessive radicalism. With the Labour right flagellating itself about New Labours public-spending record, it fell to the depleted forces of the Bennite left to defend the more progressive aspects of the Blairite settlement.

Grassroots members pushed for an alternative. The end result was the impromptu candidacy of Jeremy Corbyn, a follower and close friend of Tony Benn, who squeezed onto the ballot at the very last minute, yet was elected on the first round with nearly 60 percent of the vote under a new one member, one vote system.

Corbyn was widely respected as a dogged campaigner who had used his parliamentary platform to promote a range of often marginal causes, and who had been active in the anti-cuts movement after 2010. He brought hundreds of thousands of new recruits with him, many of whom had been formed by that movement.

However, once Corbyn assumed his position as Labour leader in September 2015, he found himself isolated. The Campaign Group had withered to barely a dozen MPs, forcing the new leader to assemble a shadow cabinet with a center of political gravity well to his right.

That shadow cabinet fell apart when most of its members resigned en masse in coordinated fashion after the European referendum of 2016, forcing another leadership election. Corbyn was reelected as Labour leader by an increased margin, but his opponents never accepted his legitimacy, and the Tory leader Theresa May called the 2017 general election in a bid to capitalize on Labours palpable discomfort.

Scores of Corbyns MPs openly despised him, barely concealing their willingness to throw the election if it forced him out. In similar fashion, senior Labour Party bureaucrats engaged in an unprecedented wrecking campaign, the details of which are only now coming to light. The malicious mindset at work will be familiar to supporters of Bernie Sanders.

Even so, Labour deprived the Tories of their parliamentary majority, with the campaigning group Momentum formed to support Corbyns leadership in 2015 playing an instrumental role.

However, the 2017 election had contradictory consequences. As Panitch and Leys detail, a rousing grassroots campaign reenergized Labour, but the partys focus then shifted back toward Westminster precisely where Corbyn was at his weakest as Brexit came to the crunch. The mass repudiation of neoliberalism that Corbyn had spearheaded in 2017 soon dissipated, as his party returned to the grind of parliamentary maneuvering.

The prospects of meaningful party reform likewise died at this point: with a socialist-led Labour government seemingly an imminent possibility, Corbyn prioritized holding the parliamentary party together over democratizing Labour. His concessions, however, earned him no goodwill from the Labour right.

Meanwhile, the issue of Brexit tore Corbyns fragile base apart. The Labour left could neither make a convincing case for a left-wing Brexit it was evident, as Corbyn acknowledged, that the nationalist right was in the ideological saddle nor could it offer a plausible strategy for democratizing European institutions from within. Corbyns supporters in the party were badly split on the matter, and they argued rancorously among themselves.

Belatedly, Corbyn ended up calling for a second referendum on Brexit, a stance that not only failed to fire up most of his supporters, but also alienated many voters in those Labour-held rust belt constituencies that had voted Leave in 2016.

Much of the Labour right, sensing an opportunity, had latched on to the anti-Brexit cause with a view to maximizing Corbyns embarrassment and splintering his support base. They succeeded in that aim, at least, but some of them paid for it with their jobs in Decembers election: fifty-two of the sixty seats Labour lost had voted Leave three and a half years earlier. In the process, they helped hand a mandate for a hard Brexit to Boris Johnsons Conservatives, before the COVID-19 pandemic intervened.

Corbyns attempt to renew and reimagine social democracy for a new era was successfully undone by his inner-party opponents, who made such a fuss of claiming the social-democratic label for themselves, without making any effort to explain what they took it to mean.

Leo Panitch has remarked elsewhere that the responsibility for maintaining Labour Party unity bears down heaviest on its left wing: it is more easily guilted, always. Keir Starmers appeal for unity has resonated with a tired party membership guilt-stricken by Decembers defeat, winning over many erstwhile Corbynites.

Starmer has implied that he will keep party policy well to the left of where it was before Jeremy Corbyns leadership. If he is serious in this aim, he will have to face down opposition from the Labour right in a way that both Miliband and Corbyn were unable to do, which seems most unlikely.

To understand the bitterness of Labours internal rivalries under Corbyn, we need to appreciate the fundamental nature of the divisions within the party. Labour has always been a fractious and borderline incoherent coalition of divergent perspectives. Simply holding the party together as a serious electoral force and a prospective party of government, then, necessitates certain ideological elisions.

The result has been, as Raymond Williams once noted, an evident poverty in theory in Labour, as any attempt to go beyond quite general definitions leads at once to strains on this complicated alliance. Corbyns unlikely rise to the party leadership instantly brought these latent tensions to the boil.

In the Labour Party, mutually antagonistic political projects primarily those of reformist socialism and centrist liberalism are squeezed together, cheek by jowl, in the same unwieldy political vehicle. The intense antipathy between its warring camps suggests that this is not because of any shared commitment to pluralism.

In truth, Labours much-mythologized broad church remains welded together primarily by the need to adapt to a first-past-the-post electoral system that punishes splits severely as underlined by the fact that Change UK, a centrist breakaway from Labour formed in February 2019, had dissolved completely by the end of the year.

And what of Momentum? With a membership that peaked somewhere north of forty thousand, the organization quickly established itself as a highly effective campaigning machine, mobilizing many thousands of Labour activists in the general elections of 2017 and 2019.

It had plenty of practice: the 2016 challenge to Corbyns leadership, which saw sizable pro-Corbyn rallies take place in towns and cities across Britain, turned out to be a useful dress rehearsal for the general-election campaign of the following year. Its social-media presence, at least at its very best, has been witty, sharp, and provocative.

But Momentum has had far less success in reorienting Labour toward social movements, or with socialist political education, notwithstanding its original intentions. It has been overwhelmed by its responsibilities, forced to serve simultaneously as get-out-the-vote operation, propaganda outfit, factional organizing vehicle, and Praetorian Guard for an embattled party leader.

Its progress in reforming the party has thus been very limited, and Labours structures remain essentially unchanged since 2015. It would be fairly easy for Starmer to roll back the modest reforms made under Corbyn; an undeniably poor return for four and a half years of acrid civil war.

As Jeremy Corbyn departs the political limelight to see out the remainder of his career on the Westminster backbenches, he does so to a chorus of derisive hooting from his many adversaries. He has done well just to survive the extraordinary campaign of vilification directed at him.

Corbyns supporters were similarly demonized. In fact, so splenetic was the screaming vitriol circulating in the press and right-wing social media circles that two elderly Labour canvassers came away from the campaign trail last December with broken bones. The British media, normally so scrupulous about upholding standards of civility in politics, took minimal interest in such attacks.

Undoubtedly, Corbyn had his failings as Labour leader, some of them major. Yet he also generated heartfelt enthusiasm, renewed interest in socialism after decades on the margins, and inspired a movement several-hundred-thousand strong: achievements that none of his detractors are ever likely to match.

Crestfallen and badly disoriented though that movement is now, the grievances that fueled it rampant inequalities of wealth and power, deep-seated social alienation, the injustices of a decade of cuts, and the impending threat of climate breakdown remain. The history supplied by Panitch and Leys provides us with a valuable and timely reminder that, for all the defeats it has suffered over the years, Labours New Left current has been stubbornly resilient.

Its worth noting the apparent change in what Panitch and Leys have to say about the prospects for socialist advance through the Labour Party. The authors had previously concluded in The End of Parliamentary Socialism that the failure of Bennism and the rise of New Labour settled the question of whether Labour could be a vehicle for socialist politics: the answer was no. In Searching for Socialism, by contrast, they acknowledge that the revived Labour left is unlikely to see any other way forward than continuing the struggle inside the Labour Party.

The failure of Europes new left parties to make the hoped-for breakthrough hangs heavy here: the eclipse of Syriza after showing such early promise was particularly shattering. Other left parties, such as Podemos, have, as Panitch and Leys note, at best served as minor partners in coalitions with mainstream social-democratic parties and even that is likely to be more than any British equivalent could hope for, so long as the first-past-the-post system remains in place.

But the authors do see 2019 as a kind of watershed, and an indication that the generation of Labour leftists that came to maturity in the 1970s can no longer take that project any further. Instead, those drawn into Labour by the Corbynite insurgency must find their own way forward, discovering and developing new political forms in the process.

It might take a while, but Corbynisms scattered forces will regroup, rebuild, and resume their struggle. There remains a world to win, though we may be short of time in which to do it.

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The Labour Left Didn't Start With Jeremy Corbyn's Leadership, And It Won't End There Either - Jacobin magazine

MY OLDEST SON was 5, in his second month of kindergarten, when his teacher asked why his dad hadn't been seen in the pickup line for a couple of weeks. "He's living with Dennis Rodman," my son answered, dripping nonchalance, as if this were a task every Catholic-school dad would eventually get around to completing.

The living arrangement was brief, roughly two weeks in the fall of 1995, and more of a necessity than a choice. I was working under an extreme deadline to write Rodman's autobiography, "Bad As I Wanna Be," and having prescribed interview times -- "From 9 to noon, we'll cover the prairie years" -- was not something that meshed with the Rodman lifestyle. So I headed to Southern California to camp out with him and his then-agent, Dwight Manley, a world-renowned coin expert who represented exactly zero other athletes at the time. Two weeks with Dennis Rodman in the mid-'90s might sound like a thrilling setup, but in reality, most of my time was spent in a panicked attempt to get Rodman to focus on telling the stories that needed to become a book in less than three months. The enduring image of that time in my life is Dennis, wearing Zubaz, lounging on a couch with a remote in his hand while I sit in a pool of my own sweat, trying to hear whatever he's mumbling over the roar of the television.

From Detroit to San Antonio to Chicago, from his appearance and his antics to his brilliance and his exuberance, Dennis Rodman crafted a Hall of Fame career on his way to winning five NBA titles in all. Watch on ESPN+

There were also moments that nestled perfectly into the mid-'90s zeitgeist: a Saturday morning at a nail salon in Beverly Hills, a block off Rodeo Drive, me sitting at the juice bar wearing scraggly basketball shorts -- I was told it was a casual outing -- while I waited for Dennis to get his nails painted a nice rosy pink. He didn't have an appointment -- fame doesn't call ahead -- but he was allowed in anyway. Afterward, he tossed me the keys to his Ferrari convertible and said he'd resume his spot behind the wheel when his nails were sufficiently dry. My car at the time, a '78 Honda Civic, was not adequate preparation for the power of the Ferrari, and my failure to master the clutch caused us to bounce our way down Rodeo Drive, top down, Dennis obscenely obvious with his fuchsia hair easy for all to see. As I remember it, the nails dried quickly.

For a brief time, I found myself uniquely positioned (in the passenger seat, mostly) to witness the basketball/pop culture spectacle of Rodman and the Chicago Bulls. Surreal is a word that has been ground into a fine mist, but trust me -- it fits here. And my experience illustrates the very real challenge that comes with "The Last Dance." Even in our saturated mediascape, it's difficult to describe the mania surrounding those Bulls teams to someone who didn't experience it at the time.

Michael Jordan was perhaps the biggest celebrity in the world, responsible for spreading the gospel of basketball across the globe. He was the brand ambassador, the headliner, the frontman, and every Bulls season of their second three-year run of championships was like an 82-stop tour of everyone's favorite band. Rodman, with his earrings and nose rings and tattoos and ever-changing hair color, was the group's pop culture phenomenon, the first sports hero of the disaffected and marginalized. His embrace of gay culture, symbolized by his highly controversial decision to dye the AIDS ribbon in his hair, was radical for the time. His open discussions about vulnerability, about how it was OK for young people to not know precisely who or what they were, struck chords never heard from a famous athlete. People who never cared about basketball cared about Dennis Rodman.

"Bad As I Wanna Be" was published before the NBA playoffs in the spring of '96, as the Bulls were finishing their 72-win season. And if there's one tidbit that might begin to touch on what swirled around that team at the time, maybe it's this: Prior to the book's release, in a move that was equal parts marketing magic and legitimate precaution, copies were locked in warehouses in the Chicago area -- and protected by armed guards.

THE FIRST TIME Rodman suited up for the Bulls, an exhibition game in late October of 1995 in Peoria, Illinois, he went on a tirade against a replacement referee that ended when he threw the ball against the shot clock and was assessed a technical. Based on years of experience playing for various martinets who failed to appreciate the innate beauty of the well-timed tantrum, Rodman's first inclination after such a transgression was to look at the bench to see how his coach reacted to what he'd just seen. Was he defending him? Was he frantically pulling off a reserve's warm-up top and flinging him toward the scorer's table? Was he covering his mouth with his hand and talking to the nearest assistant about what fresh hell this is?

The second Rodman joined the Bulls, Phil Jackson understood his fate. And even though he was probably shocked to confront it so soon, he reacted to this outburst in the best possible way: He leaned back in his chair and laughed. You remember the look: fingers steepled across his right knee, head tilted back, foot raised slightly off the floor. It was the Jackson Special: laid-back, trusting, his benevolent aura beaming its way into Rodman's fragile psyche.

"I found out from the start, he's going to let me go," Rodman told me for the book. "He's not as worried about distractions, because look who he's been coaching all these years. The Bulls know about distractions, and they know how to play through them."

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Rodman played every possession like it was a referendum on his worth as a human. He went to outrageous lengths to convince the world that basketball was not his identity, and then he played like nothing else mattered. He reveled in the dirty work, the game's menial and unquantifiable tasks, and then demanded adulation for it. There was, of course, something manic about the way he played, like it was something embedded deep in his core, something unrelated to the game. Insecurities, questions of self-worth, fear of losing everything -- it was all swirling inside him. I'm sure it signifies something important that our most indelible images of Jordan are of him launching his body vertically, and our most indelible images of Rodman are of him launching his body horizontally. John Edgar Wideman, writing in The New Yorker in 1996, described Rodman's on-court style as "compelling, outrageous, amoral," and his persistence as "percussive behavior so edgy it threatens to wreck the game that's supposed to contain it."

Anyone who spent any time around Rodman during his career would come away with a profound appreciation of the resilience of the human body -- or at least his. Even in his mid-30s, Rodman could stay out all night and still play 40 minutes and grab 15 rebounds the next night. During the season chronicled in "The Last Dance," he led the league in rebounding for the seventh straight season, played 80 games and averaged almost 36 minutes a game -- nearly all of them at a pace only he could keep. He was 36 years old. For comparison, the last time Steph Curry averaged 36 minutes a game he was 25. The last time he played 80 games he was 26.

Any consideration of Rodman the basketball player -- not the actor or reality-show celebrity or amateur diplomat -- has to start by separating his self-destructive tendencies from his work ethic. He might have wanted people to believe that he didn't work hard, that his body was somehow genetically inclined to withstand whatever punishment he chose to inflict upon it, but that isn't entirely true. One of his more endearing quirks was a compulsion to randomly stop at health clubs for an impromptu workout. These stops were never prefaced by an announcement or a conversation. He never expressed a need or a desire for a workout; he just pulled into a parking lot and walked through the door. (Wearing Zubaz every time, sometimes right side out, other times inside out. I never discerned a logic to the pattern.) The first time, I injected my own limited (rule-bound) worldview into the mix by asking (stupidly) whether he was a member of whatever gym he'd just discovered. He gave me a look that made it clear he hadn't ever considered that health clubs existed for any purpose other than his convenience. Every stop played out the same way: He walked in, told the gobsmacked kid behind the counter he was going to be working out, grabbed a towel and headed to the nearest unoccupied StairMaster. Nobody had the time or the inclination for paperwork.

RODMAN AND JORDAN weren't friends, as I'm sure "The Last Dance" will make clear. Their lives converged only on the court. But Rodman didn't have unqualified respect for many players -- his favorite epithet was "phony," a weapon he wielded, at times recklessly, as a means of protecting his self-proclaimed authenticity -- but he had unqualified respect for Jordan. And for good reason: Rodman would undoubtedly dispute this, but his alliance with Jordan might have saved his career.

The 10-part Michael Jordan documentary "The Last Dance" is here.

Latest updates, full schedule NBA experts on MJ's greatness Big moments from the premiere How to get ready for the doc

In October 1995, I happened to be with Rodman when he received a call announcing the finalization of the trade that sent him from the Spurs to the Bulls. It's easy to forget, amid the glare of those three straight NBA titles, how risky this move was at the time. Rodman was borderline radioactive in San Antonio, a combustible brew of grievance and insolence. His talent was undeniable, and the fit in Chicago held tantalizing potential, but why would the Bulls take this chance? At a news conference, Spurs general manager Gregg Popovich said, "Big surprise, huh?" and made a point to tell everyone how difficult it was to find a team willing to take Rodman, who had played just 49 games the season before because of suspensions and injuries. Asked if he considered it a big relief to be rid of Rodman, Popovich said, "A big relief? We were without him for quite a bit last season, so it's not any different in many respects."

The 1995-96 Bulls entered the season a mysterious bunch. The roster was strong, but roles would have to be altered. Jordan was coming off a 17-game season after ending his fling with baseball. Power forward was manned by a collective shrug. Rodman the basketball player was uniquely engineered for the job -- how many Hall of Famers get there through an outright refusal to shoot? -- but his potential to blow the whole thing up was no small consideration. Bulls general manager Jerry Krause, loved for assembling the NBA's greatest team and loathed for dismantling it, harbored just enough non-mainstream views to make him the ideal candidate to welcome Rodman. (For instance: Krause once told me players should be measured only to the top of the shoulder; he believed the neck and the head were not functional inches and were thereby irrelevant -- hence his affection for Elton Brand, a man unencumbered by a superfluous neck and Krause's choice as the No. 1 pick overall in 1999.)

What would have happened had Rodman stayed in San Antonio or been relegated to another basketball outpost? Despite his talent, he was inching closer and closer to becoming a permanent sideshow. It's not inconceivable that without Jackson's calm and Jordan's obsessive competitiveness, Rodman's career could have devolved into a series of signings and releases by teams willing to take a chance but not make a commitment.

The Bulls refocused Rodman, brought him closer to the guy he was early in his career in Detroit, when he famously responded to a question about his background by saying, "I'm nobody from nowhere." Jackson macheted his way through the thicket of Rodman's insecurities. Jordan was strong enough on the court to channel Rodman's energies. He might have been the only one, at that moment in time, strong enough to do this.

The Bulls brought out Rodman's genius and allowed him to hold it up for the world to see. They made him. Somewhere else, maybe anywhere else, might have unmade him.

ONE OF THE last times I interacted with Rodman was during training camp in Deerfield, Illinois, mere days after the trade was completed. He was living in a Residence Inn adjacent to the Bulls' complex, sharing a "loft suite" with teammate Jack Haley. I would like to say Dennis and I were tidying up some of the book's ragged edges -- or fine-tuning, maybe -- but that book was intended to be ragged and loosely tuned, as a reflection of Rodman's uniquely random path to fame.

We were talking in a hallway of the Berto Center training facility when Rodman said he needed to go lift. The day's obligations were over, and the place felt empty except for a few muffled conversations down the hall. I stopped when we got to the weight room -- I'm sure I was already at least 100 yards beyond the boundaries specified by my credential -- but Rodman waved me through with a look that said his imprimatur was an all-access passport.

The groundbreaking sports analysis program returns with a historical edition airing in conjunction with "The Last Dance" on ESPN. The 5-episode series explores the 1998 Chicago Bulls team and features episodes hosted by Phil Jackson, Dennis Rodman and Steve Kerr. Watch on ESPN+

There was no one else around, so why not? I wasn't there as a journalist, really, and the place seemed empty. Why couldn't I be the preferred non-member for a change? Still, when your professional life is defined in many ways by the places you can and cannot go, an infraction like this one feels egregious.

And weirdly liberating.

The room was L-shaped, as I remember, the flooring bloodred, and my attention was drawn to human movement coming from my left, the long leg of the L: a person on a bench. Great -- I'm busted. A head turned toward me. Our eyes met.

Jordan?

Jordan!

Be cool. Be calm. Me, Dennis, Michael. Nothing big, really. Just us three. Just us three dudes. Just us three dudes hanging out at the gym.

I mumbled something to Dennis about how I should probably be going. Michael's eyes remained fixed on me, and I could feel the heat of a thousand suns bloom in my face. Dennis waved off my common-man concerns -- Michael's cool, the wave suggested -- and asked me to spot him. When Dennis finished his set, I sensed a presence behind me. I turned.

Jackson?

Jackson!

My mind registered his arrival with the brain-stem buzz reserved for the moment high school kids at a kegger see the cops. How did he know? Did my new friend Michael rat me out?

Phil wasn't there to lift. He was there to expel. The look he gave me was mostly pity -- Who do you think you're kidding? -- and maybe a little amusement. I responded with a look I thought he might appreciate, one that said this was all Dennis' idea. I might have even pointed a finger at Dennis, shielded by my body, like a hostage indicating his kidnapper.

"Time to go" was all Phil said, and it was. It definitely was. I said goodbye to Dennis, who was laughing by this point. I had to walk past Phil on my way out, and he stood his ground, looking through me to Dennis with a bemused look on his face. I knew that look, had actually employed it myself, and I knew there was more of that -- more of Dennis' quirkiness and volatility and, yes, charm -- awaiting Phil, and Michael, and the Bulls, and Chicago, and pretty much everyone else in the world. I muttered an ineffective, and probably unnecessary, apology, and as Phil turned toward me I swear I detected something approaching kinship in his eyes.

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'The Last Dance' - Dennis Rodman embodied the pop culture phenomenon of the '90s Bulls - ESPN

Every year, on 22 April, Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement. Songs about the natural world, including those by Woody Guthrie, have been around since the 40s, and many of the greatest songwriters have penned compositions about the planet on which we all exist. The best Earth Day songs, then, reflect not only the ways in which our planet has changed over the years, but also the ways in which we have expressed concern over its survival.

To mark Earth Day, we have selected our 20 best environmental songs. Though we werent able to squeeze in all our favourites and had to leave out wonderful songs by Ken Boothe (The Earth Dies Screaming), The Byrds (Hungry Planet), Miley Cyrus (Wake Up America), Bo Diddley (Pollution), Peter Gabriel (Here Comes The Flood) and Country Joe McDonald (Save The Whales) we scoured reggae, jazz, country, folk, soul, rock and pop for songs both disturbing and inspiring.

Heres to this amazing endangered world of ours. Think weve missed any of your best Earth Day songs? Let us know in the comments section, below.

Listen to the best Earth Day songs on Apple Music and Spotify.

The song One World was recorded in a Berkshire barn. John Martyn remembered it as a time when the adjoining farmhouse was filled with Jamaican friends and their children who were in England to visit Island Records boss Chris Blackwell. The title track of his masterpiece album features one of Martyns greatest vocal performances, against his echo-saturated guitar. The song has a beautiful simplicity, as he sings, Its one world, like it or not/Its one world, believe it or not/Its one world. Nearly three decades later, when Martyn was reflecting on the song, he believed he had captured a zeitgeist moment. One World has now become a phrase used all over the television, Martyn said. Took em a long time to f__king realise. I dont think many people knew the expression before then. The tune is superb a perfect expression of how we are all individual and universal at the same time.

Bonos longing for spiritual renewal was reflected in his song Indian Summer Sky, which is about the desire to return to a more organic world (the seasons change, and so do I). Bono wrote the song in New York and said he was trying to convey a sense of spirit trapped in a concrete jungle. Sixteen years earlier, U2 had allowed a live version of their song Until The End Of The World to appear on the album Alternative NRG, which raised funds for Greenpeace. U2 were joined by other bands, such as Sonic Youth and UB40, on an album recorded live with a solar-powered mobile facility. Guitarist Brian May of Queen contributed the song New Damage.

Since the dawn of industrialisation, poets and songwriters have been extolling the spiritual and mental health benefits of getting out into nature. Dar Williams wrote the powerful song Go To The Woods in 2012, a composition that expressed her fears that the green spaces of the world are disappearing. Touring musician Williams devotes her spare time to environmental causes, not least her Give Bees A Camp project, which combines concerts and planting bee-friendly gardens for schoolchildren. Williams has also covered Joe Strummers rousing song Johnny Appleseed (If youre after getting the honey, hey/Then you dont go killing all the bees).

On his 1974 album Ragged Old Flag, country singer Johnny Cash addressed the political issue of the environment, through the device of a nostalgic song in which a father warns his son that they cannot eat the fish they are trying to catch. Though the acoustic mood of the song is upbeat Cash was joined on guitar by Carl Perkins the lyrics are bleak: There was a time the air was clean/And you could see forever cross the plains/The wind was sweet as honey/And no one had ever heard of acid rain.

Mike Love, who co-wrote with Al Jardine a different song also called Dont Go Near The Water, said he hated the ignorance that made people violate the laws of nature. Love and Jardine were encouraged by The Beach Boys then manager, Jack Rieley, to write an environmental song for the band, and the result was the anti-pollution plea that became the opening track for their 1971 album, Surfs Up. The prescient lyrics about man poisoning the sea were sung by Brian Wilson and the band. The downbeat mood of the song was heightened by the eerie Moog synthesiser playing of Daryl Dragon.

Photographs of the dust storms that wrecked southern America in the 30s are still shocking, and the devastation and migration they caused prompted Woody Guthrie to write his brilliant album Dust Bowl Ballads. I met millions of good folks trying to hang on and to stay alive with the dust cutting down every hope, said Guthrie, who made poetry out of despair.

In Pollution, the brilliant satirical singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer warned visitors to America about the environmental problems of his home country, and the way his nations air and water was being blighted. A short film of Pollution, featuring a cartoon of a bird playing the piano at a rubbish dump, combined with scenes of industrial contamination across the States, was made for the US Communicable Disease Centre. The bitingly funny lyrics included the verse Just go out for a breath of air/And youll be ready for Medicare/The city streets are really quite a thrill/If the hoods dont get you, the monoxide will.

Randy Newman was poleaxed by back pain and lying on the floor in 1969 when a television news item came on about the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, literally catching fire once again, because it was filled with oil waste. His disturbing song, sung at a maudlin pace with slow piano, is full of potent imagery: The Cuyahoga River goes smokin through my dreams/Burn on, big river/Burn on.

Rush lyricist Neil Peart once commissioned some drum makers to build him an entire kit from a 1,500-year old piece of Romanian wood. Peart recalled that he wrote his song The Trees in about five minutes, after seeing a cartoon picture of trees carrying on like fools. He said: I thought, What if trees acted like people? So I saw the song as a cartoon, really, and wrote it that way.

Queen singer Freddie Mercury said that he sometimes felt helpless about the state of the planet and that was the reason he and Brian May penned Is This the World We Created?. Mercury went on to explain that he and May were thinking about poverty going on all around the world and thats why the track came about it was a way of showing that I can do my bit. The song, which reflected the suffering of children, came at the time of natural disasters in Africa which had resulted in terrible famine. Queen performed the song, which was on their 1984 album, The Works, as the encore to their famous Live Aid showin 1985.

In 1971, singer-songwriter John Prine wrote his marvellous song Paradise about the environmental damages of strip mining and the destruction it wreaked on small communities. Paradise, which was also known as Mr Peabodys Coal Train, was about was about Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, the town his parents had grown up in and how it was ruined by a coal company. Among the poetic, moving verses is: Then the coal company came with the worlds largest shovel/And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land/Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken/Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.

On his 1974 environmental song, Before The Deluge, Jackson Browne told the story of his generations ideals and illusion, and their fall from grace. The song was eerily prophetic, with its stark warning: Some of them were angry/At the way the earth was abused/By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power/And they struggled to protect her from them/Only to be confused/By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour. The song was from the album Late For The Sky, which featured Jai Winding, the son of Verve Recordsjazz trombonist Kai Winding, on keyboards. Versions have been recorded by musicians as diverse as Joan Baez and Christy Moore.

Cat Stevens wrote his song Where Do The Children Play? for the 1970 album Tea For The Tillerman. The song reflects many of his concerns about poverty, war, ecological disaster, pollution and the future of the human race. Stevens became a Muslim later in the decade and is now known as Yusuf Islam. He remains committed to what he called the harmony and balance of the universe, and in May 2019 gave his support to Europes first green mosque, in Cambridge, which was clad in solar panels and surrounded by apple trees.

Earth Song, which appeared on the album HIStory: Past, Present And Future, Book I, was the best of Michael Jacksons socially conscious songs. This sweeping track about the environment and welfare was a No.1 hit in the UK and went on to receive a Grammy nomination. It was notable for its powerful video, too.

Bob Marley died in 1981, but his music continues to inspire people who love protest songs and care about the environment. In 2019, for example, Chicagos The Rock And Roll Playhouse held an Earth Day celebration concert featuring tunes by the great master of reggae. Marleys gorgeous song Sun Is Shining was first recorded in the 60s and re-recorded for the album Kayain 1978. Island Records boss Chris Blackwell later recalled, The original version of Sun Is Shining was produced by Lee Perry. I loved his production, which was very sparse. But the version we re-recorded for Kaya has a great atmosphere, too. We tried to reflect the essence of the song, which is saying the sun is shining but dont forget that people are suffering too.

I wrote Big Yellow Taxi on my first trip to Hawaii, Mitchell explained in 1996. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart this blight on paradise. Thats when I sat down and wrote the song. Mitchells mesmerising song has been covered by Bob Dylan, Counting Crows and Janet Jackson.

Bob Dylan was only 21 when he wrote the beautiful lyrics, such as Ive stumbled on the side of 12 misty mountains, in A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall, the iconic protest songin which he warned of impending apocalypse. In 2009, before a United Nations climate change conference began in Denmark, the UN Environment Programme released a rare live recording of Dylan performing his song-poem set to dramatic photographs of shrunken ice caps, barren landscapes and devastated lives.

The mysterious, multi-layered After The Gold Rush is full of different themes and meanings, but there is one thing at the heart of the song: After The Gold Rush is an environmental song, said Neil Young. Dolly Parton has recorded several versions it. The line Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s is memorably chilling, and has been updated by Young, who now sings in the 21st Century in concert. Young also wrote Be The Rain, a song that calls on the big oil companies to stop ruining the planet. In 1985, Willie Nelson, Young and John Mellencamp set up Farm Aid to increase awareness about the importance of family farms. Young has remained a committed environmental activist and in 2018 he criticised President Trump for his denial of climate-change science.

The beautiful voice of Marvin Gaye rings out in despair as he sings Where did all the blue skies go? on his Motownclassic Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology), which was written for his 1971 album, Whats Going On. At the time, Motown boss Berry Gordyhad not heard the word ecology, and Gayes masterful song may have been one of the first ever to deal with the mercury poisoning of fish. This is a sorrowful masterpiece and, given what we now know has happened to the environment in the past half-century, seems a moment of musical genius and foresight.

What A Wonderful World is one of the most uplifting, life-affirming songs of all time and all because of the heartfelt warmth in the singing of the jazz legend Louis Armstrong, a man who was already in failing health when he recorded the two-minute gem, written by Bob Thiele and George Weiss. Lush instrumentation introduces a magnificent song that opens with such memorable lines: I see trees of green, red roses, too/I see them bloom for me and you/And I think to myself: What a wonderful world.

Its good to end on a note of positivity so treat yourself on Earth Day and savour again the beauty of Satchmos hit.

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Best Earth Day Songs: 20 Tracks That Make The World A Better Place - uDiscover Music

Update 11:15am CT: After publication, TikTok banned Nick Fuentes and several other Groyper accounts. They issued the following statement:.

We are committed to promoting a safe and positive app environment for our users. Our Community Guidelines outline behavior that is not acceptable on the platform, and we take action against behavior that violates those policies, including by removing content or accounts.

The original post follows below.

White nationalists and far-right figures have found a new platform to spread their messages and expand their following, moving to TikTok, Gen Zs current favorite app.

The move is being led by Nick Fuentes, who is bringing his loyal, white nationalist Groyper following with him.

I never got into it cuz (sic) I cant dance or anything, so I was always Im not going to do the Renegade, Fuentes stated on Sunday referring to the wildly popular dance of TikTok.

But hes since changed his tune.

Were on TikTok and were going to be using TikTok because its fun, because why not? Fuentes added. He then gave credit to a fellow Groyper who came up with the idea to move to the platform while adding, It was his idea, he suggested we get serious about making an American First Hype House on TikTok and bring the Groypers on TikTok and I think its a great idea because you know, when you think about social media, our biggest presence as a political movement is on Twitter.

As the Daily Dot wrote last year:

A Groyper is a member of Fuentes movement of his brand of alt-right white nationalism. The alt-right is a loose collection of conservatives that harbor white nationalists. Fuentes is currently one of its most public faces.

As their chosen mascot, Groypers took hold of anexploitableillustration ofPepe the Frog. While iterations of Pepe are commonly used within the far-right,this version is of Peperesting a conspicuous face against his two hands.

Fuentes further stated that the problem with Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube is that they all have these restrictions, regulations, community guidelines, terms of service that are obstructive and restrictive, while adding, I think TikTok is going to be a great outlet for political content, but particularly for young people, for zoomers

Were trying to appeal to a younger audience, Fuentes added.

Asked why he has joined the platform, Fuentes didnt respond to multiple requests for comment from the Daily Dot.

His white nationalist venture seems to be a work in progress. On Tuesday while making a TikTok, Fuentes apparently became overcome with rage and destroyed a trash can.

I got so mad making this one [TikTok] that I smashed a garbage can, he wrote with a picture attached to the message of a shattered plastic waste bin. I kept accidentally deleting good takes and my phone kept falling off the table, I was so upset.

But the rest of their use of the platform seems to be going much smoother. Fuentes has been pushing a list of other far-right figureheads who are on the platform as well, hoping to grow their audience.

The list, on messaging app Telegram, includes the likes of Vincent James Foxx, a far-right YouTuber, and alt-right personality Tim Baked Alaska Gionet.

Now, they are using the platform to start another Groyper War, their effort to attack conservative Trump supporters who hold a slightly mainstream conservative view.

Other college-aged followers of Fuentes including Jaden McNeil and Patrick Casey have joined the TikTok movement.

They touted the response their presence on the platform received Tuesday on Telegram, noting that apparently these TikTok dummies are blocking all groypers.

https://www.tiktok.com/@nickjfuentes/video/6817426953071643910

Fuentes and his crowd have specifically used the duet feature on TikTok which allows them to respond to Trump-supporting MAGA teens in their own videos.

In one video, Fuentes could be seen responding to a user by putting on a Cookie Monster hata reference to his own Holocuast denialism, which he has once made while using a baking analogy.

https://www.tiktok.com/@nickjfuentes/video/6818212876809932038

Caseya white nationalist who is currently president of Identity Evropa, now known as the American Identity Movement, which seeks to recruit white, college-aged men for their organizationjoined Fuentes on the platform.

The ability for Fuentes to go live and talk directly to the young demographic on TikTok has become a main appeal, as a way to further reach an audience while navigating his YouTube ban.

https://www.tiktok.com/@mcneiljaden/video/6817261822383623429

Following violations of terms of service and being booted from YouTube and Reddit, Fuentes continues to expand his following on other platforms such as Twitter and DLive

TikTok appears to be the next front for white nationalists when it comes to the internet culture wars. Theyve even tried to catch some of the zeitgeist of the app, as the crowd of white nationalists has also made a TikTok account parroting the infamous Hype House, creating the AF Hype House.

It currently has no posts, however.

Groypers flooding TikTok is just a continuation of Fuentes fight with younger conservative activists.

Last year, he started an online and in-person feud against the college student activist organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA)where Fuentes and his far-right fans trolled Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr. for not having conservative enough principles.

Predominantly, they consider current conservatives weak on immigration and despise any support for Israel.

The move to the youth-focused platform has even been praised by the movements elders. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, a fan of Fuentes immigration views, wrote on Telegram Tuesday night that while she supports the move to the social media site, she wouldnt be joining them.

Mommy Malkin is way too old for TikTok but I wholeheartedly support the mass migration of Groypers and AF-ers to that foreign soil, Malkin stated.

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Nick Fuentes and his white nationalist Groyper Army have a new home on TikTok - The Daily Dot

On Netflix comes THE Originals, a new documentary focusing on the history of the photographer Estevan Oriol and the artist Mister Cartoon and their rise in the hip hop world of Los Angeles.

Their first meeting in 1992, at a party. You do not know, but their origins xicane make the two understand from the first glance.

Both soaked to the zeitgeist of hip-hop of the 90s, are bound together by music, by art and by the much-loved pastime of car lowrider custom.

The documentary will explore the culture and landmarks of the movement, chicano and street art that has strengthened the status of Mister Cartoon and Estevan Oriol as legends of hip-hop. 90 minutes of interviews and other scenes with the legends of hip-hop and other names profile including Kobe Bryant, Eminem, Michelle Rodriguez, Danny Trejo, Snoop Dogg, Cypress Hill, Blink-182, Wilmer Valderrama, Terry Crews, George Lopez.

Photographer and director, Oriol he has photographed celebrities ranging from Eminem and Kim Kardashian to Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, but he has also documented the urban culture and Los Angeles gang. An exhibition was also hosted during the circuit off of the festival of European Photography in 2019. With regard to Mister Cartoon, tattooist and artist, has worked with Bryant and Beyonc, the Los Angeles Clippers, and the game series Grand Theft Auto.

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on Netflix, the documentary about the culture of the street - Spark Chronicles

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Some have suggested that the civil unrest and social movement so prominent in Hong Kong last year seem to have receded permanently as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. Indeed, with the District Council elections results last November, the gradual de-escalation in tensions in December, and the implementation of social distancing and anti-gathering measures (both by legal stipulation and through voluntary civil society initiatives), it appears that peace has been restored to Hong Kong, with the social movement fading into the background as civilian efforts (with some governmental coordination) have been predominantly redirected to tackling the ongoing pandemic.

This diagnosis is not only nave, but also romanticizes a deeply problematic status quo. Hong Kongs respite from civilian-police altercation, regularized vigilante violence, and the inept handling of an unprecedented political crisis is both temporary and precariously maintained. The underlying sentiments, grievances, and motivations for the social movement remain vigorous and tenacious, and it is unlikely contrary to the wishful thinking of some in the local establishment that such uneasiness will simply dissipate. Once the pandemic settles (plausibly within the next six months, but that is up in the air), old wounds would only re-emerge as fresh flare-ups ignite long-standing animosities and tensions. The seeming peace in Hong Kong reflects a gathering storm on the horizon a storm with which Hong Kong and Beijing alike must grapple seriously.

Same Grievances, Different Masks

How has the COVID-19 outbreak interacted with the pre-existing socio-political movement, originally initiated as a response to the now-withdrawn Extradition Bill?

Its worth noting primarily that much of the pre-existing antagonism and resentment toward the government had not been resolved through the crisis. Conventional wisdom (per John Muellers rally round the flag effect) suggests that at times of crises, governmental popularity and approval ratings would increase as a result of the population prioritizing country over politics, responding positively to the states policies and measures (albeit imperfect or flawed) out of both subconscious attachment to sources of relative certainty and the rational calculus of rewarding or encouraging efficacious governance. Yet the Hong Kong administrations approval ratings have persistently hovered around its historic low points, with further dips well into the outbreak (see the Hong Kong Public Opinion Programme survey conducted between February 17-19 this year). The reason for this is simple animosity toward the administration has persisted over failures to address allegations of police brutality and misconduct, repeated refusals to open up a genuine and thorough investigation into the structural issues underpinning Hong Kongs governance, as well as the continually botched handling of issues sensitive to Hong Kongers self-conceptions in relation to Beijing and the central administration. These are long-standing, structural grievances that incidental relief measures and anti-crisis rhetoric are incapable of sustainably or viscerally crowding out as such, unlike the temporary cross-partisan consensus in the post-9/11 United States, the pent-up frustrations of Hong Kongers are neither displaced by more salient concerns nor counteracted by countervailing sentiments.

If anything, the outbreak has broadened the coalition of individuals with substantive disgruntlement toward the political establishment. New joiners to the coalition range from the politically apathetic with minimal ideological commitments, yet with newfound antipathy over their loss of employment and downward socioecomonic movement during the crisis to members of the establishment who had previously rallied behind the administration out of political loyalties and the self-constructed need to toe the right line. In terms of the latter, these have ranged from the higher-end working classes (from which pro-Beijing parties, such as the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong and the Federation of Trade Unions, traditionally source their political support) to middle-class voters previously perturbed by the ostensible disruption to law and order from the protests in 2019. These individuals have swiftly pivoted away from the government both out of frustration at the governments delayed responses to the crisis, but more eminently, perhaps, out of the resentment that their loyalty and continued support has not been duly rewarded.

The intriguing interplay between the ongoing pandemic and mass attitudes has given rise to subcultural memes and slogans that convey gleeful schadenfreude in response to reports of members of the police force being infected with the virus. It would come as no surprise that while pro-establishment forces have continually sought to frame such speech as unethical and unlawful, they have found far less vocal resonance among these newly disillusioned constituents, who do not harbor vindictiveness toward the police yet are far less willing to speak up in support of the establishment .

Some cynics may argue that while animosity has persisted, it seems that the movement has become as a whole less violent; presumably, the decrease in frequency of mass rallies, assemblies, and police-civilian confrontations indicates that the political momentum of the movement has gradually dissipated, at least in the ferocity of its form. Yet this is a poor argument transformations to the mode of contestation (per Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrows analysis of social movements) do not equate to the disintegration of the movement.

An unpublished paper by Tak Huen Chau and Kin-Man Wan (CUHK) offers illuminating insights into the strong correlation between the frequency and intensity of tear-gassing in districts and the propensities of constituents in said district to vote for pro-Democratic, anti-establishment candidates in the 2019 District Council Elections. The institutionalization of the movements momentum poses a significant worry for members of both the local establishment and Beijing the upcoming 2020 Legislative Council elections could well be the first in Hong Kongs post-handover history where the opposition has a viable path to capturing over half of the 70 contested seats. Irrespective of the downstream implications (which may well include worsened polarization and entrenchment of the political standstill), the establishment cannot afford to downplay the need of responding to abundantly clear public sentiments.

Moreover, while the frequency of violent confrontations has indubitably decreased, the intensity of such confrontations has only increased. In January, a group of protesters set up roadblocks and engaged in arson near Fai Ming Estate, an unoccupied estate that was proposed as a potential site for quarantine. Three petrol bombs were hurled into the Hong Kong police married quarters in late March. Sporadic confrontations between police and protesters have often escalated into bellicose physical altercations between the forces and civilians. The increase in intensity has been accompanied by a continued proliferation of an attitude of not participating, but not rebuking ( ). Zealous devotees to the political movement view any and all condemnation of violence particularly directed toward targets construed as alleged tools of oppression as fundamentally misguided and a betrayal of the movements values. These permissive attitudes toward violence indicate that once the pandemic settles, or sufficient anger and disillusionment have built up within the public, violence may once again become a routinized reality on Hong Kongs streets an outcome of which any sensible political actor ought to be wary.

Finally, the COVID-19 outbreak has inevitably become a subject of global political contestation and critique. Increasing antagonism toward the Chinese regime brought about both by understandable resentment for its handling of the crisis, as well as targeted instigation by partisan politics has been accompanied by a surge in racism toward Chinese migrants and citizens. The Hong Kong protest movement has swiftly adapted to this nascent zeitgeist and incorporated distinct elements of the anti-Chinese backlash into its activism. From heightened awareness of and concern over the tensions between Taiwan and the World Health Organization, to (misinformed, but nevertheless effective) attempts at echoing racist generalizations about the Chinese, to expressing schadenfreude at the suffering of mainland Chinese citizens and migrants, the more radical fringes of the movement have sought to reclaim the COVID-19 outbreak as an opportune window for launching what they deem to be structural critiques of the Chinese regime.

Whether such critiques are valid, substantiated, or logically coherent is beside the point. Rightly or wrongly, the more radical among the protesters have sublimated their original critique of alleged Chinese interference in Hong Kong by latching it onto a global wave of anti-Chinese sentiments (which, against the wishes of the armchair idealist, has struggled to differentiate, as it should, between anti-regime and anti-ethnicity variants).

Get first-read access to major articles yet to be released, as well as links to thought-provoking commentaries and in-depth articles from our Asia-Pacific correspondents.

The Political Disease Is Harder to Shake

This trend is worrying, for several reasons. First, it gives hard-line bureaucrats and politicians within the Chinese establishment newfound ammunition to perceive or spin the Hong Kong movement as ostensibly secessionist, thereby legitimizing sterner responses. Second, it provides ideological accreditation to an originally fringe yet increasingly popular variant of localist thought within the movement one that embraces Hong Kong as an outpost for the West in constraining China. While some in the movement may think that they could maneuver and effectively channel Western support in constraining the Chinese presence in Hong Kong, an embittered and battered regime recovering from both a nation-wide epidemic and the U.S.-China trade war is unlikely to capitulate or concede in face of this not-so-strategic realignment. Third, the distinctly ethnocentric tinge of both the critiques of the Chinese regime, as well as the continued projection of hyper-defensive nationalism by Beijing, would only cause a denaturing of a movement that started out in response to inept governance in Hong Kong. These are trends for which Hong Kong inevitably must pay the price. While the mercurial support from Trumps administration is unlikely to last or be in the citys interests, it could very well alienate the last remnants of support for moderate dialogue and compromise within the mainland and Hong Kong administration.

With all that said, the outlook is not sheer doom and gloom. I suggest here that it is in the interests of the Hong Kong and Beijing administrations to engage in open, unreserved discussion with members of the opposition who are willing to this neither constitutes the radical fringes of the movement, nor those who are bent on instigating further escalation for ulterior political motives.

First, the current respite for violence enables both Beijing and Carrie Lams government to avert the fundamental worry they harbor concerning coming across as capitulating in the face of violence. It is understandable; after all, for both actors, with their end goals of preserving stability, succumbing to violence could well endanger their ability to rule by encouraging replication or imitation. This is precisely why, given the decreased frequency of violence, as well as the potential for goodwill-building (through policies that target small and medium enterprises and working-class citizens in Hong Kong), Lams administration should and could act in facilitating a genuine de-escalation to the crisis. This would take the forms of independent investigation into a multitude of areas including police conduct, protesters actions, and the blunders of the government, accompanied by more structural rethinking of how Hong Kongs governance could be improved, even without full universal suffrage. In the short term, this could be accompanied by an acknowledgment of the administrations inadequacies and an explicit olive branch to engage in genuine dialogue. The space for dialogue and compromise cannot remain on a theoretical and abstract level it must be forged, at times with great difficulty, at other times against the adversaries of inertia and cowardice. Those with the greatest political power must bear the responsibilities of preventing the disintegration of political order.

Second, the political establishment should also recognize that the continued maintenance of one country, two systems even on a merely symbolic or economic level cannot hold without restoring public buy-in and faith in the system. This does not mean unconditional acceptance or concessions to each and every demand of those who oppose the regime. Instead, it suggests that the establishment must critically reflect upon how Hong Kongs political institutions could be liberalized and reformed, without posing a fundamental threat to Beijing in its rule over the rest of China. Some suggest that in face of Beijings instructions, Hong Kongs political establishment has no teeth or ability to act. This characterization is not only mistaken, but dangerous; it neglects the potential of change initiated by a more open-minded and proactive local establishment that steps up to its task of mediating and liaising between Beijing and the Hong Kong public.

Should the Hong Kong administration fail to seize upon this moment, the increasingly prevalent trend of Hong Kong nationalism even secessionism would only take further root in the city, thereby pushing the city into a new international Cold War that its citizens, including those in the movement, have little to no ability to control. Hong Kong must save itself before it passes the point of no return in its slide into ethno-nationalism. It falls upon members of the establishment, the government, and the self-anointed political elite to act promptly.

Brian Wong is a Rhodes Scholar-Elect from Hong Kong (2020), and a current MPhil in Politics Candidate at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. They are the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Political Review, Founding Secretary of Citizen Action Design Lab, Founding Fellow of Governance Partners Yangon, and a frequent contributor to publications such as TIME, South China Morning Post, Times Higher Education, Asia Times, Fortune, and the Hong Kong Economic Journal.

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Hong Kong's Protests Amid COVID-19: A Dying Movement or a Halted War? - The Diplomat

Michigan State University had general liability coverage from the same insurance company for nearly two decades. Then it was revealed that one of its sports doctors had sexually abused hundreds of women and that top administrators knew of and mishandled complaints about his behavior.

After more than $500 million in settlements and fines and a coverage dispute, Michigan State's longtime insurer declined to include coverage for sexual misconduct related to the sports doctor and another official in the university's general liability policy, The Wall Street Journal reported. The university ultimately created its own insurance company to get coverage.

Most higher education institutions haven't had that degree of scandal, but they're still finding it tough to get insurance against sexual harassment, assault and abuse. As juries become more willing to penalize sexual misconduct and their verdicts get more expensive insurers are exiting the market or tightening their standards. That means schools that can get coverage are paying more for less.

"[Those changes have] really forced the insurers to question whether or not they want to be in this market and what type of premium they need to be in this market,"said Charles Moran, a senior vice president in the complex liability consultingpractice at global insurance broker and risk advisory firm Marsh, in an interview with Education Dive.

Universities'insurance difficulties are part of a slow-moving cultural shift that can be traced back to the recent sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, said Moran and others in the insurance industry. Those scandals triggered insurance issues for numerous dioceses and archdioceses around the U.S., some of which ended up in court. In 2011, the revelation of a major sexual abuse scandal at Penn State University brought that kind of attention to higher education, resulting in more than $100 million in settlements.

With the #MeToo movement, the zeitgeist moved even further toward large penalties for institutions perceived as covering up sexual misconduct. In 2019 alone, 16 states loosened their deadlines for suing over sexual abuse, according to advocacy group Child USA, increasing the number of potential lawsuits.

"You used to see where there'd be an isolated case, and now that's evolved into class action and national cases,"Blake Wells, higher education practice lead at insurance brokerage IMA, said in an interview with Education Dive. "It's in the paper a lot more."

That's led to what Wells called "nuclear verdicts" court decisions or out-of-court settlements 10 to 50 times bigger than what was common before the past decade. Insurers, who pay for those cases, have responded by tightening their offerings for new and existing clients.

Generally, colleges'coverage for sexual misconduct claims is included in their general liability insurance. In some cases, institutions may cover those claims through separate policies. An incident doesn't necessarily mean the school will lose that insurance but a scandal like the ones at Penn State and Michigan State increases the chances substantially, because of the high costs of defending and paying the claims.

Insurers could become more restrictive in the coverage they offer, reduce their limits or even stop offering coverage for certain circumstances, such as sexual abuse and molestation, said Bryan Elie, vice president of underwriting at United Educators, in an interview with Education Dive. The insurer, prominent in the education sector, worked with Michigan State prior to its sexual abuse scandal.

Coverage is still available, but the remaining insurers are rethinking how they offer it. For example, some insurers are reducing their coverage limits substantially, Wells said, so a policy that would have covered up to $10 million in losses would now cover only $2 million.

Some insurers are also moving coverage out of their general liability policy to a separate, optional policy. Moran is seeing this more frequently. He called it an opportunity to buy the coverage back but with more limits.

"It's going to be obviously at a higher premium," he said. "There are certain conditions that have to be met, more stringent timeframes that apply. ... The window for coverage narrows."

That's driven more higher education clients to insurer Beazley, which offers risk- and crisis management services bundled with a standalone sexual abuse and misconduct policy. Interest in that specialty product has grown as the market has changed, said Paul Nash, leader of Beazley's employment practices liability team.

Insurers that offer sexual misconduct coverage now require colleges to maintain stricter due diligence. They're asking institutions to demonstrate that they have strong policies and procedures against sexual misconduct and that those policies are backed by enforcement, training and background checks.

That's not just for prevention, Wells said it's also to avoid being sued. "If you read the verdicts a lot of it is for the lack of training and oversight basically, failure to protect the students,"he said.

Those policies and procedures should be more than just nice words, Elie said. Institutions need to show they respond appropriately when incidents arise.

"We really expect institutions to work on having that proper risk management if we're going to provide the coverage," he said. "And if they don't, the coverage would be excluded under our general liability policy."

That's even more crucial for institutions that have had recent sexual misconduct incidents serious enough to lead to litigation. They're generally expected to demonstrate what they learned from the experience to secure coverage.

Knowing schools are taking the situation seriously and addressing any issues makes insurance companies more likely to work with them, Nash said.

Institutions might have favorable insurance coverage for older incidents, however. That's because general liability policies prior to 1986 were written to cover incidents that occurred during the policy period, regardless of when claims are made.

As Moran explained it, these so-called legacy policies are often advantageous for colleges. Typically, they demand the insurance company pay for schools'legal defense, and they often don't require schools to pay much or anything to defend themselves. They also don't usually have an exception for sexual abuse.

Still, Moran said, a school would need to prove it had the coverage, and then follow its terms, to make a claim. It could be tough even to find a policy from 1984.

"Insureds really need to think about how are they preparing for these legacy claims that are going to come out of the woodwork,"he said.

Insurance professionals said sexual abuse coverage is out there for institutions willing to take the steps to get it. Elie said United Educators has found its insureds open to improving their policies and procedures.

Those extra steps could pay off for everyone by reducing the chance of a situation like that at Michigan State, Nash observed.

"With greater awareness comes better risk management, and ultimately, improvements such that prevent bad things from happening in the first place,"he said.

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For colleges, insurance against sexual misconduct is becoming harder to get - Education Dive

Remember when everyone was talking about how millennials do not want to own stuff, as long as they can access it? Those were the days. The days when we did not need a house on the French Riviera as long as we had an AirBnb account; the days of who needs a car when you can call an Uber; the days when the size of your flat was not germane to your physical fitness because at any time you could zoom out to a nearby 24-hour gym and pump iron while chasing wrought-iron abs.

Well, those days are no more. At least for the foreseeable future. The coronavirus crisis has us restricted to supermarkets, pharmacies and, largely, our humble abodes. That is bad in several ways. One of these is that, unless you have a place with a garden, or a home gym (or both, if you own an outdoor gym, like farmer-cum-personal-trainer Tom Kemp), exercising properly is now a lot harder.

Judging from the procession of gaudily clad joggers gracing the view from my window, some of those property-spurning millennials have taken up running. But for those who do not like running, or who think that exercising should be about more than inanely hopping along the street while listening to old Talking Politics episodes, the other option is the home workout.

Now, you could - theoretically - draft a workout plan by yourself, striking the right balance of planks and squats, push-ups and pulses. But if ever there was a time when people might turn en masse to workout apps for advice, this is it. And the apps themselves are rising to the challenge: while most of them had been designed and marketed as aids for gym-goers, they are now beefing up their offers of home workouts and routines requiring no equipment.

Over the past three weeks, I decided to test four of the most popular apps, ranking them for effectiveness, interface, convenience and, importantly, compatibility with living in a relatively small flat.

Before we start, two caveats. First: I ignored the nutrition plans featured in most of these apps as sticking to a rigid eating routine would have required more trips to the supermarket than advisable under present circumstances (see my review of Centr to give you some idea of the commitment required). Second: I worked out in my bedroom, a pitiable 4m by 3m affair taken up for the most part by a squeaky single bed. I decided against using my living room, as doing burpees and jump-squats in front of my Netflix-bingeing housemate would have not been conducive to a peaceable atmosphere.

Aaptivs proposition is to lodge a happy-go-lucky personal trainer in your pocket. The app creates a weekly plan based on your settings, and every day you can pick from a range of workouts all aiming for the same fitness goal (cardio, strength training, stretching), but each MCd by a different trainer and accompanied by a different type of music.

The routines boil down to an audio file of the trainer soothingly giving (or frantically barking) instructions. While that might sound discomfiting on paper, I found it a breath of fresh air amid the current apocalyptic zeitgeist. More importantly: it works. It is genuinely energising. Once, during an intense training session with a trainer of clear Californian origin, I kept mishearing his great job! encouragements as great Gian! Now, that is ridiculous, but the point is that Aaptiv is effective at coaxing you into buying into its method.

The workouts are rewarding: a 30-minute full-body session feels like a proper workout for all the main muscle groups, which leads into breaking a sweat if done properly. Even better, whether by sheer luck or by design, most of these workouts can be completed without spreading your legs, rocking left and right, or side-shuffling a trait that made them eminently suitable for my small bedroom.

The one real downside is also Aaptivs main strength: it is too audio led. When doing some of the most complex movements and exercises, I felt that a video element to supplement the trainers instructions would have greatly helped. Granted, you can access an archive of clips showing how to do certain movements but that is not possible for every workout, nor for all the exercises.

Effectiveness: Aaptiv definitely feels like a workoutApp: the UI is simple and solidCost: about 79 a yearSmall-flat friendly: Extremely (I never had to skip an exercise for lack of space)Score: 8/10

I wish I lived in a bigger flat to take full advantage of Fiit. This app was clearly designed with storybook lovebirds cavorting on their sun-soaked verandas firmly in mind rather than quarantined millennial housemates vying for a right of way through their dining rooms. Think Harry and Meghan in California rather than housemates in Peckham.

Fiit works best when the app is linked to your TV, showing the video workouts on a big screen. The reason is that sessions can get complicated, and understanding how to make a movement correctly can become hard if you have to peer at your phones screen mid-squat. The trainers also tend to be of the show-dont-tell type: often theyll simply perform a movement rather than verbally explaining what you're supposed to do. That is further complicated by the fact there is no way to rewind a video to check a movement.

That said, it would be unfair to dismiss it as a bad app. The workouts are challenging and rewarding, the trainers are charming and top-notch, the music and ambience in the videos are appropriate and distinctive. And although I struggled with keeping track of what was happening on my phones screen, I never had any significant problem with working out in my bedroom. If you have a normal-sized living room and a TV you can use without disrupting your housemates Red Dead Redemption marathon, go for Fiit. (It also features a Bluetooth-connected chest strap that kept malfunctioning because my chest wasnt moist enough.)

Effectiveness: workouts are challenging; the trainers are likeableApp: lack of a rewind button is a misstep; best used on your TVCost: between 10 and 20 a monthSmall-flat friendly: bedroom flat workouts possible, but best for a normal houseScore: 7/10

Now is as good a time as any to talk about jumps. If you live in a flat, chances are that you live above someone else. Jumps, burpees, and anything else involving hard-landing on your floor is something you want to avoid. Sadly, many workout apps actively encourage you to jump and bound about. Freeletics is not the only offender in this regard, but it was certainly the worst of this particular quartet featuring up to a whole minute of jumps in certain sessions.

Other than that, though, I liked Freeletics. It is no-frill, spartan, almost blunt in its effectiveness. Based on your level of fitness, it creates a weekly plan with varied and articulated daily sessions usually around 40 minutes each. Each movement is shown in a handy video clip, and each exercise features a timer that lets you know when you have to proceed to the next series. There is no trainer persona only a raspy, no-nonsense voice counting down before you start but that is absolutely on-brand.

Other than the fixation with jumps, one of Freeleticss blemishes is a pushiness when it comes to sharing your results. Every time you finish a workout, the app will try and coax you into telling the world i.e. Instagram about your achievements. I found it a bit annoying.

Effectiveness: Intense workout, but too many jumpsApp: the utilitarian aesthetics will grow on youCost: between 5.76 and 10.16 a month (higher if you also opt in for the nutrition feature)Small-flat friendly: Jumps apart, there are plenty of workouts that are doable in smaller flats hereScore: 8/10

Nike Training Club is by far the most challenging app I tried. I had trouble finishing a full work-out session almost every time. Whether that is down to my poor physical fitness, or to the app being too unforgiving, I am not sure. What is certain is that, if you go for Nike Training Club, you will notice it. And here we go again so will whoever lives below you. (There is so much jumping and burpeeing.)

The app features a slightly more cheerful version of the kind of interface adopted by Freeletics. Each session is broken down into timed clips showing exactly how to do each exercise and for how long. Leaps and bounds apart, most of the exercises can be done in a small room with no difficulty.

The only clear flaw is that many sessions will be structured as rotations of three or four routines, done over and over again at varying intensity. There is certainly some merit to that method, but it can feel a touch repetitive or, at worst, outright tedious. However, we can cut Nike some slack about this. Why?Because the app is absolutely free of charge. Bargain.

Effectiveness: intense (maybe too much?); but at times repetitiveApp: sleek Cost: freeSmall-flat friendly: generally good, although too much jumpingScore: 9/10

Gian Volpicelli is WIRED's politics editor. He tweets from @Gmvolpi

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The best fitness apps to keep in shape while on lockdown - Wired.co.uk

The image for Murder Most Foul, from Bob Dylans official website.

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Wolfman Jack, hes speaking in tonguesHes going on and on at the top of his lungsPlay me a song, Mr. Wolfman JackAd Policy

On March 27, Bob Dylan released on the Internet Murder Most Foul, his first new song in nearly a decade. Delivered in the aging, tender, and cracking voice familiar to fans who caught his recent global tour, the song unfolds like an epic poem about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and the music, culture, and mystery that still surround one of the most shocking events in American history.

This is an unreleased song that we recorded a while back that you might find interesting, Dylan wrote on his website early that Friday morning. Stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you. As Ive listened to the song, over and over, during these last traumatic weeks, Ive come to see Murder Most Foul as Dylans gift to the world at another terrible moment in our history, when our leaders have failed us and we are living through a calamity that seems to have no end. Like Kennedys murder in 1963, the federal governments utter failure to protect the people in 2020 is a collapse of biblical proportions.

President Trumps slow, cowardly, and stupendously foolish response to Covid-19 has allowed this nation to become the epicenter of the outbreak, and surpassed George W. Bushs monumental blindness to the drowning of New Orleans in 2005. With hundreds of thousands of people in mortal danger and millions without jobs, health care, or hope, the country faces an existential crisis comparable to the Civil War, the Great Depression of the 1930s, World War II, the horror that unfolded after 9/11, and the terrifying future of climate change. High waters rising, were up to our necks, and the specter of death is stalking the land: the perfect setting for a Bob Dylan song.More on Dylan

What we hear in Murder Most Foul is the weary voice of a Nobel laureate whos closing in on his 80s, walking us through our trials and tribulations as only a great poet can do. Its set to a bowed bass, a mournful violin, a piano, and a smattering of drums that blend together in a lovely, bluesy dirge perfectly fitting to the times and our shattered emotions. Clocking in at over 17 minutes, Murder Most Foul is the longest song Dylan has ever recorded, just surpassing Highlands, his wry commentary about aging on the Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind, released in 1997. On April 8, Murder Most Foul became Dylans first-ever No. 1 hit on the the Billboard chartsa phenomenal achievement for such a lengthy composition.

The effect of the song, with its pointed lyrics about treachery and betrayal, are similar to the sound Dylan captured in 2012 on Tempest, his last album of original songs. Some of the phrasing also reflects his recent forays into the American songbook of Frank Sinatra that transformed his shows over the past decade into intimate, Paris-style cabarets. Yet there is little joy to be heard in this recording, where the subject is dark and unfathomable: President Kennedy being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb by unseen men seeking to collect unpaid debts who killed with hatred and without any respect.

Backed by the melancholy chords of his piano, Dylan takes us through the terrible images of the Zapruder film of the assassination that hes seen thirty three times, maybe more (Its vile and deceitfulits cruel and its mean / Ugliest thing that you ever have seen). But, contrary to some of the hot takes you may have read about it, the point of the song is not to publicize JFK conspiracy theories or take us on a nostalgia tour of the 1960s. Like many of his songs, his message is much deeper, and far more profound.Current Issue

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At its most essential level, Murder Most Foul marks the collapse of the American dream, dating from that terrible day in Dallas, when a certain evil in our midst was revealed in ways not seen for a hundred yearsa day that, for Dylan, myself, and others of our generation is forever seared into our collective memory. The murder and the hidden machinations behind it, he tells us, robbed us of Kennedys brain, a symbol for the positive, forward-looking American spirit that he represented, and for the last fifty years theyve been searching for that. And this is the outcome:

I said the soul of a nation been torn awayAnd its beginning to go into a slow decayAnd that its thirty-six hours past judgment day.

Second, the song is a reminder of the beauty of our music and culture. Its a tribute to the artists, obscure and famous, whove taken us through the hard times, and who continue to lift us up as we brave this new world of Covid-19, social distancing, and the death of thousands by government failure and incompetence. In Murder Most Foul, that music becomes the counterpoint, the juxtaposition, to the horror and chaos of both JFKs very public death and todays global pandemic. (To get inside its structure, listen to Laura Tenscherts beautifully narrated podcast about the song on her London-based show, Definitely Dylan.)

Dylan makes the leap from murder to music by conjuring up Wolfman Jack, the legendary disk jockey celebrated in the film American Graffiti, who represents the ghosts of all those DJs from New Orleans, Memphis, Chicago, and New York who introduced him to the secrets of American music when he was a kid in Hibbing, Minnesota, growing up near Highway 61 in the aftermath of World War II. Starting with the Beatles, whose joyous music would hold your hand soon after the assassination, the names of dozens of musicians and singers float through:

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Play Oscar Peterson and play Stan GetzPlay Blue Sky, play Dickey BettsPlay Art Pepper, Thelonious MonkCharlie Parker and all that junkAll that junk and All That Jazz

Sometimes the music and the culture seem to emanate through the voice of Kennedy himself, who could have heard Wolfman Jack on the radio during his years as a senator, when he was hanging out in Hollywood and Las Vegas with Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, and other friends and family of his wealthy, ambassador father.

Play John Lee Hooker play Scratch My BackPlay it for that strip club owner named JackGuitar SlimGoin Down SlowPlay it for me and Marilyn MonroePlay please, Dont Let Me Be MisunderstoodPlay it for the First Lady, she aint feeling that good.

Murder Most Foul references so many musicians that Dylan experts have posted on Spotify a stream of songs that he identifies. There are the Rolling Stones (Altamont), The Who, Elvis (Mystery Train) Bo Diddley, Jelly Roll Morton, B.B. King (play Lucille), Patsy Cline, Nat King Cole, Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Stevie Nicks, Miles Davis, and the dozens of artists who covered Stella by Starlight from the 1944 Hollywood classic The Uninvited. And on and on, mixed with images from old movies, famous songs, and legendary figures from the American pastBirdman of Alcatraz, Bugsy Siegel, Pretty Boy Floyd, On the Waterfront (Play Down in the Boondocks for Terry Malloy).

Dylan even makes a few allusions to his own songs, including Blood in My Eyes, a cover, from his 1993 album World Gone Wrong, of a song by the Mississippi Sheiks, a 1930s African American string band that was led by a former slave fiddler, and Dignity, a rollicking favorite from his 2008 Tell Tale Signs bootleg about a time when the soul of the nation is under the knife. As the names and the titles fly by, you hear the music and culture that America experienced from the time of the Depression to our current era.

The contrast between the culture of Dylans musical past and the Trump-stricken country of today is summarized in his take on Kennedys plea to the nation, turned upside down:

Dont ask what your country can do for youCash on the barrel head, money to burnDealey Plaza, make a left hand turnIm going to the crossroads, gonna flag a rideThats the place where Faith, Hope, and Charity died.

These are old, familiar themes for Dylan. That cash is the money that doesnt talk, it swears from his 1965 song Its Alright Ma (Im Only Bleeding), which also contains the immortal line, as applicable now as it was then, that even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked. And its the same tainted cash that will never buy back your soul from his bitter critique of the military-industrial complex in Masters of War, his famous antiwar ballad from 1963.

In that sense, Murder Most Foul may have been written for Trumps America, but its also the America of the forever wars that began in the era before Trump, when militarism and empire dominated our foreign policy and killer drones became the weapons of choice for Democrats and Republicans alike. And, in Dylans mind, the nightmare of today dates back to November 1963 and Kennedys death. And thats where my story picks up, because Dylans JFK storyhistory told through a radio station, as Neil Young put itis the story of my generation as well.

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I first learned about Kennedys murder most foul one morning in Tokyo, when my dad walked into my room as the shocking news came through the shortwave static of his Sony transistor radio. The president, our beloved JFK, had been shot in Dallas just a few hours ago, and was dead. Assassinated? Assassinated? my mother said, over and over, as we tried to absorb the brutal facts of the terrible event. I was all of 12 years old, and was shocked to the core.Related Article

Like so many of my fellow baby boomers, I looked to Kennedy an an idol. He was the young, vibrant leader who personified everything positive and hopeful about the country I had come to love from afar while spending my boyhood in Japan and South Korea, where my missionary parents went as relief workers after World War II. He was the spirit behind Americas exciting space program and the inspiration for thousands of young men and women who enlisted in the Peace Corps and the War on Poverty to help make the world a better place. His murder was the moment I realized that something was seriously wrong with the land of my birth.

Up to that point, America, to my innocent eyes, was a benevolent place, a land of abundance that produced sturdy, well-made cars like the Plymouth station wagon my father loved to drive. The election victory of the boyish, exuberant Kennedy in November 1960 only solidified my faith. Through the radio, I listened excitedly to his call to send Americans to the moon. I even wrote him a fan letter from Korea, and was thrilled beyond measure when I received a response from his assistant, Kenneth ODonnell, that included a signed photograph of the president.

But with his sudden death, the old, familiar America I knew suddenly vanished, only to be replaced by something sinister, unexplained and mysterious. Most shocking was the blatant nature of the crime, which Dylan recalls in Murder Most Foul:

The day that they blew out the brains of the kingThousands were watching, no one saw a thingIt happened so quicklyso quick by surpriseRight there in front of everyones eyesGreatest magic trick ever under the sunPerfectly executed, skillfully done.

The details of the assassination and the accused killer as they unfolded in the Japanese newspapers I read were mystifying, and I wanted to know more. Like Dylan, I pored over the Zapruder film stills when they were published in Life magazine. I read everything I could about the event in the school library, scouring every issue of Time and Newsweek when they came out. In the months that followed, the news was especially bad from Vietnam, which I had visited with my family in March 1963. By 1964, President Lyndon Johnson was escalating the war, pummeling the country with bombs and napalm, and by 1965, when US Marines landed by the thousands in Da Nang, the horror later spelled out in Apocalypse Now by Marlon Brando was in full force.Related Article

That was the time of Freedom Summer and the murders by the Ku Klux Klan of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi. We had already begun our terrifying lurch into the dark and lunatic decade of assassinations: In addition to JFK in 1963 there was Medgar Evers, then Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. America was coming apart at the seams. The nations soul had indeed been torn away. But, through it all, there was one constant: the music, especially the rock and roll, jazz, and folk I was hearing on the radio.

I was introduced to Bob Dylan by Pete Seeger, who came to play at my American school in Tokyo during his world tour in 1964. After zipping through a repertoire of folk songs and civil rights anthems, Seeger told us of a new talent in New York City whos writing the most amazing songs. He then picked up his 12-string and sang A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall, Dylans powerful, apocalyptic song from the days of the Cuban missile crisis.

I was stunned by the soaring words; Id never heard anything like that before, not from the Beatles, not from the Kingston Trio, not from Johnny Cash, not from anybody. That magnificent song, which Patti Smith performed so movingly at Dylans Nobel Prize ceremony in 2016, set the stage for everything that was to come from the gifted singer from Hibbing.

His songs seemed perfectly tuned to my surroundings, even in Japan. Ill never forget first hearing All Along the Watchtower, with its haunting line, Two riders were approaching and the wind began to howl. It was 1968, and Japanese citizens were protesting, often ferociously, the US militarys use of bases in Japan to attack Vietnam. From my house in Tokyo looking out at the Kanto Plain, I could spot American war planes landing and taking off from a US airbase far to the west. Dylans music was ominousand a fitting soundtrack to what I was living through.

His music has remained closely attuned to the American zeitgeist well into the 21st century. On September 11, 2001, Dylan released Love and Theft, a searing blend of rock and blues perfect for our new, dark era. Its highlight was High Water (For Charley Patton), a tribute to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the songs and blues riffs it generated. It included these chilling lines, which we later heard echoed by Bush himself in his hunt for the 9/11 perpetrators:

Judge says to the High Sheriff,I want him dead or aliveEither one, I dont careHigh water everywhere.

Dylans eye for the truth came home to me one night in 2014, when I took my daughter Roxanne to see him at Constitution Hall in DC. It was the day after Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year-old black man, was fatally shot by a white cop in Ferguson, Missouri, and most of us were raw with shock and anger. Dylan closed the show with a slow and melodic Blowin in the Wind that brought tears to my eyes. His perennial question, How many deaths will it take til we know / That too many people have died? resonated deeply, just as it did when it was released during the civil rights movement in 1962.

I had a similar experience last year that illustrated the power he can hold over an audience. On December 8, I went to The Anthem in DC for what would be Dylans last performance before his Never Ending Tour was cut short by the coronavirus. Midway through his set, I watched with astonishment as the audience sat silent and spellbound through two songs: Lenny Bruce, a loving tribute to the radical comedian (the best friend you never had) and Girl From the North Country, his touching, prayerful song to a long-lost love from his days growing up in Minnesota. I have never seen a rock and roll crowd so quiet, so awed, so stilled. It was a moving tribute to our last true American troubadour.

Its with that voice, breaking with emotion, that Bob Dylan, during the pandemic of the century, has dropped this song about Kennedy, the end of the American dream, and the music that has defined and consoled us all these years.

Take me to the place Tom Dooley was hungPlay St. James Infirmary in the court of King JamesIf you want to remember, better write down the namesPlay Etta James too, play Id Rather Go Blind

Those lines, summoning the spirit of the blues and another execution long ago, are the sign of a master songwriter at work. All the songs and musicians he mentions are signposts of that America he once knew, that old weird America from Harry Smiths Anthology of American Folk Music, which Dylan drank from when he was just starting out, an America thats disappeared in the maw of endless war and free-market capitalism that mark the Trump era and the year of the coronavirus.

Viewed through that lens, Murder Most Foul is a shout-out to the great music Dylan heard as a youth on the airwaves, learned in the coffeehouses, bars, and concert halls of Minneapolis, New York City, Cambridge, and Londonand then passed on to us. Its the music that, in his eyes, defined the America where faith, hope, and charity were our guidepoststhe music that helped us defeat fascism, create the New Deal, face down systemic racism, and build the New Frontier that Kennedy never saw. Now is the time, he seems to be saying, to bring back that faith and do everything we can to keep it.

As Dylan knows only too well, that vision can be snuffed out in an instant. Play the Blood Stained Banner, he sings as he closes out the song, in a reference to the last flag of the Confederates who ripped the country apart during the Civil War; play Murder Most Foul. As I look out on the abandoned and frightened streets of my city and sense the fear and tension rippling through the country, I can only say: Yes, and play a song for me too, Mr. Bob Dylan.

More here:

JFK, Bob Dylan, and the Death of the American Dream - The Nation

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As COVID-19 continues to affect different economies and vulnerable populations, more people are calling for a revolution against the structures of capitalism. In the U.S., many are advocating on behalf of those who cannot practice social distancing because of their jobs and their need to make a living. But its not just people in the working class calling for action. On Thursday, March 23, 38-year-old pop legend Britney Spears shared an Instagram post calling for the redistribution of wealth during this unprecedented time.

The graphic that Spears shared was originally written and posted by Mimi Zhu, a queer Chinese Australian artist, writer and community organizer. Refinery29 had previously shared the image, which is why Spears tagged them as the source in her post.

The graphic boldly states: We will feed each other, redistribute wealth, strike. Spears left the simple caption: Communion goes beyond walls. She also included several red rose emojis, a well-known symbol associated with anti-authoritarian and socialist organizations.

Spears social media presence has always been something of an enigma. Her political takes are sporadic, almost artful and often reach notorious levels of fame. Some fans might remember Spears infamous tweet from 2011: Does anyone think global warming is a good thing? I love Lady Gaga. I think shes a really interesting artist.

Like Spears other rare political remarks, this Instagram post seemed to come out of nowhere. Throughout the pandemic, Spears has been sharing several selfies showcasing some dramatic makeup, a handful of dancing videos and a photo of a cheetah as well. Spears reposting of Zhus graphic definitely stood out, causing somewhat of an uproar from her supporters and other socialist-leaning folks on the internet.

Some of the top comments on the post are: Yesssss queen of wealth re-distribution!, Britney wrote the communist manifesto!, Britney pay our rent and queen of post-capitalism!

#ComradeBritney started trending on Twitter almost immediately after her post. A popular thread also emerged, which portrayed Spears as different printed editions of Karl Marxs Communist Manifesto.

Spears Instagram post gained traction with political organizations too. Democratic Socialists of America tweeted, Comrade Britney knows: Together we can build a better world, because capitalism is Toxic. When Spears tweeted an image that modified the lyrics to her song: My loneliness is saving lives, People for Bernie Sanders responded saying, Thank you for your service for the working class.

Though many of the responses to this post may be exaggerated or tongue-in-cheek, the excitement around Spears radical political suggestion is justified. More often than not, mainstream music artists either advocate for mainstream politics or remain entirely apolitical especially pop stars who reigned in a Pre-Trump America.

Though Spears call to action may seem odd or random, longtime followers of the pop legend know that our current legal and economic system hasnt always partied in her favor. In 2008, after many public displays of mental illness one might be most familiar with the head-shaving incident, a moment that certainly holds its own in our 2000s zeitgeist Spears was put under legal conservatorship by the court. In February 2020, that sentence was extended, meaning that at 38 years old, Spears father and lawyer still maintain control over her health and estate. This includes maintenance of business prospects, home visitors and all of her finances.

This public conservatorship birthed the longstanding #FreeBritney movement, in which fans passionately advocate for the pop stars autonomy. Her supporters, in demanding for her freedom, have several conspiracy theories surrounding the conservatorship, suspecting its the reason that she hasnt been at the same level of fame in the past couple of years.

As a response to Britney Spears Instagram post, fans have adapted the #FreeBritney into #FreeComradeBritney. Her more loyal supporters have pushed the medias tongue-in-cheek responses to something more sympathetic, seeming to understand that even if Spears wanted to take political action and redistribute her own wealth, legally, she wouldnt be allowed to.

Taking into consideration some of the restraints our economic system has placed on Spears, who cannot access any of her hard-earned money, it makes sense that she would call for a general strike against that system. And though her political presence may be dissected for its ambiguity or superficiality, longtime fans of Britney Spears understand that this post, this insight, aligns with her story of perseverance, and her kind, charitable persona.

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Britney Spears Is the Internet's New Communist Queen - Study Breaks

At face value, jam bands and hip-hop seem to have very little in common. Jam music is characteristically free-form and instrumentally-oriented, and discussions regarding which acts fall under the jam band umbrella are rarely straight forward. Hip-hop has clearly defined pillars (rapping, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti) and tends to be more lyrically-oriented. Live jam band shows tend to focus on breaking from the mold of recorded tracks, while hip-hop shows tend to highlight the songs themselves. Jam bands use improvisation as a vehicle to launch your mind into orbit, to another place and time, while hip-hop uses improvisationfreestylingas a means to focus your attention on the lyrics and wordplay and bring you into their world. Upon a more in-depth examination, however, the hip-hop and jam bands are more alikeand more connectedthan many may think, on both a musical and cultural level.

For the purpose of clarity, we must first define the term, jam band, as many use it as an umbrella term to describe a variety of bands with vastly different sounds. While Googledefines jam band as a rock band that plays music characterized by long improvisational passages, Wikipedia describes it as a movement and collection of bands and musicians who have followed in the footsteps of the Dead and the Allman Brothers by performing concerts consisting of improvisational musical passages, regardless of genre. Bands like Phish,Widespread Panic, The String Cheese Incident,moe.,Soulive,Leftover Salmon,Blues Traveler, Yonder Mountain String Band, andGalactic, despite their musical differences, would all fall under this broader, more accurate jam band umbrella.

Without diminishing the impact that hip-hop, in particular, has had on historically and presently marginalized minority communities, this writer has noticed several similarities between hip-hop and jam band culture that bring the two together in ways that few could have imagined.

Culturally, while both have seemingly developed a semblance of a mainstream following over recent yearsadmittedly, hip-hop more so than jam bandsthe two genres are alike in having created counterculture movements during their inception. While the term counterculture quickly evokes thoughts of the Grateful Dead and the psychedelic 60s, hip-hop similarly took shape and was fostered by its own new cultural lane in the 70s, 80s, and beyond.

As Becky Blanchardnoted in her paper, The Social Significance of Rap & Hip-Hop Culture, published by Stanford University, Rap has developed as a form of resistance to the subjugation of working-class African-Americans in urban centers. Though it may be seen primarily as a form of entertainment, rap has the powerful potential to address social, economic, and political issues and acts as a unifying voice for its audience.

Whether directly or indirectly, jam bands have also continued to tackle social, economic, and political issues as well, be it through the music, lyrics, public statements, or the surrounding community rooted in freedom from judgment, love, a strong sense of community, and open-mindednesssomething thats far too scarce in society at large today.

In an article for the MEIEA Journal,Casey Lowdermilkexplained, This spirit of being open-minded and willing to experience new things is not only an approach to music, it also translates into a philosophy of life for some fans and helps to explain the attraction of the community. This community is critical to the development of the innovative business practices of jam bands.

Then, theres the musicality.

As Blanchard continued in her paper, Hip-hop music originated from a combination of traditionally African-American forms of musicincluding jazz, soul, gospel, and reggae. Over the years, many hip-hop artists have produced funk and even rock n roll-inspired tracks, such as Grandmaster Flashs Tear The Roof Off andRun DMCs King Of Rock. As the genre has evolved into the 21st century, these influences have only grown, as seen via high-profile samples like Kanye Wests use of James Browns Funky President on New God Flow and King Crimsons 21st Century Schizoid Man on Power. Even underground hip-hop artists have collaborated with rock acts, such as when Tech N9neworked withChino MorenoandStephen Carpenterfrom the Deftones on his 2011 track, If I could.

Of course, jam bands are also inextricably linked with jazz, funk, blues, rock n roll, soul, reggae, and everything in between. For starters, the links between jam bands and jazz are undeniable and have only grown throughout the years. One could argue that jazz is the most significant influence on jam music, as both genres share the same defining characteristic, improvisation.

InPhil Leshs bookSearching For Sound: My Life WIth The Grateful Dead, the bassist described the impactfamous jazz musicianMiles Davishad on himself and the rest of band when the trumpeter opened up for them at the Fillmore Westin San Fransisco, CA in April 1970:

As I listened, leaning over the amps with my jaw hanging agape, trying to comprehend the forces that Miles was unleashing onstage, I was thinking, Whats the use? How can we possibly play after this? We should just go home and try to digest this unbelievable sh!t. This was our first encounter with Miles new direction. Bitches Brew had only just been released, but I know I hadnt yet heard any of it In some ways, it was similar to what we were trying to do in our free jamming, but ever so much more dense with ideas, and seemingly controlled with an iron first, even at its most alarmingly intense moments. Of us all, only Jerry [Garcia] had the nerve to go back and meet Miles, with whom he struck up a warm conversation. Miles was surprised and delighted to know that we knew and loved his music.

Related: Grateful Dead Retrospective: A Look Back At Phil Leshs Birthday Shows Over The Years [Audio]

InMiles: The Autobiography, the jazz icon touched on that meeting of musical minds as well, clearly illustrating the impact jazz had on the pioneers of jam music:

Jerry Garcia, their guitar player, and I hit it off great, talking about musicwhat they liked and what I likedand I think we all learned something, grew some. Jerry Garcia loved jazz, and I found out that he loved my music and had been listening to it for a long time. He loved other jazz musicians, too, like Ornette Coleman and Bill Evans.

The commonalities jam music and hip-hop dont just stop at jazz, either. In an interview withJazzTimes,Deep Banana Blackout guitarist Fuzzexplained that while funk, soul, and hip-hop had influenced his bands sound, it nonetheless remains jazz:

It seems to me that jazz was always about individual expression. So to perform it or try to recreate how the original guy had done it seems to be taking away from the original concept. I mean, youre supposed to take this music and do it your way, right? How can you make this part of your personal expression? Well for me, the thing that Ive been really feeling for a long time now is definitely funk and soul music. So Im combining funk, soul and hip hop with the jazz and even a little bit of rock psychedelia. Today theres no hard and fast rules about making a jazz record. Maybe back in the day some people had a little bit of a snobby attitude about it. Not today.

With all of that said, the relationship between jam music and hip-hop doesnt stop at the influences they share. While relatively rare, the two genres have crossed paths at various notable points over the years, culminating in some memorable moments in music history. Lets take a look at some of those moments below.

Phil Lesh & Friends & Talib Kweli

Back in 2018, New York City saw one of the most memorable jam band/hip-hop crossovers of all time when Harlems ApolloTheaterhosted a historic performance billed as Dont Tell Me This Country Aint Got No Heart: A Benefit for Voter Participation.Phil Lesh and hisTerrapin Family Bandanchored theHeadCountbenefit along with special guestsEric Krasno(guitar), Nicki Bluhm(vocals),Robert Randolph(pedal steel), and theHarlem Gospel Choir.

The significance of this event went beyond the 2018 mid-term elections. As the Live For LiveMusicEditor-in-ChiefAndrew OBrien explained in his coverage of the performance,

The Apollo Theater opened in Manhattans historically African-American Harlem neighborhood more than a century ago. Ever since, the venue has been a pillar of black culture in the city, giving countless world-class performers a stage and serving as a point of pride for the oft-oppressed community it represents.

Throughout the second half of the Apollos hundred-plus year lifespan, the Grateful Dead also established themselves as an influential cultural institutionthough in a largely separate social space. The Grateful Dead fanbaseand the extended jam band scene that eventually followed in its wakehas always been predominantly white. The why behind that notion is another complicated conversation for another day, but going into the benefit, the facts remained: No iteration of the Grateful Deadnor any of its individual membershad ever played Harlems entertainment Mecca, and The Grateful Dead could not have been farther from the zeitgeist of contemporary urban culture.

On that day, however, Phil Lesh invited rapper, entrepreneur, and activistTalib Kwelito the stage for a performance that will live on in hip-hop and jam music lore. The video begins with the band playing the Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia, Grateful Dead classic, Shakedown Street, before segueing to Kwelis Get By from his 2002 release, Quality. Watch the unforgettable moment below.

Phil Lesh & Friends Ft. Talib Kweli Shakedown Street> Get By 9/7/18

[Video: Relix]

String Cheese Incident & GZA

Halloween in 2015 saw one of the best jam/hip-hop crossovers when String Cheese Incident invitedWu-Tang ClansGZAto host the bands Ghoul Train spectacle at Suwannee Hulaween Music Festivalin Live Oak, FL.

Hosting asDon Cornelius, the iconic show host and creator ofSoul Train, GZA took the band and special guests, the Antibalas horns, Sheryl Renee, andLeonard Julien, through an hour-long set of funk and soul classics like Brick House, Car Wash, I Want To Take You Higher, and Dance To The Music. The performance marked a high-point in jam/hip-hop collaborations as a premier jam band enlisted one of the biggest rappers alive for a crossover for the ages. Watch the entire set below.

String Cheese Incident Ft. GZA, Antibalas Horns, Sheryl Renee, Leonard Julien 10/31/15 [Full Show]

[Video: TheSoberGoat]

Soulive, Talib Kweli, & Darryl DMC McDaniels

Soulive has bridged the gap between hip-hop and jam for years. The instrumental funk/jazz trio, comprised of Eric Krasno and brothers Neal and Alan Evans, has worked with many hip-hop acts in the past, both as a group and in different projects. During a 2018 interview with Live For Live Music, Krasno described his deeply rooted love for the genre.

The first records that I bought as a kid wereThe Beastie BoysLicense to Illand Run DMCsRaising Hell, so that was always a thing for me. My parents had really great taste in music and so did my brother, but that was likemymusic, the one thing that was my era, he said. Kraz continued, Early on with Soulive, we linked up with Talib Kweli andHi-Tekand theRawkus Recordspeople. Theres a guy namedDJ Spinna, and through him, I met a lot of other artists.

He went on to describe meetingG-Unitand producing My Gun Go Off for 50-Cents Curtis album with longtime friend, producer, and acclaimed drummer, Adam Deitch.

Back in those daysI guess they still do this, thoughthey would record like 50 songs, and we would just hope that one we made would make it on the album. With Talib Kweli, I worked with him a lot closer, like in the studio, helping him mix things, add instrumentation, and bring other musicians in. He had always been someone that really wants to work with musicians and be apart of the process, he elaborated.

That relationship with Kweli didnt just manifest itself in the studio. During SoulivesBowlive 5 at theBrooklyn Bowlin New York on March 20th, 2014, Kweli andDarryl DMC McDanielsjoined Soulive on stage for a performance of the Run D.M.C. classic, Peter Piper. During that show, Soulive and Kweli also treated fans to a rendition of State of Grace, from the rappers 2013 release, Gravitas. Watch both of those performances below.

Soulive ft. Talib Kweli & DMC Peter Piper 3/20/14

[Video: Barry2theB]

Soulive ft. Talib Kweli State of Grace 3/20/14

[Video: Barry2theB]

Galactic & Chali 2na

Out of all the bands in the jam scene, Galactic might have the most experience in working with hip-hop artists. The group has worked with several rappers throughout its 26-year career, including Boots Riley,Gift of Gab,Dendemann,and Chali 2na.

The latter, Chali 2na, hao s been known to add rhymes to the mix with various acts in the jam sphere. This past January on Jam Cruise 18, in addition to his own billed sets with longtime friend, DJ, and fellow Jurassic 5veteranCut Chemist, Chali 2na hopped onstage with OG Garage A Trois (featuring Skerik, Stanton Moore, Charlie Hunter, and Mike Dillon), Galactic, and more to add a layer of hip-hop sensibilities to the jam-heavy event.

His relationship with bands like this dates back more than a decade, In 2007, he even recorded a song with Galactic, titled Think Back. The group recently performed this song with 2na at The Capitol Theatre on February 7th, 2020. Watch it below.

Galactic ft. Chali 2na Think Back 2/7/20

[Video: Stanton Moore]

Below, check out a few jam band/hip-hop crossover honorable mentions.

Phish ft. Jay-Z 99 Problems 6/18/04

[Video: Adam Brandeis]

Umphreys McGee ft. Lupe Fiasco The Show Goes On 5/15/15

[Video: Live For Live Music]

Dumpstaphunk ft. Chali 2na Jam 2 4/22/16

[Video: Live For Live Music]

The Killa 4 Dilla (Pt. 1) New Orleans, LA 4/30/16

[Video: FunkItBlog]

The Killa 4 Dilla (Pt. 2) New Orleans, LA 4/30/16

[Video: FunkItBlog]

Go here to see the original:

Opinion: Jam Bands And Hip-Hop Have More In Common Than You Think - Live for Live Music

The Witcher was already a beloved franchise courtesy of Andrzej Sapkowski's original novels and CD Projekt Red's hit games, culminating with the classic The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The franchise rose to greater prominence though with the release of Netflix's recent adaptation series, simply titled The Witcher, and season 2 is scheduled to hit in 2021. Couple that with the upcoming Anime prequel The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf (which will focus on Vesemir) and you've got one of the hottest franchises around. That means there's plenty of room for some amazing cosplays, and there are many to choose from. We've collected 7 of our favorites right here, and while some are based on the show and others on the games, they are all definitely worth checking out.

Because there are so many we decided to highlight just a few here, but we will be spotlighting more in the future, so if you see a cosplay that deserves some shine, make sure to let me know by hitting me up on Twitter @MattAguilarCB!

You can find the official description for Netflix's The Witcher below.

Based on the best-selling fantasy series of books, The Witcher is an epic tale of fate and family. Geralt of Rivia, a solitary monster hunter, struggles to find his place in a world where people often prove more wicked than beasts, Netflix said. But when destiny hurtles him toward a powerful sorceress, and a young princess with a dangerous secret, the three must learn to navigate the increasingly volatile Continent together.

Henry Cavill (Geralt of Rivia), Anya Chalotra (Yennefer), Freya Allan (Ciri), Jodhi May (Calanthe), Bjrn Hlynur Haraldsson (Eist), Adam Levy (Mousesack), MyAnna Buring (Tissaia), Mimi Ndiweni (Fringilla), Therica Wilson-Read (Sabrina), Emma Appleton (Renfri), Eamon Farren (Cahir), Joey Batey (Jaskier), Lars Mikkelsen (Stregobor), Royce Pierreson (Istredd), Maciej Musia (Sir Lazlo), Wilson Radjou-Pujalte (Dara), and Anna Shaffer as Triss.

The Witcher is available to stream on Netflix now, and you can check out more from our Witcher coverage right here. Hit the next slide to check out some of our favorite Witcher cosplays, featuring Geralt, Triss, Yennefer, and Ciri!

Next up is a team-up between Geralt and Ciri brought to you by cosplayers Kuromaru and PopCorni with photography by Yumikasa Photography, and it's delightful. The photo has Geralt playing on the swings and having a ball of a time, while Ciri looks on in resigned disappointment. To be fair we're not if that's because Geralt looks like a child on the swings or that there's only one swing and she didn't get to be the first one to use it, but either way, she's not happy.

You can find more of Kuromaru Cosplay on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitch, and you can find more of PopCorni Cosplay on Instagram, Facebook, and Etsy. Yumikasa Photography can be found on Instagram.

"Something funny for April Fools' Day Photo by @sliwkowapannaCiri by @popcorni_cosplay"

Next up is Dayhazzza of CosplayWon, who along with photographer Stasgubkin brings a stunning cinematic flair to this Yennefer cosplay. This feels like it could be right out of Netflix's hit series thanks to the moody forest backdrop, and there's a perfect look of confidence and could care less in Dayhazzza's expression. Couple that with a costume that feels like a marriage of the show and the games and you've got yourself a top notch cosplay.

You can find Dayhazzza on Instagram, and Stasgubkin can be found on Instagram as well. You can check out more of CosplayWon on Instagram or the official website.

"Character: YenneferSeries: The Witcher.First feature from new CosplayWon member @dayhazzza joining us from Ukraine You can follow her here: https://www.cosplaywon.com/dayhazzzaAnd ofcourse also on Instagram..Doesn't she look great? Photo taken by @stasgubkin"

Hendoart delivers a gorgeous Ciri cosplay with photography from EccentricErick, and the makeup is especially stellar, complete with that pronounced scar on her face. The background is gorgeous as well, as is the attention to detail on Ciri's costume, and in this case we are talking about the first photo.

You can find more of Hendoart's work on Instagram, Patreon, and Twitter, and EccentricErick can be found on Instagram.

"Posted both versions of Ciri you know where! Just a casual reminder that o dont always share ot but I do spicier cosplay things too and I think it's just as valid Building things is hard and amazing... but sucking it in while flexing and making your face look normal is also a damn challenge LMAO! : @eccentricerick on the 1st shot with moody editing from me"

Next up is a beautiful Triss cosplay by Aida.Zeitgeist with photography by avokphoto. The photo features a stark snow-filled backdrop that sets off the flames coming from Triss'shands perfectly, which then brings out the red in Triss's hair and cloak. This is not the only Witcher themed cosplay on her account either, and you can find more on her Instagram right here.

You can also find her on Twitch, and you can find more from avokphoto on Instagram.

"Triss by mePhoto by @avokphoto_____________ , ? ?#trissmerigold #trisscosplay #thewitcher #thewitchercosplay #wintercosplay #gingerhair #fairyphotoshoot"

What's better than just an awesome cosplay? Why adding animation to it of course, and that's what we get in this slick combo between cosplayer Andrews_MacDragon, photographer Zloy__Gremlin, and effects and animation creator Manmeet Singh. Everything about this photo is epic, from the spot-on armor and makeup to the Igni sign produced ball of fire leaving his hand. Then a series of animations are added in to bring to life smoke, fire, birds, and Geralt's movement, making a great cosplay somehow even cooler.

You can check out Andrews_Macdragon on Instagram, and Zloy__Gremlin can be found on Instagram as well. Manmeet Singh can be found on Instagram too.

"SWIPE TO SEE ORIGINAL PHOTO Cosplay by ( andrews_macdragon )Photography by ( zloy__gremlin )And animation by me....."

Azura Cosplay and photographer Pasha Vixen delivered another stellar entry in the Ciri cosplay category with this team-up, and at times it is difficult to tell whether or not you're looking at a piece of artwork or a genuine photo. This cosplay is stunning from head to toe and has a movie-style sheen that is hard to pull off, but this one does it in spades.

You can check out more of Azura Cosplay on Instagram and Patreon, and you can find Pasha Vixen's work on Instagram, Patreon, Facebook, and Twitter. H/T to Geek Stop.

"Cosplayer: @azuracosplayofficialPhoto: @pashavixen#witchernetflix #witcher #witcher3wildhunt #witcher3cosplay #witchercosplay #ciri #ciriwitcher #cosplay #cosplaygirl #cosplayer #cosplaymakeup #cosplaycostume #stop_geek #cosplaynation #cosplayers"

There's something quite magical and lovely about this Triss cosplay from Astrid Cosplay, photographer Marriyanego, and Hustler Cosplay. The colors are so wonderfully vibrant, and the tranquil backdrop lets the costume and the magic effects truly shine. Speaking of, the magic on display is not just a bean of energy or a white light but is instead filled with color and motion thanks to the butterflies emanating from the spell. The best part is there's more from this gorgeous set, and it can be found on the Instagram accounts below.

You can find Astrid Cosplay on Instagram, and you can find Marriyanego on Instagram as well.

"POWER OF MAGIC Triss Merigold of MariborPhoto by @marriyanegoSpecial thanks to @hustlercosplay #cosplay #cosplayer #cosplaygirl #cosplayphotography #cosplayofinstagram #game #gamecosplay #games #witcher #witcher3 #witcherwildhunt #witchercosplay #triss #trissmerigold #trisscosplay #trissandyen #witchernetflix"

Read more here:

The Witcher: 7 Amazing Cosplays We Love - ComicBook.com

Punk, an exciting four-part Epix docuseries exec-produced by John Varvatos and Iggy Pop, manages to cover the movements various bases: gestation in the late-60s; NYCs CBGB scene; Londons two-fingered salute to the establishment; the rise of hardcore in DC, LA and beyond.

Legendary contrarians like John Lydon attempt to resolve timeworn debates, like whether UK punks ripped off their NYC counterparts (that beef spilled out into a chaotic panel discussion with Henry Rollins and Marky Ramone). But its the decision to show those who made it all happenincluding Lydon, Debbie Harry, and the Slits Viv Albertine, to name a fewlistening to the sounds they created and talking about its reverberations that make Punk worth watching.

Punk Epix Trailer

The series kicks off with the man whos widely considered the godfather of the movement talking about one of the seeds of rebellion planted in his young mind. Iggy Pop says The Kinks You Really Got Me was a welcome reprieve from the sh*tty Top 40 of the day and he recalls huddling under the covers past bedtime waiting for it to come on the radio as a kid. Pop says it sounded like life in the Industrial Age: You were free of the blues, you were free of Perry Como, you were free of mom and dadyou were dangerous. You turned into a monster.

Related: Iggy Pop: A Real Wild Child Returns

The KinksYou Really Got Me (Live on Shindig,1965)

The story picks up with another formative influence on Iggy and future punks: his fellow Detroit natives the MC5. The bands co-founder Wayne Kramer tells how the anti-war and civil rights protests inspired the MC5 to Kick out the jams. As the footage of the band kicking into high gear at the infamously riotous Chicago Democratic National Convention of 68, we get reactions from those the song inspired: NY Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain; Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra, who effusively says this is what changed my life, and Black Flag singer Henry Rollins, who says the song was the promise of what rock and roll could be.

Iggy later recalls witnessing a shambolic and unruly Doors show at the University of Michigans Homecoming dance in 67 that inspired him to wonder: If these people with a Number 1 song can do that, what excuse do I have?

I stopped singing about mice and rainbows and started singing about having nothing to do and no fun and animal sex, Iggy goes on to say. About his band The Stooges he says: No one rocked as hard as we did at that time. No argument here.

The StoogesI Wanna Be Your Dog (1969 studio recording)

One of the keys to Punks success is that it not only features those who helped create the music but also those who acted as catalysts like Legs McNeil, who co-founded the zeitgeist magazine that gave the movement its name, and Zelig-like figure Danny Fields. Fields was the Doors publicist and signed The Stooges and MC5. In Punk, he reveals he was ready to sign the Ramones 15 seconds into seeing them perform at CBGB in 1975, but it took a trip to Florida and a check from his mom to meet the bands one signing conditiona $3000 drum kitin order to seal the deal.

Speaking of CBGB, Marky Ramone, Jayne County, Blondies Debbie Harry, and Chris Stein bear witness to the grit and the grime that was Hilly Kristals famous downtown NYC venue, recalling the dogsh*t on the floor and the inedible chili and hamburgers once served there.

Related: Rapture Ahead: The Top 10 Songs of Blondie

Episode 2 shifts to London and we hear from Lydon, who cites The Kinks and Iggy but also Irish folk songs as key ingredients to his formation. Still very much the contrarian at 63, the former Sex Pistol talks about his distaste for the very word punk, citing the so-called dictionary definition of Mr. Bigs toyboy in an American prison system to which he deadpans: Im afraid I dont fit that, but somehow the term stuck. But in classic Lydon fashion, he follows the snark with a moment of insight when he says: Whats really important to me is what punk turned into: honesty, originality and a genuine feel for my fellow human beings.

John Lydon and Marky Ramone at post-screening Epix panel discussion

Episodes 3 and 4 cover late-70s/ early-80s hardcore and bands like Cro Mags, Bad Brains, Agnostic Front, The Germs, Black Flag and second wavers Nirvana, L7 and Bad Religion. Along the way, Joan Jett, the Slits Viv Albertine, and Palmolive, L7s Donita Sparks are among the women who remind us just how crucial a role they played and continue to play in its ever-expanding reach.

Minor Threat and Fugazi co-founder Ian Mackaye sums up what might just be the most revolutionary thing about punk when he explains why teens continue to respond to it like he did when he first heard it:

Its just a piece of plastic spinning in a circle. Whats there to be scared of? It must be the ideas.

-Colm Clark

-Photo Credit: The Damned pose outside CBGBs club on the Bowery in New York in April 1977 L-R Rat Scabies, Dave Vanian, Brian James, Captain Sensible (Photo by Roberta Bayley/Redferns/Getty Images)

Previously published on culturesonar

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Mapping the Unruly History of Punk - The Good Men Project

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, infected by the coronavirus, was moved Monday to intensive care at a London hospital, a dramatic development illustrating his countrys escalating battle with the outbreak.

The first major world leader to be so seriously sickened with COVID-19, the 55-year-old prime ministers move to a stepped-up level of care came less than 24 hours after he was hospitalized, ostensibly for tests.

He tested positive for the virus on March 26 and acknowledged persistent symptoms including a fever and cough. In a video released Friday, he looked markedly ill, puffy-eyed and subdued, a far cry from his usual ebullient self.

His foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, was deputized to step in as necessary for Johnson, who had been reported earlier in the day to be tending to government affairs from his hospital bed.

Johnsons fate added new uncertainty to a fractious government led by one of Europes most polarizing figures. Quick of wit and at times blustery in temperament, Johnson helped lead Britain out of the European Union while upending the nations politics with his brand of unapologetic populism.

After Johnsons hospitalization was disclosed Sunday, President Trump called the prime minister a personal friend and great gentleman, expressing hopes for his recovery.

In recent years, Britain and the United States have shared a certain political zeitgeist, with Brexit and Johnsons rise both preceding and echoing the populist presidency of Trump.

That transatlantic pas de deux continued into the early days of the coronavirus crisis, with Trump and the British leader both striking an initially dismissive stance about the dangers of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the virus.

But now the two countries responses to the outbreak may be diverging, even as the near-term epidemiological trajectories in Britain and the United States appear similarly grim.

Less than two weeks before being hospitalized Sunday, Johnson shifted his stance on the outbreak, ordering a March 24 lockdown allowing only essential movement in public. His government now strongly advocates physical distancing measures, consistently pleading with Britons to stay home and save lives.

Queen Elizabeth II, who turns 94 this month, delivered a rare televised address to the nation Sunday evening that was widely hailed as a pitch-perfect expression of both dauntlessness and somber realism about the outbreaks gravity.

Queen Elizabeth made a rare address, calling on the British people to rise to the challenge of the coronavirus pandemic and exercise self-discipline in an increasingly challenging time.

(Buckingham Palace)

Trump has been far more equivocal. He approved voluntary 30-day guidelines meant to slow the spread of the virus, but has turned aside calls for a national stay-at-home order and repeatedly voiced hopes that the country would soon be up and running again.

On Sunday, the president again predicted the now-battered U.S. economy would take off like a rocket when the outbreak eases. Experts say such an economic opening is far from imminent.

LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL! Trump tweeted Monday morning.

Britain, like the United States, is facing a projected increase of illness and fatalities in coming days.

During the weekend, the country marked an unwelcome milestone, surpassing devastated Italy in daily coronavirus deaths. Britains fatality toll as of Monday more than 5,000 was roughly half the total coronavirus deaths in the United States, whose population is about five times larger.

The United States, too, is on course for an extraordinarily bleak week, public health officials say. The surgeon general, Jerome Adams, on Sunday likened the coming seven days to Pearl Harbor or the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

As recently as the weekend, Trump was almost jocular when asked about the close physical clustering of senior aides at near-daily White House coronavirus briefings. Johnson was seemingly casual about that kind of contact as well until he, Health Secretary Matt Hancock and Englands chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, all tested positive for the virus in the last week of March.

Hancock and Whitty recovered, and even after Johnson was hospitalized, initial reports were positive. The prime ministers office said earlier Monday he had spent a comfortable night at Londons St. Thomas Hospital.

But even then, aides refused to address news reports that he received oxygen treatment, though they stopped describing his symptoms as mild.

The outbreaks course in Britain and the United States have followed some common pathways, but on a few crucial points, the similarities break down.

As people have done in New York City, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, Britons have been taking to balconies and doorsteps for raucous, pot-banging rounds of applause for frontline health workers, a number of whom have died of or been sickened by COVID-19.

But while the U.S. and British publics share warm public sentiments toward individual doctors, nurses and others who care for coronavirus patients, the outbreak is seen in the U.K. as a ringing affirmation of its system of universal healthcare. In the United States, appreciation for medical workers is coupled with uninsured or underinsured patients fears of being bankrupted by the cost of care.

Although Britains National Health Service headed into the crisis already burdened by a long-term budget crunch, it has been holding its own even as the caseload inexorably rises.

In just nine days, marshaling hundreds of soldiers and a team of architects, the government set up a vast temporary hospital at a conference center in East London. Prince Charles the 71-year-old heir to the throne, who suffered his own bout of COVID-19 presided over last weeks ceremonial opening, but remotely.

New York City, with a measure of federal assistance, has also responded with swiftly assembled makeshift facilities, but individual hospitals have been staggering under the influx of critically ill patients. And state Gov. Andrew Cuomo like many of his counterparts has complained that individual states have been largely left to go it alone in obtaining crucial supplies.

While Trump has continued to lash out at domestic political opponents throughout the coronavirus crisis, Britains polarized political establishment has, for the moment, largely put aside bitter divisions over Brexit, the countrys exit from the European Union that took formal effect at the end of January.

Before the outbreak took hold, Scotlands first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, was spearheading demands for a second Scottish independence referendum, reflecting most Scots wish to stay in the EU, while Britain as a whole voted in 2016 to leave, 52% to 48%.

But Sturgeon, previously an unrelentingly sharp critic of the prime minister, has pivoted to working with him to help stem the spread of the coronavirus and shore up the healthcare system. The outbreak demands that Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson cooperate, and so far it appears they are doing so, the Scotsman newspaper noted in an approving editorial.

Britains opposition Labor Party which went head-to-head with Johnson in December in one of the most bitter general election campaigns in recent memory over the weekend installed a new leader, Keir Starmer. He said he would speak out where he saw flaws in the governments strategy, but promised for the duration of the crisis to steer clear of opposition for oppositions sake.

And Britain possesses a singular weapon in its fight to rally the country in the face of the coronavirus: its doughty monarch, whose televised address from Windsor Castle was likened to the iconic radio speech delivered in 1939 by her father, King George VI, as war clouds threatened.

Composed and calm, wearing one of her signature brooches, Elizabeth urged Britons to show solidarity and resolve.

I hope in the years to come, everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge, she told her compatriots.

Across the Atlantic, royal watchers and public intellectuals took note of the value of inspirational rhetoric at such a moment.

Though I lived in Britain for many years, the monarchy always felt alien to me; if youre not raised to feel reverence for it, you never will, tweeted German American academic and author Yascha Mounk, now based in Washington. And yet, this brave, sensible woman puts into relief what America so desperately lacks: a head of state capable of uniting the nation.

The queen acknowledged the painful sense of separation as people must keep their distance from one another to prevent the spread of infection. But Elizabeth, alluding to the lyrics of a World War II-era song, also held out the implicit promise of a return to normal life even if a post-coronavirus era now seems impossibly distant to some.

We will meet again, she said.

Special correspondent Boyle reported from London and Times staff writer King from Washington.

Read more here:

Britain's Boris Johnson in intensive care, illustrating U.K.'s growing struggle with coronavirus - Los Angeles Times

The current coronavirus pandemic is more than a medical crisis, it is also a political and ideological crisis. It is a crisis deeply rooted in years of neglect by neoliberal governments that denied the importance of public health and the public good while defunding the institutions that made them possible. At the same time, this crisis cannot be separated from the crisis of massive inequalities in wealth, income and power. Nor can it be separated from a crisis of democratic values, education and environmental destruction.

The coronavirus pandemic is deeply interconnected with the politicization of the natural order through its destructive assaults waged by neoliberal globalization on the ecosystem. In addition, it cannot be disconnected from the spectacle of racism, ultranationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and bigotry that has dominated the national zeitgeist as a means of promoting shared fears rather than shared responsibilities.

The plague has as one of its roots a politics of depoliticization, which makes clear that education is a central feature of politics and it always plays a central role whether in a visible or a veiled way in any ideological project. For instance, it has been a central pedagogical principle of neoliberalism that individual responsibility is the only way to address social problems, and consequently, there is no need to address broader systemic issues, hold power accountable or embrace matters of collective responsibility. As a politics of containment, neoliberalism privatizes and individualizes social problems, i.e., wash your hands as a way to contain the pandemic. In doing so, cultural critics Bram Ieven and Jan Overwijk argue, it seeks to contain any real democratic politics; that is to say, a politics based on collective solidarity and equality [because] democratic politics is a threat to the market.

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Additionally, neoliberalisms emphasis on commercial values rather than democratic values, its virulent ideology of extreme competitiveness and irrational selfishness, and its impatience with matters of ethics, justice and truth has undermined critical thought and the power of informed judgment. As Pankaj Mishra states, for decades now, de-industrialization, the outsourcing of jobs, and then automation, have deprived many working people of their security and dignity, making the aggrieved vulnerable to demagoguery.

Americans live in an age when neoliberalism wages war on the public and inequality is recast as a virtue. This age supports notions of individual responsibility that tear up social solidarities in devastating ways. This is a historical moment that puts a premium on competitive attitudes and unchecked individualism, and allows the market to become a template for structuring all social relations. The social contract has been all but eliminated while notions of the public good, social obligations and democratic forms of solidarity are under attack. This is a form of gangster capitalism that speaks only in the market-based language of profits, privatization and commercial exchange. It also legitimates the language of isolation, deprivation, human suffering and death.

Ravaged for decades by neoliberal policies, U.S. society is plagued by a series of crises whose deeper roots have intensified the stark class and racial divides. Such a divide is evident in the millions of workers who do not have paid sick leave, the millions who lack health insurance, the hundreds of thousands who are homeless, and the fact that as the Boston Review points out, One in five Americans cannot pay their monthly bills in full, and 40 percent do not have the savings needed to cover an unexpected $400 expense.

Neoliberal capitalism is the underlying pandemic feeding the current global shortage of hospitals, medical supplies, beds and robust social welfare provisions, and increasingly an indifference to human life.

Under such circumstances, the social sphere and its interconnections become an object of either financial exploitation or utter disdain, or both. What is lost in this depoliticizing discourse of neoliberalism and made clear in the current pandemic is that our lives are indeed interconnected for better or worse. There is a certain irony here in that the current White House call for the public to abide by social distancing mirrors not only a medically safe practice to slow down the spread of the virus, it also occupies a long-standing neoliberal ideological space that disdains social connections and democratic values while promoting death-dealing forms of social atomization. Here is where the medical crisis runs head on into a long-standing political crisis. This is also the space where politics has become a tool of neoliberalism as the economy and powers of government relentlessly attack and erode the common good and democracy itself. Irony turns into moral and political irresponsibility as Trump pushes social distancing while also indicating he will relax social distancing guidelines, against the advice of public health experts, in order to reboot the economy.

In a time of crisis, capitalism reveals itself as a disimagination machine whose underlying message is that the market provides the only forms of agency left. In this context, political, economic and social forces become the new workstations incessantly pushing the flight from any vestige of social, ethical and political responsibility, parading as the new common sense. Politics becomes a war machine running overtime to habituate people to the abyss of power while undermining any sense of dissent, resistance and social justice. Of course, this is the wider context of neoliberalism in which the coronavirus pandemic operates.

The financial crisis of 2008 made visible the plague of neoliberalism that has for over 40 years ravaged the public good and imposed misery and suffering upon the poor and others considered excess, waste or dangerous. With its merging of brutal austerity policies, financialization of the economy, the concentration of power in few hands, and the language of racial and social cleansing, neoliberalism has morphed into a form of fascist politics. The new political formation is characterized by a distinctive and all-embracing politics of disposability, a massive gutting of the social state, and support for pedagogical apparatuses of spectacularized violence, fearmongering and state terror.

All of this points to a disdain for any notion of the social that expands the meaning and possibilities of the common good, including the crucial sphere of public health, and the broader notion of what political philosopher Michael Sandel calls living together in a community, which requires solidarity and sacrifices to treat people with compassion, humanity and dignity. Central to this notion of the common good, argues scholar Shai Lavi, is a mass movement willing to bring together struggles for emancipation, economic justice and political community established on the basis of human equality.

The brutality of the pandemic of neoliberalism was evident in Trumps call on March 24, 2020, to reopen the economy, by Easter. At that time, he wanted to move the U.S. quickly toward ending cautious measures such as social distancing and letting the virus run its course. Trumps initial rationale for such an action restated a right-wing argument that the cure is worse than the disease. After being told that 2.2 million people could die as a result of reopening the economy too early, Trump said the White House would keep in place its social distancing rules at least through April.

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has stated that social distancing is the most important tool for containing the virus, yet Trump still refuses to issue a national stay-at-home order, especially at a time when seven states do not have one. At a press conference on April 4, Trump had stated that things will get a lot worse with many more deaths. Yet, soon afterward, he reiterated that he would like to see the country open again. Such actions display a shocking level of moral turpitude, making clear that Trump is more concerned about his reelection, commerce and the stock market than the ensuing death toll. As reporters from The Washington Post point out, Trump has long viewed the stock market as a barometer for his own reelection hopes.

The not-so-hidden and terrifying message is that political opportunism, the drive for profits and the embrace of a cruel neoliberal ideology are being embraced by the Trump administration without apology. Trump appears to take pleasure in belittling experts and expertise and only follows the advice of public health officials in the midst of the most dire warnings. He treats the pandemic as a partisan battle, disparages governors desperately calling for supplies, and refuses to implement a coordinated national federal approach to addressing the crisis.

Without hard evidence or scientific proof, Trump endorses specific drugs as treatments, falsely claims the U.S. is close to a vaccine and often relies on the advice of right-wing pundits who push conspiracy theories. When it comes to the choice of saving lives or the economy, Trump appears more concerned about the fate of Wall Street. What is more, his often confused and contradictory public remarks are filled with hyperbole and falsehoods and serve to mislead the American public while potentially causing unimaginable misery along with the possibility that Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, maybe millions would get sick and die. In this instance, sheer incompetence coupled with an aversion to experts and scientific evidence rise to the status of being a public danger and a catastrophic crisis.

In light of the ongoing spread of deaths, infections, and hospital shortages and public health catastrophe, experts have called for long-term planning, strategies, increased testing, and coordination between the federal government and the states. Many governors have complained that the governments lack of a federal plan has created something akin to the Wild West a system beset by shortages, inefficiencies and disorder.

The urgency of demands are amplified by the fact that the White House and leadership at multiple levels failed to provide any sense of urgency and immediacy in the early stage of the looming crisis. A report by The Washington Post stated that it took Trump 70 days from first being notified about the grave implications of the coronavirus to treat it not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked Americas defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens.

Of course, the many people who are and will die as a result of this reckless policy will be those traditionally viewed as disposable under the reign of neoliberalism. These include the elderly, the destitute, poor people of color, undocumented immigrants and people with disabilities not to mention the front-line medical workers who lack the equipment they need to be safe as they treat the elderly, sick and dangerously ill.

There is more at work here than a hardened depravity of an ill-informed, petty celebrity politician who is causing havoc and needless human suffering in a time of crisis. Trump has always had a penchant for thoughtlessness and self-absorption, and takes delight in humiliating others. Citing Stephen Greenblatt in a different context, his words perfectly fit Trump for whom There is no deep secret about his cynicism, cruelty and treacherousness, no glimpse of anything redeemable in him, and no reason to believe that he could ever govern the country effectively.

Trumps crudeness, mendacity, disregard for science, and arbitrary rule had led him to disregard previous warnings from experts about the possibility of a looming pandemic. This willful form of ignorance and sheer effrontery was on display in his earlier refusal and colossal failure to mobilize the power of the federal government to provide widespread testing and masks while simultaneously ensuring that hospitals and medical staff had enough beds, masks, ventilators and other personal protective equipment for treating people infected with the virus.

Ed Pilkington and Tom McCarthy report in The Guardian that Trump not only downplayed the threat the virus posed after the World Health Organization confirmed that there were 282 confirmed cases in several countries on January 20, his actions were mired in chaos and confusion. Rather than act quickly to avert a national health disaster, Trump let six weeks go by before his administration took seriously the severity of the threat and the need for mass testing. Pilkington quotes Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the U.S. governments response in 2013-2017 to a number of international disasters. He stated: We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.

Trump has a penchant for turning politics into a form of theater and entertainment into a form of cruelty. In a shocking display of pettiness, he publicly told Vice President Mike Pence not to answer the calls of those governors who are not appreciative of his efforts to deal with the pandemic. This includes Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, both of whom have made desperate pleas for critically needed supplies.

Moreover, as part of an ongoing effort to shift blame away from himself, Trump has attacked and attempted to humiliate reporters who asked him critical questions, and went so far as to claim that hospitals had squandered or done worse with masks and were hoarding ventilators, and that states were requesting equipment despite not needing them. He went so far as to suggest that much-needed masks were going out the back door. It is hard to overlook this type of weaponized cruelty, especially given the moving pleas by medical professionals appearing on social media begging for masks, gowns, ventilators and other crucial protective and lifesaving equipment. There is more at work here than the politics of denial and solipsism on the part of Trump; there is also what Robert Jay Lifton calls malignant normality, which I interpret as behavior that revels in violence and is fueled by what appears to be an immense pleasure in engaging in acts of cruelty. We have seen echoes of such cruelty in other eras with consequences that resulted in the death of millions, such as in the lynching of Blacks in the United States and acts of genocide in Nazi Germany.

Trumps obsession with wealth and ratings, and his limitless self-regard define him not only as an inept leader but also as a dangerous fraud. For instance, in the midst of the rapidly rising death toll in the United States, Trump boasted at one of his press media appearances about the [high] ratings for the White Houses coronavirus task force briefings. This is a form of political theater and pandemic pedagogy that weaponizes a rising death toll in the service of entertainment. Trumps incompetence bears tragic results in that hospitals are overcrowded, medical personnel lacking adequate protective equipment are dying, and the governors of hardest-hit states such as New York appear to be in a running feud with Trump, who is more at ease in insulting governors who have criticized him for his lack of leadership than in supplying them with much-needed medical equipment.

Trump and his administration are not alone in pushing a necropolitics that celebrates death over life, capital over human needs, greed over compassion, exploitation over justice and fear over shared responsibilities. How else to explain the chorus of Trump supporters in the media, corporate board rooms and the White House arguing for rationing life-saving care on the basis of age and disability in order to prevent imposing drastic strains on the nations hospitals and the U.S. economy? How else to explain that long before this pandemic crisis, as Naomi Klein points out, the apostles of neoliberalism have attempted to underfund services, such as state-funded health care, clean water, good public schools, safe workplaces, pensions, and other programs to care for the elderly and disadvantaged.

At the same time, a war has been waged by predatory capitalism on the very idea of the public sphere and the public good. One consequence is that the publicly owned bones of society roads, bridges, levees and water systems are going to slip into a state of such disrepair that it takes little to push them beyond the breaking point. When you massively cut taxes so that you dont have money to spend on much of anything besides the police and the military, this is what happens.

What is being revealed in the current pandemic crisis is the underlying plague of neoliberalism that has dominated the global economy for the last 40 years, though increasingly brandished as a badge of honor by fascist politicians, such as Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and others. Ruling-class corruption is also readily visible in a bailout package which, as Rob Urie observes, amounts to Bailouts for the Rich, the Virus for the Rest of Us. He writes:

In an economy where the richest 1% takes all the gains while the poor and working class havent seen a raise in four decades, it is the rich who will reap the benefits while workers get sick and die. It is finance capitalism that is being bailed out when it should have suffocated under its own weight in 2009.

What is being revealed in this looming pandemic is an unabashed resurgence of fascist politics with its history of grotesque inequalities, disposability, unadulterated cruelty and regressive policies. The latter neoliberal rudiments have a long legacy in the United States and have returned with revenge under the Trump administration. Neoliberal fascism signals a resurgence of a terror that bears an eerie echo to the racial cleansing and embrace of eugenics that marked the purification policies of the Hitler regime and made the concentration camp the endpoint of fascism. This was also policy designed to reboot the economy in a time of crisis.

We live at a time of multiple plagues that fuel the current coronavirus epidemic that is engulfing the globe inflicting economic misery, suffering and death as they move through societies with the speed of a deadly tornado. These include the plague of ecological destruction, the degradation of civic culture, the possibility of a nuclear war, and the normalization of a brutal culture of cruelty. Moreover, the plague of neoliberalism has waged a full-scale attack on the welfare state. In doing so, it has underfunded and weakened those institutions such as education and the public health sector. In addition, it has removed the vast majority of Americans from the power relations and modes of governance that would enable them to deal critically and intelligently with natural disasters, pandemics, and a slew of planetary crises which cannot be addressed by the market. In the midst of this pandemic, the poison of ruling-class power is at the center of the current political, ideological, and medical crisis. Frank Rich gets it right in arguing:

the pandemic has revealed in particularly stark terms that the extreme economic inequalities unmasked by the 2008 economic collapse remain unaddressed. Theres a titanic dynamic playing out now in real time. Celebrities and the wealthy are first in line for the lifeboats of coronavirus tests. Rupert Murdoch and his family protect their own health while profiting from a news empire that downplayed and outright disputed the threat of coronavirus. As the virus spreads from its current epicenters through the country the grotesque discrepancy between the elites and the have-nots is going to make Parasite look as benign as an episode of Modern Family.

The other plague, among many, is the rise of right-wing cultural apparatuses, such as Fox News and Breitbart Media in which truth is treated with scorn, science viewed as a hindrance and critical thought is maligned as fake news. This is a plague of willful ignorance and state-sanctioned civic illiteracy.

Under such circumstances, language at the highest levels of power and among powerful conservative cultural apparatuses operate in the service of denial, lies and violence. These media relentlessly push conspiracy theories such as the claim that the pandemic is a product of the deep state designed to prevent Trump from being reelected; a hoax created by the Democratic Party; or a virus that is no less dangerous than the common flu. They have also relentlessly insisted that all social problems are a matter of individual responsibility so as to depoliticize the public while making them indifferent to the neofascist claim that the government has no responsibility to care for its citizens or that society should not be organized around mutual respect, care, social rights and economic equality.

The current crisis is part of an age defined by a pedagogical catastrophe of indifference and a flight from any viable sense of moral responsibility. This is an age marked by a contempt for weakness, as well as rampant racism, the elevation of emotion over reason, the collapse of civic culture, and an obsession with wealth and self-interest. Under such circumstances, we are in the midst of not simply a political crisis, but also an educational crisis in which matters of power, governance, knowledge and a disdain for truth and evidence have wreaked havoc on the truth and endangered both millions of people and the planet itself. This is a politics fueled by a disimagination machine whose political and cultural workstations make the truth, justice, ethics, and most of all, bodies, disappear into the abyss of authoritarianism.

For the plague to end, it is crucial to address the ideologies of neoliberal fascism that prevent people from translating private troubles into broader systemic issues and to fight pedagogically in order to convince the public to move beyond the culture of privatization and atomization that propels a consumer society and reinforces a politics of single issues detached from broader considerations. This political crisis can only be grasped as a crisis of the social totality, one in which a range of democratic ills form the specifically political strand of a general crisis that is engulfing our social order in its entirety. We live in a moment in which it is becoming more credible to acknowledge that capitalism and democracy are not the same thing, and that the endpoint of capitalism is not only massive inequality and human suffering but a brutal machinery of death in which humanity is one step closer to the edge of extinction. This suggests that crises can have multiple outcomes resulting in a surge of authoritarianism and repression, on the one hand; or on the other, a resurgence of resistance movements at numerous levels willing to fight for a more just and equitable society, one that rejects what Brad Evans has called an age of multiple exclusions, mass terror, increasing expulsions and the hollowing out of the social state.

The coronavirus pandemic has pulled back the curtain to reveal the power of a brutal neoliberalism and its global financial markets in all of its cruelty. This is a system that has not only eroded the democratic ideals of equality and popular sovereignty, but has also created a political and economic context in which the looming pandemic puts a severe strain on medical workers and hospitals that lack ventilators and other essential equipment to treat patients and limit the number of deaths caused by the virus. This points to a moment in the current historical conjuncture in which the space between the passing of one period and the beginning of a new age offers the possibility for the social and political imagination to set in motion a global movement for radical democracy.

The current viral pandemic cannot be discussed outside of the crisis of politics and education. What is needed is a new vocabulary to comprehend the current pandemic crisis. Such a language must provide a sustained critique of neoliberal fascism with its discourses of exclusion, exploitation and racial purity. Such a discourse should also address the underlying causes of poverty, class domination, environmental destruction and a resurgent racism not as a call for reform, but as a project of radical reconstruction aimed at the creation of a new political and economic social order. In the words of Amartya Sen, we need to think big about society. In spite of the overwhelming nature of the current crisis, there is a need to think beyond being isolated, overwhelmed and powerless.

As we have seen in a number of countries, such as Hungary, Egypt, the Philippines, Thailand and Israel, the pandemic crisis creates extraordinary circumstances for restricting civil liberties, free speech and human rights while intensifying the possibilities of an emerging authoritarianism. There is no doubt that the COVID-19 crisis will test the limits of democracy worldwide.

At the same time, the magnitude of the crisis offers new possibilities in which people can begin to rethink what kind of society, world and future they want to inhabit. What we do not want to do is to go back to a system that equates democracy and capitalism. We must move beyond modifying the system, because the current crisis has deeper political and economic roots and demands a complete restructuring of society. David Harvey is right in arguing that The fundamental problems are actually so deep right now that there is no way that we are going to go anywhere without a very strong anti-capitalist movement.

As the pandemic crisis recedes, we will have to choose between a society that addresses human needs or one in which a survival-of-the-fittest ethos becomes the only organizing principle of society. It is time for new visions, public transcripts and pedagogical narratives to emerge about the meaning of politics, solidarity, mass resistance and democracy itself.

We still have the opportunity to reimagine a world in which the future does not mimic the predatory neoliberal present. This should be a world that brings together the struggles for justice, emancipation and social equality. More urgent than ever is the need to struggle for a world that imagines and acts on the utopian promises of a just and democratic socialist society. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, matters of criticism, understanding and resistance are elevated into a matter of life or death. Resistance is a dire necessity.

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The COVID-19 Pandemic Is Exposing the Plague of Neoliberalism - Truthout

Each month in PC Gamer magazine we devote a few pages to a section we like to call 'now playing', which features stories from our writers about games they have been enjoying recently. In this edition we take a look at Last Year, Cardpocalypse, Sayonaara Wild Hearts and The Witcher 3.

I didnt belong to any particular clique in school, but Last Year lets me live out thatnow that Im saying it out loudpretty abnormal fantasy. But it also punishes me for wanting to in the first place, often by A) feeding me to a large spider B) placing my skull between the large, meaty fists of a giant, or C) uh, well, hooks. So, so many hooks.

Yeah, its another asymmetrical monsters vs men game, but Last Year doesnt just copy Dead by Daylight or Left 4 Dead. It takes the conceit, a genre all its own at this point, and makes the monster an offensive level editor with a messed up suit and the teens focused, class-oriented (get it? Because school!) teammates. To be even more reductive, its a light level editor (monster) against five fragile testers (teens).

Heres what I mean: each match, five teen survivors, each their own horror movie cliche, picks a class and sets out into the level with a few typical horror movie objectives, like finding batteries to start a generator that opens a door and lets them escape. The four classes make up a team composition that, together, can foresee and repel any cleverly placed trap or monster attack. The scout can ping traps and tell if the monster is close, while the medic and assault classes work... well, pretty much how youd expect. Crafting materials are strewn about the level, often in precarious people-separating places, that allow players to make crucial items and weapons: hockey sticks, smoke bombs, flamethrowers, that sort of thing. Its that Left 4 Dead item management team meta, but deeper and wider and much more dependent on successful team coordination.

The monster (there are four types now, with the spider the newest addition) gets to play a demigod in order to even the odds against a team of five potentially well-equipped and communicative teens. As long as the monster isnt in anyones line of sight, it can despawn into something called Predator Mode. From this invisible no-clip adjacent overview, they can do horror movie stuff.

All that complexity makes it a necessity to play with friends, or at least communicative players on the same page. Any gap in the teen teamwork is easily exploited by the monster. It doesnt help that theres no tutorial to teach survivors how to work with one another either. Every third match with randos ends in the first few minutes because no one has a clue whats going on.

But when it works, Last Year brushes up closer to the feeling of being in a slasher flick than any other game of its type. Pounding synth-driven music and the ambience of whimpering teens help nail the oppressive atmosphere. It all works well enough that I still revel in watching a spider bite my head offas long as theyve earned it.

For players of a certain age, theres an easy nostalgia to Cardpocalypses premise. You play a kid at a school where everyones obsessed with a collectable card game starring weird, animal-like monstersin other words, a throwback to Pokemons utter domination of the playground zeitgeist in the late-90s.

But that set-up serves to do more than just evoke happy memories. By presenting its Power Pets card battles from the perspective of a group of enthusiastic kids, it gives itself permission to be messy. Children dont spend their time worrying about balance in games, or finding the most precise, efficient combos. They dont religiously follow the rules, or pore over FAQs online for the latest tweaks.

Theres only one rule that kids follow: the rule of cool. Especially in the period in which the game is set, the community that defined that rule wasnt a global one, it was local. What was fair play and what wasnt, what made sense and what didnt, it was up to you and your friends.

And so it is in Cardpocalypse. The kids at protagonist Jess school love playing Power Pets, but even more so they love making it their own. They trade not just in cards, but in stickersits agreed that you can stick new numbers over your favourite pets stats to buff them, and even give them a new name. Thanks to an article in the official magazine, its also considered kosher to create your own new cards from scratch, as long as you can do a convincing enough crayon drawing to illustrate it.

Cards are coveted, but not hoarded in pursuit of a complete collection. Instead they constantly change handstraded back and forth, used as currency, borrowed, stolen. If you want a particular card, youve got to find a kid whos got it, and give him something he wants. Maybe thats a card of equivalent raritybut, equally, maybe its just a fistful of chocolate bars.

I love a deep and straight-faced strategy game as much as the next PC gaming magazine editor, but theres something wonderfully freeing about Cardpocalypses anarchic approach. It conjures up nostalgia not just for a particular time and place, but for an entirely different attitude to gamingone based in youthful curiosity and wonder. We could all do with a little more of that in our lives, eh?

Im so glad this gorgeous indie made the leap from consoles, travelled full speed through cyberspace, and skidded to a timely halt on Steam. Its a rhythm action game about fast bikes, giant swords, lost loves, and magical girl transformations. Its free-spirited and energetic, and its pop soundtrack buzzes with energy.

On paper it sounds like a lot to keep up with, but Sayonara Wild Hearts is great at tying all of its ideas together neatly and coherently. In this universe, contemporary ballet is a rather more action-packed practice than it is in ours, and the game uses the grace of ballet choreography to create seamless transitions and a thematic throughline to its setpieces. The result is masterfully smooth, speedy gameplay that doesnt give you whiplash.

The story follows a young woman who has had her heart broken, and goes on a journey to accept herself and learn to love again. As part of her journey, she must chase down and defeat a number of bosses in a vibrant dreamscape of pinks, purples and blues. After a gentle tutorial that uses Debussys Clair de Lune, a song that many ballet dancers have performed, youre launched into the action.

All of the levels from Sayonara Wild Hearts repertoire have multiple different game modes, and it switches between them without breaking pace. One moment youre dodging incoming enemy missiles, then suddenly youll be challenged with some rhythm QTEs, and in another moment youll leap off the back of your bike and straight into a duel.

Its dazzling and spectacular, like something you would see in a Cirque du Soleil performance, and Sayonara Wild Hearts never leaves you behind. Theres a constant rush of landscapes, items and coloursbut the game takes it all in its perfectly choreographed stride. Your characters fluid ballet movements are always the thing to carry you smoothly through from one sequence to the next.

In one scene, shes gracefully pirouetting out of the way of enemy attacks while leaping effortlessly and the camera follows her movements. She doesnt just jump out of the way, she leaps and flips with elegance and poise. As she spins out of the way of the last threat, she spins to land back on her already moving motorbike and speeds away, already in position for the next sequence. Its all in one elegantly smooth motion, and this transition makes the movement between the different sequences as fluid as possible.

Theres no need for the game to pause and adjust, it just carries the player through to the next section in a rush of excitement. Sayonara Wild Hearts love of ballet means that it doesnt have to put the breaks on its speedy visuals. Its burst of ideas and expression all flows together through its fluid transitions, meaning youre never left behind.

Its been weeks since I watched Netflixs The Witcher, and I still cant get Jaskiers Toss a Coin to Your Witcher out of my head. His fantasy banger echoes through me, haunting my every waking moment. So in an attempt to break the spell hes clearly cast on me, I decide to do as he says, returning to The Continent to help Geralt earn a little extra pocket money.

The only problem there is that my version of Geralt is currently chilling out in sunny Toussaint in the gardens of his fully refurbished vineyard. That doesnt sound like the down-on-his-luck monster hunter from Jaskiers song, so I load up an earlier save and find a dishevelled and impoverished Witcher standing miserably in the rain beside a lake in Velen instead. Much better.

With little more than a handful of Orens to my name, I head towards a nearby village. When I arrive, I head straight for the noticeboard, and discover that the only Witcher contract available concerns someone called Jenny of the Woods. I ask the villages leader about her, and negotiate my (substantial) fee. Hes not happy, but Im not about to let Jaskier get the better of me. I head off to find Jenny, but soon discover that shes met an untimely end and transformed into a horribleand very angryNightwraith. I quickly find out that Im comically under- levelled for the ensuing fight, but I eventually vanquish Jenny and collect my reward.

As I head out of the village, Im ambushed by a band of deserters. As much as Im loathe to even pick up my sword if Im not getting paid for it, theyre a tenacious bunch, and Im forced to fight them off. To ensure I dont come away empty handed, I pick their corpses clean and sell everything to a conveniently-placed travelling merchant. With a few more coins clinking in my pockets, I head off in search of my next contract.

I dont have to go far. Just outside a nearby fishing village, I find a Nilfgaardian captain searching for a missing patrol. He thinks monsters are to blame, but then gets upset when I try and charge him nearly double the going rate to deal with them. Im forced to accept his paltry offering and head off in search of the soldiers, but I cant help but feel short-changed. Arriving at the patrols last known location, I find a band of ghouls. Thinking that this might be a chance for a quick buck after all, I head into battle, but discover to my horror that these corpse-eaters are so powerful that the games UI wont even tell me how strong they are. I manage a few minutes of frantic dodging, but Geralt is eventually torn apart, and I find myself back where I started. Stuff thisI reckon Ill have better luck convincing people to toss a coin to their Gwent opponent instead.

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PC Gamer plays: Last Year, Cardpocolypse, Sayonara Wild Hearts, and The Witcher 3 - PC Gamer

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker co-writer Chris Terrio admits to having struggles with the films ending. Launched this earlier December,The Rise of Skywalker not solely served as a result of the conclusion of the sequel trilogy that began withThe Strain Awakens, however moreover the entire Skywalker saga. It aimed to wrap up the nine-movie arc that started with the distinctive installment in 1977 and continued over the course of four a few years. It is perhaps an understatement to say that was a tall order, considerably since each viewer had their very personal ideas for the best way the story ought to complete. The understanding its unattainable to please allStar Wars followers doesnt make points any less complicated.

Lucasfilm positively had their justifiable share of points ironing out the last word chapter. Initially, Colin Trevorrow was introduced in to make a film known asDuel of the Fates, nevertheless he left the problem due to creative variations with the studio. J.J. Abrams modified Trevorrow, recruiting Terrio to co-write a model new script with him. Lucasfilm higher-ups may need preferred their mannequin to Trevorrows, nevertheless the ending was always a hard nut to crack no matter who was calling the pictures.

Related: Star Wars Followers Will Forgive The Rise of Skywalker Quicker Than The Prequels

Throughout the making-of documentary included on theRise of Skywalker residence media launch, Terrio discusses how laborious it was to craft the movies end and why it provided such an issue for them:

J.J. and Ive been having a number of problem with the highest of the film at one stage throughout the course of, and [production designer] Rick Carter talked about to us, I consider its because you two dont want Star Wars to be over. You dont want the Skywalker saga to be over, so you dont truly want to write it. And I consider there was a number of actuality in that.

Its unclear what Terrio is referring to when he saysthe highest of the film. One threat is hes talking regarding the Rey Skywalker scene, which was the last word sequence in the whole saga. Its easy to see why that will present troublesome for Abrams and Terrio. Its one issue to have the film assemble as a lot as an infinite third act battle in the direction of Emperor Palpatines giant fleet, nevertheless putting a bow on the Skywalker story is one different matter. There is no easy reply to what the ultimate scene throughout the Skywalker saga must be, and like so many alternative choices inThe Rise of Skywalker, Rey Skywalker proved to be terribly divisive. Nonetheless, author Rae Carson, who wrote the officialRise of Skywalker novelization, talked about it represents that familys closing victory over Palpatine. Since that battle has outlined the franchise over the course of three trilogies, one may say Rey Skywalker makes for a robust ending.

Saying goodbye to the Skywalker saga was bittersweet, nevertheless fortunatelyStar Wars as an entire simply isnt over. The franchise will nonetheless have a big presence throughout the widespread tradition zeitgeist, be it through the upcoming Disney+ TV reveals or the recently-announced Extreme Republic publishing initiative. Lucasfilm will also be planning on a model new slate of films, the first of which is able to premiere in December 2022. It is going to be attention-grabbing to see if any of these tales resonate as lots with most people as a result of the Skywalker saga.Star Wars is about to find new horizons, which is an thrilling prospect.

Further: Why Tatooines Suns Rise (In its place of Set) At The End of Rise of Skywalker

Provide: The Skywalker Legacy

Jar Jar Actor Says Phantom Menace Achieves Lucas Imaginative and prescient Higher Than Disney Sequels

Chris Agar is a info editor for Show Rant, moreover writing choices and movie critiques for the positioning as one among Show Rants Rotten Tomatoes accredited critics. Hes a graduate of Wesley Facultys Bachelor of Media Arts and Grasp of Sport Administration purposes. In 2013, Chris was employed to put in writing down weekly discipline office prediction posts together with the Show Rant Underground podcasts Subject Office Battle recreation and his place expanded over the following few years. Together with defending the latest info and hottest movie issues day-to-day, Chris has attended fairly a number of media events for Show Rant, along with San Diego Comic-Con, delivering content material materials his readers care about. He credit score Star Wars and Toy Story with launching a lifelong fascination with movies that led to his career, and now he has quite a lot of cinematic tastes, having enjoyable with the latest Hollywood blockbusters, Oscar contenders, and all of the issues in between. Chris favorite film genres embody sci-fi/fantasy, crime, movement, and drama.

Further About Chris Agar

Dana R. Dille Heather leads is leading the Entertainment column. She has mastered the art of writing since her childhood, and with time, this has developed to be an enormous talent. When we hired her, we were definite that her skill sets would benefit our website, and gladly, we were right. Not only she has shown skills in writing, but she has also demonstrated her ability to manage time according to her work schedule.

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Techland 's Dying Gentle 2 Is In Hassle: Why The Launch Taking Time And When Will It Come??? - Global News Hut

That Donald Trump transformed himself from property developer, reality television star and owner of the Miss Universe franchise into the 45th president of the United States seems no less bemusing more than three years on than it did on November 8, 2016.

Since he entered the presidential race in 2015, the Trump zeitgeist has shaken up the political establishment in both the Republican and Democratic parties, and left US policy watchers, foreign leaders and international market traders scratching their heads. His pronouncements via Twitter have done little to clarify matters.

Following his presidential triumph, anticipating how he might behave, what policies or actions he might prioritize next, has become a primary occupation for many of us. Yet in his fourth year, he is still behind his Oval Office desk and has managed to do many of the things he promised to do when a presidential candidate.

Now, in the midst of the global coronavirus crisis, he faces the most important test yet of his presidency, one which no candidate would have predicted.

With the US presidential and congressional elections now only seven months away it is a good time to separate the man from the myth and work out what solid achievements he has made behind the bluster.

Allow me to demystify Trump. If you want to know what Trump is going to do, just listen to what he says. In particular, listen to what he has said he intended to do since he was a presidential candidate. A good place to start is with his Contract with the American Voter, released in October 2016. In the document, which is readily available online, Trump and his team outlined a 100-day action plan to Make America Great Again.

Considered against the backdrop of Trumps first 100 days in office, the contract seems gimmicky. When viewed as a roadmap for Trumps first term, however, it becomes hard to ignore how closely he and his administration have worked to tick items off this list.

On domestic policy, Trump committed in the contract to reducing regulation. By the White House account, for every new rule it has enacted the Trump administration has cut eight and a half regulations, reducing regulatory costs by an estimated $50 billion.

Trump also promised to lift restrictions on the production of US energy reserves, and in office he has rewritten the Clean Power Plan to stimulate the coal industry and offered plans to ease methane emission limits, roll back offshore drilling safety restrictions and expand offshore drilling. Trump committed separately to restarting the Keystone Pipeline and similar energy infrastructure projects, which his administration has taken steps to advance.

Trump also proposed various actions to restore security and the constitutional rule of law. To restore security, Trump committed to various immigration reforms including cancelling all federal funding for sanctuary cities, which he did by a January 2017 executive action that has been challenged in the courts.

He also pledged to remove illegal immigrants and suspend immigration from terror-prone regions, a measure enacted through the 2017 travel ban which was extended in 2020. He also announced his intention to build a border wall with Mexico, more than 90 miles of which were reported to be completed by December 2019, and which the Trump administration repeatedly appropriated funds for.

On restoring the constitutional rule of law, Trump vowed to cancel Barack Obamas unconstitutional executive actions and has since rolled back a number of Obama initiatives including those on climate change and protections for transgender individuals in the military. He has also nominated Supreme Court justices from a list of anti-abortion candidates prepared by the conservative Heritage Foundation: Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.

Finally, Trump pledged changes to the tax system which included a reduction in the corporate tax rate, decreases in the number of individual tax brackets and deductions for childcare, all measures incorporated into the 2017 tax overhaul.

On foreign policy, Trump laid out plans to: withdraw from Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he did almost immediately upon taking office; cancel payments to the UN climate change programmes he withdrew from the Paris Agreement in June 2017; renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement Trump signed the revised USMCA trade deal in January 2020; and rebuild the military and end the cap on spending Trump has overseen increased defence spending, including in his fiscal year 2021 budget.

Unsurprisingly, Trumps contract extensively covered trade, the linchpin of his America First foreign policy. In it, he promised to direct the Treasury Secretary to label China a currency manipulator, something carried out in August 2019 and subsequently reversed in January 2020 before the two parties signed their Phase One trade deal.

Trump also committed to identifying all foreign trading abuses affecting US workers and take action to end them.

Between the global tariffs on solar panels and washing machines and later steel and aluminium, the Section 301 investigations imposing tariffs on an increasing range of Chinese goods, or proposed tariffs on Mexican imports, Trump has aggressively pursued perceived trade abuses and imbalances.

Whether one agrees with Trumps policies or not, his administration has accomplished much of what it set out to.

And Trump knows this. His re-election campaign as previewed in his State of the Union Address on February 4 will be this: Trump has kept his promises and the economy and the country are all the better for it. In fact, his re-election website is promisekept.com where the headline has changed from Making America Great Again to Keeping America Great.

When trying to anticipate what Trump will prioritize next, the obvious place to start is with what is left to be ticked off that October 2016 contract list.

At home, this looks like: additional immigration reforms continuing to build the southern border wall with Mexico, further visa restrictions and asylum curbs; more environmental deregulation; movement on his long-delayed 2018 infrastructure proposal; educational reforms; a proposed Restoring Community Safety Act targeting crime reduction; and perhaps taking another shot at repealing Obamacare.

On foreign policy, what is left on Trumps list includes more trade action, particularly pursuing more bilateral trade deals. This potentially includes a US-UK free trade deal, which Steven Mnuchin, the US Treasury Secretary, indicated was a priority when speaking at Chatham House in January, as well as an agreement with Europe. These will probably be phased deals, similar to the Phase One trade deal with China.

With any movement on trade arrangements, the administration will probably rely on another standby of Trumps presidency, executive action, including on tariffs and sanctions. This could include raising the volume on Twitter on car tariffs in the run-up to potential US-European trade negotiations. Similarly, threats of World Trade Organization action or tariffs on British goods are likely to increase as part of any US-UK trade negotiations, especially if Britain imposes a technology tax similar to Frances.

Longer-term objectives such as a sweeping infrastructure overhaul or a Phase Two China deal will be left until after the November elections, if Trump is returned to office.

What matters most for him in the run-up to his re-election bid is the strength of domestic economic indicators such as jobs and unemployment levels, GDP growth rates, the stock market and wages. All of these have been thrown into the air by the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis.

Given the outsized role that the health of the economy will play for his re-election, the potential economic, health and collective fallout of a protracted outbreak of COVID-19 in the US is the type of low probability, high impact event that could pose a real challenge to Trumps re-election.

Polling in March suggests that Americans remain split on the Trump administrations handling of the outbreak; even as cases of coronavirus continue to rise unabated, the Dow Jones Industrial Average vacillates daily after ending its longest ever bull market, presidential primary elections are postponed, hospitals and households face supply shortages, and all aspects of life go virtual.

Whether appropriate or not, comparisons with 9/11 have been frequent. In the aftermath of the devastating terrorist attacks in 2001, George W Bush saw his approval rating spike to as high as 90 per cent.

Now, in 2020, after an initial slow response that sought more to downplay the risks from the virus than to take action to contain its spread, the governments emergency economic stimulus plan will be the largest in US history at US$2 trillion.

How effective and effectively implemented these measures are including direct cash handouts, small business support, aid for airlines and other severely distressed industries as well as funds for election security will determine whether Trump sees his own rally-around-the-flag effect or whether the political toll of the coronavirus outbreak costs Trump his re-election. The advantage of being an incumbent president in US politics is real, however. During the period from 1788 to 2004, the in-office party has retained the White House two thirds of the time when running incumbent candidates.

The coronavirus crisis aside, one other aspect of Trumps Contract with the American Voter cannot be ignored. In it he committed himself to six measures to clean up the corruption and special interest collusion in Washington, DC. These measures proposed both a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government and a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.

Yet it was the administrations involvement of a foreign government in the electoral process that lay at the heart of the move to make Trump only the third US president to face impeachment. US officials in and around the Trump administration including Trump himself lobbied the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for compromising information on Joe Biden, the former vice president and Trumps likely rival in the November presidential election, and withheld US military aid that had already been authorized by Congress.

In the final analysis, what Trump has done politically cannot be divorced from how he has done it.

While assessing Trumps actions on trade or immigration or deregulation, we cannot ignore his modus operandi of expansive executive authority, erosion of institutions, blurring of lines between the executive and judicial branch and deep questions about Americas reliability as an ally and its continued engagement in the world.

Trumps decision in February to pardon or commute the sentences of a number of individuals imprisoned for fraud and corruption, is just the latest, revealing example.

We may be able to demystify Trumps priorities by listening to the messages he has sent since he was a presidential candidate. Whether this provides any comfort will depend on how one feels about his objectives and the ways he crosses them off his list.

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Forget the tweets, read the contract - Chatham House

How does everymovie inThe Matrix franchise rank from worst to best? Envisioned by the Wachowski siblings and developed in the late 1990s,The Matrix delivered a pre-millennial dose of existential science fiction action and quickly became a cultural phenomenon. Based in a dystopian future where a war between man and machines ended with AI robots enslaving the human race in a digital simulation (the titular Matrix), the 1999 classic follows a small band of resistance fighters as they fight back against their captors, free others from their virtual prison and wear some damn cool leather trench coats. At the eye of the storm is Keanu Reeves' Neo who proves to be the figure of prophecydestined to finally end the war and liberate mankind.

A pair of sequels followed, both released in 2003,but the Wachowskis' world has also expanded into animation, video games and other media considered canon alongside the cinematic releases. The influence, legacy and popularity ofThe Matrix remains strong 17 years after the last film was released and talk of a fourth entry has been almost non-stop during that period. After much speculation,The Matrix 4 was officially announced in 2019 for a 2021 release, bringing back Neo, Carrie-Anne Moss' Trinity and The Merovingian, while also adding an array of modern stars such as Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jessica Henwick and Neil Patrick Harris. Although the coronavirus pandemic has put a halt on Neo's return (and pretty much everything else) for the moment,The Matrix 4 is happening and in production, with Lana Wachowski directing.

Related:The Matrix: Everything That Happened After The Original Movies

While fans will certainly need to catch up on all 3The Matrix movies before diving intoThe Matrix 4, which of the trio comes out on top, and which is the glitch in the program? And has the passage of time forced a reevaluation of the less-liked films in a similar manner to theStar Wars prequel trilogy? Here's our ranking of the movies inThe Matrix series, from worst to best.

Upon release, fans widely pannedThe Matrix Revolutions as one of the most disappointing climaxes in science fiction cinema and that opinion has barely improved with the passage of time. It could even be said that fan desire to fix the mistakes of the thirdMatrix movie is as much of a driving force behindThe Matrix 4 as the prospect ofreuniting withKeanu Reeves' Neo or the multitude of story possibilitiesyet to be explored in the Wachowskis' world.

Despite suggestions to the contrary,The Matrix Revolutions isn't an entire disappointment. The finaleputs greater emphasis on story over action, compared toThe Matrix Reloaded, boasting a far meatier plot to chomp on.The Matrix Revolutionsrounds off Neo's deadly feud with Agent Smith, the final days of the war against the Machines, the true purpose and nature of the Matrix, and Morpheus' faith in Neo - all points that lingered in the previous film without much movement.This progression immediately fixes one of the biggest problems withThe Matrix Reloaded, but the 3rd film still doesn't match the storytelling quality of the original. Trinity's death, for example, is a waste of a major character and lacks any real emotional impact. Thankfully,The Matrix 4has a key opportunity to remedy this error.

Another positive to draw fromRevolutions isthe ending itself -even ifhowthose final moments play out largely fail to satisfy. The trilogy concludes with the Matrix rebooted, Neo ending the Machine war with a heroic sacrifice, and humanity given hope at a brighter future. Audiences are afforded the closure of a happy ending but not without a touch of bitter mortality, and this is exactly where The Matrix should have finished.

Related:The Matrix 4: Why Only One Wachowski Sibling Is Directing

Unfortunately, the routeThe Matrix Revolutions takes to reachsaidfinaleleft movie-goers reaching for the blue pill.The end of Neo's story is a meandering and frustrating quest for answers that fails to emulate the philosophical intrigue of the 1999 movie, coming off as pretentious, ambiguous and evasive. AsThe Matrix Revolutions struggles to bring together its real-world Machine storyline and the threat of Agent Smith inside the Matrix, it becomes clear thatReloadedandRevolutions really should've been condensed into a single streamlined film.

As detailed above, the sequels ofThe Matrixfranchisearen't fondly remembered, but while it's tempting to lump the pair together in one disappointing bundle,Revolutionsbears more responsibility thanThe MatrixReloadedfor the series' decline.

Perhaps the most damning indictment ofThe Matrix Reloaded, the middle installment of the trilogy, is that the entire film can be removed and the emphasis of the overall narrativeis barely effected.The Wachowskis' first sequel does precious little to develop the story of the originalMatrixor advance key events, and instead plays more like a procession of action sequences loosely linked together by barely-concealed exposition. While the cast, crew and visuals all remain consistent with the firstMatrix offering,Reloaded actually employs an entirely different ethos, replacing smart subtlety and interesting metaphor with obvious and literal parallels. This more straightforward approach lifts the curtain on the aura of mysteryThe Matrix built, but fails to put anything of substance for viewers to discover underneath. Apart from an awful rave sequence.

Despite its shortcomings,The Matrix Reloaded isn't entirely without merit, and succeeds on two fronts: expanding the fictional universe and visually stunning action. While the plot itself might be largely inconsequential, the secondMatrix movie introduces concepts that would become key to the franchise as a whole and enrich the in-universe dystopia. The Merovingian's influence is explored and his famous twin henchmen introduced, viewers learn more about the formation and hierarchy of the Matrix, and Agent Smith is established as a rogue program - all great additions, but ones that serve the franchise more thanThe Matrix Reloaded as a standalone movie.

In terms of action, the highwaybattle over The Keymaker is without question the most memorable part of the Wachowskis' awkward middle child. The fight sequences are one of the few elements thatfeellike palpable step-up from the original, proving every bit as fun, innovative and artistically intense. And therein lies the key problem withThe Matrix Reloaded; where the original film was a novel blend of philosophical themes, mind-bending science fiction andaesthetically grandioseaction scenes, the follow-up's focus was squarely on heart-pounding adrenaline.The trigger-happy "Reloaded" tagline perhaps should've been an early warning thatThe Matrix's sequel wouldn't meet expectations.

Related:How John Wick Could Be A Matrix Prequel (Or Sequel)

The first 1999The Matrix is quite simply several levels above the other 2 films in the series. Movie sequels are sometimes unfairly judged just because fans are so attached to the original, they struggle accepting any expansion of their beloved franchise. In the case ofThe Matrix, however, there exists a clear and tangible gulf in quality between the original and its successors.

Visually,The Matrix was a revolutionary undertaking from the Wachowskis. The creation of a dual setting - one familiar to viewers but malleable and fake, and one futuristic but completely fabricated - was unlike anything movie-goers had seen before and felt utterly immersive, even with pre-2000 special effects.The Matrix also helped pioneer new trends such as "bullet time" and gun-fu, as the action sequels seamlessly melded together martial arts, firearms and futuristic technology. This approach wasn't just fresh, it also perfectly melded with the zeitgeist of the day - the fears and hopes of the western world heading into the year 2000.

But with the visuals and action sequences consistently stunning across allMatrix movies, what elevates the first above the pack? Somewhat ironically, given the themes at play,The Matrix's true strength lies in its near-perfect balance. As much asThe Matrix is a landmark action movie, the film also incorporates cerebral science fiction subject matter in the style ofBlade Runner, and can either be enjoyed as a mindless fists-and-firefights flick or endlessly analyzed and dissected as a dystopian think-piece. Such balance is lost in the sequels, withThe Matrix Reloaded falling too far into action territory andRevolutions disappearing up its own backside in an attempt to be intelligent. Similarly, The Matrix manages to tread the fine line between intriguing the audience, but without frustrating with a lack of clear answers - unshackled byunnecessary filler or confusing contradictions, unlike the sequels.

With a mind onThe Matrix 4, it's difficult to imagine the 17-year-in-the-making movie happening ifthe original hadn't left such a strong and enduring legacy, navigating the potential damage 2 less-than-impressive sequels might've inflicted. The benefit of hindsight might not have done much to improve fan sentiment towardsRevolutions andReloadedbut, hopefully, the intervening years have allowed Lana Wachowski to finally craft a truly worthy successor toThe Matrix.

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Craig first began contributing to Screen Rant in 2016, several years after graduating college, and has been ranting ever since, mostly to himself in a darkened room. Having previously written for various sports and music outlets, Craig's interest soon turned to TV and film, where a steady upbringing of science fiction and comic books finally came into its own.Craig has previously been published on sites such as Den of Geek, and after many coffee-drenched hours hunched over a laptop, part-time evening work eventually turned into a full-time career covering everything from the zombie apocalypse to the Starship Enterprise via the TARDIS.Since joining the Screen Rant fold, Craig has been involved in breaking news stories and mildly controversial ranking lists, but now works predominantly as a features writer.Jim Carrey is Craigs top acting pick and favorite topics include superheroes, anime and the unrecognized genius of the High School Musical trilogy.

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