Hyundai Motor Group renews its website to introduce future technology leadership – Automotive World

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Hyundai Motor Group (the Group) today introduced its renewed Hyundai Motor Group Tech website highlighting the key technologies driving its future mobility vision. The new digital platform is available in Chinese, English, Indonesian and Spanish as well as in Korean.

The website provides a detailed overview of key mobility technologies as well as the Groups roadmap for technology development and deployment across a range of future mobility solutions. The site encompasses technologies used by the Groups automotive brands Hyundai, Kia and Genesis as well as those held by the Groups affiliates.

Reflecting preferences of website users, the Group has organized Hyundai Motor Group Tech website into six key sections, which are further divided into 25 categories. The six sections include Mobility Device, Mobility Service, Essential Performance, Electrification, Fuel Cell and Convergence, which play vital roles in Hyundais vision of future mobility.

The Mobility Device section covers Urban Air Mobility (UAM), Purpose Built Vehicles (PBV) and the Hub all essential to the Groups innovativevision for future citiesfirst introduced in January at 2020 CES.

The Mobility Service section explores the Groups vision of hyper-connected lifestyles, facilitated by innovations in infotainment and connected vehicle services.

The Essential Performance section highlights the Groups work in automotive fundamentals, such as powertrains, road-noise control along with Ride and Handling (R&H) technologies.

The Electrification section presents the Groups its current and future eco-friendly vehicles, along with its vision for sustainability.

The Fuel Cell section showcase the Groups vision for hydrogen energy and its applications, including a variety of fuel-cell electric vehicles as the group seeks to lead a paradigm shift toward clean mobility.

Lastly, the Convergence section details the Groups vision for smart factories, smart cities, AI and other innovations, raising expectations towards the upcoming future mobility era.

As a digital platform, the Hyundai Motor Group Tech website offers easy-to-understand definitions, descriptions and development history of each technology to guide customers who want better understanding of the Groups strategic direction and vision for future mobility.

SOURCE: Hyundai

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Facial recognition technology and travel after COVID-19 – World Economic Forum

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The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on transportation companies, especially airports and train stations, because of the travel restrictions implemented by most countries around the world and passengers' growing fear of travel.

In the aviation industry, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), passenger air transport measured as revenue passenger kilometre was down 94% year-on-year in April 2020, across all regions. Eurostat also observed a dramatic drop in demand for rail transport services. Compared with the second quarter of 2019, the sector experienced a 94% decrease in the number of rail passengers in Ireland, 78% in France, and 77% in Italy.

In response to the pandemic, transportation companies had to make immediate major operational adjustments, including limiting passenger capacity, introducing intensive cleaning and consolidating terminals. Yet there is also a growing acknowledgment that regaining passengers trust in the post-COVID-19 world will require significant investment in digital technologies to address health and safety concerns.

To this end, an increasing number of industry players are turning to facial recognition technology (FRT), which is perceived as an efficient means to ensure a seamless and contactless passenger journey while preventing virus transmission.

Facial recognition technology requires a robust governing structure

While the development of this technology creates considerable opportunities for the transportation industry, it also raises serious governance challenges for passengers and citizens alike. Indeed, its deployment may further undermine passengers' privacy, contribute to consolidating surveillance infrastructure and perpetuate systemic racism because of its well-documented bias issue against minorities.

To address these challenges, the World Economic Forum's governance framework is structured around two key components. Firstly, a self-assessment questionnaire that details the requirements organizations must respect to ensure compliance with the 10 principles for action, which define what responsible use of FRT actually means for this use-case.

Secondly, we recommend the creation of an audit framework, run by third-party certification bodies, that validates the robustness of the risk-mitigation processes introduced by transportation companies. As such, this initiative represents the most comprehensive response to the risks associated with FRT for flow management applications, led by a global and multi-stakeholder community.

Major industry actors such as Narita International Airport (Tokyo), NEC corporation have already tested the self-assessment questionnaire with great success. Also, their answers (available here) have convinced us that the framework is ripe for wider roll-out and adoption in the aviation industry. Now, other industry players are about to run a similar test.

Market forecast confirms that the COVID-19 pandemic will have long-term effects on the aviation industry, even in the hypothesis of a vaccine being globally accessible by the end of 2021. To recover and then thrive, airports and airline companies will need to adapt to the new normal. This implies addressing passengers increased concerns for health and safety through the deployment of facial recognition technology while effectively mitigating the risks associated with this emerging technology. To a lesser extent, the rail industry faces a similar challenge.

In recent years, public concerns about facial recognition technology have grown and civil society calls for stronger regulation of this emerging technology has intensified. As they rely increasingly on this technology to improve flow management, transportation companies need to adopt an appropriate policy response to maximize its benefits.

We argue that this can be achieved by adopting our governance framework. Indeed, taking the self-assessment questionnaire and going through the certification scheme, in collaboration with a certification body, is an agile and robust way to build trust with passengers, regulators and citizens.

In this spirit, we encourage industry players, public actors, civil society representatives, certification bodies, policymakers and academics to join our initiative and participate in our open and experimental approach to strengthen this certification model and ensure its impact.

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How Curtiss-Wright is bringing PacStar into the fold – Washington Technology

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M&A

Pacific Star Communications journey began in 2000 as a reseller of military communications hardware and software, then the company applied lessons from that experience in its move to gradually become a maker.

That shift eventually led PacStar to start working with Curtiss-Wright on investigating new technologies and other applications of those tools. Then in November, Curtiss-Wright closed its $400 million acquisition of PacStar as part of the formers broader push into the defense technology landscape.

Curtiss-Wrights defense product line is centered on commercial-off-the-shelf models and subsystems, which then get integrated onto the platform. The company made one move into the data link and software landscape last year with its $50 million acquisition of Tactical Communications Group.

Where we dont have a lot of technology is actually in connecting the vehicles together and thats right in the heart of PacStars strength, said Chris Wiltsey, senior vice president and general manager for defense solutions at Curtiss-Wright.

Adding that capability is just incredibly obvious to us, Wiltsey added to me in a joint interview. The product line is complementary to us and then conversely the size of our catalog means we can apply PacStars technology and especially (their) IQ-Core Software to the large Curtiss-Wright catalog.

Peggy Miller, PacStars CEO since 2015 and hence leader of its shift, is staying with the business as senior general manager.

Those five years included wins that gradually grew in size, culminating with the potential $300 million contract won last year to supply wireless command post networking equipment to the Army.

Miller told me in the same interview that Curtiss-Wright was one of a number of strategic partners PacStar has worked with during this phase of growth, but felt that aligning with one was the next best step.

How did PacStar get to the point where a strategic buyer like Curtiss-Wright was interested in acquiring them? Miller mentioned how nearly one-third of PacStars 145 employees are engineers to check the technical expertise box, but then there is the customer knowledge aspect as well.

Miller told me that PacStar breaks out those engineers into three groups -- one on hardware and another on software, then a third as described below that links both the physical and digital.

One of the secrets is our network engineering group because you can have hardware and you can have software, but if you cant effectively connect to the networks that the military is deploying, then you really dont have something thats useful, Miller told me.

PacStars focus on smaller-form offerings as an alternative to those larger in size was another element that Curtiss-Wright was attracted to as customer requirements for in-theater technology evolve.

Think about especially an expeditionary force, where the configuration of the networked system is dynamic and changing, and the technology needs to enable that, Wiltsey said. It needs to allow the network to change and be very dynamic, and that can be difficult to do if you have a technical solution that is capable of doing that but cumbersome to use.

About the Author

Ross Wilkers is a senior staff writer for Washington Technology. He can be reached at rwilkers@washingtontechnology.com. Follow him on Twitter: @rosswilkers. Also connect with him on LinkedIn.

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How Curtiss-Wright is bringing PacStar into the fold - Washington Technology

How 2020 Changed the Way That Protests Are Organized – 5280 | The Denver Magazine

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Photo by Lindsey B. King2020: The Year That Changed Everything

Coloradans took to the streets this year to fight against police brutality and structural racism. But 2020 didnt make it easy, as advocacy organizations were forced to adjust how they planned protests.

There were plenty of tears in the crowd. They were streaming down Black womens faces until the liquid pain trickled behind their brightly colored face masks. Gathered near the Colorado State Capitol, women took turns telling stories of dead family members, exhaustion, and fearfear for their children, their brothers, their friends, and their partners. In 2020, there were more reasons than ever for the March for Black Women Denver to come together to rally for racial equity. Unfortunately, there were also many reasons not to.

Protesting and organized marching arent new to the Mile High CityDenver hosted one of the countrys largest womens marches in 2017 but the murder of George Floyd, an out-of-control pandemic, and a contentious election cycle have encouraged Coloradans to voice their concerns with more urgency and frequency this year. In years past, however, the March for Black Women Denver would have sounded, looked, and felt very different. Along with all the other changes 2020 has brought with it, this year has also necessarily altered the way protest planners have had to organize their events.

That is, of course, if they even felt comfortable staging in-person events. The Womxns March Denver canceled its October rally and pivoted from rallying in the streets to encouraging a parade to the polls in November. It also set up moderated panels and other smaller eventsmost held in virtual settings.

For some organizations, however, the risks of gathering were far outweighed by the need to capitalize on the national zeitgeist surrounding racial equity. The March for Black Women Denver and Black Lives Matter 5280 had to modify their programming and enforce strict social distancing protocols. Temperatures were taken, masks were required, and hugging was discouragednot only because those measures are widely known to help stop the spread of the virus, but also because COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Black and brown people in Colorado and across the country. Although it pained organizers to scuttle their usual lineup of deejayed dance parties, free food, and a long list of speakers, they dutifully replaced events that engendered too much close togetherness with programming that allowed for social distancing, like quiet reflections, long marches through Denvers streets, and impromptu speeches from members of the community. In the past we have been able to really have community and be in close proximity with each other, says Tiya Trent, one of the organizers of the March for Black Women Denver. Laughing, dancing, huggingwe really didnt get to do a lot of that this year. We wanted to make sure that the people who chose to show up were safe.

COVID-19 wasnt the only safety issue event planners had to think about, though. Considering protesters physical safetyfrom law enforcement, counter-protesters, and random dissentershas always been a priority. That concern was heightened this year. Theres always been a risk in Black women gathering, says Shontel Lewis, another organizer for the March for Black Women, who explains how Black women have long been susceptible to violence, whether through their relationships or at the hands of police. But this is 2020. With all the agitators and antagonists against the movement, we felt that it was best to take a few more safety precautions. The Black women who chose to speak were physically surrounded by Black men and white allies. There was an effort to protect and shield, something Black women have had to live without for a long time, Lewis says.

Black Lives Matter 5280 orchestrated four marches in 2020. But local organizers didnt stop there: They also continued to focus on traditional tacticslike fundraising and community educationthat have always been part of Black Lives Matter 5280s mission. We have been modeling after our ancestors before us and the types of direct actions that they engaged in, whether thats formal protest, or other forms of direct action, like different forms of collective action in fundraising efforts, says Apryl Alexander, a professor at the University of Denver and BLM 5280 Community organizer. I think there are some things that changed with 2020 and a lot of things that didnt change.

What has changed, according to multiple organizers, is the response theyve received to their work. Black Lives Matter 5280 has been able to work with far more people this year than ever before; its marches were heavily attended; and their fundraisers elicited more donations than in previous years. What the tragic events of 2020 havent changed, planners say, is the fight for Black rights. Alexander explains that 2020 has only changed the reactions Americans are having to the movement. And there are upsides and downsides to that: White allies are paying more attention, but white supremacists are becoming more emboldened.

Organizers say theyll deal with the need for increased safety measures and take the good response with the bad so long as the increased interest in social justice doesnt fade away when 2020 comes to an end. My biggest fear is that people forget, because thats happened in movements before, Alexander says. I fear that people wont continue to engage in the action thats needed to abolish systemic and institutional racism.

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Viola Davis, Colman Domingo on the Importance of Telling August Wilson’s Stories on Screen (Exclusive) – WUSA9.com

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Viola Davis, Colman Domingo on the Importance of Telling August Wilson's Stories on Screen (Exclusive)

With the arrival of Ma Raineys Black Bottom on Netflix, playwright August Wilsons celebration of Black lives once again takes center stage. The film, produced by Denzel Washington and starring Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman and Colman Domingo, chronicles the day in the life of the legendary blues singer and her backing band as they record music one afternoon in the 1920s. It also marks the second time one of Wilsons award-winning plays has been adapted for the screen. The first, of course, being Fences, which Washington produced, directed and starred in.The two-time Oscar winnerhas also made it his mission to make movie versions of Wilsons 10 plays, known as the Pittsburgh Cycle.

Also referred to as the Century Cycle, nine of the 10plays depict different generations of African Americans living in Pittsburghs Hill District, with the other, Ma Raineys Black Bottom, being set in Chicago and focused on the singer. Overall, Wilsons aim was to bring Black experiences -- not just a singular one -- in America to the stage, with all 10 eventually performed on Broadway.

He wrote vital plays, director Ruben Santiago-Hudson told ET of Wilsons work. Plays that had pulses. They reflected each generation and each time specifically in importance and nature of issues of that era. But things change only so much, the disguise just becomes different. August has a lot of revolution in his plays; its not just survival, theres a lot of revolution.

The last one to make it to Broadway was Wilsons first play, Jitney, which was directed by Santiago-Hudson and starred Andre Holland among an ensemble of Black actors. It opened at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in New York City in 2017, just as Fences was earning accolades, including four Academy Award nominations -- with one being a posthumous nod for Wilson in Best Adapted Screenplay -- and eventually one win, for Best Supporting Actress for Davis performance opposite Washington.

[Audiences] are being exposed to greatness, Davis told ET, when asked about the significance of Wilsons two works being produced for stage and screen at the same time. I think the worst thing is to be that great and to live in any sort of obscurity, because I know I've reaped the benefits of the words and that writing and those characters and those narratives and how much it enriched my life. That's the beauty of it. People are being exposed to the effects of that writing.

She added, Hes no longer unknown. Hes going to be right at the tip of everybody's tongue. It's not going to be August Wilson who?

It's significant because people recognize this extraordinary quality, and it allows the integrity of August Wilson's star to shine so bright right now, Santiago-Hudson also said of the zeitgeist moment, sharing Davis sentiment.

Several years later, Wilson is back in the spotlight as both Ma Raineys Black Bottom and Giving Voice, a documentary produced by Davis and Washington about an annual monologue competition inspired by his work, find their way onto Netflix. The projects also come amid a cultural reckoning in America, as the Black Lives Matter movement not only challenged the systemic and institutionalized racism in all facets of the country but encouraged the importance of Black stories in entertainment.

If director George C. Wolfe had it his way, Ma Raineys Black Bottom would have been released during the height of the movement over the summer. But Washington and others discouraged him from that knee-jerk reaction. Ultimately, the most important thing is that the film is out there, available for audiences to see again and again, unlike the play, which people often only get to see that one time.

People all over the world are going to see it, he tells ET now. I think that feels really kind of thrilling to me simply because all of a sudden, even people who know nothing about him or who have heard of him but havent seen the play will now have his language and his understanding of the world and his characters in their lives.

And what sets Ma Raineys Black Bottom apart from Wilsons other plays, and perhaps what makes it even more resonate as more stories about LGBTQ people of colorare being told, is that it focuses largely on a queer woman. I think thats something that needs to be even celebrated more so, Domingo says, adding that Wilsons plays tend to be very male-centric and normally dont include any gay characters.

But when it comes to Ma, the actor adds, shes a force to be reckoned with, who was an openly gay blues singer who was fighting so many fights in one day. Just to get through the day, she was a woman, she was a Black woman, she was a queer, Black woman in a male-dominated industry.

That diversity within the Black experience is even reflected in Giving Voice, and the new generation of performers who are interpreting and performing Wilsons words in the annual August Wilson Monologue Competition. Every year, thousands of students from across America vie for a chance to perform on Broadway.

And despite Wilsons work being written decades ago, for many of the young competitors, it still relatable to what many are going through today. If this play was written a while ago and this is still happening, we need to do something about it, says Gerardo Navarro, one of the teenage performers in the documentary.

No matter what, with both projects available on the streaming platform, People will now know the majesty of August Wilsons work, Wolfe says.

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Duluth’s best bites of 2020 ranged from fresh herring to ice cream – Duluth News Tribune

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The News Tribune asked local brewers and bakers and others in the biz to talk about their best bites from the past year. Here is what they said.

Lobster roll at Scenic 61 (Christa Lawler / clawler@duluthnews.com)

"My best food was the lobster roll from the airstream trailer at The Scenic Cafe. My best drink was cedar and cider from Vikre and Duluth Cider."

DAVE HOOPS is the veteran brewer behind Hoops Brewing and whose Hoops on Hops column runs in the News Tribune. The New Scenic opened an airstream trailer, Scenic 61, and has been serving customers in the parking lot and at a few pop-up locations.

Laura Kirwin liked New Scenic Cafe's meal kits. (Photo courtesy of Kirwin)

As someone who works in the restaurant business, it was so refreshing to have a nice meal cooked for me from New Scenic Cafe. My husband and I were sick of cooking at home so for our 13-year wedding anniversary, we got a meal kit from New Scenic Cafe. Missing travel and reminiscing about our worldly travels, we ordered the cassoulet (a hearty bean dish with housemade sausages and duck confit) paired with a cherry frangipan tart. I can't tell you how much it lifted our spirits and (temporarily) made us forget about the stressful times we are living in. I'll never forget it.

LAURA KIRWIN goes by the name Bayou Baker when she adds the dessert red velvet cupcakes, pralines, coconut snowballs to the Cajun dinners from Gumbo Boi. New Scenic Cafe, in addition to opening the Scenic 61 food truck, has added meal kits in its Mise en Place Marketplace.

The Buffalo Chikn Tacos at Mama Roots Vegan Food Truck (2020 file / News tribune)

Mama Roots is a huge standout this year. The vegan food truck sold out during their debut, and the peoples taste buds dont lie.

During my visit, the Buffalo Chikn Tacos and Moroccan Carrot Slaw were to die for with organic soy curls that really tasted like chicken! Also, greens, tomato, green onion, buffalo sauce and bus-made ranch (made of aquafaba, lemon, fresh dill and parsley, among other delicious things).

The slaw was sweet, bright, orange in taste and color and well-covered in their ACV-maple syrup-lime aioli. Their food is 100% plant-based, impressive on the taste buds, easy on the wallet and on Mama Earth what more could you ask?

MELINDA LAVINE is a features reporter at the News Tribune and frequently contributor to the Things We Like column. Mama Roots opened as the weather warmed in 2020.

A menu card showing the Real Tacos served by Oasis Del Norte in Duluth. (Clint Austin/caustin@duluthnews.com)

I've loved the innovation of 2020 and the way food became a source of entertainment: The buzz around Doc Witherspoon's Soul Food Kitchen, the radically honest social media presence of Tony O'Neil from JamRock Cultural Restaurant, Gumbo Boi's muffuletta sandwich, served out of a borrowed kitchen, with the coziest homemade bread, Scenic 61 offering New Scenic levels of food with the decidedly concession stand of regular old bag of chips or a bottle of wine. When I interviewed Eduardo Sandoval Luna about taking Oasis Del Norte to a pop-up spot at the mall, he recommended his super torta. I keep going back for it, this handful of taco flavors like beans and cheese and avocado; we add carnitas, but there are other meat options, on a soft tela roll. Every once in a while you come across a glop of mayo and audibly groan with pure food joy. Do not skip the tres leches cake, which is a moist crumble of dessert, and tack on horchata.

CHRISTA LAWLER is a News Tribune features reporter. Oasis Del Norte spent the summer popping up in areas often untouched by food trucks, including an insurance company's parking lot in West Duluth.

Vikre Distillery is offering cocktail kits. (file / News Tribune)

I think the one thing that I enjoyed and was impressed with the most was Vikre and their quick offering of cocktail kits. Each one was hand mixed, creatively packaged and (duh) delicious. It really helped take the edge off those early months of the lock downs and helped keep me feeling classy. And let's not forget to mention the sanitizer program, I didn't drink it, but Vikre deserves a lot of praise for things they did this year. Also, I really enjoy Bent Paddle's Snow Maker brew.

ROBERT LEE went from cooking hobbyist to a full-fledged pop-up shop with Gumbo Boi, which serves cajun dishes on weekends out of the kitchen at Zeitgeist. Vikre Distillery began making hand sanitizer early on in the pandemic, but also has kits filled with ingredients for the home bartender.

The enchiladas at Bucktales are worth the drive, according to Taco Stand writer Jon Nowacki. (Jon Nowacki / jnowacki@duluthnews.com)

Growing up in a small town, I was used to taking road trips as the nearest town was eight miles away, and the nearest restaurant chain, 30 miles away. I did even more driving than normal this spring, with everything shut down, sightseeing out of boredom. I liked hitting Wisconsin Point until they posted a sign saying it was only open to people who lived in Douglas County (not sure how a guy walking outside by himself checking out a lighthouse contributes to the spread of coronavirus, but I digress).So I went the other direction and ended up south of town at a place called Pickled Petes, shortly after Wisconsin opened back up. I was hungry, and the bartender recommended a place just down the road that served great Mexican cuisine.A Mexican restaurant in the middle of nowhere? I had to investigate.Turns out, Bucktales Cantina and Grill was just as advertised.Ive been to Bucktales about a dozen times since, and Ive never been disappointed. Owner and chef Dee Morales never mails it in its always good. He clearly takes pride in his work, whether its traditional Mexican dishes like enchiladas and chimichangas or gyros and Philly sandwiches, and theres always a good Mexican beverage to pair with it.I was there just the other day and while it was listed as an appetizer, the chorizo tacos were a meal in and of themselves, and man, they were good.In this year of COVID-19, and with Minnesota back on lockdown, this holiday season Bucktales has been the gift that keeps on giving. Its definitely worth the drive.

JON NOWACKI is the News Tribune sports reporter who writes the Taco Stand food column. Bucktales is a Mexican restaurant in a bar on South State Rd. in Superior.

The Boat Club's Lake Superior Breakfast comes with whitefish, eggs, arugula, mushrooms and pickled red onion. (Melinda Lavine / mlavine@duluthnews.com)

I was a big fan of The Boat Club. From set up to service to plated meals loved everything about them and went to my own JamRock page to rave about them publicly.

TONY ONEIL took JamRock Cultural Restaurant from a mobile grill to a brick-and-mortar spot at Average Joes and now has plans to move to the former Paks Green Corner, 1901 Tower Ave. The Boat Club, located in the lower level of the Fitgers Complex, specializes in seafood and views.

The Toasty's Burger in Paradise features cream cheese spread, Colby jack cheese, pineapple, cilantro, organic BBQ sauce, lime zest, jalapeos and bacon. (Clint Austin / caustin@duluthnews.com)

We're so blessed with so many amazing local options. But, if I've gotta choose just one I'm going with the Burger in Paradise from Toasty's. It's mortal magic in a bun. Two cheeses, jalapeos, bacon, bbq sauce, lime, two perfectly juicy patties *chef's kiss* superb. I once let someone try a bite of my burger (pre-covid) and cried because they took a bigger bite than I was expecting. Also, I haven't confirmed this, but their fries taste like they blanche them. The BIP and fry combo could get me through, like, five more 2020s. Although Universe if you're reading this pleeeaaassee understand that it's just hyperbole. Less pandemics, more burgers in paradise.

RACHELLE RAHN of Duluth Kombucha recently reopened in a new space, 12 S. 15th Ave. E. Toastys, located in downtown Duluth, is a sandwich shop that offers variations on the classic grilled cheese sandwich in addition to burgers.

There are two things I have eaten the most in 2020.

One would be a cheese burger from Lake Ave. This is definitely my favorite restaurant in Duluth. They always have a creative, well thought out delicious menu but I always come back to this perfect patty. I have to get my burger fix from them a few times a month. Hands down best in the D!

Two would be fettuccine alfredo from Gannuccis Italian Market! Bill puts a lot of love into all his dishes but that one in particular is, in my opinion, the best in town. The noodles are handmade, perfectly cooked, and the sauce is creamy perfection.

JONATHAN REZNICK owns The Rambler food truck and MidCoast Catering and was part of the movement to deliver food to frontline workers during the pandemic. Lake Ave. is based in the Dewitt-Seitz Building and Gannuccis Italian Market is a West Duluth mainstay.

Love Creamery's salted caramel ice cream. (2016 file / News Tribune)

We honestly eat our food all the time, but we also love love love to visit Love Creamery. The completely made-from-scratch taste is never missed and included in every flavor. My wife especially loves the gluten/dairy free options like Smores. My favorite flavor is the Honey Chamomile because it reminds me of home, a flavor I had growing up as a kid.

EDUARDO SANDOVAL LUNA opened a pop-up Oasis Del Norte at the Miller Hill Mall with plans to stay through March. Love Creamery, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, seemed to have a steady stream of masked and distanced customers throughout the pandemic.

Lulu's Pizza Banh Mi-Za features pork or mock duck, a pickle medley, cilantro, banh mi sauce, roasted garlic, olive oil and shredded mozzarella cheese. (Clint Austin / caustin@duluthnews.com)

The affogato at Love Creamery. This isn't news, but does it need to be? It's sooooo good. I like to get mine with the salted caramel ice cream and top it with whipped cream because it reminds me of the ones we had on our honeymoon in Italy!

The banh mi pizza at Lulu's pizza. Lulu's opened right before the pandemic began, which seems like unlucky timing, but maybe it wasn't since their pizza is pretty much the perfect take out food. We have been picking up pizza for dinner almost every Friday since the pandemic began, and the banh mi is my steady favorite.

EMILY VIKRE of Vikre Distillery published Camp Cocktails this past year and the distillery also made a quick move to create hand sanitizer when there was a sanitizer drought and also has created cocktail kits. Love Creamery is a craft ice cream shop that quickly adapted to the pandemic. Lulus Pizza has clever pizza options and is at 420 W. Superior St.

It's been a super odd year for eating out, but there were still some good experiences. I have so many favorite spots like Lake Ave Cafe, Phoholic, OMC / Duluth Grill. It's really hard to pick something. I really miss the Scenic Cafe. The Earthwood Inn in Two Harbors sometimes has fresh herring and fresh lake trout fish cakes. It's bar food connected to a little motel, but if they have fresh fish they do a really great job served with hush puppies and fries. Yikes, it's a greasy dinner, but a little juxtapose to fine dining and super foodie fun that I'm usually after. For a favorite drink option, the new Jade Fountain has some really top-notch cocktails with really interesting ingredients and house made ginger beer and other concoctions.

JASON WUSSOW made a quick shift to add a drive-thru window at Wussows Concert Cafe in West Duluth, in addition to hosting parking lot concerts this past summer. Jade Lounge is a tiki bar located across the street from Wussows and The Earthwood Inn will often update its Facebook page with its fresh fish options.

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Duluth's best bites of 2020 ranged from fresh herring to ice cream - Duluth News Tribune

The Wall Group Launches Digital Magazine, Showcasing BLM and Creatives at Home – WWD

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The Wall Group has produced a digital magazine, out today.

The global agency, which represents the industrys leading fashion and beauty creators, tapped into its in-house talent for the free publication, called Inside/Outside. The project is a reflection of the climate this year with the coronavirus pandemic, featuring home diaries from the likes of stylist Yashua Simmons and makeup artist Bo Champagne, recipes from creator Margaret Zhang and FaceTime shoots with IMG Models.

Stylist Chloe Hartstein used the opportunity to spotlight Black Lives Matter activists Qween Jean and Vidal Guzman.

When The Wall Group first approached me about contributing to their new magazine, it was very clear to me that I wanted to share this platform with people who have inspired me and challenged my thinking in the past few months, and who dont necessarily get a huge platform to amplify their voices, Hartstein said. As hard as 2020 has been, I feel so thankful for the incredible humans Ive met through the [Black Lives Matter] movement, whove shared their stories, and made all of us better people through the process. It felt right to share my new family with my Wall Group family.

Inside/Outside, available at insideoutside.thewallgroup.com, was done remotely by The Wall Groups digital team, led by creative director Erin Dennison. The work was a collaborative effort with nothing commissioned, said the agency. They expect to produce more issues.

As we reflected on the extraordinary events of 2020 and their profound impact on our lives, we felt compelled to capture and memorialize the diverse perspectives and experiences that have shaped our understanding of this watershed moment, founder and chief executive officer Brooke Wall told WWD in a statement.

Wall created the agency in 2000. In 2015, it was acquired by Endeavor, formerly WME-IMG.

I am proud of our artists and our team, who have come together to create a body of work that beautifully encapsulates the myriad emotions of this year, showcasing not only their creativity but their support of one another through this challenging time, she continued. Our hope is that Inside/Outside will not only capture the 2020 zeitgeist, but remind our fashion community that we can and will get through this together.

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The Wall Group Launches Digital Magazine, Showcasing BLM and Creatives at Home - WWD

Julie Mehretu on the Right to Abstraction – Ocula Magazine

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In her recent paintings exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, on view through 23 December 2020, the artist has continued to develop what she refers to as insistent gestures and neologisms. They are marks that have progressed over time, becoming larger in size, decisive in stroke, and referential to forms before them. This newly invented language emerges from her desire to further develop the space she creates, where she reimagines the potential of the liminal expanse born in the in-between or transitional place.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

Always circling back to biblical references, Mehretu's exhibition is enveloped in its drama. Like the clouds over The Raft of the Medusa (18181819) by Thodore Gricault, the exhibition recalls the Book of Revelation and the narrative of the Seven Seals of God that eventually lead to the beginning of the apocalypse.

It is in that moment before the apocalypse, and in that impossible frame of theological time, that Mehretu finds the space for another possibility. In these paintings Mehretu works dynamically, starting her process with a news image, which she first digitally alters and blurs. She distils the essence of that image, its spirit and substance, and builds layers of a gradient and saturated palette consumed by blacks and resonating colours, airbrushed and sanded impressions of varying opacity and pointed deconstruction.

Julie Mehretu, Maahes (Mihos) torch (20182019). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

The series of seven paintings, 'about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1)' (20182020) depict this hovering between realms. There is a sense of anticipation among streamers of saturated colour, movement, and form, their gestures evoking a post-event in an uncanny space. They are suspended among particles of airbrush, indicating that the dust hasn't settled yet.

Mehretu's paintings collapse space and time, breaking linear progressions of human histories and narratives through repurposing and transformation.

In the series of aquatint photogravures, 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (2020), Mehretu references both Joan Didion's collection of essays and W.B Yeats' poem, 'The Second Coming'. Her paintings in this series begin with blurred images of worldwide protests and movements transformed into abstractions of light, shadow, and colour on the large surfaces inhabited by her gestural marks.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

The vertigo-induced image both manifests and destabilises the catastrophic logic of those contemporary moments that are alluded to in the works' titles. This is a unique quality in the paintings, which maintain their indeterminacy as delineated in the spaces of near illumination and penumbras manifested by the hovering patterns, computer glitches, painterly streaks, and forms and glimmers of light that push through the shadows. Mehretu's paintings collapse space and time, breaking linear progressions of human histories and narratives through repurposing and transformation. The paintings consequently evoke the possibilities to be discovered within the blur, altering the images into disembodied experience.

'There's an access to this other condition that is insistent,' she explains to me in our conversation. Black lines and shapes hover over masses of shadow and light in another series of seven paintings also in the exhibition. In Loop (B. Lozano, Bolsonaro eve) (20192020), the title suggests a realm between contemporary Brazilian political corruption and a dedication to novelist Brenda Lozano whose love story ruminates on marking and erasure.

Julie Mehretu, Loop (B. Lozano, Bolsonaro eve) (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas 243.8 x 304.8 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

Here, Mehretu looks to her surroundings. Synthesising her immediate environment and the social and political zeitgeist raging in the United States and the world, she reciprocates with abstraction that resists a single idea, and instead, draws a perspective where a once fortified patriarchal world shows its cracks.

Mehretu's paintings are immersive in this way. Works like Rise (Charlottesville) (20182019) allow us to step into these histories of brutal colonialism, orthodox doctrines, and natural exploitation, their demise revealed in a collective punishment of flames devouring parched forests, and revolts and protests fuelled by racial oppression and killings.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

The paintings on view demonstrate Mehretu's tremendous creative output during this year of global pandemic. She began some of the painting at the early stages of the pandemic reality in New York, and continued throughout the curfews and lockdowns.

Within this space of anticipation, she constructed a visual language in abstraction, which leaves an afterimage imprinted in the mind's eye, like the fleeting flash-blindness of dark spots that appear after a bright flash of light. This corporeal and time-based experience of Mehretu's paintings feels like an emergence in that instance of anticipation as your vision begins to return, and the swirly lines and dots dissolve. It is the calm before the storm, as the image comes back into focus.

Julie Mehretu, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Second Seal (R 6:3) (2020). Photogravure, aquatint. 170 x 208 cm. Edition of 18. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist, BORCH Gallery & Editions and Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMOpacity and abstraction are at the core of my practice and have been since graduate school. One should never feel the need to translate, or explain who and how one is for anyone else. This has never been asked of white male artists in terms of their identity. Black artists are too often expected to explain who they are in their work, which is based on racist ideas of authenticity.

Radical liberatory practices come from breaking away from the constraints of those ideas of authenticity, language, identity, culture, or any form of determinism. So much of the Black Radical tradition has been based in abstraction, precisely for this reason.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

In my work, the language of abstraction has evolved. Painting evolves slowly. But through years of working and mark-making, how I think about space, surface, the marks, and what can happen in a painting has transformed.

I think it really started with the 'Mogamma' paintings (2012)the scale of them and what takes place in terms of how one optically experiences the paintings. They take timea different kind of space opens up in them. It is a visceral experience, not just of space, but maybe also in relation to the memory of space and how one experiences that, while the marks become something else in their interaction with the architecture.

When I started to understand this whole time-based physical experience in the paintings, the architectural drawing became redundant to me. It was not necessary as a signifier anymore. At that point, I became interested in the blur.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 457.2 x 365.76 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

The blur grew out of projecting a photograph that had an architectural image in it. I was projecting a photograph of a bombed-out street that was out of focus on the projector, and it felt more haunting than tracing the ruins.

Everything that the blurred photo contained felt more palpable. One could not only feel the history of it, but the possible future of that ruin as wellall from this weird blurred photograph. It became more potent, in a way, so I took that as a starting point. I experimented in Photoshop using spray paint and airbrush, trying to create this ephemeral, blurry, hazy spacethe blur became the uncertainty of the image.

We live in a super mediated environment, especially considering social media, and every person's reality is differently informed by that. It's like a house of mirrors where we can't locate ourselves, and I don't think anyone really understands our sense of space, time, place, or history within it.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 457.2 x 365.76 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

The whole idea of 20th-century progress and ideas of futurity and modernity have been shattered, in a way. All of this is what is informing how I am trying to think about space.

Paul Pfeiffer and Lawrence Chua and I have a collaborative, collective project called Denniston Hill, which has been an artist residency but is also a collaborative creative space to mine and invent forms of liberatory practices and pedagogies.

The whole idea of 20th-century progress and ideas of futurity and modernity have been shattered, in a way. All of this is what is informing how I am trying to think about space.

For the past few years and the foreseeable future, the theme of our interrogation and projects revolve around the idea of exodus and aesthetics of uncertainty. Not the promised land, but rather of the post-emancipatory moment of those 40 years at a complete and utter loss in the desert: the cognitive confusion of that moment and that uncertaintythe haze and blur of the murmurings.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 457.2 x 365.76 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

That is the conceptual space that I have also been exploring in my paintings. These blurred photos are of a moment that we collectively experience. You don't need to know which California fire Hineni (E. 3:4) (2018) isit could be Beirut, Brazil, or Myanmar.

My interest is more in the visceral, collective source of that experience. For me, it becomes this activated, fertile space I can work in and respond to. I think the opacity of abstraction, that space to play with language, is where one can invent other images or possibilities. It's not about delineating or defining some concrete political perspective, or some directive on how to understand things, or even a historical narrative. It's about the collision of all those thingsthe uncertainty and murmurings of all that.

For a lot of people, this way of working can be problematic, especially so for Black artists or artists of colour, who are expected to explain who they are and to tell the world their perspectives. It goes back to the idea of the right to abstractionthe right to opacity.

Julie Mehretu, Hineni (E. 3:4) (2018). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 304.8 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMYes. In the Book of Revelations, it's the moment after the four horsemen of the apocalypse are released; after the seventh seal is opened and 'there would be silence in heaven for about the space of half an hour.' It is the moment that's considered the threshold, the calm before the storm, or the space before the apocalypse; before the second coming.

During this whole pandemic, it felt like time was suspended. Many failures of our social systems have been exposed by the pandemic. But, at the same time, especially the first few months, it was this massive pause.

I was working upstate on these paintings, reading Moby-Dick and listening to it when I had insomnia. This story is about foreboding and mayhem, as well as the calm before the storm. We have been completely captured in this suspended, vertiginous, foreboding moment, with our own Captain Ahab catapulting us further into clear disaster. The show also opened the day before the election, so that was another threshold in my conscious.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMYes, I was more interested in that blur and that hazeto find the emergent light and forms within, as well as the absence and emergence of figures and what happens to them within these haunted spaces of imprisonment.

There is a charged DNA in the blur, for me; it affects my interaction with the painting, and it enables me to play with the spectre inside the image.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMFred Moten discusses the continual release of the fugitive and the possibility that emerges therehow Black joy can be advanced through negotiating against the constant effort to negate and extinguish that.

There are incredible inventions across American culture that are rooted in the effort to find possibility and joy, in the context of Black creativity and experimentation, despite all efforts against this and through pain.

Julie Mehretu, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Third Seal (R 6:5) (2020). Photogravure and aquatint. 169.9 x 208 cm. Edition of 18. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist, BORCH Gallery & Editions and Marian Goodman Gallery.

So even though many of the previous 20th-century concepts of futurity feel shattered and impossible as tropes, there's still a determined persistence on something else that is possible. That is core to my investigation in painting. There is intentionality and intensity in this pleasure and excitementthe fervent effort to make and createand I think part of that comes from this place.

I'm reading this book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, where she follows the ecology, economy, and history of the matsutake mushrooma rare delicacy in Japan. Basically, it's this mushroom that thrives in damaged landscapes. She argues that by tracking the mushroom, the people who have travelled the world to pick itmostly refugees from Southeast Asiapresent a case for creative, imaginative ways to reinvent ourselves in the midst of precarity.

Julie Mehretu, A Mercy (after T. Morrison) (20192020). Julie Mehretu. Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 304.8 cm. Courtesy the artist.

To me that is super profound when considering the creative work and creative thinking required of this time. It is our role to mine those possibilities, and to figure out how to continue to exist, insist, and to persist. It's not pessimistic.

I think that the elements of wanting to create, think through mediated images and painting, participate in the history of painting, learn how to make another picture and what that time-based experience is like, and to insist on a visceral, transformative experience that can happen in front of a work, can allow one to participate in those imaginative possibilities.

Julie Mehretu, Orient (after D. Cherry, post Irma and summer) (20172020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 274.3 x 304.8 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMYes, I was writing a piece on John Coltrane recently, and I was thinking about how, 50 years ago, coming out of Jim Crow and the denial of any type of humanity, there was still a revered creative force. His work, I think, was to mine and invent another space where he could be free, through concepts of universality and various forms of religion and spirituality.

So how do you do that when you don't have a language for that? You can't use the language of the oppressor in the same way. But it's not just the language of the oppressorit's the way you understand the world.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

I think that's where the neologism comes inwhere we invent new words. In music, there's the invention of sound and the constant effort to mine structure and sound. There's the effort in trying to create some kind of texture, space, and experience that goes beyond what can be defined or described or articulated with the language of pain, because experience is visceral and known.

I think the opacity of abstraction, that space to play with language, is where one can invent other images or possibilities.

I'm not trying to speak opaquely, it's just all of this stuff is complicated, contradictory, undefined, and intangible. Is intuition a sense that is mined from the ontological congregation of resistance, an ontological congregation of ancestry; of a collective? How does one have understanding or access to different points of history, of time and of space in their knowing?

Marilynne Robinson said these beautiful words about writing fiction: 'It sounds as if it's some jag of mysticism or something but in fact it's true and I think it's important to me for people to realize that there are much larger, more complex, more consequential entities than most culture allows them to believe . . . when I'm writing fiction the hope is that I will have found my way to something that speaks for itself that is not interpreted but is adequate to interpretation when it comes.'

Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1) 1 (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMAbsolutely, especially in the architectural drawingsthe marks were always trying to be like clogs in the machine. They were trying to devour that system, if you willwork against it, devour it, participate in it, but ultimately, there's this kind of emergent entropy.

I think you see that energy in the paintings in the gallery. There's a kind of fury coming out of what the marks and blurs participate in creating, but there's also this dynamic happening with all of the other elements in colour. I feel like they participate in the construction of a systemic thing, but they also fall apart in that.

Julie Mehretu, Rise (Charlottesville) (20182019). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

It reminds me of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, who wrote, 'I find myself surrounded by patchiness, that is, a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs . . . only an appreciation of the current precarity as an earth-wide condition allows us to notice thisthe situation of our world.'

I think all of that is a part of the disruption and the kind of breaking of a particular linear narrative. One of the paintings is titled Loop, after Brenda Lozano's book, where the protagonist goes through these cycles that weave from ancient mythology to today, through these repetitive, sometimes creepy patterns. That's the kind of magnitude of time that we connect with that's also broken and disrupted, so I think there's a participation in that, not only in a disruptive way, but also in a generative way.

Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1) 3 (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMOf course, part of the intention with the work is to participate in this grand history of painting, which has been dominated by the white male painters for the most part. And institutionally and structurally, whether it's colonialism or patriarchy, or heteronormativity, it all contributes to the history of abstraction.

Julie Mehretu, Being Higher I (2013). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 213.36 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and White Cube. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

What I'm trying to do with the making of these pictures is to try to resist, invent, and push against all of that. So, part of it is the scale of the work, and part of it is the desire to work in this language that has been denied to many people, though numerous artists have been working this way for decades. How does one articulate fragmentary breakdown, of a decentred way of looking? A multi-perspectival way of approaching paintings and an openness to their reading? It is all a part of the refusal of autocratic and patriarchal systems.

I think about those things because they are core to not just the way that I make, but also the way that I amthe way I live and participate in the world. This also goes back to what you asked earlier about opacity alongside negation in abstraction.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMI think part of the effort in trying to find a space for oneself is to constantly be inventing, finding, and mining your own spaceinsisting that you have that rightas we have to do as marginalised people.

The constant effort of trying to find a space for oneself is to work against and participate in that language: to use that language, to participate in that language, to shift it and morph it, and to create something else out of that, but also to insist on a state of possibility. I keep using that word 'possibility,' without it being too directed.

Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1) 4 (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMIt is the most potent thing I feel I can do. Morton Subotnick said, in a conversation with Paul Holdengraber, 'The meaning of life, for me, and it never changed, is you find out who you are. Your duty is to find out who you are, what you are, and do the very best you can with that, and share what you do with other people. That's what I've done my whole life.'

Read more from the original source:

Julie Mehretu on the Right to Abstraction - Ocula Magazine

The Dream of the Swimming Pool – Los Angeles Review of Books – lareviewofbooks

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DECEMBER 14, 2020

COFFEE-TABLE BOOKS about swimming pools are a surprisingly well-established genre. Lavish, glossy, and tempting, theyre almost like pop-up books their images practically lunge at the reader, a medley of splashes and bodies. They dont look particularly serious and seem to make the perfect winter gift, if you can withstand the tease of aquatic pleasure while its freezing, raining, or snowing outside.

The latest entry in this increasingly crowded field is Lou Stoppards Pools from the house of lavish itself, Rizzoli. Like the editor of most such books, Stoppard is light of touch and low of word count, including just a few choice paragraphs to accompany photographs that are intended to speak for themselves. But what are they saying? To distinguish this book from several similar ones, Rizzoli has wrapped the cover in a latex-like transparent blue sleeve. This slightly kinky touch makes the book appear to be submerged in water, beckoning the reader to dive in. Several of the pictures Stoppard includes have been reproduced before in recent books like Hatje Cantzs stunning album of classic 20th-century images, The Swimming Pool in Photography (2018). Stoppard, however, juxtaposes canonical shots with pool photography from the present, allowing the reader to see how the cultural imagination of the swimming pool has evolved.

These utilitarian exercise machines, these mere accessories to boutique vacations, possess a very varied cultural backstory. Enjoy your workout! my friendly neighborhood pool attendant yells at me just before I enter the water. I always bristle at this aggressively cheerful exhortation, because swimming is much more than exercise. Its a form of ritual that involves a highly deliberate process of transformation: the careful, even fetishistic shedding of a quotidian skin. One doesnt have to accept the Freudian notion that swimming enacts a return to the womb and some form of prelapsarian amniotic nirvana to appreciate that bathing originated in the ancient world as a component of religious ritual, and that the act has by no means entirely lost the aura of a baptismal rite. The Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro in Sindh, Pakistan, which dates as far back as the third millennium BCE, appears to have encouraged bathing for just this sort of reason, and remains an archaeological site of considerable historical value. The ancient Greeks and Romans constructed pools for athletic purposes, it is true, but employed them for many other purposes besides, including ritualized social bathing and the keeping of fish, resulting in the term piscine.

Our modern image of the swimming pool as exercise machine and Olympic arena thus possesses a richly complicating global history. In the early modern era, Europeans shunned bathing as an activity for savages Africans and Asians were brilliant divers whose skills they could barely comprehend, let alone emulate. When Westerners finally embraced swimming again as a mass pursuit by the turn of the 20th century, it was with a dramatic sense of rediscovery and rapture. The avatar of the Surrealist movement Andr Breton rhapsodized about what he called the voluptuousness of swimming, declaring himself born under the sign of Pisces. Swimming not only changed ones body, he insisted, but transformed ones mind, freeing it from the shackles of rationalistic thought to a more authentic dimension of imaginative consciousness.

Lou Stoppards juxtapositions of classic and contemporary photos suggest how the swimming pools cultural meaning has shifted during the century since Breton. Consider, for instance, the following carefully curated double-page spread. On one side, the reader is greeted by Jacques-Henri Lartigues adoring portrait of Marie Helvin at the French Rivieras Eden Roc Hotel pool in 1977. On the one hand, its just another glamour shot: big-name photographer, top model, high-end digs. But the picture is exquisitely realized, a vision of ecstasy. Helvins head thrown back, eyes closed, her expression is beatific. Her jet-black locks dance mesmerizingly in the water around her. The portrait dazzlingly records the play of light on her chest, tracing wild light-lines across her skin, which looks as though it is swathed in sunlit Jell-O. In Helvins profoundly private sense of repose and pleasure, Lartigue captures the paradox of erotic desire as innocent bliss.

Opposite this blast from the 1970s, Stoppard reproduces two bright and striking images by Karine Laval shot in 2010. Laval calls these images Poolscapes. Four-plus decades on from Helvins hedonistic headshot at Eden Roc, Lavals pictures offer few anatomical, social, or geographical coordinates. No details of place or person are deemed worthy of inclusion even in the titles of these shots. Lavals are not pictures of a swimming pool as such, more an exercise in the production of disorientating chromatic-aquatic effects. A submerged human figure, clad in red, can be seen in some sort of agitated pose, like a cubist minotaur strutting against the currents. The viewers gaze is dashed by shards of light and color that come flying out of the image. Brittle and crystalline, they cut up the humanoid form: all that is soft shatters into lines. If this is the picture of a swimming pool, youd never know it, since Laval has abstracted it into a set of tones, lines, and ripples. We have left Bretons voluptuousness of swimming and Helvins fleshy ecstasies far behind. The question is how and why?

Its crucial here to go back to the early part of the 20th century, when Breton and many others dreamt of swimming as a revelatory and paradisiacal form of experience, to understand how the archetypal pool photo was invented. A better description than ecstasy for Helvins portrait is reverie: closing ones eyes while in the water, escaping into a personal and private realm not merely of physical pleasure but intimate emotional and psychological experience, enabled by the act of immersion. This is the classic photographic conceit of the swimming pool as an entity that transports its subject to a dream-like world beyond the quotidian and beyond the limitations of gravity. Invented in the 1920s and 30s during the zeitgeist of Surrealism and psychoanalysis, this kind of photo features the swimming pool not as an arena of competition or consumerism, but as the trigger of subconscious desires for personal transformation.

There are many versions of this archetype, and Stoppard lovingly reproduces several of the best. Perhaps the first great psychological pool picture is George Hoyningen-Huenes masterpiece from 1930 featuring two bathers sitting together on a diving board. Their backs are turned to us and we cannot see their faces. They are modeling elegant designer beachwear, but this mundane act of salesmanship is completely transcended by the existential quality of their pose. They look away to the horizon, following the trajectory of the diving board, perhaps with excitement, perhaps trepidation. We cannot know. But we have been fooled. The viewers mind has responded to the diving board and imagined the presence of water below it. There was no pool: Hoyningen-Huene took the picture on a rooftop high above the Champs Elyses in Paris.

The conceit of the swimming pool as a portal to other mental, historical, and even mythological dimensions is also superbly suggested by Louise Dahl-Wolfe in Night Bathing, shot in 1939. A woman in a delicately striped one-piece bathing suit stands at the edge of a pool by night, mirrored in her pose by a statue of Aphrodite, goddess of love. Both figures look shyly away from the camera, as the darkness presses in. This pool is a scene of metamorphosis; indeed, it is reminiscent of the tales of Ovids Metamorphoses, such as Narcissus falling in loving with his own reflection. The juxtaposition of the two female figures implies the pools hidden power to transform the living woman into a goddess.

Pools, bathing, swimming, swimwear: in the post-Freudian imagination, the superficial accessories of luxurious living become tools of psychological emancipation and emotional self-expression. Yet they also became instruments of fascist conformism, racialist theorizing, and eugenic ideology. Between Hoyningen-Huenes divers and Wolfes Aphrodite, Leni Riefenstahl filmed Olympia, her unsettlingly brilliant documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Riefenstahls Aryanist dogmas led her to combine bravura images of swimmers and divers competing in front of cheering stadiums in Nazi Germany with a fantastical sequence featuring Greek statues coming to life as German athletes. The modernist swimming pools dream of transformation was as politically dangerous as it was personally alluring.

The psychological pool photo enjoyed a long afterlife, flourishing well into the 1970s. Martine Francks image of a boy in a hammock gazing at sunbathers round the curves of Alain Capeilleress pool near Marseilles suggests those curves as the very contours of his mind. Horst P. Horst who posed as one of Hoyningen-Huenes divers in 1930 shot Janice Dickinson cocking her head to one side, eyes closed, in that eternal yet fleeting instant before exiting a sun-drenched pool. Its 1979, and like Helvin, Dickinson is a nude supermodel. But Horsts portrait is still an image of innocence and experience still the picture of swimming as flight to a private mental paradise.

Such images of bathing as reverie coexisted, however, with two main rivals in the late 20th century: social shots of public pools as riotous lower-class playgrounds; and luxury shots of private pools as pure consumer glamour. Exceptionally, all three visions might converge in the same image, like Helmut Newtons virtuosically overloaded panorama of Pariss Piscine Deligny in 1978. Newton fused sexuality, surrealism, and glamour with dark humor. Worlds collide with magnificently absurd results. In the foreground, two models in black evening gowns pose with incongruous campy melodrama, as male bathers stripped down to their briefs look on with a mix of desire and exasperation under a hot sun. Yet the humorous center of the photograph is a wonderfully oblivious topless female bather who entirely ignores the absurdity around her, hunched with Rodin-like concentration over the book she is reading. Newtons photo captures the invasion of the swimming pool as a public institution and its denaturing by money, glamour, and fantasy, presaging the shift in pool photos since the 1980s from a public resource for ordinary people to a moneyed private oasis. Newton played a leading role in this transformation, especially in all the celebrity shoots he did in the 80s; perhaps the Deligny panorama is a confessional premonition, a mea culpa before the fact. Anyone who has floated idly in the Standard Hotels enticing rooftop pool in downtown Los Angeles, to name just one of todays most photogenic boutique destinations, might well conclude that glamour won, the spirit of the bains publics is dead, and Newton helped kill it.

It would likewise be tempting to read pictures of bathers taken in momentous political years, like Olaf Martenss portraits of swimmers in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 (which Stoppard also includes), in a similar light. 1989, after all, is famously taken to mark the end of the Cold War, the end of history, the end of the public, and the dominance of capital. In the vanished world of the GDR, now a distant mirage of social unity and fodder for Ostalgie, a regimented body is about to spring into a pool like a wind-up toy programmed to win an Olympic medal for the communist bloc. Meanwhile, Martenss portraits of the naked yet submerged Simone evince the distinctive German Freikrperkultur (free body culture) that encouraged public nudism as a form of salubrious self-expression in the absence of political or economic freedoms.

If 1989 does mark the caesura between 20th and 21st centuries, what does recent photography reveal about the cultural meaning of the swimming pool of the present? One answer lies in the utterly banal celebrity culture that Newtons Piscine Deligny image foreshadowed. We have ended up with images like supermodel Gisele Bndchen striding past a pool, staring straight to camera, being ogled by some starry-eyed dude in sunglasses. And with shots of former James Bond star Pierce Brosnans teenage sons Dylan and Paris lounging in jeans, backs turned to their Bel Air pool, occupied instead by two inflatable swans. The pool as designer accessory is wholly evacuated, a reference point you dont even have to look at. Its just a checklist luxury. In the absence of any social realism or public context, glamour, wealth, and privilege have bored themselves, and the viewer, to death, making the pool itself invisible.

A second answer is to be found in Stoppards canny juxtapositions. Opposite Janice Dickinsons glamour shot, for example, Stoppard places a double-portrait taken from 2018 by the fashion photographer Joyce Sze Ng. This picture features two women of color, elaborately clothed in gowns, staring from distance straight at the camera. They stand on the other side of a motionless, mirror-like pool that reflects their dignified yet expressionless faces. The photograph is neither one of pleasure nor psychological depth; indeed, it seems to disavow any invitation to depth. The picture is a hybrid: a fashion photographer evidently making a political statement, but what is the statement? Sze Ngs subjects appear to demand that the viewer acknowledge their presence but without any promise of revelation or intimacy, since they parry the viewers gaze. The inward gaze of reverie has turned outward to repel the viewer. Sze Ng seems to want to make a point about identity but, perhaps wanting to disavow the history of female nudity in pool art, feels it necessary to disavow the pool itself, converting it instead into a conceptual abstraction.

Sze Ngs double-portrait has a self-consciously pristine quality that is even more evident in the photography of Slve Sundsb, although Sundsbs pristineness is of a different character. It is technological, and showcases a third trend in recent pool imagery: the abstraction of pools and bodies into technical virtuosity. Sundsb does still take photos of people in water. One portrait of a young woman in a dark asymmetrical bathing suit shows her gazing wide-eyed under sanitized steel-blue water, like a doll in suspended animation or an amniotic spa. She enjoys no state of reverie, however; her open eyes appear lifeless. But the viewer is distracted by Sundsbs bubbles, which the speed of his camera recasts as beads of blown glass. Sundsb loves his bubbles; other shots engulf human forms in vast bubble clouds that fan out like Rorschach patterns. Sundsb says he strives for purity in such images, but the result is really pure mechanism: one cant help look at these pictures without thinking of the lens rather than the artist. What is absent from this kind of work is not merely the psychological charisma of classic pool photography, but the social reality of the swimming pool and its storied cultural identity. Instead of accumulating and drawing on this history, it is all but erased.

Why has pool art taken these turns? Several predictable answers naturally suggest themselves. We now possess more powerful cameras than ever before, with much faster lenses, and greater capacity for manipulating images. At the same time, our culture has tired of meaning and come to mistrust the promise of depth. We have rejected not only Freud but, seemingly, the whole nave project of self-discovery, settling instead for anti-depressants, cheaper consumer goods, harder bodies, and endless Instagram posts. Most importantly of all, we have retreated from public life to private islands. If photography provides any sort of guide to our collective imagination and it may not we no longer marvel at the grand architectural designs of public baths but dream of the hotel spa and the exclusive infinity pool. Twentieth-century photographers loved social realism and the hedonistic playfulness of the madding crowd; their 21st-century heirs are private clinicians who shun the mixing of different social classes in public waters.

But lets go easy on the jeremiad. Stoppards selections undeniably show that the dream of the swimming pool in all its different forms is far from over. There are a number of contemporary photographers who resist the current vogue for the clinical and the impersonal, the luxurious and the technical. For these artists, the pool is not an abstraction but an enduringly meaningful dream-machine that continues to inspire compelling, humorous, and imaginative visions.

Stoppard includes many extraordinary images of public pools as social panoramas that continue to be shot around the world, showcasing multitudes of bathers clambering en masse for the physical pleasure and psychic relief of water from the multiracial swimmers of the French banlieues to the vast crowds happily hugging the shores of indoor beaches complete with artificial wave machines in Japan. The reverie shot is not dead either, but lives on, poignantly renewed in Diana Markosians portraits of Afghani refugees floating in pools in Germany. They lie on their backs, gazing heavenward, dreaming of a better life. Even America boasts trusty throwbacks to bygone pool pleasures. Alice Hawkins is an expert in the popular sublime: she knows how to take sparkling shots evoking dreams of glamour that are far from faded for her subjects. These include gangs of girls lounging on dusty pool decks, wedding parties thrilling to kitsch joys of liquor and love, and close-ups of a cheeky blondes Lucky Bum, poolside in Vegas. Hawkinss bathers have no doubt that the swimming pool can still sprinkle magic dust on ordinary life.

Finally, Stoppard includes one of the most striking pool photos of recent years, and quite possibly of all time a remarkable untitled image made by the British photographer Polly Brown, taken in France in 2015. Like much recent pool art, the picture admittedly has a clinical quality, lacks an explicit psychological appeal, and offers no portrait of society. Unlike almost all recent work, however, it possesses a genuinely exhilarating grandeur of conception. Browns camera tracks a lone female swimmer in mid-stroke from high above a large multi-laned pool. All geared up, she wears a dark blue one-piece, cap, goggles, and even fins. The aerial distance between camera and subject makes the picture impersonal. Bright but sunless, its steely blue colors cool the viewers eyes. We are too far to sense the swimmers emotions.

There is, however, no flight to abstraction here: this is a swimmer in a pool. Yet we cannot see the pools edges. This is crucial. We cannot see where the pool begins or ends, that it begins or ends. Through her cropping, Brown has given us a subtly yet profoundly suggestive portrait of the pool as an infinite expanse, and of the swim as a limitless odyssey. The notion is reinforced by two telling details. Painted dots mark distance in each lane like repeating metronomic beats; and the swimmer swims through an opening or gate, the width of a single lane, leading her from one section of the pool to another. She is going somewhere. This is not the 20th-century dream of the inner life; indeed, in the pandemic year of 2020, it could be read merely as an image of persistence or survival in an evacuated world. But it is undoubtedly the image of an existential quest. The majesty of Browns photograph lies in its liberation of the viewers mind from the narrowness of much recent pool art, returning the swimming pool at last to the free rein of the imagination.

James Delbourgo is professor of history at Rutgers University, where he teaches the history of science, collecting and museums, and the history of the Atlantic World. His most recent book is Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Harvard University Press, 2017).

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The Dream of the Swimming Pool - Los Angeles Review of Books - lareviewofbooks

Review: I Hate It Here: Stories from the End of the Old World – DC Theatre Scene

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Do you remember the old Firesign Theatre? On their records (do you remember records?), an absurd scene would dissolve into another absurd scene, until you dissolved in laughter.

To put a period on our annus horribilis, Ike Holters I Hate It Here uses the Firesign Theatre motif. Absurd scenes dissolve into other absurd scenes. But what you dissolve inisnt laughter.

Like Firesign Theatre, this production uses uniformly fine acting and excellent, integrated sound design (Mikhail Fiksel) to turn the soundscape into a dreamscape. Occasionally the tension breaks out into a musical number, just like it does on the Firesign Theatre albums (they are all in exceptional voice in I Hate it Here). But there the resemblance ends.

Another title for Holters work, which is now available for free in audio form on Studio Theatres website, might be I Hate You Here, because its business, like the years, is to strip away our pretensions to reasonableness and good will to reveal the loneliness, fear, and hatred that lies beneath.

Thus, for example, a mother of the bride, a White woman (Jennifer Mendenhall) has a conversation with an African-American guest (Jaysen Wright) which begins with her strategy to be free of responsibilities by her mid-forties but turns into an abstract discussion about the beating of a Black man by police and then turns into a harrowing tale of personal responsibility.

Thus, for example, a schoolteachers (Sydney Charles) monologue about the familiar afflictions of her profession parent-teacher conferences, parents who abdicate responsibility for their childs learning suddenly warps into an account of a profoundly racist act, and of her supervisors decision to accommodate those involved rather than right the wrong. The teacher complains that her supervisor did not hear her, but we know that he did. He just didnt care.

Thus, for example, a woman marks the beginning of the reign of King Covid by noting the death of her dog and then spins a narrative about a world gone completely out of control. (Because the character was never identified by name in this audio piece and is not otherwise identified in the program, I cant name the actor).

In the most compelling piece, Frank (Gabriel Ruiz) and Wash (Tony Santiago) have won a singular victory in their war against the system: the city has installed a stop sign on the corner of their street. Tanya (Charles), a second-generation activist and an old friend of Wash, scoffs at their accomplishments. Is this what they struggled to achieve? Shes meeting the Mayor next week but to what purpose? And so Wash and Tanya go at it, with bad intent: is it better to shoot for the Moon, and achieve nothing? Or to aim lower, and achieve a stop sign?

In this twenty-minute episode, Holter has identified the dilemma of the present movement. The objective is not to change laws, its to change hearts and minds. Its easy to change laws. All it takes is a little marching, some beatings, being torn apart by dogs, going to jail, having a national leader who can play Congress like a bass fiddle, and having your own leader assassinated. But its harder to change hearts and minds. We humans are hard-wired to see the world as sum-zero, and to believe that the only way to be safe is to subdue or kill everyone else. So if the mission is to bring us to the civility and good will we pretend to have, its not the heart and mind that needs to be convinced. Its the amygdala.

Besides, thanks to covid, a lot of folks have lost their minds. And their hearts.

The works subtitle is Stories from the End of the Old World. This implies that there will be a new world. Good luck with that.

Ive made I Hate It Here sound pretty grim. It is. But if this year has made you feel anger, despair, sadness, frustration, hate and depression, its satisfying to know that youre not alone.

It is a clich to say that a work of art captures the zeitgeist of the age. But I Hate it Here does, and thats that.

I Hate It Here: Stories from the End of the Old World1 hour, 22 minutesStreams for free thru March 11, 2021

I Hate It Here: Stories from the End of the Old World, written and directed by Ike Holter, with Sivan Battat as Assistant Director . Featuring Sydney Charles, Behzad Dabu, Kirsten Fitzgerald, Jennifer Mendenhall, Gabriel Ruiz, Tony Santiago, and Jaysen Wright . Sound design by Mikhail Fiksel . Noel Nichols is the audio engineer and dialogue editor . Adrien-Alice Hansel is the dramaturg . Luisa Snchez Coln is the stage manager . Produced by Studio Theatre . Reviewed by Tim Treanor.

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Review: I Hate It Here: Stories from the End of the Old World - DC Theatre Scene

How David Hockney Trolled the New Yorker – The Bulwark

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The New Yorker has released a preview of the magazines second-to-last cover of 2020. The cover features an original digital painting by David Hockney, titled Hearth. It depicts a fireplace and is decidedly juvenile in execution. The brushwork appears childish and has sparked a Twitter backlash and outcry.

This is very funny. Hockney is perfectly capable of using digital brushes properly, can only assume he hates someone in the TNY art dept, Jo Livingstone of the New Republic noted in now-deleted tweets, Either that or somebody at TNY doesnt care enough to protect his legacy. Livingstone pointed to a number of Hockneys recently exhibited digital paintings as evidence of his mastery, supporting the supposition that the New Yorker cover might be, in some way, a troll.

Along with the cover in question is a brief synopsis and Q&A with Hockney conducted by Franoise Mouly, the New Yorkers art director. In it we learn that Hockney, after doing 220 digital paintings in 2020, will be returning to oils for a large mural in 2021. While not a sweeping or in-depth discussion of his work, the interview touches on his now decade-long fascination with the iPad as an artistic device and his taking inspiration from tapestries. The piece also features a time-lapse of the digital painting being created.

If anything, the interview raises more questions than it answers. Why, if Hockney went to such great pains over the course of the year to produce this great and specific quantity of work, did Mouly not choose to elevate one of better quality? For these short, dark days, she writes, David Hockney offers the traditional comfort of a hearth.

Hockney is 83 years old and considered among the greatest living British artists for his contributions to the pop art movement in the 1960s. Over the course of his career, he has used a wide range of media and has not shied away from technology.

But Hearth simply does not justly represent Hockneys digital work. Just last month The Art Newspaper featured an item on his digital art in quarantine, highlighting the hope that his most recent work is capable of eliciting.

The Art Newspaper featured two digital paintings in particular, first The Big Tree in Autumn, has a remarkable skyblue in the center of the frame, breaking through the clouds behind the branches of the tree. There are layers of gray in the clouds. The details of the trees branches and leaves show deliberate use of different textures and opacities. These are advanced techniques regardless of medium.

The Pond in Autumn, made two days later, is even more impressive. Again the range of detail, color, texture, and gesture, while not entirely controlled or pristine, still shows the hand of a skilled and dedicated artist. The tranquility of the water Hockney is able to portray is masterful.

Given the well-honed skill and style evident in these works and others exhibited over the years, why the New Yorker chose or accepted upon commission such a seemingly anomalous painting is a valid question. Hockney is clearly in command of his faculties, making it seem all the more likely that the irreverence and slap-dash nature of Hearth are an intentional thumbing of the nose at the magazines grandiosity.

This is also not the first iPad sketch from Hockney that has graced the New Yorkers cover. The three previous digitally produced Hockney covers featured beneath the interviewstill lifes from 2010 and 2011 and a landscape from 2018are all vastly more complex and impressive. It is not just that the study of the fireplace is weak or a departure from the other iPad work he has done at largeit is a departure in quality from what he has submitted in the past to this same magazine and this same art director.

Responding to Livingstones critique, Sterling Crispin suggested that Hearth was in continuity with Hockneys previous digital work:

But thats part of the appeal, hard for people to understand its supposed to be sort of shitty, Crispin continued.

Given, again, Hockneys stated mission to complete 220 paintings in 2020, its safe to say we cant expect all of them to be bangers. So yes, some are going to have that intentional shitty crude quality to themthat is not the surprise. The surprise is that he chose to shoddily iPad it in for the cover of one of the most prestigious magazines in the world after a year of social uprisings calling for the cultural standard bearers to be more inclusive in who and what they chose to promote. At a moment when art, almost alone among human endeavors, can offer us beauty and inspiration, or solace and consolation, or distraction and humor, or any other variety of grace, Hockney and the New Yorker give us this?

Kyle Chaykausing a logical fallacy to bait the conversation away from why or why not the painting is shitty and why was it chosen to well actually, it is a virtue that the painting is shittychimed in with this bit of wisdom: making people mad is a great side-effect of art. It can be, yes. It is also the intended effect of trolling.

Chayka goes on to invoke a well-known anecdote of dubious origin:

It always reminds me of the story about the woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, That will be $10,000.

But you did that in thirty seconds, the astonished woman replied.

No, Picasso said. It has taken me forty years to do that.

This vignette does not contradict Livingstones point, though. Dashing off a scribble for someone seeking, and willing to pay for, the work of a master is inherently an act of trolling: an instance of behaving provocatively or antagonizing someone. The crux is the irreverence and the New Yorkers acceptance and elevation of it.

Suggesting that the iPads paint app is unforgiving is an insult to Hockney, who has demonstrated that he is perfectly capable of producing very fine work in the medium. It is not difficult to grasp that some media are cruder than others. That is not what is at issue here.

Chaykas and Crispins defenses of the cover are silly. To suggest that there is something shallow or misinformed in taking umbrage at the covers juvenile quality is simply pretentious. This is not a case of my kid could do that but a moment to reflect on editorial integrity (and the possible virtues of shitposting). Because ultimately an editor made the choice to feature that image in all its mediocritychoosing to capstone the year by having an old white man dash off an image severely lacking in technical qualities and at odds with his proven abilities and reputation.

Even so, there is something pleasurable about seeing something done so terribly appear on the cover of the New Yorker. The disjunction is genuinely hilarious. Some have gone so far as to call it iconic. By being elevated to the cover it is able to capture a bit of the 2020 zeitgeist. This is not enough to redeem the digital painting as a standalone work of art. A fittingly shitty end to a shitty year.

Abstraction is still difficult for people!!! Chakya exclaims. Indeed, it seems at least some of the meta aspects of trolling have gone over quite a few heads. But saying a work is purposefully bad doesnt make it good.

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How David Hockney Trolled the New Yorker - The Bulwark

Was 2020 the year of BTS? Here’s why ‘Time’ magazine thinks so – Film Daily

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From being the biggest Korean outfit on the scene, the boy band BTS has now become the biggest band in the world. Its the impression youd get from their majestic presence as the Times Entertainer of the Year & theres no exaggeration in this. If pop stardom in 2020 had a mascot, BTS would be it.

Sure, Taylor Swift has given us some of the best music with a countryside aesthetic a much-needed comfort in the year 2020, but BTS has kept the spirits upbeat. They released multiple albums, broke so many records across the board including their own, had a busy life appearing on live streams & bonding with their fanbase, lovingly referred to as the BTS ARMY.

To be able to do that in a year when all the live, in-person concerts stood cancelled is no mean feat, and BTS has shown what theyre capable of, while simultaneously keeping their empathy & love front & center. Which is why when other celebrities seemed to leverage the lockdown, they seemed disingenuous, but when BTS brought new music, it indicated hope.

When Time says 2020 was the year of BTS, theyve evidence to back it up. They talk of the success of BTS, From propelling their label to a $7.5 billion IPO valuation to inspiring fans to match their $1 million donation to Black Lives Matter, BTS is a case study in music-industry dominance through human connection. This sums up the impact of the band very well, so lets expound this evidence.

When it comes to their sticky popularity, the band has its BTS ARMY to thank. The year began with the release of Map of the Soul: 7, the fourth Korean-language seventh overall studio album by the band. Among the many records that the band broke this year is the most views on the music video for their single Dynamite, where they surpassed 100 million views on its debut day itself.

Today, the video is nearing 700 million views. Even on streaming giant Spotify, BTS took away the metaphorical awards. Dynamite is the most-streamed K-pop song this year and Map of the Soul: 7 is the most streamed K-pop album on Spotify. Dynamite opened at the top spot on Spotifys daily Global Top 50 chart when it released in August this year.

While the boy band garnered money & accolades for their work, they were always empathetic & aware of the trials & tribulations plaguing the world. Their activism has an ethos of anti establishment & compassion. Multiple members of the band have been extremely vocal about their challenges with mental health, the quirks of fame, and have embraced non-toxic masculinity as exhibited in their performance.

Even though same-sex marriage is still not legal in their country, South Korea, theyve been vocal about their support for LGBTQ+ rights. This year, they donated $1 million to the Black Lives Matter movement, something Jin from the band claimed was not politics. It was related to racism. We believe everyone deserves to be respected. Thats why we made that decision.

This donation amount was matched by their fandom BTS ARMY in no time. Thats their impact.

Even though their initial plans for a world tour stood cancelled, they ended the year with a bang by releasing their latest album BE. It has been hailed as the music thats closest to BTS aesthetic. With that album, they debuted a song & album at No. 1 on Billboard charts in the same week. More recently, they got another feather in their cap they got nominated or a Grammy.

Even in their interview with Time, theyre candid, It was a year that we struggled a lot. We might look like were doing well on the outside with the numbers, but we do go through a hard time ourselves, Jimin said.

No one can deny the impact of the band on the current zeitgeist & how they made the tough year better for all of us.

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Was 2020 the year of BTS? Here's why 'Time' magazine thinks so - Film Daily

British pound hits highest level in over two years on Brexit trade deal progress – CNBC

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Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends a virtual press conference inside 10 Downing Street in central London on Nov. 26, 2020.

Jamie Lorriman | AFP | Getty Images

LONDON Sterling broke through the long-awaited $1.35 barrier on Wednesday morning after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said progress had been made toward a post-Brexit trade deal between the U.K. and the European Union.

Addressing the European Parliament, von der Leyen said that while she could not say whether there would or would not be a deal, "there is a path to an agreement now" and the next few days will be critical.

"We have found a way forward on most issues but two issues remain outstanding: the level playing field and fisheries," von der Leyen said.

"I am glad to report that the issues linked to governance now have largely been resolved. The next few days are going to be decisive."

However, a U.K. official reportedly told Reuters that the two sides remain "very far apart in key areas" and that despite some progress, the deal is "still not there." CNBC was unable to independently verify the report.

Sterling climbed 0.4% against the dollar following the remarks, breaking above the $1.35 barrier for the first time since May 2018. The euro also gained 0.45% against the greenback to top $1.22 for the first time since April 2018.

The U.K. left the EU in January but it agreed to keep the same standards and regulations until the end of the year, so both sides would have time to develop new trading arrangements.

However, this transition period ends in around two weeks and there are serious concerns that they will not have a new agreement ready by then. Failure to get an agreement in the coming weeks, a so-called no-deal Brexit, could push up taxes and costs for exporters on both sides.

CNBC's Silvia Amaro contributed to this article.

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British pound hits highest level in over two years on Brexit trade deal progress - CNBC

Eduardo Rodriguez shows off progress in throwing session – RADIO.COM

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There was word that Eduardo Rodriguez was making significant progress in his return from myocarditis. Now we have proof just how far the pitcher has come.

Rodriguez, who missed all of 2020 due to the COVID-19-induced condition, was forced to ease back into regular athletic activity, even once the regular season concluded.

But each step of the way throughout the past few months the Red Sox have surmised that Rodriguez would be participating in a normal spring training, with Wednesday's video supporting that notion.

In Eduardos situation, the most important part is that hes healthy, right? Forget the baseball part of it, Red Sox manager Alex Cora said on MLB Network Radio earlier this week. He can have a regular life. Hes working out. Hes going after it, which is pretty exciting. He started playing catch. As of now, hes on pace to be ready for the start of the season. Obviously, were not going to push him. Were going to be very careful. Its something very serious. Im glad hes upbeat and hes going through his workouts as normal as possible."

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Eduardo Rodriguez shows off progress in throwing session - RADIO.COM

Virgin Hyperloop and Tucker County Commission discusses the benefits and progress of the project – WBOY.com

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PARSONS, W.Va. The announcement that Virgin would be building the certification center for its new hyperloop technology came to the area back in October. While construction may still be months and months away, staff with the company explained that theyre already looking to support its new home.

Hyperloop is really focused on being a positive part of the community and working together to make the certification center a success for the locals, the state, and then globally, said Project Development Lead Kelsey Kirby.

With that in mind, Kirby spoke at the regular meeting of the Tucker County Commission on Wednesday to talk about what the new project has to offer the county and the wider region. Commission President Lowell Moore said hes looking forward to many new jobs in the area.

After theyre up and running, I think a lot of it will be in the engineering department, but West Virginia is going to do a lot too. The colleges and West Virginia University, I think that will draw in a lot of our students from them, and I think itll make employment for them to where they can stay in West Virginia rather than go out of state, said Moore.

And thats a goal that many people share around the state. Kirby is a West Virginia native herself. She said the new facility would go a long way towards helping students see the different career paths available to them without leaving their home state.

We are very excited about the opportunity that hyperloop presents to the young people really excited about STEM. And so certainly one of the things thats a personal passion and one of many of the engineers on the hyperloop team is to share that excitement around science and education, said Kirby.

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Virgin Hyperloop and Tucker County Commission discusses the benefits and progress of the project - WBOY.com

A year of erased progress in the workplace – Axios

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The pandemic didn't just move us forward in terms of workplace transformations it also moved us back, erasing decades of workplace progress and deepening existing societal inequalities.

Why it matters: It could take years to reach the levels of equity that existed before the coronavirus ravaged the U.S. economy.

1. A generation of American women has been set back.

In February, before the pandemic, women in the U.S. hit a milestone. For the first time in history, they held the majority of non-farm payroll jobs, outnumbering men in the workforce.

2. The pandemic has deepened the divide between the two worlds of work.

"We're seeing a really strong dichotomy between white-collar and blue-collar work," says Levit, the workplace expert. "We treat our front-line workers like cogs in the machine."

Go deeper with my reporting on these troubling trends from earlier this year:

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A year of erased progress in the workplace - Axios

UPDATE 2-Progress on Brexit but coming days will be critical, says EU chief – Reuters

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BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Britain and the European Union have moved closer to sealing a new trade deal but it was still unclear if they would succeed, the blocs chief executive said on Wednesday.

Britain and the EU are in the final stretch of talks to keep an estimated one trillion dollars of annual trade free of tariffs and quotas beyond Dec. 31, when the United Kingdom finally transitions out of the worlds largest trading bloc.

With just over two weeks left, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he hoped the EU would see sense and agree a deal that respected Britains sovereignty, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the bloc favoured agreement.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament: I cannot tell you whether there will be a deal or not. But I can tell you that there is a path to an agreement now. The path may be very narrow but it is there.

Her relatively upbeat comments on the long-running Brexit crisis helped nudge sterling upwards on currency markets. However, von der Leyen also said two issues were still unsolved.

We have found a way forward on most issues but two issues still remain outstanding: the level playing field and fisheries, she said. Issues linked to governance now have largely been resolved. The next days are going to be decisive.

The level playing field refers to EU insistence that Britain does not undercut it on environmental, labour and social standards, as well as state aid, while governance covers the resolution of disputes.

Von der Leyen said discussions about access to UK fishing waters for EU vessels were still very difficult.

Britain formally left the EU on Jan. 31 but has been in a transition period since then under which rules on trade, travel and business remain unchanged. It finally exits the blocs single market and customs union on Dec. 31.

Failure to agree a deal would erect trade barriers between the EU and Britain, snarl borders, send shockwaves through financial markets and cause chaos in supply chains across Europe as it also struggles with COVID-19.

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Johnson, who won election last year pledging to get Brexit done and for Britain to take back control, said he hoped the EU would see sense and do a deal.

He emphasised the point at a press conference, when he said: Where we get to with the EU - well, again, that is very much a matter for our friends. They know what the parameters are.

His spokesman said no trade deal was still the mostly likely outcome. A later statement from Johnsons office said talks would continue over the coming days.

Britains parliament will begin its Christmas break on Thursday, but could be recalled at short notice and as early as next week to legislate if a deal is reached.

Merkel said the EU would prefer a deal but is prepared either way, adding there was no breakthrough yet.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who is at odds with Britain over fish quotas, said he wanted the best relationship with London.

FILE PHOTO: European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen speaks during a debate on next EU council and last Brexit development during a plenary session at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium November 25, 2020. Olivier Hoslet/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

But the two sides have yet to narrow gaps on two of the thorniest issues: fishing rights in British waters and the level playing field.

An EU official told Reuters the bloc had rejected Britains offer of phased access to its waters over three years by EU fishing vessels and the sides were an ocean apart on the issue.

Von der Leyen hailed a big step forward in agreeing a so-called non-regression clause, which would ensure that our common high labour, social and environmental standards will not be undercut.

Sources said there were disagreements over balanced equivalence, which London saw as tying Britain to the EUs regulatory orbit, and a dispute resolution mechanism to determine whether competition was distorted and remedies if so.

Britain saw the EUs pitch for effective remedial measures as giving the bloc too much leeway to retaliate on trade.

Reporting by Francesco Guarascio, Marine Strauss, Gabriela Baczynska, William James and Elizabeth Piper in London, Sudip Kar-Gupta in Paris and Paul Carrel and Michael Nienaber in Berlin, Writing by Robin Emmott, Gabriela Baczynska and Elizabeth Piper; Editing by Giles Elgood and Andrew Cawthorne

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UPDATE 2-Progress on Brexit but coming days will be critical, says EU chief - Reuters

Facts and Secrets About Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress – Inside the Magic

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Theres a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day.

Walt Disney and WED Enterprises teamed up and created what is now the longest-running stage show in American theater history. Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress was originally created as the prime feature of theGeneral Electric Pavilion for the 1964 New York Worlds Fair, but I bet you didnt know it actually has been in a total of three different locations, which brings me to the fact that there is much more to this attraction than one may realize.

That is why we created an entire guide to everything you need to know about Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress!

What is Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress?

This attraction, created by Walt Disney himself, is a rotating theater audio-animatronic stage show attraction, currently located in Tomorrowland at Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World Resort. The official description listed on the Walt Disney World website reads:

Travel through the 20th century and marvel at the evolution of technology during this classic Audio-Animatronics show.

Follow an American family over 4 generations of progress and watch technology transform their lives.

During each era, learn how the technological marvels of the day made life more comfortableand paved the way for unimaginable innovations.

Discover how gas lamps, the hand-cranked washing machine and gramophone made the pre-electric era a breeze.

Watch the advent of electricity give rise to modern conveniences like the electric iron, the radioand the simple, revolutionary light bulb.

See how the automatic dishwasher and television set transformed the American household.

Todays high-tech marvels include virtual-reality games, high-definition televisions and voice-activated household appliances. Imagine the wonders the next hundred years may bring!

In the late 1950s, Walt Disney wanted to expand Main Street U.S.A. with two different districts, International Street and Edison Square. Edison Square would be home to a show, which was supposed to be called Harnessing the Lighting, and would showcase the evolution of electricity in the home from the late 19th century to the present (and beyond). After each era ended, the Guests would then get up and walk to the next one, however, this idea was eventually scrapped and Disney had to go back to the drawing boards.

Not long after the idea of Harnessing the Lighting was scrapped, General Electric approached Disney to see if he could develop a show for the GE pavilion at the 1964-65 New York Worlds Fair. The company would fund the project and the new technology to bring it to life so Disney felt he couldnt pass it up Plus, it could help his relationship with the company. He immediately thought of his Edison Square concept and pitched the idea of an electrical progress show to the companys executives. They loved the idea and moved forward with it.

Walt Disney asked songwritersRichard M. ShermanandRobert B. Sherman, who you may know for creating many other Disney classics including the music for Mary Poppins, to create a song for the idea Disney had. He explained that he wanted the song to play as a segway between acts and the Sherman Brothers came up with what is now known as Theres A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.

The Sherman Brothers later shared that they created this song with Walt in mind and they believe that it was Walts theme song, since he was very optimistic and excited about the future and technology.

D23 writes:

General Electric Carousel of Progress Attraction at the 1964-65 New York Worlds Fair, later moved to Tomorrowland at Disneyland, where it opened July 2, 1967. Closed September 9, 1973 and moved to Walt Disney World. America Sings then moved into the carousel theater at Disneyland. At Disneyland, the attraction was tied to the theme song Theres a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, which echoed General Electrics then current philosophy. The attraction featured the increased importance of electricity in the home through four different scenes of an Audio-Animatronics family. When the attraction moved to Walt Disney World, where it opened on January 15, 1975, the theme song changed to The Best Time of Your Life, reflecting General Electrics changed philosophy. General Electric ended sponsorship in 1985, but the attraction continues to operate, and to satisfy nostalgia buffs, the song Theres a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow was returned during a 1993 rehab, which also saw a theming of the four tableaux to various holidays. It was renamed Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress in 1994.

Fun Fact: For all of you fans of A Christmas Story, the narrator of this classic film is featured on the Carousel of Progress as John the main narrator and the father!

Where Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress is Located

I bet you didnt know that Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress has actually been in three different locations! Thats right It was first created under the name Progressland for the 1964-65 New York Worlds Fair. Following its success, it was then moved to Disneyland park and renamed Carousel of Progress.

Then, in 1975, Disney moved this attraction to Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World where it was rewritten and renamed again as The Best Time of Your Life. However, to stick to its origins, Disney decided to once again rename the attraction in 1994 and it is now referred to as Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress.

The official Disney World website explains these moves and name changes as:

Walt Disney originally conceived the show as part of a new area at Disneyland Park called Edison Square. When the concept was abandoned, the idea was reimagined, eventually opening under the name Progressland at the 1964-65 New York Worlds Fair.

With the classic song Theres a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow by the Academy Award-winning team of brothers Richard and Robert Sherman, the show was an instant hit. Following its success, the show moved to Disneyland Park and was renamed The Carousel of Progress.

In 1975, the attraction moved to Magic Kingdom park where it was rewritten and restaged with a new theme song, The Best Time of Your Life.

In the true spirit of progress, the show was reworked in 1994 to its initial incarnation with the original theme song intactas a tribute to nostalgia.

When Guests approach the attraction, they will hear a pre-show video play on the televisions, which talks about the history and development of Carousel of Progress. It includes clips of Walt Disney himself along with The Sherman Brothers, singing Theres a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.

Once Guests enter the rotating theater and have a seat, they will follow an American family over 4 generations of progress and watch technology transform and change their lives.

In act one, we are taken back to the 1900s as John, the family father, is sitting in his home with Rover, the family dog, by his side. He starts off by telling the audience it is right around the turn of the century and then proceeds to discuss all of the new inventions during this time Including Thomas Edisons idea for snap-on electric lights.

John then highlights all of the new technology and appliances within his home as well as explaining how some problems such as chopping wood, souring milk, and getting water from the well are all things of the past now.The audience then meets Johns wife, Sarah, who shows off her new wash-day marvel and explains how she can now do laundry in five hours instead of two days. The show proceeds to introduce other family members including James, the familys son, who is caught using Johns stereoscope without his permission.

John proceeds to tell Guests other technology highlights during the 1900s such as one of those new talking machines, which leads to the familys grandmother, who we see has fallen asleep while listening to the phonograph, which is the talking machine John referred to. We then meet another member of the family, the daughter Patricia, as she is getting ready to go to a Valentines Day dance. John explains Patricia will be taking one of the new horseless trolleys, which John loves to take to get a root beer, also known as sarsaparilla.

The scene comes to an end and Theres a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow begins to play as the audience is rotated to the next act.

In act two, we move ahead twenty years to the 1920s. John is on stage, sitting in his kitchen and we soon realize it is Independence Day. He begins the scene by telling the audience that the Roaring Twenties has several new accomplishments such as Charles Lindbergh is about to fly over the Atlantic Ocean by himself, people being able to travel by train from New York to California in 3 days and cars now having electric starters so they no longer need to crank them. Additionally, John talks about how sports stadiums are being built all over the United States and even makes mention that Babe Ruth is the countrys best baseball player.

John then goes on to tell the Guests that Thomas Edison has brought electricity to his home, in which he proceeds to show off all of his electrics. It doesnt take long before he not only blows a fuse in his own home but the entire block. John soon asks his son, Jimmy, to put in a new fuse and we soon hear Jimmy start to complain as every time they have company over, a fuse blows.

The power comes back on and the rest of the family begins their Independence Day celebration prep work as they see Sarah working on sewing a George and Martha Washington costume. John and Sarah go back and forth, interrupting one another in which Rover, the family dog, then begins to bark. John then makes a joking remark saying Dont interrupt while Sarahs interrupting.

The scene continues on as Sarah lets John know that Jimmy, their son, volunteered to pick the music for the Independence Day celebration, which we then see him on the side stage in a colonial outfit tapping his feet to the music. Patricia, the daughter, is sitting in a room on the other side of the stage, wearing a Statue of Liberty costume. She expresses that she hopes her new boyfriend doesnt see her in the costume because he may run away.

The other new invention John lets the audience know about is indoor plumbing, which he says is great for cold days, especially for Uncle Orville, who is their constant houseguest. Uncle Orville then appears sitting in a bathtub as John tells the Guests that Orville has no job.Orville responds by saying No privacy at all around this place! which is when Sarah chimes in and calls John to let him know its time to go. The scene concludes and John begins to sing Theres A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, as Guests rotate to the third scene.

Moving into the 1940s, also known as the Fabulous Forties, the Guests quickly notice it is now Halloween as John proceeds to tell Guests that everything is better than ever. He begins to show off some of the new kitchen technologies, including a refrigerator that holds more food and ice cubes and an automatic dishwasher.

John also tells Guests that he is now a part of the rat race and they have television, (when it works), and that John Cameron Swayze brings them the news every night. We then see the grandmother and grandfather watching wrestling on the television and Jim asking John what he thinks about his Jack-O-Lantern, which he says he used his beautiful sister Patty as a model.

We then get back into seeing the technology side of things when John tells everyone that Patty is using an old exercise machine thatwas all the rage in the twenties, but it never worked. However, the audience then sees Patty using the machine while she is talking on the phone to her friend about her date for that night.

In the next portion of the scene, John tells the audience that he is now caught up in the do-it-yourself craze in which John proceeds to explain how he and Sarah are redoing their basement and making it into a rumpus room.

We see Sarah working on the new room, as she is putting up wallpaper up using a paint mixer, which quickly goes haywire and shoots paint everywhere. John then realizes that its time to move on, and tries to get everyone collectively singing to try and cheer Sarah up. Theres A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow begins playing and Guests move into the final scene.

The last act is set during Christmas in the 21st century, where the entire family is gathered together in the living room and kitchen singing Theres a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow together, rather than just hearing John sing it like weve heard the last few scenes.

We see John in the kitchen making Christmas dinner, Sarah on her computer working nearby, Jim, who is now a young adult and no longer a child, is showing his grandmother how to play a virtual reality game, and Trish and her grandfather sit in the living room near the Christmas tree.

Sarah tells John that she has successfully programmed the oven to recognize his voice so he can tell it what to do. John explains to the audience that all of the household items are now voice-activated and proceeds to tell the oven to turn onto a certain degree temperature. After the oven confirms Johns temperature voice command, Trish, the daughter, makes a comment that it even talks back!

The family then pokes fun at Johns burnt turkey from last year right before we see the grandmother reaching 550 points in the virtual reality game. She impressed both John and Jim who repeat the score in shock and the oven hears 550 and turns the temperature up. The grandfather then starts talking about how he cant believe the new gadgets these days and proceeds to explain how before they even had car phones, they didnt even have a house phone. He is in shock over the technology they have in the 20th century such as laser discs and high-def TVs and how everything is automated today.

We then shift back to focus on the grandmother who has now reached a score of 975, beating the video game. The oven hears this number and turns the temperature to 975 degrees before it begins to smoke and start giving off warning noises before the oven door pops open and we see a severely burnt and blackened turkey. The family laughs at the fact that another Christmas turkey has been ruined and John jokes that maybe moving into the new century, ovens will learn to read minds. Jim responds with, Dont worry Dad, someday everything will be so automated that you wont ever ever have to cook another Christmas turkey again. The family then proceeds to sing Theres A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow one last time together.

Who Should Visit Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress

Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress is aimed to please all families at Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World. Walt Disney had the vision to create a place where families could go and spend time together And thats exactly what he had in mind when creating all of his attractions as well. No matter your age, this relaxing and entertaining ride in Tomorrowland is a great experience for everyone.

But, for those of you who are avid Walt Disney fans and really want to feel a connection to Walt and his history, as well as the history to the theme park, this is the attraction for you!

When to Visit Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress

Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress typically never has a long line and is almost always a walk on. You can visit Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress any time during the theme park operating hours, which vary depending on the day of the week and the time of year. Make sure to check the Disney World Parks Calendar prior to visiting for the most up-to-date hours.

Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress goes all the way back to the beginning With Walt Disney himself creating the concept for this attraction. Because of this, there are so many hidden details and tidbits included in the show.

Check out our video here and the next time you are at the attraction, see how many of these you can spot!

Do you want to learn more about Walt Disney and how the magic of Disney came to be? Well, you can step back to Marceline, Missouri, and learn several different little-known and fun facts about Walt himself as you tour the Magic Kingdom with a V.I.P. tour guide on the Walt Disney: Marceline to Magic Kingdom Tour.

The Walt Disney World website describes this tour as:

Discover how key events in Walt Disneys life inspired the creation of Magic Kingdom park on this eye-opening, 3-hour walking tour.

Step back in time for a behind-the-scenes glimpse into some of the secrets behind the magic. Your knowledgeable guide will share many little-known facts about Walts upbringing in Marceline, Missouri as well as provide insider info about the design and operation of several classic attractions, including those inspired by Walts participation in the 1964 Worlds Fair.

This insiders look at the history of Magic Kingdom park is perfect for the avid Disney fan and offers a lighter alternative to the more in-depthKeys to the Kingdomtour.

Please note: This tour is not open on Monday and Tuesday.

Know Before You Go

View important information including recommended attire, Guest restrictions and cancellation policies.

If you want to experience Walt Disneys Carousel of Progress at Walt Disney World Resort for yourself, but arent sure where to begin planning Dont hesitate to reach out to our friends over at Academy Travel.

Founded in 1996, Academy Travel is celebrating over 20 years in business and as the original Disney Exclusive travel agency. Academy Travel has earned the highest designation that Disney can bestow upon a travel agency, EarMarked Diamond! Academy Travel is anAuthorized Disney Vacation Plannerand has been designated as a Diamond EarMarked Travel Agency specializing in Walt Disney World, Disneyland Resort, Disney Cruise Line, and Aulani, a Disney Resort & Spa.

One reason the agency attained the Authorized Disney Vacation Planner status is that all the frontline leisure travel agents are College of Disney Knowledge graduates. The College of Disney Knowledge is an in-depth comprehensive course that allows agents to develop their expertise regarding the Disney Destinations knowledge that consumers can take advantage of when planning a Disney vacation.

As long as you book your trip with anAuthorized Disney Vacation Planneryou can rest assured that you will be working with an agency that Disney has vetted and is willing to associate their brand with that agency due to the knowledge and service level you will find at that particular agency. As you can probably imagine, this is a big deal as Disney emphasizes stellar service above all else. Disney has high standards as to with whom they will partner and as a baseline we believe you should only consider booking your Disney vacation with anAuthorized Disney Vacation Planner.

And, no other travel agency in the world books as many Walt Disney World, Disneyland Resort, Disney Cruise Line, a Disney Resort & Spa vacations as does Academy Travel. Yes, you read that right, Academy Travel has more experience booking these trips than anyone else, plus they are also the #1 travel agent booking Universal Studios vacations and so much more!

So what are you waiting for? Start planning your dream Disney vacation today!

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Facts and Secrets About Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress - Inside the Magic

Progress on Brexit but coming days will be critical, says EU chief – Reuters

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BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Britain and the European Union have moved closer to sealing a new trade deal but it was still unclear if they would succeed, the blocs chief executive said on Wednesday.

Britain and the EU are in the final stretch of talks to keep an estimated one trillion dollars of annual trade free of tariffs and quotas beyond Dec. 31, when the United Kingdom finally transitions out of the worlds largest trading bloc.

With just over two weeks left, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he hoped the EU would see sense and agree a deal that respected Britains sovereignty, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the bloc favoured agreement.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament: I cannot tell you whether there will be a deal or not. But I can tell you that there is a path to an agreement now. The path may be very narrow but it is there.

Her relatively upbeat comments on the long-running Brexit crisis helped nudge sterling upwards on currency markets. However, von der Leyen also said two issues were still unsolved.

We have found a way forward on most issues but two issues still remain outstanding: the level playing field and fisheries, she said. Issues linked to governance now have largely been resolved. The next days are going to be decisive.

The level playing field refers to EU insistence that Britain does not undercut it on environmental, labour and social standards, as well as state aid, while governance covers the resolution of disputes.

Von der Leyen said discussions about access to UK fishing waters for EU vessels were still very difficult.

Britain formally left the EU on Jan. 31 but has been in a transition period since then under which rules on trade, travel and business remain unchanged. It finally exits the blocs single market and customs union on Dec. 31.

Failure to agree a deal would erect trade barriers between the EU and Britain, snarl borders, send shockwaves through financial markets and cause chaos in supply chains across Europe as it also struggles with COVID-19.

SEE SENSE

Johnson, who won election last year pledging to get Brexit done and for Britain to take back control, said he hoped the EU would see sense and do a deal.

He emphasised the point at a press conference, when he said: Where we get to with the EU - well, again, that is very much a matter for our friends. They know what the parameters are.

His spokesman said no trade deal was still the mostly likely outcome. A later statement from Johnsons office said talks would continue over the coming days.

Britains parliament will begin its Christmas break on Thursday, but could be recalled at short notice and as early as next week to legislate if a deal is reached.

Merkel said the EU would prefer a deal but is prepared either way, adding there was no breakthrough yet.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who is at odds with Britain over fish quotas, said he wanted the best relationship with London.

FILE PHOTO: European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen speaks during a debate on next EU council and last Brexit development during a plenary session at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium November 25, 2020. Olivier Hoslet/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

But the two sides have yet to narrow gaps on two of the thorniest issues: fishing rights in British waters and the level playing field.

An EU official told Reuters the bloc had rejected Britains offer of phased access to its waters over three years by EU fishing vessels and the sides were an ocean apart on the issue.

Von der Leyen hailed a big step forward in agreeing a so-called non-regression clause, which would ensure that our common high labour, social and environmental standards will not be undercut.

Sources said there were disagreements over balanced equivalence, which London saw as tying Britain to the EUs regulatory orbit, and a dispute resolution mechanism to determine whether competition was distorted and remedies if so.

Britain saw the EUs pitch for effective remedial measures as giving the bloc too much leeway to retaliate on trade.

Reporting by Francesco Guarascio, Marine Strauss, Gabriela Baczynska, William James and Elizabeth Piper in London, Sudip Kar-Gupta in Paris and Paul Carrel and Michael Nienaber in Berlin, Writing by Robin Emmott, Gabriela Baczynska and Elizabeth Piper; Editing by Giles Elgood and Andrew Cawthorne

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Progress on Brexit but coming days will be critical, says EU chief - Reuters

DOH updates website to reflect vaccination progress; addresses difference in positivity rate information for state, counties – KELOLAND.com

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PIERRE, S.D. (KELO) The COVID-19 vaccination has arrived in South Dakota and there will be enough in the next weeks to vaccinate the key frontline health care workers, South Dakota State Department of Health Secretary Kim Malsam-Rysdon said on Wednesday.

The state will receive 7,800 doses of Pfizer vaccine and expects 14,600 doses of Moderna vaccine next week. The total doses of the two vaccines will be enough to cover the 19,000 people designated as priorities for the first phase, she said.

The DOH has added a feature on its website that allows the public to track the vaccine doses and number of people who receive it. The DOH information also shows the number of vaccines and people vaccinated in each county.

As of Wednesdays update, 405 individuals have been vaccinated, according to the DOH website. The number includes 153 in Minnehaha County, 74 in Lincoln and 67 in Pennington. Those three counties were top priorities for delivery of the vaccine, DOH officials said.

Twenty-three people have received the vaccine in Codington County. The South Dakota Wing of the Civil Air Patrol said it delivered doses of the Pfizer vaccine on Dec. 15 to Prairie Lakes Healthcare System in Watertown, which is in Codington County.

Prairie Lakes officials said in a KELOLAND News story they would be vaccinating their frontline workers. It would also be a distribution site for members of the regional health care network.

Nursing home residents are among the priority individuals to receive the vaccine. So far, 204 individuals aged 80 and older have been vaccinated.

Malsam-Rysdon said the DOH will provide the vaccination from the federal government in a series of steps, according to its COVID-19 vaccination plan.

It will be at least several months until the general public can receive a vaccine.

The Veterans Administration facilities in the state and the health care facilities on Tribal Lands will be provided the vaccine through federal officials. Malsam-Rysdon said the state will not be involved in those vaccination plans.

Who gets a vaccine first in South Dakota?There is a 3 phase approach of vaccine administration

Throughout Phase 1 and Phase 2, South Dakotas three primary health care systems Avera, Sanford and Monument Health will provide the vaccination services to priority populations.

Who is in Phase 1 of getting the vaccine? The state determined through an allocation criteria four key priorities

Based on that criteria, health care workers, first responders and older adults living in congregate settings will receive the first vaccines as described in Phase 1A and Phase 1B.

How much vaccine is needed to cover Phase 1?Estimations for the population for Phase 1A are 23,171. Vaccine dose allocation will continue under Phase 1A until the population is met. Phase 1B will start after Phase 1A.

South Dakota is set to receive 7,800 doses of Pfizers vaccine starting Monday, Dec. 14. Pfizer will send another set of 7,800 doses within about three weeks to provide second doses to people who got the first round of shots.

When will Phase 2 start? Health officials said limited vaccine doses are expected throughout Phase 1 and Phase 2 isnt expected to start until 2021. As vaccine becomes available, location of vaccination sites will be found at Vaccinefinder.org.

DOH officials also briefly discussed the states percent positivity rate for the last seven days which is 9.9% as of Wednesday.

But as of Dec. 15, only nine counties had weekly rates lower than 9.9%, according to the DOH website. Some countys had percent positive rates as high as 44.39% and 33.73%.

DOH epidemiologist Dr. Josh Clayton said the weekly table rates for each county and the last seven day rate posted for the entire state will only match one day a week because of how they are tabulated.

The percentage includes the last seven full days that the DOH has RT PCR tests for, Clayton said. The county table percentages are based on the past week, Clayton said.

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DOH updates website to reflect vaccination progress; addresses difference in positivity rate information for state, counties - KELOLAND.com