Our Only Black Moon Of 2020 And A Stargazing Utopia: What To Watch For In The Night Sky This Week – Forbes

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Any nights with clear skies this week will be perfect for stargazing.

Each Monday I pick out the northern hemispheres celestial highlights (mid-northern latitudes) for the week ahead, but be sure to check my main feed for more in-depth articles on stargazing, astronomy and eclipses.

This week is all about the absenceand then the dramatic and delicate reappearanceof the Moon. Its absence from the night sky is a boon for stargazing, making it much easier to see deep sky sights such as star clusters, galaxies and nebula (but also more stars).

It also means that for most of this week we can seefrom a dark sky sitethe Milky Way arcing across the sky and streaming down to the southern horizon right after dark. Look for Jupiter and Saturn in the south; the Milky Way is right there!

However, who doesnt like to see a super-slim crescent Moon emerge in the western sky during twilight?

After a New Moon this Wednesday, watch out for a crescent Moon hanging in the west after dark on Thursday through Saturday.

What is a Black Moon? Although it can also be the second New Moon in a single calendar monthwhich happens sometimesa Black Moon is better defined as the third New Moon in a season with four New Moons.

Either way, its a calendar quirk. More importantly, the New Moon occurs at 02:41 UTC and makes sure that this week is perfect for stargazing and looking for the Milky Way.

The Crescent Moon and Spica on Saturday.

In the nights after New Moon our satellite gradually moves away from the Sun and becomes slightly more illuminated by it each night. It will be a fabulous, but fleeting (and ultra-slim) 5%-lit sight on Thursday, August 20look just above the western horizon at dusk.

The following night, on Friday, August 21, look to the west again, this time slightly higher, to see a 12%-lit crescent Moon. Even on Saturday, August 22, the crescent Moonby now 20% illuminatedwill remain a delicate and fascinating sight, this time with bright star Spica just below it (see above).

The "Great Square of Pegasus" around midnight this weekand below it, the planet Mars!

Or is it the Great Diamond of Pegasus? Rising on its side in the eastern post-sunset night sky is a vastand one of the most geometrically preciseasterisms (shapes) in the night sky. Part of the constellation of Pegasus, the winged horse, the Great Square is easy to find because its corners are marked by four stars of roughly equal brightness.

The highest top star is Scheat, which is flanked by Alperatz (below, left) and Markab (below, right), with Algenib at the bottom, near to the horizon.

Once found, you can use the Great Square to gauge the darkness of your location. If you can see more than five stars within its boundaries, its pretty dark!

If youre looking an hour before midnight, look underneath the Great Squaredown to the eastern horizonand youll see the planet Mars rising.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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Our Only Black Moon Of 2020 And A Stargazing Utopia: What To Watch For In The Night Sky This Week - Forbes

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Make First Appearance Together in Their New Montecito Home – ELLE.com

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Last week, news broke that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry quietly moved to Montecito a few weeks ago. Now, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have made their first joint appearance in their new house, joining a Zoom call for the Queen's Commonwealth Trust, of which they still preside over as president (Harry) and vice president (Meghan). The Duke and Duchess joined a conversation about "the role of the online world as a force for good," as QCT's YouTube summed it up.

They were joined by Brighton Kaoma, founder of Agents of Change Foundation in Zambia; Hunter Johnson, founder of The Man Cave in Australia; Rosie Thomas, co-founder of Project Rockit in Australia; and, Vee Kativhu, Study & Empowerment YouTuber and founder of "Empowered by Vee."

Meghan, dressed in a black and white sleeveless dress, and Harry, complementing her in a white button-up, sat in what appears to be a room from their estate in Santa Barbara, giving fans a little glimpse at their new place.

The couple spoke with the young leaders about their work and Meghan and Harry's own thoughts on the role of social media and its potential harms. At one point toward the end, Harry commented that the future was in those young leaders' hands, and Meghan laughingly told him not to count themselves out: "Stop, were not that old."

Meghan, earlier in the discussion, more seriously discussed how the toxicity of negative online communities can really hurt people. "Everyones mental and emotional wellbeing are perhaps more fragile than ever before, certainly with COVID and our dependability on our devices right now in the absence of human interaction," she started. "People are going online more than ever before to feel community. And unfortunately, which you rightly point out, when that community becomes divisive, when that community isnt a pact for good but is a pact of people ganging up on one another, I think whats challenging about that is if people dont feel an escape, and it can probably feel really lonely in that space."

She added later that "[a healthy online community] is not an echo chamber. Its not everyone being in agreement all the time but being able to have a healthy discourse, being able to disagree. That is so key is not trying to build utopia. Its trying to build a healthy community so people feel safe or heard and perhaps walk away with a different perspective that they hadnt encountered or experienced or thought at the onset but that they have that interaction, thats whats so important. Thats what this life is all about, learning everyday, but if you dont feel youre in a space that is safe enough to express those thoughts and to be heard and supported in a way that is actually beneficial for us as a community, then where does that leave us?"

"This isnt for lack of desire that its not out there," she continued. "This is for lack of it being built. And so you guys out there doing the work and building what people really need is really everything."

You can watch their full discussion below:

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Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Make First Appearance Together in Their New Montecito Home - ELLE.com

Want to Flee the City for Suburbia? Think Again – The New York Times

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Walking the streets of San Francisco during these coronavirus days, youll see a sight rarer than Bigfoot: for sale and for rent signs.

Six months ago, Id have texted pictures of them immediately to friends who were hoping to move. You had to act fast if you wanted a good slot on the list of dozens of potential buyers.

Now, some of those friends are posting on Instagram about their freshly built suburban homes, surrounded by trees, wild animals and lots of space. Living in San Francisco used to be an impossible dream; today, the dream is to escape it.

For the first time since the tech crash of 2000, housing vacancies in San Francisco are skyrocketing, and rents on one-bedroom apartments are down by 11 percent. Still, this isnt like previous economic busts. For the most part, the people leaving havent lost their jobs, and they arent being priced out of rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods; theyre the ones who are rich enough to work remotely from a bucolic palace with high-speed internet and a two-car garage.

And its not just in San Francisco. Real estate services in Florida and Arizona are reporting similar patterns. Expensive cities are losing their luster, while smaller cities and towns feel like the wave of the future. It seems a harmless enough trend. After all, what could be bad about getting more fresh air and space to take walks?

A lot, it turns out. The 20th century offers object lessons in why fleeing cities for suburban and exurban settings can backfire even if it seems like a good idea at first.

In the early 1900s, many large cities were suffering from the side effects of rapid industrialization: they were polluted, full of high-density housing with bad sanitation. Crime flourished under corrupt policing systems. There were disease outbreaks, too; in San Francisco, bubonic plague killed more than 100 people at the turn of the last century.

In response, a new wave of utopian thinkers proposed moving to what Ebenezer Howard, a British urban planner, called the garden city in his 1902 manifesto Garden Cities of To-morrow. His garden cities would be planned communities of limited size, built with ample park space and free housing for people in need. Everyone could eat locally, from sprawling farms that ringed the city.

Howards ideas were so compelling that he was able to work with planners to build two English towns to his specifications Letchworth and Welwyn, both of which still stand today a few dozen miles outside London. Though both towns are pretty, they fell short of Howards vision, which was to provide shelter for the needy as well as prosperous country folk.

During the Great Depression, American planners funded by the Works Progress Administration tried their hand at creating some garden cities. They founded Greenbelt, Md., a community that offered extensive social support services to its residents at first though today it has become a hotbed of private development.

As the craze for these British-style garden cities grew in the States, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote about building a uniquely American version. He called it Usonian the Us in the name stood for United States, to distinguish it from the Central and South American cities he didnt like.

Wright argued that the Usonian city wouldnt be a flight from modernity instead, he would liberate ordinary people from high-density industrial tumor metropolises through technology. Brand-new inventions like telephones, radio and automobiles meant everyones work could be done remotely. Sounds familiar, doesnt it?

Some of Wrights followers eventually built a garden city called Usonia in Westchester County, N.Y. Its 47 homes are still occupied, each at the end of a winding driveway, surrounded by flower beds and groves. It was supposed to be an idyllic rural community, progressive and affordable, welcoming people of all backgrounds. And yet, though its first homes were built in the late 1940s, it was decades before the self-declared diverse community welcomed a Black family. This wasnt a unique problem; the progressive garden city of Greenbelt was also built for whites only.

There were other issues, too. Though Usonias homes were inexpensive in theory, the reality was that they were quite expensive to build and maintain. And to this day, everyone who lives there is dependent on cars. Those gardens that give the town its special character are at odds with a world of carbon-belching transportation machines.

Utopian communities like Usonia are still relatively rare, but Wrights urban plan became a template for thousands of midcentury American suburbs, with their low-slung, ranch-style homes and endless lawns. These suburbs, like their more idealistic ancestors, were a mess of contradictions. Supposedly democratic, they were ground zero for redlining policies. Plus, their commuter populations often depended on nearby light industries that flatlined in the 1990s. Eventually, wealthy young people fled these suburbs as urban cores bloomed in the early 2000s.

Now the cycle has come around again, as the middle class flees cities in pandemic panic, seeking unpolluted yet car-dependent places. But we need to pay attention to the tragic fate of the garden cities that Howard and Wright dreamed of nearly a century ago.

Ultimately, the garden city future is a false Utopia. The answer to our current problems isnt to run away from the metropolis. Rather, we need to build better social support systems for people in cities so that urban life becomes healthier, safer and more sustainable.

Annalee Newitz (@annaleen), a science journalist and contributing opinion writer, is the author of the forthcoming Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

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Want to Flee the City for Suburbia? Think Again - The New York Times

HINAPIA disband after 10 months together – Metro.co.uk

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HINAPIA are no more (Picture: OSR Entertainment)

HINAPIA have officially disbanded after 10 months together.

The K-pop girlband made their debut in November 2019, with four of the members coming from the Pledis Entertainment group PRISTIN, who had disbanded in May.

However, after less than a year together, the group has gone their separate ways, with OSR Entertainment terminating the five members exclusive contracts.

A statement from the agency shared on HINAPIAs official fan cafe read: First, we wish to apologise for bringing unfortunate news to the fans who have always loved and waited for good news from HINAPIA.

We wish to speak to you of HINAPIAs disbandment and the termination of all members contracts.

Our agency has spoken at great lengths with the members over a substantial period of time, and we all came to the decision to disband the group and terminate ourexclusive contracts with all five members.

The members of HINAPIA are set to be active in a variety of fields in the future, and we hope you will support their new beginnings as well.

Thank you for loving HINAPIA till now, and we wish to apologise once more.

HINAPIA was formed of former PRISTIN members Minkyeung (previously known as Roa), Gyeongwon (previously known as Yuha), Eunwoo and Yaebin (previously known as Rena), as well as newcomer Bada, who was the last member to be revealed.

It was confirmed that the ex-PRISTIN members were forming a new band in October 2019, and after Bada was unveiled as the final member, the girls released their debut single Drip the following month.

Their first mini-album Pursuit of a New Utopia was also released in November, with a second record initially promised in early 2020.

However, the new music never materialised.

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HINAPIA disband after 10 months together - Metro.co.uk

The story behind the debut album from Todd Rundgrens Utopia – Louder

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By 1974, fans of Todd Rundgren had had to get used to him changing from record to record. But if the shift hed effected between his first three albums and 1973s A Wizard, A True Star had seemed dramatic, this was another quantum leap entirely.

Todd Rundgrens Utopia was this most mercurial of artists first recorded foray with a band since his (late-60s) stint with The Nazz, but it was a long way from Anglophile power-pop and winsome balladry. Four cute guys sporting Beatle cuts this was not. If the image on the front cover of an all-seeing eye at the centre of a pattern of coloured balls suggested there might not be too many I Saw The Light-style three-minute pop singles on this latest venture, confirmation lay with the live photograph on the back: it showed Rundgren on stage at his most gaunt and strange, leaning back, lost in music, flanked by four musicians with outsized hairdos in full space-age regalia, and surrounded by a shiny arsenal of hi-tech equipment that looked as though it was capable of some serious instrumental bombast.

Final proof that Rundgrens days as a purveyor of sweet pop candy and rock nuggets were behind him was provided by the tracklisting: there were just three numbers on side one, and one taking up the whole of side two. Goodbye, pop concision; hello, elaborate compositions bearing complex multipartite structures.

The Mahavishnu Orchestra were a big part of our musical lexicon at the time, as were Return To Forever and Weather Report, says Rundgren, as erudite (not to mention tonsorially idiosyncratic) as ever, talking to Prog in a London hotel ahead of a gig at the Jazz Cafe.

You can discern the impact of the aforementioned jazz-rockers and fusioneers on the music of Todd Rundgrens Utopia, but there is a funkiness to the playing that led Rundgren to describe it as Grateful Dead meets P-Funk. He also cites the influence of Frank Zappas Mothers Of Invention. But how did the performances of the musicians on Todd Rundgrens Utopia arguably the first ever American prog album compare with those of their UK counterparts in terms of technoflash expertise?

The difference was, those English prog rock bands like Yes and ELP, most of their influences were in the classics, whereas ours were in jazz and R&B, and we were more inclined to do something from a funk standpoint, he reiterates. That didnt necessarily stop us attempting to play fast, but I dont think anyone in the band had the desire, or the chops, to play that way. That would have required a whole other level of woodshedding discipline, and we were having too much fun playing to want to do our exercises.

Was he aware of developments across the pond?

We werent ELP fans particularly, and we didnt mix in the same circles, but we were big Yes fans, he replies. ELPs music was something else it was about highlighting an instrumentalist, Keith Emerson, whereas Yes were more of a band.

Another explanation for the way that the tracks on the album - even the 10-minute Freak Parade, 14-minute Utopia Theme and half-hour-long The Ikon sounded less like lengthy extrapolations and more like short bursts of intricate rhythm and melody fastidiously edited together, was that Rundgren was a superb arranger.

I was an orchestrator as much as a player, he asserts of the fragments pieced together at Secret Sound studio in New York in early 1974 (with the exception of opener Utopia Theme, which was recorded live the previous November at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia). My job, beside fronting the band, was to make decisions as to how the various musical sections should fit.

Furthermore, his fellow Utopians were songwriters in their own right whose skills had been honed on the NYC circuit (Mark Moogy Klingman, who sadly died in November 2011, had jammed with Hendrix while his songs were covered by everyone from Johnny Winter to Bette Midler). This was something else that separated them from the UK prog fraternity.

We came from a songwriting sensibility as opposed to having freeform song structures where only playing was necessary, explains Rundgren. We didnt have a strictly purist prog rock approach. There was jamming, but it came between more melodic verse/chorus things.

He agrees, however, that Utopia provided him with his first opportunity for some serious guitar wizardry since The Nazz, even if virtuosity for its own sake wasnta priority.

Id made my success as a songwriter and singer so I wanted a band principally so I could play guitar in one form or another, he admits. Fusion presented challenges so you had to be very good performance-wise. It was very technically ambitious. I certainly got faster, although I had no aspirations to be a John McLaughlin.

He continues: We all looked at this as an opportunity to do something aggressive and experimental in instrumental music because theres werent many of those until prog rock and jazz fusion became popular forms. It was a lot of fun. My success as a solo artist allowed us to take a slightly radical approach. The tenor was enthusiastic and experimental.

It also came with its in-built philosophy. Talking to me in 1999 for a series of CD reissues, Rundgren explained the Utopia concept, and the sense of missionary zeal expressed throughout the album.

I realised I had an inclination to get into an elitist music that only certain people could appreciate, music with transportive elements, he declared. There were no 10 Commandments of Utopianism, but I did feel that we should have the same quasi-spiritual objectives as the fusion bands. More than a commune, Utopia would be a model for human interaction. And I felt the audience should be encouraged to become a society of the mind.

Back in the present, I ask whether Rundgren and co were high at the time?

We were all into different things, he reveals. No one was into heroin or methedrine. I do remember being up in Santa Fe and someone bestowing upon us a whole load of mushrooms that everybody took.

But, he adds, laughing, I know for a fact that I was the only one in the band who would show up for work with a peyote button in my mouth.

In addition to his mescaline trips, Rundgren was, he says, trying to integrate my expanding view of the world and cosmology by augmenting it with a lot of reading material, although he admits that there are some books that he has still to read 38 years later.

There is a feeling of furious spiritual uplift about Todd Rundgrens Utopia, one enhanced by the trebly nature of the sound, the result of so much music (the album is almost an hour long) being crammed into the grooves. Mark Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon and notoriously a Rundgren obsessive who left a copy of The Ballad Of Todd Rundgren by his hotel bed on the day of the assassination, picked up on this quality of transcendence. In the Jack Jones biography Let Me Take You Down, in a chapter entitled God And Todd, Chapman waxes euphoric about his favourite Rundgren tracks, especially Freedom Fighters (at four minutes, the shortest song on the album), as though its intense urgency somehow justified his heinous zealotry.

It was a disturbing outcome for a positivist album designed to counter the downer consciousness of the early 70s, and the likes of Lou Reed, Bowie and Iggy Pop.

Rundgren is uncomfortable about being drawn into a conversation about Chapman, dismissing Freedom Fighters as a musical after-thought written at the last minute because there was nothing on the album that vaguely resembled a single. But he accepts that it was meant as a call to arms (Kind of pick up your guitars, boys, and rock out) on a record broadly concerned with providing succour for societys marginal types.

The lyrics were for people on the fringes, he explains. Freak Parade, The Ikon, too, was about fringe-thinking. The Utopia Theme was about that state of consciousness, the city in my head, thatmental state.

Collectively, Utopia a sort of benign dictatorship, with Rundgren affording the others ample chances to take instrumental flight achieved a higher state of consciousness when they took the album on the road. Concerts might last three or four hours, with renditions of The Ikon being feats of improvisatory endurance lasting three times longer than the album version.

That was just the state you got into, recalls Rundgren, when everybody knows where theyre at and theyre fairly confident about where theyre going. You get into the zen of it. Youre just there. You dont even think about how long youve been doing it suddenly, three or four hours have gone by and its time to wrap it up.

In those days, he furthers, we had a guitar player and three keyboard players and everyone took a 10-minute solo on every song. The audience didnt notice the time going by as they were so high on acid!

In January 2011, Rundgren and his Utopians (minus green-haired synth whiz M Frog Labat) reconvened for the first time since 1975 for a charity gig in aid of Moogy Klingman, then battling bladder cancer. They played the album in its entirety every speed-racing, prog-inflected, funk-addled note.

We were struggling a bit, grins Rundgren, but everyone in the audience was so thrilled to see us, they werent aware of our shortcomings. I never make the assumption that the audience comes to see how well you can play it, like going to see an orchestra where they have to do it perfectly every night. We like it when things dont go exactly as planned.

Did the audience get off on the cosmic joy of it all?

If there is such a thing, he says, drily, There was a soupon of that.

Probably more than was felt by Rundgrens record company, Bearsville, when he delivered the commercially unviable finished product in 1974.

I dont know to what degree they were delighted or horrified by it, he considers. Suffice to say that there were people at the label who had no compunction about telling me flat-out that they didnt care about the band. But then again, when they signed me, they didnt know they were also going to get Utopia.

So they got much more than they bargained for?

You could say that, yeah.

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Flock Theatre stages Aristophanes’ ‘The Birds’ in Westerly – theday.com

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Flock Theatre will perform Aristophanes Greek utopian comedy "The Birds" outdoors following strict COVID-19 safety guidelinesin Westerly'sWilcox Park, at 7 p.m. Aug. 27-30.

A modern adaptation designed to sound the way it might have to an Athenian in an ancient comic theater, "The Birds" (written in 414 B.C.) details the escapades of the comedy team of Pithetaerus and Euelpides as they set out to create a utopia. Fed up with Athenian society, they seek out Epops, the King of the Birds who was once a human himself, to found a new civilization where the birds reclaim their status as the original gods and goddesses.

Leading the cast are Flock regulars Eric Michaelian as Pithetaerus and Madeleine Dauer as Euelpides, with Eric Propfe returning from Flocks2003 production of "The Birds," and featuring musical arrangements of choral odes by Noah Todd.

Circles for households will be painted on the park lawn suitable for groups of up to five, and there will besix feet of space between each circle in every direction. The circles closest to the performance area are set 12 feet away, and all performers will be using face shields. The audience will also be asked to be masked when not enjoying their picnics, and there will be space for 75 audience members. Passersby are welcome towatch the performance from beyond the audience seating area.

Hand sanitizer will be available for audience members, and there will be porta-potties open for use before and after the performance and during intermission.

Performancesrunone hour and 45 minutes, including intermission. Admission is free, and donations to Flock Theatre will be accepted at the door and at flocktheatre.org.

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Flock Theatre stages Aristophanes' 'The Birds' in Westerly - theday.com

Around the Remote: What not to miss next week – The Union Leader

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Top picks on TV and streaming services next week:

DONT MISS: Yellowstone Another gripping occasionally gruesome season of Kevin Costners wildly popular summer drama series comes to a close and theres an ominous feeling in the air. As the battle for the ranch reaches a boiling point, John Dutton (Costner) sits down at the negotiating table with former friends and foes. We wont be at all surprised if someone doesnt make it out of the finale alive, but were at least heartened by the fact that the series already has been renewed for a fourth season. (9 p.m. Sunday, Paramount Network).

Other bets:

SUNDAY: In the new season of Alaskan Bush People, the Brown family is locked in a brutally challenging race against time. In subzero temperatures, they need to complete work on their dream cabin on the mountain before spring. (8 p.m., Discovery Channel).

MONDAY: Brace yourself. A second season of Love Island kicks off with a two-hour premiere as an all-new cast of lustful islanders attempt to find romance while sequestered in a bubble at a Las Vegas hotel. (8 p.m., CBS).

MONDAY: The gripping first season of I May Destroy You concludes with an episode that has Arabella closing in on the answers she seeks about her drugged sexual assault. And now she must drag the last of her demons out from under the bed once and for all. (9 p.m., HBO).

TUESDAY: Need more soapy story lines in your life? Tyler Perrys The Haves and the Have Nots launches the second half of its seventh season with back-to-back episodes that promise more revenge, deceit, betrayal, decadence and destruction. And, yes, were all in. (8 p.m., OWN).

WEDNESDAY: Women in Film Presents: Make It Work is a special with a blend of music, comedy and celebrity testimonials. The program, aimed at exploring the issues and solutions for getting women back to work, boasts a talent lineup that includes Mara Brock Akil, Alison Brie, Connie Britton, Rosario Dawson, Jane Fonda, Jennifer Garner, Rita Moreno and many more. (8 p.m., The CW).

THURSDAY: The 2020 Republican National Convention, held in virtual style, concludes tonight. President Donald Trump is scheduled to accept his partys nomination and make his case that he deserves four more years in the White House. (Check local listings for times and networks).

THURSDAY: Pure is a new comedy about a young, London-based woman named Marnie (Charlie Clive) who is caught in the grip of an excruciating obsessive-compulsive disorder. Seems that her mind is teeming with a constant barrage of intrusive sexual thoughts. (HBO Max).

FRIDAY: In the 2019 feature film Bombshell, Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman play real-life TV journalists Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson. The story recalls the accounts of women at Fox News who leveled explosive allegations of sexual harassment against network CEO Roger Ailes. The stellar cast also includes Margot Robbie, John Lithgow, Kate McKinnon and Connie Britton. (8 p.m., Epix).

FRIDAY: Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Candace Against the Universe is a new animated saga that follows stepbrothers Phineas and Ferb as they trek across the galaxy to rescue their sister Candace, who after being abducted by aliens, finds utopia in a far-off planet free of pesky little brothers. (Disney+).

SATURDAY: In the TV film Sorority Secrets, a young college student (Brytnee Ratledge) is all excited when she gets her first taste of the Greek life until she discovers that the chapter president is running a gasp! clandestine escort service. (8 p.m., Lifetime).

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Around the Remote: What not to miss next week - The Union Leader

World Photography Day: 5 of the year’s best photo series – CNN

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With Wednesday marking World Photography Day 2020, CNN Style is looking back at some of the most striking photo series published over the past 12 months.

Whether showcasing new work or delving into their archives, these five photographers demonstrate the diversity and vibrancy of the medium, bringing together images from Mexico, Nigeria, England and beyond.

Justine Kurland imagines a girls' utopia

Throughout the series, ideas of freedom and belonging prevail as girls form their own communities off the grid. Credit: Justine Kurland

Justine Kurland's "Girl Pictures" imagines runaway girls roaming the American landscape in a sylvan utopia where girls make their own rules. Taken between 1997 and 2002, but released as a book this year, the images offer a nostalgic glimpse of a bygone era and an exploration of timeless themes such as defiance, self-actualization and female sexuality.

"I had this desire to make this girl world, this feminist utopic solidarity between (young) girls and teenagers," Kurland said. "But between women, really."

Steve McCurrry explores the relationship between humans and animals

Many of the photos in "Steve McCurry. Animals" include human subjects, but those that don't hint at the presence of humans, or at least what they've left behind. Credit: 2019 Steve McCurry, Long Island City, NY

"Animals are in constant motion, have a mind of their own and rarely pay any attention to directions from a photographer," McCurry said. "Understanding animal behavior is essential to making good animal photographs, just as understanding human behavior can help with taking someone's portrait.

Oye Diran embraces vintage Nigerian style

From Diran's "A Ti De" series. The photographer has honed a minimalist yet warm aesthetic, citing renowned West African photographers J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, Malick Sidib and Seydou Keta as influences. Credit: Oye Diran

For his latest project, Oye Diran looked to images from Nigeria in the 1960s to 1980s -- including old family photos -- for inspiration. The resulting series "A Ti De" (We Have Arrived) recreates the era's aesthetic through the elegant clothing his parents used to wear, including his mother's classic Nigerian "iro" and "buba" (a wrapped skirt and tailored top).

"I was struck by how appealing and rich these outfits looked and was reminded of how well my parents and their friends were attired when I was young," Diran said. "The relevance of iro and buba doesn't dissipate over time, so I came up with this story to shed light on the beauty of my heritage to the world."

Orlando Gili goes in search of 'Englishness'

Every year, a village in Gloucestershire hosts an annual cheese-rolling competition, in which participants chase a wheel of cheese down a steep hill. Credit: Orlando Gili

A cheese-rolling competition (pictured above) and an annual "bottle-kicking" are among two of the odder pastimes captured by Orlando Gili, who set about documenting how the English have fun. Inspired by the divisions caused by Brexit, his series "Trivial Pursuits" captures a humane portrait of a nation navigating its history and place in today's world.

"We are really more similar than we like to think," he said. "And going to all these different types of events, and seeing different sections of society having fun, you see essentially the same things being played out.

Tania Franco Klein asks if we can ever disconnect

Klein shot "Proceed to the route" across California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. Credit: Tania Franco Klein

Tania Franco Klein's ongoing series "Proceed to the Route" combines dystopian unease with the warmth of nostalgia. At first glance, one might not think that the Mexican photographer is examining our modern digital age, but she wields ambiguity to examine our relationship with -- and reliance on -- digital technology.

"You cannot fully escape and fully disconnect from everything," she said. "But how can you (find) balance?"

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World Photography Day: 5 of the year's best photo series - CNN

The Unbearable: Toward an Antifascist Aesthetic | by Jon Baskin – The New York Review of Books

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Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty ImagesDirector Leni Riefenstahl operating a camera from a lift basket while filming Triumph of the Will at the Nazi Partys Nuremberg Rally, Germany, 1934

Triumph of the Will, the 1935 Nazi propaganda film directed by Leni Riefenstahl in Nuremberg, comes up twice in the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaards six-volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle. Both mentions of the film occur in the midst of Knausgaards epic tangent on Hitlers autobiography and the rise of National Socialism in Europe.

The first comes during a discussion of the conversion of Martin Heidegger and other German intellectuals to Nazism. Quoting a German journalist on how Nazism provided a widespread feeling of deliverance, of liberation from democracy, Knausgaard indicates the sense we can get of this aspect of the Third Reichthe popular demonstrations, the torchlit parades, the songs, the sense of community, all of which were unconditional joys to anyone who participatedby watching Riefenstahls films of the Nuremberg Rally where all these elements are present. Precisely because Riefenstahls film was so meticulously staged, Knausgaard alleges, it is striking how its content far eclipses the fact, because emotions are stronger than all analyses, and here the emotions are set free. This is not politics, but something beyond. And it is something good.

Knausgaard does not mean good in the moral sense. He refers to the feelings of the people involved in the marches and parades. As he does throughout the four-hundred page section, Knausgaard attempts to reconstruct the thoughts and emotions of those who were attracted to National Socialism, under the principle that it is impossible to understand the emergence of Nazismthe last major utopian movement in the westwithout understanding what moved the people of Germany, and later of other European countries, to embrace it. And what moved them, in Knausgaards view, was not the Nazis promise to redistribute income, or Hitlers analysis of world affairs, or even, initially, their hatred of the Jews. What moved them was, rather, the joyful feeling of togetherness and community, of being able to transcend not only the fragmented democracy of the Weimar period but politics altogether.

In National Socialism, writes Knausgaard, philosophy and politics come together at a point outside the language, and beyond the rational, where all complexity ceases, though not all depth. Riefenstahls film communicates the pleasure the people experiencedhow good it felt to themat having escaped the quotidian chaos of their shabby republic and their trivial private lives, at being liberated from the restrictions of rationality and deliberation, at being on the brink of achieving something large and lasting, deep and simple.

A similar focus on the emotional wellsprings of Nazi politics is evident in an important but largely overlooked recent film, which opens with black and white footage from Triumph of the Will. At the beginning of Terrence Malicks A Hidden Life, we seein lieu of opening creditsimages of Hitler in the open cockpit of a plane descending through the mist as he lands for the rally in Nuremberg, Hitler standing before a teeming square of Nazis in neat lines, Hitler riding in his cavalcade through the streets. The film then shifts abruptly to the mountain town of Sankt Radegund, in the Austrian countryside, which appears at first to exist in total isolation from the opening tableau.

Against a backdrop of green hills and blue skies, we are introduced to Franz, a farmer and father, along with his mother, his wife, Fani, and their three young daughters. There are no military parades in Radegund, and, in the consciousness of the farmers, there seems to be hardly any politics. Fanis and Franzs lives are consumed by their faith, their work on the land, and their family. They live in what appears to be a fairytale innocence.

The fairytale ends when Fani is shown looking skyward, alarmed at the sound of planes buzzing overhead. The war has arrived, and Franz is soon sent to a training camp for the German army. At the military camp, Franz watches quizzically as the recruits are shown filmed imagesprojected on an outdoor screenof Nazis marching victoriously through foreign cities in flames. But the propaganda has the opposite of the effect it is supposed to have on Franz. When he is called to fight again, Franz informs the recruiters that he wont go. Later, he resolves not to serve Hitler in any way.

Based on the life and letters of Franz Jgersttter, a farmer born in Radegund in 1907, later beatified by the Catholic Church, the character cites his faith in God and his love for Fani as his inspirations for refusing to do what everyone around him does without exception and, in most cases, without hesitation. When asked to articulate his reasons, he says little; when challenged with the fact that his resistance will change nothing, he merely nods. Offered a chance to avoid military service if only he will sign an oath of loyalty to Hitler, Franz refuses. He is taken from his wife, mother, and daughters, then imprisoned, tortured, and eventually executed. In Radegund, his family is outcast from the community and deprived of wartime rations.

Some critics of A Hidden Life have bemoaned the films lack of historical detail, pointing out that hardly anything is said about concentration camps or about the intricate political circumstances that prepared the way for Nazism. According to The New Yorkers Richard Brody, Malick uses Nazi Germany emblematically, as a merely metaphorical backdrop to illustrate the ultimate clash of good and evil, the ultimate price of resistance. Likewise, The New York Timess A.O. Scott lamented that Nazism is depicted a bit abstractly, a matter of symbols and attitudes and stock images rather than specifically mobilized hatreds.These criticisms not only miss Malicks point, they invert it.

Malick, like Knausgaard, thematizes the symbols and attitudes of Nazism because he perceives how central these were to the appeal of Nazism itself. The film demonstrates impressionistically what Knausgaard, with his characteristic thoroughness, lays out in voluminous excerpts of diary entries and contemporaneous accounts from the period: the goodness of Nazism was as much about its symbols and attitudes as it was about its policies and actions. But the appeal A Hidden Life makes as an artistic experience is the opposite of symbolic. For the contemporary viewer, the films power flows from the fact that, whatever political and social convulsions led to the moment when Fani cranes her neck skyward, individual Germans like Franz and Fani were confronted by a choice that remains perfectly legible today.

Some at the time may not have felt Nazism to be a choice at all. History nevertheless records that there were, without any doubt, resisters. The existence of these resisters has proved crucial to establishing a kind ofex post factomoral compass, writes Rand Richards Cooper in Commonweal magazine, reminding Germansrather in the way that the witness of passionate nineteenth-century abolitionists reminds Americans regarding slaverythat a point of moral sanitywasin fact visible to some, and thus available to all.

How does Franz achieve this moral sanity? That is the central question of A Hidden Life, and it is in how he addresses it that Malicks critics find special cause for complaint. Scott, at the end of his review, confesses that his incomprehension of Franzs motives may be related to his personal preference for historical and political insight over matters of art and spirit. It is refreshing to hear a critic be so honest about their intellectual biases. It is also revealing of the assumptions that seem to pervade the broader discussion in recent yearscarried on mostly by academics and op-ed writers, as opposed to artistsabout the relationship between the politics of 1930s Europe and those of our own time. But what if the capacity to appreciate the relevance of Nazism to our own time is, in fact, inseparable from our willingness to attend seriously to matters of art and spirit?

Knausgaard finished his noveland Malick likely started working on his filmwell before Trump took office, so it is misleading to think of their artworks as responses to the events of the past four years. Nevertheless, and partly for that reason, they offer a useful vantage point from which we can evaluate not only our own relation to that past, but also the limitations of the intellectual tools we have tended to turn to when trying to articulate that relation.

Beginning not long after the 2016 election with the historian Timothy Snyders bestseller Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017), soon followed by the philosopher Jason Stanleys How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), numerous scholars have sought to use historical analysis of the Weimar period to alert Americans to the early signs of fascistic rule. As the Trump presidency has dragged on, these urgent warnings have given way to a wide-ranging debate, including in these pages, about whether such historical analogies are warranted or appropriate.

Understood in relation to that debate, Malicks and Knausgaards artistic treatments of Nazism may persuade us not of the inaccuracy or inappropriateness of such analogies, but of their utter and complete futilityat least insofar as it is claimed such comparisons can inoculate us against repetition. In their focus on the emotional pull of Nazismits promise to liberate citizens from the frustrations and banalities of an alienated, lonely existence, to connect them with a mass of like-minded souls in unconditional joythe works of Malick and Knausgaard expose us to aspects of how fascism works that it would be laughable to think could yield to academic analysis, no matter how accessibly arranged.

Establish a private life, warns Snyder. Listen for dangerous words. Do we really imagine it was advice such as this that interwar Germans lacked?

*

The second time Triumph of the Will comes up in Book Six of My Struggle, Knausgaard reflects that Nazi Germany was the absolute state. It was the state its people could die for.

Watching Riefenstahls film of the rallies in Nuremberg, its depiction of people almost paradisiac in its unambiguousness, converged upon the same thing, immersed in the symbols, the callings from the deepest pith of human life, that which has to do with birth and death, and with homeland and belonging, one finds it splendid and unbearable at the same time, though increasingly unbearable the more one watches, at least this was how I felt when I watched it one night this spring, and I wondered for a long time where that sense of the unbearable came from, the unease that accompanied these images of the German paradise, with its torches in the darkness, the intactness of its medieval city, its cheering crowds, its sun, and its banners [and] I came to the conclusion that it came from something in the images themselves, the sense being that the world they displayed was an unbearable world.

Once again, the emphasis is on the affective allure of this paradisiac world, the pleasure that is involved in sublimating ones individual will to the mythic collective. To make one feel justified in dying for ones country is, in some sense, the greatest gift a country can bestow on an individual. And yet Knausgaard, watching the film as an adult in a liberal democracy more than seventy years later, finds it unbearable. What is it in this worldor, more precisely, in these images of itthat are so unbearable to Knausgaard?

One of the chief insights yielded by Knausgaards close reading of Mein Kampf is that Hitler, for all his vehement disgust with modernity, was one of us. He was modern and Western in the sense that he was secular yet wanted some larger meaning; modern and Western insofar as he craved something that the rationalized, bureaucratic nation-state is organized to exclude. To say that Knausgaard arrived at this insight by making an analogy between Hitlers time and our own would be to miss its force, for the analogy presumes a distance requiring some leap of imaginationor historical scholarshipin order to bridge it. In fact, no such distance exists.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Knausgaard recounts, large portions of Western high society closed the door on religion, while millions were uprooted from their communities and traditions, often settling in overcrowded cities teeming with poverty, exploitation and, soon, militarism. If we can only clear our eyes of self-serving fantasies, Knausgaard believes, we will see that we are still living, spiritually if not quite synchronously, in that century, and that its problems are still our problems. Among the largest of these is how individuals cut off from religion and tradition can satisfy their craving for meaning and transcendence, how they may connect with that deepest pith of human life.

Knausgaard acknowledges the salience of this problem, and also the ugliness of the ways many modern societies have endeavored to solve it. His artistic project in My Struggle may be viewed, in one respect, as an argument for art, rather than politics, as the proper place to explore the transcendent. Throughout the six volumes, Knausgaard strives to make contact with the inexhaustible feelingsfeelings he associates with experiences of joy, beauty, plenitude, ecstasy, and reverencethat he believes are suppressed in so much of modern, secular life. In Book Six, he emphasizes that these emotions are also at work in Riefenstahls film, and that they speak to some of the elemental forces that drove Nazi ideology. But whereas Riefenstahl intentionally blurs the line between aesthetic feelings and political ones, Knausgaard insists on the necessity of segregating them. In contrast to the undifferentiated masses that populate Riefenstahls German paradise, the responsible modern artist anchors their artistic vision in distinctive personal experience, which they invest with what Knausgaard calls the inimitable tone of the particular.

But even within art, Knausgaard argues, the Nazi experiment has had its effect. So complete was the catastrophe of Nazism that it warns us not only against the danger of utopianism in politics, but also against the danger of utopianism in any collective cultural endeavor, including art. Knausgaard laments the extent to which Western art after Nazism has been oriented toward ideas (the cerebral, the critical) rather than toward the emotions (the passionate, the inexpressible), but his novel, about the life of a bourgeois man raising his family, demonstrates that even he does not wish completely to disavow this orientation. Indeed, as many critics have noted, Knausgaard surrounds his musings on the transcendent with thousands of pages documenting a man making cereal, tidying his childrens bedrooms, checking his email, and agonizing over whether he should get off the couch to make another cup of tea.

The prosaicness of My Struggle is, in this light, an act of prudence and self-limitation: while expressing his perennial attraction to the inexhaustible emotions, Knausgaard never forgets their danger. The long digression on Hitlerthe culmination of Knaugaards book-length Kampf against what he takes to be his own Hitlerian impulsesends with Knausgaards remembering the moment he felt most powerfully the stirrings of the we he associates with fascism: in the aftermath of Anders Breiviks summer camp mass shooting outside of Oslo in 2011.

This we emerged amid a moment of national mourning and grief, and yet Knausgaard still perceives in it the germ of a potentially fascist collectivity. Even sitting alone, as he writes the final portion of his book from his home office in Malm, a medium-sized city in Sweden, where he lives with his wife and his (then) three children, Knausgaard recognizes in himself a desire he identifies with Nazism: to reach beyond the dull comforts and tedious complications of bourgeois democratic life. But he also knows something the Germans marching in Riefenstahls film did not know, and this thing compels him to resist this desire, as it relates to politics and even to art.

What makes Riefenstahls film unbearable to Knausgaard is that he knows the catastrophic endpoint of the joyful, torchlit parade. We might even say My Struggle in its entirety is an investigation of the liberal-democratic selfin its nobility as well as in its banalitythat has been shaped by the knowledge of where Hitlers parade of the we ends.

Malick, too, knows where this parade ends, yet he comes to a conclusion different from Knausgaards about how art might be meaningful after Auschwitz. In a review that chided the film for its heavy-handed moralism, the critic Lidija Haas observed that it was hard to tell whether its an intentional irony that Malick begins A Hidden Life by showing a fantasia of a mountain community that a fascist would adore. I dont see anything ironic about it, but Malicks romantic evocation of life in the mountains, in a movie that begins with footage from Riefenstahl, could hardly be accidental.

Before her Nazi period, Riefenstahl both starred in and directed a series of mountain films that were reputedly admired by Hitler. In these films, wrote Susan Sontag in her famous essay on fascist aesthetics, the mountain is represented as both supremely beautiful and dangerous, that majestic force which invites the ultimate affirmation of and escape from the self. A Hidden Life also makes use of a majestic romantic imagery: the mountains shrouded in mist form the backdrop for more than one scene in which a farmer is tilling the fields at dusk. That this imagery is deployed in a film devoted to resistance to Nazism, however, might inspire us to ask whether it is necessaryor wiseto abandon the field of the emotional sublime to the fascists.

Ever since Walter Benjamin observed, in the epilogue to his much-cited 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, that the logic of fascism was toward the introduction of aesthetics into political life, Western artists have gravitated toward one of two paths. Many leftwing artists, suspicious not only of the aestheticization of politics but of any emotional appeal not immediately assimilable to their political purposes, have taken part in a counterattack that culminates, as Benjamin predicted it would, in the full politicization of artthat is, the reduction of art to agitprop. Liberals and many conservative writers have, on the other hand, predominantly done as Knausgaard recommended and tried to sequester aesthetics within the artistic sphere, even there taking care not to let things get out of hand.

An appreciation of the full spiritual force of movements like Nazism might encourage us to countenance a third alternative, one that acknowledged the centrality of symbolism and emotion to political life, and deployed them againstthe eroticized collectivism that is so evident in Riefenstahls film. This aesthetics would honor the triumph, we might say, not of the collective will, that threatening we, but of the individual conscience.

Midway through A Hidden Life is an arresting tableau: Hitler, again in grainy film footage, appears in uniform, playing with a little boy on the viewing deck of his retreat in the Bavarian mountains, the sun glittering off the mountainside behind him. The interludebeautiful but haunting (haunting because beautiful)underscores, just as the films opening does, the aesthetic and emotional appeal of the Nazi project. Malick does not shrink from this appeal, but neither does he allow it to shrink his own ambition as an artist. In a film that begins with Riefenstahls footage, the very worst that can ensue from the politicization of such ambitions is in full view. ButA Hidden Life rather than being intimidated into modesty by fascist art, presents a countervailing utopia to the vlkisch collectivist one, holding out the prospect of a different kind of escape from the self.

It is not incidental to Franzs story that, for him, religion is still an open door. Christianity provides both the substance and the inspiration for the orienting world beyond politics in A Hidden Life. Of course, as the film depicts, plenty of churchgoing Christians were among Nazisms most enthusiastic supporters. And conversely, the aesthetic power of Malicks late films, even as they have grown more explicitly Christian in their imagery and message, is perfectly accessible to many of us who are not Christians. Christianity, in these films, is one among many educators of the moral sentiments, one among many reminders that ethical action is not dependent on historical and political insight and often will remain unmoved by it. Art can be another such educator.

I have thisfeeling, Franz tells the Nazi judge who presides over his trial. If God gives us free will, were responsible for what we door what we fail to do. I cant do what I believe is wrong. Franzs belief, like the beliefs of the fascists, is based on a feeling. This why his resistance has seemed opaque to those more accustomed to researching and factchecking their way to virtue, but it is precisely what gives his story its relevance in a period in which a new emotional sincerity is spreading throughout our political life, often overpowering our liberal-democratic caution about political passions.

Yet, in contrast to the fascists, Franz does not clothe his moral feeling in self-certainty; still less does he attempt to transform it into dogmatic judgment. Rather, he accepts that his decision is vulnerable to counterarguments, including those that his wife and lawyer repeatedly put before him. He could be wrong, he acknowledges to the judge, but he cannot sign the oath. It is not only fascist feelings that are, sometimes, inexpressible.

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The Unbearable: Toward an Antifascist Aesthetic | by Jon Baskin - The New York Review of Books

Mohali INST scientists develop new nano-particle-based treatment for kala azar – The Tribune India

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Vijay Mohan

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, August 21

Patients affected by kala azar, one of the most neglected tropical diseases, may soon find relief in an oral medicine from India. Scientists from the Institute of Nano Science and Technology (INST), Mohali, have developed a nano-medicine by combining different compounds for combating the disease.

Scientifically called Visceral Leishmaniasis (VL), kala azar is a disease in which a parasite migrates to the internal organs such as the liver, spleen or bone marrow and, if left untreated, will almost always result in the death of the host, according to medical literature.

It is a major health problem in India with an estimated 1.5 lakh new cases per year and also a serious concern in many other developing countries. About 95 per cent VL cases in the world are reported from Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Nepal, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan.

While general symptoms of VL include fever, weight loss, fatigue, anaemia and substantial swelling of the liver and spleen, infliction of the disease can also be asymptomatic in some cases. Since it is spread by insects and parasites, VL is a community problem and requires individual and society participation in its control.

In their project, supported by the Department of Science and Technology - Science and Engineering Research Boards (DST-SERB) Early Career Research Award, INST scientists have developed an oral nano-medicine with the help of surface-modified solid lipid nano-particles-based combinational system for treating the disease.

According to the INST team, till date, there is no study reported where a combination of two anti-leishmanial drugs has been delivered through nano-modification as a potential therapeutic strategy against VL. This work suggests the superiority of the combination prepared by them as a promising approach towards the oral delivery of anti-leishmanial drugs, the Ministry of Science and Technology said on Friday.

The INST team was led by Dr Shyam Lal. Anti-leishmanial drugs Amphotericin-B and Paromomycin were encapsulated in solid lipid nano-particles and further modified with a Hydroxypropyl-Cyclodextrin compound. The nano-particle combinatorial drug delivery system developed by them enhanced the efficacy of the formulation by reducing intracellular amastigote growth in cells without causing any significant toxic side-effects.

This study by the INST team, published in the journals Scientific Reports and Materials Science and Engineering C, may lead to product and process patents, enhancing indigenous capability for developing innovative therapy against neglected diseases. The usage of lower therapeutic dose of the purified drugs through nano-modifications will greatly help in reducing toxicity, which has been a major hindrance in the existing conventional treatment, when administered orally.

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Mohali INST scientists develop new nano-particle-based treatment for kala azar - The Tribune India

Book Review: What Can India’s Embrace of Nanotech Tell Us About India’s Science? – The Wire Science

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A glass nanoparticle suspended in an optical cavity. Photo: uclmaps/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

Nanotechnology may not be a familiar term to many although nanotechnology-based products are available in the market and many consumers use them. Thanks to Nano Mission, an initiative funded by the Government of India through the Department of Science and Technology from May 2007, India has made great strides in nanosciences and engineering.

In this regard, Nanoscale, a new book by Pankaj Sekhsaria, a policy researcher at the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas, IIT Bombay, doesnt eulogise the technology and its achievements nor does it criticise them and their deployment and risks.

Instead, Sekhsaria takes an atypical tack to set out what is possible, offering us new ways to conceive of and evaluate research. Through four case studies, he attempts to understand the links between science, technology and society at different sites and at different scales as if to ensure we are aware of what all is possible before we embark on our respective critical journeys. They are:

1. Developing a cutting-edge microscope at a university in Pune, despite severe constraints

2. Using nanotechnology to validate some components of a traditional Ayurvedic preparation

3. The failure of an innovative product a nano-silver-coated ceramic candle used to purify water in households

4. Nanotechnology-based treatment protocols for retinoblastoma, a cancer that affects children

The first case study concerns the construction of a scanning tunnelling microscope by C.V. Dharmadhikari at the University of Pune, using a variety of materials, including nanoparticles. Sekhsaria describes how Dharmadhikari built this sophisticated device from scratch, indigenously, and which he and his team now use for their research.

With this in mind, Sekhsaria invokes the concept of jugaad and the culture of innovation in laboratories around India. However, Eric von Hippels user innovation theory offers a better explanation: that more innovation is driven by intermediate or end users, at the site of consumption, which is then integrated by suppliers. In this case, Dharmadhikari is both a user and an innovator: he first developed the instrument and then, in the course of using it, continued to make minor modifications to better suit his and his peers purposes.

In fact, this would be true of most scientific instruments which are constantly attended to by a community of user-innovators of PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and investigators. As a result, in an ecosystem where resources are scarce and grants and funds are constantly shadowed by uncertainty, such DIY endeavours contribute more innovation and help adapt sophisticated technologies for more local conditions including nanotechnology.

Sekhsaria subsequently describes the fate of Dharmadhikari et als scanning tunnelling microscope, and compares it to that of similar innovations elsewhere in India. However, he stops short of discussing the range, utility and novelty of such instruments and how they have enabled Indian scientists to pursue science despite their constraints. Nor is there mention of how common such solutions are common across disciplines and institutions. Of course, user innovation can occur even when new instruments are acquired but if building instruments from scratch is very widely practised, it deserves a fuller study, as an important dimension of doing science in India.

The second case study concerns the use of nanotechnological tools to validate the components of a traditional Ayurvedic preparation, called bhasmas, and related work at the Centre for Nanobioscience, Agharkar Research Institute, Pune. Using the studies of Rinku D. Umrani, Sekhsaria highlights how the dialog between modern science (nanotechnology) and traditional medicine (Ayurveda) is necessary, although there are skeptics on both sides.

While the usefulness of traditional medicine is well known and accepted, it is often debunked as unscientific or considered to be scientifically unprovable. But a dialog could help better understand each system from the other systems perspective, paving the way for potentially fruitful collaborations.

With the specific example of bhasmas, Sekhsaria focuses the discussion onto the challenge of checking if Ayurveda can provide an alternative way to manage diabetes. Umranis work suggests that the mechanisms of action of some Ayurvedic preparations, including bhasmas, involve reactions involving nanoparticles. But instead of limiting himself to a yes/no answer, Sekhsaria argues that validation is necessary but a dialog as equals is more important to facilitate further research that, by extension, the introduction of radical new technologies brings with it radical new opportunities to improve the way we organise and conduct research.

Also read: Why Elon Musk Isnt Right About Nanotechnology Being BS

The third case study highlights how an innovation perceived to be locally useful to provide good quality drinking water at the household level using nanosilver-coated candles failed in the market. Researchers at the International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials (ARCI), Hyderabad, had developed these devices, essentially ceramic candles coated with nanoparticles of silver that could filter out some bacterial species from water.

But for the fact that they were simple to use, required less maintenance and were locally produced, they flopped at the market because they rested on the products uniqueness instead of adjusting for consumer behaviour and aspirations. The ceramic candle platform itself was becoming obsolete as a water purification technology, and newer entrants, ranging from advanced filters to ultraviolet and reverse-osmosis systems, all of which trapped more than bacteria, heightened buyers expectations.

Nonetheless, the candles were still useful, especially in low-cost settings. So Sekhsaria contends that such products shouldnt have been left at the mercy of market forces and that the government should have stepped in with subsidies. In fact, he challenges the idea that nanosilver-coated candles are obsolete per se, and argues that obsolescence is linked to infinite demands and consumption and that ARCI might have had more success if it had involved end-users during the product development process. According to him, there is also scope to recalibrate, renegotiate and revive the product, especially if were willing to learn from our mistakes.

The fourth case study is on treating retinoblastoma in female children. While nanotechnology is expected to offer better solutions like using gold-based nanoparticles to destroy cancer cells in a photothermal process the grim reality is that in some cases, parents prefer not to treat the child and let her die. This is because when children afflicted with retinoblastoma are not treated on time, they may lose eyesight and sometimes even their lives. In this regard, Sekhsaria spotlights how clinicians often talk to these childrens parents as if they are activists, and attempt to educate parents.

There is hardly any categorised data on retinoblastoma in India and how different sections of society have responded to it. It is true that technology is no panacea and the social complexities have to be taken into account but the complexity cant be reduced to that of only discrimination.

Sekhsaria discusses how girls and women are discriminated against, and how some parents choose to ignore new technologies that offer better treatment in favour of letting them die. However, his foundation is almost entirely anecdotal, based on discussions he had in two institutions in Hyderabad and Chennai. His analysis would have been enriched by including examples from more institutions, even if only in these cities, and could have fortified Sekhsarias arguments.

As such, the reader is unable to generalise from his examples as to the fraction of parents in the country who decide thus and why, nor whether the parents of male children behave the same way. Moreover, Sekhsaria discusses only those cases where parents didnt treat the child even if they had the option to do so, or accessed treatment when the retinoblastoma had entered the later stages.

Instead, the discussion could have covered the class and access to treatment dimensions. Unless we know how different sections of society respond to all the options available to them, the books view remains one-dimensional and unable to help us understand the technology-society interface. Nanotechnological solutions are not yet in vogue and are years away from widespread adoption. And even if nanotechnology has to have a positive impact, its success depends on the solutions affordability, accessibility and the decisions of parents who need to decide what is best for their children and themselves.

In fact, overall, Nanoscale often doesnt go far enough to flesh out the stories it uses to make its point about the unique prevalence of nanotechnologies across four very different slices of society, as if the book is attempting to anticipate the nanos outsized impact on society, and even social relations, in future.

Currently, India publishes the third-highest number of research papers on nanotechnology in the world. Nanotechnologies themselves have applications in sectors ranging from agriculture to textiles, from medicine to construction materials. For example, nano-fertilisers can help increase the efficiency with which plants use nutrients in the soil and help reduce nutrient run-off. Researchers have also used precepts of nanotechnology to improve hydrogen-based renewable energy technologies.

Also read: Why India Needs Nanotechnology Regulation Before it is Too Late

In this regard, Nanoscale provides a new perspective on nanotechnology in India and asks important questions about the corresponding science, technology and policies of innovation. Sekhsaria also successfully subverts conventional wisdom on innovation and attempts to link jugaad with sophistication, calls for dialog between modern science and traditional medicine, and highlights how the market can destroy innovations even as it patronises more expensive technology.

As such, Sekhsarias reluctance to pronounce verdicts works to the books advantage because, by highlighting the gap between traditional ideas of innovation in laboratories and the ground reality, he is able to contend that we can utilise nanotechnologies to a fuller extent by applying them to areas where there is a contest of paradigms or worldviews.

Krishna Ravi Srinivas works at Research and Information Systems for Developing Countries, a policy research think-tank. The views expressed here are the authors own.

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Book Review: What Can India's Embrace of Nanotech Tell Us About India's Science? - The Wire Science

Healthcare Nanotechnology (Nanomedicine) Market Analysis, Key Players, Industry Segments And Forecast To 2026 – The News Brok

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The global Healthcare Nanotechnology (Nanomedicine) market is valued at million US$ in 2019 and will reach million US$ by the end of 2026, growing at a CAGR of during 2020-2026. The objectives of this study are to define, segment, and project the size of the Healthcare Nanotechnology (Nanomedicine) market based on company, product type, application and key regions.

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The report offers an exhaustive geographical analysis of the global Healthcare Nanotechnology (Nanomedicine) market, covering important regions, viz, North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India and Central & South America. It also covers key countries (regions), viz, U.S., Canada, Germany, France, U.K., Italy, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, U.A.E, etc.

The end users/applications and product categories analysis:

On the basis on the end users/applications,this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, sales volume, market share and growth rate foreach application.

On the basis of product,this report displays the sales volume, revenue (Million USD), product price, market share and growth rate ofeach type.

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Healthcare Nanotechnology (Nanomedicine) Market The Regional analysis covers:

Key Findings & Data Available in Healthcare Nanotechnology (Nanomedicine) Market Report:

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Healthcare Nanotechnology (Nanomedicine) Market Analysis, Key Players, Industry Segments And Forecast To 2026 - The News Brok

Nanomedicine Market: Industry Analysis and forecast 2026: By Modality, Diseases, Application and Region – Good Night, Good Hockey

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Nanomedicine Marketwas valued US$ XX Bn in 2018 and is expected to reach US$ XX Bn by 2026, at CAGR of XX% during forecast period of 2019 to 2026.

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Nanomedicine is an application of nanotechnology, which are used in diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, and control of biological systems. Nanomedicine usages nanoscale manipulation of materials to improve medicine delivery. Therefore, nanomedicine has facilitated the treatment against various diseases. The nanomedicine market includes products that are nanoformulations of the existing drugs and new drugs or are nanobiomaterials. The research and development of new devices as well as the diagnostics will become, more effective, enabling faster response and the ability to treat new diseases are likely to boost the market growth.

The nanomedicine markets are driven by factors such as developing new technologies for drug delivery, increase acceptance of nanomedicine across varied applications, rise in government support and funding, the growing need for therapies that have fewer side effects and cost-effective. However, long approval process and risks associated with nanomedicine (environmental impacts) are hampering the market growth at the global level. An increase in the out-licensing of nanodrugs and growth of healthcare facilities in emerging economies are likely to create lucrative opportunities in the nanomedicine market.

The report study has analyzed revenue impact of covid-19 pandemic on the sales revenue of market leaders, market followers and disrupters in the report and same is reflected in our analysis.

Nanomedicine Market Segmentation Analysis:Based on the application, the nanomedicine market has been segmented into cardiovascular, neurology, anti-infective, anti-inflammatory, and oncology. The oncology segment held the dominant market share in 2018 and is projected to maintain its leading position throughout the forecast period owing to the rising availability of patient information and technological advancements. However, the cardiovascular and neurology segment is projected to grow at the highest CAGR of XX% during the forecast period due to presence of opportunities such as demand for specific therapeutic nanovectors, nanostructured stents, and implants for tissue regeneration.

Nanomedicine Market Regional Analysis:Geographically, the Nanomedicine market has been segmented into North America, the Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. North America held the largest share of the Nanomedicine market in 2018 due to the rising presence of patented nanomedicine products, the availability of advanced healthcare infrastructure and the rapid acceptance of nanomedicine. The market in Asia Pacific is expected to expand at a high CAGR of XX% during the forecast period thanks to rise in number of research grants and increase in demand for prophylaxis of life-threatening diseases. Moreover, the rising investments in research and development activities for the introduction of advanced therapies and drugs are predicted to accelerate the growth of this region in the near future.

Nanomedicine Market Competitive landscapeMajor Key players operating in this market are Abbott Laboratories, CombiMatrix Corporation, General Electric Company, Sigma-Tau Pharmaceuticals, Inc, and Johnson & Johnson. Manufacturers in the nanomedicine are focusing on competitive pricing as the strategy to capture significant market share. Moreover, strategic mergers and acquisitions and technological innovations are also the key focus areas of the manufacturers.

The objective of the report is to present a comprehensive analysis of Nanomedicine Market including all the stakeholders of the industry. The past and current status of the industry with forecasted market size and trends are presented in the report with the analysis of complicated data in simple language. The report covers all aspects of the industry with a dedicated study of key players that includes market leaders, followers and new entrants by region. PORTER, SVOR, PESTEL analysis with the potential impact of micro-economic factors by region on the market are presented in the report. External as well as internal factors that are supposed to affect the business positively or negatively have been analyzed, which will give a clear futuristic view of the industry to the decision-makers. The report also helps in understanding Nanomedicine Market dynamics, structure by analyzing the market segments and project the Nanomedicine Market size. Clear representation of competitive analysis of key players By Type, Price, Financial position, Product portfolio, Growth strategies, and regional presence in the Nanomedicine Market make the report investors guide.Scope of the Nanomedicine Market:

Nanomedicine Market by Modality:

Diagnostics TreatmentsNanomedicine Market by Diseases:

Oncological Diseases Infectious Diseases Cardiovascular Diseases Orthopedic Disorders Neurological Diseases Urological Diseases Ophthalmological Diseases Immunological DiseasesNanomedicine Market by Application:

Neurology Cardiovascular Anti-Inflammatory Anti-Infectives OncologyNanomedicine Market by Region:

Asia Pacific North America Europe Latin America Middle East AfricaNanomedicine Market Major Players:

Abbott Laboratories CombiMatrix Corporation General Electric Company Sigma-Tau Pharmaceuticals, Inc Johnson & Johnson Mallinckrodt plc. Merck & Company, Inc. Nanosphere, Inc. Pfizer, Inc. Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. Celgene Corporation UCB (Union Chimique Belge) S.A. AMAG Pharmaceuticals Nanospectra Biosciences, Inc. Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Leadiant Biosciences, Inc. Epeius Biotechnologies Corporation Cytimmune Sciences, Inc.

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Nanomedicine Market: Industry Analysis and forecast 2026: By Modality, Diseases, Application and Region - Good Night, Good Hockey

New ‘molecular computers’ find the right cells – UW Medicine Newsroom

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Scientists have demonstrated a new way to precisely target cells by distinguishing them from neighboring cells that look quite similar.

Even cells that become cancerous may differ from their healthy neighbors in only a few subtle ways. A central challenge in the treatment of cancer and many other diseases is being able to spot the right cells while sparing all others.

In a paper published 20 August inScience FirstReleasea team of researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine and theFred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centerin Seattle describe the design of new nanoscale devices made of synthetic proteins. These target a therapeutic agent only to cells with specific, predetermined combinations of cell surface markers.

Remarkably, these 'molecular computers' operate all on their own and can search out the cells that they were programmed to find.

"We were trying to solve a key problem in medicine, which is how to target specific cells in a complex environment," said Marc Lajoie, a lead author of the study and recent postdoctoral scholar at the UW MedicineInstitute for Protein Design. "Unfortunately, most cells lack a single surface marker that is unique to just them. So, to improve cell targeting, we created a way to direct almost any biological function to any cell by going after combinations of cell surface markers."

The tool they created is called Co-LOCKR, or Colocalization-dependant Latching Orthogonal Cage/Key pRoteins. It consists of multiple synthetic proteins that, when separated, do nothing. But when the pieces come together on the surface of a targeted cell, they change shape, thereby activating a sort of molecular beacon.

The presence of these beacons on a cell surface can guide a predetermined biological activity -- like cell killing -- to a specific, targeted cell.

The researchers demonstrated that Co-LOCKR can focus the cell-killing activity of CAR T cells. In the lab, they mixed Co-LOCKR proteins, CAR T cells, and a soup of potential target cells. Some of these had just one marker, others had two or three. Only the cells with the predetermined marker combination were killed by the T cells. If a cell also had a predetermined "healthy marker," then that cell was spared.

"T cells are extremely efficient killers, so the fact that we can limit their activity on cells with the wrong combination of antigens yet still rapidly eliminate cells with the correct combination is game-changing," said Alexander Salter, another lead author of the study and an M.D./Ph.D. student in the medical scientist program at the UW School of Medicine. He is training in Stanley Riddell's lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

This cell-targeting strategy relies entirely on proteins. This approach sets it apart from most other methods that rely on engineered cells and operate on slower timescales.

"We believe Co-LOCKR will be useful in many areas where precise cell targeting is needed, including immunotherapy and gene therapy," said David Baker, professor of biochemistry at the UW School of Medicine and director of the Institute for Protein Design.

Theresearch was conducted at the Institute for Protein Design, the Immunotherapy Integrated Research Center at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and the UW Department of Bioengineering.

The co-lead authors of this work are Marc J. Lajoie (supported by a Washington Research Foundation Innovation Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Cancer Research Institute Irvington Fellowship from the Cancer Research Institute), Scott E. Boyken (supported by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface), and Alexander I. Salter (supported by the Hearst Foundation and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Interdisciplinary Training Grant in Cancer Research).

This work was also supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Nordstrom Barrier Institute for Protein Design Directors Fund, Hearst Foundation, Washington Research Foundation and Translational Research Fund, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Open Philanthropy Project, and The Audacious Project organized by TED.

Several authors are inventors on patents related to this work. Some hold equity in Lyell Immunopharma. Some authors are now employees or consultants of Lyell Immunopharma.

This news release was written by Ian Haydon of the Institute for Protein Design.

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New 'molecular computers' find the right cells - UW Medicine Newsroom

Another Libertarian candidate makes it on the ballot – week.com

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Peoria, Ill. (WEEK) -- A rare event in local election history as nine Libertarians have made it onto the November ballots.

After a court battle over verifying signatures, Chad Grimm joins the rest of the third party candidates already on there.

"I understand the political logic if you are a Republican or Democrat and have a race and it's a close race you might not want someone on there that could throw the vote. Do I philosophically agree with that? No. I think that everybody who wants to be on a ballot should be heard," said Grimm.

Chad Grimm is running against Jehan Gordon-Booth for the 92nd District in the House of Representatives.

"I'm extraordinary in support of the small business owner. I'm absolutely for lower taxes, less government. I'm also to the left of her on criminal justice which she pretends to champion," explained Grimm.

Libertarians are also seeking seats like, coroner, auditor, board members in both Peoria and Tazewell County.

Peoria County Election Commission's Executive Director, Thomas Bride calls this local election history in the making.

"We've only had one independent or third-party candidate in the last 10-12 years that I've been doing this. So it's extremely rare. It's not as rare at the state level, but on a local level it's more rare," said Bride.

Bride thinks the state lowering the required signature number is a reason behind the change.

"In Peoria County you needed a little over 3,000 and it was down to about 330 signatures needed for the county wide race. They were allowed to collect signatures online which they haven't been able to do before. It dramatically lowered the bar than it has been in the past," said Bride.

Bride said more people on the ballot means more choices for the voters.

Grimm hopes he and the Libertarian party is the choice people are looking for.

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Another Libertarian candidate makes it on the ballot - week.com

A Voice of Reason: #LetHerSpeak – Hanford Sentinel

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On Aug. 8, 2020, Libertarians in every state, across the country, gathered in cities to protest the exclusion of the Libertarian Party presidential candidate, Jo Jorgensen, from the media and the presidential debates. Due to COVID-19 restrictions and worries across the country, the form of protest used was a vehicular caravan, where protesters traveled around the city in cars decked out in Jo Jorgensen campaign signs and covered with the hashtag #LetHerSpeak. These caravans would stop in front of local media outlets, especially television stations and the protesters would honk their horns, get out of their cars, and chant Let her speak!, Let Jo Jorgensen into the debates!, etc.

The protests on Aug. 8, 2020, were posted on social media by the protesters using the hashtag #LetHerSpeak. That hashtag became one of the top trending Twitter hashtags that day, hitting at least as high as number 6 at one point during the day.

It is obvious why Libertarians would protest the exclusion of their candidate from the debates. But the protesters were not just made up of Libertarians. People from all political persuasions were protesting alongside the Libertarians. The caravan I participated in which was held in Bakersfield, California, included at least one Republican. In a Gallup poll in 2018, 57% of Americans said that the United States would benefit from the inclusion of a third political party. Yet, the Commission on Presidential Debates, their sponsors, the media and the courts continuously deny the American people the right to hear from more than two choices.

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A Voice of Reason: #LetHerSpeak - Hanford Sentinel

Trump and Biden tied in Minnesota: poll | TheHill – The Hill

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President TrumpDonald John TrumpFive takeaways from the Democratic National Convention What we'll remember from the 2020 Biden convention Chris Wallace labels Biden's acceptance speech 'enormously effective' MORE and Democratic presidential nominee Joe BidenJoe BidenFive takeaways from the Democratic National Convention What we'll remember from the 2020 Biden convention Chris Wallace labels Biden's acceptance speech 'enormously effective' MORE are statistically tied in Minnesota, according to a new poll.

The latest survey from the Trafalgar Groupfinds Biden at 46.9 percent and Trump at 46.5 percent. Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen gets 3.7 percent support, while 1.7 percent are undecided and 1.2 percent said theyd support someone else.

The Trafalgar Groups surveys have been showing a tighter race in the battlegrounds than other pollsters have found.

The outlet weights its polls to account for a social desirability bias, or the so-called shy Trump voters who are embarrassed to tell pollsters they support his candidacy. In 2016, Trafalgar was the only polling outlet to show Trump leading in Michigan heading into Election Day.

Pollster Robert Cahaly has told The Hill he believes there are more quiet Trump voters in the U.S. than there were in 2016.

The survey is the latest to find Trump closing the gap in Minnesota, which Hillary ClintonHillary Diane Rodham ClintonFive takeaways from the Democratic National Convention What we'll remember from the 2020 Biden convention Overnight Energy: Michigan agrees to 0M Flint settlement | Sierra Club knocks DNC over dropped fossil fuel subsidies language MORE carried by only 1.5 points in 2016.

An Emerson College survey, the only other poll of Minnesota released this month, found Biden with a 3-point advantage over Trump, which was also within the surveys margin of error.

The Trump campaign has circled Minnesota as one of the few states Clinton won in 2016 that it intends to contest. In addition, the Trump campaign says it will try to flip New Hampshire and Maine.

The Trafalgar Group survey of 1,141 likely general election voters was conducted between Aug. 15 and Aug. 18 and has a 2.98-percentage-point margin of error.

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Trump and Biden tied in Minnesota: poll | TheHill - The Hill

Texas Democrats suing to kick Green Party candidates off November ballot – The Texas Tribune

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State and national Democrats are waging a legal offensive to kick Green Party candidates off the ballot in some of Texas' highest-profile races this fall and they are seeing success.

On Wednesday, both a Travis County district judge and a state appeals court blocked the Green Party nominees for U.S. Senate and the 21st Congressional District from appearing on the ballot. The Austin-based 3rd Court of Appeals additionally forced the Green Party nominee for railroad commissioner off the ballot.

Earlier this week, it surfaced that a Green Party contender for chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court had withdrawn after the Democratic nominee questioned his eligibility.

The Democrats are largely targeting Green Party candidates because they have not paid filing fees a new requirement for third parties under a law passed by the Legislature last year. The filing fees were already required of Democratic and Republican candidates. Multiple lawsuits that remain pending are challenging the new law, and the Green Party of Texas has been upfront that most of its candidates are not paying the fees while they await a resolution to the litigation.

The Green Party argues that the filing fees, which go up to $5,000 for a U.S. Senate race, are an unconstitutional burden. It has also pointed out that the fees normally go toward primaries, something neither the Green nor Libertarian parties conducts because both nominate their candidates at conventions. Only two of the Green Party's eight nominees for November have submitted the fees, according to the secretary of state.

Responding to Wednesday's rulings, the Texas Green Party said the legal challenges were suspiciously timed, coming after the Monday deadline for write-in candidates to file with the state and days before a series of deadlines finalizing the November ballot.

"The timing of these actions is an obvious attempt to remove voter choices from the ballot and lessen the work Democrats have to do to earn votes," the party said in a statement. "It is disappointing to have the legal system weaponized to suppress voters in this way."

The major deadline looming over the process is Aug. 28, when the secretary of state has to certify to counties the names of party nominees to appear on the November ballot. The Green Party confirmed its nominees at its state convention in April.

The party focuses on issues such as climate change and social justice, regularly leading to complaints that it siphons votes away from Democrats.

The rulings Wednesday came in response to lawsuits in two courts that involved some of the same candidates. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, MJ Hegar, sued to disqualify David Collins, the Green Party nominee for U.S. Senate, and Tom Wakely, Green Party nominee for the 21st Congressional District. Meanwhile, Hegar joined the Democratic nominee for the 21st District, Wendy Davis, and candidate for railroad commissioner, Chrysta Castaeda, to seek an ineligibility ruling for three respective Green Party candidates before the 3rd Court of Appeals.

In the appeals court's opinion, Justice Thomas Baker ordered the Green Party of Texas to declare its three candidates ineligible and do all it could to make sure they do not appear on the ballot. Baker said the court would not accept motions for rehearing, citing the "time-sensitive nature of this matter." It was party-line vote from a three-judge panel, with the one Republican in the group, Chief Justice Jeff Rose, dissenting.

In the Travis County district court decision, Judge Jan Soifer said her order is in effect for the next two weeks. However, she scheduled a hearing for Aug. 26 two days before the state's ballot certification deadline where she could reevaluate the decision.

Wakely is probably the best known of the three Green Party candidates whom the courts ruled against Wednesday. He was the Democratic nominee for the 21st District in 2016, when he lost by 21 percentage points to then-U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio. He also unsuccessfully ran in the 2018 Democratic primary for governor.

Wakely said Wednesday he thought the parties should be focused on "discussing ideas, debating policy," rather than working to take options away from voters.

"Im dismayed that while the Democrats are complaining about [how] the Republicans and Donald Trump are trying to suppress the vote, theyre doing exactly the same," Wakely said.

The 21st District is now held by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, and he is on the DCCC's seven-seat target list this cycle in Texas. His Democratic opponent, Davis, is the former state senator from Fort Worth and 2014 Democratic nominee for governor.

Not paying filing fees is not the only way a third-party candidate could be knocked out of contention, though. In the state Supreme Court race, Green Party candidate Charles Waterbury abandoned his bid last week after Democratic nominee Amy Clark Meachum asked the court to declare him ineligible because he voted in this year's Democratic primary, according to the Austin American-Statesman. State law says such candidates cannot represent one party in the general election if they voted in another party's primary earlier in the same election cycle.

Third parties could have a sizable impact in Texas this fall, when ascendant Democrats are anticipating numerous close races up and down the ballot.

There were already a number of examples last cycle where third-party candidates drew a not-insignificant amount of votes. In the 23rd Congressional District, a perennial battleground, Libertarian nominee Ruben Corvalan took 4,425 votes, while U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, R-Helotes, defeated Democratic challenger Gina Ortiz Jones by just 926 votes.

In the 21st District last cycle, the Libertarian candidate, Lee Santos, garnered 7,542 votes. That was not far off from Roy's margin of victory over Democratic opponent Joseph Kopser: 9,233 votes.

Disclosure: The Texas secretary of state has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Texas Democrats suing to kick Green Party candidates off November ballot - The Texas Tribune

Your Illinois News Radar Hearing officer recommends that Willie Wilson’s name be included on the ballot – The Capitol Fax Blog

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* Illinois State Board of Elections Hearing Examiner David Herman

This matter commenced when Doris J. Turner (hereinafter Objector) timely filed her Objectors Petition with the State Board of Elections. Objectors Petition is based solely on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversing the Order entered in Libertarian Party of Illinois v. Pritzker, 20 CV 2112. In the Libertarian case, the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois entered a Preliminary Injunction on April 23, 2020 reducing the required minimum number of signatures for candidates nominated by any new political party, as defined by 10 ILCS 5/10-2, and for any independent candidates, as defined in 10 ILCS 5/10-3, to 10% of the statutory minimum established by the Illinois Election Code. Objector admits in her Petition that the Candidate filed a total number of signatures greater than the 10% threshold established by the Order entered by the Northern District. Objector argues that should the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reverse the Order entered by the Northern District, then the Candidates Nomination Papers are invalid in that they contain less than the 25,000 signatures required by the Illinois Election Code. []

While the Hearing Examiner has reviewed those filings, the Hearing Examiner will not make a ruling as to the merits of the Motion to Dismiss because the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has not yet acted.

At the time of this Recommendation, the Seventh Circuit has not ruled on the validity of the Preliminary Injunction entered by the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Therefore, there is no basis to reach the merits, if any, of Objectors Petition. Wherefore, the Hearing Examiner recommends that the Illinois State Board of Elections DOES place the Candidates name on the ballot for the office of United States Senator for the State of Illinois because the Candidate has filed a total number of signatures meeting the 10% threshold established by the Preliminary Injunction Order entered by the Northern District of Illinois.

Conclusion

The Hearing Examiner recommends that Candidates name BE PLACED on the ballot as a candidate for the office of United States Senator for the State of Illinois at the November 3, 2020 election.

The board will meet Friday and likely issue its ruling at that time.

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Your Illinois News Radar Hearing officer recommends that Willie Wilson's name be included on the ballot - The Capitol Fax Blog

Early voting begins for Aug. 25 Oklahoma runoff elections; what you need to know – KOCO Oklahoma City

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Early voting for Oklahomas Aug. 25 runoff primary elections began Thursday for voters in 50 counties. Heres what you need to know before you go to the polls.When can I vote early?Early voting is available from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday and Friday. Counties with state or federal runoff elections will also be able to take part in early voting from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, according to the election board.Where can I vote early?Oklahomans are urged to check the OK Voter Portal to find their polling place and view their sample ballot. The following counties have a federal and/or state election on the ballot and will have in-person absentee (early) voting on Thursday, Friday and Saturday:AtokaChoctawGarvinGradyHaskellHughesLatimerLeFloreMcClainMcCurtainOkfuskeeOklahomaPittsburgPottawatomiePushmatahaSeminoleStephensTulsaThe following counties have only county and/or local elections on the ballot, and will have in-person absentee (early) voting on Thursday and Friday: (There is no early voting on Saturday, Aug. 22.)AlfalfaBeckhamCarterClevelandComancheCreekCusterDelawareEllisGarfieldHarperJacksonJohnstonKingfisherKiowaLincolnLoganMcIntoshMuskogeeNowataOkmulgeeOsageOttawaPawneePaynePontotocRogersTexasWagonerWashingtonWashitaWoodwardIf you have a sample ballot available in the portal, that means you have an election in your precinct. If no ballot is available, it means you do not have an election, State Election Board Secretary Paul Ziriax said. Whats on the ballot?Voters are urged to check their sample ballot here to see whats on their specific ballot. One of the biggest races in Oklahoma County is the Republican nomination for Sheriff. Current Sheriff PD Taylor will face challenger Tommie Johnson III. The winner will then face democratic nominee, Oklahoma City Police Lt. Wayland Cubit in November.KOCO 5 recently spoke with both GOP candidates. Watch the videos below to see their takes on the issues the sheriffs office faces:Voters in several counties will also decide on the GOP nomination for U.S. House of Representatives District 5. Stephanie Bice will face Terry Neese in the Aug. 25 runoff primary election. The winner will then take on incumbent, democrat Kendra Horn in November. Secretary Ziriax also reminds voters that Oklahoma is a closed primary state. In order to vote in a partys primary or runoff primary, you must be a registered voter of that party. The Democratic Party, however, has made an exception for Independent voters for the 2020 and 2021 election years. If youre an Independent voter you may ask for a Democratic Party primary ballot, Ziriax said.The Republican Party and Libertarian Party have chosen to keep their primaries closed.Absentee VotingVoters who have requested an absentee ballot for the Aug. 25 Runoff Primary have several return options. Absentee ballots can be returned by the United States Postal Service or a private mail carrier, provided delivery documentation is provided.Standard absentee ballots, the most common form of ballot, can be hand-delivered to the county election board provided the ballot is returned no later than the end of business day, the Monday prior to the election. Only the voter may hand-deliver his or her own absentee ballot. Please be prepared to show proof of identity when you drop off your ballot. You will be asked to show the same identification that is required when you vote at the polls.Absentee ballots returned by mail for the Aug. 25 election must be received by the County Election Board no later than 7 p.m. on Election Day.Voters can track their absentee ballot using the OK Voter Portal.COVID-19 measuresSocial distancing and COVID-19 safety protocols will be in place during early voting and on Election Day. While masks or face coverings are not required at voting locations, they are strongly recommended. Voters can find more information about COVID-19 and the 2020 elections on the State Election Board website.

Early voting for Oklahomas Aug. 25 runoff primary elections began Thursday for voters in 50 counties. Heres what you need to know before you go to the polls.

When can I vote early?

Early voting is available from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday and Friday. Counties with state or federal runoff elections will also be able to take part in early voting from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, according to the election board.

Where can I vote early?

Oklahomans are urged to check the OK Voter Portal to find their polling place and view their sample ballot.

The following counties have a federal and/or state election on the ballot and will have in-person absentee (early) voting on Thursday, Friday and Saturday:

The following counties have only county and/or local elections on the ballot, and will have in-person absentee (early) voting on Thursday and Friday: (There is no early voting on Saturday, Aug. 22.)

If you have a sample ballot available in the portal, that means you have an election in your precinct. If no ballot is available, it means you do not have an election, State Election Board Secretary Paul Ziriax said.

Whats on the ballot?

Voters are urged to check their sample ballot here to see whats on their specific ballot.

One of the biggest races in Oklahoma County is the Republican nomination for Sheriff. Current Sheriff PD Taylor will face challenger Tommie Johnson III. The winner will then face democratic nominee, Oklahoma City Police Lt. Wayland Cubit in November.

KOCO 5 recently spoke with both GOP candidates. Watch the videos below to see their takes on the issues the sheriffs office faces:

Voters in several counties will also decide on the GOP nomination for U.S. House of Representatives District 5. Stephanie Bice will face Terry Neese in the Aug. 25 runoff primary election. The winner will then take on incumbent, democrat Kendra Horn in November.

Secretary Ziriax also reminds voters that Oklahoma is a closed primary state.

In order to vote in a partys primary or runoff primary, you must be a registered voter of that party. The Democratic Party, however, has made an exception for Independent voters for the 2020 and 2021 election years. If youre an Independent voter you may ask for a Democratic Party primary ballot, Ziriax said.

The Republican Party and Libertarian Party have chosen to keep their primaries closed.

Absentee Voting

Voters who have requested an absentee ballot for the Aug. 25 Runoff Primary have several return options. Absentee ballots can be returned by the United States Postal Service or a private mail carrier, provided delivery documentation is provided.

Standard absentee ballots, the most common form of ballot, can be hand-delivered to the county election board provided the ballot is returned no later than the end of business day, the Monday prior to the election. Only the voter may hand-deliver his or her own absentee ballot. Please be prepared to show proof of identity when you drop off your ballot. You will be asked to show the same identification that is required when you vote at the polls.

Absentee ballots returned by mail for the Aug. 25 election must be received by the County Election Board no later than 7 p.m. on Election Day.

Voters can track their absentee ballot using the OK Voter Portal.

COVID-19 measures

Social distancing and COVID-19 safety protocols will be in place during early voting and on Election Day. While masks or face coverings are not required at voting locations, they are strongly recommended. Voters can find more information about COVID-19 and the 2020 elections on the State Election Board website.

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Early voting begins for Aug. 25 Oklahoma runoff elections; what you need to know - KOCO Oklahoma City