SPIRIT MATTERS: The earth quaked, physically and spiritually – MyWebTimes.com

Posted on by

Note: I wrote this reflection last week, on Palm Sunday, and shared it with friends on my Facebook page. As I sat down this past Thursday to come up with a relevant Easter column for Spirit Matters, this seemed about as applicable as any, this year. May you all have a Happy and Blessed Easter. ~ Jerrilyn

Recently, I saw a meme on Facebook that pretty much sums it up for those of us who observe Lent, the 40-day penitential period before Easter.

This is the Lentiest Lent Ive ever Lented.

I laughed, but those words are so true.

This Lent has been different than any other, because to me, I have felt the discomfort of feeling as though God is absent, while I have been trying to navigate soooo many competing emotions.

I know God hasnt been absent.

His Presence, for me anyway, has just been clouded by all the anxiety and fear that is blowing in the wind.

I havent really been able to find a firm footing this whole time, although I have tried to continue a regular prayer practice, at least as far as I could. I have been gentle with myself, not expecting myself to be perfect in all my practices or even getting anything done on any given day.

I think that is important for all of us. This is an unprecedented time. If we dont get all the things checked off our list that we are supposed to do, that is okay.

Our routine has been shattered.

In fact, this morning, Palm Sunday, I woke up and felt a fresh desire to really give myself to walking with Jesus during this Holy Week. I watched Mass online, and felt a spiritual connection with the countless others who were watching Church services online today. I could feel how all those watching with me had been brought to their knees in a new way, and had returned rending their garments, mourning and weeping, to the only God who could make any sense of what we are experiencing.

After Mass, everything changed for me.

I was finally able to put a name on what all of this chaos we have been experiencing is.

These past weeks, the world has experienced a spiritual earthquake.

Religious observance aside, the spirits of human beings everywhere, have been completely obliterated as they try to make sense of this new normal.

Nothing is the same as it was before.

I dont claim to know the mind of God, and I am not willing to say this virus is something God handed down as a punishment.

I dont believe that is the way God works.

However, this virus and all the uncertainty that goes with it has certainly knocked every one of us to the ground.

As we walk through the wilderness and try to figure this all out, we are scared, frantic, anxious, disturbed, frightened, helpless, you name it.

****

Just before I started to write this tonight, I read todays Gospel, the Passion according to Matthew.

As I was reading through it, probably a little too quickly, I was intrigued to come across these words:

And behold, the veil of the sanctuarywas torn in two from top to bottom.The earth quaked, rocks were split, tombs were opened,and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised.And coming forth from their tombs after his resurrection,they entered the holy city and appeared to many.The centurion and the men with him who were keeping watch over Jesusfeared greatly when they saw the earthquakeand all that was happening, and they said,Truly, this was the Son of God!.

I honestly had not thought about or seen the word earthquake in todays gospel when I thought of our current circumstances as a spiritual earthquake. It was only as I read through the Gospel, that I made the connection and saw the word as sort of an affirmation from the Holy Spirit that I might be on to something.

Upon Jesuss death on the cross, the earth quaked, rocks were split, tombs were opened and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised. And coming forth from their tombs after his resurrection, they entered the holy city and appeared to many. The centurion and the men with him who were keeping watch over Jesus feared greatly when they saw the earthquake and all that was happening, and they said, Truly, this was the Son of God!

It wasnt until the earth quaked when Jesus died and nature went wild with mourning, that those who persecuted and crucified Jesus were humbled enough to see Reality as it was.

The Creator of the Universe had spoken, as he mourned the death of his Son, who had come into this world to Love every single one of us into Eternal Life.

Perhaps at this moment in time, during this spiritual earthquake, we are being given the opportunity to see Reality as it isto recognize the harm we are doing to one another in our thoughts, our words, our actions, our bickering our complete ignoring of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. To step back and see how, while we are trapped in our houses, nature continues to gift us with Her wonder as we look out our windows and doors and see Spring come alive again. To see that no, we are not to dominate nature as it was graciously given to us by the Creator, but to be good stewards of that Creation, living in harmony with all other Life on the planet.

Rather than seeing all of this chaos as just that, I choose to see this spiritual earthquake as an opportunity to reorient myself to what really matters.

To Reality as it Is.

And as I begin this walk through Holy Week, remembering the suffering, death and crucifixion of the Son of God, I comfort myself, knowing how the story ends.

See you next Sunday.

SPIRIT MATTERSis a weekly column that examines spirituality in the area. Contact Jerrilyn Zavada at jzblue33@yahoo.com to share how you engage your spirit in your life and in your community.

Read the original here:

SPIRIT MATTERS: The earth quaked, physically and spiritually - MyWebTimes.com

The Spiritual Person’s Guide to Drinking Through the Coronavirus – Patheos

Posted on by

Patrick Fore via Unsplash

Is it 5:00 yet? These are words youll hear almost daily in our house as we enter the fourth week of our Covid-19 related quarantine. And its not because 5:00 is quitting time from workit marks the hour when my wife and I uncork a bottle of wine or uncap a couple of bottles of beers.

During pre-Coronavirus times, we limited our drinking to weekends. Admittedly, with the occasional glass of wine on weekdays. But if youre like me, and you just spent another day working from your home office/basementor another day home-schooling the kids, or hours watching the clock go by because your regular routine has been disrupted, it can be comforting to end the day with an adult beverage.

I know that for some people drinking causes problems. These people are better off not drinking. But for whatever reason, when not done to excess, drinking has always taken the edge off for me. Its the reward for another day spent upright, ideally having checked all the boxes on my daily to-do list. It quenches my early evening thirst in a way a bottle of water cannot.

While I commemorate the end of the day with a drink, I start the day with a routine I find equally uplifting. My mornings begin in quiet contemplation over a cup of coffee, followed by meditation, centering prayer or a simple prayer of gratitude, and on most days a three-mile run. If I have the time, and I do now that my commute to work takes a few seconds, Ill engage in some spiritual reading.

Work can be hectic, even from home, so I make sure that throughout the day I take mini-breaks. Ill close my laptop and step outside for a few breaths of fresh air. Ill do a quick touch base with my family members at home and email or text anyone else I might be thinking about. When time permits, Ill sneak in a cat nap.

Then, when my work for the day is over, Im ready for a drink. (As long as its not Monday, see the rules below.) Its as if the running and other spirituality-related endeavors soothe certain parts of my brain, and the glass of wine or beer satisfies another. This includes enjoying the mild buzz this beverage provides.

Its reassuring to know that for centuries monks of various spiritual traditions have made beer and wine, and indulged in it as well. In Belgium alone there are six Trappist monasteries that produce and market their own brands of beer, the best known being Chimay. There are also many non-Trappist monasteries across Europe making whats called Abbey Beer and most of these brews pack a potent high-alcohol punch.

The most famous Trappist monk of our time, the revered spiritual writer Thomas Merton, also had a fondness for beer. This description of him by poet and longtime friend Ron Seitz may bring a smile to your face: Merton was a guy with big baggy pants, needed a shave, laughed too much, drank too much beer, just an ordinary guy. In Mertons own words:

A few years ago, the monks at the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina, California, joined forces with the brewer Sierra Nevada to make a few unique beers, with the proceeds helping to raise funds to restore one of its monasteries. The Abbey also produces and sells its own wine. At its website, visitors are welcomed to enjoy the peace and serenity of our sacred space. We encourage you to be still and listen to the voice of God in you.

Be still and listen to the voice of God in you. Its something Ill sometimes do after a few drinks. While alcohol may excite some people, it tends to mellow me. Its at these times, I often grow appreciative for all the good in my life, past and present. The warm glow of a drink is accompanied by the sense of a greater presence and the knowledge that there is more to this life than meets the eye.

Im not suggesting you abide by these rules, but in my household we do. (Of course, with the occasional slip-up here and there.) Like everything else in life, there can be too much of a good thing, so these rules help us stay grounded.

There you have it. Judge me if you will. But on a list of 100, I think there are 90-plus better ways to judge the character of a man or a woman. So, to those spiritually-minded people joining me in a drink this evening, I say cheers. And amen. I also offer these words in a toast: To better days ahead.

See the article here:

The Spiritual Person's Guide to Drinking Through the Coronavirus - Patheos

Salvation Army creates emotional and spiritual hotline during pandemic – KIMT 3

Posted on by

ROSEVILLE, Minn. The Salvation Army Northern Division is launching an Emotional and Spiritual Care Hotline.

The Salvation Army says anyone who is feeling lonely, fearful or hopeless during the coronavirus outbreak is encouraged to call the hotline number, 877-220-4195, to reach a friendly and reassuring voice as trained Salvation Army officers, employees and volunteers will be available to talk, listen, comfort, and pray for individuals, families and situations.

Those who call will be in different situationssome afraid, some lonely, and some who might need a word of encouragement or a prayer, says Lt. Colonel Lonneal Richardson, Commander of The Salvation Army Northern Division. Others may just need the comfort of knowing that someone is listening. The hotline fits well with our mission of caring for the body, soul and spirit.

The hotline is free and available to anyone in Iowa, Minnesota, and nine other Midwestern states.

Read the original post:

Salvation Army creates emotional and spiritual hotline during pandemic - KIMT 3

WOSTER: Trying to replicate the spiritual blessings from afar – Rapid City Journal

Posted on by

When I stood in our kitchen and read aloud from a notice on my iPhone that public masses were to be suspended, almost certainly through Easter, Mary let out a gasp. We stared at each other, wide eyed.

Cradle Catholics, we couldnt imagine a Palm Sunday, Holy Week, Good Friday and Easter Sunday without the gift we had taken for granted our whole lives that is, being both physically and spiritually present for the ceremonies and music and prayers and fellowship that define our spiritual year.

Since then, so many things we couldnt have imagined have become the things of every day life. The horrid national death toll, of course, and the fear and confusion. Also the smaller, less-significant things: No Y workouts. No library stops. No coffee-shop visits. No handshakes and hugs.

Now grocery shopping is a masked-up mission of military style planning. The recent spring shearing of my winter-furred springer spaniel was a similarly stragegized affair. I scheduled and paid in advance by phone, announced with a text my presence outside the Animal Clinic and walked with Rosie on a leash to meet a masked, gloved staffer out in the parking lot.

Personal health care changed, too. When I noticed a worrisome spot on my head, I notified my dermatologist. Rather than an office visit, I downloaded an app, set up an appointment online, had Mary shoot pictures of the spot and sent them in by smart-phone.

Read the rest here:

WOSTER: Trying to replicate the spiritual blessings from afar - Rapid City Journal

A spiritual walk through Holy Week – The Oakland Press

Posted on by

The stay home, stay safe executive order means many of us have missed attending our church services and are going online now to receive our spiritual messages. Its a wonderful way for churches to provide services to members and nonmembers alike.

At Unity of Lake Orion we, too, have adopted technology with our Reaching Out Service once a month. For the past few years, once a month, we have an online video message from another Unity Church around the country. We create our own service and then add the video message.

Technology is awesome.

But Holy Week is a time to celebrate in church. So lets walk it together now.

Palm Sunday: Jesus entered the town of Jerusalem in deep peace, knowing within His entire being that the week would end with Him giving His life so that we could experience freedom from sin and live more abundantly.

Holy Monday: Jesus affirms the church is a house of prayer. In anger, He clears the temples of those he felt were not representing Gods Truth. Prayer is the highest mind action known to man. It is a time of communion with God and spoken in Truth only.

Tuesday: Religious leaders showed that they did not want Jesus teaching His lessons to their people. However, Jesus came to awaken us to our spiritual nature.

Wednesday: Perhaps Wednesday was a day of contemplation, a day of being in silence and connecting with God. In the silence He could exercise his faith in God and uplift His spiritual energy, as Jesus already knew what was coming.

Maundy Thursday: This was the day of the Last Supper, where Jesus shared communion with his disciples. The bread, Gods Word, when taken in, moves Spirit through our entire being. The blood of Jesus represents the energy of life, eternal life, which we find in Gods Word. This is a time of silence and deep prayer work where you consciously connect your heart with the heart and love of God, in total Oneness.

Good Friday Jesus, who had been falsely accused and judged, was mocked, tortured and said to have been crucified on a cross. His body was laid to rest in a tomb guarded by Roman soldiers. Changes in our thoughts, words and deeds make us go into our conscious minds and decipher what will better serve us in mind, body and spirit, which sometimes can be very challenging. The crucifixion is something we experience when we decide to cross out what is not good in our lives. The tomb represents a time of closing us off to our Earthly ways and having us look at a more spiritual way of living. In living more spiritually, we make changes in our consciousness, making us better people. We live life more graciously and other people and humanity benefit as well.

Saturday Jesus body was still in the tomb covered by a huge boulder. This day reminds me of the song, When Ten Thousand Angels Cried, by LeAnn Rimes, and Im sure the angels did cry. Like the angels, you may also feel that this was a sad time for humanity. It also gives each of us the opportunity to look at ourselves today. Are we insensitive to the thoughts and differences of others? Are we raising up humanity by our actions?

Easter Sunday The stone is rolled away from the tomb and Jesus body is no longer there. He has risen! Just as He said. Jesus was raised from the material world and physical life into the spiritual awakening of the I AM presence of God and the Christ in man.

Throughout the Holy Week, the life of the Christ Consciousness was demonstrated and made clear for us. We know that man set this story in motion and Jesus accepted His path and remained true to awakening and telling others about God. From Him, we learned the Truth of our being, how to commune and connect with God through prayer, to have faith and trust, and that life never ends.

Each year, may you remember the Easter story without the passion of sin, the crown of thorns or the crucifixion. Instead, remember it with the passion of the risen Christ; the opening of the Christ consciousness and the outpouring of love that God has for us.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16NIV.

Attend your church as soon as it is deemed safe, and remember your tithes and gifts of the past have maintained the church in your absence. It will do so again if you continue to give from your heart.

Linda La Croix is the Unity Director & Prayer Chaplain at Unity of Lake Orion. Find positive and uplifting posts on her Facebook page A Spiritual Walk, or Aspiritualwalk.com.

Go here to see the original:

A spiritual walk through Holy Week - The Oakland Press

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

Posted on by

Advertisement

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

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

Same Grievances, Different Masks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Political Disease Is Harder to Shake

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go here to see the original:

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

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

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rest is here:

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

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

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did coronavirus start and what happens next?

The UK's job retention furlough scheme, explained

Can Universal Basic Income help fight coronavirus?

Best video and board games for self-isolating couples

Follow WIRED on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn

Get The Email from WIRED, your no-nonsense briefing on all the biggest stories in technology, business and science. In your inbox every weekday at 12pm sharp.

by entering your email address, you agree to our privacy policy

Thank You. You have successfully subscribed to our newsletter. You will hear from us shortly.

Sorry, you have entered an invalid email. Please refresh and try again.

Continue reading here:

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

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

Posted on by

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

Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe today and Save up to $129.

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

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

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

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

If you like this article, please give today to help fund The Nations work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get unlimited digital access to the best independent news and analysis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More here:

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

Britney Spears Is the Internet’s New Communist Queen – Study Breaks

Posted on by

Post Views: 1,166

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View post:

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

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

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, theres the musicality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phil Lesh & Friends & Talib Kweli

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Video: Relix]

String Cheese Incident & GZA

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

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

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

[Video: TheSoberGoat]

Soulive, Talib Kweli, & Darryl DMC McDaniels

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Video: Barry2theB]

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

[Video: Barry2theB]

Galactic & Chali 2na

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

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

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

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

[Video: Stanton Moore]

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

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

[Video: Adam Brandeis]

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

[Video: Live For Live Music]

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

[Video: Live For Live Music]

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

[Video: FunkItBlog]

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

[Video: FunkItBlog]

Go here to see the original:

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

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

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more here:

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

Erased from utopia: the hidden history of LA’s black and brown resistance – The Guardian

Posted on by

In August 1965, thousands of young Black people in Watts set fire to the illusion that Los Angeles was a youth paradise.

Since the debut of the TV show 77 Sunset Strip in 1958, followed by the first of the Gidget romance films in 1959 and then the Beach Boys Surfin USA in 1963, teenagers in the rest of the country had become intoxicated with images of the endless summer that supposedly defined adolescence in southern California.

Edited out of utopia was the existence of a rapidly growing population of more than 1 million people of African, Asian, and Mexican ancestry. Their kids were restricted to a handful of beaches; everywhere else, they risked arrest by local cops or beatings by white gangs. As a result, Black surfers were almost as rare in LA as unicorns. Economic opportunity was also rationed.

During the first half of the 60s, hundreds of brand-new college classrooms beckoned to white kids with an offer of free higher education, while factories and construction sites begged for more workers. But failing inner-city high schools with extreme dropout rates reduced the college admissions of Black and brown youth to a small trickle. Despite virtually full employment for whites, Black youth joblessness dramatically increased, as did the index of residential segregation. If these were truly golden years of opportunity for white teenagers, their counterparts in South Central and East LA faced bleak, ultimately unendurable futures.

But LAs streets and campuses in the 60s also provided stages for many other groups to assert demands for free speech, equality, peace and justice. Initially these protests tended to be one-issue campaigns, but the grinding forces of repression above all the Vietnam draft and the LAPD drew them together in formal and informal alliances.

Thus LGBT activists coordinated actions with youth activists in protest of police and sheriffs dragnets on Sunset Strip, in turn making Free Huey one of their demands. When Black and Chicano high school kids blew out their campuses in 196869, several thousand white students walked out in solidarity. A brutal LAPD attack on thousands of middle-class antiwar protesters at the Century Plaza Hotel in 1967 hastened the development of a biracial coalition supporting Tom Bradley, a liberal Black council member, in his crusade to wrest City Hall from rightwing populist Sam Yorty.

In the same period, the antiwar movement joined hands with the Black Panthers to form Californias unique Peace and Freedom Party. There are many other examples. By 1968, as a result, the movement resembled the music of LA free jazz pianist Horace Tapscotts Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra: simultaneous solos together with unified crescendos. Historians of 60s protests have rarely studied the reciprocal influences and interactions across such broad spectrum of constituencies, and these linkages are too often neglected in memoirs, but they provide a principal terrain of our analysis.

The 60s in LA have obvious bookends. The year 1960 saw the appearance of social forces that would coalesce into the movements of the era, along with the emergence of a new agenda for social change, especially around what might be called the issue of issues: racial segregation. In LA, those developments overlapped with the beginning of the regime of Sam Yorty, elected mayor in 1961. 1973, on the other hand, marked not only the end of protest in the streets but also the defeat of Yorty and the advent of the efficient, pro-business administration of Tom Bradley.

There were also three important turning points that subdivide the long decade. 1963 was a rollercoaster year that witnessed the first: the rise and fall of the United Civil Rights Committee, the most important attempt to integrate housing, schools and jobs in LA through non-violent protest and negotiation. (Only Detroit produced a larger and more ambitious civil rights united front during what contemporaries called Birmingham Summer.) In California it brought passage of the states first Fair Housing Act repealed by referendum the following year in an outburst of white backlash.

1965, of course, saw the second turning point, the so-called Watts Riots. The third, 1969, began as a year of hope with a strong coalition of white liberals, Blacks and newly minted Chicanos supporting Bradley for mayor. He led the polls until election eve, when Yorty counterattacked with a vicious barrage of racist and red-baiting appeals to white voters. Bradleys defeat foreclosed, at least for the foreseeable future, any concessions to the citys minorities or liberal voters. Moreover, it was immediately followed by sinister campaigns, involving the FBI, the district attorneys office, and both the LAPD and LA county sheriffs, to destroy the Panthers, Brown Berets and other radical groups.

This is the true context underlying the creeping sense of dread and imminent chaos famously evoked by Joan Didion in her 1979 essay collection, The White Album. If helter skelter was unleashed after 1970, the Manson gang were bit players compared to the institutions of law and order. For the past half century, a number of stereotypes have framed our recollections of this age of revolt, but the Los Angeles experience confounds most cliches. In the standard narrative, for instance, college students, organized as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Free Speech Movement (FSM) in Berkeley, were the principal social actors, and the great engine rooms of protest were found at huge public university campuses in places like Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor, and Kent. (The exceptions, according to this narrative, were some historical Black colleges and Ivy League Columbia.)

In Los Angeles, however, it was junior and senior high schools that were the principal battlefields, and the majority of protesters were Black and brown. Indeed, as many as 20,000 inner-city teenagers and their white Westside allies participated in walkouts and demonstrations between 1967 and 1970. Members of college radical groups as well as the Black Panther party played significant roles as advisers to these protests, but the indigenous teenage leadership was most important. These struggles recruited hundreds of kids to groups like the Panthers and Brown Berets and gave birth to a unique high school New Left formation, the Red Tide.

The terrain of college protest in Los Angeles also differed from that of the mainstream. Of the two flagship local universities, the University of Southern California was a citadel of campus Republicanism, birthplace of Nixons so-called USC Mafia (and, as it turned out, the alma mater of several Watergate conspirators). UCLA, for its part, saw only episodic mass protests, most notably during Nixons invasion of Cambodia in spring 1970. The real homes of sustained student activism were the three inner-city community colleges (LA City College, Southwest College and East LA College), along with Cal State LA and Valley State (later Cal State, Northridge).

The latter was the site of a 196970 uprising by the Black Student Union and SDS that was quelled by police batons, mass arrests, and a staggering 1,730 felony charges against Black students: repression on a scale that rivaled or exceeded the more famous battles at San Francisco State.

Historians and political scientists have generally conceded that the one hundred or so ghetto insurrections of the 1960s should be regarded as genuine protests, but they have usually described them as leading to mere chaos and demoralization. Conventionally, rioters have been portrayed as the opposites of organizers and builders. This does not describe events in Los Angeles.

The 1965 explosion unified and energized a generation of young Black people, ended gang conflict for a number of years, and catalyzed the extraordinary Watts Renaissance, the citys most important arts and literary movement of the decade. Black Power became an aspiration shared by thousands, and in 1967 this grassroots unity found expression in the emergence of LAs Black Congress the more radical successor to the United Civil Rights Committee. It included SNCC, the Black Student Alliance, the Che-Lumumba Club of the Communist Party, the Black Panthers, and the powerful Us organization (or Organization Us) led by Ron Karenga. (The congress would later be destroyed by a violent conflict between Us and the Panthers, instigated and fueled by the FBIs secret Cointelpro program.)

Contests over public space were also extraordinarily important in Los Angeles. In part this was the legacy of earlier decades when the LAPDs notorious Red Squad had been the enforcer of the anti-union open shop doctrine, and when city hall supplied draconian anti-picketing and antifree speech ordinances. The 60s saw a renewal of this unsavory tradition.

The LAPD, aided by the LA county sheriffs, conducted an unending siege of bohemian Venice, tried to drive teenyboppers and hippies off Sunset Strip, regularly broke up peaceful love-ins and rallies in Griffith and Elysian Parks, suppressed lowriders on Whittier Boulevard, harassed kids selling the underground LA Free Press, raided coffeehouses and folk clubs, and invoked obscenity as an excuse to crack down on artists, poets and theater groups. No other major city outside of the deep south was subjected to such a fanatic and all-encompassing campaign to police space and control the night. Along with minorities, many young whites were also routinely victimized, leading hatred of the LAPD to grow into a common culture of resistance.

The cops, however, had a formidable opponent in the ACLU of Southern California, the national organizations most hard-charging and activist affiliate. When national ACLU director Roger Baldwin and a majority of the national leadership publicly embraced anti-communism in the late 1940s, AL Wirin, ACLU SoCals legendary chief counsel, pointedly challenged the ban on representing Communist party members in trial proceedings, taking on several cases in private practice.

Moreover, in 1952, the local branch chose as its new director Eason Monroe, a state college professor from San Francisco who had been fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. A decade later, Monroe charted a novel course for the affiliate by not only defending the local civil rights coalition in court but also joining in its leadership. Significantly, it was an ACLU team, led by UCLA professor John Caughey and his wife LaRee, that launched the legendary 1963 lawsuit to force integration of LAs de facto Jim Crow school system an effort that would reverberate for three decades. No other ACLU branch claimed such a large role in the decades protest movements.

Understanding Los Angeles in the 60s also requires rewriting the histories of gay liberation and the womens movement. Indeed, New York City was not the origin and center of everything. Los Angeles had the first gay street protest in America over police raids on the Black Cat Bar in Silver Lake, two years before the Stonewall uprising; it had the first gay church the Metropolitan community church, now the largest gay institution in the world; and it had the first officially recognized gay pride parade on Hollywood Boulevard in 1970. LA also witnessed the nations first police raid on a womens health clinic, following which the organizers were tried for practicing medicine without a license.

Finally, the course of events in Los Angeles challenged the myth that the Old Left was irrelevant in the 60s and that the New Left had invented itself ex nihilo. The Communist party, for its part, never appears in the standard narrative except as an unattractive corpse. But in Los Angeles its most unruly and dissident branch remained very much alive under the charismatic and eventually heretical leadership of Dorothy Healey.

Despite the partys devastating losses following Soviet secretary Nikita Khrushchevs 1956 Crimes of Stalin speech, Healey was determined to resurrect what she could of the 1940s Popular Front and to reach out to the new radicals on campus, in the ghettos and in the barrios. Still under the threat of a prison sentence, she found a niche at KPFK, the new 75,000-watt Pacifica Radio FM station, in 1959, where her Communist Commentary impressed even hostile listeners with its intelligence and wit although it almost cost the station its license. In 1966 she ran in the primary for county tax assessor and received a staggering 85,000 votes. By then the local Communist party had confidentially rebuilt many of its links with progressives in the Democratic party and had assumed an important role in the Peace Action Council. Its youth members, relatively unconstrained by a party line or adult control, played innovative roles in the early 60s, including participation in Southern Freedom Rides, and later, more influentially, as the Che-Lumumba Club which would become the political base of Angela Davis. For two generations Healey defined radicalism in the public eye.

This is a movement history of Los Angeles that looks at the city from the vantage points of its flatland neighborhoods and bohemian beaches where the young heroes of this story lived. We have tried to give human faces to social forces, to understand rebellion as a constant debate about goals and tactics, and to recall the passions of struggle, especially the power of love. It was also important to describe in some detail the machinery of racial oppression that kept good schools, well-paid jobs and suburban homes out of the reach of people living inside the citys ghettos and barrios.

At epic moments in the long decade the United Civil Rights campaign in 1963, the Watts uprising in 1965, and the wave of high school revolts from 1966 to 1969 the movement tried mightily to break through to the other side, only to face the batons and drawn guns of the LAPD. By 1973, repression had dug nearly 100 graves and put more than 10,000 protesters in jail or prison. An enormous effort has been made to trivialize the 60s and to bury its dreams in a paupers grave. But its unruly ghost, like that of the 1930s, still shakes its chains in the nightmares of elites.

View original post here:

Erased from utopia: the hidden history of LA's black and brown resistance - The Guardian

Nervous Recs: ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ Shows That the 90s Weren’t ‘Simpler Times’ – VICE

Posted on by

It's not every day that a new series unites two of my favorite actresses: Kerry Washington and Reese Witherspoon. It's been almost two decades since my introduction to Washington as she portrayed Chenille, a single teen mother in Save the Last Dance, and Witherspoon as Annette, the bad girl posing as a goody-two-shoes in Cruel Intentions. I could have spent quarantine diving into the hysteria of Tiger King, but I was craving a show something that had nothing to do with Joe Exotic.

Little did I know, Little Fires Everywhere, a new Hulu drama series, would bring elements of those characters to the series' Ohio suburb. Little Fires Everywhere is what happens when underlying tensions within race and class coalesce. It dismantles the whitewashed, homogenous 90s utopia that Friends embraced, revealing a less sunny version of the decade highlighting its subtle but still pervasive racism. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

The series, based on the novel by Celeste Ng, chronicles two families in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Mia Warren (played by Washington) and her daughter Pearl have never lived anywhere for more than a few months, and the Midwestern suburb is their newprobably temporaryhome. Elena Richardson (played by Witherspoon) is a journalist for the local paper, striving to be the quintessential supermom to four teenagers. Mia and Elena couldn't be more different; Mia smokes weed while working on her artwork, while Elena can't even say "vagina" at her book club about The Vagina Monologues. When Elena becomes Mia's landlord, we see life has dealt each mother different hands, and their respective social stigmas show that they've each made poor choicesjust different ones based on their places in this world.

Little Fires Everywhere doesn't only contextualize race in black and white terms; it also analyzes how race factors into motherhood and whom society considers a fit parent. When the neighborhood learns that the baby Elena's friend Linda plans to adopt is the child of Mia's coworker, a Chinese immigrant named Bebe, all hell breaks loose. This is Shaker Heights, after all, a community so concerned with appearances that you'll be fined if the grass on your lawn is over six inches. Worried that the biological mother might want to reclaim her maternal rights, Linda launches into a nasty rant about how Bebe is an "illegal alien" who doesn't deserve her baby. By episode six, we see Elena's journey with motherhood has been overwhelming for her, tooeven as a married woman with two homes and blinding white privilege. But Elena and Linda never consider why Bebe, an undocumented immigrant with few resources, might choose to leave her newborn child at a fire station.

At a glance, Little Fires Everywhere seems like your typical dose of middle-aged neighborhood drama, but it's so much more than that. The set design and soundtrack are spot-on (Chumbawamba's "Tubthumping" at the school dance is peak 1997), but the real beauty is in the details of how the mothers interact with each other. Elena, afraid to be perceived as racist, asks Mia to be her "house manager," though she really means her maid. Elena's daughter Lexie uses a racist experience Pearl had at school for her Yale admission essay, turning it into a bogus story about sexism and third-wave feminismand somehow, it isn't even the worst thing she does to Pearl. The Richardsons are rigid in how they cling to calling Black people "African Americans," despite discussing the term as antiquated over dinner. It's a clever window into how the family dismisses race, even though their lives are consumed by it.

"You made this about race the day you stood on the street and begged me to be your maid," Mia tells Elena. "White women always be friends with their maid. I was not your maid, Elena. And I was never your friend."

Mia's outburst to Elena stands to be the crux of the entire series. There is a constant need to reboot the sitcoms of the 90s, holding on to the idea that somehow they were simpler times. But for some, they weren't. The microaggressions were always there, and they still are. Racism is not always outfitted in a Southern drawl. Sometimes, it looks like the white picket fences, otherwise known as the American dream.

Little Fires Everywhere is available to stream on Hulu.

Kristin Corry is a staff writer for VICE.

See original here:

Nervous Recs: 'Little Fires Everywhere' Shows That the 90s Weren't 'Simpler Times' - VICE

Animal Crossing Has Some Crazy HousesHere Are the Best – HouseBeautiful.com

Posted on by

It's been more than a month since much of America began social distancing in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, and we're all turning to different indoor activities. While some have embraced binge-watching TV shows like Tiger King to pass the time, others have picked up a bit of a video game habitnamely, by obsessively playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Launched on March 20, the life simulation video game is the fifth in Nintendo's Animal Crossing series, which debuted in 2001, and is the first developed specifically for the Nintendo Switch console. It begins at the airport. You, a cute little cartoon character, are whisked away to a private island, where you and some new anthropomorphic animal neighbors are going build your own utopia with the help of a company called Nook Inc. Sound idyllic? It is! And a little creepy? You betcha!

But truthfully, the game is more adorable than ominous. You spend your days fishing, collecting seashells, and catching butterflies as you explore your scenic island, plus and building everything your new society might need, like a shop and a museum. You're not stuck on your island forever, eitherif you pay for an online subscription (the payment is IRL, mind you), you can actually visit your friends' islands. It's more or less the ultimate form of escapism in the age of social distancing.

Of particular interest to us at House Beautiful, however, is the fact that you can customize your home, la The Sims. While you start out by camping in a very basic tent, you can take out an interest-free loan to upgrade to a house, which is highly customizable. Players have created mansions with some pretty gorgeous roomsand some really unusual ones. Check out a few standouts we've seen across social media below.

We'll start nice and straightforward. How lovely is this study-like basement, complete with a library corner, a fireplace, and a model train table?

2. Chill Onsen

We *wish* we had a Spirited Awaythemed onsen like this in our house during quarantine.

3. Flower Power

A touch Van Gogh with the sunflowers, a touch Scandi-chic with the wood furniture. We like.

4. Zen Garden

Sure, this is a little trippy, but what's a video game if not the perfect escape from our daily lives?

5. Plant/Garden/Spa Room

What exactly is the purpose of this Japanese-style room? Not sure, but we love it all the same!

6. Witchy Room

In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you can get a little alternative with your decor. As a commenter tweeted, "[L]ooks like a place I could get a tarot card reading and a cheap tattoo."

7. Bunny Day Room

Yes, this is an Easter themed room. There are special events throughout the game tied to real-world occurrences like Easter and cherry blossom season, in which you can craft special decorations for your house.

8. Star Room

Sign us up for one ticket to the moon, please!

9. Golden Room

We might be a *touch* concerned that we'll be sacrificed in this room, but props for the cool Indiana Jones vibes.

10. Turnip Room

Sometimes you can buy turnips for really low prices during gameplay. Sometimes players might hoard them they like would toilet paper during a real-life pandemic, which leads them to create turnip storage rooms. We're not here to judge. (Okay, we are judging you about the toilet paper...)

Follow House Beautiful on Instagram.

Excerpt from:

Animal Crossing Has Some Crazy HousesHere Are the Best - HouseBeautiful.com

What Were the Origins of the Holocaust? – The New York Times

Posted on by

Still, Aly has a masterly command of the facts of the Nazi catastrophe, its bricks and mortar amassed in all their mountainous detail. And the details he captures are all the more crucial because they are generally inaccessible in secondary sources elsewhere.

Curiously, Aly sees his new book as something more than a historical narrative: It is, he suggests, a guide for how to prevent similar horrors from happening in the future. Thus, it begins (this a jarring turn for a study of the backdrop to Nazi genocide) with Zionisms progenitor, Theodor Herzl. In Alys version, Herzl sought to guide the construction in the Middle East of a European-inspired, Jewishly homogeneous nation-state, with its predictable outcome: the dismissal of the lands indigenous population, a tragedy that festers to the present day.

Herzl is portrayed, at the same time, as a prescient prophet of doom, who sees more starkly than most the dangerous development in Europe of a view of Jews as disruptive immigrants, subversive radicals and intolerable economic competitors. Herzls solution, as Aly sums it up, is Jewish settlement on the empty spaces on earth so that Jews can create a homogeneous nation at peace with itself.

This he culls from Herzls diaries. But the problem once again is with Alys inclination to flatten his details. Herzl does indeed say all that Aly attributes to him, but as the Harvard historian Derek Penslar has observed, Herzls diaries are not a readily transparent source for his politics since theyre often punctuated by fevered speculations on matters contradicted by Herzl elsewhere. This is especially true with regard to his late-life novel Old-New Land, the work probably dearest to Herzls heart, where Palestine is depicted as a social utopia with Arabs and Jews living peacefully side by side. There the villain is a heinous Jewish ethnocentric.

Alys book appears, of course, at a moment when anti-Semitism seems ascendant, yet also when the chasm between proponent and foe is more confounding than ever. Israels Benjamin Netanyahu is now the most articulate, respectable proponent of much the same far-right nationalist populism that has historically nurtured anti-Jewish hatred. And in the United States the White House continues to stoke anti-Semitisms embers, branding others as purveyors of hate while itself remaining the bearer of insidious messages that cut deep into public life.

Alys reminder of the usefulness of taking a close look at the quiet horrors of Europes interwar years thus, despite the shortcomings of his new book, feels all the more valuable today. And his acknowledgment that comparisons between now and then once the province of the ill-informed deserve more serious attention from historians and others is just one of many reminders as to how far weve stumbled into an age of troubled sleep.

See the rest here:

What Were the Origins of the Holocaust? - The New York Times

Surveillance Capitalism: Bigger Brother | by Tim Wu – The New York Review of Books

Posted on by

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

by Shoshana Zuboff

PublicAffairs, 691 pp., $38.00

In the 1970s, when Shoshana Zuboff was a graduate student in Harvards psychology department, she met the behavioral psychologist B.F.Skinner. Skinner, who had perhaps the largest forehead youll ever see on an adult, is best remembered for putting pigeons in boxes (so-called Skinner boxes) and inducing them to peck at buttons for rewards. Less well remembered is the fact that he constructed a larger box, with a glass window, for his infant daughter, though this was revealing of his broader ambitions.

Zuboff writes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that her conversations with Skinner left me with an indelible sense of fascination with a way of construing human life that wasand isfundamentally different from my own. Skinner believed that humans could be conditioned like any other animal, and that behavioral psychology could and should be used to build a technological utopia where citizens were trained from birth to be altruistic and community-oriented. He published a novel, Walden Two (1948), that depicted what just such a society would look likea kind of Brave New World played straight.

It would risk grave understatement to say that Zuboff does not share Skinners enthusiasm for the mass engineering of behavior. Zuboff, a professor at Harvard Business School since 1981, has made a career of criticizing the lofty ambitions of technoprophets, making her something of a cousin to the mass media critic Neil Postman, author of Technopoly (1992). Her intimate understanding of Skinner gives her an advantage that other technoskeptics lack. For as she posits in her latest book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, we seem to have wandered into a dystopian version of Skinners future, thanks mainly to Google, Facebook, and their peers in the attention economy. Silicon Valley has invented, if not yet perfected, the technology that completes Skinners vision, and so, she believes, the behavioral engineering of humanity is now within reach.

In case youve been living in blissful ignorance, it works like this. As you go through life, phone in hand, Google, Facebook, and other apps on your device are constantly collecting as much information as possible about you, so as to build a profile of who you are and what you like. Google, for its part, keeps a record of all your searches; it reads your e-mail (if you use Gmail) and follows where you go with Maps and Android. Facebook has an unparalleled network of trackers installed around the Web that are constantly figuring out what you are looking at online. Nor is this the end of it: any appliance labeled smart would more truthfully be labeled surveillance-enhanced, like our smart TVs, which detect what we are watching and report back to the mothership. An alien might someday ask how the entire population was bugged.

This is exclusive content for subscribers only.Get unlimited access to The New York Review for just $1 an issue!

View Offer

Continue reading this article, and thousands more from our archive, for the low introductory rate of just $1 an issue. Choose a Print, Digital, or All Access subscription.

If you are already a subscriber, please be sure you are logged in to your nybooks.com account. You may also need to link your website account to your subscription, which you can do here.

Read the original post:

Surveillance Capitalism: Bigger Brother | by Tim Wu - The New York Review of Books

Abigail Thernstrom, conservative voice on voting rights and education, dies at 83 – Thehour.com

Posted on by

Political scientist Abigail Thernstrom and her husband, historian Stephan Thernstrom, in 1997.

Political scientist Abigail Thernstrom and her husband, historian Stephan Thernstrom, in 1997.

Photo: Photo By Michele McDonald For The Washington Post

Political scientist Abigail Thernstrom and her husband, historian Stephan Thernstrom, in 1997.

Political scientist Abigail Thernstrom and her husband, historian Stephan Thernstrom, in 1997.

Abigail Thernstrom, conservative voice on voting rights and education, dies at 83

Abigail Thernstrom, a political scientist who was steeped in left-wing politics from childhood but became an influential conservative voice on racial equality, voting rights and education, died April 10 at a hospital in Arlington, Virginia. She was 83.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter, author and journalist Melanie Thernstrom, who said that Dr. Thernstrom went into a coma about a week earlier. She had tested negative for the novel coronavirus, and it was unclear what had caused her decline, her daughter said.

Thernstrom was launched to national prominence with the publication of "America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible" (1997), an optimistic and polarizing survey of race relations in America written with her husband, Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom. Across 700 pages thick with charts, graphs and academic citations, they argued that African-Americans had made extraordinary gains over the past five decades, while lamenting that not enough progress had been made.

In television appearances and essays for publications including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the Thernstroms went on to champion a "colorblind" society while opposing the use of racial preferences, which they deemed divisive, inessential and largely ineffective. Their work made them two of America's leading conservative opponents of affirmative action - and stunned former allies on the left, who knew the Thernstroms from their earlier activism on behalf of liberal causes.

Thernstrom, who was raised on a left-wing commune outside New York City, had sung alongside Pete Seeger at the progressive Little Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich Village, picketed a Woolworth's department store to protest segregation and campaigned for presidential nominee George S. McGovern, voting for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in 1988.

A year earlier, she challenged the creation of "majority-minority" electoral districts in her book "Whose Votes Count?," arguing that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 successfully opened polling booths to Southern blacks but should never have been used to create "safe" seats for minority politicians.

The book was later described by the American Prospect as "a virtual bible among conservative jurists, including Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas." But it was far from a right-wing treatise, winning the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (given to works focused on racism and diversity), and marked what Thernstrom described as a continuation of her longtime views.

"I'd say we've stuck to our principles over the years: Don't judge people on the basis of the color of their skin," she told The Washington Post in 1997. It was a shame, she said, that "the classic civil rights message is now called conservatism."

Thernstrom ultimately identified with the neoconservative movement, her husband said, and developed affiliations with a host of libertarian and conservative organizations, including the Center for Equal Opportunity, the Institute for Justice, the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute, where she was a senior fellow.

She also served on the Massachusetts Board of Education for more than a decade, championing charter schools and overhauls to state testing, and was vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during the George W. Bush administration. In an email, her daughter recalled that Thernstrom "infuriated her fellow Republicans (whom she disliked and referred to as 'political hacks') by voting with the Democrats more than with them."

Thernstrom remained best known for "America in Black and White," which she and her husband described as a spiritual sequel to "An American Dilemma," Gunnar Myrdal's classic 1944 study on race relations. Progress had been made since then, they argued, but "black crime," black nationalism and race-conscious programs such as affirmative action had stalled the march toward racial equality.

"I really believe it is the biggest book on race in a long time," Clint Bolick, then litigation director of the Institute for Justice, told The Post after its release. "I think that it is testimony to the deep substance of the book. They are out to prove their case, not simply throw rhetoric."

Some scholars, including economist Glenn Loury, argued with the Thernstroms' interpretation of crime and education data. Liberal critics said that the authors' opposition to preferences for African Americans ignored the enduring effects of slavery and racial discrimination; others accused them of striking a condescending tone.

"Here are two white people who are essentially lecturing black Americans," political scientist Andrew Hacker told the Times, "saying: 'What are you complaining about? Stop your griping. Here are the data. You're better off than ever before.' "

Thernstrom, who said she had hoped to elevate the national dialogue surrounding race, was invited to a confrontational town hall meeting on race by President Bill Clinton, who sparred with her over abolishing the Army's affirmative-action program and later invited the Thernstroms to the Oval Office for further discussion.

"This is simply an effort to draw a series of maps, to supply data, to teach how to weigh evidence," Thernstrom told The Post in 1997, responding to some of the criticism of her book. "Other people are going to be critics of our analysis. That's great. The data are there for them to analyze."

Abigail Mann was born in New York City on Sept. 14, 1936, and grew up in nearby Croton-on-Hudson. Her mother was a Jewish emigre from Germany, and her father owned a collective farm, home to left-wing intellectuals as well as Holocaust refugees.

"Unfortunately neither he nor any of the other people involved knew anything about farming," Thernstrom's daughter said in a phone interview. "They were all highly educated radicals, with the idea of living on the land and creating this utopia. . . . Animals were always dying, and nothing ever worked out."

Both parents sympathized with the Soviet Union, turning toward secular communism as a replacement for the Orthodox Judaism in which they were raised, and Thernstrom recalled early years "in a very racially integrated scene." She graduated from Elisabeth Irwin High in Manhattan and studied modern European history at Barnard College.

After receiving a bachelor's degree in 1958, she entered Harvard as a graduate student. She soon met Stephan Thernstrom, then a PhD student in American history, and switched from Middle Eastern studies to the government department, with a focus on constitutional law. "We just seemed to magically fit," her husband said in a phone interview, recalling their initial attraction.

They were married in 1959, a few months after they started dating.

While Stephan launched his academic career at the University of California at Los Angeles, Abigail delayed her doctoral research to focus on raising their two children: Melanie, of Palo Alto, California; and Samuel, of Arlington, Virginia. They survive her, in addition to her husband, of McLean, Virginia; and four grandchildren.

Thernstrom received her master's in 1961 and doctorate in 1975. She began teaching in Harvard's social studies program that same year and also reviewed books for the New Republic (then owned by a friend from Harvard, Marty Peretz), wrote for the Economist magazine and published some of her first voting rights articles in the Public Interest, a neoconservative journal.

With her husband, she edited the essay collection "Beyond the Color Line" (2001) and wrote "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning" (2003). She later published the solo volume "Voting Rights - and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections" (2009).

Thernstrom could be mischievous, telling the American Prospect that she and her husband had hung a framed photograph of Thomas, the Supreme Court justice and conservative icon, above their office fireplace "to make reporters faint."

"I've got a problem with being stuffed into boxes," she told the magazine. "Put me in a room of conservatives and I start running to the left; put me in a group of liberals and I start running to the right. I mean, I just have problems with ideologically coercive environments - I get claustrophobic."

Read the rest here:

Abigail Thernstrom, conservative voice on voting rights and education, dies at 83 - Thehour.com

Has Coronavirus Made the Internet Better? – The New York Times

Posted on by

For a time, futurists dreamed, optimistically, that cyberspace might exist as a place where humankind could hit reset on society. The idea was that the arrival of networked computers would create an imaginary space where bodily markers of difference would be masked by a Utopian fog. In 1996, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, John Perry Barlow issued a manifesto titled A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which stated, We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force or station of birth. Barlow continued that the civilization he and others hoped to create would be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

By now we know that those dreams were a fantasy, informed by the same imperialistic and colonial urges that underpinned the creation of the internet itself. No dream internet Utopia ever emerged. Instead, societal woes have been compounded by the rise of technology. The internet has been oriented around an axis of maximizing profits, almost since its inception. In The Know-It-Alls, the journalist (and my former colleague) Noam Cohen documents the emergence of Stanford University (nicknamed Get Rich U.) as the birthplace of Silicon Valley, a place where a hackers arrogance and an entrepreneurs greed has turned a collective enterprise like the web into something proprietary, where our online profiles, our online relationships, our online posts and web pages and photographs are routinely exploited for business reasons. Today, it feels almost impossible to imagine another way of thinking about the internet.

And yet, in the aftermath of the arrival of the novel coronavirus, one has emerged that feels, at least for the moment, closer to John Perry Barlows embarrassingly earnest speech. Its worth noting that he also said that cyberspace was an act of nature, and it grows itself through our collective actions.

Historically speaking, new infrastructures tend to emerge as a response to disasters and the negligence of governments in their wake. In the 1970s, for example, an activist group called the Young Lords seized an X-ray truck that was administering tuberculosis tests in East Harlem, where the disease was prevalent, and extended the operating hours to make it more readily available to working residents. In the days since the crisis began, Ive been turning to Adrienne Maree Browns 2017 book, Emergent Strategy, which offers strategies for reimagining ways to organize powerful movements for social justice and mutual aid with a humanist, collective, anticapitalist framework. She describes the concept as how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for. Her book asks us not to resist change. That would be as futile as resisting the deeply embedded influence technology has on our lives. Its the same as resisting ourselves. But rather, it asks that we adapt, in real time, taking what we know and understand and applying it toward the future that we want. The internet will never exist without complications already, many of the tools that are helping acclimate to this new cyberreality have been called out for surveillance but perhaps people are learning how to work the tools to their advantage now.

View original post here:

Has Coronavirus Made the Internet Better? - The New York Times

Brought to you by nature: Death, destruction, and pandemics – Grist

Posted on by

News on climate in the time of coronavirusSubscribe today

The natural world can be wonderful, but its often terrible. It tortures the creatures within it, kills infants, and, oh yeah, produces pandemic viruses. This isnt incidental; its central, the very engine of evolution. Yet, when people see the word natural in the grocery store aisle, it conjures up sunshine, happy chickens, and warm hugs. You forget all the nasty bits.

Theres no chance that supermarket shoppers will mistake all natural for a warning instead of an endorsement, writes Alan Levinovitz in his new book. Natural: How Faith in Natures Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science. It scrutinizes the way people use the idea of natural goodness to justify their position whether its free-market boosterism, opposition to birth control, or supporting farm-to-table restaurants. This naturalness, he writes, is a mercenary ethic that anyone can hire to fight for their cause.

Levinovitz teaches religion at James Madison University, and to him, the way we embrace the idea of natural goodness looks exactly like religion. So when the coronavirus began to spread earlier this year, Levinovitz waited for people to react as if it were an act of a vengeful God, retribution for humans sinning against nature. He didnt have to wait long. Youve probably seen the memes suggesting that We are the virus.

Get Grist in your inboxAlways free, always fresh

The Beacon Other choices

Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy

We asked Levinovitz what he means when he says allegiance to nature has the hallmarks of religion, why nature has such a strong grip on our collective unconscious, and how we might think differently if we stopped believing in a God-like nature.

Q. Lets start with the coronavirus. Why are people drawn to this idea of nature taking retribution on destructive humans?

A. When confronted with unexpected suffering we want to take universalizable lessons from it. It feels like we should have an existential solution to what feels like an existential problem. So with coronavirus, the real solutions arent universal truths. They are very local, specific fixes: Figure out how to better regulate our interactions with wild species; figure out how to slow the spread of viruses quickly; figure out the infrastructure to deal with sick people. But those kinds of solutions dont address the existential angst, so people turn to things like, This is our punishment for living wrong, or the meme that humans are the virus, which is taken from the movie The Matrix.

Q. So people are looking for a more meaningful way to explain the pandemic?

A. There are more sophisticated versions of the humans are the virus messages, but in the end they all boil down to: There is a harmony in nature, and humans disrupt it in a variety of ways whether its through burning forests, or industrial agriculture, or eating the wrong kind of animal. At the end of the day its this search for universal laws that we have violated. If you can explain the pandemic as the consequence of violating natures laws that is reassuring because it means you know what went wrong, you know how to fix it, and you know how to fix the future. Thats extremely important, especially in times of crisis. If you are not going to locate those universal laws in God, you have to locate them in some other harmonious entity.

Its no coincidence that the same narrative comes up all the time with religion: Why was there a hurricane? Because people were having unnatural sex. This idea that living unnaturally results in a punishment, has been around for a very long time. So Im not surprised to see the same kinds of things coming up. The important thing to note is that this time they look secular, even when they are actually religious.

Q. Some people might be thinking, Wait, I say things like, its only natural, all the time! Is that a sign of stealth religious faith?

A. The idea that natural is good is so baked into our language, our consciousness, and even the subconscious myths that guide us through the world, that it can sometimes be difficult to get out of those myths and see them for what they are. One way to make it visible is to point to its inverse, the futurists myth. So the futurist looks to a utopia in which nature has disappeared and things are harmonious because humans have complete control. And to most people, myself included, that way of thinking makes no sense. We would never say, The computer works because it is unnatural. We would never say, Eyeglasses are beneficial because they are artificial. That is a bizarre way to think about things! Yet we attribute the same kind of causal goodness to nature all the time: This food is good for kids because it is natural. And we invert it too: Screens are bad for our children because they are unnatural. What I want people to understand is that that makes no more or less sense than saying things are good because they are artificial.

Q. Why does this way of thinking have so much power over us?

A. The word natural itself has to do with origins and birth. It really is an organizing force from beyond and before humans. Nature really did give birth to our solar system, to life, to humans, plants, and animals. So theres something tremendously compelling about that force. And theres an intuition that we ought to be grateful for it, right? Its a respect for a cosmic force, like the respect one might have for their parents. Surely its a good force, surely its a force we should not violate. So thats a big part of why we have this reflexive respect for nature and naturalness.

Q. I wrote a book, All Natural, on the same subject, and one of the conclusions I came to was that this nostalgia for a pre-industrial Eden was really a nostalgia for childhood. What do you think about that?

A. Nostalgia takes you back to a simpler time. But that simplicity comes from the fact that you are ignorant of the complexity. The childlike vision of the world is one where you dont understand how things work: The dishes just magically get washed, and the food magically appears, and theres something wonderful about that. People who dont study the pre-industrial past have that same childlike vision of what life was like because they dont know all of the bad things about it. Nostalgia is a selective forgetting.

Q. How did your own belief system change as you investigated this?

A. I went into this book thinking it was going to be a straight debunking of naturalness. Thats not where I ended up. I ended up thinking it makes sense to value things simply because they are natural: Yellowstone National Park is valuable because it is more natural than other places. Its fine to value naturalness in the same way that we might value freedom or beauty. The problem is that its not the only value which is where you get when you confuse nature with God. That means there are going to be tradeoffs sometimes. Sometimes whats natural is not going to be good for our health. Sometimes whats natural take Yellowstone is not going to be good for something else we value, like accessibility. You have to have a road through Yellowstone Park or people cant get to it, so you make it slightly less natural. I came out of this project thinking we need to be able to love and value nature without worshipping it. That is to say, without assuming that any departure from nature is corrupt or bad.

Q. But where does that leave you? Practically, in your daily life.

A. My editors asked the same thing. Whats the alternative? We run into these questions all the time. How do I parent my kid? What do I eat? How should I choose to give birth? When you take away that simple and existentially satisfying rule of thumb that natural is good, you need to put something in its place.

My answer to that is that we need to be comfortable with uncertainty. Sometimes the natural approach will be better. Sometimes the natural approach will be worse. Its unfortunate because thats not a satisfying theological answer.

Q. It can be an exciting answer though. Embracing uncertainty means embracing dynamism and wonder.

A. I love the word wonder because wonder is an optimists synonym for doubt or uncertainty. To wonder is to not know. But its to not know in a way that makes for awe and joy rather than anxiety and ignorance.

One thing thats really helped me, especially during this uncertain time, is that I dont see uncertainty as something that needs to be overcome, but celebrated instead. As I was talking to the experts I interviewed for this book, I noticed that the most knowledgeable people are more attuned to complexity: The more you learn, the more your expectations are overturned, and that experience of uncertainty becomes normal.

This is really important at this time of the pandemic. Its OK imperative even to change our minds. When a scientific body or a government shifts its position on something because new data has come in, that does not represent weakness or a violation of a law that we used to think was universal. It just means that they are being responsible rather than dogmatic. Reframing uncertainty as wonder, and certainty as dogmatism, can do a lot for feeling more secure in our uncertainty.

The way that humanity tackles this pandemic parallels how it might fight climate change. Sign up for our semi-weekly newsletter,Climate in the Time of Coronavirus.

Follow this link:

Brought to you by nature: Death, destruction, and pandemics - Grist