How one camp is changing the lives of many – The McDaniel Free Press

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What is your idea of the perfect utopia for kids? Where would you want to see your younger loved ones spend their summer? Regardless of where you choose, your loved ones belong in a place where they are respected, loved, and appreciated. My idea of the perfect utopia for kids is far more than any physical place. A utopia is more of how you feel rather than where you find yourself. That utopia is Camp Uncommon.

Camp Uncommon is a camp that runs over the course of the summer and prioritizes children in elementary and middle school from impoverished neighborhoods. Camp Uncommon serves children from a number of cities such as Boston, Camden, New York, Newark, Rochester, and Troy. Camp gives children the opportunity to venture outside of their neighborhoods and connect with other kids who, in most cases, become lifelong friends. Camp Uncommon first began in the summer of 2016 at Colby College, but has since changed locations to Poyntelle, Pa.

Camp Uncommon is split up intofour different sessions to accommodate as many kids as possible.The goal this past summer was to share the experience with overone thousand kids, which is now the largestnumber of kidsthey have ever served in camp history. In previous years, they have only had about 500 kids over a span of two weeks, butthey believe so strongly in theirmission of giving children the best summer ever thatthey continue to groweachyear.

Children who attend Camp Uncommon engage in various activities throughout the course of the summer such as hiking, nature discovery, athletics, arts, and STEM courses. Alongside the various physical activities the kids take part in during their time at camp, they are also immersed in character building activities such as Discovery and Morning/Evening Summit. Discovery takes place every other day during the span of two weeks and focuses on self reflection as well other values of the day such as empathy, gratitude, wisdom, and honesty. Camp Uncommon prioritizes making kids summer enjoyable, but also insightful so they can become young leaders the following school year.

Camp Uncommonnot only benefits the kids who attend, but also helps employees with their future by building qualities needed for adulthood, college, and teaching. Most employees at Camp Uncommon are teachers themselves, or are getting involved with teaching as a career. Camp Uncommon is under Uncommon Schools so most people find themselves with an opportunity to have a career in teaching after their first or second summer with Camp Uncommon. Aside from this career opportunity, Camp Uncommon also employs high school juniors as junior counselors, which is a good way for them to gain a recommendation for college applications and a paying job for the summer.

In my own experience, Camp Uncommon has strengthened my college application, given me a new perspective on life, and has granted me with life-long connections that I cherish.My coworkers similarly believe Camp Uncommon has made a difference in their lives.

Its made me a more responsible and aware person in my professional life, said Louis Copin. Its made me more comfortable in who I am and expressing who I am no matter who is around me.

Working at Camp Uncommon has encouraged me to step out of my shell, and network with different people, which ultimately made me trust myself more and give new things a try, Tyriq Presely added.

Camp Uncommons ultimate goal is to provide the best summer for as many kids as possible every year.More information about the camp can be found on their website and Instagram page.

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How one camp is changing the lives of many - The McDaniel Free Press

On her 80th birthday: Margaret Atwood points the way toward a new humanity – People’s World

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Canadian author Margaret Atwood speaks during a press conference at the British Library to launch her new book 'The Testaments' in London, Sept. 10, 2019. | Alastair Grant / AP

Margaret Atwood, who turns 80 on November 18, 2019, has written several novels that explore dystopian situations or circumstances where people are subjected to control and violence. The most famous of these is The Handmaids Tale (1985). However, what distinguishes Atwoods work is that people resist such coercion, not just in individual acts but most successfully as part of a secret group or illicit organization. This might be considered a leitmotif of her work. We encounter such resistance not only in The Handmaids Tale, but also elsewhere, for example, in the deeply disturbing The Heart Goes Last (2015), or in her contemporary take on Shakespeares The Tempest, Hag-Seed (2016).

Oscar Wilde, in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, had this to say about hopes for a positive future:

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.

Utopia, according to Wilde, is the hope of a better possible life, one where humanity will feel at home. Thinking about what will define such an ideal, and that progresses toward it, occupied writers from Thomas More to William Morris. With the Industrial Revolution and the appearance of more hidden forces at work in society at the beginning of the 19th century, the arts increasingly reflected the experience of horror, and of extreme violence over people and nature. The old, visible powers of feudal society (God, king, law) enter into an alliance with the invisible powers of capital power, and everyday life becomes a world in which the ghostly omnipresent terror of an anonymous dominating and oppressive power can break out at any time. Examples of such horror include the work of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Goyas Caprichos and Desastres de la Guerra, Schuberts Winterreise. Toward the end of the 19th century, further manifestations are Stokers Dracula and Munchs The Scream.

These visions of horror become the dystopias of the 20th and 21st centuries, many leaving little hope for liberation. Continuing wars, with their displacement of people, the ever increasing anonymity of domination and accompanying loss of control, as well as environmental disaster are all valid factors feeding into this pessimism.

The Maddaddam trilogy

Margaret Atwoods Maddaddam trilogy imagines an all but post-human world. She explores a world where the free market has led to global anarchy. A technocracy of enormous corporations has destroyed national governments, communities, the ecosystem and, finally almost extinguished life on the planet. Apart from some very few humans, there are left genetically engineered animals such as pigoons, wolvogs and rakunks, and artificially created creatures called Crakers, produced by Crake in his top-secret Paradice project.

Oryx and Crake is the first of the trilogy; Year of the Flood the second, and Maddaddam concludes it. Oryx and Crake sets the scene. The time is in the future, however, the elements making up this future have their recognizable roots in our present. The world is divided into the haves and have-nots. The haves are the corporations; their employees live in corporation compounds. They are given better lifestyles than the working-class pleebland inhabitants. The raison dtre of the companies is to produce, in competition with others, products promising eternal youth, vitality, sexual prowess, and the promise of resulting happiness: AnooYoo, HelthWyzer, OrganInc and RejoovenEsense. OrganInc created pigoons to grow organs for transplant. AnooYou is designed to prey on the phobias and void the bank accounts of the anxious and the gullible. HelthWyzer manufactures pills for profit, not for health, indeed, health is one of their last considerations. In the race for profits, they introduce viruses into their health products, to which they can then develop and sell antidotes. Wars over markets are commonplace.

The compounds are policed by private Corporation Security, CorpSeCorps, who control their populations movements, by violence and murder, if they deem it necessary. Opposition is not tolerated.

A hierarchy exists among the corporations, some being rather less successful and thereby poorer than others. The wealthiest ones still provide real food to their workers; the less successful ones seem to be sliding into the artificial food and other conditions imposed on the outside world. This setting is the profit-making class with its more or less bribed employees.

The outside world is called Pleebland (plebeian land, desolate neighborhoods, where the poor live). The pleeblands still contain cities like New New York and San Francisco and hold some attraction for the corporation employees as, while dangerous and diseased, places of entertainment and time out. Permission and passes are required to go there. This is where the poor live, those at whom the sale of products is aimed.

The story is told from the point of view of Snowman from the novels current time, with flashbacks to his past when he was still Jimmy. His best friend at the time, Glenn, is referred to as Crake, a name he picked as a character in an online game the two played, Extinctathon, controlled by the enigmatic Maddaddam.

Both characters have parents who have disappeared. Crakes father died in a car accident when Crake was very young. Crake believes his father was eliminated for objecting to the practice of introducing disease into the population in order to profit from then selling the remedy. Jimmys mother, whom the reader gets to know better, runs away from the compound and protests against their practices. Such defection is dangerous, and she knows she needs to disappear without a trace. The corporation tries to locate her, follow her surreptitious messages to Jimmy, and interrogate him occasionally regarding her whereabouts. It is likely, although not certain, that Jimmy and Crake witness her execution online.

These two people are not the only examples of resistance to corporate rule. During the coffee war, there is mention that Union dockworkers in Australia, where they still had unions, refused to unload Happicuppa cargoes. While Crakes fathers protest is an individual one, these dockworkers act in unison, and they are supported: in the United States, A Boston Coffee Party sprang up. Jimmys mother, too, has clearly joined opposition groups. When Jimmy hears from her or sees her online, she is always part of broader movements.

Crakes highly valued academic science and maths skills ensure his speedy progression in corporation hierarchy. Jimmys verbal skills land him in advertising. Eventually, Crake brings him to the most powerful RejoovenEsense corporation, in which he is a high senior operator. Jimmys job here is to run the ad campaign for BlyssPluss, a product to increase sexual performance, protect against STDs, extend youth, and function as male and female birth control to reduce global population. Secretly, Crake works on the creation of humanoids, the Children of Crake. These are grown in an artificial dome.

Jimmy and Crake both love Oryx, whom they first see in a child pornography film. She is Asian by birth and was sold, as was common practice in her village, to a white man. Her odyssey brings her to North America and Crake later hires her to be a teacher for his Crakers: to explain simple concepts and communicate with them. She also markets BlyssPluss around the world.

When the catastrophe strikes, both Crake and Oryx die violently, and Jimmy takes the Children of Crake to a safe place by the sea. Just how safe this place is, is debatable, as the environment is badly damaged and they need to seek food and other essentials for survival. The children of Crake have been programmed to live on plants only.

This first volume of the trilogy ends as first the Children of Crake, later Snowman, encounter other human survivors. Perhaps playing on a set of fossilized early human footprints discovered on the shore of Langebaan Lagood, South Africa, in 1995, here too, Snowman traces the whereabouts of the humans by following their imprints on the beach. He finds Two men, one brown, one white, a tea-colored woman. He is uncertain as to what to expect, knowing his own species, and considers different scenarios of how to relate to them. In the end, he leaves them without making himself known and returns to the Children of Crake, who he knows are nave, friendly, peaceful, and care for him.

Toward a new humanity

While Oryx and Crake (2003) is set in the Compounds, the second volume in the trilogy, The Year of the Flood (2009), is set contemporaneously in the violent and disease-ridden pleeblands. This is where the novels central female characters, Toby and Ren, live, relating the stories of their lives and individual survival of Crakes pandemic. The narrative shift from compound to pleebland is echoed in the transition from individual narrator to two narrators, from male to female, from isolation to group.

The two women had been members of a religious sect (albeit themselves not terribly religious), the pacifist and ecological Gods Gardeners, who had predicted the apocalyptic Waterless Flood brought about by environmental destruction. As they see it, Crakes pandemic is this flood. Gods Gardeners is a dropout group, which is not idealized by Atwood, but shown with its own weaknesses.

A disagreement over tactics causes Zeb to leave the pacifist Gardeners and engage in active bioterrorist opposition to the Corporations security police. As the narrative draws toward the present, surviving Gardeners are forced into hiding and are hounded by dehumanized criminals (painballers), who murder and kidnap. Echoing the ending of Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood concludes as the main characters find other survivors, including Jimmy, and the two painballers, along with their kidnap victim. They do not kill their criminal captives, but tie them up and feed them. The closing paragraph announces the arrival of Crakes Children approaching them, many people singing. Now we can see the flickering of their torches, winding towards us through the darkness of the trees.

The final book in the trilogy, Maddaddam (2013), is written from the perspective of Zeb and Toby, who were both introduced in The Year of the Flood. Their stories are told in the wake of the same biological disaster. They eventually meet up with Jimmy (from Oryx and Crake) and other survivors. Together with the Crakers, they start remaking civilization, but are still troubled by criminals. Some humans mate with the Crakers, but eventually die out. The end part of the story is told by the human-like new race. They are peace-loving and environmentally aware.

Atwoods outlook is cautiously, if thinly, optimistic for the survival of life on the planet. Despite an impending profit-driven environmental catastrophe, wars, and cynical disregard for human beings, it is the ordinary human beings who have the greatest potential for survival. Very few do survive, but they realize that continued existence can only be achieved in solidarity with one another, not in competition, rivalry, exclusion, or individualism. While the danger is by no means banished, a return to the awareness our tribal ancestors had of community is essential. And perhaps humankind will only live on in a new version of itself.

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On her 80th birthday: Margaret Atwood points the way toward a new humanity - People's World

Philadelphia Named the Top U.S. City To Visit in 2020 – NBC 10 Philadelphia

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This content comes from our partnerVisit Philadelphia. Used with permission.

Philadelphia, youre blushing.

The City of Brotherly Love is one of the 25 must-visit destinations in the world in 2020, according to a phenomenal new write-up in National Geographic Traveler that hits newsstands on Friday, November 29.

Even more impressive: The city is one of only two U.S. destinations (alongside the Grand Canyon) to make the list, which is part of the publications annual Best Trips feature.

In the piece, author Johnna Rizzo reflects on Philly as a metropolis of the unexpected in the midst of an exciting reinvention, saying that Philly has changed from a city of industrial might to a city of ingenious makers.

For Rizzo, that excitement is palpable in the citys art. She draws attention to the eclectic (The Electric Street neon installation off East Passyunk Avenue, Klip Collectives holiday Deck the Hall Light Show) as well as the familiar (the LOVE sculpture, the William Penn statue on City Hall).

Elsewhere, Rizzo finds lots to love in the citys dining scene, noting that food in Americas first capital city is being reinvented at a radical clip.

Nationally acclaimed eateries like Fishtowns Suraya and South Philly Barbacoa warrant glowing mentions. So does the cheese-and-salami utopia Di Bruno Bros. and dive bar Dirty Franks. (One thing we learned: Bob Dylan was maybe once kicked off the stage at Dirty Franks.)

Rizzos exploration of the city as an American classic also finds her visiting Cherry Street Pier on the Delaware River waterfront, the Philly Typewriter store on East Passyunk Avenue, Keith Harings only in situ mural in the U.S. and Indonesian to-die-for restaurant Hardena/Waroeng Surabaya.

And The Rittenhouse, the Lokal Hotel and the Notary Hotel receive call-outs as worthy places to lay your head after a full day exploring the city.

The whole article is, of course, worth a read. (Were also admittedly a bit biased.)

Check out a sneak peek of the article on National Geographic Travelers site, then pick up a hard copy of the Best Trips edition on newsstands beginning on Friday, November 29 to read the full piece.

Ready to start planning your own epic Philadelphia adventure? We thought so. Check out Visit Philly's overnight hotel package, an easy way to start exploring the spots extolled by National Geographic and beyond.

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Philadelphia Named the Top U.S. City To Visit in 2020 - NBC 10 Philadelphia

Every last Easter egg and comic reference in Episode 5 of HBO’s Watchmen – SYFY WIRE

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In 1985, a squid from another dimension appeared in New York and killed 3 million people with a psychic blast. I feel like I have a decent idea of what that psychic blast must have felt like, because its how I feel after noting all of the Easter eggs and comic references in the fifth episode ofHBOs Watchmen series.

Here are all the Easter eggs from Episode 5, and we will update the list with any that are missing.

DOOMSDAY CLOCK ON THE RADIO

When the episode opens, we hear a snippet of a news broadcast where the anchor mentions that the Doomsday Clock has been set at one minute to midnight. The Doomsday clock is a real-life metaphor for how close humanity is to man-made global catastrophe. In the comic, it was set at this time right before Ozymandias unleashed his squid on New York, as well soon see.

A JERSEY CARNIVAL

Young Looking Glass/Wade Tillman and his fellow proselytizers are attempting to convert sinners at a carnival in Hoboken. In the graphic novel, Jon Osterman and Janey Slater visit a similar carnival in New Jersey before his transformation into Doctor Manhattan.

WHORES' DEN

The group leader calls the New York-New Jersey area a whores den, echoing Rorsarchs famous all the whores and politicians will look up and shout Save us! ...And I'll look down and whisper No, quote.

WATCHTOWER

The Watchtower is a Jehovah's Witnesses publication, but its fitting that it would feature in the Watchmen series.

THE VEIDT METHOD

One of the people Wade passes by as hes looking for someone to convert is reading what appears to be an issue of Tales of the Black Freighter, complete with an advertisement for Adrian Veidts much-promoted workout routine, The Vedit Method. This same comic appeared in the graphic novel.

PALE HORSE POSTER

Pale Horse, as well be reminded later in the episode, was the name of the band that was playing in Madison Square Garden the night of the squid attack.

KNOT TOPS AND KATIES

The group Wade ends up talking to are Knot Tops, a gang who frequently appeared in the graphic novel. Theyre known for their distinctive hairstyle and use of a drug called KT-28s, or Katies for short. One particular Knot Top is wearing a shirt that says Katies on it, which really underlines the connection.

SINATRA DRIVE

As Wade screams in the middle of the carnage, we zoom out past Sinatra Drive, a real street in Hoboken, just as Ol Blue Eyes classic New York, New York starts playing. Again, a little on-the-nose, but it works

THE SQUID

Not really an Easter egg, but theres our first live-action glimpse of the infamous squid. The 2009 Zack Snyder movie swapped the squid for an imitation of Doctor Manhattans power gone haywire.

OPPENHEIMER, THE MUSICAL

As part of the return to New York ad, we see a glimpse of a couple who have apparently just seen the hit new Broadway musical based on Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the Atomic Bomb.

PROMETHEAN CAB CO.

In the background of the Broadway shot, theres a sign for the Promethean Cab Co., which also operated in the original graphic novel.

"LITTLE FEAR OF LIGHTNING"

The title of the episode is a twist of a quote from Jules Vernes Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning. Presumably, it refers to Wades discovery later in the episode that the inter-dimensional squid isnt real, meaning he shouldnt really have a reason to fear lightning.

BEANS!

As Looking Glass, Wade rolls up his mask partways and eats beans straight from the can, which is extremely Rorschach-core.

AMERICAN-HERO STORY

While eating his beans, Wade watches the next episode of American Hero Story, which once again features Hooded Justice and another Minutemen-era hero, Captain Metropolis. The two were rumored to be lovers, as the show portrays.

SMILEY-OS

Back at his day job, Wade watches some kid try a new cereal with a name and logo that brings Watchmens iconic smiley face button to mind. The camera even zooms out from the button, echoing the way the first issue of the comic begins and ends with a zoom in or out from the Comedians blood-stained button.

PET CLONING AND PET KILLING

Wades ex-wife works at a lab where they clone peoples pets. Less advanced versions of this service actually exist in the real world, but in Watchmens reality, the technology stemmed from some of Veidts advances that allowed him to create Bubastis, his genetically modified Lynx. Lady Trieu further developed the technology, as seen in the previous episode. Also, the way the little puppy is unceremoniously incinerated resembles the sad way Bubastis met her end in the original comic, when she was disintegrated in Veidts attempt to stop Doctor Manhattan.

NOSTALGIA

One of Veidts many business ventures in the comic was Nostalgia, a brand of cosmetics and perfumes. The drugs Will gave to Angela share the same name, but if Veidts old Nostalgia was supposed to evoke the comfort of the past through a fondly remembered scent, the pills, which Trieu Pharmaceuticals created,are literally memories in medicinal form.

DOES IT EVER END? OF COURSE IT DOES.

At the support group, Wade contradicts Doctor Manhattans final words from the graphic novel, when he tells Vedit that Nothing ever ends. However, later conversations in the episode imply that Wade doesnt exactly believe the optimism hes selling.

TECHNICALLY, DOCTOR MANHATTAN WON VIETNAM

The United States lost the Vietnam War in the real world (although the conflict did catastrophic damage to Vietnam and many surrounding countries), but in Watchmens reality, Doctor Manhattan won the war in two months. Vietnam would eventually become a state.

STEVEN SPIELBERGS PALE HORSE

As we learn, inWatchmen's 1992, Steven Spielberg made a movie about the Dimensional Incursion Event, titled Pale Horse because of the band that was playing Madison Square Garden when the squid attacked. Its described as being black-and-white except for certain flashes of color, like a little girls red coat. This would seem to imply that, in Watchmens reality, Spielberg made Pale Horse instead of the gripping Holocaust drama Schindler's List, which is similarly in black-and-white and came out in 1993.

TOBACCO IS OUTLAWED

Just a minor detail, but apparently tobacco is outlawed in Robert Redfords America.

THE WALL OF TVS

The 7th Kavalry sit Wade in front of a wall of TVs, which is an obvious visual allusion to Veidts wall of TVs in his Antarctic lair, where he learned about the success of his gambit to unite the world against his squid invader.

WHERES THE ORIGINALITY IN THAT? NO, WERE GONNA DO SOMETHING NEW.

In October, showrunner Damon Lindelof told SYFY WIRE that he thought it would be super-duper lame to adapt the original Watchmen, and repeat all of the original graphic novels beat for TV, which is why he instead decided to create a sequel of sorts. Senator Keenes promise that the Kavalry isnt planning to just drop another squid on the world seems like a sly wink at Lindeloffs adaptation.

I LEAVE IT ENTIRELY IN YOUR HANDS

When letting Wade know that the decision to watch his video or not is his choice, he quotes the very last line of the graphic novel, when The New Frontiersmans editor Hector Godfrey tells his hapless employee Seymour that the choice of what to pull from the crank box and put in the paper is up to him. Seymour has Rorsarchs journal in front of him when Godfrey says this meaning that in both instances, the truth behind Veidts plan is about to be revealed.

UTOPIA

While telling President Redford his plan in the pre-recorded video, Veidt invites Redford to be his partner in building a Utopia. Hes almost certainly talking about the better world he wants to build, but its worth noting that in the graphic novel there was a movie theater with that name in New York right by where the squid first appeared. The theater, which was renamed New Utopia after the Dimensional Incursion Event, was probably owned my Veidt Enterprises, and showed lots of old sci-fi movies to subconsciously prime people for the idea of alien invaders.

Veidt launches himself into the sky and he suddenly appears on the surface of one of Jupiters moons. (This would appear to debunk the theory that hes on Mars with Doctor Manhattan, though it still seems likely that Doctor Manhattan has something to do with Veidts captivity). In order to write his SAVE ME! message out of the broken, frozen bodies of his deceased servants. Its similar to the moment in Tales of the Black Freighter, the graphic novels comic-within-a-comic when the protagonist uses the bloated bodies of the dead to create a buoyant life raft for himself. Its not quite as literal, but Veidts message is also a life raft of sorts.

I DID IT!

After assembling his message, Veidt throws up his hands and yells I did it! This is the same thing he says after news reports reveal his plan with the squid did, in fact, bring an end to the Cold War.

YOUR GODS ABANDONED YOU

Upon returning back to his manor estate, Vedit comes face-to-face with The Game Warden. Much of the Wardens character is still a mystery, but it seems increasingly likely that Doctor Manhattan created this facsimile of human life, as he implied he might in the final moments of the comic.

DOCTOR MANHATTAN IS HOODED JUSTICE???

Panda, who by all accounts appears to be the idiot of the Tulsa Police Department, is telling Red Scare his theory that Doctor Manhattan was Hooded Justice. That this was a real fan theory that got written up by a number of entertainment news sites is embarrassing.

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Every last Easter egg and comic reference in Episode 5 of HBO's Watchmen - SYFY WIRE

BLOKEY Banter is Dying Out in the Workplace: British Men Embrace the Culture of the "Modern Man" – Yahoo Finance

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LONDON, Nov. 19, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- A new study reveals that whilst overly masculine behaviours in workplaces are on the way out, there is still a lot to be done by employers in supporting the needs of modern men who want to shoulder responsibilities for childcare as well as be the main provider for their family.

Research by culture change business Utopia and The Hobbs Consultancy found men's expectations of themselves have shifted. Seven in ten (71%) men report they still feel the need to be the main financial provider for their family, yet almost half - 46% - claim that it's now also their responsibility to be the primary carer to their children.

And yet, only a third of men (35%) say their workplace has a formal strategy of inclusiveness in place that helps ensure an understanding that work can have an impact from parental pressures to mental health or sickness.

Whilst progressive parenting and equality is a key step in modern relationships, workplaces are falling behind when it comes to modernising and supporting men in being all round providers to their families.

From flexible working hours and working from home to last minute childcare, parenting comes with challenges made easier with an accommodating employer.Research found one in five men (21%) say their employers actively discourage them from taking on parenting duties that may affect their work and a mere 11% report their boss is comfortable with them taking unexpected days off due to child sickness showing a distinct lack of flexibility and support.

Furthermore, both men and women face challenges in flexibility to work from home when needed with 28% of all workers claiming their employer actively discourages them from working from home.

Whilst not a typical trait of a masculine culture often associated around behaviours and personality traits such as assertiveness and competitiveness the lack of support and flexibility for men in sharing childcare responsibilities and parental leave is an issue employers need to address.

Daniele Fiandaca, Co-founder of culture change business Utopia, says: "Recent focus has been on the changes that women need to make to fit into a masculine workplace, when we should be focusing on creating more inclusive workplaces which work for all genders. Blokey banter might be dying out, but traditional masculine traits are still hindering modern businesses, and this research shows why we need to continue to work to build workplace cultures that are more effective and more inclusive for everyone."

Roxanne Hobbs, Founder at The Hobbs Consultancy, adds: "It's integral that everyone is able to be their authentic selves at work. The fact that men now feel they can't balance their careers with their families is worrying - the world is changed via conversation, and until the conversation about men and family happens, men will continue to be dragged down by a system that's inclusive in name only.

"We want to create a culture in which being a male leader is synonymous with courageous vulnerability, caregiving, empathy, and balanced mental health. We simply cannot talk about creating a difference with gender in the workplace without including men and making masculinity part of that discussion."

Notes to Editors

Utopia and The Hobbs Consultancy's Masculinity in the Workplace research was completed through market research company Opinium. The research polled a representative sample of 2,001 across the UK, between October and November 2019.

About Utopia:

Utopia is a culture change business. In a business landscape where creative thinking is the primary driver of growth, our changemakers help organisations build more purposeful, more inclusive and more entrepreneurial cultures, fit for this age of creativity. We do this by disrupting, inspiring and rewiring - from the intern to the CEO, through workshops and hacks - to create happier, inclusive, more productive workforces that deliver competitive advantage. And we've done it for businesses across the board, including Coca-Cola European Partners, D&AD, Google, Schneider Electric, Spotify and Universal Music.

To find out more, click here.

About The Hobbs Consultancy:

The Hobbs Consultancy is passionate about putting the humanity in to the workplace. We are a team of coaches, facilitators and content creators who are all passionate about transforming business through inclusion. We support individuals in showing up as their authentic selves. We support businesses in creating a culture in which people feel able to show up as themselves, where diversity of thought is valued and where people are cherished. We recognise that creating diverse and inclusive organisations is not necessarily an easy path and we help businesses to navigate this complexity, learning the skills required for everyone to be able to step into their inclusive leadership.

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BLOKEY Banter is Dying Out in the Workplace: British Men Embrace the Culture of the "Modern Man" - Yahoo Finance

Estonian bishop doesn’t have ‘a recipe against secularization’ – Crux: Covering all things Catholic

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ROME French Bishop Philippe Jean-Charles Jourdan has some big shoes to fill: At the age of 45, in 2005, he was appointed as the apostolic administrator of the Church in Estonia and became only the second bishop in Estonia since the Protestant Reformation.

The Catholic Church in Estonia, a country Pope Francis visited last year, is a small minority where those who belong to an institutional church are a small minority themselves: an estimated 80 percent of the population describes themselves as non-believers.

When some foreigners visit, Jourdan told Crux they say that they feel like God has disappeared, from this nation that was under Soviet rule from the Second World War until 1991.

The Soviet Union saw Archbishop Eduard Profittlich, Jourdans predecessor and second Catholic bishop since the Reformation, as a threat. He was arrested during World War II and accused of spying for the Germans and inciting hatred against the USSR by appealing to the religious feelings of the masses. He was sentenced to execution by firing squad, but he died in a Gulag in Kirov, in the northeast of European Russia.

Today, Jourdan is leading the cause for his predecessor to be declared a martyr, as he was sentenced to death due to his faith.

Crux caught up with the bishop, a member of Opus Dei, while he was in Rome last week to ordain 29 new deacons to the personal prelature. Among other things, he discussed the rapid secularization in some quarters of western Europe, saying it is true that our experience of the religious situation in Estonia could be, and with some probability will be, the experience of western Europe in the next generation.

Jourdan also said that he doesnt agree with the proposal from some circles calling for Christians to live in small communities isolated from the dangers of a post-Christian society, saying instead that a dedicated presence in the world is necessary, based on a realistic, but also hopeful vision of the society, even of a secularized society.

I find that, perhaps because of difficult circumstances, there is a latent pessimism among Christians nowadays, sometimes leading to apathy and resignation, sometimes on the contrary to an activism mixed with bitterness, the so-called bitter zeal of the spiritual literature, he said.

Crux: A year ago, Pope Francis visited Estonia. What would you say was the impact, if any, of the visit to the country?

Jourdan: Certainly, the visit of Pope Francis had a great impact in our country. Firstly, for the local Catholic Church. We saw a greater number of persons asking to know better the Church and eventually being baptized and received in the Catholic Church.

But it had an impact in society at large too. Before, for the people of our country, the Catholic Church was something very far away, in space or in time. I would say that now the average Estonian perceives the Catholic Church, and especially the Holy Father, as something much closer.

We are much more a part of the religious and social landscape. For the future of the Church in Estonia, which is slowly but steadily growing, it is very important.

You minster in a country where a majority of the population 50 percent describe themselves as non-believers. What is this like?

I would be happy if I could say that half of the Estonian population are believers. But in fact, all the surveys made about religion in Estonia indicate far less, between 20 and 25 percent, 75 to 80 percent being without religion. For that reason, sometimes foreigners visiting Estonia said to me that, by comparison to other places, our country looks like as if God had disappeared, was nowhere to be seen.

Of course, it is also due to the fact that a foreigner never knows very well the country he is visiting and tends to judge only on some appearances. But there is certainly a truth in that. Nevertheless, you find also good people everywhere, looking for a sense in their life.

For instance, I was recently in Santiago of Compostela and was told that since the beginning of the year hundreds of Estonians have come as pilgrims to Santiago, the great majority of them being probably non-Catholics or non-Christians.

In some circles of the Church, theres a lot of concern over growing secularization, but youre in a country where, due to its history, this has been the case for a long time. What would your advice be for those who minister in some of these places, like for instance, most of western Europe?

If I had a recipe against secularization, I would have published it, and of course used it long ago! It is true that our experience of the religious situation in Estonia could be, and with some probability will be, the experience of western Europe in the next generation.

But I dont agree with an idea present in some Church circles that due to the growing secularization living as a Christian in the society becomes virtually impossible, and Christians should retire in small communities, a little bit like the monasteries of the first millennium, which were like well protected sources of light in a dark age.

I dont think this would be a solution. Certainly, each one of us needs, more than ever, the support of a fervent community of Christians where people help each other, on the material as well as spiritual level. It is especially clear in a situation like ours, where every Catholic is usually the only Catholic in his or her family, and often the only Christian.

But a dedicated presence in the world is necessary, based on a realistic, but also hopeful vision of the society, even of a secularized society. I find that, perhaps because of difficult circumstances, there is a latent pessimism among Christians nowadays, sometimes leading to apathy and resignation, sometimes on the contrary to an activism mixed with bitterness, the so called bitter zeal of the spiritual literature.

Both should be avoided.

We should find our model in the first Christians, not in a new utopia fueled by fear. Despite obvious attacks against the sanctity of life and family, a secularized world is not like a new Moloch, swallowing small children.

But living in a secularized world will be certainly a purifying experience, where our former Christian society and way of life will probably be reduced to the one necessary thing Jesus spoke of in Bethania. I think that Pope Francis, thanks to the divine Providence, is preparing us to such an experience. And in the purification are already the seeds of the resurrection!

So, we should not live in a nostalgia of better times. Our time is the time prepared for us by God, and it will also revealthe fruitfulness of the grace of God.

Earlier this year, you were in Rome to deliver to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints the documents of the diocesan phase of the process of beatification for your predecessor, Archbishop Eduard Profittlich, the first bishop of Estonia after the Lutheran Reformation. He could become Estonias first saint, a martyr. What impact could this official recognition have in the countrys small Catholic community? Have you heard anything about the cause, or have you been given a possible date for his beatification?

Of course, I have heard about the cause of Archbishop Profittlich: I have been and I am very directly involved in it! The first phase, the diocesan phase, is finished, and the cause is now in Rome and advancing well. We were given a founded hope that, if things go on well, the Beatification could take place when we celebrate the 80 years of the death of Archbishop Profittlich, in 2022.

But of course, sometimes things in Rome take a lot of time, and we cannot for sure give a date with certainty. It is of course important for our small Catholic community, but also for the whole Estonian society, because it will be also, in a certain way, a recognition by the universal Church of the tragic fate of the whole Estonian people in that dark period of our history.

In any case, I recommend to the readers of this article to ask many things through the intercession of Eduard Profittlich, who is helping many people!

What brought you to Rome this time around?

I am now in Rome to ordain deacons, more than 29 members of the Prelature of Opus Dei. It is certainly for me a great joy, both personally as a member of the Work, and as a bishop, [I am] happy to bring new workers to the vineyard of the Lord.

Follow Ins San Martn on Twitter:@inesanma

Crux is dedicated to smart, wired and independent reporting on the Vatican and worldwide Catholic Church. That kind of reporting doesnt come cheap, and we need your support. You can help Crux bygiving a small amount monthly, or witha onetime gift. Please remember, Crux is a for-profit organization, so contributions are not tax-deductible.

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Estonian bishop doesn't have 'a recipe against secularization' - Crux: Covering all things Catholic

Read BECOMING? Here Are 21 More Recs: Critical Linking, November 19, 2019 – Book Riot

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Critical Linking, a daily roundup of the most interesting bookish links from around the web is sponsored by Read Harder Journal, a reading log for tracking your books and reading outside your comfort zone!

On this, the one-year anniversary of the release of Becoming, I have compiled a list of 21 new releases from August to the years endbooks of all kinds on my reading listthat showcase what black womens literature this year is becoming, and what it has always been: essential to fully understanding the American story, the human story, and to what we are all becoming.

Challenge accepted!

The new location for Russell Books was the scene of a world record Thursday as about a thousand books were used to make a tower six metres high (19 feet, eight inches) in front of a cheering crowd.

All were copies of Guinness World Records books dating back as far as 1962.

I get so nervous watching these!

In creating space for just that, lesbian romance novels are essential, radical, and also just a fun break from the heaviness that so often coexists alongside our queerness. While some lesbian romance novels respect and recognize that heaviness in their plots, other lesbian romance novels choose to sidestep homophobia and sexism entirely, preferring to offer up a utopia in which their readers can luxuriate, if only briefly.

Below, youll find a mixture of books that do bothand that give us thoughtful, queer pleasurefreed of the male gaze and written with queer readers in mind.

Lesbian romances to love.

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Read BECOMING? Here Are 21 More Recs: Critical Linking, November 19, 2019 - Book Riot

Necessity of action – The New Indian Express

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Express News Service

BENGALURU: The expression of revolt varies in different countries. Drug taking is a form of that revolt. The revolt of the black and white in America, anti-war, pro-war, the explosion of population right throughout the world, the undeveloped countries. And has revolt any meaning at all? And to act is necessary, to do something. Either one does, or responds adequately to the fragment of a particular breakdown, taking the political issue and throwing oneself into it, or the economic issue, or the social work, or shall one withdraw completely into ones own isolation, retire into a world of meditation, which is what is happening also. Surely all these are an indication, arent they, of approaching the problem fragmentarily? This is a human problem - as a whole, not of a particular group or a particular people, or of a particular culture.

Can one respond to this, totally, as a whole phenomenon, not a particular kind of phenomena? And is it possible to respond to this with our whole mind and heart, so that we act not in fragments but as a whole being? And I feel thats the only possible response and the only possible action, confronted as we are, with this phenomenon of degeneration. After all, degeneration takes place when one knows what to do, and not to do it. And do we know what to do? Not what to do with regard to a particular fragment, but what to do with regard to the whole structure and nature of our society and of ourselves? I dont know if you have thought about this, or if you are interested in this kind of approach. Because the house is burning - not your house or my house, but the house that man has built for millennia, where there is so much sorrow, illusion, where there is no faith in anything - quite rightly.

How is one to respond to all this? Shall one invent a new ideal, a principle, a directive? Because the old ideals, the old directives, the old morality has completely failed. So in reaction to that, one can have or intellectually conjure up a marvellous ideal, a new utopia, and work for that. And is that the answer? An ideal? A new principle? When the old ideals and old principles have completely failed? And mustnt all ideals always fail? Because theyre not real; theyre just the opposite of what actually is. So can one discard all ideals? And if you do, can one live without a directive? Ideals at least give a certain directive, as one can lay the course of ones life along that. But the ideals, as in the past, have really no meaning whatsoever, when one examines it very closely. So if you have no directive - and apparently human beings at the present state have no directive - they are driven by various issues. And being driven by propaganda, by certain structure of a particular society and culture in a certain direction is not directive at all; its just acting out of confusion. This is really a very serious question.

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Necessity of action - The New Indian Express

Resilience in the workplace can help retain employees – Quartz

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Patricia Acensi-Ferr learned that she had breast cancer on Valentines Day.

It was 2013, and she was a 35-year old new mom caring for a baby at the tail end of her maternity leave. Her situation was serious. But she decided to fight it with humor: She named her tumor Roberto and, when her hair started falling out, she named one of her wigs Ginger. She survived a 15-month-long treatment that grew to involve surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. Today, she is cancer-free.

With the date of her return set for March 2014, though, Acensi-Ferr received another blow: While she was away, her job had been eliminated. Before her cancer, she had worked for about 15 years in the French government. In accordance with French law, Acensi-Ferr was offered another projectbut it was unrelated to her interests and experience.

Even before her maternity leave, Acensi-Ferr had felt like her employer wanted her to quit. The French have a name for it: placardis, meaning relegated to a closet. Now, she had had enough; she negotiated an exit package with her employer, and then quit.

Even without the cancer, the moral limit had been surpassed from my point of view, she says. I think it could not have happened any other way. But still, she wondered how her situation could have played out differently.

Acensi-Ferrs double-whammy of personal transitions may be uncommon, but her experience taking time away from work isnt. Exact figures are tough to come by, but off-ramping, or voluntarily taking leave, has become more common in many rich countries. Every month, 273,000 women and 13,000 men take maternity or paternity leave in the United States. And there are plenty of other reasons why someone might leave their work for an extended amount of time: a serious illness, the death of a close family member, or even burnout, which affects up to two thirds of US workers.

As some workplaces become more flexible about their policies, the number of workers off-ramping is growing.

Not everyone can afford to, or wants to, take time off work. But as some workplaces become more flexible about their policies for everything from parental leave to mental health breaks and sabbaticals, the number of workers off-rampingand the challenge of managing their returnis growing. People who have gone through these kinds of experiences may come back to feel and act differently. They may feel stressed, isolated, and depressed, all of which can impact peoples ability to function at work.

Acensi-Ferrs employer could have welcomed her back and offered her a new position better suited to her background. That wasnt meant to be. But what happened next turned out, in a sense, even better: She started laying the foundation to become a leading advocate for professional resilience in Francepoised to help a population of off-rampers just like her.

For Acensi-Ferr, professional resilience is how we transform a trauma into an opportunity for performance. And in 2015, she did just that, launching SynchroniCits, a consulting and coaching group that trains employees and employers on how to foster resilience in professional situations.

Acensi-Ferr was able to bounce back from adversity on her own, and one goal of her organization is to give other individuals the tools to do the same. But increasingly, companies are seeing the value in supporting their employees transitions after a difficult or traumatic experience requires time away from work. As they struggle to retain or retrain returning employeesand bear the associated costsbusinesses have turned to resilience consulting and coaching firms like Acensi-Ferrs, which have proliferated in the past two decades.

Resilience can absolutely be learned, and experience is the best teacher, says Jessica Chivers, a psychologist and CEO of The Talent Keeper Specialists, a UK-based consulting and coaching firm that helps people returning to work after extended leave.

Resilience can absolutely be learned, and experience is the best teacher.

Along with Chivers company, Acensi-Ferr is joined by Wisdom Labs, a company that focuses on the mental, emotional, and social well-being of workers, and Shes Back, a UK-based coaching group that focuses on women reentering the workplace. Acensi-Ferr has also launched Envie2Rsilience, a group that advocates for professional resilience with employers and public officials. Every year, the groups give out a Professional Resilience Prize (link in French).

These groups believe that coaching makes a difference, says Chivers. Individuals having access to somebody outside of their organization that they can strategize, plan, talk openly with, and use as a sounding board, can make all the difference between that person staying and working to reintegrate and thinking I just cant do this, I need to leave.

And that, the coaches say, is good for business. The faster you can get someone up to speed and working at full capacity, the more money youre going to make out of them, says Lisa Unwin, founder of Shes Back. They also argue that helping returning employees boosts companies bottom line, by keeping turnover and recruiting costs down.

Arlette Pujar saw the value of resilience training for the officials she trains at the National Center for Territorial Public Service in Martinique (CNFPT), a French overseas territory. The center trains hundreds of public officials in all industries across the Caribbean island. Absenteeism, burnout, and turnover is very high, says Pujar.

Despite our idyllic environmentthe sun, the sea, the coconut treesmany territorial officials are suffering, she explains. Income inequality is high and many officials earn less than minimum wage. The island is plagued by air pollution and contaminated waters, and there are deep-seated issues tied to its history of racism and oppression. We are descendants of slaves, says Pujar. Today, we suffer the consequences and sequelae.

Acensi-Ferr spoke to agents of the CNFPT about resilience in June. She gathered small groups of officials who had recently returned to work or been away for a long time for personal or medical reasons, and encouraged them to share their stories with their colleagues. One woman spoke about how her burnout kept her indoors for the better part of two years, too traumatized to go to the office to hand in her medical leave papers. A former public hospital employee talked about losing his leg in a car accident and the difficulties he experienced returning to work. There was a lot of crying, because every situation felt like a mirror to the officials present, says Pujar.

With Acensi-Ferrs help, CNFPT was able to encourage employees to support one another. For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Pujar marshaled a group of officials, some of whom had had cancer themselves and others who simply wanted to show their support, to take part in the yole ronde, a special maritime race that is traditional in Martinique, where each person in the boat has a very particular job that keeps it afloat. The goal is to use a tradition employees are familiar with as a tool to increase their confidence, says Pujar.

Since then, things have changed for the better. The CNFPT set up programs to improve reentry for officials after a long absence, and it plans to redo the resilience seminar with Acensi-Ferr.

It has been a great achievement for us, Pujar says of the resilience training. Beyond the number of participants, I believe fundamentally that it has been a game-changer, and even HR directors who were present have realized the importance of taking into consideration the reentry of employees.

Whether or not training affects the bottom line, workers and employers have plenty of reason to want to foster resilience. A lot of people are suffering right now, in the workplace especially, says Cory Smith, the co-founder and CEO of Wisdom Labs. He founded the company with the explicit goal of protecting employees from depression, isolation, stress, and burnout.

Smith knows a thing or two about those issues. In 1997, while working for the UNESCO World Heritage Center, he survived a suicide bombing in Ben-Yehuda Square in Jerusalem. He returned to the US and immediately founded a company, not realizing that he was suffering from symptoms of PTSD. He eventually burned out, which forced him to reexamine his career and life choices. How do we provide something that allows people to not have to go through this alone and suffer so much? he asks.

Smiths answer was to co-found a company that uses the science of what we know about the brain to help workers develop the skills of resilience: setting goals and acting on them, taking risks, and practicing mindfulness and an attitude of gratefulness. Practices like guided breathing, meditation, and exercise can help.

Strengths-focused conversations reconnect individuals with a sense of capability, credibility, and can-do.'

Companies that turn to Wisdom Labs hope to equip their employees with these skills for self-awareness and self-regulation. Similarly, for Chivers clients, the first step in the process is often a strengths diagnostic tool, she says, which helps individuals find out how their skills can help them navigate their transition. Strengths-focused conversations reconnect individuals with a sense of capability, credibility, and can-do, she writes in an email.

But theres only so much an employee can do for themselves. Professional resilience has to be built into an organization itself. So another important element is to highlight the resources an individual has in their workplace, says Smith, including social connections and support. Studies show that people with close and supportive relationships are often more resilient to external stressors. But people can feel quite isolated when they return to work, says Unwin. You dont have to be out long to feel as though youve lost some of your social networks.

For employers, then, resilience can be fostered by encouraging connections and community in the workplace. That can mean group activities, trainings, or mentorship programsanything that makes it comfortable for colleagues to share with each other and ask for help.

Its also important for employers to help off-ramped employees maintain ties while theyre gone. Theres a lot of things you can do during your time off to keep in touch with people, says Unwin. In the UK, employees can work up to 10 days, called Keep In Touch Days, while on leave and still keep their benefits. Companies can support their employees attempts to ease back into the workplace by organizing Keep In Touch Days and making sure their HR departments are on hand to support employees on those days.

Employers should also make sure, as Chivers says, that return employees are sufficiently stretched but not stressed. Being busy is good, but not being overwhelmed. The very worst thing that could happen is for an employee to show up on her first day, and for no one to be expecting her, or for her computer not to be set up, or for her to have nothing to do. Its really soul-destroying, says Unwin. And that happens a lot.

Acensi-Ferr did what she hopes her clients wont do after an extended period of leaveshe left. But she believes time away can be an opportunity for people to ask themselves important questions about their career goals, the big one being, do I really want to come back after this is all over?

What I advocate for in my work, Acensi-Ferr says, is either a reunion, when possible and desirable for the parties involved, or a divorce by mutual consent.

Sometimes our coaching work is about helping people to leave well with reputation and relationships intact, once theyve decided that staying isnt an attractive option, writes Chivers in an email. That isnt a failure of resilience, its the very opposite: Its realizing there are options and choices and they dont have to stay in an unhappy situation.

When employees choose not to return to work, or return for a little while and then quit, Smith views it as an opportunity for their former employer to examine which resources (time, money, technology, support etc.) were missing or which demands were out of balance. Would coaching or training have helped them cope? Or does there need to be a systems change of some kind that optimizes workflows and demands that are in line with employee wellbeing?

The field of professional resilience is just a few decades old, but according to Acensi-Ferr, most companies still dont invest time or resources into thinking about ways in which they can ease an employees reentry into the workplace. Her company has only brought in about 50,000 this year in individual and company coaching fees. There are brave people and brave companies who dare to take an interest in these issues. Unfortunately, for the majority of them at the moment, there is instead a tendency to wait for the situation to resolve itself.

Still, applying the lessons she has learned in her work, she is sticking behind her project of building the practice of resilience in Frances professional settings. My utopia, Acensi-Ferr said in a speech earlier this year (French), is convincing companies that resilience is a virtue that will determine their performance.

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Resilience in the workplace can help retain employees - Quartz

It’s estimated that Romeo Santos sang to more than 100 thousand people in first four concerts – Dominican Today

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The tour began in San Cristobal. (External source).

SANTO DOMINGO.- The Telemicro Group reported on Monday that more than one hundred thousand people gathered at the feet of El Rey de la Bachata, Romeo Santos, last weekend, when the star of the music put to vibrate to San Juan de la Maguana, Barahona, Azua and San Cristbal with the musical download of Utopia: La Gira del Pueblo, an art show that will reach 15 provinces of the country thanks to the owner of the medium, Juan Ramn Gmez Daz.

A show with an impressive stage, never seen in the towns of the interior, an artist delivered to his audience and enjoyed with the audience every moment and every song.During the surprise factor presentations, he was the protagonist of the show that the bachatero offered for two hours, last Sunday, in the province of San Juan de la Maguana, at the Hermanos Surez baseball stadium.

This time the segment of special guests was attended by Alexandra Cabrera, who, despite arriving on stage without Ramn Rijo, known as Monchy, seduced the public by performing Light Years with Santos.

The empathy between Alexandra and The Boy of Poetry became visible immediately, the public confirmed it with their excitement. The former member of the missing duo Monchy and Alexandra came to sing for the second time, but, this time, to the rhythm of Obsession, a vintage theme that Adventure placed on the cusp of popularity, in full premiere, about ten years ago.

As if by magic, Santos reviewed one by one the 20 songs he would play in San Juan de la Maguana.Buried Love and The Demand were just some of the new pieces that intermingled subtly with Amigo or Take Me With You, classic tunes that allowed the public to embrace the first two record productions Santos released solo.

Saint John is one of you, I am prepared for anything.As shown, ask me for a song in a cappella that I dont even remember, the artist asked the public who later heard him interpreting versions of successful songs such as Sometimes I want to cry, Just for a kiss, or Teach me to forget.

To conclude the show, the people from San Juan enjoyed a final presentation of luxury, thanks to the interpretation of The Kiss I Didnt Give from the duo, together with the bachatero Kiko Rodrguez.

During the four presentations Romeo has been singing with Kiko Rodrguez and with Natti Natasha in the first three installments.Theodore Reyes joined in San Cristbal;in Azua Luis Miguel del Amargue came as a surprise, in Barahona the attraction was Frank Reyes and in San Juan de la Maguana Alexandra Cabrera.

The Tour of the people continues this weekend from this Thursday, November 21.

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It's estimated that Romeo Santos sang to more than 100 thousand people in first four concerts - Dominican Today

Wake Up With BWW 11/19: A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY Opens at the Public, and More! – Broadway World

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Good morning, BroadwayWorld!

A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY opens at The Public Theater tonight! This scorching new version of Kushner's first play stars Linda Emond (Annabella Gotchling), Michael Esper (Vealtninc Husz), Grace Gummer (Paulinka Erdnuss), Jonathan Hadary (Xillah), Nikki M. James (Agnes Eggling), Crystal Lucas-Perry (Zillah), Nadine Malouf (Rosa Malek), Mark Margolis (Gottfried Swetts), Estelle Parsons (Die lte), Michael Urie (Gregor Bazwald), and Max Woertendyke (Emil Traum).

Lucas Steele joins Off-Broadway musical Emojiland alongside Lesli Margherita, Josh Lamon, George Abud, Emojiland Co-Writer Laura Schein, Felicia Boswell, Natalie Weiss, and Ann Harada. The production will have a limited Off-Broadway run Thursday, January 9, 2020 through Sunday, March 8, 2020 at The Duke on 42nd Street in New 42nd Street Studios.

Read more about these and other top stories below!

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1) Voting Now Open For The 2019 BroadwayWorld Cabaret Awards, Presented by TodayTix!

Voting is NOW OPEN for the 2019 BroadwayWorld Cabaret Awards, brought to you by TodayTix! The BWW Cabaret Awards honor exemplary performers and productions in New York from October 1st, 2018 to September 30th, 2019. Nominees in all categories excluding Special Event - Solo and Special Event - Multiple needed to have performed all or the majority of their shows (at least two of three shows) during this eligibility period.. (more...)

2) Kerry Butler, Will Swenson & More Will Star in BROADWAY VACATION Reading

They've been to Wally World, Europe, and Vegas . . . and now The Griswolds are coming to Broadway!. (more...)

3) Photo: Lin-Manuel Miranda Receives the Portrait of a Nation Prize

Lin-Manuel Miranda received the Portrait of a Nation Prize from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery this weekend. The prize was presented to Miranda by former First Lady, Michelle Obama.. (more...)

4) Review Roundup: The National Tour of FROZEN - What Did the Critics Think?by Review Roundups

From the producers of The Lion King and Aladdin, Frozen launches a North American tour, commencing in Schenectady, NY prior to an official opening at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles. Heralded by The New Yorker as 'thrilling' and 'genuinely moving,' Frozen has emerged as the biggest hit musical of the last two Broadway seasons, breaking four house records at its New York home, the legendary St. James Theatre. For more information, including a list of currently announced cities, visit FrozenTheMusical.com/Tour.. (more...)

Today's Call Sheet:

A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY opens at The Public Theater tonight!

This scorching new version of Kushner's first play, originally scheduled to close on December 8, has been extended through Sunday, December 15, with an official press opening on Tuesday, November 19.

The complete cast for A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY features Linda Emond (Annabella Gotchling), Michael Esper (Vealtninc Husz), Grace Gummer (Paulinka Erdnuss), Jonathan Hadary (Xillah), Nikki M. James (Agnes Eggling), Crystal Lucas-Perry (Zillah), Nadine Malouf (Rosa Malek), Mark Margolis (Gottfried Swetts), Estelle Parsons (Die lte), Michael Urie (Gregor Bazwald), and Max Woertendyke (Emil Traum).

BWW Exclusive: Ben Rimalower's Broken Records with Special Guest, Michael Musto

BroadwayWorld is excited to bring you the newest episode of our first self-produced podcast - Ben Rimalower's Broken Records, The Albums You Wouldn't Shut Up About. On each weekly episode Rimalower and co-host Daniel Nolen chat with guests about one album that they were obsessed with, how they discovered it, what it led them to, where they were in life when it impacted them and how it's stayed with them since.

In this episode, Ben and Daniel talk to legendary writer and New York nightlife fixture Michael Musto about the 1968 album "Diana Ross and The Supremes Sing and Perform Funny Girl." They also discuss "The Wiz," Motown, Barbra Streisand, "Mahogany," Liza Minnelli, Madonna, "Evita," Nancy Walker, Mary Wilson, "Follies," and Marilyn Maye. Michael talks about the first time he saw the movie "Funny Girl," as well as his attempt to see Diana Ross live in Central Park. Michael can be seen performing live at venues around New York City, and his weekly column can be found on NewNowNext.

Listen here!

Set Your DVR...

The cast of David Byrne's American Utopia will appear on THE TONIGHT SHOW STARRING Jimmy Fallon

Josh Gad will appear on THE LATE LATE SHOW WITH James Corden

Lin-Manuel Miranda will appear on THE DAILY SHOW WITH Trevor Noah

Kristin Chenoweth will appear on WATCH WHAT HAPPENS LIVE, THE Wendy Williams SHOW

What we're geeking out over: Lucas Steele Will Join The Cast Of EMOJILAND The Musical

Lucas Steele (Tony Nominee for The Great Comet) makes the jump from Broadway to the inside of a smartphone this winter, in the new Off-Broadway musical Emojiland. Arborhouse Productions & Visceral Entertainment (Michael Chase Gosselin and Tim Sulka) today announced that the actor will be taking on the role of Skull alongside the previously announced citizens of Emojiland: Lesli Margherita (Matilda, Dames at Sea) as Princess, Josh Lamon (The Prom, Groundhog Day) as Prince, George Abud (The Band's Visit) as Nerd Face, Emojiland Co-Writer Laura Schein as Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes (aka "Smize"), Emmy Winner & Grammy Nominee Felicia Boswell (NBC's Jesus Christ Superstar LIVE, Shuffle Along, Motown) as Police Officer, Natalie Weiss (Everyday Rapture, YouTube's "Breaking Down the Riffs") as Construction Worker, and Ann Harada (Avenue Q, Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella) as Pile of Poo.

The production will have a limited Off-Broadway run Thursday, January 9, 2020 through Sunday, March 8, 2020 at The Duke on 42nd Street in New 42nd Street Studios (229 West 42nd Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues). Emojiland The Musical garnered 12 nominations and 5 wins at the 2018 NYMF Awards and was a 2018 Richard Rodgers Award Finalist.

What we're watching: Watch Marisa Tomei & More in New Highlights from THE ROSE TATTOO on Broadway

Roundabout Theatre Company's new Broadway production of Tennessee Williams' Tony Award-winning play The Rose Tattoo, directed by Trip Cullman, is entering its final weeks of performances. The play will conclude its limited engagement on Sunday, December 8, 2019 at the American Airlines Theatre (227 W 42nd St.).

The Rose Tattoo stars Cassie Beck, Alexander Bello, Tina Benko, Andra Burns, Susan Cella, Emun Elliott, Paige Gilbert, Greg Hildreth, Isabella Iannelli, Jacob Michael Laval, Ellyn Marie Marsh, Carolyn Mignini, Portia, Ella Rubin, Jennifer Snchez, Constance Shulman, Burke Swanson and Marisa Tomei.

Social Butterfly: THE SOUND OF MUSIC's Tally Sessions Takes Over Instagram!

The hills were alive this weekend as Tally Sessions took over BroadwayWorld's Instagram Story at Asolo Repertory Theatre's The Sound of Music, exactly 60 years after the iconic musical's original Broadway production opened! So in case you missed it (or just want to relive all of the fun and excitement), we compiled clips for you to enjoy.

And a Happy Birthday shout-out to Allison Janney, who turns 60 today!

Janney starred as Prudy Pingleton in the big screen adaptation of HAIRSPRAY. She most recently starred on Broadway SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION for which she received a Tony Award nomination. Her other Broadway credits include 9TO 5, A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE and PRESENT LAUGHTER.

Allison Janney currently stars alongside Anna Faris in the CBS/Chuck Lorre hit comedy Mom. The actress also received rave reviews for her turn as Margaret Scully on Showtime's Masters of Sex. She won Emmys for both roles in the same year and won a second Emmy for Mom the following year.

She recently won an Oscar for her role in I, Tonya. Her recently released movies include Tallulah, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, The Girl on the Train, Minions and Spy. Other film credits include The Way, Way Back, The Help, Juno, Finding Nemo, The Hours, American Beauty, Nurse Betty, Drop Dead Gorgeous, 10 THINGS I Hate About You, Primary Colors, The Ice Storm, The Object of My Affection and Big Night.

See you bright and early tomorrow, BroadwayWorld!

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Wake Up With BWW 11/19: A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY Opens at the Public, and More! - Broadway World

The Life of LaMelo – Bleacher Report

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LaMelo Ball tries to catch his breath, placing his hands on his hips as if holding on to them is all that is preventing him from falling down. His hamstrings burn. His knees creak. His white ankle socks have turned a dirty shade of gray from his beach sprints this October afternoon. As he stares out at the Pacific Ocean, his feet sink into sand so dense it might as well be tar.

The glittering, blue-green waves have no beginning, no end. Some might find it idyllic, relaxing, here on the beach in the sleepy, saltwater-scented beach town of Wollongong, Australia.

Not LaMelo. He doesn't like to think about what's out there.

It's not just that he's far from home, from all he knows. LaMelo is afraid of the ocean. Or more so, of everything in it. Tiger sharks, great white sharks, bull sharks. He is sure that if he dips his feet in, lets the water swirl around his toes, he'll be swallowed up. This is the other side of the Pacific, but it's the same ocean.

And there's something else familiar, something else after him. He can sense it, see it out of the corner of his eye. He realizes he's being watched. Two girls, one blond, one brunette, come closer. Close enough to see the imprint of his footsteps. The blonde pulls out her iPhone and starts recording LaMelo with one hand, holding an H&M bag in the other. The girls point and stare at him like he is an art exhibit. An animal. Like one of the sulphur-crested cockatoo birds hovering in the distance. The brunette asks LaMelo for a selfie. "Best day of my life," she says a few minutes later before walking away.

A world away from where the Ball family is known for seeking such attention, I'm struck by the awkwardness of the scene, of the strangeness that is constant in this teenager's life. But LaMelo doesn't seem bothered. Smile, selfie, smile is the rhythm of his life.

"It's always been like this," he says. He can't remember a time when cameras weren't rolling, when he wasn't being watched.

Maybe it began at age five, when kids lined up for his autograph as he played with his older brothers, Lonzo, now a guard for the New Orleans Pelicans, and Gelo, who played briefly at UCLA. Or age 10, when he was expected to outperform 15- and 16-year-olds. Or age 14, when he was playing for Chino Hills High School and recalls a random man coming from behind him in line at Yogurtland to pay for his order, knowing how highly he was ranked. Fans would stalk his family after his games that year, chasing them to whatever restaurant they chose. His father, LaVar, would remind him as the youngest, the one shouldering the heaviest of expectations: Don't chase the money. Let the money chase you.

But LaMelo never chose this chase. Never had a say. "All my life, I felt like I was just supposed to go to the NBA, you know?" he says. "Ever since I was born, damn near, He's going to be an NBA player." He says he wants to be the greatest basketball player to ever play. Most boys who grip the peach-dotted leather, launching free throws into the air from their beds, share that dream. But no other American prospect has lived LaMelo's life: prepping for the pros with a middle school body, dropping out of high school at 16 and moving to Lithuania to play pro in 2018. His every move was scrutinized, his every facial expression dissected: Is he happy? Is he sad?

I traveled to Lithuania for three weeks back then, to profile LaMeloto look at how someone that young performed in front of that many eyes for that many years. And now, a year and a half later, I'm here in Australia, on a two-week trip to watch him play for the Australian National Basketball League's Illawarra Hawkshere to see how he's changed.

Ever since LaMelo landed in Australia, he's been dazzling scouts with behind-the-back passes and uncanny court vision. The hype has increased. One scout has even likened him to Luka Doncic. For good reason: LaMelo has an extremely tight handle and is a gifted passer. He is creative, flashy, an instinctive playmaker. "The stuff I see is NBA stuff. His IQ is amazing," says Aaron Brooks, the 10-year NBA veteran who played alongside LaMelo on Illawarra until he tore his Achilles in late October. "There's no doubt about it: He's ready for the NBA. His ceiling is so high."

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LaMelo plans to play with the Hawks through the end of the 2019-20 season, in February, before jumping to the NBA in June, when he's sure to be one of the first names called in the draft. Wollongong, about an hour and 15 minutes south of Sydney by car, has never landed a prospect of that caliber. "This is definitely unprecedented," Hawks general manager Mat Campbell says. The Hawks are the NBL's smallest team and don't have a history of success (their only title came in 2001). They're 2-8 this season. It seemed strange that LaMelo didn't choose a bigger, more competitive squad such as the Sydney Kings, where he could have played alongside former NBA No. 1 overall pick Andrew Bogut, or the Perth Wildcats, the nine-time NBL champions. "I just didn't want any distractions," LaMelo says.

But distractions still swarm him. LaMelo lives with Jermaine Jackson, his mentor and manager and former coach at SPIRE Institute, but LaVar and the rest of the family (minus Lonzo) are here filming this week for their Ball in the Family Facebook reality show. Even without them, LaMelo is followed like a Kardashian. Against Melbourne United, one man dodged security, reached the door leading to the locker room and banged again and again, screaming for LaMelo. Recently, LaMelo wore sparkling diamond earrings to Steelers Seafood & Grill. "It was massive talk of the town," says Molly Wharfe, a barista at Utopia Coffee House. "We can't believe he's here. This is crazy."

The NBL has profited from LaMelo's talent, securing ESPN and Facebook deals to broadcast the games. Brittany Gray, the Hawks' marketing and media manager, says that the announcement of LaMelo's signing generated 1.6 billion impressions across the NBL's web and social channels. Over a million viewers in the U.S. streamed LaMelo's debut against the Brisbane Bullets on Facebook, an NBL record.

For LaMelo, this is the same script, different continent. "People done made money off this kid for years," says Jackson, who played in the NBA from 1999 to 2006. "I don't really want to use the word, but it's damn near like he's a prostitute."

People here seem to always mention LaMelo's social media following, his global presenceso much so that he has almost become the tweet, become the Instagram story. "He's a little bit like our spotlight to the world," says Larry Kestelman, the NBL's owner and executive chairman. "Because until people have a look, because of LaMelo, to see what we have, you don't necessarily know we exist."

But as much attention as he attracts, he doesn't want any of it. He drags when asked to film scenes for Ball in the Family. He just wants to play basketball. He is bubbly but soft-spoken, friendly but guarded, trusting few. When he smiles, you can see a faint glimmer, a rhinestone of a cross he lasered on a tooth near the corner of his mouth. It's a testament to his faith, as are the tattoos "Fear" on his left wrist and "God" on his right. "I look at this every time I wake up," he says, referring to the angel wings he has tattooed on his chest. "It makes me feel like I have angels with me. For all the stuff I've been through.

"People don't know me, know me as a person. They don't know what I've been through."

The more he speaks, the words begin to tumble out as if they've been held in for a long time. He is acutely aware of howpeople view him, treat him."People don't look at you as a human," he says. "People look at you as a dollar sign."

Today, LaMelo is brighter than anything in the Snakepit, the Hawks' practice court, where the first NBL game was played in 1979. It's not just his colorful tights underneath his shorts: red-and-green plaid (tomorrow, black-and-white checkered; the day after, green camouflage). It's the way he rushes to the worn, copper-colored court while his teammates, many a decade older, head in slowly, softly.

"Caaaaaaaaaashhhh!" LaMelo screams, popping a three a few seconds after throwing his forest green backpack on the sideline. He doesn't start close to the rim, like most do. His first shot is always a three. Then a longer three. "I might not miss a shot today!" he says to his teammates, still lacing up their sneakers on the sideline.

This is his joy, his peace. His enthusiasm changes the gym's mood from dormant to vibrant.

"He keeps me upbeat and energetic," says David Andersen, a 39-year-old Hawks forward and four-time Olympian. "That's a good trait to have as you go through the grind of a professional season."

LaMelo greets Todd Blanchfield, a guard who is teaching him to play the sport of cricket. "G'day, maaaaaate!" LaMelo jokes. Then he spots Brooks. "Oooh! Oooh!" LaMelo squeals, trying to cross Brooks over. "You dancing now!"

The first time they met, Brooks told LaMelo, "Your brother's really good," referring to Lonzo. LaMelo stared at him and said, deadpan, "I'm better than him." He also believes he can play in the NFL right now: "Swear to God, I can be an NFL quarterback!" Any such dreams were squashed, though, when LaVar said the fashion-conscious, sneakerhead teenager would have to closet his sneakers and wear cleats all day every day of ninth grade if he wanted to play football.

LaMelo's confidence can easily be mistaken for arrogance, his playfulness for lack of focus. I spent enough time around him in my two weeks to see that that's not the case. He listens intently, and he yearns to be coached. But he is 18. Not yet mature but not immature. He's just a boy. Problem is, he can't speed up time. He can't jump to the NBA yet. He can't be a man yet, either, let alone his own man.

He's trying to be, though. "People think he's just Lonzo's brother or just LaVar's son," says RJ Hampton, a close friend and fellow top draft prospect who plays for the New Zealand Breakers. "Melo's his own person."

He can snake his way into the paint and handle physicality despite his lanky, still-growing 6'7" frame because he's crafty. It is easy to get pickpocketed at his size, but LaMelo rarely loses the ball. He has struggled in Australia in terms of shooting percentage, but his "tremendous upside" is clear, says Hawks head coach Matt Flinn. "Can you imagine him in four years?"

He is still a work in progress, most glaringly on defense. His teammates have not babied him either. Once, a teammate took off for a fast break but missed the layup. He yelled at LaMelo, trailing at half court: "F--king run with me! You should have f--king been there to put it back!"

Earlier this season, Flinn gathered the team to talk about accepting roles. He told them there are two wolves living inside them: the bad wolf, responsible for whining, self-loathing, self-pity; and the good wolf, responsible for playing hard, loving teammates, having confidence. "The two wolves are inside you, fighting constantly," Flinn said. "The one that leads your life, determines what you do, is the one you feed the most. Do you know which wolf wins in the end?"

Players fell silent, some looking down at their sneakers. LaMelo waited a second or two before poking his head through the huddle, saying softly, "The good wolf!"

It's around 10 p.m., and LaMelo is hungry. We walk to the McDonald's he frequents. If he isn't here, he's at Chicko's, a chicken spot up the street; or at the cafe Coffee Club, eating a Caesar salad (he hates most vegetableswon't chew them, has to swallow them wholebut lettuce is OK).

Once inside McDonald'sor "Macca's," as the Aussies call itLaMelo heads toward six large machines. "You gotta order on these things," he says. He breaks into a smile once he has his large Oreo McFlurry. "They use more Oreos than in America," he says, a couple of cookies crumbling down his white tee. "In America they be stingy with the Oreos!" It's true; the Australian McFlurry seems to have cookies inside and not just on top. Still, this dessert feels like home.

His nearby apartment, however, does not. It's small, modestfar from his family's spacious estate in Chino Hills. In the living room, there are two giant cardboard boxes draped in front of the curtains to keep the sun's glare off the TV so LaMelo can play Fortnite. There is a wooden hand flipping the middle finger. There's LaMelo's bed, which he makes every morning. He brought a couple dozen shoes, including the fuchsia Gucci shoes he's wearing tonight, but not much else. He can't take much. "I've been on the road so long," he says.

For LaMelo, home is wherever he happens to be. He is 18 hours ahead of his friends back in California, but at least people here speak English. At least Wollongong is much warmer, much more cosmopolitan, than the freezing, rural town of Prienai, Lithuania. But days here are just as monotonous: weights, practice, working out, video games, napping, eating. "Then wait for time to die," he says. "People think playing overseas is easy. It's not." He doesn't complain, though. He learned not to as a child.

When LaMelo was six, he jumped from a high wall to the pool in the family's backyard. "Y'all, this is funnnnnnnnnnn!" he squealed to his brothers. The next time, he slipped and fell hard. He couldn't walk, so Gelo gave him piggy-back rides the rest of the week. LaMelo remembers LaVar yelling at Gelo: "Why the f--k you giving this dude a piggy ride? Put his ass down!" But when LaMelo tried to walk, his ankle throbbed. Didn't matter. He had to walk through pain.

As the years wore on, as Lonzo's fame increased, as LaVar's proclamations became more brazen, LaMelo realized that he could not slip. He had to perform. But performing, always performing, has left little time for processing. "Melo can't really relax," Jackson says.

It's morning, but the sun has disappeared. It's windy, overcast. Few are outside walking their dogs along the Blue Mile, a path adjacent to the beach. The waves crash gently, a quiet hum for a smaller audience.

I meet LaMelo and Jackson at Jackson's white Kia Cerato to head to a team weightlifting session. I tell LaMelo I returned my own rental car because it was terrifying driving on the left side of the road with the steering wheel on the right side of the car. He tells me he drove here once. "Wasn't hard, though. I'm just cold at driving, period," he says, laughing. "Coldest driver ever!"

Jackson is less chipper. Forbes published an article a few hours earlier examining NBA teams' interest in LaMelo, but instead of assessing his on-court skills, it focused more on his commercial, global appeal. The academy director at SPIRE Institute was quoted saying, "The viewership and social media metrics back up the value of taking LaMelo Ball and the financial return on investment it brings prior to him even stepping on the court." Like LaMelo is a piece of stock.

A car.

A thing.

LaMelo hasn't seen the article, so Jackson tells him about it. LaMelo stares blankly at Jackson, nods three times. His head drops, and he looks out the window. Something in him quiets, shuts down. Then he blasts G Herbo's "Summer Is Cancelled": "They tellin' me I'm the man, I ain't even settle in yet // Gotta get youngin' together, they starve on the regular // I came from sparkin' competitors // My life was never no regular degular"

LaMelo cranks the dial up, switching to Meek Mill's "Cold Hearted II": "Scream, 'Ride or die,' I thought you would ride with me // Found out you was jealous, you wouldn't even grind with me." LaMelo is moving his entire body now, rapping along: "Goin' city to city, can't take my son to school when I want to // Can't see my mama, my family when I want to."

He almost always has his cherry-red headphones on. They teleport him to a place beyond Australia. A place where he is understood as he is: a kid who doesn't seek awards, acclaim. He hasn't kept a single trophy except his Chino Hills state championship ring freshman year. Back when he was 14. Back before everything changed.

Most days in middle school, LaMelo would run hill after hill in Chino. As the sun beat down his back, sometimes he wished he could hang out with his friends. Play NBA2K.

Relax.

But he couldn't. He was supposed to go to the NBA. And his brothers were, too. "You weak as hell! You think you good, but you ain't!" Lonzo would scream, battling one-on-one, in challenges laced with love. Exhausted, playing against people older than him, LaMelo wanted to quit at times. "Moments like, Man, I'm done, bruh. I'm not trying to do this," he says. "But at the end of the day, my dad was like, 'What else you gon' do, to be honest?'"

LaMelo never had time to contemplate. LaVar pulled him out of Chino Hills High his junior year, and he had to leave his friends behind and head to Lithuaniaand now, Australia. "People don't know how much he sacrificed," Jackson says. "If you go back to the most times in your life you really had fun, when was that? The years he missed." LaMelo never thought he'd grow up across the globe. "Definitely not," he says. "I thought I was gonna do four years at Chino Hills. I thought I was going to go to USC and from there go one-and-done."

"I just saw life different," he says. "Not being a normal kid, not going to dance parties, not going to school." He doesn't know whether that's good or bad because, he adds, "I don't know any other way."

I remember watching practice every day in Lithuania, struck by how no matter how freezing it was outside, no matter how miserable he was inside, LaMelo kept a stiff upper lip. He played hard. He didn't complain. "It was like a scary movie," LaMelo says. "It just made me want to go home."

LaMelo wouldn't call Lithuania tough, though. Tough was seeing his mother, Tina, in a wheelchair, shivering in her BBB puffer jacket, in the cold Lithuanian gym, forcing a smile for Ball in the Family cameras despite recovering from a stroke. "My mom could have possibly died," LaMelo says.

Seeing her continue to suffer guts him. So when he is with her in offseasons, he pours her water, tears open the straw. He hops in the pool, holding her hands as she completes rehabilitation exercises. He becomes the parent, she the child.

People don't see those moments. Many think LaMelo is egotistical, disrespectful. Spoiled, immature. Too loud.

"I'm just misunderstood," LaMelo says. "About everything." That's, of course, partially because of his father. Assumptions that people have are fed by whatever his father says or does. "It gets attached to us," LaMelo says. "I mean, at the end of the day, that's my dad. I know him. He knows me. That's always going to be a bond."

"I just play basketball," LaMelo adds. "Whatever he say, he say. I don't" He cuts off. It's hard to explain. He can't control much but the backspin on his jumper, the precision of his passes. He can't control what his dad says about him. About anyone. But when stripped of the labels both have been assignedoutspoken father, prodigious sonthey are, at their core, still a father and a son. A father and a son who will have years where they understand each other, years where they don't. Moments they feel tethered, moments they feel distant.

"You not gonna turn on your dad. You only get one dad in the world," LaMelo says. "People say to me, 'He's ruining your career.' I mean, no he's not, because he made me who I am."

For most anyone, approaching adulthood means beginning to look, really look, at your parents as separate from you. People who have their own lives, problems, emotions, ambitions. People who are flawed, human. You inherit the best of them, the worst of them. And you try to figure out who you are because of them or in spite of them.

That's part of what LaMelo is going through now...but going through it while living a half-world away from his home, while living with someone hired by his father to groom him in the father's image of what he should be. (LaVar and the rest of the family declined, through Jackson, to be interviewed for this article.)

LaMelo remembers one afternoon in a gym in a rough neighborhood in Los Angeles when he was four. He remembers shooting off to the side with LaVar while Lonzo and Gelo were playing pickup with grown men. Someone fouled hard, and a verbal altercation broke out. "All right! All right! I'mma be back!" one man threatened.

He did come back. He slid through the back door with a black hoodie on, carrying a gun. "Shot the whole gym up," LaMelo says. "Pop pop pop pop." He remembers how in a split second, his feet dangled in the air, his tiny body sheltered by his father's stomach. LaVar had scooped him, Lonzo and Gelo up in his arms, somehow carrying all three while running, running so hard, out of the gym.

Hearing this story, having seen the way this family operates for so long now, I think of how LaVar would operate with a similar protective instinct in the coming years, shielding his sons before harm touched them. Maybe that's why he pulled LaMelo out of high school and kept him from playing college basketball. From being exploited by powerful systems that other boys cannot escape.

The sad part is, the vultures still got to LaMelo. He is still prey. Still treated like a dollar sign.

"It's LaMelooooo Balllllllllll!" says guard Angus Glover as LaMelo enters WIN Entertainment Centre for shootaround, hours before the Hawks' season opener against the Brisbane Bullets. LaMelo starts popping threes. "Damn, my s--t butter," he says. "Smack!"

Critics have questioned his shot selection and his unconventional form. LaMelo has been tinkering with it for the last year and a half or so. Nowadays he launches 260 in the morning and 340 at night without leaving the ground, working on a balanced, fluid motion: up, rather than out.

He used to chuck 35-footers without settling into the offense, but these days he is more thoughtful. Selfless. "He tells us, if you run, I'll find you," says guard Sunday Dech. LaMelo is aware of his weaknesses. He isn't a lockdown defender. He is still growing into his body. "He's 18," center Josh Boone says. "Everything is new to him."

But competition in the NBL doesn't compare to that of the NBA. Guards here are solid, but the bigs are two steps slower. In this practice, Hawks players are moving through shell drill with little go. It is usually like this: low intensity, little defense. LaMelo makes a turnover, but no one calls him out.

Sitting next to Jackson on the sideline, I ask why LaMelo's family sent him here when there are much more competitive destinations, like Sydney, or teams in the EuroLeague. Perhaps Spain. "Connections," Jackson says. He won't reveal which ones, instead saying: "If you know someone at a hair salon, you're gonna go to that salon. It's never about what's best for the kid. It's about what's best for the rest."

LaMelo stays on the court to shoot after practice. "I'm finna make 20," he tells Jackson. "This s--t easy, dawg." He makes five, misses the sixth. "This rim ass." He finally hits 20. "Wraps!" He puts on red pajama pants but is compelled back to the court.

He stands on one end and rolls the ball perfectly to the other end. Then he stands on one sideline and bounces the ball so it lands immaculately inside the ball rack. He dances, pleased with himself. Then he gets more excited: It's time for his Caesar salad.

We arrive at Coffee Club, and LaMelo spots one of the cooks in the kitchen he has befriended: "My boyyyyyy!" A waitress brings a vase of water, and he giggles, filling everyone's cup to the brim so the water teeters on spilling over. He orders his Caesar salad with a side of pancakes, drowning them with two cups of syrup.

I ask about practice: "Do you wish you were more challenged here?"

"Ummmmm," he says, pausing. "I just gotta get through the year."

"How do you do that, though? Get through it? It seems hard to do every day."

"That's like me asking how you do your job," he says. "How hard is your job?"

"I mean, I think your job is harder than mine."

"Nah, your job is way harder," he says. "You gotta listen to me, write notes down, think about your next question, then ask more questions and then you gotta write the story. That's hard."

I try to imagine how many reporters have stuck a mic in his face since he was a child. How many fans, handlers, family members have asked for his photo, his time, his smile. All watching him but never really seeing him.

Security is tight a few hours later, two hours before the Bullets game. "We've got twice as much," says Jonathan Malishev, a security guard. The Hawks' content creator, Matthew Adekponya, and I walk to the back entrance, but another security guard doesn't let us pass. "We've got a player here," the guard says into his walkie-talkie, staring at Adekponya.

"Really?" Adekponya says, flashing his media badge. Adekponya is Australian but a dual citizen (Australian-Ghanaian). The guard apologizes and lets us in. "Racial profiling," Adekponya says, sighing as we head into the arena. He says last year hardly any security existed: "It's the LaMelo effect."

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The Life of LaMelo - Bleacher Report

Supermans apocalyptic villain finally revealed by DC Comics – Polygon

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After months of teasing, misdirection, and red herrings, the finale of DC Comics Event Leviathan finally told us who the heck Leviathan is.

As the head of the spy organization of the same name that, Leviathan destroyed all the covert super-spy organizations and evil secret societies in the DC Universe in one fell swoop. The six-issue miniseries, from Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev, followed a group of the DC Universes greatest detectives, as they tried to figure out who Leviathan was in a single night, before the rest of their plan could be put into effect.

Bendis maintained that Leviathan wasnt a new character, but someone who existed in DC Comics canon. And as revealed by Event Leviathan #6, that someone was a relatively unknown superhero with a long origin in DC Comics history: Manhunter.

Like 1940s comics characters who never reached the popularity of a Justice League member, Manhunter has been through waves of reinvention. He began as a non-costumed crime fighter, but was revived several times as a red-clad and masked vigilante detective and as an army of robots called the Manhunters who preceded the Green Lantern Corps. as a failed attempt to police the galaxy.

Now, hes one of Supermans canniest foes. Well just have to wait and see how long this incarnation sticks!

What else is happening in the pages of our favorite comics? Ill tell you. Welcome to Polygons weekly list of the books that our comics editor, me, enjoyed over the past seven days. Its part society pages of superhero lives, part reading recommendations, part look at this cool art. Lets get started!

Mark Shaw, the 1980s incarnation Manhunter, turned out to be Leviathan. He was a human man empowered for costumed crime-fighting by the remnants of the ancient robot Manhunter army. Now hes gone all mastermind-y trying to remake the world in a better image, etc. etc.. You know how this villain stuff goes.

N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbells Far Sector finally kicked off this week and its got a great hook, great worldbuilding, and absolutely gorgeous art. If you like science-fiction mysteries, you should get in on the ground floor with this one.

Im still waiting for the real plot of The Batmans Grave to show itself, but also loving how Ellis writes Bruce and Alfred.

Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy is a comic about women defending their girlfriends (and I dont mean friends who are girls), and Im really into this Ivy-makes-armor-out-of-bark look.

Id fall for those big blue puppy dog eyes, too, Lois.

Hey! Its the Wonder-Woman of China! Im so glad someone out there is remembering that the Justice League of China exists and is great.

If you read one comic this week, make it the finale of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, if only for the scene with Galactus. Its a beautiful metaphor about dealing with loss and necessary change, for how to navigate the ever shifting status quo of Marvel and DC comics characters, and also is the books creators speaking directly to its many kid-aged fans who have to say goodbye. It almost made me cry.

Meanwhile, in X-Men #2, two sentient islands did some very personal business and now the mutants utopia is, uh, bigger.

Im a simple woman: A comic makes me laugh out loud, I put it in the roundup.

Runaways gets a runner-up prize for Best Scene This Week, in a bit where all the characters try on new costumes from a giant closet. Kris Anka nails these faces, especially Nicos girlfriend, Karolina (top right).

I thought that some of you might like to know that ElfQuest is back with a new story and its about Skywise being very gay.

Reaver #5 has my favorite kind of reveal: The powerful old sorcerer jerk with a mute female slave turned out to actually be a corpse being puppeted by a mute female sorcerer. If I had a dime for every time that happened to me...

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Supermans apocalyptic villain finally revealed by DC Comics - Polygon

The Internet Dream Became a Nightmare. What Will Become of It Now? – The New York Times

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Hey, everyone! the worlds eighth-richest man said, with a bit too much brio, as he waved to the crowd at Gaston Hall in Washington. Its really great to be at Georgetown with all of you today. But then the smile fell away from Mark Zuckerbergs face, and there was an awkward pause as he licked his lips and looked at the crowd.

With his next lines an acknowledgment of the death, earlier that day, of the longtime House of Representatives member Elijah Cummings he settled into a more sober mood, which he sustained for the remainder of his speech. It was clear that Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, knew the message he had come to deliver, bearing the awkward title Standing for Voice and Free Expression, would not be an especially popular one on a college campus in deep-blue Washington, and that indeed he himself might not be an especially popular man.

Over the course of just five or so years, and accelerating significantly in November 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, there had been a sea change in how Americans, especially liberal Americans, regarded Facebook. If, during the Obama era, there was a nagging suspicion among critics of Silicon Valley that Zuckerbergs company and its fellow internet giants had become too large their market power too great, their sway over the political and cultural discourse too absolute the election left millions of people convinced that those suspicions were absolutely correct. Now there were calls among prominent Democratic politicians for tough regulation, even for breaking up the company. One of the most vocal among them, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, had recently surged to a near-lead in the presidential primary race; in leaked audio from a Facebook town hall, Zuckerberg lamented her ascent and vowed, in the event she were elected president, to go to the mat and fight.

All of it the fierce criticism in the media, the political maneuvering among Democrats, the leak from his own staff had fostered a sense of a company under siege, and it was easy to hear this Georgetown speech in October as a simple and defiant response, a middle finger raised to the haters. To those eager to regulate speech on his platform or hold Facebook legally accountable for misinformation, Zuckerberg offered reminders of the First Amendment and the American tradition of free expression more broadly. He pointed out how that tradition benefited movements the audience seemed likely to support (#BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo) and contrasted Facebooks approach with that of Chinese-owned services like TikTok, the new sensation among teenagers in the United States and elsewhere, which has been accused of censoring mentions of anti-China protests in Hong Kong.

Afterward, observers analyzing the speech were unimpressed, seeing it as at best a reiteration of Facebooks perennial self-serving arguments and at worst a vacuous word salad. (Zuckerberg doubles down on free speech, as Wired put it, while Recode sniffed that he offered a lot of nothing.) By the following week, the appearance at Gaston Hall had been filed away as just one more maneuver in Zuckerbergs continuing charm offensive toward the political class, his sole goal being to maintain the status quo.

But whether Zuckerberg intended it or not, his speech showed glimmers of something else. There were hints of a more profound sense of threat and dislocation perhaps, even, a signal of Zuckerbergs understanding, conscious or not, that the status quo might no longer be sustainable.

Despite all his efforts at optimism, Zuckerberg acknowledged some basic problems with Facebook that had become impossible to ignore. Having built a machine to connect the world and let everyone have a say thereby giving rise to a new social reality in which, as he put it at Georgetown, people no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard Facebook now had to concede that there was no foolproof way to stop those voices from saying things that were unfactual or malevolent, or to stop their friends and followers from believing them. In part, this was because of a genuine Catch-22 involving scale: Phenomenal size had allowed Facebook and its fellow American tech giants to become the center of online life, but now they could not correct the most toxic problems of online spaces without wielding even more unsettling levels of power. While I certainly worry about an erosion of truth, Zuckerberg said, I dont think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100 percent true.

Also revealing was his take on his Chinese competitors, which went well beyond just criticizing them on free-expression grounds. China is building its own internet focused on very different values, and its now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries, he said, informing his American audience that its sense of an internet dominated utterly by Facebook was by now a parochial notion. A decade ago, almost all of the major internet platforms were American, he said. Today, six of the top 10 are Chinese. This remark was directed at his antitrust-minded critics, but it was also a reminder that however bad Facebook might be for democracy, the alternatives might be worse.

For a decade, the story of Facebooks growth seemed like a positive (for Facebook) feedback loop: More users meant more conversation, which meant more relevance, which meant more users. The service became a kind of social power grid, a platform that you simply couldnt not be on. It became fashionable among tech writers to claim that Facebook was subsuming the entire internet, if it hadnt done so already.

Optimism about Facebooks impact on the world was an important part of the cycle. Everything about its sunny rhetoric, its design (clean and spare), its policies (real names, no pseudonyms), was finely calibrated to make people embrace it as the safe and upbeat alternative to the seedy world of the open web. When Facebook became a publicly held company in 2012, its I.P.O. prospectus included a long letter from Zuckerberg about Facebooks values, in which he declared that the company was built to accomplish a social mission and that connecting the world would ultimately bring about better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

It wasnt hard to glimpse, lurking behind the strained smiles and flag-draping of the Georgetown speech, the death throes of that Facebook dream. The chief executive was forced to admit that his platform, far from solving social problems, had given rise to some thorny ones of its own. In his bracing rhetoric about the rise of the Chinese internet, you could even see the contours of Zuckerbergs nightmare of the virtuous cycle becoming a vicious one, with the gravitational pull of Facebook reversing, spinning its billions of users and their monetizable conversations out of his platform and inexorably toward China, toward despotism, toward dystopia: a TikTok of a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

In this special Tech & Design Issue of The New York Times Magazine, we ponder the internets future at a time when that future has never felt more unsettled. It isnt just about Facebook and the other American tech giants, which no longer enjoy the rapid growth that characterized their early days. The rise of the Chinese internet has threatened a geopolitical power shift, as a different government and national economy looks poised to become the center of the online world. Even governments that dont censor the internet have begun to talk about regulating it in unprecedented ways as with the European Unions G.D.P.R. law, which already has given a huge swath of the developed world a subtly different set of online rules.

But perhaps the deepest shift has been a shift in attitudes: the breaking of a spell that seemed to protect Silicon Valley from distrust. After years in which questions about online privacy hardly penetrated the consumer consciousness, Americans have awakened to a feeling of deep suspicion about how companies are harvesting and using their data. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll earlier this year found that American adults, by double-digit margins, believed that social media does more to spread falsehoods than truths and more to divide the country than to unite it. Even the tech giants own employees have now become uneasy about the implications of their work, leading to some unusual labor movements among their highly compensated white-collar ranks.

If all this disappointment seems so acute, its only in contrast to the unrealistic hopes that the internet grew up on, long before Mark Zuckerberg showed up. From the earliest days of Arpanet, the internet has been seen as embodying an ambitious, even utopian set of values. Its supposed to be open and global (such that anyone can plug in, anywhere) and also equal (in that every node should be able to get the same things). Even as the internet quickly morphed from a (mostly) public-funded (mostly) academic project into a (mostly) corporate-funded profit center, the power of those core values persisted. It persisted because those values have proved to be extremely profitable, at least for those who understand how to profit from them. People like Marc Andreessen, who took what he learned developing a web browser at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and helped found a company, Netscape, that went public and eventually was sold to America Online for $4.2 billion; and Mark Zuckerberg, whose company allows all those voices to get attention free but makes a mint by selling them, and their personal data, to advertisers.

In retrospect, Zuckerbergs letter in that 2012 Facebook prospectus was the high-water mark of internet boosterism, and it in fact encompassed most of the dreams that had attached themselves to the internet over the previous decades. References to Gutenbergs printing press? Check. Denouncing of monolithic, top-down mind-sets, coming from the chief executive of a huge corporation? Check. A sense that effecting broad-based social change and becoming fabulously rich are goals that go hand in hand? For sure: Ive developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems. Intimations that tech will topple authoritarian rulers around the world? Its in there: Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

As the technology critic Evgeny Morozov noted in his trenchant 2013 book, To Save Everything, Click Here, the distance between the quotidian reality of the internet and the utopian set of notions we projected onto it had become so vast that quotation marks ought to separate the idealized version from the real thing. The internet was going to empower the masses, overthrow hierarchies, build a virtual world that was far superior to the terrestrial one that bound us. But the actual internet was never capable of any of that, and once it fell into the hands of plutocrats and dictators, all the gauzy rhetoric around it only served their interests.

By the same token, though, we might make the same observation about the internet that many people fear theyre bound up in today: Our dark new fantasies about it with the puppet strings that stretch from the Kremlin to Palo Alto, making Grandpa dance to QAnons fiddle are often just as ridiculous as the sunny visions they replaced. In this issue, weve tried to see the internet and its likely future as best we can, from as many angles as we can, in the hope that after decades of imagining it as a utopia, and then years of seeing it as a dystopia we might finally begin to see it for what it is, which is a set of powerful technologies in the midst of some serious flux.

So the internet didnt turn out the way we hoped. Now what?

Arguably the most bracing reality about the internet today is that, after years of pretending that the internet means the same thing to all people everywhere, that fiction has finally become impossible to sustain. For the upper end of the income spectrum, a new suite of pay services promises to clean up the worst aspects of online life, even as the basic infrastructure of broadband and mobile remains highly unequal depending on where you live, both in America and around the world. And while Facebook and its fellow tech giants continue to loom over the American economy, through a business model that involves exploiting user data, their individual dreams of imperial expansion have brought them, collectively, to an awkward stalemate.

At the same time, its crucial for Americans to realize, as Zuckerberg now seems to, that the internet is no longer as American as it once was. Government censorship and other interventions are only entrenching an online reality in which different nations are seeing very different internets, even different sets of facts. In China, a parallel and growing mobile-based internet doesnt just portend a more censored online future; its offering up whole new ways to structure and order online life, with possible consequences that are scary in some ways and egalitarian in others.

Perhaps the most profound force at work upon the internet right now is the simple passage of time. Everyone raised in a pre-internet era continues to age and disappear, while new generations grow up not merely as digital natives but as lifelong witnesses to the internets best and worst effects. In the nave dreams of earlier days, many people joined Zuckerberg in imagining that connecting the world could bring about new social virtues at no social cost. But its now clear that interconnection by its very nature also brings about confounding new social situations, whether its the problem of disinformation seeded and spread by organized propagandists or the mind-bendingly obsessive culture of online fandom. For teenagers today, the internet is both a stage onto which to step boldly and a minefield through which to step gingerly a double bind that has given rise to whole new habits of living online, in which self-expression and self-protection are inextricably linked.

The passage of time, its clear, has been weighing even on Zuckerberg a fact evident in what was, without a doubt, the most eye-opening moment in his Georgetown speech. Building this institution is important to me personally, he said, late in his oration, because Im not always going to be here, and I want to ensure that these values of voice and free expression are enshrined deeply into how this company is governed. Not always going to be here? This 35-year-old, multibillionaire chief executive, with an ownership vice-grip that essentially guarantees he can remain atop Facebook for as long as he chooses, was raising the specter of his retirement, or perhaps even his death.

Those concerns are surely premature, but neither would it be surprising if the impermanence of human existence were on Zuckerbergs mind right now. Facebook and its chief executive might both hold on for decades, but the vision of the internet they represented sunny, American, all-devouring is already dead and gone. What, exactly, is arising to take its place? Its complicated. Read on.

Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist whose work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Pierpaolo Ferrari is an Italian photographer and, along with Cattelan, is a founder of the magazine Toiletpaper, known for its surreal and humorous imagery.

Additional design and development by Jacky Myint.

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The Internet Dream Became a Nightmare. What Will Become of It Now? - The New York Times

How Should We Remember the Puritans? – The Nation

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Hand-colored engraving of Puritans about to embark for America. (Alamy)

When the word Puritan entered the English language almost 500 years ago, it came as an insulta soul-killing Nick-name, as one of the insulted called it. One of the name-callers, a conforming clergyman exasperated by demands to purify the Anglican Church of all vestiges of Roman Catholicism, replied to his implacable critics, We call you Puritans not because you are purer than other menbut because you think yourselves to be purer.Ad Policy Books in Review

In one variation or another, the charge has been repeated ever since. In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne portrayed his Puritan ancestors as stern and black-browed members of the most intolerant brood that ever lived. The narrator of George Santayanas 1935 novel The Last Puritan accused them of sharing with the Bolshies a scorn of all compromises, practical or theoretical. Just a few months ago, Maureen Dowd devoted a New York Times column to denouncing the left flank of the Democratic Party for keeping the spirit of the Massachusetts Bay Colonyalive and well on the Potomac and Twitter, thereby raising the risk of a second term for Donald Trump. These modern Puritans, she wrote, eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough.

No nation or culture has had a monopoly on this phenomenon: the hyperorthodox who recoil not only from the profane world but also from anyone who fails to share their revulsion. Nevertheless, serious historians have detected something peculiarly American in the typebeginning with the breakaway faction of Puritans who gave up on England in the fourth decade of the 17th century and emigrated to America, where, it is alleged, they aimed to prove their incorruptibility by serving as a light unto the nations (Isaiah 42:6). And so began, some have argued, the insidious presumption that America stands alone, like ancient Israel, in covenant with God.

Today, college students are often introduced to this ideasometimes called American exceptionalismthrough A Model of Christian Charity, a speech by John Winthrop, a devout Christian of Puritan temperament who became the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Borrowing an image from the King James version of Matthew 5:14 (Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid) that was itself an echo of Isaiah 42:6, the speech contained the famous claim that we shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us, and it has become the prime exhibit for prosecuting the case against those first New Englanders. In the words of Daniel T. Rodgers, a distinguished professor emeritus of history at Princeton University who in his new book, As a City on a Hill, recounts the history of this argument in order to dispute it, the Puritans have been blamed for injecting a sense of Gods chosenness into the distinctive cultural DNA of imperially expansive America.

Rodgerss book is not only a close reading of the reception and history of Winthrops speech but also a rescue operation for Puritanism itself. Rather than instigating the pernicious idea of the United States as Gods most favored nation, the Puritans, he argues, were unsure of their worthiness and subjected themselves to the moral scrutiny of the world.

To begin with, Rodgers shows that almost everything we thought we knew about Winthrops speech is wrong. Ever since a copyist (its unclear when) scrawled Written on board the Arrabella on the Atlantick Ocean on a cover sheet attached to the surviving manuscript, Winthrop has been imagined as raising his voice into the roaring wind on the roiling sea. But in fact, he was more likely to have delivered the speechoften called a lay sermon because he was not an ordained ministerin Southampton before embarking. Or he may never have delivered it at all.

For more than 200 years the work lay in manuscript, until the Massachusetts Historical Society published it in 1838, in a collection of documents in which it was preceded by a few poems just a cut above doggerel and followed by a short history of the US Postal Service. Throughout the 19th century, the speech remained little more than an antiquarian curiosity. Even in the early 20thcentury, when scholars began to take note of it, no one attributed to it any claim of divine special favor. Writing in 1916, the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who traced his New England ancestry to the 1660s, heard in it an emphasis on collectivism rather than individualismas if Winthrop had been a secret socialist.Current Issue

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The modern career of Winthrops speech got underway in the 1930s, when a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Perry Miller, went east to Harvard, in part to study with Morison. Miller, who also had New England roots (he was related to Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy) but cultivated the personal style of a Midwestern tough guy in the Dreiser-Hemingway mode, had dropped out of college for a while and joined the merchant marine, which took him, among other places, to the west coast of Africa. It was there, he later recalled in brash emulation of Edward Gibbonwho had been seized by the ambition to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire while contemplating the ruins of the Forumthat Miller discovered his destiny while unloading drums of American oil. Suddenly, he grasped his lifes mission: to expound to the world what I took to be the innermost propulsion of the United States. This propulsion, Miller insisted, had been ignited in colonial New England.

In two magisterial volumes composed in the 1930s and 40sThe New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century and The New England Mind: From Colony to ProvinceMiller ranged over a vast number of tracts and sermons from both old and New England and assembled them into a brilliant portrait of the Puritans, as Rodgers puts it, in an existentialist key. For Miller, dreadlay at the heart of the Puritan experiment, by which he meant not primarily dread of the wilderness or Americas native heathen inhabitants but dread of themselves. At the core of the Puritan church, in his view, were not the sacraments of baptism or Communion (though he chronicled the furious disputes that arose over qualifications for these rites) but the copious sermons whose central subject was the ubiquitous sin of pride.

The essential task of the Puritan minister was to destroy the presumption that any human being had the slightest merit in the eyes of God. But Puritanism also offered consolation. It taught that the more unworthy one feels before God, the more ground there is for hope. This was the preachers paradoxical work: to castigate his flock without mercy (the minister, as one thundering preacher put it, will discover the lusts, and deceits, and corruptions, that you could not find out) until, stripped of the belief in their essential worth, penitent listeners would throw themselves upon Gods mercy. According to one English minister who did not emigrate to America but mentored several leaders of the emigration, None are fitter for comfort than those that think themselves furthest off.

These were among the themes of Millers demanding two-volume study of the New England mind. But the work for which he remains best known was a kind of codaa short essay published in 1953 whose title, Errand Into the Wilderness, he borrowed from an Election Day sermon delivered in 1670 by the Puritan minister Samuel Danforth. In that essay, Miller focused on A Model of Christian Charity, arguing that Winthrops little flotilla, which sailed from Southampton to Salem, Massachusetts, in April 1630, was a task force launched for the purpose of working out that complete reformation which was not yet accomplished in England and Europe, but which would quickly be accomplished if only the saints back there had a working model to guide them.

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Winthrop and his comrades, Miller contended, departed the Old World not to abandon it but to save it. They wanted to build in New England a model of what old England should be. They fled the Anglican crackdown on religious dissent (several ministers who joined the exodus had been threatened with defrocking or worse) and sought safety in America in order to erect a true church. What they had in mind was not an ecclesiastical establishment like the Church of England, with authority exerted downward from king and bishops. Instead they envisioned independent communities of gathered believers, each with authority vested in itself and served by a pastoral and preaching ministrywhat became known as Congregationalism.

Miller was a prodigious scholar, but he could be carried away by his metaphorical imagination. He told a dramaticeven melodramatictale of self-exiles bewildered as the world they left behind changed beyond recognition. In the 1630s and 40s, while New Englanders built their godly commonwealth, their Puritan comrades in old England were fomenting not only church reform but also a political and social revolution, including what Michael Walzer, in The Revolution of the Saints (1965), called the whole apparatus of radical politics: the illegal press, organized book smuggling, a rough underground network. They defied the bishops and worked to restore power to Parliament after its dissolution by CharlesI, to depose and ultimately execute the king, and under Oliver Cromwell to establish a regime with a degree of religious pluralism that shocked their brethren abroad.

Watching from afar, Millers Puritans were forced to confront their obsolescence. The guiding example of their city on a hill was no longer needed. Miller, who served in Britain during World War II with the Office of Strategic Services, compared them to a platoon of soldiers sent on a reconnaissance mission who, by the time they get back, find that the situation at headquarters [is] entirely changed and their mission has been forgotten. To amplify his point, Miller added a theatrical trope to his military metaphor. The emigrant Puritans were like an actor who, having prepared for the leading role in the greatest dramatic spectacle of the century, stepped onto the stage only to find the theatre empty, no spotlight working, and himself entirely alone. Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill, Miller concluded, they were left alone with America.

Millers prose was heartfelt and arresting, so much so that many students and readers who went on to teach or write about early America had their impression of Puritanism shaped by him. But Rodgers also notes the oversights and exaggerations in his rendition of the Puritan errand. For one thing, Winthrop said nothing in A Model of Christian Charity about transforming England but spoke only of succeeding plantationsthat is, future coloniesabout which he hoped that men shall saythe Lord make it like that of Massachusetts. Rodgers also makes the telling point that Miller used the word model in the modern sense of a small precedent to be replicated on a larger scale, but in the 17th century it could also mean something closer to what we would call an analysis or anatomy, a condensation, Rodgers writes, the marrow and principle of the thing being outlined.

Moreover, Miller missed the force of the crucial words that Winthrop wrote immediately after we shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us: So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world. These wordswhich express the existential anxiety that Miller did so much to illuminate in his earlier workattest to Winthrops craving fame less than he feared notoriety.

Nonetheless, when the time came for resistance and revision, as always happens when a new generation of scholars succeeds the last, Millers version of the Puritans was not tamped down but ratcheted up. Another gifted scholar, Sacvan Bercovitch, born in Canada to (in his words) Yiddishist left-wing immigrant parents, was astonished upon his emigration to the United States to discover the persistence of the myth of America as Gods darling nation. Beginning in 1975 with The Puritan Origins of the American Selfwhich took as its proof text Cotton Mathers Nehemias Americanus, the Life of John Winthrop (1702)Bercovitch, who eventually succeeded to Millers professorial chair, argued that his predecessor had not gone far enough. Puritans did not merely see themselves as taking incremental steps toward reforming international Protestantism; they saw themselves appointed by God to prepare the scene of Christs triumphant descent to His New Jerusalem. They imagined New England as no less than the site of the Second Coming, from which truth would radiate throughout the world, as prophesied in the Book of Revelation. These were not Millers Puritans beset by self-doubt. Bercovitchs Puritans were convinced, with terrifying certainty, of their divine charge to lead what he called the last stage of the worldwide work of redemption. Their hallmark was not dread but an overweening confidence in the sanctity of their mission. They saw themselves as legatees of the divine mandate granted to ancient Israel.

Writing in the shadow of another warthe United States monstrous misadventure in VietnamBercovitch went so far as to claim that the Puritans had used the biblical myth of exodus and conquest to justify imperialism before the fact. In this reading, Winthrops speech becomes the ur-text for a kind of collective narcissism that runs through American life: the brazen conviction that the American way is the only way. By implication, the Puritans were retroactively responsible for the predations committed in the name of manifest destiny, for the folly of trying to remake Europe in Americas image after World War I, for the fanatic hatred of godless communism, and for the catastrophic intervention in Vietnam.

By the turn of the 21st century, after the tragic sequence of 9/11 and the Iraq War, this way of telling American history had become so habitual among some scholars that when a Harvard undergraduate, Pete Buttigieg (who studied with Bercovitch), wrote in his 2004 senior thesis that the very founding of America was an act of international interventionwhich would recur in later years with Americas exportation of its democratic creed, he was repeating an academic dogma.

Rodgers insists that neither Millers version of the Puritans attempting to save the Old World by example nor Bercovitchs version as the self-appointed vanguard in the cosmic drama of salvation gets Winthrop and his contemporaries right. In this judgment, Rodgers is not alone. In a sweeping new history of what he calls the city-state of Boston, Yale historian Mark Peterson laments that these interpretations badly distort the meaning and influence of the governors words, and Michael P. Winship, in a valuable new history of Puritanism, Hot Protestants, observes that the idea that the puritans envisioned New England as the site of the millenniums New Jerusalem has been thoroughly discredited. And so the pendulum swings. The Puritans seem to be coming back into view not as progenitors of some future America but as they appeared to themselves in their own time, what the mid-20th-century historian Carl Bridenbaugh called vexed and troubled Englishmen.

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In taking the turn to a more historicist approach, it makes sense, as Rodgers does, to stick with Winthrop as the Puritans representative man. Before emigrating to America, Winthrop struggled to negotiate the accelerating transformation of England from a relatively static feudal order to a dynamic and disruptivemorally as well as sociallymarket economy. A member of the landed gentry, he feared that England was becoming a place where no mans estate almost will suffice to keep sail with his equals, and he who fails herein must live in scorn and contempt; hence it comes that all arts and trades are carried in that deceitful and unrighteous course, as it is almost impossible for a good and upright man to maintain his charge and live comfortably in any of them. In short, it was becoming harder for men of Winthrops rank to be both virtuous and prosperous.

The aim of the great landowner, as R.H. Tawney wrote in his still valuable Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), was no longer to hold at his call an army of retainers, but to exploit his estates as a judicious investment. Winthrop was not quite a great landowner, though he owned enough to have commissioned a portrait of himself in ruffled collar and white gloves. But when Suffolk, his home county in England, was struck in the 1620s by an economic downturn and revenue from his land holdings declined, he felt compelled to accept an appointment as an attorney to the Court of Wards in London in order to supplement his income. This work was rife with opportunities for corruption. Bribery and favor trading were rampant, and it was common practice for the court to sell wardships on behalf of the king to bidders intent on extracting value by carrying off timber and crops, allowing buildings to rot, and thus leaving the ward, when he came of age, with a depleted inheritance.

Meanwhile, Winthrops real estate holdings in Suffolk forced upon him vexing questions. Should he raise rents on subsistence farmers who had long resided on his property at nominal fees? Should he prohibit scavenging? Should he enclose his lands with hedges for the purpose of raising sheep, thus driving his tenants into the swelling ranks of vagabonds or what we would call the homeless? As the great historian Christopher Hill wrote, this was a time when large landowners had no inhibitionsabout evicting whole villages to make room for sheep in order to profit from the growing wool export trade.

Winthrop never shed his inhibitions. He may have fled England in part because he feared becoming one of the losers in the new economy, but he also feared becoming one of the morally compromised winners. As Rodgers aptly puts it, Winthrops flight from old to New England is best understood not only as an ocean passage but a passage from self to others. His Model of Christian Charity was filled with yearning for a lostno doubt largely imaginaryworld where poor and rich treated each other with reciprocal loyalty.

Winthrop was certainly no radical egalitarian of the sort found in Hills revelatory book The World Turned Upside Down, about the Levellers and Ranters who dreamed during the English Civil War of expanded suffrage, the redistribution of wealth, and limits on the size of property that any landowner could possess. But neither was he insouciant about the plight of the poor, however much he believed, as he wrote in the opening lines of Model, that God hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor. These words have often been read as an ominous overture to the long history of Americans justifying the extremes of poverty and wealth as consistent with natural law. But as Rodgers shows, this is a bad caricature. Rather, Winthrop hoped that in the New World, God would touch the hearts of those empowered like himself so that the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor. One of the most significant passages in A Model of Christian Charity is his discussion concerning the repayment of loans. If the debtor have nothing to pay, he said, citing Deuteronomy 15:2, then thee must forgive him.

Rodgers gives a subtle account of how the memories of destitute people in old Englandwandering ghosts in the shape of men, as Winthrop called themhaunted not only Winthrop but also other magistrates and ministers in New England, where harsh measures such as whipping vagrants were implemented alongside the abatement of taxes for poorer town residents and grants of grain or firewood to families in distress. Grudging as it often was, Rodgers writes, public, tax-supported responsibility for the poor was a fixture of New England town life. By 1700, he points out, Boston was spending perhaps a quarter of its budget on poor relief. At the center of As a City on a Hill is the insight that Winthrop and his fellow Puritans believed that market price and ordinary market relations would not suffice for a moral community.

In later chapters, Rodgers tells the story of how A Model of Christian Charity was plucked out of Winthrops context by politicians, pundits, and even some historians and reimagined as something quite differentas a founding document for the nation itself. In the process, the moral question Winthrop had placed at the core of his text would no longer be the part of the Model that mattered. Winthrop and his fellow Puritans were turned into prophets of nationalism and unfettered capitalism, and the aching tension, as Rodgers calls it, between the social fact of inequality and Winthrops yearnings for a community rooted in love was all but lost.

Disputes concerning the meaning of the past are, of course, indices to conflicts over the present and divergent hopes for the future. Such a dispute took place some 40 years agothough it is not usually thought of as a debate about Puritanism and its legacybetween two American presidents. In July 1979, in what became known as the malaise speech (although he never used that word), Jimmy Carter spoke of a spiritual crisis in the United States and called for a renewal of Americans faith in each other. In preparing his speech, he was counseled by, among others, Christopher Lasch, who was steeped in the history of the Puritans and especially valued their vision of a society in which, Winthrop wrote, we mustmake others conditions our own and must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others necessities. Winthrop asked his fellow emigrants to keep their eyes [on] our commission and community, and using the language of 1Corinthians, he beseeched them to conceive of themselves as members of the same body. Although Carter made no direct reference to A Model of Christian Charity, his admonishing speech, now notorious for its political miscalculation, was filled with echoes of Winthrops call for charity and self-restraint.

Carters recapitulation of Puritan social and ethical ideals proved unpersuasive. Sixteen months later, Ronald Reagan defeated him for the presidency and set out to dismantle a half century of public policy from the New Deal to the Great Society designedhowever meager those efforts may seem nowto mitigate the inequities of American society. Reagan, too, appropriated the Puritans. For him, they were laissez-faire capitalists in the making, prophets of a free market utopia. Over the next eight years, on at least 30 occasions, he echoed Winthrops speech (to which he liked to add the word shining as a flourish before the scriptural phrase city on a hill). Reagans shining city bore little resemblance to Carters anxious nation. It was a triumphant image of American power, prosperity, and eminence, a movie-set city, as Rodgers describes it, with nothing in it of Winthrops clarion warning that God is affronted when putative believers shutteth our ears from hearing the cry of the poor (Proverbs 21:13) or worship other Gods, our pleasures, and profits.

Every generation imagines its own version of the Puritans errand. The one Rodgers invokesa social experiment conducted with an acute sense of the conditionality of Gods promises and more open to self-criticism, even to a certain humility, than most in historys annalsis a salutary one for our dark time.

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How Should We Remember the Puritans? - The Nation

Boom, Bust and Bankers review a harrowing tale of two Cities – The Guardian

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In a world in which finding facts and making sense of things seems increasingly akin to trying to assemble a jet engine made of sand in a hurricane, it is a great comfort to be presented, every now and then, with the intangible rendered tangible. We often labour unsuccessfully to resolve a visual representation of issues and systems into words. Metaphors made flesh make life easier to understand.

Broadgate is a metaphor made flesh, bricks and mortar. The subject of Channel 4s Boom, Bust and Bankers documentary, this is the 13-hectare (32-acre) office and retail estate near Liverpool Street station that is dominated by the fifth tallest building in London, the 164m (538ft) Broadgate Tower.

The site came into being in 1985, complete with what were effectively defensive walls it was known as the Ring of Steel to keep the people of the deprived parts of the city immediately to the north and east out while the men (and, yknow, it really was just men) inside got on with mastering the new universe Thatcher created with the free-market revolution. They warmed themselves at the bonfire of regulations she ignited, while outside it got colder and colder.

The show neatly mapped out a short history of finance from then to now. I dont know if you have heard, but it did not work out well. A lot of people got rich and then even richer when, as Geraint Anderson, a former member of their ranks, put it, they realised there was no downside to being reckless. At least until 2008, when the entire banking system teetered on the brink of collapse with Lehman Brothers tumbling into the abyss, Morgan Stanley losing 80% of its market value and many other stories causing the share price of tiny violin manufacturers to rocket. Fortunately, a full reckoning was averted by the injection of billions upon billions of pounds of taxpayer cash. Everything went back to more or less normal. Footage from the time, showing Peter Mandelson slithering tight-lipped into his car as a reporter asked why he, as business secretary, couldnt stop bankers having bonuses, summed up the whole event quite well.

Alongside this succinct summary of how things work at the top ran an equally concise encapsulation of how they work at the bottom. Literally, as the programme went down into the basement of Broadgate to interview some of its cleaners, security personnel and other unseen workers who make sure the lives of those higher up run smoothly. Jos Tandazo, originally from Ecuador, gets up at 4am to start cleaning and is back home at 11.30pm. This is the best place he has been, he says, but I do miss being outside. Luis Valencia earns the London living wage of 10.50 an hour but it turns out that 355 a week after tax is not all that liveable on, and he and his father (who has two jobs, the first of which is an 11-hour shift at Victoria station) live together to make ends meet. In their spare time (I dont know, I dont know) they join protests outside places that do not even meet the living wage; here, Thomas Cook, which says it outsources to Accelerate. Accelerate declined to comment.

And there was Barry Smith, a former trade union rep who was made redundant from the railway job he loved by privatisation and is now a security guard another forcibly broken link in the chain that once connected the powerless to the powerful.

Interspersed with these stories was the tale of Broadgates regeneration and the millions of pounds being spent on its transformation from financiers fortress to what its overseer, David Lockyer, is keen we envisage as a modern capitalist community utopia. To this end, he is having the ring of steel dismantled and replaced by buzzwords and an enlivenment programme to encourage a mix of tenants and dilute the suits that once formed its rental mainstay.

I imagine Lockyer also envisaged a useful bit of promotion in return for granting Channel 4 its access-all-areas pass. But the makers outmanoeuvred him with their delicate blending of stories, with all their wordless contrasts (the absolute guff talked by PRs about the mindfulness of their new project versus the human language coming out of everyone else), invisible connections (the geopolitical crises that created profits for the people upstairs who bet the right way, but destroyed the lives of many who were forced to emigrate as a result and now work beneath them), and silent testimony to the growing inequities between the haves and have nots. Class, capitalism, power and privilege all playing out in the microcosm of one small patch of London, as they do the world over. Oh, for a reckoning.

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Boom, Bust and Bankers review a harrowing tale of two Cities - The Guardian

Nike’s New Running Shoe Aims to Cut the Running Injury Rate in Half – Gear Patrol

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Just about anyone who runs regularly encounters injury or at the very least aches and pains. Nike envisions a world where such hangups are not the norm, and its newest running shoe, the Nike React Infinity Run, is the brands latest effort toward such a utopia. And this one has some science to back it up.

The shoe features a blend of technologies developed for earlier shoes. The ultralight, performance-oriented Nike Zoom Vaporfly 4% is celebrated for its geometry, with the rockered bottom fueling more fluid and efficient strides. Meanwhile, the Nike React boasts a proprietary foam that delivers a high level of cushioning and energy return.

Weaving the best of these two shoes together results in a shoe that is simultaneously speedy, supportive and, it turns out, safe. According to a study of 226 runners by the British Columbia Sports Medicine Research Foundation, the Nike React Infinity Run resulted in a 52 percent lower injury rate versus the Nike Structure 22, a classic motion-control shoe. Wearers also reported less pain in the knees and feet.

Because it basically compared a new Nike with an older Nike, this study is best digested with a healthy grain of salt. Still, the prospect of a super comfortable running sneaker that also delivers high performance and makes running more pleasurable and (possibly) reduces injury is a pretty tempting one. We are currently testing the shoe and will be sharing first-hand impressions very soon.

At a price of $160, the Nike React Infinity Run will be available January 3for Nike Members and January 16 for everyone else.

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Nike's New Running Shoe Aims to Cut the Running Injury Rate in Half - Gear Patrol

Need the Tor Browser on iOS? Try Onion Browser – The Mac Observer

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Need a Tor browser on iOS? Onion Browser is the only iOS app recommended on the Tor Projects website. Starting out at the U.S. Naval Research Lab, Tor is a special network that helps people browse the internet with as much privacy as possible. You should note there are a couple of security advisories on its website:WebRTC/Media leaks: Due to iOS limitations, WebRTC and media files leak outside of Tor and are routed over the normal internet. This will reveal your real IP address to sites using these features. (If you are using a VPN, the VPN IP address is revealed instead.) To defend against this, you may set Strict security mode in Host Settings, which will disable Javascript. More information here.OCSP leak: Visiting EV Green Bar HTTPS sites may leak information that can be used to reveal the domain name of the website you are visiting. This is handled within iOS and cannot be changed by Onion Browser. There is no known workaround. A detailed report can be found here. App Store: Free

Check It Out: Need the Tor Browser on iOS? Try Onion Browser

Tags: Onion Browser, privacy, security, TOR, tor browser

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Need the Tor Browser on iOS? Try Onion Browser - The Mac Observer

How to take a screenshot privately on chat without being detected – The Android Soul

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With so much content being shared online, its sometimes tempting to want to take screenshots of whatever you see. But you never know if the app youre browsing through is sending notifications to the other person whose pictures you might be taking screenshots of.

Starting with Snapchat and gradually moving over to Instagram (and discontinued later), social media apps started alerting users when their pictures, videos or chats were being screenshotted of. While theres nothing stopping you from taking a screenshot, it might sometimes be embarrassing when the other user is being alerted of your screenshots.

To save you from such a scenario, weve now found a way to take screenshots secretly on Snapchat and any app that detects screenshots and notifies the other user.

Note: Every time you need to take screenshots secretly, you need to run the Private Screenshots app, let it record everything, go to Snapchat/similar app, take a screenshot using its screenshot button (only!), and then come back Private Screenshots app to stop the recording.

Private Screenshots has a presentation mode that captures a phone screens content for the time its switched on for. The screenshot button then saves the picture into an image file and the entire process ensures no broadcast message has been sent about the screenshot.

Another quirky feature about the app is that the files saved by Private Screenshots cannot be accessed by other apps on the phone. This is because the app saves all the images into a hidden directory inside your storage.

Note:

Private Screenshots does not work on Netflix, private chats on Telegram, Tor Browser or Incognito mode inside Chrome. The app will instead display a black screen or an error when capturing.

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How to take a screenshot privately on chat without being detected - The Android Soul

Are You Sharing Your Disney+ Account? Thousands of Accounts Hacked and Sold on Dark Web – Grit Daily

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In the first 24-hours, Disney+ gained 10 million plus subscribers throughout the U.S., Canada, and the Netherlands. However, the platforms immediate and predictable success came with some not so exciting news with respect to its customers also finding homes on the dark web.

On the first-day alone, Disney+ crashed when users attempted to sign up and login. The company tweeted that it had an overwhelming response and apologized.

Following the pattern of any new technology that is unveiled to a mass number of consumers, a very lucrative employment sector is hard at work, hiring and receiving just as much if not more money than what its shelling outthe dark web and black hat hackers.

Upon the immediate launch of Disney+, thousands of customers accounts were stolen and then put up for sale on the dark web.

The dark web is a part of the internet (deep underground) that isnt indexed by search engines, operating as a criminal hotbed, for encrypted online content and transactions that are not tracked or traceable (ideally). In order to access and engage in transactions on the dark web, it requires specific software, configurations, and/or authorization to access itusually through the TOR browser. Many may be familiar with the usage of the dark web back from The Silk Road investigation and Ross Ulbricht.

Initially reported by ZDNet, the ever-flowing number of complaints flooded social media networks including Twitter and Reddit. Even more frustrating is that users were actually getting emails LETTING THEM KNOW their Disney+ account was changed (presumably by the hacker).

When first reported, hacking forums were flooded with Disney+ accounts selling anywhere from $3 (2.30).per account to $11which is of course more than the legitimate price a Disney+ account is priced at$7 (5.40) per month.

The majority of these compromised accounts are labeled as FRESH CRACKED, PREMIUM/ANNUAL, and many other variations. Screenshots below indicate the formatting:

For those who immediately signed up for the streaming service on November 12, many experienced a series of technical issues, taking to social media to express their frustrations. Others indicated they were locked out of their accounts and had no idea as to why. And customer support hasnt been too helpful in addressing these issues.

Thousands of these stolen accounts show what kind of subscription the person signed up with and when it expires. For example, one websites post included the language:

Disney+ USA Service launches on 12th November 2019. These accounts will be ones where people have pre-paid for either 2 or 3 ears. Warranty is 2 months, but may last much longer.

In addition to ZDNets investigation, BBC jumped in with the assistance of a cyber-security researcher, finding several hacked customer accounts for sale on the dark web, which at the time of its findings, included over 4,000 customer accounts.

Unfortunately, Disney+ does not have two-factor authentication incorporated into its streaming platform, which surprisingly enough, should have been considered from the beginning, considering the massive (and successful) marketing campaign Disney has been putting on for many months.

Many customers are also concerned that their now compromised accounts will also grant black-hatters access to other products and services Disney provides, such as the Disney store and its recreation parks.

So if you are sharing your account with friends, family, co-workers, or unknowingly a hacker(s), it may be smart to change your account information just for the sake of it.

This news comes at a similarly troubling time for Google as its data collection practices have been heavily scrutinized. Several Fitbit users have expressed their distrust for Google, and are getting rid of their devices.

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Are You Sharing Your Disney+ Account? Thousands of Accounts Hacked and Sold on Dark Web - Grit Daily