Category Archives: New Utopia

Accused of pandering to the far-right ahead of Frances federal election in 2022, President Emmanuel Macron attempted a balancing act. In January 2021, the leaders party said it would create a memories and truth commission on Frances painful colonial history and war with Algeria. In March, it released a report on the positive contributions of individuals of immigrant backgrounds called Portraits of France.

These initiatives are part of a broader effort to find alternative solutions to growing demands for the removal of statues and street names honoring historical figures that are connected to Frances colonial past, including its slave trade. Yet, at the same time, Macron and some of his ministers have been igniting emotions as they publicly denounce forces that they see as stoking so-called separatism, including what many see as US-style political correctness and cancel culturethe latter of which is a largely unpopular but growing concept in Franceas well as a perceived US-version of multiculturalism.

Recent events within and outside of France have further stoked this fire. The #MeToo movement has been met with uneven hostility. The October decapitation of a teacher who showed cartoons of the prophet Muhammad during a course on free speech has led to a new bill against separatism, which aims to combat Islamic radicalism. And the protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in the US last year have prompted renewed conversation about the nature of racism in France, and put the countrys old ways of cultural assimilation on trial.

Against this backdrop of a culture war that shows little signs of abating, artistic projects remain a powerful place for progressive discourse in Franceeven as some factions in the country move to denounce what many have called an importation of Americas discourse on identity politics.

President of France Emmanuel Macron. Photo: Jean Catuffe/Getty Images.

As warring factions argue over how to integrate populations of citizens descended from former colonies, a new resurgent left, notably marked by young people from within the very populations at the center of the issue, has been pushing back against the countrys universalist social model, which traditionally downplayssome would say ignorescultural differences between citizens. The traditional style of governance aims to avoid what is often viewed as an Americanized version of warring ethnic and religious groups.

In a Le Monde editorial from March, supporters of the presidents Portraits of France project said that playwrights, filmmakers, and painters should seize upon these life stories and make works of art out of them that speak to our society and our world. They added that by ignoring a part of our shared past, we have made it harder to understand our present and to write our future.

But these cultural in-roads are not always met with open arms. The executive branch of French government has specifically singled out academia, including the social science fields of post-colonial and intersectional studies, saying that these areas are under risk of influence from radical agendas that are pitting communities against each other. It also announced in February a sweeping investigation into the presence of Islamo-gauchismea term loosely referring to extreme-left activists who are complacent toward radical forms of Islamism or who apologize for terrorismin universities. As a result, many are worried about censorship in schools and that scholarly research into the darker chapters of Frances history is under threat.

Emo de Medeiros notwithstanding the forces at hand (2018).Collection MACAAL / Fondation Alliances ADAGP, Paris, 2021. On view with the exhibition Ce qui soublie et ce qui reste currently on view at the Palais de la Porte Dore.

This debate spewed over into the art world when a government-commissioned portrait series of women publicly displayed in March in Paris, which was designed to celebrate diversity by featuring images of professionals from an array of different fields, sparked a vicious response. The photographs in 109 Mariannes became fodder for controversy due to the inclusion of the young astrophysicist Fatoumata Kb who was singled out for her headscarf. Angered that Kb was chosen to emblematize Marianne, the personification of the French Republic often seen interpreted in art or on stamps, former spokesperson for the right-leaning Republican party, Lydia Guirou, was among the angry tweeters: Marianne is not and will NEVER wear the headscarf!

The sentiment dovetails with a draft bill that the Senate amended this month to forbid chaperones on school field trips from wearing Muslim headscarves. The bill has been strongly criticized for stigmatizing Muslims and called an overreach of Frances already strict secular laws, which forbid the wearing of clearly visible religious symbols in schools, and by civil servants.

Visitors look at The Slave for sale (1873) painting by Jean-Leon Gerome during the press visit of the exhibition Black models: from Gericault to Matisse at the Musee dOrsay in Paris on March 25, 2019. Photo: Francois Guillot/ AFP) via Getty Images.

Despite instances of incendiary reactions, the cultural sphere is being won over by a new wave of progressive viewpoints and views are indeed changing. A younger generation has become eager to more openly focus on the topic of race and difference. French citizens of immigrant descent are raising their voices to say that, in practice, their identities are under-represented in a society that discriminates against them for their inherent differences. With a sense of irony, they describe a society which claims to be blind to those differences while demanding that any outward signs of that differencefor example, hijabsare avoided, to best fit a cultural mold.

We like the idea of universalism, because its a kind of utopia But its easier to go to Mars than to the land of universalism, Nadine Houkpatintold Artnet News. She is co-curator with Cline Seror of a show that includes work by artists from Africa and its diaspora called Memoria: accounts of another Historythat is on view until November at the Frac-Nouvelle Acquitaine MECA in Bordeaux. Houkpatin notes that while a new generation has indeed been inspired by some of the woke political ideas stemming from the US, the theorists behind many of these left-leaning ideas are often of French origin.

Views of the exhibition Memoria: Tales of another History at the Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MCA. Photos: Galle Deleflie.

The curators of the Bordeaux show surmise that, when it comes to discussing these issues through art, people have an easier time accepting more progressive, controversial topics. I think that through art, we can address these questions that are essential, said Seror. Art gives a certain liberty that enables us to express ourselves about these subjects, she added.

Indeed, it seems that the art world has been somewhat shielded: Responses were overwhelmingly positive to the two shows, despite the debates going on in the public realm. The show at Muse dOrsay even received a nod from a critic who supports the governments investigation into academics. I saw the exhibition, and very much appreciated it, said Nathalie Heinich, a sociologist who has published work on contemporary art. She is in favor of the French governments recent stance against radical intellectual currents that come from elsewhere and a signatory in an editorial in Le Monde that described them as feeding a hatred for whites.

Immigration Museum director Pap Ndiaye, a French historian, poses during a photo session, outside the museum in Paris on March 5, 2021. (Photo by Martin BUREAU / AFP) (Photo by MARTIN BUREAU/AFP via Getty Images)

Pap Ndiaye, the historian and new director of Frances immigration museum, the Palais de la Porte-Dore, recently told reporters that he too is concerned by the pushback on academia. It comes at a moment when post-colonial and intersectional questions are beginning to find their very small space in French universities, he said. If we stop teaching them, where will the students go? The Paris museum he oversees is currently showing an exhibit on the immigrant experience that includes 18 artists from Africa and its diasporait is a poignant explorationof artistic diversity and it falls on the 90th anniversary of the museum, which infamously opened with an exhibition to celebrate the colonies and included human exhibits.

The title of the show at Ndiayes museum, Ce qui soublie et ce qui reste, which translates to What is forgotten and what remains, also seems to ask what traces of this dark past remain in the popular subconscious today. It is on view until July.

While the government and certain factions of the population continue to rail against the universities, art institutions are set to become an increasingly singular voice for pressing questions about post-colonialism in France. When an artist presents [their work] in a museum that is open to the public, then we can start talking about colonialism, decolonization, and its impact on society, said curator Seror. Thats the power of art.

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As a Cultural War Continues to Cause Waves in France, Art Has Become a Lighthouse for Progressive Views - artnet News

On the stage of an empty concert hall, the Austrian-born composer Peter Ablinger sits in a chair and begins to tell the time. At the third stroke, it will be twenty oclock precisely, he says, adhering to the hallowed formula of the BBCs Speaking Clock. He accompanies himself with a simple C-minor sequence on a keyboard. After continuing in this vein for twenty minutes, Ablinger cedes the floor to the young German actress Salome Manyak, who speaks over an atmospherically bleeping soundtrack by the Finnish experimental musician Olli Aarni. The ritual goes on for nearly twenty-seven hours, with an ever-changing team of artists, curators, composers, singers, and d.j.s announcing the time in German, English, Italian, French, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Oromo, Mandarin, and twelve other languages. A rotating assortment of prerecorded tracks, usually electronic, provide accompaniment. Most of the reciters maintain a crisp, cool demeanor, even when their Web sites lead one to expect something more uproarious. The Swedish dancer and costume designer Bjrn Ivan Ekemark, for example, gives no sign that he also performs under the name Ivanka Tramp and leads a sticky and visceral cake-sitting performance group, called analkollaps.

We are, needless to say, in Berlin, witnessing the finale of MaerzMusik, an annual bacchanal of sonic extremes that falls under the aegis of the Berliner Festspiele. This years edition was streamed online, meaning that you could absorb it from the banal comfort of an American home. In keeping with European practice, there was an imposing but vague central theme: Zeitfragen, or time issues. The programming emphasized experiences that sprawl beyond conventional time frames and engulf the consciousness. The most potent example was liane Radigues Trilogie de la Mort (1988-93), a three-hour soundscape of darkly hypnotic electronic drones. It had the feeling of an indecipherable monument outside time.

Yet MaerzMusik offered more than an escape from aesthetic norms. In a high-profile, well-funded festival such as this, time becomes a political question: Who gets to speak, and for how long? In the European cultural sphere, the long-unquestioned dominance of the white-male perspective is receiving nearly as much scrutiny as it is in America. MaerzMusik, which is led by the arts curator Berno Odo Polzer, has taken a sharp turn away from the usual suspects. The African-American composer and scholar GeorgeE. Lewis was invited to organize a concert devoted to Black composers. Several events paid tribute to the eclectic Egyptian-American composer Halim El-Dabh, who died in 2017, at the age of ninety-six. Two Berlin-based experimental groups, phnix16 and noiserkroiser, presented a multimedia evening in collaboration with the Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos, a Bolivian ensemble that seeks new contexts for traditional Andean instruments.

The ever-formidable Lewis, who is based at Columbia but is currently a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study (the Wissenschaftskolleg), has led the way in confronting the German new-music world with the question of race. A few years ago, he assembled statistics showing that the venerable Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music had featured only two Black composers in seven decadesamounting to 0.04 per cent of all the compositions selected. In response, Lewis has argued not only for greater numerical diversity but also for a different vision of musical culture itselfone of a creolized world in which histories and identities circulate freely. The word creole is often used to denote racial mixing, but for Lewis, and for post-colonial theorists who have embraced the term, it denotes a broader confluence of languages and values.

The young Swiss composer-drummer Jessie Cox, who is studying with Lewis at Columbia, exemplifies what such a hyphenated future might look and sound like. Cox grew up in the majority-German-speaking town of Biel, but his family has roots in Trinidad and Tobago. At an early age, he took up djembe and Latin drumming; later, he turned to a serious study of modern composition. At MaerzMusik, he appeared during the tribute to El-Dabh, playing drums alongside the guitarist Nicola Hein and the sheng player Wu Wei in a partly improvised piece titled Sound Is Where Drums Meet. He was also featured on an Ensemble Modern program called Afro-Modernism in Contemporary Music, which included works by Hannah Kendall, Alvin Singleton, Daniel Kidane, Andile Khumalo, and Tania Len.

The idea of a creolized music was most obvious in Sound Is Where Drums Meet, with its implicit fusion of deep-rooted world traditions. (The sheng, a Chinese free-reed instrument, is at least three thousand years old.) The piece was hardly an ethnomusicological exercise, though; the performers adopted an experimental lingua franca, ranging from delicate washes of timbre to furious spells of collective pandemonium, which reminded me at moments of duos between Max Roach and Cecil Taylor. No less commanding was Existence lies In-Between, Coxs contribution to the Ensemble Modern project. This is a fully notated score that nonetheless offers some freedom to the performers. The bass clarinet, for example, is sometimes asked to engage in wild, free-jazz-like playing in the manner of Marshall Allen, the longtime saxophonist of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Coxs style might be described as dynamic pointillism, with breathy instrumental noises giving way to mournfully wailing glissandi, and then to a climactic stampede of frantic figuration.

The two pieces still seemed to dwell in separate worlds: one in the experimental zone, the other in the concert hall. Online, Cox has undertaken projects that collapse such distinctions by creating their own virtual acoustic spaces. Just after his visit to Berlin, he presented, in league with issue Project Room, a ninety-minute work titled The Sound of Listening, which invites spectators to visit an array of rooms where various musical activities are unfolding. The mood here is spacious, ruminative: an opening solo, for the bassist Kathryn Schulmeister, comes across as a restless, questing meditation. Far more fraught is Breathing, a kind of video aria that Cox made for the Long Beach Operas Songbook series, in November. The Black bass-baritone Derrell Acon vocalizes as he wanders through city and forest landscapes, his voice fractured by pain and rage. At the end, he exhales while birdsong fills the soundtrackan idyllic turn that appears to astonish him as much as it does the viewer.

Amid a general trend toward ad-libitum frenzy at MaerzMusikthe event with the Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos swelled to an impressively apocalyptic roarthe premire of Jrg Freys Fourth String Quartet provided an oasis of focussed stillness. Frey, who is from Aarau, Switzerland, about forty-five miles from Coxs home town of Biel, writes chamber music that seems to pick up where Shostakovichs left off, in a realm where Romantic harmony has decayed into beautiful, half-buried ruins. The Fourth Quartet is especially notable for its coda, in which a soft, low C-sharp is plucked out more than a hundred times on the cello, like a muffled clock, while the violins and viola grasp at ghostly chords.

The festivals epic speaking-clock finale had its own bleary pleasures. Titled timepiece, it built on Ablingers 2012 work tim Song. Lewis appeared as a reciter in the first hour; a few hours later, the Bozzini Quartet accompanied the speakers with Michael Oesterles Consolations, which is not unlike Freys quartet in mood. Long past midnight, the Irish composer-performer Jennifer Walshe took over the broadcast and wreaked havoc, as is her wont. She switched to Dublin Mean Time, which has not been in active use since 1916, and diverged from the script with such announcements as At the third chime, it will be arse oclock. Above all, it was mesmerizing to hear the time told in so many languagesa multiplicity that testified to Berlins cosmopolitan nature. According to the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, diverse world cultures should take pride in their distinctive features while seeking the higher truth of a shared humanity. For a day or so, this utopia seemed to come into being, as the people of many nations came to agree about at least one thing: the time.

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The Sonic Extremes of the MaerzMusik Festival - The New Yorker

NEW YORK, April 14, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Why are life coaches so popular these days? Life coaches have helped their clients in many ways, ranging from achieving and maintaining a good mindset to shedding light on tough decisions. They help you in setting the right goal and gain confidence along the way.

If you are planning to invest your time with life coaches, then today is your lucky day as Building Your Authority has compiled a list of the best female life coaches that will impact and elevate your life this year.

These women have proven their reputation with years of undying passion for helping their clients. For them, providing compassion and commitment is an absolute priority when it comes to maintaining partnerships and creating results with their clients.

In this list, these incredible women offer different niches in their line of business that can impact your life in 2021!

1.Nadiya Manji (@nadiyamanji)

Nadiya Manji is a highly sought-after transformational master coach, registered clinical hypnotherapist, board-certified master neuro-linguistic programmer, and emotional intelligence expert; who helps clients achieve powerful internal alignment and optimal mental health. Author of the book Searching for Balance, Nadiya shares her story and the pivotal life lessons that changed her life, unlocking her high performance through internal alignment. Nadiya first shared her message of alignment and the work-life balance fallacy on the TEDx stage. Nadiya develops self-awareness in professionals of all levels, producing aligned, emotionally intelligent, and resilient leaders through her twenty years of global experience, honing her skills in science, spirituality, and intuition. Nadiya offers a wide range of life coaching programs, corporate workshops, and training sessions through her Rewire Your Life, Rewire your Business, and Profound Wellness programs.

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3. Dr. Nikki Starr Noce(@drnikkistarr)

Dr. Nikki Starr Noce is a medical doctor turned transformational life coach. Shes traveled the world touching every continent except Antarctica, researching alternative healing modalities while awakening her innate healing and intuitive abilities. Dr. Nikki comes from a lineage of Colombian healers. She also appeared on the FOX show Utopia where they named her #DrLove. Dr. Nikki Starr uses a holistic approach to help clients dissolve drama and turn pain into purpose with the Awaken Your Spiritual Power Guidebook. She also works with high-achieving women ready to rise to their next level via the Ultimate Woman Uprising Cheat Sheet.

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Courtney Quinn is an intuitive life and health coach who aims to help women step into their power, reclaim their radiance, and live a life of fulfillment. Through one-on-one life coaching, and her high-level mastermind Reclaiming Radiance, she has helped women gain clarity on what they want in life, commit to healthy rituals that set them up for success, and let go of limiting beliefs that hold them back from their true potential. She began coaching over 5 years ago, where she started in fitness and nutrition. Since then, Courtney Quinn has helped hundreds of women transform their bodies, mind, and life. If you are looking to up level your life in 2021 and reclaim your radiant power as a woman, visit her website here to learn more.

6.Chrystal Rose (@xtalrose)

Chrystal Rose is a Self-Love Life Coach, entrepreneur & host of the Self Love Breakfast Club Podcast. She is dedicated to helping women heal their hustle, make peace with food and their bodies, and step into their best selves. Chrystals passion and desire to create a massive impact stems from surviving an incredibly traumatic childhood. She now uses the same techniques in her coaching that allowed her to heal. Rather than focusing on the surface with mindset and behavioral change, Chrystal helps her clients achieve lasting results by getting to the root and healing it from within. Chrystal offers multiple levels of accessibility, from her high-level one-on-one coaching, group program Pendulum, retreats, to a full-blown membership site coming soon. She is obsessed with exceeding her clients expectations and promises youll never feel the need to pick up a self-help book again. If you are truly ready to transform, visit Chrystals website.

7.Natacha Cottu (@natachacottu)

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8.Kristy Love (@KristyLove)

Kristy Love is the CEO of Kristy Love LLC Coaching. She is a Mindset/Quantum Coach and NLP Practitioner. Over the last six years, Kristy has worked with clients to uncover the beliefs, blocks, behaviors, habits, and patterns of thinking that prevent them from living the life that they desire through her Mindset Coaching Programs. 95% of Kristys clients have achieved new jobs they love, started businesses, improved their credit scores, changed their diet, and gained new mental growth by completing her program. Kristy states, Think about this, what is it costing you to hold on to your excuses and procrastination? What are the benefits of holding on to your limiting beliefs? Then make a decision from there. If youre looking to step into the best possible version of you, book a consultation with coach Kristy Love and check out her Mindset Programs.

9.Brooke Summer Adams (@brxc)

Brooke Summer Adams is an internationally accredited Transformation Coach and NLP Master Practitioner, coaching women into the very best version of themselves. Specializing in mindset, self-worth, and lifestyle transformations, Brooke works one-on-one with clients, runs her Best-Self Blueprint course, and provides training in various online communities. She showcases an impressive amount of testimonies and client transformations on her social media, and credits her results to addressing the root of the problems, rather than their symptoms. This approach, Brooke says, is what allows her to address many of my clients complaints simultaneously, allowing for total transformations in a relatively short amount of time. Find out how to work with her on her website, and join her free Transformative Trainings Facebook community here to learn how her work helps women become their best versions, so they can love themselves and their lives.

10.Sushma (@resetwithsushma)

Sushma is an Emotional Alignment Specialist and master life coach based in Dubai. She uses NLP tools and Time Paradigm techniques to enable her clients to clean up their suppressed negative emotions and self-limiting beliefs on a subconscious level. Shedding layers and aligning your thoughts and actions with your desires is an integral part of any healing, as it helps a person build resilience.

Sushma specializes in coaching her clients to break thought patterns, build self-worth, and get them to a state of feeling empowered through her program. The Reset Alignment Program is done over ten days and consists of seven coaching sessions which are ninety minutes each. She has seen phenomenal results in her clients once they discover their true selves and feel empowered to achieve their goals.

During her sessions, her clients release many years of piled up negative emotions like anger, resentment, fear, and live a more fulfilling life. Her biggest strength lies in her very own life experiences, which have enabled her to intuitively heal, guide, and uplift her clients effortlessly. The techniques used during the program result in creating a change swiftly, whilst keeping the growth consistent. One can expect to feel totally new from within and gain immense clarity about their lives as they finish the program. As Sushma states, You are simply a decision away from creating lasting change from within.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/4c486046-8014-4b71-b397-d2f526e314f8

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Top 10 Female Life Coaches That Will Impact Your Life in 2021 - GlobeNewswire

Construction work on the newest addition to Nuneaton's Ropewalk Shopping Centre continues.

The new Barclays bank continues to take shape at the main Queens Road entrance to the mall.

It is in readiness for when the new branch opens its doors next month.

The bank has now officially left its former home, the hugely prominent Grade II listed building in Market Place.

Its last day of trade from historic building, which is now on the market, was on Friday, April 9, and customers have to wait until May for the new branch to open.

A sign previously on the window said: "Your Nuneaton branch will be moving on Friday, 9 April 2021.

"We will be closing on Friday 9 April 2021 and will re-open at our new home on Monday 10 May 2021."

It goes on to add: "Your new branch will have a new look and a feel along with the latest banking technology."

As we reported in our newsletter, news about the bank's move was first revealed when a planning application was submitted to Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council.

The application requested permission for the bank to move to the unit 15A, the former home of Utopia clothing, which faces onto Queens Road.

Utopia moved into the former Topshop and Topman unit within the shopping centre, leaving its old unit empty.

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When the newest big name addition to Nuneaton's Ropewalk Shopping Centre will open - Coventry Live

Bored with pacing the same streets and parks or lacking motivation to get off the couch?

If so a Nottingham runner has planned new running routes themed around restaurants and eateries.

Each month the Grub Run, founded by primary school teacher Marc Faulder, has a different venue with a tasty treat to eat after exercising.

The 33-year-old, from Cotgrave, said: "The idea is that the runner places their order before running and collects to eat afterwards, starting and ending at the food venue.

"I am publishing one Grub Run each month of the year, but they can be downloaded and followed at any time.

"Whenever I feel unmotivated to run, it is route planning that excites me again."

The routes are planned around click and collect services and this month's Grub Run starts and ends at the Rustic Crust in Farnsfield. May's route will be announced shortly.

March was Annie's Burger Shack, February was Doughnotts and in January runners could reward themselves by buying chocolate from Chocolate Utopia in Friar Lane.

Marc, who started running in 2015 through Couch to 5k, said he has always been motivated to run in new places and see the sights. After his first marathon in Amsterdam, he trained to run events in other cities and countries.

He said: "When the third lockdown came in January 2021, I was a runner who was uninspired by running the same streets, parks and trails.

"My running club, Holme Pierrepont RC, remained closed, parkrun still postponed and all race events continued to be cancelled. I watched as local businesses continued to be creative and adapt the way they could sell products and remain open. I decided to plan new running routes around these new creative click and collect restaurants and eateries.

"Grub Runs are designed to support local businesses and motivate people to lace-up and run the streets with a new focus or goal. They are three to five mile routes that can be ran or walked, or both."

Run so far have taken in the sights including the Arboretum, the Sky Mirror, the Park Tunnel and along canal paths out to the River Trent.

"It's a chance for local people to rediscover our city of culture, history and art or a chance for new residents to discover the gems of Nottingham."

"After completing the run, good food can be collected and enjoyed. Its like getting a coffee and cake after a parkrun, a feeling of community and connectedness without the crowds but knowing the route is the same and can be shared on social media or by meeting with a friend to exercise."

As lockdown started to ease, Grub Runs can travel a little further out of the city limits so this month's focus is the pizza restaurant, the Rustic Crust, in Farnsfield, which is the first-off road Grub Run.

"It takes in the countryside scenes of Hexgreave Estate hall and deer park and the Southwell Trail. Theres even a special offer for Grub Runners when they order a DIY pizza kit," added Marc.

"I hope to see groups of friends meeting up to run these routes and catch up over good food as the lockdown continues to ease."

The routes can be downloaded for free at tiny.cc/grubruns or follow @ordinary_marc on Instagram.

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How to get on board Nottingham's Grub Run - fitness with a tasty reward - Nottinghamshire Live

Unreasonable requests

I would like to respond to the nasty letter from the CEO of Kalispell Regional Healthcare.

I retired last July, so I can write this without fear of retribution, which would of been swift, sure and vicious. It wouldnt be for this letter, per se, but some other sin, real or imagined. That is one of the unreasonable wants from the nurses, employee advocates. There is none.

The re-organization in 2019 was disastrous. Not only did staff have zero input, this was done right before Christmas! Although I am not a nurse, I worked closely with them in an acute care setting. It was heartbreaking listening to them talk about being afraid to buy their children or grandchildren presents because they didnt know if they would have a job. Then there were all these new executive directors, making an administratively top-heavy organization more so. This heavy-handed, top down change is what started the drive for the union. I guess its unreasonable to want a say in what happens to you on the job.

What the CEO also doesnt mention is the high turnover of skilled acute care nurses going to travel nursing. Why are they doing this? When they walk out the door, they can immediately make double, if not more. Wanting decent wages and benefits is unreasonable.

It is also not mentioned about staffing. Wanting a good nurse-to-patient ratio for the safety and security of the patient is unreasonable. I can remember a shift when there was an LPN and a new graduate nurse for 20 patients. 20! Is that safe? They set up staffing based on productivity numbers instead of acuity, i.e. the sicker a patient is, the more staff is needed.

The letter written in the paper, and giving all the non-union staff higher wages are all a blatant attempt to break the union and bribe the non-union staff form doing so.

I was appalled and deeply angry at this trying to turn the community against the nurses. Shame on you, sir.

Patrice Neal, Columbia Falls

How do you warn friends who no longer hear your words? How do you get through to someone who hears global socialism and sees a utopia?

Global socialism, the Democratic goal of today, will give us an earth that will look like Cuba, Venezuela, China or the pre-Cold War USSR. Anyone who has lived in or spent time in these countries, one or all, knows the ultimate disaster we are facing. Do yourself a favor of talking to anyone who has escaped one of these totalitarian socialist governments. They will all beg you to not go down this path.

The magic of the U.S. lies in one word that completely disappears in the vocabulary of socialist countries: opportunity. Opportunity to seek your dreams of lifestyle, occupation, belief system, and happiness only lies where the cultivation of hope is possible. In a land where the decisions of your life are no longer your own, but left to the regulations and decision making boards, your dreams only die and wither.

I have had the experience of having conversations with people still trapped in or escaped from these socialist governments. Talk to someone who has heard, first-hand, directly from a Cuban just coming out of a ration card food distribution center, escaped from Venezuela to feed their starving children, had their reproductive decisions made by the Chinese government, escaped from a USSR labor factory to work and thrive in a U.S. company. No one sees the slippery slope coming, its a fallacy, until it isnt. They didnt see it.

William Lincoln, Lakeside

As a biomedical scientist, I watched with dismay last year as the CDC said masks only protect other people and not the wearer. Huh?

They also said the SARS-Cov-2 virus that causes the disease, Covid-19, is mainly spread by coughs from infected people. Clearly absurd because the virus was spreading like wildfire and not that many people cough in public.

Anyone who searched the available literature about the spread of respiratory viruses would have known that the major route of viral spread is through tiny aerosol particles that are released by breathing, talking, or worse, singing and shouting. They dont settle out for hours and travel 20 feet or more.

The CDC, of course, knew all that. Why didnt they say it? Perhaps from political pressure or an overdose of caution because they didnt have peer-reviewed, 10,000 patient, masked and mask-less controlled trials that would have shown that masks greatly reduce Covid transmission and protect the wearer. The point is they failed to state the obvious and many Americans needlessly died.

So, the question becomes how many Americans would have died had we done what other countrys governments did in terms of shutdowns, masking and social distancing? To answer it, we need to look at Covid death rates per million people in a country and compare it to our 535,000 Covid deaths in the U.S.

The answers are startling! If we had done what each of the following countries did, we would have had the following Covid deaths, based on our population: Canada, 196,363; Australia, 12,817; South Korea, 10,606; New Zealand, 1,746; China, 1,142; Thailand, 416. Thailand?

You would think we could have done better than all those countries. Pitiful and tragic, I say. Does anyone still think that government is the enemy?

These data are from statista.com.

Matthews O. Bradley, Kalispell

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Letters to the editor April 15 - Daily Inter Lake

Seven years ago Elizabeth Kolbert wrote The Sixth Extinction. In her new book about climate, Under a White Sky, she finds a middle ground between optimism and apocalyptic bleakness.

Soon it would be too hot J G Ballard, The Drowned World (1962)

The real problem is the sun. It warms the earth which is nice, the basis of all life but over the past 200 years weve altered our planets atmosphere so that it captures too much warmth. And weve failed to reduce our carbon emissions, or even slow their rapid growth, and it seems obvious that well continue to fail, that the problem defies our economic and political systems. So the atmosphere will continue to capture more and more warmth with increasingly dire consequences.

The solution is obvious. Dim the sun.

Elizabeth Kolbert is the climate reporter for the New Yorker. She won the Pulitzer prize for her 2014 book The Sixth Extinction, a collection of essays describing the accelerating mass extinctions of the modern era, comparing them to previous large scale extinction events in our planets remote past, caused by super volcano eruptions and meteor strikes. The book helped popularise the term the anthropocene, an informal description for our current geological era, a period in which human activity is the most significant actor on the planets ecosystems.

Most climate writing takes an activist approach. It wants to influence politics and policy, and it does this by warning people what might happen if humanity doesnt change our ways in the next six months or 18 months, or three years or 12 years. Those warnings are usually apocalyptic. But the public has remained unpersuaded, and even elected politicians who described themselves as progressive on climate delivered very little action, preferring to set emissions targets for dates decades in the future, which would then get pushed even further out by their replacements.

So The Sixth Extinction wasnt an activist book. It was journalism; calmly and objectively describing a global mass extinction event that was already well underway when it was published seven years ago. Under a White Sky is Kolberts equally detached attempt to imagine the future in a climate changed world; a future that is now inevitable. And she does this by reporting on the present.

In 2019 the journalist David Wallace-Wells published The Uninhabitable Earth, a book that peered beyond scientific reticence by outlining the most dire imaginable consequences of climate change: a planet that is incapable of sustaining human life, a state that Wallace-Wells predicted wed arrive at very soon. No matter how frightened you are of climate change, he warned, you are not nearly frightened enough. Then, in late 2020 the science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson published The Ministry for the Future describing the next stages of the climate apocalypse millions dying in heat waves, vast coastal cities flooded. But he then imagined the progressive/activist response, which leads to the transformation of the global economy into a Piketty-esque zero carbon egalitarian post-nation state techno-utopia.

Robinsons book is dedicated to Frederic Jameson, the literary theorist who claimed it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Robinson imagines both, ending on a vision of wild optimism. (Along the way he wonders why the worlds central banks dont do carbon quantitative easing, printing money to pay people to sequester carbon instead of using QE to inflate their share markets and metropolitan house prices which is what most western governments are currently doing, including ours. Which might be the most important question in the world right now.) His solutions are partly political, partly economic, mostly technological; the heroes use distributed ledgers to invent new carbon currencies and drone swarms to assassinate the heads of energy companies.

For some climate activists Naomi Klein is the most prominent opting out of the carbon economy is easy. The problem is ideological, and we solve it by waking up and accepting that economic theory is wrong and economic growth is bad. Climate change is useful, in Kleins view: its the catalyst for realising that our real problem is capitalism. The radical transformation of our economy that the climate crisis forces upon us is the path to a better world.

Kleins logic found its way into the degrowth movement of the mid to late 2010s, championed by the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, in which the consequences of climate change are prevented by halting and then reversing economic growth. But its hard to imagine a political climate in which citizens of developed nations willingly dismantle most of their energy infrastructure to reach emissions parity with the developing world. And its even harder to imagine states like China, India, Brazil or Nigeria scaling back their economic development to meet a global carbon budget that was almost entirely blown out by western nations over the previous hundred years.

For the novelist and former environmental activist Paul Kingsnorth whom Kolbert quotes in Under a White Sky, and who became a harsh critic of the environmental movement for its obsession with carbon accounting and tendency to see the natural world as an engineering challenge and not a sacred entity both technology and degrowth are illusions. There is no way out. Climate change is not ideological but systemic. Humanity has created a trap it cannot escape, a machine that sustains eight billion lives, more every day, who all will fight to keep it running. But its a machine with no pause, and no off switch. Economists merely describe this machine, which will continue to consume the planet and everything on it until the collapse of the ecosystem causes the destruction of our civilisation. Kingsnorths advice: move to the country. Buy a compost toilet. Learn to use a scythe.

Under a White Sky suggests a middle ground between the utopian optimism of writers like Robinson and Klein, and the apocalyptic bleakness of Wallace-Wells and Kingsnorth. Although theres a way in which her conception of the future is more depressing. There is, after all, something romantic about Kingsnorths vision: the terrifying chaos of modernity comes crashing down and the wise survivors live contemplative pastoral lives in the ruins. But what if modernity all the capitalism, globalisation, technological transformation doesnt stop? What if it keeps going? What if the apocalypse never comes? Or, what if it comes but nothing really changes? Kolbert sketches out what Ive come to think of as the boring apocalypse.

She starts with a river. Back in the 1960s Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a foundational text for the modern environmental movement. It described the devastating impacts of synthetic chemicals on the natural environment. As an alternative to industrial chemicals, Carson suggested, we should be using natural solutions. Instead of spraying a waterway with toxic chemicals to wipe out insects, turning them into rivers of death, we could merely introduce a new species that would consume the insects. It was in this spirit that several species of Asian carp were introduced to lakes in the American south, to control the aquatic plants, algae and molluscs causing problems in the waterways.

The carp were aquafarmed in China for centuries, but when transported to US waterways they found themselves in a new environment with abundant food and no natural predators. They spread rapidly, either eating or outcompeting almost every other aquatic species they encountered. Which was bad for the rivers and lakes of the US south and midwest, but would be disastrous if they reached the great lakes ecosystem of the Atlantic northeast.

For millions of years the Great Lakes basin was separated off from the waterways of the rest of North America, but in the late 19th/early 20th century these systems were linked by the US Army Corps of Engineers, who were charged with redirecting the Chicago River. At the time the river carried Chicagos sewage directly into Lake Michigan, which caused routine outbreaks of cholera and typhoid. The Corps dug a gigantic canal and used it to reverse the rivers flow, carrying the effluent south into the Mississippi river delta. One hundred years later, it became the entry point for the endemic carp, moving upstream, to access the great lakes.

The same Engineer Corps that created the canal were given the job of preventing this, but they couldnt dam or block the waterway because it was still a vital part of Chicagos infrastructure. They looked at a variety of solutions: dosing the canal with poison, irradiating it with UV light, zapping it with ozone, superheating it, turning it anoxic by flooding it with nitrogen. In the end they decided the simplest solution was electricity. Kolbert, inspecting the canal on a pleasure craft called City Living, captures the surreal creepiness of floating down a deliberately electrified river: the dire warning signs, the flights of birds gathering to consume any fish that have been stunned or killed. If a human fell into the river, an engineer informed her, theyd probably die.

Its easy to say that its crazy to electrify an entire river, or that invasive new species shouldnt have been introduced to the US ecosystem, or that the Chicago River shouldnt have been reversed. But Kolberts book is about path dependency. All of those things happened. Theyre locked in and cant be rolled back. Rachel Carsons alternate title for Silent Spring was The Control of Nature, an idea Carson was firmly against. It was grounded in arrogance, she argued, in a worldview in which nature existed for the convenience of man. But what if relinquishing control is no longer an option? What if the attempt to control is already there, and all you have left is trying to control the control, in an endless layering of improvisations and feedback loops?

What will happen to the worlds coastal megacities when the sea levels rise and they begin to flood? Climate stories are often illustrated with drawings of drowned cities; the streets transformed into lagoons beneath the skeletons of abandoned skyscrapers. Kolbert suggests they might look like New Orleans, already a flood-prone city, already below sea level and sinking a little lower every year.

Some of the hydrologists and geologists Kolbert interviews no longer refer to the Mississippi River delta around New Orleans as a landscape, or a natural environment. Instead it is a CHANS: a Coupled Human and Natural System. The scale of the engineering works the levees, floodgates, canals and pumping stations needed to keep the city dry are so vast, so denaturing, the results require a new acronym, a new framework for thinking about humanitys relationship with nature. The section of the Mississippi running through the CHANS is so regulated it can no longer be thought of as a river, in any meaningful way. And, of course, these attempts to control nature have unintended consequences, requiring further interventions.

Some of this is simple. Relatively. Because most of New Orleans is below sea level, any rain falling on it needs to either evaporate or be pumped away by the massive network of pumping stations and canals distributed across the city. But marshy soils compact through dewatering so the city itself is sinking even deeper as a result of all the pumping. Which increases the danger, both from flooding and storm surges, which requires more levees and more pumping. The city is trapped in a loop, each iteration of which escalates both the problem and the solution required.

But the real headache is the river. The Mississippi is regulated to prevent it from drowning the city but its annual flooding once deposited millions of tons of sediment across the delta, and in its absence the land around New Orleans is eroding. It is, Kolbert informs us, one of the fastest-disappearing places on Earth, with the government officially retiring the names of its bays and bayous because theyve been consumed by the Gulf of Mexico. Kolbert flies over the area, observing the roads and fields still visible beneath the slowly rising waters.

Of course there is a plan to fix this, with the Engineer Corps and other agencies dreaming up grand plans to sledge vast amounts of sediment and divert it to the coastline. More control. The coastal cities of the future might not drown but theyll be radically transformed, with pharaonic flood control infrastructure rising to join the skyscrapers and motorways. It will fail, sometimes, as New Orleans does. Residents will get used to storms that scatter fishing boats across the roads and hang dead cows in the branches of trees. And the regions of the landscape that cant be saved because they have no economic value and their residents have no political capital will gradually disappear.

30 August, 2005; New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina (Photo: Michael Appleton for the New York Daily News Archive, via Getty Images)

The best way to dim the sun to turn down the heat it casts onto our planet is by scattering vast amounts of small reflective particles into the stratosphere. Tiny (manufactured) diamonds are a strong candidate: theyre non-reactive and wont absorb any energy at all; the light scatters harmlessly back into space. But once you spray them into the atmosphere theyll eventually fall back to earth, and no ones quite sure what would happen to any or all of the planets lifeforms when we start inhaling or otherwise metabolising diamond dust.

The scientists Kolbert talks to at the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program like calcium carbonate. Its natural: the main component of eggshells, snail shells, pearls. The air is already full of it; the ecosystem is saturated with it. And it has the right optical properties. Build enough specialised planes, dump enough of it in the atmosphere and itll reduce the energy of the incoming sunlight enough to offset the increased warmth from the greenhouse effect.

This was, Kolbert explains, almost the first technological solution proposed to the problem of climate change. Way back in the 1960s, when American and Soviet scientists first diagnosed the consequences of increased atmospheric carbon, they grimly predicted that nation states were highly unlikely to reduce their emissions, so youd have to counteract the warming some other way, and this seemed like the best answer.

Is it, though? Climate systems are famously hard to model so no one knows what will happen when you dump hundreds of thousands of tons of reflective particles into the atmosphere. The main concern is that itll disrupt rainfall patterns causing droughts in Africa and Asia. It will probably make solar panels less effective so it might increase the demand for fossil fuels. It will probably turn the sky white: that empty, bleached-out colour you already see in skies over megacities like Cairo or Delhi on a hot clear day.

But the biggest problem with solar geoengineering is that unless your atmospheric CO2 drops you have to keep doing it. It doesnt solve the climate crisis; it just addresses one of its symptoms. Imagine the heater in your house is broken: it keeps getting hotter and hotter. You can use an air conditioning unit to cool the rooms down but you havent fixed the heater. So you need to keep turning the air con up, and up, and up, just to maintain a stable temperature.

All those particles diamonds, or calcium carbonate, or whatever gradually fall to earth, but if CO2 levels continue to rise you need more particle dispersal; more flights. And if those flights are powered by fossil fuels you need even more flights to offset the emissions from those flights. And if you stop doing it, for whatever reason, the compounded heat hits very quickly a scenario that climate modellers refer to as a termination shock. So solar engineering is another trap; another loop. Another path dependent attempt to control a system thats too complex to adequately predict or control.

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The Harvard physicists understand all of these problems. In most cases theyre the ones who figured them out. Their argument is that weve already blown past the CO2 level that would see a 1.5C increase in global temperature. Were already locked into a trajectory that will see catastrophic climate change. And emissions arent going down. Itll take decades for the planet to transition to renewable energy economies, even if every country in the world starts now, which most of them wont.

Many of the IPCC pathways that see emissions reduce over the 21st century rely on widespread adoption of an industrial process called BECCS: Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage. In the simplest implementation: you grow a forest, chop it down, burn the wood for energy and separate out the CO2 as its emitted. Then you store this captured carbon by injecting it deep underground, where it soaks into rocks deep in the planets crust. Climate modellers and economists love BECCS because it lets us have things both ways. We generate the energy that powers most economic growth and remove carbon from the atmosphere at the same time.

As of 2019 there were five BECCS facilities around the world, sequestering roughly 0.0004% of the worlds annual carbon emissions (my calculation; not Kolberts). So it needs to scale up by many orders of magnitude, at the same time that were transitioning the worlds 1.5 billion combustion engine vehicle fleet to electric and all the coal plants to solar and nuclear and wind.

The argument for solar geoengineering is that it buys the world time to carry out the transition to carbon neutrality: the transition we should have been working on for the last 30 years. Critics of the idea wonder if humans even have the right to do this. Were already geoengineering, its advocates reply: Thats what climate change is. But right now were geoengineering in this completely unplanned, uncontrolled way. Is it really worse to do it in a planned way to try and correct that? Kolbert quotes Lampedusa: Everything must change for everything to remain the same.

Towards the end of the book Kolbert contrasts three very different environmentalists on the subject of godhood. The technophile Stewart Brand, who said of humanity, We are as gods and might as well get good at it, the biologist EO Wilson who responds, We are not as gods. We are not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything, and Kingsnorth who commented, We are as gods but we have failed to get good at it. We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children.

In one of his most famous essays Kingsnorth wrote:

When I was young, I thought that the world was divided into good and bad people, and that I was one of the good ones. Later, slightly older, I thought it was divided into informed and ignorant people, and that I was one of the informed ones. Older still, though still not nearly old enough, I thought it was divided into Bad Elites and Good Masses, and that since I had no money or power, I must belong to the second category.

Now I think that humans like ease, material comfort, entertainment, and conformity, and they do not like anyone who threatens to take these things away. I think that even the people who say these things should be taken away in order to prevent the collapse of life on Earth do not really mean it The collapse of the industrial economy is, in all likelihood, the only remaining way to prevent the mass destruction of life on Earth.

Some people love this strain of fatalistic nihilism; they relish the prospect of humanity being destroyed for its sins. But Ive met more people whove read Kingsnorth or The Uninhabitable Earth, or other climate doom literature and found themselves overwhelmed with despair. Theyve abandoned environmentalism because whats the point? or decided not to have children, because why bring new life into a world that is about to end?

Under a White Sky points towards a vision of the future that is far from utopian but there is still a future. And it is a future that looks a lot more like the IPCCs higher probability intermediate pathways than the rapid extinction scenarios which have captured so many imaginations, but which weve been steadily moving away from over the last 10 years. Its a future where problems have been caused by people who arent bad, or ignorant or addicted to material ease; theyre smart and well intentioned but working with systems that were too complex for them to predict the consequences of their actions, which are now irreversible. And those problems are partly solved by that same class of people, who are creating further problems downstream. Its a future in which some things are better while others are horrible (the rivers are electrified, the skies are white, Elon Musk is the worlds first carbon currency trillionaire) but both the terrible and miraculous have become banal to those who live in it. A future we still have agency to influence, for better or worse.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, by Elizabeth Kolbert (Bodley Head, $37) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.

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Systems control: Introducing a new way of thinking about the climate crisis - The Spinoff

As large corporates weigh up the pros and cons of the office versus working from home, PwCs commitment to Merchant Square sends a strong signal about its faith in the future of Belfasts office sector. Its commitment to the scheme, which last month became the provinces biggest investment deal when it was sold by Oakland Holdings to a Middle Eastern investor for 87m, could also aidthe regeneration of Belfasts staid core.

So, just how big a role could the accounting giants commitment to Belfast play as we slowly emerge from lockdown?

The office sector in Belfast, along with every other UK town and city, has taken a massive hit from Covid. Figures from Savills show a significant drop in take-up from around 517,000 sq ft in 2019 to 140,000 sq ft in 2020. Data from CBRE shows that 2020 rents for grade-A office space stood between 21/sq ft and 23/sq ft, while rents for refurbished space were around 18/sq ft to 20/sq ft.

Commentators say it is too early to know whether Brexit will also have an impact on the market, but Belfast is expected to emerge from the pandemic stronger and raring to go.

PwCs tenancy announcement has already heralded a mini tsunami in lease take-ups by retail and leisure operators.

Merchant Square is a good location with leisure and public transport

Kevin MacAllister, PwC

No sooner had we signed our deal on Merchant Square than every lease and restaurant was taken up in the surrounding area, says Kevin MacAllister, regional market leader for Northern Ireland at PwC. We will not single-handedly regenerate Belfast city centre, but we are going a fair way to kickstarting it.

Progress would be swifter if there was not a shortage of office space, but the many statement buildings now under way or with planning consent should remedy this (see panel, overleaf).

Several huge projects are also set to alter the face of Belfast in the coming decades. There is Weavers Cross, a new 1bn regional transport hub; The Sixth, which is set to open in the old Belfast Telegraph Building; the Destination Hub a new 100m tourist attraction and cultural hub that the council is currently looking for a site for; and Smithfield Yard, just off the main retail thoroughfare.

All these are making developers salivate and, following the Merchant Square sale, investors are now watching the city closely.

A commitment of this scale [in buying Merchant Square] from an international investor new to the jurisdiction shows the exciting and unique place our market finds itself in, says Ben Turtle, director of investment at Savills. We are aware of other assets being prepared for market that will further test the depth of interest in Northern Ireland.

Brian Lavery, managing director Belfast at CBRE, describes the Merchant Square deal as a shot in the arm for not only the citys market but for PwC, making it clear they are going back into the office to be an office tenant.

There is a certain irony in PwC taking Merchant Square given it originally occupied the building two decades ago when it was known as Ferguson & Rushton. However, according to MacAllister, PwCs move was not because those of us who had worked there before [were] feeling in any way sentimental.

He says the building is well-located in the city centre and has a thriving leisure scene and good public transport links, so signing on the dotted line was a no-brainer.

When Covid struck, it seemed the world of professional services occupying big office development was gone, that we were going tomove into virtual working forever, says MacAllister. But we were never convinced that was the case. We are talking about future-proofing our business developing a place where people want to be, rather than have to be.

Merchant Square is just a few hundred yards away from the proposed Weavers Cross transport-led regeneration scheme. The eight-hectare site, in the heart of the city, will be home to a modern, high-capacity transport hub and mixed-use developments, including large swathes of offices. Set to be developed on the site of the existing Europa bus centre and Great Victoria Street railway station, the 1bn scheme promises to create 50,000 new jobs.

MacAllister says the development is seen as a huge catalyst for Belfasts regeneration. [Weavers Cross] is certainly influencing our decision to move in that direction because that will bring the whole life into the city centre.

Another development that will have a significant impact on the local property market is The Sixth. In February 2019, the 80m joint venture between Belfast City Council and McAleer & Rushe got the go-ahead. The 300,000 sq ft mixed-use scheme at the old Belfast Telegraph site on Royal Avenue will have 230,000 sq ft of workspace, and potential for a global HQ with floorplates of upto 30,000 sq ft.

The Sixth will be next to Ulster Universitys new 250m Belfast campus. The 750,000 sq ft site will house up to 15,000 students and staff the equivalent of a population the size of Armagh being dropped into one end of the city. The biggest change in Belfast is going to be the Ulster University campus, says Patrick OGorman, principal at Bywater Properties, which along with partner Ashmour is bringing its own changes tothe city.

Together they are refurbishing a 30,000 sq ft building, 35DP, which is five floors above the Boots shop on Donegall Place and set to be completed in early July.

Its a slightly untested environment for office space because traditionally the upper floors in Belfast have been left fallow above retail, says Gareth Howell, director at Savills, the schemes leasing agent.

Potential occupiers have clearly not been put off by the location,as the building is close to being under offer on half the space.

The Bywater/Ashmour partnership is also bringing on Smithfield Yard, a 167,000 sq ft mixed-use scheme with 152,000 sq ft of offices, which is currently populated by a hub of independent retailers. The scheme has planning permission and is viewed as a long-term prospect when market conditions allow.

It is one of the things that attracted us to working in Belfast, says Theo Michell, principal at Bywater. You dont get many major city centres in the UK where you get vacant sites that have sat for a long time with not much happening. But its right off Royal Avenue, slap bang in the city centre.

At all the new schemes and developments being brought forward in Belfast city centre, the spotlight is very much on wellbeing and ESG.

The wellness agenda was ramping up pre-pandemic, [but Covid has] sped up that process, says David Wright, director at CBRE Belfast. Theres going to be a flight to quality in the short term. We have a lot of secondary-type buildings in Belfast that arent fit for purpose.

Merchant Square has an entire floor dedicated to wellbeing, hosting pilates and yoga classes along with social activities. And next door is a building leading the charge on wellbeing.

The Lotus Group is developing The Well, a 36,000 sq ft office building on Wellington Street that has a strong focus on wellness and will be delivered in 2023. Already dubbed the healthiest building in Belfast, its website boasts it will be an office utopia where the air is clean, the lights are controlled and the journey from door to desk is 100% touch-free.

Alastair Coulson, managing director of The Lotus Group, says he has no worries about leasing activity post-pandemic. We bought a building in a really prime location next to the city centre, and the new transport hub [Weavers Cross] is going to be opposite PwCs new building so location is A1. We were always confident we were in the right location.

Despite the challenges the industry has faced over the last 12 months, Coulson is optimistic about the future. There are a lot of great developers doing great things in the city. That all [aids] Belfast plc, as a rising tide helpsall ships.

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Belfast is ready to bounce back | Insight - Property Week

Even the concert hall at Mills College is different.

Looming at the back of the stage is a huge, bright mural of a forest opening onto a deep blue lake. The ceiling is painted in geometric patterns and vivid colors. Frescos of Gregorian chant scores flank the stage.

We are not in sedate, monochromatic Carnegie Hall. No, Littlefield Concert Hall at Mills, in Oakland, Calif., is a vibrant, even eccentric place, where it is clear from the surroundings that music outside the mainstream is not simply tolerated, but celebrated.

There was a real atmosphere of comfort and support for whatever it is that you wanted to do, the composer David Rosenboom, who led the music program at Mills in the 1980s, said in an interview.

Now that program and the electronics-focused Center for Contemporary Music, together among the most distinguished havens for experimental work in America over the past century, are facing possible closure. On March 17 the college, founded in 1852, announced that ongoing financial problems, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, would mean the end of its history as a degree-granting institution made up of an undergraduate womens college and several coeducational graduate programs.

Pending approval by its board of trustees, the schools final degrees are likely to be conferred in 2023. The statement announcing the proposed closure alluded to plans for a Mills Institute on the 135-acre campus, but the focus of such an institute and whether it would include the arts is unclear.

For composers and musicians, the potential loss of the Mills program has come as a startling blow, even if the colleges finances have been shaky for years. I long feared this might be the worst-case scenario, but I am still devastated by the news, said the harpist and composer Zeena Parkins, who teaches there.

It has been an astonishing run. The schools faculty over the years has been practically an index of maverick artists, including Darius Milhaud, at Mills for three decades beginning during World War II; Luciano Berio, who came at Milhauds invitation; Lou Harrison, who built an American version of the Indonesian gamelan percussion orchestra; the deep listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros; Robert Ashley, an innovator in opera; Terry Riley, a progenitor of Minimalism; the influential composer and improviser Anthony Braxton; James Fei, a saxophonist and clarinetist who works with electronic sounds; and Maggi Payne, a longtime director of the Center for Contemporary Music, Millss laboratory for electronic work since the 1960s, when Oliveros was its first leader.

Among the alumni are Dave Brubeck, Steve Reich, John Bischoff, William Winant and Laetitia Sonami; several former students ended up returning to teach after graduating.

What Mills College had was unique, said Riley, who taught there from 1971 to 1981. I have never in my travels encountered another institution like it.

Millss defining feature was its sense of community. Despite all the famous names involved, the overriding impression was that music is not created by lone geniuses, but by people working together.

Fred Frith, whose career has included avant-garde rock and idiosyncratic improvisations and who retired from Mills in 2018 after many years there, said, Music is essentially a collaborative activity, and if Im going to teach improvisation or composition without real hands-on involvement, then were all going to miss out on something.

In the first half of the 20th century, when composers like John Cage became associated with the school, Mills developed a reputation for nonconformity. Performances ran the gamut from traditional instruments to obscure electronics to vacuum cleaners, clock coils and other found objects. Riley recounted an early performance of In C, his open-ended classic from 1964, at which the audience was dancing in the aisles. Laetitia Sonami recalled taking singing lessons with the master Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, guru to Riley and others.

At that time, the program was practically public access. In the 1970s, Mills was still like a community group, said the composer Chris Brown, a former director of the Center for Contemporary Music. It still had the idea that community members could come and use the studios.

Robert Ashley, a guiding presence from 1969 to 1981, helped foster that spirit. Though the radically open sensibility faded as the years went by, Mills maintained a commitment to access through frequent performances in and around Oakland, many of them free.

One of the amazing things about Mills is the rich musical community that it creates through the entire Bay Area, said the composer Sarah Davachi, who graduated in 2012.

As the personal computer revolution was taking hold in the nearby Silicon Valley, experiments with home-brew electronics and microcomputers, like those of David Behrman, were common at Mills, where technology had long been at home through the Center for Contemporary Music. Serendipitous moments abounded: As a student in the 70s, John Bischoff remembers running into David Tudor, renowned as a collaborator with John Cage, in the hallway and being asked to assist with recording Tudors work Microphone. William Winant said he found an original instrument built by the composer and inveterate inventor Harry Partch hidden under the stage in the concert hall.

It felt like utopia: an environment where students are encouraged, and given the support they need, to pursue any and all ideas that came to mind, free from the stifling pressures of capitalism, said Seth Horvitz, an electronic composer who records under the name Rrose.

Students built their own instruments and sound installations, exhilarated by the freedom to do what they wanted. We commandeered every square inch of the music studio and surrounding areas, said the composer Ben Bracken, putting up rogue installations in the courtyards, hallways and hidden rooms, inviting friends to perform in inflatable bubbles, screening Kenneth Anger films in the amphitheater with live studio accompaniments, Moog studio late nights that bled into morning.

But pressures on institutions of higher education around the country, which have intensified in recent decades, did not spare Mills. In 2017, as a cost-cutting measure, it began laying off some tenured faculty. The celebrated composer and multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell learned his contract was not being renewed news that was met with an outcry from the experimental music community. (Mitchells contract was eventually extended, but he chose to retire.) In 2019, the college sold a rare copy of Shakespeares First Folio at auction for just under $10 million, and a Mozart manuscript for an undisclosed sum. But the losses continued and then came the pandemic.

Many musicians said they were concerned about the fate of Millss archives. Maggi Payne said it includes over 2,000 tapes of performances, lectures and interviews, along with scores, letters and synthesizers and hundreds of percussion instruments owned by Lou Harrison.

David Bernstein, the current chair of the music department, said the archives would be protected. We have been working on this project for quite some time, he said. And yes, there are instruments at Mills of significant historical importance. We are very concerned about their fate. Most of all, they should not be stored but used by students interested in exploring new sounds and different musical cultures. And they should also be played by virtuoso performers, as they are now.

But if Millss future is unclear, Roscoe Mitchell said, its legacy is not. It will live on much longer than you and I, he said.

Its history, Mitchell said. Its not going to go away.

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Is the Music Over at Mills College? - The New York Times

A few months ago, when a Reddit-induced buying spree inflated the stock of GameStop and other imperiled companies to absurdist heights, several people asked me if it reminded me of Occupy Wall Street, the protest movement I covered a decade ago that confronted the financial elite. After all, isnt that what the GameStop stock story was all aboutordinary people sticking it to the big investors, swarming a system rigged against most of us?

No, it didnt remind me of Occupy Wall Street at all. There, protesters didnt buy stock; they fed warm meals to hundreds of people each day. They ran a library and held teach-ins and organized free clinics. They worked at making decisions together in a way where everyone could be heard. The goal wasnt to play with commodities; it was to make a commons.

These days, the viral asset class of the moment is NFTsnonfungible tokens, which are turning pieces of digital culture into multi-million-dollar bonanzas. Essentially deeds of ownership enforced by computers rather than governments, NFTs are being heralded as a new opportunity to bring the mechanisms of the elite art world to the people. Think of it as Christys meets eBay, except what you buy doesnt come in the mail, it just sits in your digital wallet. The speculation is fueled by historic highs in the value of cryptocurrencies of all sorts.

I have been hanging around the crypto world since early 2014, during the first murmurs about Ethereum, the system that runs much of the NFT craze. I have been drawn to the creativity of many crypto pioneers, who envision utopias of community governance and equitable distributions of value. But when the crypto market soared in 2017, it was on the basis of collectible CryptoKitties and largely scammy initial coin offeringsstart-ups raising cash with virtually no regulation or accountability. It democratized start-up investing, but for participants in most projects, it was a disaster, much like a lot of the GameStop froth.

The democratization is spreading. In addition to buying NFTs for art, you can buy tokens attached to brands and even non-consenting people, betting on whose tokens you think will be worth more later on. Crypto makes it easier to buy collateralized debt and futures and all the other fun stuff that caused the financial crash in 2008. I coined the term exit to community to describe how start-ups could become owned and governed by their users, rather than investors; but increasingly people are using this to describe turning users into petty investors.

Types of speculation once reserved for elite traders in office buildings or underground gamblers are now subject to that hallowed democratization. Now you, too, can get rich by playing with financial abstractions. But is that what we want to be democratizing?

This latest phase of capitalism has a feeling of dj vu from its first stageexcept rather than speculating on colonial land-grabs and the bodies of slaves, tokens are making commodities of famous people and GIFs. This seems less harmful for now, until it isnt; until we all become tokenized assets, along with the air, water and everything else we need to survive. Already, crypto markets demand massive amounts of electricity. That looks more like dystopia than utopia so far. The apparent freedom to speculate quickly turns into servitude to the whims of the market.

Take art. As the NFT superstar Bleeple told Kara Swisher, all these tokens will probably just make the rich richer. Is more inequality really what the art market needs?

In contrast, consider an important new report commissioned by Grantmakers in the Arts, Solidarity Not Charity, which points the way toward an art-world based on the solidarity economy. The goal there is not to create overvalued superstars but to support cultural workers of many kinds, particularly those who have been most left behind by speculation.

The idea behind the solidarity economy is the opposite of democratizing speculation: It is about expanding the commons, ensuring that more and more of the goods of the world are available for everyone, no matter what tokens they do or dont hold. As Occupy Wall Street tried to show in microcosm, health care and food and housing could be shared resources for everyone, not scarce commodities. Rather than a few people getting rich from their art, the solidarity economy means more and more people having time to develop their cultural skills. Rather than trying to predict what will be valuable in the future, it turns attention to what we need right now.

Crypto technology could support this, too. Projects like Cambiatus and Moeda, both born in South America, put crypto to work to create abundance among the poor. Gitcoin uses a clever system of matching grants to fund common-good software development. The same tools that can be used to speculate can also be used to coordinate and collaborate in new ways.

With every boom and bust cycle, crypto gets closer to the mainstream. Facebook is slated to release its own cryptocurrency this year. Before long, todays wild experiments among early adopters will be the precursors for what we all use and take for granted. But too many of the visions for this emerging technology take us straight down the road of dystopia, where everything is for sale and nothing is shared.

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NFTs are leading to a new financial dystopia. Here's why you should care. - America Magazine