Category Archives: Zeitgeist Movement

Moms and dads stormed into the Spotsylvania County town hall, in Virginia, in early November, hell-bent on purging all objectionable books from in the scholastic jurisdiction. Novels containing any commentary about race, sexuality and sexual content was put under the microscope, as a fresh reactionary panic takes aim at the stacks in high school libraries. Results for gay, 172. Results for heterosexual, two, said Christina Burris, one of the attending parents, who used the districts literature search function to make her point. The board relented, voting 6-0 to enact a liquidation.

One of the books targeted by name was 33 Snowfish, an acclaimed 2003 novel concerning a trio of runaway teens and all sorts of sordid, Kids-ish behavior. The concerned parents of northern Virginia believed that heady themes of poverty, addiction and abuse have no place in the sanctums of learning, and therefore, the book needed to go.

When Paul Cymrot heard about the meeting, he tracked down as many copies of 33 Snowfish as he could find. He soon discovered, ironically, that book was never really in the school library. 33 Snowfish is barely in print, and Cymrot tells me that it was an ebook version, lingering in some dusty corner of the school library servers, which sparked the initial animus.

The moral militancy immediately backfired, because Cymrot knows a good business opportunity when he sees one. Hes owned the Spotsylvania-area Riverby Books for 25 years, and possesses a shrewd nose for the ebbs and flows of the publishing market. One bookselling truth remains eternally undefeated, explains Cymrot. When a censorious zeitgeist swallows up a novel, a lot of people will want to buy it.

It was not easy to find a box full of 33 Snowfish, but we did, he continues. We sold all that we bought, and we kept a couple as loaners because we wanted to make sure any students in the community could see what the fuss was about. There will always be some around.

Its now easier than ever to read 33 Snowfish in Spotsylvania county, subverting the rightwing siege on the supposed woke conspiracy infecting school libraries.

New ominous headlines about book bannings trickle in all the time. Just this month, Texas state representative Matt Krause pushed for the ousting of 850 books, including classics by Alan Moore and Margaret Atwood, from the public curriculum. A few days earlier, Parents in Kansas City barnstormed school conventions because they fear that their children might start internalizing the wisdom of Alison Bechdel or Angie Thomas. Two members of the board at the Spotsylvania meeting floated the idea of literally burning the offending titles, which would be an assault on both our precious norms and our precious subtext.

As always, the impetus of the mania is simple, stupid and cynical. The Republican party has made a concerted effort to bring outr philosophic principles like critical race theory to the heart of our politics, which is why the Virginia governor-elect, Glenn Youngkin, spent much of his time on the campaign trail griping about Toni Morrisons Beloved. Parents took the bait, and overnight high school librarians those brazen extremists pushing their anti-American agendas by cataloging Pulitzer winners from 1987 were put in the crosshairs.

These books are rarely inflammatory or obscene; instead, they simply contain narratives about race, gender and inequality that chafe against prescribed American ideology. Thats more than enough for an emboldened conservative movement.

But there is no evidence that the wave of book bans are actually accomplishing their intended ambition. If anything theyve achieved the opposite effect. Sales of Beloved increased after Youngkin transformed Morrison into a partisan figure, and Jerry Craft, an author and artist who found himself on the Krause list for his 2019 graphic novel New Kid, has spoken at length about how legislative suppression is an unlikely boon for his career. What has happened is so many places have sold so many copies because now people want to see what all the hubbub is, he said, in an interview with the Houston Chronicle. Theyre almost disappointed because theres no big thing that they were looking for.

In 2021, with countless different merchants all manacled together by an intercontinental supply chain, proscribing a novel is almost entirely ceremonial more of a whinging fit than a genuine political project. The Nazis burned thousands of books after seizing Berlin in 1933. Today, if a constable comes looking to repossess your literature, a replacement copy can be delivered to your mailbox the next morning.

In fact, the booksellers I spoke to for this story all seemed eager to take on the governments injunction as a spiritual challenge almost like a test of their moral fortitude. Mark Haber, operations manager at Houstons Brazos Bookstore, tells me his staff put up a display featuring a selection of the books evaporating from Texas school libraries. (Beloved and Michelle Zauners Crying in H-Mart are currently performing very well.) We had a drive where people could buy a banned book as a donation for a free library somewhere in the city, says Haber. The bannings feel so organized. They arent targeting a specific book, theyre targeting books in general.

Brazos, of course, is part of Houstons liberal enclave. There is a self-selection bias in his sales figures and customer clientele, which Haber happily admits. Its definitely a political stance, he says. We have customers whove maybe already read the book, and just want to buy it again.

In fact, Cymrot tells me that he thinks that the book-ban sales bump is truly a bipartisan phenomenon. He notices a surge regardless of what party is currently relitigating the library. Earlier this year, when six of Dr. Seuss books left circulation due to some offensive caricatures in the pages, Riveryby thrived once again. These paperbacks in our basement suddenly became collectibles, he says.

At the very least, hopefully the censorship campaigns encourage kids to read more. I like the idea of enterprising teens wielding the Krause agenda like a summer reading list, checking off every title, one by one, until theyve firmly opened their third eye.

One of the most heartening stories that surfaced from the hysteria occurred in York county, Pennsylvania, where local ordinances forbade teachers from using a swath of texts in their lesson plans last November. (The taxonomy was bizarre. Biographies of Aretha Franklin, Malala Yousafzai and Eleanor Roosevelt were put on ice.) High schoolers around the community roused to action staging campus protests, canvassing the local papers and eventually winning a reversal of the policy in September.

Today, the confluence of students and teachers who overturned the ban are known as the Panthers Anti-Racist Union, named after the mascot of Central York high school. The group aims to continue their social justice advocacy into the future, which could soon result in much bolder action than the mealy proclivities of the local school board.

Weve always said this organization is about creating a safe space for everyone to talk about who they are, and what their struggles are. Not just in our school community, but in their lives, says Edha Gupta, a senior at Central York high school and a member of the Panthers Anti-Racist Union. Any healthy way for people to genuinely express how theyre feeling about these matters. We want a place for students to feel like they have the authority to speak up about what theyre passionate about.

I went through the list of the banned books and I thought they sounded great. My mom had a ton of them, I got others from random people, says Olivia Pituch, another member of the union. Its funny, the ban made me more curious to see what they were about.

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US conservative parents push for book bans and unintentionally make reading cool again - The Guardian

Raising virtuous men is vital for the continuity of liberty and self-government in the American republic.

There is a notion prevalent among cultural commentators that expressing concern for the welfare of men specifically or reservations about modern societys impact on American men in particular indicates an insidiousand, we are also led to believe, newideology, often called toxic masculinity in telemedia discourse. Even among so-called conservatives, there seems to be a war over whether considerations of masculinity or the pursuit of a particularly masculine politics has a place in civil discourse.

A prominent historian at an evangelical university wrote a book denouncing the 20th-century masculine ideal represented by John Wayne as incompatible with Christianity. David French recently warned of the dangerous politics of manly toughness, and accused national conservatives of holding up Trump as the masculine ideal. (They didnt.) It seems that those conservatives angry about sociological changes in the Republican political coalition since 2016 decided they have no use for masculine politics nor a positive discussion of manliness because of the perceived ever-present threat of Donald Trump. This is short-sighted.

Meanwhile, a rediscovery of masculinity among young American conservatives is well under way. Aaron Renns newsletter, the Masculinist, offers support and advice for traditional Christian men who seek to reclaim natural masculinity, shorn of the goofier evangelical polemics surrounding manliness. Oren Cass has written on mens need, in an era of mass male unemployment, to reclaim their place as the pillar of American vocational life. Senator Josh Hawley recently issued a clarion call for a revival of strong and healthy manhood in America. Healthy concern for a republic that exemplifies the best of masculine (and feminine) virtue should not be merely the province of latter-day Nietzscheans or left to the derision of progressives.

Whatever excesses exist in corners of the movement to reclaim masculinity, it seems clear that societies throughout history have understood men needed outlets for their aspirations and models to emulate. In the 19th century, American intellectuals called great men of the past to their readers attention precisely because they understood male thirsts for achievement, conquest, and excellence as natural aspects of human life. Rather than things to be eradicated, they were seen instead as virtues to be cultivated and rightly ordered. Men needed to learn how to achieve, conquer, and excel in ways that helped the republic as a whole and did not merely aggrandize themselves or feed their egos.

Great American minds of the 19th century knew that men needed great men as models. Ralph Waldo Emerson argued in Representative Men (1850) that it was natural to believe in great men. If the companions of our childhood should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not surprise us. All of mythology, said Emerson, opened with demigods, and the circumstance is high and poetic; that is, their genius is paramount. In the legends of the Gautama, the first men ate the earth, and found it deliciously sweet. Masculinity, in Emersons intellectual economy, was not a European or white construction. It was global and transcended race.

Emerson emphasized that the reality and necessity of using great men as models for masculine pursuits and human society were global in character. The world, he declared, is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Human life was made sweet and tolerable by the beliefs of such an aspirational male society. Actually, or ideally, we manage to live with superiors. Men called their children and their lands by the names of great men, and their names are wrought into the verbs of language, their works and effigies are in our houses, and every circumstance of the day recalls an anecdote of them.

The pursuit of greatness that defined male existence was, according to Emerson, the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood. Men traveled to foreign parts to find their works, and if possible, to get a glimpse of the great men they might become themselves. But too often, lamented Emerson, men were put off with fortune instead. The pursuit of money and financial success were no substitutes for actual male greatness. Actual greatness needed to be aimed at virtue and the good of society.

The good of society was not necessarily actuated through feats of physical strength or forcing the male will upon an object or person. What determined the quality of republican manhood was the ability to self-govern, what Emerson called mans ability to attend his own affairs, and to pursue a cultivated mind. I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light, and in large relations. Thoughtful republican masculinity was not bull-headed and unwilling to change. The thoughtful man was willing to make painful corrections, and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error. Constant thoughtfulness marked Emersons great man.

The notion that greatness was achieved through thoughtfulness meant that any man, no matter his rank in society, income, or temperament, could become a sort of great republican man. Emerson offered great men of all classes, those who stand for facts, and for thoughts as worthy of admiration. This habit of mind led men to exhibit real courage. Real courage was noted by men and women of the early republic because it enabled the thoughtful man in a democratic society to stand up for truth against whatever mob might oppose him. Harriet Beecher Stowe said that no test of personal courage or manliness was greater than a willingness to stand and oppose a mobnot by subduing members of the mob with brute force, but instead by arguing with them.

The aspirations of young men deserve attention precisely because we should shape them to aim at the high objects set by great men of the past. Tolerance comes from a position of strength. A generation of men trained to be willing and ready to stand against the mobs of the 21st century will be better able to choose to do so by thoughtful engagement, and less likely to resort first to brute force and so feed the increasingly violent zeitgeist of the age. This is vital for the continuity of liberty and self-government in the American republic.

In 2019, David French argued that Americans did their sons no favors when we tell them that they dont have to answer that voice inside them that tells them to be strong, to be brave, and to lead. We do them no favors when we let them abandon the quest to become a grown man when that quest gets hard. He noted that American men also did themselves them no favors when they were insensitive to those boys who dont conform to traditional masculinity. But when it came to the crisis besetting our young men, traditional masculinity isnt the problem; it can be part of the cure. Then, David French was exactly right. We should hope for a republican politics that affirms the best of the masculine virtues Emerson celebrated, without regard to the partisan and intraparty squabbles of the moment.

Miles Smithis visiting assistant professor of History at Hillsdale College. His main research interests are 19th-century intellectual and religious history in the United States and in the Atlantic World. You can follow him on Twitter at@IVMiles.

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Raising Republican Men - The American Conservative

For obvious reasons, 2021 has seen a dragster-like acceleration of the adoption of digital technologies for education, consolidating the learnings of 2020 into long-term strategies.

Amongst those, VR has moved from being a curiosity to being heralded as the most meaningful way to transform education for good.

Finally, its also been the year the Metaverse found its way into the zeitgeist.

This is, however, still very much exploration time: understanding the medium, testing students appetite, designing new models of blended pedagogy.

Every educator will have to start somewhere. But where is that somewhere exactly?

We have compiled the 10 best affordable education VR apps to try in 2022 and broken them down into categories such as Soft Skills, Arts & Culture, Geography & Nature, Social VR and Anatomy & Design.

Bodyswaps is an award-winning soft skills training platform on which students can practise and develop their communication, teamwork and leadership skills.

Immersed in realistic workplace scenarios such as job interviews or project presentation, students interact with virtual characters using their voice before swapping bodies to watch themselves back through the other persons perspective.

This is real-play not roleplay! And the best way to prepare set students up for successful career starts.

Available demos on Quest

Apollo 11, places students on one of humankinds greatest ever feats the first spaceflight to the moon. Once they embark on this journey theyll be able to experience this historic event through the eyes of the astronauts who took one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. By using a mix of original archive audio and video together with accurate 3D recreations of spacecrafts, all set to inspirational music, this is not only educational, its a mind-blowing sensory journey!

Available on Quest for 7.99

Her story of hope, persecution and desperation is known throughout the world and her secret-annex in Amsterdam attracts 1.2million visitors per year. Not everyone is lucky enough to include this in their school trips for the year and thats why this experience is so powerful.

As now, students can visit the secret-annex, experience the rooms hidden in an office building that hosted the Frank family for two years. A unique, powerful and emotional insight into the life of a 13 year old Jewish girl during WW2.

Available on Quest for Free

Traveling While Black is a filmed 360 experience that transports the viewer into historic Bens Chili Bowl restaurant in Washington DC. Youll sit down with patrons at Bens as they reflect on their experiences of restricted movement and race relations in America.

It feels like having an intimate conversation with newly-met strangers about something both very personal and shared by millions. A powerful and memorable experience.

Available for free on Quest

Wander the world openly through the magic of VR.

How does Wander work? With the assistance of Google Maps Street View, youll be able to visit any place in VR: walk across the London Bridge, stroll the gardens of the Taj Mahal, or witness the enormity of the Great Pyramids of Egypt unlimited exploration awaits! For those studying from home during lockdowns, this is a great way to travel across the world and through time without having to step foot outside your door. Bring your students on a field trip, anytime, anywhere, from the comfort of their rooms.

Available on Quest for 7.99

Whats better than a tour of the planetarium? A tour of the Solar System. With Titans of Space students go for a densely educative ride through an academically accurate and interactive recreation of the Solar System. They will have access to 4-dimensional tour information, including facts about over 40 different Solar System bodies. That certainly beats the textbook with a single color picture I had in the 90s.

Available on Quest for 7.99

Engage is a social VR platform that allows educators to create multi-user sessions to host conferences, classes or private lessons with people from around the world. It features customizable avatars (you can make your avatar look as similar to your physical self), pre-designed virtual objects/environments and ability to host up to 40 users at once in one session. For Educators, youll have the opportunity to design your own immersive classes thanks to a huge library of assets and their editing tools

Available for 4.99 per month

The concept is simple: Tilt Brush lets you paint in 3D. With an extremely intuitive UX, TiltBrush lets you unleash your creativity with three-dimensional brush strokes, stars, light, and even fire. Your room becomes your canvas. The possibilities are truly endless. MultiBrush is a multiplayer implementation of the open source code for Tilt Brush. Now you can play, create, and enjoy art with friends. Since its release back in 2017, TiltBrush has remained firmly in my top 3 to get anyone to discover the power of VR.

Available on Quest for 14.99

3D Organon is a multi-award winning self-discovery experience into the human body. Students can visualize and interact with the skeletal system, muscles, vessels, nerves, and other organs in 3D. The app features an extensive knowledge-base of anatomical definitions with terminology based on the official Terminologia Anatomica.

Demos Available

ShapeXR is a design and rapid prototyping tool in VR. Students can start creating in 3D within minutes without prior experience and create immersive 3D storyboards to show their ideas. While most AR and VR building tools tend to require steep learning curves or coding experience, ShapeXR ditches all that by providing an interactive onboarding process where you learn to build with your hands. Finally, it also enables real-time collaboration on projects, the closest thing to actually bringing ideas to life.

Available for free on Quest

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What are the top 10 VR Apps for Education in 2022? FE News - FE News

movement that emerged from the Zeitgeist movie series

The Zeitgeist Movement is an activist movement established in the United States in 2008 by Peter Joseph. The group is critical of market capitalism, describing it as structurally corrupt and wasteful of resources. The group dismisses historic religious concepts as misleading, and embraces sustainable ecology and scientific administration of society.[1][2][3][4] VC Reporter's Shane Cohn summarized the movement's charter as: "Our greatest social problems are the direct results of our economic system".[5]

The Zeitgeist Movement was formed in 2008 by Joseph shortly after the late 2008 release of Zeitgeist: Addendum, the second film in the Zeitgeist film series.[6][7]

Zeitgeist was first linked to the Venus Project. In April 2011, partnership between the two groups ended in an apparent power struggle, with Joseph commenting, "Without [the Zeitgeist Movement], [the Venus Project] doesnt exist it has nothing but ideas and has no viable method to bring it to light."[6]

The first Zeitgeist documentary which predates the organization Zeitgeist movement, borrowed from the works of Eustace Mullins, Lyndon LaRouche, and radio host Alex Jones.[8] Much of its footage was taken directly from Alex Jones documentaries.[8]

The group holds an annual event, Z-Day (or Zeitgeist Day), an "educational forum" held in March. The New York Times reported on the second Z-Day held at Manhattan Community College in New York in 2009 which included lectures by Peter Joseph and Jacque Fresco.[9] This event sold out with 900 people paying $10 each to attend. The event's organizers said that 450 connected events in 70 countries around the globe also took place.[9]

An article in the Journal of Contemporary Religion describes the movement as an example of a "conspirituality", a synthesis of New Age spirituality and conspiracy theory.[10]

Michelle Goldberg of Tablet Magazine called the movement "the world's first Internet-based apocalyptic cult, with members who parrot the party line with cheerful, rote fidelity."[8] In her opinion, the movement is "devoted to a kind of sci-fi planetary communism", and the 2007 documentary that "sparked" the movement was "steeped in far-right, isolationist, and covertly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories."[8]

Alan Feuer of The New York Times said the movement was like "a utopian presentation of a money-free and computer-driven vision of the future, a wholesale reimagination of civilization, as if Karl Marx and Carl Sagan had hired John Lennon from his "Imagine" days to do no less than redesign the underlying structures of planetary life."[9]

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The Zeitgeist Movement - Wikipedia

XR protesters march down Vancouvers Main Street, September 25, 2021. Photo by Cole Schisler.

On Monday, October 25, a group of over 70 activists occupied an intersection to disrupt access to the Vancouver International Airport. Impassioned speeches were made about the climate emergency and the impending mass extinction of humankind and about Canadas ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples. After nearly 30 minutes, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced that those who did not vacate the intersection would be arrested.

As most began to clear out, 18 people sat in a line across the intersection and refused to leave. One by one, each of them was arrested. Most decided to go limp, a form of non-compliance with arrest, requiring the police to carry them away on stretchers before being rounded up in paddy wagons and taken to the station for processing. Later, as those arrested were released from the police station, Indigenous elders greeted them with more singing, drumming, and the burning of sage, and bowls of chili were passed around.

This was day 11 of Extinction Rebellions October Rebellion, in which demonstrators blocked bridges and occupied major intersections across Vancouver every day for two weeks. Their goal was to call for an end to fossil fuel subsidies and highlight Prime Minister Trudeaus inadequate climate action in the lead-up to the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26. Over the course of these 14 days, 54 demonstrators were arrested in Vancouver alone.

XR is a global environmental movement founded in the United Kingdom in 2018 that has since spread to every continent. Through non-violent civil disobedience, their aim is to compel governments to take action regarding climate change and put the climate crisis at the forefront of public awarenesseven if that means mass disruption. We are deeply sorry for any inconvenience that this causes, their website reads.

Protest action that incurs the risk of mass arrest is a central part of the XR movement, whose guiding philosophy is rooted in previous grassroots civil disobedience models, such as the civil rights and womens suffrage movements. The rationale is that causing mass disruption in urban centres and overwhelming criminal justice systems is the only way to force the government to listen.

This summer, British Columbia experienced a scorching heat dome, which claimed nearly 600 lives. The same mass swaths of the province that were literally burning this summer are now completely flooded. On Vancouver Island, some of the last remaining old-growth forests are being destroyed for corporate profits. Meanwhile, the Canadian government is a major investor in oil and gas, to the tune of $18 billion in 2020, making it the largest per-capita public spender on fossil fuels in the G20.

If you look at the past 30 years of campaigning, carbon emissions have gone up by 50 percent, explained Zain Haq, a 20-year-old Simon Fraser University student and an organizer of XRs Vancouver chapter. Due to the carbon lag, which refers to the delayed response between the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and its subsequent effects, XR believes that immediate action is required for there to be a sliver of hope for a habitable future. Even though direct action doesnt guarantee success, we need to recognize that all other forms of advocacy and campaigning dont work, Haq asserted.

Haq has extensively studied the history and philosophy of civil disobedience and draws his inspiration from grassroots movements across the Global South. He pointed to Gandhis Salt March in 1930, where he led a group of followers on a 386-kilometre walk to protest the Salt Tax, and, more broadly, British colonial rule in India. Along the way, 60,000 arrests were made, including Gandhi himself. This drew international attention to the oppressive colonial system and was a major catalyst along the road to independence.

During the US civil rights movement, at least 450 Freedom Riders were arrested in 1961 for protesting racial segregation in public transportation. By intentionally filling the prisons, they effectively overwhelmed the Mississippi state treasury. Within months, segregation of public transportation was outlawed by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Indeed, mass arrests have been a central feature of some of historys most notable and successful civil disobedience movements. An organizer by the name Badger explained how, through mass arrests, XR is trying to shift the zeitgeist on climate change. Given Canadas heavy investment in fossil fuels and the fact that the mainstream media routinely fails to report on the severity of the crisis, Badger argues that the issue needs to be pushed into the faces of the general public, and that arrests are the only way to do that.

Badger and other protesters awaiting arrest at the airport blockade. Photo by Dorothy Settles.

At the beginning of each XR action, a roster is passed around for people to literally sign up to get arrested. Organizers lead training sessions about what to expect during an arrest, including the legal consequences. Arrestees are typically charged with mischief and intimidation for blocking a roadway. While nobody has yet incurred a criminal record for partaking in an XR action in Vancouver, many activists have taken considerable personal risks and sacrifices by getting arrested.

Haq has been arrested ten times for his environmental activism, running the risk of deportation since he is residing in Vancouver on a study permit from Pakistan. Badger, on the other hand, had his first (and second, and third) arrest during the October Rebellion. Although he has been active in XR since April of this year, he was initially hesitant to get arrested, as hes on a working holiday visa from the UK. Ultimately, he views the sacrifice and personal consequences in terms of his visa status as minimal compared to the sacrifices people are being forced to make because of the climate crisis. Its a minor inconvenience to me, he said, compared to life or death for millions of people.

Badger explained that beyond knowing arrest is the right thing to do, people will generally be moved to be arrested if they know it will make a tangible difference. Thats largely why he decided that the October Rebellion was the right time for his first arrestgiven that dozens of others were also getting arrested and the timing of COP26, he figured this was when his arrest would have the most concrete impact.

XR actions tend to attract people from a wide diversity of age groups (ten of the individuals who were arrested during the October Rebellion were over the age of 60). Andrea Miller, for instance, was arrested twice during the October Rebellion because she has nothing to lose. Miller, who is 77, has been active in the environmental movement for decades and has also been arrested for protesting the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline as well as the destruction of old-growth forests at the Fairy Creek blockade.

Im an angry old crone, Miller shrugged, and crones are supposed to give back to society. They are the wise women spreading their knowledge.

The recent COP26 summit drew global attention to climate change. Although Trudeau has pushed for carbon pricing and a carbon-neutral economy and a cap on emissions, he has faced criticism for his pipeline policies and for failing to adequately address carbon production. Meanwhile, nearly 100,000 demonstrators took to the streets of Glasgow to demand climate justice and call for a greater international response to the climate emergency. At one rally, Greta Thunberg even pronounced COP26 a failure. Public scrutiny of the national and international responses to climate change is at a high point, partially due to global protests such as XR.

XRs disruptive protests have been successful in winning the attention of the local media, especially when the number of arrests is high. For instance, the airport action on October 25, which had the highest number of arrests by far of the 14 days, received considerably more media coverage than other days.

The Vancouver Police Department has also drastically increased its budget for protests in recent years. In 2018, $478,460 was spent on managing them, and the police chief estimates that $3.2 million will be spent by the end of 2021. Whats more, its estimated there will have been a record of 840 protests by the end of the year, with high numbers of pandemic and environment-related protests.

Beyond arrests, XR has taken other forms of direct action to generate change. In January 2020, eight members of the University of British Columbias XR chapter held a 100-hour hunger strike to call for the university to divest from fossil fuels. This, paired with the advocacy of political climate action group UBCC350, pushed the UBC Board of Governors to commit to a full divestment from fossil fuel companies. Similarly, on November 2 of this year, Simon Fraser University committed to fossil fuel divestment after a group of students, including Haq, threatened a hunger strike.

Perhaps the most tangible testament to XRs success was in May 2019, when the British Parliament declared a climate emergencyone of XRs core demands. This decision was made only weeks after 1,130 people were arrested in XR-led demonstrations across London. However, XR involvement is vastly more widespread in the UK. That October, 1,832 more arrests were made in London alone.

XR demonstrations are effectively drawing more attention to the climate crisis and applying financial and political pressure to governments across the Western world, yet to bring about the changes XR is pushing for, more people are needed. Regardless, the thinking around climate change is shifting as Canadians are being forced to reckon with the climate emergency, and XR is arguably a driving force of that change.

A protestor being arrested at the Commercial-Broadway blockade, October 17. Photo by Dorothy Settles.

A woman drumming in front of the police during a demonstration at the University of British Columbia immediately before her arrest, October 27. Photo by Dorothy Settles.

Badger during the second day of the October Rebellion at Commercial and Broadway. Photo by Dorothy Settles.

Dorothy Settles is the co-founder and president of Spheres of Influence, a non-profit digital publication dedicated to explaining and analyzing issues in international relations and global affairs. She is based in Vancouver and holds a BA in International Relations from UBC, specializing in the relationship between armed conflict, human rights, and climate change.

More than 75% of our operating budget comes to us in the form of donations from our readers. These donations help to pay our bills, and honorariums for some of our writers, photographers and graphic artists. Our supporters are part of everything we do.

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Extinction Rebellion: Shifting the zeitgeist through ...

You may have experienced an unsettling amount of swaying and wobbling if you've been on a bridge with large numbers of pedestrians traveling over it at the same time. Now, we have a fascinating new explanation for what causes this worrying movement in the structure.

Until now, the thinking went as follows: people fall into step with each other while they're walking, causing a synchronized pendulum effect as everyone moves from left foot to right foot and back again. This is known as theKuramoto model.

However, the new hypothesis puts forward evidence that bridge oscillations can begin with many pedestrians walking with their own individual rhythm instead. Then, once the swaying starts, each person tries to stay upright, with these adjustments destabilizing the bridge even further.

"Think of passengers walking on a boat rocking side-to-side in a stormy sea," says mathematician Igor Belykh, from Georgia State University.

"They will adapt their motion both laterally and in a forward direction in response to the shaking of the boat. In particular, they will slow down their forward motion."

The transfer of energy to the bridge from the footsteps, and the subsequent rocking of the bridge, is an example of negative damping very small vibrations causing much larger end results. The researchers compare it to a rusty swing in a playground, that can eventually be made to move if enough people apply force to it.

The team crunched the numbers using observations of different bridge swaying events, experiments and modelling to reach their conclusions, although some events were recorded in more detail than others. Few of the records mentioned pedestrians walking in sync.

It was the Millennium Bridge in London which closed for two years due to excessive wobbling that was used as the primary case study for putting forward the Kuramoto model as an explanation. Video analysis did indeed show heads and torsos of pedestrians moving together, like a wave of momentum.

The Millennium Bridge, London. (Johan Mouchet/Unsplash)

"This explanation was so popular, it has been part of the scientific zeitgeist," says Belykh.

Another well-known bridge swaying incident occurred in 2003, when an East Coast blackout caused so many people to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge in New York that it started to oscillate significantly. Pedestrians reported feeling seasick and unable to keep their balance if they stood still.

In the course of their calculations, the researchers found that bridges in general are likely to be more vulnerable to swaying than previously thought.

To further back up the explanation that naturally varying footsteps rather than synchronized walking causes this effect, the researchers want to do more work on the movement of people in crowds.

As earlier work from the team has outlined, there is a threshold for each bridge after which oscillations begin (it's about 165 people for the Millennium Bridge, by the way). In the future, engineers could figure this out in advance and tweak their designs as needed, although it's not easy to calculate.

"Bridge designers should be aware there could always be dangerous instances of negative damping," says Belykh.

"Our formula provides useful estimates, given the expected number of pedestrians using a bridge."

The research has been published in Nature Communications.

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Crowds Can Cause Bridges to Sway Unnervingly, And We May Finally Know Why - ScienceAlert

Last week, the George Harrison estate released a new, official video for Harrisons 1970 masterpiece, My Sweet Lord from his magnum opus All Things Must Pass.Its a playful and fun video, with a kind of goofy X-Files plot, featuring a star-studded cast (Mark Hamill, Fred Armison, Vanessa Bayer, Weird Al Yankovic, Rosanna Arquette, Joe Walsh, Kate Micucci, Claudia ODoherty, along with Harrisons wife and son, Olivia and Dhani, and his former bandmates Jeff Lynne and Ringo Starr (conspicuous in their absence: Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan). Of course, the song is the real star, as it should be, and like all great Beatles (and solo Beatles) songs, it seems timeless, sounding as fresh and joyous today as it did a half century ago.

If you havent seen the video, take a break and give it a watch.

As fun as this video is, I think it rather misses the point of the song. I wrote about My Sweet Lord in the spring of 2020 when I blogged about the break-up of the Beatles as a metaphor for the fragmented spirituality of our age. At the time, I commended the optimism and unapologetic spirituality of this song as a welcome alternative to John Lennons cynicism, Paul McCartneys sentimentalism, and Ringo Starrs escapism. I think that still holds true, as a commentary on the Beatles, but today I just want to reflect on My Sweet Lord on its own merits.

My Sweet Lord is the national anthem of interspirituality.

Let me explain. Harrison, as a devotee of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (who gave the world transcendental meditation), could have easily written this song as a simple hymn ofbhakti devotion to Lord Krishna, and left it at that. And certainly the song could be sung in a kirtan, with its devotional lyrics, sung in a kind of call-and-response to Harrisons lead:

Hare KrishnaHara KrishnaKrishna KrishnaHare HareHare RamaHare RamaMahevaraGuru SktPara BrahmaTasmai SrGuru Namah

And so forth, all song as a counterpart to Harrisons joyous love-song-to-God: I really want to see you, Lord, I really want to be with you, I really want to see you, but it takes so long my Lord

He could have left it at that. But there was one little detail, earlier in the song, that to my mind anchors this song as aninterspiritual anthem. Before all the bhakti lyrics, the backing singers chantHallelujah in response to Harrisons vocals.

Hallelujah! Hebrew for Praise the Lord a word that is as anchored in the devotional spirituality of Judaism and Christianity as much asHare Krishna embodies the spirit of bhakti yoga.

In other words, Harrison has written a song that deftly brings western and eastern spirituality together into a single expression of love for the divine, transcending our religious and cultural boundaries.

What blows my mind is that this song waswildlysuccessful. It was a number one song in America, Britain, and other countries around the world; the single sold a million copies in eleven days. It was the first solo Beatles song to become a #1 hit and remains one of the best-selling solo Beatle songs of all time. But it wasnt just Harrions Beatles-cred that made this song a radio juggernaut (in the words of Harrison biographer Gary Tilley) the song was the perfect expression of the zeitgeist of the early 1970s, when books like Ram DasssBe Here Nowand YoganandasAutobiography of a Yogi not to mention the words of writers like Alan Watts or Christmas Humphreys were bestsellers in the west. It was the dawning of the age of Aquarius and young people especially were interested in the spirituality of the world, not just the religion of their upbringing.

A half century later, that seems like an innocent, idyllic time. As the 70s progressed, Christians responded to the rise of interspirituality in both conservative (the charismatic renewal) and progressive (the contemplative movement) ways; eventually it seemed like consumerism co-opted the spirituality of the hippies into the crystalline mercantilism of the 1980s-era new age movement. As our society has moved ever more steadily toward consumerism and pervasive entertainment, it seems that interspirituality has become marginalized more of a special interest worthy of its own Facebook group, than a groundswell of cultural consciousness capable of catapulting a song like My Sweet Lord to the top of the charts.

So when you watch the video, enjoy its silliness, epitomized by Ringo Starr throwing popcorn on a hapless Fred Armitage. The song is a joyful song, so a little bit of silliness is not entirely out of place. But its also a venerable song now, half a century old, and its a reminder that once upon a time, and not so very long ago, being interested in a spirituality that transcended religious boundaries wasmainstream. Thats the legacy of this song, which unfortunately this video seems to miss entirely.

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The New My Sweet Lord Video is Lots of Fun, But Misses the Point of the Song - Patheos

The anorexics attraction to the stories of Holocaust victims could be seen as yet another symptom of her reading disorderconsuming descriptive texts as prescriptive. But it actually reveals a more structural condition of the starving mind: one that is rooted in obsessive fixation and decontextualization, allowing a single feature of the human body to stand in for the totality of ones self-worth, like a synecdoche. Or one that lets the signs of starvation, in Auschwitz or Utah, stand in for one another, like a metonymy.

This kind of substitutive logic appears in early case histories of anorexia. In 1919, Ellen West, an anorexic and bulimic patient of the psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, wrote out her thought pattern as an equation: Eating = being fertilized = pregnant = getting fat. Such symbolic displacement is the bread and butter of Freudian psychoanalysis; it should also be familiar to the average solver of a crossword puzzle. The clue and the answer in a crossword must be perfect substitutions for each other. The clue can be straightforward: three letters for Consume (Answer: EAT), or it can play on linguistic misdirection: three letters for Not fast (Answer: EAT). The potential for words to mean so much with so little context is the puzzlers great pleasure.

Before I entered rehab, I wanted to treat my eating disorder as a puzzle to be solved. My body had become a glaring symbol that was at once obvious to others and totally inscrutable to me. I was a walking sign of misery and virtue, slow death and supremacy (over my appetite, over other women), self-erasure and self-display. I felt an almost melancholic disappointment in my inability to produce the key (some repressed trauma, some psychosexual dilemma) that I could use to cure myself.

In case histories of anorexics from the first half of the twentieth century, the patient, who is nearly always a woman, becomes a puzzle for her psychiatrist, who is nearly always a man. The key to solving the puzzle usually lay in the equation of food and sexuality: two common solutions were the fear of pregnancy, as with Ellen West, and the repressed desire for fellatio. In 1942, the psychiatrist Ruth Moulton suggested that the anorexic rejects slimy foods because they remind her of semen, or because she wants to be force-fed to satisfy a fantasy for oral sex. The former is sexually timid; the latter demonstrates sexual aggression. At once too frigid and too promiscuous within the terms of early psychoanalysis, the anorexic girls appetitesfor sex, for food, for ambitionwere a threat to the cultural order.

In the same period that anorexic women became a source of medical suspicion, the crossword puzzle became an object of cultural hysteria. Newspapers and magazines from the nineteen-twenties and thirties warned of a crossword craze gripping the countrys minds. Hotels considered placing a dictionary next to the Bible in every room; telephone companies tracked increased usage, as solvers phoned friends when stuck on a particularly inscrutable clue; baseball teams feared that Americas pastime would be usurped, the grid to replace the diamond. The passion for crosswords was described as an epidemic, a virulent plague, and a national menace.

Much of the outcry focussed on the puzzles trivializing waste of brainpower. In 1925, Arthur Brisbane wrote, in his syndicated column, Young people who want to increase their vocabulary should not deceive themselves with crosswords. Let them read Shakespeare. Others feared that the puzzle was a threat to the family unit. A host of divorces in Ohio were said to have been caused by the daily crossword, with the manager of one legal-aid association claiming to have received an average of ten letters a day from wives who have to remain at home these evenings just because their husbands are suffering from crossword puzzleitis. Like an emotional affair, the crossword seemed to be siphoning off energy and intimacy from married life.

This square vice, as the Daily Princetonian called it, became a locus for anxiety about a movement that was explicitly changing American gender relationsfirst-wave feminism. The earliest innovators of the puzzles form were women: in 1914, the first crossword puzzle published under a byline was created by Mrs. M.B. Wood; in 1929, Mildred Jaklon, the founding puzzle editor of the Chicago Tribune, pioneered the crossword contest; and, in 1934, Mrs. ElizabethS. Kingsley invented the Double-Crostic puzzle (or the acrostic, as its now called). In books, comics, and postcards from the time, the New Woman and the crossword puzzle became linked as flouters of Victorian gender conventions. Flora Annie Steels novel The Curse of Eve, published in 1929, is about two antiheroines who are making a living out of the craze for crossword puzzles. One is a fashionable beer heiress, with more bite and better business instincts than her brothers; the other is a cash-strapped dancer, who sees marriage as another form of prostitution. Both are depicted as simultaneously desexed (in the fullness of her bodily and mental powers she sits free of sex) and oversexed (with an unconscious desire to attract, unconscious desire to appropriate). Both are too great a puzzle for the modern man to grasp.

The dangerous fantasy of the puzzle woman is perhaps most famously registered in the 1925 novelty song Crossword Mama. A puzzling woman, she devotes herself to the crossword as a proxy for other fashions of the time. Like the flapper, she is liberated from the corsets and the customs of the Victorian age. A double-crosser, she is not to be trusted: You call me honeythat means bee!/Looks like Ill be stung no doubt. The conceit extends across nine verses: I heard you mention butcherthat means meat!/Who you gonna meet tonight? But, like the Sphinx before her, the Crossword Mama solicits a solution: Crossword Mama, you puzzle me, the chorus concludes. But Papas gonna figure you out.

There are hundreds of other Jazz Age relics that conflate the flapper and the crossword as icons of the Zeitgeist. In these images, the puzzle represents the enigma of female desire and fuels the intimacy between men and women in an otherwise chaste culture of heterosexual courtship. It allows verbal and physical taboos to be breached, as members of the opposite sex say four-letter words to each other, cuddling around the newspaper page. You naughty boyit couldnt be that word! reads the caption on a postcard featuring two young solvers, a blushing man and a woman clutching her breast. By the dual logic of the crossword craze, the woman is the puzzle, and the puzzle brings solvers closer to their desire. The puzzle, in other words, is a sex object.

A few months before I left for rehab, in 2010, my boyfriend persuaded me to start submitting my crosswords to the Times. Will Shortz, the newspapers longtime crossword editor, encouraged the submissions: if I was quick with my revisions, he said, I could be the youngest woman to publish a crossword in the papers history. (I wasnt that quick; I became the second youngest.) At the time, I didnt understand that I was an outlier in what has come to be known as the CrossWorld, a highly devoted, pun-loving set of mostly male, mostly STEM-educated speed-solvers and constructors.

My second puzzle appeared in the Times when I was in Paradise. (The staff drove to Logan, Utah, the nearest big city, to buy a copy of the print edition but couldnt find one.) The puzzles theme was Its all Greek to me, and its answers included words with Greek letters nested inside them. My inspiration came from the discovery that Freuds oral phase contained the Greek letter alpha; that answer was the puzzles 1-Down.

I would remain in Paradise for another three months. The occasionally punishing, often surreal conditions of rehab suited me. Food and body-image challenges that I was givenmeant to simulate life after treatmentbecame more tolerable and even amusing to me by the end of my stay: Surprise! Doughnuts for breakfast today; Group therapy will be done in bikinis today; No makeup today (easy for me); No hair-straightening today (harder, for a Jewish girl). When I checked out of the facility, after spending the better half of a year there, and returned home to New York City, my recovery was precarious but hard-won. I was learning to trust my bodys hunger cues and to reimagine my days in terms of opportunities and responsibilitiesnot willfully overdetermined by food rules and restrictions.

That fall, I returned to college, and during intractable periods of body dysmorphia, I retreated into the grid. Constructing crosswords remained a primary source of solace, but something had changed: I was beginning to be recognized for my work by the audience I had ambivalently courted in the pages of the Times. Other outlets, looking to diversify their bylines, solicited my puzzles. I was known not just as a constructor but as a woman constructor.

When I graduated, in 2013, Shortz offered to hire me as his assistant. I was reluctant to accept the post: resolutely committed to my newly stable recovery, I worried that giving my time over so fully to crosswords would somehow prove symptomatic of relapse. But I uncrossed the wirespuzzles disembodiment anorexia relapseand took the job. Four days a week, I rode the Metro-North train from the city to Pleasantville, New York, to join Shortz at his home office, a room flooded with crossword ephemera and walled with reference books, holdovers from his pre-Google editing days. I knew that I was benefitting from a kind of CrossWorld affirmative action: there were many young men creating crosswords, more prolific than I, a handful of whom even expressly wanted to be the next Will Shortz. But, if my appointment at the Times was political, so, too, was my output.

Excerpt from:

Escaping Into the Crossword Puzzle - The New Yorker

Bagged SnacksWalkers

Are you the victim of a potentially life-changing workplace injury? No worries. So long as you have a pack of Walkers crisps and a phone to hand.

After slipping from a rooftop and smashing through a glass roof light, an aerial fitter played by comic actor Asim Chaudhry finds himself wedged. But he sees the funny side after a mouthful of salt and vinegar crisps taking selfies, texting friends and jiving to Dancing for the Judges on his phone.

Its a humorous sequence to illustrate a deft twist on the idiom when life gives you lemons. Or in the case of Walkers, when life gives you potatoes, make crisps.

Walkers now finds itself in a tight spot of its own. After many weeks of stock shortages, the brand released ads for humble pie crisps the flavour we never wanted to taste.

Young people are so lazy these days. Nope. Theyre studying for exams, playing sports, doing dance classes, the lot. The teen girl in John Wests ad this year is especially determined, from the first bus in the morning to football practice long after dark.

Enter John Wests easy-to-prepare, ambient on-the-go pasta salads. Eat strong, go strong reads the tagline, marking a bold overhaul for the canned fish supplier as it seeks to reposition itself as a health and nutrition brand.

A lot of things can arguably look like a pint of Guinness. But when youre yearning to go back to the pub, everything does: a white cat on a composter, snow on a bin, seagulls on a chimney, a bollard. A montage of stout pint-a-likes set to a cover of Elvis hit You Were Always On My Mind closes with the real thing being placed on a bar.

Aired to mark the reopening of bars in May this year, the spot ends with a group of friends enjoying a pub get-together, at long last.

Theres not much natural about pumping fragrance into your living room.

But Airwicks ad is blossoming with flowers and fluttering butterflies, set to the ASMR sounds of babbling brooks, birdsong and deep breathing. The words relaxed, balanced and happy come into focus on screen and fade away.

It serves as a flash meditation video, linking the brand to a sense of calm rather than a product to counter smelly dogs and bin stinks.

Voltarols grandad aint no cardigans and Werthers Originals kind of pops. He used to race motorbikes. And after a quick rub of the joint pain relief, hes down in the garage scrubbing up his old bike.

His grandaughter thinks hes super cool when he turns up on his glistening motor and plonks her in the sidecar. Its not just movement, its riding with the best goes the tagline.

A clever approach: its not about the product itself, but what it enables you to do.

The cinematography in Lurpaks Where there are cooks campaign turns a potentially plain ad into a work of art.

With clever use of light, everyday scenes like a flatmate making pancakes for his hungover friend, or a wife making soup for her sick husband become Caravaggio-like moving paintings. Choirs in the background and phrases like a cook can heal the sick, feed the masses somehow turn a simple butter ad into a near-religious experience.

Its a biscuitor cake? The question thats as old as time is on this occasion tackled by a bemused shop owner.

Its an existential question that prompts him to consider that if a cake can be a biscuit, maybe he can be something else too in this case, king of the roller-palace.

The store transforms into said palace, covered in disco lights and neon. The message: if a cake can be a biscuit, you can be anything. Be what you want to be.

This year, Coca-Cola launched its first new global brand platform in five years: Real Magic. The creative approach is about creating a movement to choose a more human way of doing things said Coca-Cola Company CMO Manolo Arroyo.

The first creative to use the line was an ad that showed gamers downing their virtual weapons after a slurp of Coke.

The use of well-known gamers gave it kudos among its target demographic, while hidden codes in ads unlocked prizes.

Kelloggs knows it has a hit on its hands with this ad, set to the soundtrack of evergreen hit a plane pour moi by Plastic Bertrand. So it has continued the campaign, debuted in 2020, through into 2021.

The backing tune provides an enormous amount of energy to the series of ads, which depict an office dalliance over a bowl of cornflakes and festivalgoers basking in a brief spot of sunshine with their cereal.

We Do Breakfast says the tagline. And great ads too.

Rather surprisingly, its a concept not used by a brand before: an online delivery arrives with the driver insincerely sorry that a substitution has been made. In this case: its Heinzs beans. The customer exclaims but beans meanstasty tea times

Still in her dressing gown, she powers to the corner shop, running through one neighbours kitchen and crashing through anothers garden fence, while extolling the benefits of the lean, supreme, plant-based protein cuisine.

Its an action-packed and hilarious take on a banal but increasingly familiar occasion, given a fifth of households consistently order groceries online each month, according to Kantar.

With the help of a baby in store, the woman chimes out the brands new endline: Beanz Meanz More.

Dance music plays as a small red ball bounces over crackers, cucumber slices and baguettes, transforming them into vessels for oodles of cheese and fresh veg. The healthy-looking snacks bounce with an overload of ingredients as the ball becomes the exclamation point on an mmmm before finally landing to dot the i on a pack of Boursin.

Its more catwalk show than fromage advert, positioning the brand as a trendy and seemingly healthy option. Its trs chic, and not at all cheesy.

With pub closures never more than a new variant away, many booze brands have foregone ads full of fun and socialising to focus on whats in the glass.

Thatchers, for example, has its ad featuring bubbling cider and practically nothing else. It sloshes and swirls around a glass to a thumping cinematic soundtrack and finally cuts out to the sound of a heavenly choir. The final drop leaps from the glass in slow motion in the shape of an apple. A safe bet, but it worked.

Tear-jerkers about separation from family are just so last year. But Branstons non-Covid related play on the advertising clich nevertheless yanks on the heartstrings to great effect.

A daughter is making her way in the big city. Over a montage of new job nerves and making new friends, a voicemail from her mum and dad plays, reminding her that theyre lucky to have you.

Theyve sent an only silly something a jar of Branstons. Pass the tissues.

A series of miserable-looking women depicted in black and white metamorphose into sparkling sirens in glorious technicolor with just a dab of Charlotte Tilburys Happikiss Hydrating Lipstick Balms. One is so pleased with her transformation that she soulfully sings the line happiness in a tube.

Backgrounds, borders and fonts with a 1950s-style, retro bent add more sparkle to proceedings never has the phrase hyaluronic acid looked so glamorous.

A new mum grimaces as she breastfeeds her baby at the bus stop. She tells her friend that one nipple is bad and the other well, pinching her Malteser into dust and stamping it into the ground makes things pretty clear.

As she reaches for another, her friend withdraws the pack. Not after that display! How dare she destroy the delicious chocolate-coated malted milk treat? But its all in good fun.

It is one of two TV ads the confectionery brand developed in partnership with Comic Relief which this year coincided with International Womens Day to humorously depict the everyday struggles of breastfeeding.

The brand is supporting mums mental health the ad says, with a donation to the charity. But as much good has been done simply by normalising a topic still taboo on TV.

Italian hunk Riccardo Acerbi took on the role of Captain Birds Eye in 2018, and was back on the high seas eating cold for breakfast in ads this year.

He strokes his beard, looks wistfully to the ocean the usual swarthy sailor stuff. But its the fish, not the captain, that captivates. A voiceover explains how freshness is locked in from sea to plate. The voice is of a man at a dinner party where the guests are all holding fish fillet pieces aloft on forks. Will he be Acerbis replacement?

Last year, brands leveraged the pandemic-prompted sense of all being in it together to associate themselves with the wave of community mindedness.

Unilevers skincare brand makes use of its position in phrase du jour Simple acts of kindness in its 2021 campaign. Scenes portray a woman walking her injured neighbours dog and giving free haircuts to jobseekers. The brand also worked with kindness.org to allow consumers to pledge an act of kindness on a community board.

Maybe its just the Lynx effect, but a few sprays of the stuff gives the protagonist of this ad a completely new and slightly psychedelic perspective on life.

Flowers with faces sing to him, a fire extinguisher becomes a watermelon, he enters a dogs brain, then becomes a hot dog.

As ever with Lynx ads, using the product means you end up with a beautiful woman. But this ad isnt all about that. A sunny outlook, it says, is just as important.

Actimel takes on a public health messaging tone in this campaign, which says keeping our communities resilient starts with you. Human-sized bottles are shown delivering post and working late in an office. Give our communities your best shot, the voiceover says rousingly (the shot being a mouthful of yoghurt drink).

Although not mentioned here, the brand set a target this year to donate a million Actimel bottles to our charity partners FareShare and FoodCloud.

Ive had meat and two veg every day of my life, says the farmer-looking fellow and instant star in Quorns hilarious 2021 ad campaign.

He is the first of a number of characters a muscle man, cavewoman, and talking venus fly trap that seem like theyd be the last people on earth to be convinced to swap out a portion of their beloved meat for a plant-based alternative.

But people and Audrey II can surprise you. Today, says the chap in a thick Yorkshire accent, Im having Quorn and two veg instead. Beefcakes dont eat beef growls the strongman.

The UK is one of the largest plant-based markets in the world, second in size only to the US, says Rabobank. But many Brits are still unconvinced. If meat-and-two-veg man cant sway them, no one can.

In 2019, Chicago Town underwent a major overhaul including a logo and packaging revamp and new slogan: Pizza? Yeah, we go to town on it.

It backed the new look with a 5m marketing campaign, which was topped up this year with a further 2.5m injection of cash. The latest effort saw bus stop wraps and billboards across major cities featuring catchy copywriting like In crust, we trust.

But it was the brands continued use of the Frank Sinatra ode to Chicago, My Kind Of Town, in TV ads that sealed its place in the zeitgeist this year. Whatever royalties its paying to Ol Blue Eyes estate, the tune is such a gift to the brand that its worth every penny.

The brand saw sales surge this year by the second-highest amount of all pizza category players, according to Kantar.

Magnums campaign is set in a steampunk factory where tubs are created by huge machines with robotic arms, rivets and dials. A thrusting saxophone provides a lusty soundtrack.

But its the final scene, in which a tub is squeezed so the chocolate top layer is satisfyingly crunched, that scoops it.

The brand also partnered with Miley Cyrus this year to present a virtual concert. By allowing viewers to take part in a lip sync challenge, it scored many shares on social media.

Is there anything not to love about this Fairy campaign? It features a crazy cute computer-generated baby surfing on a sponge scourer across dirty dishes to the tune of Bob Marleys Three Little Birds. Its so bubbly and blissful that the baby even cracks a Buddha pose as it glides across last nights grimy baking trays.

Its a brief moment of pure fun and suds. And about as far removed from the almighty chore of having to do the dishes as its possible to get.

Taylors coffee for lattes, simply called Latte, gets one drinker pondering: What if everything was this simple? A postman calls, gets proposed to and accepts. Where will we live? he asks as they walk down a beach post-wedding. There she responds as a beautiful mansion materialises.

By the end, our heroines wish to be a stingray comes to fin-flapping fruition. Its fast-paced and bonkers, and ends with the woman sipping her coffee and snapping back to reality.

This year McCain partnered with Family Fund to help provide 150,000 grants and services to families raising disabled or seriously ill children. Many of those families star in this campaign, which is all warmth and never strays into wearisome worthiness.

Its all about the little moments like time with siblings, hugs, going for walks. And eating McCain chips, of course. Its a lovely bit of CSR in keeping with McCains We Are Family slogan.

Young consumers expect brands to take a stance on social issues, according to Kantar some 46% of millennials and 42% of Gen Z.

Ben & Jerrys does just that with campaigning around issues like refugees. Controversially, this summer, the brand announced it would stop selling its ice cream in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Cue Twitter trolls in all caps screaming the brand should stick to selling ice cream. But theres little danger of that.

Opening with the bizarre scene of seven washing machines seemingly fly-tipped on a mountain top, this campaign is all about the #washcoldchallenge.

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Top Campaigns: the 50 best brand adverts of 2021 | Analysis & Features - The Grocer

In the 1930s, two St. Louis artists, Aimee Schweig and Jessie Beard Rickly, rented the Mammy Shaw House across the street from the Felix Vall House in Ste. Genevieve. The pair had spent several previous summers at an artists colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they studied with painter Charles Hawthorne of the Cape Cod School of Art. They eventually grew tired of traipsing to New England and decided to start their own art colony. Rickly told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that one reason was the Depression. The other was a conviction that there were enough things worth painting in the Middle West, particularly at Ste. Genevieve, to make it worthwhile.

At first, the townspeople stood around in a curious staring group when Rickly set up her easel in the town square and began to paint, and marveled the more, as who would not, on discovering she did most of her painting with a putty knife, and not a brush. But all reservations melted away once they were asked to sit for paintings. The barber who posed for Paper Roses held up the proceeding to shave himself, don a necktie and slick back his hair, the Post noted.

Rickly and Schweig convinced other St. Louis artists, including Bernard Peters, Frank Nuderscher, Joe Jones, and Thomas Hart Benton, to join them. There was a vision: Although all had a deep familiarity with contemporary art produced in New York City and Europe, they aimed to create more honest art that reflected who and where they were. Many of them were also radicalized by the Depression, Jones in particular. At first, no one paid attention to the art colony, Melanie Owen, who helped rediscover the art colony decades later, told The Daily Journal in 1980. Then people began referring to it as the Mecca of Midwestern art. It really was a big deal.

Throughout the 1930s, the artists slingshotted between St. Louis and Ste. Gen. In the city, they showed canvases depicting tenant farmers encampments, lime kiln workers, sharecroppers, and gravediggers. In Ste. Gen, they brought in as many painters as they could to capture a world that was quickly disappearing in an increasingly industrialized America. Although the colony flourished in the 1930s, it had dissolved by the end of the decade, as the cultural zeitgeist shifted at the onset of World War II.

The colony was largely forgotton until Kansas Cityborn artist Robert Dick rescued a carriage house worth of paintings, documents, and photos in the early 2000s. He spent two years writing An American Art Colony: the Art and Artists of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, 19301940. I didnt realize there were these kinds of people in the state of Missouri, he told the Belton Star Herald. It was a shock.

Jessie Beard Rickly was a member of The New Hats, a group of St. Louis painters so progressive that members got kicked out if they didnt produce new work on a constant basis. The name was a statement that the artists were rejecting anything old hat. They often showed at Noonan-Kocian Gallery on Locustno shabby thing, considering one of Arthur Kocians best friends was Paul Durand-Ruel, the Paris art dealer who discovered the Impressionists. The Post noted that Rickly, a founder, insisted that a New Hat was always a painter, never an artist. To call oneself an artist is presumptuous, she told the Post. This group anticipated the present movement in artand decided that the organization of such a group would help to acquaint St. Louis with contemporary art, she continued, adding a caveat: the use of the word contemporary rather than modern is preferred. Why? Because so many atrocities have been committed in the name of modern art.

Excerpt from:

What was the St. Genevieve art colony? - St. Louis Magazine