Category Archives: Zeitgeist Movement

He might not be a household name, but youll certainly be familiar with the hairstyles hes created over the decades for the catwalk, magazine covers and ad campaigns. Guido Palau, the man behind some of the most influential hair in fashion, was showing off his form again in London last week on the front of British Vogue, with the unconventional 54-year-old supermodel Kristen McMenamy, and at a Jack Kerouac-inspired Dior mens show.

The 59-year-old Dorset-born, Anglo-Iberian Palau also published #Hairtests, a spiral-bound book that captures the presentation of hair, or relative relaxation of it, over the course of the pandemic amid broad re-negotiations around gender and diversity.

We all manage to curate something were interested in, flowers or animals or whatever, on Instagram, Palau known in the fashion world simply as Guido told the Observer on his way to a test for the show at Kensingtons Olympia last week. I just happen to be into hair.

Palau, who is known to execute dozens of shows and can have 100 producers and hairstylists under his direction at each, is a protege of Vidal Sassoon and was a close collaborator of the late Alexander McQueen. He is also one of the key figures to bring the grungy, anti-perfection and individualistic movement of British fashion in the early 90s to the wider world.

It may be that, as philosophy and politics falter, it will again be up to hairdressers to provide clues to what women often know and men less easily grasp: that among exterior clues to the interior life, hair can be the most instructive.

Im being informed the whole time. Most people have hair on their head though a lot of people dont so the way hair is worn, intentionally or not, interests me. Combed, brushed or dyed, put up or down in their own way, its all something I pick up on.

The images in the book document hairstyles in profile and without makeup, taken on an iPhone, and later posted online. They are an impression, in a sense, of what was and still is happening, in a vulnerable time.

Young people are looking at the 90s again and [are] inspired by that time. We see it in the individualism of the models, but [also] in a more diverse, inclusive way. When theres a reaction in fashion that sticks, its always something to do with the world changing because fashion and beauty reflect the times.

For one, the changes beauty currently reflects are less gendered. Masculine and feminine seem kind of old now, so I try to look at their profile, see what fits. Its more fluid. Ive always been interested in an ambiguous kind of sexuality, and always wanted hair to be slightly questionable.

Fashion, of course, has taken its share of recent criticism for lapses in approach and sensitivity to issues of social justice. Theres a new awareness to how people feel or have felt in the past, and rightfully so, he says.

Palaus craft, then, is to take from the street, interpret, place in a fashion show or magazine and filter back. It is, by definition, a highly mutable process. I cant really tell. People might see it in a different way, and then take it back, consciously or unconsciously, or its just in the zeitgeist. People are more aware now, because theres so much more information out there than when I started, when we didnt know where references came from.

Instagram is affecting the changes, in part because visual information is being posted and absorbed, as Palau says, all day long. Beauty trends are coming into our home, or into our hand, all the time.

There was a moment early in the pandemic when the beauty business, for reasons of social distance, effectively ceased to function, returning people to do-it-yourself, make-do-and-mend. To Palau, Covid has given people time to reflect on self-presentation, and that, in turn, has propelled a return to individualism.

If a woman wants to go out with damp hair because shes just washed it, nonchalantly cool, it should be completely acceptable. Wet hair always looks sexy, and hair in fashion is what people wear anyway. So its about realness or reality. No one should feel they have to look a certain way for anyone bar themselves, and the idea of social acceptability is hopefully breaking down. The way your hair looks should be your idea of it.

That, in a sense, is a throwback to the 90s. But even the most maligned decades, like the 80s, came with cool looks as sub-cults, from goths to New Wave to New Romantics, proliferated alongside the glamour dos of Dallas or the yuppies. Fashion takes from the past but it never really goes back. If you do, its a pastiche.

Palau is not of any particular church, though friends joke that hes never seen a pudding bowl he doesnt love. Hair is important to everyone. Women love to talk about it, men love to talk about it. Sometimes it gets a bit of a short straw and people dont realise how difficult it is to do well. It is psychologically impactful as it changes the way people feel and look. When you look back, its amazing how its changed and how it defines social aspects of life.

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The world according to Guido Palau, the man behind fashions hottest hairstyles - The Guardian

OPINION:

For Such a Time as This: My Faith Journey Through the White House and Beyond by Kayleigh McEnany delivers a real insiders view of what was going on in the White House and on the campaign trail during the final year of the Trump administration. Ms. McEnany was a former White House press secretary and is now a co-host on the Fox show Outnumbered.

With an education that included Georgetown, Oxford and a Harvard Juris Doctor, Ms. McEnany was academically well prepared for the depth of knowledge and debate skills necessary for her executive appointment.

In addition to spiritual and political insight, there is so much practical advice to recommend in this book. For Such a Time as This provides dozens of pointers on effective communication, including an entire chapter devoted to crisis communications. It demonstrates how integrity, authenticity and humility can effectively counter ostentatious arrogance even at the highest level and as displayed by the bias and egotism of many in the White House press corps and the mainstream media.

One of the problems Ms. McEnany found in Washington politics was people who cared more about what the New York Times or Washington Post wrote about them versus what the American People needed from them. She goes on to observe that, in the Trump administration, for the most part, we had tireless public servants willing to break from the mold of caring what the media elite said about them, instead focusing on things like Middle East peace and a roaring, but accessible, economy with opportunity for all.

As for highlights of her career, Ms. McEnany reveals that she can easily say that my most valued moments were not the moments that I walked to the White House podium, ready to face a room full of hostile correspondents. No, the time that meant the most to me was interviewing the men and women marginalized and demonized who made up the conservative movement. And Ms. McEnany identifies herself with such deplorable and irredeemable hillbillies and credulous rubes.

During her time on the campaign trail, she notes, it was an honor shaking hands with these patriots, hugging their necks, and hearing their stories. These were people from all walks of life and all different backgrounds. Listening to them prepared me for my time in the White House. The American People were on my mind when I stood at that podium.

At times, this exceptional book reads like a devotional, but not an otherworldly devotional, rather one thats more down-to-earth. For Such a Time as This puts the words of Scripture into contemporary action.

Indeed the title For Such a Time as This hearkens to the words found in Esther 4:14. Esther was queen to the Persian King Ahasuerus (aka Xerxes) beginning about 478 BC. Soon after Esther became queen, a decree to slaughter all Jews went out at the request of Haman, a high official of the Persian kingdom.

Queen Esther, secretly a Jew, potentially had the power to reverse the decree. Yet she was concerned that if she entered the kings presence without being summoned that she would be executed. Nonetheless, Queen Esther, at the encouragement of her uncle Mordecai approached the king on behalf of the Jewish people. As Mordecai advised her (and Ms. McEnany reports) if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place [for God is faithful to save His people], but you and your fathers family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this.

Ms. McEnany advises that those words are not just applicable to me. I believe God wants everyone to embrace an Esther-like outlook. You are sitting where you are sitting geographically, professionally, and personally for a reason. God wants you to fulfill His purpose. He has great plans and a solemn mission for all of us to further His kingdom. The question is, will you accept it?

With so many cowering to the brutish zeitgeist, strong women such as Esther-like Ms. McEnany, are allowing the grace of God to work through them to give the United States, indeed the world, a bright future for such a time as this.

Anthony J. Sadar is an adjunct associate professor at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa., and co-author of Environmental Risk Communication: Principles and Practices for Industry, 2nd Edition (CRC Press, 2021).

For Such a Time as This: My Faith Journey Through the White House and BeyondKayleigh McEnany256 pages, $28.00, Post Hill Press, Dec. 7, 2021

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BOOK REVIEW: 'For Such a Time as This: My Faith Journey Through the White House and Beyond' - Washington Times

Just over two decades ago, Josh Wolfe co-founded Lux Capital, a New York City-based venture capital firm dedicated to investing in science and technology firms developing ideas with the potential to change the world. The year was 2000, and the dramatic growth of the internet over the previous decade had created a bubble that was beginning to burst. Over the next few years, the NASDAQ would drop by more than 75% as a slew of heavily-hyped tech startups plunged into failure, humbling the recently overconfident industry.

The lessons of the dot com bubble stuck with Wolfe, who developed a skepticism of hype and a passion for finding businesses with solid balance sheets and healthy cash flow. But today, Wolfe sees many of the same psychological forces enveloping tech firms and the broader investor class. The YOLO investing process, most closely associated with the subreddit wallstreetbets, has pumped stocks like GameStop to the moon and pushed people all in on fad coins like DogeCoin. But for many people, it has also replaced the investment process, popularized by one of Wolfes idols, Warren Buffett, of a slow and steady search for good business fundamentals.

Got a tip or want to talk? From a non-work device, contact our reporter at maxwell.strachan@vice.comor via Signal at 310-614-3752 for extra security.

To The Moon is not fundamental analysis. It is an inducement. It is an encouragement of belief. And the only thing that is fueling that rocket ship To The Moon is the credulity of others, Wolfe told Motherboard. These are all pressure tactics weaponized to induce people to be greater fools. And it's almost like a pyramid scheme: Get the next people in, and those people have every incentive to tell their friends, Yeah, I just made, you know, 20-50 percent in a day, and you got to get in on this. But they're not gonna be ringing the bell at the top and saying, It's time to sell. Because when were there, it's a rush to the exit. And that's when you see mass downturn.

The market today reminds Wolfe in many ways of the same forces that were so prominent at the height of the dot com boom, and perhaps no single person better encapsulates the moment than the worlds richest man, Elon Musk. Motherboard spoke to Wolfe about the worrying signs he sees, and the downside of prioritizing hype over fundamentals.

The conversation below has been lightly edited for clarity.

I'm really interested in this idea that creating a profitable business is less important to a lot of modern companies and investors than hype and narrative. I wonder how you started to come to see that. How did this happen? How did we get here?What was that word that you used that starts with a P? Profit? That's such a weird word. I haven't heard that in so long.

People are saying that value investing is dead. That Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are dead. They are not dead, and these ideas are not dead. They are timeless ideas. They are ideas that say that a business today is the present value of its future cash flows; that a business has a competitive advantage when there's something structural in its supply, or its brand, or its pricing power, or its ability to have a monopoly on intellectual property or government licensing. There's real things that make real businesses. And the value that you provide to the customer is then in the pricing power that you have and in the margins that you make. And contrary to the scarcity of the word today, profits are a great measure of the value that you provide to people.

Probably my favorite examplenotably, they are both in pursuit of spaceis Bezos and Musk.

In Bezos case, you have somebody who did one equity issuance, raising less than $60 million when they went public, and then went from a $300 million market cap or whatever it was to $300 billion. And now, a trillion. He did that by solving a problem that we had, maybe one we didn't know we had, which is that we want what we want, and we want it now at ever lower prices with ever more choice and convenience. And we're willing to pay for that. For sure, there were externalities of that, like the decline of Barnes & Noble or local, certain businesses, but consumers have a choice and could decide No, I prefer to wait longer or pay a price or have less choice. We've all collectively decided we want lower prices and more choice and faster service. Amazon has compounded capital the way a great business should. It's not as widely studied, because you don't have the sycophantic fanboys.

You contrast that to the poster child of technological hope, environmental mission, and selling stock as a product. Elon has parlayed an almost religious movement of true believers to fund losses. This is a business that's never really made accounting profits, let alone actual cash flow. Amazon did all of that, generating internal positive cash flow. Tesla has just burned cash. I joke that Elon should not just be seen as a great engineer and great entrepreneur. He should be seen as the greatest investment banker in the history of capital markets. He raises more money on an annual basis than the Mormon Church does. And it's just an amazing phenomenon. To me, he was the poster child of true belief and credulity and not caring about whether the company made profits. It was about the mission, and then it became about a rising stock price. And then it became, again, about facing off critics. Those, to me, are polar opposites of what you would want to study in learning what is a great business.

I think a lot of people took the Elon playbook and basically said, If I just promised the moon, I can get too big to fail, I can just keep raising money as I raise expectations. And if I raise expectations, fundamentals don't matter. The only thing that matters is expectations. And if I can keep leading peopleor in some cases misleading themthen it'll keep working if I don't get caught. And if I do get caught, in the case of Theranos or in the case of Nikola [Editors note: the electric-truck maker that paid a $125 million after the SEC charged the companys founder with misleading investors over social media], maybe you pay a fine or you have your day in court, and maybe Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is found guilty or maybe the zeitgeist of the day surprises and she's not. But so far, there has been really no great penalty for people whose relationship with the truth is less than ideal.

My next question is, who cares? We have the lowest number of unemployment claims in 50 years. By a lot of barometers, the economy is doing well. Maybe inflation is transitory. What's the concern here?Nobody cares when you're out on the ice and everybody's having fun and they're serving hot chocolate and you're skating and everybody's cheering. But when people start plunging into the icy depths and are getting hurt or killed, that's when people care and when it matters. When stocks are only going up, everything's fine. This happened in 99 and 2000, until the successes led people to borrow, in some cases extravagantly on margin, to invest more. It was all just one big party and then when the punchbowl got taken away, people suddenly woke up, as though it was the Ishiguro novel The Buried Giant, and said, Wait a second, these companies are gonna run out of cash.

The reason that it matters is at some point, somebody is left holding the bag. Today, you have record numbers of CEOs selling their stock. A great indicator markets are bad is when, at peak prices, companies are buying shares to continue to prop up their stock. And maybe the incentive structure of their CEOs is based on their share price. The only thing that mattered was pump the stock. And if you're along for the ride, that's great. But when the CEO starts sellingnow $10 billion in Musks case and billions of dollars in many other casesthe people left holding the bag are the people that were last in.

The tragic thing would be if those people are lower income or lower-middle income people that shouldn't be gambling or speculating, but they see all of their friends making money, their stock portfolios getting bigger, and they are lured deeper and deeper at the worst time. A market reckoning may not be a single 20 percent or 30 percent drop in a day. With 1999s dot com boom and the 2000s busts, there wasn't just one tragic day. It was roughly two years of a near 80 percent deflation. And then another 12 years for that to recover if you were still in the markets. But you think about the losses, let alone the indebtedness that people had during that time, it was painful. And you have not seen, in nearly half a generation, mass layoffs, bankruptcies, suicidesall the things that come from terrible, tragic financial downturns.

As I've said to our limited partners, inflation has already been here for a very long time, not in the classic economic GDP numbers, but in asset prices. It matters not just that asset prices are inflated, but because I actually think we'll see a scenario where the poorest will be hit the hardest, as few fuel and food and basic consumer staples see rising prices, when consumers incomes or portfolios are hit the hardest. You're going to have this almost bifurcation of lower declining prices at the high end of stuff that nobody really needs, and rising prices of the stuff that people do need. It's gonna be a potentially painful situation when Wall Street is potentially seeing the bubble deflated and people clinging to hope that their portfolios will come back.

It seems to me that this concept of To The Moon that's popular amongst retail traders is of a kind with what you're talking about with Elon Musk. And it seems in a lot of ways, his mentality towards the economy has been replicated on the subreddit wallstreetbets and those sorts of places. A lot of these people are often under 30 years old and have never dealt with a crisis before. They don't understand that, at some point, they might very well be the people that end up losing everything.I'm more concerned about the people who have dependents or mortgages, and everything has been working. In some cases, they might have had a job that maybe wasn't so great. And they decided to quit it because they're making more money speculating in crypto or speculating in the stock market and maybe even levering or buying on margin to do that.

To The Moon is not fundamental analysis. It is an inducement. It is an encouragement of belief. And the only thing that is fueling that rocket ship To The Moon is the credulity of others. Theres always a case for optimism, optimism of human ambition and capability of great technological and scientific discoveries. But if your main argument for owning an asset is that other people will own it, not because it has intrinsic value, but because theres a greater fooli.e. let's just hype it up and pump it and promote it until more and more fools get ineventually, the smarter people that induced the fools are leaving them as the bag holders. That to me is the great inequity. To The Moon is a constant encouragement of people. These are all pressure tactics weaponized to induce people to be greater fools. And it's almost like a pyramid scheme: Get the next people in, and those people have every incentive to tell their friends, Yeah, I just made, you know, 20-50 percent in a day, and you got to get in on this. But they're not gonna be ringing the bell at the top and saying, It's time to sell. Because when were there, it's a rush to the exit. And that's when you see mass downturn.

Look, my business is a speculative business. My day job is investing in scientists and entrepreneurs who truly want to make an impact and competitively bring cutting-edge crazy technologies to market. We pride ourselves on saying, We believe before other people understand. And we always want them to agree with us, just later. But we want the people that we're backing to develop real technology and real businesses that are solving real problems with margins and economics and cash flow so that they don't have to constantly promise new investors: We're going to do this and then this and then this, so that they can constantly raise money. But you have entire asset classes and investment theses and ETFs and portfolios that are built on nothing more than narratives about disruption and innovation and belief. It is, by definition, faith and religion, and I find that to be extremely effective and extremely dangerous.

You started Lux Capital at around 2000, is that right?We were born focused on crazy cutting-edge material science, physics, and chemistry when everybody was chasing dot coms. We basically said this is going to end really badly. And when it does, we want to be a venture firm that is not focused on optical networking, which was the infrastructure layer back then, or the dot coms.

It's amazing today watching and benefiting as a consumer, from Jokr and Gorillas and these under 15-minute delivery services, because I lived during the Kozmo.com and UrbanFetch moments, when you would order something and a dude would bring you your one-dollar drink with a hot chocolate chip cookie and a T shirt and a CD with a wrap on it, and you could order something again seven minutes later, they would do the same thing. Those companies went bust. That idea is back, and it's being funded again. As a consumer, I think it's brilliant. As an investor, I think these things are going to crash and burn again.

But yes, we were born in the tail end of this dot com mania, watching money being spent on ice statues peeing vodka at parties and the Bacchanalia of excess. Today, there is an excess of excesses, and it's not a prediction. It's observable. It's right in front of your face. So we decided then to focus on areas that we thought were neglected and scarce. And that would be my admonition today is, when the shit hits the fan, you want to be in the other room, and you want to be focused on stuff that other people haven't yet found.

How much does this remind you of 1999?A lot. I mean, you look at the level of the NASDAQ in the public markets. You look at the composition and the absence of breath in the market between the giant leaders of the NASDAQ and the large number of smaller companies starting to diverge from it. You look at Cathie Woods ETF and the number of companies that are now in bear market territory. And you look at the rationale used by promoters back then, and it was about this qualitative, you-must-believe nonsense about eyeballs. And today, it is these hokey flap doodle-filled inducements around disruption and innovation. The number of brokerage accounts being opened. The people that are quitting their jobs that would have gone to med school or law school or consultancies or regular jobs and are all either starting companies or becoming day traders. I feel like I've time traveled 20 years, back to February of 2000.

You look at Woods portfolio, like you said, or you look at the performance of tech IPOs this yearhow they're trading today versus when they openedand it does seem like there's evidence, if you want to see it, that something already could be happening.And remember, technologies change and companies change and markets change and governments change. But just human nature is a constant. The things that drive greed and fear, the things that have us moving in herds, the information cascades that infect each other into bubbles and busts. It takes time for people to change their mind. Most of the behavior over the past few years has been buy the dip. Well, people might be buying the dip right now. People think that this is a short-term aberration. But when the dip keeps dipping lower and lower and lower, eventually you realize the frog is fried after enough boiling water.

It's surprising to me how few people use terms like irrational exuberance these days.Which itself is a great measure. I can tell you thatif we are correct that a downturn may be imminent, that there will be massive dislocationsyou will see people running as they did in 02 to re-learn and re-read the wisdom of decades of Buffett letters and take accounting classes and understand what an income statement and a balance sheet and a cash flow statement are and how they flow together. And it won't just be about To The Moon and higher stock prices. Thats just an entirely cheerleading-, narrative-driven inducement of people to get in the pool, and you're starting to see stuff float in the pool.

You've talked about this concept of price versus value. And I wonder if you could elaborate on that.The famous quote that I cling to is that price is what you pay and value is what you get. This was something that the critics used to talk about with Tesla. The only thing that the believers would say is Stock price, bro. Meaning, look at the stock price. Youre wrong. It keeps going up.

But the only thing the stock price measures is what other people believe. It doesn't measure fundamental value or intrinsic value, which is something you can look at by analyzing a balance sheet or an income statement and seeing what the actual performance of a business is. You have companies that are losing more money with every sale they make. Meaning they have negative gross margins, and the more they sell, the more money they lose. They have to raise more money. You could show that you're growing sales 50 percent or 100 percent, and you could be losing 75 percent or 125 percent. So, price is only a measure of belief and expectations. Fundamentals are a measure of value. That discrepancy between fundamentals and expectation is where great investors are made.

Historically, when you had active investors in the market, you could short overly excessive expectationswhich were either typically affiliated with fads or frauds or things that might face technological obsolescenceand you could be long the things that were ignored and unsexy but were great businesses, because they had really good fundamental value and really low expectations. And a lot of great investors over time just made that pairs trade. They would go long great companies, and short the crowd favorites that eventually would come back to reality.

Going back to religion: Religions only exist based on the strength of their believers. And as soon as people stop believing in a god or religion, it disappears.

We started this conversation by talking about the religion of Elon Musk. Do you get the sense that he's sort of using these people or that he truly believes in this?My instinct isin the same way that a good Sunday morning preacher gives people a community and hopehe has, in the case of SpaceX, delivered real teams of people that have delivered technologically, competitively advantaged engineering marvels. There's very little to criticize about SpaceX. (Notably, it's a private company.) In the case of Tesla, you have millions of customers that are very happy. You have a minority of customers that feel like they were misled. And you have an entire tribe of investors that are true believers and a minority of people that are saying the emperor has no clothes. I don't know what Elon truly believes. But I know that that number of true believers in Elon and the messages that he's been putting out are not going anywhere. And I would say I massively underestimated the power of religious belief.

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The To the Moon Crash Is Coming - VICE

The excitement building for And Just Like That (HBO, December 9), the new chapter of Sex and the City, is palpable; its announcement during the pandemic was almost therapeutic. "I do think it is a thing that people return to, particularly in a time of crisis," says Cynthia Nixon, back as Miranda Hobbes. There are a few notable changes from the original. First is the absence of Kim Cattrall's Samantha Jones. "I can't speak for the other women. I hear people chattering about it. I will only speak for myself, it's not something I think about," partly because the new series has an "embarrassment of riches of these new characters." Another absence is Miranda's signature red hair. After a conversation about a hair mishap plot point, Nixon recalled telling writer/director Michael Patrick King, "She's 55. She's not going to screw up her hair...and he was like, 'Ahhh, Miranda doesn't give a f**k.'" In the end, fans will be comforted by the return of familiar characters. "Hopefully it's like rejoining friends that you haven't seen in a long time, but you can pick up right where you left off."

Did you ever think a project like this would come along?

Never. But I'm the person who hasn't seen this at any step. I never expected I would get cast, I never expected it would really be a hit, much less the hit that it is, I never expected that we would make a film, then make another film, or that we would come back now. I don't know where Sarah Jessica would place herself on this trajectory, but I think, in my mind anyway, Kristin Davis is the person who has always believed. People would ask me, and I'd be like, "I don't think so. Maybe 1 percent chance. I don't see it." [laughs]

Without giving anything away, what's something unexpected fans can expect from And Just Like That?

One of the things that I love about our show, and when I say our show I mean our old show and our new show, is that our writers, and Michael Patrick King, in particular, held the writer's room to a very high standard. Any great show that's beloved and has been on for a lot of seasons, they start to repeat themselves. You can't blame them, particularly when it's a network show and you do a million episodes. But I have to say, I feel like we almost never repeated ourselves. They had this rule in the writer's room that if a plotline happened, it had to have happened directly to one of the writers or someone that the writer knew personally. So even though bizarre, outlandish things happened on the show, bizarre, outlandish things happen in life, and they always had their roots in this real thing that happened. So part of us not repeating ourselves was that we wouldn't go back to the same tropes of the characters again and again. We would actually allow the characters to grow and change and mature and in this one particularly, age. It's kind of an evasive answer, but I guess there are not a lot of shows about people, much less women, in their mid-50s. Hopefully, you love the characters and so it's like rejoining friends that you haven't seen in a long time but you can pick up right where you left off. Things have happened, wonderful things and terrible things. I don't know what the title means, it's very open to interpretation, but I think it does mean that suddenly something happens and everything is different.

When the project was announced at the height of the pandemic, it felt almost therapeutic.

Totally. This is something that people have always said to me. It's interesting because it's such an intricate show in a funny way. I think it's one of the reasons that it bears people watching it again and again. It's very dense. There's always something you didn't catch the first time and it's so economical the way they have these four characters, and you have to jam pack four storylines into 26 minutes. But yeah, I do think it is a thing that people return to, and people particularly return to in a time of crisis.

Each of the characters is so perfectly defined, but there's something about Miranda that has always been the voice of the zeitgeist. Why do you think that is?

It's really interesting because there was this Miranda Renaissance, right? These amazing women who have the Instagram (@everyoutfitonsatc), they're scholars of the show. They came out with the book We Should All Be Mirandas. Then a whole series of bags, when I ran for governor [of New York in 2018], we teamed up with them. "I'm a Miranda" and I'm Voting for Cynthia," that kind of thing. But there was stuff that Miranda kept trying to trumpet to the other characters, about ourselves, our obsession with men, not being honest with ourselves, that guy you're dating, he's not good for you...She was such a truth-teller. And she's was ahead of the curve in terms of so many things that we now just accept. I think we've all moved in the Miranda direction, in terms of our view of the world and particularly our view of women and the challenges that we face.

OK, there's one question that is on the mind of every fan, and it's probably not the one you're thinking: what happened to the red hair?

It's really funny. I was having a conversation with Michael Patrick King, and we were working out things that would happen in the new show. He had Miranda embarking on something new and she was a little nervous about it. He was thinking of this plotline about how her regular colorist wasn't there and she went to this new colorist, and they mess up her hair and it looked like Bozo. I was like, I'm just not feeling it. She's 55. She knows what colors to get. She's not going to screw up her hair. Also, we've done the Miranda with terrible hair from the '80s and stuff. I'm not interested in her being 55 and looking like a clown. It's really interesting because this is the brilliance of Michael Patrick King. What he heard me saying was "I'm not interested in Miranda and her red hair anymore," and he was like, "Ahhh, Miranda doesn't give a f**k." I think that's something that's happened to a lot of women, especially during the pandemic, when they couldn't get to a colorist, and they didn't want to try and do it. They looked at what they looked like and they actually liked it. It's a thing we do talk about in a bunch of different episodes, what relation do you have to aging and to your face having wrinkles and to your hair being gray.

You must get asked a lot about Samantha's absence, previously played by Kim Cattrall?

No one is asking us. I mean, no one's asked me, I can't speak for the other women. I hear people chattering about it. I will only speak for myself, it's not something I think about because I feel like, first there's the three of us, and then there are the other characters, the husbands and the friends and the kids and all that stuff. We have this embarrassment of riches of these new characters. Sara Ramirez and Karen Pittman and Nicole Ari Parker and Sarita Choudhury! Yeah, honestly, I never think of it.

How has your style been influenced by Miranda, and how do you think she's evolved over the years?

I had a mother who really loved clothes. A lot of time in my childhood was spent in dressing rooms with my mother trying things on, and my mother saying to me breathlessly, "Do you love it? I can't afford it, but is it amazing?" And I would be like, "It's nice mom." When I met Patricia Field (the costume designer on Sex and the City), when we did the pilot, I was like, 31 maybe? I had been acting for almost 20 years at that point, but I had never had a role that was actually kind of focused on my body, not just in sex scenes and nudity, but the clothes and walking around. The main thing that Pat taught me was that you want to wear the clothes, you don't want the clothes to wear you. You don't want to be a hanger for the clothes and you don't want to kowtow to the orthodoxy of the very high-end designer that has designed this beautiful thing. You want to mix and match and you want to do high and low, which I think our show does in a number of ways. We do high and low with food, we do high and low with plot, we do high and low with locations. That's really the essence of it. Certainly having access to all this amazing designer clothing, but then also great vintage pieces. I never really wore high heels much before. I guess don't be intimidated by the clothes, the clothes are there for you. For me, whose belly has never been flat even before I had children, God bless the high waist. Point me to the high-waisted pants.

Broadway has reopened, which is so exciting! You're an icon of the stage. What was first show you saw after the reopening?

Two things. One is I go to the theater a fair amount. When the shows were closing in mid-March, I think it was maybe March 11, I woke up and I was like, "You know what, I'm going to go see the show that I most want to see. Because there's no time for messing around." I got tickets that night for Company, and it was one of the greatest things I've ever seen. Then the next day Broadway was shut down. So the amazingness and execution of that show nurtured me for a long time, but I really missed going to the theater. It was interesting to me because I'm a pretty informal person, but what I found is that I missed the ceremony. I didn't miss myself personally having to dress up but I missed being able to go to the theater as a form of church. Not just for being moved or entertained, but actually being with people in a collective experience. So I really missed it. The first show I went to see this summer was Merry Wives of Windsor in Central Park. We took our son and that was a delightful adventure. Then I've seen two shows already, one was my friend Douglas Carter Beane's totally charming, delightful Off-Broadway show Fairycakes. Fantastic! I also went to see a Caroline or Change. [Sharon D Clarke] was amazing. And I don't mind sitting in the audience in a mask. I don't know why I don't mind it, but I don't really mind it.

Do you have plans to come back to Broadway anytime soon?

I was supposed to be directing a play on Broadway. It's a really interesting play that was having its 40th anniversary in 2020 and we were going to do it in the fall of 2020. It's called Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, which is the first positive theatrical depiction of lesbians. It's about a group of friends in a beach community over one summer. So that was my next Broadway play, but I don't have any plans to come to Broadway in the near future. We're still talking about what are we going to do and how are we going to get that one together again. There is a play that I've signed on to that I'm very anxious to do by a great playwright named Jordan Seavey called The Seven Year Disappear. So maybe we'll workshop that a little in January.

New York is changing politically, and you've been a voice in that change. What sort of positive changes do you see happening and would you ever consider running for office again?

I don't think that I would ever run again. One of the reasons I ran is that no one else would because no one else felt they could run. Andrew Cuomo was such a terrifying and vindictive and looming figure that anybody who was actually in politics as their bread and butter could not oppose him or their career would be over the moment they announced. Luckily, he is gone and other people will run and are running. So I don't have to. But one of the reasons I ran was to show what New York State could be like. And I think that as Democratsand New York State is a two-to-one Democratic stateit's a very blue state and very progressive, very wealthy place, so we should be able to do a lot. We've got a lot of debate and a lot of infighting going on in the Democratic Party right now. I think there is a sense, from the electorate, like, "Oh the person in charge is a Democrat, I don't have to worry, I'm sure they're doing the right thing." And it's just not always the case. People who are really firmly entrenched in the establishment, there's not so much difference between who's a Democrat and who's a Republican. It's like, who are the people that are in power that want to stay in power, and that's their main concern rather than actually achieving any change or serving the people that they're supposed to serve and making those people's lives better. What I feel is, more and more people are being elected, they're younger, they're more diverse, they're more ethnically diverse, they're more economically diverse, they're more sexual-identity diverse, gender-identity diverse, and they are really part of a movement. I feel like there are more and more different kinds of people who are challenging entrenched elected leaders. And when we talk as progressives, when we talk about the change we want to bring, we have to fight against the socialist label, take the vilifying off and you just look at what we're talking about. People are like, I can have universal health care. I can have this Green New Deal because it would not only save the planet, but it's actually a tremendous jobs program and an economic engine. Where can I sign up for that? It's like, you can sign up for that. By voting.

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Cynthia Nixon on the Changes in the 'Sex and the City' Revival, 'And Just Like That' - Newsweek

Fandom has become huge in recent years. Once an unfamiliar word, fandoma term that refers to a community of fansentered the mainstream vernacular about a decade or so ago. While the history of fandom is a long one, with some claiming its origins began with Arthur Conan Doyles famous detective Sherlock Holmes, the internet has only amplified fandoms reach. Its especially popular on social media sites where fans interact with one another, share information, participate in cosplay, create fan fiction and fan art, and more.

There are few limits to what fandom encompasses. While traditionally, a fandom emerged around entertainment media such as books, television shows or films, nowadays, fandoms can form around anything from tech companies like Tesla and Apple to sports teams and celebrities. Taylor Swift fans, for example, refer to themselves as Swifties and Beyoncs fans call themselves the Beyhive.

At first glance, fandom and philanthropy appear to have little in common. One funder, however, is looking to harness the power of fandom to inspire social change. Its goal is simple: to make good famous.

Most people in the mainstream can only name a Malala [Yousafzai], a Greta [Thunberg]and why? Because theyre huge on social media, and if not social media, theyre just huge in media in general. Theyre very visible, said Elevate Prizes executive director Carolina Garcia-Jayaram.

Its not because their cause is more important than another cause, she said, but theyve been able to garner that kind of attention over a period of time, not just a one-off story. So building that capability within the person and the organization so that its sustainable is really important.

The Elevate Prize Foundation was founded in 2019 by business leader, author and philanthropist Joseph Deitch. The vision? Building the first-ever fanbase for good to shine a light on social leaders and issues around the world that deserve more recognition. Elevate Prize hopes that this will inspire others to do good themselves. Deitch is founder and chairman of Commonwealth Financial Network, a Massachusetts-based financial services firm. He also won a Tony Award as co-producer of The Gershwins Porgy and Bess in 2012 and authored a book titled Elevate: An Essential Guide to Life. Aside from the Elevate Prize, Deitch participates in giving through Commonwealth Cares, a nonprofit associated with his firm.

So what does the Elevate Prize involve? The goal is to provide activists and social entrepreneurs with resources that raise the visibility of their work, helping them to better mobilize support for their causes. Winners receive approximately $300,000 in unrestricted funding. The prize also includes two years of resources, including professional and leadership development, mentorship, social media training and the means to expand platforms to reach a wider audience.

Last month, the foundation announced the 10 winners of its second annual prize. They include Amanda Alexander from the Detroit Justice Center, which works alongside communities to transform the justice system and promote equitable and fair cities; Tony Weaver from Weird Enough Productions, which runs a national education program that combines inclusive comic books with an anti-racist and equity-based learning curricula; and Krista Donaldson from Equalize Health, which provides access to medical care and addresses the leading causes of maternal and newborn mortality through innovative tech.

Winners were chosen from a pool of over 1,200 applicants for their innovative approaches to global causes, such as LBGTQIA+ rights, access to healthcare, social justice reform and sustainability.

The Elevate Prize is funded by Deitch himself. The foundation has also partnered with MIT Solvea social entrepreneurship initiative based at the research universityto build the infrastructure of the prize, including outreach, the application and selection processes, and vetting. The foundation does not receive any funding for the prize from MIT Solve.

The panel of judges for this years prize included Diane von Fustenberg, Maria Elena Salinas and Natalie Tran.

A unique approach to fostering change

So why fandoms? For starters, fandoms typically inspire enormous enthusiasm and participation. The Elevate Prize Foundation in turn asked a simple question: What if we harness that enthusiasm and community for change?

We recognize that there were these organized fan bases around the world, whether you were a fan of the NBA or a fan of the Kardashians, said Garcia-Jayaram. These fandoms, she added, were only getting bigger and stronger.

At the same time, many of the major social movements were really beginning and taking shape on social media, whether it was Black Lives Matter or the response to COVID or #MeToo, said Garcia-Jayaram.

Fandoms have already proven capable of doing big things. As Inside Philanthropy has written before, the popular South Korean pop (K-pop) group BTS donated $1 million to Black Lives Matter, which in turn led to their fans to raise more than $1.3 million to match BTSs contribution. Additionally, last year, K-pop fans and TikTok users reserved tickets to a Donald Trump rally but did not attend the event, cutting into its overall attendance.

Businesses and marketers have learned to tap into that enthusiasm to help sell their products, whether thats teasing an upcoming slate of movies at Comic Con or introducing a new iPhone at an Apple event. For better or worse, this is part of the zeitgeist of online life.

For the Elevate Prize Foundation, this convergence of fanbase and social media movement building represents a new opportunity and space for philanthropy, one that not many foundations have taken note of.

As Garcia-Jayaram pointed out, most social leaders and nonprofit organizations have little to no visibility in social media. As such, the training and professional development that Elevate Prize winners receive is invaluable to their success.

Although some elements of this training are more traditional, such as board building and enterprise developments, perhaps more importantly, winners receive other perks to which smaller nonprofits are usually not privy.

Winners go through an intense six-month social media bootcamp with a Los Angeles agency called Shareability. They also receive a complete brand audit and are exposed to Fresh Speakers to help them sell and pitch their work.

So all of these steps that we take [them] through, prepare them and help them build their presence in the public realm so they can build their audience, said Garcia-Jayaram. If theyre looking to enact policy change, if theyre looking to just bring more attention to their sector and their cause, thats where we feel we can really make a difference, so thats how the program is designed.

Winning organizations have progressed beyond the idea stage, and can demonstrate a proven model, a proven leader and a position of growth. Typically, prize winners have already received support from major institutions and foundations. Where Elevate Prize wants to make a difference is in helping winners garner more support so they can scale up.

As with fandom in general, Elevate Prize recognizes the importance of the storytelling aspect of the work. Thats what gets people to really care, said Garcia-Jayaram. This is a content-driven world, and so [we want to be] able to give our winners the tools that allows them to connect to the world through the channels that are everywhere today, whether its social media or streaming services or whatever the case.

We see the foundation at the intersection of entertainment, culture and philanthropy, she said. So one of my main goals and the goal of the foundation is to open up philanthropy to the world a bit, you know, make it more accessible to people, break down the barriers a bit.

A campaign against hatred

One of last years winners, Amanda Nguyen, offers a prime example of just how much of a difference the Elevate Prize can make. Nguyen is the founder and CEO of Rise, a civil rights accelerator dedicated to advancing the rights of sexual violence survivors throughout the world. According to Nguyen, Rise trains organizers, activists and everyday people how to navigate our democracy, specifically by penning their own civil rights into existence.

One of Rises major goals is for all 50 states to pass their Sexual Assault Survivors Bill of Rights, which include the right to informative rape kit procedures and notification, the right to survivors advocacy, and the right to terminate all legal ties with the assailant.

To be clear, Nguyen and Rise were already successful before the Elevate Prize. Nguyen has made the Forbes 30 under 30 list, she was nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, and she was appointed by President Barack Obama to the U.S. Department of State as deputy White House liaison.

The prize is meant to help an organization scale up and increase its visibility, said Garcia-Jayaram. Such was the case with Nguyen.

According to Nguyen, the Elevate Prize believed in Rises model of creating change. So often, foundations in philanthropy are risk-averse and thats why well see this enormous economic stratification within who gets allocated money within the philanthropy world, she said. But what Elevate Prize does is, it helps bridge that gap by resourcing, by funding changemakers who are on the ground, who have lived experiences, and who are creating innovative models for changemaking.

Undoubtedly, we would not be where we are without the support of the Elevate Prize, said Nguyen.

Thanks to the Elevate Prize, Rise was able to train more organizers. Rise also played a crucial role in creating the enormously successful Stop Asian Hate campaign.

February of this year, I turned on my camera and I asked people to stop Asian hate, and specifically, the call to action was to get the stories of violence toward the AAPI community into the mainstream media, said Nguyen. The video went viral, racking up more than 11 million views on TikTok.

It was because of Elevate Prizes resources that we were able to set up a rapid-response infrastructure and create out of these Stop Asian Hate viral videos a movement that focused on addressing the roots of systemic racism towards the AAPI community, said Nguyen.

Elevate Prize was able to provide funding and direct resources to bring trusted AAPI voices into the fold and to organize communities. It also helped amplify the work that Nguyen had been doing.

Im so deeply grateful to Elevate for believing in this vision, and a future for Rise looks like a world where people speak with empathy, that they learn and are educated about AAPI history and that everyday citizens have the ability to feel like America is a country of the people, by the people and for the people, added Nguyen.

A different kind of fandom

In the end, its doubtful that many social movement leaders will be able to inspire the kind of fervor that fandom does. There likely wont be people cosplaying as social change leaders anytime soon. And I dont think well see much in the way of nonprofit-themed fan fiction (though heres to hoping).

However, this convergence of fandom and social change draws attention not only to some of societys biggest problems, but to those who are working to find the solutions.

As the Stop Asian Hate campaign showed, the internet, and social media in particular, is a powerful tool to effect change. In its first 18 months, the Elevate Prize Foundation has reached more than 16 million people and has an engagement rate of over 16%. On average, engagement rates vary depending on the social network. For Facebook, a good engagement rate is about 2%. For Twitter, its between 0.02% and 0.09%. For Instagram, a good rate is between 1% and 5%.

The Elevate Prize Foundation also has a number of other programs. They include sponsoring MIT Solves Antiracist Technology in the U.S. Challengeaccording to the foundation, a spot in the challenge is reserved for one of the Elevate Prize recipients. This years chosen recipient was Tony Weaver. The inaugural Elevate Prize Catalyst Award went to Trevor Noah of The Daily Show for using his platform to spread awareness, inspire change and mobilize others around some of the biggest issues of today.

Like it or not, thats the way the world is working right now, said Garcia-Jayaram. If you can get the eyeballs on what youre doing through the media, through entertainment, youre much more likely to have sustainability and be able to build much more quickly support for your cause.

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With the Elevate Prize, a Foundation Looks to Harness the Power of Fandom for Good Inside Philanthropy - Inside Philanthropy

Will Donald Trump try to steal the next US election? Is there a cabal of Satan worshipping paedophiles hell bent on destroying society and mass abusing children? What the hell is QAnon?

These are just a few of the hard-to-believe questions I was asking myself earlier this year as I entered the upper echelons of conspiracy politics for a documentary I was making and it was a world I was quite unprepared for.

I wanted to find out what happens when the line between truth and lies is so distorted that no one knows what is real anymore When the voting public no longer care about what is real, but only what side of the aisle theyre on?

Quite a lot, it turns out, and we should be bracing ourselves for more.

In the last year misinformation and alternate truths have ushered in a new era of riots, violence and murders. Its also changing our politics forever.

The dizzying world of conspiracy isnt a new concept though many of the theories of QAnon are revisions of old anti-Semitic tropes.

Its a community that has taken the conspiratorial mantle from the likes of InfoWars radio host Alex Jones, 80s TV presenter-turned-conspiracist David Icke and others, to become THE preeminent conspiratorial factory. The conspiracy of everything.

Its been an amorphous blob that soaks up any and every conspiracy in a mass scale connecting-of-the-dots. You want to talk about how vaccines are actually weapons of Bill Gates? Youre welcome in the world of Q. How about 9/11? Hop aboard. Are you obsessed with elite peadophiles? Well, QAnon is the community for you.

However, thanks to years of Donald Trump in the White House and unmitigated use of social media, combined with an unprecedented pandemic, the world of conspiracy isnt just hidden away in the corner of the internet any more its filtered into the mainstream.

You might have seen the word QAnon while scrolling through social media, or maybe youve spotted the image of a furry horned man breaking into the Capitol building in Washington DC on January 6th 2021?

Perhaps its something you may have at first found amusing, then shocking, then no longer paid much attention.

But it should have your attention. While Donald Trump may call QAnon adherents, People who love our country, the FBI prefers to call them a domestic terror threat.

Amanda Quimper, from Elyria, Ohio, is one of Qs most ardent digital soldiers and someone I met while making my documentary, The Cult of Conspiracy: QAnon. She is also testament to how complicated the world of Q and conspiracy can be.

Despite believing in horrific conspiracies involving satanic peadophiles, shes also an incredibly kind soul who practices spirituality and believes she is in conversation with God. Her mission is to help people, and to save the children. She dabbled with drugs in her earlier years, she lost friends to a heroin epidemic in her area and now finds herself working in a strip club.

Q, Amanda says, was her saving grace, something she knew that others didnt it also gave her a community with a shared goal.

But at the same time, as she fell further down the rabbit hole, she also fell further from her family. She started spouting off wilder and wilder conspiracies.

For Amanda, this was the most important thing anyone could ever talk about. The world needed to be saved from evil. But to her family, she needed help. And their relationship fractured.

I heard this story time and time again. The story of mothers who had lost children, families who had fallen apart, people who had suffered a catastrophic event that caused them to question everything. In the vulnerability of this carnage, they found Q. But as they became obsessed with their new research, they slowly started to lose everything else.

Some, like Neely Petrie-Blanchard, whos family I filmed with, are even accused of killing in QAnons name. Its alleged she killed a man after falling down the Q rabbit hole. She now sits in a Floridian prison, believing Q and Donald Trump will soon save her.

These individuals had often found their way to Q after falling on a conspiratorial influencer that showed them the light. Sometimes they had risen to the role of community leader themselves, becoming increasingly responsible for a gaggle of conspiracy theorists who hung on their every word.

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I was particularly interested in these leaders and my mission was to embed myself with the figures attempting to usher in a new age of conspiratorial politics.

I wanted to understand where this would all end up. So I did what every ardent Q follower does, I went on the forums and went to the public events.

Although QAnon stopped posting forever on December 8 2020 after Trump lost the election, that didnt mean its followers had stopped meeting up.

Across the US there were QAnon-related events from Anaheim, California, to Tampa, Florida, to Dallas, Texas. Thousands upon thousands of people turned up, with tickets costing up to $1000 dollars a piece. It was a real whos who in the world of conspiracy, and this is how I made my way up the conspiracy tree.

I found myself spending time with some of Qs earliest adopters, talking about Michelle Obamas non-existent penis and Obamas secret homosexual tendancies.

I also found myself parlaying with some of the biggest names in US Republican politics: Michael Flynn, Donald Trumps former National Security advisor, Roger Stone, a King Maker of US politics who helped get Nixon and Trump elected, and Mike Lindell, a key ally of Trump and the main proponent of the Big Lie the conspiracy that the 2020 US election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Glimpsing behind the veil was fascinating. In shabby back offices and hallway corners, they gave me minutes of their time. Surrounded by adoring fans and staff, they were intimidating and convincing. On stage they wore fine suits, frequently asked for donations from their supporters, and rallied the troops to fight back to save America. In my conversations they were more cautious, sensing I may not be on their side.

They were wary of mentioning Q directly and even went to so far as to deny any knowledge of the conspiracy groups existence but had one simple message: America is corrupt and they are going to take their country back. I was struck by their conviction. It wasnt hard to see why so many listened they were firm and decisive.

However, dont think that just because were across the Atlantic were immune to this. In an exclusive poll with YouGov for the documentary, we found 58% of Brits believe satanic ritual abuse of children probably happens in the UK.

We also discovered that 10% of Brits believe the government should be overthrown by force. Both of these beliefs have their links to the QAnon movement, and they both demonstrate just how deeply embedded conspiracy currently is in the national zeitgeist.

When I watched the Capitol Riots unfold on TV when thousands of Q supporters, buoyed on by claims of a rigged election and years of revolutionary conspiratorial chatter raided the home of congress in Washington I had originally hoped that the events would be some kind of turning point for the millions around the world hooked on the alternate truths.

That perhaps after seeing the chaos and destruction the conspiracy had helped to bring about, theyd wake up to the lies theyd been fed. But the exact opposite happened.

Despite endless failed Q predictions, despite this act of anti-democratic rioting and despite the hours of video definitively showing Q supporters at the Capitol on January 6, nothing could free followers from the Kool-Aid that was now running through their veins.

It became once again, another conspiracy. Another secretive move by the Cabal to harm the movement. And it pushed them all deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.

While mainstream media organisations painted the picture of a rampant right-wing mob raiding the Capitol building in an effort to reinstate Donald Trump prominent right-wing commentators and Q influencers flipped the narrative entirely. January 6 was actually planned by Antifa and the FBI, they claimed. It was a false flag with crisis actors. A familiar and convenient story of deep state conspiracy once again hooked in the people it was meant to.

But how did it all come to this? The origins of QAnon is a uniquely modern concept. Its a movement that started on the fringes of the internet in October 2017 on 4chan an infamously toxic message board website where users post anonymously. Despite these offbeat beginnings though, it has become entirely mainstream even making it to the office of the President of the United States.

Through thousands of cryptic social media posts from a mysterious figure called Q, the movement became a religion and the webpages of 4chan, and then 8chan, became the holy scripture.

The original idea was that there was a deep state secretly running the world and its politics. They were dirty, nefarious paedophiles and the likes of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama were in on it. Trump, the conspiracy went, was the saviour. He had been selected by top military officials to bring about The Storm and The Great Awakening. The mysterious figure originally called, QClearancePatriot, was the Messiah spreading the message to its followers.

Over the years the movement gained traction and spread its tentacles throughout the online world, creeping ever increasingly into mainstream social media until the likes of your brothers, sisters, parents and uncles suddenly started talking about cabals and microchips. Families were destroyed, followers lost their jobs, people killed in the name of conspiracy convinced they were fighting an evil cabal.

But its rise continued and culminated in the biggest attack ever on US democracy last January.

By this point, I was well on the way to making a documentary and I was struck with a couple of burning questions, what happens next? And where does this all end? Despite Q no longer posting, it increasingly felt like the QAnon movement was now too big to fail.

New leaders and new influencers have filled the gaps left by Q. Empowered by the realisation that even though they are wrong almost every time, it just doesnt matter. As long as they speak with conviction, never apologise and always blame left-wing protest groups the conspiracy will continue.

These new leaders often shy away from using Qs name in their conspiracies but the roots of their misinformation are deeply embedded in the movement.

Now, the community has its sights on upcoming elections, the 2022 Midterms and the 2024 US Presidential Election at the top of them.

The next stage of Q and conspiracy was to take over politics from the ground up. Inspired by lies of a rigged election, fears that childrens blood was being harvested by elites in order to obtain a satanic psychadelic drug and rumours that communists were stealing their country Qs believers up and down the US were answering the call to fight back. They were joining each stage of the political process. From the very lowest levels of the school boards and community town halls, to the height of power: US congress.

Reporting by Media Matters suggests almost 50 US House and Senate candidates have embraced QAnon theories in their bids for election in 2022. And the unsettling thing is, theyre having success.

Two prominent conservative figures, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, have welcomed conspiracies around rigged elections and they are now serving congresswomen. Majorie Taylor Green has since attempted to distance herself from Q, but one thing all these candidates have in common is that the vast majority are Republicans, theyre deeply religious, and deeply conservative.

The other thing they have in common is their propensity towards alternative facts.

That was the pseudo reality Ive spent the last year trying to wrap my head around. But Ive come to the conclusion its not possible to understand it in any traditional sense. Instead, one can only attempt to understand the psychology of peoples journey down the rabbit hole.

For some, those die hard believers who would give up everything in the name of Q, its often a journey spurred on by trauma.

My interviews often ended dramatically, with accusations I was asking stupid questions and that I was destroying America.

There were often staunch denials of any knowledge of QAnon. But Qs conspiracies were absolutely everywhere and permeated the room like a bad stench.

Both Flynn and Lindell are committed to the idea that the 2020 US election was rigged, and they regularly urge their supporters to fight to take their country back.

In the moments after difficult interviews, I would ponder the question: do they really believe this? I would wonder whether it was all just a ploy to appeal to a base created by Donald Trump, an anticipation of a Trump second term, and an attempt to curry favour with the most controversial man in US politics.

I eventually concluded though, that the question didnt matter. The impact was the same, whether the leaders believed it or not.

And as Trump likely prepares for a run for office in 2024, riding on the back of a conspiracy threatening the whole of the US democratic system, I sit cautiously waiting for the ripples into UK politics. And I have only one piece of advice: dont believe everything you read on the internet.

The Cult of Conspiracy: QAnon airs on Channel 4 at 9pm,December 7, 2021

MORE : QAnon Shaman sentenced to 41 months for Capitol riot role, avoids harsher penalty

MORE : QAnon believers wait for dead JFK Jr to announce Donald Trump 2024 presidential run

MORE : 5G, child trafficking and Covid-19 cover ups how does someone end up a conspiracy theorist?

Do you have a story youd like to share? Get in touch by emailing Claie.Wilson@metro.co.uk

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Beware the rabbit hole: How conspiracy is taking control of politics - Metro.co.uk

There was blood on the floor across U.S. stocks on Friday, but for meme stocks only a frantic last hour of buying prevented social medias favorite ticker symbols from getting exsanguinated to end the first trading week of December.

Both GameStop GME and AMC Entertainment AMC among other key meme names spent most of Fridays trading hours getting outright clobbered with GameStop falling as much as 11.8% and AMC plummeting 15.2% going into the final hour of trading.

For memes, it looked like the close to a particularly difficult week as confusion over how concerned markets should be about the omicron variant mixed with the very real fear that Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell is getting ready to start tapering, ending an unprecedented period of central banking accommodation of capital markets.

AMC, more exposed to the concerns over a new COVID variant, felt the pain more acutely than its ur-meme partner, falling back almost 33% by 3 p.m. Friday. GameStop bottomed out at the same time but at a comparatively shallower 21.4%.

Generally, signs were popping up everywhere that the salad days of buying stocks for the sake of future growth might be coming to an end.

That pain was felt across meme names like Koss KOSS, Tesla TSLA and Nvidia NVDA as the Nasdaq COMP was openly flirting with a bear market, and even zeitgeist investor Cathie Wood found herself getting mauled by that waking bear as her flagship ARK Innovation ETF ARKK dropped another 13.8% on the week.

For AMC, the two-week wait is on for the newest Spider-Man film, which AMC CEO/memelord Adam Aron is using to gauge Reddit Ape interest in nonfungible tokens and other cryptos. But for now, Aron has been reduced to trying to juice up retail fervor by taking to Twitter and inviting his followers to Aaron Sorkins new movie about Lucille Balls difficult marriage to Desi Arnaz.

Really.

Spider-Man cannot swing fast enough.

For GameStop, some of the week was taken up by some hot drama around retail investors seeing some incorrect data about the stock on Fidelitys platform Tuesday morning.

That data appeared to show that there were more than 13 million shares of GameStop available to short when in reality there were only about 2 million, a number that GameStops Ape army knew was wrong thanks to their obsessive watching of short interest on the stock.

After Fidelity released a statement claiming the root cause was an incorrect entry of the number of shares available to short by one of our external counterparties. The issue was fixed by 12:10 p.m. ET today.

Reddit and Twitter were ablaze with conjecture over who could have been at fault for the discrepancy with many once again pointing the finger at short sellers that they see as their archenemies, with one theory alleging that a defunct market maker was to blame.

But in the end, the answer was a very boring one. On Wednesday evening, a spokesperson for Vanguard sent a statement to MarketWatch admitting that the house that Jack Bogle built was in fact the counterparty that made the error on GameStop data.

Due to a clerical data entry error, yesterday we provided Fidelity with the incorrect potential securities lending availability data for Gamestop (GME), read Vanguards statement. The error was corrected shortly thereafter and before the markets opened. We regret this error occurred and apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

According to insiders, the timing issue was a result of Fidelity taking its data feed from Vanguard and then updating later in the day. That time lapse accounted for Vanguards corrected data not hitting Fidelitys trading tickets until just after noon EST.

And, like it or not, errors like this are not uncommon.

Brokers receive incorrect data that gets displayed to the public all the time, explained Anthony Denier, CEO of trading platform Webull Financial. Once brokers are made aware or catch the error themselves, they rectify it as soon as possible, but because this error happened regarding short interest on GME its now a conspiracy against the Apes.

But because of the scrutiny that eagle-eyed Apes are putting on meme stocks, even Denier sees a shift happening.

This is the new world, but I will tell you this, the retail army has put everyone on notice to be better, he said.

The retail army has also made it difficult for old school traders to get comfortable with any trend.

Another clear indicator of how retail Apes play by their own rules was the fact that between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. EST Friday, GameStop soared 7.6% and AMC popped almost 13% in that time frame as social media was rife with users encouraging one another to BTFD, or buy the f@*$ing dip.

The major indexes also pared back losses in the final hour of the trading day, but GameStop and AMC have both managed to go on dramatic run-ups in the last hour of trading every day this week.

Some die-hard Apes will continue to believe that theres more to bad data than simple errors by some of the most trusted and drama-free investment advisers around and that no one is selling in a massive selloff because everyones hands are as diamond as their own, but some might also be coming around to the notion that they started a movement in January and there are people on the fringes who see that movement as. a tradeable trend, and they arent as zealousand they have much softer hands.

And were not talking about hedge fundsnecessarily.

Now, what remains to be seen is if the dips created by those fringe players remain buyable as the world starts to shrug off COVID variants and gets back to normal as Jay Powell tightens the spigot and money gets a lot less cheap.

Diamond hands will start to feel heavy by then, but so will the cost of borrowing to short a videogame retailer stock that is up 900% in 2021.

And, oh, GameStop reports earnings on Dec. 8.

See the original post here:

Late surge in GameStop and AMC save meme stocks from a very bloody Friday - MarketWatch

Ruth Conniff

Refugee High: Coming of Age in America (The New Press), by Elly Fishman, tells the story of four teenagers from four different countriesIraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, and Myanmarwho land at Roger C. Sullivan High School in Chicago, home to more refugee students than any other high school in Illinois. Principal Chad Adams and Sarah Quintenz, the big-hearted, foul-mouthed director of the schools English Language Learners program, share a vision of Sullivan as a welcoming place for new American teens, supporting and challenging them to succeed in their new country.

Elly Fishman spent the 20172018 school year at Sullivan, following the teenagers and their families, teachers, and friends. That year happened to coincide with one of the worst global refugee crises in history as well as a massive increase in pressure on immigrants in the United States from President Donald Trumps aggressive policies and escalating public hostility.

You cant help but root for the kids in this book, who struggle to overcome trauma and dislocation as well as the common heartaches of adolescenceand the terrible reality that the violence and poverty that caused them to flee their countries still stalk them like a recurring nightmare in Chicago.

As Alejandro, who witnessed his best friends murder by gangs in Guatemala and fled before he met the same fate, awaits his asylum hearing, his classmate is shot by gang members near Sullivan. Shahina resists her parents determined efforts to force her into an arranged marriage, and makes a harrowing escape after she is kidnapped in another state.

Despite such extreme circumstances, the kids at Sullivan are mostly engaged in regular kid stuff, and their teachers see them as whole people. Fishmans clear-eyed, empathetic portraits are a powerful rebuke to the nativism and bigotry that have gripped our country.

A Promised Land (Crown), by Barack Obama, is a hefty 701-page memoirand its only Volume I!that came out at the end of 2020, just after our last year-end review. The former President is a good writer, and this is a thoughtful book, not a ghost-written product meant to burnish his image.

Obama confesses to self-doubt, and while his accounts of the war in Afghanistan, Wall Street bailouts, and other disappointments wont assuage progressive critics, it is a humanizing read. Its also poignant to look back now, in this poisoned political era, at the optimism that propelled Obamas first presidential campaign, his search for common ground, and the idealism of his young supporters.

Obama, who saw the future of Republican politics in Sarah Palin, muses about whether John McCain would have chosen her as a running mate if he knew what he was starting. But while the ugly, know-nothing politics of the Palin/Trump variety continue to plague us, this book is a reminder of our nations better angels and the possibility that they could, again, ascend.

Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive and editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner.

Mike Ervin

Melanie Morrison was euphoric when she discovered that the Lillian E. Smith Center for the arts was offering a writing residency. As she recalls in Letters from Old Screamer Mountain (Resource Center for Women & Ministry in the South), To find a place of solitude and beauty in the mountains of North Georgia was appealing in and of itself; to be on the very mountain where Lillian Smith wrote Strange Fruit (1944) and Killers of the Dream (1949) was more than I could imagine.

Morrisons parents revered Smith. Her picture hung on a wall in Morrisons childhood home.

The two Smith books, the first a novel and the second a collection of essays, were about the tragic failure of white people to own up to the societal destruction wrought by racism in the United States. Smith and her life partner, Paula Snelling, operated the Laurel Falls Camp for girls on the same site from the 1920s to the 1940s. Morrisons mother, Eleanor, attended a weekend session at Laurel Falls as a college student in 1939, which Morrison describes as an unforgettable turning point in my mothers young life.

Morrison conducts anti-racism seminars for white people. She planned to use her residency to write essays about the horror of lynching. In 2000, Morrison opened the Leaven Center in rural Michigan, which, she says in the book, was devoted to equipping participants to become more effective and knowledgeable agents of social change. (I attended many Leaven retreats, and Morrison presided over my wedding in 2006.)

But when Morrisons residency began in July 2012, she was feeling ambivalent. Leaven had closed due to financial pressures less than a year earlier, and Morrison was still mourning that loss. At the same time, she was immersing herself in pictures and accounts of lynchings. So during her residency she wrote letters to her mother, who was descending into dementia, describing the avalanche of emotions and epiphanies I was experiencing.

Morrison never shared the letters with her mother because of her dementia, but theyre published in this book.

The historical amnesia about lynching is the silence that weighs heavily on my spirit, Mom, she writes in one letter. If this reign of terror remains unacknowledged by the descendants of its white perpetrators, we can be certain that the lies and fears that fomented lynching will continue to infect our white psyches and imaginations.

Letters from Old Screamer Mountain is an engaging tale of love, grief, healing, and family connection.

Mike Ervin is a columnist for The Progressive.

Brian Gilmore

The title of John Thompsons book, I Came As a Shadow: An Autobiography (Henry Holt and Company), comes from Nocturne Varial, a poem written by his uncle, the Harlem Renaissance poet Lewis Grandison Alexander: I came as a shadow / I stand now a light.

That the legendary Georgetown University basketball coach would pick such a literary reference is no surprise. He was a man who respected intellectual pursuits just as much as the game.

Thompson was the first African American coach to win the NCAA Division I Mens Championship in 1984. When asked at the time how it felt, he called the question insulting, because it implied that Black coaches before me had not been good enough to win a championship. That was Thompsonhe fought racism his way with every fiber of his being.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., Thompson was himself an accomplished basketball player. His working-class parents stressed education and hard work, which he embraced. He made it to the NBA, playing for the Boston Celtics for two years, but found his true calling as an educator, calling himself a teacher, not a basketball coach. He used basketball as an instrument to teach and the court as his classroom.

I Came As a Shadow (actually published in mid-December 2020, after The Progressives 2020 Favorite Books package) reminds me of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A Black man of stature, intelligence, and notoriety tells of his life in the United States. Thompsons book, written with Jesse Washington, comments on slavery, racism, money in college sports, and education. And, as his mother, Anna, taught him as a boy, Thompson always speaks his mind.

Thompson talks about his most consequential Georgetown player, Patrick Ewing, and the evolution of the superstar Allen Iverson, as well as others who are not so well known. He recounts his famous walkout during a college basketball game over the NCAAs racist eligibility policies for student athletes and gives an insiders account of the NBAs own embarrassing racist history toward Black basketball players.

Thompson remembers being forced to ride on the back of the bus on family trips to Maryland and seeing how the Black people taking communion at the familys Catholic church could go only after all the white people went first.

The racism stuck with him. He was going to fight it. And not once would he bite his tongue.

Brian Gilmore is a poet and senior lecturer in the University of Marylands MLaw program. His latest book is come see about me, marvin (Wayne State University Press).

Sarah Jaffe

This year saw a banner crop of books about work from a variety of authors, from the mainstream to the radical left. We cant blame the pandemic for thatafter all, researching and writing a book takes years and most of these projects were launched well before we knew how much our relationship with wage labor would be transformed by global catastrophe. Yet many of these books land with new urgency in the world of COVID-19, and none more so than Amelia Horgans Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (Pluto Press).

Horgan, an English philosopher, has written a concise yet thorough dissection of work in the 2020s, from deindustrialization to the gig economy, unpaid household work to academia. But it is more than just a look at the way work has gotten worse in recent years, particularly with the pandemic. It is a book, she writes, about how work under capitalism is bad for all of us.

The problem that we are so rarely allowed to admit to, that COVID-19 has made impossible to ignore, is that work is not something we do out of free choice. We must work in order to survive, to pay ever-inflating rents or mortgages, pay down student debt, feed our children and elderly family members, and be seen as productive members of society. That background unfreedom, Horgan notes, seeps into every work relationship, even as we tell ourselves that work is a place where we find meaning.

Horgan manages to clarify this somewhat depressing fact and have fun doing so. She uses Britney Spearss 2013 hit Work Bitch to explain our different understandings of the term, and brings in examples of present-day and past labor struggles to illuminate the ways that workers can, and do, change the conditions of theirand all of ourlives.

Its worth noting that Horgan finished her book while suffering the debilitating effects of long COVID, and she writes movingly about what the pandemic has wrought. COVID-19 did not fundamentally change our relationships with work, but it did pull back the veil that has allowed many people to pretend that the way we work now is the best of all possibilities. Horgans necessary argument is that it doesnt have to be this way, and that the change might be already beginning.

Sarah Jaffe, a reporting fellow at Type Media Center whose most recent book is Work Wont Love You Back, is a frequent contributor to The Progressive.

Sarah Lahm

Heres a radical thought: Everyone deserves to be comfortable, relaxed, and happy. This idea forms the basis of social psychologist Devon Prices new book, Laziness Does Not Exist (Simon & Schuster), which reflects an emerging zeitgeist for our post-COVID-19 world by showcasing our growing resistance to work and the grind culture that often defines it.

Grind culture has seeped into every facet of our modern lives. It is most commonly associated with Millennials, who are at greater risk of being pressured to work all day, every day. But it even affects young children, whose brains and future purchasing habits are desperately coveted by companies such as Facebook.

In recent years, activists and thought leaders like Tricia Hersey have pushed back on our demanding 24/7 work and social media culture. Hersey is a theologian, artist, and self-care proponent who started the Nap Ministry in 2016 to popularize the idea that rest is resistance. She has linked the work-till-you-drop pressure of today to a long legacy of compulsory work culture in the United States, going all the way back to the experiences of Black Americans under slavery.

Price does not mention Hersey in Laziness Does Not Exist, but the book clearly reflects the ideas she has helped popularize. Price, who is transgender, insists a laziness lie has permeated American culture ever since the Puritans first arrived on Native soil centuries ago.

Puritans were purveyors of a productivity-obsessed version of Christianity, Price notes, and this helped lay the groundwork for capitalism in this country. Then, as now, work was deemed virtuous and anyone who did not succeed was dismissed as lazy. They say this has led to a dark implication that our failures are always our own fault.

Price does not just decry this problem. They also provide strategies for resistance, including a chapter on how to establish boundaries with ones own family members to preserve ones right to rest, dream, be creative, and simply be temporarily unavailable.

The intent is to impart a message of empowerment. Step one on the path to ending grind culture might indeed be rooted in awakening individuals, as Price seeks to do, to the idea that laziness is a most damaging lie.

Sarah Lahm is a columnist for The Progressive.

Emilio Leanza

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Macmillan), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is a book with a very particular axe to grind.

A familiar story told in other expansive history bookssuch as Jared Diamonds Guns, Germs, and Steel or Yuval Noah Hararis Sapiensgoes something like this: For most of prehistory, an era that roughly spans from 3.3 million to 10,000 years ago, humans lived in bands or chiefdoms which, due to their small size, were inherently democratic and egalitarian; it was only with the invention of agriculture that, to paraphrase philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we rushed headlong into our chains.

At its core, The Dawn of Everything is about how we live; or, to be more exact, how we choose to live in relation to each other.

Agriculture, these authors claim, was the original sin that set the stage for everything else, from kings and private property to bureaucracy, colonialism, genocide, and the contemporary nation state.

Graeber and Wengrow reject this narrative. Relying on new archaeological research, they rigorously debunk the idea that early human societies can be as neatly categorized as Diamond and Harari suggest. Early hunter-gatherer groups, for example, were not necessarily tiny, isolated democratic communes, but instead engaged in bold social experiments. This included seasonally shifting into temporary settlements, with something like a Neolithic aristocracy.

Likewise, the authors argue, the first cities were not all defined by social stratification and inequality. Among them were many large-scale ancient cities, like Harappa of the Indus Valley Civilization, that seem to have functioned without any sort of rigid, top-down government.

In fact, according to Graeber and Wengrow, the way a society worked was never solely determined by technologies (for example, the plow) or environmental factors (the availability of large, tameable livestock to pull them). Rather, the humans of the past actively debated and experimented with social formsmuch more so, it turns out, than we do today.

At its core, The Dawn of Everything is about how we live; or, to be more exact, how we choose to live in relation to each other.

As Graeber, whose untimely death in September 2020 cut short the career of one of the most brilliant thinkers of recent decades, once wrote, The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

Our distant ancestors grasped this truth. Its up to usas we churn about in states where money is converted into political power and the environment is in perilto remember it.

Emilio Leanza is associate editor of The Progressive.

Bill Lueders

Among the panoply of issues clamoring for our attention, none are more urgent than finding less destructive ways to interact with our planet. Some of my favorite books this year are about that challenge.

For a case study in how a nations citizens can deliver stunning rebukes to the destroyers of Earth, theres The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed (Beacon Press). It is written by the wife-and-husband team of Robin Broad, a professor at American University, and John Cavanagh, the former director of and now senior adviser to the Institute for Policy Studies; both played minor roles in helping spare El Salvador from the environmental ravages of a proposed gold mine.

In 2016, after a seven-year legal battle, the Central American nation won a lawsuit filed against it by a global mining company ticked off about a denied permit. The next year, El Salvador became the first nation in the world to ban metals mining.

The Water Defenders of El Salvador, similar to Indigenous-led groups throughout the world, succeeded by building alliances around a simple message of water over gold. They rallied the public, enlisted experts, and secured political support. The mining ban passed the Salvadoran legislative assembly 70 to 0.

But these gains came with sizeable costs, including the still-unsolved 2009 murder and mutilation of anti-mining activist Marcelo Rivera. The Water Defenders, a deeply informed and highly readable book, does justice to his cause.

Another important take on achieving a cleaner and safer world is Prosperity in the Fossil-Free Economy: Cooperatives and the Design of Sustainable Businesses (Yale University Press), by Melissa K. Scanlan, a longtime Wisconsin environmentalist. She envisions a future where green policies go hand-in-hand with worker empowerment, and provides a detailed blueprint for how to get there.

Already, Scanlan notes, more people in the United States are members of cooperatives than participants in the stock market. Her book offers essential hope that we can yet save ourselves . . . from ourselves.

Finally, let me acknowledge the fiftieth anniversary edition of Frances Moore Lapps seminal Diet for a Small Planet (Ballantine Books), which includes a lengthy new introduction, the updates made in earlier editions, and even some new recipes. Lapp (see her essay, Acts of Rebel Sanity, on page 51) argues that the advice shes been giving about our wasteful and unhealthy food systems has become even more imperative.

The challenge now, she writes, is learning how to focus both on our everyday choices and on our courage as empowered citizens to revolt against concentrated power and achieve democratically set rules putting our health and Earth first.

To the barricades! And the dinner plate.

Bill Lueders is editor of The Progressive.

John Nichols

Critical race theory, the bane of conservative pundits and Republican political strategists, found an unexpected defender last summer when General Mark Milley, the sixty-three-year-old chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared in June before the House Armed Services Committee.

As part of their cynical effort to discredit teaching that recognizes the influence that 400 years of slavery, segregation, and racism has had on contemporary laws, Republicans on the committee demanded to know why instructors at West Point were teaching students materials from a lecture by Dr. Carol Anderson of Emory University with the title Understanding Whiteness and White Rage.

This sincere desire to understand how this countrys tortured past influences its tortured present has turned a great many Americans to the writing of Carol Anderson, a historian and professor of African American studies at Emory.

General Milley did not blink: I want to understand white rage, he responded. Im white, and I want to understand it. So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building [on January 6, 2021] and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.

This sincere desire to understand how this countrys tortured past influences its tortured present has turned a great many Americans to the writing of Carol Anderson, a historian and professor of African American studies at Emory. Anderson has written a series of transformative booksincluding White Rage and One Person, No Votethat critique how our laws and public policies developed. She does this by shedding light on patterns of racism and anti-Blackness that have always been present but that have not always been explored.

In her latest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury Publishing), Anderson presents a Constitutional history that exposes how the Second Amendment was designed and has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable.

Rejecting the simplistic notion that the amendment outlines a right to bear arms in order to preserve the freedom of Americans, she describes the explicitly racist story of its drafting and interpretation over the past 230 years. The Second Amendment is so inherently, structurally flawed, so based on Black exclusion and debasement, she concludes, that, unlike the other amendments, it can never be a pathway to civil and human rights for 47.5 million African Americans.

Andersons argument is more than compelling. It takes the debate about guns and gun violence to a deeper and more vital level, as does her brilliant observation that the Second is lethal; steeped in anti-Blackness, it is the loaded weapon laying around just waiting for the hand of some authority to put it to use.

John Nichols, a frequent contributor to The Progressive, writes about politics for The Nation and is associate editor of The Capital Times newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin.

Ed Rampell

The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (Common Notions), released in April, boldly proclaims a sweeping First Peoples ecological and political caretaking vision for the humble people of the Earth and their other-than-human relatives. The Red Deal, it explains, goes beyond the proposed Green New Deal because it prioritizes Indigenous liberation and a revolutionary left position.

The book, an anti-capitalist, anticolonial manifesto, was written collectively by the Red Nation, a coalition of Native and non-Native activists, educators, students, and community organizers advocating Native liberation, and resisting targeted destruction and violence towards Native life and land.

Indigenous people have lived sustainably since time immemorial and can continue to live in reciprocity with all those we share the Earth with.

The Red Nation, from The Red Deal

The Red Deal opposes the edict of Genesis 1:28, giving humankind dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth, an ideology that justified Western colonialism, the conquest of Native peoples, and the theft of their lands. The book posits that capitalists view the Earth as a resource to be exploited instead of a relative to be protected.

In contrast, the Indigenous ethos sees humans as having sacred bonds with nature, not something separate from or superior to it. Indigenous people have lived sustainably since time immemorial and can continue to live in reciprocity with all those we share the Earth with, asserts The Red Deal, which calls for decolonization, demilitarization, and repatriation of stolen ancestral lands.

In recent years, pipeline protests have magnified the impact of Indigenous peoples on U.S. policy. President Joe Biden, elected over Donald Trump with help from tribal votes in battleground states like Wisconsin, tapped Deb Haaland as his Secretary of the Interior, the nations first Native American Cabinet member. The push continues to restore national monument status to Utahs sacred sites. Octobers People vs. Fossil Fuels protests included civil disobedience at the White House and the occupying of the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The Red Deal is thought-provoking and visionary. It synthesizes socialist and Indigenous worldviews, suggesting that theres some truth in Friedrich Engelss 1884 prophecy in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that the next higher plane of society . . . will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the ancient gentes.

The humble shall then inherit the Earth. Its about time.

Ed Rampell, a Los Angelesbased film historian and critic who lived and reported in the Pacific Islands for twenty-three years, is a frequent contributor to The Progressive.

Norman Stockwell

Polity Books has achieved another tour de force in its Black Lives series. I reviewed the first volume W.E.B. Du Bois: The Lost and the Found a year ago; now the third volume, Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition, provides insight into this important Black Radical thinker.

Robinson, who passed away five-and-a-half years ago, was a friend, so I may be a bit biased. But Joshua Myers, an associate professor of Africana Studies at Howard University, does an excellent job in contextualizing Robinson in this very readable biography. The new book is a worthy companion to Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance, a collection of Robinsons essays and articles, some never before published, which came out from Pluto Press in 2019.

It is a hopeful sign that Robinsons work is being rediscovered by younger scholars of the Black Radical tradition. As Robinson wrote in his 1997 book, Black Movements in America, It is always possible that the next Black social movement will obtain that distant land, perhaps even transporting America with it.

Bill Gentile, another friend and a colleague whom I first met in Nicaragua in the 1980s, has a new autobiography, Wait for Me: True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll (self-published but readily available in bookstores and online). As a journalist and photographer, Gentile has told intimate stories of people whose lives have been deeply affected by wars and conflict. This book gives us the tales behind the imagesillustrations of a life well lived.

From the steel mills of Pennsylvania, to the jungles of Central America, to the deserts of Iraq, to a classroom in Washington, D.C., Gentile has faithfully told the stories of his subjects. And in recent years, he has helped inspire a new generation of equally responsible backpack journalists.

This falls chaotic U.S. exit from its twenty-year war in Afghanistan came as no surprise to British journalist, activist, and filmmaker Tariq Ali, who has been writing about the region for decades. His new book, The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold (Verso), a collection of previously published articles and columns, revisits his years of coverage. As he told me when we spoke via Skype on August 31, the day after the last U.S. troops pulled out, Its been a disaster on every level, as have most of the wars that have been fought by the United States in the name of the war against terror.

Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.

Kassidy Tarala

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Favorite Books of 2021 - Progressive.org - Progressive.org

Disco Balls and Design: The Architectural Performance of Night Clubs

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For decades, cities around the world have been promoting their nightlife scene and the designed spaces in which these activities occur. Occasionally hidden away from the hustle and bustle, offering a sort of escapism from the day-to-day-routine behind red velvet ropes and intense security measures, or sometimes proudly on display for people from all walks of life to congregate and spend the evening under the glisten of a disco ball or flashing lights, nightclubs are an example of how fashion, culture, and societal norms influence an often overlooked and underground side of architecture.

While clubs are often viewed as a sort of abandoned space, only activated from late in the evening until early hours of the morning on the weekends, theyre actually often intentionally crafted and curated to create highly-specific experiences, and go much beyond the dramatic visual effects. Nightclubs are over-the-top exercises in creating fantasy worlds, where the details of design fall to the back in order to put spatial arrangements on center stage. By creating various atmospheres, the placement of everything becomes key. Locations of bars, bathrooms, the DJ booth, the size of the dance floor, and its adjacencies are actually more important than the lights, sound, and everything in between.

The success of nightclubs lies in their ability to blur boundaries, push thresholds, and where parties and events could come together undercover to continue the zeitgeist of a countercultural revolution. In their most simple form, nightclubs existed long before the famous celebrity-filled parties and took on a much more conservative form of working-class dance halls. As time went on people who had united in secret in order to express themselves saw an opportunity emerge in parallel with the mainstream jump in consumerist activity and advancements in technology that allowed them to play music louder and shine lights brighter. As a way to create their own space, these groups felt the need to design a new typology, one that would only serve as a nightclub instead of a space that would need to be converted, and then back again for regular public use.

In 1967, one of the first clubs that was credited with going against the societal grain was Electric Circus, located in New York City. Boasting interiors designed by famed architect Charles Forberg, it used white tented fabric to contrast psychedelic posters and projections. Within a couple of years, these parties would catch on in Europe and involved the younger generation who were a part of the Italian Radical Design Movement. Their designs also focused heavily on multi-media and multi-disciplinary collaborations.

This intercontinental emergence of club design pushed architects to think beyond the tangible aspects of space, and more about how users would interact with each other. At New York Citys now closed-down Electric Circus, Andy Warhol would host his famous Exploding Plastic Inevitable events that combined music by the Velvet Undergrounds with entrancing light shows. At the same time, Club Cerebrum, a brainchild of up-and-coming artists had guests dress in white gowns, lay on white carpets, and eat marshmallows. At the iconic Studio 54, where only the hippest celebrities of the era were allowed in, having an effective design was critical. Inside of this reconverted theater space, lighting was designed by Broadway specialists to ensure that the aesthetic was the talk of the town.

Into the early 1980s, many of these exclusive clubs lost their allure as the middle class sought out places of their own. With mainstream accessibility, prominent, modern architects began to devise their own solutions in imagining the nightclub of the future. OMA proposed a new venue for Londons Ministry of Sound that featured moving walls and a diversity of spaces that could serve different purposes, as OMA claimed that nightclubs were losing their allure. Perhaps a true statement, many cities still have one or two hot spots that people will venture to for a once-in-a-blue-moon night out. For now, the history of clubs shows us that an anything-goes mindset can continue to push the boundaries of design and create spaces where fun follows function.

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Disco Balls and Design: The Architectural Performance of Night Clubs - ArchDaily

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Kim Petras, photographed in Manhattan

Kim Petras was just coming off the high of the Met Gala when we met in her publicists West Village apartment in the fall. The nights theme was Americana, and the German-born pop star put her signature twist on the red carpet: a horse girl homage that was like Heidi meets The Godfather. The fashion statement mixed the literal and the conceptual: a tail braid on her head and an actual plastic horse head on her chest.

The morning we met, she went for a simpler look: high ponytail, glistening blue cat eyes, black sweatpants, and a crop top. She was getting ready for her day, with the help of two makeup artists and a sweet twentysomething assistant. But Petras was warm and earnest as she opened up about her career trajectory so far.

Its been an eventful year, even in a pandemic. Ive done a lot of growing during lockdown, and life has changed, and Im kind of like, You know what? Its most fun for me to make really out-there pop songs, really going for being outrageous, she said. And I feel very very liberated by that and very excited to share that.

The 29-year-old was able to launch her new era on the MTV stage, where she became the first openly trans artist to perform at the network's award shows, twice over. At the September Video Music Awards, she unveiled her Europop-inflected new sound with the neo-disco Future Starts Now in a bubblegum dress that looked like pink everlasting gobstoppers exploded on Barbarella (in a good way). In November, she staged the liberation part: bursting out of an enormous revolving coconut at the MTV Europe Music Awards, belting out her latest single, Coconuts, which sounds like Katy Perry doing a suntan lotions jingle about breasts (in a good way).

Getting on the music network was a career highlight for Petras a far cry from making the rounds of radio stations on her own just five years ago. She faced confusion from the industry about being a trans artist; her musical style, built on her shameless love of sugary melodies, was deemed too queer clubby by radio and labels.

In the beginning when I did the rounds to major labels and played them the music, people didnt really get it, Petras said. People were kind of like, Ah, I dont know who the fanbase is for this. It was kind of like almost a little bit like, Youre going to be a gay artist, and thats niche and we dont know. So I got shitty deals offered to me.

Still, starting in 2017, her euphoric bops, like the spoiled princess anthem I Dont Want It At All, and her shimmery longing-infused songs, like Heart to Break and Hillside Boys, began getting hundreds of millions of streams, thumped out of speakers in gyms and queer clubs, and made her gay famous.

Shes been interviewed by Paris Hilton (who cameos in one of her earliest videos) for the cover of Paper magazine, collaborated with Kygo, performed at Lollapalooza, opened for Troye Sivan, and drawn stan Twitter backlash for trying to defend working with Dr. Luke (before apologizing).

Pop stardom is all about timing, though, and right now queer is in in a different way. Bottoming anthems and gay lap dance videos are par for the course; Sam Smith and Demi Lovato came out as nonbinary, as did Halsey and Kehlani. The world and industry seem open to new kinds of stars, and it looks like it might finally be Petrass moment. Of course, being a pop star is about a musical style, a narrative, and the zeitgeist all aligning. Those other acts were all already celebrities when they came out. Petras has had a very different journey.

Kim Petras always lived for pop music. She was born in Cologne, in 1992, to an architect dad and dance teacher mom, and music was an integral part of her household. The late 90s and early 00s were all about Orlando teen pop and Britney Spears and boy bands. She was obsessed with Max Martin machine pop songwriting and stardom. She loved the Spice Girls movie and yearned to be a Disney kid. I have two older sisters, she said. We used to lip-synch Disney songs.

As a teen, she was shy; music, though, was her outlet. Shed enlist her sisters to film her videos, and she started working on music for real, with a sisters friend, who had this little studio where he only did, like, metal bands, she said. Its literally in his attic, sometimes he would give me studio time, and Id just record my demos. Id be on my laptop and make little productions.

Back then I wanted to get discovered more than anything, she remembered, smiling at her navet. But I never did. And then I learned like, Shit, I gotta do it myself.

Shed use MySpace and YouTube to try to get the music out there. There are still traces online of that 15- and 16-year-old Petras, debuting songs on then-file-sharing site Napster, with titles like Fade Away (2008) and Last Forever (2009). The style was synthy Europop, with lyrics about breakups and love drama.

A decade later, when Petras first started getting press coverage in the US, the headlines often emphasized her supposed desire to Just Be a Pop Star, as if she wanted to transcend her transness. I dont care about being the first transgender teen idol at all, the New York Times quoted her as saying in 2018.

But what shes actually battled is trying to exist as a musician without having her celebrity defined by her trans identity outside of her terms. This is what happened early on. In the early 2000s, she became Germanys protoJazz Jennings, through documentaries about early transition, which exposed invasive details. I was 13, she said. My whole school saw that, and it was I felt used, I felt not seen, I felt not protected.

Today pop culture understands trans teens only just a little better; young celebrities like Hunter Schafer have storylines on teen dramas like Euphoria. But Petras felt isolated in school. I grew up going to gay clubs way too young, she said. I loved gay club music. I felt very at home with my gay friends and felt understood.

I wanted to be a raver, and I wanted to wear crazy outfits, she added. When she would step out into the media, on talk shows, they used her as a spectacle rather than an ambitious teen who wanted to be a musician. So she made the decision to get out of Europe, she said. Im seen as a joke, and nobody wants to talk about my music, people dont want to work with me. Im just, like, the tranny on TV to people.

Back then I wanted to get discovered more than anything, she remembered, smiling at her navet. But I never did. And then I learned like, Shit, I gotta do it myself.

Kim Petras preparing for the Met Gala in New York, September 2021

Fantasy is often better than reality, Karl Lagerfeld once said at least according to those refrigerator magnet quotes that attach themselves to celebrities. Petras cites that as her artistic philosophy: Imagining what I would be like if I was some spoiled Hollywood brat. The fantasy of something is super interesting, and new things can come out of that.

In reality, around 2011, when she was only 19, Petras came to LA with only $500 in her pocket, which meant $10 a day for food. Little Caesars pizza and Subway was my shit. She slept on a producer friends couch and started making connections. The Stereotypes, a production crew that later produced Bruno Mars massive hit Thats What I Like, gave her the first break: use of their studio.

They believed in me, she remembered fondly. For a pophead, she said, it was an honor to work with the makers of MTV reality trio Danity Kanes debut hit, Damaged. Through them, she ended up writing on JoJos 2013 album Jumping Trains, which was shelved; Fergie recorded one of her songs and never ended up using it; she ghost sang on one of the 2014 Danity Kane reunion songs. Finally, one of her songs, Bratz Whats Up, made it onto a 2015 Bratz web series.

A publishing deal contracting her to write songs with Dr. Lukes Prescription Songs allowed her to move into her own place, and she blew a lot of the money to live in the Hollywood Hills, that mythical slice of reality show dreams. She made industry friends like English electropop star Charli XCX, who featured her on 2017s Unlock It and fellow songwriter Aaron Josephs at a Halloween party in Toluca Lake. There wasnt a plan, she said. It was just kind of like, OK, use studios with Aaron, make more songs, make more demos, write songs for other people, maybe. But she decided to write for herself.

Josephs, a lover of Rage Against the Machine and Metallica, became a pophead like Petras after falling for Rihannas Only Girl (in the World). We love things that are silly and fun, and flamboyant and careless, he said of their chemistry. I think we just were both escapists. We wanted to make music that took you out of real life and was about having fun and living a fantasy, or just making people want to dance.

Hillside Boys, an homage to her new home, was one of their first creations. Its the details that make a pop song, and everything in it builds up to perfect catharsis: the fizzy champagne opening, 80s synths, melodic chord changes, the desperation of the belting vocals. Boys is like pop about the euphoria of pop, and the lyrics include one of her best lines, about the fleeting nature of summer love: You only stay until our tan lines match.

The bratty I Dont Want It At All is the other side of her. I want all my clothes designer, she sings. I want someone else to buy them.

I've always been obsessed with girls who get what they want and are strong and ditch the guys, and I was never that, she said.

Petras said she draws from her personal experiences for her music. I was always kind of like the girl who was fun for a little bit and then bye, for guys, and I ended up so obsessed with them and needy, she said about those early lyrics, chuckling. But I just wanted to be someone's girlfriend, and they never wanted to do that.

Theres a haziness, a girlish romance to her synth-pop, almost like talking about boys among girls.

Her early experiences made her self-protective in her personal life; shes never online-dated or dated anyone she doesnt know through friends. And theres a romantic, diffuse lens to the boy fantasies in her songs. Heart to Break, which features desperate belting about giving up her heart to pain, is really about the illusion of not caring and giving oneself up to love; Hillside Boys is a celebration of the idea of being into men, evoked through the distance of Paco Rabanne cologne. Theres a haziness, a girlish romance to her synth-pop, almost like talking about boys among girls.

She and Josephs shopped the songs to labels. We went to everybody, he said. Wed bring a guitar and just sing acoustic and a cappella demos of songs, and it got things started for us. Theres a video of her performing Hillside Boys in acoustic mode, with Josephs on guitar wearing an I Love Pop shirt. She introduces the song in her matter of fact, vaguely Teutonic inflection, So this is Hillside Boys. Its about rich boys breaking my heart. Then she adds the wink: A tragedy by Kim Petras.

According to Petras, no labels were interested. A lot of people were like you write gay club music, she said. As if that was a bad thing. (Thats an honor for me, she added.)

I was kind of known in LA cause I was always wearing a bun, and people called me bunhead, she recalled. So in 2017 she created BunHead Records to release her own music. She made videos for the singles, enlisting Paris Hilton as the fairy godmother sugar mommy with the credit card for I Dont Want It At All. (Hilton offered to appear after Petras reached out to her stylist to borrow a Hilton dress, which is in the video.) Heart to Break featured then-rising YouTuber Nikita Dragun, whod used I Dont Want It At All in one of her first makeup ads.

But all the radio stations were weirded out, Petras said. And it was like a lot of them had probably never met a trans person, also it was like, This is, like, loud and you sing really loud, and its not whats happening right now. They were like, Sorry.

The maximalism of Petrass sincerely glossy vocals was definitely out of step during the reign of indie-pop voice. But streaming, and performing at gay clubs and pride festivals, got her name out there, and she was one of those big-voiced pop girls beloved by queer men.

Kim Petras performs during Manchester Pride on Aug. 24, 2019, in Manchester, England

Heart to Break made it onto RuPauls Drag Race, used in one of the infamous lip syncs. Some people were down to play it, she said, and it went to the top 40 on radio, which was exciting. It was streamed more than 50 million times, and it helped her accrue a highly engaged social media following.

Petras keeps her fanbase interested by constantly releasing collaborations, one-off singles, and EPs. In 2019 she collaborated with Sophie, the hyperpop pioneer who died this year. I jumped on stage with her in Brooklyn at LadyLand Festival, Petras said. Her crowd of fans is incredible. And she was such a wild artist. She would play unreleased songs. She would drop stuff that's half-finished, that's still a demo. And it was just like full freedom. And I'm still very inspired by that.

Shes tried to re-create that freedom in her career through streaming, releasing singles and EPs on her own timetable. In the whimsical Halloween-themed album Turn Off the Light, Petras plays Elvira, and the thumping club anthem There Will Be Blood became one of her most-streamed songs on Spotify. There was also Clarity, which was inspired by a breakup and included some less upbeat lyrics as well as more overtly sexy songs. It was like everyone was like, You need to do midtempos, you need to not sing, thats how were going to play you on the radio, she said. And I was like, OK, bitch, you want something that sounds like everything else? Here you go. Do Me and Sweet Spot had a more house-y feel, with subdued vocals that were still very Petras-y.

She toured from Kansas City to London and saw herself mirrored back in a fanbase thats as passionate about pop as I am. The shows were like pophead conventions, and before her own performances, they whipped up the crowd with a DJ playing hits like Potential Breakup Song and Toxic, and fans were screaming these songs; those songs are their bible as much as theyre my bible, Petras said.

Screengrabs of Kim Petras performing "Coconuts" at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Hungary

But Petrass elevated profile has also come with higher scrutiny. With trans rights under siege, and trans representation moving into contesting cis beauty standards, Petrass image and celebrity can come off as assimilationist. And in 2018, Pitchfork ran a piece about Petras and what it means to be an apolitical trans pop star.

"I think my fantasies say more about me than my actual life, because Im just like a person, waking up in the morning, same old shit.

I asked her if she has ever thought about what it would mean to write songs more specifically from a trans perspective. I think I do, she answered. I mean I write honestly, I write about my fantasies, and for me I think my fantasies say more about me than my actual life, because Im just like a person, waking up in the morning, same old shit.

The wave of attention also brought on her first backlash. Amid the growing awareness of power imbalances in the music industry, the #MeToo movement, and Keshas 2014 accusations of sexual assault against Max Martin disciple Dr. Luke, there has been newfound surveillance of women artists signed to his label or publishing companies.

Like Saweetie and Doja Cat, Petras has been made to answer about why she works with his label. And Petrass first unofficial statement on the matter, casually dropped during an interview I would like my fans to know that I wouldnt work with somebody I believe to be an abuser of women, definitely not upset a lot of her fans.

The comment continues to follow her, and when Troye Sivan asked her in 2018 to join his tour she issued another statement: She did not want to "dismiss the experiences of others or suggest that multiple perspectives cannot exist at once."

When I brought this up in our interview, Petrass publicist got uncomfortable. Even though we did a preinterview and she knew Id ask about the backlash, she broke in: Thats not a fair question to ask her.

I just feel like a lot of it is like getting transferred to me, Petras said. A lot of people like to blame it on the women. I asked her if she understood that the questions are all part of a wider conversation around women in music and Svengalis. Of course. But I think I'm sometimes being held to a different standard than other artists, she countered.

Some stans have started shifting the conversation from the artists signed to Dr. Lukes companies to his continued dominance in the industry, and his power over women he signed early on in their career. Doja Cats fans theorized that theyre tied to contracts in which Dr. Luke gets publishing credits regardless of his involvement. Becky G eventually sued him because of the restrictiveness of her contract. Petras was guarded on what she could say about her agreement. So people want me to quit making music? she said at one point. Because thats the option.

But when news came out of her signing to Republic this year, fans uncovered that it was for a Dr. Luke sublabel, Amigo, and wrote about the ethics of supporting her music. I've kind of become a punching bag for that, and thats what it is, and thats OK.

The afternoon we met, Petrass long nails were shaped like bloody knives in anticipation of a Halloween Kills premiere party. She was going to a dinner with Marc Jacobs and Sofia Coppola later that night. The publicists apartment had music history on the walls, including a Bob Dylan painting in the living room, and in the kitchen, a picture of bubblegum punk pioneer Debbie Harry cooking in the kitchen. With Britney blasting in the background, Petras would later pose on a piano and a rooftop, as the apartment suddenly became a stage.

Im a shy person until I get onstage, she said. I get to be this person I wish I was in real life. Thats when I feel like I don't think about what I do. I just am and I feel powerful, and I feel like I can do anything.

But theres still a shyness to Petras, and not in the annoying way of extroverts who claim to be introverts. She comes off more like an excited studio nerd than a diva performer. I was kind of more fearless as a kid than I am now, to be honest, or that I became later, she said.

During the pandemic, Petras got three dogs: a pug, a Pomeranian, and a Chihuahua mix. They help her unplug. She started writing for her new album, moving in with Aaron Josephs and queer DJ Alex Chapman. Into an Airbnb in LA, and we started writing sex songs, a million sex songs, and there is this element of Europop in it, which I dont think Ive fully explored, she said.

The result was on view in her homecoming performance on the MTV Europe Music Awards in November. On that stage, in Hungary, she unveiled her newest songs and a more out-there sexual persona. She turned the stage into a tropical Carmen Miranda fruit stand, shimmying as she sang about giving her chest pet names. Mary Kate and Ashley, she sang-sashayed, everybody loves the twins.

In Hit It From the Back, she mixed her love of heartbreak drama with the specter of anal (Before you break my heart / Ill let you hit it from the back). In the performance, she hip-thrusted a rope with a bevy of jockstrapped dancers. (I came I pegged I conquered, she tweeted after.)

The high-budget staging was unlike anything Id seen from Petras before. Shes now working with Wendy Goldstein, the same woman who helped guide the careers of pop titans like Ariana Grande and The Weeknd. I have full creative freedom, in which I make the decisions, she said. I get to release whatever I want whenever I want, but I still get the advice.

When we talked, she admitted that starting with the neo-disco track Future Starts Now on the VMAs was a bit of a misleading first single in a way. She said the untitled forthcoming album (no release date yet) is a lot more the songs [she] didnt dare to do, its a lot more sex, its a lot more going for really going for being outrageous. When I first heard the lead single, Future Starts Now, it sounded more like Dua Lipa than Petras, and maybe a concession to a label asking for a broad song for a big audience. You're more than just anybody, she sings. One day, everyone will notice.

But relistening to it after we met, I can hear how she smuggled her message in; its really a queer club-kid anthem. Dont let love get out of focus, she sings. And she doesnt mean romantic love, but love as life energy, the kind that powers people on dance floors. I know you can take the pressure, it continues. Take the pain and make it pleasure. Its the philosophy that has carried her this far.

The newer songs push the envelope of white girl pop divas; Hit It From the Back is like a less metaphoric version of Grandes Side to Side (which is saying something). The tracks come off differently on an MTV stage than in a gay club, though, where theyre received by a queer gaze that loves femininity outside of cis-hetero anxieties. In the broader pop landscape, these songs could still seem out of step with a moment when even aspirational Disney princess pop divas have gone punk.

I asked Petras if she thought shed have to edit herself for broad appeal. I wouldnt enjoy what I'm doing, she said. I want to love my life, I want to feel free as an artist, I want to express myself, she added, with conviction. I dont really need a huge hit to feel successful. Ive been feeling successful since I could tour. That's what's driven me, my career and this goal of me on a huge stage, with people who sing my songs. That was all Ive ever dreamt about.

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Kim Petras Wants To Be The Next Big Pop Star - BuzzFeed News