Plans for investing heavily in womens cricket will be protected despite the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a top official at the England and Wales Cricket Board. Clare Connor, managing director of womens cricket at the ECB, said there are no guarantees but that there is a commitment at the highest level to protect a strategy to spend tens of millions of pounds on expanding womens and girls cricket.

I remain really confident that the momentum weve built behind the womens and girls game will be protected to the absolute best of our endeavors, Connor told The Associated Press on Wednesday. There is a very strong desire to protect the investment into the womens and girls game. The ECB on Thursday unveiled its Together Through This Test campaign highlighting the cricket communitys volunteer efforts during the lockdown.

Also read:Parthiv Patel recalls sledging episode with Mitchell Johnson

Cricketers and clubs have rallied to support their neighbors in more than 200 initiatives ranging from charity runs to food deliveries. The virus has killed more than 35,000 people in Britain and has brought sport to a halt. We are a very small piece of an enormous, difficult jigsaw, said Connor, who captained England in her playing days.

If we can make some contribution to boosting morale or keeping people hopeful of better times, then that will have been a job well done. The campaign offers online resources to support the game and volunteers. A fundraising auction Friday offers opportunities to participate in training sessions and Zoom calls with England internationals.

Cricket was set for a big year in England. The Hundred tournament was scheduled for July and August with the aim of capitalizing on Englands men winning the 2019 Cricket World Cup and inspiring a new generation of fans through a shorter, 100-ball format. Now postponed to 2021, The Hundred is a key part of the ECBs five-year plan dubbed Inspiring Generations.

The plan called for hundreds of millions of pounds in spending through 2024 on investments in the county network, facilities, programs for youth and women, and inner-city centers. Boosting participation among women and girls is the games biggest growth opportunity, according to the Inspiring Generations strategy document. The original plan, announced last year, was to invest $61 million (50 million pounds) over five years to provide more opportunities for women and girls and to identify and develop elite players.

Also read:Robin Uthappa recalls bowl-out against Pakistan in 2007 T20World Cup

No segment would be spared, however, if the cricket seasons are wiped out. The mens County Championship is postponed until at least July 1. A new womens semi-pro league is scheduled to debut in September. Potential losses could reach 400 million pounds ($490 million), Connor said. If we were to suffer the worst-case scenario, in terms of nearly 400 million pounds of losses this year, then we are going to have to revise most of our plans for the coming years, and that would be across the game, she said.

Still, Connor said its a good sign that the ECB recently committed to monthly payments for 24 female players in advance of the new league. The goal is to pay full professional salaries to 40 women. Connor, who grew up playing on boys teams, said the system should offer equal pathways for boys and girls.

Thats the utopia were after, and that obviously doesnt happen overnight because were a game built on foundations and structures that have been about catering for men and boys for decades, she said. Other sports are under pressure, as well. The international soccer players union, FIFPro, warned in April that COVID-19s impact may present an almost existential threat to the womens game if no specific considerations are given to protect the womens football industry. Postponement of The Hundred was a blow to the womens game in particular, Connor said. The tournament was set to feature eight new mens and womens, city-based teams a departure from the traditional county system and featuring some of the worlds biggest cricket stars.

For the womens game, that meant strong revenue and marketing on par with the mens side, along with television exposure. That was going to be an enormous step forward for professional womens cricket, Connor said.

Originally posted here:

Funding for womens cricket in England to be protected - Hindustan Times

For a brief period, I lived in a windowless box. It was a glimpse of what it must be like to be trapped in a tiny apartment under lockdown for days, weeks, on end.

I often think about how Taiwan will be cut off from the world by Covid-19. Taiwan has not been severely affected by Covid-19; there have been less than 500 cases and no expansive lockdowns. We will be cut off, not so much by travel restrictions, but by our radically different collective experience of this world-altering event.

This sense of subjective distance between Taiwan and the rest of the world will solidify as the pandemic rages. For Taiwan, long described as a society isolated, the orphan of Asia, Covid-19 will help form a distinctive sense of Taiwaneseness in the eyes of the people here and those outside.

Taiwans government, unlike many governments, has earned the trust of its people. The state intervened in the private sector to requisition medical supplies, whereas in the United States, the invisible hand of the free market was left to its own destructive devices.

The only running baseball season in the world, before the start of South Koreas league, was Taiwans Chinese Professional Baseball League. The increased attention on baseball in Taiwan since the start of the Covid-19 has transformed the league from a mere curiosity to the lone succor of baseball fans internationally.

While film crews around the world are searching for ways to work around quarantines, the Taiwanese film industry has continued apace. An inadvertent effect of Covid-19 is that it may give Taiwans film and television products a wider audience.

The rise of Taiwan-related film and drama series has mostly been relegated to Netflix, but other platforms are stepping up. Taiwans LGBTQ-focused streaming platform GagaOOLala launched worldwide earlier this month. Greater attention, domestically and from abroad, to Taiwanese cultural productions, imparts Taiwan with a cultural recognizability that distinguishes the country from China.

Though some may dismiss the rise of Taiwanese baseball and film as mere public relations coups, beneficial merely to Taiwanese business, these resonate throughout Taiwan.

As the world burns, Taiwan soldiers on is our collective experience of the pandemic.

But as Taiwan becomes more distant from the lockdowns, illness, and death in the rest of the world, Taiwan paradoxically will become more globally connected.

Daily life under Covid-19 for me is fielding questions from journalists abroad prodding me to attribute Taiwans Covid-19 successes to Confucian values and a Confucian proclivity to surrender power to the government.

My coverage of Covid-19 has gone from being pilloried on online forums for reflecting poorly on Taiwan, to being cited by the Presidents social media team. Both reactions seem like two sides of the same coin, arising from the same impulse to uncritically celebrate Taiwans successes.

Yet if now is a time for Taiwan to embrace the international spotlight, we must abandon this complacent self-adulation. Complacency doesnt allow for progress or innovation.

The Chinese military has stepped up military activity near Taiwan attempting to intimidate the country, but it is likely to accelerate Taiwans decoupling from China. This withdrawal was already set into motion by the U.S.-China trade war driving up production costs in China and pushing Taiwanese factories to relocate.

Reducing Taiwans reliance on the Chinese economy will push Taiwan closer to western countries. An early indicator of this is Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.s plans to build a US$12 billion plant in Arizona, and suspension of future orders to Huawei.

To borrow the words of the anarchist and political scientist Wu Rwei-ren, the circumstances beckon Taiwan to reclaim the world, to seek to overcome its historical dependence on larger powers. Its a moment to expand the international space for Taiwan and aspire toward greater self-determination.

Leaving Chinas orbit should not simply imply dependence on the U.S. and western powers. The U.S.s history of treating Taiwan as a catspaw for its geopolitical aims, not to mention the Trump administrations grotesque mismanagement of Covid-19, should serve as a warning against this temptation.

This is looking ahead to the longue dure future. In the meantime, were a long way off from utopia.

Apart from the sober reality that self-satisfaction may result in new outbreaks of Covid-19, this is a moment that demands giving free reign to our imaginations of a Taiwan cut off from its old bonds, joined to the world anew.

TNL Editor: Nicholas Haggerty (@thenewslensintl)

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Will Taiwan Still Be the 'Orphan of Asia' After Covid-19? - The News Lens International

In 1990, when Cameroon's football team did the unthinkable and beat Argentina in the World Cup, the proportion of the world's population living below the poverty line was 37.1 per cent. Fast-forward 35 years later to 2015, following a global adoption of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), this figure now stands at 9.6%.

The concept of a universal benevolent dictator a classic assumption in beginner economic courses to escape the complexities of real-world decision-making such a person would no doubt have said The world is doing infinitely better!

But on the contrary, the world has not been doing as well as it should. The fact is, there have been warning signs all along.

The proportion of people living below the poverty line in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 was an astonishing 41%, about the same as the global rate of extreme poverty in 1981.

On October 17, 2018, the then President of the World Bank Group, Jim Yong Kim, presented a report titled Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing together the Poverty Puzzle. With rigorous data but in a simple and direct way, the report clearly indicated that global conditions were not in place to bring the rate of extreme poverty below 3%by 2030.

The most alarming case in point was, where even in the most optimistic of scenarios, the poverty rate would continue to be in double digits.

The report was a pitcher of cold water in my state of mind. But it was not the first time Jim Yong Kim had jolted me. A few years earlier in 2015, in Lima, Peru, at the Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank, during a panel moderated by Femi Oke, the British journalist of Yoruba descent, Jim Yong Kims projections caught my attention. In attendance were Peruvian President Ollanta Moises Humala Tasso; Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary General; Christine Lagarde, IMF Managing Director; and Justine Greening, UK Secretary of State for International Development. For 90-minutes, they spoke eloquently about the type of partnerships that would be needed to make Agenda 2030 a reality; the international cooperation that would be deployed; the necessary financing mechanisms and formulas; and the creativity and citizen action required.

Gathered in this august venue, the guardians of the global architecture responsible for eradicating poverty spoke convincingly and articulately about the world of tomorrow. Collectively, they concluded that by 2030, we would end up, to quote Oscar Wilde, in a country called Utopia. The Road to Lima was a party.

But barely three years later as 2018 dawned, the same global architecture presented us with a new story: The end of Utopia.

In December 2019, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) launched its Human Development Report titled Beyond Income, Beyond Averages, Beyond the Present: Human Development Inequalities in the 21st Century. As with the World Bank, the conclusion was straightforward and clear: While humanity is progressing, something is just not working in our globalized society. A new generation of inequalities, beyond basic capabilities, is emerging and threatens to render people living in developing countries obsolete in the future.

Combining the alarming 2018 World Bank report with the no less alarming 2019 UNDP report, the picture is not one of optimism: not only was the aspiration to eradicate poverty by 2030 not going to be met, but a new inequality gap was opening up as well.

These challenges had previously been the focus of the World Economic Forum Regional Strategy Group (WEF RSG), of which I had had the privilege of being a member.

One of the ideas behind the WEF RSG was very simple and irrefutable: Africa must leapfrog into the Fourth Industrial Revolution or risk being left behind inexorably.

In 2019 as well as in previous years, several countries, including Equatorial Guinea, my country, made important policy decisions to define and prioritize national development aspirations in alignment with the UN's Agenda 2030 and the African Union's Agenda 2063. Additionally, to take advantage of the Fourth Industrial Revolution we scaled up our investments in ICT and technology and in developing the capacity of our youth. And then, COVID19 arrived!

In just a few short months the world has changed. When we return to normal, it will be a new normality and a brave new world.

COVID19 is an existential crisis. It is severely testing Africa's social, economic and political resilience. In a post-COVID19 world, the continent's leaders will therefore have to rethink many prior assumptions and find new balances for individual and collective behavior.

What I am absolutely certain of is that opportunities will emerge. Innovative minds previously imprisoned by institutional inertia and interest groupswill rise to the challenges that we collectively face.

What will the brave new world post-COVID19 look like in Africa? The African Development Bank estimates that Africa will lose between 35 and 100 billion dollars due to the fall in raw material prices caused by the pandemic. The World Economic Forum estimates that global losses for the continent will be in the order of $275 billion.

There is a real risk therefore that Africas inequality gap will worsen in the coming years.

Ever since the virus crossed the continent's borders, regular bilateral and multilateral consultations among African finance ministers have philosophically revolved around the need to rethink our multifaceted responses to COVID19 and other future threats that have equal or greater potential for disruption.

Today, African States are developing strategic and in-depth approaches to human development, regional integration, digitalization, industrialization, economic diversification, fiscal and monetary policies, and international solidarity. In short, they are rethinking the causes of the continent's underdevelopment and coming up with feasible solutions. The outcomes will undoubtedly be good for Africa and for all humanity.

To better understand the scenarios before us, there are three sparks that could light a flame in the brave new world that is before us:

This last note has triggered another debate: the necessary industrialization of Africa, to transform and add value to the continent's vast and valuable raw materials.

Many African countries have already been deprived access to COVID19 essentials. Excessive global demand has relegated Africa to the

But there is much reason for optimism. African leaders recently lauded artemisia annua tonic that Andry Rajoelina, President of Madagascar, presented to the world as Africas solution to COVID19 .

Our enthusiasm as Africans, is rooted in wounded self-esteem. For way too long, we have been victims of marginalization. The power to regain our dignity has too often been stripped away. Today, nestled in the souls of all Africans is an unshakable faith that the most important resource that Africa needs in order to rise up, is none other than Africans themselves.

No one will help us if we do not help ourselves. Africa is no longer asking to be taught how to fish. Africa is already rowing towards the utopia enunciated in the UNs Sustainable Development Goals and the Africa Union's Agenda 2063.

In spite of dire predictions and narratives, humanity always has a way of ending up in that country called utopia. Africa is humanity.

*Cesar A. Mba ABOGO is the Minister of Finance, Economy and Planning of Equatorial Guinea and Member of the Regional Action Group for Africa of the World Economic Forum.

Africanews provides content from APO Group as a service to its readers, but does not edit the articles it publishes.

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The African Utopia at the End of the COVID-19 Tunnel - Africanews English

If you thought spending a month indoors binge-watching Netflix and ordering delivery was some sort of gruelling quarantine ordeal, imagine being sealed inside a giant glass terrarium in the Arizona desert with seven other people for two years, all while operating a self-sufficient farming project and managing a working replica of the Earths ecosystem.

That's just what happened back in September 1991, as a group of researchers set out to inhabit a project called Biosphere 2 a self-contained structure of glass Aztec-style pyramids and sci-fi domes that housed an ecological experiment to test the potential sustainability of life on other planets.

It was the mother of all iso projects, a utopian vision that seemed as such visions often do like a combination of wild-eyed scientific endeavour and idealistic, otherworldly cult.

This unusual episode of relatively forgotten pop culture history is captured in the new documentary Spaceship Earth (named for the phrase popularised by futurist Buckminster Fuller, a key inspiration for the project), which uses a wealth of archival footage and new interviews with the "biospherians" to tell a story of technology, art and environmentalism working in inspired synchronicity until their eventual unravelling at the hands of utopia's great foe, humanity itself.

Director Matt Wolf is drawn to eccentrics that tend toward (sometimes unlikely) genius, as evidenced in Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (2008), a tribute to the late experimental pop musician, or Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019), which chronicled how one woman's 30-year obsession with videotaping television led to her becoming a key custodian of the late 20th-century news cycle.

In Spaceship Earth, he finds perhaps the perfect subject for his fascination: visionary experimenters whose futurism had roots in the counterculture, theatre and the arts.

Of course, to an outside world fed by the prejudices of mass media, it had all the trappings of a potential cult.

From the film's opening shots of the biospherians in their quasi-futuristic attire looking less like intrepid explorers than the hapless henchman of some 90s-kids-TV villain through the early sequences locating the project's hippy-adjacent genesis in late 60s San Francisco, it's tempting to draw an easy thread connecting spaced-out, self-proclaimed visionaries and apocalyptic cult delusion.

But as Spaceship Earth demonstrates early on, this was a movement that took countercultural ideas and pushed them towards tangible progress, conceiving of projects that were committed to transforming humanity's vision for the future.

The group coalesced around John Allen, a systems ecologist who was less a guru than a kind of visionary frontiersman, closer to a fedora-hatted traveller from a Philip K Dick novel than some be-robed charlatan of the type that the counterculture specialised in cranking out.

Allen's Synergia Ranch and its Theater of All Possibilities attracted like-minded artists and futurists, whose energy soon focused on what they saw as the impending ecological disaster facing a resource-depleted planet.

The movement's peculiar combination of theatre sports and scientific entrepreneurship might scan as a precursor to 21st-century tech company culture, but seen here in grainy, hand-held 16mm footage, it's as though the troupe from Jacques Rivette's Out 1 were training for space colonisation images that Wolf splices together to resemble dispatches from an alternate history of a better future.

Allen and his colleagues speak with admiration for Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running (1972), another radical, post-60s sci-fi imagining in which Bruce Dern communes with plants inside a biodome cruising into deep space.

But as the group's finance VP Marie Harding is quick to point out, the Theater of All Possibilities wasn't a commune but a corporation.

Bankrolled in part by billionaire Texas oil scion and eco-sympathiser Ed Bass, the group took a necessarily capitalist approach to funding their designs, and as the 80s wore on, with its high tech advances in space travel and boom economy, their plans would come to encompass a vision for developing extraterrestrial colonies in space an eco utopia that seemed to herald the best of what business, technology and ecology could achieve in tandem.

Under the imprimatur of Space Biosphere Ventures, the team set about construction of Biosphere 2 on land in Oracle, Arizona between 1987 and 1991 at a cost of some $150 million and curiosity surrounding the project would turn its launch into a national media event.

It even had in one of the film's more surreal interludes a Golden Girl, Rue McClanahan, introducing it to viewers at home.

Wolf, as he loves to do, conjures this expectant atmosphere with so much gloriously bled-out analogue video footage, overlaid with the familiar yapping of 90s media pundits that would almost feel nostalgic if it werent tainted by the ghosts of early 24-hour news cycle sensationalism.

As he proved in Recorder and his underseen youth chronicle Teenage (2014), Wolf is attentive to the aesthetics of cultural ephemera, pausing to linger on peripheral fashion, the occult-like vector graphics of current affairs broadcasts, or showing a group of black kids in Afro-centric t-shirts wondering why the biodome containing a self-proclaimed "ethnically diverse" group didn't have any provision for "brothers in space".

In these heady moments, Spaceship Earth recalls the anticipatory montages of last year's wondrous Apollo 11 just with more acid wash and hypercolour.

Meanwhile, sequences showing the early stages of life inside the biosphere the farming, the oceanic aquarium, the far-flung technology of video calls connecting occupants to the outside are set to the appropriate strains of Talking Heads' This Must Be the Place, aligning the biospherians with another eccentric American utopian, David Byrne.

But as with all dreams,reality, and human pettiness, inevitably intrudes. (It's telling that no-one interviewed seems to recall the bummer ending to Silent Running.)

"It won't work," says one random bystander interviewed for a TV vox pop. "People are too mean."

While the media do their bit to dismiss the project as "eco entertainment" at best, and a cult at worst, problems with rising carbon dioxide levels, issues with public transparency and inter-project bickering conspire to give the naysayers the fuel they need, and Biosphere 2 gradually turns into a proto reality-TV house with outside observers wondering wholl last the duration inside.

By the time the eight biospherians emerge from their terrarium, it's a different world one in which their vision has been called into question, and a Goldman Sachs banker by the name of Steve Bannon has been put in charge of administering the project, with a view to turning short-term profits.

It's a depressing moment, for sure, but the project has something approaching a hopeful ending, as many of the original members convene on the Synergia Ranch looking for all intents like the cast of Cocoon awaiting their benign alien transport or at least for SpaceX to give them a well-earned ride to the stars.

It may have been a flawed experiment, even a visionary folly, but as Allen says at one point, "it's all theatre".

Spaceship Earth is screening on DocPlay, which offers a 30-day free trial.

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Documentary Spaceship Earth resurrects stranger-than-fiction story of utopian Biosphere 2 experiment - ABC News

As venues continue to find workarounds to allow a safe space for entertainment, the concept of Drive-In concerts is gaining traction.

The first Drive-In concert was in Denmark at the beginning of the month.and sold out 500 cars worth of space in minutes. Now, a New Hampshire concert venue has taken the concept to the U.S. The Tupelo Music Hall in Derry, NH has announced a series of drive-in concerts. Their first concerts happened over the weekend with Country artist Jimmy Lehoux, and they also sold out both shows. Future shows at the New Hampshire venue include some friends of ours, like former Utopia bassist and solo artist Kasim Sultan, guitarist Gary Hoey, and Beatles-inspired power pop band The Weeklings.

The way it works is that your $75 ticket gets you two parking spaces, one for your car and one for the adjacent space to allow for social distancing. It is not intended for tailgating or mingling, and walking around to visit friends is discouraged. The venue's liquor license does not allow for outside sales and you can't bring your own booze either. Lower cars will be parked in the front rows and bigger vehicles in the back to attempt to give everyone a decent view. There is a big PA set up and the shows are also broadcast to your car on a low-powered FM signal.

If Drive-through concerts were to happen in Connecticut, would you go? I think I would, at least once to check it out. Obviously you would need a venue with a giant parking lot and understanding neighbors. But the New Hampshire venue seems to have come up with a well-thought out plan that allows music fans to get back to seeing live music.

See the article here:

Drive-In Concerts Are A Thing In New Hampshire, How About CT? - i95rock.com

King Obama

The new revelations concerning the unmasking of General Flynn, during the days before the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump presidency lead one to consider motivations. As I thought of why would the unmasking be important just days before the inauguration, it is very possible that then President Obama had big plans.

Truth and reality no longer matter in the Democrat party; the accusation would be enough.

If Flynn could be tagged as a Russian asset, it would be just a small step to sully the reputations of President-elect Trump, his running mate Mike Pence, the liberal news media would say, surely Mike knew that Trump was also a Russian asset, so he would be declared dirty along with some or all of the transition team. Keep in mind that accusations, especially against Republicans is all you need, proof is not relevant or needed.

This would give Obama his opportunity: he would then step up to "save" the country from foreign infiltration; he would stay on as president; postpone the inauguration so there can be an aggressive, extensive, extremely long, investigation; Marshall law is put in place, then the Trump election could be declared null and void; and "plans" for a new honest and pure election would take place in the future, way in the future, probably never to occur.

Obama gets what he has always wanted -- unlimited power, King Obama, and we become the communist "utopia" he envisions. What is the one thing that kept him from following through with his plans, Trump votes, he feared their reaction, I believe that his fear was prudent.

William "Charlie" Carpenter

Big Rapids

Excerpt from:

Letter to the Editor - The Pioneer

On a moonless dark night in ancient Mathura, the ascetic Upagupta sleeping in a garden grounds woke suddenly to the rhythm of anklets and the rude light of a lamp focused on his face.

It was the enchanting Vasavdatta famous courtesan of the Kingdom of Mathura. Walking through the garden on her way to a tryst, she was attracted by Upaguptas handsomeness and requests him to come to her house.

She tells him this hard ground is not the place for him to sleep. The Buddhist monk replies that when the time comes, he will come to her himself.

This is the opening of the poem Abhisaar (journey to a tryst) by Rabindranath Tagore. The poem sketches a very realistic picture of what happened to people suffering through epidemics in ancient times.

Abhisaar, regularly staged in many adaptations in India and abroad, is only a curtain of the literary world and on lifting it we find how poets, storytellers and novelists have portrayed what they saw in their own lifetime while surviving pandemics and plagues.

Just four years before Abhisaar was born in 1900, the Black Death had ravaged the Bengal Province and other parts of the British Raj.

Tagore, however, is not the only literary figure who has made wordly sketches of the mass frenzy and psychological trauma the world faced at different junctures of history. The Decameron of Boccaccio, New Atlantis by Francis Bacon, and Utopia by Thomas More are some of the best examples of the plague literature of Europe.

Utopia (1516) merits a special mention as it talked of an ideal society free from epidemics. A world free from epidemics may be a Utopia but efforts can really be launched in India and other parts of the world to, at least, safeguard the humanity from its curse through preventive measures.

But it is now time to explain to you the mutual intercourse of this people, their commerce, and the rules by which all things are distributed among them. As their cities are composed of families, so their families are made up of those that are nearly related to one another

If an accident has so lessened the number of the inhabitants of any of their towns that it cannot be made up from the other towns of the island without diminishing them too much (which is said to have fallen out but twice since they were first a people, when great numbers were carried off by the plague), the loss is then supplied by recalling as many as are wanted from their colonies, for they will abandon these rather than suffer the towns in the island [of Utopia] to sink too low.

Let us wander further in the wonderland of literature, to Rajlakshmi O Srikanta, a very famous Bengali film based on the novel Shreekanta by Saratchandra Chattopadhyaya.

Like Vasavdatta and Upagupta, the story of it revolves round the vagabond Srikanta and the courtesan Rajlaxmi.

In the movie we find scenes of the epidemic in Bengal province that broke out about a century ago. Some tally with actual scenes of what has been happening during the Covid-19 attack in India.

In one such a very touching scene, Srikanta is shown suffering from high fever with signs of the disease and is brought to a kothi or palace by none other than Rajlaxmi.

Srikanta was a vagabond renouncing all earthly riches and Rajlaxmi, a tawaif (dancer), was rich and strikingly beautiful. He had nothing. She had everything. Something like Vasavdatta and Upagupta the monk.

Incidentally, Saratchandras first wife Shanti and their one-year-old son died of the plague in Rangoon (Yangon, Myanmar) during his Burmese days. No wonder he could express the pathos of losing someone very close through Rajlaxmi O Srikanta.

Some family members of Geoffrey Chaucer, the English writer of the Canterbury Tales, also died of the Black Death (bubonic plague) when it hit Europe in 1348. About eight years old when the epidemic struck London, Chaucer could never forget the scenes of people suddenly falling dead in the London streets.

From a modernised rendering by John Nicolson (1900)

Believe it or not, the outbreak of epidemics in the past gave new trends to literature, creating new genres, forwarding very revolutionary thoughts and novel ideas.

Before we deal with Boccaccios Decameron which shows how the plague shook peoples faith in the Papal authority of Rome, let us see what the monk Upagupta replied to Vasavdatta refusing her entreaty to move to her home.

Much to Vasavdattas dismay and displeasure, the monk says the time is not yet ripe. When the time comes, I myself will come to you without invitation, he tells her.

Now back to the Decameron to see how it brought about a new trend in international literature. Boccaccios thematic plot was simply unique for his time and place. The book recounts 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men who reach an empty house in Florence while fleeing from the Black Death of 1348.

These 100 stories depict all shades of human life: lust, love, sacrifice, avarice and who knows what else?

The plague literature of Europe also sometimes brought in new ideology. Take New Atlantis, written by Francis Bacon around 1626. It may surprise you that it talked about quarantining sailors to protect the imaginary island of Bensalem from contamination. What Bacon suggested in 1627, the world has done time and again, including in 2020: lockdowns to contain infection.

Incidentally, Bacon died of pneumonia in 1626 which then used to take the form of epidemics in Europe. New Atlantis was published posthumously.

The book describes an imaginary land named Bensalem, home of the people of lost Atlantis, where the scientific temperament was so high that the state had created a scientific institution to conduct such researches as creating submarines, wind turbines and hearing aids.

Incidentally, a township named Bensalem also exists in the USA but it has nothing to do with Bacons Bensalem.

Now, what are our Vasavdatta and Upagupta doing?

After being rebuked, the courtesan is shocked as people always oblige whatever she commands. But this penniless monk refuse her? She leaves the scene and proceeds on her abhisaar: tryst.

What happened to them will be dealt with later, let us have a glimpse of what Daniel Defoe wrote about the epidemic describing actual scenes from memory in A Journal of the Plague Year published in 1722.

Defoe gave graphic details of The Great Plague of London in 1665. He had been five years old then and wrote whatever little he remembered of it and all that he heard from his elders. He also used eyewitness accounts of the event.

This book, written as an authentic record of the plague in 1722 and not a fictional account at all, attained fictional status after about 60 years. Has this ever before happened in the literary history of the world?

The people showed a great concern at this, and began to be alarmed all over the town, and the more, because in the last week in December 1664 another man died in the same house, and of the same distemper. And then we were easy again for about six weeks, when none having died with any marks of infection, it was said the distemper was gone; but after that, I think it was about the 12th of February, another died in another house, but in the same parish and in the same manner.

This turned the peoples eyes pretty much towards that end of the town, and the weekly bills showing an increase of burials in St Giless parish more than usual, it began to be suspected that the plague was among the people at that end of the town, and that many had died of it, though they had taken care to keep it as much from the knowledge of the public as possible. This possessed the heads of the people very much, and few cared to go through Drury Lane, or the other streets suspected, unless they had extraordinary business that obliged them to it

This increase of the bills stood thus: the usual number of burials in a week, in the parishes of St Giles-in-the-Fields and St Andrews, Holborn, were from twelve to seventeen or nineteen each, few more or less; but from the time that the plague first began in St Giless parish, it was observed that the ordinary burials increased in number considerably.

There is also a feverish account of the plague ravaging towns in north Africa and west Asia in the 1340s, in the Moroccan jurist Ibn Battutas account of his travels through the known world. He wrote in 1348 that:

Early in June we heard at Aleppo that the plague had broken out at Gaza, and that the number of deaths there reached over a thousand a day. On travelling to Hims I found that the plague had broken out there; about three hundred persons died of it on the day that I arrived. So I went on to Damascus, and arrived there on a Thursday. The inhabitants had then been fasting for three days; on the Friday they went out to the mosque of the Footprints, as we have related in the first book, and God eased them of the plague. The number of deaths among them reached a maximum of 2,400 a day.

Thereafter I journeyed to `Ajaln and thence to Jerusalem, where I found that the ravages of the plague had ceased. We revisited Hebron, and thence went to Gaza, the greater part of which we found deserted becuse of the number of those who died there of the plague. I was told by the qdi that the number of deaths there reached 1,100 a day. We continued our journey overland to Damietta, and on to Alexandria. Here we found that the plague was diminishing in intesity, though the number of deaths had previously reached a thousand and eighty a day. I then travelled to Cairo, wehre I was told that the number of deaths during the epidemic rose to twenty-one thousand a day.

It is now time to return to Upagupta.

Seven months have glided by since Upagupta refused Vasavdattas request. It is the month of Chaitra and in Mathura the festival is underway. All the people seem to be happy except one! Vasavdatta. In fact, she has little sense of anything at all as she has been swallowed up in an epidemic.

But from Mathura we venture now briefly to the Algerian port city of Oran, and see how Albert Camus thematically gave new direction to some literature by using epidemics as a theme.

In 1947, Camus The Plague appeared in bookshops in Europe and around the world. It is one of the immortal pieces of the existentialist genre. It basically deals with the condition of human being under the siegelike condition caused by an epidemic.

Its poignant depiction of mental trauma, be it a medical doctor or a fugitive escaping from the claws of law, were most wonderfully sketched with the Algerian Muslim city of Oran (then under French occupation) acting as the backdrop.

The novel tries to portray death as the biggest equator, which does not care to discriminate between rich and poor. Naturally, there is nothing called glorification of power: physical beauty, social status, money, political power.

True, in the spring, when the epidemic was expected to end abruptly at any moment, no one troubled to take another's opinion as to its probable duration, since everyone had persuaded himself that it would have none.

But as the days went by, a fear grew up that the calamity might last indefinitely, and then the ending of the plague became the target of all hopes. As a result copies of predictions attributed to soothsayers or saints of the Catholic Church circulated freely from hand to hand.

The local printing firms were quick to realize the profit to be made by pandering to this new craze and printed large numbers of the prophecies that had been going round in manuscript.

Finding that the public appetite for this type of literature was still unsated, they had researches made in the municipal libraries for all the mental pabulum of the kind available in old chronicles, memoirs, and the like. And when this source ran dry, they commissioned journalists to write up forecasts, and, in this respect at least, the journalists proved themselves equal to their prototypes of earlier ages.

It is time to return one last time to the courtesan Vasavdatta in Mathura. Before the small pox had attacked her, she was the kingdoms star, with everybody wanting to be by her side.

What happened to her after the epidemic struck?

One day as Mathuras people celebrated the Chaitra Utsav or festival, Upagupta was moving carelessly outside the citys walls. Suddenly he saw a womans body covered with pox and discarded by the townspeople for fear it would infect them.

It was Vasavdatta! Upagupta, who had once refused to go to her house, took charge of her saying: The time of our togetherness has come, Vasavdatta!

An abhisarika nayika (the trysting heroine type)

Read the rest here:

Literature and Epidemics: In Death, Some Geniuses Sang of Life - The Citizen

Last week, I wrote about Googles somewhat confounding hardware strategy in the wake of a report about internal conflict from The Information. But I did something else right after that: I interviewed Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai on The Vergecast with Nilay Patel.

The whole interview is worth a listen, of course. Pichai is in charge of one of the most important tech companies in the world, and Big Tech has taken on such an outsized role in our lives that its only natural that its taking on an outsized role in the coronavirus response. We spoke to Pichai about that and also about the recent report about Googles flagging diversity efforts.

And he definitely made fun of me for being obsessed with RCS Chat before getting into his thinking on Googles communication apps. So give it a listen; its in our feed.

But here in this newsletter, I want to zoom in on Pichais responses about Googles hardware division because I do think theyre illuminating not in a sharp, spotlight kind of way but in a soft glow on the horizon kind of way. Not to belabor the metaphor, but when it comes to Googles hardware efforts, theres a bit of a darkest before the dawn vibe.

I asked specifically about the Pixel, but Pichai wanted to put it in a larger context. Im quoting the beginning of his answer in full here because I think it contains the seeds of the rest of our discussion:

The last couple of years have been a major integration phase for us because weve combined our Google hardware efforts with Nest. We absorbed the mobile division of HTC. So its been a lot of stitching together. And we have a wide product portfolio, too. So its definitely been a building phase. Were super committed to it for the long run. Hardware is hard. And it definitely has components, which take real time to get it right, thinking about underlying silicon or display or camera or any of those tacks. And so we are definitely investing in it, but that timeline. I think weve made a lot of progress.

Pichais not wrong that the hardware division under Rick Osterloh has had a lot of corporate distraction. The HTC mobile division was acquired in 2017. Osterloh has said the first phone to fully come out of that division was the Pixel 3A. And Google made the public announcement that it was reabsorbing Nest from Alphabet almost one year ago.

So, fair. Theres been a lot going on. But if theres a getting in your own way and squandering an opportunity example worthy of a canonical Harvard Business Review case, Googles handling of Nest is it. You would think that a company as big and multifaceted as Google (to say nothing of Alphabet) would be able to walk and chew through an internal merger at the same time.

One of the reasons that its been frustrating to watch the Pixel struggle to catch on is that smartphones seem like a solved problem. Thats obviously an oversimplification at best, but companies big and small crank out Android phones at a dizzying pace every year hell, every week. Youd think Google Google! could figure it out.

Hardware is hard, Pichai says. It is. And just adding more engineers and resources doesnt necessarily make it easier. Still, explanation isnt absolution, and I think Googles hardware division could have done more over these past few years.

All that history is what it is. Whats most important about the exchange is when Pichai answers the question I posed last week in this newsletter: what is Google hardware for? It turns out that, as with many things in tech, what you think is the obvious answer turns out to be the obvious answer. Or three answers, as it happens. Emphasis mine below:

So for me, three reasons. One is to drive computing forward. The second is we really guide our ecosystem. Pretty much everything weve done well, you can go all the way back and Androids early days, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which we worked together, was a pivotal phone. Nexus 7 in the tablet world. I can point to Chromebooks all along, we did our original hardware to kind of bootstrap it. And I look at areas maybe where we havent done opinionated [work] maybe [smart]watch is a good example where we havent. And then you can see its tough to guide an ecosystem to what your vision of it is, just building the underlying platform.

So I think thats the second reason. And third is to really build a sustainable hardware business. I think all of it is important, and thats how I think about it. And Im excited. Rick [Osterloh] and team, working closely with Hiroshi [Lockheimer] and team, they have that long-term view. So were pretty committed to it.

If youve been watching Googles hardware efforts over the years, there is just so much you could unpack here. The admission that Google squandered its first-mover advantage in smartwatches. The fact that the first two reasons are the exact reasons Google created the Nexus program before the hardware division existed. The idea that Google needs to do opinionated work (which Id distinguish from just trying to make the flat-out best thing possible).

Finally, theres the part of the original quote where Pichai looks ahead, talking about components which take real time to get it right, thinking about underlying silicon or display or camera or any of those tacks. Later, he adds: Because some of the deeper efforts we are putting in will take three to four years to actually play out. And when they come in, I think Im excited about how they will shape where we are going.

When I think about investments that will take three or four years to actually play out, I wonder what they might be, especially in the phone space. Maybe this is just wishful thinking, but to me, theres only one Android component that really fits the bill: the processor.

As I said before, Android smartphones are practically a commodity. A big part of the reason for that is so many of them just use Qualcomms processors. That means, every year, a lot of Android phones have new capabilities that are defined by whatever Qualcomms new chips are capable of.

Google is in the same boat as every other Android manufacturer in that regard. But a custom chip would mean Google could potentially differentiate its products more not just phones but Chromebooks, too.

In April, Axios reported on just such a chip codenamed Whitechapel. Its reportedly being manufactured by Samsung and may arrive as soon as next year. Google has demonstrated some capability in chip design before, by the way: it has created machine learning tensor processing units (so-called TPUs) for servers and imaging processing chips for its phones.

Is that what Pichai was hinting at? No idea! But whatever he was referring to, it does seem clear that we are still at least a year (or three or four) away from those investments coming into fruition. In the meanwhile, I think Google is going to need to show a little more momentum.

Google reportedly put out a survey recently that suggested the price of the upcoming Pixel 4A would be $349, undercutting the competition by fifty bucks. It also suggested that this years flagship Pixel 5 might not try to compete at the ultra-premium tier (i.e., phones that cost $1,000 or more). Both ideas strike me as smart.

When I asked Pichai how much time he personally spends thinking about hardware, he noted that he had a meeting that morning looking at next years hardware portfolio. I jokingly asked him if there was anything he wanted to tell us from that meeting.

He replied, You guys are going to figure it out anyway.

Apple details its plan to safely reopen retail stores

Apples supply chain is making safety changes to protect workers in response to the pandemic

Apple to launch a new iPad and a new iPad mini with bigger screens, says Ming-Chi Kuo

Facebooks Giphy acquisition sounds antitrust alarms in Congress

The FBI successfully broke into a gunmans iPhone, but its still very angry at Apple. Apples response statement included. It is as cogent and ethically clear as the FBIs is manipulative and dissembling. (Very, in both cases.)

Disney streaming chief Kevin Mayer resigns to become TikTok CEO. Passed over to become the CEO of Disney, hes moving on. If you were looking for a sign that TikTok wants to be a little more legit here in the US and tamp down the worries over its Chinese ownership, this one is big and glowing and neon.

Microsoft: we were wrong about open source. I feel like at least half of Microsofts last decade has been Haha whoops! That was dumb and/or mean. Lets try again to do it right this time. And it is working.

Logitechs new Circle View camera comes with built-in privacy controls. It looks nice, and its fascinating to see that it ONLY works with HomeKit and therefore Apple products it even uses iCloud for storing clips. Its almost like Apple asked Logitech to make a camera it would be comfortable selling in its stores as a privacy-focused option.

Logitech has added a pair of nice privacy features to the camera, too. The first is simple: the camera can be tilted downward to face its base so that you can easily block it from seeing anything. The second addition is a hardware button on the back that lets you shut off the camera and microphone so nothing is being monitored

Edison Mail rolls back update after iOS users reported they could see strangers emails. Forthwith, a comprehensive list of cloud services I feel comfortable granting full access to my email account:

1. The original email provider, e.g. Gmail or Outlook.

End of list.

Microsoft Surface Go 2 review: dont push it. In case you missed it, my review from last week.

Gigabyte Aero 15 review: works hard, plays hard. Monica Chin reviews and is impressed. However:

The big question is whether you need this kind of power. An OLED screen, a 45-watt H-series processor, and a cutting-edge GPU are certainly cool things to have. But they also cost a chunk of change, and youre paying in hours of battery life as well.

TCL 10 Pro review: premium looks, budget performance

Jon Porter reviews TCLs attempt to get its own brand recognized and sought-after in the US. Despite the companys long history of making phones, it feels a little bit too much like a first attempt.

How to buy refurbished gadgets. Great overview from Cameron Faulkner. I fully endorse refurbs so long as you can buy them from a store you can go back to if you have problems. I always look for a refurb option now when Im buying electronics.

Samsung and Xiaomis midrange phones dominate Android bestsellers list in Q1 2020. When I reviewed the Galaxy A51, I essentially said that if you care about a big, nice screen above all else, this phone should appeal to you even if its a touch slow and the camera is a touch disappointing. Clearly, a lot of people care about a big, nice screen above all else: it was the worldwide best seller last quarter.

Makes me wonder if this years iPhone SE is going to end up feeling like more a misstep than I would have guessed.

How Alphabets smart city echoed a failed sci-fi utopia in Minnesota. Adi Robertsons interview really shows how utopias keep trying to do similar things over and over.

Or the idea of modularity, thats something people were going crazy for in the 60s with megastructures. Eventually MXC was going to have a megastructure where youd just have a frame for your main structure and you could plug in units based on what you needed, so it would be constantly shifting. I saw similar kinds of language in Googles proposal as well. So these are relatively old ideas, we just havent found a way to actually do them yet.

Read more:

What Sundar Pichais long-term hardware commitment means for the Pixel - The Verge

In 1990, when Cameroons football team did the unthinkable and beat Argentina in the World Cup, the proportion of the worlds population living below the poverty line was 37.1 per cent.

Fast-forward 35 years later to 2015, following a global adoption of the UNs Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), this figure now stands at 9.6%.

The concept of a universal benevolent dictator a classic assumption in beginner economic courses to escape the complexities of real-world decision-making such a person would no doubt have said:The world is doing infinitely better!

But on the contrary, the world has not been doing as well as it should. The fact is, there have been warning signs all along.

The proportion of people living below the poverty line in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 was an astonishing 41%, about the same as the global rate of extreme poverty in 1981.

On October 17, 2018, the then President of the World Bank Group, Jim Yong Kim, presented a report titledPoverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing together the Poverty Puzzle.With rigorous data but in a simple and direct way, the report clearly indicated that global conditions were not in place to bring the rate of extreme poverty below 3%by 2030.

The most alarming case in point was, where even in the most optimistic of scenarios, the poverty rate would continue to be in double digits.

The report was a pitcher of cold water in my state of mind. But it was not the first time Jim Yong Kim had jolted me.

A few years earlier in 2015, in Lima, Peru, at the Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank, during a panel moderated by Femi Oke, the British journalist of Yoruba descent, Jim Yong Kims projections caught my attention. In attendance were Peruvian President Ollanta Moises Humala Tasso; Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary-General; Christine Lagarde, IMF Managing Director; and Justine Greening, UK Secretary of State for International Development.

For 90-minutes, they spoke eloquently about the type of partnerships that would be needed to make Agenda 2030 a reality; the international cooperation that would be deployed; the necessary financing mechanisms and formulas; and the creativity and citizen action required.

Gathered in this august venue, the guardians of the global architecture responsible for eradicating poverty spoke convincingly and articulately about the world of tomorrow. Collectively, they concluded that by 2030, we would end up, to quote Oscar Wilde, in a country called Utopia. TheRoad to Limawas a party.

But barely three years later as 2018 dawned, the same global architecture presented us with a new story: The end of Utopia.

In December 2019, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) launched its Human Development Report titledBeyond Income, Beyond Averages, Beyond the Present: Human Development Inequalities in the 21st Century. As with the World Bank, the conclusion was straightforward and clear: While humanity is progressing, something is just not working in our globalized society. ]

A new generation of inequalities, beyond basic capabilities, is emerging and threatens to render people living in developing countries obsolete in the future.

Combining the alarming 2018 World Bank report with the no less alarming 2019 UNDP report, the picture is not one of optimism: not only was the aspiration to eradicate poverty by 2030 not going to be met, but a new inequality gap was opening up as well.

These challenges had previously been the focus of the World Economic Forum Regional Strategy Group (WEF RSG), of which I had had the privilege of being a member.

One of the ideas behind the WEF RSG was very simple and irrefutable: Africa mustleapfroginto the Fourth Industrial Revolution or risk being left behind inexorably.

In 2019 as well as in previous years, several countries, including Equatorial Guinea, my country, made important policy decisions to define and prioritize national development aspirations in alignment with the UNs Agenda 2030 and the African Unions Agenda 2063. Additionally, to take advantage of the Fourth Industrial Revolution we scaled up our investments in ICT and technology and in developing the capacity of our youth. And then, COVID19 arrived!

In just a few short months the world has changed. When we return to normal, it will be a new normality and abrave new world.

COVID19 is an existential crisis. It is severely testing Africas social, economic and political resilience. In a post-COVID19 world, the continents leaders will therefore have to rethink many prior assumptions and find new balances for individual and collective behavior.

What I am absolutely certain of is that opportunities will emerge. Innovative minds previously imprisoned by institutional inertia and interest groupswill rise to the challenges that we collectively face.

What will thebrave new worldpost-COVID19 look like in Africa? The African Development Bank estimates that Africa will lose between 35 and 100 billion dollars due to the fall in raw material prices caused by the pandemic. The World Economic Forum estimates that global losses for the continent will be in the order of $275 billion.

There is a real risk therefore that Africas inequality gap will worsen in the coming years.

Ever since the virus crossed the continents borders, regular bilateral and multilateral consultations among African finance ministers have philosophically revolved around the need to rethink our multifaceted responses to COVID19 and other future threats that have equal or greater potential for disruption.

Today, African States are developing strategic and in-depth approaches to human development, regional integration, digitalization, industrialization, economic diversification, fiscal and monetary policies, and international solidarity. In short, they are rethinking the causes of the continents underdevelopment and coming up with feasible solutions. Theoutcomeswill undoubtedly be good for Africa and for all humanity.

To better understand the scenarios before us, there are three sparks that could light a flame in thebrave new worldthat is before us:

This last note has triggered another debate: the necessary industrialization of Africa, to transform and add value to the continents vast and valuable raw materials.

Many African countries have already been deprived of access to COVID19 essentials. Excessive global demand has relegated Africa to the

But there is much reason for optimism. African leaders recently laudedartemisia annuatonic that Andry Rajoelina, President of Madagascar, presented to the world as Africas solution to COVID19.

Our enthusiasm, as Africans, is rooted in wounded self-esteem. For way too long, we have been victims of marginalization. The power to regain our dignity has too often been stripped away. Today, nestled in the souls of all Africans is an unshakable faith that the most important resource that Africa needs in order to rise up, is none other than Africans themselves.

No one will help us if we do not help ourselves. Africa is no longer asking to be taught how to fish. Africa is already rowing towards the utopia enunciated in the UNs Sustainable Development Goals and the Africa Unions Agenda 2063.

In spite of dire predictions and narratives, humanity always has a way of ending up in that country called utopia. Africa is humanity.

Cesar A. Mba ABOGO is the Minister of Finance, Economy and Planning of Equatorial Guinea and Member of the Regional Action Group for Africa of the World Economic Forum.

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CESAR A. MBA ABOGO: The African Utopia at the End of the COVID-19 Tunnel - Red Pepper

Television adaptation of Little Fires Everywhere: Small change, in fact By Joanne Laurier 18 May 2020

The eight-episode series Little Fires Everywhere, created by Liz Tigelaar, premiered on Hulu on March 18. It is based on the 2017 novel, a New York Times bestseller with the same title, by Celeste Ng.

The web television miniseries, set in the late 1990s, focuses on several families and individuals in Shaker Heights, an affluent, integrated suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, who come into sharp conflict with one another. The television adaptation places even greater emphasis in particular on race and race relations, and the so-called blind spots of white America.

As this may already indicate, the series is driven by a muddle-headed and confused notion about whats wrong with the US. The fact it is being aired in the midst of a pandemic that has seen tens of millions lose their jobs, in the greatest economic and social crisis since the Great Depression, makes the self-absorbed and trivializing tendencies of Little Fires Everywhere stand out all the more sharply.

Elena Richardson (Reese Witherspoon) considers herself a paragon of American womanhood, someone who, with considerable finesse and skill, balances her duties as mother, wife, part-time journalist (for the local paper) and pillar of the community. While she has not fulfilled her dream of becoming a big-city newspaper woman, her life is otherwise what she intended and designed it to be.

The elite town of Shaker Heights unofficial motto is: Everything should be planned out by doing so you could avoid the unseemly, the unpleasant and the disastrous. (The introduction to each episode includes the newspaper headline: Shaker Heights is a dream town come true).

With overbearing efficiency, Elena runs her household of four teenagers: Ivy League-bound Lexie (Jade Pettyjohn), athletic Trip (Jordan Elsass), sensitive Moody (Gavin Lewis) and artistic Izzy (Megan Stott). Elenas affluent lifestyle results from the successful career of attorney-husband Bill (Joshua Jackson).

But a hyper-organized manner of life does not allow room for problems, or children who are out of synch, such as her youngest Izzy, who is gay, rebellious and considered by her mother to be a misfit.

Generally speaking, everything is apparently sunny and smooth-sailing in Shaker Heightsonly a short distance from traumatically deindustrialized Clevelanduntil an African-American art photographer, Mia Warren (Kerry Washington) and her teenage daughter Pearl (Lexi Underwood) rent Elenas second house. (The novel does not specify Mias ethnicity).

Believing Mia has money troubles, Elena offers the newcomer the position of house manager in her domicile. Oddly, Mia accepts, but only to keep tabs on daughter Pearl who is enamored with Elenas brood, mansion and overall opulent way of life. As the relationship between Elena and Mia begins to sour, the latter says sarcastically: White women always want to be friends with their [black] maids.

Specifically, the pair go to war when a custody battle erupts over the fate of a Chinese infant. Out of the proceeds from the sale of one of her most prized photographs, Mia finances the attorney for the babys biological mother, Bebe Chow (Huang Lu), who, suffering from poverty and postpartum depression, has left the infant outside a fire station.

Elena wholeheartedly sides with friend Linda McCullough (Rosemarie DeWitt) and her husband who were handed the child by the authorities and are proceeding with an adoption. Elenas husband Bill is the lawyer for the McCulloughs (as he explains, somewhat regretfully, People like Bebe Chow dont win.).

It is a court battle whose outcome tears Elenas world apart.

The series purports to be a kind of report on the moral state of America. But how realistic and deep-going is it? There are recognizable situations and human beings, but one feels the presence of an ideology and agenda throughout. To far too great an extent Little Fires Everywhere is congealed upper middle class lecturing.

Many of the pivotal sequences are colored by the presence of this aggressive outlook. The series creators are not making a work about life, but rather a film based on their schemas about life.

This renders the narrative in many places improbable. The guiding conception behind the series seems to be that white people are afflicted with the virus of racism. Despite the latters best intentions, this prejudice resides in the recesses of the white soul. To dramatize this false and reactionary notion requires unconvincing plot manipulations.

The suburban utopia of Shaker Heights is turned upside down by the arrival of Mia and Pearl (hints of Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter), whose ethnicity and bohemianism create friction, gossip and worse. But, according to the 2000 Census, Shaker Heights was 59.9 percent white and 34.1 percent black. Its not clear that Mia is or does anything to merit the commotion she generates.

For her part, when Mia is not scowling or crying, or threatening to do one of those two things, her righteousness in relation to the white population is simply assumed. The series takes Mias moral superiority as its starting point, something it would actually need to prove dramatically. This is the equivalent of Believe women. In fact, Mias behavior is largely cold and disdainful, and she suffers from vast doses of self-pity.

Bebe too feels awfully sorry for herself. But this is not typically how people in such circumstances, who are a hundred times tougher and more resilient than the series writers imagine them to be, respond to adversity.

And then there is Lexie. Her boyfriend Brian (SteVont Hart) is African American, but her supposedly hidden racism surfaces when she takes advantage of Pearl by stealing the latters essay and appropriating it for her entrance into Yale. Even worse, she uses Pearls name as her own at an abortion clinic. The creators stack the deck against her.

In turn, Brian accuses Lexie of not truly seeing him as a black man. For Brian, as well as Mia, colorblindness does not existor rather claiming a lack of prejudice is one of the surest proofs that the claimant is a secret bigot! According to the former, Lexie stole a black girls story ... you stole her discrimination as your own.

Furthermore, despite Elenas pretentions, when push comes to shove, she stands with her race and her class. The viciousness with which both she and her friend Linda treat Bebe Chow is the primary reason that Elenas house suffers a fiery fate.

Little fires abound everywhere. They are less fires than narrative implausibilities. It makes no sense, for example, that two middle class kids, Lexie and Brian, should have unprotected sex; that Bebe Chow should hysterically crash a baby shower, throwing herself into a crowd of people; that Elena, the model mother, should treat Izzy so miserably; that book club members should be scandalized by reading The Vagina Monologues; that the college-bound Richardson offspring end up performing the most unlikely anti-social act. These are only a few of the unrealistic and unbelievable momentsas though someone were trying, hurriedly and carelessly, to cram something that doesnt fit into a bureau drawer.

It is also telling that the series creators, including Witherspoon and Washington, both executive producers, consider the tepid and half-thought out incidents earthshaking. This, in a country that has experienced tremendous shocks and trauma, including the emergence of an elite possessing unimaginable wealth, endless war and threats of even more catastrophic wars and the relentless drive toward authoritarianism over the past 20 years. Not so much little fires as small change.

The series advances a host of essentially petty bourgeois perceptions about race, gender, sexual orientation, unorthodoxy versus respectability, repression and intolerance versus free-spiritednessall for the supposed benefit of the benighted American people. This is an effort by moneyed, insulated Hollywood celebrities, people for whom the devastating economic conditions of every section of the working class in nearby Cleveland mean very little compared to the questions of cultural appropriation, white fragility, intersectionality, marginalization, etc.

In an interview with Hollywood Reporter, series creator and showrunner Liz Tigelaar explains: Its that theme of the show, I think its like, how can we know who we really are if were too afraid to look at ourselves? Its the whole beginning of The Vagina Monologues and looking at your own vagina. If were not willing to look at the parts of us that kind of scare us to look at, how can we really see ourselves? ...

Who shes [Elena] really struggling with is herself. She is not comfortable that she had prejudice and acted because of it. But that spark is this whole series ... If it were today she would have voted for Obama.

What can one say? The entire set of unquestioned assumptions with which Tigelaar and her collaborators set out, including the belief that voting for the war criminal and enemy of the working class Obama is a tell-tale indicator of political progressiveness, lies at the heart of the problems when it comes to Little Fires Everywhere. Someone needs to light a large blaze fire under these people, sooner rather than later.

We need you to help the WSWS and ICFI make 2020 the year of international socialist revival. We must expand our work and our influence in the international working class. If you agree, donate today. Thank you.

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Television adaptation of Little Fires Everywhere: Small change, in fact - World Socialist Web Site

The future setting of Demolition Man seems ludicrous at first, but certain predictions like the touchless high five are more accurate than expected.

Real life is now one handshake closer to the future shown inDemolition Man. The 1993 sci-fi action filmfollows John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone), a gruff and tough police officer awakened from cryosleep in the utopian San Angeles of 2032 after being convicted for blowing up the building where a group of hostages were held byterrorist Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) 36 years prior. His mission isto recapture the criminal in a city governed by strict puritan laws where the police force is unfamiliar with threats bigger than profane language andinnocuousdeeds.

Some of these "crimes" arerecited to Spartan byLieutenant Lenina Huxley (Sandra Bullock) the moment he wakes up: cigarettes, alcohol, meat, caffeine, contact sports, cursing, and even intimate contact are all banned by law. Thisidealistic society isconcocted byDr. Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne), the man who led the city to seek an aseptic approach to life. Unfortunately for him, his plan to eliminate the last underground resistance to his pristine utopia goes off the rails when Huxley and Spartan figure out his intentions, on top of losing control of the pawn he brought from the past to achieve it Simon Phoenix.

Related:What To Expect From Demolition Man 2

Not all of the crimes predicted byDemolition Manseem too egregious now, though, 27 years after the film's release. When Huxley first arrives at the police department building, she greetstwo police officers with a quick circular hand motion, similar to an incomplete high five. The salute is carried out so casually that it's obvious it has replaced the handshake. Minutes later, when Huxley remotely locates Phoenix after his escape, officer Erwin (Rob Schneider) exchanges the same gesture with fellow officer Alfredo Garca (Benjamin Bratt) as a sign of celebration.

This non-touchhandshake is a result of the future's aversion tophysical contact. When Huxley wants to get intimate with Spartan and surprises him with the concept of "VR sex," she explains to him that"the rampant exchange of bodily fluids was one of the main major reasons for the downfall of society."So, it is implied that besides the fictional "GreatEarthquake" of 2010 the spread of illnessdrastically changed society in the early twenty-first century,resulting ina statewide (and presumably worldwide) restructuring. Just 12 years before the film's setting, the real-life coronavirus pandemic is driving out acts of physical contact like handshakes and high fives due to their high transmission rate of infection.

Demolition Mancontinues the tradition of the many '80s sci-fi films that has successfully predictedthe future in some way or another. FromArnold Schwarzenegger getting into politics to smoke-free laws, the movie accurately picked up some clues of the era toportray real-life events.Now that the film'ssetting is getting closer, and with a Demolition Mansequel in the works,anewnotion of the future will bring more interesting predictions that may set a fictional precedentfor what lies ahead.

More:Demolition Man: How Do The Three Seashells Actually Work?

Star Wars Theory: The First Jedi Was A Skywalker

Nicolas Ayala is a screenwriter, photographer, and model with a passion for blockbusters and big-screen adaptations. He's been writing movies since he got his first crayon and continues to do so in his final year of Film Production at university. An extensive immersion in the behind-the-scenes of a couple dozen projects has let him see films in a new light and talk about his experiences around the web. When not writing or dreaming about writing, he's probably cosplaying, directing goofy films, creating comic books, studying ancient mythology, learning new languages or producing music that your hips can't stop dancing to.

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Demolition Man's Handshake Explained: How It Predicted The Future - Screen Rant

In 1990, when Cameroon's football team did the unthinkable and beat Argentina in the World Cup, the proportion of the world's population living below the poverty line was 35.9%. Fast-forward 35 years to 2015, following a global adoption of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), this figure now stands at 10%.

To use the concept of a universal benevolent dictator a classic assumption in beginner economic courses to escape the complexities of real-world decision-making such a person would no doubt have said, "The world is doing infinitely better!

On the contrary, the world has not been doing as well as it should. The fact is, there have been warning signs all along. The proportion of people living below the poverty line in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 was an astonishing 41%, about the same as the global rate of extreme poverty in 1981.

On October 17, 2018, the then President of the World Bank Group, Jim Yong Kim, presented a report titled "Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing together the Poverty Puzzle." With rigorous data, the report clearly indicated that global conditions were not in place to bring the rate of extreme poverty below 3% by 2030. The most alarming case in point was Africa, where even in the most optimistic scenarios, the poverty rate would continue to be in double digits. The report was like having a pitcher of cold water upended on me.

But it was not the first time Jim Yong Kim had jolted me. A few years earlier in 2015, in Lima, Peru, during a panel at the Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank, Jim Yong Kims projections caught my attention. In attendance were Peruvian President Ollanta Moises Humala Tasso; Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary General; Christine Lagarde, IMF Managing Director; and Justine Greening, UK Secretary of State for International Development. For 90 minutes, they spoke eloquently about the type of partnerships that would be needed to make Agenda 2030 a reality; the international cooperation that would be deployed; the necessary financing mechanisms and formulas; and the creativity and citizen action required.

Gathered in this august venue, the guardians of the global architecture responsible for eradicating poverty spoke convincingly and articulately about the world of tomorrow. Collectively, they concluded that by 2030, we would end up, to quote Oscar Wilde, in a country called Utopia. The Road to Lima was a party.

Barely three years later, as 2018 dawned, the same global architecture presented us with a new story: the end of Utopia. In December 2019, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) launched its Human Development Report, "Beyond Income, Beyond Averages, Beyond the Present: Human Development Inequalities in the 21st Century". As with the World Bank, the conclusion was straightforward and clear: While humanity is progressing, something is just not working in our globalized society. A new generation of inequalities, beyond basic capabilities, is emerging and threatens to render people living in developing countries obsolete in the future.

Combining the alarming 2018 World Bank report with the no less alarming 2019 UNDP report, the picture is not one of optimism. Not only was the aspiration to eradicate poverty by 2030 not going to be met, but a new inequality gap was opening up.

These challenges had previously been the focus of the World Economic Forum Regional Strategy Group (WEF RSG), of which I had the privilege of being a member. One of the ideas behind the WEF RSG was simple and irrefutable: Africa must leapfrog into the Fourth Industrial Revolution or risk being left behind.

In 2019, as well as in previous years, several countries including my country, Equatorial Guinea made important policy decisions to define and prioritize national development aspirations, in alignment with the UN's Agenda 2030 and the African Union's Agenda 2063. Additionally, to take advantage of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we scaled up our investments in ICT and technology and in developing the capacity of our youth.

And then, COVID-19 arrived. In just a few short months the world has changed. When we return to normal, it will be a new normality and a brave new world.

COVID-19 cases, deaths and recoveries in Africa as of May 9, 2020.

Image: African Union

COVID-19 is an existential crisis. It is severely testing Africa's social, economic and political resilience. In a post-COVID-19 world, the continent's leaders will have to rethink many prior assumptions and find new balances for individual and collective behaviour.

What I am absolutely certain of is that opportunities will emerge. Innovative minds previously imprisoned by institutional inertia and interest groups will rise to the challenges that we collectively face.

What will the brave new world post COVID-19 look like in Africa? The African Development Bank estimates that Africa will lose between $35 and $100 billion due to the fall in raw material prices caused by the pandemic. The World Economic Forum estimates that global losses for the continent will be in the order of $275 billion. There is a real risk therefore that Africas inequality gap will worsen in the coming years.

Ever since the virus crossed the continent's borders, regular bilateral and multilateral consultations among African finance ministers have philosophically revolved around the need to rethink our multifaceted responses to COVID-19 and other future threats that have equal or greater potential for disruption.

Today, African States are developing strategic and in-depth approaches to human development, regional integration, digitalization, industrialization, economic diversification, fiscal and monetary policies, and international solidarity. In short, they are rethinking the causes of the continent's underdevelopment and coming up with feasible solutions. The outcomes will undoubtedly be good for Africa and for all humanity.

To better understand the scenarios before us, there are three sparks that could light a flame in the brave new world that is before us:

1. In 2001, African leaders pledged to invest around 15% of their budgets in health. By 2020, only five countries have fulfilled this promise. No one doubts today that the health sector in Africa will be strengthened by COVID-19. There are decisions that can no longer be postponed. In mid-March, a Togolese activist, Farida Nabourema, mocked African elites who used to go to Europe to have their ailments treated, saying: I would like to ask our African presidents who travel to Italy, Germany, France, the UK and other European countries for medical treatment, please, when are you leaving? On April 2, Bloomberg published an article entitled: Trapped by Coronavirus, Nigeria's Elite faces squalid hospital. Things are going to change.

2. The vast majority of African countries, after COVID-19, will have to put in place social protection systems to mitigate the suffering of the continent's most disadvantaged. Kenya and Equatorial Guinea offer excellent examples of countries that have regulated and put in place social protection systems that will survive and outlast our battle against this common enemy.

3. The continents poor pharmaceutical capacity has been a source of amazement to locals and foreigners alike. Bangladesh, a poorer country than many African countries, produces 97% of the national demand for medicines, in contrast to Africa which is almost 100% dependent on imports.

This last note has triggered another debate: the necessary industrialization of Africa, to transform and add value to the continent's vast and valuable raw materials. Many African countries have already been deprived access to COVID-19 essentials. Excessive global demand has relegated Africa to the back of the queue. This is an early warning and lesson for Africa.

A new strain of Coronavirus, COVID 19, is spreading around the world, causing deaths and major disruption to the global economy.

Responding to this crisis requires global cooperation among governments, international organizations and the business community, which is at the centre of the World Economic Forums mission as the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.

The Forum has created the COVID Action Platform, a global platform to convene the business community for collective action, protect peoples livelihoods and facilitate business continuity, and mobilize support for the COVID-19 response. The platform is created with the support of the World Health Organization and is open to all businesses and industry groups, as well as other stakeholders, aiming to integrate and inform joint action.

As an organization, the Forum has a track record of supporting efforts to contain epidemics. In 2017, at our Annual Meeting, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was launched bringing together experts from government, business, health, academia and civil society to accelerate the development of vaccines. CEPI is currently supporting the race to develop a vaccine against this strand of the coronavirus.

But there is much reason for optimism. The African Union is in discussions with Madagascar over the artemisia annua tonic, a herbal remedy that Andry Rajoelina, President of Madagascar, presented to the world as Africas solution to COVID-19.

Our enthusiasm as Africans is rooted in a wounded self-esteem. For way too long, we have been victims of marginalization. The power to regain our dignity has too often been stripped away. Today, nestled in the souls of all Africans is a rational expectation, an unshakable faith that the most important resource that Africa needs in order to rise up is none other than Africans themselves.

No one will help us if we do not help ourselves. Africa is no longer asking to be taught how to fish. Africa is already going fishing and rowing towards the utopia enunciated in the UNs Sustainable Development Goals and the Africa Union's Agenda 2063. In spite of dire predictions and apocalyptic narratives, humanity always has a way of striving for a better future.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with our Terms of Use.

Written by

Cesar Augusto Mba Abogo, Minister of Finance, Economy and Planning, Ministry of Finance, Economy and Planning of Equatorial Guinea

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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Africa's response to COVID-19 will have lasting benefits - World Economic Forum

MORGAN It might be a bit easier for the residents of Morgan to stay home now than it was a few weeks ago.

On April 27, UTOPIA Fiber completed its infrastructure in the city, giving the 4,500 citizens access to some of the fastest internet speeds in the nation.

UTOPIA Fiber started as a group of 11 local cities that joined together in 2004 to bring fiber internet to residences and businesses in their areas. The group lays down fiber optic cables, then leases the infrastructure to local internet service providers so residents can choose from a variety.

Were all excited about our new fiber connectivity, said Ray Little, Morgan's mayor. As Morgan City continues to grow, high-speed Internet is increasingly important for our residents and businesses.

Little has some stats to actually back up the excitement. About a third of Morgans households signed up for the service during the five-month period, leading to all bond payments of the $2.5 million project already being paid off. UTOPIA expects north of 60% of the city will eventually be using fiber.

The completion of the project comes at a time when the internet is needed the most. With most Utah business doors still shut due to the coronavirus pandemic, work has to be done primarily online. Thats made a quick and reliable connection not only a convenience but a near necessity.

UTOPIA chief marketing officer Kim McKinley said internet usage has surged during the pandemic as people have become more reliant on video conferences to conduct business.

It's been a crazy time to watch what's really happened, McKinley said. We're seeing about a spike of about 30% of bandwidth usage, and our peak hours have changed for residential usage.

In fact, there are now two peaks. The first comes from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., as employees finish up the workday. The second comes after 8 p.m. when streaming becomes popular.

With more time spent online, it makes sense for residents to be looking for a better connection. And, so, yes, UTOPIA has had some profitable months.

We just calculated our sales for the month of April and we are still seeing a staggering amount of customers coming on the network still, McKinley said. This would be our second-highest month in UTOPIAs history.

That comes from people getting fiber for the first time, but also existing users that have needed to upgrade to accommodate school work done, business being conducted, and entertainment being streamed all at once for the majority of the day.

Where some people might have been more price-conscious before, they now might be like, this is more of a necessity to me now, McKinley said. And so we've seen this huge uptick of sales. ... People used to think it was a luxury.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, it had been a busy year for UTOPIA. It finished a $23-million infrastructure build in Layton and began building the infrastructure in West Point as more cities have put their faith in fiber.

As a governmental agency, we don't have shareholders, we're a steward of the residents of Utah, McKinley said. So we go into whatever city comes to us, and we'll go talk to him and say can we make this work? We've done Woodland Hills, which only had 300 residents, and we built out that city.

The Morgan build is the latest in the line of smaller cities that UTOPIA has built fiber infrastructure in. Others include Perry, Tremonton and Payson.

We believe we're one of the ways forward for rural Utah to get connected to the 21st century, McKinley said. Its funny because I live in downtown Salt Lake and Morgan, Utah, has better connectivity than I have.

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'People used to think it was a luxury': Internet use is surging and so is UTOPIA Fiber - KSL.com

Trade

Foyles will be nationalised, handed over to staff to own collectively and run cooperatively.

Every publishing house will have a recognised Trade Union for all workers.

Anyone in publishing who references Harry Potter will be fired, this will be accepted by the Union.

Editors who do not do any editing will be moved to Sales and Marketing.

Editors will spend 70% of their week consuming culture that is in no way related to books.

Editors will not have to pretend they have read the Classics.

Editors Whatsapp groups will be leaked regularly.

90% of publishing will take place outside of Zone One.

Only 3% of publishers will be privately educated until private schools are completely abolished.

#ClapForBooksellers every Friday until the netbook agreement returns.

Tote bags will no longer exist, they will be replaced by A0 posters.

All existing tote bags will be requisitioned and used as bags for life at the Turkish Food Centre.

No book will cost more than 10.

A book shall not be celebrated for its size unless it is very small.

Small presses will not be patronisingly labelled brave. All publishing will be courageous.

Working class women from marginalised communities will hold editorial positions at all publishing imprints or houses.

English will become a minority influence in world publishing.

Translation will account for 40% of UK Publishing.

Prizes will not be awarded to books that do not need the publicity.

Prizes will be judged by readers who have nothing to do with the publishing industry or the media.

Prizes will be judged with a person to surname ratio of 3:4. So only one double-barrelled human per four judges.

Prizes will not be shared. The definition of the word competition will be respected. If you have a competition, you will keep it a competition. Otherwise, do not have a competition.

Prizes will not exist.

Publishing will be quicker and more responsive.

Publishing will be slow, deliberate and more thoughtful.

Working-class black men will be published more than once a year by more than one or two presses, and sold in more than one or two bookshops.

All publishing will fight fascism.

Publishing will not be Sensible; Sensible will not be published.

Publishers will aim to ferment revolution at all times as possible, in all areas possible, if possible.

Publishing will no longer be part of the Spectacle, support the Spectacle, or ignore the Spectacle.

Free spectacles will be available to all readers of books over 450 pages.

The profits from cookery book bestsellers will be split evenly across the 40 smallest presses in the country.

Books over 10 years old that are still in print will be added to the public domain.

New books published must be meaningful and do one or more of the following:

Pamphlets will return to everyday reading life and will be considered alternatives to newsprint media.

Books will prioritise ideas over form.

No one will have to pretend Literary Fiction is a genre.

Autofiction will auto-destruct after reading.

Airport novels will disappear along with airports and airport bookshops.

Not only books by dead black writers will make it onto the recommended reading tables in bookshops, alive ones will be prominent too.

The British Library will take its archive on tour in restored Led Zeppelin tour buses.

Books will be published to encourage and facilitate class war.

Books will be published to combat Received Opinion, not reinforce it.

Books will imagine new futures not hide in false pasts.

Books will not be put on pedestals, Books will be considered everyday objects that everyday people possess.

The text will be the only thing that matters because equal representation will be the foundational structure of publishing.

The Author with no experience of it, and physically able, will do manual labour between books.

The Author will engage with life outside of literature until the Author no longer believes literature to be necessary.

The Author will know they are important but act as if they are irrelevant.

The Author will have the name of their private school listed in their Twitter bio and is required to wear its insignia at literary events.

The Author complaining on Twitter about how hard writing is will not get a book deal.

The Author self-memeing quotes from their work on Instagram will not get a book deal.

The Author will not be on Social Media for the protection of The Authors mental health and ability to produce genuine thought.

The white Author will shoulder the burden of discussing representation equally and will be asked about it frequently in interviews.

The Author will only communicate with the reader.

The Author will not be put on pedestals, The Author will be considered an everyday person with everyday thoughts.

The Author will admit that all experiments have already occurred and nothing they write is new. Experiments with form will not be labelled experimental as they are finished pieces of work, not experiments.

The Author will not believe the hype.

The Author will believe in their reader

The Author who lives off their spouses vast wealth will have Spouse Funded England printed on the back of their books.

The Author will be paid fairly.

The Author will be under no illusion that being a writer is a viable career option.

The author will drop the uppercase.

The author will be killed once again, so that the text may live.

Kit Caless is co-founder of Influx Press. He is also the author of out-of-print 2016 Christmas stocking classic, Spoons Carpets: An Appreciation. This article first appeared on Minor Literatures.

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After the virus: What utopia will look like for the publishing industry in the UK - Scroll.in

If you've been watching a lot of TV during the coronavirus lockdown, then like me you may have noticed an odd collision of ads.

One minute we're watching a trailer for the new Penny Dreadful in which 1930s Los Angeles is tearing itself apart. Natalie Dormer, as a shape-shifting demon, delivers a line that reflects our long-held deepest fear about human nature: "all mankind needs to be the monster he truly is... is being told he can."

But this dark diagnosis is followed by one of those heartstring-tugging pandemic PSAs showing our quiet, peaceful, riot-free neighborhoods. "You're not alone," they say. "We're all in this together." Indeed we are. Consistent and large majorities of the U.S. supports and understands the life-saving science of social distancing astroturfed protests notwithstanding. Look for the helpers, as Fred Rogers famously advised, and you'll find them everywhere.

How do we square these views? If we are monsters hiding under a thin veneer of civilization or even just self-interested egotists at heart, as economists tend to assume then why are most of us willing to sacrifice our wellbeing to protect vulnerable people we've never met? The most coherent, well-proven answer can be found in Humankind: A Hopeful History, a book by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman garnering global buzz ahead of its June 2 release.

You may remember Bregman from a widely-shared, unaired Fox News interview in which he called Tucker Carlson "a millionaire funded by billionaires." Or from his viral appearance at Davos where Bregman chided billionaires for not paying their fair share of taxes. He's also the author of Utopia For Realists, which has become a bible for the Universal Basic Income movement.

"Basically, what you assume of other people is what you get out of them," Bregman said of Humankind when I interviewed him for our series on UBI. "If you assume other people behave selfishly, that's how they behave."

The only scientific proof he'd found of people becoming less generous over time, he said, was a 1990s study of first vs. third-year economics students. Their answers on behavior quizzes became less generous the more they were told that humans are basically selfish.

In fact, we're hardwired to help. Bregman's book summarizes a mountain of new discoveries in a wide range of fields that debunk what we thought we knew about humanity.

For example, instead of of "survival of the fittest," evolutionary biologists and psychologists now talk about "survival of the friendliest." Over time, without even trying, we've selected for social intelligence in our mates. This is why loneliness can literally make us sick (and hence why our COVID-19 lockdown is even more of a show of love).

This is why we're the only animal that blushes, a strong social signal of shame and why politicians who have mastered the art of being shameless can take advantage, time and again, of our essentially trusting nature.

Homo sapiens has undergone the same transitions as we caused in wolves and foxes (and still do, in famous Siberian fox domestication experiments): rounder faces; smaller brains that counterintuitively have more connections, and hence more facility for language; more childlike playfulness. Bregman, with a touch of that playfulness, suggests our species needs a new name: Homo puppy.

So why, so often, do we think otherwise? Why do we keep believing Natalie Dormer's line about mankind being monsters held in check? Because, for centuries, we've been spreading and reinforcing one particular, pernicious untruth.

The best thing about Bregman's book is that it doesn't just present you with his optimistic conclusions, fully formed. It takes you on his personal journey, from believing (and teaching) many of society's shibboleths about inherent evil to systematically tearing each one apart with evidence.

First up: Lord of the Flies, the 1954 novel about a bunch of British schoolkids stuck on a desert island and their descent into bloody anarchy. Like many of us forced to read it at school, Bregman was depressed as hell by what it had to say about human nature. It doesn't present any scientific evidence, of course, it's a story, but it feels right. It was filmed twice, and influenced so many other books and films it's a cliche. Look at a high school today and you think: Yep, these kids are one plane crash away from Lord of the Flies.

But how can we run an experiment to see if kids actually turn into murderous barbarians when left to fend for themselves? Bregman trawled the historical record and found there's only one test: The little-known tale of a bunch of British teenagers in Tonga in 1965 who stole a boat, tried to make for New Zealand, and wound up castaways on a mostly barren island instead until their rescue 15 months later.

What did these kids do? Stick pig heads on spikes and shout "bollocks to the rules?" No, they sat down together and made rules. After taking days to make fire, they set up a rota system that kept it burning nicely their entire time on the island. They figured out how to collect rainwater and pick berries. If two kids had an argument, they had to walk to opposite sides of the island to cool off. When they came back, doctors declared them in excellent physical and mental shape.

Of course, Lord of the Flies wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize for literature if it ended that way. Drama often requires exaggerating the darker parts of the human soul. But its author, William Golding, a reclusive alcoholic schoolteacher who beat his own children, actually set out to spread the message that kids are nasty little bastards who need discipline. "I have always understood the Nazis," Golding said, "because I am of that sort by nature."

He's just the first in the book's parade of villains. Bregman doesn't draw this connection, but it's clear that most happen to be privileged white males who figure out how to get famous by fabricating evidence that humans are basically monsters implying that they alone have the solution.

A still from "The Stanford Prison Experiment" (2015)

Image: Steve Dietls / Coup D'Etat / Sandbar / Abandon / Ifc / Kobal / Shutterstock

Golding wasn't alone. The same year he published Lord of the Flies, U.S. psychologist Muzafer Sherif conducted something called the Robbers Cave Experiment. He took two teams of well-behaved boys, stuck them in the Oklahoma wilderness, and watched as they turned into knife-wielding warmongers.

Except, as we discovered when the archives were finally opened in 2017, Sherif manipulated the whole thing dissuading friendships to "create a sense of frustration," trashing the boys' stuff and blaming the other side, almost coming to blows when a research assistant tried to stop him. The whole thing was halted when the kids discovered his notes on them, revealing it was an experiment. (Or, as we'd call it today, a reality show.)

Equally unethical was Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. When a group of students were divided into "guards" and "prisoners," for a week, the resulting brutality from the guards on their classmates shocked the world. Surely, people reasoned, here was proof of inherent human savagery.

Again, it wasn't until the 2010s that Zimbardo's deceit was discovered: He had handpicked the guards, coached them, and suggested their most sadistic methods. One "prisoner" who was taken out of the experiment after having what was widely reported as a breakdown later revealed he was playacting because he was bored, wanted to study, and Zimbardo wouldn't let him have his textbooks.

By the time we knew all this, the damage had been done. Zimbardo, who should have resigned from academia, became president of the American Psychological Association. He also helped provide the foundation for the "broken windows theory" via a dubious experiment in which he smashed his own car's window. That led to a wave of brutal policing across the U.S. in the 1990s, when cops went crazy writing up anyone they could find for minor infractions mostly minorities, as it turned out in the belief it drove down crime. A belief that later research confirmed was mistaken.

Thanks to several other flawed studies like Zimbardo's, U.S. prison reform efforts in the 1970s also ground to a halt. Instead of rehabilitating prisoners, we made their guards and their environments meaner. Bregman contrasts this with Norway, where even in maximum security prisons, guards and prisoners mingle at social events, and prisoners are given meaningful work and dignified rooms. It sounds crazy, it shouldn't work, and yet only 20 percent of prisoners in Norway are back inside two years after being released. In the U.S., it's 60 percent.

The evidence is so incontrovertible that even officials from deeply Republican North Dakota decided to modify their prison system after a trip to Norway in 2015. "I'm not a liberal, I'm just practical," said the director of the North Dakota Department of Corrections, Leann Bertsch. She'd broken down in tears during the trip, her entire world view in tatters. "How did we think it was OK to put human beings in these settings?"

That's an excellent question. And the answer isn't as easy to frame as the tribal conflict between so-called bleeding heart liberals and tough-on-crime conservatives. Bregman points the finger at a lot of causes. In part, it's both sides' belief in the "tragedy of the commons," another psychological concept of selfishness that you guessed it isn't borne out by the actual research. (Its creator was, once again, a racist white male in the 1960s.)

Historically, Bregman says, it's a hangover from when we switched from being hunter-gatherers to farmers, when authoritarians got people to work the fields by drilling their inherent worthlessness into them. ("No pain, no grain," Bregman says.) It's also the legacy of a dispute between 17th century philosophers (Thomas Hobbes said mankind's life was naturally "nasty, brutish and short" and therefore needed a strong government; his pro-primitive nemesis Jean-Jacques Rousseau couldn't have disagreed more).

In part, we've messed up our studies of ancient primitive cultures, mistakenly believing them to be more violent than they were. For example, everything you learned about the downfall of Easter Island's civilization may be wrong. There may have been no war between its inhabitants, as Jared Diamond claimed in his bestseller Collapse. A couple of 2016 studies showed, firstly, that only two out of 469 skulls found on the island showed any signs of trauma. Secondly, their stone tools were deliberately blunted, not weapons as Diamond claimed. The rumors of an internal war turns out to be based on a single story told to a visiting researcher in 1914.

This, ultimately, is the problem: We keep taking the wrong stories too seriously, whether they're Lord of the Flies or Penny Dreadful. And that's why the pandemic is such a powerful moment, because it's one of the best chances we've ever seen to change the narrative.

"Disasters bring out the best in us," Bregman writes. "It's like they flip a collective reset switch and we revert to our better selves."

See more here:

Humans are basically good. This incredible new book proves it. - Mashable

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50 years ago Clarice Lispector already pointed out how difficult it was to unveil Brasilia: "the two architects did not think of building beautiful, it would be easy; they raised their amazement, and left the amazement unexplained". This year the capital turned 60, and still remains intriguing for scholars, students, and anyone who allows themselves to explore it better. In order to understand the daily life that exists there, we invited six professionals- in the field of architecture and urbanism - who live in the city, to share their visions with us and bring a few more layers that help to build an interpretation of utopia and reality that Braslia currently represents.

Below, we've compiled excerpts by Daniel Mangabeira, founding partner of Bloco Arquitetos, Gabriela Cascelli Farinasso and Luiza Dias Coelho, alumni of UnB and co-founders of the collective Arquitetas inVisveis (inVisible Architects), Maribel Aliaga Fuentes, professor and researcher at FAU-UnB , and Luiz Eduardo Sarmento, architect and urban planner at IPHAN and Senior Adviser at IAB-DF, all accompanied by photographs of the Brazilian capital by Joana Frana.

+ 35

by Daniel Mangabeira - Bloco Arquitetos

Braslia and quarantine are antagonistic. This city was not invented for cloistered residents. Obviously no cities were designed for this, but the Plano Piloto de Braslia has particularities that make seclusion the antithesis of what it was meant to be. Lucio Costa's French-affiliated city was born to be free, open, and democratic utopia. The celebration of this imagined and real city, therefore, is essential in times of confinement.

The experimental plan cannot be an example to be followed, but what is celebrated here is precisely what is missing in many Brazilian cities: generous and democratic public spaces. Although many of these lawless green voids are not designed to be useful, they are essential for the well-being of their users. Brasilia, in this sense, has great potential to help Brazilians understand what is missing in their cities when everyone starts to leave their enclosures. Norma Evenson wrote an article in which she stated that "there is nothing in the design of Braslia that indicates a desire to harmonize man's works with those of nature". Despite agreeing with this statement and knowing that the cerrado is not present in its voids - which is a pity - nonetheless, the wide green spaces in our city need to boost the value of non-occupation in other cities. What is the importance of a park for health? Why have trees on the street? Why is seeing the horizon important in a city? What is the relevance of emptiness within an urban center? Simple questions can be easily answered by those who live here. Brazilian cities need a little more of Brasilia now more than ever.

The monumental axis presents the most celebrated works of the Plano Piloto, but it is the road axis, on the south and north wings, that best celebrate the great success of Lucio Costa. The city is full of bakeries, bars, corner stores, meetings, markets, churches, fruit shops, gym, florists, schools, and everything we need to live that is monumentally human. This is the city that must be celebrated!

The tribute to the city's 60th anniversary will take place on the superblocks and not on the terraces. It will occur in the utilitarian city, not in the representative one. It will happen where mankind feels protected, and not where he sees himself represented. It will occur for those who live and make their lives in the city and not for those who are passing through for four years. We are in quarantine, so there will be no celebration, but there will certainly be a just and necessary tribute to the one who originally was made to be an experiment, but became a standard. Braslia exists, it is beautiful, imperfect and I am grateful to live in it.

by Gabriela Cascelli Farinasso e Luiza Dias Coelho - Arquitetas inVisveis

Behind every great man is a great woman. A saying as common as it is ancient, has for years synthesized the relationship between architects-, and with Braslia, it would be no different. The process of creating the new Capital has forever cemented the names of Brazilian men as the history of architecture and urbanism. But beside them were women, who in the late 1950s were breaking barriers and writing part of a little-known story. Today, 60 years after its inauguration, it is time for Braslia to recognize the women who helped to build the city, as well as to learn about how women can contribute to the transformation of spaces with more security, accessibility, sustainability and that favor positive social interactions.

Braslia was the dream fueled by the desire to show that we could do something ahead of our time. It was this spirit that enabled the construction of the city in such a short time frame, and the creativity of the first architects and planners who lent a hand for the creation and development of projects for the construction of the new city. Even the competition in Brasilia played an important role in enabling female professional performance.

Despite the low representation, there were women participating in one of the main architecture and urbanism competitions in Brazilian history. Although the reality of the cerrado was so harsh, many women came to the capital with their families to work and study at the University of Braslia. The accomplishments of women there are well documented through membership lists from the Institute of Architects of Brazil - IAB, and lists of commemorative meetings, which indicate that around 30 architects were in the capital in the 1960s and 70s- the period of greatest momentum in local construction.

Among the women involved in the city's inception was Mayumi Watanabe Souza Lima. Mayumi was born in Tokyo, and became Brazilian in 1956. In the same year, she enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of So Paulo, completing her degree in 1960. She came to Braslia in the early 1960s with Srgio Souza Lima, her partner and husband, living the collective dream of creating a new University where she developed a master's dissertation, titled "Aspects of Urban Housing", where she faced the challenge of transforming a theoretical discussion of housing into the construction of the city, which at the time was a becoming a design competition. The housing project is now realized in the blocks of the So Miguel Neighborhood Unit.

Her husband designed a series of public school projects for the country, and also was involved in the construction of some of them. In more than thirty years of work with educators, administrators of basic education, daycare centers, and children outside and inside institutions, he discussed and analyzed issues related to spaces for children in our society. Following this line of work, he published two books: Educational Spaces, use and construction (Braslia, MEC / CEDATE, 1986) and A Cidade ea Criana (So Paulo, Nobel, 1989).

Mayumi developed other interests based on his academic experience. She was a professor at the Faculties of Architecture and Urbanism at UnB, in Braslia, Santos, So Jos dos Campos and the So Carlos School of Engineering. It was affiliated with the Communist Party and had an important role in the discussion about the professional performance of architects from the criticism of the capitalist mode of production. He put his students in contact with the favelas in the first year of study, seeking to politicize the students, as he believed in architecture combined with social changes.

The curiosity that made us revisit the history of architecture in search of female names, presented us with Mayumi Souza Lima and the So Miguel Neighborhood Unit. She is an architect who inspires us with her professional career, personal engagement, and works that are built in the present day.

It took more than 50 years to recognize Mayumi's role in the design of this city, which is why we wish that on this particular anniversary, Brasilia shines a light on the women who helped shape this capital.

by Maribel Aliaga Fuentes - Professor at the Department of Design, Expression and Representation at FAU-UnB

Today I decided to venture into a new world outside the Superquadras circuit.Early in the morning I left the Setor Hoteleiro Sul near Parque da Cidade towards Eixinho, crossed the W3 and went down the internal street of the southern commercial sector towards the municipalities sector.I saw people, commerce and traders.Shoes, clothes, snack bars.People!The marquee of the buildings shaded the path.The streets, corridors of wind.I went down the gallery of the states and crossed the Eixo through an underground passage.To end the adventure as it should, I took a little zebra back to Asa Norte.It was such an urban experience, that for a brief moment I was happy.

by Luiz Eduardo Sarmento - architect and urban planner at IPHAN and Senior Adviser at IAB-DF.

"(...) I felt this movement, this intense life of the true Brasilians (...). This is all very different from what I had imagined for this urban center (...). Those Brazilians took care of it who built the city and are legitimately there. In fact, the dream was less than the reality ".-Lcio Costa

Braslia is perhaps one of the most exceptional cases of urban growth that we know of.

The capital city is the result of a national public competition, and was designed for approximately 500,000 people. Now, it is the third-largest metropolis in the country, according to IBGE data. Literally, the dream was less than reality, as Lcio Costa said, when he visited the platform of the Rodoviria do Plano Piloto in 1984.

Just as Costa did when visiting the city that was born from his ideologies, it is important that we take a more careful look at how the city operates today. Much is debated about the dreamed Brasilia, but we need to understand the but we still need to understand how the metropolis has grown over the years.

By understanding that Braslia today is much more than what Braslia was planned to be, we will be able to connect the city dwellers of today to those who came to build the capital city and realize the modernist dream many years ago.

Braslia's sixty-year history is very challenging because it is the Brazilian metropolis that emerged from a modernist nucleus, but it also currently presents significant problems that we need to face to provide the solutions that a city that was born under the aegis of demands for urban innovations.

The genetics of the modern city is present in the settlements that have emerged around the Plano Piloto, which underscores the contrast between the urban center and the clear urban sprawl, with a greater span than what is usually observed in other Brazilian metropolises. The evolution of the peripheries is a continuation of the road logic of the Plano Piloto, which is an aggravating factor in the Administrative Regions whose population has a lower income and that infrastructure consumes a considerable part of its resources. In informal settlements, it is common to have shacks whose structure is extremely precarious, but which reserves a space to house its main asset: a car.

The peculiarity of our urban fabric presents daily difficulties, such as transportation problems and the continuous expulsion of the poorest people to the edges of the metropolis, as well as symbolic, cultural, and social problems, such as the small interaction between the various social classes in the city center. Is it all Brasilia if everything is so far away?

One factor that explains this socio-spatial segregation is the distance between the center of Braslia and some administrative regions. Ceilndia, whose name comes from the Invasion Eradication Center, was a settlement promoted by the state to resettle the residents who lived in the camps in the Plano Piloto Region. About 50 years later, Ceilndia became home to old areas of agricultural production and the Sol Nascente community, which was once considered the largest slum in Latin America. Sol Nascente is an exemplary case of these distances, with the more than 30 km separating the Eixo Monumental do Plano and the community.

This enormous distance is so striking for the residents that it was mocked by the filmmaker Adirley Queirs in the film White Out, Black I, in which the population of Ceilndia needed to present a passport to enter into the urban zone of Braslia.

It is essential that the innovative and hopeful spirit that guided the New Capital project be summarized and pushed forward, especially with the adversity our nation currently faces.

We have a big responsibility to (re)design the future of the city's mobility and inequality problems that demand creative actions. Through this, Braslia can return as a standard of urban management, and become a city that can face its mobility problems, precarious housing, lack of urban infrastructure, and absence of afforestation and urban equipment. The challenges are great and our creative and execution capacity needs to be developed on the same scale.

If reality is bigger than a dream, we need to dream even bigger. It is our historical duty.

______ ALIAGA FUENTES, Maribel ; COELHO, Luza Dias; TABOSA, Mayara. Aspects of Urban Housing: A critical look from Mayumi Souza Lima to the construction of Braslia .. In: 9 PROJETAR, 2019, Curitiba. Anais 9 PROJETAR 2019. Curitiba, 2019. v. 2.

COSTA, Lcio.Ingredients of the Urban Conception of Braslia, 1995. In: XAVIER, Alberto;KATINSKY, Julio (Org.).Braslia: Critical Anthology.So Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2012. Chap. 5. p.144-146

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From Utopia To Reality: Braslia's 60th Anniversary - ArchDaily

Montgomery hip hop artist I Sixty Five sings his song "Picture Perfect" at The Sanctuary. Montgomery Advertiser

There's new music flowing from from I Sixty Five, and we're not talking about the interstate.

"When I write music, I just let it come to me," said I Sixty Five, aka Derrick McCorkle, a Montgomery hip hopartist who is a graduate of Alabama State University. "You can't rush it."

Though he's had to cancel a few shows due to the coronavirus pandemic, I Sixty Five has a couple of releases ahead for this summer, and an album in the works that could be done by August.

"I'm releasing it no later than January of next year," I Sixty Five said.

That's coming out through Utopia Entertainment, a label for which he is both an artist and a co-CEO.

"The labels that I deal with, they don't look for songs. They look for hit records," I Sixty Five said. "That's what I try to bring to the table."

I Sixty Five performs during a recent Montgomery Area Musicians Association artist event at The Sanctuary.(Photo: Shannon Heupel/Advertiser)

Two years ago, he visited the Montgomery Advertiser for an earlier version of the MAMA event, joined by singer LaGuardia Wright. Back then, they were preparing to sing at GumpFest 2018.

Things have taken off a bit since then.

"I have two hot releases out. Both of them are overseas in Denmark playingon the radio," I Sixty Five said. "I have overall 50,000 streams on 'Picture Perfect.'"

"Picture Perfect" is his 2019 song, which he performed recently at The Sanctuary for an artist event by the Montgomery Area Musicians Association.

But I Sixty Five isn't just about his own music. He sees himself as a mentor to young artists, and want to help promote them. If he can help, he wants to.

I Sixty Five is promoting his single "Picture Perfect," and has new music on the way.(Photo: Shannon Heupel/Advertiser)

"If you're trying to do something, learn the business aspect of it," he said. "If you want to bring something to the table, if you bring a hit record they can't deny you."

One bit of advice he offers is to tone it down a little. "We're trying to deliver a unity speech to the world, and showing them that hip hop is back," I Sixty Five said.

Outside of music, I Sixty Five said family life is good.

"I'm just trying to maintain," he said. "Keep above water. Keep grinding and staying focused. Never let any negativity get to me. I always try to move in a positive light. If you continue to move in a positive light, positive things will always happen for you."

As soon as he virus threat is past, I Sixty Five said he'd be back on the road to places like Rochester, New York and Texas.

"I'm going to have to reschedule everything, but hopefully we'll make it through this plague, and all my people and everybody on this earth will be saved," he said.

Follow him on Facebook at @lethal205.

Contact Montgomery Advertiser reporter Shannon Heupel at sheupel@gannett.com.

Read or Share this story: https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/entertainment/2020/05/10/sixty-five-living-and-singing-picture-perfect-world/3106636001/

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I Sixty Five is living and singing in a 'Picture Perfect' world - Montgomery Advertiser

I am less than pleased with the sponsored advertising-to-content ratio on Instagram. And yet that social media platform is still the best for looking at art and witnessing the creative process of an artist. (And I use the word artist loosely: Im an avid consumer of memes.) I once described Instagram to a fellow critic as the show-me-the-money platform, and she agreed: substance (or lack thereof) is revealed pretty quickly, since youre generally looking at one image at a time with minimal captioning. I overhaul my feed frequently, unfollowing accounts that fail to amuse, inspire or inform. Here are five Instagram accounts I consistently view; New York Times critics will be posting their own picks every week.

OlaRonke Akinmowos project is a mobile, pop-up library that showcases literature written by black women. It could be described as a social practice artwork, but also a participatory one: to borrow a book, you must give a book. I have learned about overlooked writers here, but also about Regina Anderson Andrews, who headed a library in Harlem and was friendly with Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. Ms. Akinmowo, who lives in Brooklyn, has taken the library to the NY Art Book Fair. During the quarantine shes focused on authors like Octavia Butler, the science fiction writer who predicted some of the dystopias were now experiencing. Ms. Akinmowo also posts some of her own collages, like one devoted to Harriet Tubman, which combine black and white found images with bright, almost psychedelic flourishes.

How to live? Andrea Zittels Instagram profile asks. Great question. Ms. Zittel offers a model in A-Z West, her Institute of Investigative Living on 70 acres in Joshua Tree, Calif., that serves as a self-actualized art-in-the-desert fantasy. You could name many precedents for Ms. Zittels project: Drop City in Colorado, with its dome architecture inspired by Buckminster Fuller; Arcosanti in Arizona; or Georgia OKeeffe and Agnes Martins art studios in the American Southwest. Ms. Zittels version of semi-off-the-grid, live-work-create utopia can be experienced close-hand(ish) on Instagram. Modernist-influenced buildings, furniture, weavings and clothing function here not just as daily trappings but also as an ongoing investigation into human nature and the social construction of needs. Ms. Zittel has been working on these concepts for more than 20 years. The rest of us are getting a crash course.

I know a lot about art, the Canadian painter and writer Brad Phillips brags on his Instagram profile. OK, so whatve you got, smart guy? First of all, Mr. Phillips works best with words, arranged into minimal acerbic poems on his account @brad_phillips. (One reads America is my favourite movie.) The other account, @brad_phillips_group_show, is an agreeable reminder that artists often make the best curators. Here you can see the work of Cristine Brache (Mr. Phillipss wife), who also twists words into artworks, or Lon Spilliaert (1881-1946), an outr Belgian Symbolist painter who worked as an illustrator for Edgar Allan Poes publisher and shared a similar creepy, horror-tinged approach. Like those of most artist-curators, Mr. Phillipss picks are highly idiosyncratic and reflect his own works proclivities. But unlike many artists who think they can school you on art, Mr. Phillips actually delivers.

David Adjaye is the world-renowned architect who led the consortium that designed the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. More than practically any other account I follow, his Instagram visual sketchbook allows you to see inside the mind of a great designer. You get to travel the world like an international starchitect, and view the built environment from a technical angle. Mr. Adjaye, of Ghanaian descent, marvels over modernist buildings and palm-roofed structures in Ghana. He also analyzes high modernist architecture, and structures made by non-humans, like a termite tower in Africa constructed to avoid floods. Humans, Mr. Adjaye informs us, use these astonishing towers as a marker of where to construct their own dwellings. Talk about organic architecture, one commenter marveled.

Funny is good at this moment. David Shrigley, a British artist who creates posters, books, cartoons, tattoos and other stuff, as his website describes it, long ago mastered the art-as-comedy angle. His crudely drawn illustrations are wry, smart, sometimes angry, sometimes self-effacing but almost always absurd. They parallel a generation of dry, weird comedy from Britain, including Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Izzard or Little Britain (Matt Lucas and David Walliams). His creations work equally well on the gallery wall, hung salon-style at Anton Kern in New York, or on Instagram, where the images are stripped down, even more existential and sometimes naughtier. One recent drawing declares It Wont Be Like This Forever. Styled as a tabloid newspaper cover, this message registers as reassuring, but with a hint of menace.

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Five Artists to Follow on Instagram Now - The New York Times

While in college, my wife and I had the privilege of attending one of the first Earth Day celebrations. It started us on a lifelong journey of environmental activism. As a result, we have supported alternative energy sources, composting, tree planting, vegetarianism, etc.

While all these are worthwhile, none of these endeavors comes close to tackling the one subject the COVID-19 pandemic has made self-evident.

In less than a month, the earth has seen an unprecedented reduction in air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution, traffic congestion, crime and other global maladies. The cause-fewer people working, playing and traveling. To save the environment, we need to flatten the curve, the human curve.

This idea is not new. Just look at the front-page article in the April 17, 1970, Life magazine issue (1st Earth Day week) titled Crusade Against Too Many People. When the article was written, the world population was 3.7 billion. It had taken 5,970 years to reach that milestone, and now only 50 years to add the next 4 billion, and we continue to add one billion every 12 years. The fact is there is nothing the Paris Accord or any other national or local environmental movement can do to Save the Planet until we address population growth.

This letter is about the future, not the past. I am not suggesting anyone present on Earth today should not be here. Nor am I implying any family with more than two children was irresponsible.

This is about what we do tomorrow. What can we do to flatten the human curve? If we dedicated even half the time, energy and money that goes into hundreds of environmental causes to population control, we could find a solution.

We have seen a brief glimpse of what could be this last month. While it is too late for our children to experience this utopia, there still is time for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Scott Harvey

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Time is running out to flatten human curve - Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber

By Jordan Valinsky, CNN Business

The coronavirus pandemic has been, to say the least, grim for business. Widespread layoffs and furloughs have prompted about 21% of the US labor force to file for unemployment benefits since mid-March, and economists say the United States is likely already in a recession. And even as states begin to reopen, many of the jobs that have been lost may never come back.

But during this upheaval, some companies been thriving because of dramatic shifts in consumer behavior.

Restaurants, bars, offices and gyms are largely empty as millions of Americans stay home to halt the spread of the coronavirus. That's created new opportunities for several companies.

Popular video games like first-person shooters, football and cute animals have been a boon for the top gaming companies.

Activision Blizzard said "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare," which came out in September, has sold more copies than any other "Call of Duty" title at this point after its release. Sales were $1.52 billion in the first quarter, up 21% compared with last year's $1.26 billion.

For Electronic Arts, fourth-quarter revenue grew 12% compared with last year. It was buoyed by FIFA, Madden NFL, The Sims 4. Like Activision, it also benefited from people staying at home and looking for a distraction.

Nintendo said Thursday its annual profit surged 41%, its highest in nine years. And profit in the first three months of 2020 more than tripled compared with the previous quarter.

Sales this spring were driven by the breakout success of "Animal Crossing: New Horizons," a game set on an island utopia. The company sold more than 13 million units of the game in its first six weeks. The Nintendo Switch console also continues to be hard to find, with the company selling more than 21 million units during the last fiscal year.

People can't stop sanitizing, bleaching and cleaning every nook and cranny of their dwellings. That's benefiting Clorox and Reckitt Benckiser, the makers of the world's top cleaning products.

Clorox said last week its overall sales jumped 15% for the first quarter. Sales of Clorox's cleaning segment, which includes its wipes and beaches, jumped 32%. There was also "increased consumer demand" for cat litter and grilling necessities, which fueled a 2% sales increase in its household segment.

Reckitt Benckiser, the British company that makes Lysol and Dettol, is also seeing record sales. First-quarter sales rose 13.5% because of "strong consumer demand" for disinfectants. (The company has also found itself in the spotlight for more than just strong demand for its products.)

In March and April, the sales of aerosol disinfectants jumped 230.5% and multipurpose cleaners 109.1% from this time last year, according to research firm Nielsen.

Peloton makes in-home workout products, including bikes and treadmills. Unsurprisingly, it reported Wednesday a blowout quarter: Revenue grew 66% and membership for its app rose 30%. The company, which has a loyal following, also raised its full-year forecast because it doesn't expect demand to decline anytime soon.

The need for household necessities and food has benefited some of the country's largest grocers, which remained open as essential businesses.

Publix recently said that sales for the first three months of the year jumped 10% to $1 billion. Sales at stores open at least a year grew 14.4%.

Kroger also benefited from the pandemic. The grocery store recently said sales at stores open at least a year surged 30% in March. Its best-selling items were boxed meals and cleaning and paper products. As a result, Kroger said it expects its first-quarter results to be better than expected.

Beyond Meat's revenue more than doubled in the first quarter, the company reported Tuesday. In the first three months of the year, sales reached $97.1 million, up 141% from $40.2 million in the same period last year.

The results "exceeded our expectations," said CEO Ethan Brown. In the United States, retail sales grew 157% compared with the same period last year. The plant-based meat company is in a strong position as it moves into the Chinese market and as the US faces a national meat shortage.

3M said the virus spurred "strong growth" for its personal safety products, including gowns and the N95 respirator masks needed by medical professionals. First-quarter revenue grew nearly 3% to $8.08 billion. That was bolstered by a 21% growth in its health-care segment and 4.6% in consumer goods, like Scotch-Brite sponges

With much of the country working from home, it leaves a lot of time to think about room refresh.

Wayfair's sales for its most recent quarter increased 20% compared with the same period last year. The online retailer said it's seeing " strong acceleration in new and repeat customer orders," with the number of orders growing 21% to 9.9 million.

Rival Overstock also said that its April retail sales were up 120% compared to the same month last year, with growth occurring in its "key home furnishings categories."

For people who can work remotely, Slack and Zoom have become ubiquitous communication tools.

Slack Technologies said it added 9,000 new paid customers, an increase 80% compared to the previous quarter, between February 1 and March 25. Not only are they adding more people, users are becoming chattier: "The number of messages sent per user per day increased by an average of 20% globally," Slack said in a press release.

Zoom, a video conferencing tool, has clearly been the biggest brand to break out. The company hosts 300 million meeting participants a day, according to CEO Eric Yuan. Zoom previously said it crossed 200 million daily meeting participants in March. Its stock is up 120% for the year.

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Business is booming for these 14 companies during the coronavirus pandemic - WICZ