Daily Archives: March 26, 2021

When Montreal documentarian Peter Wintonick passed away in 2013, he left an impressive legacy in the world of documentary filmmaking behind him. More than just a documentary director, Wintonick was a massive champion and cheerleader of the documentary scene and he left one particularly cherished project unfinished: a documentary about the concept of utopia that he had been working on for years. When his daughter Mira Burt-Wintonick found the tapes her father had recorded, she took it upon herself to finish the film her father had started.

Wintopia is not that film. Not really.

Though the film is built around the footage in question, Wintopia soon becomes an infinitely more personal film in which Burt-Wintonick explores her relationship with her father through the images of him she finds but also the images of them together. One gets the idea from the film that Wintonick was constantly pointing a camera at the world around him and that untold amounts of home-movie footage existed from which to build the film. As it turns out, Wintonick may have shot a lot of footage in his career, but not much of it at home.

There actually arent that many home movies, says Burt-Wintonick. There are maybe four or five tapes, and theyre from when Im 5, when Im 11, and then from when Im older and we made a film together. Theres nothing in between those ages, which is kind of funny. But I was really happy to see that, as a record of who I was at those different ages. But the surprising thing and the kind of sad thing, really is seeing the footage where Im 5 or 6 and hes filming me. I seem really comfortable in front of the camera, and Im being very silly and joking around with him. I seem like a really happy, carefree kind of kid. When Im a preteen, I seem more annoyed still kind of having fun, but also kind of annoyed.

But watching the footage where Im 18 makes me so uncomfortable, because I can sense how uncomfortable I was as a teenager, she continues. Even though its probably very natural that as you become older, you become more self-conscious, it was just kind of sad to see that proof that I used to be this carefree, comfortable in her own skin kind of kid.

Having that record is so much more than having a photo. Video is such a strange medium that captures someones essence so fully. Their voice, their laugh, their mannerisms, their way of being its really kind of fascinating to have that. Even though I was clearly uncomfortable on camera as I got older, now Im really glad I have those records of these moments between me and my dad, especially the ones where Im younger and Im joking around with him. It just kind of captures this dynamic between us that I have memories of but its really special to have a concrete example of it.

Suffice to say that its a little daunting to interview someone who has made a film that already answers so many questions about itself. Most regular questions fly out the window because theyre not only answered in the film, they form the overall basis of the whole thing. Its a startlingly honest film not just in how it draws deeply and intimately from the directors life, but also in how blankly it states that it may not come to any pithy conclusion. It becomes clear that while Wintonick seems like a great father in a lot of the footage, his relationship with his daughter was not exactly the way he seems to depict it in footage where Mira isnt present. Wintopia becomes an emotional exercise in biographical archeology, one where the image of Wintonick inevitably becomes coloured by the untold hours his daughter has spent poring over his footage.

Its a selective archive, Burt-Wintonick explains. Its not a complete portrait. Its kind of the way you look at a photo of something that you remember and stop remembering the event and start remembering the photo of it. I think even though he wasnt filming everything and its not a full picture of him, now that hes gone, it feels like such an important connection to him. Just from talking to other people who have lost family members: you forget the sound of their voice, the sound of their laugh, the details about them become kind of blurry. Memories will evolve and erode anyway. I dont know if its eroding more than a normal grieving process. But its also interesting because I wasnt there for most of the footage in the film if he wasnt filming it, I wouldnt have seen those moments. I always think about how, normally, when someone dies, you dont get any new moments with them. Thats it. You only have memories that you can revisit. Maybe you can hear new stories about them from people, but with this I had like 200 hours of moments with him where he was so alive, so present. It was kind of a weird, confusing way to grieve, I think.

As personal as Wintopia is, one cant help but consider that film is a collaborative medium even if the movie youre making is mostly made up of archival footage. Its a particular challenge to grieve someone through countless hours of footage of them; its another challenge to do that with others collaborating as well.

I was pretty protective of the film, says Burt-Wintonick. We applied for funding early on but didnt really end up getting any early on in the process, and that ended up being really great. I didnt really want any outside expectations of the film like a deadline for a funder or a broadcaster. It would have been too much pressure to make something that some other outsider wanted it to be. So I was only really working with a very small team of people who were very open to letting me do what I wanted to do and letting me take the time I needed to take. The first few months, I was working with a woman that I know, who knew my dad also she had edited pilgrIMAGE, the film I had made with my dad so that was really helpful at first. There was a point where I really needed to work on it alone because I was trying to figure out what I was trying to say with the film, and I couldnt have anyone elses outside perspective influencing that.

So I spent a few years just working on it by myself, she continues. I would occasionally show people what I was working on. And then in the last stage, the last year of the film, that became too isolated. It was a dark window and I was just spending all day in a windowless editing room, looking at footage of my dead dad. (laughs) It was a bit depressing, so I brought in another editor who didnt know my dad. I always wanted to make the film something that was moving whether you knew my dad or not. Working with her was really helpful because it helped me figure out if he was coming across and what sense she was getting of him from the footage for someone who had never met him. But it was mostly about inviting a few key people into the process and they were all really respectful.

One of the most interesting things was working with the composer, she explains. Most of the film is just about these emotional shifts that Im going through in the meta-process of making the film: me trying to understand my dad or get to know my dad better and grieving him. So just communicating to the composer the subtle nuances of exactly what kind of music would represent exactly my grief at a specific moment was really interesting. It had to be so precise, and every time he would give me a draft of a song that was a bit too sad or a bit too dark. My grief is such a layered and complicated emotion, because it has love and sadness and it has all of these different things in it. It was a lot of finessing the language around emotion to try to communicate to him what I wanted it to sound like. Ultimately, he nailed it and its a really beautiful score, but I hadnt anticipated how challenging it would be to communicate how I was feeling in different stages in the dark of the film.

Some viewers heading into Wintopia might expect the film to be a more straightforward biographical documentary about a major figure in Canadian documentary history. I asked Burt-Wintonick if there was ever any concern about using the film to crystalize her fathers oeuvre and his standing in the film community.

I felt a lot of pressure to do him justice, in a way, she says. I was watching a lot of documentaries for inspiration that other people have made about their fathers. It was kind of hard to find movies about their fathers who are also filmmakers. I would watch My Architect, which is a son making a film about his architect father, but thats as if he had to build a building to honour his father. Using this medium that my father was so well-known and respected for using to honour his memory, that was a very specific pressure! (laughs) Its my first real film and Im mostly a radio documentary maker. I think he was respected and known in his lifetime, but there was also a lot of his work that went unseen and unacknowledged.

His behind-the-scenes work, his mentoring, just how much he influenced peoples films and their careers I really wanted to showcase that in the film. Even though he didnt direct that many films he directed maybe a handful of films he had his hands in helping so many people in the documentary community. I wanted to showcase that and showcase his optimism! That was the tension that I was really wrestling with in the film. I was very cynical, I think, about the world and about utopia, whereas he was really optimistic and hopeful about the fact that documentaries could really change things and make things better. Especially this year, where weve all been struggling, giving people a chance to spend time with this optimism that he had was a really meaningful thing. I know for me it was really inspiring to spend time with that energy that he had for trying to make things better.

Wintopia opens in Montreal theatres on Friday, March 26. Mira Burt-Wintonick will be participating in two Q&A sessions following the screening of the film: today, March 26 (Cinma du Muse, 6:30 p.m.) and on March 29 (Cinmathque qubcoise, 5:15 p.m.). Watch the trailer here:

For more film coverage, please visit our Film & TVsection.

Excerpt from:

Montreal filmmaker Peter Wintonick is the subject of a very personal new film - Cult MTL

Chag Pesach sameach; gut yontif! These are among the traditional greetings for Passover, which starts at sundown this Saturday, March 27. Observant Jews will have cleaned the house of leavened foods and are preparing for the seder, a feast that includes ceremonial foods to commemorate the holiday: four cups of wine, an egg, matzah, bitter herbs, sweet charoset, and vegetables dipped in salt water.

The meal is not just a meal. It is a ritualized commemoration, done in an order, with prayer and storytelling ushered in by the question, Why is this night different from all other nights? Reading from the Haggadah tells the story of Abrahams covenant with God, the hardships of the Israelites, the exodus from Egypt, and the liberation of the Israelites from slavery. Participants recall the various plagues that God inflicted on the Egyptians, Pharaohs eventual acquiescence after the final and most horrific plague, and then Pharaohs pursuit of the fleeing people with the intent to kill them. God parts the waters of the sea to allow the people to pass, and then closes the waters, drowning Pharaohs troops. It is a cornerstone story to Jewish identity.

As to whether it happened: no archaeological evidence has been found that would corroborate a mass migration of almost three million Israelites, asserts Rabbi Burt Visotzky of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Nor does the account fit with the control Egypt had over vast territories during the late Bronze Age. Perhaps the story was passed from a different tribe or time. But the literal factuality is less important, I believe, than metaphor. To form an identity and a cohesive group, a people left behind all that had power over them: multiple gods and idols; a ruler who believed he was divine; access to comfort and plenty. They set off into the unknown and learned to trust their own God and their own utterly human and fallible leaders, and to do right.

The message of liberation from slavery is not unique to Judaism. Buddhist practice teaches of five hindrances and of entrapment from clinging to the five aggregates through ego grasping. One of the hindrances in particular, restlessness often referred to as monkey mind is compared to a kind of slavery. A person is liberated from it through learning, questioning, and close attention to cultivating mental peace, which is no easy feat given that the monkeys are intent on wrecking the house.

In Christianity, slavery appears in a different context, with a different message. Jesus proclaimed, for example, that no one can serve two masters (Matthew 6:24). Give up your slavery to money, Jesus was in effect saying, and become a slave to God. Paul called himself a servant of Jesus (Romans 1:1). At the time of early Christianity, slavery was a fact of the Roman Empire, and there is historical evidence that slaves were attracted to the movement in numbers only once it became an urban movement and upper class people often slave owners were attracted to it, writes professor of ancient history Dimitris Kyrtatas. Hence we see New Testament texts telling slaves to obey their masters with fear (Ephesians 6:5) as well as texts telling masters to treat their slaves better, to stop threatening them, because both slaveowner and slave have the same master in heaven (Ephesians 6:9). In Christianity, slavery was not something to be abolished; it was something to be done right. In fact, part of doing slavery right was for slaves to bear up under harsh treatment (beatings, rapes, and more) to emulate the suffering of Jesus (Peter 2:18). The ultimate goal was nothing here on earth: it was gaining the kingdom of God.

How we see and cultivate relationship with God/the Infinite, and how we see our own identity, determines how we live in this world. It determines what we value and what we view as moral and immoral. It determines our path and actions. It determines whether we celebrate our own liberation while recognizing and feeling regret for the suffering others experience through their own closed minds and closed hearts. It determines whether we strive toward our own liberation from the thoughts and desires and actions that ensnare us. It determines whether we accept suffering as par for the course, maybe even as something desirable, because we think that suffering has a greater good, like the miserable child in Ursula LeGuins famous story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, whose abject suffering enables all the citizens to live in a utopia. It determines whether we look the image of misery straight in the face, accept it, and return to all that makes us happy, or, like the few in Omelas who find the price too high, step out into the wilderness.

Nancy Thompson teaches comparative religion classes at Community College of Vermont and NVU-Online. She is author of Touching the Elephant: Values the Worlds Religions Share, and How They Can Transform Us.

Originally posted here:

Speaking of Religion | Nancy Thompson: The Journey Out of Slavery - Bennington Banner

That all cultural institutions in America have been taken over by the Left is beyond question. The media, the academy, Hollywoodall are now in its clutches. Conservatives still cling to talk radio, just as tightly as they do to their guns and bibles, as President Obama so dismissively put it, but that is about the only redoubt of the sense-making institutions they still have.

This was no accident. Those who have studied the genesis of this annexation know that it was a deliberate long march through the institutions. That campaign was conceived in the late 1960s by the violent German activist Rudi Dutschke, a disciple of the non-violent but much more dangerous Frankfurt School academic Herbert Marcuse, who approved of Dutschkes plan.

Today, this strategy manifests in the demand that institutions be woke. The term, borrowed from African-Americanslangfor being awake, has come to mean not just any type of liberalism, but one denoted by an obsequious obsession with social issues, denunciations of whiteness, the insistence that the freest and most prosperous society today is hopelessly racist and in need of deep change, and the intolerant resolve to censor any deviation from any of these concepts through cancel culture. Other American institutions are teetering on the verge of a woke takeover.

The Churchesas in the institutionalized Abrahamic faithshave long been bastions of conservatism by their very nature, but they are now in danger of seeing their commitment to true justice and the care for the poor and the strangerhijacked in the name of Social Justice, a concept that undermines religion. Social Justice abandons forgiveness and concentrates on punishmentespecially, but not only, through forced redistribution of resources according to membership in categories of the supposedly oppressed and marginalized. Forgetting past sins, which the Bible repeatedly tells us is what God routinely does, is verboten.

Professional sports, too, have turned into pageants for ritualistic woke denunciations of the country and its history, the white race, etc. Despite being one of the most integrated areas of American life, the NBA, the NFL, and now MLB constantly remind viewers in need of escapism that our country is uniquely, structurally, institutionally, and systemically racist, sexist, and homophobic.

Still, all these areasthe media, the academy, the churches, sportsare basically volitional. You dont have to watch Monday Night Football; you can cancel your newspaper subscription; if your rabbi is too much of a social justice warrior, you simply switch synagogues. Most of us, however, have to do one thing every weekday: go to work. Ever since Adam bit the apple and God told him that henceforth by the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, we have gotten up almost daily, put on overalls, a uniform, or a tie, and set forth to make a living.

Moreover, no American today is a self-contained individual who grows his own food, erects his own house, and makes his own clothes. Wemustbuy goods and services from businesses that produce them to satisfy our Maslowian basic needs. Therefore, no area of American life would be more devastating if it were to be taken over by the woke.

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The bad news is that business is the new battlefield: the woke have set their sights on corporate America. The good news is that the woke have so overplayed their hand that they have awakened a nascent but nonetheless furious resistance.

Those are the words of Stephen R. Soukup, who has written a delightful book on this battlefront,The Dictatorship of Woke Capital. Though it is a delight to read, full of facts and stimulating insights into the nature of our society and its religious and philosophical underpinnings, the book is also downright scary. The woke have indeed made great strides in their campaign to take over American businesses and the capital markets that fund them. Whether it is too late to mount a counterattack is not clear. But, as is the case when battling all ills, from disease to threats to our way of life, the first step is awareness of the problem and an understanding of its nature. This much Soukups compact book does in spades.

The book is divided into two sections: the first is a history of the evolution of the left, and the second documents the effects of this change on capital markets and businesses. Those who, like me, love the history of ideas, will be fascinated with the first part; those who like business and deconstructing how ideas impact actual human systems, will prefer the second. Those who want to prevent this from happening will need to understand both. Soukup explains near the middle of the book (and its so fundamental that he might have put it earlier) that woke capital is not a left-right issue, but a battle between those who would politicize all areas of life, and those who believe that there must be a line between the public and private spheres.

The Road to Wokeness

Soukup begins his history of ideas with a key observation: that the left has struggled to deal with the promise of earthly utopia made by its intellectual godfather, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the mid-18th century. Soukup here blames the Enlightenment, which he calls a three-century long attempt to construct a reason-based moral system to replace the Judeo-Christian framework. This project was doomed from the beginning by its refusal to recognize the premise upon which the Christian moral system was based: that man is flawed and neither reason nor science could fix him. The failure to deliver utopia led directly to nihilism and relativism. It exacerbated a crisis of belief and elevated the epistemological skepticism of Nietzsche to new heights. In response to socialisms disappointments, the left abandoned reason, abandoned reality and in the end rejected the Enlightenment itself in favor of relativism, writes Soukup.

It is important to observe that Soukup here makes a typical error, though one that does not undermine the books analysis, in tarring all of the Enlightenment with this charge of secularism and belief in the perfectibility of man. Had he said the Continental Enlightenment, he would have been on entirely safe ground. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, however, was not aimed at God, and in fact understood mans flawsfor example his penchant to look after his self-interests. It worked with these flaws, in fact, to produce the greatest good for the greatest number.

These two schools of the leftthe Enlightenment and the nihilistic reaction to its failuresare the origin of todays assault on business and capital markets. Our storythe story of the politicization of business and its funding sourceshas two starting points, writes Soukup. These two streams of contemporary liberalism are diametrically opposite each other, one positing the belief that the entire world and all of mans social behaviors can be analyzed through the lens of objective science and the other insisting that this scientifically observed surface reality represents the repression of mans true nature.

The first leads to the progressives of the late 19th and early 20th century, men like Herbert Croly, Richard Ely, and Woodrow Wilsonand to their cherished principle that an appointed, professionally trained bureaucracy of public administrators would be better at guiding the affairs of men than men themselves. This turns on its head the principle on which the Anglo-Scottish enlightenment was basedthat those systems that take account of mans self-interest are more benign and democratic and produce a greater good for a greater number than those based on coercion. Scientism, as Soukup explains, is based on the belief that man is too ignorant or selfish to be trusted.

The second stream of contemporary liberalism also spins on the key question of how man satisfies his needs. It taught that the senses misrepresented reality and were not to be trusted to relay the necessary information. This stream was born in Europe, with Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and the Parisian postmodernists. Marcuse thought, for example, that the satisfaction of needs got in the way of the revolution needed to overthrow the bourgeoisie: All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions.

What this second stream tells us, Soukup explains, is that if man was ever to be truly happy, ever able to be what nature intended him to be, he would first have to shed the false consciousness of capitalisms self-interested civilization.

These two trends, though contradictory, completely changed America. They blended with one another to create a new American weltanschauung, Soukup writes. Out of this cocktail come contradictory ideas such as the fetishization of scientific methods, the belief that American traditions blocked progress, and the belief that a trained permanent administrative state was superior to individual planning. Only one thing now stood in the way of the emergence of the New American Man, namely, the Old American Man who was pretty happy and didnt want to change.

This is invariably the problem with anything the left ever tries: Che Guevaras Nuevo Hombre, the New Man, just never shows up. Human nature, it turns out repeatedly, is unchangeable.

What kept Old American Man grounded, says Soukup, was his job. That Old American Mans ability to satisfy his needs kept him happy was something that drove Marcuse and his Frankfurt School cohort nuts. They find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment, Marcuse wrote dismissively in 1964. As Soukup described Old American Man, he had a job, likely a good job. He got up in the morning, went to work, came home, had dinner with his family, went to bed, and got up to repeat the whole cycle afresh, five days a week. And it was all made possible by American business. Soukup then gives us the famous Calvin Coolidge line about the business of America being business, but also adds what Coolidge then said about Americans: They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.

But American business was about to change, as the new love for the scientific method turned into the pursuit of scientific planning for businesses, including a new player, the stakeholderthe employees, the consumers, and the residents who may live near a plantwhose interests supposedly diverge from those of the shareholder. The eager supporters of stakeholder activism gavethe idea a superior moral forcethe narrative that what mattered was making profits was supplanted with the theory that stakeholders were ends in themselves. The stakeholder became superior to the shareholder and subject to the planners actions. And the superiority was not simply moral, but also in terms of the bottom line. Soukup quotes professors Thomas Donaldson and Lee Preston as writing in 1995 on the evolution of the stakeholder model that whatever their methodologies, these studies have tended to generate implications suggesting that adherence to stakeholder principles and practices achieves conventional corporate performance objectives as well or better than rival approaches. Stakeholder analysis became, Soukup tells us, a key concept in corporate strategic analysis and planning.

The problem here, writes Soukup, is an old one: these planning theorists applied purely systemic, scientific methods to phenomena that were not easily shoehorned into a scientific method, i.e., human affairs. In one of the books best lines, Soukup writes that the little human animal has a mind of his own and defies behaving in ways that fit the statistical model.

The supporters of stakeholder theoryand also of the obviously false idea that the interests of the stakeholder and the shareholder always divergeneeded a foil, and Soukup makes a good case that they set up a strawman opponent in the ideas of Milton Friedman, especiallya 1970 essay he wroteforThe New York Times Magazine.

In the essay, the monetarist economist, who would win a Nobel Prize six years later, explained that the corporate manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation and that his responsibility was to conduct the business in accordance to their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible. This somehow was traduced later as a cult of shareholder value which, to critics, meant short-termism and ignoring the interests of stakeholders, things Friedman didnt say and wouldnt have said because theyre nonsensical. None of this matters, writes Soukup. The only thing that matters is the myth of Friedman, the myth of the greedy shareholder and the rapacious capitalists, the myth that shareholders and stakeholders must, always and everywhere, be opposed to one another.

Tactics of a Culture War

To show how all of this is implemented to make business woke, Soukup offers a very useful rundown of how leftist activists (mis)use the process by which public (that is, publicly traded) corporations govern themselves. As he explains, the activists hijack the annual general meeting of shareholders, the proxy statements that companies file with the SEC to describe what will happen at the meeting, the shareholder proposals that shareholders make to corporate management, and the proxy advisory services that provide advice to large asset managers. The shareholder proposal is the primary tool of the corporate activists, writes Soukup. Activists often buy stock in a corporation in order to disrupt annual meetings through their proposals, and the asset managers and the proxy process help them in their endeavors.

Chapter 8, the chapter that gives a rundown of the players on the left that abuse this entire process, is 39 pages, by far the longest in the book, nearly one-fourth of it. In it, Soukup explains how large asset managers such as Black Rock and State Street have been taken over by CEOs (Larry Fink in the case of the first, Ronald OHanley in the second) that agree with the goals of the left. Because they must be passive investorsthat is, they must invest in indexed funds and cant sell a company simply because it does not conduct business with the values the asset manager CEO embracesthese CEOs feel they must become activists by pushing the companies they own ever leftward.

The same forces are at work with proxy advisory services, an industry that is basically a duopoly: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis account for 97 percent of the business. They are both pro-activism, and because they offer research services and then make recommendations to asset managers on how they should vote on shareholder proposals, they shape the perception of what investors interests should be before telling those investors how to vote those interests. Interestingly, among the players on the left that are tipping American business in that direction, Soukup names the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose career officials, he says, are often taught, trained and encouraged to apply their own values to the execution of their duties. (Full disclosure: this author was speechwriter to SEC Commissioner Christopher Cox in 2005-2006).

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The chapter on players on the right is, not coincidentally, the shortest in the book at eight pages long, and names outside players, like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Capital Research Center, indispensable organizations made up of hard-working Americans whom I know well, but who can hardly compete with Larry Fink, ISS, and the SEC.

Soukup, finally, also takes the countrys biggest and more important corporations, such as Apple and Disney, to task for trying to dictate moral matters to the American people when they dont like what voters decide, while at the same time coddling the dictators in Beijing because they dont want to lose out on 1.4 billion consumers.

Butand this is an important butthe dictatorship of woke capital is not inevitable. The books title is in fact taken from the title the editors of the journalFirst Thingsgave toa powerful speechthat Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton gave in June 2019. As liberal activists have lost control of the judiciary, they have turned to a different hub of power, Cotton said. In a democracy, we resolve our differences through democratic debate; what should never happen is a billion-dollar corporation trying to dictate these moral questions to us. America has awakened, finally, to what the woke are doing.

The way back will have to involve, unfortunately, using the courts. Much of what corporations do now is illegal, or should be, especially the new emphasis on subdividing along racial lines. One man who has done much work in this area is Chris Rufo, the director of the Center for Wealth and Poverty at the Discovery Institute. Rufo is gathering lawyers who will take up cases pro-bono, instilling fear in corporate hearts as they do so. Conservatives, too, can take a page from what the woke have done by using shareholder meetings to get their ideas across. Repeating these dubious practices of the left is distasteful, I will admit, but theMarquess of Queensberry Ruleshave not done conservatives a lot of good. And still, there are no guarantees that we will be able to depoliticize the corporation.

Are there flaws in this book? Some, like its overbroad characterization of the Enlightenment, and an insufficient discussion of how Human Resources departments are used to introduce Critical Race Theory in trainings thatamount to workplace harassment. But despite the occasional flaw, anyone who wants to understand how the woke are taking over our engines of growth would be well served to read Soukups manifesto.

Read the original here:

The Long March Through the Corporations - Heritage.org

Sing, o muses of the house of unceasing calamities!

Over the past three years, the drama behind the scenes at the Volksbhne in Berlin has surpassed any onstage. To say that the company has struggled would be putting it mildly: Depending on your point of view, the goings-on have increasingly resembled either a Greek tragedy or a satyr play.

Since 2017, dysfunction if not outright misfortune has dogged the venerable theater, which, like most in Berlin, is publicly run. It began when the minister of culture at the time fired the longtime artistic director Frank Castorf, who had led the house for 25 years and was known to rule with an iron fist. Berlin politicians passed the torch to Chris Dercon, a former director of the Tate Modern in London.

Berliners vehemently objected; the theater was briefly occupied by protesters. Feces were left in front of Dercons office. He quit only months in and was replaced by Klaus Drr, who was supposed to fill the vacancy until Ren Pollesch, one of Germanys leading dramatists and a veteran of Castorfs Volksbhne, took over as artistic director in 2021.

Last week, Drr abruptly resigned over sexual harassment allegations. Yet in the midst of a trying season for theaters worldwide, the Volksbhne has plowed ahead with an ambitious series of premieres inspired by ancient Greek drama and myth called Polis/Reset.

Although the cycle examines the relevance of its classical sources from the contemporary perspective of our worlds environmental and economic ills, the themes of unappeased gods, inescapable fates and tragic flaws seem oddly appropriate to the Volksbhne in light of its long-running bad luck.

Half of the eight productions planned for Polis/Reset are streaming on the Volksbhnes website. The shows are a diverse crop, but they all confront, to varying degrees, the existential issues facing humanity in the Anthropocene, the era in which humans are the dominant influence on the natural world.

Oedipus is the last king of the Anthropocene. This is our last winter. No one will escape this catastrophe, an actor intones early in Anthropos, Tyrant (Oedipus), an associative and sometimes pedantic stage essay by the writer-director Alexander Eisenach. Of the productions in the Volksbhnes series, this one, loosely based on Sophocles Theban Plays, most directly addresses environmental and economic devastation. In the middle of the performance, the marine biologist and climate expert Antje Boetius delivers a lecture on the Anthropocene that is informative, though dry.

I enjoyed some of the snappier slogans, such as Tragedy has become the language of science and Awaking the wrath of the gods is not a metaphor. Its very real. But it is possible to agree while still feeling that the show is rough around the edges.

Since it couldnt be shown in front of a live audience, the theater presented it as a livestream in 360 degrees: It was filmed with an omnidirectional camera, and viewers at home were able to control their perspective of the stage. The effect was kind of cool, although it seemed more like an interesting experiment with technology than a full-fledged production. My internet connection was too weak to view it as intended, in razor-sharp 4K.

Oedipus and the other rulers of the ancient world were judged by their ability to keep nature in balance and the deities happy. The director Lucia Bihler put an environmentally conscious spin on the divine wrath in Iphigenia. Sad and Horny in Taurerland, a reworking of Euripides two Iphigenia plays that is peppered with cheeky dialogue by the young Austrian writer Stefanie Sargnagel.

In the original, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and commander of the Greek fleet, sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis to gain favorable winds for sailing. Bihlers staging suggests environmental parallels: with the deities refusal to bestow natures fortune on humanity and with the notion of mortgaging the future that child sacrifice represents. In the evenings irreverent second half, Iphigenia (the young American-born actress Vanessa Loibl) is whisked away to the island of Tauris, where she works in a call center alongside a vulgar, funny gang of women who put up with verbal abuse from prank callers.

Iphigenias sacrifice is the preamble to The Oresteia, Aeschylus tragic trilogy about Agamemnons family. The young German director Pinar Karabulut has tackled Eugene ONeills 1931 play cycle, Mourning Becomes Electra, which transposes the action of The Oresteia from ancient Argos to New England shortly after the Civil War. Although there is much to admire in Karabuluts muscular production, it turns ONeills tragic cycle into a dreary and sordid soap opera.

On the plus side, the production looks great: sleek and stylish, with colorful costumes and props dominated by reds and blues. The atmosphere of surreal domestic horror is heightened by visual allusions to David Lynchs Blue Velvet and Roman Polanskis Rosemarys Baby. Those scenes are effectively unsettling, but they also seem irrelevant. Another element that doesnt quite work is a bracing monologue about race delivered by Malick Bauer, the only Black actor in the companys performing ensemble. Written by a dramaturge, Laura Dabelstein, the soliloquy is a very politically incorrect disquisition about prejudice in Germany, designed to shake the audience up, among other ways, with the repeated use of the N-word. Its a powerful text and Bauer delivers it with conviction, but it feels like a forced bid for timeliness.

ONeills play stands in a long line of works refashioned from Greek sources. One of the earliest is the Roman poet Ovids Metamorphoses, written in A.D. 8 and comprising roughly 250 myths. In this epic poem, women turn into trees and birds, drowned men become flowers, and gods transform themselves into animals.

Like Iphigenia, Claudia Bauers Metamorphoses [overcoming mankind] doesnt strain for relevance. Its an arresting production that combines surreal pantomime and song. For the majority of the performance, the actors wear blank masks. They become mythical characters through movement accompanied by live music (featuring the accordion virtuoso Valentin Butt) and voice-over narration delivered by actors whose faces are projected above the stage.

Metamorphoses proposes the transformative world of myth as an alternative to the Anthropocene. Even though there is much violence in Ovid, including cannibalism and rape, the production holds up the enchanted symbiosis between man and nature as a sort of utopia. Of the Volksbhnes digital streams, its the one with the most rhythm and verve, thanks to skillful filming and editing. Its also the only one Im dying to see live once theaters reopen.

Polis/Reset is a step toward making the Volksbhne a place for engag theater that tackles burning issues. Castorf, the former artistic director, didnt go in for topicality. Its hard to imagine him ever structuring a season around environmental themes.

The recently departed Drr deserves credit for replenishing the acting ensemble. This versatile group of 17 has been the most consistently exciting thing about the new Volksbhne, and many of them, including Bauer and Loibl, are prominent in Polis/Reset.

It remains to be seen whether Pollesch will be able to lift the curse placed on the house by the theatrical deities when he arrives in the fall. He faces formidable artistic and managerial challenges. I pray that Pollesch, who, like Castorf, favors intense theatrical partnerships with a small group of collaborators, doesnt send the acting ensemble packing when he takes over. That would be a real tragedy.

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Theater Review: Polis/Reset at the Volksbhne in Berlin - The New York Times

The City as a Data Field: Graz Museum shows us what the future might be like

A new exhibition in Graz Museum

On 26 March, Graz Museum presented the exhibition The City as a Data Field - How we want to live in the future at a press conference. In eleven rooms, the museum gives the visitors an opportunity to see how the city will change in the future within our own lifetimes.

The exhibition's narrative is based on images suggested by Vilm Flusser, a philosopher of science, and his plea for "designing fate" and "venturing utopia" as playful testing of alternate possibilities for a "decent" existence in response to the crisis.

In each room, there is a QR code that will lead visitors to themed tours, as well as permanently installed tablets for further discussions. Furthermore, as a visitor, you get a marble that you can put into a box in the final room - and thus answer the question of whether technology and science will help create a better world or not.

The city is conceived from a wide variety of data - one can certainly puzzle over which well-known Graz buildings are shown on the ground in cartographic outlines - a different type of data processing. For City Councilor for Culture Gnter Riegler (VP) it is also a question of how the future will change through digitisation since data is constantly being enquired and recorded in our world.

The designers will not stop with the exhibition in the Graz Museum. After its end, there will be a ten-week discourse festival on the topics of the exhibition rooms, held partly in the GrazMuseum and in GrazMuseum Schloberg, as well as at prominent cultural locations, including lectures on individual topics and featuring initiatives from the city.

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Graz Museum imagines the city in the future through a new exhibition - TheMayor.EU

By Kate Douglas

Crowds fill a park in Essen, Germany, at a summer music festival in 2013

Jochen Tack/Alamy

FROM the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the orange gardens of Seville, urban planners down the ages have taken inspiration from nature. And those of us living in the concrete and brick jungle have perhaps never appreciated scraps of green space more than during the covid-19 pandemic. During lockdowns, city dwellers across the world have found parks and gardens where they exist an unexpected source of calm and joy.

That comes as no surprise to the growing number of psychologists and ecologists studying the effects of nature on peoples mental health and well-being. The links they are uncovering are complex, and not yet fully understood. But even as the pandemic has highlighted them, it has also exposed that, in an increasingly urbanised world, our access to nature is dwindling and often the most socio-economically deprived people face the biggest barriers. Amid talk about building back better, there is an obvious win-win-win here. Understand how to green the worlds urban spaces the right way and it can boost human well-being, help redress social inequality and be a boon for the biodiversity we all depend on.

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On evolutionary timescales, urban living is a new invention. Our species has existed for at least 300,000 years, but the oldest cities are only some 6000 years old. Only recently little more than a decade ago, according to figures from the UN Population Division have we become a majority-urban species. Now the number of us living in cities is booming like never before. By 2050, projections suggest almost 70 per cent of us will be urban dwellers (see Urban latecomers).

Our late arrival into cities might help explain our affinity with nature and green spaces. In 1984, biologist Edward O. Wilson made this connection explicit with his biophilia hypothesis. His idea was that the environment in which humans evolved has shaped our brain, priming it to respond positively to cues that would have enhanced survival for our ancestors, such as trees, savannah, lakes and waterways. This, Wilson argued, is why being in nature makes us feel good.

Whether that is the reason or not, the past few years have seen an explosion of research finding concrete links between increased exposure to nature and not just improved physical health, but better mental health, too. Mental health issues are estimated to account for as much as a third of all years lived with disability, and account for around 13 per cent of disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) lost, similar to the toll of cardiovascular disease and circulatory disorders.

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The evidence of positive effects from nature includes studies on specific psychological conditions such as depression, anxiety and mood disorder. Access to nature has also been found to improve sleep and reduce stress, increase happiness and reduce negative emotions, promote positive social interactions and even help generate a sense of meaning to life. Being in green environments boosts various aspects of thinking, including attention, memory and creativity, in people both with and without depression. The evidence is very solid, says psychologist Marc Berman at the University of Chicago.

Complications in comparing studies and saying exactly whats good for whom makes it hard to distil the effects into an individual prescription (see How much nature do I need?). In the UKs remote Shetland Islands, however, they are doing just that: since 2018, doctors there have been able to prescribe nature-based activities such as birdwatching and beach walks to treat mental health conditions and stress, as well as physical conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. They arent alone, either: a review in 2019 identified 28 nature-based interventions used in various countries to improve health and well-being, from organised gardening programmes to forest bathing.

If we are to maximise the benefits of nature for the worlds legion of nature-deprived city dwellers, we need to know exactly how they work. Here, too, there appears to be no simple answer.

Urban vegetation can benefit peoples physical health by absorbing harmful airborne particulates and other pollutants produced by fossil fuel-powered transport and industry. It may improve mental health in this way as well. Evidence is emerging that exposure to these pollutants can damage the central nervous system and is linked with certain mental health conditions such as depression. Urban vegetation also helps mitigate noise pollution, which causes stress and sleep disturbance.

Another possibility is that the mental health effect is mediated via physical health: urban residents living near green spaces simply take more exercise, which in turn improves their mental health. But most research suggests otherwise. In many cultures, visiting green spaces is less associated with physical exercise than with sedentary social activities, such as picnicking. That could be a source of natures benefits in its own right: socialising can reduce loneliness, anxiety and depression. Certainly, being part of a supportive community is good for mental health and research shows that attractive public spaces are a catalyst for building cohesive neighbourhoods.

Intriguingly, some well-being effects do seem to be entirely psychological. Just this year, researchers in Switzerland found that simply having a view of nature from your home can reduce your perception of noise and the closer the green space, the bigger the effect. Attention restoration theory is the name given to one hypothesis that attempts to explain such effects. It says that everyday focused thinking is cognitively draining, with negative consequences for mood, and that the wide range of stimuli intrinsic to nature provide a restorative sensory environment that alleviates this attention fatigue.

Some of the well-being effects of nature seem to be entirely psychological

But that is as yet educated guesswork. Theres a lot going on. We have to be creative with our studies to try to isolate the different mechanisms, says Berman.

And it is only half the story. Besides mental health benefits, we know that healthy natural spaces provide us with a whole range of essential ecosystem services for free, from clean air and water to nutrient recycling, flood defence and pollination. Ideally, in designing or reconfiguring urban environments, we should aim to maximise the benefits for biodiversity too. How do we do that?

That is always going to be a trade-off because cities occupy land that could be wild, says ecologist Karl Evans at the University of Sheffield, UK. Urbanisation is a major and increasing cause of global extinction risk, he says. Whats more, we have a limited understanding of urban ecology upon which conservation-minded planners can draw. In 2017, Evans and his colleagues highlighted some fundamental questions yet to be resolved. These include how large, connected and diverse urban green spaces must be to promote biodiversity. Many animal species need access to different types of habitat to thrive. Its not just about the amount, its about the quality of those spaces, says Evans.

He points out that about half the green space in urban environments in the UK is just closely mown grass, a pattern repeated in many Western cities. You could convert this to meadows or plant more trees, he says. In a study of urban meadows in the south of England, his team found that people responded more positively to the more-biodiverse meadows than to mown grassland. Similarly, a recent study led by landscape architect Anna Jorgensen, also at the University of Sheffield, concludes that what urbanites, at least in the UK, most value in their encounters with nature is variety.

We still dont know whether increased biodiversity equates to increased mental health benefits for urban dwellers. But incomplete as these findings are, they nevertheless make a strong case for greening cities. People think of nature as being an amenity, not a necessity, says Berman. But we all need it and we need to take it very seriously. Environmental engineer Anu Ramaswami at Princeton University agrees. She says green public spaces are one of seven key provisioning systems in cities, along with shelter, water, food, energy, connectivity and sanitation. I think they are exactly on par, she says. People need green spaces.

This is something that enlightened urban planning has long taken to heart, from the UKs Garden City movement at the turn of the 20th century to the recently announced plan to turn Pariss Champs-lyses, currently a busy thoroughfare, into a green oasis. Our evolving understanding of natures broad health benefits, plus our ongoing pandemic experience, is a wake-up call to apply that lesson more widely.

The pandemic has shown that we dont have enough [access to nature], says Berman. That is especially true for people in more deprived socio-economic groups. Access to green infrastructure is very income-based, says Ramaswami. A recent survey by Natural England, for example, found that children from low-income families spent less time outside in green spaces during the pandemic than children from higher-income families.

Meanwhile, a study by Berman and his colleagues in Toronto, Canada, found that adding just 10 trees to a city block has a huge impact on peoples perceptions of their health and well-being, equivalent to the effect of earning $10,000 more per household. If urban greening were an investment priority, it neednt take much to have a big impact, with the most disadvantaged benefiting the most.

Even minimal green spaces, such as under this overpass in Osakoko, Japan, boost our mental well-being

Nick Hannes/Panos Pictures

So, what does an ideal green city of tomorrow look like? I would think of compact, walkable cities, says Ramaswami. You want four or five-storey buildings in a liveable fabric. Thats the base. Then you include green spaces that are accessible and equitable. Berman says it is important to make green spaces multipurpose so they meet a variety of needs. He also favours incorporating more natural elements into the built environment, such as green roofs, and even designing buildings that mimic patterns found in nature such as curves and fractals. Research using eye-trackers indicates that people are drawn to such shapes, and Berman thinks there is something about the way our brains process the aesthetic of nature that is comforting.

Advocating for nature itself, Evanss utopia is quite similar, emphasising building compactly to minimise the amount of land taken by cities. A model green city for me would be one that was relatively densely packed, he says. But the green space within it would be highly connected and extremely high quality and, crucially, highly accessible to all sectors of society.

Realising such visions wont be easy. Evans says it is incredibly hard to retrofit existing cities to match his ideal, and he doubts that new urban areas will be built with such a brief in mind. I dont think biodiversity conservation needs are given high enough priority to make that a realistic prospect, he says.

But Ramaswami is more optimistic. She notes that the trend for urban greening has already begun, pointing to some inspiring examples in the US, including the Million Trees Los Angeles initiative and an ambitious greening programme in New York.

People use green spaces for physical and social activity, here tai chi in Taiwan

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This isnt just a richer-world phenomenon, either. Most urban growth in the next decades will occur in lower-income nations. The Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, which aims to increase urban gardening around the world, has 211 cities signed up, many in Africa, South America and South-East Asia. Chinas Ministry of Ecology and Environment, established in 2018, has made fighting pollution one of its three critical battles, spurring the building of parks, green spaces and wildlife corridors in many cities. Admittedly, lower-income countries face many challenges in building greener cities, but they can learn from the mistakes already made in older-growth cities in the West, says Ramaswami. Theres a lot of opportunity for sustainability in developing cities, she says.

Some researchers are thinking of new ways to get policy-makers across the world to value nature more. Biologist Gretchen Daily at Stanford University in California pioneered the concept of ecosystem services as a way of evaluating the benefits nature provides and factoring these values into economic decision-making. In conjunction with Berman and others, she published a paper in 2019 outlining how this approach could be used to put a price on the mental health benefits of nature in cities. The intense pressure on urban land means we need to invest strategically, she says. Daily has founded the Natural Capital Project, which offers free science-based computer programs to guide such investments. Software modules on health are being tested now for release in the first half of 2021, she says.

How we plan cities now will affect the well-being of billions in the future

But it will take more than policy-makers to push urban greening up the agenda. We need a grassroots movement, says Berman. Community involvement ensures that different cultural and local needs are met, says Ramaswami. You want the imagination of those people in those communities to think of their own vision.

geogif/Getty Images/iStockphoto

In some parts of the world, that is already happening: the economically disadvantaged favelas of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, for example, are home to a burgeoning forestation movement. A common problem, however, is that people dont know about the benefits of nature, says Berman. Scientists need to work a bit harder to get out of the ivory tower, to get their message across, he says. Its important to talk to communities. Its not going to work to be paternalistic.

And it isnt just about knowledge: people need to also experience the effect that urban green spaces have on their sense of well-being. If we can do interventions where we can encourage people to try it, then I think they will buy in, says Berman.

That is why the pandemic could be such a powerful force for change. Our planning today and into the future will affect the well-being of billions of people, says Daily. And if we can build back greener, that will create a virtuous circle. Recent studies from both China and England find that feeling more connected with nature makes people more likely to adopt positive environmental behaviours. If so, then greener cities wont just improve the mental health of their residents, but also focus our minds on the needs of nature beyond our urban jungles.

When it comes to pinning down the link between well-being and access to nature, there are big confounding factors. To begin with, what is psychological well-being? The World Health Organization defines mental health as a state of well-being in which an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and is able to make a contribution to his or her community. That is hard to quantify.

Then there is the question of what access to nature means. Some studies measure passive access, or how much green space is available in someones local area. Others look at active access, which is the actual exposure a person gets to green space. That makes it difficult to compare results and build a coherent picture.

A few researchers have tried to assess what the appropriate dose of nature might be. A 2019 study involving almost 20,000 participants in England concluded that at least 120 minutes a week of recreational nature contact was associated with good health or well-being. The team, led by Mathew White at the University of Exeter, UK, found that the effect peaks at between 200 and 300 minutes a week, with people reporting no further gain after that.

What exactly this means for you or any individual is unclear. As other studies indicate, the mental health benefits a person gets from access to nature are likely to be influenced by myriad factors, including age, gender, personality traits, personal preferences and socio-economic status. Your culture matters too and, so far, most research into the well-being effects of nature has been done in Western societies.

This feature is the fourth in our Rescue Plan for Nature series produced in association with the United Nations Environment Programme and UNEP partner agency GRID-Arendal. New Scientist retains full editorial control over, and responsibility for, the content. The fifth and final part of the series, on 10 April, will look at the links between climate change and biodiversity loss.

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Green spaces aren't just for nature they boost our mental health too - New Scientist

When it debuted in 2003, you'd be forgiven for assuming the superhero comic series Invincible was yet another in a slew of playful but similar riffs on the superhero genre that filled comic store shelves at the time, peopled as it was with analogues of various well-established characters. There was a team of heroes called the Guardians of the Globe who looked, if you squinted, an awful lot like the Justice League. There was an all-powerful hero from another planet called Omni-Man who read as a straight-up Superman stand-in (though he'd swapped out Kal-El's signature spit-curl for a bushy mustache). And there was a group of super-powered, perpetually squabbling adolescent heroes clearly modeled on the Teen Titans.

The look of the series, provided in turns by artists Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley, was classic superhero clean lines, bright colors, and friendly, inviting, and in some cases downright cartoony character designs. It set out to tell the tale of young Mark, the half-human son of Omni-Man, who was waiting for his powers to kick in so he could follow in his father's superboot-steps. Mark was only the latest in a long line of fledgling superheroes in the Peter Parker mode: a nerd unsure of himself, his powers and his social status which is to say: it all felt familiar, old school, nostalgic.

But it soon became clear that there was more going on in the pages of the comic than playful, whimsical pastiche. The writer was Robert Kirkman, who would go on to show, in the pages of The Walking Dead, a gift for getting the reader to care about his characters, only to dispatch them in horrific, gore-flecked ways. Again and again, he ripped your heart out by having characters get their hearts ripped out, or their brains smashed in, or their limbs gnawed off, or all of the above, simultaneously. He didn't hold back.

In The Walking Dead, a zombie comic featuring grimy, gritty black-and-white art by Tony Moore, Charlie Adlard and others, all that gruesome blood and guts seemed simply part of the book's grim visual landscape. The presence of grisly, graphic violence in such an otherwise hopeful, breezy and frequently funny superhero comic, however, was striking, and unusual.

That was back in 2003. For the next 15 years, Kirkman and his artists built a vast superheroic universe around Invincible, his friends and his family. The series was dense with plot twists, sudden reveals and teenage, soap-operatic emotion, but it never shied from depicting the violent, real-world ramifications of superhero physics. The resulting perpetual tonal whiplash couldn't help but cause the quality of the series to vacillate wildly, as Invincible's youthful delight in discovering his powers gave way to his struggling with the weight of responsibility on his shoulders.

The new Amazon animated series based on the comic tells much the same story the comic set out to tell back in 2003. But the intervening years have seen countless superhero stories clamoring for our attention, across all media; the landscape has changed. Consider: At its core, Invincible's basic narrative formula (superpowers + grisly violence) has been gleefully adopted by The Boys, a live-action show on the very same streaming service, which was also based on a comic book.

The good news: Invincible is more than its formula, and its approach is vastly different. Where The Boys comes from a place of smirking, sadistic, let's-see-what-we-can-get-away-with adolescent nihilism, Invincible seems sincerely committed to building emotional connections between its characters. It is greatly aided in this endeavor by an outstanding cast of voice actors who find the humor and pathos amid the over-the-top action, led by Steven Yeun as Mark, Sandra Oh as Mark's mother Debbie, and J.K. Simmons as his father, Omni-Man.

There's more where they came from many more: Zachary Quinto, Gillian Jacobs, Zazie Beetz, Walton Goggins, Andrew Rannells, Jason Mantzoukis, Mahershala Ali, Mae Whitman, Djimon Hounsou, Sonequa Martin-Green, Nicole Byer, Jon Hamm, Seth Rogen, Jonathan Groff, voice-acting all-stars like Clancy Brown and Kevin Michael Richardson and, somehow inevitably, Reginald VelJohnson.

Some of the series' devices now seem less fresh than they did in 2003 (a bit about using a special tailor to devise super-outfits, for example, has since become well-trodden ground), but the show combats this by devoting serious screen time to building out the dynamics between its characters in ways big and small.

The comic's grisly violence is made all the more stark and shocking when animated, as it is here. But it's not depicted with the cynical, repellent glee it is on shows like The Boys, Preacher and Utopia -- oh, it's harrowing, yes, but it's not played for laughs, which turns out to be hugely important. But if the gobbets of animated flesh flying around on an animated show like Harley Quinn turns you off, know that Invincible ratchets it up even higher.

Amazon made only the first three episodes, which drop together on Friday, March 26th, available to press. The other five episodes of this (first?) season will be parceled out over the next five weeks. There's every chance that the series will trade the emotional heart it displays in these first episodes for more literal ones, strewn across the floor and smeared across the walls; it's attempting to thread a very difficult tonal needle, after all. But the voice cast is certainly up for it, and there's 144 hugely imaginative issues (plus spin-offs) of the original comic for the writers to pull from. I'll be watching, even if, every so often, through my fingers.

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'Invincible' Is Packed With Pulpy, Visceral Thrills And Lots Of Pulpy Viscera - Capital Public Radio News

Mar 26, 2021 11:43 AMET

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Talentopia, aCambridge, Massachusetts-Based Remote Talent Company has merged with Impactian, an Extraordinary Talent on Demandplatform. EToDplatform first started to leverage cutting-edge technologies to provide the innovative 'Talent as a Service' hiring model to enterprises, startups or law firms. Effective immediately, Impactian'sEToD platform will be known as Talentopia. The merger shows Talentopia's growth, position, and most importantly, long-standing commitment to acquiring the best and the brightest talent in the world.

The merger is to run a new hiring and interview platform that companies can utilize to find their talented remote developers and professional writers. TheCambridge, Massachusetts-Based Talentopia will take advantage of the innovative EToDplatform's thorough vetting process to further grow an elite talent network of developers and writers. Employers who hired pre-vetted candidates would be sure to get the exact candidate they needed.

The new brand name, Talentopia,and its platform, Talentopia.com, will now focus on bothonline remote developer sphere andskilled legal and technology writers for various application domains. Similar to Impactian, Talentopia will work to gather the top 2% professionals of each field and match them with jobs and independent cases that best match their expertise and interests. Talentopia nowseeks to find hundreds of highly motivated and experienced writers who are interested in the following:

Candidates should be equipped with:

To optimize the recruitment process and identify the top-notch talents and to meet the future trend of remote jobs and gig economy transformation, Talentopia has consistently invested in innovative technologies to accelerate and optimize the recruiting process while retaining strong cloud-based vetting system. Despite the merger, the core value and culture of recruiting top talents will remain intact. Talentopia will continue to operate as a utopia for talents and empower them to grow their professional career.

Before joining Talentopia, interested writers will need to undergo two steps of challenging assessments. If you think you would like to be one ofthe extraordinary talents in the new Talentopia network, For more information on this role, please visit Talentopia's website via the following linkhttps://www.talentopia.com/technical-writer-jobs. Visithttps://hire.talentopia.comto apply now!

CONTACT:Talentopia, Inc.Public Relations Department1.617.315.4828[emailprotected]https://www.talentopia.com

URL : https://www.talentopia.com

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Talentopia Announces Merger of Impactian and Aims to Recruit Top Remote Technology and Legal Writers - Law.com

TWO Cheshire towns have been named among the best places to lives in the North West of England.

Bollington and Knutsford appeared in the list of eight locations in the region chosen by The Sunday Times in the annual Sunday Times Best Places to Live guide.

Altrincham has been named the Best Place to Live in the North West.

The Sunday Timess expert judges behind the guide assess a wide range of factors, from schools, air quality, transport and broadband speeds to culture, green spaces and the health of the high street.

They look for improving towns, villages or city centres, for attractive, well designed homes and locations bursting with community spirit - which the pandemic has shown to be the most vital quality of all.

A detailed breakdown of house prices has been supplied by data specialists TwentyCi and information on internet speeds has been supplied by Thinkbroadband.com, the UKs leading independent guide to broadband.

The Sunday Times Best Places to Live 2021: Northwest of England

Winner: Altrincham, Cheshire

Arnside and Silverdale, Lancashire

Bollington, Cheshire

Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria

Knutsford, Cheshire

Liverpool

Manchester

Saddleworth, West Yorkshire

Helen Davies, The Times and Sunday Times property editor said: This guide has never been so important. The pandemic has taught us just how much we rely on our homes, our communities and our surroundings. With working from home now common, its no surprise that many of us are reassessing our priorities and thinking hard about where we really want to live.

Our focus for this year has been community, countryside and convenience. It hasnt been a year for big cities or small villages. Instead it is small towns that have shone: big enough to have everything you need within walking distance and small enough for everyone to feel connected.

Altrincham was named The Sunday Times Best Place to Live in Britain last year. It was chosen as our regional winner this year, as it has everything you want in a suburb: parks, excellent transport links and top-class schools.

The inspirational market and food hall that transformed the town centre from the worst in Britain to a favourite destination have continued to show their value, even during the pandemic.

* Altrincham :The judges described Alty as where suburbia meets utopia. They particularly admired the schools: the selective girls grammar was named the Northwest state secondary school of the decade by The Sunday Times Parent Power guide the boys grammar came second, the convenience of the tram route into central Manchester and open spaces such as Stamford Park, the River Bollin and the National Trusts Dunham Massey. Most of all, though, they were impressed with the market and food hall responsible for the inspiring regeneration of the town centre. They love Tender Cows triple-cooked chips (4) and the way that, even selling essentials only during lockdown, it has remained at the heart of life in the town.

Average sale price: 400,000

Average rental: 995 pcm

* Bollington: Cheshires happy valley kept a smile on its face thanks to an endless choice of country walks and helpful neighbours, said the judges. They love the views from White Nancy, the beehive-shaped folly overlooking the town, the walks on the Middlewood Way, and the spicy takeaways from the Indian Goat, a brilliant new food truck based at the immaculately kept recreation ground.

Average sale price: 285,000

Average rental: 725 pcm

* Knutsford Posh Cheshire with a sense of fun and a love of the countryside, is how the judges described the ancient market town that is a regular feature on the Best Places to Live list. Theres no better example of its spirit than the Knutsford Hosts, a group of volunteer helpers whose efforts have been vital during the pandemic, they said. They also liked the quirky buildings designed by Richard Harding Watt, the walks in Tatton Park, in Toft Wood or around Knutsford Moor - and the coffee from the Tatton Perk coffee van.

Average sale price: 445,000

Average rental: 1,100 pcm

Go online at: : https://www.thetimes.co.uk/best-places-to-live

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Two Cheshire towns named among the best places to live in the North West - The Chester Standard