Category Archives: New Utopia

Michael Corleone is dead. He lost his will to live when his daughter, Mary, took a bullet intended for him in the closing moments of 1990s The Godfather Part III. He lost his life in the films final scene, falling from a chair in the courtyard of Don Tommasinos villa, a lone orange the symbol of death in director Francis Ford Coppolas magnificent film series rolling from his limp grasp. The saga that began with Michaels return to America from World War II, that continued as he rose to power in the wake of his fathers passing, and concluded with his attempt to make the Corleone family business legitimate, is over.

But nothing is ever truly over in Hollywood, certainly not a valuable brand that continues to generate profits from video sales and TV repeats. And no character stays dead as long as theres public interest and untold portions of their life story remaining ask one of the many resurrected superheroes.

Mentioning comic books in the same paragraph as Coppola might be hazardous to ones health, but there exists a period in the Godfather timeline between Marys murder and the fade to black at Don Tommasinos villa that holds potential for one last chapter in the tale of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), one that could be particularly brutal and ruthless (and satisfying) if set against the New York City real estate boom. There were some terribly unsavory people working in that milieu; one of them became president of the United States.

The Godfather Part IV could absolutely happen. And considering Hollywoods current state, the turbulent theatrical business, and the cultural zeitgeist, it should.

Imagining how a fourth movie might play out, its vital to make a case that it would be at all financially viable for the sagas rightsholder, Paramount Pictures, to risk what would almost certainly be a $100 million-plus budget on extending a franchise that didnt perform particularly well commercially or critically the last time out.

Indeed, The Godfather Part III casts a long, unfortunate shadow over a prospective fourth film. Notoriously rushed through production, Coppola was allotted only a year between writing the script and delivering a final cut in time for a Christmas 1990 theatrical release. Then there were contract disputes and casting snafus: Robert Duvall balked at taking considerably less than Pacino to reprise his role as consigliere Tom Hagen, while Winona Ryders physical exhaustion at the outset of shooting caused Coppola to hastily replace the actress with his daughter, Sofia Coppola.

All of these issues combined to compromise the movie in crucial ways. Michaels pursuit of the Vaticans controlling interest in Immobiliare is inelegantly interwoven with the street-level shit-stirring of his nephew, Vincent (Andy Garcia); Duvalls presence is sorely missed (and George Hamilton possesses zero gravitas as the familys new consigliere); and 19-year-old Sofia Coppola underplays the role of Mary to the point of somnambulance. But Pacinos portrayal of a man finally waking up to the moral nightmare of having murdered his own brother is shattering and, despite the aforementioned missteps, Francis Ford Coppola manages to bring the film to a rousing, debt-settling finale. It feels like a Godfather movie. Part III reminds the viewer why these films hold such a prominent place in our popular culture.

A fourth entry would carry a hefty price tag. The Godfather Part IIIs reported $54 million budget translates to $106 million today. Considering that Paramount balked at merely distributing Martin Scorseses The Irishman because the films financier, Fbrica de Cine, couldnt cover the ballooning budget, the company seems awfully risk-averse. But The Godfather is one of Paramounts most prestigious and valuable properties. Compared to behemoths like Disney and Warner Bros., the studio is currently franchise-poor after another Terminator misfire, Mission: Impossible is its only healthy live-action series). Why not fire up the prestige and franchise hype machines and get folks excited about a new Godfather movie?

Paramount is currently working the same nostalgia angle with Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop, which itll produce for Netflix; revisiting the Corleone family would be in keeping with its development philosophy under CEO Jim Gianopulos. Meanwhile, Oscar bloggers would hail a fourth Godfather as an awards contender sight unseen, if only because The Godfather Part III earned seven nominations, including Best Picture, despite mutedly positive reviews.

Francis Ford Coppolas involvement seems key, though at the age of 80, he might not be up to the physical rigors of an epic production. And even if he has the wherewithal to do it, would he? Coppola didnt sound too hot on the idea when he spoke with GQ in 2012. For me? At my age? Being on a big, expensive movie that has a producer wholl want to give me notes? They dont have enough money on earth to give me to spend a year doing that.

If Paramount coughed up the coin to get him back in the directors chair, Coppola said he was unsure what story hed tell. What happens in it? How does it have to relate to the first one, the cast, the look? I would safely say The Godfather was a complete movie. It wasnt a serial and it didnt lend itself to being a serial. I wouldnt even know what the story is for a fourth one. All the people are dead.

He could be referring to the characters or his key collaborators. The loss of cinematographer Gordon Willis, whose darkly lit photography is as important to the feel of a Godfather movie as the cast or screenplay, might be the best argument against moving forward with a new installment. Digital video is more conducive to low-light shooting (perhaps best exemplified by Arrival director of photography Bradford Young), but Willis counterintuitive 35mm aesthetic is vital as well theres an inimitable richness to his darkness that no digital lenser has been able to capture and previous attempts by talented cinematographers to mimic anothers look (e.g., Janusz Kaminski doing Douglas Slocombe on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) felt like stale imitation.

And then theres the absence of Mario Puzo, with whom Coppola collaborated on all three films (and, briefly, a fourth film just before his death in 1999). While other authors like Mark Winegardner and Ed Falco have written perfectly readable fill-in-the-narrative-blank prequels, neither of them is a screenwriter. Coppola would either have to find a new co-writer, or summon the spirit of Puzo as best he could and write the whole thing himself. Again, thats a lot of work for a man who just turned 80.

The other obstacle to Coppola getting involved: Hes making another movie at the moment. In July, he announced that hes finally going to direct his long-in-gestation Megalopolis, an ambitious project about an idealistic architects attempt to construct a utopia in New York City. Since Coppola appears to have covered his Zoetrope debts with for-hire directing gigs (including The Godfather Part III) over the last few decades, he doesnt need The Godfather Part IV to realize Megalopolis; its going to happen regardless. As time is finite for the maestro, its unlikely hed want to waste a year or two of his life going back to a well that feels dry to him.

That could put the kibosh on the entire endeavor. Would Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Andy Garcia, and the rest of the surviving clan want to return for a Coppola-less Godfather film? Probably not. But if Coppola wrote the script, offered to be fairly involved as a producer, and hand-picked a successor who earned the approval of the actors, there could be a path forward.

Big if. In 2012, Coppola struggled to think of a younger director whod be right for the material, saying, There are so many great young directors I like but the ones I like are all doing personal films. Theres no one I can think of who Id send to do a Godfather. But if the money was just too right for all involved, perhaps the persuasive auteur could talk Sofia Coppola into giving it a shot. Obviously, her aesthetic is completely different and generally noncommercial, but, hey, Francois Truffaut made Fahrenheit 451. And it would set up a nifty redemption arc for her as well (or deepen the humiliation of her association with the series).

If the right director could be found, theres no denying that Pacino still has the fire to carry a three-hour epic. He is reportedly dynamite as Jimmy Hoffa in The Irishman, and seems to be having a ball on the films press tour. Keatons still got plenty of chutzpah, and, in the spirit of wild speculation, if Coppola wants to right a wrong, all he has to do is drop a single line of dialogue from The Godfather Part III, and Tom Hagen yet lives. Bring in the legendary and still kickin Walter Murch to edit, and a skillful composer who can work powerful new variations on Nino Rota and Carmine Coppolas scores, and this could be the rare non-spectacle movie to crack $100 million on opening weekend. (OK, length would be a factor, but even $80 million would be a huge win for Paramount.)

At the end of the day, The Godfather Part IV only has story because theres plenty of material to lift from. Anyone who knows their mob history is well aware that the 1980s were a volatile time for organized crime in New York City. Heres a pitch: Assuming Michael returns to the Big Apple after the tragic conclusion of The Godfather Part III, he could find himself in a power struggle with the headstrong Vincent. Both men would still be grieving the death of Mary one as a father, the other as a lover. And whatever bad blood had started to boil up over Vincents pursuit of Mary could very easily simmer anew and turn the men into enemies.

Then theres the family business. Michael could remain a legitimate businessman, but his ruthlessness and basic greed could lead him to get involved in the exploding real estate market. This would put him into contact with ravenous, mob-connected developers like, say, Donald Trump (or, for the films purposes, a thinly veiled caricature), and stir up a fetid stew of venality that wafts straight to the present day.

A Michael Corleone with nothing to lose and zero compunction would bring the character back to the end of The Godfather Part II, only now he could play kingmaker on a much grander, more pernicious scale. Or maybe hed want to be the king himself. This would absolutely tear the family apart. Kays abhorrence would make her a very dangerous foe. Connie would probably side with Vincent. Francis Ford Coppola has already made it patently clear how far Michael would go to maintain power (although hed be without the lethal assistance of his muscle Al Neri, as actor Richard Bright passed away in 2006).

There is every reason for Paramount to dip back into The Godfather series, and theres a way to do it without going the remake route. The plan in 1999 was to revitalize the series with Leonardo DiCaprio as a young Sonny in a two-era narrative la The Godfather Part II. DiCaprios too old to do that now, but the saga shouldnt be beholden to star power. Its The Godfather. The films aura makes stars. And its remained relevant for over 45 years because it reflects the griminess of the American dream more accurately and palpably than any movie ever made. Its time for more.

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The Godfather Part 4 is the next logical step after The Irishman - Polygon

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Google recently announced it will bring its Smart Compose feature from Gmail over to Google Docs. The move will leverage the search giant's expertise in machine learning to empower consumers to streamline communication and save time, allowing them to live better, happier, healthier lives.

Ok, I'm sorry, that was awful. It probably won't make anyone happier or healthier. Google's phrase-suggesting tool you type "looking" and it prompts "forward to it" has from the start been a little leaden and depressing, not so much because it's bad but because it's good. I use it constantly. Because in those mundane emails about setting up appointments or going over details, it tends to suggest exactly what I need.

That doesn't mean it isn't unnerving. It's worth asking what this kind of algorithmic suggestion does to the way we speak and think. Will it make our language and writing more homogenous? Will we all talk in corporate jargon, circling back to things, hoping to pick each others' brains, signing off every time with "hope you're well!"?

The internet promised to wildly expand our cultural diversity by virtue of access to so much content. That happened sort of. Even now, the web is full of tiny little communities with unique cultures: forums with their own vocabulary, group chats with inside jokes, successful YouTube stars you've never heard of, and thousands of little islands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. At the same time, the contemporary digital is hardly a utopia of diversity. Just look at how quickly terms from African-American vernacular get co-opted by the mainstream: Everyone is "woke" now, despite that term once being a very specific black skepticism of whiteness. Niche things go viral, creators with one hit amass millions of followers, and social media is often dominated by talk of the already-famous, articles from The New York Times, and Hollywood blockbusters.

So yes, we have access to more culture than ever before thanks to the internet, but the viral nature of the internet has also increased homogeneity and sameness. Will the same thing happen to writing and speech as we rely more and more on technology to complete our sentences for us?

In her recently released book Because Internet, linguist Gretchen McCullough explains how the web is giving rise to inventive uses of language acronyms, new ways of deploying punctuation, or just new constructions like "it me" or "lol what?"

That's true. But on the other hand, spelling is becoming more standardized, and language is changing more quickly as we are exposed to more communities more frequently. That accelerated pace means people across the world gravitate toward the same usage. For example, my family members across the globe in India are using the same slang as I a phenomenon we would never have seen before the web.

But Google's Smart Compose isn't simply an effect of the internet's global nature, or the way in which texting or Twitter influence language. It is instead predicated on an algorithm meant to speed up and make language more efficient. The goal is not diversity or even clarity; the goal is simplicity.

Algorithms tend toward sameness. In the early 20th century, Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about two competing pressures on language: the centripetal and the centrifugal. Structures of power were centripetal forces that centralized and homogenized language, while for Bakhtin, centrifugal things like folk culture or marginalized voices part of what he called the carnivalesque made language diverse. Machine learning works by taking what exists and then suggesting it back to you. In other words, algorithms are centripetal in nature because they are based on feedback loops. They will inevitably suggest language or phrasing that other people are already using.

It's hard to seriously say that one new feature in one piece of writing software will fundamentally change language. But Smart Compose is part of a broader pattern in digital culture that at least beckons people toward sameness. The rise of algorithms in things like writing software isn't going to doom us, but they are a centripetal force that you can either choose to go along with or resist.

The world is too vast and the places for people to express themselves too many for Google to ruin language all by itself. But we are nonetheless presented with a choice about what kind of diversity we wish to see in the world, and what place tech has in either fostering that uniqueness, or simply reasserting what is the same and already exists. And without some awareness of that, we might end up "circling back" forever to one way of speaking our answers and our writing all a product of some gentle suggestions that are nonetheless more insidious in nature.

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Google wants to finish your sentences. That's a problem. - The Week

Recreational marijuana sales begin Sunday, and at least three dispensaries will be open to consumers all in Ann Arbor.

Greenstone Provisions on South Ashley Street, Arbors Wellness on East Liberty and Exclusive Provisioning Centers on Varsity Drive are expected to be open on Dec. 1 with at least some product available to users without a medical marijuana patient card.

A Michigan Marijuana Regulatory Agency spokesman said additional licenses could still be approved Wednesday afternoon.

The agency also has approved adult-use recreational licenses for five non-store front marijuana businesses. Exclusive received two of those licenses for its processing and grow operation in Ann Arbor. The others include: Arbor Kitchen LLC, a processor in Ann Arbor; Kalkaska-based Real Life Solutions, a cannabis-focused event organizer; and and Precision Safety Innovation Laboratories LLC in Ann Arbor.

Greenstone Provisions will open at 10 a.m. Sunday, two hours earlier than normal, to accommodate demand, said Maggie Smith, manager of the dispensary.

Despite expected long wait times and lines due to the limited number of dispensaries open on Sunday, Smith expects Greenstone Provisions to have enough product to supply demand.

When the state surprised the industry by moving the date from January 2020 to Dec. 1, it made adjustments to allow retailers meet demand. Retailers are allowed to transfer 50 percent of the product that's been held in inventory for at least 30 days from medical marijuana to adult-use recreational marijuana.

"I'd say we should be able to handle both our medical and the influx of recreational that day," Smith said. "We definitely don't have as much (product) as we want to have. Everyone is scrambling to get enough product."

The supply chain is not fully developed as it takes several months to grow, process and distribute marijuana products. Medical marijuana supply has been constrained for months and with licensed growers and processors able to shift half of their medical supply over to recreational, the shortage is only expected to continue.

Since announcing the emergency rules earlier this month, prices for legal marijuana have climbed as high as 50 percent, according to Stuart Carter, owner of Utopia Gardens in Detroit.

"The already extremely tight supply of medical marijuana has been cut in half as the growers now earmark half their crops to rec," Carter told Crain's in an email. "This has exacerbated an already short supply for the medical provisioning centers and because the supply and demand curve became artificially skewed by this development, the pricing has increased dramatically. The average wholesale cost of one pound of (marijuana) flower has risen overnight from $3,000 to $4,500."

Compounding the issue is the state's temporary halt of marijuana vape sales amid dozens of deaths linked to vape use, particularly among black market products. The agency is requiring dispensaries and manufacturers to test a sample of each batch of existing marijuana vape cartridges, about 1.5 percent of all existing product, confirmed Harns.

Under the new rules, the MRA will inspect processing facilities twice a month to ensure testing for vitamin E acetate, the believed culprit in the outbreak of vaping-related illness that has sickened more than 2,100 people across the U.S. and killed 42.

The synthetic chemical is an oily chemical added by some to thicken and dilute marijuana-vaping liquids. It's commonly used in skin creams and other supplements, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) believes its introduction into the lungs of vape users is interfering with the users' respiratory function.

The testing is expected to take up to 90 days.

Smith said marijuana vape products accounted for roughly 30 percent of Greenstone Provisions' sales.

"It's definitely a concern," Smith said. "They provided a lot of convenience and ease and our customers liked them. A lot of people are upset, so we're hoping the testing moves faster than anticipated."

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Recreational pot sales set for Sunday, but approved retailers will be few - Crain's Detroit Business

In 2010, Bill Gates first came up with the term Innovating to Zero to advocate a nuclear energy technology that would be safe, reliable and have Zero emissions. Its an idea that stayed with me ever since and, together with the Visionary Innovation Group at Frost & Sullivan, I set out to explore a Zero Concept World, where the vision of Innovating to Zero could be used to guide and achieve Zero emission vehicles, Zero waste, Zero accidents, Zero defects, Zero security breaches, Zero carbon emissions (carbon neutral buildings and cities), Zero obesity, and even Zero diseases.

A Zero Concept world

I am not under the illusion that this utopia is likely to happen (unless its a Bollywood movie) anytime soon or, for that matter, ever. And, indeed, my interest lies not so much in the destinationa world free of errors, defects and negativesas in the journey and the gains that I believe will be made along the way. I know that if we, as a society, are able to accomplish even a fraction of our ultimate goals, it will mean real progress.

What is encouraging is that, in the course of my research, Ive come across numerous instances of people, cities, companies and governments consciously moving towards this idea of Innovating to Zero.

Our Cities

The perils of climate change are starker than ever before. Earlier this month, New Zealands Zero carbon target was signed into law, setting the country on the path to reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 maybe a bit too slow and long. Several cities, in the meantime, have committed to becoming carbon neutralwhere the net carbon emissions generated annually by a city is absolutely Zerowith Copenhagen leading the charge.

Bicycles parked in central Copenhagen, Denmark

The Danish capitals march towards becoming the worlds first net carbon-neutral city by 2025 is well on track and what has truly impressed me is the way in which sustainable practices and improved quality of life measures have been successfully welded with economic growth. The idea that the future will bring with it a revolutionary brand of innovative green growth with exciting new opportunities for businesses represents a model that every city, grappling with mounting challenges, should aspire to emulate.

Carbon neutral buildingswhich operate using intelligent systems and renewable energy, and are off-the-grid or harvest energy onsitewill play an important role in a citys drive towards becoming Zero carbon. In 2018, the Mayors of 19 leading global cities including London, Paris, New York, Johannesburg, Sydney and Tokyo signed the Net Zero Carbon Buildings Declaration, pledging that all new buildings in their cities would function at net zero carbon by 2030.

Cities aim for Zero waste

In the meantime, cities are also pushing towards Zero waste which envisions a cradle to cradle ideal of complete recyclability. San Francisco which has fallen short of becoming a Zero waste city by 2020 has, nevertheless, made massive progress in terms of recycling, composting, or reusing almost 80% of its waste.

Our Transport

The automotive industry has long been familiar with the concept, using it both as a tool of competitive differentiation and to tackle what I call the three evils of the industry: congestion, air pollution and road fatalities. The Innovating to Zero solutions on which they have zeroed (!) in are electric cars and autonomous vehicles.

From the early pathbreakers Toyota (with its hybrid, Prius) and Nissan (with its insanely popular, Leaf), electric vehicles with zero emissions have rapidly gone mainstream. Today, almost every leading automaker, including the flagbearer of all things innovative Tesla has worked to create efficient and environmentally-friendly e-mobility alternatives.

Looking for Zero emissions

If electric cars speak to the issue of Zero vehicle emissions, then autonomous vehicles have been put forth as the solution for a world with Zero accidents. Volvo and Mercedes holistic vision of Zero car accidents yokes together technology developers, infrastructure planners, and government & policy makers to enhance vehicle, road and driver safety. The Vision Zero strategy of Continental Automotive Systems, a leading automotive systems supplier, is powered by passive and active vehicle safety technologies that preempt accidents before they can happen. Over two decades ago, Sweden initiated a pioneering Vision Zero project which seeks to systematically eliminate serious injuries or deaths caused by traffic accidents, eventually reaching Zero fatalities by 2050. Variants of Swedens Vision Zero have been implemented in cities throughout North America and Europe with positive results.

Our Industries

In the retail sector, I foresee tremendous potential for Zero carbon shops and Zero carbon products ( laMarks & Spencers famous carbon neutral bra). Im quite certain theres soon going to be Zero design-to-shelves response time where data analysis and customer feedback will be used to continuously create and market designs that are always current the logical conclusion to Zaras extremely agile and responsive business model. Zero shrinkage would imply the absence of inventory losses caused by shoplifting, employee theft, administrative error or vendor fraud. While these are all to the good, one Innovating to Zero concept that I am sure is likely to face a chill reception is: Zero discounts!

Today, sustainability, and not just profits, is a core business objective. Italian luxury fashion company Gucci recently articulated its goal of becoming an entirely carbon neutral company, while German industrial manufacturing giant Siemens is already working towards becoming the world's first major industrial company to achieve a net-zero carbon footprint by 2030.

Apart from carbon neutral factories, the manufacturing sector has embraced the grail of Zero defects. This Innovating to Zero concept has morphed from a theoretical concept into a quality improvement mechanism and now onto to its current incarnation as a full-fledged business and manufacturing strategy. The Six Sigma strategywhose extremely strict quality control standards are touted to result in an astounding 99.99966% defect-free productsis a variant of this theme.

Our Work

Innovating to Zero could have many avatars hereZero papers (paperless office) and now even Zero emails, Zero downtime, Zero delays in delivery, Zero client complaints, Zero waiting time, Zero contract hours, Zero work accidents, Zero latency, and Zero business incubation periodthat could result in safer, more flexible and efficient work environments.

Quite frankly, an office with paper has become pass (Ill make an exception for publishing firms!). For that matter, emails are on their way to becoming redundant. In my own case, I find I am increasingly using new communications apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, nudging my email account towards redundancy, even as I actively contemplate new payment getaways like blockchain that promise greater security than traditional emails.

Towards paperless offices

Theres Zero latency, which will eliminate the time lag between the receipt of, and response to, critical information. Go-to-market pressures will alleviated by advanced technology that will enable ideas to be created, implemented, and commercialized in Zero time, leading to Zero Time Business Incubation (ZTBI).

To this list I am now going to add a few Innovating to Zero ideas that Frost & Sullivans CEO Darrell Huntsmann often talks about: Zero Friction Capitalfinding capital and optimizing its use; Zero Friction Careerstreamlining the movement of human capital between and within organizations so that their skills are optimally matched to current organizational needs; and Zero Friction Educationcreating a fluid system of work and education which allows people to move organically between both spheres, while maximizing results at both professional and personal levels.

Our Health

The scope for Innovating to Zero in the healthcare sector is enormous. For instance, Net Zero Hospitals could guide the construction of hospitals in terms of ensuring greater energy efficiency, while achieving the actual functions of the hospitalZero medical waste and net Zero surgery errorslikely to be more long-term ambitions.

Aspiring to Net Zero hospitals

Minimally invasive surgery could give way to Zero invasive surgery, while the march towards Zero diseases has already yielded gains in the form of reduced malaria related deaths and eradication of polio in large parts of the world.

Zero hunger or Zero malnutrition is a long-term global aspiration. In India, Britannia Industries Tiger brand of iron fortified biscuits aimed to realize Zero child malnutrition. Zero obesity is likely to be the next big target and I foresee a carrot and stick approach to achieving it. The carrot will be incentives in the form of perhaps gym memberships or lower insurance premiums for those who are healthy, while the stick approach will manifest in increased taxes on fatty foodsthe so-called Fat Tax. That said, companies and consumers are both conscious of the perils of an expanded waistline, explaining the popularity of Zero calorie foods and Zero sugar drinks like Coke Zero and Pepsi Zero Sugar.

Beyond Zero

Tremendous investments of time, money, and human intelligence will be put into the service of Innovating to Zero, despite the full knowledge that many of the goals will not be achieved in their entirety. But what will be exciting will the journey towards this Mega Vision, with all its attendant opportunities to truly transform our world. Indeed, Innovating to Zero is already reinforcing positive changes to cultures, mindsets and ecosystems - its unlikely that Copenhagens push towards sustainability would have been able to maintain its momentum were it not for 40% of the citys residents opting to forgo cars for bicycles. It also reflects changing goal posts for humanity: from economics, trade and profits to innovation-driven agendas that aim to create a better world.

I was once asked about what would be next: a world of Beyond Zero where, for instance, buildings and cities would not just be carbon neutral but carbon positive? Thats an idea well worth considering once we realize innovations that are truly Zero.

For further reading on Innovating to Zero, read Sarwant Singhs book, New Mega Trends: Implications for Our Future Lives.

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Innovating To Zero: How To Build a Zero Vision World - Forbes

I always found it hard to judge Mrs. Thatcher dispassionately, because she was so like my mother. They looked and sounded similarshortish urgent women who moved with purpose. From large hair, their faces narrowed downward; they had receding chins that appeared weak and strong at once. Force of will made them courageously disagreeable. They were born two years apart (Thatcher in 1925, my mother in 1927), came from modest, fiercely principled Nonconformist religious backgrounds, and saw life as a ladder that everyone must climb, from evil to goodness, from error to correction, from the lower social classes to the higher ones. Estranged from their native accents, they spoke in their grander borrowed ones a little carefullyas if, having learned their elocution lessons, they were now giving them. Both women were complex feminists, of a kind, who didnt use the term, preferred men to women, and coddled their sons over their daughters. And both powerful women married supportive men named Denis.

The degree of my hostility for Mrs. Thatcherpolitical, but also affectivetroubled me, because it cast a cold shadow over my filial love. Yet I was hardly alone. The entire country seemed to be passionately insane about Thatcher and Thatcherism. I was thirteen when she became Prime Minister, in 1979, so all my adolescence was spent under her long reign. She was still Britains leader when I left university, in 1988. Where I grew up, in the North of England, her name was uttered bitterly. We were twenty miles from Newcastle, stalked by once powerful industriessteel, shipbuilding, coalthat Thatcherism eyed as chronically sick, inimical to progress, and infested with unionist leftism. During the bloody miners strike of 1984-85, men and women collected money every Saturday in the market square of my home town with signs that asked us to Dig deep for the miners. In those days, there was no such thing as political indifferencethat would be allowable only in the next decade, the era after the fall of Communism, the era of steady Third Way prosperity, when history had been called off. Of course, we couldnt be dispassionate: Margaret Thatcher breathed over the country like a great parental god. She wanted her nation to be as ambitious, successful, hardworking, thrifty, and right-principled as she was, and to those ends she hectored, wounded, pushed, and inspired.

Force of personality was the most striking thing about heralmost too powerful for easy rational discussion, a political colleague of hers said. Its the dominant theme in the more than two thousand pages of Charles Moores authorized biography, now completed by its third volume, Herself Alone (Knopf), which chronicles a political downfall brought about by a force of personality too large for rational discussion. As early as 1981, one of Thatchers advisers complained that she bullied her weaker colleagues: You criticise colleagues in front of each other and in front of their officials.... You give little praise or credit. If this is the best you can do, she told Geoffrey Howe, a long-abused Cabinet minister, then Id better send you to hospital and deliver the statement myself. On one occasion, when she became particularly strident, the Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had to remind her, I am not a member of your government, I am the head of a sovereign nation! But she could just as easily rebuke entire nations, genders, or both at once. You men, youre all so weak, she spat at some Dutch representatives after an episode of failed European negotiation. Robin Butler, her principal private secretary, confessed that dealing with her face to face was like feeding a fierce animal. Moore, who has an excellent eye for anecdotes and a Gibbonian way with footnotes, buries one of the best of such tales at the bottom of a page in his second volume. Once, at a meeting, when she compared something to Waiting for Godot, and pronounced Godot with a hard t, Lord Carrington, her first Foreign Secretary, whispered to her, Its pronounced Godo, Prime Minister. How is it spelled? she asked. Carrington spelled it out. Then its Godot, she replied, enunciating the t with even greater distinctness.

Some of the squeamishness she prompted can be attributed to male chauvinism and Tory patrician snobbery; Moore, a right-wing columnist for the Daily Telegraph and a former editor of The Spectator, likes to use this defense when Thatcher is at her most indefensible, soothingly reminding us of her role as the great disrupter of the old boys club and its afternoon fug. This is undeniable, though snobbery seems generally to have topped misogyny among her detractors. Carrington, a suave old Etonian diplomat, once exclaimed, If I have any more trouble from this fucking stupid, petit-bourgeois woman, Im going to go. Thatcher reminded Valry Giscard dEstaing, the aquiline French President, of a tiresome English nanny his family had once employed.

Snobbery she could do nothing about. But the Westminster club remained a stiflingly male one in large part because Thatcher, across eleven years and three administrations, appointed just one woman to her Cabinet, and to a politically irrelevant post at that. The women she encountered, insofar as they appear in Moores biography at all, seem likely to have joined the men in their patterns of fascination and recoil. We arent told what her mother thought of her, but Margarets emphatic sidelining of the maternal influenceI loved my mother dearly but after I was fifteen we had nothing more to say to each othershades in a sad mutual attrition. Geoffrey Howes wife, Elspeth, detested Thatcher, and faulted her for having, especially around women, Queen Bee syndromeI made it. Others can jolly well do the same. Even Queen Elizabeth shared the general squeamishness; seven years into Thatchers rule, she let it be known through her press secretary that she considered the Prime Minister to be uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive.

In the opening pages of The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence describes the long rhythms of traditional agricultural life in Nottinghamshire. The men, he suggests, stay close to the ground in wordless communion, and do not yearn for a significant life beyond their elemental work. The women are different. They look out and up, at the horizon, to the spoken world beyondto the village, with its church and hall and school. For Lawrence, the woman is the ever-restless agent of social change. Margaret Thatcher, born ten years after the publication of The Rainbow, in the neighboring county of Lincolnshire, into the same religious Nonconformism that shaped Lawrence (and, before him, George Eliot), belonged to that sorority. With astonishing enterprise and intelligence, she treated her lower-middle-class background as a problem to be solved. It isnt surprising that her schoolmates thought her accent was affected and that she had about her a smug perfection: she would not be held back; she was not going to stay in the rural town of Grantham.

She looked out and up; she instinctively agreed with Mr. Vincy, in Middlemarch, who announces that its a good British feeling to try and raise your family a little. Thatchers father, the deeply pious Alfred Roberts, was a shopkeeper, and she was born into modest circumstances above the corner store in Grantham. The family house lacked a yard, hot water, and an indoor lavatory. But Roberts was also a lay preacher, and later became an alderman and the towns mayor. Ascent, for Margaret, wasnt merely a matter of sorority, then; she studied her fathers public speaking. At Oxford, she was one of only five women in her year studying chemistry. Called to the bar in 1954, she was the first woman in her mentors law chambers. She chose tax law, because, as a young mother, she needed a regular schedulea year earlier, she had given birth to twins, Mark and Carol. She evidently went into the law because it was the familiar (male) path to a career in politics.

Her deep understanding of middle- and working-class social aspiration, revolutionary in the placidly entitled world of Conservative Party politics, is what kept her in power for so long, and is also her greatest legacy. She figured out that the labor movement, conservatisms traditional radical foe, had itself become conservative: it wanted too many things to stay the same. Arthur Scargill, the militant leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, said that his members strike was taken in defense of the right of their sons and grandsons to go down the mine. Almost two decades earlier, Mrs. Thatcher, then a young M.P., had said that if she were given a choice she would not send her son down a pit. It was perilous and unhealthy: in 1967, three miners were killed a week. The important word there is choice, something exercised, in 1993, by the same Arthur Scargill, when he tried to buy a London council flat (the equivalent of public housing), under a right-to-buy policy that Mrs. Thatcher pioneered in the early nineteen-eighties.

There is an unavoidable sense of strategic efficiency about her domestic life. Margaret Roberts was twenty-three when she met Denis Thatcher, and she reported back to her sister thus: Major Thatcher, who has a flat in London (age about 36, plenty of money) was also dining and he drove me back to town at midnight. As one would expect he is a perfect gentleman. Not a very attractive creaturevery reserved but quite nice. With admirable evolutionary shrewdness, the right mate was being selected: Margarets husband, who had means from the family paint-and-preservatives business he managed, would prove to be impressively supportive, and canny at backing out of the limelight. Friends said that it was a solid marriage but no great love affair. She was pleased to have twins, but more because it meant that she need not get pregnant again than because of a wild enthusiasm for motherhood is Moores dry comment. Not that Denis compensated with any wild enthusiasm for fatherhood. I just wished the little buggers had been drowned at birth, he said years later, when asked about his children. He was watching cricket at the Oval when they were born. Mark and Carol were dispatched to boarding schools at the ages of eight and nine, respectively, and Margaret Thatcher entered Parliament, in 1959, as a Conservative M.P. for the North London constituency of Finchley. Her steady rise to power had begun.

Thatchers singular mission was political. Such single-mindedness, which is hoarded eccentricity, is easy to dislikeit so isnt like us. Yet one can only marvel at the determination and the fortitude needed to surmount the slights and obstacles of that time. Nearly every normal habit of lifeengaged parenthood, sibling loyalty, marital intimacy, deep friendship, ordinary social intercoursegave way to the achievement of that one thing. Denis Healey, a brilliant Labour politician of Thatchers generation, thought that politicians needed to have a hinterland; he said that he had always been as interested in music, poetry, and painting as he was in politics. The English idea of the nonchalant gentleman-amateurHarold Macmillan calmly reading Jane Austen, and so onhad always presupposed such hinterlands. You had one foot in Downing Street and the other in your country-house library. It was a tradition of male affluence, to be sure, and Thatcher might well have felt that she couldnt let her guard down. Or perhaps she just had no hinterland. And no innerland, either: in all of Moores thousands of pages, there is not the slightest stirring of interiority. What Margaret Thatcher felt privately about God, or death, or a beautiful phrase of music, or love, or sex, or a sad movie, or the great blessings of having children, or the beauties of foreign cities, or the anguish of suffering, is not recorded. Her soul was shuttered.

But how hard she worked at that one thing, and with what steely ministration! Moore provides an example from the beginning of her career. Junior members of Parliament are encouraged to propose their own bills; the gesture announces a freshmans seriousness of intention. The young Thatcher found a subjectshe devised a bill that would force Labour councils to open up their proceedings to the public (including newspapers involved in labor disputes). But she identified an impediment to its passage. On Fridays, when such bills were debated, M.P.s were often absent. Thatcher wrote individually to two hundred and fifty of her Conservative colleaguesI have always believed in the impact of a personal, handwritten letterasking them to stay in Westminster; her private-members bill was carried by an overwhelming margin. About a decade later, in the early seventies, she joined Prime Minister Edward Heaths Cabinet as Education Secretary. When Heath lost the general election of 1974, she made a bid for leader of the Conservative Party, and won, in February, 1975. Just over four years after that, she became, as Moore says, the first elected woman leader in the Western world.

Colleagues were astounded at how thoroughly she could master briefing material. She needed little sleep, and worked late into the night. In 1984, when the I.R.A. bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where the Prime Minister was staying for the annual Conservative Party Conference, she was polishing her keynote speech at the moment her suites bathroom exploded, at 2:50 a.m. On a twenty-four-hour flight from Hong Kong to Washington, D.C., in a government jet equipped with a bed, she told Robin Butler that, while he could go to sleep, she was going to stay awake for the entire journey while she studied the intricacies of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. She intently marked up everything that came her way, blitzing her colleagues internal memos and policy proposals with double and triple underlinings, groaning castigations, and flat prohibitions: No, Very disappointing& sketchy, This is awful. Vacations provoked something like bewildered impatience; in his long chronicle, Moore eventually flourishes a droll shorthand for these recurrent challenges: For her customary but always unwelcome summer holidays, Mrs. Thatcher...

Indeed, what emerges from these impeccably researched, coolly absorbing volumes are two Margaret Thatchers, whom we might call the scientist and the atavist. For the scientist Thatcher, the chemist who had studied with Dorothy Hodgkin at university, knowledge existed to be mastered, made use of, leveraged. This Thatcher had read Friedrich von Hayeks The Road to Serfdom at Oxford, and at opportune moments would pull his Constitution of Liberty out of her handbag. Christmas of 1975 found her doggedly continuing her anti-communist holiday reading: The Possessed and Darkness at Noon. This Thatcher was genuinely interested in whether Mikhail Gorbachev could reform Soviet Communism; she coaxed and encouraged him before any other Western leader dared to, and engaged him in passionate, freewheeling colloquies. (Their first lasted six hours.) She convened what were essentially academic seminars on the Soviet Union at Chequers, the Prime Ministers country residence (with guests such as the British historians Robert Conquest and Hugh Thomas and the Columbia University scholar Seweryn Bialer).

The scientist surrounded herself with intelligent men (Nigel Lawson, Geoffrey Howe, Keith Joseph, Douglas Hurd), and approached Britains manifold woes at the start of the nineteen-eighties with an unsentimental willingness to push experiment to the edge of cruelty. Britain was teetering: the figures still astonish. Interest rates in 1979 reached seventeen per cent and inflation a staggering eighteen per cent. Nationalized industries were sluggish and fabulously costly to the taxpayer. British Leyland, the automotive conglomerate that included Jaguar, Triumph, and Austin Rover, was producing comically dreadful cars and had consumed about two hundred million pounds a year in government subsidies. Many of these companies approached customer satisfaction like the proprietor in the Monty Python cheese-shop sketch: Normally, sir, yes, but today the van broke down. Moore, in one of his footnotes, remembers trying to get a phone installed in 1981, and being told by British Telecom that it would take six months, owing to a shortage of numbers. As Howe, Thatchers first Chancellor of the Exchequer, noted in his budget speech of June, 1979, Britains share of world trade in 1954 had been equal to that of France and Germany combined. Now the French and German share was three times bigger than Britains.

Controlling expenditure and the money supply was part hypothesis (Thatchers fabled monetarism, which she got from Milton Friedman) and part common sense: uncontrolled inflation, like religion, poisons everything. A system that was increasing miners pay by nearly ten per cent a year was clearly unsustainable. Since many of the major industries (including railways, coal, telecommunications, and a good chunk of automobile production) were nationalized, the government was effectively acting as a giant employer. But since many werent profitable, it was also acting as a giant bank. The country had apparently wandered into the worst of two worlds: nationalization of the means of production (largely achieved by Clement Attlees postwar Labour government) could offer no magical respite from the marketwhich had decided, for instance, that it didnt want badly made British carsand so it simply insured that capitalism was being done poorly. As a remedy, Thatcher and her ministers embarked on a campaign of privatization, releasing British Gas, British Airways, British Telecom, BP, and British Leyland from government control.

Government subvention had fended off the ravages of capitalism in one important way: it had provided steady employment. Now the countrys unemployment rate rose; it hit a high of thirteen per cent in 1984, and was still seven per cent in 1990, the year of Thatchers ouster. Thatchers calculation was that widespread unemployment was an unavoidable fact of economic reform, that certain jobs would have to be the mulch that went into the revival of the general economic habitat. Apart from the profound human misery that resulted, there was an enduring political costmuch of Scotland, Wales, and the North of England remains lost to Conservatives. This was the Thatcher who maintained that there was no such thing as society, only individuals, and people must look to themselves first, a statement that Moore attempts, with little luck, to wrestle from its infamy. That unequal society tended toward ugly extremes, with great new impoverishment and great new enrichment. Still, the new order created undeniable economic expansion (an average G.D.P. growth rate of 3.2 per cent in the nineteen-eighties), and Thatcher was relected in 1983 and 1987, the first Prime Minister after universal suffrage, Moore notes, to win three elections.

Alas, the atavist Thatcher was a different creature, and the atavist gradually consumed the scientist, because the scientist drank her own potion, the one marked ideology. The atavist had been happy to be called a reactionary, before she became Prime Minister. The atavist complained publicly about Britains being swamped by immigrants; never, as far as we know, used the National Health Service herself and wanted to convert it to an American-style insurance-based system; believed in capital punishment; agreed with her husband that the BBC was infested with left-wing pinkos; supported legislation prohibiting local government authorities from promoting homosexuality; refused to countenance any meaningful political progress in Northern Ireland; vehemently opposed German reunification; was virtually alone among world leaders in opposingsanctions on the South African apartheid regime; and called the A.N.C. a typical terrorist organization. The atavist stopped listening to her colleagues, and deeply distrusted her civil servants (particularly at the Foreign Office), whom she worked around or behind whenever she could. The atavist was the possessor of what one colleague called a very English Englishness: she didnt sacrifice Scotland and Wales as part of a Conservative strategy; she hardly noticed they were there.

Europe was the great theatre of this very English Englishness. Throughout Mrs. Thatchers career, Moore observes, the story of 1940 was the myth which most dominated her imagination. It is the Dunkirk story, and not wholly mythical: Nazis rampant in Europe, Paris vanquished, Britain alone as the last bulwark of Western civilization, while the air flashed with Spitfires and Churchill growled in the Commons. Margaret Roberts was fifteen, and Britain would never be as noble againunless it was in 1982, when she led the country to victory over Argentina during the Falklands War, and quoted the Duke of Wellington: There is no such thing as a little war for a great nation. The refusal to accept Britains diminishment, the refusal merely to manage the decline, was central to Thatchers pugilism, and it is the reason for her Churchillian status among contemporary Conservatives.

Yet the question that devoured her career, and remains grievously unresolved to this day, is whether Britain is a greater nation inside or outside the European Union. Remainers and assorted economic pragmatists tend to argue that the right question is whether Britain is a richer nation inside Europe or out; greatness will have to look after itself. Brexiteers reply that greatness cannot look after itself when the nations sovereignty is curtailed. Thatcher appears to have been one of those economic pragmatists for a brief period, when Great Britain voted by referendum to stay in the European Economic Community, in 1975, and she saw the economic possibilities of a large internal market. Soon she grew dismayed by French and German plans for greater integration, a European Central Bank and single currency, and the borderless utopia that sought to banish nationalist rivalry and bloodshed. To her, it all smacked of socialism. It deprived nations of their ability to control their own currencies and interest rates; it favored burgeoning German and French power; it operated by lite consensus and an irritating sort of mild bureaucratic snuffling.

Some of these objections were reasonable, but its hard to resist the idea that the core of Thatchers hostility to Europe was flamingly unreasonable, almost exceeding articulate discourse. It is unreasonable to credit nuclear weaponsbut not the E.U.for keeping the peace in modern Europe, as Thatcher did. Moore, a prominent Brexiteer, herniates himself in his effort to defend his subject in this area, assuring us that Thatcher was not, in any general sense, anti-European, to which the reply might be: no, only in many specific senses. The first speech she gave as Party leader, in 1975, pushed against the notion that Britain had become a poor nation whose only greatness lies in the past. Yet a frozen allegiance to the myth of 1940 rather guarantees a nostalgia for the greatness of the past. The theme was struck repeatedly. How dare they! We saved all their necks in the war, she exclaimed at a European summit in 1984, apparently annoyed by the spectacle of European foreign ministers idly drinking coffee and swapping funny stories.

Her deep suspicion of all things German became more vociferous once German reunification loomed. She saw greater European unity, Moore says, not as a solution for German power, but as a cloak for it. She had a map of Europe in her handbag, marked up with a black circle around Germany, and another, even warier circle around the German-speaking peoples of Europe. The German Chancellor Helmut Kohl reportedly joked to her at a 1990 meeting that, at the recent World Cup semifinal, the Germans had apparently beaten England at their national game, only to have Thatcher reply that the English had beaten the Germans at theirs twice in the twentieth century. But it was Kohl who accurately diagnosed the problem: She thinks history is not just. Germany is so rich and Great Britain is struggling. They won a war but lost an empire and their economy.

Increasingly, her colleagues and civil servants worked around her. Officials at the Foreign Office privately noted her Germanophobia and her obsessions about the European Community and Germany. One minister, Douglas Hurd, complained that Cabinet meetings now involved three orders of business: parliamentary affairs; home affairs; and xenophobia. The greatest pressure was felt by Geoffrey Howe, who became her Foreign Secretary in 1983. A loyal colleague from the earliest days of her leadership and an architect of the first Thatcher economic plan, he was perhaps the last person you would have selected to spend long hours by the Prime Ministers side, as she sliced her way through flabby world gatherings. Thickly bespectacled, deferential, gently overweight, and meek of manner, he spoke in a civil murmur, a kind of clerical stutter that unfailingly cast a sleeping spell over the entire nation. Denis Healey said that being attacked by Howe was like being savaged by a dead sheep. Howe was a lawyerly civil servant who had been mysteriously transferred to the front lines of partisan politics. Where Thatcher craved decision, Howe preferred deferment; where Thatcher disrupted, he convened. He favored consensus, formulas, protocols, quietly stagnant back channels.

He was also decent, capable, and well liked. Perhaps she needed him around, in an odd-couple way, as her reliable negative: find out what Geoffrey would do, and then do the opposite. Moore speculates that she despised his unmanliness, a shrewd surmise given her Lady Macbeth-like disdain for the slightest wobbliness in masculinity. She regularly rebuked him in front of his peers. At one of the Chequers seminars on the Soviet Union, she called out, Dont worry, Geoffrey. We know exactly what youre going to say. After a memorial service for her old friend Ian Gow, at which Howe had delivered the eulogy, she upbraided him in front of Gows grieving sons: Why dont you speak up, Geoffrey? You mumble. Howe had been distressed by Thatchers opposition to South African sanctionshe feared that Britain would be seen as the sole defender of apartheidand now he grew convinced that Thatcher was attempting to turn the Conservative Party into an anti-European tank. On November1, 1990, she again reprimanded him in front of his colleagues; later that day, he resigned. He did not go quietly. The resignation speech he delivered at the House of Commons (declaring that Thatchers perceived attitude towards Europe is running increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation) led Tories to move against her leadership.

Once Mrs. Thatchers fall had begun, the toppling was fast. But perhaps it had really started earlierwhen, in October of 1989, she fell out with Commonwealth leaders on the question of South African sanctions, and said, If it is one against forty-eight, I am very sorry for the forty-eight. Or when her second Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, resigned a few days later, complaining that she just doesnt listen any more. Or in March, 1990, when some of the worst rioting in modern British history swept through central London, as thousands of citizens protested the new poll tax. Or when inflation rates and unemployment began to rise, in the same year. And how curious that Thatcher, whose oft-repeated mantra was Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted, could not or would not see this. Everyone else, it seems, was aware of what Moore nicely calls the growing fin de rgime feeling. Parties exist to win elections. Miraculously, she had won three elections; now she imperilled the fourth: Labour was polling between sixteen and twenty-one percentage points ahead of the Conservatives. So she faced a leadership challenge and resigned, on November 28, 1990. Two years later, under her successor, John Major, the Conservatives won the election that had looked so grim for them.

She was a violently political animal, and when the hunt was taken from her she dwindled away into a cruelly permanent winter that finally erased her only self. Her private secretary Charles Powell thought that she never had a happy day once she left power. Friends and admirers did their best, setting her up with houses and assistantsone wealthy donor sent her flowers once a week for the rest of her life. She signed up with a speakers bureau, formed the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, and travelled the world in the remunerative manneras a kind of auctioned iconthat is now grimly customary among former world leaders, but was then unusual. Her politics, simmering away untended, thickened into solid reductions: she became ever more fervently opposed to E.U. membership. She defended the former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, an old ally, when, visiting Britain for medical treatment, he was placed under house arrest in compliance with a Spanish warrant. Once presciently interested in climate changethe scientist Thatcher had organized an early conference, in 1989, devoted to Saving the Ozone Layer, and a subsequent seminar at which she sat with the environmentalist James Lovelockshe appeared to recant it all in the book Statecraft (2002), a dull collection of right-wing speeches and anecdotes. The atavist now decried the issue as little more than an excuse for the promotion of worldwide, supranational socialism.

Colleagues noticed her declining capacities. Giving a speech in 2000, she repeated the same joke three times. She suffered a mini-stroke at the end of 2001, and another early in 2002, temporarily losing the power of speech. Denis Thatcher, mysteriously kept alive by a stern regimen of nightly gin-and-tonics and two packs a day, died in 2003, at the age of eighty-eight. His absence caused further bewilderment: I must go home now and get his supper, she sometimes exclaimed. As her dementia deepened, her temperament sweetened; I saw the same change in my own mother, who followed Mrs. Thatcher in this regard, and who, born two years after her, died a year after her, in 2014. Almost mute, uncannily gentle, and patient as she had rarely been in the fullness of her life, Mrs. Thatcher wouldit is one of the most poignant details in Charles Moores accountsit for hours in front of a certain painting at the Oxfordshire estate of a wealthy friend. The painting was a Victorian scene, titled The Leamington HuntMr Harry Bradleys Hounds, by John Frederick Herring. She liked counting the dogs.

Dementias whittling seems crueller when the oak once stood as tall as Thatcher did. Her fiercest opponents could not be unmoved by Moores last pages. But a cold eye is required for her legacy, which has been calamitous. Brexit is always at the center of it, and yet almost the least of it. She split her own party, but she also split the Labour Party (with plenty of assistance from that great Thatcher admirer Tony Blair). After all, her opposition to the European Union wasnt just about Europhobia; it had to do with her visceral Americophilia. When she flew to Washington, D.C., in 1981 to proclaim her ardor for the newly inaugurated Ronald Reagan, she was not only announcing an ideological kinship but binding her country to the larger power. Americas successes will be our successes, she declaimed. Your problems will be our problems. That promise was tragically fulfilled when Tony Blair decided to join George Bushs invasion of Iraqa decision that fatefully weakened Blairs party.

Thatcher legitimated a new kind of inequality; she protected and coddled Rupert Murdochs right-wing press, which returned the favor with blind support; she ignored and undermined her civil service, especially at the Foreign Office; she divided politics into a purity war of loyalists and enemies; she stopped being the leader of one nation; she disrupted. Alas, these are now very familiar woes, with their own familiar rhetoric. As David Cameron put it when she died, She made our country great again.

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Its Still Margaret Thatchers Britain - The New Yorker

Jeremy Corbyn: pledges (pic: Terry Murden)

As I See It: Terry Murden

For three years businesses have been told to prepare for the potential upheaval of Brexit and the ultimate test of a No Deal exit from the EU. But a potentially more disruptive challenge is looming that could put any new trade deal negotiations in the shade: a Jeremy Corbyn government.

The Tories are maintaining a significant lead in the polls, but even the pollsters caution against too many assumptions. There are just under three weeks to polling day and plenty of time for Mr Johnsons party to let a commanding lead slip. A minority government led by Mr Corbyn cannot be ruled out given that neither the LibDems or SNP would prop up another Conservative administration.

A programme of investment in infrastructure and public services, together with widespread nationalisation, will appeal to those tired of austerity and impatient for improvements to a worn out and underfunded state sector.

For those less enthusiastic about the promised spending splurge it conjures up images of a return to an economy beset with 70s-style inefficiencies and industrial unrest, as well as huge tax increases and massive borrowing to meet the cost of this largesse.

While the numbers are eye-watering, the impact on re-sizing the state is not perhaps so great as the numbers may suggest. Labours plans would take the state as ashare of GDPto just above the OECD average, a reflection perhaps of how much it has shrunk. Many European countries which consider themselves flag bearers of free enterprise also have large public sectors which Labour would merely be hoping to match. The partys demand for a rebalancing of income so that the top earners pay a little more seems reasonable enough, though as explained below the tax plan also hits the less well-off.

Few could disagree with Labours vision of a country where hospitals and schools have the funds they need to provide the level of care the public demands, where everyone has a decent home, works fewer hours, can travel freely on the bus network and climate change is properly addressed. If it stopped at promising basic rights it may pass muster, but it extends into free university tuition fees and halting the changes to state pensions as well as buying out large chunks of industry. These are costly items and the spending spree keeps mounting, In the past week it has conjured up an extra 30bn for Scotland alone.

Labour says its plans will be partly paid for by rebalancing the tax burden on to wealth (unearned income), through such measures as hiking capital gains tax on shares, while overlooking the impact that this has on pensions and other investments, including those of working people.

Its plans to compensate women born in the 1950s who have lost their entitlement to state pensions until they are 66 is another eye-catching pledge and one that comes at a high price. Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies says it immediately breaks the partys promises in their manifesto just last week to only borrow to invest. The party would need even more than its 80bn of tax rises if it wanted to cover the pensions shortfall.

Paul Johnson also points out that whilst some of this so-called Waspi women have suffered hardship, many of them are quite well off.

Aside from convincing sceptical voters that he can actually create this new utopia Mr Corbyns biggest challenge is himself. He is regularly rated the least popular leader and his radical agenda is certainly frightening a few horses. Businesses feel they will be hammered and already he has talked of hiking corporation tax at a time when rising costs is a major headache. Labours tax plans threaten to undermine Britains status as an attractive destination for overseas investors.

The partys faith in the state is nothing new but it has very loud echoes of a less than glorious past, including the failed experiments in state ownership of industry that crippled the post-war economy. Nationalising rail, energy and broadband cuts out the shareholders whom Labour sees as good-for-nothing money-grabbers and has already sent shivers through two energy companies SSE and National Grid who have re-incorporated abroad in order to protect their investors.

The nationalisation of industries is usually sold as ownership by the people, although it rarely means giving power to the people. Instead it creates a new and expensive bureaucracy with the managers drawn from the same pool who operated them in the private sector. Taxes rise to compensate for the free buses and broadband being offered so that consumers are no better off.

In terms of performance nothing much changes, a lot of money is spent and were all made to pay for it.

Related

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Labour wants to transform Britain, but can we afford it? - Daily Business

Who cares? I have nothing to hide

Weve all heard that one before.

The only people Ive heard say, Who cares? are people who dont understand the scope of the problem, Mr. Cyphers said.

A lot of the tracking systems out there make it easier for law enforcement to gather data without warrants, he said. A lot of trackers sell data directly to law enforcement and to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. I think the bottom line is that its creepy at best. It enables manipulative advertising and political messaging in ways that make it a lot easier for the messengers to be unaccountable. It enables discriminatory advertising without a lot of accountability, and in the worst cases it can put real people in real danger.

[Like what youre reading? Sign up here for the Smarter Living newsletter to get stories like this (and much more!) delivered straight to your inbox every Monday morning.]

Still, there are signs that things could be improving, if slowly. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, Mr. Cyphers said, dredged up the worst parts of the industry into the press and popular knowledge, which in some ways forced companies and lawmakers to acknowledge the issue. Sweeping changes, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act and Europes GDPR, have led the way in giving internet users new rights and protections, and Mr. Cyphers said that popular awareness and the techlash has opened up room for real regulation.

But were a long way from a privacy utopia.

As long as you can make a buck and what youre doing isnt illegal, Mr. Cyphers said someones going to do it.

First, be more cautious of the information you voluntary hand over.

Dont hand over data unless you have to! Ms. Hill said. If a store asks for your email address or ZIP code, say no. When Facebook asks you to upload your contact book, dont do it. If youre buying some sensitive product (prenatal vitamins, medication), dont use your store loyalty card and use cash.

Added Mr. Cyphers: Think hard before you enter your email into a form online about why the company actually needs your email and what they might do with it. You can lie. Its not illegal to put a fake email, or a fake phone number or a fake name in the vast majority of services you sign up for, he said. Theres no reason they need it, theres no reason you have to give it to them.

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Youre Tracked Everywhere You Go Online. Use This Guide to Fight Back. - The New York Times

With Anupama Chandrasekhar's When the Crows Visit playing its final week and Mike Bartlett's Snowflake in rehearsals, Artistic Director of Kiln Theatre, Indhu Rubasingham, today announces the full cast for her production of the UK premire of Antoinette Nwandu's Pass Over. Joining the previously announced Paapa Essiedu (Moses), are Alexander Eliot (Mister/Ossifer) and Gershwyn Eustache Jnr (Kitch). The production opens on 19 February 2020, with previews from 13 February, and runs until 21 March.

Directed by Indhu Rubasingham; Designer Robert Jones; Lighting Designer Oliver Fenwick; Sound Designers Ben & Max Ringham; Movement Director Lanre Malaolu; Casting Director Julia Horan CDG; Voice and Dialect Coach Hazel Holder

A lamppost. Night. Two friends are passing time. Stuck. Waiting for change.

Inspired by Waiting for Godot and the Exodus, Antoinette Nwandu fuses poetry, humour and humanity in a rare and politically charged new play which exposes the experiences of young men in a world that refuses to see them.

Antoinette Nwandu is a New York-based playwright. Her plays include Breach, Pass Over, 4 Sustenance, Black Boy and the War, Vanna White Must Die and FLAT SAM. She is the recipient of The Whiting Award, The Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, The Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, The Negro Ensemble Company's Douglas Turner Ward Prize, and a Literary Fellowship at the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference. Her plays have been included on the 2016 and 2017 Kilroys lists, and she has been named a Ruby Prize finalist, PONY Fellowship finalist, Page73 Fellowship finalist, NBT's I Am Soul Fellowship finalist, and two-time Princess Grace Award semi-finalist.

Alexander Eliot plays Mister/Ossifer. Eliot recently graduated from Drama Centre. His theatre work includes Three Sisters (Almeida Theatre) and television work includes Casualty.

Paapa Essiedu plays Moses. His theatre credits include The Convert (Young Vic), Pinter One (Harold Pinter Theatre), Hamlet, King Lear (RSC, Kennedy Center and Brooklyn Academy Of Music, New York - Ian Charleson and UK Theatre Award winner for Best Actor), Racing Demon (Theatre Royal Bath), The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Mouse and his Child (RSC), You For Me For You (Royal Court Theatre), Romeo and Juliet (Tobacco Factory), King Lear (National Theatre), Black Jesus (Finborough Theatre), Outside on the Street (Pleasance Theatre), and Dutchman (Orange Tree Theatre). For television, his work includes Gangs of London, Press, The Miniaturist, Black Earth Rising, Revolting, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Kiri, Not Safe for Work and Utopia; and for film, Murder on the Orient Express and Women at the Well (Screen International Star of Tomorrow 2017).

Gershwyn Eustache Jnr plays Kitch. His theatre work includes Small Island, Pinocchio, Home, Nut (National Theatre), Anatomy of a Suicide, A Profoundly Affectionate Passionate Devotion to Someone (Royal Court Theatre), The Royale (Bush Theatre) and The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare's Globe). For television, his work includes January 22nd, Small Ave, Britannia, Fortitude, Legends, Peter and Wendy and Run; and for film, The Yellow Birds, Second Coming and Starred Up.

Artistic Director of Kiln Theatre Indhu Rubasingham directs. Her work for the company includes When the Crows Visit, Wife, White Teeth, Holy Sh!t, Red Velvet (which transferred to New York and later to the Garrick Theatre as part of the Kenneth Branagh Season) and Handbagged (winner of Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre - also West End, UK tour, Washington DC and New York). Other productions for Kiln Theatre include The Invisible Hand, A Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes, Multitudes, The House That Will Not Stand, Paper Dolls, Women, Power and Politics, Stones in His Pockets, Detaining Justice, The Great Game: Afghanistan, Fabulation and Starstruck. Other theatre credits include The Great Wave, Ugly Lies the Bone, The Motherf**cker with the Hat (Evening Standard Award for Best Play), The Waiting Room (all National Theatre), The Ramayana (National Theatre/ Birmingham Rep), Belong, Disconnect, Free Outgoing, Lift Off, Clubland, The Crutch and Sugar Mummies (Royal Court Theatre), Ruined (Almeida Theatre), Yellowman and Anna in the Tropics (Hampstead Theatre), Secret Rapture and The Misanthrope (Minerva, Chichester Festival Theatre), Romeo and Juliet (Chichester Festival Theatre), Pure Gold (Soho Theatre), The No Boys Cricket Club and Party Girls (Theatre Royal Stratford East), Wuthering Heights (Birmingham REP), Heartbreak House (Watford Palace Theatre), Sugar Dollies and Shakuntala (Gate Theatre), A River Sutra (Three Mill Island Studios), Rhinoceros (UC Davis, California) and A Doll's House (Young Vic).

http://www.KilnTheatre.com

Link:

Full Cast Announced For The UK Premire Of Antoinette Nwandu's PASS OVER - Broadway World

by: Jessica MaoNov 27, 2019

If there was a surefire candidate for owning this year, Dombresky would be at the top of the list. Now, the house maven capitalizes on his double-packed release and tour momentum with his newest release, Trust The Process.

The latest track follows Meli-Melo, released in August. The French producer has quickly risen as an excitable new force in the house scene, establishing bases in music-heavy cities Miami and Los Angeles while maintaining his roots. Backed by fellow Frenchmen Tchami and DJ Snake alongside releases on the formers Confessions label, Dombresky has infected dance floors with his groove appeal on tracks like Soul Sacrifice and showcased his chameleon-like range with bass house-infused songs like Utopia.

The latest track to hone in on Dombreskys house prowess, Trust The Process conjoins playful Chicago chords with soulful vocals that build to a spell-binding drop composed of irresistible basslines, groovy synth melodies, and percussive embellishments to the four-on-the-floor flow. With funky falsettos and expressive messaging, Dombresky is poised to take the throne as the next house healer.

Tags: Dombresky, trust the process

Categories: Music

Originally posted here:

Dombresky sheds house grooves on 'Trust The Process' - Dancing Astronaut

When Bjrk first conceived of the live show for her ninth studio album, 2017s lush Utopia, she envisioned something a little bit Pollyanna. Having cut short the tour for the preceding Vulnicura album owing to the emotional weight of its dense break-up songs, this was a chance to create a new world, one bathed in light. Cornucopia has been billed by Bjrk as her most elaborate staged concert to date, which is saying something considering that 2011s Biophilia jaunt utilised actual lightning to make beats. Her choice of arena-sized venues suggests that logistics won out over intimacy. Everything here is oversized, from the constantly shifting fringed screens that drape the stage made up of a collection of fungi-like pods to the crisp projections showing polymorphous alien-like flora and fauna that often engulf the 18-piece choir and the flute septet, to the dome-like reverberation chamber into which Bjrk occasionally disappears to sing without a microphone. That its predominantly soundtracked by Utopias birdcall-heavy art-pop makes it feel as if youve been shrunk and let loose in an underwater episode of Blue Planet.

Its an unnerving experience at first, with the crowd hushed as if in a theatre, all polite applause and near silence between songs. Its a respect that Bjrk resplendent in a peach ruffled dress and gold headpiece wallows in, unleashing that crystal clear voice on opener The Gate, before kicking and prodding at an imaginary figure on the gloopy Arisen My Senses. Her movements often seem to relate to a different song entirely, as if these sprawling, densely layered epics read as pop to her now. Even when cloaked in blossoming flowers or, as on the rumbling highlight Body Memory, surrounded by CGI bodies crashing into each other, she remains your main focus. When she loses her way during Hidden Place one of the few songs from her pre-2015 discography she styles it out with some trademark, wordless ad-libs, while a cute cry that flutes rock! is met with the nights only real concession to arena-sized cheering.

Undercutting the shows streamlined spectacle is Bjrks anarchic spirit. Songs such as Utopia and a reworked Mouths Cradle feel like they might implode at any point, all zigzagging beats and fluttering flutes, while 1995s Isobel which almost elicits relief when it appears mid-set starts off fairly straight before almost being upended by distorted bass. The main set closes with a run of songs that work through her messy break-up, with the self-explanatory Losss giving way to the anger of Sue Me and the fresh start of Tabula Rasa, a heartfelt plea to her daughter: Clean plate, she sings sweetly. Not repeating the fuck-ups of the fathers.

The failures of dominant power structures crop up again as environmental activist Greta Thunberg appears on screen to deliver a climate crisis wake-up call ahead of the encore. That its followed by Utopias crystalline closing track, the All Is Full of Love-referencing Future Forever, suggests that Bjrk wants to send everyone home with a glimmer of hope. Its a fake, however. She ends with Vulnicuras Notget, a gloriously unwieldy opus that lurches gravely around the refrain love will keep us safe from death and is introduced, perhaps comically, with a cheerful lets dance. Perhaps full utopia is too much for even Bjrk to conceive.

At SSE Hydro, Glasgow, 25 November; and touring.

Read the rest here:

Bjrk review a spectacular vision of Utopia - The Guardian