Category Archives: New Utopia

As this weeks cover story writer, Francine Kiefer, will tell you, there was one source about the history and future of California who was always atop the must-call list. When I was our Northern California correspondent in the 2000s, Kevin Starr was that rarest of interviews: someone who could succinctly and reliably blow your mind using his remarkable depth of knowledge to see sweeping trends in original ways.

This is the one comment from him that I have never forgotten: California is dealing with developing-world challenges in a first-world context.

Francines cover story brings back that memory today. Her story is about the long-anticipated rise of Latino power in California and what that could presage for the country. And the crux of her story is Proposition 187. The ballot initiative, passed overwhelmingly in 1994, sought to deny public services to unauthorized immigrants.

Though it was eventually struck down by the courts, Proposition 187 planted the seeds for a new era of Latino advocacy. It was seen as an attack on Latino dignity and humanity, and it played no small part in bringing down the Republican establishment that supported it. In California state government, Republicans are such a minority today that they are essentially irrelevant.

Fear played an important role in Proposition 187. The idea of an immigrant wave taking over the country remains potent and present in politics across the United States. But the late Mr. Starrs comment years ago has always forced me to consider a different perspective, too.

Illegal immigration put strains on the Golden States public services. For many people who grew up in the era of the California Dream during the 1950s, California used its state largesse to build the best roads and the best universities, and to undertake water projects of awesome (and environmentally devastating) scope. Its financial might was used to create something approaching a middle-class Utopia.

A large part of that middle class saw Proposition 187 as a last-ditch attempt to save that vision to make California great again, if you will. Was that group overwhelmingly white? Did societal structures make it hard for people of color to share that dream? Yes and yes. But illegal immigration was also far, far greater than it is today. It was reshaping California. While Proposition 187 was tinged with racial fears, it also had roots in other widely held concerns. To use Mr. Starrs words: how to stem the developing-world challenges that are significantly fueled through an illegal process.

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The past 25 years have proved an insightful epilogue. A quarter of the state Legislature is now Latino. California remains Americas most powerful economic engine, the worlds fifth-largest economy. And a majority of both Republicans and Democrats in the state now view immigrants as a net positive.

California has long been a glimpse of the nation 20 years in the future. At this moment of division over immigration, that is perhaps more poignant than ever.

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California offers a glimpse 20 years into the future - The Christian Science Monitor

David Byrne has been a busy man as of late. The 67-year-oldTalking Heads singer has spent the last two years sharing his one-of-a-kind American Utopia performance with fans across the country and on Broadway, and will now look to launch a new kind of immersive experience in Denver next summer.

Related: David Byrne Performs With Youth Chorus On Kimmel At Brooklyn Academy Of Music

Byrne, along with writer Mala Gaonkar, has developed whats being described as an immersive theatre experience when their new collaborative production, Theater of the Mind, premieres at Denver, COs Denver Center for the Performing Arts in August 2020.

According to the announcement, Byrne and Gaonkars production will be that of a 15,000-square-foot immersive experience where sixteen audience members at a time will journey through self-reflection, discovery, and imagination, inspired by and grounded in neuroscience. The limited number of just 16 fans who can take in the experience at a time, and will be led by a guide whose stories are inspired by the creators lives. Attendees will be encouraged to explore how they perceive the physical world through sensory experiments that reveal the inner mysteries of the brain by use of sight, touch, taste, and sound.

We are so pleased to be premiering Theater of the Mind in Denver with such wonderful partners at the DCPA. Byrne said of his latest undertaking in a statement. I have long had an interest in creating something that incorporated the sensory experiments we often read about in a way that was entertaining and engaging, but still gave people an experience that was visceral and profound.

For a few years, David and I partnered with several cognitive neuroscience labs to see how some of the most basic human intuitions determine how humans react, Gaonkar also added. What we concluded was the experiments and ideas of the labs we partnered with, several of which we embedded in our narrative, seemed as engaging as any piece of theatre. Theater of the Mind will challenge the ever-changing reality written in our minds and I am thrilled for audiences to think of science and theatre in a new way.

The announcement comes following ByrnesAmerican Utopialanding on Broadway as the theatrical rendition of Byrnes 2018 tour debuted at New York Citys Hudson Theatre late last month.

Click here to learn more aboutTheater of the Mind ahead of its summer 2020 debut.

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David Byrne To Bring Immersive 'Theater of the Mind' Experience To Denver In 2020 - Live for Live Music

Just about anyone who runs regularly encounters injury or at the very least aches and pains. Nike envisions a world where such hangups are not the norm, and its newest running shoe, the Nike React Infinity Run, is the brands latest effort toward such a utopia. And this one has some science to back it up.

The shoe features a blend of technologies developed for earlier shoes. The ultralight, performance-oriented Nike Zoom Vaporfly 4% is celebrated for its geometry, with the rockered bottom fueling more fluid and efficient strides. Meanwhile, the Nike React boasts a proprietary foam that delivers a high level of cushioning and energy return.

Weaving the best of these two shoes together results in a shoe that is simultaneously speedy, supportive and, it turns out, safe. According to a study of 226 runners by the British Columbia Sports Medicine Research Foundation, the Nike React Infinity Run resulted in a 52 percent lower injury rate versus the Nike Structure 22, a classic motion-control shoe. Wearers also reported less pain in the knees and feet.

Because it basically compared a new Nike with an older Nike, this study is best digested with a healthy grain of salt. Still, the prospect of a super comfortable running sneaker that also delivers high performance and makes running more pleasurable and (possibly) reduces injury is a pretty tempting one. We are currently testing the shoe and will be sharing first-hand impressions very soon.

At a price of $160, the Nike React Infinity Run will be available January 3for Nike Members and January 16 for everyone else.

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Nike's New Running Shoe Aims to Cut the Running Injury Rate in Half - Gear Patrol

In the wake of last months federal elections, in which Trudeau held onto the prime ministers post but his Liberal Party lost the majority in Parliament, Deconstructed headed to Toronto for the Hot Docs Podcast Festival. There, Mehdi Hasan talked to two of Canadas leading politicians. Ahmed Hussen is the immigration minister in Trudeaus cabinet an immigrant himself who arrived in Canada from war-torn Somalia in the 90s. Jagmeet Singh is the leader of the New Democratic Party and the first Sikh to head a major political party in Canada. Hasan sat down with Singh and Hussen to discuss Canadas reputation as a shining beacon of Western multiculturalism and whether its truly deserved.

Jagmeet Singh: One of the things that Im so proud of is that young kids would come up to me from so many different backgrounds and say Seeing you run for prime minister makes me feel like I can do anything.

[Music interlude.]

Mehdi Hasan: Welcome to a very special episode of Deconstructed. Im Mehdi Hasan. From the U.S. to the UK, from France to Australia, the Western world has been torn apart in recent years by bitter divisions over race, immigration and, yes, Islam. Canada has seemed to be the one hold out, resisting the rise of nationalists and populists, and praised, celebrated even, as a liberal multicultural utopia. But is it really? Or is there a darker side to Americas nice, northern neighbor?

I went to the Hotdocs Podcast Festival in Toronto to find out and, in the wake of last months federal elections, sat down in front of a live audience with two of the most prominent figures in Canadian politics: former refugee turned Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen:

Ahmed Hussen: Opening your doors to people from around the world, its not just a nice thing to do, its a smart economic policy to have.

MH: And the Sikh leader of the New Democratic Party, Jagmeet Singh.

JS: While during the campaign weve seen the liberal party campaign like they care about people, they dont govern that way.

MH: So does Canada the land of free healthcare, legal marijuana, and lots of immigrants really deserve its reputation as a progressive paradise?

If youre not Canadian, you probably know at least one Canadian politician: this guy.

Justin Trudeau: Canadas a country that was built by immigration. We know that this has been the story of Canada.

MH: Yes, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, son of iconic former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who took office in Ottawa with his Liberal Party back in 2015. The handsome, eloquent, youthful new face of Western progressivism.

Jeanne Moos: No, not Justin Bieber. Its Justin Trudeau, Canadas new prime minister in his prime.

Phil Gayle: Trudeau is seen as something of a political golden boy. Hes young. Hes charismatic. Hes effeminate.

Eleanor Clift: Handsome, charismatic, progressive. The new darling of the progressive world community.

MH: Fast forward though to September 2019.

Michelle Fleury: Many were shocked when pictures of the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau emerged showing him in blackface.

JT: This is something I deeply, deeply regret.

Newscaster: Yesterday, Trudeau apologized again after more images emerged.

Trevor Noah: Trudeau came out to apologize for one blackface and ended up admitting to more.

Newscaster: When pressed by reporters about just how many times he had dressed in black face, Trudeau refused to answer.

MH: The Trudeau blackface story got quite a lot of attention south of the border: it was simple, digestible, social-media ready, and completely intelligible to a U.S. audience given our own recent history of political blackface scandals thank you Virginia governor Ralph Northam. And it hit the news just weeks before the Canadian federal election, in which the country had to decide whether or not Trudeau would hold on to the top job. An election story that didnt get play in the U.S., though, was Quebecs controversial Bill 21.

Newscaster: The government of Quebec passed a law this weekend prohibiting some public servants from wearing religious symbols on the job.

MH: Bill 21, passed by the Quebec provincial government back in June, imposes a religiously neutral dress code on state employees in the province. That is, it bans public workers in positions of prominence school teachers, judges, police officers from wearing hijabs or yarmulkes or turbans on the job. Which has left many residents of Quebec, especially Muslim women, feeling like theyre no longer welcome there.

Nadia Naqvi: We cant simply put our identity on a shelf and come to our jobs. No, whether I wear my hijab or not, Im still the same teacher.

MH: Bill 21 became a big issue in the election campaign during the Fall, and led to clashes between prime minister Trudeau and his rival to the left, Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, or NDP.

JT: I am the only one on this stage who has said yes, a federal government might have to intervene on this. You didnt say that you would possibly intervene. You didnt even leave the door open and thats not

JS: Lets be honest for a second here. Every single day of my life is fighting a bill like Bill 21. Every single day of my life

JT: So why wont you fight it if you form government?

JS: Every single day of my life is challenging people who think that you cant do things because of the way you look. Every single day of my life, I channel the frustrations of people who feel that as well. Many people across our country who are told they cant achieve what they want because of how they look. I am running to become prime minister of this country

JT: So why not act on your convictions and leave the door open to challenging it?

MH: Trudeau scraped back into office last month, but lost his parliamentary majority and will now lead a minority liberal government. Hell need the support of the left-wing NDP which despite a lively and energetic campaign by its leader Jagmeet Singh, lost 15 of its seats during the election.

So last week, I went to Toronto to talk to Singh the first Sikh and first person of color ever to lead a major Canadian political party. But first, I spoke to Ahmed Hussen. Hussen arrived in Canada in the 90s as a teenaged Muslim refugee from war-torn Somalia and eventually rose to become Immigration Minister, yeah, Immigration Minister in the Trudeau government. With a back story like that, who better to discuss Canadas reputation as a seemingly shining beacon of western multiculturalism?

[Music interlude.]

MH: Its a pleasure to be here in Toronto at the Hotdocs Podcast Festival for a special live edition of Deconstructed. We are talking tonight about immigration, Islamophobia, racism, multiculturalism, refugees, borders, all the good stuff with two very special guests, two of Canadas best known Politicians. My first guest tonight is Canadas Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Refugees. He is a lawyer, an MP. He was former president of the Canadian Somali Congress. Hes a former refugee himself. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the honorable Ahmed Hussen.

Ahmed Hussen, welcome to Deconstructed.

AH: Thank you.

MH: Great to be here in your country, in your city. Congratulations on your very close to victory in last months elections.

AH: Thank you. That was a very, very close race between the third place finisher and the second place finisher so I didnt have a lot of problems.

MH: It was a bit of a weird victory. You lost your majority in parliament. You lost the popular vote to the conservatives. Youre basically Donald Trump to the conservativess Hillary Clinton, arent you? Im just saying in terms of winning power despite losing the popular vote. Im just saying.

AH: Well, I think we have a strong minority government. I think the message we got from Canadians is that they expect us to work with everyone in Parliament, making sure that we tackle the very, very real issues that have preoccupied Canadians and we are the first to acknowledge that we dont have all the answers, so.

MH: What went wrong for your party? Why did so many Canadians lose faith in Justin Trudeau, this once popular Prime Minister?

AH: I think look, I would say that Im very proud of the record that weve been able to achieve over the last four years. Of course, better is always possible, but I can tell you just the amount of stuff we were able to get done. I have seen it on the ground, you know, the number of children that we were able to lift out of poverty, the number of Canadians who are working now

MH: Im not disputing. Im just wondering, why did that not translate into a big victory?

AH: Its tough because, you know, its always a challenge when you are, you know, when you have a record to defend, youre dealing with a lot of false information floating in the universe. You know, there was a guy sitting in Buffalo sending stuff to Canada, that was completely false about everything under the sun and the current structures that we have simply couldnt do anything about that. So youre dealing with

MH: Is Canada more divided now than ever before?

AH: I think this election campaign was a very, in some ways it was uglier than Ive ever seen. It was it was very divisive. And I think that its fair to say that everyone has had a role in that. I think now, you know, looking back its important for all of us to reflect on how we all contributed to that environment and how we can do better as a country.

MH: What is the plan now? Youve ruled out a coalition government with the New Democratic Party, with the NDP. You talked about a strong minority government, isnt that a contradiction in terms?

AH: No, its not. It just means that what Canadians expect us to do Look, when you listen to Canadians, you can never go wrong. And what theyve told us is we expect you to work with every parliamentarian in the House of Commons to make sure that you address the issues that matter. A majority of Canadians voted for strong action now against climate change.

MH: So, why not form a coalition to do that wouldnt that be easier?

AH: Well, I think that you know, what matters is how you reach across the aisle and work on issues as they come along and work together to get things done. I think the majority of Canadians voted for Pharmacare. The majority of Canadians voted for an activist government that continues to invest in them. I think that we can agree with many of our friends across the aisle. I think that is the agenda that weve

MH: You are going to be relying on your NDP friends across the aisle to get some of this stuff through?

AH: Well rely on all parliamentarians to get the job done, depending on what the policies are. But I suspect on a lot of these issues, for example, on Pharmacare, I think our NDP colleagues would be supportive of that because they also want Pharmacare to be done now and we had already started some of that work.

MH: Ive got to ask about an issue that dominated a lot of the election campaign as one of the most senior and high profile black politicians in Canada. What was your reaction when that first image of Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister, your boss, appeared in blackface, which dominated global headlines in the United States? It was everywhere when I switched on the TV in the U.S. What was your reaction that day?

AH: Before I answer the question, I heard some laughter in the audience. Its a very serious issue. I dont think it was a funny issue. And I think its, you know, my first reaction was one of disappointment. The images were disappointing to me and to many people. I think that, from my perspective, and I, again, I cant speak for anyone else. I can speak for myself. I took the time to reflect on this and to compare the images to the four years of my experience working with this individual and making sure that I was able to recollect and reflect on all the work that I had done with Justin Trudeau on engaging the black community, delivering unprecedented investments on black issues. I mean, the first sitting prime minister in Canada to acknowledge systemic racism as a reality in Canada, acknowledging and committing Canada to the UN Decade for People of African Descent. This is not an empty commitment. Once Canada signed on to the UN Decade for People of African Descent, it comes with deliverables that you have to deliver. I chose to look at that and

MH: Did you do that in a vacuum? Or did he call you up? Did he talk to you?

AH: We had a conversation. He called me.

MH: What did he say?

AH: He was kind enough to call me ahead of the release of the images in the media.

MH: You had a heads up? You knew it was coming up?

AH: Yes, he called me shortly before and and you know, we had a conversation. And I can tell you that one of the things that I contrast with everything else that happens in this country is the fact that he exercised leadership enough to come out unequivocally to apologize to those who are hurt by those images, and to use that experience to do better on issues, the real issues of systemic racism that really need to be tackled in Canada. I think one of the things that I regret about the aftermath of that was how the media really focused on him and the images, which, I mean, there were

MH: Three images, I think. Three images, right?

AH: But what I was hoping to happen after that was for us in Canada to finally have a long overdue conversation about systemic racism. You know, to ask ourselves, does the civil service of Canada for example, or the civil service of Ontario does it look like

MH: So I want to talk about that tonight with you, but I just want to get

AH: Do our institutions and our corporate boards

MH: And I want to talk about that with you tonight.

[Crosstalk.]

AH: I dont think the media did that. The media didnt do that.

MH: I guess partly because it wasnt just one image, it was three images. Did he tell you that when he called you up, there were multiple images? Or was it just the first one?

AH: No, he look

MH: I mean, he really committed to blackface. I know its not funny, but its very weird that there were so many images.

AH: No, again, as I said, you know, its human to err but it takes a leader to own up to the mistakes and to apologize to those who are hurt by those images and to commit, sincerely to learn from that experience and double down on more work against systemic racism. Thats not something that Ive seen in a lot of other instances in which that has happened.

MH: And his reputation is being rebuilt, do you think? Has he done enough to win back trust?

AH: Well, I think from again, from my perspective, my engagement to the black community after that and knocking on doors with my own constituents and some of the young folks that I spoke to, they chose to focus on the record. They said, you know, we want him to come back because hes been the most progressive prime minister. And hes taken a clear stand against racism and intolerance and bigotry in this country. And so, we are going to judge him on his record and we want him to come back. Thats the sense that I got.

MH: When I last interviewed you, it was late 2017. It was Donald Trumps first year in office. It was your first year in office. Have things got better or worse on issues around race relations, immigration, these kind of the debate about populism, and nationalism? Not just in Canada, but across the west from your vantage point, have things got worse?

AH: I think were at a point where, you know, its not that monolithic, right? When youre talking about immigration, when youre talking about responses, by countries refugee issues, there is the national noise and then there are amazing leaders at the municipal level and community leaders in places like France and Italy, who are really, really open to opening their hearts and their homes to the most vulnerable. So we gotta give those folks credit as well. Some of the most amazing creative work on refugee integration and providing homes to the most vulnerable is being carried out by cities around the world. Theyre meeting to work together on those issues. And they are working with Canada in many ways on that. And thats what I choose to focus on.

The other thing that I want to tell your listeners is, we chose, you know, every country has the right to decide on their own immigration policies. But we wanted to prove in Canada, that you can that, first of all that, you know, welcoming others, and opening your doors to people from around the world is not just a nice thing to do. Its a smart economic policy to have, that it is in your best interest to actually attract the best and the brightest from around the world and actually allow everyone to contribute including refugees. Secondly, that you can avoid the temptation to fear monger your way to power and build walls and instead choose to do the difficult thing to trust your fellow human being and build bridges for the world and having a smart and open immigration policy and win elections. And you know what, in Canada, weve done that. And Im proud of that fact. We wanted to take an unapologetic opposite approach to those who build walls to others and weve proven that it can work.

MH: You have been praised globally for your welcoming stance on immigration. Back in 2015, Justin Trudeau grabbed headlines by turning up at the airport to personally welcome Syrian refugees. I think 40,000 came in after that. But some would say that Canadas changed. And I want to see what your take on that is, that actually the Canadian Not just Canadian public opinion on refugees has changed but even the government that youre the immigration minister in has toughened up its attitude. Earlier this year, I believe your government asked the United States government to amend a 15-year-old border treaty, the Safe Third Country Agreement between your two countries. Why did you do that?

AH: When you say weve changed thats news to me because in 2018, Canada welcomed the most refugees in the Western world, more than the United States of America, a country that has 10 times our population.

MH: I mean, if Trumps your benchmark its not the greatest achievement.

AH: Its not just Trump. Its England. Its France.

MH: Fair enough.

[Crosstalk.]

AH: Im talking about the G-7.

[Crosstalk.]

AH: Canada, the generosity of Canadians

MH: So why are you trying to amend this treaty that refugee groups and others in this country are criticizing you for.

AH: Ill come back to the Safe Third Country Agreement in a second. But the generosity of Canadians has actually increased towards refugees

MH: Even though Im seeing a poll saying 57% of Canadians, according to a recent poll, said they didnt want the country to take in any more refugees.

Thats a scary number.

AH: There was a poll. There were some issues with that poll, but there was a poll last week that showed that 64% of Canadians do not think that we take in too many immigrants.

MH: Okay, 77% of polls are made up.

AH: Thats a snapshot in time.

MH: We have different polls, which is why we shouldnt rely on polls.

AH: Look, first of all the 40,000 Syrian refugees, we were able to do that from November 4, 2015 to February 29, 2016. Weve since welcomed a total of more than 60,000 Syrian refugees.

MH: So, Im saying people are giving you credit for that. Ive given you credit for that. All Im asking is people are saying theyre detecting changes, and theyre pointing to, for example, this treaty with the U.S. where youre saying to the U.S., you take these people back. Theyre not going to come and claim asylum here.

AH: Oh, the treaty has always been there. This is a treaty that was signed in 2004. I want to make it clear, its not a treaty that is designed to deny asylum, absolutely not. In fact, Canada, one of the things that Im very proud of is in the last four years, we have made sure that we have abided by our international obligations to protect the most vulnerable, that, you know, when you talk about the messaging in the past, weve kept up the principle that, you know, if youre facing persecution and you need protection, Canada will provide that protection for you. So the treaty is about the the orderly management of asylum seekers on both sides of the border. You know, its a 14-year-old

MH: But youre pushing for it to be hardened up for the Americans

AH: No, look, we talk about a lot of things.

MH: I mean, its called a Safe Third Country Agreement. Do you believe a country where the President puts kids in cages and tries to build a moat filled with snakes and alligators is a safe third country for refugees?

See the rest here:

Deconstructed Podcast: Is Canada Really a Progressive Paradise? - The Intercept

Lets admit it: Ive been Jane Costlows shadow a Boswell to her Johnson these last three months as I try to document her 34th and final year of teaching at Bates.

Ive followed her onto the Quad for Opening Convocation, into Bates classrooms to see her teach, and down to Portland (and into a Trader Joes store) to photograph a student-led climate protest.

Little did I know that we were just getting started.

Graded papers in hand, Jane Costlow departs her Hedge Hall office to walk over to the Olin Arts Center, where shell teach her 9:30 a.m. course Lives in Place. She uses the short stroll from Hedge to Olin as a time to decompress. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

In late October, I rode the bus for seven hours to New York City to photograph Costlow presenting scholarly research about oil pollution in the Volga River in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Behind me on the ride down, a woman read her poetry aloud off her laptop (arent they handy?) to a stranger, an all-too-willing conversational partner who compared her poems, at length, to Yeats and then to Thoreau.

At first, I had a rosy reaction to their dialogue. What great preparation, I reasoned, for entering Costlows academic milieu, a heady mix of literature and history and language study until the dialogue persisted for the full seven hours, the kind of time I wouldnt spend even on Costlow.

But was it worth it? Yes, because I got to see how Costlow, in her final year at Bates as the colleges Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, continues to excel at teaching, research, and service, the holy trinity of faculty responsibilities by which professors across the land are judged and measured.

Costlow attends a one-day conference Energy Aesthetics: Force, Flow, and Entropy in Russian Culture at NYUs Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

And over a recent three-week span, Costlow undertook all three with zeal.

On campus, she taught students and graded their papers.

In New York, she presented the paper Seeing Oil: Transporting the Volga into the Modern Era at the conference Energy, Aesthetics: Force, Flow, and Entropy in Russian Culture at New York Universitys Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

Costlows Final Year

Join us as we follow Jane Costlow esteemed Bates teacher, scholar, and colleague month by month during her 34th and final academic year.

And then, serving as chair of the colleges Philip J. Otis Committee, she orchestrated a three-day visit to campus in early November by poet and essayist Ross Gay, who visited classes, dined out with faculty and students, and delivered this years Otis Lecture.

(Squeezed into the mix, too, was Costlow offering commentary one Saturday afternoon on the documentary film Makala, screened at Lewiston Public Library for the Tournes French Film Festival.)

We spoke to Costlow about the pleasures and challenges of trying to manage all of these roles nearly simultaneously.

Ideally, they all feed into, nourish, and sustain each other. At Bates, Ive had the good fortune to teach what I really love, things that Im intellectually and personally really interested in.

Jasper Beardslee 22 of Miami and Elly Beckerman 22 of Washington, D.C., students in Costlows Lives in Place course, wedge in a quick conversation with her after class. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

There are ways in which my teaching has led me into new kinds of scholarly questions, which is great. And there really is something about your own intellectual curiosity, and other forms of curiosity, that can be fed by your scholarship and then that comes back into the classroom.

But theres never enough time for the scholarship that you want to do.

The service part can sometimes feel really integrated, and sometimes its just part of what we need to do to keep the household of Bates College going, part of what it is to be at a liberal arts college. I find that service is more likely to sap energy than necessarily nurturing energy.

Its just too much I dont think thats healthy for anybody.

Costlow meets with members of the Otis Committee, including Assistant Professor of Philosophy Paul Schofield and Professor of English Lillian Nayder in Hedge Halls Environmental Studies Lounge. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

And its not just the faculty trying to keep all these balls in the air. I have a first-year student violinist whos very excited about everything. I heard someone ask him after class, Oh, are you going to be playing in the orchestra? And he said, Well, technically, I dont have the time to play in the orchestra. But I might try to anyway.

And I just found myself laughing because I thought, There it is: You dont really have enough time to do all these things, but youre kind of ramming more things into your day. I worry about us trying to get too much done in too little time at Bates.

Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies Jane Costlow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Francis Eanes head to lunch.

We had dinner with Ross Gay at Nezinscot Farm in Turner the other night. We do it each year: a group of faculty and students take our Otis visitor to Nezinscot for a wonderful country-farm meal. Its just incredibly relaxed. We sit around this long table and have a sort of Thanksgiving dinner. We chat, and then at a certain point, somebody tries to ask a good question that we can all have a conversation around.

This year, we talked a lot about what an environmental studies education ought to be, about the students hunger for some kind of hands-on aspect to their education.

The next day, my colleague Carissa Aoki told me that on the ride back to Bates from the farm, the students talked about how wonderful it was to sit and just talk with the faculty, just to have that big, rambling, relaxed conversation, and that we dont do it enough. And theyre absolutely right. We dont.

At top, before dinner at Nezinscot Farm, essayist and poet Ross Gay kicks off introductions as Costlow and environmental studies major Alexandra Cullen 20 listen. Above left, Costlow consults with host Gloria Varney, and above right, Costlow leads the group in a moment of gratitude before dinner. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

I dont know. Do I need to bring in donuts and coffee to my classes? Should we sit on the floor instead of at desks? Theres something about the arrangement here the stress and the dizziness that gets in the way of having those deep conversations. I guess Im thinking that we just live in a world that is not conducive to reflection. And that impacts me and it also impacts my students.

For example, to write well, you really do need space to be reflective space to empty and clear your mind and get ready to write. Do we give our students that space for deep creative work?

In that sense, for me, writing and teaching often seem incompatible. The poet Adrienne Rich said that when she was teaching, she wasnt actually able to write poetry. It had to do with the way that being in a classroom takes the energy out of you.

Teaching students how to write and responding to their writing is probably one of the most important things I do as a teacher. And its a big task. I have pretty large classes now, and I just cant imagine teaching without having them write papers. I need to see their writing. I need to see their ideas developed. I need to try to help them even in the context of a fairly large class. I need to give them feedback and help them develop as writers.

As the 2019 Otis Lecturer Ross Gay puts a writing prompt on the blackboard, Costlow hands back papers to her students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

I think Ive learned a lot over the years about how to approach responding to student writing. But grading is a whole other thing: Its really hard to know how to put a letter grade on a piece. I always hope that my responses to a students writing are more complicated and helpful than just the grade. But you know that students are going to look at the grade, and the grade matters.

I learned years ago from the Writing Workshop at Bates to start your remarks with something positive. I think thats something Ive pretty much internalized. I always try to say something supportive to a student in terms of responding to their ideas, even if something hasnt come together very well or that theres a really interesting idea thats kind of buried on page four.

The other thing Ive learned is not to get bogged down in minutiae or get lost in the weeds. Try to give some general comments that can be helpful for the development of their writing.

Jane Costlow shares her thoughts on the importance of student writing. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

I dont use red pens; I use green or purple. When I edit my own writing, I tend to have a twitchy finger: I circle a lot and make lots of marks. I try not to do that too much on a piece of student writing because everything that Ive learned about student writing says that while the mechanics of the paper the grammar and the like are important, its a lower-order importance. You have to try to look at the overall organization: the structure and the ideas.

I continue to learn from student papers, a new take on something that Ive been reading or a movie that weve been watching for a really long time. Thats exciting. Then you can also really tell when a student is engaged in what theyre writing about. Its hard to put a name to it, but theres this intangible feeling in the tone of the paper that you can recognize.

Maya Vinokour,assistant professor in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU, takes note of a response made by Costlow after Vinokours presentation. Konstantine Klioutchkine of Pomona College is at right. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

That was a wonderful workshop because it was a relatively small, focused, and interactive gathering of scholars. We were all interested in similar issues, but it wasnt such a narrow focus that it felt like we were all talking about the same thing all day long. I like that kind of conference, where its more intimate and you can actually have sustained conversations with people over the course of a day.

We have a shared language. We all speak Russian. But we also share a deep love for some of the same texts and have similar kinds of questions about Russian culture.

At top, Costlow presents her paper at NYUs Jordan Center. Above left, Costlow receives feedback on her paper from a colleague. Above right, conference participants take a break before lunch. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

That day in particular was incredibly helpful because Id been working on this paper all summer and was super into it. Then the semester began, and I had to basically say, Okay, all those files have to go down on the floor, because the student papers have to come on to the desk.

That meant that I was significantly overdue with the paper it was commissioned for a volume of essays written mostly by environmental historians and I didnt know where I wanted to go with it. So, the comments that I got from people at the workshop were just amazing and really helpful.

Yes, its a reminder that in the best situations, our work can be involved in dialogue with each other. And so as much as I like kind of going and closing the door of my study and doing a deep dive into the material, theres something about being in conversation with other people. Thats actually true of my students as well as other colleagues, where I can get to that ah-ha moment and figure out my way through a writing project. Thats kind of cool.

After the conferences morning session, Tyler Harper, a doctoral candidate in the NYU Department of Comparative Literature, speaks with Costlow. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

Ellen is a professor of Russian literature at Princeton. Shes from Lewiston, and her mother taught piano in Lewiston and at Bates for years Natasha was a very beloved teacher, and taught my daughter piano. Ellens father, Ralph Chances, was in the Bates economics department for years, though I unfortunately never got to know him.

Ellen and I have become really close friends. We share a love of Russian literature, but we share lots of other things as well, and we actually have regular telephone conversations. Whenever I go to New York, we have breakfast at the Utopia Diner. Its always energizing and heartwarming to see her.

Costlow has breakfast at the Utopia Diner with her longtime friend Ellen Chances, professor of Russian literature at Princeton University. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

Being chair of the Otis Committee is a wonderful opportunity, and we receive great help from a lot of people, in College Advancement in particular. But of course theres still a lot of scheduling, logistics, and working everything out that I end up having a hand in. So on the one hand, its really gratifying. But there are only so many hours in the day. And its on top of other things.

Professor of Religious Studies Cynthia Baker joins Ross Gay and Costlow before his Otis presentation in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

Its an example of a service contribution that folds integrally into my teaching and my scholarship. Service contributions dont always do that. This service was a huge benefit for my students and for my own thinking about literature and the environment. Its nice when it feels like youre all kind of heading in the same direction.

I dont think Ive ever laughed so much at an Otis Lecturer, as a lot of our speakers tend to bring us perspectives about difficult and dire situations in the world, whether its extinction or climate change or plastics in the Pacific Ocean, those really tough issues. And those have been wonderful contributions.

Ross Gays reading prompted lots of laughter. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

But what I felt from Ross was that he was reminding us what we love and treasure why we care about particular places and possibilities in the first place. He also, somehow, created an experience of community in that place and short time.

It was like everybody there was really with him. Having that experience of being a kind of mini-community for the space of his performance was energizing and life-giving.

Read more from the original source:

My Last Year: Trying to get too much done in too little time - Bates News

This article originally appeared on i-D UK.

Queer people are everywhere. When theyre not presiding over whole countries (see Luxembourg and Serbias heads of state), theyre dominating the Billboard Hot 100 for months at a time like our boy Lil Nas X. A whole bunch of them -- including i-D favourite Indya Moore -- are playing pivotal characters in the iconic, Emmy-winning series Pose right now, and are dominating magazine covers too. Right now, were supposedly living in a queer utopia, in which young peoples futures are being nurtured by progressive politics and a new-found acceptance from mainstream culture.

Just a decade ago, the surface-level scenario seemed different. Interpretations of queer people on screen were sanitised, one-dimensional and, more often than not, white. (Friends, for example, didnt even include a same-sex kiss in their 'The One with the Lesbian Wedding' episode). Meanwhile trans people were either victimised or the butt of a joke; like Lieutenant Lois Einhorn in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. We needed a new wave of liberal young minds to help dismantle those ideals. For the most part, we have them now.

But while the general outlook looks positive -- a study commissioned by GLAAD showed that Americans over the age of 72 were more accepting of LGBTQ+ people now than they were just a year ago -- the demographic we thought held the key to instigating change in future seem to be the ones most likely to turn their backs on the community instead. In fact, data gathered by the LGBTQ+ anti-violence charity Gallop found 1 in 4 Britons under the age of 24 thought the community was immoral. The same demographic also thought they were a danger to society, or that homosexuality went against their own beliefs. This is compared to one in five people in older age groups given the same survey.

Equally shocking statistics show that intolerance against queer people is surging right now. Transphobic attacks have risen 81% in the past year, while attacks based on a victims sexual orientation have risen roughly 15%. Where this animosity stems from hasnt been formally studied yet, but if its disproportionately targeting Generation Z, its likely that its breeding somewhere older generations spend less of their time: the internet.

Widely credited for providing a safe space for queer Gen Zers and millennials growing up (love you Tumblr), the internet has always been a generational soundboard. It cultivated friendships that werent possible in suffocatingly small towns and gave trans people the platform to chronicle their journeys, helping build accessible blueprints for other gender-questioning teens. [They] use the internet to help them to understand themselves, find positive role models and find vital information and support, Jeff Ingold, Head of Media at Stonewall says. Our research found that almost all LGBT young people (96%) say the internet helped them understand more about their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.

But online congregations can be nasty too. On easily accessible message boards like Reddit, alongside more hidden platforms similar to the now defunct far-right melting pot 8chan, young people with increasingly conservative views have found their own space away from a society they consider too politically correct. Statistics Jeff gives us show that 40% of young queer people have been targeted by direct hate speech online, but even more of it happens in secret.

Subreddits like /unpopularopinion have become recruitment spaces for incels and far-right young people. What start as questionable, controversial takes -- about the legitimacy of trans rights, the idea of queer people choosing their queerness rather than being born that way, or the gross way gay couples express their love in public -- are cloaked ways of spreading queerphobic and transphobic rhetoric as infallible truth. Participants in these threads find like-minded people and form their own groups to revel in their disdain for the LGBTQ+ community. A quick look at many of their profiles shows its just as likely to be young straight people -- predominantly men -- who take issue with the idea of LGBTQ+ people having the same rights as they do.

Miss Blanks is a 24-year-old trans woman of colour. She receives a barrage of hatemail through her social media feeds everyday, Verbal abuse, death threats, rape threats, the list goes on. The majority of it comes from white people her age. The way I'm forced to negotiate safety in Gen Z spaces is really confronting, she says. Equally dark comments have wound up on 24-year-old Leons Instagram posts, with strangers -- some just 18 years old -- openly judging his androgynous appearance. One time I had a comment saying, "Is this n**** a boy or a girl?", he points out. Beneath it, there was a thread where someone answered them by saying looks like a girl. A whole discourse surrounding his existence was happening right there: as if he wasnt a real person, reading those comments.

I asked a young man, who has frequently responded to anti-LGBTQ+ posts on the /unpopularopinion subreddit, what he thinks of queer people. I just think theyre weird, he said. His sentiments reflect the common fear of the other many cisgender, heteronormative people have. Another anxiety stems from the idea that queer people are asking for too much by demanding equality, and in doing so, compromising the freedom of expression enjoyed by those who until recently remained blissfully oblivious of their lives and concerns. The intersection of internet culture and the mainstream news sweep has pushed once-fringe issues to the fore, and the byproduct of partial liberation is that we are allowed to be more vocal and fight our own fight. But this vocality is often treated by those on the receiving end as a cry for attention; as shoving the LGBTQ+ agenda down their throats.

The notion that LGBTQ+ people want superiority over mere acceptance is going to be the hardest thing to change here, perhaps because so much of the community's narrative is taken out of their hands and skewed; by internet hearsay and tabloid rumours, for example. Trying to contain that discourse and snuff it out seems impossible right now, because for all of its positive aspects, the web also gives its bigoted users to option to migrate and morph, slipping out of one space and manifesting somewhere new when said bigotry gets shut down. Its so important social media and online platforms take clear action in removing homophobic, bi-phobic and transphobic content and promote their reporting tools to the public, Jeff says. If we find a way of implementing this properly, then itll help stall the spread that happens outside of the publics consciousness. For queer people, the internet has become a double-edged sword of liberation and oppression. In 2019, its time to dull down the latter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

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Has the Internet Helped Breed a New Generation of Queerphobia? - VICE

Hey, everyone! the worlds eighth-richest man said, with a bit too much brio, as he waved to the crowd at Gaston Hall in Washington. Its really great to be at Georgetown with all of you today. But then the smile fell away from Mark Zuckerbergs face, and there was an awkward pause as he licked his lips and looked at the crowd.

With his next lines an acknowledgment of the death, earlier that day, of the longtime House of Representatives member Elijah Cummings he settled into a more sober mood, which he sustained for the remainder of his speech. It was clear that Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, knew the message he had come to deliver, bearing the awkward title Standing for Voice and Free Expression, would not be an especially popular one on a college campus in deep-blue Washington, and that indeed he himself might not be an especially popular man.

Over the course of just five or so years, and accelerating significantly in November 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, there had been a sea change in how Americans, especially liberal Americans, regarded Facebook. If, during the Obama era, there was a nagging suspicion among critics of Silicon Valley that Zuckerbergs company and its fellow internet giants had become too large their market power too great, their sway over the political and cultural discourse too absolute the election left millions of people convinced that those suspicions were absolutely correct. Now there were calls among prominent Democratic politicians for tough regulation, even for breaking up the company. One of the most vocal among them, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, had recently surged to a near-lead in the presidential primary race; in leaked audio from a Facebook town hall, Zuckerberg lamented her ascent and vowed, in the event she were elected president, to go to the mat and fight.

All of it the fierce criticism in the media, the political maneuvering among Democrats, the leak from his own staff had fostered a sense of a company under siege, and it was easy to hear this Georgetown speech in October as a simple and defiant response, a middle finger raised to the haters. To those eager to regulate speech on his platform or hold Facebook legally accountable for misinformation, Zuckerberg offered reminders of the First Amendment and the American tradition of free expression more broadly. He pointed out how that tradition benefited movements the audience seemed likely to support (#BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo) and contrasted Facebooks approach with that of Chinese-owned services like TikTok, the new sensation among teenagers in the United States and elsewhere, which has been accused of censoring mentions of anti-China protests in Hong Kong.

Afterward, observers analyzing the speech were unimpressed, seeing it as at best a reiteration of Facebooks perennial self-serving arguments and at worst a vacuous word salad. (Zuckerberg doubles down on free speech, as Wired put it, while Recode sniffed that he offered a lot of nothing.) By the following week, the appearance at Gaston Hall had been filed away as just one more maneuver in Zuckerbergs continuing charm offensive toward the political class, his sole goal being to maintain the status quo.

But whether Zuckerberg intended it or not, his speech showed glimmers of something else. There were hints of a more profound sense of threat and dislocation perhaps, even, a signal of Zuckerbergs understanding, conscious or not, that the status quo might no longer be sustainable.

Despite all his efforts at optimism, Zuckerberg acknowledged some basic problems with Facebook that had become impossible to ignore. Having built a machine to connect the world and let everyone have a say thereby giving rise to a new social reality in which, as he put it at Georgetown, people no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard Facebook now had to concede that there was no foolproof way to stop those voices from saying things that were unfactual or malevolent, or to stop their friends and followers from believing them. In part, this was because of a genuine Catch-22 involving scale: Phenomenal size had allowed Facebook and its fellow American tech giants to become the center of online life, but now they could not correct the most toxic problems of online spaces without wielding even more unsettling levels of power. While I certainly worry about an erosion of truth, Zuckerberg said, I dont think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100 percent true.

Also revealing was his take on his Chinese competitors, which went well beyond just criticizing them on free-expression grounds. China is building its own internet focused on very different values, and its now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries, he said, informing his American audience that its sense of an internet dominated utterly by Facebook was by now a parochial notion. A decade ago, almost all of the major internet platforms were American, he said. Today, six of the top 10 are Chinese. This remark was directed at his antitrust-minded critics, but it was also a reminder that however bad Facebook might be for democracy, the alternatives might be worse.

For a decade, the story of Facebooks growth seemed like a positive (for Facebook) feedback loop: More users meant more conversation, which meant more relevance, which meant more users. The service became a kind of social power grid, a platform that you simply couldnt not be on. It became fashionable among tech writers to claim that Facebook was subsuming the entire internet, if it hadnt done so already.

Optimism about Facebooks impact on the world was an important part of the cycle. Everything about its sunny rhetoric, its design (clean and spare), its policies (real names, no pseudonyms), was finely calibrated to make people embrace it as the safe and upbeat alternative to the seedy world of the open web. When Facebook became a publicly held company in 2012, its I.P.O. prospectus included a long letter from Zuckerberg about Facebooks values, in which he declared that the company was built to accomplish a social mission and that connecting the world would ultimately bring about better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

It wasnt hard to glimpse, lurking behind the strained smiles and flag-draping of the Georgetown speech, the death throes of that Facebook dream. The chief executive was forced to admit that his platform, far from solving social problems, had given rise to some thorny ones of its own. In his bracing rhetoric about the rise of the Chinese internet, you could even see the contours of Zuckerbergs nightmare of the virtuous cycle becoming a vicious one, with the gravitational pull of Facebook reversing, spinning its billions of users and their monetizable conversations out of his platform and inexorably toward China, toward despotism, toward dystopia: a TikTok of a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

In this special Tech & Design Issue of The New York Times Magazine, we ponder the internets future at a time when that future has never felt more unsettled. It isnt just about Facebook and the other American tech giants, which no longer enjoy the rapid growth that characterized their early days. The rise of the Chinese internet has threatened a geopolitical power shift, as a different government and national economy looks poised to become the center of the online world. Even governments that dont censor the internet have begun to talk about regulating it in unprecedented ways as with the European Unions G.D.P.R. law, which already has given a huge swath of the developed world a subtly different set of online rules.

But perhaps the deepest shift has been a shift in attitudes: the breaking of a spell that seemed to protect Silicon Valley from distrust. After years in which questions about online privacy hardly penetrated the consumer consciousness, Americans have awakened to a feeling of deep suspicion about how companies are harvesting and using their data. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll earlier this year found that American adults, by double-digit margins, believed that social media does more to spread falsehoods than truths and more to divide the country than to unite it. Even the tech giants own employees have now become uneasy about the implications of their work, leading to some unusual labor movements among their highly compensated white-collar ranks.

If all this disappointment seems so acute, its only in contrast to the unrealistic hopes that the internet grew up on, long before Mark Zuckerberg showed up. From the earliest days of Arpanet, the internet has been seen as embodying an ambitious, even utopian set of values. Its supposed to be open and global (such that anyone can plug in, anywhere) and also equal (in that every node should be able to get the same things). Even as the internet quickly morphed from a (mostly) public-funded (mostly) academic project into a (mostly) corporate-funded profit center, the power of those core values persisted. It persisted because those values have proved to be extremely profitable, at least for those who understand how to profit from them. People like Marc Andreessen, who took what he learned developing a web browser at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and helped found a company, Netscape, that went public and eventually was sold to America Online for $4.2 billion; and Mark Zuckerberg, whose company allows all those voices to get attention free but makes a mint by selling them, and their personal data, to advertisers.

In retrospect, Zuckerbergs letter in that 2012 Facebook prospectus was the high-water mark of internet boosterism, and it in fact encompassed most of the dreams that had attached themselves to the internet over the previous decades. References to Gutenbergs printing press? Check. Denouncing of monolithic, top-down mind-sets, coming from the chief executive of a huge corporation? Check. A sense that effecting broad-based social change and becoming fabulously rich are goals that go hand in hand? For sure: Ive developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems. Intimations that tech will topple authoritarian rulers around the world? Its in there: Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

As the technology critic Evgeny Morozov noted in his trenchant 2013 book, To Save Everything, Click Here, the distance between the quotidian reality of the internet and the utopian set of notions we projected onto it had become so vast that quotation marks ought to separate the idealized version from the real thing. The internet was going to empower the masses, overthrow hierarchies, build a virtual world that was far superior to the terrestrial one that bound us. But the actual internet was never capable of any of that, and once it fell into the hands of plutocrats and dictators, all the gauzy rhetoric around it only served their interests.

By the same token, though, we might make the same observation about the internet that many people fear theyre bound up in today: Our dark new fantasies about it with the puppet strings that stretch from the Kremlin to Palo Alto, making Grandpa dance to QAnons fiddle are often just as ridiculous as the sunny visions they replaced. In this issue, weve tried to see the internet and its likely future as best we can, from as many angles as we can, in the hope that after decades of imagining it as a utopia, and then years of seeing it as a dystopia we might finally begin to see it for what it is, which is a set of powerful technologies in the midst of some serious flux.

So the internet didnt turn out the way we hoped. Now what?

Arguably the most bracing reality about the internet today is that, after years of pretending that the internet means the same thing to all people everywhere, that fiction has finally become impossible to sustain. For the upper end of the income spectrum, a new suite of pay services promises to clean up the worst aspects of online life, even as the basic infrastructure of broadband and mobile remains highly unequal depending on where you live, both in America and around the world. And while Facebook and its fellow tech giants continue to loom over the American economy, through a business model that involves exploiting user data, their individual dreams of imperial expansion have brought them, collectively, to an awkward stalemate.

At the same time, its crucial for Americans to realize, as Zuckerberg now seems to, that the internet is no longer as American as it once was. Government censorship and other interventions are only entrenching an online reality in which different nations are seeing very different internets, even different sets of facts. In China, a parallel and growing mobile-based internet doesnt just portend a more censored online future; its offering up whole new ways to structure and order online life, with possible consequences that are scary in some ways and egalitarian in others.

Perhaps the most profound force at work upon the internet right now is the simple passage of time. Everyone raised in a pre-internet era continues to age and disappear, while new generations grow up not merely as digital natives but as lifelong witnesses to the internets best and worst effects. In the nave dreams of earlier days, many people joined Zuckerberg in imagining that connecting the world could bring about new social virtues at no social cost. But its now clear that interconnection by its very nature also brings about confounding new social situations, whether its the problem of disinformation seeded and spread by organized propagandists or the mind-bendingly obsessive culture of online fandom. For teenagers today, the internet is both a stage onto which to step boldly and a minefield through which to step gingerly a double bind that has given rise to whole new habits of living online, in which self-expression and self-protection are inextricably linked.

The passage of time, its clear, has been weighing even on Zuckerberg a fact evident in what was, without a doubt, the most eye-opening moment in his Georgetown speech. Building this institution is important to me personally, he said, late in his oration, because Im not always going to be here, and I want to ensure that these values of voice and free expression are enshrined deeply into how this company is governed. Not always going to be here? This 35-year-old, multibillionaire chief executive, with an ownership vice-grip that essentially guarantees he can remain atop Facebook for as long as he chooses, was raising the specter of his retirement, or perhaps even his death.

Those concerns are surely premature, but neither would it be surprising if the impermanence of human existence were on Zuckerbergs mind right now. Facebook and its chief executive might both hold on for decades, but the vision of the internet they represented sunny, American, all-devouring is already dead and gone. What, exactly, is arising to take its place? Its complicated. Read on.

Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist whose work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Pierpaolo Ferrari is an Italian photographer and, along with Cattelan, is a founder of the magazine Toiletpaper, known for its surreal and humorous imagery.

Additional design and development by Jacky Myint.

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The Internet Dream Became a Nightmare. What Will Become of It Now? - The New York Times

click to enlarge

Photo: Kevin Clancy

Utopia or Oblivion

Despite the brightness, Clancy admits that the shows themes are less than cheerful.

Its definitely more on the bleak side, I would say, says Clancy, an interdisciplinary artist who works in installation, sculpture, light, and new media.

He goes on to describe it as very much a personal dive into the larger social ramifications of the rapid accelerations of technology, including facial and hand gesture recognition, screen time, and, as he puts it, humans merging with machines and melting into the void.

Its a lot of questioning how were using these devices and what their effect is on us, says Clancy.

Photo: Kevin Clancy

Utopia or Oblivion

To achieve this, he created an immersive environment occupied by sculptural tableaux with fake laptops, smartphones, and tablets with holographic, reflective screens. These are all set into built-in alcoves and arranged on commercial gridwall displays. Adding to the effect is a soundscape composed by John Also Bennett.

Funded by the Professional Artists Grants Program, a partnership of The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments, Utopia or Oblivion is a continuation of a body of work that, over the last few years, has been investigating the way our devices and technology shift our relationships to the world, ourselves, and each other, says Clancy. But while he feels that addressing these concerns is important, he also believes its the job of the artist to maintain hope and vision.

Hopefully, [Utopia or Oblivion is] doing all those things at once, and creating a space where people can sit with that, and using beauty and aesthetics to create a space where people can be calm and comfortable, but still go into those subjects, says Clancy.

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Utopia or Oblivion exhibition at Bunker Projects takes a colorful approach to addressing technological concerns - PGH City Paper

With my colleagues, Robin Ferner and Carl Heneghan, I recently contributed an editorial to The BMJ about drug shortages. Already online, it will appear in the print issue tomorrow (12 October 2019). So far, the modest altmetrics score includes 76 tweets, one from a senior editor of The BMJ: crisis in the supply of medicines paints a dystopian future.

The IndoEuropean root TOP meant to travel or reach a place. The Greek derivative meant a place in general and hence a part of the body, a passage in a piece of writing, a burial place, a district, a room in a house, and a house of the zodiac. Aristotle used to mean a class of general matters that would serve as a kind of place in which a rhetorician might look for suggestions for treating his subject, a so-called commonplace, a common or ordinary topic; arguments based on such topics were called topic axioms, rules, maxims, or arguments, or simply topics. A topos in English, a 1940s coinage, is a traditional motif or theme in a literary composition, a rhetorical commonplace, or a literary convention or formula.

The diminutive of is , plural . In English, topia are interior wall-decorations like those found at Pompeii, consisting of the natural or artificial features of a place, such as landscapes or pictures of trees and bowers; topiary, a word that was introduced by Rabelais (topiaire), is the art of shaping trees and shrubs into ornamental shapes.

Atopy refers to the hypersensitivity syndrome that includes rashes in unusual places. Ectopic means out of place, applied to fetuses and testes, and tarsectopia is displacement of the tarsus. Other words that begin with topo- or end in -topia are listed in Tables 1 and 2.

In 1516, Sir Thomas More published his novel De optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia (On the Best Type of Republic and the New Island of Utopia), written in Latin. He had been in correspondence with the Dutch philosopher Erasmus, and they had discussed the title. Utopia is generally regarded as being from the Greek , no place, but it could equally well have come from , a good place. When Samuel Butler wrote his utopian novel in 1872 he called it Erewhon, a near reversal of nowhere.

In 1818, Jeremy Bentham, in A Catechism of Parliamentary Reform, took the eutopian route and coined its antonym, cacotopia (Greek , bad): As a match for Utopia (or the imagined seat of the best government), suppose a Cacotopia (or the imagined seat of the worst government). In 1915, Patrick Geddes made the same association in Cities in Evolution. An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics: The material alternatives of real economics, which these obsessions of money economics have been too long obfuscating, are broadly two, and each is towards realizing an ideal, a Utopia. These are the paleotechnic and the neotechnicKakotopia and Eutopia respectively.

Then in 1952, Glenn Robert Negley and J Max Patrick, in The Quest for Utopia, invented the word dystopia: The Mundus Alter et Idem [of Joseph Hall] is the opposite of eutopia, the ideal society: it is a dystopia, if it is permissible to coin a word. They used the Greek prefix, -, hard, bad, or unlucky. The OED defines dystopia as an imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible. Others have used the term anti-utopia, which is also used to describe criticisms of utopias. The term is not listed in the OED; the earliest instance I have found is from 1962.

Famous dystopias include 1984 by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, but the form is nowadays most commonly associated with the post-apocalyptic novels of J G Ballard, such as Crash.

Drug shortages have been with us for a long time. The earliest description that I have found is in a November 1942 editorial in the Indian Medical Gazette, describing shortages of quinine and mepacrine (Figure 1).

Figure 1. An extract from an anonymous editorial in the Indian Medical Gazette, November 1042, describing shortages of quinine and mepacrine

The pattern of publications listed in PubMed whose titles include drug shortages and similar terms is unusual. Sporadic single reports between 1942 and 2000 are followed by small clusters in 20002010, but then in 201112 the number suddenly rockets and then falls. It has now plateaued at about 30 papers per year (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Numbers of publications containing drug shortages or related terms in their titles since 1990 (source PubMed)

The prospect of a no-deal Brexit has raised the spectre of major drug shortages. Whether it would make the current shortages worse, creating a therapeutic dystopia, remains to be seen.

Jeffrey Aronsonis a clinical pharmacologist, working in the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Oxfords Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. He is also president emeritus of the British Pharmacological Society.

Competing interests: None declared.

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Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Dystopic drug shortages - The BMJ - The BMJ

Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Utopia, 1516. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

In partnership with LA arts organization Clockshop, The Huntington's "Beside the Edge of the World" features works by artists Nina Katchadourian, Beatriz Santiago Muoz, and Rosten Woo, and writers Dana Johnson and Robin Coste Lewis

Nov. 9, 2019Feb. 24, 2020Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art, Susan and Stephen Chandler Wing, and various garden locations

New works of art and literature will debut at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in "Beside the Edge of the World," one of the programs marking The Huntington's Centennial. The exhibition, on view Nov. 9, 2019 to Feb. 24, 2020, features works by artists Nina Katchadourian, Beatriz Santiago Muoz, and Rosten Woo, and writers Dana Johnson and Robin Coste Lewis, and will give visitors the opportunity to experience video works, poetry, and more in a gallery setting, as well as an audio tour and a sculpture installation in the gardens.

Beside the Edge of the World uses an item at The HuntingtonThomas Mores satirical workUtopia(1516)as a thematic point of departure. The Los Angeles arts organization Clockshop, in partnership with The Huntington, invited the three artists and two writers to consider Mores work and its map depicting the fictional Isle of Utopia. The cohort spent a year delving into the institutions library, art, and botanical collections to create works that make up the exhibition, which is anchored by an installation in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Arts Susan and Stephen Chandler Wing that will include a selection of the objects used by artists in their research alongside their new works.

We selected the artists and writers in Beside the Edge of the World because of their interest in working in archives to re-frame and re-imagine history, said Julia Meltzer, founder and director of Clockshop and co-curator of the exhibition with Jennifer A. Watts, curator of photography and visual culture at The Huntington and coordinator of the /five initiative. Watts added, The exhibition will be revelatory. The work responds to the projects directive with enormous energy and intellectual depth.

Thomas More structured his story around a newly created world that described an alternative society. More was pushing boundaries, and these new works are, too, said Meltzer. The artists expanded their inquiry to borders and edges, islands, forgotten histories, and utopian experiments that necessarily happen on the periphery.

ArtistNina Katchadouriansresearch centered on the theme of monsters in maps and rare books within The Huntingtons archive. Her kinetic silicone sculpture Strange Creature, which the artist describes as half-baby, half-fish, is inspired by Ulisse AldrovandisMonstrorum Historia(1642); the English edition of Abraham OrteliusTheatrum Orbis Terrarum(1608?), considered to be the first true atlas of the known world; and the ancient Chinese textGuideways through Mountains and Seas, compiled between the fourth and first centuries B.C., which describes mythical beasts within the cosmos of heaven and earth. Installed in the Chinese Gardens Lake of Reflected Fragrance, the sculpture is meant to provide an element of surprise for visitors, appearing at the surface momentarily before disappearing underwater. The brief glimpses that visitors may catch of the Strange Creature are intended to suggest that there is more around us than we can see or perceive.

FilmmakerBeatriz Santiago Muozfocused on The Huntingtons botanical collections. Her video work, Laurel Sabino y Jagilla takes its title from the vernacular names of twoMagnoliaspecies native to the artists birthplace and home on the island of Puerto Rico.Magnoliais an ancient genus, dating back 20 million years; its family, Magnoliaceae, has survived ice ages, mountain formation, and continental drift.Magnolia splendensis now endangered by logging and wood harvesting. Filmed in the rain forest of Puerto Rico and in the botanical gardens at The Huntington, the work imagines the relationship of theMagnoliagenus to utopia, photography, soil, vision, and time.

Artist, designer, writer, and educatorRosten Woocreated "Another World Lies Beyond," consisting of a series of interrelated stories told through audio tours in the gardens along with a projection and artifacts installed in the gallery. Woo's research focused on the life and work of Robert Hine (19212015), a scholar of utopian communities in California whose archives are housed at The Huntington. Each audio story (accessed via smartphone in the gardens) offers a glimpse of the idea of the perfect state and the world just beyond it: a historian slowly goes blind as he documents American communes, only to regain his sight suddenly in his final years; a dilettante is charged with drawing the border between the United States and Mexico, and instead creates an archive of every living creature he encounters before being dismissed and discredited by Congress; an archivist plots to rename the world's largest tree and erase the history of America's most successful Marxist commune. Additionally, one of Woo's audio tours will guide visitors into the Chinese Garden where the phrase 'Another World Lies Beyond' appears on a placard at the main entrance to the garden. The phrase, which is also the title of the Woo's work, is intended to prepare guests for the space they are about to enter, a space separated from the mundane world of daily life.

AuthorDana Johnsonwrote a short story, Our Endless Ongoing, that unearths the history of a remarkable woman, Delilah L. Beasley, who wrote and self-publishedThe Negro Trailblazers of California(1919). Beasley recorded the lives and stories of pioneering African Americans living in California in the 19th and early 20th century, from gold prospectors and early settler families to the founder of a utopian black community near Fresno. Johnsons short story, along with a biographical essay of Beasley, is included in a limited-edition publication Trailblazer: Delilah Beasleys California, published by Clockshop and The Huntington. A copy ofThe Negro Trailblazers of Californiais on view at The Huntington through Jan. 20 in the exhibition Nineteen Nineteen.

Poet laureate of Los AngelesRobin Coste Lewistook Chapter 14 of Henry David ThoreausWaldenas the starting point for a new poem. In Chapter 14, Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors, Thoreau conjures up the community of free blacks who lived around Walden Pond long before he arrived. Lewiss poem, titled Inhabitants and Visitors, erases and rearranges words and phrases in Thoreaus text to illuminate the world of the free black community that once lived at Walden Pond. A limited-edition book of Lewiss poem, along with images of the draft manuscript of ThoreausWaldenheld at The Huntington, will be included in the exhibition and sold at the Huntington Store.

About the artists

Dana Johnsonis the author of the short story collectionIn the Not Quite Dark. She is also the author ofBreak Any Woman Down, winner of the Flannery OConnor Award for Short Fiction, and the novelElsewhere, California. JohnsonsThe Story of Biddy Mason(2016) retraces the parallel but contrasting early 20th-century Los Angeles of Henry E. Huntington and African American entrepreneur Biddy Mason. Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, Johnson is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Nina Katchadourianis an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography, and public projects. Her projects often make a case for closer scrutiny of our everyday surroundings by creating situations that attempt to provoke and awaken a viewers curiosity.

Robin Coste Lewisis Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. She won the National Book award in 2015 forVoyage of the Sable Venus: and Other Poems.

Beatriz Santiago Muozis an artist whose expanded moving image work relates to Boalian theater, experimental ethnography, and feminist thought. Her recent work is on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements and everyday poetic work in the Caribbean. She has received the Herb Alpert Arts Award, a USA Ford Fellowship, and a 2015 Creative Capital Visual Artist Grant.

Rosten Woois an artist, designer, and writer living in Los Angeles. His projects aim to help people understand complex systems, reorient themselves to places, and participate in group decision-making. He is co-founder and former executive director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) and winner of the 2016 National Design Award for institutional achievement. His bookStreet Valueabout race and retail urban development was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2009.

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Exhibition Takes a Fresh Look at 'Utopia' with New Works That Engage with The Huntington's Collections - ArtfixDaily