Category Archives: New Utopia

As these families decorated their apartments, the party declared war against middle-class peasants. Famines brought on by collectivization spread through Soviet Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia. Slezkine describes a peasant and his family thrown out of their home in the middle of a winter night, leaving his daughter-in-law frostbitten and her 2-day-old baby dead from the cold. While the peasants ate grass, Stalin requisitioned their grain to fund industrialization in the cities. Please congratulate me on my new party card, a requisitioner wrote to a friend. My heart was overcome with incredible joy, like Id never felt before. In the countryside there was cannibalism. Party officials stumbled over corpses. Peasant women who fled the famine became nannies for House of Government residents. The families who remained behind starved.

The turning point in Slezkines story is the 1934 murder of the Leningrad party head Sergei Kirov. Human emotions had always been at the heart of Bolshevism, Slezkine says. The telephone call on Dec. 1, 1934, changed everything. No one believed human emotions anymore. Now Old Bolsheviks became the targets of their own terror. Nights with fewer than 100 executions were rare, Slezkine writes. At the House of Government there was silence. Everyone talks as if nothing has happened, Aleksandr Arosev wrote in his diary.

Tania Miagkovas daughter, Rada, was 8 when her mother was sent to prison. Tania used her time there to read Das Kapital. When her husband was arrested, Tania switched from Das Kapital to Anna Karenina. When her request for transfer to the gulag to be with her husband was denied, she began to read poetry: Mayakovsky, Blok, Pushkin. To her mother she wrote, A concentration camp? So be it! Over a period of several years? So be it! Long, difficult years? So be it! Mikhas must be accepted back into the party.

These chapters on the Stalinist Terror are the most vivid. Over all, Slezkines writing is sharp, fresh, sometimes playful, often undisciplined. The momentum suffers from the narratives overpopulation; and Slezkine falls into digressions about the Exodus, Armageddon and repressed memory theory. Despite meandering, he makes certain arguments clearly: Bolshevism was a millenarian sect with an insatiable desire for utopia struggling to reconcile predestination with free will that is, working ceaselessly to bring about what was supposedly inevitable. Utopias failure to arrive after the Civil War led to The Great Disappointment. In the second half of the 1920s, Soviet sanitariums were filled with Bolsheviks eating caviar, playing chess and suffering from depression.

For Slezkine, two qualities made the Bolsheviks special. The first was wrapping faith in logic: Marxism fused mysticism with scientific rationalism. The second was sheer magnitude: history had known many other millenarian sects, but not on this scale. This book is about the possibilities and limits of social engineering. When in 1934 Evgeny Preobrazhensky said, It has been the greatest transformation in the history of the world, he spoke the truth. The Soviet project was the most far-reaching experiment ever conducted on human beings.

Yet, as Slezkine writes, the Soviet age did not last beyond one human lifetime. Why? He answers: Among the generation enjoying the proverbial happy Soviet childhood, no one read Das Kapital. What they did read was Tolstoy and Pushkin, Heine and Goethe. The Bolsheviks, Slezkine claims, dug their own graves when they gave Tolstoy to their children. The historical novel made it impossible for them to gaze solely into the coming utopia: the parents lived for the future; their children lived in the past. The parents had comrades; the children had friends.

Slezkine plots The House of Government as an epic family tragedy. Last night NKVD agents came and took Mommy away, wrote an 11-year-old boy in 1938. Mommy was very brave. A few days later: Im reading Tolstoys War and Peace. Then, Mommy-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y!!!

Neither Tania Miagkova nor her husband ever saw their daughter again. Like many children of Bolsheviks, Rada was raised by her grandmother. That many of these grandmothers were orthodox Bolshevik sectarians Slezkine observes does not seem to have diminished their family loyalty. The fact that their families were punished for unexplained reasons does not seem to have diminished their Bolshevik orthodoxy. The two sets of loyalties were connected to each other by silence.

Children from the House of Government without grandmothers completed their school days in orphanages. Many went on to be killed fighting the Germans in World War II. Those mothers who did survive the gulag returned years later, aged. They were no longer needed by their children, who had grown up without them. As one woman whose mother returned said, We never really managed to get used to each other again.

Marci Shore is an associate professor of history at Yale and the author of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.

A version of this review appears in print on August 20, 2017, on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Unbreakable Broken.

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The Russian Revolution Recast as an Epic Family Tragedy - New York Times

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven.

Or so we thought as we entered the seventies. Smoking weed; falling in love; writing poetry and dreaming of a new and just world order. I had barely entered Presidency College when Naxalbari happened and classmates began to disappear.

They had gone to the forests, in the memorable words of Marxist poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay to fight a war for those who knew not how to. By coincidence, that was when my first book of poems appeared. I got married. All night I stayed awake translating the nine cantos of the Meghnad Badh Kavya, Michael Madhusudan Dutts 19th century epic. I did a day job as an office boy in 14 Bentinck Street where the Chinese shoe shops were.

Satyajit Rays Aranyer Din Ratri had just released. No one had known there was a sexual side to the Brahmo. Shombhu Mitra was still staging Dasachakra based on Ibsens Enemy of the People while Badal Sircar had discovered the Third Theatre and taken his plays out of the proscenium and on to the streets.

Shakti Chattopadhyay, then in his mid-thirties, was lying in the gutters, drunk as usual. His poems scribbled on torn sheets may yet outlive Tagore. Nikhil Biswas had died at 36, leaving behind 10,000 drawings. Yes, it was the best of times.

India was still recovering from the excitement of the Beatles visiting Rishikesh. Ravi Shankar was storming the West, with Yehudi Menuhin at times, with John Lennon other times. Rajneesh was shocking Bombay with his spiritual sermons on free sex.

Dylans harmonica rang in our ears as Blowing in the Wind played everywhere. Madhubala had just passed away. Zubin Mehta was conducting the LA Philharmonic. And I? I was smoking hash with Ginsberg and listening to Howl midst the smell of burning flesh as funeral pyres lit up Calcuttas night sky. Or strolling home at daybreak with the great Ustad after a nightlong concert. No, no one could sing the Malkauns like Amir Khan did.

We were all young then, full of anger and hope. We dreamt of a just world. We believed poverty could be fought and defeated. Che with his trademark beret stared down at us from red posters, though very few among us were actually Red. It was azaadi we yearned for. We protested against the Gulag as loudly as we raised our voice against Mai Lai.

I quit college. Not for politics but for poetry. Poetry, for me, was hope. It was azaadi from the tired clichs of politics. I started a magazine that brought together the best voices. Agyeya and Faiz, Muktibodh and Yevtushenko, Octavio Paz.

Brewing next door was a war. The young students of East Bengal took on the Pakistani army with the poetry of Shamsur Rahman echoing in their hearts: Freedom is a voice everyone hears; freedom is a voice everyone fears. I remember Kaifi telling students in Dhaka that poetry alone can win the war for them.

Around that time, a young man quit his job in Calcutta and caught a train to Bombay to try his luck at the movies. KA Abbas gave him his first break. But it took him a few more years and a film with Rajesh Khanna to be noticed.

A script by two young men, Salim and Javed defined his real role: the role of the Angry Young Man ready to set the skies on fire in his pursuit of hope and justice. It started with a small film called Zanjeer but soon went well beyond cinema. It defined the indomitable spirit of the seventies and raised its richest baritone: Rage.

The rhetoric of non violence had already tired. The young were seeking hope, a new Utopia in a world without answers. Doubt and dilemma dogged them. That is when Bachchan picked up the gauntlet and showed them the way out. India found a new hero. He stood up for the weak and the poor. He fought against injustice and crime. And yes, he was violent when violence was required. He was the new moral compass, the voice that whispered in our ears: Fight back.

The long war in Vietnam had ended. Free Bangladesh was born by the will of its young writers and poets. And India showed it will not cower before the Emergency, come what may. It was a reassertion of our will. The left, the right, everyone got together to fight back the darkness. Till Mrs Gandhi submitted to the will of the people.

The eighties came with the assassination of John Lennon. Andrei Sakharov was arrested in Moscow. The Rubiks Cube arrived. So did the first 24 hours news channel by CNN. Mrs Gandhi returned to power. Mikhail Gorbachev broke the Kremlins grip. The USSR was no more the USSR. Pac-Man took Japan by storm. Led Zeppelin broke up. And Uttam Kumar died. So did Mohammed Rafi. And Sahir. By then I had married again. The Emergency was over. Mrs Gandhi was back in power just one day before my birthday. Naxalbari was also over. My poetry gave way to journalism.

Two years later, Kapil brought home the World Cup. I moved to Bombay. Amitabh won an election and went to Parliament. (I made the same mistake a decade later.) Bofors broke out. And the world as we knew it had changed forever.

The seventies was about freedom, hope, courage. Each one of us against the world, living out our bravest moment. Will that ever come back again? I doubt it.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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The 70s: Naxalbari, LSD, Poetry and the Emergency - Times of India (blog)

Dylan was Blowin' in the Wind, theatre had hit the streets, Indira was forced to submit to people's will It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven.

Or so we thought as we entered the Seventies. Smoking weed; falling in love; writing poetry and dreaming of a new and just world order.

I had barely entered Presidency College when Naxalbari happened and classmates began to disappear. They had gone to the forests, in the memorable words of Marxist poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay, to fight a war for those who knew not how to. By coincidence, that was when my first book of poems appeared. I got married. All night I stayed awake translating the nine cantos of the Meghnad Badh Kavya, Michael Madhusudan Dutt's 19th-century epic. I did a day job as an office boy in 14 Bentinck Street where the Chinese shoe shops were.

Satyajit Ray's Aranyer Din Ratri had just released. No one had known there was a sexual side to the Brahmo. Shombhu Mitra was still staging Dasachakra, based on Ibsen's Enemy of the People, while Badal Sircar had discovered the Third Theatre and taken his plays out of the proscenium and on to the streets.

Shakti Chattopadhyay, then in his midthirties, was lying in the gutters, drunk as usual. His poems scribbled on torn sheets may yet outlive Tagore. Nikhil Biswas had died at 36, leaving behind 10,000 drawings. Yes, it was the best of times.

India was still recovering from the excitement of the Beatles visiting Rishikesh. Ravi Shankar was storming the West, with Yehudi Menuhin at times, with John Lennon other times. Rajneesh was shocking Bombay with his spiritual sermons on free sex. Dylan's harmonica rang in our ears as Blowin' in the Wind played everywhere. Madhubala had just passed away.

Zubin Mehta was conducting the LA Philharmonic. And I? I was smoking hash with Ginsberg and listening to Howl 'midst the smell of burning flesh as funeral pyres lit up Calcutta's night sky. Or strolling home at daybreak with the great Ustad after a nightlong concert. No, no one could sing the Malkauns like Amir Khan did.

We were all young then, full of anger and hope. We dreamt of a just world. We believed poverty could be fought and defeated. Che with his trademark beret stared down at us from red posters, though very few among us were actually Red. It was azaadi we yearned for. We protested against the Gulag as loudly as we raised our voice against Mai Lai.

I quit college. Not for politics but for poetry. Poetry, for me, was hope. It was azaadi from the tired cliches of politics. I started a magazine that brought together the best voices. Agyeya and Faiz, Muktibodh and Yevtushenko, Octavio Paz.

Brewing next door was a war. The young students of East Bengal took on the Pakistani army with the poetry of Shamsur Rahman echoing in their hearts: Freedom is a voice everyone hears; freedom is a voice everyone fears. I remember Kaifi telling students in Dhaka that poetry alone can win the war for them. Around that time, a young man quit his job in Calcutta and caught a train to Bombay to try his luck at the movies.

KA Abbas gave him his first break. But it took him a few more years and a film with Rajesh Khanna to be noticed. A script by two young men, Salim and Javed, defined his real role: the role of the Angry Young Man ready to set the skies on fire in his pursuit of hope and justice. It started with a small film called Zanjeer but soon went well beyond cinema. It defined the indomitable spirit of the seventies and raised its richest baritone: Rage.

The rhetoric of non-violence had already tired. The young were seeking hope, a new Utopia in a world without answers. Doubt and dilemma dogged them. That is when Bachchan picked up the gauntlet and showed them the way out. India found a new hero. He stood up for the weak and the poor. He fought against injustice and crime. And yes, he was violent when violence was required. He was the new moral compass, the voice that whispered in our ears: Fight back. The long war in Vietnam had ended.

Free Bangladesh was born by the will of its young writers and poets. And India showed it would not cower before the Emergency, come what may. It was a reassertion of our will. The left, the right, everyone got together to fight back the darkness. Till Mrs Gandhi submitted to the will of the people.

The Eighties came with the assassination of John Lennon. Andrei Sakharov was arrested in Moscow. The Rubik's Cube arrived. So did the first 24 hours news channel, by CNN. Mrs Gandhi returned to power. Mikhail Gorbachev broke the Kremlin's grip. The USSR was no more the USSR. Pac-Man took Japan by storm. Led Zeppelin broke up. And Uttam Kumar died. So did Mohammed Rafi. And Sahir.

By then I had married again. The Emergency was over. Mrs Gandhi was back in power a day before my birthday. Naxalbari was also over. My poetry gave way to journalism. Two years later, Kapil brought home the World Cup. I moved to Bombay. Amitabh won an election and went to Parliament. (I made the same mistake a decade later.) Bofors broke out. And the world as we knew it had changed forever.

The Seventies was about freedom, hope, courage. Each one of us against the world, living out our bravest moment. Will that ever come back? I doubt it.

(Pritish Nandy is a poet and journalist)

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Freedom, poetry, rebellion and music ... when we lived our bravest moments - Economic Times

Video games have come a long way since the very first console, the Magnavox Odyssey, was released in 1972.

Augmented and virtual realities are now on the rise as gamers find more ways to distract themselves from their actual reality. But what happens when the line between real and virtual begins to blur? How will virtual realities shape our future? Explore these concepts by picking up one of these fascinating novels about video games and the people who play them:

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline Immersing himself in a mid-21st-century technological virtual utopia to escape an ugly real world of famine, poverty and disease, Wade Watts joins an increasingly violent effort to solve a series of puzzles by the virtual world's creator.

Lock In by John Scalzi When a new virus causes 1 percent of the population to become completely paralyzed in body but not in mind, the United States pursues a scientific initiative to develop a virtual-reality world for victims, with unexpected consequences.

Reamde by Neal Stephenson When his own high-tech startup turns into a Fortune 500 computer gaming group, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa family who has amassed an illegal fortune, finds the line between fantasy and reality becoming blurred when a virtual war for dominance is triggered.

Omnitopia Dawn by Diane Duane Dev Logan, the genius programmer responsible for a popular, massive multiplayer online game, Omnitopia, guards a secret about his invention it is no longer simply a program, it has become sentient.

Monkeewrench by P.J. Tracy Grace McBride and the team at her software company are horrified when events in their murder mystery computer game are replicated in the real world by a ruthless killer, a situation that prompts them to analyze the game in order to anticipate his next move.

Armada by Ernest Cline Struggling to complete his final month of high school only to glimpse a UFO that exactly resembles an enemy ship from his favorite video game, Zack Lightman questions his sanity before becoming one of millions of gamers tasked with protecting the Earth during an alien invasion.

Enders Game by Orson Scott Card A veteran of years of simulated war games, Ender believes he is engaged in one more computer war game when in truth he is commanding the last fleet of Earth against an alien race seeking the complete destruction of Earth.

For the Win by Cory Doctorow In a future where poor children and teenagers work for corrupt bosses as gold farmers, finding valuable items inside massively-multiplayer online games, a small group of teenagers work to unionize and escape this near-slavery.

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LIBRARY MATTERS - A brave new (virtual) world - The Daily Progress

Merriam-Webster, the venerable dictionary publisher known for its often snarky Twitter account, unveiled a new feature on Monday that lets users go back in time.

The online dictionary's Time Traveler feature allows curious amateur linguists and cultural historians to enter a year and see all the words that were initially recorded in other words, published in that period.

Both apology and civil war were first used in 1533, for example. Other words and phrases that made their first appearances in English that same year include famed, harangue, excrement, good-for-nothing, ovation, ungrateful, vigilance, preposterous, carrot, turnip and utopia.

The project is extensive, allowing users to choose options time beginning in before 12th century to 2010, the year that brought us "Arab spring" and "gamification."

"Exploring Time Traveler is surprising and enlightening, with many words first recorded much earlier or later than one might expect," the dictionary publisher said in a news release. "Prima donna and unsportsmanlike date back to 1754, while neurotypical wasnt recorded until 1994."

Many recent years have yielded words that have become common parts of the American English vocabulary, such as "photobomb" (2008), "hashtag"(2007), "bucket list" (2006) and "sexting" (2005).

Not all of the recent words will be instantly familiar to the general public, however. It's unlikely that you'll hear "roentgenium" (2004, a type of radioactive element) or "rock snot" (2005, a single-cellalgae) in casual conversation unless you run in some esoteric circles.

Merriam-Webster included a caveat in its news release: "Note that there is some art to these facts: antedating happens regularly, and first-known-use dates are subject to frequent (but not instant) updating, as new evidence is uncovered."

That might explain why the dictionary has the word "cheesesteak," the iconic Philadelphia sandwich that dates to the 1930s, as being first recorded in 1977, the same year that saw "brewski" (a beer, of course) entered the language.

Still, users might be surprised at how long some popular slang words have been around. According to the dictionary, people have been "chillaxing" since 1999, "face-palming" since 1996 and "smack talking" since 1992.

Lisa Schneider, Merriam-Webster's chief digital officer and publisher, suggested that users explore milestone years using the new feature.

"Its entertaining to see what words were first used the year you were born, or the year you graduated college, and its especially interesting to discover a word that has been around for centurie slonger than (or is much newer than!) you might expect," she said."Were thrilled to extend this new feature to our users, and invite them to explore along with us."

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Did you know 'apology' and 'civil war' were coined the same year? Thank Merriam-Webster's new Time Traveler feature - Los Angeles Times

Farmers in the Mesilla Valley have started the annual chile harvest, and soon the sweet smell of roasted chiles will drift from Hatch, New Mexico, to El Paso and beyond.

You cant grow the same chiles in California, said Anita Rodriguez, a third-generation New Mexico farmer. You cant grow the same flavor because our climate is different, our land is different, the soil is different.

Demand for New Mexico chile stems from national interest in Hatch. The small town 40 miles north of Las Cruces has developed a reputation for producing some of the nations best chiles.

Some orders are small and some huge. This year, Austin-based restaurant chain Chuys plans to buy more than 3 million pounds of Hatch green chile. The chain opened its first El Paso location two years ago.

The green chile has amazing flavor. We are hearing good things from customers all over, said Chuys spokesperson Hilary Delling.

New Mexican chile production is not what it once was. In 1992, an estimated 34,500 acres of green chile was harvested in New Mexico. Farmers harvested 8,700 acres in 2016, according to the United States Department of Agriculture in New Mexico.

The decline in New Mexican chile production has been attributed to growing competition from outside industry and shortages in labor and water.

This year, farmers hope to match or slightly exceed last years crop. Heavy rain showers in late June and early July lifted hopes. More acres were planted this year to meet higher demands, according to the New Mexico Agriculture Department.

Chuys, a publicly traded company, has taken New Mexico chile season and the Hatch name nationwide, distributing chilies to its more than 80 restaurants throughout the United States, as far Washington D.C.

While they might not produce millions of pounds of chile, smaller farms in Las Cruces will supply the El Paso area as well.

Anita Rodriguez grows green chile on little more than an acre of her familys small farm in Las Cruces to supply El Paso markets and restaurants. Rodriguez has followed in the footsteps of her grandfather, who was a full-time farmer, and her father, who farmed as a hobby. She calls her farm Utopia.

After graduating from New Mexico State University in 1996, Rodriguez moved to Mexico City with $500 in cash and three credit cards to survive.

With a little help, Rodriguez found a job at the American School Foundation, where the children of diplomats and large businesses owners went to school. She taught middle-schoolers about where food comes from and how to prepare food.

When she moved to El Paso in 2016, Rodriguez began talking to her family about growing organic crops. She said it took some time to convince her dad.

During a short walk through the farm, she showed El Paso Inc. the farms organically grown chile, parsley, chives, basil, watermelon, cantaloupes, and tomatoes.

While major farms use large vehicles and tools to collect and sort chile crops, Rodriguez uses a bucket and her hands.

My interest in agriculture all began with planting those first chile seeds in the field with my dad, she said.

Rodriguez said green chiles are picked when they are firm and stored until they are sold. The picked chiles are transported to Shahid Mustafa, the chair of a co-op of about eight farms called Sol y Tierra.

Mustafa said the co-op is made up of small farms from all over the region. The farms are located from Chaparral, New Mexico, to Socorro, Texas. The co-op provides farmers markets and restaurants with organically grown produce.

The market in El Paso has, in terms of restaurants, shown more interest, he said. In Las Cruces, the biggest customer for Sol y Tierra has been public schools.

Last week, Rodriguez was tasked with supplying True Food, a local buying club, with 60 pounds of green chile and another 60 pounds to two different farmers markets.

She is not concerned. Rodriguez said she can pick 84 pounds of chile in less than an hour.

Email El Paso Inc. reporter Aaron Montes at amontes@elpasoinc.com or call (915) 534-4422, ext. 105. Twitter: @aaronmontes91

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Chile harvest begins in Hatch - El Paso Inc.

Life without oil, natural gas and coal would most likely be nasty, brutish and short

Al Gores new movie, a New York Times article on the final Obama Era manmade climate disaster report, and a piece saying wrathful people twelve years from now will hang hundreds of climate deniers are a tiny sample of Climate Hysteria and Anti-Trump Resistance rising to a crescendo. If we dont end our evil fossil-fuel-burning lifestyles and go 100% renewable Right Now, we are doomed, they rail.

Maybe its our educational system, our cargo cults easy access to food and technology far from farms, mines and factories, or the end-of-days propaganda constantly pounded into our heads. Whatever the reason, far too many people have a pitiful grasp of reality: natural climate fluctuations throughout Earth history; the intricate, often fragile sources of things we take for granted; and what life would really be like in the utopian fossil-fuel-free future they dream of. Lets take a short journey into that idyllic realm.

Suppose we generate just the 25 billion megawatt-hours of todays total global electricity consumption using wind turbines. (Thats not total energy consumption, and it doesnt include what wed need to charge a billion electric vehicles.) Wed need more than 830 million gigantic 3-megawatt turbines!

Spacing them at just 15 acres per turbine would require 12.5 billion acres! Thats twice the land area of North America! All those whirling blades would virtually exterminate raptors, other birds and bats. Rodent and insect populations would soar. Add in transmission lines, solar panels and biofuel plantations to meet the rest of the worlds energy demands and the mostly illegal tree cutting for firewood to heat poor families homes and huge swaths of our remaining forest and grassland habitats would disappear.

The renewable future assumes these eco-friendly alternatives would provide reliable, affordable energy 24/7/365, even during windless, sunless weeks and cold, dry growing seasons. They never will, of course. That means we will have electricity and fuels when nature cooperates, instead of when we need it.

With backup power plants gone, constantly on-and-off electricity will make it impossible to operate assembly lines, use the internet, do an MRI or surgery, enjoy favorite TV shows or even cook dinner. Refrigerators and freezers would conk out for hours or days at a time. Medicines and foods would spoil.

Petrochemical feed stocks would be gone so we wouldnt have paints, plastics, synthetic fibers or pharmaceuticals, except what can be obtained at great expense from weather-dependent biodiesel. Kiss your cotton-polyester-lycra leggings and yoga pants good-bye.

But of course all that is really not likely to happen. It would actually be far worse.

First of all, there wouldnt even be any wind turbines or solar panels. Without fossil fuels or far more nuclear and hydroelectric plants, which rabid environmentalists also despise we couldnt mine the needed ores, process and smelt them, build and operate foundries, factories, refineries or cement kilns, manufacture and assemble turbines and panels. We couldnt even make machinery to put in factories.

Wind turbines, solar panels and solar thermal installations cannot produce consistently high enough heat to smelt ores and forge metals. They cannot generate power on a reliable enough basis to operate facilities that make modern technologies possible. They cannot provide the power required to manufacture turbines, panels, batteries or transmission lines much less power civilization.

My grandmother used to tell me, The only good thing about the good old days is that theyre gone. Well, theyd be back, as the USA is de-carbonized, de-industrialized and de-developed.

Ponder America and Europe before coal fueled the modern industrial age. Recall what were we able to do back then, what lives were like, how long people lived. Visit Colonial Williamsburg and Claude Moore Colonial Farm in Virginia, or similar places in your state. Explore rural Africa and India.

Imagine living that way, every day: pulling water from wells, working the fields with your hoe and ox-pulled plow, spinning cotton thread and weaving on looms, relying on whatever metal tools your local blacksmith shop can produce. When the sun goes down, your lives will largely shut down.

Think back to amazing construction projects of ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome or even 18th Century London, Paris, New York. Ponder how they were built, how many people it took, how they obtained and moved the raw materials. Imagine being part of those wondrous enterprises, from sunup to sundown.

The good news is that there will be millions of new jobs. The bad news is that theyd involve mostly backbreaking labor with picks and shovels, for a buck an hour. Low-skill, low-productivity jobs just dont pay all that well. Maybe to create even more jobs, the government will issue spoons, instead of shovels.

That will be your life, not reading, watching TV and YouTube or playing video games. Heck, there wont even be any televisions or cell phones. Drugs and alcohol will be much harder to come by, too. (No more opioids crisis.) Water wheels and wind mills will be back in fashion. All-natural power, not all the time.

More good news: Polluting, gas-guzzling, climate-changing cars and light trucks will be a thing of the past. Instead, youll have horses, oxen, donkeys, buggies and wagons again grow millions of acres of hay to feed them and have to dispose of millions or billions of tons of manure and urine every year.

Therell be no paved streets unless armies of low-skill workers pound rocks into gravel, mine and grind limestone, shale, bauxite and sand for cement, and make charcoal for lime kilns. Homes will revert to what can be built with pre-industrial technologies, with no central heat and definitely no AC.

Ah, but you folks promoting the idyllic renewable energy future will still be the ruling elites. Youll get to live better than the rest of us, enjoy lives of reading and leisure, telling us commoners how we must live. Dont bet on it. Dont even bet on having the stamina to read after a long day with your shovel or spoon.

As society and especially big urban areas collapse into chaos, it will be survival of the fittest. And that group likely wont include too many Handgun Control and Gun Free Zone devotees.

But at least your climate will be stable and serene or so you suppose. You wont have any more extreme weather events. Sea levels will stay right where they are today: 400 feet higher than when a warming planet melted the last mile-thick glaciers that covered half the Northern Hemisphere 12,000 years ago.

At least it will be stable and serene until those solar, cosmic ray, ocean currents and other pesky, powerful natural forces decide to mess around with Planet Earth again.

Of course, many countries wont be as stupid as the self-righteous utopian nations. They will still use fossil fuels, plus nuclear and hydroelectric, and watch while you roll backward toward the good old days. Those that dont swoop in to conquer and plunder may even send us food, clothing and monetary aid (most of which will end up with ruling elites and their families, friends, cronies and private armies).

So how about this as a better option?

Stop obsessing over dangerous manmade climate change. Focus on what really threatens our planet and its people: North Korea, Iran, Islamist terrorism and rampant poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death among the billions who still do not have access to electricity and the living standards it brings.

Worry less about manmade climate cataclysms and more about cataclysms caused by policies promoted in the name of controlling Earths climate.

Dont force-feed us with todays substandard, subsidized, pseudo-sustainable, pseudo-renewable energy systems. When better, more efficient, more practical energy technologies are developed, they will replace fossil fuels. Until then, we would be crazy to go down the primrose path to renewable energy utopia.

Paul Driessen is a senior fellow with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, nonprofit public policy institutes that focus on energy, the environment, economic development and international affairs. Paul Driessen is author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power, Black death

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Life in fossil-fuel-free utopia - Canada Free Press

Photograph by Tim Hout.

With her fifth novel, The Burning Girl (Norton), Claire Messud forgoes clever satire for elegant sympathy. Slim but impactful, her narrative follows the diverging paths of a pair of teenage girls in a small town, torn apart by men, drugs, and, most polarizing of all, fantasy. If you have to imagine, asks the troubled Cassie, why imagine something bad? The Burning Girl asks how well we can ever know our closest confidants and answers its own question with every refined page.

V.F. writer Tom Sanctons juicy The Bettencourt Affair (Dutton) is the very picture of un grand scandale about the worlds richest woman. First novels as rich and enchanting as Augustus Roses The Readymade Thief (Viking) dont come around too often, and when they do, they rarely combine secret societies, teenage runaways, and Marcel Duchamp. Acclaimed novelist Kamila Shamsies Home Fire (Riverhead) is a blaze of identity, family, nationalism, and Sophocles Antigone. V.F. contributing editor Kurt Andersens erudite Fantasyland (Random House) is a study of magical thinking and mania throughout American history. Meanwhile, fantasy becomes reality in NBC reporter Katy Turs Trump-trailing Unbelievable (Dey Street).

Back in a flash: Sam Stephenson takes a wide-angle view of a celebrated photo-essayist in Gene Smiths Sink (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Only connect with Bill Goldstein as he peers through a literary lens at The World Broke in Two (Henry Holt). And whats black and white and flashy all over? Famed photographer Jean-Pierre Laffonts New York City Up and Down (Glitterati).

Its all cafeteria trays and dormitory IDs until it isnt. Vanity Fairs Schools for Scandal (Simon & Schuster), edited by Graydon Carter, offers not just an inside peek but a multifaceted examination of the dramas that unfold on Americas most elite campuses. From the unraveling of allegations at big-name institutions (Duke University, University of Virginia) to art thefts at Transylvania University, Schools for Scandal presents a syllabuss worth of riveting journalism. As V.F. editor-at-large Cullen Murphy writes in the books introduction, schools are a point of intersection for just about every social phenomenon on the planet; come for the Trump University filleting, stay for John Kerry playing boodleball, a violent soccer-hockey hybrid, in Yales Skull and Bones Tomb.

George Giustis Kromekote: Salesmaker for the World of Music, from The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design (Abrams), by Steven Heller and Greg DOnofrio.

Photographs from the George Giusti Collection/Cary Graphic Arts Collection/Rochester Institute Of Technology/permission of Robert Giusti (Kromekote).

Judith Newman reveals the tender side of tech in To Siri with Love (Harper). Literary biographer James Atlas is a writers writers writer in The Shadow in the Garden (Pantheon). Salman Rushdie signs a magical lease on The Golden House (Random House). Yve-Alain Bois and Ben Easthams Ed Ruscha (Rizzoli) puts us in a typographical trance. Jonathan Dees The Locals (Random House) shrinks class warfare down to size. Kristen Iskandrian explores maternal bonds in Motherest (Twelve). Adorn your life with all things Alice Temperley (Rizzoli). Mumble a prayer for Stephen Colbert in Stephen Colberts Midnight Confessions (Simon & Schuster). Absorb Danielle Allens account of an abbreviated life, just Cuz (Liveright). Gabriel Tallents My Absolute Darling (Riverhead) captures a compelling young heroine. Three eccentric socialites buttress Judith Mackrells The Unfinished Palazzo (Thames & Hudson). The Red-Haired Woman (Knopf) takes us outside Istanbul and inside the mind of Orhan Pamuk. Culinary icon Alice Waters goes farm-to-bookshelf with Coming to My Senses (Clarkson Potter). Its racial Utopia for two but not forever in Danzy Sennas New People (Riverhead). Heather Harpham finds Happiness (Henry Holt) when her life is rocked. Emily Culliton dazzles in The Misfortune of Marion Palm (Knopf). William Taubman leaves his mark on Gorbachev (Norton). Mike Perry manufactures a hipster maze in The Broad City Coloring Book (Laurence King). Russell Westbrook (Rizzoli) dares us not to sweat his style. Daniel Handler deftly details All the Dirty Parts (Bloomsbury). Loudon Wainwright IIIs Liner Notes (Blue Rider) delves into death, decay, and other delights.

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What to Read This Month: Katy Tur's Unbelievable, Claire Messud's The Burning Girl, and More - Vanity Fair

His own worst enemy: Anton, a participant in Channel 4s Eden. Photograph: C4

Eden: Paradise Lost (C4) | All 4 Citizen Jane (BBC4) | iPlayer Utopia: In Search of the Dream (BBC4) | iPlayer Trust Me (BBC1) | iPlayer Diana: In Her Own Words (C4) | All 4Eden, the Channel 4 year-long reality experiment in the wilds of Scotland that famously went wildly wrong, suddenly resurfaced in a week-long coda, Paradise Lost, in which the producers sought to excuse their mistakes by giving us more of the same: inanity, truculence, the milk of human kindness openly curdling. It was a grim watch, made brief fun only by our knowledge that the contestants emerged from their months of fame-seeking to discover the show had long been cancelled: more of Britain had watched Cash in the Attic. Chief problem was apparently that, as one of the women said, it turned into just a penis size matching competition.

It has been said more succinctly, but we knew what she meant. The main swinging dicks were Titch, presumably named for the breadth of his non-swearing vocabulary, and Anton, a lumbering, infuriating soul and his own worst enemy: every hour last week I was waiting to see Anton decked.

Here was a generation brought up to believe in their right to believe in themselves, if not actually be good at anything

Given my feelings of depression and boredom and that was only in three or four nights watching goodness knows what it was like for the participants. There was some revolting misogyny, but there was also some savage incompetence. A hunter who couldnt hunt, a gardener who couldnt weed, a chef who seemed only to plunge knives into peoples backs. No one count them, none appeared to take more than the briefest of seconds, in a whole almost-year, to drink in the beauty of the Ardnamurchan peninsula, fresh startled every morning, or to read half a book, or teach others about anything.

Here was a generation brought up to believe in their inalienable right to believe in themselves, if not to be actually good at anything, who, for all their easy talk of democracy, had forgotten how to count the very thing, as witnessed in the shoddy voting-out of Anton. By the end I just felt sorry for the midges.

Far more instructive, hopeful even, in terms of a slice of paradise on Earth was Citizen Jane, a masterly film on the battle for the soul of a city. New York, as it happens, and a battle fought from the 30s to the 70s, but it encapsulated much of the soul of the 20th century.

On the one hand, city developer Robert Moses, in increasing thrall to the automobile, and the utopian blandishments of Corbusian modernism. On the other, Jane Jacobs, a phenomenally articulate writer. Her every sentence sang off the screen: Projects that are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life civic centres that are avoided by anyone except bums.

Jacobs understood, viscerally in the main but also through exhaustive empirical research, that cities cannot be built top-down, by even well-intentioned gods (and here I was minded of the soaraway success of SimCity). Buildings that turn their backs on the streets; expressways that eviscerate. She went to war against Moses and his armies, arguing instead for short blocks, myriad channels, a mix of old and new buildings, constant connections with neighbourhoods. Jacobss mantra was: There is no logic that can be superimposed: people make the city.

There was great footage of Little Italy in 1962: flashing-eyed women arguing that the streets were immensely safer there. Two-three in the morning, the men are sitting in the cafes and theyre watching for you. And there were grim lessons from 50s slum resettlement in Baltimore, the replacing of neighbourhoods with sanitised architectural housing projects that had turned within nine years into some of the most dangerous places in the world. We saw, in turn, their late 90s demolition: literally, a bonfire of the vanities. China is currently engaged in Brobdingnagian urban expansion and has decided its template will be exactly that failed 1950s American model.

BBC4 is also giving us a highly promising three-parter, Utopia: In Search of the Dream, and art historian Richard Clay has already managed, without straining, to link Thomas Spences commons of shared ownership, via George Bernard Shaw and Star Treks Gene Roddenberry, directly to Wikipedia. Its intellectually splendid. We saw a flash-forward to this weeks second episode, and a keen-eyed young black architect enthusing: We are declaring war on the slums! The words of Robert Moses, 80years on.

I almost stopped watching TrustMe, BBC1s new four-part drama, 10 minutes in, when the already semi-daft plot dunked its head into simple medical ignorance. Jodie Whittakers angelic if stroppy nurse Cath, trying to expose hospital abuses in Sheffield, is given her perfunctory jotters: shamed and angry, she (somewhat inexplicably) decides to steal her best pals identity, pretend to be a full doctor and gets a whizzy new job in Edinburgh. Shes welcomed north with more friendship, and certainly a greater lack of credential-checking, than greeted the announcement of the actress as the next Doctor Who.

Sharon Small is Brigitte, Caths stressy new Scots boss, and wonders: So why here? This place is a backward step, surely? this isnt exactly a centre of excellence.

Diana was not a republican (the clue coming in the fact that she wanted her son to be king)

Say what? It gave its name the Edinburgh Model to global teaching systems: its graduates founded five of the seven Ivy League medical schools. The storyline was fullof such sillies. The Sheffield reporter who insisted that Cath herselfgo public and personal (absolutely no need) with her whistleblowing, and thus lost the story; the absurd ease with which Cath multitasks upheaval, a daughter, a new affair and speed-reading Surgery for Dummies from her gown pocket: if a patient arrived in A&E up here boasting as many plot holes, theyd be borrowed for a string vest.

They might just seem surface sillies, but Ill warrant a writer such as Jed Mercurio would have taken better chances to tell more sober truths aboutwhistleblowing, along with the drama. Yet Ill stick with it, mainly to see if the plot manages to extricate itself from the roils of its own entrails and to enjoy a good cast.

What did we learn from Diana: In Her Own Words? Barring a couple of swipes at those who cant answer back, and the fact that such shows will resort to much padding, and that the exceedingly posh and coy Diana was, despite strident claims from the misguided, not a republican (the clue coming in the fact that she wanted her son to be king), Id have to say a big fat jack. What learned, though, from the weeks of hissy furore between Channel 4s right to broadcast private recordings of Diana, and her sons rights to a quiet life? Those twin British failings a capacity for self-deception and love of deference are alive and kicking today: it might be 2017 rather than 1953, but millennialsare keen to bend the knee anew.

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The week in TV: Eden: Paradise Lost; Citizen Jane; Utopia: In Search of the Dream; Trust Me; Diana: In Her Own Words - The Guardian

PUBLISHED: 12:11 10 August 2017 | UPDATED: 12:11 10 August 2017

Professor Richard Clay filming on location in Letchworth for Utopia: In Search of the Dream. Picture: LGCHF

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The team behind Utopia: In Search of the Dream presented by art historian Professor Richard Clay filmed in the original garden city in April.

Among other things they explored the Garden City Collection, off Wilbury Hills Road, and interviewed curator Vicky Axell.

Letchworth features heavily in the second hour-long episode, Build It and They Will Come, which will be shown on BBC Four on Tuesday night a week on from the opening episode, Blueprints for Better.

The people behind the show include production manager Clare Burns who lives in Letchworth herself, and very much enjoyed shooting in her hometown.

She said: The second episode of our series examines some of the attempts to create liveable utopian societies.

Sometimes they work, but more often, for various reasons, they fail. We filmed at a Shaker village in New Hampshire, a hippie community in Virginia, a communist housing estate in Lithuania and in Letchworth!

As well as interviewing Vicky, we filmed all across the town from the allotments in South View and the first roundabout in Broadway to the little green on Westholm and the Spirella Building.

We sent up a drone camera over Norton Common and got some beautiful aerial shots.

I was very proud of my hometown, and I hope viewers enjoy the series and agree with our conclusions about Letchworth.

The documentary is part of BBC Fours utopia season of programmes, which looks into and celebrates the ideas, inspirations and visionaries behind the idea of a place or state of things in which all is perfect.

BBC Four channel editor Cassian Harrison explained: Utopian ideals and the very idea of utopia itself have always fascinated and inspired the human race from art and architecture movements, to genres of fiction, new experimental societies and beyond.

With the intellectual ambition that is its hallmark, BBC Four is delving into a world of visionaries, philosophers, and genius to examine what propels us to endlessly search out ideas of perfection.

The show featuring Letchworth is scheduled be shown on BBC Four at 9am on Tuesday, August 15, and will be available afterwards on BBC iPlayer at bbc.co.uk/programmes/b090w6y3.

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Letchworth features in new BBC Four documentary series Utopia: In Search of the Dream - Comet 24