Category Archives: New Utopia

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The year 2020 seems to be drawn straight from the plot of some discarded dystopian novel a book that never got published because it sounded too far-fetched. Not only is there a pandemic to contend with, unemployment nearing levels last seen in the Great Depression, and nationwide protests against police brutality, but its all happening in the same year Americans are supposed to elect a president.

Amid the chaos and tear gas, some people see a chance to scrap everything and start over, a first step toward turning their visions for a better world into reality. In Seattle, protesters in one six-block stretch of Capitol Hill, a neighborhood near downtown, have created a community-run, police-free zone, recently renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, CHOP. Its a scene of masked crowds, vibrant signs and street art, a no cop co-op giving away food and supplies, and newly planted community gardens. In Minneapolis, volunteers turned a former Sheraton hotel into a sanctuary offering free food and hotel rooms until they got evicted.

Were seeing a new resurgence of utopianism, said Heather Alberro, an associate lecturer of politics at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom who studies radical environmentalists and utopian thought.

Problems like climate change, the widening gap between the rich and everybody else, and racial inequality gives many the sense that theyre living through one giant unprecedented crisis. And these combined disasters create the exact conditions that give rise to all sorts of expressions of utopian thinking, Alberro said. From broad ideas like the Green New Deal the climate-jobs-justice package popularized by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Seattles autonomous zone, people are offering up new plans for how the world could operate. Whether they came from literature or real-life experiments, these idealistic efforts can spur wider cultural and political change, even if they falter.

A community garden in CHOPs Cal Anderson Park. Grist / Kate Yoder

Based on President Donald Trumps tweets about Seattles CHOP (or Fox News websites photoshopped coverage of the protest) youd picture pure chaos, with buildings afire and protesters running amok. The reality was more like people sitting around in a park, screening movies like 13th, and making art. Its a serious protest too, with crowds gathered for talks about racism and police brutality in front of an abandoned police precinct. The protesters demands include abolishing the Seattle Police Department, removing cops from schools, abolishing juvenile detention, and giving reparations to victims of police violence.

The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone #CHAZ is not a lawless wasteland of anarchist insurrection it is a peaceful expression of our communitys collective grief and their desire to build a better world, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan tweeted last week.

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The protest zone goes by many names: Originally called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, it was later rebranded as CHOP. The barricaded area, which spans from Cal Anderson Park into nearby streets, is part campground, part block party. Tourists wander through, snapping photos of the street art.

A week earlier, protests in Cal Anderson Park, sparked by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, were met by police officers spraying rubber bullets, mace, and tear gas. Then, last week, the police abandoned the area, and the protesters declared it their own, turning the Seattle Police Department into the Seattle People Department with a bit of spraypaint.

The CHAZ follows a long history of anti-capitalist experiments that reimagined the way the world was run. In 1871, the people of Paris, sick of oppression, rose up to take control of their city for a two-month stint. The Paris Commune canceled debt, suspended rent, and abolished the police, filling the streets with festivals. The French government soon quashed their experiment, massacring tens of thousands of Parisians in The Bloody Week. Even though it was short-lived, the Paris Commune inspired revolutionary movements for the next 150 years.

Protesters sleep in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan during Occupy Wall Street, 2011. Ramin Talaie / Corbis via Getty Images

In 2011, Occupy Wall Street protestors took over New York Citys Zuccotti Park for two months to highlight the problems of income inequality. Their encampment offered free food, lectures, books, and wide-ranging discussions. The radical movement ended up changing the way Americans talked, giving them a new vocabulary the 99 percent and 1 percent and its concerns about income inequality went on to mold the priorities of the Democratic Party.

Alberro compared Seattles CHOP to a community of 300 environmental activists in western France who set up camp at a site earmarked for a controversial new airport starting in 2008. One of many ZADs (zones dfendre) that have sprung up in France, the community ended up being not just a place to protest the airport, but to take a stand against what protesters saw as the underlying problems capitalism, inequality, and environmental destruction. (The government ended up shelving plans for the airport in 2018). The point of these autonomous zones is not only to create these micro exemplars of better worlds, Alberro said, but also to physically halt present forces of destruction whether thats an airport or, in the case of Capitol Hill, how police treat black people.

A bike rides past a farm in la Zad, a utopian community protesting an airport in Western France. LOIC VENANCE / AFP via Getty Images

Seattle has a lengthy history of occupations and political demonstrations tracing back to the Seattle General Strike in the early 1900s. The Civil Rights era brought sit-ins and marches. Indigenous protesters occupied an old military fort in 1970 and negotiated with the city to get 20 acres of Discovery Park. Two years later, activists occupied an abandoned elementary school in Beacon Hill, demanding that it be turned into a community center (now El Centro de la Raza).

And it might not be a coincidence that the new protest zone appeared on the West Coast, often portrayed in literature as an ideal place to set up utopian communities, Alberro said. For instance, the book Ecotopia, published in 1975 by Ernest Callenbach, depicted a green society complete with high-speed magnetic-levitation trains! formed when northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the United States. The book went on to become a cult novel, influencing the environmental movements focus on local food, public transportation, and renewable energy.

Ecotopia isnt exactly an ideal parallel for the current wave of protests, as its utopia was white. Callenbach envisioned a segregated society where black people opted to live in the less affluent Soul City. Still, its apparent that some of its other messages live on. Alberro has talked to many radical environmental protesters for her research, and most of them havent read any of the green utopian books she asks about. But they repeat some of the ideas and phrases from that literature nearly word for word when describing the changes they want to see in the world.

Though Seattles protest zone is focused on racial oppression, not environmental destruction, Alberro sees a similar impulse behind all these projects. Many activists would argue that its all part of the same struggle, she said, arguing that people cant successfully take on environmental issues without addressing racism and other socioeconomic problems. There seems to be a cultural atmosphere that molds these different movements, even though they often dont come into contact with one another.

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Seattles autonomous zone belongs to a grand tradition of utopian experiments - Grist

June 17, 2020 The smart cities of the future have the potential to be extraordinarily efficient and to minimize the danger of natural disasters, said UTOPIA Fiber CEORoger Timmermanin a Tuesday webinar sponsored by Utah Ignite.

The coronavirus pandemic has made social media and other technologies indispensable, and Timmerman said smart cities offer a unique opportunity to continue technologizing modern life.

Smart cities would enable businesses and other organizations to have surveillance cameras wherever they wished, he said. The cameras would rely on high-quality infrastructure, and subsequently, high-speed internet.

The more connectivity they benefit from, the better the cameras, he said.

Speaking at an event of Utah Ignite, a smart city group affiliated with the national non-profit organization U.S. Ignite, Timmerman also said that smart cities could assist with the efficient allocation of resources amid turbulent natural circumstances.

This is a really urgent thing in Utah because we are low on water, he said. So the better we can manage that resource, the better for our conservation of water.

The employment of smart meters can help to measure resource usage in the cities, and are ideal for sustainable use, Timmerman said.

They dont use much bandwidth theyre pretty insensitive to delay and jitter and things like that, he said.

The meters could utilize artificial intelligence to monitor for suspicious usage levels, Timmerman added.

I dont know how many of you had that happen to you, but the ability to put these systems in water is one thats very common for cities.

Smart cars could offer new possibilities for autonomy and other advancements, Timmerman said, allowing smart cities to get creative with new applications.

Now they want to have as much of [the new technology] as possible so that you want to buy the car, but at the same time those types of connectivity are available. They want to leverage those, he said.

Other technologies like LED smart lights and smart facilities that sense when people are using them can all help to make the lives of the smart cities residents easier, Timmerman said.

However, he admitted that smart cities and the surveillance systems they employ often raise important questions about privacy.

They use technology almost like what Amazon has their little stores where you go and pick up stuff and walk out, and it knows what you did, he said. [Its] really cool when its Amazon, its not socool when its the government.

The technologies carry both risks and rewards, but Timmerman claimed that the rewards outweigh the risks as well as predicting that UTOPIA Fiber will play a crucial role in their rollout.

UTOPIA stands for the Utah Open Infrastructure Agency, and providers Gigabit-level symmetrical broadband services through its fiber network. It is the largest open access network in operation in the United States.

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UTOPIA Fiber CEO says at Utah Ignite Event that Rewards of Smart Cities Outweigh Risks - BroadbandBreakfast.com

Jan Weismiller and Tim Budd of Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City and Kathy Magruder of Pageturners Bookstore in Indianola talk about the best books to read this summer.

The coronavirus pandemic has made this a difficult time to sell books, an unfortunate time to publish a book and a wonderful time for many to read.

In this edition of Talk of Iowa, its the annual summer books show. If youre looking for powerful fiction, a read that might challenge your ideas and broaden your mind, poetry that explores the depths of joy, or a light-hearted escape, we have books for you.

The titles were chosen by Jan Weismiller and Tim Budd of Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City and Kathy Magruder of Pageturners Bookstore in Indianola.

Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano

Twelve-year-old Edward is the sole survivor of a plane crash that claimed the lives of 186 passengers and crew members, including his parents and older brother. "The premise of this novel may seem depressing and, yes, there is great sadness and grief here but the book soon turns into an extremely uplifting and moving story about memory, connection with others, and finding beauty and love in small kindnesses."

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The Bear by Andrew Krivak

Sometime in the future, a young girl and her father are the last two humans living; when the girl finds herself alone, a bear comes to her aid in the wilderness. "This slim novel is part adventure story, part fantasy and part love story to the world of nature -- it reminded me of a Native American folktale."

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The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

This new novel, by the author of Station Eleven, follows Vincent as she leaves her bartending job at a resort hotel to become the kept girlfriend of a wealthy Ponzi scheme manager. "Superbly written, this is a novel about adapting to the transitions in life and the fragile, memorable connections we have with others."

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Processed Cheese by Stephen Wright

A man named Graveyard is walking down the street when a bag of money falls from the sky, changing his life forever. "A very funny, very sharp satire about income inequality, material obsession, and the light and dark side of all that money!"

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This Is Happiness by Niall Williams

Noel,in his seventies, recounts the summer of 1958 when, as a 17-year-old, he lived with his grandparents the same summer when electricity finally came to their small Irish village. "A charming coming of age novel, with the naivet of youth balanced against the wry remembrances of old age. Full of the eccentricities and personalities of country life, this reads like an Irish Lake Woebegone."

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Real Life by Brandon Taylor

This coming-of-age novel is narrated by Wallace, a young, gay black man from Alabama who has come north for the first time to pursue a PhD in biochemistry at a large, midwestern university. It takes place over the course of one long summer weekend in which tension, both personal and racial, come to a head. "Taylor is one of the most precise writers imaginable and Real Life allows us insight into our riven culture without giving up an inch of complexity."

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Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld has written a historical novel based on a life of Hilary Rodham that might have unfolded had she not married Bill Clinton. "Sittenfeld, both humanist and historian, has written a book you wont be able to put down."

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Camino Windsby John Grisham

This is the second of John Grishams novels to feature protagonist Bruce Cable, owner of Bay Books in Florida. "He does a marvelous job of bringing the bookselling/publishing world into the world of true crime. The real sleuth is Nick, the college student slacker who is always reading mysteries behind the counter. The prescient Grisham has found a villain in a nursing home chain."

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My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

This subtle and compelling novel is narrated by Vanessa, a young woman floundering in her early thirties. It is the height of the me too movement and Vanessa is forced to reconsider a relationship she had with a manipulative teacher when she was a precocious teenage scholarship student at a boarding school. "This book raises vital questions of agency, consent and complicity. Intimate and intense it confronts the shifting cultural mores that transform our relationships"

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In the Not Quite Dark stories by Dana Johnson

Thiscollection of bold stories is set mostly in downtown Los Angeles. They examine large issues - love, class and race - and how they influence and define our most intimate moments. "My husband and I came across Dana Johnsons firstcollection of Stories: BreakAny Woman Down when we were house cleaning in the early days of the pandemic. We have since read both her story collections and her Elsewhere, California. This is an amazing African American voice that has been with usfor months."

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Network Effect by Martha Wells

When Murderbot's human associates (not friends, never friends) are captured and another not-friend from its past requires urgent assistance, Murderbot must choose between inertia and drastic action. Drastic action it is, then.

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This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger

In the summer of 1932, on the banks of Minnesotas Gilead River, Odie OBanion is an orphan confined to the Lincoln Indian Training School, a pitiless place where his lively nature earns him the superintendents wrath. Forced to flee after committing a terrible crime, he and his brother Albert, their best friend Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own. Over the course of one summer, these four orphans journey into the unknown and cross paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an enthralling, big-hearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole.

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Beach Read by Emily Henry

Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes best-selling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast. Theyre polar opposites. In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, theyre living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writers block. Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. Shell take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and hell take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously.) Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. Really.

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The Heap by Sean Adams

Once standing 500 stories high, Los Verticals is now collapsed into a massive pile of rubble called The Heap, where volunteers have created their own ad-hoc society of Dig Hands, removing trash, debris and bodies from the vast site. Orville Anders' brother--a radio DJ--has miraculously survived and is broadcasting from inside The Heap. The brothers' nightly conversations are a rating bonanza but Orville is cut off when he refuses to cooperate with corporate sponsors. The next night he hears "Orville" on the radio and determines to uncover the corruption at the core of their enterprise.

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Conviction by Denise Mina

The day Anna McDonald's quiet, respectable life exploded started off like all the days before: Packing up the kids for school, making breakfast, listening to yet another true crime podcast. Then her husband comes downstairs with an announcement, and Anna is suddenly, shockingly alone. Reeling, desperate for distraction, Anna returns to the podcast. Other people's problems are much better than one's own -- a sunken yacht, a murdered family, a hint of international conspiracy. But this case actually is Anna's problem. She knows one of the victims from an earlier life, a life she's taken great pains to leave behind. And she is convinced that she knows what really happened.

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The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison

In an alternate 1880s London, angels inhabit every public building, and vampires and werewolves walk the streets with human beings under a well-regulated truce. A fantastic utopia, except for a few things: Angels can Fall, and that Fall is like a nuclear bomb in both the physical and metaphysical worlds. And human beings remain human, with all their kindness and greed and passions and murderous intent. Jack the Ripper stalks the streets of this London too. But this London has an Angel. The Angel of the Crows.

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Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro

James Shapiro looks at pivotal moments in America's history through the lens of the plays and productions of Shakespeare that were either being performed at the time or were used as examples to bolster current popular opinions. "You don't need to know Shakespeare's plays to enjoy this incredibly interesting look at the complex relationship between the US and the Bard of Avon. Utterly fascinating."

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The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. The United States of America by Eric Cervini

The story of Frank Kameny, an early pioneer of the gay rights movement, and his battle for equality in the decade before the Stonewall riot. "I found myself filled with wonder and admiration for these men and women who displayed such bravery and perseverance in a time of real danger and persecution."

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What It's Like to Be a Bird by David Allen Sibley

A famed birder and author of several bird guides, Sibley's new oversized book looks at the behaviors and science of the birds of North America. "Full of vibrant illustrations (many life-size) and interesting tidbits about how birds are able to do what they do, this is a book for both kids and adults. You'll be spellbound for hours."

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The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

In Winston Churchills first day as Prime Minister, Hitler invaded Holland. In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson draws on diaries, archival material and once-secret intelligence reports releasedonly recently to provide a new lens on Londons darkest yearthrough the day-to-day of Churchill and thoseclosest to him. The Splendid and the Vile takes readers out of todayspoliticsdysfunction and back to a time of true leadership.

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Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcenturyby Honor Moore

Our Revolution follows the life of Jenny Moore - Honors mother - as she becomes involved in the great mid-twentieth century movements for peace and social justice. When she is diagnosedwith cancer at 50 she bequeaths to her 27-year-old daughter her unfinished writing. As Honor pursued her own life as a writer she was haunted by her mothers request. Our Revolution is the result of Honorsre-engagement with her mothers work and the new understanding she gains of a woman and of a time.

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Joy: 100 Poems edited by Christian Wiman

Following Simone Weils statement, A test ofwhat isreal is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, Christian Wiman has edited a collection of poems that are joyful in the deepest sense.It will buoy up the darkest moment.

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Becoming Duchess Goldblatt by Anonymous

Part memoir and part joyful romp through the fields of imagination, the story behind a beloved pseudonymous Twitter account reveals how a writer deep in grief rebuilt a life worth living. Becoming Duchess Goldblattis two stories: that of the reclusive real-life writer who created a fictional character out of loneliness and thin air, and that of the magical Duchess Goldblatt herself, a bright light in the darkness of social media. Fans around the world are drawn to Her Graces voice, her wit, her life-affirming love for all humanity, and the fun and friendship of the community thats sprung up around her.

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The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the Worlds Greatest Library by Edward Wilson-Lee

At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando Coln sailed with his father Christopher Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbuss death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue and surpass his fathers campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library that would collect everything ever printed: a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues; really, the first ever database for the exploding diversity of written matter as the printing press proliferated across Europe.

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The Best New Fiction And Nonfiction Books To Read This Summer - Iowa Public Radio

Photo: Bravo/Tommy Garcia/Bravo

In recent weeks, there have been a handful of surprisingly swift reactions from powerful institutions in the wake of the mass protests demanding justice for Black Americans. There was the repeal of a law shielding NYPD records from the public, the divestment of public schools from the police in Minneapolis, the stepping-down of the New York Times opinion page editor James Bennet for running a piece called Send In the Troops and the fallout at Vanderpump Rules, a reality show on Bravo about a group of young hot people who work or used to work at a West Hollywood restaurant.

Last week, Bravo fired two Vanderpump men for past racist tweets, and two women, Stassi Shroeder and Kristen Doute, who bragged publicly in 2018 about calling the police to report Faith Stowers, a Black former cast member the shows only one, ever for crimes she had nothing to do with. The cruelty of this harassment should have been obvious at the outset, but it was horrifically magnified by the way George Floyd died in Minneapolis, after someone called the cops.

And more heads are likely to roll. Another star, Jax Taylor, repeated the same smears about Stowers; he and his wife, Brittany Cartwright, have also been accused of asking a pastor with a history of making homophobic remarks to officiate their wedding. Beyond their terminations, many fans are calling for Vanderpump to be entirely gutted, or axed altogether, given that most of these incidents were already known to former Real Housewife Lisa Vanderpump, the shows executive producer, as well as to the rest of the cast and to others behind the camera all of whom did nothing, until they became a public-relations and financial liability.

From here, if you are a Bravo completist like me having seen not only Vanderpump Rules but every Real Housewives iteration and their offspring, for over 15 years since the franchise began and launched the Bravo cinematic universe the scope of the purge begins to snowball. What about the show set in Charleston with all-white cast members, some of whom still own plantations? What about the nearly all-white show set in summer in the very white Hamptons? What about the shows with the Trump supporters, of which there are numerous? Ramona Singer, a Real Housewife of New York, was recently filmed flirting wildly with a former Republican senate candidate in Missouri famous for writing a Facebook post about preventing his future daughters from becoming feminist she-devils. If the viewers are truly taking a zero-tolerance stance toward racism and all types of bigotry, what must we decide about whether to continue watching these shows, reliant as most of them are on white people behaving very, very badly?

This existential crisis was already looming last November over the first BravoCon, a three-day convention in New York that I attended nearly every hour of (for journalism). It was a mass of almost exclusively white women, ecstatically gathered like congregants in a ros-soaked megachurch. The friction between the frivolous unreality of the shows heavily edited and produced, about people encouraged to act in outsize ways and the sobering fact that these were real human beings was already uncomfortable. Not to mention how much money Bravo and the stars were clearly making from this behemoth enterprise, along with a satellite ecosystem of podcasters and bloggers. The fans I spoke to largely consider themselves liberal-minded; Sarah, a 24-year-old nurse from Nashville, told me about a few Facebook groups that had been roiled by political discussions, about several stars posting All Lives Matter on social media, for example. But the conversations were largely circumscribed by the escapist nature of the viewing. At the end of the day, I just dont want to think, you know? she said. Thats generally how Ive considered these shows, too, something to satisfy and soothe after work, like a heavily processed, sugary snack.

Now I cant get the bad taste out of my mouth. The idea that we can keep watching Bravo without thinking, now that more of us than ever are finally doing just that thinking, about how the concepts of racism and anti-Blackness play out in real life has fully soured. In a buffet of guilty pleasures, Bravos reality shows present a somewhat sinister conundrum: The things we should feel guiltiest about are done in real life, by real people. Doutes and Schroeders actions were not written into a script for characters in a drama, for which a white writers room could be held to account; they make money directly from playing themselves. It never made sense to me that Vanderpump Rules, originally about waiters trying to make it in L.A., never had more Black stars or other stars of color, given that that milieu is clearly not all white people. But I didnt linger too long on the disconnect. The tacit understanding we all had is that it was never about reflecting reality but putting hyper-reality on display; as long as the cast was drinking hard, playing hard, slapping each other, and lasering their foreheads, it didnt matter what world they were presenting or what the extreme ends of their behavior produced. That calculation, and the safe remove from which we made it, feels no longer viable.

Vanderpump Rules probably cant be salvaged. Maybe Bravo can, starting with the inclusion of more nonwhite producers and other executives, who might have raised a red flag earlier on two white stars lying to the police about a Black colleague. The bigots on other shows should be fired, and more nonwhite stars should be hired. Certain joys tracking yearslong interpersonal drama like memorizing baseball stats; watching fairly harmless, delightful insanity can remain. A woman dramatically taking off her prosthetic leg at a restaurant; a medium wreaking havoc at a dinner party there are people the world over who can be counted on to want attention and drink too many Pinot Grigios without being racist.

Of course, representation in something like entertainment is a limited, top-down goal and shouldnt be confused for political organizing. Bravos negligence in keeping its cast to its own standards of conduct is evidence that a corporate entity is not an effective steward of civil rights. There is too much pressure on consumer choice to help shape our lives and too little emphasis on, say, our government, which can feel almost impossible to influence in comparison. No wonder, during weeks that set the country ablaze, people looked around to see what things they could light up more immediately. Bravo was one of them.

But it is a good thing if audience members are losing their appetites for despicable behavior. And it is good if Bravo actually caters to the impulse to hold ourselves accountable, finally, in both the real world and this world we pretended wasnt really real for too long. Part of the seduction of reality shows is that looking at the worst of them helps us look away from the worst parts of ourselves: I am not involved in this, we can say from the couch. But of course we are. Bravo will probably never become an egalitarian utopia. But it could be a test case for this new era of openness, in which Americans who have long benefited from thinking of themselves as apolitical, just fans watching a show, are seeing themselves for the first time as cast members. Where do we want next season to go?

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What Do We Do With Bravo? - The Cut

The Simsis still going strong as a series, allowing players to project their personalities in a whole new world. The possibilities are endless, and having more creators is a key part of that. With EA finally going beyond the Origin platform,The Sims 4 will finally be on Steam later this year, as the team revealed at EA Play Live 2020. Of course, being able to create, live, and enjoy a utopia created by your own hand is always awesome. EA also celebrated the many fans that made the series what it is, a heartwarming message that many sorely need right now.

Having made its debut back in 2000,The Simshas certainly come a long way as a franchise. Giving players the freedom to create virtual people, construct dream homes, and living out virtual lives, it was escapism that retained a touch of reality. It was a huge hit with fans, and has spawned a legacy that is envied by many. With its latest iteration, The Sims 4, arriving in 2014, the game has reached over 20 million players and counting.

That has plenty to do with the support coming from the developers as well. Each entry came with its own set of downloadable content and expansions. Not only did this keep fans coming back for more, but it also breathed new life into the game every time. WhileThe Sims 4 has always been an Origin exclusive, the move to Steam will surely benefit the community even more.

The message of a better life, one where you are not judged, and makes you feel included is one we can get behind. WithThe Sims 4 coming to Steam, hopefully, more players will have the opportunity to experience that in a whole new world.

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The Sims 4 will bring the good life to Steam soon - PC Invasion

This essay is the seventh in a series of memos by artists, writers, curators and scientists written to the world after the COVID-19 crisis. In homage to Italo Calvinos Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), they are divided into six categories: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency.'Rethinking Community in the Wake of the Pandemic'was written in response to multiplicity.

After Italo Calvino, lets begin with a story, a Tantric Hindu myth. Sat wants to leave. iva, god of destruction, bars the departure of his good wife. An ascetic, Sat summons the fiery energy of opposition; iva shuts his eyes in fear. When he opens them to descry an escape route, the walls of his mountain seat are surrounded. The supreme Goddess speaks herself forth; Himalaya shudders as thousands of names emanate in omnipresent sound. In Sats anger, the Goddess assumes multiple forms: a blood-drenched lotus (Kamal), many wilful arms (Mtag), the power to silence enemies (Bagalmukh), holy smokes revenge (Dhmvat), her formidable studiousness (Bhairav), sacrificially devoted to you (Chinnamast), the cosubstantiality of earth (Bhuvanevar), girls playing, laughing (Tripura Sundar), a bridge of stars (Tr), times hunger (Kl). The story ends here, as stories proliferate.

This myth helps me to refigure the feeling of blockage that accompanies anger into an anger that blossoms and transforms space. The circumscription of power can produce a centrifugal force, from oppression to entropy: Sats resistance is the mother of insurrection. During a recent talk for The Lab, San Francisco, on Militant Care: Limits and Horizons, Hannah Black discussed the ways in which the horror conditions of the global pandemic bring about new political possibilities and coalitions, from the complete terraforming of the terrain of politics (e.g. mutual aid, rent strikes) to the peristaltic closure of reaction that moves to shut down these possibilities (e.g. community policing, closed borders). We are neither levelled nor unified by facing the same threat. The pandemic manifests the reality of our interrelation, the density and ineluctability of that entanglement, its potential for support and harm. As douard Glissant writes in The Poetics of Relation (1990): Relation contaminates, sweetens, as a principle, or as flower dust.

Glissant distinguishes between Einsteins theory of relativity and relations science of chaos-monde (chaos-world), contrasting what he describes as the formers arrowlike projection with the latters circular nomadism. Where Einstein sought a grand unified theory to prove the harmony of the universe, Glissant perceived a desire to flatten difference, silence the disharmonious, to measure everything in the world according to the same ideal scale. In his assertion of the right to opacity, Glissant seeks liberation for those who are not seen or measurable, who are unintelligible in the cosmic song or refuse to play along.

Im interested in this turn to physics to think about sociality and poetics. In his notes on Visibility, Calvino correlates the endless triangulations of atomic particles, lived experiences and the impalpable, powder-fine dust of words that seek to know through representation. He writes: The poets mind, and at a few decisive moments the mind of the scientist, works according to a process of association of images that is the quickest way to link and to choose between the infinite forms of the possible and the impossible. What image expresses every single relationship between every single existent in the expanding universe? What image expresses the oscillation of existence and non-existence contingent on relation, on contact that entails creation and destruction, as in particle colliders and political uprisings?

Calvino seems to respond to Glissants opposition to the desire for harmony in his memo on Multiplicity: What matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure but the centrifugal force produced by it a plurality of languages as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial. Knowledge is opposed to singularity of language, culture or perspective; knowledge moves, goes in circles, gets knotted, activates nodes and networks.

The Mahvidys named above great goddesses of knowledge and language offer an image.Their shared attributes (icons, mantras, social contexts) render them a loose, constantly reorganizing community. Attributes function like hyperlinks, so thatshellor xsacred syllableorcremation groundenables transition before you realize youre moving. Black articulates her political horizons as a movement for homes that makes the world a safer place for wandering. These horizons are far out, but theyre not confined to the future, she says; apocalypse and utopia are already with us. I wander through language, conveyed by microscopic waves and macroscopic spirals, in search of revolutions that already exist and supportive forms of relation and homes and wormholes

Main Image:Mahavidya. Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

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Rethinking Community in the Wake of the Pandemic - frieze.com

Hand Pin Vises Industry Overview Competitive Analysis, Regional and Global Analysis, Segment Analysis, Market Forecasts 2026

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Covid-19 Lockdown Impact On Global Hand Pin Vises Market Growth and Demand, Projected MarketResearchStore - Cole of Duty

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams is not, by any means, a prison or police abolitionist. But you may be forgiven for thinking so if you listen to some of the language he uses to describe his vision of what the future of public safety could look like.

Hopefully one day we can evolve to the point, as human beings, that we dont need any form of policing, Adams tells The Root over the phone on Wednesday morning. How do we address our issues? How do we use community-based systems of resolving conflicts? I think thats quite possible. I dont think thats a utopia.

But, Adams, cautions, Are we there now? No, were not.

The journey to this moment has been a long one for Adamsspanning more than 20 years as an NYPD officer and another 20 years in public service. He has always positioned himself as a reformer, particularly when it comes to policing: Adams was a vocal opponent of stop-and-frisk policies during his time in the police force, joining the force under the guidance of Rev. Herbert Daughtry, who told him and other young black men to infiltrate the nations largest police department.

These experiences mean he can talk about policing with a specificity that many other politicians cant. Hes called for more robust data collection of arrests based on race and ethnicity, to better track patterns of biased policing within the NYPD. Hes calling for allocating substantial portions of the NYPD budget to other departments, like education. He wants to completely transform the criteria used to select precinct commanders, emphasizing metrics that show engagement with the community (like how many police assisted local residents with getting city identification cards, or helped hand out Census forms).

Six months ago, these proposals would have certainly seemed radicaland compared to other prominent city and state leaders, they still are. But the conversation in the last month around policing has shifted dramatically from transformative reforms to defunding and abolition. For Adams, the question is how effectively he can sell his vision of public safety to a city with a long and tumultuous history with policing.

G/O Media may get a commission

Racist policing is, of course, a nationwide problemone that the breadth, diversity, and persistence of the countrys Black Lives Matter protests speaks to. But in a city policed by 36,000 officers, the borough of Brooklyn has been at the forefront of discussions about the NYPD and its disproportionate impact on black and brown communities. The rapidly gentrifying borough has had a strained relationship with the police force for decades; given Brooklyns size (it is, by population, the largest borough in New York) and relationship to policing, its no wonder that the citys largest protests have occurred there.

Born in Brownsville, Adams is very much a native son of the borough, and as its president, Adams has been one of Mayor Bill de Blasios most vocal critics when it comes to policing. This was true particularly during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. After several high-profile social distancing arrests of black men occurred in his borough and in other parts of the city, Adams compared the police tactics to the stop-and-frisk arrests of the early aughts (data about these arrests would soon confirm that there was a marked racial disparity in who was arrested for not social distancing adequately).

Now, as the institution of policing itself is being debated, Adamswho has repeatedly voiced interest in a mayoral runsays he is heartened by the progress the Black Lives Matter protests have brought and the newfound political will to look at community-based models of policing. He tells me he has been in conversation with the mayor about a proposal where civilians would have a greater say in picking precinct commanders. Adams is also encouraged by the charges brought not just against former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd last month after kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes, but against the three officers who didnt intervene.

These are some reforms that weve called for for so many years and they seem to be taking root, says Adams, before emphasizing theres still a lot of ground to be gained.

There is an entire puzzle that needs to be put together of what policing and public safety need to look like, he continues. We only put a few pieces on the board. A lot of big pieces remain.

For Adams, these big pieces include taking substantial portions of the police budgetwhich currently sits at $11 billionand funneling them toward initiatives that could prevent crime; in Adams words, a proactive, rather than reactive approach to public safety. Here, he cites the high instances of dyslexia and mental health issues among those imprisoned at Rikers Island. At the infamous New York City Jail, nearly half have mental health issues, while 30 to 40 percent are dyslexic, he told AM NY last year. Eighty percent of those incarcerated at the jail dont have a high school diploma.

To him, these statistics indicate that more money ought to be going to youth services, public schools and, in particular, learning disability programs, which can help support young people in their education.

But Adams position, which emphasizes tackling the root causes of crime, is not necessarily an abolitionist one. Adams very much believes in the necessity of a police force, and wants to see the city take incremental, tactical steps to fixing policing rather than an outright disbandment.

Adams points to high rates of gun violence to explain why Brooklynand New York City, broadlystill needs the NYPD, citing several recent shootings in his borough.

Theres a level of professionalism that goes with responding to a shooting. Everybody cant walk around with a gun. Everyone cant walk around dealing with those extreme investigations that come with serious crimes, he says. There are, at this point, still roles that police officers have to take...to get to the root of a serious criminal action.

But Adams also emphasizes that he has lived experience with the mutual aid, community-care model of public safetyone that doesnt rely on police. Adams tells me that before becoming a police officer, he took part in a community safety initiative on his block in Prospect Place. He describes his particular street as being high in drug crime, and subject to abusive policing.

Then, it turned out later that some of the police were involved in the selling of drugs and guns, he says. We organized the block and said, hey, we got this. You dont even have to come down this block.

He doesnt go into the specifics about how this was donefocusing instead on the countrys collective addiction to using police to solve myriad problems, ranging from loud music to mental health concerns.

I saw how neighborhoods stopped going from believing the answer was 911, says Adams. We evolved in a city, in a country where resolutions to issues were in three numbers: 9-1-1.

To get a clearer idea of Adams values and approach to community care then, its helpful to look at his time as a state senator. In 2010, Adams, who said he acted at the behest of a group of young college women, launched a Stop the Sag campaign in the city, directed at getting young black and brown men to pull their pants up. The campaign included billboards and a political ad that connected pants-sagging to a long history of racist stereotyping. The video begins with a series of racist caricatures, before landing on footage showing young, black men walking with their pants down.

It is disturbing that today we see similarly negative and degrading imagery, but this time it is self-imposed, Adams says in a voice over.

Ten years later, Adams remains proud of the campaign, which provides a revealing look into his values and his approach as a community leader. While many might be wary of the respectability politics that come with policing how black people dressparticularly with such a public-facing campaignAdams sees it differently. To him, the trend of sagging pants is indicative of a failure of community care.

During that time, you were seeing 30 and 40-year-old men walking down the street, showing their pubic hairs, showing their underwear. Thats not civilized, he says. How did we go from the men of the 50s and 60s, always impressive attire, business attire, no matter what the economics was, to a point where we walk the streets showing our undergarments.

When we do a real reflection of that period, I just think we made a great mistake. We were trying to be cool with our children, Adams continues.

But when we talk about how dress codes have historically been weaponized against black folksin the streets, in schools, in the workplaceAdams makes clear he never intended for the campaign to be punitive in nature. What he wants is community interventionsadults pulling children aside and telling them that their behavior is not acceptable.

It is fair to say that Adams defies easy categorization as a politician. He was a vocal critic of NYPD policing practices as a member of the police force, but still managed to climb the ranks of the department. He cites experience with robust community care that exists outside police patrols, but remains focused on reforming and improving the institution of policing itself.

Its important to note here that abolitionist philosophywhich is the driving force behind calls to defund police departmentsis focused on defunding as just one step toward prison abolition. But in order to successfully do this, we need to ensure that other facets of our societyour schools, our workplaces, our mental health services, housingdont replicate the same patterns of discrimination, harassment, and abuse found in policing. While city councilors and other elected officials are pushing to cut funding to the NYPD, considerations like how the citys deeply segregated school system can successfully use these new funds in a way that advances racial progress remain to be articulated by any city leader. Notably, Adams says he wants to see the citys schools using a restorative justice approach, working with students and the community when discipline or behavior issues arise, rather than kicking them out of school. But how this wide-scale transition would look, particularly in a pandemic, is a conversation the citys leaders have not arrived at yet.

This is the task that lies before Adams and other elected officials as they grapple with reforms at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement is driving the conversation of what a substantive transformation of American society ought to look like. Every politician is charged with developing and selling a vision of the community, of the city they want to lead. For decades, Adams vision has been one of reform and, ultimately, a faith that policing can and ought to work for vulnerable communities. The question that remains to be answered is no longer just a matter of how to accomplish this kind of reform, but who in his community believe the same.

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How Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams Envisions the Future of Policing in New York City - The Root

I have two different thumbs. The right one is short and squat, narrow at the base and rounds to a thick bulb at the top, like a mushroom. It is identical to my mothers. My left thumb is long and slender, extending a good half-inch past the other. This one is from my father.

I was thirty-three years old the day my dad sat in his doctors office and received news of his leukemia. Forced to face his own mortality, he cried. Although I was not present at the exchange, I saw it in my mind as clear as a photograph when Mom told me, and the photo disappointed me. Throughout the years my family endured countless heartaches: bankruptcy, incarceration, drug abuse. Dad remained indifferent to all of it. It took the thought of losing his own life to bring tears to his eyes for the first time.

In the midst of my resentment and confusion over his diagnosis, my left thumb, my dads imprint on my DNA, gnawed at me. How had his existence shaped mine? There had to be more than just a skinny thumb.

My mom was talented, attractive, personable. I grew up in the countryside of Oregon in an unincorporated area outside of Woodburn, but Mom originally came from the East Coast and wore fashionable outfits with matching shoes. She enjoyed reading books and going to the theater. Her work ethic was uncompromising. I adored everything about her. I wanted to be her.

But I was not her. My mom could not understand any of the adolescent angst I had about my appearance. She never dealt with being heavyset or acne-prone or having oily hair. These were traits I inherited from my father. As a teenager, I believed everything I hated about myself came from him.

Dad was messy. He abhorred physical activity. He wanted easy money. Playing solitaire on the computer was his only discernible hobby.

I spent my life disassociating from Dad, identifying so strongly with my mother it was as though I had convinced myself I was a virgin birth. If I could just will him out of my genetic pool, I could will away the worst qualities in myself. But my left thumb was a constant reminderhe was, inevitably, part of me.

A professional studio portrait hung in my parents living room. My mom sits with perfect posture next to me as a toddler. My older brother kneels next to us on the floor. The portrait must have required coordination, a scheduled appointment and money to arrange. My dad is conspicuously absent. Why isnt he in it? Did my mom want it to be just the three of us? No, she said, he forgot to show up.

He skipped from job to job, refusing to stay anywhere that displeased him in the slightest, even if we were desperate for the money. He did not attend my school functions or any of Moms work parties. He would not even tolerate sitting through a movie if he hadnt been the one to choose it. Unlike Mom, who was consumed by duty and responsibility, Dad could not be bothered to do anything he was not interested in.

In the wake of his diagnosis, I began to see a watered down version of his self-indulgence staring back at me in the mirror. I sometimes quit jobs mere days after starting. I did not cook or clean unless the mood struck me. I returned calls sporadically or not at all. I showed up at parties and left two minutes later, already bored. I was not beholden to dead-end jobs, dead-end relationships or dead-end towns. Moving on was simple for me. I put myself and my needs first, just like Dad.

My dads closet was always full of Army-issued grey T-shirts and dress uniforms that no longer fit him. He had some affiliation with the military throughout most of his life. When he went away to Army Reserve training camp each summer he never failed to bring a T-shirt home for me. I shoved them all into my bottom drawer and refused to wear a single one in public. As a twelve-year-old girl, I wore peace sign earrings to symbolize my political feelings about the first Iraq War. Dad was furious. He screamed things at me about Hanoi Jane, a cultural reference I was too young to understand, and demanded I take the earrings off.

In my freshman year of college I decided to major in sociology. The issues around class resonated deeply with me; I was the first one in my family to go to college. I came home bursting at the seams with Marxist social theory, waxing poetic on the slogan from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Dad was incensed.

Do you really think all people are created equal and entitled to the same things? he snarled.

It was such a strange question to come from such a poor man. Surely he could see the beauty of a socialist utopia for people like us?

I remained determined, Yes.

His voice increased an octave with each subsequent word, You dont think youre any better, any smarter, than ALL THOSE IDIOTS OUT THERE?!

Timidity seeped in. I grew confused about what we were debating. Well, no, not really.

Youre wrong! Were not all equal. Youre not equal. Youre better! You deserve more! He spat the words at me, red-faced.

When I was seven years old, my grandpa, Dads dad, told me plainly, Youre going to be the first Zumwalt to make something of yourself. And at seven years old, I knew what he meantthat our family was essentially a pack of losers, but I was supposed to be different. I was supposed to be special. That must be where Dad learned it, flattery intertwined with disdain.

In my late twenties I relocated to San Francisco and rarely went back to Oregon to visit. There was one Thanksgiving holiday I did come home for the weekend. It had been almost two years since I saw my dad last. As he came in from work, he made no move to hug me. I guess it suited me fine since I did not feel like getting up from the couch. He asked, Hows the job? and shuffled on to play solitaire in the next room.

Communication on my dads side of the family was sparse. Extended family members were like the Loch Ness Monster. I heard rumors of their existence, but I never spotted them firsthand. I had a mysterious Aunt Joyce and two half-sisters I never met. This lack of communication was not unique to my dad, it was the whole clangrandma, grandpa, cousins, aunts, uncles, all acted in the same way. None of them felt bound by any sense of familial obligation to keep in touch. It was peculiar, because there were no dramatic falling-outs. They all just stopped talking to each other at some point, as if by a silently understood family code. I guess that code lived on in me too.

It was not surprising, then, that I was not with him at the end. He had been diagnosed with leukemia for about a year when Mom took him to the hospital, unwell. I considered flying up to see him but figured I would wait until it got really serious. Dad had already been hospitalized four days when he passed away. I have no idea how I would have defined really serious.

Our last conversation had been two months prior to his hospitalization. I was on the phone with my mom, and he wanted to speak to me. Mom handed him the receiver, and I sighed under my breath.

He got on the line and said, Im so proud of you and your promotion, punks. Youre really doing great. I told him I was nervous about the new responsibilities I had at work and what would be expected of me.

It was the best conversation we had ever had.

Growing up, we constantly found new objects strewn about the yardbattered oxygen tanks, discarded boat motor, pieces of sheet metal twenty feet long, winemaking equipment. Dad had a ludicrous scheme in mind for all of it. Some of his get-rich notions included restoring dilapidated VW Bugs, planting Christmas tree farms, marketing homemade cherry moonshine, starting a security firm, and constructing beaded earrings by hand. Not one of his plans ever came to fruition or produced any income, but that never inhibited him. He spoke about each new idea with a conviction normally reserved for a lawyer arguing a case.

When Mom spotted the latest addition in the yard, she demanded, What is that? Whats that metal for?

Im going to build a two-person passenger plane, he replied in all seriousness. I can fly you to Chicago to visit your sister when its done. Think of the money well save on airfare.

As a child, I was mesmerized by movie musicals and fairy tales of hardscrabble kids from Nowhere, USA, showing up on the doorstep of New York City where they were discovered for their undeniable talents. These fantasies infiltrated my psyche to the point where, in the summer of my twenty-third year, I emerged from Penn Station into the muggy afternoon air of New York City. I hugged a paper shopping bag to my chest, my pet lizard inside. As I tried not to gawk at the skyline towering above, I thought, I live here now. I had moved three thousand miles cross-country to the most imposing city in the US with no job, no prospects of a job, no apartment, no moneyand a lizard in a bag.

When I reflect on that moment a decade later, I realize how representative it was of a lifetime of ill-advised choices. Like my father, my thinking has never been constrained by the limits of reality. All my life I watched him suspend disbelief; its in my blood.

I have come to understand that Dad has given me the ability to dream crazy ideas, and that my mom has given me the work ethic and pragmatism to accomplish them. It turns out I needed both of them, just like a right and left thumb.

Melissent Zumwalt is an artist, advocate and administrator who lives in Portland, Oregon. She learned the art of storytelling from her mother, a woman who has an uncanny ability to recount the most ridiculous and tragic moments of life with beauty and humor.

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My Left Thumb - oregonhumanities.org

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That is exactly what fans of Season 5 of A Place can expect if the NBC series returns for another incident. The fantasy comedy was made by Michael Schur, who is also famous for his work in shows such as Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Parks and Recreation, and The Office. When The Place debuted in 2016, it was highly praised by viewers and critics, but all great things must come to a conclusion.

The Good Place initially followed Eleanor (Kristen Bell) when she had been at the afterlife that looked like a beautiful utopia. While inGood location, Eleanor met Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Tahani (Jameela Jamil), and Jason (Manny Jacinto) while secretly knowing that she had not earned a spot in an afterlife celestial lifestyle. It was later demonstrated that the set of four had been in thebad place and has been tortured by Michael (Ted Danson), the community architect who supported the group.

Even though the show had garnered ratings on NBC, it seems like the show is gone for good. The manager of this show, Michael Schur, also known for his work in The Office and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, stated he had the ending for the series mapped out since season two.

Fans were quite hopeful using the future of the show, however, when NBC declared the renewal after season 3, months later Schur announced that it would be the final one.

But lets see matters if season 5 occurs later and try to be a little optimistic.

Team Cockroach had the ultimate afterlife experience that is peaceful, not in the last season while the fans had always expected for it all.

The season could ignite a new problem with a loophole or the system to describe that there is a man wiped out through the doorway out of the fantastic Place.

Honestly, we should accept the fact that all good things must conclude although there are infinite possibilities.

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The Good Place: Season 5? Release Date Reportedly Revealed? All The Latest Updates Here - Auto Freak