Category Archives: Singularity

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This week, the entire world is socially distancing to avoid the spread of the coronavirus, which means everyone is staying home. And what do you do when your plans have been canceled and you're stuck at home? You watch TV. If you need a break from CNN whipping everyone into a frenzy with its pandemic coverage, here are some recommendations for what to watch this week.

The best shows and movies to watch this week includes a chillingly resonant HBO miniseries about an alternate-history version of the United States, the long-awaited return of TV's most expensive sci-fi Western, and the apocalyptic final season of a comedy about baseball that's even more relevant than ever, now that baseball has been postponed due to pandemic. (If you want to learn more about pandemics, we have recommendations for that, too.)

If you're looking for even more hand-picked recommendations, sign up for our free, daily, spam-free Watch This Now newsletter that delivers the best TV show picks straight to your inbox, or check out the best shows and movies this month on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.

Now on HuluWhen you were in high school, did you ever know that guy who graduated from high school years ago but still hung out with high schoolers? Perhaps YOU were that older guy or gal who still hung out with high schoolers. No judgments, sometimes we want to be the Matthew McConaughey in the teenage ecosystem. Saturday Night Live's Pete Davidson gets to be that guy in Hulu's film about friendship and growing up, as his character Zeke, a drug-dealing college dropout, strikes up a palship with high schooler Mo (Griffin Gluck), much to the annoyance of Mo's parents and friends. Slightly more than just a stoner bro hangout comedy, Big Time Adolescence tackles some of the same difficult themes as Boyhood and other coming-of-age movies, but with Davidson doing bong rips in the background. -Tim Surette

Season 3 premieres Sunday at 9/8c on HBOThe robot uprising moves out of the theme park and into the real world in Season 3 of HBO's Westworld, a cautionary warning against technology, and the good news is that it's not nearly as confusing as Season 2 was. Gone are (most of) the storytelling tricks and the one-note Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) who murdered humans, and in is a more straight-forward story about the Singularity, privacy issues, and deep dives into human consciousness. Don't get me wrong, you'll still be scratching your head a-plenty, but your scalp will remain intact as answers come more quickly. Aaron Paul joins the cast as a wayward low-level criminal who gets caught up in Dolores' plans, and expect some pretty exciting cameos in the first few episodes. -Tim Surette [Read our review of the season]

Limited series premieres Monday at 9/8c on HBOThis limited series is written by The Wire's David Simon and Ed Burns and based on a book by legendary novelist Philip Roth. It presents an alternate version of American history in which celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh beat Franklin D. Roosevelt in the election of 1940 on a fascist, isolationist platform. It tells the story through the eyes of the Levins, a working class Jewish American family in Newark whose pursuit of the American Dream gets halted as America slides into fascism. The book was written during the George W. Bush presidency, but the limited series is a Crucible-esque allegory for the Trump era. The premiere will take you right back to how you felt in 2015-16, as Lindbergh's rise makes people uneasy, but they don't think he could actually be elected.

Limited series Episodes 1-3 available Wednesday on HuluHulu's Little Fires Everywhere, an eight-episodes adaptation of Celeste Ng's 2017 novel of the same name, is a soap that won't admit it's a soap. The limited series tackles cultural differences, class issues, and immigration through a story involving two mothers, played by Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington, who take opposing stances in a legal battle involving a couple trying to adopt a baby from China. Although it's a bit of a slow burn, the show takes enough liberties with the source material to offer a few surprises for readers of the book while also expanding on its exploration of race and class tensions. -Kaitlin Thomas [Read our review of the season]

Fourth and final season premieres Wednesday at 10/9c on IFC; Now streaming free on IFC.comHank Azaria's hilariously profane comedy Brockmire, about alcoholic, self-destructive baseball announcer Jim Brockmire, returns for its final season, and it's going down swinging and taking the whole world with it. This season jumps forward in time to 2030, and baseball is dying out as a sport due to climate change making it too hot to be outside for long periods of time, a problem compounded by games getting longer and longer. So Major League Baseball turns to Brockmire to save it, and hires him as commissioner. The season is bleak, apocalyptic, and cathartically funny. Watch the Season 4 premiere now.

Friday on NetflixClassism gets the incredibly potent metaphor it deserves in this acclaimed Spanish thriller. Set in a tall, dystopian prison, the titular platform is a massive dumbwaiter loaded with a feast that starts at the top and slowly makes it way down to other inmates who can only eat the leftovers of the level above them. It looks gross, funny, twisted, and eerily insightful. -Tim Surette

Stop searching, start watching! TV Guide's Watch This Now! page has even more TV recommendations.

Aaron Paul, Westworld

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The Best Shows and Movies to Watch This Week: Westworld, The Plot Against America - TV Guide

If someone was to ask most gamers to name a first-person shooter they most likely answer would either be Call of Duty, Battlefield, or even Halo. Which is unsurprising considering how popular these games are with fans of multiplayer shooters.

RELATED:5 Multiplayer Games Best Played Solo (& 5 With Friends)

One only has to look at the Call of Duty franchise topping the number one selling game every Christmas for the last few years to see its dominance on the market. Unfortunately, this has meant that many great first-person shooters that perhaps focused more on its single-player than the multiplayer have gone under the radar. Lets take a look at ten great but forgotten single-player shooters that gamers should check out if they want something different from the CoD series.

Released in 2005 for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and the PC, F.E.A.R. is an atmospheric survival horror first-person shooter developed by Monolith Productions. The game offers players a well rounded single-player campaign with an interesting story taking inspiration from Japanese horror films like Ju-On: The Grudge and Ring.

RELATED:10 Horror Games That Take The Longest To Beat

F.E.A.R. also uses its own version of the bullet-time mechanic called Reflex Time which comes in handy against the games advanced artificial intelligence. The long-haired little girl Alma may be pretty scary but the true star of the show is the unpredictable A.I. The enemy soldiers coordinate with teammates, use suppressive fire, blind fire, and really seem to make an effort in taking down the player by not repeating the same mistakes.

Released on the Nintendo Wii in 2010, Red Steel 2 is a first-person action shooter that combined themes from samurai and Wild West movies. It also implemented cell-shaded visuals which still look great giving it an anime-style appearance.

Red Steel 2 also made excellent use of the Nintendo Wiis motion controls delivering some of the best swordfight mechanics in any game and it transitions fluidly into gunplay very nicely. Unfortunately, a planned sequel was canceled by its developers by Ubisoft due to its low sales, but Red Steel 2definitely deserves another chanceand could be the perfect candidate for the PSVR.

Released in 2006 for the Xbox 360 and PC formats in 2006, Prey is a science fiction horror first-person shooter developed by the now-defunct Human Head Studios. It was created using the Doom 3 engine also known as id Tech 4 and unsurprisingly the graphics still hold up well. Level design is top-notch, and monster design is gruesome in all the right ways.

Its a completely different game to the very good 2017 reboot of the same name developed by Arkane Studios. The gameplay implements the use of portals that are there to interconnect the levels and create new methods of attack. In addition, the Spirit Force mechanics allows the protagonist Danny to enter the spirit realm to solve puzzles and surprise enemies.

First released in 2011, Bulletstorm was released on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and the PC. Despite being well received by critics, the game was a commercial failure. Bulletstorm was released again on the Xbox One and the PS4 in 2017, and the Nintendo Switch in 2019.

In spite of the remasters, Bulletstorm is still not a game that is considered to be a mainstream hit. For lack of a better term, Bulletstorm is an absolute blast to play and has a great sense of humor. The Skillshot mechanic is what will keep players hooked from beginning to the end, however, letting players pull off some amazing feats with the games unique weapons.

Developed by Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay creators Starbreeze, The Darkness is another fantastic first-person shooter based on thecomic book series if the same name. The gunplay is solid but the games most unique mechanic is the Darkness powers such as Creeping Dark allowing stealth attacks and Dark for more violent tentacle attacks that can impale enemies in lots of creative ways.

In addition to the excellent gameplay, The Darkness world is a joy to explore with lots of characters and items to interact to help bring the game to life, and the storyhas lots of twists rig.

Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter was released on the Xbox, PC and PlayStation 2 in 2003. It is a futuristic science fiction game with inspirations from classic Wild West movies. Mace Griffin allows players to switch between space ship fights and first-person viewpoints and was way ahead of its time in terms of loading speeds and transitional gameplay.

The game features solid voice work from Henry Rollins as the titular character, and the interesting and involved sci-fi story builds and develops at a great pace in relation to the mission design.

Released in 2012, Syndicate was a first-person shooter reboot of the cyberpunk real-time strategy series. It was developed by Starbreeze Studios. Just like The Darkness, theres a lot more to this game than simply running and gunning. However, it must be said that running down a corridor John Woo-style taking out enemies with ease is very satisfying.

Syndicate gives its players an incredible amount of tools to use in battle from the DART chip that can tag enemies through walls, hacking techniques and lots of weapons that feel great to use. Despite being on the PS3 and Xbox 360, Syndicate still holds up well visually with great art design and excellent animations.

The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay is another great action title from Starbreeze Studios and arguably their best effort to date. First released in 2004 on the original Xbox it was best looking and performing game on the machine. However, the remastered edition included with Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is the best version giving gamers two great games in one.

RELATED:The 10 Best Stealth Games Ever Made (According To Metacritic)

The lighting and shadows look realistic and really add to the games stealth mechanics which are among some of the best in the genre. Furthermore, in terms of hand-to-hand combat in the first person, there are very few games that can match the fluidity of the Riddick games.

Released in 2010 on the PS3 and Xbox 360, Singularity is a first-person science fiction horror shooter developed by Raven Software. Even though Raven is perhaps now better known for developing Call of Duty games Singularity is a narratively driven FPS that has more in common with the Bioshock series.

RELATED:Call of Duty: 5 Reasons Why Its WW2 Era Was The Best (& 5 Why It's The Modern Warfare Era)

In addition to its very good storyline, Singularity implements an innovative time manipulation mechanic that can be used as a weapon and solve several puzzles as the game progresses. Theres an alternate timeline storyline thats inspired by classic science fiction TV shows and was far more imaginative than it was given credit for at the time of its release.

Released as a launch title for the Xbox 360 in 2005, Condemned: Criminal Origins is a survival horror FPS developed by Monolith Productions the same team behind the F.E.A.R. series. Unlike F.E.A.R. however, theres a stronger emphasis on horror and successfully making the player jump out of their skins - gamers will never look at a store mannequin in the same way again.

The shooting mechanics areweighty and satisfyingbut its brutal melee combat that stands out among the best in the genre. Despite its age, Condemned is still one of the more visually striking games on the system and quite possibly one of the most underrated horror games of the last two generations.

NEXT:10 Great RPGs That Flew Under The Radar (And Their Metacritic Scores)

Next10 Ridiculously Long PC Games (& How Long They Take To Beat)

Writer for GameRant, The Gamer, The Sportser, and ScreenRant. Gaming, wrestling and film fan for over 35 years. He's a Schwarzenegger and Stallone fanatic that considers himself something of an expert in all things RPGs and cheesy action films from the 80s and 90s.

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10 Forgotten First Person Shooters You Need To Play | Game Rant - GameRant

Fresh from roles in Deadpool, If Beale Street Can Talk and Kill Your Friends, London actor Ed Skrein stars on one of four covers for GQ Style SS20. Shot by Ben Weller and styled by GQ Style Editor Luke Day, Skrein is every inch the leading man in looks by Vivienne Westwood, Levis, Dsquared2 and Carolina Herrera.

In an in-depth interview in East London with journalist Caspar Salmon, Skrein is refreshingly candid and no-nonsense on his rise to become to worldwide acclaim, his collaboration with Carolina Herrera as the face of the brands Bad Boy fragrance and his pivot to indie gems this year, acting alongside John Boyega and Bill Skarsgrd in the forthcoming Naked Singularity.

Read on for an exclusive preview of Ed Skreins shoot and interview

On being his authentic self as an actor:

Im a six-foot white man with brown hair and blue eyes... if you never heard me speak, I could be part of RADA and have a double-barrelled surname and all of that which is fine, but its not my route. I feel like as actors, what we can offer is only us, our true selves, our authentic selves, and Im proud of my authentic self, I dont want to hide it and furthermore, Ive been having conversations in recent times with fellow actors from similar demographics and we say that we now have a responsibility to be more honest about us to tell our stories, tell our truths and not feel like we have to fit into this Hollywood, safe, diplomatic mould. We dont have to put on a posh accent and toe the line. We should be honest, and we have a responsibility to our community. And Im repping...

On the statement he released announcing he was stepping down from his Hellboy role:

He wrote the statement from the heart, and I only showed it to three people my brother and father and Riz Ahmed. He carries on: I want to be an ally for people, for my friends that I care about.

I didnt put that statement out for everyone around the world, it was for my friends, my people, he says, sincere as ever, before adding, randomly, I was sitting in The Dumpling House when I sent that tweet.

GQ Styles Spring/Summer 2020 issue is out on 12 March via newsstands and the GQ Style app.

Ezra Miller: Were not fighting for equality. We are fighting for regard of our supremacy

Orville Peck: People think that masks are there to conceal something...

Egyptian-Italian musician Mahmood stars in the AW19 issue of GQ Style

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Ed Skrein: As actors, we dont have to put on a posh accent and toe the line - British GQ

Tesla is having a banner year, and were not even two months in. After reaching what was an all-time high in December at a value of $393.15 per share, last Wednesday the companys stock closed at more than double that: $917.42 per share.

While its car sales are strong, theyre not the source of Teslas skyrocketing value; people are investing in the company because they see it as the future of electric vehicles. After clearing a legal hurdle last week, Tesla is set for more growth, and in a brand-new market: Europe. Germany, to be specific.

CEO Elon Musk announced plans last November to build a fourth Gigafactory outside Berlin (the first three are in Nevada, New York, and Shanghai). But construction involves cutting down a pine forest the size of 100 soccer fields (not to mention removing buried World War II ammunition), and work was halted after local environmental groups protested. On top of having to cut down thousands of trees, the factory will border a nature reserve, and theres been much concern raised about how the areas water supply and wildlife will be impacted.

A Berlin-Brandenburg court stopped Teslas forest-clearing with an injunction earlier this month, but last Thursday overturned the injunction and granted the company permission to resume activity, finding that the legal requirements for early construction had been met.

The factory will be located in Gruenheide, a small town about 33 kilometers (20 miles) south-east of Berlin. Tesla intends to have the plant completed and fully functional by mid-2021, and will eventually produce up to 500,000 cars a year there. Though its moving forward with land-clearing and other construction preparations, the company technically doesnt have final project approval from German authorities. Tesla has projected that the factory will employ about 12,000 people.

Getting the state governments approval is just one of a few hurdles left to clear, and in fact may be more straightforward than the other tasks awaiting Tesla as it builds this factory.

German environmental laws dictate that construction must not interfere with the breeding period for wildlife, which starts in March; this essentially means that for the project to move forward on its planned timetable, tree-cutting would need to be completed in the next couple weeks.

Speaking of protecting wildlife, Tesla will also have to provide bats living in the forest with alternative spots to hibernate, put up fences to prevent reptiles from entering the area, relocate ant nests without destroying them, and find a way to humanely expel any wolves living in the area.

In a tweet from January 24, Musk emphasized that the factory will absolutely be designed with sustainability and the environment in mind. He added that Tesla will plant three trees for every tree it cuts down in the area.

Home to iconic brands like BMW, Mercedes, Audi, and Volkswagen, German car manufacturing has been disrupted by companies that got an earlier and stronger start in electric vehicle technologyspecifically, Tesla. The companys Model 3 outsold all German competitors in both the US and European markets last year, and Germanys auto industry is now at a 22-year low.

The arrival of Tesla will, in the best-case scenario for German automakers, spur innovation through competition and encourage more private-sector investment. The Germans may not be leaders in electrification, but they certainly have a reputation for high-quality engineering. They would do well to follow in Teslas footsteps and start investing in energy storage technology and research; perhaps this could be the path to a rejuvenated German auto industry and economy.

But first, lets make sure those bats, wolves, lizards, birds, and ants are taken care of.

Image Credit: Artist rendering, Gigafactory. Image courtesy of Tesla

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Tesla Is Building Its First European Factory But It Has to Clear a Forest First - Singularity Hub

Artist: Rob Brown

Project: Dont Bow Down on that Dirty Ground: The Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans

Description:With an anthropologists dedication to understanding a distinct subculture, Rob Brown has spent two decades working among the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians, whose ceremonial dress, mysterious vernacular idioms, a song canon of complex rhythm and rhyme, [and] unique style of dance and movement, according to Brown, constitute a folk group that has maintained its cultural richness and singularity for more than a century.

Ostrich plumes and intricate beadwork adorn the participants handmade suits as they take to the streets in a parade unlike any other in the city. Documenting the unique traditions of the Uptown neighborhoods, Brown captures the lively atmosphere of masking on Mardi Gras.

Eyes on the Southis curated byJeff Rich. The weekly series features selections of current work from Southern artists, or artists whose photography concerns the South. To submit your work to the series, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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Rhythm and Rhyme - Oxford American

Penicillin, one of the greatest discoveries in the history of medicine, was a product of chance.

After returning from summer vacation in September 1928, bacteriologist Alexander Fleming found a colony of bacteria hed left in his London lab had sprouted a fungus. Curiously, wherever the bacteria contacted the fungus, their cell walls broke down and they died. Fleming guessed the fungus was secreting something lethal to the bacteriaand the rest is history.

Flemings discovery of penicillin and its later isolation, synthesis, and scaling in the 1940s released a flood of antibiotic discoveries in the next few decades. Bacteria and fungi had been waging an ancient war against each other, and the weapons theyd evolved over eons turned out to be humanitys best defense against bacterial infection and disease.

In recent decades, however, the flood of new antibiotics has slowed to a trickle.

Their development is uneconomical for drug companies, and the low-hanging fruit has long been picked. Were now facing the emergence of strains of super bacteria resistant to one or more antibiotics and an aging arsenal to fight them with. Gone unchallenged, an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide due to drug resistance could rise to as many as 10 million in 2050.

Increasingly, scientists warn the tide is turning, and we need a new strategy to keep pace with the remarkably quick and boundlessly creative tactics of bacterial evolution.

But where the golden age of antibiotics was sparked by serendipity, human intelligence, and natural molecular weapons, its sequel may lean on the uncanny eye of artificial intelligence to screen millions of compoundsand even design new onesin search of the next penicillin.

In a paper published this week in the journal, Cell, MIT researchers took a step in this direction. The team says their machine learning algorithm discovered a powerful new antibiotic.

Named for the AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the antibiotic, halicin, successfully wiped out dozens of bacterial strains, including some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria on the World Health Organizations most wanted list. In a monthlong experiment, E. coli bacteria also failed to develop resistance to halicin, in stark contrast to existing antibiotic ciprofloxacin.

In terms of antibiotic discovery, this is absolutely a first, Regina Barzilay, a senior author on the study and computer science professor at MIT, told The Guardian.

The algorithm that discovered halicin was trained on the molecular features of 2,500 compounds. Nearly half were FDA-approved drugs, and another 800 naturally occurring. The researchers specifically tuned the algorithm to look for molecules with antibiotic properties but whose structures would differ from existing antibiotics (as halicins does). Using another machine learning program, they screened the results for those likely to be safe for humans.

Early study suggests halicin attacks the bacterias cell membranes, disrupting their ability to produce energy. Protecting the cell membrane from halicin might take more than one or two genetic mutations, which could account for its impressive ability to prevent resistance.

I think this is one of the more powerful antibiotics that has been discovered to date, James Collins, an MIT professor of bioengineering and senior author told The Guardian. It has remarkable activity against a broad range of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

Beyond tests in petri-dish bacterial colonies, the team also tested halicin in mice. The antibiotic cleared up infections of a strain of bacteria resistant to all known antibiotics in a day. The team plans further study in partnership with a pharmaceutical company or nonprofit, and they hope to eventually prove it safe and effective for use in humans.

This last bit remains the trickiest step, given the cost of getting a new drug approved. But Collins hopes algorithms like theirs will help. We could dramatically reduce the cost required to get through clinical trials, he told the Financial Times.

The bigger story may be what happens next.

How many novel antibiotics await discovery, and how far can AI screening take us? The initial 6,000 compounds scanned by Barzilay and Collinss team is a drop in the bucket.

Theyve already begun digging deeper by setting the algorithm loose on 100 million molecules from an online library of 1.5 billion compounds called the ZINC15 database. This first search took three days and turned up 23 more candidates that, like halicin, differ structurally from existing antibiotics and may be safe for humans. Two of thesewhich the team will study furtherappear to be especially powerful.

Even more ambitiously, Barzilay hopes the approach can find or even design novel antibiotics that kill bad bacteria with alacrity while sparing the good guys. In this way, a round of antibiotics would cure whatever ails you without taking out your whole gut microbiome in the process.

All this is part of a larger movement to use machine learning algorithms in the long, expensive process of drug discovery. Other players in the area are also training AI on the vast possibility space of drug-like compounds. Last fall, one of the leaders in the area, Insilico, was challenged by a partner to see just how fast their method could do the job. The company turned out a new a proof-of-concept drug candidate in only 46 days.

The field is still developing, however, and it has yet to be seen exactly how valuable these approaches will be in practice. Barzilay is optimistic though.

There is still a question of whether machine-learning tools are really doing something intelligent in healthcare, and how we can develop them to be workhorses in the pharmaceuticals industry, she said. This shows how far you can adapt this tool.

Image Credit: Halicin (top row) prevented the development of antibiotic resistance in E. coli, while ciprofloxacin (bottom row) did not. Collins Lab at MIT

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AI Just Discovered a New Antibiotic to Kill the World's Nastiest Bacteria - Singularity Hub

Its Bruce Springsteen who says it best: It was like youd never heard them before and like theyd always been there forever and ever.

Springsteen is talking about the Band, a dazzling group that for a brief period in the late 1960s used a combination of rock, country and blues to jump start the Americana sound and set the popular music world on its ear. Then, seemingly just as suddenly, they were gone.

The story of the rise and disintegration of the Band turns out to be as compelling as its spectacular music, and its good to have the tale told and the groups formidable sounds heard one more time, in the documentary Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, directed by Daniel Roher.

As the title indicates, this is the groups story from the point of view of Robertson, its most prolific songwriter and the man whose post-Band career has been the most noteworthy, and while that situation is inevitable, its not quite ideal.

Inevitable because not only is Robertson the band member most comfortable with what Joni Mitchell called the star maker machinery behind the popular song, but three of his band mates (Rick Danko, Levon Helm and Richard Manuel) have died, and the fourth, Garth Hudson, is very much not comfortable in the public eye.

But though he is in effect the last man standing, Robertson and his comrades did not see eye to eye toward the end, and though Brothers acknowledges that situation, giving him pride of place invariably unbalances the film.

Add to that the not surprising deference the 25-year-old director shows to a 76-year-old superstar with a willingness to self-mythologize, and regretting that the other Band members could not be seen and heard more than they are in archival interview clips is unavoidable.`

But it is a measure of the singularity of the Bands story, and the way their music remains such a tonic to experience, that Brothers still demands to be seen.

Just watching and listening to the group tearing through their classic Up on Cripple Creek near the documentarys opening, alive with the pleasure of making great music with one another, is enough to joyously lift you out of your seat.

Because Once Were Brothers also functions as a Robertson biography, we begin with tales of his Toronto background as the child of a mother born on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario and a Jewish gambler who died before he was born.

Rock music captivated Robertson, and when he was 15 his band opened in Toronto for the wild and crazy rockabilly group Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks.

At age 16, he took a train by himself to Fayetteville, Ark., and joined the group, becoming fast friends with the groups drummer and fellow teen, Levon Helm.

Under their influence, Hawkins hired three other Canadian youths Danko, Hudson and Manuel and the group was soon playing in bars they were too young to patronize.

More than that, as Hawkins, at age 85 one of the films most engaging interviews, avows, playing together the five Hawks shot past me musically like a bolt of lightning.

The group took a leap forward in visibility when it came to the attention of Bob Dylan and became the band that backed him and faced hostile crowds on the infamous Going Electric tours, leading Dylan, interviewed briefly here, to call them gallant knights standing behind me.

When Dylan ended up moving to Woodstock, the group followed and even persuaded Helm, whod left during the Dylan tour, to join them in a brightly painted house that became iconic when the group, having decided to call itself the Band, released Music From Big Pink in 1968.

What happened next, involving great musical success, drinking, serious car crashes and the inevitable hard drug use, is so complex and so frenetic you almost wish Brothers had the length of a limited series to deal with it all.

At a certain point Robertson, alone among the group to have married and started a family (former wife Dominique is spoken to) began to get bigger ideas. He went out to Los Angeles, took meetings with David Geffen, moved to Malibu (as did Dylan and other Band members) and became friendly with Martin Scorsese.

The Last Waltz, the concert and Scorsese film commemorating the official end of the Band in its original incarnation, was apparently Robertsons idea, and the rest of the gang did not necessarily love it.

Soon to come were disputes, referred to briefly in the film, over who should be getting songwriting credit and the royalties that went with it, and its sad to watch the wheels falling off this once glorious enterprise. As Robertson himself puts it, it was such a beautiful thing, and it went up in flames.

'Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band'

Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes

Playing: Starts Feb. 21, Arclight Hollywood; The Landmark, West Los Angeles

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Review: 'Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band' - Los Angeles Times

Although there are many things I miss about being young (all of them too obvious to detail here), one thing I dont is the hyperawareness of age. When you are young and ambitious, your 20s can feel like a constant and unrelenting race, one in which you are vividly aware of not only your own position, but that of your peers as well. How many times did I moan about someone who seemed to be so much more accomplished than I? How much of my consciousness was dedicated to cataloging how many years (or months, even) younger or older a perceived rival was than I? I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be an editor in chief, and yet everyone always seemed so much further ahead of me; everyone elses pace looked so much brisker, their triumph so much more assured.

Anyone who is reading this and in a similar position should take heart, however: At some point, those feelings will fade. You will realize that early professional success ensures nothing. You will also realize that the most important thing is not that you were first to accomplish something, but that you did so on your own terms, with as few compromises as possible. By this time, youll probably be nearing or in middle age, but the consolation prize for being in your 40s is the relief youll feel that, despite everything, you are free from that particular tyranny.

The ticking clock is, Id venture, louder still for those of us living (or attempting to live) a creative life. We celebrate savants, prodigies, early promise. Your first gallery show, your first stage role, your first published book, your first runway collection these are laudable moments; they happen for so few, and they should be celebrated. But its after the show closes or the curtain falls that the second test begins the one in which you have to prove to yourself not just that you can produce art, but that you can be an artist. This test will consume the rest of your life, and although there will be moments of joy, the pursuit will often be lonely and mapless. Your age will not matter in this test; what will instead is your resilience, your durability and the singularity of your vision.

There are probably few fashion designers who understand this as vividly as Marc Jacobs. Jacobs was 29 and the creative director of Perry Ellis when he presented his infamous grunge collection, which made him an instant sensation. Now 56, he has been famous and an artistic director for almost half of his life. Over the course of his long career, he has been responsible for giving shape and relevance to American luxury; for transforming the business of fashion; for changing our perception of what an artistic director looks like and what a runway show can be. Of course, there have been disappointments as well: both professional and personal. And yet what I admire most about him is his constant vulnerability, the generosity of his imagination, his lack of cynicism, the wonder hes able to make his audience feel. To see one of Jacobss shows is to witness the work of someone who has never become weary of creating, who knows as all artists do that every beginning is another chance to make the world anew. He is a reminder to all of us seeking to live a creative life that trying something different is not only not a bad thing, it is an imperative.

So dont waste your time tracking who got there first, young artists. There is no stopwatch. What there is, finally, is you and a blank canvas, whether that canvas is a literal one, or whether it takes the form of a notebook or computer screen or rehearsal space or dress form. All you have to do is start. All you have to do is never stop.

Read more from Ts Feb. 23 Womens Fashion issue.

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T's Spring Women's Fashion Issue: The Test - The New York Times

Dear Editor,

The Through the Glass Darkly (GA, Feb 20th ) column finishes with the claim There is absolutely no way to drastically reduce carbon emissions in only 10 years.... without the appalling prospect of a massive global recession, which will impact the greatest on the poorest on the planet.

Given the fuzzy logic of a column dealing with such generalisations as Judeo-Christian and traditional religion it is hardly surprising that it concludes by invoking absolutes, notwithstanding its side excursions into references to science as though that word also embraced some absolute singularity despite its covering multitudinous theoretical speculations on approximations to possibilities as our sense organs coupled to our cranial processors, magnified by our ramifying technologies, attempt to unravel the mysteries of human existence without resort to assumptions unbased on evidence.

It seems to me there may actually be ways ..to drastically reduce carbon emissions in only 10 years.., and even to do so .. without the appalling prospect of a massive global recession, which will impact the greatest on the poorest on the planet.., and that the failure to attempt the effort required will be the result of continuing to abdicate our responsibilities to future generations, and the continuing of our feckless m finist thinking fed by the indoctrinated wisdom of greed is good, Im all right, Jack, there is no such thing as society ubiquitous neoliberal theologising of finance capital ideology under the deified Invisible Hand of the Market uber a$; a.k.a. Oscar Wildes definition of rampant cynicism as being the belief system of someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, i.e. the elevation of the great god Moolah to supreme being in our pantheon of assessments of worth.

In some quarters solutions have been proposed under the shorthand label of a Green New Deal, referring as it does to FDRs attempts to wrestle with the enormity of finance capitals ca$ino-capitai$t implosion which created the Great Depression after the squanderU$t of the Roaring Twenties. Meanwhile that same capitalism was indulging itself in the global arms race that fed European fascism and culminated in the mushroom stew of Hiroshima and their collective lunacy of ye olde napalm-raining Cold War, a demonically lucrative brainwave the usual suspects seem determined to resume.

The reason it is unlikely is due to the extent of the vested interests of greed, megalomanic militarist Mars-worship (often masquerading as Judeo-Christian crusades for democracy and human rights ), the power of group-think conformity lest boat-rocking sink our sacred careers, the slow pace of our emergence from religious wishful thinking of some celestial father-figure wedded to our patriarchic societies galloping to our rescue while we light candles in the dark. Examples of this resistance to the necessitated changes range from the orchestrated smears against Corbyn to our east, Sanders to our west, and even the terror of our local complacent evolutionary dinosaurs and tories at the moderate democratic proposals of SF, which are reminiscent of apartheid Unionisms militarising of the 1960s civil rights campaigns for a semblance of civic equality in the stagnant north east, and the failures of imagination in post-Lemass Dublin.

As has been predicted for decades, these global crises are indeed coming to a locality near us all, and at an accelerating pace.

Yours,

Damien Flinter,

The Regressive Hypocrite Party,

Headford,

Co Galway

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Disagreeing with the fuzzy logic - Galway Advertiser

Black History Month has been thematic since its inception in 1976, not to distill focus on the African American experience but to add to a collection of historical awareness and food for thought. This years theme, African Americans and the Vote, is deceptive in its title, and, as Penn researchers elaborate, on the face may be an inaccurate representation of singularity. In fact, the African American vote spans a history that extends beyond the adoption of Black suffrage in America, has been politically and socially fraught, and is representative of as diverse a voting body as the country at large. In short, there is not one Black vote, and there is not one history of the Black vote. The nuance is at the heart of Black History Months theme, and implores all Americans to understand the history and the current climate, to educate themselves on what it means to be Black in the American polity.

Penn Today reached out to current and former Penn faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences to expound on the idea of the African Americans and the vote.Adolph Reed, Kathleen Brown, andMary Francis Berry each spoke on the historical state of voting for African Americans, and the current election year. Black History Months origin goes back to February 1926 when Carter G. Woodson implement Negro History Week. Woodson, a writer and historian who founded of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, spent his career working to popularize knowledge about the history of Black people.It was Woodsons goal to see African American history celebrated as a one-week affair, and urged schools to use Negro History Week to demonstrate what students learned all year. By the late 1960s, college campuses across the country had begun to replace Negro History Week with Black History Month, and designated an annual theme.

2020 marks the 100-year anniversary of womens suffrage. It also marks 150 years since the Fifteenth Amendment, which won the right for Black men to vote in America. For both Black men and women, the constitutional right to vote has not hewed historically with the ease and accessibility of voting. Nor, as Reed and Brown point out, the privilege of voting for a candidate who most resembles them in terms of identity and cosmology. The womens suffrage movementa fractious campaign that spanned over eighty yearswas rife with tension between former abolitionists, eager to see newly freed Black people enfranchised, and white women who put their own access to vote ahead of a true womens suffrage.

Disenfranchisement for all Black voters has been a common roadblock to equality at the polls both before and after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. For the countrys current two-party system, more Black candidates at the local and state levels may help usher new generations of voters to the polls, and even more electoral visibility for alternative political parties. But, as Brown, Reed, and Berry all stress, to reduce Black voters to an indivisible unit is to deny African American voters singular identities, and distills the implied cohesion of the Black vote to a simple matter of opposition to racial inequality, while bypassing the broad range of political issues white voters can prioritize: economic uncertainty, religious freedom, environmentalism, etc. Black politics are more complex than simply a shared opposition to racial discrimination. The theme of this years Black History Month is to highlight that.

Adolph Reed is professor emeritus of political science in the School of Arts & Sciences. He has written on voting and the American electorate for many election cycles, including an article titled Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger: Its Important

The idea of a Black vote is itself historically specific, and is bound up in a circular argument. Its assumed that the definitive concern is race. To assume that all Black Americans are concerned about racial justice and racial equality slides into a taxonomy issue,that is, reduces Black Americans concerns to issues that supposedly have to do with racial classification,and contends that only questionsbearing directly or explicitly onracematterto African Americans. What marks the boundaries of Black politics? Racial justice and equality are important to all African Americans, but it doesnt end there.

What we think of as the Black vote isaproduct ofa racially defined interest-group politicsthat emerged as the consolidation of the victorious social movement of the 1960s. In that interest group peoplesinterests can be reduced to what elites have defined as Blackpeoplesconcerns. But Black peopleare concerned about a lot of things, not just racewomens issues, sexual identity, union politics, etc. But then there are arguments about political campaigns as not being Black specific.

There aremoreBlack people in the U.S.than the entire population ofCanada. DoCanadian votershave Canadian essentialism? In the U.S., income inequality has been increasingacross the boardsince the 1960s and 70s;this is a function of capitalist class dynamics, not simply race, and thats true even of the worsening economic conditions experienced by Black people. If whats understood to be a Black agenda is erasing disparities, youdontaddress the general system of inequality.In thedisparitiesframework,Black people disappear in every dimension of life except racial status. There is no room foreven imagining their interests as postal workers, homeowners, railroad maintenance workers, parents, students, stamp collectors, etc.

In a polity defined by the democratic selection of leadership, things go fine when the lower tier accepts the agenda of the people at the top.At the momentwhen the lower tier acts up, the top tries to reduce access. After the defeat of the populist insurgency in the 1890s, and since Reagan empowered the right wing, the majority went after disenfranchisement. The main reason to disenfranchise voters is to actively take Blackpeople out of the political equation for two reasons: One, because of racism, and two, because Black people voted the wrong way.

If Black voters had voted with theright-wing, disenfranchisement would not have been so actively sought. Now, in the 21st century, there is no questionthe Republican Party has been openly and stealthily disenfranchising voters. The objective is to disenfranchise Black people,buteven deeper, to disenfranchise people who arent voting Republican. Reducing the Black vote to an indivisible blochelps with this.

However, I think its narrow and shortsighted not to vote. Most of the significant votes Ive cast have been because the other candidate is worse. The time to change who and what we vote for is not at the poll but between the elections.

Kathleen Brown has been teaching early American history and the history of gender and race for 25 years. She is the David Boies Professor of History in the School of Arts & Sciences and the author of two books and numerous articles. Her current project is Undoing Slavery: Abolitionist Body Politics and the Argument over Humanity. (forthcoming, Penn Press)

Black voting rights have a long history of being denied, contested, defrauded, and obstructed. In the early years of Reconstruction, formerly enslaved men in the South voted for Black Republicans, the party of Lincoln. During this era, Black men became state and national officeholders in numbers that have yet to be surpassed. Entire communities of women as well as men turned out on Election Day, testifying to the importance of the vote. Abandonment by the federal government in 1877 left Black voters vulnerable to terrorist tactics, and Jim Crow laws subsequently defrauded Black southerners of the vote.

Many Black women supported the womens suffrage movement as it gathered momentum in the early twentieth century, despite the obvious racism of the movements leadership. Ida B. Wells, Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, and locally, Gertrude Bustill Mossell [a relative of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander] all saw possibilities for African American empowerment in womens suffrage. White suffragists from the North pandered to white supremacists in the South, which included some of the movements most important political allies. It is no exaggeration to say that the womens suffrage amendment achieved ratification in 1920 because white allies of the movement considered white womens vote to be a valuable new tool to protect white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. Upon the amendments ratification in 1920, some African American women, including in states like Virginia and Georgia, managed to circumvent voting restrictions to cast their ballots.

The historic shift in African American national political party affiliation came in the 1930s during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, a feminist social reformer who, unlike her husband, was connected politically and personally to many Black educators and activists, advocated for programs and policies that ultimately helped to sway Black voters to support the Democratic Party.Historians now judge FDR harshly for the half-measures of his policy and his continued pandering to racist southern Democrats. But the historic shift in party affiliation had taken place.

The quandary for Black voters today is to be a minority population in a political system with only two parties in which the winner takes all. In such a system, the diverse interests of African American voters can rarely be represented. A small proportion of African American voters have become Republicans because they are tired of being taken for granted by the Democratic Party.

Mary Frances Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and a professor of history. She is the author of twelve books, including Five Dollars and a Pork Chop Sandwich: Vote Buying and the Corruption of Democracy, which exposes the ways Black voters have experienced voter discrimination in the U.S., including felon disfranchisement, voter identification laws, and hard-to-access polling locations with limited hours.

Weak turnout for elections is commonplace in most U.S. elections. So, making promises, though never kept, is one way to try to inspire turnout. Another way is handing out goodies on Election Day, like fried chicken boxes, or influencing the absentee ballots of nursing home residents and other probable targets. Both parties in elections at every level utilize these approaches.

For Black voters who, when they vote, usually vote for Democrats, arguing that Republicans are engaged in voter suppression is the main approach to increasing their turnout. It doesnt require serious support for easing the wealth gap, such as increasing slave-descended African American enrollments in elite higher education institutions, or actually improving K-12 education by giving poor children what well-off children receive in school (concentrated attention), or reducing mass incarcerationor even reparations. As one young man told me recently on the importance of nonviolent protest along with voting, Ive been voting and voting, and the people I vote for dont do what they say they will do, and most of the time they dont even try.

Clinton lost in 2016 in part because young people especially are wary about the efficacy of voting. Democrats ought to remember this during this 2020 election cycle.

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African Americans have been blocked from voting, but the Black vote is not a 'bloc' - Penn: Office of University Communications