Category Archives: Zeitgeist Movement

(from left) Daisy Edgar-Jones and director Olivia Newman on the set of Where The Crawdads Sing.Photo: Sony Pictures

Where The Crawdads Sing, an adaptation of Delia Owens bestseller, is the kind of must-see movie that seemed to arrive every few months during the mid-1990s, and now director Olivia Newman is hoping her film can help bring that type of project back into vogue.

Newmans film, which beautifully merges the urgency of a soapy page turner and the unhurried familiarity of myth, stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kya, a self-taught outsider growing up in 1960s North Carolina. Kya spends her life surrounded by suspicious townspeople, and she gets accused of murder when a young man dies under mysterious circumstances. Newman, best known for her 2018 debut First Match, delivers an affecting character study, a complicated love triangle, and a juicy murder mystery that simultaneously tugs at viewers heartstrings and keeps them on the edge of their seats.

The director recently spoke to The A.V. Club about Where The Crawdads Sing, starting with the challenge of bringing this successful novel to life, the disparate threads of the books romance and mystery, the central characters search for self-actualization, and the films sad parallels with topics in the zeitgeist today.

The A.V. Club: Did the fact that this was a bestseller make it a no-brainer to direct? Or was there simply something about the book that resonated with you?

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Olivia Newman: First and foremost, it was the book that drew me to the project. I could not put the book down when I read it. I was really drawn to the character of Kya, who embodied this incredible strength and resilience, but is also a character Id never seen before. Her ability to survive under incredibly harsh circumstances and the way that she finds her own life and discovers her own sense of self-worth despite suffering from the worst rejection imaginable, that story really resonated with me. And then the landscape of the marshlands of North Carolina, and the forest and the swamps and those kind of magical landscapes really drew me visually to the project.

Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) in Olivia Newmans Where The Crawdads Sing.Photo: Sony Pictures

AVC: What was the biggest challenge in trying to condense a rich character study that also has the imprint of a Gothic murder mystery?

ON: I like to say that blending all of these genres was the delicious challenge of this movie. It is a murder mystery. It is a love story. It is a survivalist tale. For me as a director, being able to sink my teeth into all of those genres was a huge challenge, but also one that I welcomed with great excitement. And it starts with figuring out how to adapt such an amazing book into a movie thats also its own standalone medium that really pays homage and captures the spirit of the book but can weave the story together in a way that keeps audiences really engaged. So at the script stage, we decided to root us as much as possible with Kya, so leaving the courtroom throughout the film, anytime we were in the present in the murder mystery, we were with Kya. And any time we were in the past, we were also following Kyas survivaland romances. And so that was a way to weave those three genres, but also stay really connected to our main character and see the story unfold as much as possible through her eyes. I think having access to an experience like Kyas was, to me, the most exciting thing to offer the viewer.

AVC: Listening to you describe it reminds me of how excited I felt by the elasticity of the story, which is this murder mystery that draws people in to these many different ideasher survival, her romance, her education. How much of that balance was fully figured out in the script?

ON: Well, as a reader of the book, the ending was everything, the ending is the story. That captures the essence of what [author Delia Owens] is trying to say. So there was no version of this movie without that ending, because then its not telling Delias story. And so that was never a questionwe were always going to be absolutely faithful and honor the book, and the message of the ending. There was a lot of conversation throughout the writing process about the best way to tie it all up, and weave all those different storylines. Theres romances that need to be tied up. Theres a murder mystery that needs to be tied up. Theres also the trauma of Kyas childhood, of her mother leaving and her understanding why, and how that reflects back on her own sense of self and self-worth. To me, every time I think about that scene of her mother leaving makes me want to cry, because its the worst thing imaginable. And so that was also a really important thread for me to try to give Kya an understanding and some ability to reflect back and understand the cycle of domestic violence. So there was a lot of conversation throughout the writing process about the best way to weave all of these things. And I think we tried a lot of different things before we arrived something that was succinct enough to fit a two-hour movie, but still gave enough time to each of those different threads in order for them all to kind of have their own space and their own importance.

AVC: One of the other things the film does so well is draw these characterizations without overstating in the dialog, especially for her two suitors. How much did you rely upon Harris or Taylor or Daisy to draw out the tension of the attraction and the possible danger?

ON: I think the priority with all of the characters was that we really believe them as fully complicated human beings, for all of their strengths and all of their flaws. I dont really believe in good guys versus bad guys. In real life, its always a question of Who are you? rather than What happened to you? How did you become the way you are? And so for all of the characters, we had lengthy conversations with each of the actors about their characters histories, their family relationships, their sense of who they are, and what they were going through at each moment of the story. They all make mistakes. None of them are perfect. They all have their own soul searching to do. But what I loved about all of the actors is just how committed they were to really believing in their characters and finding some way to connect to and relate to them. And the actors are all so different from the characters they portray.

(from left) Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith) and Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) in Olivia Newmans Where The Crawdads Sing.Photo: Sony Pictures

I mean, Harris is one of the loveliest, most charming, wonderful, sweet humans youll ever meet. And so his portrayal of a guy who is really kind of a bit lost and complicated, I think is a testament to his acting abilities. And so it goes with their performance, of course, and their embodiment of these characters. And then in writing the script, that was also something Lucy and I talked about a lot. We wanted to make sure that they felt really three dimensional through the writing and that you believed in both of the relationships. You could understand why Kya was so taken by Chase. Delia does an amazing job in the book in describing the real physical attraction that she feels towards him and that need for human connection after being alone for so many years, and why somebody with the charm of Chase would be such welcome company. He gives her attention and he gives her company. And he can be very caring. And then the connection with Tate really grows out of their shared love of the marsh and of science and nature. That connection really blooms from a friendship and an intellectual connection. So it was the writing, and it was the performance.

AVC: What did Daisy bring to the character that made her the right choice for the role?

ON: When we were casting, I had seen Daisy in Normal People and it was a show that I binged during the start of the pandemic when I was desperately in need of romance. I wanted a romantic escape, and Normal People was the medicine for Covid melancholy. That was my discovery of Daisy, and I just thought, Who is this amazing actress whos so layered and so deep? And the role she plays in Normal People is quite different from Kya, so I had no idea what to expect when she auditioned, and I was just astonished at her very first read. She read the book in two days. She had the script for like 48 hours before she read for us, and I just was astonished by how quickly she was able to embody both Kyas raw vulnerability, but also that real inner strength. And in working with Daisy, I now know shes an actress who can do anything. The sky is the limit for her. And shes so committed to the craft and so committed to the work. She came down to New Orleans six weeks before we started shooting. She learned how to drive a boat. She learned how to fish. She did movement work to really kind of get into Kyas body and really get into what its like to walk around the marsh barefoot and be so at one with nature. Shes unbelievable with accents. So she learned the dialects with no problem. So now I know, of course, shes an actress who has just an incredible range. But it was an amazing surprise when she auditioned, to discover that in her very first read.

AVC: This film feels very timeless, but it also taps into some contemporary ideas. How much did current themes factor in?

ON: I felt like it was a real conversation about what it is to be marginalized and outcast that sadly continues to be incredibly urgent and part of the current zeitgeist. I wish it wasnt, to be honest. The film takes place during the height of segregation in the South. And its really sad to me that so many of these themes are still relevant today. And at the same time, I really felt like the story of the Marsh Girl had this very timeless quality. I read folklore from all over the world to my young children, and we read all of these different stories that have different variations depending on the culture that theyre from. And the story of the Marsh Girl sort of felt that way to me, that you could imagine there was a similar story about the Marsh Girl who was rejected and ostracized by society and had to overcome all these great challenges. And you can imagine that kind of story being told in many different cultures, many different time periods, many different societies. And so I did want to find a way to give it that sort of timeless feeling. And so that was part of the conversation in terms of the look of the film. It was a huge part of the conversation with my composer, Mychael Danna. I had loved the work he did on The Ice Storm. That is another example of a movie that is set during a very specific time period in American history, and yet the score sort of makes it feel like it is something much more universal, about the disintegration of the family. And so that was a big part of the conversation when we were talking about how we wanted the score to give it that feeling of folklore.

WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING - Official Trailer (HD)

AVC: There were a lot of bestseller adaptations in the 90s, and it feels like weve gotten away from that. How emblematic is this of the work you want to do?

ON: I hope this is emblematic of a return to watching great dramas in movie theaters. Im so grateful that this film was made always with the intention to be shown on the big screen, because it feels like a story and a palette and a landscape that needs to be experienced in that way. So Im very grateful that Sony always intended to release it theatrically. Its been a complicated time for moviegoing, for many reasons. But my hope is that people are craving this kind of story on the big screen again as much as I have been. Im working on another book adaptation now, so maybe that says something about me. I dont know. Im working on a limited series for Apple thats another adaptation of a bestselling novel, called The Last Thing He Told Me. I dont know what that says about me [Laughs], but Im drawn to, especially, stories that really highlight exceptional women and complicated roles. And Ive just gotten really lucky that Ive managed to get my hands on these incredible books that are being adapted.

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Where The Crawdads Sing director Olivia Newman on mysteries and myth-making - The A.V. Club

the first half of 2022 has been good to gamers. While the last few years have been filled with a woefully large reservoir of delayed games, the dam has burst and the first half of 2022 has been crammed with some absolute bangers.

Whether youre a fan of strategy, action or horror, the games industry has spent the last seven months ensuring theres at least one must-play title waiting for you. Games like Starfield and Breath Of The Wild 2 may have been pushed back to 2023, but have no fear: the amount of world-class games that have already launched this year means youll be kept busy for the foreseeable future. Without further ado, here are NMEs best games of 2022 so far:

Horizon Forbidden West. Credit: Guerrilla Games

Horizon Forbidden West is hardly a radical reinvention of the formula established in 2017s Zero Dawn, but Aloys jump to the PS5 has given developer Guerilla Games licence to expand, well, just about everything.

As you explore the sprawling domain of the Tenakth tribe on a mission to restore the terraforming AI GAIA youll get to play with more weapons and more melee options while you fend off more robotic wildlife, master more skills, gather up more collectibles, and tick off more side quests.

Not everything is an improvement the control scheme is strained to breaking point by the added combat abilities, and the convoluted RPG weapon system can absolutely get in the sea but the easy charm that made the original a winner is back in spades, bolstered here by deeper side characters and a few big heart-filled moments.

It helps that Guerilla has learnt from being left in Breath of the Wilds shadow, with a flexible new climbing system and open exploration that makes the Forbidden West feel far more free than Aloys old digs.

As Horizon expands into a VR spin-off and a TV adaptation, Forbidden West is a reassuring reminder of what all the fuss was about in the first place.

By Dominic Preston

Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Credit: Nintendo

Despite being one of the franchises that Nintendo is most eager to experiment with, most of Kirbys adventures have felt more than a little bit by-the-numbers since Kirby: Triple Deluxe arrived on the Nintendo 3DS back in 2014. Happily, this is not the case for Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which is probably the biggest switch-up for franchise since he first got his power copying abilities back on the NES.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land pulls its titular hero far from the familiar locales of Planet Popstar and drops him into what appears to be a post-apocalyptic version of Earth, adapting his familiar 2D gameplay into 3D for the first time. What results looks like something between a kid-friendly The Last of Us and Super Mario 3D World look, and what is presented gameplay-wise feels fresh and vibrant simply through the introduction of a third dimension. Add in Kirbys new Mouthful Mode powers, where the pink powerhouse takes on the attributes and abilities of real-world objects hes wrapped himself around, and theres never a dull moment to be had. Want to leather a bad guy while wielding the powers of a vending machine? You can do that here.

Forgotten Land wont be winning any awards for best story at the end of the year, but HAL Laboratory has proven once again that with stunning visuals, catchy music, and exciting enough gameplay, adding in long cinematics would just get in the way of us having a good time anyway. Got a Nintendo Switch? Dont skip this one.

By Vince Pavey

Elden Ring. Credit: FromSoftware

Elden Ring is so impressive, you really do have to feel sorry for any other AAA game release in 2022. The remarkable impact that this title has had, not only in bringing back returning FromSoftware fans but in attracting an entirely new, untapped audience, means that this fairly niche brand of action role-playing game is now well-and-truly in the spotlight, and with 13.4million sales and counting, it looks like its here to stay.

FromSoftware has been perfecting its craft for many years, complementing artistic, beautiful environments with seamless, methodical combat. Extravagant bosses have been a mainstay, peppering gameplay with difficult and rewarding challenges, and rich lore has forever run through its veins like marble through rock. Elden Ring is the apex of this design, taking those key elements and ramping them up to unprecedented levels.

The linear gameplay of past titles has been swapped for a breathtaking open world where the direction of your journey is entirely your own, and never has that sense of adventure felt so pure. It truly is FromSoftwares magnum opus, and despite over two years of relentless audience hype, somehow it delivered in every sense. As a result, weve been gifted with another unique FromSoft experience, a testament to studio confidence and the value of artistic vision above all things. Games just dont get better than this.

By Benjamin Hayhoe

Total War: Warhammer 3. Credit: Creative Assembly

Total War: Warhammer 3 may have hit a few speed bumps at launch, but that didnt stop Creative Assemblys latest fantasy outing from becoming one of the best strategy games of all time. The Total War series remains unmatched at bringing large-scale battlefield clashes to life, and Warhammer 3s ocean of unit diversity took that to new heights in February.

From hordes of plague-spewing demons to gun-toting Kislevites, no two factions in Warhammer 3 play remotely the same, and every single race brings at least one compelling reason to play them. Plus, an Outpost system allows players to recruit troops from other races, which means that army compositions can be shaken up and revolutionised to your hearts content.

However, the best thing about Warhammer 3 still lies ahead. A slew of major patches have already cleared up Warhammer 3s launch gripes, and the game is set to become unfathomably better when Immortal Empires arrives later this year. This gargantuan update will fuse Creative Assemblys Warhammer trilogy into one jaw-dropping map brimming with six years of factions and improvements, which should turn the studios already-unmissable gem into the undisputed Prince and Emperor of strategy games.

By Andy Brown

The Quarry. Credit: Supermassive Games.

The Quarry is the latest horror game from Supermassive Games and it manages to be a truly memorable experience. Featured in the game is an entertaining cast of characters who are brought to life with fantastic performances from the likes of Brenda Song, Justice Smith, and Ted Raimi.

As you progress through the story, youll take control of several characters. While playing as each character, youll be making choices that affect their relationships and, crucially, whether they live or die. Each choice you make feels important no matter how small it may seem. Even if you do mess up, you can always use the rewind system to save a characters life. I loved having this feature as games like this usually wont let you reload once a character dies.

As a casual horror fan, I found myself drawn to the mystery of Hacketts Quarry. Without spoiling too much, the games story features tons of shocking twists and turns like your typical horror movie and each one is more shocking than the last. The Quarry is a game I will certainly revisit to make different choices and view the different endings. If youre a horror fan like me, this game is for you.

By Brendan Bell

GhostWire: Tokyo. Credit: Bethesda Softworks

When playing Ghostwire: Tokyo, it doesnt take long for its creaky open-world design to show itself. Set in Shibuya where a supernatural fog has spirited away the citys usually dense and bustling population, its a map you can accurately decry as being empty or lifeless as you follow the formulaic structure of gradually opening up the spaces you can explore while more icons of quests and collectibles take up the real estate.

Yet these flaws never stop the games setting from being anything but compelling. Made even more immersive with its first-person perspective, this is perhaps the most detailed and authentic representation of Japans capital outside of the Yakuza games, and on a grander scale given the impressive verticality you have to traverse its rooftops to take in the breathtaking views while rescuing the citys inhabitants in spirit form.

But Tango Gameworks also looks closer to home culturally, imbuing its collectibles and quests with such a detailed specificity, from the yokai you encounter based on Japanese folklore to the seemingly random collectibles that have something to say about historical and contemporary Japanese culture. As a piece of virtual tourism, albeit one plagued by spooky visitors youll have to routinely defeat with your own supernatural powers, its utterly irresistible, especially when a trip to Japan post-Covid is still off the cards.

By Alan Wen

Neon White. Credit: Annapurna Interactive

Neon White is as good as the gameplay is rapid. Right from the get-go, you are experiencing the tight movement mechanics and interesting level design that make Neon White so enjoyable. The game is unashamedly built for speedrunning, with each of the gradually introduced mechanics adding a new form of movement. Neon White is not aiming for later replayability, it wants you to retry the stage you just completed immediately. It displays the stage leaderboard proudly beside a button asking you to replay it, Neon White knows you can go faster and whats more, it knows your friends have already gone faster.

Neon White is so much more than its stages, though. This game is plugged into the cultural zeitgeist of the modern age. The writing of the characters nails modern anime tropes, and makes fun of them in a tasteful and knowing way. The writing is equal parts nonsensical and intelligent, with endearing characters and a plot laced with just enough mystery to keep you hooked. In a fashion akin to dating simulators, youll find yourself going back to old stages to grab the collectable gifts just to unlock additional dialogue with the characters in the hub area. Thats not to mention the intoxicating rhythmic soundtrack. Neon White is high-speed, well-written and just a damn good time in general.

By Jack Coleman

Rogue Legacy 2. Credit: Cellar Door Games

Rogue Legacy 2, which began life as an Early Access title in 2020, is a genealogical roguelite according to developer Cellar Door, meaning that instead of upgrading one character, you progress your legacy and each new run sees you select one ancestor (of a possible three) of your previous character. Upon death, your character is retired, setting this sequel apart from other games of a similar ilk where the focus is placed upon upgrading one protagonist.

Hopping around 2.5D levels, attacking scoundrels that stand in your way with a variety of swords, bows, magic and other instruments of death contributes to your gold balance, which is put towards upgrading your headquarters. This giant castle base serves as a skill tree that the player will constantly unlock and upgrade before each run, or face losing gold previously acquired.

Cellar Door knew not to mess with anything that made the original Rogue Legacy so special, keeping everything that worked well and combining it with a plethora of new features, unlockables and upgrades for players to chase. On top of this, an adorable refined art style and incredibly tight controls round off the experience. The only unfortunate factor here is that youll lose hours to this black hole before youve realised.

By Cheri Faulkner

Sniper Elite 5. Credit: Rebellion.

Rebellions latest Nazi basher, Sniper Elite 5, is an exercise in levelling up. Previously the snipe-em-up franchise has been a schlocky affair, B-movie thrills for people willing to overlook some dodgy AI and slightly rough edges.

No longer. With Sniper Elite 5, Rebellion seems to have cracked the magic formula. The open-world levels are dense and interesting while enemies are just the right side of challenging to let you play however you want to play. With many of the giants of the stealth genre now hiding away,Sniper Elite 5has shown its capable of carrying the torch forwards.

By Jake Tucker

Looking to fill the rest of 2022 with even more fantastic games? Here are NMEs 20 best games of 2021.

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The best games of 2022 so far - NME

Review of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry, 200 pages, Polity (June 2022) and Rethinking Sex: A Provocation by Christine Emba, 224 pages, Sentinel (March 2022)

The question of feminism and sex has been causing controversy for as long as feminism has existed, and has only intensified since the sexual revolution. In the 1980s, radical feminists, led by law professor Catharine MacKinnon and activist/writer Andrea Dworkin, regarded not only pornography but most heterosexual sex as male exploitation of women. This anti-porn faction clashed with pro-sex liberal feminists like Ellen Willis and Susie Bright, who focused on womens sexual liberation. In the 1990s, the feminist campaign against date rape on college campuses sought to redefine many ambiguous sexual experiences as nonconsensual. This galvanized critics like Katie Roiphe, whose 1994 critique of rape-crisis feminism, The Morning After, assailed the tendency to portray men as predators and women as helpless victims. In the 21st century, the feminist revival of the past decade combined a sex-positive celebration of enthusiastic consent and female sexual liberationin all its guises from kink to sex workwith the punitive spirit of #MeToo, which embraced MacKinnons dictum that feminism is built on believing women's accounts of sexual use and abuse by men. The unsurprising result has been confusion and dissonance.

Now, British journalist Louise Perry enters the fray with The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. It is, as the title suggests, a provocative book; so provocative, in fact, that radical feminist Julie Bindel contributed an effusive blurb to the dust-jacket (Brilliantly written, cleverly argued fresh and exciting) and then wrote a heavily negative review for UnHerd, in which she attacked Perry for endorsing pre-feminist sexual modesty and urging women to invest in a hypothetical chastity belt.

What, then, is Perrys controversial case against the sexual revolution, which was precipitated by the invention of reliable contraception but also challenged and dismantled a wide range of traditional cultural taboos? Her view is that, while women may have been freed to have sex without marriage and even without love, this freedom was and remains illusorybecause, to quote Perrys famous compatriot Kingsley Amis, girls arent like that. Or, as Perry puts it, Women did not evolve to treat sex as meaningless, and trying to pretend otherwise does not end well. Men, she argues, not only have a much stronger preference and capacity for casual and promiscuous sex; a substantial minority also have a propensity for violent predation and abuse. Thus, encouraging women to find liberation and empowerment in having sex like a man is to set them up to be hurt emotionally and sometimes physically: at best exploited, at worst raped, battered, or even murdered.

A true feminism that puts womens needs first, Perry insists, would take its cue from those 18th and 19th century feministsstarting with Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Womanwho addressed the sexual double standard by advocating male chastity rather than female licentiousness. How would that play out today? Perrys ideal scenario is nothing less than restoring the normative expectation that sex must take place within a monogamous and preferably lifelong marriage. Short of that, she urges women to delay sex with a new partner for at least a few months and [o]nly have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children (even if you dont actually want to have children with him).

Perry is at her best when deftly and savagely skewering the pieties, hypocrisies, and absurdities of modern progressive feminists. She is scornful of those who think the answer to the dangers posed to women by violent males is to teach men not to rape (now why didnt anyone think of that before?), or who invent pseudo-sexual orientations like demisexual to explain why a disproportionate number of women feel they need an emotional connection before they can feel sexual attraction. She is also compelling when she argues that post-1960s sexual liberationism, including its feminist incarnation, often ended up romanticizing some atrocious behavior and odious figuresa tendency that culminated in the cult of the Marquis de Sade.

Many of Perrys theses are not only convincing, they are commonsensical: consent cannot be the end-all and be-all of sexual ethics (there are a lot of sexual behaviors that are neither criminal nor good and about which the consent framework has very little to say); some desires are bad; denying that sex has some kind of specialness that makes it different from other acts ultimately doesnt work. She points out, for instance, that even liberals who insist that sex is morally neutral generally care if their partner has sex with someone else, and not only because doing so involves breaking a promise: polyamorist communities still struggle with sexual jealousy.

And yet, the picture Perry paints of the post-revolutionary sexual landscape is also unconvincing in several important ways. For a start, she vastly oversimplifies the treatment of sex and sexuality in mainstream culture. Has the view of adventurous, no-strings sex as empowering for women really been dominant in the post-sexual revolution era, with a near-taboo on the discussion of attendant risks from male violence to emotional attachment? Hit movies from the last half-century suggest otherwise. In Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), the heroines quest for sexual freedom leads to a string of disastrous relationships and culminates in rape and murder. In Fatal Attraction (1987), a single womans one-night stand with a married man plunges her into a destructive obsession that finally leads to her death.

Even the two television series Perry cites as paradigmatic vehicles of liberal feminism in which women affirm their agency through loveless, selfish sexHBOs Sex and the City (19982004) and the BBCs The Fall (20132016)are far more ambivalent than Perry allows. Yes, in the Sex and the City premiere, Manhattan sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw announced her intention to stop looking for Mr. Perfect and have funspecifically, by using an unlikable ex as a human sex toy. But ultimately, most of the show was about Carrie and her friends respective quests for love (except for the happily promiscuous Samantha, who was something of a caricature). The Fall introduced its protagonist, police detective Stella Gibson, as a sexually confident woman who enjoyed a guilt-free one-nighter with a married colleague; but later on, the show undercut its heroine as much as it glamorized her, finally suggesting that her liberated faade may be the mask of a lonely and vulnerable woman still hurting from the loss of her father.

Media coverage of real-life female sexual liberation has also been far more nuanced and less gung-ho than The Case Against the Sexual Revolution would have its readers believe. Perry appears to think that her critique of hook-up culture as a mans game in which women can only be the losers is revelatory, but its all been said before (and not just by countercultural conservatives like Wendy Shalit, who advanced the same thesis in her 1999 book A Return to Modesty). Washington Post reporter Laura Sessions Stepp, who chronicled the trend of buddy sex in high school and college in a 2003 article, warned that [w]omen have always shouldered the emotional burden of sexual behavior and to pretend that they can ignore their emotions easily is poppycock. She followed up with a 2007 book titled Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both.

True, there was something of a feminist pro-hookup backlash in the early 2010s, when Hanna Rosin argued that casual liaisons are a savvy strategy for career-minded young women to avoid investing too much time in romance. Still, when the New York Times devoted a long feature to hook-up culture in 2013 under the apparently approving title, Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game Too, the piece gave plenty of room to the downsides, from romantic disappointment to sexual assault.

As it happens, a lot of those reports greatly exaggerated the prevalence of loveless, uncommitted sex; Perry makes the same mistake. In fact, in a 2010 survey of nearly 30,000 American college students, fewer than one-in-five men and one-in-six women reported having had more than two sexual partners (using a definition that included oral sex), while 38 percent of men and 43 percent of women reported only one and over a third of men and women alike had never had sex. More than half of the respondents said they were in a relationship at the time of the survey. Other studies around that time came up with similar findings; more recent college surveys, albeit smaller, point in the same direction. Beyond college campuses, about one-in-10 American singles not currently in relationships say they are looking only for casual dating.

Another problem is that, in her eagerness to push back against dogmatic sex-difference denial, Perry lapses into massive and drastic generalizations about women and men, despite some pro forma disclaimers that these differences are averages, not absolutes. Yes, the evidence of a greater male preference for sexual variety and a greater female preference for sexual commitment is quite strong; however, not only are there numerous variations in this pattern, but the preferences are often a matter of degree rather than a stark binary. (There are many gradations between emotion-free hook-up and monogamous marriage.) Perry acknowledges the remarkable flexibility within male sexuality that allows it to manifest itself in cad and dad modes, depending on the situation. But is there a female duality, too? Perry seems to think that, with a few exceptions, women who have casual sex have been conned into it, either by men or by a feminist culture that has duped them with a false promise of liberation. However, the evolutionary psychologists she cites in support of her views, such as David Buss, argue that womens sexual strategiesalso depending on circumstancescan include short-term as well as long-term mating.

The result is that Perrys indictment of the sexual revolution is disappointingly simplistic and one-sided. It gives short shrift to the women who find uncommitted or adventurous sex enjoyable (and plenty do, at least sometimes, as surveys about campus hook-ups indicate). It also ignores men who find the casual sex scene empty and unsatisfying, or prefer committed relationships but feel strong peer pressure to hook up (as noted, for instance, in a 2016 Quartz article that Perry cites for its conclusion that most women dont like hookup culture). When The Case Against the Sexual Revolution invites readers to re-scrutinize their own sexual experiences, the questions are split sharply along gender lines: only women are asked if they have ever become attached to a casual sex partner but kept those feelings concealed, or felt disgusted about a consensual past experience; only men are asked if they ever ditched a partner after a sexual encounter or strung someone along despite sensing that she had developed an emotional attachment.

But in real life, things are more complicated. Sometimes, for instanceas journalist Peggy Orenstein found when interviewing teenage boys about sex and sexual normsboys and young men who are interested in pursuing a relationship with a hookup partner fail to do so because theyre afraid she may dismiss the encounter as just a party thing. I have been, for the record, at both ends of some of the experiences on Perrys lists.

Ultimately, for all her dissent from modern feminist orthodoxy, Perrys own feminism is stuck in the same woman-as-victim mindset. Its telling that one of the feminists she cites most approvingly is writer and activist Andrea Dworkin, who died in 2005 and was briefly touted as a misunderstood prophet during the rise of #MeToo. Dworkin may have been more correct about Sade than the sexual liberationists, but in her own way she was just as deranged and obsessed with sexual barbarism as the Marquis. (This is a woman who once wrote that Caesarian sections are a form of sadistic rape in which the doctors cut directly into the uterus with a knifea surgical fuck.)

Perry makes the self-evident point that the male advantage in size and strength makes women far more vulnerable than men in sexual encounters with someone they dont know well. But are women really trapped in the sexual hellscape she depicts in such lurid colors? Im doubtful. Perry makes much, for instance, of an apparent rise in British cases of men charged with killing women who have employed a rough sex defenseparticularly in deaths by strangulationand links this to the trend of normalizing kink. But were talking about a miniscule number of cases; overall, official statistics show, the rise in homicides in the UK after the 1960s was due almost entirely to male victimization, and British women today are safer from homicide than at any point since the mid-1960s.

Should it be concerning that three-quarters of British women under 25 in a 2019 poll reported at least some experiences of being choked (defined as any hand-on-neck pressure), slapped (on any body part), or spat on during consensual sex? Or that one-in-six reported at least one instance of being upset or frightened by such an act? Are women who say they find pleasure in such activities pathetically deluded? The answers may be, once again, complicated; but Perrys stubborn insistence that Girls Arent Like That can make her an unreliable narrator. She insists, for example, that women simply dont (with vanishingly rare exceptions) enjoy erotic asphyxiation, since there is no record of them practicing it on their own. Yet the article she cites discussing this fetish among men mentions comparable (though rarer) cases in women, as does other research.

Meanwhile, Perry hardly ever acknowledges that men also suffer injuries on the sexual battlefieldfrom false accusations of misconduct to (yes) unwanted sex to a wide range of humiliating, cruel, or otherwise toxic behaviors of which humans of both sexes are capable. Perhaps its true that, as the stronger and hornier sex, it is more important for men to exercise moral restraint; but that is not the whole story. As for the idea that the new sexual order is rigged in mens favor: Perry never even mentions the rather extraordinary fact that between 2002 and 2018, the proportion of men aged 18 to 24 reporting no partnered sex in the past year spiked from 19 percent to 31 percent.

(Sexual inactivity among women in this age group rose much more modestly, from 15 percent to 19 percent.) Thats a rather large share of young males who are clearly not on the winning side.

Perrys book spurred me to dig up a trenchant critique of the sexual revolution published almost 40 years ago: a 1983 Psychology Today essay by writer and psychotherapist Peter Marin titled A Revolutions Broken Promises. A secular liberal concerned that sex was being not only separated from love but emptied of generosity, Marin wrote about various casualties of the sexual revolution he had seen in his practicefrom young men and women who, barely out of adolescence, had slept with so many people that they found themselves frigid or unresponsive beside those whom they genuinely loved to middle-aged couples whose bonds had been shattered by the siren call of open marriage. Compared to The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Marins examination of these pitfalls was remarkably sex-neutral, except for his observation that men are less articulate [and] feel less justified than women in their public complaints about the disappointments of sexual liberation. Perrys book is an illustration of this tendency, and it weakens her case against the sexual revolutions undoubted excesses.

For all its flaws, there is no doubt that The Case Against the Sexual Revolution taps into something in the zeitgeist. As evidence, one can look to another book with strikingly similar themes published just two months earlier. Rethinking Sex: A Provocation is by Washington Post reporter Christine Emba, and the echoes are downright uncanny, right down to the chapter titles: Men and Women Are Different (Perry)/Men and Women Are Not the Same (Emba); Some Desires Are Worse Than Others (Emba)/Some Desires Are Bad(Perry); Sex Must Be Taken Seriously (Perry)/Sex Is Serious (Emba, chapter section title). Emba speaks of the tyranny of chill, which requires people to pretend not to care; Perry, of the pressure on women to be the Cool Girl. Both authors stress that consensual sex isnt necessarily good or ethical. Both lament that equality for women seems to have been (mis)interpreted as acting like the worst sort of mancavalier about sex and disdainful of real feeling (Emba) or having sex like an arsehole, as Perry more pithily puts it. Both approvingly cite Dworkin.

Emba, who is in her early 30s, brings an interesting perspective to her book: a Catholic convert raised as an evangelical Christian, she spent her 20s as a virgin who rejected premarital sex on religious grounds. She admits that several boyfriends worth of on-the-edge encounters left me (and them, Im sure) furious at myself for my stance. Eventually, she changed her mind about premarital sex, but retained the belief that sex should not be trivialized, is not merely a private matter, and has a spiritual dimension. Her conversations with young adultswomen and some menbear this out: many admit, often with embarrassment, that they dislike casual sex, and even those who arent necessarily looking for long-term relationships are still looking for something beyond the physical.

We can now fuck without feelings, but lets be honestthe feelings were the fun part, Emba writes. The reality is that the dispassionate, disconnected, empty approach to sexuality was never what we wanted, and is barely even possible: engaging in intimate acts begets feelings, its natural. Total freedom was never a realistic goal, and the warped vision of freedom we celebrate now fails to satisfy.

Here, as with Perrys book, one may quibble about the generalizations: Who are the we to whom she refers in that quote? And how many people celebrate the feelings-free approach to sexuality? Is Emba confusing the lifestyles of a socially progressive knowledge class eliteor even a subsection of that elitewith the lives of the population at large? The answer to that last question is almost certainly yes. In a revealing scene that reads almost like a conservative parody, one of her interviews takes place at a downtown Le Pain Quotidien in Washington, DC, filled with men and women gesturing broadly over their lattes and wielding law firm-branded laptop bags, and the subject is a queer-identifying woman who does advocacy work for a womens health organization. The limitations of such a focus are obvious; but it doesnt invalidate Embas analysis, especially since the segment of American society to which she directs most of her attention has disproportionate cultural influence.

Like Perry, Emba deftly identifies some of the contradictions of the progressive sexual creed: for instance, sex means nothingat least, no more than any other fun activityuntil sexual identity, or ones status as a sexual assault survivor, means everything. Unlike Perry, however, she does not propose radical shifts in societal norms, such as a restoration of a marriage-centric culture; hers is a more modest plea to adopt an ethic of careor what Marin called generosityeven in short-term relationships. Can we not love each other for a single day? asks one of her interviewees, a woman who suddenly found herself wondering if her partner in a one-night stand respected her. (Perrys answer to both questions, no doubt, would be a curt no.)

Unlike Perry, Emba positions herself not as a dissident skewering progressive pieties but as a member of the progressive subculture urging fellow progressives to reconsider some of their views. This gives Rethinking Sex a certain anodyne quality; at times, Emba seems to be trying too hard not to offend, as when her discussion of sex differences stresses the structural constraints and social programming that come with our gender as well as biological factors. (That doesnt make the generalizations any less massive: is it really true, for instance, that women and only women in our culture are taught not to make a scene, not to be difficult, selfish, or rude, or to put up with discomfort?) Nonetheless, in at least one way, Emba departs from woke dogma more than Perry: she is willing, at least briefly, to consider that men can get hurt too, including by false accusations of sexual misconduct. Not every sexual misstep is a crime, she writes, but we tend to punish them as though they were, ignoring the fact that our rules are so impoverished that they are easy to misconstrue.

The insight that trying to separate sex from human emotions and human connection usually ends in disappointment and sometimes in disaster is not new. It even predates the modern age: the greatest literary legacy of 18th century libertinismarguably the first sexual revolutionis Choderlos de Lacloss brilliant 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, whose charming and amoral protagonists are occasionally compelled to admit that their loveless exploits are deeply unsatisfying (Let us be honest: in our affairs, as cold as they are casual, what we call happiness is hardly even pleasure, remarks Lacloss antihero, the vicomte de Valmont) and are finally undone when their libertine principles clash with the reality of their feelings.

In the modern age, the upheaval of the sexual revolution, coupled with the womens movement and boosted by the unprecedented availability of reliable birth control, has undoubtedly had negative consequences as well as positive ones. The surge in divorce rates produced many casualties (children, first and foremost); the sexual free-for-all of the singles scene has left many scarred people (perhaps more women than men; perhaps roughly similar numbers of both, scarred in different ways); the feminist war on male sexual misconduct, which was arguably part of the fallout, claimed its own innocent victims. Nonetheless, the majority of peopleat least, people from the affluent and educated classes that both Perry and Emba primarily write abouthave still managed to adjust and lead reasonably happy lives. Truly brutal sexual disorder, including the near-total collapse of marriage, has happened primarily in the low-income, low-status communities that are off both authors radar, and where liberal beliefs about sexuality and sex roles are not commonly found.

This is not to say that we dont need to rethink some of todays sexual rules and norms. Sexual utopianismthe idea that the complete liberation of all sexual preferences, kinks, and predilections can bring about a paradise of tolerance and understanding with no jealousy or conflictneeds to be retired. The normalization of graphic descriptions of ones sexual experiences as part of mainstream discourse could stand some reconsidering (too much information is a concept that deserves a comeback). And, of course, reorienting ourselves toward kindness and generosity in our sexual lives is always a course worth pursuing. That generosity should be extended, among others, to men accused of sexual misconduct over trivial sins.

But should we reconsider sexual freedom itselfand, in a very real sense, sexual equality as well? The ideas of Perry and self-described reactionary feminists like Mary Harrington should, of course, be part of the conversation, but count me in the disagree column. Yes, biology matters, and women and men are not the same; but the interaction of nature and culture is still too little understood, and equality is still too recent (there are, even now, many places in the West where the traditional stigma against loose women retains its power) to make definitive pronouncements, not only about the way men and women are, but about the way they should be. In the absence of such knowledge, our only way forward is a sexual ethic that is cognizant of group differences, but ultimately approaches and judges people as individuals.

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Children of the Counter-Revolution - Quillette

As the 1979 general election campaign went on, it became increasingly clear that the Conservatives would likely win a significant majority. In the heat of battle, James Callaghan, then Labour prime minister, showed remarkable foresight. There are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea-change in politics, he told his advisor. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea-change and it is for Mrs Thatcher.

Thatcher went on to win not only that election, but the following two as well. Her successor, John Major, prevailed in 1992, and Labours Tony Blair won three consecutive elections by overtly embracing her policies. At the start of the 21st century, Thatcherism was for the most part the political common sense of the country. Thatcher would later comment that her greatest achievement was New Labour. She was, without doubt, the most successful British politician of the 20th century, and still casts a long shadow over British politics (as a cursory glance at Johnsons would-be successors will tell you). Not bad for someone who had just one supporter in the shadow cabinet when she launched her leadership bid in 1975.

While the rise of Boris Johnson was far more predictable his tilt at the top job less a meteoric rise than starting on the playing fields of Eton Callaghans words could just as easily have applied to his stunning win in 2019. Capturing Labours red wall, comprehensively settling the question of Brexit and accumulating the largest number of votes since 1992 should have meant Johnson was able to oversee another sea-change in British politics. He was a powerful, popular leader with big ambitions and a mandate to match. If youre a Tory, these are the moments that come along once in a political lifetime.

And yet in less than three years, Johnson squandered not only his own political reputation but this momentous opportunity. As Aris Roussinos wrote on the day he promised to step down: Fate had granted Johnson an appointment with History: but he missed it, lost in a diary clash with wallpaper merchants, lobby courtiers and the endless need to flush away the squalid mess he was compelled to smear around the highest offices of the state. While the calibre of Tory personnel was a factor in his downfall (certainly no business would survive such a litany of sexual assault and harassment cases), what wrecked Johnson, and his potential legacy, was himself.

Yet the scale of what has happened, and the opportunity missed, still seems not to have dawned on many Conservatives. Whatever else you think of him, Boris is a historic figure, tweeted Robert Colvile, director of the rightwing Centre for Policy Studies, two hours after Johnson announced his decision. Changed the course of the nation in both 2016 and 2019. (And the memory of that election night and the destruction of Corbynism is one I will always treasure.)

Besides the fact that being a historic figure is far from always positive (Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler and Fred West merit the label, billions of decent people dont), this, in a paragraph, reveals the extent of Johnsons failure. He was handed an opportunity on a par with that of Clement Attlee in 1945 (after which we got the modern welfare state and NHS) and Thatcher in 1979 (which led to the biggest transfer of wealth in the nations history since the Enclosure Acts). If Thatcher re-made the British psyche, and I believe she did, Johnson changed little more than the John Lewis decor at Number 10. In Brexit, he helped catalyse a political revolution which now hasnt the slightest idea where its going. Were constantly told by the media that Jeremy Corbyn was Westminsters answer to the Chuckle Brothers and yet Johnsons legacy is nothing more than defeating him.

Johnsons mandate to not only get Brexit done but level up the country could, and should, have led to a rupture every bit as seismic. With a disciplined top team, a shared vision and a party capable of at least minimal standards of probity, we would be looking at something similar. When Johnson won the Hartlepool by-election just last year turning a Labour seat won twice under Corbyn blue thats what the electorate still believed in: putting the constant rancour of Brexit behind us and building an economy no longer focused on London and the south east. It was always a brave pitch from the Tories, particularly given their base is in the home counties, but it seemed to be paying dividends. Relocating some Treasury jobs to Darlington was emblematic of how they had grabbed the zeitgeist, not only mitigating Labours powerful arguments over regional and income inequality but stealing their voters while doing so.

It was the same in Batley and Spen, where Keir Starmer was likely just several hundred votes from having to resign last year. When I was there it was clear that the Tories were competitive without really trying, their campaign decidedly low-key. Many constituents wanted to give Labour another bloody nose, but ultimately they either stayed with the party, because of Kim Leadbeater, or voted for George Galloway. Already it was becoming clear that the Johnson project didnt know what it wanted to do.

While Johnsons successor may win a future election (who can really tell after the last 18 months), an especially large margin feels unlikely. Whats more, it wont be on a populist platform for transformational change. Decades of activism and persuasion lay behind the Attlee and Thatcher supremacies. Johnson appeared to have enjoyed their mandate without the graft: no long march through the labour movement like in the 1930s, no neoliberal thought-architecture built in response to the triumph of Keynesianism. With Johnson, it was easy come, easy go.

In 2019, the electorate wanted a decisive break. What they got was a damp squib. For the Tories, that should prompt a reckoning. While Johnson is overwhelmingly to blame for his own downfall, perhaps the party simply doesnt have the ideas, personnel or institutions to execute meaningful change anymore. It has power, yes, but stuck in the intellectual world of the 1980s, it doesnt really know what to do with it in the 21st century.

Aaron Bastani is a Novara Media contributing editor and co-founder.

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Boris Johnson Could Have Been Another Thatcher - Novara Media

The technology company Google is keen on building a home for African creators who are promoting the Alternative movement through its platforms such as YouTube. It demonstrated this in a recent two-day programme in Nairobi, Kenya, for 25 creators from different parts of the continent, Isioma Usiade witnessed the event

The Alternative Movement, colloquially known as the Alt Movement, is getting the spotlight from the technology company Google. Recently, the company hosted a two-day Residency Programmein Nairobi, Kenya for creators who identify as Alternative and Non-mainstream.

Similar to a Bootcamp, the two-day program was aimed at upskilling and celebrating 25 young creatives whose idea of being misfits or nonconformists is not easily acceptable in mainstream media. The movement champions unconventional self-expression in all aspects of life but mainly through music, fashion and visual arts.

The creatives were a mixed bag. They were alternative artists, and creative and cultural arts journalists from Nigeria, South Africa, Accra, Botswana, Kenya and other parts of the continent.

The Alt Community is an emerging culture that is uniquely African and is increasing in popularity among the Gen Z demographic. Alt, short for Alternative, originated as an avenue for unconventional self-expression that transcends the traditional. At the centre of the Alt movement, is the desire to remain sincere to oneself regardless of existing traditions or cultural restrictions.

The Alt movement arguably has its origin in Nigeria, with musical Artists like Teezee, BOJ, Tems, Odunsi and Lady Donli, driving the movement but the sub-culture is visible among young Africans across the continent. Sichangi, from Kenya and Amaarae from Ghana, are among the musical artists from other parts of Africa who are propagating Alt sounds. Beyond music, Alt has grown as a lifestyle and its influence is also visible in fashion and the visual arts. Mowalola and Tse are some of the creative influencers that are driving the Alt movement in fashion and photography respectively.

There is also a growing number of creative entrepreneurs in the Alt community. These young individuals are running their own businesses and thriving within Africas creative ecosystem. By optimising the internet, they are carving their distinctive identity and propagating the growth of the Alt community in Africa.

Historically, alternative youth culture is rarely recognised in mainstream media, therefore creators have turned to YouTube to connect with their audiences because there are no barriers to entry.

Speaking during the Residency, Sharon Machira, Communication and Public Affairs Manager for Google Kenya said, Its exciting to see creators that identify as non-mainstream find community on our platform. This comes just a few days after we announced a call for applications for the YouTube Black Voices Fund for 2023 aimed at elevating marginalised voices.

The residency aims toamplify the impact of the Alt movement in Africa and the world. We also want to showcase how products like YouTube and YouTube Shorts and platforms like Google Arts and Culture can help drive the culture forward, added Machira.

Recent Google Search trends from across Africa show an increase in `Alt related searches from 2020, with questions like What is alt?, Who is an alt? and How to dress alt?, being the most searched alt related questions.

Google, through the Alt Residency, is spotlighting and contributing to Africas cultural zeitgeist by exposing Alt creatives and expressionists to skills that can be harnessed through the lens of YouTube, YouTubeShorts, Search and Google Arts and Culture, and enable creatives to scale up in their businesses and career.

The Residency ran from Tuesday, June 28 to Thursday, June 30, 2022, and helped them learn how to better connect with their audiences and move the culture forward. They will be equipped with entrepreneurial skills on how they can enhance the visibility of their brands.

Google also invited Tshepo the Jeans maker for an interactive fireside career talk with the young creative entrepreneurs on how to further build and monetise their brands.

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How Google is Amplifying Alternative Youth Culture - THISDAY Newspapers

The cultural zeitgeist around work is changing. Last week, many of us will have been frantically adjusting our journeys amid nationwide train strikes. If the transport gods were merciful, we will have got home in time for the latest episode of Sherwood, a twisty drama about the legacy of the miners strike. You may have just finished Apple TVs Severance, which depicts a future where work is so bleak the only way it can get done is by creating alternate versions of ourselves. Now we have Minions: Rise of Gru which asks if there is a place in todays world for a morally compromised but lovable boss supported by a legion of subservient, amorphous workers.

Having worked in retail in the mid-to-late 2010s, no collection of words makes me shudder like: It might seem crazy what Im bout to say. This is the opening line to Pharrell Williamss Happy, as featured on the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack, which was blasted across shop floors like audible amphetamine to keep workers conscious and adequately cheery. The song also defined much of the 2010s, frantically screaming at us to be happy while the world around us, in many ways, became increasingly grim. The Despicable Me franchise also loomed large in the same era, becoming the highest-grossing animated film series of all time in the space of seven years. The films breakout stars the Minions were ubiquitous throughout the decade. They were plastered on everything from tic tacs to salad bags and Amazon parcels, they led Zumba classes and adorned the tops of NYC yellow taxis. They were quite literally everywhere.

When the first Despicable Me film was released in 2010, ultra-rich business moguls received a mostly positive reception in popular culture. Elon Musk guest-starred in an episode of The Simpsons in 2015 where he was presented as a world-saving genius whose immense wealth was a secondary concern. The episode ends with Musk rocketing off into the sky like a tech-bro Mary Poppins. In the same year, Steve Jobs was eulogised as a troubled visionary in the Danny Boyle-directed biopic. But the seeds of a big business backlash were planted with The Big Short, which lamented Wall Streets role in the 2008 financial crash.

In the years since, the cultural backlash against the ultra-rich has only intensified. 2019s Joker reimagined the aristocratic Wayne family as a cruel, selfish clan while recontextualising the villains rampage as a tragic consequence of a failing society. Dont Look Up, which saw a Jobs-esque billionaire annihilate our planet after promising (and subsequently failing) to stop a comet filled with lucrative minerals from crashing into Earth became the second most-watched film in Netflixs history last December. Earlier this year, The Dropout, Super Pumped and WeCrashed, three shows about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs meteoric rises and cant-look-away falls debuted within weeks of each other, all but cementing popular cultures assault against this once vaunted section of society.

This shift isnt confined to English-language fare. The best picture-winning Parasite resonated around the world with its wildly entertaining exploration of wealth inequality. Squid Game twisted universal fears about debt into a gore bonanza. Javier Bardem plays a factory owner who meddles in the lives of his employees in order to win a business award in the Spanish film The Good Boss (on release later this month in the UK). An exploration of the toxic impact of work and its overreach into our personal lives, the film is another addition to this burgeoning canon of pro-worker, anti-big boss on-screen work.

The parallels between Gru, the supervillain protagonist of the series, and the legion of ultra-rich business moguls in the public eye is striking. Like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, Gru is interested in space exploration. Perhaps most potent, he has a workforce so voiceless and obedient, these bosses would probably salivate with envy. Though, in this area, he faces tough competition from Bezos and Amazon where warehouse workers report frequent injuries and fear of getting fired for not packing enough items an hour while their delivery drivers are so overworked, they have to urinate in bottles.

Most revealingly, real-world corporate culture loves the Minions. HR managers use them as a not so subversive allegory for their workforce. On LinkedIn, you will find many posts about the lessons workers could learn from the Minions, from offering colleagues a helping hand to eating bananas to stay productive or even that having a big bad boss is desirable. Minions, in their eyes, are what workers should be loyal, infantile and replaceable.

The cultural shift against work and big business has opened a vacuum that the burgeoning workers movement is filling. As workers from all sorts of jobs, from barristers to call centre staff, vote for strike action, it is likely that the political and cultural landscape will only tilt further towards pro-worker sentiment. Perhaps it is time to lay the cute-as-a-button do-badders to rest.

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The revolution will be televised: why we are witnessing a big-boss backlash - The Guardian

Vibes has become a ubiquitous word in the past half decade, one many people now reach for when describing the distinct emotion given off by a place, or a thing. It is the prevailing shorthand for a cultural atmosphere, mood, and zeitgeist.

Vibe talk has also entered politics. In this magazine in 2021, Derek Thompson invited readers to think of politics as a vibes war. This spring, again in these pages, David A. Graham argued that John Fetterman won the Democratic Senate primary for Pennsylvania less on policy than on vibes. And Rolling Stone pronounced that Fetterman was neither centrist nor a progressive. Hes a vibe.

To the political commentator Will Stancil, vibes is the idea that politics is rooted in and governed by mass psychology, which makes political behavior intrinsically difficult (and sometimes impossible) to model as a series of quantifiable inputs and predictable outputs, the approach favored by econometrically-inclined disciplines.

In place of data, vibe-talk promises instead to capture deeper emotional currents. What interests me about this form of analysis is that it is a rejection of analysis itself. Its a way of saying: Numbers lie, and emotion always lurks beneath the surface, so lets stop pretending. It expresses the suspicion that dry objectivity is never quite sufficient.

Read: The vibe shift on Capitol Hill

What also interests me is that, not too long ago, the commentators who reach for vibes now would have reached for charisma, and that latter word may help us understand what vibes conveys about emotional politics today.

The rejection of hard evidence in favor of emotional intuition is one of the oldest moves in modern political thought. At the end of the 18th century, Romanticism pushed back against empiricism, as symbolized in William Blakes 1795 painting of Isaac Newton: The scientists obsession with measurement leads him to literally turn his back on the natural world. In the 19th century, positivists like Auguste Comte, who believed that society could be explained in coldly scientific ways, split with anti-positivists like Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued for more subjective, affective approaches. Perhaps the most influential of these anti-positivists was the German sociologist Max Weber, and among his more influential contributions was the word charisma.

Charisma comes from the ancient Greek for gift for grace. Its classical origins give it a timeless feel. Yet its modern usage is only a century old. In the 1910s, Weber dusted off this obscure theological term to describe forms of political authority based on the extraordinary powers of specific individuals. Charisma, he argued, is the specifically creative revolutionary force in human history.

Heres how Weber described the concept in his posthumous 1920 book, Sociology of Religion:

Not every person has the capacity to achieve the ecstatic states which are viewed, in accordance with rules of experience, as the pre-conditions for producing certain effects in meteorology, healing, divination, and telepathy. It is primarily, though not exclusively, these extraordinary powers that have been designated by such special terms as Mana, Orenda, and the Iranian Maga (the term from which our word magic is derived). We shall henceforth employ the term charisma for such extraordinary powers.

Weber, famous as a chief architect of modern social science, was not rejecting nonempirical, magical ideas such as telepathy, the Polynesian mana, or the Iroquois orenda, but repackaging them. Rather than economic forces or ideologies, it was the ecstatic state between rulers and their followers that explained politics.

This new usage remained obscure for almost half a century. Charisma owes its popularity to its journey across the Atlantic, where it was enthusiastically adopted first by postwar American intellectuals sympathetic to Weber, and then by a mass public eager to explain the new world of televisual political celebrity.

In 1949, the sociologist and journalist Daniel Bell tried to slip the word into a Fortune magazine piece only to have it rejected by the editors as elite jargon. But within two decades, the word was widespread enough for a 1969 piece in Time to call it one of the dominant clichs of the 1960s. Google Books data confirm this, showing charisma and charismatic leaping 1,700 percent from 1940 to 1970, and continuing the same exponential curve through to the 2000s, by which time it had grown 6,000 percent.

The 1960s articles that introduced the concept to the American public are eerily like todays vibe think pieces: They acknowledge that the word mystifies rather than clarifies, yet embrace its value as an alternative to dry analysis. The big thing in politics these days is charisma, pronounced karizma, an April 1968 New York Times piece told a readership it clearly assumed to be new to the word. Noting how the idea was being used to describe the mysterious powers of political figures such as Stokely Carmichael and Bobby Kennedy to enchant audiences, the author concluded that charisma was a symbol for telling a complex story in simple terms.

From the September 2016 issue: The charisma effect

Six months later in the same paper, a multipage splash by Richard Lingeman under the title The Greeks Had a Word for ItBut What Does It Mean? championed charisma and suggested that the word persists perhaps because it reflects some deep-rooted need we have to believe in the magic of personality. A need, he added, that was quite separate from traditional demands of proof, evidence, or data.

When it was embraced in the 1960s, charisma offered a way of talking about the ever more entwined worlds of politics, celebrity, Hollywood, and television. It gave a secular label to a mood of spiritual resistance to existing institutions, and not coincidentally, gave its name to the charismatic movement in evangelical American Protestantism. Above all, charisma was useful as a way of avoiding reliance on statistics or technical analysis and a deft means of side-stepping ideological sciences of history such as Marxism or liberalism.

These anti-empirical qualities inspired many lines of attack. In 1968 the British sociologist Peter Worsley thought charisma a hopelessly blunt instrument; in the 1980s, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu derided it as a means of escape from having to think about social relations; in 2009, the American political theorist Fredric Jameson dismissed it as an utterly useless pseudo-concept that led away from lived realities.

Yet, again, the take-up of charisma suggests that most people simply found the term useful.

Even those contemporary commentators, such as Matt Yglesias, who pour scorn on the imprecision of vibes today are content to use the equally anti-empirical charisma.

Is this shift from charisma to vibes merely history repeating itself, or is vibes doing something different from its illustrious predecessor? The answer is yes, and yes.

Like charisma, vibes can be seen as an artifact of the 1960s, specifically the good vibrations language of the counterculture borrowed from older esoteric traditions that described social relations as vibratory. As Google Books data testify, vibrations were a particularly important part of 19th-century language, peaking in the 1880s at the height of the Spiritualist movement. Hippie revival of this language owed as much to Victorian sances as it did to California communes.

Derek Thompson: Democrats are getting crushed in the vibes war

Both vibes and charisma make the case that politics is experiential. Where charisma appealed to a 20th-century discourse with its whiff of classical antiquity, however, vibes today instead meets the needs of a looser, self-consciously atomized algorithmic world. Where charisma was admiring and grand, vibes is noncommittal and irreverent. Charisma, like glamour, is about an exotic superiority: Someone with compelling vibes can be extremely ordinary, and in fact the very vibe they communicate can be that of ordinariness.

And where charisma describes an individuals power, vibes focuses attention on collective emotion. Rather than describing gifted or extraordinary people, modern vibe-talk puts the significance back on the crowd. This emphasis was present in 19th-century Spiritualist uses of vibes. Some people had a stronger relationship to shared spiritual vibrations in the ether than others, and they could perceive and then channel an ambient mood. They might be unnaturally empathetic or open to the vibes. But they werent where the power truly lay.

In this way, vibe-talk reaches back beyond charisma to describe a fascination with people, like Fetterman, who seem to have a powerful receptivity to their immediate milieu. In place of hero worship and subordination, vibes is all about authenticity and what the philosopher Robin James calls sympathetic resonance.

The tools we use to describe political psychology matter. As linguistics and psychologists are eager to point out, metaphors and abstract nouns are not just linguistic conventions but real elements of thought that control how we think. Tracing their rise and fall offers a window into shifting values.

The vibe-shift away from data and dry analysis might simply be a fad. But it also allows us to measure the distance between the ideas that younger and older generations hold about the individual, about collective emotion, and about the politics of language itself.

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The Origin of Vibes - The Atlantic

From photographs of remarkable Black women to an exploration of the definition of kinship, these new exhibits explore the breadth of the modern American experience.

The saying goes that good things come in threes, but four good things are coming to Washington, D.C.s Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery this year. Over the course of the summer and fall, the museum will show four new exhibits that examine what it means to be an American today.

Opening July 8, I Dream a World: Selections from Brian Lankers Portraits of Remarkable Black Women will showcase a selection of portraits of contemporary Black American women whove shaped the country with their work in the arts, literature, activism, and politics. Next up, One Life: Maya Lin takes a biographical look at the award-winning Asian American architect behind D.C.s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (September 30April 16, 2023). Kinship, which features more than 40 works by eight U.S. photographers, explores the interpersonal relationships that bind us (October 28January 27, 2024). And slated to debut November 10 is Portrait of a Nation: 2022 Honorees, which pays respect to seven notable Americans who have made a significant impact on the country in the past year.

Together, the four exhibits create a poignant representation of the ever-evolving, modern American identity and the commonalities that unite usa powerful balm in todays divisive times. Because the gallery is a Smithsonian institution, admission is free and tickets are not required.

I Dream a World may look familiar to those who know the work of late Pulitzer Prizewinning photographer Brian Lanker; his 1989 book of the same name serves as the basis of the exhibit, with the likenesses of 25 extraordinary Black women. Although Lanker passed away in 2011, the iconic photographs have been in his familys possession since then and were first displayed at the Mulvane Art Museum in Topeka, Kansas, in 2020. In the first installation (July 8, 2022January 29, 2023) at the National Portrait Gallery, photographs of women like Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and Rosa Parks will be on display while in the second (February 10September 10, 2023), visitors may recognize familiar faces like Oprah Winfrey and Odetta, the voice of the Civil Rights Movement.

This exhibition is important because, through compelling portraits, it invites us to consider the achievements of inspiring Black women who overcame tremendous challenges to succeed in fields as diverse as literature, law, music, sports, and politics, said Ann Shumard, senior curator of photographs, in an email.

The next to make its big entrance will be the latest chapter in the National Portrait Gallerys One Life series, which involves the museum dedicating a full gallery to the life of one significant American. This time, the special exhibition will focus on the heralded architect, environmentalist, and sculptorMaya Lin, who is perhaps best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The exhibit uses photographs, sketchbook drawings, architectural models, sculptures, and personal items that guide viewers through the four decades Lin has produced work. Lin is passionate about the environment, and part of her What Is Missing? project, which addresses the global biodiversity crisis, will also be on display. One Life: Maya Lin will be the first time the series has honored an Asian American since it began in 2006. The exhibition opens September 30.

Kinship features the work of international contemporary photographers Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Ruth Leonela Buentello, Jess T. Dugan, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jessica Todd Harper, Thomas Holton, Sedrick Huckaby, and Anna Tsouhlarakis, who were all tasked with exploring the nature of love and relationships of all kinds. Some themes that the installation will touch on include childhood and adulthood, gender roles, the geographic and regional diversity of the country, and life and death. Kinship is the latest exhibition of the Gallerys Portraiture Now series, which showcases the work of the most renowned and innovative photojournalists of the 21st century. Visitors can catch the exhibit beginning October 28.

Last but not least is Portrait of a Nation: 2022 Honorees, which is scheduled to run starting November 10 for nearly a year. The gallerys Portrait of a Nation series commemorates seven Americans who had a huge impact in their respective field within the year, and have subsequently become a part of the countrys zeitgeist. Honorees this year include director Ava DuVernay, for her work in television and film; Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the U.S. President who guided the nation through the COVID crisis; and Serena Williams and Venus Williams, tennis stars whose lives were explored in the Oscar-winning film King Richard.

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4 Powerful Photography Exhibitions Will Debut at the National Portrait Gallery This Year - AFAR Media

It could be argued that the pro-choice movement is not fully aware of the organization pro-life movement, as well as its reach when it comes to young people in particular. While your documentary will shed much needed light on the situation, why do you think the pro-choice movement isn't as clued into the demographics of the pro-life protestors?

Pro-choice audiences and I expect that the majority of audiences for this film will be pro-choice people, and we've really started to hear this already in the screenings that we've been doing people are really surprised by how little they know about the anti-abortion movement. Even for people who are very staunchly pro-choice and who consider themselves to be reasonably engaged in current events and news, a lot of people don't know about these organizations.

They don't know about the Susan B. Anthony List. They don't know about Students for Life. That same feeling was part of what compelled me to want to make this film I felt like we're seeing anti-abortion legislation passing in very sweeping ways and we're seeing the results of the power of the anti-abortion movement trickle down in various ways in state bans and other kinds of bans and legislation that were being passed prior to Roe being overturned.

There was something missing. There was something that I wasn't seeing in the equation that would help me understand why, in a country where the majority of people support abortion access, we were seeing abortion being so radically dismantled. That sense of my own not knowing who the anti-abortion movement is and how they're doing what they're doing and how they're organizing and what they believe, those were all things that compelled me as a pro-choice person to want to understand. That curiosity was behind the approach to the film.

I also was struck in making the film that Marjorie Dannenfelser has a book on her desk that is called "Know Thine Enemy: A History of the Left." It's very clear to me in making the film, and hopefully for people in watching the film, that the anti-abortion movement is certainly watching what the left is doing and what the pro-choice movement is doing and what the progressive social justice movements in the United States are doing.

You see them appropriating that language, the language of the Women's March, by calling the theme of the March for Life in 2020 "pro-life is pro woman." You see when the Black Lives Matter protests happened that Students for Life is very fast to appropriate that movement, creating all of these "Black pre-born lives matter" events across the United States.

This phenomenon is something that is attempting to mainstream the anti-abortion movement as something that is within the contemporary zeitgeist in the United States. It's also an attempt to reach people who consider themselves to be concerned about social justice, to reach young people through this appeal. By showing how much the anti-abortion movement is keeping an eye on progressive movements and using the language of the left and absorbing it and appropriating it, it's important on the flip side to shine a light on who they are and what they're doing and how they're doing it. It's something that the pro-choice movement and many people who are pro-choice aren't necessarily looking at and haven't necessarily investigated very closely.

Learn more about the documentary, "Battleground,"athttps://battlegroundfilm.org. Follow the film on Facebook at @BattlegroundTheFilm, on Twitter at @battlegrndfilm, and on Instagram at @battlegroundthefilm.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Correction:Terrisa Bukovinac's name was initially misspelled. This has been corrected.

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Battleground Director Cynthia Lowen On Roe V. Wade And Pro-Life Views - Exclusive Interview - The List

Thirty years ago, Irish youth culture took its brains to another dimension. The 1990s was a golden age for clubbing all over the world, as genres such as house music and later jungle and trip-hop briefly dominated the zeitgeist. But in Ireland the shockwaves felt especially profound as a country that had spent the previous decades languishing in poverty, religiosity and grinding hopelessness stepped into the bright lights.

This cultural insurgency was countrywide. But it manifested in different ways in different places. In Cork, Sir Henrys became the lodestar for a clubbing scene that would put the city on the international map. In Waterford, the short-lived South mega-club previously the Celtworld theme park became an epicentre (albeit slightly later in 2001) while the Bridge Hotel hosted Underworld during their Born Slippy imperial phase. Galway had the Castle in Salthill, with its regular Sex Kitchen evening.

In Dublin, the sheer size of the city ensured clubbing would become a multi-headed beast. It was simultaneously underground and commercial, niche and mainstream, grass-roots and corporate. And the full scale of that explosion is now explored and celebrated in a new exhibition, to be hosted at the Bernard Shaw pub and venue in Drumcondra July 9-10.

Analog Rhythms A Celebration of Dublin Club Culture tracks the rise and fall of venues such as Sides DC at Dame Lane, Temple of Sound on Curved Street in Temple Bar, The Ormond Multimedia Centre on Ormond Quay, The Pod on Harcourt Street, Columbia Mills on Sir John Robertsons Quay in the docklands, and The Asylum, a three-storey, pink-exterior building on Sackville Place.

The 1990s was a time of cultural awakening in Ireland for many reasons. There was a lot of [social] liberalisation. The nightlife industry gained traction over that period, says Stephen Wynne-Jones of club culture website 909 Originals, which has put on the exhibition.

It's important to tell the story of where things came from, says Wynne-Jones who began DJing and documenting the scene in the late 1990s. The nightlife industry is going through a difficult period at present. But it is well established that Dublin and Ireland is a good place to go out in. And that were attractive to foreign visitors in terms of our nightlife.

The story of clubbing in Ireland is bound up with the wider cultural history. The early 1990s were a period of huge change for the country. The despair of the Eighties had gone but the empty swagger of the Celtic Tiger had yet to come roaring through. And if Ireland was becoming recognised as a cultural hotspot, Dublin had yet to turn into a purgatory of British stag parties and Leprechaun museums. For just a moment, everything seemed possible and that sense of unfulfilled potential lit a fuse under Irish nightlife.

You can track it from the late 1980s, says Wynne-Jones. There were a few clubs. Established places like Sides and the Olympic Ballroom [on Pleasants Street in Dublin 8] were running dance events by the early 1990s. But there was also a lot of negativity about the industry. There was acid house hysteria [in the press].

This attitude of shunning youth culture had fallen away by the middle of the decade. Clubbing was recognised for its cultural currency.

As the 1990s progressed, there's an element of growing sophistication about Dublin nightlife, says Wynne-Jones. You had venues like the Pod opening up, with John Reynolds. And the Kitchen [at Bono and The Edges Clarence Hotel]. You went in terms of media coverage from clubbing being some sort of dirty underground nasty thing. To being something we should be proud of. During the mid-point of the 1990s you had countless magazines coming from overseas saying, Is this the clubbing capital of Europe?

Each clubbing scene in Ireland was unique. What set Dublin apart was the sheer diversity, says Wynne-Jones.

You had different tribes to a certain degree. This was very prevalent back in the 1980s and 1990s. For the real underground clubbers you had venues such as the Asylum. For the more sophisticated you had the Pod and the Kitchen. Even within that, if you were into drum and bass, youd go to the Funnel or Switch.

If you were into hard techno you might go to the Kitchen on a Tuesday. Dublin being the capital city and a bit of a melting pot culturally, though obviously a lot more so now, you had the development of multiple different strands of nightlife all happening at the same time. You had some promoters you took things very seriously. And others who just wanted to have a bit of a laugh, like Martin Thomass Strictly Handbag.

One of the first to recognise something was happening in Dublin was David Bowie who, by 1997 had fallen hard for drum and bass (that year saw the release of his jungle-themed Earthling LP]. He would visit the capital, attending drum and bass nights at venues such as Andrews Lane. He may have been attracted by the grass-roots character of the movement here. He will certainly have noticed the sense of self-belief and optimism in the air.

Ireland began to feel a little more self-confident about itself, agrees Wynne-Jones. Those who were in college in the 1980s who didnt emigrate, who didnt leave the country were like, why dont we create something? People would go to London and further afield and come back seized by a sense of possibility.

They were seeing what was going on in the UK with the emergence of the acid house scene. And seeing there was nothing happening here. It was really about taking a punt: could we create something in Ireland? A promoter might know a few people who played some records. They might save a few quid and bring down someone from the North to play a night. They might bring bands with them as well.

Initially, this was a DIY movement. It was born really out of the 1980s and the disillusionment and the lack of job options and career prospects, says Wynne-Jones.

From the outside, it looked like an overnight revolution. One minute Dublin was a moribund backwater, the next one of Europes party capitals. In fact, this was a story years in the making.

It depends who you talk to. The likes of Tonie Walsh [founder of Gay Community News] would say it started with Flikkers, a gay disco which opened in the late 1970s [on Fownes Street in Temple Bar]. Others should say Sides which opened in 1986 but which didnt become a house music venue until a few years after that. The UK had its 1988 and all of that [when influential acid house night Shoom began to attract media attention in London].

Dublin was a couple of years behind. You had venues like the Olympic Ballroom opening to dance events. And the Mansion House, which was really well covered in the mainstream media and put things in the spotlight. You had events taking place in The Point. You had clubs like The Asylum. Certainly, by 1993 or 1994 we had a broader outlook catering for different tastes.

There are lessons for today, too. Amid a seemingly unresolvable accommodation crisis, youth culture has to find new ways to express itself. There is evidence, feels Wynne-Jones, that the DIY outlook that informed 1990s clubbing may be about to come roaring through once more.

A lot of people who were clubbing back then are now the bosses, CEOs and international representatives of Ireland. Including plenty of TDs. It cant have harmed our confidence, which was obviously lifted by the Celtic Tiger as well. The problem with clubbing in Ireland and Dublin and a lot of markets is that it is cyclical. There are periods when things shut down and people ask, Is the honeymoon over? Then theres a new generation coming through saying Lets go back to basics and keep the fire burning.

Irelands Greatest 1990s Club Nights

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Club culture in the 1990s: How Dublin danced to a new beat - Irish Examiner