Category Archives: Zeitgeist Movement

John Lydons view of The Beatles is an unusual one. When speaking at a Q&A at The 100 Club in London, the iconic punk figure opined, There are social changes in this country that are really important that you understand. It was vitally relevant when I was just a tiny little kid, that rather than listen to that endless fking dreary classical stuff, they started to play pop music. But the pop music was selected, and it was a bit wank at first. Then when bands like The Beatles came in, they were doing something really fking important!

He then continues in a wry ironic fashion, You have to understand that when I slag them off, Im not slagging off their historical perspective. They were vital for my development. Then comes the confused question, But you didnt like them? To which the iconoclastic frontman bluntly proclaims, No.

In truth, the parallels between the Sex Pistols and The Beatles are almost non-existent in a musicological sense, however, if you look at attitudes and the way that both artists handled inspirations from the past in order to seize the future zeitgeist, the two acts share a kinship. Punk was almost a revival of the tearaway sixties attitude shaking up with the stilted world of culture and liberating change.

Punk revitalised culture in the same way the Lydon had proclaimed of The Beatles, the movement was, indeed, very important. As Paul McCartney himself would later declare:I understood that it needed to happen. It was a great thing and something like Pretty Vacant as a record, is really good. Before explaining that there was even a tangible link too. It was produced by Chris Thomas, who we knew he was George Martins assistant and had worked on some Beatles stuff, he added in aQuietusinterview.

However, it was John Lennon shortly before he was tragically killed who took the link between the bands even further. I only heard whatever they did on video. There was a lot of video down at Maxs [Kansas City] or wherever they were playing and Johnny Rotten and all that stuff. And yeah, great, he began when asked about The Sex Pistols.

Later adding: To me, initially on impact, seeing all that stuff was like Oh thats how we used to behave at the Cavern [Club] before Brian [Epstein] told us to stop throwing up and sleeping on stage and swearing. In Hamburg, I used to sleep on stage, we used to eat on stage, we used to swear on stage, we were absolutely au naturale.

However, the rather conservative mainstream wasnt quite ready to face that rock n roll heathenry head-on. As Lennon added: Nowadays, they dont have to put a shine all over it to get a record contract, even if they are getting a hard time over it. But, yeah, I think its great, I absolutely do. When I was in Bermuda a guy turned me on the B-52s, Lenny Lovitch [Lene Lovich] or whatever her name is and Madness about two years ago, but then I wouldnt listen now I want to hear what is going on, and I dig it!

Forever with their finger to the pulse, The Beatles were a band who thrived on knowing the whys and wherefores of the current state of culture. When they were together they picked up on the vital importance of the virtues that Bob Dylan was extolling in his music and incorporated it into their sound. Clearly, when the next generation blazed their own trail, they were happy to take heed of its spirit, even if it wasnt in keeping with their sound.

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John Lennon on the similarities between The Beatles and The Sex Pistols - Far Out Magazine

Photo: Will White, Courtesy of Twin Oaks

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For years, whenever I was feeling exhausted or overwhelmed or underappreciated, whenever I began contemplating the number of dishes Id scoured or meals Id prepared or loads of laundry Id washed and folded and sorted, I would say to whoever happened to be listening, Maybe Ill run away and join a feminist commune.

It wasnt a threat so much as a fantasy. Well, maybe it was a threat, albeit an ineffective one. Im not exactly commune material. I have a stubborn, contrarian streak, and I like central air-conditioning. Still, it comforted me: the idea that one day I might live in a place where the burden of domestic labor, both waged and unwaged, would be borne equally by all who benefited from it.

If you want me to do something around the house, why dont you just ask me? every man Ive ever lived with has said.

My Swedish friend suggested this was an American problem that men in Sweden didnt have to read womens minds to know they should do some dishes. Other men, apparently, would shame them for a dereliction of domestic duty.

But fleeing to a feminist commune, or to Scandinavia, wasnt very practical. Still, I wondered if the kind of utopia I was imagining still existed. I knew that in the 19th century, followers of the French philosopher Charles Fourier and the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen had inspired others to set up experimental, utopian communities as an alternative to what one Fourierist called the innumerable evils of the isolated household. I knew that in this century, in the 60s and 70s, there had been lesbian separatist communes and mens child-care collectives aimed at reimagining gendered relations and divisions of labor.So that night after speaking with my Swedish friend, while the dishes festered and the dog stood longingly by the door, I Googled Are there still feminist communes? Can I move there?

The first site that appeared was a place called Twin Oaks.

Twin Oaks is the oldest secular, income-sharing commune in the country. It is located on a swath of rural land in central Virginia about an hour from Charlottesville. Over the years, other sister communes, the Acorn Community and the Living Energy Farm, have cropped up around it, creating an island of secular communitarians in the unlikely region of Amelia County. Founded in 1967 by Kat Kinkade and seven other students of behavioral psychology, the architects of Twin Oaks modeled the place after B.F. Skinners Walden Two, a book about a fictional behaviorist community set up to encourage cooperation, egalitarianism, and nonviolence. Valerie, a 54-year-old woman originally from Ontario who has lived at Twin Oaks for 29 years, stressed in our first conversation that people always assume we were founded by hippies but, really, we were founded by psychologists. At the core of Skinners behavioral model is the premise that human behavior is shaped as much by environment as it is by individual will or choices. If you value children, then you set up a system that meets both their needs and the needs of those who care for them. Change requires a reimagining of spaces and environments rather than of individual desire.

In this way, Twin Oaks is more of a social experiment than a political one. The people I spoke to who moved there tended to do so more out of dissatisfaction with the modes of social living available to them in mainstream society than out of a specific, political conviction, though many certainly held strong anarcho- and ecological-leaning beliefs.

While the community is founded on values around equality, ecology, and nonviolence, it offers more of an escape from the isolation and scarcity model of the nuclear family than a road map for remaking it. When I asked writer, transfeminist theorist, and family abolitionist Sophie Lewis what she thought of such communities, she replied that while she doesnt view these places as proto-revolutionary, she does believe that after the revolution, well be looking to experiments like Twin Oaks for the skills people have learned there.

What exactly were those skills, I wondered, and could they help overwhelmed mothers like myself live in a better, saner way now, even before the revolution?

For over a year, Id been reading about American families devastated by school closures and lost income and an unprecedented mental-health crisis among children. Id read about the conditions that forced nearly 2 million women to leave the workforce since the start of the pandemic. Even last month, eight out of ten child-care centers around the country were still reporting staff shortages, one in three women said they have considered either downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce completely, and children are coping with unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, suicide, and self-harm. Many parents, particularly those in Black and Latino families that have been hardest hit, have watched their children lose academic skills, falling behind more privileged peers. Under normal circumstances, raising kids in a country without paid family leave, affordable day care, a well-funded public-education system, or basic social safety nets can feel like an impossible task. The past year and a half has been the opposite of normal.

But how has it been, I wondered, for parents at a place like Twin Oaks?

Was the pandemic rough on parents? a slender, unimposing man in his early 50s asked me from across the picnic table during my first day there. I was picking at my leek-and-lentil salad when he said it, and it took a moment to swallow. I thought the man was joking, but there was nothing insincere in his expression.

Its been hard, I said. Really hard.

The man, Keenan, was sitting across from his partner, Kelpie, a cheerful woman in her late 50s with a long salt-and-pepper ponytail, and beside them were two other Twin Oaks parents and a man in his 40s named Christian, who technically has no children of his own but, because he has lived in this place for many years, feels as though he has many children of all different ages some still living at Twin Oaks and others who have left.

I tried to explain to the group all the reasons it has been a very bad year for American children and the people who care for them. The Twin Oaks parents had read about these multiple crises but remained largely insulated from them. Unlike us, they were not anxiously awaiting to see if any form of child-care credit or family-friendly reform might be salvaged from Bidens torpedoed Build Back Better bill, which originally proposed 12 weeks of mandatory paid family leave. It was a depressing legislative failure, especially here, at a place that had figured out how to integrate child care into its economy over 50 years ago and is still doing so today.

Many of the parents I spoke to at Twin Oaks had been drawn to the community precisely because they hoped to one day have children without making the kinds of wrenching sacrifices and compromises so many American parents make. Keenans partner, Kelpie, for example, who just before lunch had been singing with a group of children, saw firsthand the toll parenthood had taken on the friends she grew up with in Kansas. Id done a lot of babysitting before I came here, so I knew what I was getting into, and I purposefully wanted to raise children in community. I could see that raising kids in a nuclear family was going to be she paused, looking for just the right word hell.

Kelpie was quick to assure me that her own family of origin was wonderful and her childhood had been a happy one. But we had relatives nearby who often took care of me and my brother, she said. My friends were moving away to different places and had no one helping them raise the kids. I knew I couldnt manage being a single parent, but you dont always get to choose sometimes it just ends up that way. Throughout her 20s, Kelpie watched her friends with children struggle: So many were just not making it. They had trouble with their parents, trouble with poverty. I wanted to help, and they were like, Uh, can you watch this child while I work, while I go on an interview, while I do anything? And I was like Sometimes when Im not working or going to school myself. There was just no support for them, not in a structural way.

After lunch, Valerie took me on a tour of the grounds, showing me the different dormitory-style houses in which members live. Every member, including children, has their own bedroom but shares bathrooms, a communal kitchen, and spaces for socializing and recreation. She showed me the house designated for members with young children; the visitors house, at which a prospective member lives for a month before applying to join; and the various agricultural businesses the commune runs (a hammock-making business, a tofu-making plant, an organic seed company).

The land on which Twin Oaks sits feels spacious, much of it rustic and undeveloped. While members come and go as they please, staying anywhere from a few months to four decades, the community caps the population at 150, adhering to evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbars theory that it is the highest number of humans with which an individual can maintain stable relationships. These relationships at Twin Oaks are nonhierarchical by design. Managerial positions rotate among members. Decisions are arrived at not by majority rule but by process of proposal, discussion, revision, and debate. This process applies to everything from a decision about adjusting members weekly individual allowance (they currently receive $80 a month for personal expenditures), to the acceptance of a new member, to decisions around family planning.

As we walked across the damp, wooded farmland, past the office, library, and the laundry lines of garments referred to as commie clothes, at which members can trade and share clothing, Valerie described to me the system and the process of starting a family at Twin Oaks. Most members of Twin Oaks were able to enroll in Medicaid under the recent expansion. Any non-covered medical costs, including prenatal care, are covered by the community. After a member has lived at Twin Oaks for at least two years, they and their partner or partners (some members form polyamorous parenting partnerships) can apply to have or adopt a child. In their application, they must document that theyve completed a certain number of child-care hours, that they have interviewed other Twin Oaks parents to learn what its like raising kids there, and that theyve formed a social support system among other members to support them as they become parents. The applications are reviewed the same way all proposals are at Twin Oaks: They are circulated around the community for anyone to read and respond to. From what members have told me, the response to a proposed new child is rarely negative or controversial. Keenan, who works sometimes in responding to inquiries about Twin Oaks, described how often families with children inquire to see about moving there with their kids. He feels bad giving them the news that Twin Oaks doesnt accept new members with children, largely because it wants to make sure it has enough space for existing members to have kids if and when they decide to.

Mala, one of the first Twin Oaks parents I met, a 46-year-old mother of two, was eager to assure me that this application and approval process is not as controlling or dystopian as it sounds. Almost everyone who applies is approved, she told me. Ive been here for 20 years, and I can only think of one case in all those years where there was a problem: A member was having some significant physical- and mental-health problems and wanted to have a child on her own. She wasnt told no, Mala said. She was told that she needed to work on some of these health issues and find people who were willing to help her and then reapply. Not long after, she had a psychotic breakdown and ended up leaving the community. We all felt like we really dodged a bullet.

For a moment, I felt a pang of sympathy for the woman and wondered if being told by those closest to her that she wasnt fit to bring a child into her community contributed to her breakdown. There are many parents who struggle with mental and physical illness and still become good parents. Of course, they generally dont do it alone. As though reading my mind, Mala added, It would have been different if shed had other co-parents onboard. The woman wasnt able to find anyone in the community who wanted to co-parent with her. The community thought she needed more support: We put a huge amount of money and labor into each child, so were trying to avoid a situation in which were making that investment for somebody who isnt invested in us.

Until the mid-1980s, that investment in children looked different than it does today. During the two decades after it was founded, Twin Oaks children lived in a separate dwelling called Degania, a child-care center modeled on the childrens houses in Israeli settlers kibbutzim.

Eventually, the parents decided they didnt want it, Mala explained. Many members had turned to communal living to escape the rigid divisions of work and homelife in mainstream life that forced people to divide up their time and attention, so in place of the former, communalized childrens house, Twin Oaks implemented a labor system that counted the hours that parents (or other members) spent with children toward their 42 hours of required weekly labor. Mala described the current system as nuclearish. There are currently 14 children living at Twin Oaks and more at the nearby sister commune Acorn. The kids and their parents are distributed across four different buildings, and many parents choose to live in the family building. Parents there help one another out the same way an extended family living in a multiunit flat might. Also, parents receive labor credit for the care of their own children that can be divided between themselves as they see fit. A 42-hour workweek sounds like a lot, but not when you realize what work includes here, Mala said. So its not that you work 42 hours and then, on your time off, you have to get the groceries, and plan the dinner, and wash the dishes, and parent your children, and fix things around the house, and so on. All of those things are work theyre valuable, but in the mainstream, theyre not counted. Here, they are.

The other thing that she and the other parents I spoke to loved about raising kids in community like this was the communes primaries: non-parental figures who receive labor credit for working with a specific child and developing a relationship with that child that often continues for years. At lunch that day, Christian described how meaningful those relationships have been: In the outside world, most people have to choose between having almost no contact with kids whatsoever or taking on the single biggest responsibility anyone can take on. If I were a single 44-year-old male living alone and childless in the outside world, I would not be okay with that. But living here, I love it. The relationships Ive had here with kids over the years, I do feel like, in some ways, I am a parent. When I asked the Twin Oaks members if it was hard to get used to this practice of having nonfamily members invest so much time with your children, they looked at me with sympathy, as though Id asked if it were strange to have a roof over your head or enough food to eat. Many of these parents had lived here for years; they had lost touch with the fact that on the outside or the mainstream, as they call it parents often have no one and nothing to rely on but themselves.

Families at Twin Oaks are insulated from the world beyond the commune but not isolated from it. Mala, for instance, left our world behind 20 years ago, but she and her partner and kids still visit friends and family regularly, as do most members of Twin Oaks. Over the years, a number of Twin Oaks kids have attended public school in Amelia and a Montessori school in Charlottesville, and members regularly take small trips in the surrounding area for entertainment and recreation.

In college, Mala wrote her thesis on feminism and reproduction in science fiction, reading Shulamith Firestones The Dialectic of Sex and Marge Piercys novel Woman on the Edge of Time. The latter depicts a genderless, classless world in which every child is assigned three mothers of any sex; Mala found the idea intriguing. I knew I wanted to have children one day, but Id already come to the conclusion that there would never be true gender equality as long as half the population did most of the work of child-rearing. When I read Woman on the Edge of Time, I thought, Thats the kind of place where I want to live or whatevers closest to that, she recalled.

The idea that the nuclear family might not be the most humane or sustainable structure for human reproduction is hardly a new one. In her forthcoming book on the subject, After the Family: The Case for Abolition, Lewis takes her readers on a tour of this movement, from Platos Republic to the utopian visions of Fourier and the polyamorous, anti-work communes founded across Europe in his name. She describes the nonfamilial modes of collective ownership practiced by Native and Indigenous peoples until they were destroyed by imperialism. She details the anti-family arguments at the heart of Friedrich Engelss The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and the revolutionary Soviet commissar Alexandra Kollontai, then jumps forward to the anti-family revolutionaries of the 60s and 70s, who launched a parallel insurgency that championed the economic, sexual and gender freedoms of young people, and attacked the private nuclear household from the outside, and, finally, to the 45-year lull in family-abolitionist activity that coincided with the Reagan-era Moral Majority, stranger-danger Zeitgeist of both neoconservatism and neoliberalism.

According to Lewis, there is a very recent resurrection of family-abolitionist activism that began around 2015 with the publication of K.D. Griffiths and J.J. Gleesons academic paper Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st Century Family and a Communist Proposal for Its Abolition. While this might have been viewed as the stuff of radical, fringe-left fantasy only a few years ago, Lewis noticed a shift that began with the pandemic, when sincere conversations blossomed around the topic in diverse forums ranging from socialist ones like Tribune and Jacobin to mainstream vehicles like Vice Media and The New Yorker.

The timing of this reemergence of family abolition, in many ways, makes sense. Last year, Annie Lowrey wrote in The Atlantic about the great affordability crisis, a meteoric rise in the cost of living, especially for families, that has substantially lowered middle-class security and quality of life during the decades of so-called economic growth. The structure of the nuclear family has always made economic life and social belonging difficult for those who fall outside it, those who, for whatever reason, choose not to marry and have children or do so without a partner. But after decades of disinvestment in public education, rising child-care costs, and the increasing isolation of the nuclear family, even middle-class, two-parent households are struggling under the strain. The pandemic did not create this crisis, but it has exacerbated it and, in a sense, democratized it. As Lewis writes in After the Family, A household breathes and dies together in its owned or rented property The virus is a stranger danger.

The newer members of Twin Oaks I spoke to, many in their 20s and 30s, were well aware of the bleakness of this economic landscape.

Faye, a 31-year-old social worker, moved to Twin Oaks in September after spending the preceding year traveling through a pandemic and working on organic farms around the country. She returned home just as lockdowns were ending and remembers clearly the moment she decided to seek out a community. It was always kind of on my radar, she explained. I had friends who lived at a Missouri community called East Wind. Living in Florida, Faye worked as a behavior analyst with kids with autism, then as a social worker in the states foster-care system. Faye had moved back in with her parents temporarily due to some health problems and remembers how when the pandemic hit, I was saving up all this money to move out of my parents house and get my own apartment. And I just realized that with my salary, I was never gonna be able to. I had a decent job, and it still felt impossible. But even more than the economic reality was the social one. I was lonely, she told me. And even if I was able to buy a house, a house wasnt going to solve that.

As Faye spoke, I found myself moved by her honesty but also saddened for all the people like her: people of every age and background who felt excluded by the structure of the nuclear family, people who, for one reason or another, felt as though there was no place where they belonged, no space where they felt seen and needed and safe.

A long time ago, in my early 20s, I had been one of those people. But unlike Faye, I lacked the courage or imagination to abandon all the old familiar structures. Instead, I married. I had children. I determined Id make the kind of home Id always wanted, that if I tried hard enough I might struggle but I couldnt possibly fail. In the years that followed, I struggled and failed to be the kind of homemaker I thought my kids deserved. Like most women who attempt this challenge, I did the best I could. Now, I might occasionally imagine running away to a commune, fleeing the confines and conventions I willingly chose. The truth, though, was that after only a few days away, I missed them badly. I missed my children, my partner, my home, my furniture, my desk, my chickens. For better or for worse, I was a woman shaped by personal possessives. I called a college friend who lived in Charlottesville and asked her if I could come for dinner.

A teacher and writer, she lived in a big house on a hill with her husband and cats. She could tell I seemed crestfallen when I arrived and raised my spirits with decadent provisions. There was chili, good bread and cheese, red wine, and ice cream her favorite brand (not local but shipped direct). After a couple days of lentils, the ice cream felt as luxurious as caviar. I saw myself for what I was: a woman softened and spoiled by civilization. I coveted Twin Oaks communal values, its anarchist and egalitarian principles, but not its lack of high-speed internet and expensive desserts.

Im a bad communist, I said to my friend, finishing off a pint.

Most of us probably are, she offered.

The next day, I returned once more to Twin Oaks. Mala had told me there was one more member who was eager to speak with me: a man named Tigger in his late 50s who had met his co-parent at Twin Oaks and raised two kids there. Both his daughter and son had left to attend the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, but six months earlier, his 18-year-old daughter, Gwen, had been killed in a car accident.

Sitting across from me at a picnic bench, set back from the others, Tigger told me how when people wrote about Twin Oaks, they often focused on what it was like to work and live there, to have fun and have relationships there, and all of this was fine, but he thought it was also important to acknowledge that in addition to all that, Twin Oaks was a place where people are born and where people die. Ive been here for 26 years, and that really impacts how I see the community and the relationships we have with each other.

Tigger was still in mourning but told me he couldnt have gotten through the past six months without this community: We went and got her from the funeral home, and the kids she grew up with were her pallbearers. They carried her coffin. There were 200 people at the funeral. It was huge. And it was beautiful.I did not want to have a funeral, and I didnt want to bury my daughter. But part of what has helped me in my grief is how we buried her together. As Tigger saw it, birth and death were not meant to be borne alone, and the main difference between Twin Oaks and the rest of the world was that its members shared things in a way and to a degree that had become unusual not only material things but also experiences, responsibility, even pain and loss. I mean, were primates on a biological level, he said. Were not meant to be private. And what has happened in the modern world is that weve slowly gone from a clan to an extended family to nuclear family to the individual. And the bonds between us are breaking. Our basic needs arent being met.

As I left Twin Oaks that day, I felt the truth of Tiggers words. I felt it even as I took in the familiar comfort of my car, my house, my partner, my kids. I felt it in my body like the memory of a fading dream while I bought my groceries, made my dinner, washed my dishes, did my laundry, paid my bills.

I even felt it as I curled up on my sofa with the new copy of Woman on the Edge of Time, the feminist utopian novel Id ordered at Malas urging, which was waiting for me upon my return. Piercy had envisioned not just a commune but an entire world without families, without boundaries around love and care and need. Reading an interview with her about the novel, I was surprised to learn that she pushed back against the books classification as utopian fiction. A utopia, she insisted, was a place that did not and could not exist. Everything she had written, she said, had existed either in the past or in isolated places today. Its not a utopia, she said.Its accessible.

The one story you shouldnt miss today, selected byNew Yorks editors.

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Parenting in Utopia - The Cut

I was in my twenties the first time I heard the concept of the chosen family, and its hard to overstate how much it resonated with me.

Yes! I thought. Forget my biological family, I want to spend my life around people who love and accept me for who I am the family I choose!

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Then again, Im gay, and Id come from a conservative Catholic family with parents who had an extremely difficult time with my being gay. Plus, this was the 80s and early 90s, at the height of the AIDS/HIV epidemic, and Id seen so many people with the disease cruelly judged or rejected by families who claimed to love them.

It didnt help that this was also the height of the pro-family conservative movement and that term, pro-family, had been coined specifically to reject LGBTQ people and our rights.

In other words, at that point in my life, almost every time I heard the word family, it was literally defined as an institution that excluded me.

In a way, my gay friends and I had no choice but to create our own families build our own 28 Barbary Lanes from the Tales of the City books. Some, like the drag families featured in the landmark documentary Paris is Burning, even featured literal parental figures drag mothers.

And trust me, those chosen families saved a lot of lives.

But thirty years later, the landscape of the chosen family looks different to me. For one thing, most biological families are far more accepting of their LGBTQ members now at least in America and Western Europe.

This has mirrored my own family, which went on to become very gay-supportive. Not long ago, pre-COVID, my elderly father laid down the law with the other folks at his retirement home: he refused to sit with anyone who didnt support same-sex marriage.

But the concept of the chosen family itself also never really lived up to its hype.

The idea definitely went big-time. Friends and Sex and the City defined the late 90s zeitgeist, not Leave it to Beaver or Little House on the Prairie.

In fact, culturally speaking, Id say we LGBTQ folks completely won the family argument, and the prevailing message in mainstream American entertainment is now way beyond even that of Friends and Sex and the City. The new message is fairly consistent: the cool people leave their families and go off to have exciting (if neurotic) single lives in the city, while the boring, stupid people get married and have kids.

Basically, the traditional family is oppressive and dysfunctional an outdated paradigm that should be mocked and rejected. In its place, we should all now assemble our own families of choice.

But even though we won the argument, Im not sure we won the war. Without the bonds of culture and tradition, how strong are chosen families anyway? Do they really last?

I think about my own chosen family from back in my twenties. At the time, I thought wed be tight forever.

But things changed. Some members of my circle both gay and straight had kids and their children became their top priority. In other cases, people changed cities or took in aging parents. We all moved on with our lives and hey, my husband Michael and I eventually left America to travel the world as digital nomads.

Im still friends with most of my chosen family from way back when in some cases, very good friends. And as world travelers, Michael and I have since made another solid circle of close nomad friends.

But I see now that the role these people play in my life isnt really the same as family.

As for the larger LGBTQ community, people dont seem to be any less lonely and isolated than before we started boldly forging all these chosen families. In fact, theres some evidence that coming out makes a gay person more depressed, not less.

In fact, all Americans seem more lonely and anxious than ever.

And, sure, there are a lot of obvious reasons for Americas current epidemic of anxiety and alienation economic pressures, cynical TV executives and political operatives, and (especially, IMHO) social media, which is literally designed to turn people into frustrated addicts.

But Im increasingly convinced the deconstruction of family is also at least part of the reason why America is so messed up.

Its a very strange thing, being old enough to see an obscure fringe belief you once completely identified with and totally championed go on to become a dominant cultural belief and suddenly youre able to see that, along with its essential truths, the concept also contains some real flaws and limitations.

Sure, the concept of the chosen family has been great for the privileged class, and the young and attractive people who have the money or connections to shield themselves from the brutalities of life. Now they have even more resources to focus on themselves and their own personal happiness.

But what about the elderly? The disabled and the neurodiverse? Addicts? The misfits and oddballs? And children? When chosen families go mainstream, and everyone is picking and choosing their family members, what happens to the folks who take more than they give? Are they simply on their own the responsibility of an impersonal government?

Let me be very, very clear about one thing: I think for a very long time, traditional families in America completely failed their LGBTQ members. They failed women too. Many families are still failing these groups. In traditional countries and cultures, the problem is far, far worse than in America.

It also must be said: despite having been treated so poorly by family, many LGBTQ people and women do the lions share of caring for elderly parents. Ironic much?

I also hope it goes without saying that I acknowledge that some families and family members are so toxic and abusive that they should be completely rejected.(At the same time, it feels to me like some people are now defining toxicity and abuse so broadly that the terms sometimes feel meaningless and some of these folks have ended up pathologizing frustrating-but-normal human interaction. But your mileage may vary.)

Where has my reassessment of family come from anyway?

More than anything, it was that decision Michael and I made to leave America. Before I knew it, I was confronted by something I truly hadnt expected namely, when it comes to family, America is a massive outlier compared with the rest of the world. Outside of the United States, most people have a completely different relationship with their relatives.

They also seem, well, happier. Theres always the danger that Im seeing the rest of the world through rose-colored glasses. And families in the rest of the world are definitely changing too becoming less traditional, less tightly woven over the decades.

But not nearly as fast as in America, where massive, sweeping changes have happened in only a few generations.

The rest of the world also really does seem to be far less anxious and neurotic than my home country.

As a result, Ive come to think that maybe family isnt the oppressive, horrible, irredeemable, dysfunctional institution I once thought.Or, rather, yes, maybe it is, some of the time especially for LGBTQ people, women, and, frankly, anyone who feels different.But there are also benefits to the family that I didnt appreciate back in my twenties benefits that simply arent replicated by a chosen family.

Living for months at a time in countries like Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, Turkey, Romania, and Czechia, Ive heard many local friends talk about their families that vast, complicated network of relatives who are an integral part of their daily lives.

Everyone complains about the obligations and responsibilities they feel toward this tangle of people, and weve definitely heard people express frustration and exasperation over what seems like genuine slights and real injustices.

But Ive heard so many good things too so much actual love. In the best-case scenario, theres always someone looking out for you. And no family member is ever left behind.

And since theyre talking about extended families, the messages they receive are often surprisingly diverse. After all, even more conservative families tend to have an eccentric aunt or a free-thinking uncle.

For better and for worse, the bonds of culture and tradition really are strong. Amid these interconnected family relationships, people gain a real sense of identity and a feeling of rootedness even if, yeah, they probably lose some personal freedom. Life is definitely less about self-expression.

This leads me to what may be the real problem with American families: unlike the rest of the world, American families underwent a massive social change in the 1950s from a rich, complicated extended family model, to a smaller nuclear one.

One father, one mother, and their kids preferably living in the suburbs.My own biological family minus extended relatives a few years back.

It makes sense this change happened in America, because Americans see themselves, first and foremost, as individuals. I couldnt see this when I lived in America, but now that Ive left, this sense of American individuality feels so overwhelming that its almost hard to put it into words.

And the nuclear family did give many Americans a new kind of freedom and a lot more opportunities, at least for white men.

It was also great for the American economy; its a big part of the reason why America is a superpower right now. After all, all those individual white families had to have their own house and a lot of their kids got to have their own bedroom too. And they had to fill all those rooms with stuff.

Corporations loved the nuclear family because it was an opportunity to sell more things to Americans and make even more money.

But in the end, the nuclear family ended up being absolutely terrible for American society. In a way, it was the worst of both worlds creating an emotionally stifling environment while depriving people of any sense of identity or culture. I think the nuclear family was worse for women too, isolating them from what had previously been, yes, a blatantly unfair social order, but also a rich social network of female interaction and respect.

In what universe does it make sense for a couple and, often, mostly the mother to raise their newborns almost entirely alone?

Maybe this is what LGBTQ people like myself were really rebelling against back in the 1980s: not family per se, but the nuclear one.

But in a way, the chosen family wasnt so much a rebellion as it was the natural next step, after nuclear families, in an increasingly individualistic and self-centered America. And, of course, it was a way for corporations to make even more money. Now every single person needed to fill their whole house or apartment with things.

Like the nuclear family, chosen families also came with huge limitations.

Look, the extended family model is far from perfect. And even now, some form of the chosen family still has a place in the world.But things arent black-and-white. I see now that traditional family networks evolved the way they did for a reason.

So whats the solution? How do we make American families functional again?

First, I think progressives need to stop with the wholesale demonization of all things family-related. In Hollywood, it may be emotionally satisfying for writers who feel misunderstood by their own families to ridicule them, but its simplistic and patronizing. And when radical leftists say really stupid, politically disastrous things like Abolish the family! more moderate progressives need to be very clear and say, Thats a kind of bigotry, and these people dont speak for me.

The rich, complicated social networks Ive witnessed in other countries seem more interesting to me now than yet more trite smugness about how horrible and oppressive family is.

Its hard to overstate how stupid this meme is, politically and otherwise.

As for conservatives, well, they need to start actually supporting families financially, I mean, with policies like paid parental leave, and affordable child care, housing, and health care.They can also start to see that egalitarianism is good for everyone. Lets face it: conservatives bigoted, exclusionary pro-family rhetoric is a big part of the reason America is now in the mess its in.

The childrens author Judy Blume once wrote a book titled Places I Never Meant to Be. That title describes the way I feel right now. How in the world did I someone who couldnt wait to replace his biological family with his newly chosen one become this person who is now saying, Hold on now! Lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But here I am. Life surprises you. Ive surprised myself.

In the end, the chosen family didnt solve all of societys problems, and it even created new ones. Who knew?

But Americans still have a choice. We can now pick and choose from the best of both models.It would be nice if this time we finally got the answer right.

Brent Hartinger is an author and editor, and the Brent in Brent and Michael Are Going Places, a couple of traveling gay digital nomads. Subscribe to their free travel newsletter here.

Read the original here:

The chosen family isn't working like we thought it would - LGBTQ Nation

In the second exclusive interview that we filmed with Richard Rogers, the late British architect explained the story behind the Centre Pompidou that he designed with Renzo Piano and the controversy it generated.

The interview is one of a series Dezeen filmed with Rogers to coincide with a retrospective of his work at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2013.

Rogers, who passed away at the age of 88 last month, was one of the world's best-known architects and a pioneer of high-tech architecture.

Among his most notable works was the Centre Pompidou, an inside-out cultural centre in Paris that he completed in 1977 with Italian architect Piano, a fellow high-tech pioneer.

In this interview, filmed at the Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners studio in London, Rogers recalled the tumultuous process of designing the Centre Pompidou, which was initially "vilified" before becoming "the most visited building" in Europe.

However, he also described the flak he received from people who hated the building. He recalled a conversation with a woman who struck up a conversation with him outside the centre: "I said that I designed it and she hit me on the head with her umbrella."

Read on for a transcript of the interview below:

"The Pompidou it was actually called Beaubourg when we did the competition, and Pompidou when Pompidou [the former president of France] died a year before completion was a competition for a museum, a library, a music centre and design centre. I'm going to say in the centre of Paris but in a very rundown area.

"When we did our first studies, it showed that there was no public space nearby. So, we created this big piazza. I think there were 681 entries. Strangely enough, there were no other ones with a big piazza.

"The piazza is really critical to the workings of the Pompidou and in a sense, it was a Fun Palace, using a very well known phrase by Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price of the post-war era, shall we say, it wasn't just a building.

"So the idea was you had a public space horizontal, and you'd go up the facade of the building in streets in the air and escalators sloping across it. So the whole thing became very much dynamic. People come to see people as well as to see art and people come to meet people. So we wanted to make that as packed as a theatre.

"And on the facade in those days was an electronic screen that could connect up with any other museum or cultural centre. We had it all going very well until Pompidou died and Giscard [the subsequent president of France] came along and he said those terrible words that sunk it with no hands.

"He said, 'but what side, the left or the right control it?' and I said 'oh, it's not political'. And he said, 'can't pull my leg, it's a political weapon. I don't want it'. So that died.

Architects and creatives remember "superstar" architect Richard Rogers

"Having said that, what Renzo and I had worked out was, of course, the French are fantastic at promenading. So they promenade through the facade, they promenaded through the piazza, and then all these other people came. It was attacked, vilified whilst we were designing, from the first day onwards. Nobody said one kind word until it opened and when people started to queue up, then it became open.

"I remember once, standing outside on a rainy day, and there was this small woman with an umbrella she said, 'do you want to have shelter?' and I said, 'yes, thank you'. We started talking as one does in the rain. And she said, 'what do you think of this building? The Pompidou'.

"Stupidly, which I'd never normally do, I said that I designed it and she hit me on the head with her umbrella. That was just typical of the general reaction of the people, especially during the design and construction stage, destroying their beautiful Paris.

"And of course, you know, it does not fit in within the sense of what was Paris. All good architecture is modern in its time. Gothic was a fantastic shock; the Renaissance was another shock to all the little medieval buildings.

"I come from Florence and the Strozzi palace, which is one of the largest palaces in Florence, which is, I suppose, four storeys going eight storeys, and there's a famous document of one of the neighbours saying 'you're building a building completely out of scale with ours', a tower next to it. Because, of course, from one to eight is a big difference.

The shock of the new is always rather difficult to get over

"So changes, the shock of the new is always rather difficult to get over. Though it's much better, it's got better, partly because I'm older, people looking at the buildings of mine and Renzo's, they either love them or hate them, so they're more used to it, but boy was that hard.

"So then we said, 'okay, we'll have fantastic flexibility'. The one thing we knew about this age is it's all about change, if there's one constant, it's change. So we said that 'we will make massive floors', which were in fact the size of two football pitches with no vertical interruptions, structure on the outside, mechanical service on the outside, people movement on the outside and theoretically you can do anything you want on those floors.

"We didn't say where the museum should go, where the library should go, and of course, the library changed radically because when we started there were books and by the time we finished it books were almost finished because it was IT.

"So again, that's about change, because you needed it to have a library, you needed it to have different types of spaces, all these racks of books, you know, more or less go, and so on. Which is typical of an evolving, lively institution, whether it's an office building or even a house, it has to respond.

"And today's buildings, unlike shall we say the buildings of the past when we used to say architecture is like frozen music, actually, I would suggest today, architecture is more like jazz, dynamic jazz, jazz that you can interpret in different ways within a beat in a framework. So we were looking also at that as the whole modern art and modern thinking was going.

Centre Pompidou is high-tech architecture's inside-out landmark

"Renzo and I, well we've been very close friends, we met about two years before we did Pompidou and now we speak at least once a week and we go sailing together so we're very, very close. It's quite difficult to divide us.

"If you look at our earlier work, we did the house in Wimbledon for my parents, which is a single storey house and steel and it's highly insulated, it's transparent, the bathrooms are in a very compact way, everything can move, all the partitions can move. You can see a link from that to the Pompidou. The difference of about 1,000 times the scale.

"If you look at Renzo's work, beautifully structured work. He's done some wonderful laboratories, tremendous engineering, construction processes and buildings. His father was a contractor, a major contractor.

"If you put those together, you could argue that it sort of goes in that in that direction. Of course, it's not true, because he probably could have gone in another direction.

We wanted to make a building that clearly was of our period

"We wanted to make a building which clearly was of our period, which caught the zeitgeist of the now. The big thing in those days, the 60s, is the student movement and in France, it is said that Pompidou had a plane revving up because he thought he'd lost the war against the students, the intellectuals, and the workers.

"Literally, with that, that moment changed history, certainly for Europe. And it looked as though there'll be a revolution. In fact, it didn't happen. But of course, we captured some of it in the building. The facade on the building, if you look more carefully, which, I've talked about the screen, was very much about the riots. It was very much about Vietnam.

"I met my wife, with other friends who were escaping the draft, not that she was but her friends were. There was a highly active period of politics. And you could argue that was also part of the concept that this is a dynamic period, a period which we know will change but we want to catch what's going on at the moment.

"Now, having said that, we rationalised it like hell. I mean, if you look at the written documents, there are very much documents which tell you about the building. Now some are post rationalisations, some are rationalisations, shall we say.

"But overall, yes, we said we will put the building not as you want it, in those days in the middle of the piazza, but actually on one side to give the people a place to meet, we'll put it on the street because we'll keep the nature of the long street.

It is a place for the meeting of all people

"We need a movement system which is dynamic, I hate going up in sort of internal lifts with people's heads in my stomach or vice versa. I mean, why not give them the view? Movement should be celebrated.

"Now is moving celebrated? How much is that something that is intellectual, how much is it something that you feel, you can't divide those things. So we had those concepts.

"There were the Metabolists in Japan who were working, there was Archigram in England. I went to school with Peter Cook in the Archigram movement. And all those were definitely influences.

"The piazza in Siena. I don't think we'd go to look at the piazza in Siena, I think we didn't even realise we'd done a piazza sloping a bit like Siena until we did it. But of course, in our minds, Siena must have been there and many other wonderful Italian piazzas.

"The whole idea of Pompidou was that it is a place for the meeting of all people. And the success of it was that the French took it over and it was the most visited building certainly in Europe."

Read the rest here:

Woman "hit me on the head with her umbrella" says Richard Rogers - Dezeen

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid warned on Monday during an online press conference that one of the greatest threats Israel faces in the new year will be charges of apartheid by U.N. groups with sports the first area affected. Their effort will be to get organizations to take Israel out of sporting and cultural events, he said.

To counter this expected trend, Israels Ministry of Foreign Affairs would devote considerable resources in 2022 to countering those efforts, he said.

The concern here from the foreign ministry is that you have three or four different legal proceedings in which allegations of apartheid have been made and that at least one of them may end up endorsing these allegations, Yuval Shany, professor of international law at Hebrew University and research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, told JNS.

He said Israel faces charges of apartheid at 1) the U.N.s Commission of Inquiry, which has an open-ended mandate to look into allegations of Israeli discrimination; 2) the Geneva-based U.N. Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which is reviewing a Palestinian Authority complaint against Israel accusing it of apartheid; and 3) the International Criminal Court (ICC), where certain Palestinian groups have submitted allegations concerning Israeli practices in the West Bank being a form of apartheid.

All of these tracks are aimed essentially at obtaining a legal, or quasi-legal, finding that Israeli practices amount to systemic discrimination or a form of apartheid in international law, he said.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, told JNS that the Commission of Inquiry is the primary threat. The commission was established by the Human Rights Council following Israels 11-day conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip last May. Neuer said it has become standard practice for the United Nations to investigate Israel for alleged war crimes after each round of fighting, but this time the commission is unprecedented in its scope.

It will investigate so-called systematic discriminationmass discrimination within Israel and the territories, he said. Its quite clear that its going to accuse Israel of apartheid. This inquiry has no end, meaning it doesnt last six months or a year. It will be reporting twice every year.

Neuer said the new mandate in which the commission is authorized to continuously investigate Israel is inspired by the zeitgeist in America where accusations of systemic discrimination have become the fashionable trend. He sees the focus on racism as a modern form of anti-Semitism, noting that Jews have been attacked throughout history as being opposed to whatever society identified as the highest virtue. Today, in 2022, anti-racism is the highest virtue, and so its not accidental that Israel is accused of being intrinsically racist, he said.

Shany, who noted that the apartheid charge has been leveled at Israel for some time, wouldnt speculate as to why its gaining momentum now. He agreed that its possible that the political temper in the United States is a contributing factor but said its probably a combination of many reasons.

Pnina Sharvit Baruch, a senior research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and head of its program on law and national security, told JNS that Israels opponents have at least one practical reason for pushing apartheid charges.

She said the two reports that will be produced by the Commission of Inquiry and the Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination are designed to push the new ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, to prioritize the investigation against Israel started by his predecessor, Fatou Bensouda. Khan is more pragmatic than Bensouda, she noted, and based on his own comments, Im not sure he would like to put our case at the top of his priorities, she said.

So this would be an attempt, first, to push him into pursuing the investigation and, second, to try to persuade him to include in the investigation also claims about apartheid because apartheid is one of the crimes against humanity included in the Rome Statute, she explained, referring to the treaty that established the ICC.

Of course, more generally, its part of the campaign against Israelto try to get more countries, organizations and companies to boycott Israel, to divest from Israel under the whole idea of the BDS movement, she said.

She doesnt see a way to stop these U.N. bodies from condemning Israel, noting that the United Nations has appointed South African Navi Pillay, known for her hostile views to Israel, as head of the Commission of Inquiry. She said its a disturbing development. Apartheid had been considered going too far, and now theres an attemptit might succeed, tooto put it within legitimate criticism against Israel. I think thats very bad for Israel.

As for Lapids belief that sports and cultural events would be the first target, Shany agreed that Lapid was right in pointing out that this is going to put wind in the sails of the BDS movement and basically render cultural, educational, sports relations with Israeli counterparts as politically unacceptable in the eyes of increasing segments of the population.

Neuer went further. He said in the United States, during the recent Gaza conflict, legislators like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) condemned Israel. (She had tweeted: Apartheid states arent democracies.)

During that time, Jews in America were being attacked on the streets in Los Angeles, in New York and elsewhere, and that was in connection with the war that was happening in Israel, said Neuer. Accusing the Jewish state of being an evil apartheid state is a means to delegitimize and demonizeand even physically attackJews. I think this cannot be underestimated. Exclusions from certain international bodies would be only the tip of the iceberg.

The post Lapid: Israel will face increasing allegations that it is an apartheid state in 2022 appeared first on JNS.org.

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Lapid: Israel will face increasing allegations that it is an apartheid state in 2022 - Cleveland Jewish News

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The 7th Dawn (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) William Holden leads a cast of characters caught up on opposing sides of a Communist insurgency in Malaya after World War II.

Shake Hands with the Devil (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) James Cagney fights with the I.R.A. against British forces in this 1959 historical drama

The Sherlock Holmes Vault Collection (The Film Detective) Even before Basil Rathbone famously took over the part, the legendary sleuth was already a cinema staple in these four British features from the 1930s.

Sparrows (MVD Visual) New restoration of a 1926 social-issue drama starring Mary Pickford.

Three Women (Kino Classics) Not to be confused with the Robert Altman film of the same name, this silent Ernst Lubitsch drama concerns a mother and daughter involved in a love triangle.

Through the Decades: 1960s Collection (Mill Creek Entertainment) A dizzingly varied collection of films in one 60s-themed box the highlight is Arthur Penns Mickey One, an existential-neurotic-jazz gangster drama with Warren Beatty, but theres lots to enjoy here, including Who Was That Lady?, The Notorious Landlady, Under the Yum-Yum Tree, Good Neighbor Sam, Lilith (starring Beatty and Jean Seberg), Baby, the Rain Must Fall, Genghis Khan, The Chase, Luv, How to Save a Marriage (and Ruin Your Life), and Hook, Line and Sinker.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection (Mill Creek Entertainment) Youll want this assortment for the two Barbra Streisand movies (The Owl and the Pussycat and For Petes Sake) and the rollicking Jane FondaGeorge Segal heist comedy Fun with Dick and Jane, but theres plenty more to enjoy here, including A Walk in the Spring Rain, $ (Dollars), The Anderson Tapes, Brother John, The Horsemen, early Stephen Frears comedy Gumshoe, and The Stone Killer.

New TV

Naysayers might have originally decried the series as a gimmicky spin-off from a beloved movie franchise, but here we are at Cobra Kai: Season 3 (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) with Season 4 new on Netflix and the show continues to build an audience while cleverly retweaking everything we thought we knew about the iconic characters played, then and now, by Ralph Macchio, William Zabka, and the rest of this talented ensemble.

Also available:

Billions: Season 5 (CBS/Paramount) The battle of wills in the world of high finance never ends!

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Liberation Hall) A priest on trial for heresy in this 1958 TV adaptation of the Thornton Wilder novel starring Hume Cronyn and Judith Anderson and directed by Robert Mulligan.

Inherit the Wind (1999) (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott remake the classic play and film for TV.

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What's New on DVD in January: The French Dispatch, Her Smell, Martial Arts Classics, and More - TheWrap

THE TRAGEDY OF THE GREENS corruption by neoliberalism is that they simply cannot grasp how completely theyve been seduced. At its heart, the problem is one of generational experience and perspective. The younger generation of Greens, the ones currently in control of the organisation, simply have no experiential connection to the zeitgeist out of which their movement was born. Their entire adult lives have been lived in the shadow of the neoliberal revolutions of the 1980s and 90s. What came before the revolution has been dismissed by its architects and disciples as existing outside the realm of common sense. Those who preach the values and aspirations of those pre-revolutionary times offer news from nowhere and no one is listening.

They could, of course, learn the origin stories of radical environmentalism by entering imaginatively into the historical circumstances out of which it was born. Historians do this all the time. Watch Mary Beards television series on Ancient Rome and it will soon become clear how thoroughly an intelligent and inquisitive human-being is able to not only comprehend, but also inhabit, the past. Beard talks of being captured by the history of the Roman world from the moment she read Tacitus chilling judgement of his own people: They make a desert and they call it peace.

The problem with the generations that have grown up in the 40 years since Thatcher and Reagan destroyed the post-war social-democratic settlement, is that they have been convinced the past has nothing useful to teach them.

Like the early cartographers who wrote Here Be Monsters in the blank spaces of their maps, the neoliberal ideologues tell frightening tales about the times before their Year Zero. Anxious to dissuade those contemplating their own voyages of historical discovery, they warn that only bad and mad things lie beyond the well-charted shorelines of the present. Sadly, they have been remarkably successful. The past remains one of the very few foreign countries that millennial influencers have no interest in visiting not least because they do things differently there.

One of the principal reasons for the neoliberals success is that their own ideologically-inspired break with the post-war world was strengthened immeasurably by the natural inclination of young people to dismiss the world in which their elders were raised as hopelessly pass. Ordinarily, such youthful disdain is reserved for the fashions, art and music of the recent past so lacking in the manifestly superior tastes of the present. What the Neoliberals merged so successfully, however, was this essentially harmless generational scorn with their own deep ideological hostility towards the ideas and institutions of the entire modern era.

When Baby Boomers like Catherine Delahunty and Sue Bradford condemn the younger generations of Greens for abandoning the foundational beliefs and principles of the Green Movement, all these younger Greens hear is an ideological version of Taylor Swift cant hold a candle to Joni Mitchell. Or, Where is your generations Godfather? Wheres your Catcher in the Rye? Your Sergeant Pepper? Social-democracy, the Club of Rome, Rachel Carson, Earth Day 1971: Catherine and Sue might just as well be touting the virtues of a dusty vinyl version of Greatest Hits of the 1960s and 70s. Okay Boomer.

Lacking a firm grasp of recent history, the generations at the end of the alphabet do not understand that while their parents and grandparents might have laughed at the RSA Generations stuffy conformism, and marched against nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War and Apartheid sport, they had nothing but admiration for the extraordinary structures of social care which these earlier generations had built. Moreover, they were full of gratitude for the fact that their own lives would be fuller and more prosperous as a result. The Boomers grew up in the shadow of fascism and genocide. They knew what the generation preceding their own had beaten back and they loved them for it.

Discouraged from accessing the past, the younger Greens will struggle to understand the extraordinary exhilaration of encountering their own movement for the first time. New Zealand was the first nation to encounter a green political party. Inspired by the Club of Romes Limits To Growth, the Values Party spoke, for the first time, of constructing a future guided by humility and restraint. To hear Tony Brunt and his successors talk about limiting economic growth, and expanding the time in which people could simply be themselves, was to envisage a world beyond tomorrow. This was news from a somewhere humankind had yet to reach.

The worst crime against History which the Neoliberals have committed, however, is to convince young people that the past was a stinking cesspit of privilege, prejudice and oppression. That their ancestors were monsters wiping out indigenous peoples even as their axes and machines laid waste to the forests, lakes, rivers and streams which had sustained them for millennia. By painting the past as a hellscape of irredeemable horror, the tiny fraction of one percent who lord it over the rest of humanity, Paul Simons loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires are robbing us of the means to rescue the future.

Is there horror in the past? Is it full of murder and rapine? Of course it is but no more than the horror that daily disfigures the present. Nor are evil deeds all that the past has to show us. Amidst the horror there is heroism. Amidst the murder and rapine there is also empathy and courage, creativity and love.

Human-beings do not suffer injustice meekly, they rise against it again and again and again. Down through the centuries reformers and revolutionaries have dreamed dreams and seen visions. Slavery was abolished. Women were enfranchised. Children were removed from coalmines and cotton mills.

When the armed constabulary invaded Parihaka in 1881, not all Pakeha cheered nowhere near all. In the end, Apartheid fell. Eventually, gay sex was decriminalised. The past is not simply a catalogue of horrors. It is also an endless source of inspiration and hope.

The Neoliberals would shut the younger generations off from that hope and inspiration. The neoliberals would have us believe that this is as good as it gets. They have almost convinced James Shaw and Marama Davidson that the future can only be reached with tiny steps. On a warming planet that is rapidly running out of time, that is deadly advice.

Catherine and Sue, and all those who stand with them, are right: this is no time for tiny steps. Humankind has made giant leaps before all the way to the moon. But the booster rockets that push us towards the future are fuelled by the knowledge of what human-beings have achieved in the past.

Clio, the Muse of History, is traditionally depicted perusing the book of humanitys past glories. At need, however, she will put down her book and take up a sword.

Never has that need been greater.

Only when we remember who we are, where we have come from, and what we have achieved, will we find the strength to drive Clios liberating sword through neoliberalisms black and befouling heart.

The rest is here:

News From Nowhere If the Greens are to have a future they must listen to their past - thedailyblog.co.nz

The wine industry is emerging from yet another chaotic year of conducting business in the middle of a global pandemic. Between catastrophic weather events (including California wildfires, devastating April frosts in France and Italy, and flooding in western Germany) and global supply chain disruptions, plus the growing threat of price inflation, instability has often felt like the only constant.

Despite it all, however, the outlook for 2022 is far from bleak. With restaurants steadily on the rebound and off-premise sales continuing their post-pandemic boom, the industry is once again proving its endless capacity for creativity, adaptability, and resilience. There are many reasons for optimism, says Ian Downey, the executive vice president of Winebow Imports. The market will be more responsive to the bold, the new, and the innovative in the year to come.

In that indomitable spirit, explore six key trends that will continue to shape the wine worlds trajectory in 2022whatever else the year may bring.

Dont miss the latest drinks industry news and insights. Sign up for our award-winning Daily Dispatch newsletterdelivered to your inbox every week.

Poll a cross-section of wine professionals across all sectors of the industry, and the consensus is unanimous: Supply chain issues will continue to disrupt all aspects of the trade in 2022, causing inevitable price inflation and shortages for familiar brands.

While weve already seen these issues impact the Champagne market, fueling fears of inevitable gaps through the holidays and beyond, experts expect the effects to be much more widespread. Our industry is no different than others that have been impacted by supply chain difficulties, and we are starting to see inflationary prices from our winery partners that will go into effect in 2022, explains Rocco Lombardo, the president of Wilson Daniels. Were definitely headed into an interesting time with regards to managing costs and margin structure.

Faced with rising prices, shipping delays, and limited inventory, buyers will increasingly be forced to look beyond the usual tried-and-true options. While thats bound to create no shortage of headaches, Christopher Struck, the beverage director for ililis New York and Washington, D.C. locations, predicts that the situation will incentivize restaurants to turn to boutique wholesalers that carry alternatives to the usual large brand names.

In my experience, smaller distributors will be more inclined to hustle and get you what you need, explains Struck. They also tend to work with independent, conscientious growers that better align with my ethos as a buyer.

Vanessa Conlin, MW, the chief wine officer at Wine Access, agrees. In her view, 2022 will set the stage for up-and-coming regions and producers to gain newfound visibility and market share. These shortages actually offer a chance to get lesser-known wines in front of consumers who would have otherwise reached for familiar things like Burgundy or Napa Cabernet. As these European benchmark items become more difficult to secure, were going to see other regions making a play to fill the gap, says Conlin. Thats welcome news for regions eager to break through.

The world of wine has long conformed to a fixed set of stylistic categories, grouped primarily according to color. But as a younger generation of boundary-pushing winemakers across the globe explore an array of alternative winemaking approaches and techniques, those once-stable classifications are beginning to blur.

Were seeing more and more people making these experimental wines that dont have a firm definition, explains Chris Leon, the owner of Leon & Son retail shop in Brooklyn, New York and Grand Rapids, Michigan. He draws a parallel between the previous fashion for genre-defying macerated whites, or orange wines, and a recent interest in co-ferments, produced by fermenting multiple grape varieties (both red and white alike) together in one vessel.

Bright, fresh, and eminently crushable, the resulting wines successfully blur the line between pale red and dark ros, but couldnt be more attuned to the current chillable red zeitgeist. According to Leon, we can expect to see more of this stylistic ambiguity in the future. The rise of this style of wine feels very apropos at a time when people are increasingly willing to sidestep strict classifications or labels and simply take things for what they are, he says.

There once was a time when the natural wine counterculture operated within a few clusters of activity confined to large coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. With a growing number of small-scale, natural-focused importers, however, the movement is quickly making inroads into parts of the country that had long been dominated by large national distributors and corporate-owned brands.

Case in point: the Raleigh-based distributor Kellogg Selections, run by former New York sommelier Jeff Kellogg. Emblematic of this larger shift, he moved south in 2017 with the goal of introducing independent and, in many cases, low-intervention producers (such as Beaujolais Mee Godard or Californias Birichino Winery) to consumers across the Carolinas.

I knew there was a real thirst among consumers here to drink things other than Napa as a category, but there werent enough people filling that void, explains Kellogg. My favorite part of selling these kinds of wines in the Carolinas is that Im able to introduce natural wines to people for the first time. I get to provide that experience all the time to buyers who were previously working in places that just made sure they were checking off the usual boxes of California Chardonnay or Argentinian Malbec.

With interest in the category steadily expanding across the United StatesWe dont see interest in natural wine slowing down at all in 2022, observes Sally Stewart of Colorados Denver Wine Merchantthe movement has officially passed from fringe to an essential pillar of wines new mainstream. As that evolution continues to unfold, the naturalist gospel is poised to convert a whole new demographic of consumers, many of whom never considered themselves wine drinkers. If were talking about the market in our region, so many people are coming to wine from other beverage categories, especially craft beer, says Kellogg. In my mind, natural wine has so much more room to grow.

According to off-premise sales data from Nielsen, the sparkling wine category grew by more than 13 percent among American drinkers over the past two yearsan upward momentum that shows no sign of abating anytime soon, even with the threat of Champagne shortages and price hikes.

Unsurprisingly, Champagne sales have dominated the premium sector of the sparkling market, with sales between January and August jumping 11.9 percent compared to the same period in 2019, according to Reuters. But value-driven options have fueled much of the categorys surge in popularity. Were seeing the same dynamism with our Prosecco Superiore, our Crmant dAlsace, and our premium domestic sparkling wine, reports Lombardo.

As drinkers gravitate towards these more affordable forms of fizz, theyre finally knocking the category off its holidays and special occasions pedestal and reclaiming bubbles as part of the everyday drinking repertoire. Though still extremely niche in terms of national sales, one alternative sparkling wine style has played an outsize symbolic role in that transformation: cloudy, crown-capped ptillant-natural.

Theres been a steady interest in pet-net throughout the year, not just on holidays,says Eric Moorer, the sales director at Washington, D.C.s natural-focused Domestique Wine. If his experience on the sales floor had taught him anything, its that the categorys appeal has yet to peak, helping to make the wider bubbly landscape more democratic. As somebody who has always championed sparkling wine as an everyday wine, pt nat has made that conversation much easier for me, he says. People no longer believe that sparkling wine is for Fridays and Saturday nights; theyre popping open bottles of pt-nat on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Even as the world has largely reopened, online wine sales have remained strong. But the future of the ecommerce sector now faces an important challenge: namely, how to find creative ways to drive digital engagement and retain their recently acquired customer base.

The key to maintaining that growth? Convincing customers that shopping for wine online can be every bit as gratifying as seeking recommendations from a trusted neighborhood wine merchant. We gained a lot of new customers during the pandemic, so a lot of what we did over the past year was try to set ourselves up to deliver a better experience than customers were able to get in a traditional store or retail environment, says AJ Resnick, the chief experience officer at Wine Access.

Critically, as Joshua Lincoln, the senior commercial directorEurope, for Vivino, points out, digital platforms enjoy a distinct advantage: a treasure trove of data with which to customize the consumers experience. To him, capitalizing on that ability will be the wave of the future for the ecommerce space. Weve got more data than any store manager could ever keep in their head, so we can actually be way more personalized than any single individual, he explains. The real winners in the e-commerce space over the coming five to 10 years will be the ones like us, who focus heavily on this aspect of personalization.

With prices rapidly rising, the pre-pandemic trend of smaller, more focused wine lists will surely extend into 2022. At the same time, though, we can also expect beverage programs to become exponentially more experimental, moving beyond the established templates and reference points that were once considered the industrys standard. In particular, as sommeliers feel increasingly empowered to depart from expectations, theyre radically reconsidering conventional wisdom about what it means to run a successful by-the-glass program.

To Dallas-based sommelier Tiffany Tobey, the glass pours she offers function as a critical form of research and development, allowing customers to explore more obscure expressions in a non-threatening and cost-effective format. My by-the-glass program is geared towards a completely different compilation of regions and off-the-beaten-path stuff, she explains. Im offering stuff by the glass that people have never heard of before, but theyre still willing to try it because the rest of my list still contains plenty of the familiar favorites that make them feel comfortable.

At the two restaurants he oversees, Struck has adopted a similar approach. I think theres too many self-fulfilling prophecies with beverage directors who insist that you set yourself up for failure if you dont offer certain specific reference points by the glass, he says. That may have been true in the past, but not so anymore. I mean, weve already entered a whole new era of dining, havent we?

Zachary Sussman is a Brooklyn-based wine writer whose work has appeared in Saveur, Wine & Spirits, The World of Fine Wine, Food & Wine, and The Wall Street Journal Magazine, among many others. A regular contributor to Punch, he was formerly selected as the Champagne Louis Roederer Emerging Wine Writer of the Year. He is the author of The Essential Wine Book (2020) and Sparkling Wine for Modern Times (November, 2021) from Ten Speed Press.

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6 Wine Industry Trends to Watch in 2022 - SevenFifty Daily

TZM Lecture Team CreateSpace (Jan 22, 2014)Softcover $13.83 (324pp)978-1-4953-0319-7

Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5

A team of essayists show how scientific and psychological advancements can improve society in this scholarly collection.

In eighteen research-based essays covering subjects such as psychology, economics, and scientific theory, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined views the American political and economic systems through a different kind of lens.

Composed of a panel of lecturers, the Zeitgeist Movement seems to direct itself by way of a train of thought that follows this self-generating premise of understanding and it hence operates in a non-centralized, holographic manner, with this train of thought as the origin of influence for action. In a nutshell, the goal behind the Zeitgeist Movement has to do with changing societys influences and pressures in an attempt to reveal the best of the human condition. This type of change isnt easy though. This is why, according to the authors, the book relies so heavily on research-based material, avoiding the more colorful and dramatic language expected from a book that tries to convince readers of something.

But The Zeitgeist Movement Defined never seems to attempt to convince its audience. Even though its goal is to address a range of political and social issues, the real substance these lecturers address is the underlying issues that seem to have permeated American society. Besides delving into specific cases of things like racism or poverty, TZM Lecture Team uses scientific data from these problems, presented in the most objective way possible. In terms of solutions to these problems, the book never pushes any sort of hard-line political rhetoric. Rather, the lecturers view these problems from a scientific standpoint, recognizing that as our understanding of both social science and human behavior changes, so should the way we address these problems. For example, when it comes to the incarceration of criminals, the lecturers acknowledge that the science behind human behavior has changed tremendously with respect to understanding causality. It is now common knowledge in the social sciences that most acts of crime would likely not occur if certain basic, supportive environmental conditions were set for the human being.

A large part of this books strategy has to do with simply acknowledging how the persisting problems in American society are tied to a much deeperand certainly much scariereconomic and political climate, which favors a capitalist ideology that has resulted, according to the book, in what Dr. James Gilligan termed structural violence. The context of this term in The Zeitgeist Movement Defined extends to include the often unseen social oppression that, through the chain of causality characteristics inherent to our social system, leads to the unnecessary harm of people, both physical, psychological or both. Backed by extensive research, the book addresses this system of structural violence, which includes everything from heart disease to class inequities, issues the book ties to increases in poverty and a decrease in the psychological well-being of people.

One of the achievements of this book is its ability to find research-based connections between seemingly unrelated social and economic conditions. Without becoming repetitive or dull, each essay is able to shed light on specific issues in a way that is neither too academic nor too informal. Powerful quotes are used at the beginning of chapters, research is clearly footnoted throughout, and the languagealbeit at times somewhat technical and term-heavydoes well to give a picture of how one social problem influences the next, and how one scientific advancement could, if accepted and adopted into society properly, change the way all humans interact with the environment that surrounds them.

Reviewed by Kenny Jakubas July 9, 2015

Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commissions 16 CFR, Part 255.

Originally posted here:

Review of The Zeitgeist Movement Defined (9781495303197 ...

OK millennial, you dont care for us baby boomers. You complain that weve taken all the food off the table and left you the crumbs. You say we cling to our jobs and wont make room for you. And you especially resent how, throughout, we took ownership of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.

In the 1960s we were a youth movement that demanded to be heard. We marched on the Pentagon and occupied college administration buildings. In the 1970s we mellowed, listened to the Band and the Eagles, and read Charles Reichs The Greening of America. In the 1980s we rebounded as yuppies. We became investment bankers and lawyers, and the women among us wore suits with padded shoulders. Thereafter we ascended to political powernot always wisely, truth be told. But our music had lyrics and melodies, and our protest songs took on real injustices. We cemented a civil-rights revolution for women and minorities and left a mark on all succeeding generations.

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Millennials Are the Silencing Generation - The Wall Street Journal