Category Archives: Zeitgeist Movement

Today, the band is made up of McCrea, DiFiore, Roper, guitarist Xan McCurdy and bassist Daniel McCallum, who joined in 2016. As two of their biggest albums turn 25 and 20 -- Comfort Eagle was released July 24, 2001 -- respectively, the way that Cake carved out their own little quiet, anti-rock corner of the then-massive alt rock zeitgeist seems at risk of fading into obscurity. The consistency of their intimate, bright, familiar but not hackneyed sound and McCreas funny/sad lyrics allowed them to continue finding new audiences from the end of the grunge era through pop punks heyday. But they remained staunchly trend-averse enough that tying them into any broader narrative of 90s and early-aughts music is a challenge.

For McCrea, thats absolutely fine. In fact, its what he wanted: to make each song not just genre-less, but its own sort of solar system.

He remembers first feeling compelled to write songs as a Sacramento high schooler in the late 70s and early 80s, tinkering with verses he describes as inane and eventually learning enough guitar and bass to flesh out his ideas. At that point, McCrea had recently come across two artists that he describes as transformative: country legend Hank Williams, Sr. (Talking about minimalism, that shit is is just like a bullet) and big band titan Benny Goodman. In a way, they got me through a period of music that was wrong for me pretty unscathed, he explains.

Country, in particular, shaped McCreas sensibilities. Nobody that I take seriously as an artist can just discount country music, he says. I really loved archetypal, moving melodies that sometimes aren't all about originality, but about just communication of feeling -- I just fall for that sort of raw emotion.

McCrea sees the tension between that and his self-professed cynical, curmudgeonly, sarcastic tendencies; later, critics would sometimes only seem to hear the latter when they listened to Cakes music. To him, though, finding ways to include both of those leanings in one song is how he found his voice as a songwriter. For a lot of years, those things were kind of irreconcilable, he says. I sort of started finding a way to push them together, and allow them to coexist.

As he put it in 1996, A good song is like a teardrop in the eye of a prize-winning poodle at a world-class dog show. It doesnt matter what mood it is, as long as theres that tension, the pulling of opposites.

He moved to Los Angeles to try to make it as a songwriter, an effort that proved futile. I realized my songs weren't really one-size-fits-all enough, says McCrea. They were kind of weird and self-indulgent. When he eventually returned to Sacramento, he started waiting tables three days a week and writing songs during the other four, building up some of the library that would eventually become Cakes songbook.

Sacramento was a small enough city at that point that future bandmates crossed paths years before the genesis of Cake. Drummer Todd Roper was in a high school band with eventual Cake bassist Victor Damiani and original guitarist Greg Brown. Ropers drum teacher had negotiated a jam session for the high schooler with McCrea, then in his early twenties, that produced little besides a cassette tape. Roper brought the cassette to school and played it for his fellow music nerd friends; Brown, as he told the drummer later, was intrigued. Thats when his attraction to John started, says Roper. It was just like, Whoa, theres this songwriter in town

Brown and McCrea formed the creative core of Cake when the first iteration of the band came together in 1991. When I was working with [McCrea], I really felt the forward momentum, Brown recalls. I felt like, Something very creative is happening here. The rest of the group coalesced around their partnership.Greg and John have still, to this day a very powerful chemistry together, says Roper. I basked in the warmth that came off of that.

Getting together to listen to classic country and soul records, they brainstormed the concept for the band. We were definitely very conceptual about it, for some reason, Brown says. We were just like, Okay, we're not going with our gut -- we're gonna make something, and we're going to be intentional about it.

McCrea explained that he felt the common threads between those country and soul records should form the cornerstone of their sound, and he and Brown took notes on what specific elements they could pull from those vintage albums to support McCreas forcefully eclectic songs. A lot of times, it would sort of be filtered through Greg's ear, says McCrea. He would do things with his guitar that would sort of square things up rhythmically, in a way that I think was really, really, really smart.

It was mostly great. Sometimes difficult. Brown pauses. But I'm not going to talk about that. Mostly just a wonderful, creative kind of explosion of ideas, like a fountain that just never stopped flowing.

What Cakes members credit Brown for today, over two decades after he left the group, is helping consolidate that efficient, economical template thats made its music so recognizable. Every instrument was deliberately tinkered with, says Brown, as they searched for something that would be rhythmically compelling.

The arrangements that Greg created with John's songs stand to this day, almost note for note, says Roper. The sound was small, groovy and deliberate. Our aesthetic was one of limitations, as Brown puts it. And of course there was the trumpet, courtesy of DiFiore a particular rarity in a pre-ska-revival '90s alternative scene.

I happened to have been writing melodies for some of the songs that just sounded kind of bulbously heroic on the electric lead guitar, says McCrea. There's an emotional baggage to like, guy guitar hero stuff. I felt very strongly that we couldn't do that. But somehow when you put those same melodies on the trumpet, it cut through in the same way -- without taking up a lot of space.

Thus, Cake was born. Cake as in, to cake onto something not the tasty bakery staple, as they made clear from the start. ("It's just the sound of the word [that's appealing]," Brown told the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat in 1997. "And it's a short word that's easy to remember.") By the time they were ready to record their first single, Jolene (not a Dolly Parton cover) backed with Rock and Roll Lifestyle, in 1993, the group had established itself on the local scene, sharing bills with an array of nascent California acts including the Deftones and, memorably, Korn. Translating the sound they had refined over hours and hours of working on arrangement and then in small Sacramento clubs to disc, though, presented a new challenge.

Brown and McCrea wanted to recreate the warm sounds of the vinyl that had inspired them, almost as a reaction to the crystalline aesthetic of the CD era. They just had this cold glassy sound that we were turned off by, says Brown. With CDs, you would turn it up, and I would feel oppressed by it. With records, on the other hand, for the most part, I could turn the volume up all the way to 100 and still feel like I had space to think. Like it had breathing room.

Besides planning to literally release the single on vinyl as well as cassette, which was fairly unorthodox at the time, Brown pulled from Mark Lewisohns The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions to find sounds that were just sort of supple and inviting, yielding as opposed to aggressive a task that required he and McCrea to really work against the grain of the studio environment in the early 90s.

Part of it was by resisting the urge toward bigness and rock bluster, and having a drier approach to production and songwriting values, says McCrea. It was very difficult, in the beginning, to get sound engineers whether in the studio or live to turn things down, for Christ's sake.

That kind of scaling back and search for an intimacy of an older vintage was a self-conscious reaction to the excesses of rock to that point. It felt a little punk rock in the context of what was coming out of Seattle, says Roper. There was just a lot of really muscular grunge music sort of being foisted in people's heads, McCrea adds. What we did, within that context, felt pretty subversive. It was not without a little bit of hostility that we delivered our music product. People thought we were a joke, because we sounded small.

The initial impression of unseriousness might have been helped by their first taste of radio success with Rock n Roll Lifestyle, which made its way to college stations after their self-released debut, Motorcade of Generosity, was picked up by Capricorn Records in 1995. The track features McCreas spoken word indicting essentially all of his musical peers over a sinister riff, clarifying the bands aforementioned position as something of an alternative to the alternative. Excess aint rebellion, McCrea intones. Your self-destruction doesnt hurt them. It was certainly a fair critique, and one that resonated -- the song reached No. 31 on the Alternative Airplay chart.

It was really the first time anybody had noticed us, says McCrea. It set a sort of precedent, and I'm not sure if it was the right one -- the right first impression. But at the same time, I love the fact that I was able to communicate a critique of culture.

Though it didnt necessarily suggest the groups potential, those who listened to Motorcade in full heard a band that was already secure in its sound. If you listen to their first album, it is very much 'Cake,' says Simmons, who signed the band as a client after hearing the album. I think John McCrea is just an unbelievably wonderful songwriter. His songs are so simple and yet, they have this mysterious quality for me.

By the time the group went into the studio to record Fashion Nugget, they were veterans of the road, with a large catalog of songs that they had already refined. The group was characteristically methodical in the studio, and the band produced all its own music. Nobody was there to have a good time, says DiFiore, Everybody was there to make a good album. There was no yukking it up at all. But most of the trickiest decisions had already been made. The meat of The Distance, for example, was recorded in one take.

We played it once, and headed back to the control room to listen to the playback, says Roper. Greg's kind of bobbing his head, and he turns and he's like, Do you like the sound of the drums? I said, No, not really. Do you? He's like, Yeah, I totally did. I was like, You mean for keeps? And he was like, Yeah. I said, Well, it's your song. You can fucking keep it. And then I went to the coffee shop and got a bagel.

The song is one of very few Cake originals that McCrea didnt write himself. He took to it right away, and I didn't really understand what he saw in it so much, says Brown, who wrote the song, of McCrea. I liked the way it sounded and everything, but I thought Frank Sinatra was a much stronger choice for the single. But the record label chose it and it worked out.

Worked out might be an understatement. The surrealist Office Space-meets-vision quest video went into heavy rotation on MTV, and the song reached no. 4 on the Alternative Airplay chart, behind Bush, Sublime and No Doubt. Suddenly the bands DIY bona fides faded into the background as it moved from the college radio fringe to the epicenter of rock on the heels of another unorthodox track -- one that doesnt really begin to reflect the range uptempo funk, melancholy balladry and country twang on Fashion Nugget.

Critics were neither overwhelmingly positive nor disparaging, but words like ironic, goofy and detached were attached to the bands music with increasing frequency, especially when it came to the follow-up single, a cover of I Will Survive. It was broadly understood as what can only be described as a bit.

I don't think there's any irony in the way I deliver that song at all, says McCrea. The disco sucks movement was weirdly white supremacist, I think that's partially why everybody just assumed it must be a joke song. That's part of the damage of living in this country. We've got some baggage. (Fashion Nuggets other covers, Willie Nelsons Sad Songs And Waltzes and the pop vocal standard Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps, got less attention.)

They all fit in with the country and soul aesthetic that was kind of undergirding our overall sound, says Brown. If it was on our record, it was because [McCrea] just thought the song was the greatest thing in the world. Nothing we were ever doing was supposed to be that cute.

The band won sincere fans too, though -- fans that made it a very successful touring act not only in the wake of The Distance and the radio hits that followed, but right up to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost a decade after their most recent album. But in the immediate wake of their evolution into an MTV-approved act, the pressure of their grueling schedule on the road took a toll on the band. McCrea was diagnosed with exhaustion; tour dates were cancelled.

It becomes really taxing, he says. You're mining for something that there's not very much of, and when you hit a vein of the gold and the quartz or whatever, you just keep going. Let's just rip up the mountain and get all this while we can. I did say no, as much as I could, but it was really an incredible amount of pressure from everybody.

Theres nothing particularly original about the story of fame and fortune putting a strain on creative and personal relationships. But as McCrea would say of the melodies of country songs, it can hit just as hard every time -- and the rapid transformation of Cake from Sacramento upstarts to international touring artists did just that.

The success of that song put such a strain on us personally, says Roper. We weren't strong enough between the five of us in a personal sense to hold it together, to survive the weight that was thrust onto us once the success began to arrive.

Brown and bassist Damiani left the band in 1997. I might have told you one thing back when I was 27 years old, and I left hot headed and mad about what I considered to be irreconcilable personality problems or whatever, says Brown. As 51-year-old me, I see a much larger context of what was going on in my life. Rather than get into all of it, I would just say there was a lot of turmoil at the time, and I felt like leaving Cake would be a decision that would be good for my health.

Because the band was in the middle of such a hot streak they were compelled to regroup almost immediately, bringing back bassist Gabe Nelson and hiring another local guitarist: Xan McCurdy, who is still in the band today. There's still a kind of kernel of Greg Brownness that I bring, whether it's intentional or not, says McCurdy. But there will never be anybody like Greg Brown. He is a total authentic original and a hardcore talent, and really built that group.

There are unintended consequences to becoming Cakes guitarist, though: I make jokes to my friends all the time, McCurdy adds. Like if I play in another band as a side thing I'm like, Look at this, I'm playing a chord! I haven't played a chord in six years.

In spite of the upheaval, Cake topped their initial burst of success with 1998s Prolonging The Magic and its lead single Never There -- both their biggest song to date (it was No. 1 on the Alternative Airplay chart), and probably the only major Cake single that allegations of unseriousness couldnt really stick to, given its a fairly straightforward song about longing. It was really a huge relief for me that the album didn't suck, that I could do it, says McCrea. Having established themselves as hitmakers, the group was signed by Columbia, a decision that came with more money and even more pressure.

There was some record company meddling in some of the decision making, McCrea says. It was a difficult interface between very New York, East Coast, sort of corporate culture and some weirdo home crafts project from Northern California. I think we could have used translators or something.

But it worked, again: 2001s Comfort Eagle, their first major label album, produced yet another Adult Top 40 and alternative radio hit with offbeat, call-and-response ode Short Skirt/Long Jacket and another collection of upbeat, deadpan, hyper-polished, genre-agnostic songs. It surprised me that it took off, says McCurdy of the single. It still does, honestly. I hear the na na nas, and I guess some people like the lyrics? They mostly just seem to like it in sort of a wacky way.

The crux of Cakes legacy lies in that paradox. Their most successful songs almost all fall at one end of their catalogs wide spectrum, the end with the most deadpan spoken word and lyrics that range from poetic to seeming almost free-associated. Short Skirt/Long Jacket, probably the least serious of all of them, helped cement that trend. I mean John keeps a tight grip on the creative side of things, so I'm sure he would have said, Absolutely not, if he didn't want Short Skirt to be the song that represented the group at that point, says McCurdy. But to me, it seemed a little like, Let's not f--k with the formula.

We didn't necessarily choose which songs got attention, says McCrea, but everything happened perfectly if that's what you wanted: to be misunderstood by baby boomers.

Cake released another album with Columbia, Pressure Chief, in 2004, whose prescient Luddite single No Phone reached no. 13 on the Alternative Airplay charts. Then they went dormant, leaving Columbia and relying on their draw as a touring act for the next half-decade. I felt like the whole music industry was somewhat wasteful, like a cruise ship or something, says McCrea. There was a lot of money being thrown at this industry selling a product that for most 19-year-olds was now free. So I just thought, Holy shit, we have to get off of this giant boat.

Going independent didnt hurt the band, though. Showroom of Compassion, recorded in their own solar-powered studio in Sacramento and released in 2011, was also their first no. 1 album on the Billboard 200 the lowest-selling No. 1 album in SoundScan history to that point, moving just 44,000 units, but No. 1 nevertheless -- and spawned one more alternative radio hit in the No. 4-peaking Sick of You. The realities of todays recorded music industry make releasing another Cake project less than appetizing, though theyve been writing and recording plenty in the decade since Showroom was released.

I just don't know if I'm willing to do all the hard work of making an album unless there's an equitable way of distributing it, McCrea says. I've been sort of curmudgeonly about my output. I still want to play music for my friends, but if we're talking about the economic situation, there's just something f--ked up about distribution right now.

But beyond their singles, which seem primed for a second life in TikTok challenges in the best way possible, Cake created an enviable, rich body of meaty songs and creative arrangements that stretched out what the alt 90s scene sounded like. If their stated ambition was a kind of reactive smallness, making music that sounded right on a well-worn record or a cozy club show, the scope of their aesthetic and topical curiosity and willingness to underpin almost all of their work with a critique of consumption was big. I don't know if we've influenced anybody, Brown says -- but the self-conscious rejection of genre and its attendant hierarchies have made Cakes early music sound, if not ahead of its time, than at least ageless.

They are still working together, albeit remotely, after being compelled to cancel tour dates at the beginning of the pandemic last year. McCurdy is in Portland; Roper, who returned to the band in 2016 after over a decade away, has moved to Muscle Shoals, Alabama; DiFiore is still in Sacramento. So is Brown, whose relationship with McCrea has long since been repaired. He's been actually helping me out on my projects, says Brown, who played with Damiani in the band Deathray until 2007, and still works on music as a soloist. We share ideas, and we have a really good relationship. I feel good about that, because I missed that creative energy that he and I had back in the day. I get a bit of that creative spark back.

McCrea lives with his family in Portland. When hes not writing more songs, he surreptitiously plants Western red cedar trees around Oregon a gesture towards environmental activism that he approaches with characteristic self-deprecation.

It's all self-indulgent, McCrea says. It's not going to lead to anything good. But it just feels good to do it, and so that's what I'm doing. If nothing else, it sounds like fuel for another great Cake song.

Continued here:

'Excess Ain't Rebellion': How Cake Has Made Moderation Sound Fun For the Past 30 Years - Billboard

The Impossibility of Equity

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Equity is a moving target. We who create architecture want our devotion to have a true forum of objective Equity. But motivations are not outcomes. How we judge design inevitably carries the baggage of Style and that makes universal equity in design apprehension impossible.

At this moment there are about as many women as men in architecture school. The story of two fully and fantastically successful architects, who happened to be female, says a lot about the impossibility of equity when it comes to how outcomes are perceived in architecture. Architecture is both popular trade and rarified fine art. Those two distinct worlds of judgment are often so separate as to offer zero possibility of equity between them. The two careers of these two women show how success in building and expression can be fully present in one sphere, while silent in the other.

I can compare these extraordinary humans because what I do enabled me to see them both before their bright light was shown to a wider world. I have written eight books and published the work of almost 100 architects. Rather than adopt stylistic screeds of either Modern or Traditional which absurdly try to define beauty, I included the great good work of those who were making the things I wrote about. Small houses, or additions, or other building types are the reason I write, not to polish any aesthetic lens.

In 1990, the book Common Walls/Private Homes written by John Nolon and me showed scores of multifamily projects across the country. In it, we featured an unbuilt housing project designed by Dale Mulfinger and Sarah Susanka. It was the first time Sarah Susankas work had been nationally published. In the intervening decade, Sarahs work exploded on the country, as she captured the zeitgeist of many in response to the insanity of a McMansion era of home marketing. Sarah Susanka wrote The Not So Big House.

The homes of her design shown in that and subsequent books were cleanly crafty, using natural wood, flowing space, and an essential domesticity of residential architecture. Susanka was featured multiple times on Oprah Winfreys television show and then on scores of other national media platforms. She lectured widely, wrote perhaps a dozen more books, even created a Not So Big Lifestyle movement. But the elite architectural press was near silent in celebrating her architecture. No equity of outcome between the Fine Arts world and the popular culture of glossy magazines at the supermarket check-out lines and cable TV where her work found infinite validation. There is no more well-known architect in America than Sarah Susanka.

In 1997, I wrote Expressive Details, featuring about forty architects whose work was shown in about sixty different details. Anne Fougerons work got my attention and she happily sent me two examples of it - tiny things that she was working on. In the next decade her work (as did Sarah Susankas) exploded, but Anne Fougeron was not on Oprahs TV show but rather she was featured in Architectural Record and Architecture magazines, exhibits and received unending AIA and other national awards and recognitions. Her leanly expressive beauty in building is the essence of a Modern sensibility. There is no more celebrated architect than Anne Fougeron.

Two extraordinary women created equity of outcome with all the rest of their peers. But their outcomes, in the same field, found distinct validation in fully separated worlds. Why? I think it is because the iniquitous apprehension of Style categorizes all design, without merit beyond the comfort of controlling definition. There is no equity in segregation.

Beauty is the soul of equity. How we react to everything, including the things that are designed, does not have the luxury of having a universal equity in outcome. We are either moved by the outcomes of others, or we are not. Rather than simply react to the beauty of Susankas craft or Fougerons lines, their buildings are judged Traditional or Modern. Consigned to a separate, but never equal, duality of judgment.

I wish Sarah Susankas architecture was a feature in Architectural Record Record Houses. I wish that Anne Fougerons work as a focus of Fine Homebuildings HOUSES issue. I have had features in both, when there was a tiny touch of aesthetic equity in architectural recognition. But no more. The irony of a lack of equity in their aesthetic outcomes belies the joy found in their human equity in the profession of architecture.

This article is part of the ArchDaily Topic: Equity. Every month we explore a topic in-depth through articles, interviews, news, and projects. Learn more about our monthly topics. As always, at ArchDaily we welcome the contributions of our readers; if you want to submit an article or project, contact us.

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The Impossibility of Equity - ArchDaily

Do you know someone who believes in QAnon? Are you afraid of QAnon? Have you been wondering where it comes from and what it even means?

Join us as todays guest explains how seemingly normal, intelligent, sane people believe in lizard people, pedophile cabals, and micro-chipped trackers delivered via vaccines.

Dr. Sophia Moskalenko

Sophia Moskalenko is a social and clinical psychologist studying mass identity and conspiracy theories at the Georgia State Universitys Evidence-Based Cyber Security group. Dr. Moskalenkos research on psychology of radicalization and terrorism has been presented in scientific conferences, government briefings, radio broadcasts and international television newscasts. As a research fellow at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (NC-START) she has led research projects commissioned by the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of State. She has written several books, including award-winning Friction: How conflict radicalizes them and us, The Marvel of Martyrdom: The power of self-sacrifice in the selfish world, and Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the mind of QAnon.

Gabe Howard

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author.

To learn more about Gabe, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

Producers Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Announcer: Youre listening to Inside Mental Health: A Psych Central Podcast where experts share experiences and the latest thinking on mental health and psychology. Heres your host, Gabe Howard.

Gabe Howard: Im your host, Gabe Howard, and I want to quickly thank our sponsor, Better Help. You can grab a week free by visiting BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral. Calling in to our show today. We have Sophia Moskalenko. Dr. Moskalenko is a social and clinical psychologist studying mass identity and conspiracy theories at the Georgia State Universitys Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Group. She is also the author of Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon. Dr. Moskalenko, welcome to the show.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Thank you so much for having me.

Gabe Howard: The QAnon conspiracy is everywhere. Weve heard it from the Senate floor, from the presidential pulpit, for Petes sake. Its literally been mentioned at the highest levels of government all the way down to seedy social media platform chat rooms. But what exactly is it? What is QAnon?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: QAnon is a baseless and debunked conspiracy theory, or rather its a whole lot of different conspiracy theories under one umbrella, and they range from things like flat earth and lizard people, the idea that there are these lizard human hybrids living among us to the belief that a Satan worshiping cabal of pedophiles has taken over the control of the American government and the media. It, of course, also includes all kinds of beliefs about the COVID virus and the vaccine being either poison or something that can turn your child into LGBTQ or something that carries a micro tracking device. So there are all kinds of different conspiracy theories that all fall under the QAnon umbrella. Its really like an Amazon of conspiracy theories. Theres something there for everyone.

Gabe Howard: When I first heard about QAnon, I thought it was a group. Is it a structured group? Is there a leadership, a membership? Can you join it or is it literally just a collection of nonsense?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Right. There is no leadership to speak of. Initially, QAnon begun with these Q drops, these cryptic pieces of information that appeared on Chans, this like lesser used social media sites that people interpreted as though they were puzzles. And theres a lot of controversy about who the poster was for these original Q drops, who the Q so to speak was, that HBO did a documentary. And at the end, they couldnt really say definitively, but they thought it probably was more than one person posting. By today, QAnon following counts in tens of millions in the US alone, and it has spread around the world to dozens of countries. Its a very loose following. Its not like there are weekly meetings or there are some check points you need to pass in order to get to the QAnon Shangri-La. You too can go online and check out the influencers who spread QAnon content and click by click, you will end up down the rabbit hole, as they call it, where all kinds of theories are formulated and augmented and discussed about how the world really, really works. What are the secret ins and outs of how the economy is controlled and who runs the world government and who are in the cabal and so on.

Gabe Howard: Some people believe that QAnon is a cult. Some people believe that its a religion and theres yet another group of people that are like, no, no, no, its just a political movement. Im having trouble understanding exactly what it is because its so fanciful. I mean, lizard people have taken over our government? I dont understand how this gained any traction, let alone millions of followers. But for the purpose of understanding this phenomenon is QAnon a cult, is it a religion? Is it a political movement? Does it have a name?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Is QAnon a cult? To the best of my knowledge, of what a cult is, it usually is a pretty tight-knit face-to-face group with a very specific leadership and very specific rules for belonging and for leading. QAnon is not face-to-face, people interact with other QAnon followers through the Internet. They usually dont know them. They are not compelled to exchange their addresses and names and phone numbers and so on. There is no central leadership. Were hard pressed to even find out who the original Q drops came from. And its a really broad group. It doesnt really seem to satisfy the definition of a cult, in my opinion. Is it a religion? I am a little rusty on what defines religion, but it seems to me there has to be a central tenet or belief. And as I mentioned, QAnon is such a broad set of beliefs. And a lot of people who are QAnon followers believe some, but not others, often kind of squabble with each other online. There are these QAnon followers who sneer at those who believe in lizard people, and there are those who believe the space lasers and maybe some other QAnon followers dont. It doesnt seem like its like a religion either, because theres no central tenet as far as their beliefs are concerned.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: So what really is it? How should we think about it? In my work on case studies that Ive analyzed for the book, really in-depth analysis of dozens of QAnon followers social media output, their own writings, their posts of videos and interviews they gave, and also looking at some of the research data that my colleagues are now putting out. It seems to me, this is my professional but personal opinion, that QAnon is kind of a zeitgeist. Its a refuge for people who feel like the society is leaving them behind. They share a number of grievances about the government, about how our country is run, the institutions that are in charge of their lives. They share a deep mistrust about science that permeates their daily lives from the food they eat, that has pesticides and hormones and all of that. And the medicines they take and the computers they use, all of the science in their lives, is giving them a lot of anxiety and uncertainty. And the most general thing that we can say about QAnon, I believe, is that its an escape route for those among us who dont feel comfortable or respected or welcomed in the society as it is right now.

Gabe Howard: But theyve turned violent. Its my understanding that the majority of the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 were QAnon believers. Isnt that concerning? I mean, tens of millions of people that are defending their beliefs with violence. Its frightening.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: It would be frightening if it were true. The majority of people who stormed the Capitol Hill building on January 6, in fact, were not QAnon follower. How many were QAnon followers? Well, as of about a month ago, I believe the number was 61 people indicted for participation in the January 6 riot were indeed QAnon followers. Sixty-one is a very small proportion of everyone who was at the January 6 event in the Capitol Hill. So why is there this pretty widespread perception that QAnon was the driving force of that riot? I think one answer is that they just really stood out. That shaman, with the horns and the naked tattoo-covered torso. Some people who wore really bright clothing that featured large letter Q on it, some people with flags. And also the fact that the two women who were killed at the event, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot when she tried to climb a barricade that led to the door behind which the lawmakers escaped, and another woman who was trampled to death on the stairs were both QAnon supporters. So its kind of a availability heuristic that were using when were trying to imagine the crowd on January 6. Because the most visible, the most widely reported as far as the two women who were dead were indeed QAnon followers.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: But in fact, they were a minority at that event. There is indeed a number of QAnon followers who did engage in ideologically motivated crime, including storming the Capitol Hill building. But relative to their population of tens of millions, its a tiny proportion. So QAnon is a set of shared radical beliefs. But as far as radical action is concerned, we probably shouldnt spend too much time worrying about them engaging in it. They are dangerous, though, in a different way.

Gabe Howard: Im very glad to hear that theyre not dangerous in the sense of theyre not trying to overthrow the government. Theyre not participating in violence. But you said they are dangerous. What? How are they dangerous if theyre not dangerous?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Well, theyre not dangerous in a terrorist threat kind of way, but think for a second how big a section of our society believes in QAnon conspiracy theories. Right? This is the same subset of our population who dont believe in our institutions and our governments authority. They dont follow government recommendations. So we already are carrying the costs of this behavior in, for example, rates of vaccination, which we know are correlated with QAnon beliefs. So people who believe QAnon conspiracy theories are a lot less likely to become vaccinated or ever intend to do so. And of course, therefore, their chances of getting sick with COVID and then ending up in a hospital seriously ill and putting pressure on our health care system are a lot higher. They may not participate in elections at the same rate, or they may participate in elections in a way that undermines them, preventing people from voting or intimidating people or discouraging them in other ways.

Gabe Howard: One of the things that I think about is that this is America. Were free to believe whatever we want, you know, freedom, of course, is the right to be wrong. Now, youve listed a lot of reasons why we should, in fact, worry about them. But where do we draw the line on this? It gets really messy quickly, right? We cant stop people from believing incorrect things. Thats not the way America works. But youve described real damage. Whats the path forward?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Right. We cant stop people from believing things, but at the same time, we can make sure that information on which they base their beliefs is at least somewhat balanced. We can make sure that the social media, which are the new public squares basically, they are the new media. A lot of people get their news completely from the social media. They can be fair players in this game and become more transparent about whats happening on their platforms, become a little more diligent about malicious players, whether those are domestic or foreign. We know for a fact that Russia was from the onset very much playing into spreading QAnon, multiplying QAnon content through trolls and bots and Kremlin backed media, because it is in their geopolitical interest to sow this division among the American public, which then results in the kinds of events like the January 6 storming of Capitol Hill. We need regulations for that. And we need legislation that will help to identify malicious players and those who spread harmful content so that people can make decisions based on facts than just what the algorithms of Facebook or YouTube or Twitter put in front of their eyes.

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Gabe Howard: Lets talk about turning loved ones away from QAnon. Is there any way to get through to them and bring them back to reality? Because just saying, hey, youre wrong. Here are the facts, doesnt seem to be working.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Yeah, in fact, its exactly the wrong thing to say, because we know from research that trying to argue with somebody about their beliefs is likely to make them even more entrenched in them. People become defensive and, in their head, even after you have finished talking with them, they will keep coming up with reasons for why they were right and you were wrong. And so a few days later, if you ask them about their beliefs, theyre going to be even more convinced of them than they were before you tried showing them the light, so to speak. So definitely dont argue with QAnon followers about facts. So what can we do? One thing that we can do that is not easy but really important is to not cut these people out of our lives and of our social circles. A really big reason why people joined QAnon or stayed with it was the social connection, especially during the COVID lockdown. The rates of QAnon following just skyrocketed because people were so lonely and so isolated in their homes, they were looking to share their emotions and their fears and QAnon offered that to them. If they could relate to people outside of QAnon not on the basis of their beliefs, but just on the basis of emotional connection. If its family, then you probably have some shared past or common loved ones, that will go a long way toward driving a wedge between them and this crazy online world.

Gabe Howard: Theres this part of me that just thinks that anybody that believes this has to be not intelligent, they have to be just extraordinarily naive or they have to be mentally ill. Is there a link there? Are intelligent people falling for this?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Youre not alone in that assumption or suspicion, people have expressed that a lot, even people in Washington suggested that. My own research doesnt show that intelligence is a correlate of QAnon beliefs. In other words, it doesnt seem to matter how intelligent a person is if you want to predict whether or not they will follow QAnon. So, among the QAnon followers that I researched, there were Harvard graduates, attorneys, physicians, successful small business owners, as well as high school dropouts, people of all ages, different economic backgrounds. We may get better data later, but at least for now, thats what it looks like. Mental illness, on the other hand, does seem to be much more prevalent among QAnon followers than it is in the general population.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Its hard to tell whether mental health problems are the cause of following QAnon, so people who are mentally unwell are more likely to seek out QAnon, or maybe following QAnon exacerbates dormant mental health problems. Or maybe theres something else that is driving both, but there is definitely a connection between the two. I am currently collecting data from, as you say, people who are sitting at home in front of their computers and asking them also about their history of mental health issues. So I will have an answer to that in a couple of months, I hope.

Gabe Howard: I love that the research is continuing on this. It really seems like QAnon took off when the former president started espousing the beliefs, so it gave it some legitimacy. Do you think that we will see this sort of die down as more polarizing political figures are in our rear view?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: I wish the more polarizing political figures were in our rear view, but we have two congresswomen who are avid QAnon supporters and disseminators, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. And we have dozens of political candidates running in the primary who are also unabashedly QAnon supporters. And it seems like its not costing them any votes or any sponsors money. In fact, it seems like it helps them get elected. So unfortunately, I dont think were going to see QAnon kind of dying out of President Trump is, as you say, in our rear view mirror. Unfortunately, I think President Trump is not entirely in our rear view mirror.

Gabe Howard: I think that youre absolutely correct. This is dominating the news cycle. I mean, its a popular enough theory that a mental health podcast is covering it from a mental health perspective. This is not some small fringe thing. Do you think something thats giving it legs is the fact that its constantly being discussed in the media?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Are you proposing a conspiracy theory, Gabe?

Gabe Howard: I, its I struggle with this so much because I just I honestly believe that if you walked up to any QAnon follower and you said to them, Im a reptilian and I live under the flat earth, they would immediately call you a liar. Yet they believe that its out there. Its a dichotomy that confuses me completely, understanding that I am not a mental health professional. I am not a researcher. I am just a gentleman with bipolar who hosts a podcast and gets to talk to great researchers and doctors like you. But the, it fascinates me. And I just dont have the words to describe how anybody can fall for this.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: I think its fair to assume that there is a number of QAnon followers who dont believe much or any of it. And for them, engaging in QAnon talk online or in-person is just a collective narrative making to vent their frustrations, to relate to people of similar political leanings. And if you put them against the wall and, you know, really interrogated them, they would say they didnt really believe any of it. For them, its just a kind of posturing. And then theres some for whom its really true. And those people, unfortunately, are probably deeply unwell. And we need to be thinking about how to provide them with mental health services that theyre not getting at the moment. And then there are a lot of people in the middle who are, like you said, you know, if you told them that you were a lizard hybrid, they would probably laugh in your face. But at the same time, they have to deal with so much on a daily basis that they have no way of ascertaining. And so they just have to take somebodys word on it. Im buying processed food at a store, and I just have to trust the manufacturing company to actually put food into it that they say they did, and occasionally turns out that they didnt do that. Same with medicine I buy for my children. You know, I just have to trust the scientist who put out research about it to be truthful instead of greedy. And occasionally it turns out they were not truthful. So people often develop this deep skepticism and suspicions of the most fundamental daily things that come from science, that come from government, and that are critically important in their lives. And so they treat everything with the same skepticism and allow for the possibility that theres poison in the food and drugs that will make you into a drug addict, even though theyre supposed to help you. And doctors who will push those drugs on you in order to get rich and that there are lizard people living out there.

Gabe Howard: Dr. Moskalenko, I can only imagine what your research is like. It had to be both fascinating and scary because Im equal parts fascinated and terrified. Do you have any final words on this phenomenon? Is this the first time that something like this to this scale has gripped America? Are we in uncharted waters here or is this just more of the same?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Conspiracy theories are definitely not new. In fact, most of QAnon folklore is a reiteration of some old conspiracy theory. Like, for example, the Protocols of Zion, which came out of Czarist Russia in the 18th century and claimed that a cabal of Jews were kidnapping children and worshiping Satan and drinking their blood and torturing them. So that part is not really new or surprising. What is new, though, is how far-reaching its gotten with the help of social media. Were so intimately connected through our devices all the time now. Before it would take some time and effort to get some pamphlets somewhere and read it. And the scarcity of paper and the expense of printing would make the spread of these stories much less. Now its just spreading like wildfire.

Gabe Howard: Its hard enough to move forward when everybody is using actual data, because even in science, we see different interpretations of facts. But when youre not bound by truth, everything is game. And its utterly terrifying to think that there are tens of millions of people that believe some of these things. So thank you so much for your research and your book, Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon. Where can folks find that?

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Its on sale at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can buy it directly from Stanford University Press.

Gabe Howard: Well, thank you so much for being here.

Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.: Thank you for having me.

Gabe Howard: And thank you to all of our listeners. My name is Gabe Howard and I am the author of Mental Illness Is an Asshole and Other Observations. And Im also a nationally recognized public speaker. And I would love to be at your next event. You can grab a signed copy of my book with free swag or learn more about me just by heading over to gabehoward.com. Wherever you downloaded this podcast, please follow or subscribe. Its absolutely free. And you wont miss a thing. Also, take a moment and review the show. And Ill see everybody next Thursday on Inside Mental Health.

Announcer: Youve been listening to Inside Mental Health: A Psych Central Podcast from Healthline Media. Have a topic or guest suggestion? E-mail us at show@PsychCentral.com. Previous episodes can be found at PsychCentral.com/Show or on your favorite podcast player. Thank you for listening.

Continued here:

Podcast: Unraveling the QAnon Conspiracy Theory - PsychCentral.com

Autumn is in the air! Or it was, briefly. This weekend brought the predictable rites of mid-September, from the sad annual remembrance of the 9/11 attacks to a Phillies pennant-race collapse and the wild optimism of a first-game Eagles win that has some fans pricing out Super Bowl LVI tickets. But now ... back to a heat wave and the new normals of the 2020s.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up at inquirer.com/bunch to get it every week in your inbox, as we head toward a heck of a fall.

Portland, Oregon, may be the American city most associated with constant chaos in the 2020s, with its frequent protests by the extreme left and right and spasms of violence, but its police want people to know theyre in control of their own affairs, anyway. In recent weeks, cops in the Pacific Northwest city have been criticized for not responding to recent street clashes. But Portland law officers did manage to take down one political figure when they successfully told Mayor Ted Wheeler to take his vaccine mandate and shove it.

With the delta variant of the coronavirus exploding nationwide, Wheeler last month declared that city police would be part of a statewide vaccine mandate for health workers handed down by Oregons Democratic governor. But when Portlands police union blasted the move and insisted many officers would quit the force rather than get the jab, city attorneys sheepishly said cops might be legally exempt from such a mandate and Wheeler backed down.

The win for Portland cops over their boss and, arguably, public safety (including their own) is part of a full-blown revolt nationwide, not just in Oregon where a statewide cop union and scores of firefighters and troopers are suing Gov. Kate Brown over vaccines, and where one now-suspended state police officer filmed a video in his cruiser, in uniform, blasting those who get the shot out of fear.

This week, six Los Angeles police officers sued their city over its mandate, calling it a scheme to embarrass, humiliate, shame and deprive [their] liberty... In New York City, city officials who initially wanted a straight-up vaccine mandate agreed after heavy police union pressure to also allow for weekly testing of unvaccinated officers yet the Patrolmens Benevolent Association is up in arms over even that. Angry cops and their unions are threatening legal action across America from San Jose to Cincinnati, often in the overwrought verbiage of right-wing resistance.

The head of Chicagos police union, John Catanzara, seemed to capture the zeitgeist of this growing cop counter-revolution when he said: Were in America, goddamn it. We dont want to be forced to do anything. Period. This aint Nazi (bleep)ing Germany, [where they say], Step into the (bleep)ing showers. The pills wont hurt you. What the (bleep)?

READ MORE: Why do police unions talk and act like the Mafia? How can we stop them? | Will Bunch

Thats an outrageous statement, but there is also something tragically sad about the massive resistance among U.S. rank-and-file police to getting the COVID-19 vaccine. Although exact numbers are hard to come by, its been estimated that at least 300 police officers have been killed by the virus, more than all other causes of active duty deaths combined. Yet despite their elevated risk of exposure while out patrolling the streets, in many departments only about half or fewer of officers have taken the free and readily available vaccines, Instead, growing numbers of cops echo misinformation about the coronavirus widely circulating on social media.

The seemingly cultural resistance among police officers given a loud voice by their union leaders is deeply troubling on several levels. The fact that city leaders from Portland to New York City have so caved to police union pressure on whats literally a life-or-death matter involving the health of citizens is doing nothing to dispel the wider fears of creeping authoritarianism within an American police state where armed men in uniform are ruling the streets.

Cop unions have already relied on political intimidation and decades of police-friendly legislation to beat back many of the radical reform proposals made after millions took to the streets to protest 2020s police murder of George Floyd. Their show of force in fighting vaccine mandates puts this crisis of public authority in stark relief.

But the sweeping mandate resistance also raises the question: Who do the police even work for? Refusing to get the shots which so far have proven both safe and remarkably effective in fighting the virus suggested that many not all, but way too many officers care most about their personal freedom to own the streets as they please, with little regard for the health and safety of the citizens they come in contact with. Their unwillingness to protect their home communities from a killer on a loose the coronavirus confirms 2020s harshest criticisms of Americas cops. Does Blue Lives Matter really mean that only blue lives matter?

Scores of cops are threatening to quit their jobs even surrender their potentially lucrative pensions rather than get a COVID-19 shot. In a moment where America should already be radically rethinking public safety with fewer warriors on the beat and more caring first-responders like mental-health workers we ought to let them walk. In fact, I cant think of a better way to not only meaningfully defund the police, but to get rid of problematic officers.

The Ted Lasso effect feels in full bloom at the start of Only Murders in the Building, the new Hulu limited series which merges a prime-time-TV-caliber murder mystery, a gentle but needed spoof of Americas addiction to true-crime podcasts, and the boomer nostalgia pairing of Steve Martin and Martin Short with singer Selena Gomez replacing Chevy Chase as the third amiga. The kickoff episode moves a little slow like its presumed audience but the appeal of its two former wild-and-crazy guys endures.

They might as well hand out next springs national magazine awards right now, because they all should belong to Anand Gopal of the New Yorker for his tour de force of investigative journalism called The Other Afghan Women, which looks at how 40 years of non-stop fighting capped by the American war devastated the countryside of Afghanistan. Gopals interviews with anguished mothers who lost as many as a dozen relatives during Americas 20-year intervention is 100 times more informative than the steady flow of retired generals on U.S. cable news.

Question: Why do reporters feel the need to ask certain politicians if they will accept the result of an election before the results are in? It happened again, this time with the potential recall in California. Drew McQuade (@creekmud) on Twitter

Answer: Drew, youve seized on a true dilemma: How to handle the growing dominance of the GOPs Big Lie around voter fraud in America the latest conspiracy theory in which journalists must decide whether to ignore a fast-spreading falsehood, with the idea of not giving it oxygen, or confronting it head on. I think the current crisis poses no alternative to fighting lies with facts. Here at home, The Inquirer has taken a stand by refusing to call the Pennsylvania Legislatures unwarranted review of the 2020 election an audit, since the process in no way resembles a valid audit. A new kind of journalism to defend the truth is slowly emerging.

President Bidens more aggressive approach on the COVID-19 pandemic, including vaccine mandates for federal workers and large and mid-sized employers, has sparked a furious Republican backlash (albeit mostly verbal ... for now). Their reaction carries many echoes of how the American South responded to a stepped-up federal role toward ending racial segregation in the 1950s and 60s a movement that came to be dubbed massive resistance. Alabamas Republican Gov. Kay Ivey is a case study: Shed broken ranks with many of her GOP colleagues earlier this summer by lashing out at her states unvaccinated people, but has now shifted with the political winds. You bet Im standing in the way, she tweeted Friday in response to Biden. And if he thinks hes going to move me out of the way, hes got another thing coming. Im standing as strong as a bull for Alabama against this outrageous Washington overreach. Bring it on.

READ MORE: Live free and die: Inside the bizarre political philosophy of Americas unvaccinated | Will Bunch

You know what other Alabama governor built a national reputation for standing in the way? The 1960s segregationist George Wallace, who famously stood in a schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama in 1963 in what amounted to a nationally televised stunt to show his opposition to enrolling its first Black students. Incredibly if that throwback allusion wasnt enough Iveys vow to be as strong as a bull also reminded readers of the eras other leading Alabama politician against racial progress: Birmingham police leader Eugene Bull Connor, whose men attacked 1963 civil rights marchers with dogs and fire hoses. Iveys words made clear how vaccine resistance is rooted in the same impulses that once battled Southern integration a warped definition of freedom that really aims to lock in privilege for white people.

In Americas tangled modern history, theres more than one important anniversary. In my Sunday column, I looked at the overlooked and vitally important legacy of the Occupy Wall Street protests that launched 10 years ago this Friday. Wrongly spun as a failure by the end of 2011, the veterans of the movement never stopped working and have put issues like canceling student debt and the $15 living wage on the front burner, while building democratic socialism into a political force.

Over the weekend, I wrote a column digging into what appears to be the worst blunder of Joe Bidens eight-month presidency, the Aug. 29 Kabul drone strike meant to stop a terror attack that apparently killed a U.S.-allied aid worker and seven children instead. I dug deeper into the hubris of Americas need to project power and military control in the world, and the tragedies from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan that have resulted. Hopefully, the senseless death of Zemari Ahmadi marks a turning point.

My home county Delaware County, Pa., better known as Delco has been having quite a moment in 2021, largely thanks to HBOs Mare of Easttown which portrayed the middle-class suburb as a land of colorful, vaping Eagles fanatics addicted to Wawa coffee and hoagies. Reality, as always, is more complicated. Delco was ruled by corrupt GOP machine politics through 2019 and has long had a nightmare criminal justice system; this week, The Inquirers ace injustice reporter Samantha Melamed toppled another domino when she exposed the countys long history of jailing people with mental health problems rather than seeking proper help. Citizens rarely learn about these kind of problems without a strong local news org with the resources to expose them. Support the power of local journalism by subscribing to The Inquirer.

More here:

To infect and serve: The cop vaccine crisis | Will Bunch Newsletter - The Philadelphia Inquirer

I. WHATS IN A NAME?

Ahead of the forthcoming university academic year, I was tasked with creating a new fourth-year seminar at my department of English. I settled upon a course on African futurisms. My goal was simple and noble: offer as much insight as possible into how a people may shape their future through stories about themselves. I wanted my students to engage with how peoples descended from the African continent however much removed from it by distance, time, and/or lineage create ideas of themselves in the future. This seemed a simple and sturdy platform on which to stand, until I came to the very first point of ingress: what exactly was I to title the course?

This is the same conundrum faced by the editors of the critical collection Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century, Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek. At first glance, it may be easier to assume Lavender and Yaszek have taken the easy route by claiming Afrofuturism in the title, therefore signaling to the reader where they stand on the nomenclature for describing futurisms created by peoples descended from the African continent. But right from the introduction, Imagining Futures in Full Color, it is clear that the stance of the editors is anything but. They soon engage various authors on how they posit Afrofuturism be defined. Though a decent portion of the voices selected end up being somewhat tied to the North American continent a situation I was hoping would be otherwise even they do not quite agree on what exactly Afrofuturism is or should be. The editors eventually decide that while the term will be employed throughout the book as a shorthand for everything in related discourse, it is by no means all-encompassing.

What, exactly, is Afrofuturism, then?

This is not the question the collection sets out to answer, and rightly so. But what do fellow connoisseurs of the field do when we simply need an expression to communicate this envelope of ideas and concepts? I found that other academics who had come before me opted for Afrofuturism or a variation of it for their courses. But I was determined to represent the global collage of ideas, concepts, and media that this term encompasses, a desire that came more from a personal than an administrative place. So I set out to find a way to do so.

II. The Future Is Divergent

When I, a born-and-raised Nigerian, first came upon the term Afrofuturism, it immediately read, to me, like a term specifically used to describe futuristic impressions of the Black experience in the African diasporas, especially in North America. This sentiment is echoed by the four non-American authors in the first chapter, Author Roundtable on Afrofuturism, which features the editors in conversation with seven authors from around the globe. Each goes on to point out that the matters of interest and import examined under the Afrofuturism label differ greatly depending on locale between (and even within) the continent versus its diasporas.

Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican-born Canadian, for instance considers Afrofuturism a filter, a lens through which her work can be viewed, but prefers not to define herself as an Afrofuturist. It can recognize work like mine, but cant completely encompass it, nor should it have to, she says. Nick Wood, a Zambian-born South African, considers it an attempt to hang a conceptual umbrella over a range of cultural products. Chinelo Onwualu, a Nigerian, believes the term defines a particular type of literary, artistic, and musical aesthetic that is born out of the unique experiences of the African diaspora. Minister Faust, a Kenyan Canadian, even considers the term of no significant analytical value due to its relative recency and believes that we need a term of our own devising.

Wildly differing views such as these are not a conceptual problem. Even American authors have similarly varying dispositions. N. K. Jemisin mentions barely applying the term to her own work, and insists Afrofuturism must not be a shorthand for science fiction and fantasy written by Black people. Nisi Shawl considers the term a convenience for critics first, a marketing tool second, and third as a moment of attention in the stream of pop-culture consciousness. Bill Campbell considers it a movement, but one that lacks a coherent doctrine or manifesto. Yet, all agree that their connections to the African continent however far back shape their experience of the world, and it is impossible to separate their work from this experience.

As an author, I feel the same frustration. I consider the global Black and African existences to be highly interconnected but too multifaceted to be grouped together under a single conceptual frame centering the outlooks of people of African descent. This is why other authors qualify Afrofuturism or reject it outright, like Nigerian American author Nnedi Okorafor, who reorients her work toward Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism.

Like Okorafor and the authors from the roundtable, I consider my longtime roots on the African continent an inextricable part of my contemporary existence. I also believe that whatever varied pathways storytellers descended from the African continent take to envision alternative existences for ourselves, our stories spring from that interconnected heritage. For us, the future is always the past is always the present the embodiment of Afrofuturist consciousness and telling our stories means we are always looking through this prism.

In this sense, I may be closer to Hopkinsons school of thought: that Afrofuturism is more a consciousness, an acute awareness that this shared history however long past creates a lens through which not a single story is seen when peered through, but a divergence into a rainbow of futures.

III. The Afrofuturist Consciousness

In the 1994 essay collection Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke University Press), editor Mark Dery published a series of interviews with Black futurist authors such as Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. It is in this essay, titled Black to the Future, that the term Afrofuturism is understood to have been coined. Since then, Afrofuturism has oscillated in and out of the American cultural zeitgeist. But two notable incidents in recent times have nudged Afrofuturist consciousness onto a wider and more global platform.

The first, in 2018, was the massive global success of the Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole film Black Panther, which served as a wake-up call reminding Blackness, wherever it is situated in the globe, of its origins, riches, and prospects. The second was Americas reckoning with racial oppression in 2020, sparked by outcries following the murder of George Floyd and exacerbated by a global pandemic and economic crisis which highlighted the harsh realities of American inequality. This reckoning had far-reaching effects, offering many the courage and confidence to stand up to oppressive systems in their countries. Together, these events sparked a flurry of discussions about what the futures of Blackness may look like both in America and the rest of the world and what steps might be taken to achieve them.

With this consciousness came a rush to define what Afrofuturism actually is and who should be authorities on the discipline. And here, minefields rooted in the multiplicity of Afrofuturism were exposed. The questions asked were seemingly simple: Whose work do I read to get introduced to Afrofuturism? Who gets to be interviewed as an expert on the subject? Whose insights are most true to the spirit of the discipline? Each new question revealed the error of the approach: searching for a seminal authority on the concept in the first place.

Luckily, Literary Afrofuturism never quite sets out to do this. The collection mirrors how amorphous the discipline itself can be, moving across the spectra of gender, age, science, spirituality, language, geography and place, time and space, etc. For instance, Sheree Rene Thomass Dangerous Muses considers the role of feminist writers in Afrofuturist thought, including discussions of novelists Andrea Hairston, Hopkinson, Okorafor, Sofia Samatar, and other short fiction authors, such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kiini Ibura Salaam, and Nisi Shawl. She discusses how their work helps frame Black womens agency and aesthetics in a world that often denies the existence of both. I consider her focus on the intersectionality of Black futurism and other axes of identity gender, sexuality, queerness, etc. groundbreaking, as these are aspects often ignored under Afrofuturist discourse. She presents the characters in these authors works as conjurers and seers, ancestors and witnesses, immortals and muses, travelers and jigganauts, rightly engaging with Afrofuturistic thought as a spectrum of intersectionality.

Themes within the Afrofuturist consciousness also discussed include the colonial intrusions on indigenous storytelling and the science-myth-spirituality spectrum. Gina Wisker draws comparisons between postcolonial literature and speculative work, especially regarding African-descended history, in Middle Age, Mer People, and the Middle Passage. By examining work from Black artists such as Merle Collins and Hopkinson, Wisker figures speculation as a pathway to righting the false histories often prevalent in postcolonial spaces, particularly noting Hopkinsons work as combining the critical insights of postcolonial literature with the utopian bent of SF. She concludes that embracing the liminality of postcolonial spaces offers speculative stories the opportunity to produce both new narrative perspectives and literary forms.

One aspect that doesnt often see much engagement within Afrofuturist cultural production or critical discourse is the centering of younger generations concerns. Rebecca Holden attempts to rectify that with Young Adult Afrofuturism, where change is a principal theme. Holden posits that the ability of YA speculative fiction to break genre boundaries, mixing fantasy, SF, horror, supernatural, and mystery with little fanfare, makes it a fitting vessel to break down our notions about how science, history, and technology might be defined. There is a strong argument for how young Black protagonists best demonstrate the dual consciousness of the African-descended experience: they must exist in the present, which continues to be oppressive to them, and cannot simply grow up and find their place in society. With the lines of identity becoming increasingly blurred due to advancements in technology, the future may be much closer in their consciousness than in that of older generations.

An essay of import to the centering of Blackness in our present geological epoch of the Anthropocene is Lisa Dowdalls Black Futures Matter, which engages with the geontology of N. K. Jemisins Broken Earth series. Dowdall posits that Jemisins series is a literary innovation that uses geology to question widespread cultural assumptions about the natural divisions between race, species and matter and promotes new ways of theorizing the human in connection to the mineral substance of our world. By depicting ecosystems as alive and granting them personhood, Dowdall explains that Jemisins work celebrates the relationships between all things, living and nonliving, by imagining a network of interconnected, mutual becoming.

IV. Mess and Making

I ended up naming my fourth-year seminar African-descended Futurisms, each word selected with intent. The plurality of futures possible as demonstrated by this collection and its myriad of voices, approaches, and matters of interest was behind my choice of futurisms over futurism or even futures. Like the contributors, I am well aware of how Africas uniquely undervalued contribution to global development has forever welded its past to its future. Futurisms offers up space for the understanding that multiple paths exist for creators to take toward imagining possible existences for peoples descended from the African continent.

The collection closes out with similar tendencies, ranging from Jerome Winters Global Afrofuturist Ecologies to Marleen S. Barrs musing on global interdependence You Cant Go Home Again to Nadine Moonsamys reframing of Amos Tutuolas The Palm-Wine Drinkard as at home in the global lexicon of global SF. It cements my personal joy with this collection: that each contributor gets to offer their distinct angle and approach to one piece of the pie that makes up the Afrofuturist consciousness. For a descriptive term that is still in its nascent stages, Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century does the important work of paving the way for said agreements and disagreements, acceptance and reluctance, and stands firm in the messiness of it all, proclaiming that messiness as, in fact, a part of its making.

Suyi Davies Okungbowa is a Nigerian author of fantasy, science fiction, and general speculative work. He is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Ottawa.

Go here to see the original:

The Future Is Divergent: On Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century - lareviewofbooks

Mixing It Up: Painting Today

Hayward Gallery, until 12 December

Newport Street Gallery, until 12 December

Painting has always been dead, Willem de Kooning once mused. But I was never worried about it. The exhibition Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery is crammed with work by 31 artists who likewise dont allow the allegedly moribund state of their medium to keep them away from pigments and palette.

This is well worth a visit, not only to see such good things as Hold the Right Rail by the 87-year-old Rose Wylie, containing a patch of yellow curtain that somehow holds the eye and stays in the memory; the kind of magic that paint can work like nothing else. Elsewhere there is plenty of evidence on show of ebullient pleasure in the material itself, whether thick or thin, loose and free or applied with a delicate touch.

Mixing It Up also provides a handy introduction to various star exponents of the easel and brush who have risen in recent years. Oscar Murillo is one of these: prominent enough to have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2019 (and would perhaps have been the winner had all the contestants not asked for the award to be given jointly). He works in other ways, including sculpture and video, but at the Hayward Murillo shows a series of huge pictures all entitled manifestation (201920) which pack a considerable punch. These have the feeling of shimmering water you get in Gerhard Richters abstracts, but in a much harsher, messier manner. There is a suggestion of black, beating wings, wreckage, chaos. In early autumn 2021, they have a rather timely feel.

Mixing It Up, however, makes few claims to have caught the zeitgeist. As the title jokily implies, it is a bit of a jumble, containing a sprinkling of fabulous things and quite a few others suggestive of the village art show. There is no proclamation of a new movement or -ism (wisely).

If there is a presiding influence, it might be Peter Doig. This is not so much a matter of how he paints (though there are signs other artists have been paying close attention to his softly saturated colour). Its more that Doig, born in Edinburgh, brought up in Canada and the Caribbean, educated in London, now living and working partly in Trinidad, is a perfect example of the global painter. Although the artists included in the show are all based in the UK, many of them have had similarly cosmopolitan careers. Murillo originally hailed from Colombia, while Jonathan Wateridge, another of the stars of the show, spent his early life in Zambia. Among painters who were new to me and caught my eye, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and Sophie von Hellermann were brought up, respectively, in Zimbabwe and Munich.

Of course, art always has been a bit globalised. What art historians called influence is appropriation by another, less hostile name. We all borrow from each other, and always have but maybe nowadays even more.

One element that isnt much in evidence is photography (the rival wrongly believed to have murdered painting in 1839). Admittedly, Hwami works from a digital collage of her own photos and found images, which she then renders on the canvas. And Wateridge, until recently, operated in a manner almost like a film director, setting up scenes with actors, which he then photographed, using the camera images as a basis for the final painting. But he has recently moved towards a looser, brushier idiom.

Over at Damien Hirsts Newport Street Gallery, there is a large exhibition of work by the doyen of American photorealist painting, Richard Estes. Except, as usual with stylistic labels, that one isnt quite correct. When one talks to Estes, one quickly discovers that he just thinks of himself as a realist artist something rather different. He first came to attention in the late 1960s with pictures of New York that seemed to have a bit of a pop art vibe, full as they were of neon signs and shiny cars and plate-glass windows.

However, the works on show bear out his claim that he is a part of a long line of artists, such as the Americans Thomas Eakins and Frederic Edwin Church, stretching back to Canaletto, who used a camera as a tool (in Canalettos case a film-less camera obscura). But that is not the same thing as slavishly copying photographs. It involves a process of translation. Ironically, in reproduction an Estes painting does indeed look rather like a photo. But when you stand in front of one, you are aware of Estess neat, decisive brushstrokes, the satisfying physicality of the paint (which Hirst has called yumminess); of all the beauties that only paint can produce. These painterly pleasures explain why, far from expiring, the medium has never even been seriously unwell. It certainly seems sprightly just at the moment.

Read more from the original source:

The yumminess of paint - Spectator.co.uk

It was during the moment of silence honoring the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks that a drunk woman began yelling obscenities at the crowd in attendance at Saturdays Triller Fight Club event.

This isnt fucking Venezuela, the woman, who donned a bandana emblazoned with the American flag, yelled as she was being escorted out of the building.

Go fuck yourself, someone in the crowd fired back.

As the commotion took place ringside, the pay-per-view broadcast maintained focus on former President Donald Trump, who was seated in a booth overlooking the arena as one of the featured commentators. Dressed in a black suit with a blue tie, the former president watched as 9-year-old DCorey Johnson deliver a stunning rendition of the national anthem prior to the evenings main event. As Johnson exited the ring, the raucous crowd performed their own chorus of We love Trump, much to the former presidents delight.

What a great evening, Trump told the crowd on the night marking the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I think youre going to see an incredible fight.

Even by Trumps standards, that statement could not have been further from the truth.

The main event pitted two fighters with a combined age of 102: boxing great Evander Holyfield, months shy of his 59th birthday, and 44-year-old former UFC champion Vitor Belfort. It was a one-sided beating that saw Belfort drop Holyfield, who was ten years removed from his last pro fight, before the referee stepped in to stop the bout at just 1:49 in the opening round. By all accounts, it was a necessary stoppage that potentially saved Holyfield from life-altering damage. But why was Holyfield there in the first place? How had a commission sanctioned a fight between a fighter close to pension age against a competitor 14 years his junior? And why was the former president of the United States calling the action?

What I mean to say is: How the hell did we get here?

Well, for starters, Holyfield wasnt even supposed to be the one fighting on Saturday. That role belonged to Oscar De La Hoyawho retired in 2009before he was hospitalized after testing positive for the coronavirus. With less than two weeks notice, Triller brought in Holyfield to replace De La Hoya but were unable to get the fight sanctioned in California (for obvious reasons). So instead of finding another fighter, preferably one who still a competitive athlete, Triller moved the entire fight card across the country to Florida, where an incompetent athletic commission had no qualms about allowing a 58-year-old to step into the ring.

Triller added fuel to the fire when the organization announced on Tuesday that Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr., would be providing commentary for the event in a special gamecast. The next day, renowned boxing commentator Jim Lampley, whom Triller had secured to call the fights, pulled out in objection to Trumps involvement in the event. This resulted in a broadcast featuring the former president, his son, former UFC champion Junior dos Santos, and Jorge Masvidal, who campaigned for Trump on numerous occasions during the 2020 presidential election cycle. Trump spent much of the broadcast reminiscing about old boxing fights, his days hosting boxing events in Atlantic City during the 1980s-90s, and his favorite boxers, all while chugging bottles of diet coke.

Trump has always had a flair for the absurd. Apart from his history of hosting UFC and boxing events in his Atlantic City casinos, Trump was also involved in a World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) storyline with Vince McMahon in 2007. The storyline culminated in a Battle of the Billionaires showdown between the two at Wrestlemania 23. Trump continues to maintain ties with McMahon and UFC President Dana White, both of whom have publicly and financially supported his presidential campaigns. Vinces wife Linda McMahon even became head of the Small Business Administration during Trumps presidency, which she later left to chair the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action.

And while Trump was relatively tame in comparison to the way he approaches his rallies, and was actually engaged in some of the fightshe seemed genuinely surprised when Anderson Silva knocked out Tito Ortiz, whom he called a very smart guyhe did manage to sneak in several political jabs at President Biden during the broadcast.

Its like elections: it could be rigged, Trump said when describing the way referees and judges decide boxing matches.

Meanwhile, those who paid $50 to watch the pay-per-view were treated to a live chat filled with adherents of the far-right QAnon conspiracy movement discussing topics such as Hunter Biden, election fraud, and whether John F. Kennedy Jr. was still alive. In other words, a hellscape that was both absurd and entirely reflective of the state of combat sports.

Triller, an entertainment app that views itself as a competitor to TikTok, formed its fight club in response to a growing interest in celebrity boxing and exhibition matches, fueled by the rise of YouTube sensations Jake and Logan Paul. Both have arguably more star power than any active fighter on the UFC roster not named Conor McGregor (and even he is far past his prime, both in fighting form and popularity). Much of this is due to the UFCs inability to generate new stars capable of capturing mainstream attention. Outside of McGregor, the only other truly mainstream figure in the UFC is color commentator Joe Rogan, who, much like the Paul brothers, owes his fame from his success on YouTube.

The UFC has proven to be unwilling of generating new stars that capture mainstream attention. Part of the problem is the over-saturation of UFC events, which has led to a noticeable decrease in the quality of the fights showcased under the UFC banner. Many UFC pay-per-views are no longer worth the price of admission, and search and web traffic for UFC fighters has dwindled relative to the Paul brothers. This is no longer the heyday of Brock Lesnar, Ronda Rousey, or McGregor.

Boxing, too, has suffered over the years. While the sport has generated talents such as Gennady Golovkin, Canelo Alvarez, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua, none carry the star power of their predecessors such as Floyd Mayweather or Manny Pacquiao did. And yet, even Mayweather could not ignore the allure (and easy pay-day) of celebrity boxing when he faced Jake Paul in an exhibition bout earlier this year.

As interest in boxing and MMA has waned, an appetite for entertainment based combat sports events reemerged. Triller understood this, which is why it signed Jake Paul to compete against Nate Robinson on the undercard of the Mike Tyson vs. Roy Jones Jr. exhibition matchand later had Paul headline their following event against MMA fighter Ben Askren. It is also why every MMA fighter (and some boxers, too) worth their salt is calling out the Paul brothers in the hope of earning the biggest pay day of their careers.

Case in point: Vitor Belfort. After beating up on the aged Holyfield, Belfort called out the elder Paul brother and announced that Triller was willing to offer a $25 million purse for the winner of a proposed fight between them on Thanksgiving. All of this occurred in an arena peppered with signs that read Trump Won and Trump 2024. It was only natural that Trump would be the one to close out the circus.

This is like a rally, Trump said while waving at the crowd and thanking them for their support. We love our country.

While Trumps involvement in the Triller carnival is a testament to the role that combat sports plays in the zeitgeist of modern American politics, it was by no means the worst part of the event. Indeed, the former president was overshadowed by the aged veterans who tainted their legacies on pay-per-view for our supposed entertainment. And though Ortizs faceplant KO loss does feel like karmic justice, we are all lucky that the Holyfield fight did not end in tragedy.

Triller may be responsible for the incompetent matchmaking but it is the collective failures of MMA and boxing that are to blame for our current nightmare.

Link:

How the hell did we get here? - Bloody Elbow

Crypto has plenty of detractors, but it is those who were once inside the tent that attract the most interest - and ire.

That's the upshot of a recent Financial Times Magazine piece that interviewed several early crypto superfans who have since become disillusioned with the sector.

The FT spoke with an unnamed figure dubbed "Neil," who in 2014, fresh out of college, joined Coinbase, then an obscure crypto startup. Neil, a computer science student, was first attracted to the idea of virtual money as a neat programming problem to solve.

But he quickly became swept up in the revolutionary ethos of the early crypto scene, which promised to take on the bad, old financial system and replace it with something better.

That spirit still lives on in some of today's most vocal crypto proponents. Take, for instance, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, who at a conference in July said the ultimate ambition of bitcoin is that it "creates world peace."

Shape Up Your Future 16th & 17th September 2021

Or take Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy, which owns more than $5 billion in bitcoin. At the Miami bitcoin conference in June now famous for the announcement El Salvador would officially adopt bitcoin, Saylor called the cryptocurrency "the apex property of the human race," saying it "fixes everything."

In 2014, that degree of crypto hype was less mainstream. Yet for Neil, the relative obscurity of crypto brought a certain coolness, a feeling of operating from the underground.

"I think nerdy types like me got fooled because bitcoin made us feel cool, like a Revenge of the Nerds type thing, so we were incentivized to not ask ourselves hard questions," Neil told the FT. "And then, the non-technical people got fooled because they didn't understand the technology."

Chris DeRose, a computer consultant-turned-bitcoin evangelist, was likewise enchanted by early crypto culture. In 2013, he quit his job to become a crypto podcaster, telling the FT that he loved the culture of open discourse that fueled the bitcoin and crypto communities then.

But as crypto rose to greater mainstream recognition, DeRose saw debate give way to dogma and uncritical hype.

"If you look online at 'what is bitcoin,' what you'll see is a gigantic amount of literature and decontextualized media snippets that paint a beautiful picture," DeRose told the FT.

"However, if you look at bitcoin off the screen, what you'll see is declining merchant uptake, zero evidence of blockchain deployment or efficiency, and mostly just a lot of promotional events offering cures to whatever ails you," he added.

But perhaps the most high-profile display of a crypto backer turning on the space has to be Jackson Palmer, the dogecoin creator who in July tore into the crypto space in a Twitter thread.

In the thread, Palmer called crypto an "inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology" that uses a "network of shady business connections" to "extract new money from the financially desperate and naive." He compared it to a cult and a get-rich-quick scheme, and said he was leaving the space.

Still, despite these detractors, in many ways the crypto enthusiasts have won. Each passing day sees more and more big-ticket companies making inroads in crypto, shrugging off scams, hacks, and sharp volatility.

Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman, who is 78, summed up the zeitgeist earlier this week in an interview.

"I say that if you don't understand bitcoin, it means you're old."

Originally posted here:

Some early crypto enthusiasts have bailed on the sector, saying the movement has bought into hype without unde - Business Insider India

By Sir John Jenkins

There has been a vogue recently to take some particular year, call it the year that changed X and produce a book or a documentary about it. These range from the mostly very bad (1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything spoiler alert: It didnt) to the rare piece of excellence (Kim Ghattas Black Wave, about the profound long-term impact of 1979 the Iranian Revolution, Juhayman Al-Otaibi, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan).

I have a sneaking sympathy with the desire to pin down moments when the zeitgeist shifted. After all, some events are so striking or devastating that they do indeed seem to derail history. Nearly 60 years on, I can still remember the first black and white pictures of the John F. Kennedy assassination in Dallas flickering across the small screen of our television set in the English Midlands on a cold November day in 1963. The same with the 1969 moon landing. I imagine the Ides of March in 44 B.C. was indelibly printed on the minds of politically aware Romans. And, in all his long years of exile in New York and Stanford, I dont suppose Alexander Kerensky ever forgot the storming of St. Petersburgs Winter Palace on Nov. 7, 1917.

But mostly this is a convenient and sometimes lazy trope that can obscure the much longer and more complex trains of events that produce historical change. The Kennedy assassination was the product of the Cold War and two decades of increasingly polarized and sometimes paranoid politics in the US and was itself only the first of three violent deaths in the 1960s that changed America. Julius Caesar didnt die because of what hed done that month: He was killed for the same reason as the two Gracchi brothers some 70 years earlier they promoted populist reforms that threatened oligarchic rule. And, in truth, the collapse of the Roman Republic was a long time coming. Even the storm of 1979 had been sown long beforehand in the radical study circles of Tehran, Qom and Najaf, Makkah and Madinah, and Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta.

And we should have seen 9/11 coming too. Osama bin Laden had already announced his intentions with attacks in East Africa and Yemen. He had made plain his absolute hostility to the US in particular, to the infidel West in general, and to all Arab states and governments that refused to accept his impossibly absolutist demands. He drew on ideas that had been brewing inside Islamist movements for half a century and more shaped into a destructive ideology and forged into a weapon of revolutionary action by, among others, Abul Ala Al-Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, Abu Musab Al-Suri, Omar Abdel-Rahman and their followers. We simply failed to pay attention and, by we, I mean all of us. Killun yani killun (all means all).

So 9/11 was an alarm call. It had been planned by Al-Qaeda from its haven inside Afghanistan, which had become a magnet for global extremism in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the destructive wars in Chechnya and the Balkans. The Taliban regime, which had emerged out of the Deobandi madrasas of Pakistan, rejected all appeals to dissociate themselves from Al-Qaeda and hand over Bin Laden. Their refusal led to their destruction. But now theyre back and gleefully celebrating, along with fellow Sunni Islamists across the world (and some in the Pakistani government), what they see as the defeat of another superpower, this time the US, along with its Western allies.

Has nothing changed? Or has everything changed?

Before we answer that question, there are two other events of the last 20 years we need to consider. The first was the global financial crash of 2007. The second is the COVID-19 pandemic. And then, into the interstices of this framework, we need to weave the rise of China and its turn to a form of personalized authoritarianism that we have not seen since Chairman Mao; the technological revolution in warfare, where unmanned aerial vehicles, cyber and other highly destructive but relatively cheap offensive weapons have transformed the balance of threat; the failure of US and European efforts to build a new state on the ruins of catastrophe in Iraq; the migration crisis in the Mediterranean after 2011 in the aftermath of the almost equally destructive Arab Spring; and the rise of highly polarized sociocultural politics in the US and Europe.

The year 2000 was, in some ways, the high-water mark of the Western-made post-1945 world order. The US and its allies had won the Cold War, Russia under Boris Yeltsin seemed to wish to be cooperative, the Balkan Wars had been ended and the Oslo peace process looked as if it was only a negotiating whisker away from ultimate success. The global economy was booming, with millions lifted out of poverty every year, demonstrating the ultimate power of the Washington Consensus. The EU was on the verge of a major expansion eastward. And the mandarins of Brussels looked forward to an accelerating, if necessarily discreet, integration of EU nation states into a modern version of the Carolingian Empire under the intellectual guidance not of Alcuin of York but the technocrats of the Berlaymont.

Then it all went wrong. Some of this was undoubtedly the result of Western hubris. The invasion of Afghanistan was entirely justified. The Taliban had allowed Afghan soil to be used to prepare an assault upon the American homeland: It was an act of war they refused to denounce. Dealing with Al-Qaeda was an imperative. But the invasion of Iraq was a catastrophe and an entirely unnecessary distraction. It also cost the US alone more than $2 trillion, which, when added to the price of Afghanistan, imposed a massively unproductive burden on the US economy and made it important to keep interest rates low, thereby encouraging financial adventurism.

The Iraq war also radically changed the nature of Western politics. The Stop the War movement in the UK was merely one example of the way in which Islamists took Western adventurism overseas as an opportunity to integrate themselves into broader coalitions of leftist and often otherwise entirely secular opposition movements. We have seen the results not just in Britain, but in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and the US. This has fueled the rise of a form of identity-based politics across the Western world that challenges and seeks to disable the traditional liberal democratic consensus.

It has also led to the rise of increasingly intrusive technology-based security regimes, not just in China (which is probably a world leader in the surveillance of its own citizens) but across the world. Some of this stems from an entirely justified desire by states to protect themselves from the globalized and often virtual threats of violent extremism, other subversive ideologies, and the vast and growing web of global organized crime. But it has also led to massive abuses, such as the treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang.

Associated with this is the use of cyber tools as offensive and usually deniable weapons designed to weaken and destabilize rival states. This would not have been possible without the extraordinary rise of social media and other internet-based global applications over the last 20 years. The West created a weapon against itself.

At the same time, we have seen the collapse of many traditional states, notably in the Middle East and North Africa, but also now in Afghanistan, and their replacement by a patchwork of areas under the control of armed substate actors the Houthis, the Shiite militias of Iraq, the various groups active inside Syria and Libya, and now the Taliban. Iran has perhaps provided the source code for this: A people held hostage by an oppressive state wholly captured by an armed ideology. But Hezbollah, which continues to act as a state within a state in Lebanon, offers a phenotype in action.

And all this has encouraged the growth of what we now know as gray-zone conflict not state to state, declared or in uniform, but militias, private contractors, deniable attacks and a fog of deliberate disinformation.

A diplomatic colleague once told me with great confidence that Al-Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups were not a major threat to the Western way of life. But if you look back to the world of 2000 and the world today, you cant help but feel that something fundamental has indeed changed and not just for the West. The securitization of politics, the rise in surveillance technologies, the constraints on freedom of speech, the fueling of powerful ethno-nationalist currents not just in the Middle East or South Asia but across the world (including China), and the general atmosphere of anxiety that now prevails all seem to me to represent the end of what, 20 years ago, looked like an increasingly prosperous, globalized and culturally converging world.

I have also seen it suggested that the post-1945 liberal world order never really existed: It was a fraud, a trick of the light, designed to obscure the self-interested pursuit of advantage by the US and its allies. But no one serious has ever thought that political order can be sustained without hard power. That was precisely the problem with the toothless League of Nations in the 1930s. The US became top nation after 1945 partly because of the collective self-immolation of Europe, but more because of its own extraordinary economic dynamism, its continental-scale economy, and its inventiveness and competitive drive, which enabled the construction of the most powerful military and intelligence apparatuses the world has ever seen. It was self-interested, thuggish and hypocritical, of course. So was Rome at its imperial height. But Rome also set the conditions for the subsequent rise not just of Charlemagnes Europe, but also the great Orthodox and Islamic successor empires.

The US, for all its faults, created the conditions for the world in which we live today. And if what we are now witnessing in Kabul and elsewhere is the beginning of the end of that world, we are unlikely to find the new world of multipolarity, proxy warfare, sociocultural fracturing and vicious ideological conflict a happy replacement. This isnt particularly the result of 9/11. That was simply one event among many: The mills of history grind relentlessly on. But we shall still remember where we were that day because, in retrospect, it perhaps marked the end of one thing and the beginning of something much worse.

More:

Today's World An Unhappy Replacement For The One Of Pre-9/11 OpEd Eurasia Review - Eurasia Review

Its a testament to the enduring legacy of ABBA that in a week of Kanye West and Drake album drops, their reunion grabbed just as many headlines, if not more. On September 2, the Swedish pop icons dropped two new songs, their first in 40 years, and announced that they have an album titled Voyage coming out on November 5. To top it all off, digital avatars of the band (cheekily dubbed Abbatars) will appear for a series of concerts at Londons Olympic Park next May.

ABBA fans across the globe, many of whom werent even born when the group released its last record The Visitors in 1981, responded to the news with unabashed euphoria. There was also a sense of vindication, especially amongst older fans who had kept the faith even when the group insisted they will never be on stage again. They had endured the dark years of the 1980s and 1990s, when the sneering gatekeepers of cool turned ABBA into a synonym for bad taste. But its not like the group disappeared they released a string of compilation albums and the Mamma Mia! musical and film earned them new generations of fans. So why wouldnt they just get back together?

Maybe the group was just waiting for the right moment, when the world needed the uniquely salubrious dopamine rush of a new ABBA record. When the group consisting of Agnetha Fltskog, Bjrn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad first broke into the global pop charts with 1974 Eurovision Song Contest winner Waterloo, it was because they offered the world something that it sorely needed after the social and cultural turmoil of the 1960s. The rock and roll revolution that took over popular music had failed, many of its stars having succumbed to drugs and excess. The fallout of this wave of political activism (the civil rights movement, the global 1968 protests, Paris 1969) had led many pop music fans to turn away from both political music and the parodies of excess that many rockstars had become.

So when the four Swedes won Eurovision with Waterloo a bright, jaunty pop song about being hopelessly in love, performed by two smiling, fresh-faced couples in colourful theatrical costumes the world was ready for them. With their unpretentious lyricism, an unerring ability to craft ear-worm pop hooks, and endearingly life-sized ambitions, ABBA quickly became the everymans pop group. They were an act you loved not because they were cool, or had something serious to say about the world. You loved them because they were pure, untainted fun.

The music too, was quite unique. It owed more to Schlager music a European style with roots in continental folk characterised by catchy melodies and vocals than to the R&B and soul foundation of most contemporary pop. Whether the songs were unrelentingly upbeat (Dancing Queen), disarmingly silly (Bang-A-Boomerang) or tinged with melancholy (The Winner Takes It All), the music always remained exquisitely crafted, incredibly textured, and unabashedly sincere.

That joyful sincerity made ABBA one of the highest selling musical groups in history, with 44 hit singles and 7 hit albums. But by the time they released 1981s The Visitors their last album chronicling the bitter dissolution of their two marriages the pendulum had shifted back towards irony, cynicism and edgy activism. The groups association with disco (even though they were more a pop than disco act) didnt help, as the genres ubiquity led to a major backlash from rock fans and critics. Though, somewhat ironically, even the biggest drivers of this pop-culture shift The Sex Pistols took the riff for their hit Pretty Vacant from an ABBA song.

But now, it seems the stars are aligning for a second if briefer wave of ABBAmania. The rock critics who decried ABBA in the 1980s and 1990s have been replaced by a younger, more diverse cohort of poptimist writers pushing to give the glorious artifice of pop music its due. ABBA itself has been rehabilitated by the success of their compilation albums, and Mamma Mia!. Even much-maligned disco is making a comeback, with Dua Lipa leading a vanguard of pop artists dabbling in disco sounds and aesthetic, which also includes Lady Gaga (the Giorgio Moroder inspired Stupid Love), Doja Cat (Say So), and Justin Timberlake and Sza (The Other Side).

The recent success of TV shows like Ted Lasso and Schitts Creek also marks a fresh turn in pop culture, as audiences finally let go of their carefully cultivated irony and cynicism in favour of wholesome sincerity. The pandemic coming after a decade of global social and political upheaval and the climate change Damocles sword hanging over our collective heads, has people once again grasping for art that offers hope instead of knowing nihilism, that reminds them of the smaller, everyday joys of a life well lived. Less jagged edges, more warm, comforting embrace, please.

Can ABBA once again tap into this zeitgeist and offer us an escape from the doom-and-gloom of 2021? The two songs already released which hew fairly close to the classic ABBA sound are promising, but even if ABBA fail to re-invent pop music for a second time though, I doubt their millions of fans will care. Theyre too busy grabbing their dancing shoes and pulling their disco pants out of storage.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE

Read more here:

ABBAs perky pop may be what the world needs - The Times of India Blog