Category Archives: Zeitgeist Movement

Why does vintage photography gives some people "the willies? Whether or not you've noticed this, the portrait subjects in the oldest black and white images are almost always glaring sternly into the lens.

I love antiques and visiting vintage shops. In my years of browsing through those dusty old shelves (with their musty yet oddly satisfying odor), I've collected dozens of stereographs. These are side-by-side photographic prints of nearly identical images, which create a three-dimensional image when viewed through a stereoscopic viewer. Stereographys invention by Sir Charles Wheatstonef in 1838 only 22 years after the first primitive photograph is historically remarkable.

My fascination with stereography has produced a small library of vintage stereograph portraits ranging across a wide array of subjects. It includes images of proud or stoic Native Americans, high-collared aristocrats, even a U.S. president. But the subjects rarely have even a faint smile. Whats with all that grimness?

The most significant explanation for the glum faces in vintage portraits is a technical one: long exposure times. In late 19th to early 20th century, photographic film wasn't as sensitive to light as modern film (or camera sensors) and required exposure times of several seconds to several minutes. Those minutes-long exposures did become less common as advancements in film were made throughout the 1900s.

Since any movement during a long exposure could create "ghosting" aberrations and ruin the sharpness of a photo, subjects were instructed to sit absolutely still during portrait sessions. Smiling requires many facial muscles to work in unison, but those muscles don't have the stamina to sit stay fixed over the course of several minutes. Some past accounts describe children being harnessed to chairs to keep them still enough for a long exposure.

How hard is it (for someone not a professional model) to hold a long smile for a camera? An entertaining 2010 case of smiling angst led to the "Hide the Pain Harold" meme: a desperately grinning Hungarian fellow who became an internet sensation for his bizarre grimace in various photo sets, apparently due to facial fatigue from forcing a smile during long photo shoots.

Also theorized as contributing to the lack of cheery faces in old-time portraits is the fact that dental care wasn't as commonplace or advancedin the 19th century. The typical solution for decaying teeth was to pull them. No wonder people were reluctant to show their off their chompers.

Cultural factors also see to have contributed to the lack of smiling in those early photographic portraits. First, the then-popular genre of "post-mortem photography" influenced a deadly serious (as it were) demeanor even in photos of the living. The grisly act of posing the dead as animate beings didn't exactly popularize smiling photo portraits. That photographic fashion tapered off early in the 20th century. I don't see it making a comeback anytime soon.

Additionally, smiling was once seen by the elite as a sign of idiocy. And since photography used to be a luxury exclusively enjoyed by the wealthy, the culture of dignity and seriousness may have also impacted the demeanor of photographic subjects.

There are, however, exceptions to the aristocratic zeitgeist of photography from the late 19th and early 20th century. Although photographed smiles of this period were rare, they can be found. A Flickr group has been dedicated to finding and re-posting the elusive "Smiling Victorian."

Historians and sociologists have offered various explanations (beyond long exposure times) for the rarity of cheerful expressions in vintage photographs, but the larger picture might have had to do with something we still work with today: the shifting vicissitudes of individuals and culture.

Smiling always has cultural connotations. Smiling at a stranger in North America can make a different impression from state to state and city to city. Whereas a smiling stranger might be seen as welcome in a socially relaxed area, that stranger could be taken as naive or even suspicious in a more conservative place. Suspicion can also prevail in some big cities, where eye contact is commonly avoided as a method of self-preservation.

Are there examples of photography from that era that make you wonder what was behind their smile (or lack thereof)? Please share with us in the comments section.

Lead image/s via Wikimedia Commons, all are in the public domain.

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Here's Why People Hardly Ever Smiled in Old-Time Photographs - Fstoppers

Fifty years ago, the consortium of Heuer-Leonidas, Breitling, Buren-Hamilton and Dubois Dpraz vied with lone wolves Zenith and Seiko in the race to launch the worlds first automatic chronograph movement. How did these brands keep their developments secret? And how did the watch world change? We searched the past for clues.

In this picture from the 1970s, Jack Heuer (left) shows Formula 1 racing champions Niki Lauda (second from left) and Clay Regazzoni how their golden automatic chronograph is made.

While reading his daily newspaper on the morning of Jan. 10, 1969, Jack Heuer, general director of the Heuer watch brand, suffered such a shock that he almost dropped his coffee cup. A short article announced that Heuers competitor Zenith had developed the worlds first automatic chronograph and was already showing functional prototypes of El Primero. How could this be true? Jack Heuers company was part of a consortium that had been working on this very same task under tremendous time pressure and the strictest secrecy for the past three years. The launch of Caliber 11 was scheduled for March 3. How could Zenith have beaten them to the punch?

This story is one of the most fascinating narratives in the history of the modern watch industry. It took place in a year that, like the entire previous decade, was characterized by technical progress and profound social change, including the first manned landing on the moon, the maiden flight of the Boeing 747 jet and the flower power movement. The whole decade was supercharged by the economic boom, especially in the automotive industry, and by spectacular auto races, whose champions thrilled large crowds. The zeitgeist of new mobility and communication was omnipresent. The world was ticking to a steadily accelerating rhythm: more and more powerful cars rolled off the assembly lines and more and more people could afford to buy them.

Brand ambassador Steve McQueen with the Heuer Monaco, which encased the new Caliber 11.

The Swiss watch industry, which cultivated centuries-old traditions, tried to keep pace with the innovation of this new era: they knew that their industry had no choice but to renew itself if it hoped to keep up with the faster pace of the times, particularly with the looming specter of competition from the Far East. In retrospect, we can see that the Quartz Crisis, which would jeopardize the very survival of Switzerlands watchmaking industry a decade later, had already begun to cast its shadow toward the West. Faultfinders would later claim that technological progress had caught the Swiss napping. Developing a modern automatic chronograph became a kind of Holy Grail for big-name manufacturers in the elite world of short time measurement.

Considering the wide selection of self-winding chronographs available today, its difficult to imagine how great a challenge this threefold problem posed. Never before had anyone succeeded in coaxing the practicality of an automatic winding system and the popular functionality of a chronograph into the narrow confines of a wristwatchs case.

The first automatic chronograph in the world: Zenith premiered El Primero with great pride and pomp.

Gerd-Rdiger Lang, who was employed by Heuer at the time and would later found the Chronoswiss brand, recalls the situation. The automatic chronograph was the greatest horological invention of the 20th century, which had otherwise produced nothing genuinely groundbreaking in this field. Switzerlands chronograph manufacturers hoped it would give them access to new markets and serve them as an innovative and sales-boosting bestseller if they could launch it before Omega, which led the chronograph market at the time.

Jack Heuer, former general director of the Heuer Swiss watch brand, was one of the key players in the development of the automatic chronograph.

A Complex ConstructionChronograph fans had no choice but to wear hand-wound models because the thorny technical dilemma of a self-winding time writer remained unresolved. The first hurdle was to overcome the energy problem. When a chronograph is switched on, its seconds hand and its counters for the elapsing minutes and hours consume much more energy than a classic time display, so they demand much greater performance from the self-winding mechanism. Watchmakers also had to leap a high bar by devising a design that would intelligently combine the two complex mechanisms, deploy the various additional components (especially the rotor) in an optimally space-saving arrangement, and provide the necessary passageways to accommodate the numerous drive shafts. All of this, it should not be forgotten, had to be accomplished within the diminutive volume of a wristwatchs case. These ambitious goals occupied the brightest minds at R&D departments in the 1960s, where they pursued their quest for solutions while preserving the utmost secrecy.

We now know that the first company to begin developing a self-winding chronograph wristwatch was Zenith, which started the project in 1962 and planned to launch the worlds first automatic chronograph to coincide with the companys centennial in 1965. But this ambitiously early date could not be kept: four more years would come and go before the project could be completed and the first prototype could be made available.

The joint development of Caliber 11 was advanced under the aegis of Willy Breitling (left). The Breitling Navitimer Chrono-Matic from 1969 (right) had a bezel that was marked with the characteristic slide rule.

A Coalition of CompetitorsProject 99 was the code name under which some of the most important specialists in short-term measurement joined together: Breitling, Heuer-Leonidas and Hamilton-Buren. The establishment of this illustrious circle was preceded by a request from a highly specialized movement designer and true specialist of his era, Grald Dubois, who directed the technical department at Dpraz & Cie. Founded in 1901 and based at Le Lieu in the Valle de Joux, this company ranked among the biggest suppliers of chronographs and owed its reputation to numerous developments in the field, including the column-wheel mechanism and the first adjustable module chronograph (Caliber 48), which debuted in 1937. Grald Dubois was the grandson of the companys founder and had long been in favor of developing an automatic chronograph, but its realization required an investment that was too large for his company to finance on its own.

Grald Dubois contacted Willy Breitling in 1965. Breitling, who was head of the Grenchen-based watch brand, was immediately enthusiastic about the project. The duo asked Jack Heuer, general director of Heuer-Leonidas, to join them. Heuer agreed because he shared their belief that the future belonged to the automatic chronograph. The fourth member of the group was Buren, the movement manufacturer that was acquired by the American brand Hamilton in 1966. The same year, after the costs had been contractually allocated and the patent rights had been granted, the consortium kicked off the development, which took place in secret. Gerd-Rdiger Lang, who joined the Heuer company as a watchmaker in 1968, recalls that no one on the staff had the slightest inkling of the secret project.

This coalition of competitors marked the beginning of a unique collaboration among rival brands and suppliers. Their alliance bore fruit with the debut of Caliber 11 three years later. Breitling designated this movement as the Chrono-Matic. Heuers dials bore the same name, albeit with a slightly different spelling Chronomatic.

An Unexpected OpponentBut a Japanese giant was not asleep. Seiko, which had been in the premium segment with its Grand Seiko models since the early 1960s and now competed with Swiss manufacturers, also began a similar development in the mid-1960s. Seikos secret project was code named 6139. A year earlier, when the world was watching the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Seiko had presented its first chronograph wristwatch, which still relied on manual winding. Meanwhile, the brand had also begun developing a totally different technology: quartz. But that, as they say, is another story.

Three Different Technical ApproachesAll three competitors were striving to achieve the same goal, but each pursued its own technical approach. The magic number 36,000 came into play at Zenith. This figure needs no explanation among chronograph enthusiasts, who are well aware that it specifies the number of semi-oscillations completed per hour by the balance in automatic caliber El Primero. Its fast-paced balance vibrated at the previously unattainably speedy frequency of 10 beats per second, which enabled this automatic chronograph movement to accomplish the unprecedented feat of measuring elapsed time to the nearest 1/10th of a second. Another distinctive feature of this technology was the integrated architecture of the chronograph mechanism. El Primero was a self-contained ensemble with a ball-borne central rotor and a column wheel instead of a cam. An especially clever detail was that the movement needed neither a module nor an additional mechanism. And notwithstanding its high frequency, El Primero offered a remarkably long 50-hour power reserve and had been miniaturized so its innovative technology could fit into a space measuring just 6.5 mm by 29.33 mm. Each characteristic was a success and the entire ensemble was nothing short of spectacular. Moreover, El Primero was also aesthetically pleasing: the harmony embodied by the original construction, which still distinguishes El Primero calibers today, has raised the pulse rates of generations of chronograph fans.

The original El Primero had a tricompax dial and displayed the date between 4 and 5 oclock. This layout has remained unchanged.

Many large watch manufacturers subsequently equipped their chronograph wristwatches with Zeniths trailblazing masterpiece. Probably the best-known example is the Cosmograph Daytona: Rolex began encasing a modified version in its chronographs in 1987. This transformed the Daytona into a self-winding chronograph. The Daytona continued to encase Zeniths movement until the year 2000, albeit with a reduced oscillating frequency of only 28,800 hourly vibrations and a balance wheel equipped with Microstella adjusting screws. Other brands, including Bulgari, Daniel Roth and Ebel, also relied on El Primero. Ebel launched a perpetual calendar wristwatch based on Zeniths movement in 1989.

A Modular Construction with a Micro-rotorIn contrast to Zeniths integrated architecture, the Project 99 consortium pursued an approach based on a modular concept similar to one used in early pocketwatches with complications. The chronograph mechanism was mounted on a plate in Caliber 11 (the Chrono-Matic) with oscillating pinion coupling. Three screws affixed this independent unit to the bridge side of the movement. The oscillating pinion coupled the chronograph to the gear train. To provide sufficient space, the team abandoned the concept of a central winding rotor positioned above the movement and opted instead for a planetary rotor, which Buren had developed under the leadership of technical director Hans Kocher in 1954. One consequence of the movements architecture with its integrated micro-rotor was that the crown had to be positioned on the left side of the case. This feature was later marketed using the slogan: The chronograph that doesnt need winding. Simpler assembly and maintenance were the perceived advantages of the sandwich-style construction as an independent frame that can be easily removed and replaced. As at Heuer, this covert project was declared classified at Breitling. Everything related to the development of Caliber 11 was discussed in encrypted form during clandestine meetings in back rooms. Only a few confidants of watchmaker Marcel Robert and Willy Breitling were privy to the confidential endeavor.

The Heuer Monaco from 1969 not only set standards with Caliber 11, but was also one of the first square watches with a waterproof case.

Seiko chose a third path. The brand had secretly developed a watch that demonstrated Seikos high degree of technical sophistication and would prove its precision three years later when this timepiece with its yellow dial ticked on the wrist of American astronaut William R. Pogue in outer space. The 6139 also relied on an integrated construction with column wheel, central rotor and energy-efficient vertical coupling, as well as the magic lever, a specialty that Seiko had used since 1959 to increase the efficiency of the winding mechanism. Mounted directly on the rotor shaft, the magic lever tapped all the energy of the oscillating weight, regardless of the rotors direction of rotation. A date display and a day-of-the-week indicator with quick correction were also installed.

The Tension MountsLets go back to Jan. 10, 1969, the date on which Zeniths press release announced, The merit of this outstanding creation makes the entire Swiss watch industry shine on the worlds major markets, where the competition is growing increasingly fierce. Jack Heuer called a breakfast meeting to decide how to proceed. The partners agreed to stick with their plan of simultaneous press conferences in Geneva and New York on March 3, 1969. In the presence of Heuer, Willy Breitling and Hans Kocher, the Caliber 11 Chrono-Matic was presented with great ceremony to the worlds journalists. Judging by their enthusiastic response, the reporters apparently werent bothered by the fact that the consortium had crossed the finish line nearly two months after its arch rival. Grald F. Bauer, president of the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry (FH), opened the event in Geneva at 5 p.m. local time. Praising the technical masterpiece, Bauer highlighted the team spirit that had made it possible to launch this new high-performance product for the Swiss watch industry. Heuer had prepared answers to questions about Zeniths El Primero, but was surprised that the journalists didnt ask any. The simultaneous press conference in Manhattan, which began at 11 a.m. Eastern Time, was also attended by high-ranking Swiss industry representatives, including the President of the U. S. Foreign Office of the Swiss watch industry and Switzerlands Consul General in New York. The international edition of the Journal suisse dhorlogerie et de bijouterie dedicated its front page and a 16-page supplement to the event. The magazines headline declared: Three Swiss companies worked behind closed doors and launched a watch that doesnt really exist: the automatic chronograph. Willy Breitling emphasized the importance of innovation for the industry in general and especially for the company that his grandfather had founded saying, Certain stages in the development of a brand are decisive for its future. Today we are witnessing an event of capital importance, and I am sure you realize that it is a source of great joy for us.

Heuer Caliber 11: Each company in the consortium encased the Chrono-Matic caliber in one of its best-selling watches.

Three PremieresEach member of Project 99 selected its best-selling watches to encase the Chrono-Matic. Breitling ensconced it in the Navitimer and Chronomat; the first collection also included a cushion-shaped model, a new interpretation of the square chronograph from 1966 and a tonneau with a divers bezel. Heuer put Calibre 11 inside the Carrera, the Autavia and the new Monaco. The Monaco blazed new trails not only with its modern self-winding movement but also with the worlds first water-resistant square case. Hamilton launched the elegant Hamilton Chrono-Matic with a legendary panda dial, which is available today in a nearly identical look. An unmistakable feature of all these models was the crown on the left side of the case, where it demonstrated that this automatic chronograph no longer needed manual winding.

Automatic Caliber 11 debuted inside Hamilton Chrono-Matic A from 1971, with a 37-mm stainless-steel case and a panda dial, which is enjoying popularity again today.

Silence Is GoldenAll brands in the consortium presented the innovation in March 1969 in Basel at the Mustermesse, the Sample Fair that would later become Baselworld. Jack Heuer received a compliment from an unexpected source: Shoji Hattori, Seikos president, visited Heuer at the stand and congratulated him on his technical breakthrough. Heuer said, Naturally, I was very flattered. But Mr. Hattori didnt divulge even the slightest hint that Seiko was showing its 6139 at the fair. Heuer subsequently expressed his admiration for Seikos rather clever product strategy. Before the international launch of a new watch, its maker typically tests it first on the domestic market to solve any remaining problems. As in the fable of the tortoise and the hare, Seikos apparent slowness ultimately paid off. According to Jack Heuer, the Japanese company brought sales of Heuers product almost to a standstill on the U.S. market a few years later, a disappointment that he also attributed to an unfavorable exchange rate. Heuer nevertheless ended the 1969 financial year with record-breaking results: the brand increased sales by 34 percent thanks to the Caliber 11 Chrono-Matic. The original caliber was manufactured until 1970 and afterward further developed into Caliber 12. Heuer continued producing the movement until 1985. The Autavia was the last model to encase Caliber 11. Breitling used it from the end of 1968 to 1978.

The Seiko 5 Speedtimer from 1969 was an integrated automatic column-wheel chronograph with vertical coupling and magic lever.

The PresentEl Primero is the only one of these pioneering movements from 1969 that has been uninterruptedly manufactured from its debut to the present day, except for a brief hiatus during the Quartz Crisis. El Primero received a boost after Zenith was acquired by the LVMH Group in 1999. The high-frequency movement served as the basis for a flurry of new developments. These included additional modules to support diverse displays, as well as modifications with a partially skeletonized base plate so the escapement could be viewed through an aperture in the dial. El Primero Caliber 4021 was introduced with an additional power-reserve display and even with a tourbillon. Caliber 4031 combined a minute repeater with chronograph, alarm and second time zone. El Primero Stratos Flyback Striking 10th kept time during an extraordinary adventure on Oct. 14, 2012, when Felix Baumgartner jumped from the stratospheric altitude of 39 kilometers with this watch strapped to his wrist. His plunge made him the first human being to outpace the speed of sound. Baumgartner and his timepiece survived the acceleration, altitude, pressure and temperature differences unscathed. The watch worked just as well after landing as it did on take off.

The stopwatch function and the time display each have their own escapement system in the Zenith El Primero 9004, which enables the Defy El Primero 21 to measure elapsed intervals to the nearest 1/100th of a second.

Half a century after its premiere, El Primero remains the worlds most accurate serially manufactured chronograph thanks to its ability to measure brief intervals to the nearest 1/10th of a second. It also has won more awards and commendations than any other chronograph. Zenith set another record in 2017 with the debut of the Defy El Primero 21 chronograph, which can clock elapsed intervals not merely to the nearest 1/10th, but to the nearest 1/100th of a second. This mechanical feat is made possible by El Primero 9004, in which the stopwatch function has its own movement with a separate escapement that oscillates at a frequency of 360,000 vibrations per hour (50 Hz).

Although the original Caliber 11 is no longer manufactured, the brands that participated in its development are still justifiably proud of their innovation. TAG Heuers Product Director Guy Bove said, TAG Heuer has presented numerous precise timepieces during the past 150 years, but probably none of them has left as an indelible a mark on watchmaking as the Chrono-Matic. The Monaco, which once encased Caliber 11, is currently in the limelight in its 50th anniversary year. A different limited-edition Monaco will be unveiled at each of several commemorative events taking place in Europe, the United States and Asia. The historical and technical highlights of this icon are chronicled in the new book Paradoxical Superstar, published in May 2019.

Monaco Calibre 11, the successor to the famous square timepiece that premiered in 2015, features automatic Sellita Caliber SW300 with a Dubois Dpraz module. Price: $5,900.

Grand Seikos Spring Drive Chronograph GMT SBGC231 in a titanium case is one of the Japanese manufacturers highlights this year. Price: $12,900.

Seikos Chairman and CEO Shoji Hattori says that the launch of the automatic chronograph movement was part of the success story that led to the development 30 years later of Spring-Drive technology, which plays a central role in the launch of new versions of the Grand Seiko in 2019.

The WinnerNow lets return to the conundrum of who, in fact, developed the first automatic chronograph. Which brand stands on which step of the winners podium cannot be answered unequivocally from todays vantage point. What is certain is that each brand achieved a success of its own. While the first prototype of El Primero was introduced at the beginning of 1969, Breitling, Hamilton and Heuer didnt unveil their development until three months later, but they were able to present the largest number of functioning prototypes at the Mustermesse in Basel. And Seiko premiered its first self-winding chronograph wristwatches in May of the same historic year. How it was possible for several manufacturers to present the most important watch innovation of the postwar era all in the same year remains puzzling even today. From a purely horological perspective, El Primero has been Number One for 50 years: It set standards not only in technical terms, but it was also a feast for the eyes, almost poetic in its beauty, said Gerd-Rdiger Lang.

This article was originally presented in the August 2019 issue of WatchTime.

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Chronomania: The 50-Year History of the Automatic Chronograph - Watchtime.com

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Like Ernest Hemingway, Frank Lloyd-Wright and Andy Warhol, the product designer Grald Genta emerges from the 20th Century as a towering figure in his field. But unlike his fellow artists, few, outside of watchmaking circles, know his name. We may never see such dominance again from a designer, especially because in-house teams have largely ousted the freelance ringer. However, during the post-WWII decades when he was active, Europeans and Americans still championed the lone genius above all else, and Genta became a brand in his own right: a man sought out by the thriving luxury industry to titillate the jet-set with elite, forward-thinking products ranging from eyeglasses for Cartier to a long list of paradigm-shifting watches, most of which are thriving as current offerings today.

Born in Geneva in 1931, Genta earned his Swiss Federal Diploma as a jeweler and goldsmith in 1951 at age 20. By 23, Genta was designing watches for the storied watch house Universal Genve. Today, collectors herald his Universal Genve Polerouter of the 1950s and the Golden and White Shadows of the 1960s as classics of the early Mid-Century style, itself a revival of the Bauhaus Schools high-minimalism that the Nazis so bitterly interrupted. Gentas designs from this time resonate with the refreshed aesthetics and abundant optimism of the post-War era.

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The Polerouter used an innovative micro-rotor to wind the watch, and despite a long-lasting patent dispute with Benrus, early models sported the clever device as part of the Caliber 215 movement, which could withstand the magnetic havoc of flying over the North Polea new challenge for pilots en route from Copenhagen to Los Angeles for SAS airlines. This unique movement started Gentas love affair with designing thin watches around thin movements. Universal Genve would riff on Gentas Polerouter for decades, making everything from dive watches to gold dress watches under the moniker.

The Polerouters dial was the template for 1959s Genta-designed Omega Constellation, which would angle the steel outer dial to become the now famous pie pan that showed up on more than a few Seamasters, and which continues to adorn modern Constellations. Gentas Constellation marks the end of distinct period for the designer, as he would soon turn to far more groundbreaking designs.

Genta came back to Universal Genve in the 1960s to design the Golden Shadow and White Shadow. The Shadows show Gentas new found fascination with ultra-thin elliptical cases, which again relied on ultra-thin movements with micro-rotos, and later Bulovas pre-quartz electronic Accutron movements. The Shadows were revolutionary in their technology and their design, and this caught the eye of Patek Philippe, who hired Genta to design 1968s Golden Ellipse.

Many consider The Golden Ellipse a masterpiece of Mid-Century watchmaking, if also Pateks first mimical design (there would be another in the Genta-designed Nautilus of 1976). The Golden Ellipse debuted in 1968 and has had a healthy run that peaked in the 1970s, tapered down to jewel-encrusted womens models during the 1990s, and eventually came back to its roots in recent decades. In 2008, Patek Philippe celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Golden Ellipse with a platinum reissue, and for the watchs 50th Anniversary in 2018 Patek released a modern sized gold version. True to the original, the 2018 Golden Ellipse runs on Pateks Caliber 240 with a micro-rotor that brings the watchs thickness below 6 mm.

The 1970s turned out to be Gentas decade of hits. He delivered classics for Bulgari, Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe, and IWC. In 1975, Bulgari released the oddly named Bulgari Bulgari, a watch that defied all expectations one might have had for Gentas work. Genta used an ancient Roman coin as the inspiration for the Bulgari Bulgaris bezel, engraving it deeply with the brand name twice (thus the odd name), and he drew upon the columns of ancient Roman architecture as inspiration for the cylindrical case. The Bulgari Bulgari has been a running hit for the Italian brand for decades. Theyve since acquired Gerald Gentas own eponymous watch brand and have captured the imagination of watch fans with Gentas Octo Finisimo, which, in true Genta style, continually breaks thinness records.

In terms of overall impact within the watch industry, Gentas Royal Oak for Audemars Piguet is arguably his greatest achievement. This nautically inspired watchwhich Genta claims to have designed in one eveningcertainly transformed Audemars Piguet from a respected brand into an industry powerhouse, but the Royal Oak also created the entire luxury sports watch category. The Royal Oak came out in 1970, and it captured the emerging fashion zeitgeist, which breezily combined casual attire and high fashion; think designer jeans and leisure suits, and you get the gist. Few watches are as instantly recognizable, broadly loved, and shamelessly imitated.

It was Patek Philippe who imitated Audemars Piguet most blatantly by hiring Genta to design the now-classic Nautilus. Released in 1976, the Nautilus was Pateks first sports watch, and because of its similarity to the Royal Oak, it garnered mixed reviews from hardcore Patek fans. But the Nautilus had the desired effect of attracting the growing consumer base for elegant sports watches to Patek Philippe, a traditional brand that feared going out of vogue as the world rushed along at supersonic speeds. Today the Nautilus is perhaps more of a hit than it ever was, with waiting lists for steel models going on for years. Any misgivings over its imitative nature have been long forgiven and/or forgotten, and the Nautilus looks as hip today as it did in the 1970s.

IWC was another brand that needed a new look to keep pace with the fast-changing fashions of the 1970s, and in 1976 they introduced the Genta-designed Ingenieur as their entry into the luxury sports watch category. Though less celebrated than the Royal Oak or the Nautilus, the Ingenieur rounds out a trio of 70s hits from Genta. All three of these watches have been in continuous production since they first arrived on the scene.

In the 1980s, Genta went on to create his own eponymous brand (eventually acquired by Bulgari). Gentas company produced watches that get the chairs creaking in the auction houses as people crane their necks to witness the bids soar. And while Gentas own brand was filled with masterpieces, they were mostly made in small numbers for elite watch aficionados, and thus never gained the popularity a watch can achieve via big brand marketing.

But there was one more dressy sports watch for Genta to design for a famous brand, this time Cartier. The Pasha de Cartier had been around since the 1930s when Mr. Cartier designed an elegant yet waterproof watch specifically for the Pasha of Marrakech, who swam daily. In 1985, Cartieralways charmingly late to the gameupdated the Pasha as a luxury sports offering. With 100m of water resistance, Arabic numerals, and a round case, Gentas Pasha was pushing the boundaries of what a Cartier could be, but he counterbalanced these innovations by including Louis Cartiers own Vendome lugs and signature nipple crown topped with a blue sapphire.

The Pasha is not currently on offer from Cartier, but it opened the floodgates for Cartier to indulge in round watches. Today there are numerous round models within the Cartier catalog, and each of them carries Gentas touch.

Genta created all kinds of watches for brands like Timex, Benrus, Seiko, and Rolex (check out the Rolex King Midas for a truly unique piece). These watches were less celebrated than the icons above, yet they demonstrate, if only in sheer numbers, how broad-reaching Gentas influence was on watch design. Though we can account for the disappearance of the lone genius designer to various cultural, technological, and economic factors, perhaps we are closer to the truth in saying that Gerald Genta was one-in-a-million, and that the stars aligned to raise this ambitious young Swiss kid to his now legendary status among the great artists of the 20th Century.

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Meet the Man Behind Nearly Every Iconic Watch Design of the 20th Century - Yahoo Lifestyle

The generation that is fighting for everythingalsocares about nothing. At least thats the impression youll getfrom many of the articles youll find on the subject ofGeneration Z,thelabelappliedto those,likeme,born around the end of the 90s and later.There is a consensus that our generation is facing (and will continue to face) a wholeplethoraof seemingly insurmountable challenges, from the looming threat of climate change to the resurgence of fascist and racist ideologiesall over the world.However,weare rising to these challenges,and championing those among us that are leading the charge against ignorance, hate, and false information. The names Malala Yousafzai, David Hogg, and,most recently,Greta Thunbergarefamiliar to much of our generation for their activist work in the fields of female education, gun reform, and climate change, respectively.These kids have earned celebritystatus precisely because they have stood up for what they believe in and have fought for it tooth and nail.

So why is it that so many of the think-pieces written about our generationscrutinizethe fact that we dont seem to care about anything?A recent Forbes article sought to explainWhy the Z in Gen ZMeansZombie,theNewYorker, in turn, haspublishedmany articlesexploring the darkeraspects of our cultural zeitgeist,fromour love ofmeaninglessTikTokstothe popularity ofthe death-centricmusic of BillieEilish. And while it is clear that these commentaries can in no way account entirely for themindsetof our generation,the truth that underlies them cannot be denied. We stand at a moment in history where we are fighting for our lives, but at the end of the day,many of us enjoy hanging up our hats, setting down our picket signs and cozying up to a hot cup of nihilism.

Gen Z nihilismis not that of generationspast. However, thinking about the meaninglessness of existencetends to beaccompanied by feelings of despair, but our generation actually seems to find some solace in thecollapseof meaning. As the meme aboveshows, rather thanbuckleunder the weight of a doom-and-gloom ideology, we,Gen Z,prefer to slap on some cool shades, give athumbs-up, and smile through it.Of course, anyone who adopts this attitude doesso with their tongue firmly incheek. If we were all truly asapathetic as we pretendto be on the internet, events like the March for Our Lives, a student-led gun reform rally that took place in the U.S. last year, would not haveyielded a turnoutin the millions and spurred a movement that is still going strong today.What we have then is a kind ofperformed,evenings-and-weekends relationship with not-caring that is used to counterbalance the rest of the time when we are forced to care deeplyabout anything and everything.

Its important to remember thatGen Zisstillyoung andtalk of them is much younger. TheaforementionedForbesarticle goes so far as to say that the archetypalGen Zkid doesnt even exist yet.The vast majority of Gen Z, it must be said, arent even old enough to vote yet, a fact which lends credence to the idea that most of us arent fully formed yet either. This way of thinking makes it a lot easier to dismiss our cultural tastes as being just a phase,and of all possible phases for an entire generation to go through, half-hearted, comic nihilism fits the teenage stereotype perfectly.This isnt the only narrative, though, and it fails to account for the precise moment that we as Gen Zare living and coming of age inareunique.

A few of the numerousthreats to our generation and the population at large have already beenlisted, but its worth consideringthe fact thatthose crises have forced us to grow up quickly. On top of the label ofGeneration Z, this generation has often been called theMass Shooting Generation, a label given to those in the United States born after the 1999 Columbine High School shootingwho have grown up with active shooter drills as a regular part of their school experience.Todays world is not a place where the youngest amongus can be sheltered from its harshest realities. If anything, theyoungest among us are being forced to confront themhead-on in a way that other generationshave not had to.

Maybethiscultural aversion to a meaningful existenceisnt a phase then, and maybe it isnt even a simple distraction.Instead, maybe its a defense mechanism.Insurmountable, overwhelming, and impossible are only some of the wordsused to describe our challenges, and while were taking the fight to them anyways, its a comfort to think that, should we fail, it never really mattered in the first place.Because if the world is truly coming to an end, which it very well might be, it would be so much easier to cope with if we could assume the cool nonchalance of the man in the meme below, and embrace our deaths with shrugged shoulders:

In the meantime, its probably best that we go about the business of fighting for our lives. In time, we might need to put our nihilism to better use, but for now, let the music we listen to, the memes we consume, and our twisted sense of humour confuse the older generations a bit longer.

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Kids these days - Strand

The reductive, materialist approach to mental disorder is running on fumes. The idea that disorders are simple, empirical things, comprised of smaller empirical things (thoughts, beliefs, desires etc.) that can be differentiated and isolated, reduced and explained by physical causes is a tale that is losing credibility by the day. The core philosophy that our mental experience just is physical experience really and is, as such, entirely conducive to the scientific method is therefore, I argue, lost. For far too long we have been seduced and overwhelmed by these ideas, and the time is increasingly upon us to reject them and think again about what mental disorder is.

Although there are several studies or avenues to make the case I want to make in this regard, I will focus on a very recent paper by Allsopp et al (2019). This paper comes to the arguably alarming conclusion that the DSM is not only conceptually problematic but scientifically meaningless. The very fact that there is considerable overlap between disorders and that two people can (so the DSM says) have the same disorder but share none of the same symptoms, it is argued, contradicts the very purpose and relevance of a system that was based on discerning discrete disorders. And it must be noted that Allsopp et als paper is not a theoretical paper in a psychotherapy journal, but a study in a psychiatry journal. Being that the DSM essentially represents the culmination of decades of empirical research on the Psyche, and being that it also represents the very philosophy of minds, brains and experience described above as applied in the real world, then this is clearly no small deal.

Before getting into the weeds, however, I would like to first very briefly paint the broader picture here. While it is certainly exciting that these kinds of conclusions are finding expression though more formal, scientifically accredited avenues, the truth of the matter is that a large portion of people in the mental health field workers and service-users alike already knew that DSM-type thinking was deeply problematic, and (behind closed doors at least) did not employ its terms in any decisive, meaningful way. Indeed, there are decades-long strands of argument and opposition that reject this kind of thinking, since at least the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and in psychoanalytic circles in some way since its inception. The general argument is that this kind of thinking is not only deeply problematic in its own terms as if we only need to start the empirical project of categorizing and predicting Psyche and its ailments again in a different way but that by its very nature it exactly misses human experience in all its complexity, and precisely because it aims to categorize psychological experience in this way.

While the anti-psychiatry movement went over similar ground as these kinds of studies (Thomas Szasz, as problematic as some of his opinions were, argued that there was no such thing as mental disorder on conceptual grounds, for example), that movement did not really survive in any efficacious way. These days it is mostly treated as an amusing historical anomaly of the supposedly nave, idealistic woo that that period has come to be characterized as producing. After a brief flash of influence, it quickly waned, and along with a lot of thought at that time was gobbled up by the behemoth of empirical science that promptly ensued cognitive science, neuroscience, genetic research, etc. Taking on its modern incarnation in the 1950s, the empirical project of the Psyche offered something that more complex, existentially and experientially accurate theories and accounts of mental distress could not: the tantalizing possibility of a scientific explanation of distress that we could all then locate the problem of suffering in, try to solve, and then breathe a collective sigh of relief.

But whereas in the 1960s one could convincingly argue the case against anti-psychiatry type criticisms and for a reductive approach to Psyche on the grounds that the science of mind was just getting started, this time the approach has unarguably had its day in the sun its shot, so to speak. And now, not only has our understanding arguably not progressed as a result of mass empirical projects like the DSM, it has arguably regressed.

So, lets dig into this. The entire DSM project was premised on the idea of discrete, differentiated and differentiatable mental disorders that people effectively had, much like one has a physical illness such as Parkinsons or heart disease. The core problem with this is that while you can empirically discover, identify and objectively treat Parkinsons or heart disease, this has never been achieved for a single mental disorder through the empirical investigation of the Psyche and its ailments. Ironically, this was Thomas Szaszs main argument in the 1960s, and it is still valid. The counter-argument was and still is that eventually science will discover the underlying physical explanation and cause(s), at which point the embarrassment will be over, and that we are effectively doing the best we can in the meantime. But unless there is a specific time limit, which there isnt, this is tantamount to an unfalsifiable claim. As falsifiability is supposedly a key criterion for considering something a science, this is not a scientific statement, but an argument based on faith.

The only thing that is not scientific about the science in this context is therefore, ironically, itself. And here we are half a century later and nothing has decisively been discovered. So even its faith has not gone rewarded. It must be a wonderful thing if you are of that persuasion to be able to fall back on, Well, we havent discovered the physical explanation that proves it, yet.

There are two specific problems of note with where the DSM has arrived without such evidence. Firstly, there is explicit and complicated overlap between most diagnoses in the DSM scheme; and, secondly, the related fact that two people can have the same diagnosis but share none of the same symptoms, both of which Allsopp et al focus on in their paper. We might also add to this the very notion of co-morbidity the reality, almost the rule, that people have multiples of these discrete disorders at the same time. Many people, of course, end up diagnosed with multiple, overlapping disorders, that are supposed to constitute the cause and explanation of their distress.

This sounds sort of reasonable if we think about people with multiple, complicated physical issues, but let the ramifications of this sink in when used as a description of mental distress. Does it seem rational to conclude that many cases of suffering are best explained as the result of a complex system of unique pathological agents inside someone somewhere, causing an illness like a virus does, when there is absolutely no empirical evidence to suggest this? When a person has had a very difficult childhood characterized by abuse or neglect, say, does it make sense to say that their symptoms are explained by the presence of an anxiety agent, a trauma agent, a depression agent and a psychotic agent that comes in and out of existence every now and again, working inside them and against them (which all then need to somehow be individually treated)? When it is put like this which it should be because this is the essential message it sounds more than a little psychotic. And this is not simply hyperbole we are all subject to the full gamut of disordered experience, experts included.

Irrespective of what one thinks about this, when the very raison detre of the DSM was to outline discrete disorders to be treated specifically, the admission (and indeed promotion) of such a complicated and confusing picture does not just undermine the project, it flatly contradicts it. So far as I am concerned, the notion of overlap and co-morbidity in this context (i.e. without empirical evidence in its favor) is just an ad hoc justification to force coherence to something that was incoherent in the first place. Im sure the not yet, but later argument would seem particularly tempting right now to defenders of the approach, but the fact remains that if there is (often considerable) overlap, then there is no discrete disorder. Likewise, if two people can be diagnosed with the same disorder but not share the same symptoms, again the premise is disproved, as the notion of it being discrete then has no meaning. Logic supposedly does not lie, and after all empirical science is supposed to be a logical enterprise.

But this isnt entirely lost on the DSM. Indeed, it is in some sense admitted. In sections away from the actual diagnoses, it is suggested that there is an essentially heuristic importance and relevance to the scheme employed. Fair enough; I do not disagree with that at all. If it was understood simply as a way of categorizing complex, contradictory, and overdetermined experiences, then great. There is no doubt, not only that this is useful but that some form of categorization is absolutely necessary in any institution of mental health treatment. But and this is a big but this is not how it is promoted, nor how it is customarily understood by the lay public. Indeed, despite the fact that they may caveat the approach in such ways, the very fact that these realities are presented as caveats, when the only logical conclusion is that they undermine the very efficacy and relevance of the entire project, supports the idea that there is something more than confusion going on here. Maybe we should conclude then that there is intent to push the agenda of categorical reduction despite the fact that the very reality of peoples experience as empirically recognized by the DSM itself contradicts the idea. Maybe I am now being a little paranoid, but what else can we conclude?

Allsopp et als paper comes to the following conclusions: there is far too much subjective discernment employed in the DSM diagnostic process to call it objective, the overlap of mental disorders shows that they do not always fit into one category, and there is and needs be a necessary pragmatism that undermines the project of discrete disorders. These appear to me to be a strain of, shall we say, restrained diplomacy for the above reasons. They simply do not go far enough. Rather, their paper and others like them do not just represent what are arguably fatal blows to the DSM. To my mind, they are actually demonstrating that the very notion that facets of Psyche thoughts, beliefs, emotions, identities, etc. are really specific, discrete things that can be located in the head, reduced to brains, or whatever else, is itself incoherent and the root problem, not whatever system is conjured up based on its premises. Rather, what is at stake, I argue, is the very empirical theory and project of Psyche itself, of which the DSM is simply an applied arm or leg. What these studies are in fact positively showing us is that we are complex, contradictory, multifaceted beings that cannot be readily categorized and therefore reduced that we are, the Psyche is, dare I say it, illogical.

The truth of the matter is that psychotic disorders, major depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example, are only abstractions. And abstractions of complex, contradictory phenomena unsurprisingly end up in contradiction. Certainly, there are psychotic, depressive or obsessive-compulsive experiences, but that is a very different statement. We all have such experiences, all the time. If we admit this, if we give validity to these experiences only as experiences and not deviant empirical entities, the notion of disorder or pathology loses its basis and meaning in the context. This failure is not the failure of the DSM per se, but the failure of the philosophy of reducing complex trans-categorical experiences into simple categories itself. This conclusion was at the core of much of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and it is still just as valid, if not more so given that the empirical project has become increasingly less valid.

The real question is, then, why do we too not come to this conclusion, from this study and those like it? Why can we not conclude that we are indeed complex, dynamic, contradictory beings and be done with it? This is where we hit upon the deeper matrix of the issue that it is not so easy to digest.

It would be comforting to conclude that the people who are in charge of such projects as the DSM (indeed, those in charge of any given socio-political project) are perhaps a little sociopathic or deviously immoral. If that were the conclusion, then there is a simple solution: get them out and replace them with people that actually care about what suffering actually is and create a new system that better presents the logic of that suffering. But, ironically, this would only be to commit the very same thing that is being criticized to reduce the problem to something simple and pathologize the them that peddle it. Unfortunately, it is not and cannot be that simple. Rather, if we truly accept the reality that people and their experiences are complex, contradictory and non-reducible, then the very narrative of perpetrators and victims must be disarmed along with it.

In the most basic sense, to come to the conclusion that we are such beings would be to admit that minds and experiences are not empirical objects which is to say, not things that exist in some self-same (i.e. one thing and not another) way and endure as such over time. If we admit that then we are admitting not only that categories of disorders do not actually exist, but that categories of ordered experience do not either. This would mean that the enduring qualities, identities and roles that we all readily accept and unthinkingly employ on a daily basis become duly suspect too; for they are the other side of the contradiction that would be un-split. And this applies to the us as to the them equally.

If we really accepted this, we would have to then say that we are all not what we think we are and what we are actually doing is not what we think we are doing. And I do not mean this in the sense of there being unconscious motivations an idea that I would argue is actually complicit in the very same scheme and project, putting, as it does, the reality of psychic contradiction somewhere else (i.e. the unconscious) but in the sense of us being explicit, walking contradictions. We would be admitting that the very experiential worlds we dwell in are weaved out of the fabric of this contradiction and paradox. In other words, it would be to say that we are not really good or bad people that are doing whats right or wrong; that we are not good nor bad parents, healthy nor ill; that we are not feminists nor white supremacists, Democrats fighting the good fight nor ignorant Republicans. Well, we may well be those, but we are also, and at the same time, other things, other roles, other personas that contradict and undermine those things presently and over time, which again applies to the us as to the them equally.

It is this that makes it almost unthinkable to actually realize this conclusion, and there is no underestimating how large of a shift in consciousness would be required. Perhaps most disturbing to our self-concepts and societal esteem, it would make a mockery of any real notion of progressing, individually or on a societal level. For progress in the way it is customarily used at least necessitates the very same ethos of specification, exclusion and reduction as the empirical project in general does; they are, in fact, of a piece. It is only by identifying with a simple notion, idea, or concept (and therefore excluding and othering a plethora of others) that realizing a given ideology, whether personal or social, is rendered possible and meaningful. Political systems and social movements are split into ostensive binaries for a reason.

Complex, contradictory things or identities do not have impetus and are more conducive to stasis than progress. As such, they cannot form the basis of a movement, personal or social; or rather, they can, but they wont really go anywhere. There must be simple categories a me, a you, an us and a them in its most basic form for gravity, momentum and direction to be generated and disclosed. On a day-to-day level, in fact, this basic psychological logic is necessary for us all in making sense of our positions in the world and carving out our futures, something which applies across the life span at different times. Indeed, the very notion of individuation at the core of the entire Western project that we hold so dear is enmeshed with and utterly dependent on this logic and process becoming an individual with a self is coextensive with this kind of othering and not-me-ing. No small thing.

We would be forced to conclude, in truth, that the core identifications we take to be us, just like disorders, are abstractions also, which are good for thinking and actingbut not actually real ways of organizing around time but onlyat the expense of dissociating the complex, stifling actuality underneath. Taken to its logical conclusion, it would mean that it is not really possible to control or predict ourselves or others, as prediction and control also rests on categorization and reduction, on specific entities and identities that are self-same and endure through time. We would ultimately be confronted by the fact that we are radically out of control or rather, have been laboring under the illusion of control, and actually have been for quite some time. It is not just empirical science that has been seduced by the apparent omnipotence that the empirical, reductive project affords, it is the whole Western structuring of experience and its people. Again, no small thing.

But as dramatic and fantastical as this sounds, this is exactly what we already know to be true; it is only that we fumble around for coherent explanations and causes for the symptoms that we do see. We, in the West, live in a world where the fact of regular mass shootings, opioid epidemics, rocketing suicide rates, to name but a few all backgrounded by the brutal destruction of nature and serious geo-political uncertainty, of course is apparently the new normal. It is, therefore, such a big issue precisely because the problem we are addressing in mental health treatment is not an isolated error, not by any stretch of the imagination. It is really only a symbol of this grand zeitgeist, this cultural mood in which the preeminence of empirical science is unquestioned, that we have been seduced by for centuries. To reject this would mean to admit that we are all, as such, inextricably bound to, and therefore also complicit in, the problem we are attacking.

But we also know this on some level too, although at times only in a dim, inexplicable way. While we know that we have progressed if we deem material gain and wealth, longevity of individual life and the rise of the individual and their individual rights as the sole criteria, we have with equal certainty regressed when it comes to that whole order of existence described by such terms as the illogical or irrational, such as our Psyches and experiential worlds. It is clear as day to anyone who wants to see that our emotional, psychological, and spiritual well-being has rapidly deteriorated. This is clearly evidenced by the rotting truths of our society mentioned above, and in the rotting truths of our personalities and actions in the world that we shove down somewhere. And this makes just as much sense as our awareness that mental health has deteriorated as a result of DSM-style pathologizing. In all cases, the ethos of reduction and identification with simple categories has the disturbing consequence of dissociating the vital human actuality underneath, a vitality that in essence we, in fact,are.

Accepting this, furthermore, would mean accepting that our belief that we have somehow transcended the limitations of nature is, and has always been, an illusion, and a very dangerous and damaging one at that. It would mean that we have to acknowledge all of us, not just the they over there doing things to us thatour progress does not represent a transcendence of the worlds limitations, but has involvedgreat cost. It would mean opening our eyes to the ways that we have all only transferred various kinds of suffering to others, whether that be to people with mental disorders, to people working in vast, deplorable factories in the third world, or whether it be to all the animals in nature that we slaughter in putrid, unimaginably immoral ways. These are also all of a piece.

To accept that we are contradictory, paradoxical, dynamic beings, and therefore also that we have all been suffering an illusion of control, transcendence and progress and have gained from this illusion at the expense of others, is a monumental task. However, this is, I argue, what we are being shown here, and in truth weve been shown it over and over again but not had the right eyes to see it.

But the question is, can we afford not to address this, this time? We have been vividly awakening to the fact that this normality we live in is deeply pathological. If that word has meaning outside of physical medicine, it is in this context. And this is the difference between now and the 1960s a time of a renaissance of hope and possibility. We, by contrast, realize this in a helpless, impotent and frustrated way, a lot of the time related, no doubt, to the actual impotency of empirical science and its philosophy to solve all our problems. And this is important. We have now lived out the reductive, materialist ideology to an obsessive extreme, and its failure is particularly evident when we think about our Psyches, emotions and mental disorders that we all know about, more or less firsthand. We are now undeniably seeing, feeling indeed being overwhelmed by its horrors. There is no argument, no hope, no well, back to the drawing board, well work it out this time when it is increasingly evident that the very drawing board we have been writing on is itself a big part of the issue. This is a big difference from the 1960s.

To bring it back to the point and to the core argument I am making, if we are truly to ameliorate people suffering with complex emotional and psychological distress, and indeed ourselves, from the problems of reduction, we cannot do so in earnest without also at the same time admitting our own complicity and culpability as beings interwoven in, and benefiting from, the very same project. To actually de-reduce and de-pathologize the emotional experience of those suffering, we have to admit that while we do not reduce this or that particular person and negate their experience persons that we think about and empathize with, whatever our reasons we do, consciously or not, negate and reduce the experience of peoples and beings that we do not think about or do not empathize with, for whatever reason.

I am making the case, then, that there is a very good reason why this model persists despite the glaring issues: to resolve it would involve the withdrawal of some serious projections, from each and every one of us. But in order to alleviate and dispel the violence done to the people we do think about and empathize with, then we have to at the same time and in the same breath admit the violence we do, and have been doing for a long time, to all these others. This would be to admit that we are all complex, dynamic, contradictory people and also participating in the problems we attack. The former without the latter is only hypocrisy, and hypocritical action does not tend to bring any real, sustained progress, which is after all what we really want or is it?

Continued here:

The Problems with the DSM Mask a Dark Reality We're All Complicit In - James Moore

by Shane de Lange (@shanenilfunct) In honor of diversity, expression and freedom, this weeks Cover Stories seeks to erode political tyranny, voracity and dictatorship, specifically the brand that was exhibited by North American president, Donald Trump, recently. Attempting to embrace those creative efforts that revolt against any form of ignorance, oppression and totalitarianism, we include two iconic publications which showcase design perspectives and approaches in protest against any embargo placed upon free thought and critical thinking.

Find a cover we should know about? Tweet us at @Marklives and @shanenilfunct. Want to view all the covers at a glance? See our Pinterest board!

As a high-end magazine catering to a predominantly female market, Destiny couldnt have chosen a better cover girl for its latest issue, setting a new standard for pluralism in the publishing industry. Deeply rooted within Ndebele culture, South African artist Esther Mahlangu is a picture of gracefulness. Sadly, not as well-known locally as she is abroad, Mahlangu is perhaps most-popular for her art car commissioned by BMW, which formed part of a limited series alongside other huge names such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Frank Stella. She wears her traditional attire with dignity, showing that this gogo lives and breathes her heritage. Highlighting this cultural icon on the cover is a radical way to celebrate the end of Womens Month in SA; themed the Heritage Issue, kudos must go out to the editorial team for having the vision to make this cover happen a respectful sentiment in support of cultural diversity, representation and identity.

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Trump officially blows, after more than a week of public outcry related to his delay and inaction towards the Charlottesville attacks. After a lengthy bout of silence, his dismal pushback placed equal blame on counter-protestors for the concerning events that were clearly caused by a white supremacist rally, suggesting the presidents support for the far right in the US. In the wake of these events, further emphasising his perceived sympathy for the American far right, Trump tweeted the importance of the statues that honor Confederate leaders, which are the root cause of these attacks. This follows a previous week of warmongering against North Korea.

Trump has an uncanny inability to hold back, unscripted. His lackluster response towards the Charlottesville rally is succinctly portrayed in three covers that went viral over the past 10 days, each depicting the president in some way related to white supremacy, on the precipice of quasi-imperialism. The cover for the New Yorker, titled Blowhard, illustrated by David Plunkert, is particularly noteworthy in this regard. Representing Trump as an inept lone sailor blowing into the punctured and tattered white sails, resembling a Ku Klux Klan mask, of a flimsy black raft navigating his morally barren, ethically devoid social, political and economic seas.

With all the physical and psychological divisions in America now chillingly apparent, these covers capture a pivotal moment in history.

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Speaking in terms of diversity and expression, variety being the proverbial spice of life, Eye is a graphic design journal tailored for critically informed visual culture junkies, taking the notion of multiplicity and pluralism to the next level in its 94th issue. Paul McNeil and Hamish Muir of MuirMcNeil studio were commissioned to create 8000 distinctive covers. To this end, the studio created 10 seed files, each containing iterations of letterforms drawn from the word eye, with fixed increments in three layers, each set in a variation of MuirMcNeils TwoPoint or TwoPlus typeface systems. Recalling Dietmar Winklers classic 1969 poster design for an MIT computer programming course, each layer is displaced laterally and spaced proportionately using letter spacing and typesetting traditions. Printed digitally on an Indigo 10000 press, these covers depend on HP Mosaic software, which allows for variable data printing that resizes, rotates and alters the colour of the artwork, based on the 10 seed files, and finally cropped it to make a diverse amount of final cover designs.

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As a Futurist bi-monthly architecture magazine, Mark is noted for thwarting convention and eroding conservatism, specifically in the context of the built environment. The latest issue reminds one of Mess-Mend (1923), a classic cover design by Russian artist and designer, Alexandre Rodchenko, who was one of the original founders of the Russian Constructivist movement. True to the revolutionary nature of Constructivist design traditions, the use of layout, photography and typography supports a well-contextualised aesthetic and ethical template. The magazine is particularly successful at creating synergy between its print and online iterations with a masthead that speaks in an architectural tone of voice, beautifully designed, standing strong on both the top-third of the printed cover, and above the fold on the landing page of the website consistently implementing clear design and art direction across multiple platforms.

Taking its name from township slang describing the manner in which black youths travel on overcrowded trains, either situated on roofs or hanging from the sides of carriages, Staffrider is an iconic South African cultural magazine. With its daredevil approach, Staffrider focused predominantly on black writing and art in SA. From its base in Johannesburg, publishing between 1978 and 1993, the magazine took an anti-apartheid stance, expressing black culture and history through poetry, short stories, art, graphics and photography; all situated outside the institutionalised norms of the apartheid regime. Challenging establishment and censorship, Staffrider advocated non-racialism, written in English as opposed to Afrikaans; it was a soapbox for black creatives who could easily have been overlooked by racially biased publishers, constructing a relevant voice in protest against racial and cultural segregation and oppression.

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Deriving its name from a song by the Ramones called Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue, Sniffin Glue and Other Rock N Roll Habits was a subversive monthly punk zine first published in 1976. Commonly referred to as Sniffin Glue, this fanzine stands as an important historical reference for the original punk movement in the UK during the late 70s, canonised by the famous cover for the God Save the Queen 7 by the Sex Pistols. At the time, punk was too underground and anti-establishment to attract much attention from the mainstream press. Fanzines, following a resourceful DIY anti-aesthetic, were often the only sources of information about the movement, specifically, the bands that contributed to the movement who often burnt out as quickly as they started. Printed using the crude Xerox machines of the time and quickly staple bound, Sniffen Glue is often referred to as the Bible of British Punk. Short-lived, embodying the spirit of punk, this zine was only published for about a year but, nonetheless, became a pivotal record for one of the most-prolific anti-establishment movements in history.

With headlines written in thick felt-tip pen a quirk that was later appropriated by the contemporary Metal Band System of a Down on the cover to its 2002 album Steal This Album Sniffin Glue stayed true to its rebellious roots and anarchic personality. The publication barely had any semblance of writing skill or journalistic talent, with grammatical errors, poor spelling, random, almost non-existent layout, and littered with slang and swearwords on every spread. All this gave Sniffin Glue its immediacy and urgency, effectively displaying the zeitgeist of poor, low-income, blue-collar youths in Britain at the time. The original approach and language of this publication disproves the misconception that links punk to white supremacy. Doing so would be a shallow and superficial reading to say the least. If anything, extreme right-wing movements are far too conservative to digest the levels of critical thinking and free thought that Sniffin Glue advocated. Punk challenged social norms with efforts, once seen as taboo, which could rather be seen a possible remedy to the established, destructive and corrupt power structures that are dominant today.

Shane de Lange (@shanenilfunct) is a designer, writer, and educator currently based in Cape Town, South Africa, working in the fields of communication design and digital media. He works from Gilgamesh, a small design studio, and is a senior lecturer in graphic design at Vega School in Cape Town. Connect on Pinterest and Instagram.

Cover Stories, formerly MagLove, is a regular slot deconstructing media cover design, both past and present.

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Cover Stories: Thoughtfulness in design (25 August 2017) - MarkLives.com

Post opinion writer Jonathan Capehart says President Trump's white nationalist tirade came from fertile ground expertly tilled by Steve Bannon. That won't stop now that Bannon is out. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)

Stephen K. Bannon may be gone, but he wont soon be forgotten. Firing the chief strategist from the White House will bolster the frayed hopes of Chief of Staff John F. Kelly that he might somehow corral the raging bull in the Oval Office. Plenty of china has been smashed since January, but a few dishes maybe even the prized platter of tax reform could yet be rescued. Maybe.

But Bannon played a role for President Trump that no one else can fill, one that Trump will pine for like a junkie pines for smack. The impresario of apocalyptic politics gave Trump a grandiose image of himself at a time when the real estate mogul was building a movement but had no real ideas.

Until Bannon came along, Trump was a political smorgasbord. He had been a Democrat, an independent and a Republican. He had been pro-choice and anti-abortion. He did business in the Middle East and tweeted about a Muslim ban. As for deep policy debates, he really couldnt be bothered. He was a vibe, a zeitgeist not a platform.

Bannon convinced him that he was something more than a political neophyte with great instincts and perfect timing. Trump, Bannon purred in his ear, was the next wave of world history. He painted a picture of Trump as a world-historical force, the revolutionary leader of a new political order, as the strategist told Time magazine earlier this year.

Under the influence of a pair of generational theorists, William Strauss and Neil Howe, Bannon conceives of American history as a repeating cycle of four phases. A generation struggles with an existential crisis: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II. The next generation builds institutions to prevent a future crisis. The next generation rebels against the institutions, leading to a Fourth Turning, in which the next crisis comes. Believing that another crisis is upon us, Bannon framed a role in Trumps imagination for the former real estate mogul to remake the world. To the list of crisis presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt they would add the name of Trump.

With Bannon gone, the White House might become a place less in love with conflict and chaos. But it is hard to think that Trump will be happy without aides who can paint such a picture for him. He will be looking for ways to keep in touch with his Svengali, because once youve been a Man of Destiny, its hard to go back to being a guywho got lucky.

The rest is here:

Bannon gave Trump exactly what he craved - Washington Post

See also: 10 Athens Punk Bands You Should Know

Ive lived in Athens for three years, and there are currently more active hardcore/punk acts right now than Ive seen the entire time Ive lived here, which is tight Athens doesnt have a single all-ages community space that hosts shows. Spaces like that are crucial to a growing, young punk scene. Its dangerous for a younger audience to be so intermingled with the bar culture that Athens is overridden with.

Oliver Vitale (Under a Sky So Blue)

As someone who doesn't drink, I only frequent the bars downtown for local music. I often feel out of place in these spots, and the bars themselves seem detached from the music scene while also limiting its growth due to age restrictions and late starting times. It seems that there's an unexplored need for a space specific to the punk scene that would remove these limitations and provide others with a safe space to explore music.

Daylan Brazis

I started doing shows at my house because it was never even a question for me to support the punk scene. I always knew [that] when I bought a place, I'd put on shows for my friends' bands. It comes from years of DIY touring and being treated like shit by clubs, then we'd play a punk house and be treated like royalty.

Christian DeRoeck (Deep State)

The current zeitgeist of Athens music overwhelmingly favors dance-friendly pop, indie rock and the immediacy of buying a beer over nurturing a countercultural movement. It's also worth noting that the creative population of Athens is largely homogeneous, liberal and honestly just not that angry.

Malevich

The scene itself, if you can call it that, is definitely tired and played out with imitations of bigger, better artists on full display and a serious lack of original, creative voices that may be present but are not shining through. This is musica reflection of culture and emotions. It is not a popularity contest. To the punk fans, stop supporting these tedious bands that are cool or safe to like. To the punk artists: Stop settling.

Kwazymoto

Athens can be a bit insular, which is a good and bad thing. People in the scene are super supportive (to us able-bodied, cisgendered, straight white males [from] upper-middle-class families, which doesn't mean much, I guess), but after being around Athens for three years, some of the small-town aspects of the scene are a bit more obvious.

Tiger Li (Faith Healerz)

I think publications in Athens tend to be focused more on garage-rock, indie rock, indie-pop, etc. The only Athens publication that has mentioned us is The Red & Black, which is honestly hilarious. When I go to shows here, people show up to watch their friends bands and then leave There's a lot of room for improvement, but considering the population of Athens, there are a lot of people doing really cool things here. We usually have better luck in Atlanta, so we've just been playing there more.

Brian Perez-Canto (Fishmonger)

Ive toured all over the U.S. and Europe, but I love to come back to Athens. For me, I feel like in a big town with a big scene, people and bands can be overlooked Athens may be mostly the land of R.E.M. and [the] B-52s, but there has been a thriving punk scene here for as long as Ive been here, and long before I got here. We've hosted bands from all over the world. People grow out of it, new people get into it, some people never get out of it, but for me, punk/hardcore has always been a part of my life.

Jason Griffin (Apparition)

Read this article:

Athens Punks Sound Off on the State of the Scene - Flagpole Magazine

During the Fourth of July congressional recess, grassroots activists in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, flooded a town-hall meeting hosted by Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner. The crowd had come to hold their barrel-bellied congressman accountable for his vote in favor of the House Trumpcare bill, legislation that would have led to 23 million Americans losing their health insurance.

Trump's victory exposed the party establishment as utterly broken now Dems hope to rebuild in time for a 2018 comeback

Ninety minutes later, as Sensenbrenner fled the public library parking lot in a black sedan under police escort, sirens bleating through chants of "Shame! Shame! Shame!" these protesters had demonstrated the power of a new wave of local activism in the age of Trump.

Nationwide, this tide of progressive resistance has sent GOP members of Congress into hiding from their own constituents, and steeled Senate Democrats into a unified opposition. "When you see Charles Schumer out there calling for 'resistance,' you realize something's happening," says Theda Skocpol, the famed Harvard political scientist who studies American civic engagement. "That's not his natural state."

This explosion of political action has the Democratic Party's new leadership wagering that success in 2018 will hinge on its ability "to channel people's energies not only into town-hall meetings," says Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez, "but also into the ballot box." But this mission-critical job stands as an uneasy work in progress. Despite calls from national leaders to make common cause with resistance activists, state and local Democrats are often missing in action. Perhaps more troubling: The unifying purpose of opposing Trump has not papered over the party's rawest policy divides.

Wauwatosa "Tosa" for short is a mixed bag, politically. The leafy Milwaukee suburb was the home of Scott Walker, and voters here backed the Republican governor in three elections. Yet Tosa gave Donald Trump just 35 percent support in 2016. And there's the rub: Sensenbrenner touts a maverick streak, but he has voted with Trump 93 percent of the time.

The congressman gets credit for showing up. Nearly 150 Republican members of Congress have yet to hold a single town-hall meeting, but this is Sensenbrenner's 83rd during the current congressional session. "You probably know some of these meetings have become very contentious," he tells the standing-room-only crowd. His crotchety, Midwest-inflected voice is a dead ringer for the late 60 Minutes complainer Andy Rooney's. "If, at any time, participants become rude or disruptive," he says, brandishing a wooden gavel, "I will immediately adjourn the meeting!"

The exchange that follows is heated but civil. Sensenbrenner responds to a no-holds-barred question about his Trumpcare vote with a disgusted bark: "No, I do not have 'blood on my hands!'" Resistance activists have distributed red disagree signs, and constituents flourish them with gusto. Outside the library's wide glass windows, a spillover crowd of more than 100 is marching. Three "handmaids" dressed in white bonnets and crimson robes a visual nod to Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel about the collapse of democracy walk in eerie silence. Other protesters hold aloft paper tombstones with inscriptions like DEATH BY TAX BREAK SAD! and chant, "Sensenbrenner, Sensenbrenner, where's your soul?!"

The Wauwatosa uprising wasn't ginned up by the Democratic Party, which had zero presence at the rally. It was organized by friends and neighbors in a node of the Indivisible movement, calling itself Indivisible Tosa, which structures its activism according to the viral how-to civics manual "Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda."

The Indivisible movement which now counts more than 6,000 chapters nationwide is the centerpiece of a robust new grassroots machinery that has arisen to confront the crisis of the Trump presidency. Rivaling anything accomplished by the Tea Party, the passionate activism of hundreds of thousands of progressives has already achieved the impossible in Washington, D.C. overwhelming Republican control of Congress and the presidency to stymie the repeal of Obamacare.

Looking ahead, Democratic Party leaders are determined to ride this political uprising to victory in the House in 2018. But neither the DNC nor the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have shown the technological savvy or comfort with grassroots engagement to create a platform for this activism within the party itself. Indeed, for many of the activists on the ground, the current Democratic Party appears less a vehicle for change than an obstacle to it. "The party is utterly irrelevant," says Markos Moulitsas, the 45-year-old founder of Daily Kos, a pioneer of the "netroots" that has become a hub for digital resistance in the Trump age. Noting that there are thousands of registered Democrats in every congressional district, even the reddest ones, Moulitsas adds, "If we get 10,000 people volunteering and create a culture where being a liberal citizen in America is normal you will volunteer, you will be a part of that army every year that changes the equation and empowers the dominant liberal majority that actually exists in this country. But the party has nothing to do with it."

What's indisputable is that the election of Donald Trump awoke a sleeping giant of progressive activism. "We're at a very rare political moment where there's an abundance of volunteer time and energy, rather than a scarcity," says Micah Sifry, executive director of Civic Hall, which fosters tech innovation in politics. And these new activist groups "make big asks of people's time and of their idealism."

The innovation and moxie of the new organizations have made an impression. "The energy is palpable," says DNC Chair Perez. "They push us as they should!" he says, adding, with perhaps more hope than conviction, "They all want the Democratic Party to succeed."

For some groups, like Swing Left, Perez's assessment holds true. Dedicated to helping progressives flip their nearest contested House seat in 2018, Swing Left is in easy alliance: "We're here to support the Democratic Party and be a new take on things," says co-founder Ethan Todras-Whitehill. "We have the same goal of getting Democrats back into power."

But for other groups, the fact that the new machinery is rising outside the party is a feature not a bug. "We don't view ourselves as an arm of the Democratic Party," says Ezra Levin, a founder of the Indivisible movement. "If we were, it would be difficult to apply pressure to make Democrats stand up for progressive values," he says. "This is not a switch that gets flipped," he insists. "This is pressure that ought to be applied regularly."

Marshall Ganz is a storied organizer who was active in the civil-rights and farmworker-union movements of the Sixties and Seventies and more recently helped structure the 2008 movement that elected Barack Obama. "The fact that Indivisible is rooted outside of the Democratic Party is an enormous strength," he says. "They can develop their own agenda. They can be the ones exercising influence over Congress, the Senate or the presidency which is something the Obama organization could not do because it was owned by Obama." Once inside the White House, Obama muzzled his activists in favor of an establishment brand of governing. "The approach he took," Ganz says, "there was no real role for people."

Moulitsas points to lessons of the Obama presidency to argue that movement politics can't thrive inside the Democratic Party. "What happened when Obama won? We all went home." But he is confident that progressives will reform the party most quickly by breaking ahead and letting officials play catch up. "That's actually ideal: Let the party piggyback off that popular wave rather than the other way around."

With resistance groups taking ownership of high-tech organizing, data and fundraising tools that previously lived inside parties or campaigns, the power has shifted, Moulitsas says. "We finally have the opportunity to build the infrastructure that we should have built a long time ago.

The Indivisible movement has emerged as the liberal answer to the Tea Party. But its creation was a viral accident. In the aftermath of Trump's election, husband and wife Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg earnest thirtysomethings with experience on Capitol Hill saw friends and family eager to resist the new administration but misfiring in their efforts to apply political pressure. They put too much faith in online petitions or one-off phone calls to House Speaker Paul Ryan's national office. "They didn't fully understand how Congress works or how you could have real impact," Levin tells Rolling Stone.

Levin is a former staffer to Rep. Lloyd Doggett, an Austin Democrat who was one of the first members of Congress to feel the Tea Party's bite. Levin recalls watching how a "relatively small set of individuals spread throughout the country was able to stall and in some cases defeat a historically popular president's agenda." Tea Party tactics weren't revolutionary; they were Civics 101. Energized constituents tirelessly bird-dogged their own members of Congress. "Separate out the Tea Party's racism," Levin says, "and they were smart on strategy and tactics."

The couple began distilling do's and don'ts of congressional activism into a manual for citizens seeking to resist Republican rule in Washington. Levin a freckled 32-year-old with close-cropped brown hair wanted to "demystify the political and the policy process" and answer "nuts-and-bolts organizing questions like: How do you run a meeting? How do you create leadership? How do you structure action?" The Indivisible guide's ultimate purpose is to help constituents get inside the heads of their members of Congress, making them sweat at every vote: "How am I going to explain this to the angry constituents who keep showing up at my events and demanding answers?"

The Indivisible guide began, humbly, as a Google Doc, shared in mid-December via a tweetstorm from the couple's row house in Washington, D.C. With just a few hundred Twitter followers, Levin had little expectation the guide would go viral. But then the Google Doc crashed. And groups across the country began announcing themselves. "People started telling us, 'We got 20 people together, and we're Indivisible Roanoke' or 'We're Indivisible Auburn, Alabama,'" says Levin. Chapters proliferated in particular after the inauguration-weekend Women's March. Levin recalls that he and Greenberg faced an "unexpected choice" at the end of January. "We could say, 'Hey, we just put out a Google Doc good luck to ya.' Or we could try to set up some kind of structure that supports that local leadership."

They launched a national Indivisible organization, offering guidance without micro-management. "These groups are fundamentally self-led," Levin insists. "We're not franchising out Indivisibles. You don't have to call yourself Subway and sell $5 foot-longs to be an Indivisible chain." Ganz sees the national Indivisible group providing crucial direction for its far-flung chapters. "Leadership is different than control," he says, adding that Indivisible is "equipping people with skills, and framing strategy at the local level, the state level and the national level."

As a movement, Indivisible is every bit the Tea Party's equal, says Skocpol, author of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Skocpol is now researching Indivisible groups as part of a study on eight counties won by Trump across swing states from North Carolina to Wisconsin. "The scale of the activity, the energy behind it is comparable to if not more than what was going on with the Tea Party back in 2009," she says.

Yet Indivisible is not a mirror image of the right-wing uprising of the Obama age. "Unlike the Tea Party, Indivisible has figured out how to be independent of the Democratic Party without being the crazy wing of the Democratic Party," says Sifry. Where the Tea Party represented a "resurgence of a white, nativist, rural wing of the Republican right," he says, "Indivisible doesn't map the same way. You can't say this is just the hippies and those old New Lefties. The only thing that's analogous is the strategy: You have elected representatives who are supposed to listen to you, so go make their life a living hell."

Indivisible Tosa the group that turned up the heat on Sensenbrenner in July is a typical Indivisible success story. The group was launched over beers in the living room of Joseph Kraynick's modest Wauwatosa bungalow. Kraynick is a 46-year-old special-education paraprofessional; he's got a shaved head and a goofy, infectious smile. After Trump's election, he says, he found himself despairing: "What the hell am I going to do? I don't have any money. I don't know anyone who has any access or contacts to a politician. How can I get them to pay attention to me?"

Then his wife returned from the Women's March in D.C. on a bus full of activists buzzing about the Indivisible guide. "I read this thing, and a whole world of ideas opened up to me: 'Oh, OK, I can do this!'" he says. "I can bring 20 people with me, and we can go to a local office and talk to the congressional staff. I can get 50 or 100 people to make phone calls and push for the same thing and they're actually going to have to listen to that.

"I never considered myself an activist," Kraynick says. "And no way in hell I'd have ever considered being an organizer. I'm not an organized person." But Indivisible Tosa took off, and Kraynick soon found himself a co-leader of a thriving grassroots community that's grown to more than 300. Members, Kraynick says, have transformed their diffuse outrage into coordinated political muscle. "It feels like we're creating power for ourselves," he says, "and trying to put things right."

For the Indivisible movement, job one of "putting things right" was blocking the Republicans' campaign to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and hobble Medicaid. "The proof is in the pudding," says Levin, who underscores that Obamacare repeal was the chief legislative goal of a unified Republican Congress and the GOP's central campaign promise for seven years. "Through months of relentless local pressure," he says, "Indivisible groups and other volunteer advocates convinced Democrats to play political hardball and peeled off enough Republicans to sink the bill."

Indivisible has focused on defense grinding the Trump train to a halt. Other progressive groups are looking to play offense, tackling critical political work in advance of the 2018 midterms. If the Democratic Party were more technologically adept, one could imagine this being done under the auspices of a Democratic committee. But with the DNC and DCCC still rebuilding following the 2016 wipeout, it's being driven from outside the party.

Ethan Todras-Whitehill, a lanky 36-year-old travel writer, GMAT tutor and aspiring novelist with a mop of curly hair, awoke from the despondency of election night ready for battle. "I go through stages of grief fairly quickly," he says, laughing. "10 a.m., day after the election, I was like, 'OK, the House. 2018. What can we do?'"

A resident of the safe blue congressional district of Amherst, Massachusetts, where his wife is a university professor, Todras-Whitehill realized he would need to project his activism elsewhere. But after spending 20 minutes locating his nearest swing district, inspiration struck: "Why isn't there a tool to do this?" he asked. "That was the genesis of Swing Left."

With help from friends, he launched a website the day before inauguration with a tool that matched liberals to their closest 2018 swing district seeking their commitment to volunteer and donate to help Democrats win the seat. "We thought we'd get to 20,000 sign-ups by March," Todras-Whitehill says. "Instead, we had 200,000 by the first weekend."

Swing Left's rookie activists quickly found themselves out over the tips of their skis. "We didn't have any political organizing experience," he admits. But Swing Left has benefited from seasoned political operatives who emerged from the woodwork to professionalize the experiment. That includes Matt Ewing, a former national field director for MoveOn, who became Swing Left's head of organizing and helped it make the leap from ragtag volunteer collective to flourishing nonprofit.

Swing Left is targeting 64 House seats and has activated local, self-organized teams across the country to begin canvassing their respective swing districts including knocking on doors to survey constituents' concerns, registering new voters at farmers markets and recruiting locals to build up volunteer capacity inside the targeted districts.

"We're not trying to control what people do," Todras-Whitehill says, describing Swing Left as "an organization trying to keep up with our members." His priority is to create tools and platforms that structure the "organic momentum" of Swing Left volunteers. "We give them our best theory of what will make the biggest difference but what's most important is that they are out there doing the hard work of voter contact 18 months before the election."

Swing Left is laying the groundwork for Democratic campaigns whose candidates haven't even been chosen yet. "Our goal is that, the day after the primary, we can hand each campaign an army of grassroots volunteers that have trained and organized and already been talking to voters in that district for over a year." Swing Left is also building campaign war chests for each of its swing districts. "We have about $260,000 waiting for Darrell Issa's opponent," Todras-Whitehill says, referring to the California congressman who is one of the most endangered GOP incumbents. On the night of the House Trumpcare vote, Swing Left also launched a fund to be split equally among the opponents of swing-district Republicans who voted for the bill. "We sent this thing out the door a half-hour after the votes," he says. "It did $1 million in 24 hours."

In the face of upcoming Democratic primaries, Swing Left is devoutly hands-off letting voters decide. "We don't want to be relitigating the Bernie vs. Hillary thing," Todras-Whitehill says. "We need to get behind whoever emerges as nominees in swing districts. They are part of our best chance to put a check on Donald Trump by taking back a branch of Congress."

Not every organization in the new constellation of resistance groups is ready to pledge allegiance to any candidate who puts a (D) after his or her name.

Our Revolution is waging a fight for the heart of the Democratic Party's platform. "Resistance is good," says Nina Turner, the group's new president. "But we have to go further than that. We have to plan for when power is back in the hands of progressives." This means backing politicians "who will push progressive issues once they get the people's power," she says. "Otherwise, what difference does it make?"

Our Revolution was founded to continue the movement politics of the Bernie Sanders campaign, inheriting the grassroots infrastructure that raised more than $200 million to propel the democratic socialist senator in his unlikely contest with Hillary Clinton. Our Revolution is poised to be a power broker in 2018's contested Democratic primaries as progressive politicians seek the support of its activists and the power of its fundraising network.

Turner is a charismatic 49-year-old -African-American who served as minority whip in the Ohio State Senate. She took the reins of Our Revolution in June, replacing Sanders' former campaign manager. The Sanders movement has been criticized as a bastion of "Bernie bros" younger white men with an alarming tendency toward misogyny. But with Turner at the helm, Our Revolution stands as a rare grassroots powerhouse led by a black woman.

Our Revolution distributes its decision-making among its local chapters now numbering around 400 in 49 states. The idea is to empower the grassroots, Turner says, "instead of us running it from on high in D.C." Candidates seeking an endorsement must first convince their local Our Revolution affiliate. "They have to go talk to the citizens in their community the very people they want to represent."

Turner says the guide star of the Democratic Party has to be brighter than putting "a check on Trump" and calls the fight for Medicare for all "a foundational issue." She points bitterly to California, where Democratic leadership spiked single-payer legislation that could have passed without GOP support. "It wasn't the Russians. It wasn't the Republicans," Turner says. "The Democratic Assembly leader killed Medicare for all in California. How are we showing people that we're any different? That we're not controlled by the pharmaceutical and medical industry? That one example in California hasn't showed them that."

Our Revolution makes no apologies about taking its fight to the national party. Progressives cannot settle for "half measures," Turner says, and need to insist on "Democrats who really stand up for what it means to be a Democrat."

For Turner, the Democrats' new "Better Deal" platform is deficient. Unveiled in July, the Better Deal pledges a $15 minimum wage, a $1 trillion infrastructure plan (not unlike President Trump's), corporate tax credits for job training, and a wonky proposal to crack down on business monopolies. It offers no solutions on expanding health coverage, combating climate change or fostering racial justice.

In late July, Turner and Our Revolution activists marched on the DNC building south of the Capitol to present a 115,000-signature petition demanding a "people's platform" that includes universal healthcare, an end to private prisons, free public college and a tax on Wall Street. Far from rolling out the welcome mat for these reformers, the national Democrats' security team barricaded the building's front steps. The DNC insists this is standard security protocol. But Turner seized on the symbolism, calling the barrier "indicative of what is wrong with the Democratic Party." Through a megaphone that could surely be heard from Tom Perez's corner office, Turner shouted, "This ain't about fancy slogans on the way to 2018. We need a new New Deal!"

The Democratic Party is at its weakest in the state legislatures, where it lost hundreds of seats during Obama's two terms at a stark human cost. Unified GOP state governments cut social services, rammed through tax cuts for the wealthy, defunded Planned Parenthood clinics, adopted restrictive voter-ID measures and passed discriminatory bathroom bills.

Rather than trust the party to right itself, a pair of grassroots groups are working to rebuild state power in advance of the once-a-decade redrawing of congressional boundaries known as redistricting, which will follow the 2020 census. At the leading edge of this effort is Sister District, founded by Rita Bosworth, a 38-year-old former federal public defender from San Jose, California, who is adamant that progressives need to focus on "races that are competitive, winnable and strategic."

Sister District's mission is similar to Swing Left's but applied to legislative districts. Bosworth was drawn to these races because they're cheap to win and can unlock a broader Democratic revival. "When you win back state legislatures," she says, "then redistricting happens and you get a more representative Congress at the national level."

Counting 25,000 volunteers, Sister District has more than 100 locally led teams in all 50 states. Bosworth is intense and dispassionate a characteristic that puts her at odds with the grassroots zeitgeist. She was disheartened to watch Democrats pour a record $23 million into the Jon Ossoff special House election in Georgia, a "shiny object" of a race, she argues, with little lasting strategic value to the party. She points instead to state legislative contests coming up in Virginia this year. "If we put $23 million into Virginia, we would just win Virginia," she says. "And then we could redistrict." By undoing Republican gerrymandering, more Democrats would win as a matter of course. "We wouldn't have to spend $23 million on them!" Bosworth has a stern message for fellow progressives: "We're not thinking strategically, and we're not thinking long-term. And we're going to keep losing unless we start doing that."

Improving Democratic chances of winning down-ballot races means bolstering the quality of progressive candidates running for office. That's the mission of Run for Something, which has created a platform for younger Americans to jump into politics. Amanda Litman, the 27-year-old co-founder, ran Hillary Clinton's e-mail fundraising program in the 2016 election, helping to bring in nearly $400 million. In the aftermath of the November election, she kept falling into conversations with friends and acquaintances who said, "I want to run for political office. What do I do?"

Litman didn't have an easy answer. She knew underfunded state Democratic parties were poor incubators of political talent. So she launched Run for Something to connect novice politicians to resources and mentoring. Her ambition was modest: "In the first year, we figured we'd have to hustle to find 100 people to run, because this is hard." But Run for Something has already been contacted by 10,000 aspiring progressive politicians. The group is now vetting prospective candidates; those who pass muster join the group's Slack channel, where they can connect with fellow rookies and receive mentorship from more than 200 volunteer Democratic campaign veterans, including many top talents from the Obama and Clinton organizations, who work pro bono.

What excites Litman about the new recruits is that they "are real people and the people our party is supposed to be representing," she says. "It's teachers, students, nurses, single moms, veterans, immigrants. They're not old, rich, white lawyers."

Fresh off its victory blocking Trumpcare, the Indivisible movement is plotting a shift from defense to offense. It's engaged in a listening tour of its chapters, seeking a common progressive political platform to fight for, even as it continues to fight against Trump. The group has hired a new political director Maria Urbina, formerly of Voto Latino who is clear that Indivisible will remain independent from the Democrats. "We don't coordinate with the party," she says. "The power lies with the people who have brought this movement to life."

But Levin sees the Indivisible movement as paying long-term dividends for progressive politicians. "If you have a healthy movement of thriving local groups, you win elections," he says.

Ganz, the veteran organizer who now lectures at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, hopes national Democrats embrace this opportunity for bottom-up renewal. "One can hope that they'll get it and not try to fight groups like Indivisible. And realize how valuable they are."

The early returns are mixed. The very existence of a group like Run for Something stands as an indictment of the party's capacity to foster fresh talent. But Litman believes that this is a productive tension. "We're frenemies," she says.

In a recent interview in Washington, D.C., deputy DNC chair Keith Ellison told Rolling Stone that the Democratic Party needs to show solidarity with new resistance groups by showing up: "We can't just let these heroic, brave organizations get out there with us not being there," Ellison says. "We gotta be there, so we can offer ourselves as a party that's going to fight for people, and that they have some confidence in."

"The new national team at the DNC is trying to be responsive," says Skocpol. But the Democratic Party is a decentralized beast, and not all state parties are following through on the rhetoric from Washington. In her research across four swing states, Skocpol says, the relationship between party leaders and Indivisible activists runs hot and cold: "I see a range from complete non-contact to close cooperation."

The DNC has launched a Resistance Summer program, offering grants to state parties to engage with voters at protest events. But the lesson from Wisconsin is that the party still has a lot of work to do. The Sensenbrenner town hall was one of only a handful that GOP politicians dared to hold over the Fourth of July recess anywhere in the nation. The Tosa protest drew hundreds of local activists, but no one representing the state or local Democratic Party.

Protester Mike Cummens a 65-year- old family physician who looks a bit like Ed Begley Jr. is a member of an Indivisible chapter calling itself Stop Jim Sensenbrenner Indivisible. To Cummens, the Democratic Party is "kind of a dirty word." When it comes to tapping into the energy of the resistance, he says, "There's been no support, no outreach from them. Nothing." The distrust runs both ways. "None of us really like them that much," he says. "They're not doing their job!"

With a grim smile, Cummens points to the Indivisible crowd that has packed the library to overflowing. "It's a telling picture," he says. "This is where the activism is. It's not the Democratic Party."

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How Progressive Activists Are Leading the Trump Resistance ... - RollingStone.com

August 23, 2017 by Perry Simpson ,

From #MAGA to #Maythe4th, here are some of the biggest hashtags of the first 10 years of the hashtag.

Its been 10 years since Chris Messina tweeted the first hashtag. In that time, hashtags have come to define not only social media, but also a generation of internet culture.

Every news item, product release, marketing campaign, movie premiere anything and everything really, has been collated around the hash symbol. As such, 10 people can come up with 10 different answers as to which 10 hashtags have defined the last 10 years on social media. Heres that selection from PRWeek staffers, in no particular order:

#Jan25One of the defining moments in modern international politics the uprising in Egypt in 2011 that eventually resulted in the resignation of the countrys former dictator, Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak was also a defining moment for social media. It showed that Twitter had real applications outside of cat memes and trolls.

#GamergateAn ugly moment for gamers, gamergate began as a statement against corruption in games journalism, and ended up as a rallying point for misogynists and trolls. Still, it was a moment that wont soon fade from memory.

#MakeAmericaGreatAgainNot much to be said about this one, really. It was (and is) as much a viral hashtag as a symbol of the right-wing zeitgeist. If nothing else, its been effective.

#YesWeCanThe chant that propelled President Barack Obama to the oval office during the campaign, and the ethos that defined much of his two terms. This hashtag defined not only the decade, but a new generation of American voters.

#BlackLivesMatterBLM seems more like a political party here in the waning weeks of 2017, but the movement began as social rally cry against police brutality; specifically, the killing of Trayvon Martin. Now it is one of the most prolific political chants in history.

#IceBucketChallengeThe magnitude of the virility of the ice bucket challenge is difficult to understate. Look at all the various "challenges" it left in its wake, with more cropping up all the time. The ice bucket challenge was a true gem as far as viral social media moments go, and it was one of the few that brands were able to effectively and organically co-opt.

#BreakTheInternetIts entirely possible to fill a list like this with Kim Kardashian content. But if one hashtag defines her reign, its #BreakTheInternet; a social media event where the semi-nude Kardashian literally broke Twitter.

#ImWithHerHillary Clinton remains a divisive, even near on 12 months after her defeat in last years presidential election. But the hashtag that followed her continues to be a call to action for women and womens rights groups.

#OscarsSoWhiteHollywood has a long and documented history of racism and exclusion, but the industry has been doing a bit of course correction in the wake of 2015s #OscarsSoWhite; a viral response to the Academy Awards that year (and many other years), which didnt include a single actor of color.

#MayThe4thEntertainment media inherently generates a ton of social buzz, but the viral fervor around 2015s Star Wars: The Force Awakens was an anomaly, even for a blockbuster film. It remains one of the most viewed online trailers in the first 24 hours to this day, and was one of the biggest cinematic events of this generation. Whatever the subjective quality of the film itself, its commercial success pushed May 4 as close as one can go to becoming an official holiday.

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10 hashtags that defined the decade - PRWeek