'It absolutely felt like a hostile environment for us'

His many credits include hit songs, television, and film

'In stark contrast to what President Trump faced'

In our new series on the top 10 Elton John songs, decade by decade, we’re going to work our way backward, starting with the 2010s. Since the 2020s are not yet over, we won’t include this decade in the list. As all true-blue Elton John fans know, as we go further back in time, it will get tougher to pick only 10 songs for each list. But doing it this way should be fun. Elton John released only two solo studio albums of original material in the 2010s: The Diving Board in 2013 and Wonderful Crazy Night in 2016. However, The post Top 10 Elton John Songs Of The 2010s appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Books QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics: The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh Published in 1981, the novel features neopronouns and a thoughtful, deeply feminist approach to gender. By Bogi Takács | Published on September 18, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share I’ve been meaning to discuss some of C.J. Cherryh’s novels in the QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics series, but I was unsure where to start. Then I realized that her Chanur space opera series was included in my pre-2010 neopronouns in SFF list, and I’d eventually like to review all titles on said list. Even if the pronouns turn out to be a minor part—which sometimes happens with these older works—it is still likely for these novels to contain some sort of interesting approach to gender. This was indeed what I found, in this particular case. The first volume of the series, The Pride of Chanur (1981) does include neopronouns: specifically the stsho, one of the non-human species in the narrative, use the pronoun gtst. “The stsho proffered delicacies and tea, bowed, folded up gtst stalklike limbs—he, she, or even it, hardly applied with stsho—and seated gtst-self in gtst bowlchair, a cushioned indentation in the office floor.” (p. 13) The stsho also have three sexes: “Methodical to a fault, the stsho, tedious and full of endless subtle meanings in their pastel ornament and the tattooings on their pearly hides. They were another hairless species—stalk-thin, tri-sexed and hanilike only by the wildest stretch of the imagination, if eyes, nose, and mouth in biologically convenient order was similarity.”(p. 12) As we might already see here, the stsho are vaguely queer-coded, but they also play little part in the plot of this novel; this might change in the sequels. Instead, the story centers on the hani, fur-covered sentient beings most comparable to lions. (The “pride” in the title thus becomes ambiguous—is it about the emotion, or the group of lions? Most likely both.) Pyanfar Chanur, captain of the spaceship The Pride of Chanur, faces a series of difficult decisions after a strange hairless creature runs onto her docked ship on a busy space station. Pyanfar and her crew soon realize the creature is sentient and capable of speech, but as they try their best to communicate, it turns out that this male of a so-far unknown species has escaped from the kif—another member species of the trade alliance called the Compact, alongside the hani. Pyanfar refuses to surrender the so-called “human” to the kif after the human claims to have been mistreated by them. An enormous mess ensues, with the fate of the Compact itself on the line…while Pyanfar also faces danger on a personal level, as the Chanur are embroiled in a battle over family succession. Cherryh explores multiple aspects of this setup in detail. Various plot points emerge from the communication difficulties not only between the lost human and the hani, but also between different Compact member species. I especially liked that the setting featured automated translation, but it still needed initial data to be fed to it to approximate even a rough translation, which required effort from the characters. It was also interesting to see that there was also a trade pidgin between some—but not all—of the Compact species despite said automation. But for the purposes of this column, it’s probably more relevant to look at how Cherryh tackles gender, sex, and biological determinism in the novel. It is only the women of the hani who travel in space. All ships are gender-segregated. The men are considered too erratic to go to space and behave themselves there; and indeed, they do spend a lot of their time physically fighting each other for dominance back on their home planet. But—and here I’ll have to discuss some developments in later chapters, though I won’t spoil the overarching plot—this strict biological determinism is undermined by Pyanfar Chanur herself, who finds herself wondering if said differences in gender roles are innate, or due to upbringing. I don’t know if I should call this a genderswap when there is so much variation on our own Earth in these kinds of roles. In one of my own cultures, it was traditionally the women who traded and made a living, though for a different reason than the hani: the men were busy with their religious duties. Maybe I could say that the hani are a genderswap of many Anglo-Western cultures, though this would also be an oversimplification: Cherryh crafts her world with her trademark sense for nuance and detail here as well as in her other novels. This is the type of space opera where you find out exactly how docking clamps work, and that also extends to social aspects beyond the technological, like gender roles. Humans still seem to be humans, and their own ideas about gender affects how the hani who come into contact with them proceed to think about their own gender. This is done in a surprisingly gentle way, with Tully the escaped human modeling a kind of masculinity that is as far from toxic as possible, while the narrative also affords him room for vulnerability as someone far from home, an outsider cut off from anything familiar. There’s something intriguing about the premise of a crew that’s single-gender for reasons of chastity (and again, I’ll need to go into a bit more plot detail to discuss this point). When speculative works include this arrangement as part of the plot, I tend to expect the intent to be subverted by showing that same-sex attraction exists. This is what I expected here, especially in a work which already had neopronouns and an interesting approach to gender. But what happened in The Pride of Chanur was altogether different: the presumably-straight man ends up on a ship of straight women, and they all decide to be professional about it and not act on any potential desires. (Despite the difference in species, the question does present itself—at one point, the captain worries that one of her crewmembers might start a liaison with the human.) I found this approach refreshing and it poked against my own preconceptions of what a gender-conscious science fiction book should look like, alongside the portrayal of human masculinity. Is the reader expecting Dudebro—because he is a dudebro, not just a man, but a specific kind of man—to do something catastrophically awful? Most likely, yes. The entire crew certainly expects him to do just that. Captain Pyanfar herself considers this repeatedly, treating the human with caution, and only allowing him increasing leeway by small increments. Does the reader expect some of the women crewmembers to be attracted to each other? Maybe not in 1981 (though I’m not sure about that—the trope existed at that point), but today, definitely so. This doesn’t happen either, and yet gendered aspects of the setting have been destabilized in a way that is deeply feminist. This is much less apparent on the surface than the three-sexed aliens with their neopronouns, who we sadly don’t see much of in this novel, but is more impactful structurally. It also enables Pyanfar to examine her own biases, and act on her realizations. A final note: when I showed the first draft of this review to my spouse R.B. Lemberg, they asked me if I knew whether Cherryh was reacting to Larry Niven’s Kzin stories, which feature catlike aliens who are extremely male-dominated. I’m honestly not sure if this is the case—I looked and I’ve only found fans comparing these works, but no discussion or statement directly from the author. I’m very much looking forward to seeing where Cherryh takes the series next—the following three books form a trilogy, and I’m hoping to cover them in my column as well. They will be interspersed with standalone works by other authors—for next time I have a novel queued up that won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. I’m also considering covering more Cherryh after I’m finished with the Chanur books: do you have any particular favorites?[end-mark] The post QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics: <i>The Pride of Chanur</i> by C.J. Cherryh appeared first on Reactor.

A United Nations resolution calling for Israel to withdraw from the West Bank within six months will cause chaos and violence in the Middle East, according to Andrew Tucker, executive director of the Hague Initiative for International Cooperation. “This is a very important and potentially catastrophic decision because it’s going to lead, unfortunately, to chaos and more violence on the ground, putting aside all the other issues about it,” Tucker told The Daily Signal. The U.N. General Assembly voted Wednesday to approve a resolution demanding that Israel unilaterally withdraw its “unlawful presence” in Gaza and the West Bank within a year. The resolution also calls for sanctions and an arms embargo against the country. “It’s the first time in history this has happened, and it’s saying that Israel must withdraw all of its presence, military and civilian, from territories they say belong to the Palestinians,” Tucker said. Tucker said this nonbinding General Assembly resolution is part of a “lawfare” (legal warfare) campaign by the Palestinians. The Arab Group, an organization of 20 Arab nations’ parliaments, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation submitted the draft resolution to the General Assembly. “The U.N. really has become a platform for the Palestinians to be able to access the courts, to use the courts—the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice,” Tucker said. The resolution is “highly problematic for the courts’ own integrity and understanding as an independent judicial tribunal,” Tucker said. Tucker does not expect Israel to be willing to leave the territories as demanded in the resolution. “Palestinians are not governed by a government under the rule of law,” Tucker said. “They are governed by terrorist organizations. Israel knows this reality only too well.” Because Hamas-run Gaza is already on Israel’s doorstep, the Jewish state will not allow another Gaza in the West Bank, Tucker said. “The West Bank is much closer to the heartland of Israel, and therefore, this demand, which Palestinians and the opposers of Israel will say, well, ‘Israel must get out,’ and Israel will say that ‘you can’t,’” Tucker said. “It is really going to lead to more conflicts.” The post ‘Highly Problematic’: UN Resolution Demanding Israel Withdraw From Gaza Will Cause Chaos and Violence, Expert Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The Biden-Harris administration is paying to put on a play that portrays God as bisexual, sharply criticizes former President Ronald Reagan, and paints communists in a positive light, all in an effort to push gay rights on Southeastern Europeans, federal grant records show. Earlier in September, the State Department greenlit funding for a showing of Tony Kushner’s 1991 play “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” in North Macedonia, with the agency claiming the production will raise awareness about “LGBTQ+ issues” in the country, federal grant records reveal.  The play follows multiple storylines, among them the ghost of convicted communist spy Ethel Rosenberg antagonizing dying conservative lawyer Roy Cohn and a gay man having sexually explicit visions of heaven as he struggles with AIDS. Prior Walter, the man with AIDS, begins to have prophetic visions in his hospital room after his lover, Louis Ironson, abandons him, according to the play’s text. In one such vision, he finds that angels have “eight vaginas” and are “equipped as well with a bouquet of phalli” and that the universe was created by God “copulat[ing] ceaselessly” with these hermaphroditic beings. Ejaculate from angels “fuels the Engine of Creation,” the play recounts. Walter recounts these visions to a man named Belize, a former drag queen who is tending to him as a nurse. The State Department has committed $20,000 to staging the play in Macedonia, according to grant records. An additional $10,500 in non-federal funding has also been allocated for the production. “In the Manichaean world of Angels in America, everything Reagan stood for (capitalism, etc.) is evil,” a National Review critic wrote of the play’s HBO adaptation in 2003. “The most vocal Republican in the film is Roy Cohn—the unscrupulous gay lawyer who denied his sexuality and AIDS diagnosis to his death. In Cohn, a man ultimately undone by his own lies and hypocrisy, Kushner finds his embodiment of Reagan’s administration.” “Angels in America” portrays Cohn, a real lawyer who was deeply involved in the conservative movement and helped Reagan get elected, as a bigoted hypocrite prone to outbursts of anger. Cohn was instrumental in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted in 1951 of spying for the Soviet Union and executed in 1953. Activists long maintained that the Rosenbergs were innocent, however, documents released by the government in the ’90s proved that the couple was involved in a Soviet espionage operation. Rosenberg, portrayed positively in the play, antagonizes Cohn throughout the story, telling him on his deathbed that she “take[s] pleasure in [his] misery.” She later guides Ironson, who is a secular Jew, through a funeral prayer for Cohn, who also had Jewish ancestry, symbolically forgiving him. “We have no system of universal health care, we don’t educate our children, we can’t pass sane gun control laws, we elect presidents like Reagan,” Kushner wrote in his play’s afterword, blaming those purported problems on “individualism.” A gay character, at one point in the play, asks “if [Reagan] didn’t have people like me to demonize where would he be?” “Kushner strips Reagan of any merit, and reduces him fictionally to an anti-gay crusader,” the National Review critic wrote of the play. The State Department’s production of an anti-Reagan, pro-LGBTQ play is not its first exercise in using theatrics for the purposes of social engineering as it spent $120,000 in 2023 to “improve communication at the level of the local community on the social issue of LGBTQ rights and domestic violence via participatory theater” in the African nation of Chad. The new grant isn’t even the State Department’s first theatrical operation in North Macedonia, as it paid to teach the country’s residents about environmental issues through theater and dance in 2023, federal grant records show. “Culture—from music to sports to theater—is a vital component of the United States’ people-to-people diplomacy efforts in Chad and around the world and supports broader U.S. foreign policy goals,” a spokesperson for the department told the Daily Caller News Foundation at the time. The State Department did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post State Department Paying to Put on Play Where God Is Bisexual and Communists Are Good—in Bid to Push LGBTQ Agenda Abroad appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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Indigenous knowledge of palaeontology is often underestimated.