'The term kangaroo court comes to mind'

One of Eric's targets wound up dead

A viral video shared on Instagram purports President Joe Biden recently said he would raise taxes if elected to a second term.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Grant Godwin (@the_typical_liberal) Verdict: Misleading The video is not recent, but shows Biden during a February 2020 rally in Conway, South Carolina. […]

'Increasing the odds of a breakthrough'

'The suspect, a 16 year old...is being charged with Terrorizing and 2 counts of Possession of a Firearm by a Juvenile'

'I may not have calibrated that perfectly'

'your dating concierge could go and date for you'

Movies & TV Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “The War Prayer” A xenophobic attack starts off Babylon 5’s “The War Prayer”… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on May 13, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share “The War Prayer”Written by D.C. FontanaDirected by Richard ComptonSeason 1, Episode 7Production episode 107Original air date: March 9, 1994 It was the dawn of the third age… Delenn is having drinks with an old friend, Shaal Mayan, a creator of Tee’la, a type of poem-song. After they part ways, Mayan is ambushed on her way back to her quarters by humans wearing cloaks who stab her, brand her, and tell her to stay away from Earth. This is apparently the sixth attack on a non-human on the station in the past few weeks. Delenn is outraged, and is not at all placated by Sinclair and Garibaldi’s insistence that they’re on the case. Mayan, at least, is saved by Franklin, though she declines his offer to remove the brand. She prefers to keep it as a reminder. The brand, which is a symbol that combines the Greek symbols for male and female, is a hallmark of Homeguard, an “Earth-first” group of xenophobes who want to rid Earth of all alien influences. Sinclair says he wants no hate groups on his station. He also has to tell G’Kar to cool his jets, as the Narn ambassador is threatening bloody retribution if something isn’t done about this. A Centauri liner is about to dock, and they have two detainees who need to be turned over to a member of the command staff. Ivanova meets them—two youths named Kiron Maray and Aria Tensus, who demand to see “Ambassador Cotto.” Also in customs is Malcolm Biggs, who calls Ivanova’s name. He’s an old flame of hers, and he tries to fan that flame, to poor effect while she’s still on duty. Later, Biggs finds her at the end of shift and the conversation is a bit friendlier, though she urges him to take it slow, as it’s been eight years. Vir is Kiron’s cousin, and he introduces them to Mollari. They ran away from Centauri Prime because they’re in love, but their parents have arranged marriages planned for them both. Mollari explains, not very patiently, that that’s how marriage works among the upper classes of the Republic, and they need to suck it up and deal with it. He intends to put them on the next transport back to Centauri Prime where they will get married like they’re supposed to. Garibaldi has a suspect: a man named Roberts who has an illegal knife that has bloodstains on it, and who has expressed sympathy for the Homeguard. Unfortunately, the DNA on the blood isn’t Minbari, it’s Roberts himself—he really did cut himself with it. Ivanova agrees to dinner with Biggs. They catch up and Ivanova expresses no regret on taking the assignment to Io even though it meant their relationship ended. Biggs announces that he’s moving his business to B5—he’s already rented quarters and office space. So perhaps they can rekindle things… Kiron and Aria are ambushed by the cloaked Homeguard goons, with Kiron critically injured. Vir finds them and brings them to Medlab, where Franklin is able to treat them. Aria is fine, but Kiron is in a coma. Mollari is appalled, and even more so at the way Aria is mooning over Kiron. Mayan points out that love is the one commonality that all sentient species have; Mollari is skeptical, and feels that their being in love will only make it worse for Aria if Kiron dies. Mayan counters that the grief will be lessened by the memory of their love for each other. G’Kar holds a very contentious meeting in Brown Sector, which a large chunk of the non-human population of B5 attends. It turns into a rally and almost turns into a riot. Meanwhile, two Drazi ambush Roberts, having heard that he was arrested and thinking he is responsible for the attacks. Garibaldi has been keeping tabs on Roberts, thinking that Homeguard might try to recruit him after his arrest. Sure enough, he’s approached in Medlab by someone from Homeguard and is recruited—worse, it’s Biggs. Ivanova is devastated, but agrees to a sting operation to catch him, but only on the condition that she be there for the arrest. During a diplomatic reception, Sinclair is cold to Delenn and the others, including an Abbai representative Delenn introduces. After Ivanova introduces him to Biggs, and Sinclair goes full ugly human. Eventually they wind up in Sinclair’s quarters, where the commander talks about how they used to say the only good alien is a dead alien back when he fought in the Earth-Minbari War. Biggs practically salivates at the notion of having B5’s commander on Homeguard’s side, and he wants to introduce him to the rest of the gang, so to speak. But Sinclair will also have make a good-faith gesture when he does so. Sinclair continues the charade by announcing to Delenn, Mollari, and G’Kar that the investigation is over, the perpetrators have fled to Earth, and that’s all there is to it. When Kiron wakes up, Mollari announces that he’s arranged for both Kiron and Aria to be fostered by Mollari’s second cousin Andlo. Andlo is a very powerful Centauri, and the offer of fosterage is a huge honor, one that neither Kiron’s nor Aria’s families dare decline. They can then spend time together under Andlo’s roof, and learn all about being a Centauri aristocrat, and then they will be able to make their own choices. The two youths are thrilled, as is Vir. Sinclair and Ivanova meet with Biggs and the other Homeguard thugs in a cargo bay. The thugs all “decloak,” wearing black-light camouflage prototypes that Homeguard acquired from EarthForce. Homeguard’s plan is to assassinate Delenn, G’Kar, Mollari, and Kosh, which will be the signal for their people on Earth to assassinate other alien delegates. Biggs will need Sinclair’s help getting off the station after the killings. (How he was planning to get off the station before he knew he’d have an ally in Sinclair is left as an exercise for the viewer.) However, there’s still the good-faith gesture: the Abbai representative, whom Biggs instructs Sinclair to shoot. However, the cavalry shows up in the form of Garibaldi and his goon squad, and they take Biggs and his people down, aided by Sinclair and Ivanova. They’re taken away and deported back to Earth. Delenn and Mayan observe their departure (presumably after Sinclair has explained why he was acting like an asshole), boggling at that kind of hatred of someone just for being different. As he’s being taken away, Biggs expresses disgust at Ivanova’s siding with aliens over him. Ivanova makes it clear that the aliens are better people than his bigoted ass. Nothing’s the same anymore. Sinclair muses to Ivanova on the peculiarity of what happened in “The Gathering” and immediately afterward: that Kosh touched the assassin disguised as Sinclair with his hand, even though Vorlons are usually always in their encounter suits; and that the two people who saw Kosh without the encounter suit, Kyle and Alexander, were very soon after transferred off B5, the former to work directly with the president. Ivanova is God. Ivanova, to her credit, wastes no time in making it clear that she’ll do her duty and not let her relationship with Biggs get in the way of stopping Homeguard. (Biggs being a total piece of shit probably helped…) The household god of frustration. Garibaldi has discovered that someone (Ivanova) is growing coffee beans illegally in one of the hydroponics bays, and if Ivanova won’t take up a duty Garibaldi doesn’t have time for, he’s just gonna have to wander by hydroponics and rip those suckers out. Ivanova declares that Garibaldi is a cruel man and does the thing. If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn is livid at how Mayan has been treated, and is completely unimpressed with Sinclair and Garibaldi’s assurances (not that those assurances are very assuring…). In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Arranged marriages are standard in the Centauri Republic, as is polygamy, as Mollari discusses his three wives. He doesn’t love them, in fact he obviously can’t stand them, and took an assignment many light-years from home at least in part to get away from them. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar is even less impressed with Sinclair and Garibaldi’s assurances than Delenn, and nearly starts a riot among the non-humans to express his (justified) fears and concerns. The Shadowy Vorlons. At one point, Sinclair visits Kosh to brief him on the attacks on non-humans. Kosh says that they have no interest in the affairs of others. In contrast to this statement, Kosh is also studying human history on a viewer, though he doesn’t tell Sinclair why. Looking ahead. Some have said that Mayan’s description of her attackers as shadowy and covered in shadow is a kind of foreshadowing of the Shadows, but I don’t see it, since Homeguard isn’t really connected to the Shadows, and shadow is, y’know, a regular word… No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Biggs sends a rose to Ivanova’s quarters by way of flirting with her, and it gets her to agree to dinner. Later, when she learns that he’s a bigoted piece of shit, she tosses the rose in the garbage. Also Aria and Kiron are totally adorably smitten with each other. Welcome aboard. Tristan Rogers is boringly slimy as Biggs, Nancy Lee Grahn is delightfully philosophical as Mayan, and Rodney Eastman is blandly earnest as Kiron. Diane Adair plays the Abbai; she’ll return in “Confessions and Lamentations” as a Markab and in “Comes the Inquisitor” as a Narn. Ardwight Chamberlain returns as the voice of Kosh from “Midnight on the Firing Line”; he’ll return in “Deathwalker.” And then we’ve got two Robert Knepper moments! There’s Danica McKellar as Aria, one of her first roles after her long-running star turn on The Wonder Years as Winnie Cooper (though to me she’ll always be Elsie Snuffin on The West Wing). And then there’s Michael Paul Chan as Roberts, over a decade before his brilliant time on The Closer and its spinoff Major Crimes as the nerdy Detective Mike Tao. Trivial matters. This is the first of three episodes written by D.C. Fontana, who is best known as one of the most prolific and important writers of the original Star Trek and its spinoffs (she was show-runner for the animated series, was the uncredited co-creator of The Next Generation, and also wrote for Deep Space Nine and various bits of tie-in fiction). The title of the episode is a reference to Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,” which J. Michael Straczynski has said should be read by everyone. Mollari refers to his three wives as Pestilence, Famine, and Death. This means Mollari himself must be War, which is appropriate given what happens to him over the course of the series. The three wives are seen in pictures in this episode; they’ll be seen for realsies in the episode “Soul Mates,” where they will be played by Lois Nettleton (“Pestilence,” really Daggair), Jane Carr (“Famine,” really Timov), and Blair Valk (“Death,” really Mariel). The conversation between Sinclair and Ivanova about the unanswered questions from “The Gathering” and its aftermath was originally written for “The Parliament of Dreams,” but that episode ran long and this one ran short, so the scene was moved, with some ADR done to cover the seams. The echoes of all of our conversations. “My shoes are too tight.” “Excuse me?”  “Something my father said. He was old, very old, at the time. I went into his room and he was sitting there alone in the dark, crying. So I asked him what was wrong, and he said, ‘My shoes are too tight. But it doesn’t matter, because I have forgotten how to dance.’ I never understood what that meant until now. My shoes are too tight, and I have forgotten how to dance.” Mollari baring his soul to Vir. The name of the place is Babylon 5. “We have friends everywhere.” For the second week in a row, the A-plot sees a good script sabotaged by a weak guest actor. The damage is much less this time, mostly because the guest actor in question is a small part of a larger problem, one that will continue to plague our heroes through the show. Indeed, bigoted humans will continue to be seen throughout the show, which is the main difference between B5 and Star Trek—the latter is utopian fiction, the former is realistic fiction. Trek is about humanity at its best; B5 is about humanity as it is. And humans can be real assholes. Malcolm Biggs is a particularly assholey asshole, and unfortunately, he’s played with all the subtlety of a nuclear explosion by Tristan Rogers, who’s practically has the word “SCUZZBALL” tattooed on his forehead. (This would’ve been a much better role for David McCallum than the dipshit scientist in the execrable “Infection.”) And he’s not the only one. I think it was a particularly nice touch to have an actor of Chinese ancestry play one of the bigots, given that Chinese-Americans have been victims of discrimination in the U.S. for centuries, for a nice little touch of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (It was also hilariously weird to see Michael Paul Chan with hair, as he’s been bald for more than twenty years now…) There’ve been hints of “Earth first” groups in the past, mostly from comments made by the reporter in “Infection,” as well as some of the noises made around the presidential election in “Midnight on the Firing Line.” Learning that they’re organized and have access to classified tech is worrisome to say the least, especially given the audacity of their plan. The B-plot has the reverse problem. The script is a hoary young-lovers-escaping-the-icky-arranged-marriage storyline that has whiskers on it, but it’s elevated by the performances. Mostly Peter Jurasik, as is typical, but also by Stephen Furst, who shows the first signs of Vir’s backbone when the aide berates the ambassador for being a big stinky. The indications of just how miserable Mollari’s life is are beautifully and subtly played, adding depth to a tired plotline. Mention also must be made of an excellent guest turn by Nancy Lee Grahn as Mayan. From her lovely conversation with Delenn at the top of the episode to her impressive equanimity when discussing keeping the brand with Franklin to her incisive comments to Mollari, Grahn plays the role beautifully. Next week: “And the Sky Full of Stars.” [end-mark] The post <em>Babylon 5</em> Rewatch: “The War Prayer” appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays What Station Eleven and All the Light We Cannot See Reveal About Art and Loneliness These two stories about characters finding connection offer some key insights into how we think about art, entertainment, and human contact. By Aberdeen Livingstone | Published on May 13, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share I was sitting on my couch in my Brooklyn basement apartment a couple months ago, experiencing a strange sense of déjà vu. I was watching Netflix’s new miniseries All the Light We Cannot See starring Mark Ruffalo, Aria Mia Loberti, and Hugh Laurie, and another show kept haunting the back of my mind: I kept thinking about HBO Max’s Station Eleven, from 2021. At first, I couldn’t figure out why the two reminded me of each other—All the Light is historical fiction and Station Eleven is sci-fi dystopia. Both are adaptations of hugely popular books (by Anthony Doerr and Emily St. John Mandel, respectively) but that’s not unique. The more I thought about the books, however, the more I noticed the similarities. Both came out in 2014, both were National Book Award finalists, and both follow a cast of characters over multiple decades and POVs. Still, there are plenty of books that would fit all of these criteria. Then I had an epiphany… I realized the crucial similarity between the two, the thing that had been nagging at me. There’s an element that both stories have in common that not only explains why these stories (in both book and TV versions) might be so popular, but which also speaks to the sense of anxiety and disconnection that seems an ever-growing part of our cultural experience over the last few years. It comes down to this: Both books feature a far-flung cast of characters that are united around a distinctive, very specific piece of media. I’ll call this thing an artifact. The context surrounding these artifacts and how they touch the lives of characters offers some illuminating insights into our collective experience in the wake of a worldwide pandemic and other shifts that affect our everyday lives. To understand what I mean, allow me a couple of brief plot summaries… In All the Light We Cannot See, we meet our two protagonists: German orphan Werner, who gets conscripted into the Nazi army for his skill with radios, and blind French girl Marie-Laure, whose father and uncle are part of the French Resistance. Both listen to the same radio station as children: shortwave 13.10. On this magical frequency, the voice of a man who calls himself “the professor” opens their eyes to the marvels of the world, explaining scientific and philosophical concepts, describing light and time, space and movement in simple, wondrous terms that offer them an escape from their different, but equally constrictive, circumstances. In Station Eleven, it’s not the radio but a comic book that connects the characters. The story dances between the initial days of a virulent pandemic that wipes out 99.99% of the population and twenty years later, as a small group of artists called The Traveling Symphony struggle to bring beauty to a world of huddled survivors and rabid cults. What unites the characters across timelines is a comic book called Station Eleven, illustrated and written by a woman named Miranda who—spoilers—dies in the first days of the pandemic. But the two copies Miranda made of her precious creation are preserved through seemingly random, fleeting connections, and in the post-apocalyptic world these books provide solace and meaning for the new generation who doesn’t remember a world of electricity, libraries, or the internet. A radio frequency and a comic book: it would be easy to simply write them off as similar plot devices and might not warrant more than a brief literary analysis. But I think they deserve more looking into, particularly given the enormous popularity of both books. Both All the Light and Station Eleven were National Book Award finalists in 2014. All the Light won the Pulitzer Prize that year; Station Eleven has sold over a million copies. Both have also been turned into TV series, All the Light on Netflixin 2023 and Station Eleven on HBO Max in 2021. What fascinates me is that these artifacts are supposed to be means of communication, of connection. Not only that, but both can be considered works of art. The comic book is described as lusciously illustrated with captivating watercolor panels; the radio station weaves classical music and scientific texts together to create an immersive experience of beauty and wonder. At a time when forms of communication are multiplying faster than we can learn how to master them and when we have practically unlimited access to various kinds of art and entertainment, available in more formats and genres than we than we have hours to count them, much less appreciate them, it seems to me the artifacts in these stories have something very meaningful to say about our current moment. And what moment do we live in? Well, there’s one key facet worth exploring in relation to these narratives… The Loneliness Epidemic Credit: HBO It’s been four years since COVID-19 first brought the world to a standstill, but more recently there has been increasing concern about the rise of a different type of pandemic. You may have heard about it, or read about it, in the last few years: the loneliness epidemic. In New York just last year, nonagenarian sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer declared that she wants to become New York’s “Loneliness Ambassador,” a position she’s invented in response to what she views as a crisis sweeping her state like a tidal wave. This came only a few months after the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released a report calling loneliness and isolation in America a public health crisis. He “warn[ed] that isolation can be just as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day and poses a greater risk to longevity than being sedentary or obese.” It’s simple, says Dr. Jeremy Nobel, founder of The Foundation for Art and Healing: “loneliness will kill you.” What’s fascinating, and troubling, about these levels of loneliness and isolation is that they were rising even before COVID-19. There are of course many factors involved in large-scale, complex trends like these, but there’s one specific area I want to explore, one that the artifacts in Doerr and Mandel’s stories expose. It’s telling that the source of connection in both Doerr and Mandel’s stories is a form of media: a radio station and a book, respectively. In today’s world, we are treated as consumers of highly curated entertainment, and that feeds into this sense of loneliness and alienation. Though we may consume more and more avidly, our ability and need to communicate with others—to exchange thoughts and opinions, to share ideas—has been stunted, fractured. It can feel as if we are being kept apart by the things that—we feel—are supposed to bring us together. As if the technologies that were supposed to unite us have failed, and are actually doing the opposite. The digital world promises greater connection, not just through proliferating ideas and information in the form of newspapers, magazines, chat rooms, and forums, but through art and entertainment. We now have increased access to more and more specific types of entertainment. We don’t have to depend on what the local channels are showing or what the people we share a living space with prefer to consume. We have our own devices with our own accounts that create our own feeds. The number of artistic offerings catering to niche interests multiplies by the day. The second promise of technology is that even as we tailor our own individualized entertainment feed to our specific preferences, we can find communities who have similar tastes and preferences. Even if there’s nobody in my small town, or even my big city, who likes my favorite art movement or singer or fantasy novel, I can always find other people online who share my excitement and enthusiasm. This is the alluring idea—that even as we create a more and more precise diet of entertainment, we will find fellow devotees who love the things we love. In fact, we can grow and expand our chosen communities and fandoms because we will be able to find people who better align with our tastes and preferences. But if this is true, then why are we still so lonely? One can imagine an alternate ending to each of Doerr’s and Mandel’s stories that answers this question. Imagine the members of The Traveling Symphony flipping through Station Eleven, knowing that before the world turned upside down, someone else was able to make something beautiful that survived. Or picture Werner and Marie-Laure feeling a warm, fuzzy sensation of unity that disregards their actual physical locations, and the curtain falls upon them sitting alone in dark rooms with invisible gold strands of radio waves connecting them. There is a certain poignancy to that. But that’s not how these stories end. Climactic Encounters Credit: Netflix The culmination of each of these narratives is not that the characters find consolation in the same artifact while remaining siloed in their own separate realities. Rather, the emotional and narrative climax of these stories is the physical meeting between protagonists who first found each other remotely, mediated by the artifact. The high point we’ve been climbing toward is the movement of chatroom friendship to into physical proximity, with the separated friends finally meeting face to face and standing in the same room. In the final chapters of All the Light, Doerr describes the moment Marie-Laure and Werner meet. He has just saved her life from a psychotic German soldier. He ascends the stairs to her attic hideout, where she has been listening to and broadcasting the radio station that has sustained them both since childhood. Doerr writes, “Werner hears Marie-Laure inhale, Marie-Laure hears Werner scrape three fingernails across the wood, the sound not unlike the sound of a record coursing beneath the surface of a needle, their faces an arm’s reach apart.“He says, ‘Es-tu là?’” Are you here? Are you here, at last, in the same space as me? It would never have been enough—for the characters, for the readers—for the story to end with Marie-Laure and Werner content with the radio’s cherished voice, separated still by miles and war and national boundaries. As a reader, you get to this scene and you hold your breath because this is what it has all been building toward. It’s only a couple of pages in the book, but those pages contain the catharsis the reader has been waiting for. (The TV adaptation rightly recognizes this point as the climax, expanding it into a more significant percentage of the runtime and adding in a kiss, as if the mere fact of them meeting for the first time isn’t powerful enough). Mandel, too, builds her story around the physical meeting (in this case, a reunion) between her characters. The HBO Max adaptation of Station Eleven is a fan- and critic-pleaser and stays pretty faithful to the book. But the biggest change is the prominence of the relationship between two of the main characters, Kirsten and Jeevan. Thrown together through random events at the beginning of the deadly pandemic, the eight-year-old actress Kirsten and mid-thirties aspiring-EMT Jeevan survive the first few years together (a deviation from the mere months they spend together in the book—the show needs to give their relationship a stronger foundation). In the cruel, alien, dog-eat-dog world where 99.99% of the population has died, the relationship frays until Kirsten runs away and a wounded Jeevan can’t follow. The impetus for this separation is the comic book, Kirsten’s one treasured copy of Station Eleven from before the pandemic. When she realizes she’s left it at one of their previous camps, she runs back to get it, despite the danger and Jeeven’s frustration at the lost time. His anger prevents him from pursuing her right away and once he does, he is wounded by a wolf, a daily threat in this dangerous new world. For the next twenty years, they each find their own way and new communities, but both remain haunted by the loss of their first and deepest post-pandemic bond. Particularly in the show, the climax is less the fate of any individual character or the rising tide of hope for this brutal world as a whole but rather the reunion of these two people. In the finale, a now-grown Kirsten catches a girl stealing her copy of Station Eleven. She moves to chase the girl and reclaim the comic, just as she did 20 years ago, when she ran from Jeevan. But this time, she lets go of the precious comic book. She makes her peace with the fact that the reality of what she has is more important than what it symbolizes. And it’s precisely because she does not chase down the little thief that she turns and bumps into Jeevan, whose path crosses hers once again (thanks to YouTuber @Rob954ever for that particular insight). Their eyes meet and they recognize each other. They walk slowly toward each other, reach out, hold each other tightly. The camera spins around them, lingering on their faces bared open with wonder and grief and love. It’s a perfect, almost holy moment. In our world, the hyper-curated consumption of art often separates us—more on that in a moment. In Doerr’s and Mandel’s worlds, particular pieces of art are the vehicles of reunification. Shortwave 13.10 and Station Eleven first connect our characters, even when they are physically separated. But when the crucial moment comes, they release the artifact and embrace what it was leading them to: each other. These climactic moments resonate with us because they heighten our ache. They reveal the depth of what we lack. They are powerful because they are relatively rare, in our experiences. What’s Missing? Credit: HBO But wait: Is that true, that it is so rare for art to bring people together in the flesh? Let’s take a survey of entertainment habits today, looking at one of the most popular forms: TV shows. Critics like to argue about the death of “appointment television,” and offer various explanations for when and how it died. While I missed out on most of the appointment TV era, I’m not entirely unfamiliar with the phenomenon; I too blocked off Tuesday nights last spring to watch the next Ted Lasso episode the minute it dropped. The difference between my Ted Lasso viewing and, say, the early ’90s Twin Peaks-era version of appointment TV is that if I absolutely had to miss the first airing (is that even the right term for streaming service releases?), I could watch it later at any other time, on a multitude of devices. Or rather, that was one big difference. Another major difference between TV shows now and TV shows pre-21st century, give or take, is that Ted Lasso is one of 817,000 shows that are apparently available to me to watch (provided I have subscribed to every possible streaming service). Ted Lasso is one of the more popular series, out of these hundreds of thousands of shows; part of the joy of watching it is how many other people are talking about it (something I’ll return to in a moment). Even so, it is just one of many, many shows that I could have chosen to watch. That’s wholly unlike the television landscape when my parents grew up, when you had a bare minimum of channels to pick from—and probably only one that was geared to your particular demographic. Last year, the BBC’s Louis Staples argued that the death knell had finally sounded for traditional soap operas. “Soaps losing viewers,” he argues, “particularly young people, reflects wider changes in our viewing habits.” It’s not just the logistical fact that streaming services are more popular and more convenient for most young people now, with accessible apps on their phones and available 24/7 after release. There’s also “a rise in ‘individual’ viewing too.” He quotes TV journalist Scott Bryan: “Ten years ago, it was much more likely that people would watch TV as a family. That is still true for some shows, but I think now we’re much more used to watching shows on individual screens…. This means that there is less of a tradition in terms of parents watching a soap with their kids and passing that on to them.” Ed Finn, director of the Centre for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, proclaims the days of appointment TV over. In a 2020 article, he says: “We’re all watching asynchronously. We’re not really tuning in to the same broadcast, we’re watching things separated by hours or days—yet our communication about these shows is instantaneous. So the anxiety over spoilers, which seems to be bigger now than it’s ever been, is balanced by this driving need [for] a sense of community.” The headline of the article Finn is quoted in says it all: “Suggestions, Subscriptions and No Sense of Community: Streaming is changing the way we watch TV.” No sense of community thanks to streaming—but why? Aren’t online worlds supposed to connect us in ways we never could when confined to the boundaries of our hometowns? Aren’t we able to find communities based on similar interests instead of physical proximity, and isn’t that supposed to open up whole new worlds and relationships that were previously inaccessible and unimaginable? Isn’t the freedom to choose what we consume supposed to make us, well, free? Recently Melissa Kirsch wrote about “The Joy and Sorrow of Streaming” for The New York Times. When the buffet of available options left her feeling unsatisfied and far from sated, she articulates what this dissatisfaction led her to realize: “I realized in the midst of my selective viewing that I wasn’t going to get what I wanted from the plot points of any particular movie I called up on a streaming service. What I wanted was a nostalgic, real-world experience: wandering in out of the cold of a midwinter’s afternoon, breathing in the stale popcorn-scented air of, say, the Angelika, or any of the city’s independent theaters, buying a ticket to whatever matinee is on, stumbling out afterward, changed. I didn’t want to watch a movie about people with interesting, complicated lives. I wanted to live my own.” This, I think, is the best way to sum up the appeal that Doerr’s and Mandel’s stories hold for us. They tell us about worlds where the art and entertainment that speaks to us actually changes our lives in meaningful ways, where we are no longer simply consuming in a vaccuum but participating in communication and making a real connection Most of us long for the kinds of connections that Doerr’s and Mandel’s characters experience. We are captivated by the idea that we could start out listening to a radio station on opposite sides of a war and, through that experience, eventually find ourselves eventually sitting side by side, at peace. Is it possible for us, too, to reach out and embrace another person the way Kirsten and Jeevan did, to have that moment where you see in the face of someone else all you have longed for, no longer separated or mediated by a screen, an avatar, an algorithm? In spite of the loneliness epidemic, Doerr and Mandel hint that we could. The Way Forward… Credit: Netflix If we take a lesson from these stories, we might consider the following: Prioritize art experiences that involve physical community. Plan to enjoy at least some of your entertainment in physical proximity to others—whether loved ones or strangers. Choose to watch the less immediately interesting show if it means you can watch it with someone else. Not all the time but sometimes, intentionally sacrifice your top preference for the one that will bring you into contact with other people.  In short, rewind to the way we used to watch TV and movies, gathering together to share the experiences: Watch what your roommate watches. Or your dad, or spouse, or neighbor. Watch it together. Make time to talk about it in person. The beauty of the online world is that it has brought together the like-minded from across the once-unbreakable boundaries of time and space. There’s real good in that, and I certainly don’t want to diminish its indisputable benefits. But as with any gain, there is a concomitant loss that we should not ignore. The ability to choose our communities based on interest versus geography has caused—or at least is correlated with—simultaneous separation from those whom we share physical space with, the people we share the most primal of human experiences with: sharing bathrooms, kitchens, beds; sharing the same air, the same plot of land (whether you own it or merely walk on it), the same smells and sights and sounds. We’ve lost the casual, adventitious unity that came from all watching the same show because it’s the only thing on. Once, we sat in the same room with friends and family, watching shoulder-to-shoulder on the couch, and then discussed it with our neighbors or coworkers in the office the next day. What if, to combat this pandemic of loneliness, we again sought ways to experience art with those in our own neighborhoods, in our own homes, instead of solely digging deeper into our curated holes that only have room for our lonely selves? The climactic scene where Kirsten and Jeevan reunite has been shared all over YouTube, and under one of those videos, @Rob954ever comments: I cried like a baby. This show was one of the best things I have seen on t.v. EVER….So beautiful in that it’s not a typical dystopian/post apocalyptic story. How everyone was connected, by and to, the comic… How there was trust and a sense of community and not just violence in the world. That human kindness still existed was utterly amazing to watch. I loved the irony of this scene. Throughout the show, Kirsten kept telling herself and everyone around her that “that there is no before” because it hurt her so much to lose those she loved. And yet 20 years later, she finds Jeevan again. It started with them and it ended with them. The comic book of Station Eleven unites various characters and is part of Kirsten and Jeevan’s initial bond. But notice that the titular work of art, the central piece of media, is nowhere in  this comment. The main emotional thrust does not come from the work itself. It comes from the human connection it inspires. We are moved by stories like Station Eleven and All the Light We Cannot See because they point to a world where our communication does not divide us but rather brings us together in profound ways. A world where the book we love—the show, the song, the painting, the game—is not a destination in itself, but rather the ticket to finding each other.[end-mark] The post What <i>Station Eleven</i> and <i>All the Light We Cannot See</i> Reveal About Art and Loneliness appeared first on Reactor.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. In a victory for free speech, Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, gained a reprieve from an Australian court’s decision on Monday not to extend a temporary block on the videos of a church stabbing incident in Sydney. The platform issued a challenge against the Australian government’s censorship demands, notably in a post on X, when Elon Musk questioned, “Our concern is that if ANY country is allowed to censor content for ALL countries, which is what the Australian ‘eSafety Commissar’ is demanding, then what is to stop any country from controlling the entire Internet?” Local reports identified that an Australian federal court judge has refused the request of the country’s eSafety Commissioner to extend an injunction for the removal of posts on X, featuring footage of an April attack on a priest, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel. The Bishop was assaulted in the middle of a sermon, an incident that garnered hundreds of thousands of views, before a temporary legal injunction was imposed on X at the behest of the eSafety Commissioner, advocating the removal of related video clips. The situation has spurred a formidable discord between Musk and the Australian government, headlined by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. In a verbal tug-of-war over jurisdiction, the PM accused Musk of considering himself “above Australian law,” citing the compliance of other social platforms and the bipartisan approval of the measure. The battle staged an escalation as Musk questioned Albanese on X, “Does the PM think he should have jurisdiction over all of Earth?” and cautioned against the extension of one country’s laws to others. Accusing Musk’s free speech stance as “arrogance,” the PM suggested that the matter was not about censorship but about “decency.” Australia’s government is setting up a parliamentary committee that will investigate social media companies over “misinformation” and other “harmful” content. And the body’s definition of what that is will range from online scams to content deemed to be “extremist.” Another issue of interest will be Facebook (Meta) announcing it will pull out of a deal that supposedly helped promote “public interest” journalism. What the deal, first struck in 2021 and now up for renewal, came down to is Australian legacy media making millions via a bargaining code based on the premise that social companies and their platforms essentially “exploit” content belonging to those outlets. With this latest decision to launch an investigation, authorities in that country continue to pile pressure on the companies behind major social platforms, explaining these moves as the need to ascertain what influence they have on society, specifically, people’s mental health. The committee’s inquiry will cover algorithms used by platforms, in terms of the content they surface. This is consistent with both Australia’s long and short-term policies aimed at tightly controlling what content (and speech) is allowed on social sites. Although the parliamentary inquiry that’s just been announced talks about the “influence” social media content has on people, in the wake of the attacks, statements made by the likes of Communications Minister Michelle Rowland essentially revealed that the “problem” was who controls what Australians are allowed to see. “These social media companies have enormous reach and control over what Australians see with little to no scrutiny,” Rowland was quoted as saying, apparently not giving her compatriots the benefit of the doubt of being capable of critical thinking. Instead, Australia’s authorities seem determined to do the thinking for them, by limiting their access to online content, while, critics might say, hiding behind haughty principles such as public interest journalism, harm reduction, democracy, and of course, “the war on disinformation.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post X Secures Court Victory in Battle With Australia’s Censorship, As Government Plots Inquiry appeared first on Reclaim The Net.