There was an aphorism in the movement: “Bad roads make good communes.” And the road we’re on today is bad. Several miles inland from California’s foggy coastline, we’re driving down a single lane hemmed in by 50-foot fir trees and then turn onto a rocky dirt path, joggling our rented SUV. Photographer Michael Schmelling and I are in Mendocino County, about a three-hour drive north of San Francisco, looking for what remains of perhaps the most famous of the hundreds of rural communes established across Northern California in the late ’60s and ’70s: Table Mountain Ranch.
The entire expanse—which once was a kind of American Arcadia, home to scores of hippies who’d fled San Francisco to live a new, idealistic kind of life—now looks deserted. We pass tree stumps, logging equipment, and mounds of dirt. The only sound is the chirping of birds. Eventually, in the middle of an open field, we come upon a peeling wood building where a lone man is perched up a ladder. Ascetically thin, with long red hair and a patchy beard, he tells us that he’s one of Table Mountain Ranch’s last remaining members. Now in his mid-70s, he’s wary of supplying his name, wary of being somehow “on the map” after so much time off the grid, so I tell him that I’ll refer to him as Jack Berg. Attempting to set the foundation for a second-story balcony, he struggles to balance on the ladder while positioning a two-by-four, an unlit roach in his fingers. As we look on, he brusquely puts us to work, chastising Michael for snapping a picture instead of immediately helping with the load.
Berg is restoring the Whale Schoolhouse, a progressive academy founded in 1971 that became the pride of communards across the Albion region of Northern California. Fifty kids, from elementary to high school age, were enrolled here, but it’s sat unused for decades—and now Berg is moving in. “Nobody cared about this building,” he says. “It was disintegrating.” He takes us inside. It’s a single room, the size of half a tennis court, with old class pictures on a corkboard. A circular window overlooks an empty field that had long ago been a playground.
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An abandoned structure at the Nonagon commune in Humboldt County.
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Ägerisee or Lake Aegeri is a glacial lake in the Canton of Zug, Switzerland. The two municipalities along its shore are Oberägeri and Unterägeri.The main tributary is the Hüribach; the Lorze river drains the Ägerisee. Since 1992 the lake has been used as a water reservoir.
The Battle of Morgarten took place in 1315 on the shores of the Ägerisee.
The orders have been sudden, dramatic, and often baffling. Last week, “American Idol”-style competitions and shows featuring men deemed too effeminate were banned by Chinese authorities. Days earlier, one of China’s wealthiest actresses, Zhao Wei, had her movies, television series, and news mentions scrubbed from the Internet as if she had never existed.
Over the summer, China’s multibillion-dollar private education industry was decimated overnight by a ban on for-profit tutoring, while new regulations wiped more than $1 trillion from Chinese tech stocks since a peak in February. As China’s tech moguls compete to donate more to President Xi Jinping’s campaign against inequality, “Xi Jinping Thought” is taught in elementary schools, and foreign games and apps like Animal Crossing and Duolingo have been pulled from stores.
A dizzying regulatory crackdown unleashed by China’s government has spared almost no sector over the past few months. This sprawling “rectification” campaign — with such disparate targets as ride-hailing services, insurance, education, and even the amount of time children can spend playing video games — is redrawing the boundaries of business and society in China as Xi prepares to take on a controversial third term in 2022.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping, seen pledging his vows to the party during the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party, is shaking up Chinese society. (Ng Han Guan/AP)
IN 2020, AMAZON turned 26 years old. Over the previous quarter of a century, the company had transformed shopping. With retail revenues in excess of $213bn (£150bn), it was larger than Germany’s Schwarz Group, America’s Costco, and every British retailer. Only Walmart, with more than half a trillion dollars of sales, was bigger. But Amazon was by far and away the world’s largest online retailer. Its online business was about eight times larger than Walmart’s. Amazon was more than just an online shop, however. Its huge businesses in areas such as cloud computing, logistics, media, and hardware added a further $172bn in sales.
At the heart of its success is a staggering $36 billion research and development budget in 2019, used to develop everything from robots to smart home assistants. This sum leaves other companies – and many governments – behind. It is not far off the UK government’s annual budget for research and development. Tesco, the largest retailer in Britain – with annual sales in excess of £50 billion – had a research lab whose budget was in “six figures” in 2016.
Henning Jacobson, a 50-year-old minister, put his faith in his own liberty. Back in his native Sweden, he had suffered a bad reaction to a vaccine as an infant, struggling for years with an angry rash. Now he was an American citizen, serving as pastor of the Swedish Lutheran Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That gave him the full protections of the U.S. Constitution.
So when the Cambridge board of health decided that all adults must be vaccinated for smallpox, Jacobson sought refuge in the Constitution’s promise that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
The year was 1904, and when his politically charged legal challenge to the $5 fine for failing to get vaccinated made its way to the Supreme Court, the justices had a surprise for Rev. Jacobson. One man’s liberty, they declared in a 7-2 ruling handed down the following February, cannot deprive his neighbors of their own liberty — in this case by allowing the spread of disease. Jacobson, they ruled, must abide by the order of the Cambridge board of health or pay the penalty.
“There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good,” read the majority opinion. “On any other basis, organized society could not exist with safety to its members. Society based on the rule that each one is a law unto himself would soon be confronted with disorder and anarchy.”
Moviegoing is at a strange, tenuous moment. With pandemic fears still circulating, and many studios still delaying their films’ release dates, not everyone is comfortable going back to theaters yet. But this is also a time of extraordinary at-home accessibility for cinema, with many thousands of titles available to stream, or digitally rent and buy, every day. So I’ve returned to a topic that sustained me during the 2020s most isolated moments: celebrating underrated and unique movies in need of wider appreciation. The following 26 films cross every genre and range from art-house to blockbuster. They were all unappreciated by critics or audiences on release and deserve a fresh look.
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AA Film / Moviestore / Columbia / AF Archive / Allstar / Alamy; Adam Maida / The Atlantic
Zakopane is a town in the extreme south of Poland, in the southern part of the Podhale region at the foot of the Tatra Mountains. From 1975 to 1998, it was part of Nowy Sącz Voivodeship; since 1999, it has been part of Lesser Poland Voivodeship. As of 2017, its population was 27,266. Zakopane is a center of Goral culture and is often referred to as “the winter capital of Poland”. It is a popular destination for mountaineering, skiing, and tourism.
Zakopane lies near Poland’s border with Slovakia, in a valley between the Tatra Mountains and Gubałówka Hill. It can be reached by train or bus from the province capital, Kraków, about two hours away. Zakopane lies 800–1,000 meters above sea level and centers on the intersection of its Krupówki and Kościuszko Streets.
The earliest documents mentioning Zakopane date to the 17th century, describing a glade called Zakopisko. In 1676 it was a village of 43 inhabitants. In 1818 Zakopane was a small town that was still being developed. There were only 340 homes that held 445 families. The population of Zakopane at that time was 1,805. 934 women and 871 men lived in Zakopane. The first church was built in 1847, by Józef Stolarczyk. Wikipedia
The median price of an American house has increased by 28 percent over the last two years, as pandemic-driven demand and long-term demographic changes send buyers into crazed bidding wars.
Might the fact that corporate investors snapped up 15 percent of U.S. homes for sale in the first quarter of this year have something to do with it? The Wall Street Journal reported in April that an investment firm won a bidding war to purchase an entire neighborhood worth of single-family homes in Conroe, Texas—part of a cycle of stories drumming up panic over Wall Street’s increasing stake in residential real estate. Then came the backlash, as cool-headed analysts reassured us that big investors like BlackRock remain insignificant players in the housing market compared with regular old American families.
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Site of the next bidding warTierra Mallorca/Unsplash
Marti Head, Ph.D., had a bad feeling. It was mid-February of 2020. She’d just returned to her home in Tennessee from a work trip. Somewhere, probably in an airport, she’d picked up what she thought was just a cold.
Sure, physically she felt crappy. But the bad feeling, which she described as “itchy,” came from the news coming out of China. A career spent working with infectious diseases had given Head all the info she needed on what, exactly, the novel coronavirus might be capable of.
And so, when her nose started running and her throat got scratchy, Head quarantined herself and her husband. Instead of watching trashy TV in bed to recover, she tucked into her quarantine cocoon of a home office—with tissues and tea at hand—and started hunting.
Head is a drug hunter. A computational chemist by training, Head uses complex computer simulations to search for molecules that can gum up the gears of a virus hell-bent on infecting human cells. She focuses on therapeutics—the things doctors rely on to treat disease. Head spent decades at a major drug company searching for drugs that would combat diseases, including viruses like HIV. But in February of 2020, she was working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Moving to public sector meant Head had an obligation to find something, anything, that might serve the public good in this time of crisis. It also meant that she had access to one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
An abandoned structure at the Nonagon commune in Humboldt County.
An image from Agerisee Switzerland
AA Film / Moviestore / Columbia / AF Archive / Allstar / Alamy; Adam Maida / The Atlantic
James' World 2 