1. Mark Lilla is Professor of Humanities at Columbia. With New York Review Books he has published The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (2016), The Reckless Mind.
2. Relevant, important fiction in the time of political chaos. Superheroes and artistic characters fill the pages with musings and arguments about what matters and what.
3. The highly acclaimed Crusader Kings 2 Mod "The Commune of Rome". The Commune of Rome was a republic that rose up in Rome in the mid 12th century. They succeeded in.
4. By Charles Montgomery The LARB Korea Blog is currently featuring selections from The Explorer’s History of Korean Fiction in Translation, Charles Montgomery’s.
5. To review the epidemiologic literature examining pesticide exposure and liver cancer incidence. A search of the MEDLINE and Embase databases was conducted in October.

Paradise Possible by Michael J. The vision of a grim and gray future is just as much a fantasy as that of a perfectly ordered society, but somehow it is the grim one that now captures our attention. The descriptions of a glistening City of the Sun or a New Atlantis have given way to the warnings of 1. Brave New World. If those title phrases have passed into general usage, as the word utopia once did, it is because they stand for things that we urgently want to talk about. All this is to be expected, according to Paradise Now, Chris Jennings’s brilliant study of American utopian societies. After the cruel experience of “the Thousand- Year Reich, Soviet gulags, the Khmer killing fields,” the very idea of utopia now seems suspect. Its vision of the future is “absolutist,” which inexorably culminates in tyranny, as modern history confirms.

Asked how she could debase herself to the level of playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind, Hattie McDaniel replied, “I’d rather play the maid and make $700 a week. For the 2017-2018 academic year, more than 750 colleges and universities will use the Common App, the powerful online platform and college planning website that. Discover Teufelsberg in Berlin, Germany: An abandoned NSA listening post on Berlin's "Devil's Mountain.".

This might explain why the five- hundredth anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia (1. As a small compensation, however, we have five engaging books that deal with various utopian communities in the United States.

They are not explicitly about Thomas More (who mostly goes unmentioned), but they pay indirect tribute by showing how ardently and imaginatively his ideas were embraced by nineteenth- century America. Some of these utopian projects were short- lived, such as Robert Owen’s secular community at New Harmony, Indiana, which flared out within a few years in the mid- 1.

Brook Farm, an equally short- lived experiment of the 1. Fourierist Associationists. But some were staggeringly vital, such as the Shakers, the celibate communal society that began in the early 1. Maine. Or the notorious Oneida Community, which began by abolishing traditional marriage, only to become America’s leading manufacturer of plated silver—the most traditional of all wedding gifts. Jennings’s Paradise Now profiles these four well- known communal societies as well as Icaria, the little- known French utopia that settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, after the Mormons moved out.

Photograph: Sunny Shokrae/NYT/Eyevine.

They were startling in their diversity, veering between secular socialism and radical Christianity, democracy and autocracy, free love and celibacy. But they also had a great deal in common. Private property was abolished and all possessions were held communally; new recruits would sell what they owned and hand over the proceeds when they entered. They also tended to adopt distinctive forms of dress and hairstyles to distinguish themselves from the outside world. Finally, all of these communities insisted on the equality of the sexes, although they enacted it in different ways—the Shakers by the segregation of the sexes in work and administration, the Oneidans by freely mixing them or inverting traditional sex roles.

Jennings is an engaging writer, and his account of the curious practices of these societies makes for entertaining reading. At Icaria, for example, a 6 a.

In all of this is a certain plaintive earnestness that is the inevitable by- product of the attempt to sweep away all of existing society, habits, and customs, and to invent an entirely new social order overnight. But Jennings aspires to more than a catalog of amusing eccentricities.

He suggests that these communal societies were not marginal movements at the fringe of American life. Their numbers were considerable: At their peak, the Fourierist Associationists counted some 1. Horace Greeley and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

According to one estimate, some 7. Shaker life, although fewer than one in ten chose to become members. If these communities flourished in the decades before the Civil War, and preoccupied the wider public of nonmembers, it is because they distilled in unusually pure form some of the essential themes and patterns of American society. And so any study of these dissident and separatist sanctuaries in the end turns into a study of America itself. The philosophical underpinning of these communal societies, even the militantly secular ones, was the communism of the early Christian Church as described in the Acts of the Apostles and by church tradition. But that tradition offers no concrete program for how to establish a society with communal ownership of property, and how to administer it once established.

For this, Thomas More was essential. Utopia appeared just twenty- four years after Columbus’s discovery of America, and it would have been inconceivable without the first breathless and fragmentary descriptions of the cultures of the New World. The Aztec and Inca empires had not yet been discovered—that would come a few years later—but the existence of great urban civilizations was already the subject of informed speculation. It was not the specifics of these travelers’ accounts that inspired More so much as the imaginative challenge, the prospect of envisioning a completely new society. His Utopia is a fictitious version of one of those explorer’s accounts, a fanciful description of a newly discovered crescent- shaped island in the South Atlantic, two hundred miles wide, with fifty- four regularly planned and gridded cities. Of course Utopia is not at all about the New World, but the Old, and every aspect of the island republic is intended as a critique of existing European society.

For contemporary readers, the most startling aspect of Utopia was the complete absence of all private property. Its inhabitants dwelled in identical houses that were assigned by drawing lots; every ten years they were required to change them.

Because there was no idle leisure class to support, the Utopians labored only six hours a day, but all were required to learn farming, for which reason families were periodically rotated between the city and country. All clothing was identical, except for slight variations to distinguish men from women, and the married from the unmarried. Families dined in communal refectories, the food being provided from central warehouses. There were no locks on the doors, for there was nothing to steal. To show their contempt for riches, the Utopians used gold for making chamber pots. As a consequence, there was virtually no crime, and the death penalty was reserved for only the direst of crimes, such as high treason (and, strangely enough, flagrant and incorrigible adultery).

Also startling were the social practices of the Utopians. Religious toleration was the rule: “Every Man might be of what Religion he pleased.” Euthanasia was practiced, even encouraged, but not suicide. The state also regulated the size of each city’s population. A city could not grow beyond 9. Likewise, families with an excess of children would surrender some to “any other Family that does not abound so much in them.” One curious Utopian practice was that prior to marriage, the bride and groom, in the presence of an elderly chaperone, were to view one another naked; any deformity would be revealed. Before you buy the horse, the Utopians said, you first remove the saddle. Virtually all of these aspects of Utopia were revisited in one or another of America’s communal societies: the abolition of private property, communal dining, regulation of clothing, rectilinear architecture, control of family size and structure, even judicious pairing in order to create healthy offspring.

The Shakers are by far the best known, largely because of their exquisite craftsmanship. Hd Video Download The Barber (2015). Because their functional design banished all decoration and unnecessary moldings, it is remarkably timeless in character.

As a result, the abundant literature on the Shakers is primarily devoted to their buildings and furniture, and there is still no comprehensive study of the history, theology, economy, and . An illiterate textile worker in Manchester, Lee came under the influence of a group of mystic Quakers who, because of their ecstatic singing and dancing, were called “jumpers, shivers, or shaking Quakers.” She married a blacksmith, only to lose all four of her children in infancy or during agonized delivery.

She discovered a gift for preaching, ran afoul of the local authorities, and made her way to New York in 1.