Canada Lee

Canada Lee (born Leonard Lionel Cornelius Canegata; March 3, 1907 – May 9, 1952) was an American actor who pioneered roles for African Americans. After careers as a jockey, boxer and musician, he became an actor in the Federal Theatre Project, including the 1936 production of "Macbeth" adapted and directed by Orson Welles. Lee later starred in Welles's original Broadway production of "Native Son" (1941). A champion of civil rights in the 1930s and 1940s, Lee was blacklisted and died shortly before he was scheduled to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He advanced the African American tradition in theatre pioneered by such actors as Paul Robeson. Lee was the father of actor Carl Lee.
Biography.
Lee was born Leonard Lionel Cornelius Canegata on March 3, 1907, in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. His father, James Cornelius Lionel Canegata, was born on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, and as a youth had migrated to New York, where he married Lydia Whaley Gadsen. Raised by his parents in Harlem, Lee had an aptitude for music, and at age seven he began studying violin and piano with J. Rosamond Johnson at the Music School Settlement for Colored People. He made his concert debut at age 11, performing a student recital at Aeolian Hall. But after seven years of music studies, without explanation, he put away his violin and ran away from home. In 1921, aged 14, Lee went to Saratoga Springs, New York, and began a two-year career as a jockey.
Lee returned to his parents' home in Harlem in 1923 with no idea what he was going to do next. He considered returning to music, but an old school friend suggested that he try boxing. At one amateur match, fight announcer Joe Humphries saw the name "Canagata, Lee" on the card he was using. He tossed the card aside and instead announced "Canada Lee"—a name that Lee liked and adopted. In the amateur ring he won 90 out of 100 bouts and the national amateur lightweight title.
Lee turned pro at age 19, in October 1926, and became a favorite with audiences.
At and about , he fought as a welterweight. His boxing statistics vary due to incomplete coverage and record keeping for the sport in the 1920s and 1930s. Boxing historian Donald R. Koss documents Lee having 60 bouts 1927–31, the majority of them taking place 1927–28. "The New York Times" reported that Lee had some 200 professional matches and lost only about 25.
During his victorious 10-round bout with Andy Divodi at Madison Square Garden on December 12, 1929, Lee was dealt a blow over his right ear that detached his retina. With treatment his vision could have been saved, but Lee feared losing his successful career and masked his injury. In time he lost all sight in his right eye. He quit professional boxing in 1933. Despite having made an estimated $90,000 during his boxing career (roughly equivalent to $ million today), Lee was broke. "Just threw it away," Lee later said. Lee eventually lobbied for insurance, health care, financial consultation and retirement homes for fighters. "The average boxer possesses little education," he said in 1946. "If he winds up broke, he has no trade, no education and nobody to turn to."
As Lee's fighting career began to wind down, he put together a small dance band that played at obscure clubs. When an old friend, sportswriter Ed Sullivan, plugged him in his new entertainment column, Lee and his group began landing better engagements. His career as a bandleader peaked in 1933 when his group played at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. The following year he opened his own small club, The Jitterbug, which he managed to operate for six months. When it closed he had no prospects, and his mother convinced him to simply get a job.
Acting.
Lee discovered a love for Broadway theatre during his years as a prizefighter. He remembered "Show Boat" as the first stage production he ever saw: "A big, tough fighter, all muscle, just sobbing," he recalled.
His acting career began by accident in 1934. While at a YMCA to apply for a job as a laborer, Lee stumbled upon an audition in progress and was recognized by playwright Augustus Smith. Lee was invited to try out, and won a supporting role in "Brother Mose", directed by Frank H. Wilson. Sponsored by New York's Civil Works Administration, the show toured the boroughs, playing at community centers and city parks into the fall of the year. In October 1934, Lee succeeded Rex Ingram in the Theatre Union's revival of "Stevedore", which toured to Chicago, Detroit and other U.S. cities after its run on Broadway. It was his first professional role.
Lee then was cast in his first major role, Banquo, in the legendary Federal Theatre Project production of "Macbeth" (1936), adapted and directed by Orson Welles.
"I never would have amounted to anything in the theatre if it hadn't been for Orson Welles," Lee recalled. "The way I looked at acting, it was interesting and it was certainly better than going hungry. But I didn't have a serious approach to it until … I bumped into Orson Welles. He was putting on a Federal Theatre production of "Macbeth" with Negro players and, somehow, I won the part of Banquo. He rehearsed us for six solid months, but when the play finally went on before an audience, it was right—and it was a wonderful sensation, knowing it was right. Suddenly, the theatre became important to me. I had a respect for it, for what it could say. I had the ambition—I caught it from Orson Welles—to work like mad and be a convincing actor."
"Macbeth" was sold out for ten weeks at the Lafayette Theatre. After an additional two weeks on Broadway it toured the nation, including performances at the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas.
After five months in a supporting role, Lee succeeded Rex Ingram as the lead in the stage production "Haiti" (1938), portraying Haitian slave turned emperor Henri Christophe. One of the Federal Theatre Project's most popular productions, "Haiti" was seen by some 90,000 people at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem and at Boston's Copley Theatre.
In January 1939, with the end of the Federal Theatre Project, Lee gained a role in "Mamba's Daughters", a Broadway success that toured North America and returned to Broadway for another brief run in 1940. Lee took a break from the road tour to make his motion picture debut in "Keep Punching" (1939), a film about boxing. He made his radio debut as narrator of the weekly CBS jazz series "Flow Gently, Sweet Rhythm" (1940–41). As that regular series came to an end, he opened a restaurant at 102 West 136th Street, Canada Lee's Chicken Coop, which offered authentic South Carolina cuisine, jazz and blues. Lee kept it going despite chronic financial difficulties.
Lee played the lead role in the 1940 revival of Theodore Ward's "Big White Fog". A 1938 Federal Theatre Project production, the play was remounted by the newly created Negro Playwrights Company, founded in New York by Ward, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Theodore Browne, Richard Wright and Alain Locke.
Lee became a star overnight in his ultimate stage success, "Native Son" (1941), an adaptation of Richard Wright's novel staged on Broadway by Orson Welles. The show was a spectacular hit for both Welles and Lee, who starred in the initial New York run, a 19-month national tour, and a second run on Broadway with accessible ticket prices. "Mr. Lee's performance is superb," wrote Brooks Atkinson of "The New York Times", who called him "certainly the best Negro actor of his time, as well as one of the best actors in this country." Wright also applauded the performance, noting the contrast between Lee's affable personality and his intensity as Bigger Thomas. The sympathetic portrayal of a black man driven to murder by racial hatred brought much criticism however, especially from the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and the Legion of Decency, and the ensuing pressure forced the play to close.
During World War II, Lee continued to act in plays and in films. In 1942, he played in two comedies by William Saroyan, and earned approving reviews despite the generally negative response to these plays. In 1943, his name was above the title on the marquee for "South Pacific", a race-themed drama directed by Lee Strasberg that again was panned by critics but won Lee critical praise.
Perhaps Lee's best known film role was in Alfred Hitchcock's "Lifeboat" (1944), in which he played ship's steward Joe Spencer, one of 8 men and women who survive the sinking of the freighter carrying them from New York to London and are joined in their lifeboat by a survivor of the crew of the U-boat that destroyed their vessel.
According to a June 22, 1943, "Hollywood Reporter" news item, Lee was the first actor cast for the film. The script was criticized for making Joe "too stereotypical". Lee testified that he attempted to round out the character by revising dialogue, primarily eliminating repeated "yessir"s and "nossir"s that sounded subservient, and cutting some actions. An NAACP critique of the film condemned the role of Joe and praised Lee’s performance. The "Baltimore Afro-American"s review, while commenting on the character's shortcomings, praised Lee's portrayal. Historian Rebecca Sklaroff, while writing in 2009 that Joe's role was more "tokenistic" than black roles in the wartime films "Sahara" and "Bataan", wrote that Joe was depicted as compassionate, dependable and heroic. He is the only one who resists the impulse of mob fury that leads the other characters to kill the German. He is the only character who steps forward to disarm the wounded German sailor rescued at the end of the film.
Lee's successful radio career continued with "New World A-Comin", which made its debut in March 1944. He narrated the first two seasons of the groundbreaking WMCA radio series that presented Negro history and culture to mainstream American audiences.
He became the first African American to play Caliban, in Margaret Webster's 1945 Broadway production of "The Tempest". Lee had admired Shakespeare since his turn in "Macbeth"; indeed, at the time of his death he was preparing to play Othello on film.
In 1946, Lee played a principal role in "On Whitman Avenue", a drama about racial prejudice directed by Margo Jones. Lee produced the play, making him the first African-American producer on Broadway. The play spoke directly to the need for interracial housing following World War II and won the praise of former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote weekly columns encouraging readers to see it.
In the autumn of 1946, Lee made American theatre history when he portrayed the villain Daniel de Bosola in John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi". Presented in Boston and on Broadway, the production marked the first time a black actor had played a white role on the stage. Lee wore a special white paste that had been used medically, to cover burns and marks, but had never before been used in the theatre. He had a supporting role in Robert Rossen's "Body and Soul" (1947), another boxing picture.
In 1948, Lee played his last stage role, that of a devoted slave in "Set My People Free", Dorothy Heyward's drama based on the aborted 1822 slave revolt led by Denmark Vesey.
In 1949, he took a supporting role in "Lost Boundaries", a drama based on William Lindsay White's book of the same title, a nonfiction account of Dr. Albert C. Johnston and his family, who passed for white while living in New England in the 1930s and 1940s.
Lee's last film appearance was the starring role of minister Stephen Kumalo in "Cry, the Beloved Country" (1951).
Civil rights activism.
As an actor, Lee came into contact with many of the leading progressive figures in the country. Langston Hughes, for instance, wrote two brief plays for Lee; these were submitted to the Theater Project, but their criticism of racism in America was deemed too controversial, and neither was staged. Lee spoke to schools, sponsored various humanitarian events, and began speaking directly against the existing segregation in America's armed forces, while simultaneously acknowledging the need to win World War II. To this latter end, he appeared at numerous USO events; he won an award from the United States Recruiting Office and another from the Treasury Department for his help in selling war bonds. These sentiments would carry on throughout his life, culminating in his early firsthand account of apartheid in South Africa.
Lee was an early influence on physician and human rights activist H. Jack Geiger. They met in 1940 when Geiger, a 14-year-old middle-class Jewish runaway, was backstage at a Broadway production of "Native Son". Lee agreed to take Geiger in when he showed up at his door in Harlem asking for a place to stay. With the consent of his parents, Geiger stayed with Lee for over a year. Lee took on the role of surrogate father and introduced Geiger to Langston Hughes, Billy Strayhorn, Richard Wright, and Adam Clayton Powell. Geiger eventually became a journalist, then a doctor who co-founded the first community health center in the United States, Columbia Point Health Center in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He became a founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility and Physicians for Human Rights, and established community health centers in Mississippi and South Africa. Geiger says he would never have moved so deeply in these worlds so quickly if not for his experiences with Canada Lee.
By the late 1940s, the rising tide of anti-communism had made many of Lee's earlier contacts politically dangerous. In 1949, the trade journal "Variety" stated that under no circumstance was Lee to be used in American Tobacco’s televised production of a radio play he had recently starred in because he was "too controversial".
The same year, the FBI offered to clear Lee's name if he would publicly call Paul Robeson a communist. Lee refused and responded by saying, "All you’re trying to do is split my race." According to newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, Lee stated that he intended to come out and "publicly blast Paul Robeson." However, the fact that the friendship between the two actors remained until Lee's death suggests that Robeson put no faith in Winchell's claim.
At the height of the Hollywood blacklist, Lee managed to find work in 1950 as the star of a British film "Cry, The Beloved Country", for which both he and Sidney Poitier were smuggled into South Africa as indentured servants in order to play their roles as African ministers. During filming, Lee had his first heart attack, and he never fully recovered his health. The film's message of universal brotherhood stands as Lee's final work towards this aim.
Being on the Hollywood blacklist prevented him from gaining further work. Scheduled to appear in Italy to begin production on a filmed version of "Othello", he was repeatedly notified that his passport "remained under review". Lee was reportedly to star as Bigger Thomas in the Argentine version of "Native Son" but was replaced in the role by Richard Wright, author of the novel, when Lee had to withdraw.
Family life.
In December 1925, Lee married Juanita Eugenia Waller. On November 22, 1926, they had a son, Carl Vincent Canegata, who became actor Carl Lee. The couple separated while their son was young, and they were amicably divorced in 1942.
In 1934, Lee began a love affair with publisher and peace activist Caresse Crosby, despite the threat of miscegenation laws. They often had lunch in uptown New York in Harlem at the then-new restaurant "Franks", where they could maintain their secret relationship. When Lee was performing in Washington, D.C., during the 1940s, the only restaurant in the city where they could eat together was an African restaurant named the Bugazi. Crosby and Lee's intimate relationship continued into the mid-1940s.
In March 1951, Lee married Frances Pollack. They remained together until he died just over a year later.
Death.
Lee died of a reported heart attack at the age of 45 on May 9, 1952, in Manhattan. It was later revealed by his widow, Frances Pollack, that he had been diagnosed with uremia and died of kidney disease, slipping into a coma and passing away 10 days after his diagnosis. He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx.


Alan Bond

Alan Bond (22 April 1938 – 5 June 2015) was an English-born Australian businessman noted for his high-profile and often corrupt business dealings. These included his central role in the WA Inc scandals of the 1980s, and what was at the time the biggest corporate collapse in Australian history and also for his criminal conviction that saw him serve four years in prison. He is also remembered for bankrolling the successful challenge for the 1983 America's Cup, the first time the New York Yacht Club had lost it in its 132-year history.
Early life.
Alan Bond was born on 22 April 1938, the son of Frank and Kathleen Bond in the Hammersmith district of London, England. In 1950, aged 12, he emigrated to Australia with his parents and his elder sister Geraldine, living in Fremantle, near Perth. At the age of 14, he was charged with stealing and being unlawfully on premises. Aged 18, he was arrested for being unlawfully on premises, and reportedly admitted planning a robbery.
Career.
Bond began his career as a signwriter under the name 'Nu-Signs' after terminating his apprenticeship 18 months before it was due to end. In 1956 he was charged with attempted burglary, having been found by police roaming the streets of Fremantle dressed in State Electricity Commission overalls and carrying tools. He formed what became the Bond Corporation in 1959. His early fortunes were made in real estate around the Perth area.
In his heyday the Perth-based Bond was one of Australia's most prominent businesspeople. He extended his business interests into fields outside property development including brewing (he controlled Castlemaine Tooheys in Australia, leading the business to legal success in the landmark constitutional law case of "Castlemaine Tooheys Ltd v South Australia", and G. Heileman Brewing Company in La Crosse, Wisconsin, US), gold mining, television, and airships. Australia's first private university, Bond University, was founded by the Bond Corporation in 1987. He purchased QTQ-9 Brisbane and settled an outstanding defamation dispute the station had with the Queensland premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen by paying out A$400,000. He said in a television interview several years later that he paid because "Sir Joh left no doubt that if we were going to continue to do business successfully in Queensland then he expected the matter to be resolved".
In 1987, Bond purchased Vincent van Gogh's renowned painting "Irises" for $54 million—the highest price ever paid for a single painting. However, the purchase was funded by a substantial loan from the auctioneer Sotheby's, which Bond failed to repay. The transaction was criticised by art dealers as possibly a manipulated sale designed to artificially inflate values generally (which it seems to have done). The painting was subsequently re-sold in 1990 to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
That same year, Bond also organised the establishment of the Bond Centre in Hong Kong, which was located in a twin tower skyscraper complex. The property was later bought by the Lippo Group of Indonesia, and is now known as the Lippo Centre.
The America's Cup.
Bond became a public hero in his adopted country when he bankrolled challenges for the America's Cup, which resulted in his selection in 1978 as Australian of the Year (awarded jointly with Galarrwuy Yunupingu). His "Australia II" syndicate won the 1983 America's Cup, which had been held by the New York Yacht Club since 1851, thus breaking the longest winning streak in the history of sport. That victory, widely regarded as one of Australia’s greatest international sporting achievements, resulted in Bond’s receipt of the Order of Australia, in the grade of Officer.
Purchasing the Nine Network.
In 1987, Bond paid $1 billion to purchase the Australia-wide Channel Nine television network from Kerry Packer's PBL. In a 2003 interview with Andrew Denton, Bond described the negotiations as follows:
...when we first sat down, we said, 'We're either going to sell our stations to you for $400 million, or you're going to sell your stations to us.' And [Kerry Packer] said, 'Well, I don't really want to sell my stations.' And I said, 'Oh, is that right?' So, anyway, after much discussion, Kerry thumped the table and said, 'Listen, if you can pay me $1 billion, I'll sell them to you, otherwise bugger off'. ... [T]hen I rang the National Australia Bank. I said, 'Look, I'm in discussions here to buy these television stations. Kerry will sell to me, and what I want to do is put our stations together and then, with Sky Channel, I'm going to float it off as a separate entity and raise the capital to pay for it... [Packer] said $1 billion [was his asking price], but I think I'll get it for $800 million.' ... [The bank manager] duly rang back and said yes. I said, 'Thank God. I'll go and have some further negotiations with Kerry,' which I did. And true to his word, he never budged one penny off it. So I settled the deal with $800 million and a $200 million note. So he put his own $200 million in. So I had $1 billion. And we put our other two stations up as collateral, which were worth probably $400 million.
In fact, the agreed price was $1.05 billion. Packer took $800 million in cash and $250 million in subordinated debt in Bond Media.
When Bond went bankrupt, Packer was able to turn the debt into a 37% equity in Bond Media, which now included Channel 9 in Brisbane, and was worth about $500 million. It was valued at $1 billion, but had $500 million in debt on the books.
Still, Packer was quoted as saying "You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I've had mine".
Bankruptcy.
In 1992, Bond was declared bankrupt after failing to repay a $194 million personal guarantee on a loan for a nickel-mining project. His debts reportedly totalled $1.8 billion at the time. He consistently feigned brain damage to avoid answering questions during bankruptcy trials, a charade he saw no need to keep up afterwards. In 1995, his family bought him out of bankruptcy, with creditors accepting a payment of A$12 million, a little over half a cent per dollar.
Conviction for fraud.
In 1992, Bond was declared bankrupt, with personal debts totaling A$1.8 billion. In 1997, Bond was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to using his controlling interest in Bell Resources to deceptively siphon off A$1.2 billion into the coffers of the Bond Corporation. The funds were used to shore up the cash resources of the ailing Bond Corporation, which spectacularly collapsed, leaving Bell Resources in a precarious and uncertain position.
At this time, Bond was stripped of his 1984 honour as an Officer of the Order of Australia. He was released from Karnet Prison Farm in 2000, having served four years in various Western Australian prisons.
Return to investment activities.
Following release, he became active in various mining investments, predominately in Africa, including Madagascar Oil PLC and Global Diamond Resources, of Lesotho and was included in "Business Review Weekly"'s "Rich 200 List" in 2008.
In 2003, Bond was inducted into the America's Cup Hall of Fame. Since 2003, Bond had worked closely with his son Craig and longtime business partner Robert Quinn through Strategic Investments Ltd.
Interests related to the Bond family also control Global Diamond Resources plc (formerly Lesotho Diamond Corporation) which is developing the Kao diamond pipe in the Kingdom of Lesotho. In 2007, the Federal Court rejected an attempt by Bond to sue freelance journalist Paul Barry over an article Barry wrote about his dealings in Africa with the Lesotho Diamond Company. Bond had claimed that the article had several false statements. In 2008 Bond appealed but this, too, was rejected by the same court which found Mr Bond's claims had no reasonable prospects of success.
Bond was involved in a long-running defamation case against "The West Australian" newspaper and journalists Mark Drummond and Sean Cowan over a series of articles published in December 2005, in which it was alleged that Bond's friend and business partner Robert Leslie Nelson was moving to hide Bond's involvement in Lesotho Diamond Corporation, Madagascar Oil and a gold company. During that case, Bond tried to have the journalists convicted of contempt of court after some electronic documents disappeared.
In 2008, Bond made a return to the "Business Review Weekly"s "Rich 200 List", in 157th spot, with an estimated wealth of $265 million—thanks primarily to his stakes in Madagascar Oil and Global Diamond Resources.
Family.
In 1955, Bond married Eileen Hughes, a member of a prominent Catholic family in Fremantle (she is a cousin of car dealer John Hughes). She and Bond were both 17, and she was pregnant at the time. Bond, who had been raised Protestant, converted to Catholicism for the marriage. The couple had four children: John, Craig, Susanne and Jody. Bond and Eileen divorced in 1992. Susanne, an equestrian showjumper who had been a member of the Australian showjumping team for seven years, died in 2000 from a suspected accidental overdose of prescription medication.
Bond married Diana Bliss, a public relations consultant and theatre producer, in 1995. On 28 January 2012, Bliss was found dead in the couple's swimming pool. Police said the circumstances of her death were not suspicious and concluded that Bliss, a longtime sufferer of depression, had committed suicide.
Illness and death.
On 2 June 2015, Bond underwent open-heart surgery at a private hospital in Perth to replace and repair his heart valves. Following complications, he was transferred to Fiona Stanley Hospital in Perth and placed on life support in an induced coma. He died on the morning of 5 June 2015.
In popular culture.
The Australian TV miniseries "House of Bond" (2017) is a heavily fictionalised account of Bond's life. Bond was portrayed by Ben Mingay. It was aired on the Nine Network on 24–25 April 2017.


A whole different animal


A New American Century


Katherine Behar

Katherine Behar is an American new media and performance artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work uses materialism and feminism to explore contemporary digital culture and is unified by an approach she calls "object-oriented feminism." Behar's art practice encompasses interactive installation, performance art, public art, and video art. In addition to her acclaimed artwork, Behar writes on various topics including feminist media theory, technologized labor, and objecthood.
Life and career.
Katherine Behar was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. In 2006, she attained a Master of Arts degree from New York University, and in 2009 received a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, City University of New York.
Behar currently lives and works in New York City. She is associate professor at Baruch College, City University of New York where she heads the New Media Arts undergraduate program and teaches classes in video art and exhibition practices. She runs the New Media Artspace, a teaching exhibition space at Baruch College.
Behar's work was the subject of a museum survey exhibition at Pera Museum, Istanbul, in 2016. Behar has been honored with residencies and fellowships including The MacDowell Colony, Pioneer Works, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Practice, Cannonball, The Wassaic Project, "Art Journal" Digital Fellow, and 7.stock. She received a Franklin Furnace Award in 2008.
Behar is also a feminist theorist of technology, and has been particularly influential in developing an approach called "object-oriented feminism." She is additionally known for introducing the concept of "decelerationist aesthetics.”
Works.
Behar's art questions how objecthood, gender, race, and labor play out in the digital realm, and often combines sculpture and performance.
New media and performance art scholar Anna Watkins Fisher calls Behar's artwork an "original contribution to the field of new media art." She writes that "Behar's work forces a different kind of interaction between the digital and the aesthetic than what is regularly shown and promoted under the banner of new media art . . . Behar makes new media and performance speak to each other."
Behar's art mixes objecthood and personhood, playing with our understandings of care. For art critic Nathan Sharratt, “Behar’s artwork raises questions about parental responsibility. As we create more and more disposable ‘children,’ what effect will that have on us? On our children?”
Anonymous Autonomous.
Behar’s interactive installation "Anonymous Autonomous" (2018) consists of three robotic office chairs that have been transformed to behave like driverless cars. Relying on simplified versions of the lidar sensors and computer vision systems used by autonomous vehicles, the chairs roam through the gallery, following paper "lanes" that viewers arrange on the floor. With this installation, Behar shows how automation, deskilling, and algorithmic decision-making are changing activities like driving and office work. The driverless chairs’ tentative, constrained movements suggest that technological innovations like these may produce more restrictions than freedoms.
Maritime Messaging: Red Hook.
"Maritime Messaging: Red Hook" (2017) is a public performance that took place on NYC Ferry boats crossing between Wall Street and Red Hook. The performance on October 29, 2017 marked the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy. It was co-produced with Pioneer Works and PortSide New York, two organizations based in Red Hook, a Brooklyn neighborhood that was hard hit by the storm.
"Maritime Messaging" considers how water witnesses and absorbs traces of human activity throughout history. In the words of art critic Laila Pedro, the project invites the water to "talk back," by "draw[ing] on the accumulated memories the water might hold." In the performance, a mock conversation unfolds between the Atlantic Ocean and an AI digital assistant app that Pedro explains, “sends messages into the water and then translates its sounds — waves, splashes — creating a mysterious, evocative ‘dialogue.’”
Roomba Rumba.
"Roomba Rumba" (2015) is an interactive installation in which two Roombas carrying potted rubber tree plants vacuum a bright green carpet. The Roombas appear to be dancing with each other and with visitors. They mirror the "little old ant" in the song "High Hopes" by Frank Sinatra, trying against all odds to "move that rubber tree plant.”
Curators Fatma Çolakoğlu and Ulya Soley describe how the installation "draws uncanny similarities between the plants and exploited workers, as well as machine production and human labor." For Behar, Roomba Rumba provides opportunities for human/nonhuman solidarities. The piece has also been exhibited under the alternate title, "High Hopes (Deux)".
E-Waste.
"E-Waste" (2014) is a series of USB sculptures that stages a science-fictional post-apocalyptic future in which humans are extinct and only devices populate the Earth.
Art critic Meredith Kooi describes how ""E-Waste" encourage[s] the viewer to affectively engage with techno-detritus." Kooi writes that "Behar's future dystopia—in which digital entities persist, even thrive, beyond human extinction—by extension creates conditions in which viewers can witness a world they cannot inhabit, but in which the human hand remains discernible, through its own technological waste. . . . But the earth that swaddles these gadgets is composed of mainly inorganic material—the soil itself has become aplastic replica of its failed self."
Art critic Kaya Genç and curator Ulya Soley describe "E-Waste" as "a timeless dystopia" related to Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of "the exform." In "E-Waste," "handmade bits and pieces of machine-made electronic sculptures in the installation are both futuristic and aged, analog and digital, animate and inanimate."
Modelling Big Data.
"Modeling Big Data" (2014) is a six-channel video installation in which the artist performs as an obese data body. Parodying the overproduction of so-called big data, Behar repeats movements that she calls "data gestures." In four scenes she mimics four common computer routines: clicking, buffering, caching, and pinging.
Theorist Tung-Hui Hu describes the moving figure's undulating motion as resembling “that of a natural organism, but the costume and mise-en-scène of the video appears inorganic; the combination is disconcerting because we expect body or data, and yet we see both at once. [… T]he literal data-body appears so lethargic that it is barely able to move, producing a choreographed awkwardness, or a virtuous antivirtuosity." As a result, he explains that Behar allows "the self to become more like an indistinct mass of data […] by accepting rather than resisting its objectification."
Street.s/wall.ing/in.
"Street.s/wall.ing/in" (2013) is a performance designed for the building at 32 Old Slip in Manhattan's Wall Street district. Orange shapes, inspired by Jersey barriers, contain dancers that travel around the building over a period of two and a half hours. The forms eventually reach a Jersey barrier lining the Northwest corner of the building, and convene in the barrier's furthermost nook.
Autoresponder.exe.
"Autoresponder.exe" (2012) is a 4K video that slowly scans to reveal an image of an executive desk standing on end in a disheveled office. The video compares a scene of managerial power to automated e-mail scripts, implying that like the e-mail reply software, corporate culture is impersonal, ineffective, and tone-deaf.
Compositions for Bit.
"Compositions for Bit" (2010) is Behar's farewell concert for Disney’s original cult-classic Tron that took place at Judson Church in New York, NY. The interactive concert featured the polyhedron sidekick Bit as three larger than life sculptures—each holding a dancer, lasers, video mixes, original sound scores, and other components of arcade culture that were brought together as an immersive environment.
3G56k.
"3G56k" (2009) is an interactive installation and BDSM-themed performance involving a twelve-foot touchscreen "iPhone" and a ten-foot tower computer. The iPhone requires a human "dialer" to input a number to call the dial-up modem inside the pink computer tower. Each call causes an analog thermal fax to slowly print out an image of the rubber hose connecting the two machines through an opening in the tower.
Building Blocks.
"Building Blocks" (2008) is a public performance and video project made for the Camouflash exhibition, concerning the 2007 demolition of the Centrum Warenhaus in Dresden. Four dancers each inhabit a silver shape modeled after the Centrum Warenhaus’ aluminum "honey-comb" facade. The pieces briefly meet at the building's original site and try to reassemble themselves, disperse, and roll away towards the exhibition site.
Primaries.
"Primaries" (2008) is a three-channel video installation of three circular projections, each seven and a half feet tall. The circles rotate while gaining and losing momentum equal to the sounds of the fans of the motors. The projections are saturated in red, yellow, and blue, each with footage of a distorted figure that is edited to counteract the "gravity" of the rotations.
Pipecleaner.
"Pipecleaner" (2007) is a cross-platform screensaver that shows a pole dancer invading the kitschy late-90s Microsoft screensaver "3D Pipes." The dancer wears a dress made of cleaning gloves and attempts to climb, polish, and clean the pipes while her actions are constantly overwritten by the growing pipe maze. Behar compares the maintenance work of the pipe cleaning pole dancer to the maintenance work that screensaver software does to keep screens in good condition. She suggests "Pipecleaner" is an example of nonanthropocentric art because unlike most art, screensavers serve machines and are not intended for humans to look at.
(de)bugging Loop(de)Loop.
"(de)bugging Loop(de)Loop" (2006) is the first installment of a series in which Behar performs computer bugs. The video features repeated logical errors of computer viruses, preventing a computer program from running to completion. The DVD explores the infinite loop through five short video loops using a hula hoop and VHS video tape, each between 16 and 28 seconds.
Collaborations.
Disorientalism.
"Disorientalism" (2005–present) is a long-term multimedia performance art collaboration between Behar and artist and professor Marianne M. Kim. The duo studies the disorienting effects of technologized labour, junk culture, and consumerism. Through performance, video, and photographic projects, they explore how these mediate race, gender, and bodies.
RSI.
From 2009 to 2013 Behar collaborated with Silvia Ruzanka and Ben Chang under the moniker RSI (also known as "Resynplement"), an art and technology team that advocated irrational human–computer interfaces.
Exhibitions.
Behar's artwork has appeared in galleries, museums, festivals, and art spaces all over the globe. Some noted exhibitions include:
Pera Museum in Istanbul; Sector 2337 in Chicago; Boston Cyberarts Gallery; Tuska Center for Contemporary Art at University of Kentucky in Lexington; SPRING/BREAK Art Fair in New York; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Judson Memorial Church in New York; UNOACTU in Dresden; The Girls Club Collection in Miami; Feldman Gallery + Project Space in Portland; De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam; the Mediations Biennale in Poznan; the Chicago Cultural Center; the Swiss Institute in Rome; the National Museum of Art in Cluj-Napoca.
Writings.
In tandem with her creative work, Behar is also a writer and theorist. She is published in many different books, journals, and catalogues. Behar writes on subjects concerning embodiment and technology, automation and labor, cyborgian human/machine ethics, emerging and obsolete technologies, and feminist media critique.
Object-Oriented Feminism.
In 2010, Behar established "object-oriented feminism" (OOF), an interdisciplinary field of feminist materialist analysis. Her edited collection "Object-Oriented Feminism" “explores the political and ethical potential of being an object.” It was published in 2016 by University of Minnesota Press, which describes the book as “a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses—like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and new materialism—that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary.” Patricia Ticineto Clough states that Behar is "not shy in reestablishing feminist theory as a primary resource for thinking about objects, things and environments." For reviewer Jesse Bordwin, “Object-oriented criticism and feminist theory are not obviously compatible—their commitments and assumptions seldom overlap—but that tension is precisely what energizes the new collection "Object-Oriented Feminism."”
And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art.
In 2016, Behar and Emmy Mikelson, coedited "And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art," an expanded exhibition catalog for their 2011 co-curated exhibition at the CUNY Graduate Center's James Gallery. This book shows “how artists have figured and prefigured nonanthropocentric ideas strikingly similar to those expounded in various ‘new’ realist, materialist, and speculativist philosophies."
Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity.
Also in 2016, Behar published an essay chapbook, "Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity." In this book she coins the term “decelerationist aesthetics” to name “the aesthetic properties, proclivities, and performances of objects come to defy the accelerationist imperative to be nimbly individuated.” This imaginative research work coincided with Behar's video series "," which puts her decelerationist theory into practice.
Art Catalogs.
Behar's solo exhibitions, Data’s Entry and E-Waste, were accompanied by illustrated catalogs with the artist's writings and essays by new media scholars and curators.
Essays.
Behar's writings have been published in journals including "Lateral", "Media-N", "Parsons Journal for Information Mapping", "Visual Communication Quarterly", "EXTENSIONS: The Online Journal for Embodied Technology", and in conference proceedings for "Digital Arts and Culture", "SPIE", and "Cyberworlds." She contributed book chapters to "Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art," "After the Speculative Turn: Realism, Philosophy, and Feminism," and "Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening."
Writings Online.
Several of Behar's writings about technology are available online:
Behar's artist statements and writings about her art include:
Lectures.
Behar frequently speaks on her artwork and critical theory.


Gardening Australia

Gardening Australia is an Australian lifestyle television program which suggests and promotes organic and environmentally friendly ways of gardening.
Hosts.
"Gardening Australia" was originally hosted by Peter Cundall, an experienced gardener with a passion for growing plants using organic methods. Stephen Ryan succeeded Cundall in 2009. After three years as host, Ryan's contract was not renewed by ABC. Costa Georgiadis was announced as the new host in December 2011 for the 2012 series.
Presenters.
In addition to the host, each episode contains segments which are recorded across Australia with local presenters. These include:
Segments.
Cundall had a segment called "Pete's Mailbag" where viewers could ask questions or send in photographs or letters about their own gardens.
The show has several segments, which include all forms of gardening, from sculptural and artistic gardens to vegetable growing and xeriscaping. Most segments are filmed on location.
The program has an Ask It/Solve It section where people can submit their garden questions/problems to be answered by the presenters.
The 6 Bed Rotation Vegetable Crop (formally Pete's Patch) at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens is still in the show, now called 'The Vegie Patch' with Tino Carnevale presenting.
The Vegie Guide is a new feature which suggests a range of vegetables that can be planted each month, in the broad climate zones around Australia.


Paippin Chuvattile Pranayam

Paippin Chuvattile Pranayam is a 2017 Indian Malayalam-language film directed by Domin D'Silva who also co-wrote the screenplay with Antony Jibin. It stars Neeraj Madhav, Reba Monica John, Aju Varghese, Sudhi Koppa, Appani Sarath, Dharmajan Bolgatty and Thesni Khan. The film was released in India on 24 November 2017.
Plot.
Paippin Chuvattile Pranayam traces the story of a young Govindankutty (Neeraj Madhav) and his friends, who are the local payans of Pandarathuruth island. As the movie starts, one can see that it takes a dip into the rustic beauty of the village and the surreal experience of lake water fishing.
Soundtrack.
The songs and background score for the film were composed by Bijibal. The lyrics were written by B.K. Harinarayanan & Santhosh Varma.


Blaine Harden

Blaine Harden (born 1952) is an American journalist and author. His 2012 book "Escape from Camp 14" is an official biography of North Korean defector Shin Dong-hyuk.
Journalism.
Harden worked for 28 years for "The Washington Post" as a correspondent in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as in New York and Seattle. Harden worked for 4 years as a local and national correspondent for "The New York Times" and a writer for the "Times Magazine". He has also worked as a reporter for "Frontline", "The Economist", "Foreign Policy", "National Geographic" and "The Guardian".
Books.
Harden's debut book was in 1990, called "Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent".
His second book was in 1996, titled "A River Lost" about the damming of the wild Columbia river and its ecological consequences. Harden and his book are featured in the PBS "American Experience" program titled "Grand Coulee Dam", about the Grand Coulee Dam.
His third book came out in 2012 titled "Escape from Camp 14". It is an official biography of North Korean defector Shin Dong-hyuk. In January 2015, Harden announced that Shin had admitted to lying about several aspects of his story.
Harden's fourth book "The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot" was released in March 2015. It is a dual biography of Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea and No Kum-sok, a defector who stole a MiG-15 and landed it in South Korea.
Harden's fifth book "King of Spies" was released in October 2017. It is a biography of Air Force Major Donald Nichols, an intelligence officer who operated for 11 years in Korea before, during and after the Korean War.


Save the forest - stop coal


Lenora Qereqeretabua

Lenora Salusalu Qereqeretabua (born March 1968) is a broadcaster and member of the Parliament of Fiji. She is a member of the National Federation Party (NFP).
Qereqeretabua was born in Dravuni, Kadavu Province, and is the daughter of former Miss Fiji Eta Uluvula Qereqeretabua. In 1988, following in the footsteps of her mum, Lenora was crowned Miss Fiji. Since 1995 she has anchored the Pacific Community's Pacific-wide news show, The Pacific Way. She also works as a public relations consultant and serves on the board of Save the Children Fiji. In 2015 was appointed to the National Flag Committee.
In February 2018 she was announced as a candidate for the National Federation Party in the 2018 elections. During the election campaign she advocated for women's rights and more women in parliament. She won 1811 votes, winning the NFP's third seat in parliament. In total, NFP had 51 provisional candidates.


Chandi Veeran

Chandi Veeran (English : Chandi warrior) is a 2015 Indian Tamil-language romantic action comedy drama directed by A. Sarkunam and produced by director Bala. The film features Atharvaa and Anandhi in the leading roles, while Lal, Rajashree, and Bose Venkat essay supporting roles. The music was composed by S. N. Arunagiri with the score composed by Sabesh-Murali. The film released on 7 August 2015.
Plot.
As a child, Paari (Atharvaa) lost his father (Bose Venkat), who tried to stop the war between his native and neighboring village as they fought over sharing a pond water. Years later, Paari is a young man who returns from Singapore, but the battle between the two villages is still on. Meanwhile, Paari is in love with Thamarai (Anandhi), the daughter of a rich village man (Lal), who also owns the pond and is adamant not to supply water to the nearby village.
Production.
The film began production in June 2014, with Bala opting to fund a film to be directed by Sarkunam starring Atharvaa in the lead role. Despite early reports that the film would be titled "Puzhudhi Parakkum Ooru", the makers denied the claim. The film progressed without a title till January 2015, when the team christened the project as "Chandi Veeran". Bala sold the film to Sri Green Productions thereafter, after the film was completed and the third schedule was finished at Rajapalayam, mannarkudi and Alathur.
Later the satellite rights were sold to Vijay Television.
Soundtrack.
The soundtrack was composed by S. N. Arunagiri.
Reception.
Baradwaj Rangan called "Chandi Veeran" a "disappointingly generic drama". "The Times of India" gave 2.5 stars out of 5 and wrote, "The problem is that the film cannot find its tone and so, the narration suffers. The filmmaking, too, lacks grace, with hurried camerawork and choppy editing that makes the film visually inelegant. We never see the confident Sarkunam of "Kalavani" and "Vaagai Sooda Vaa"." Sify wrote, "Though the intention...to convey a message on water scarcity and nonviolence is laudable, the film is too preachy and loud with an abrupt comedy ending..."Chandi Veeran" is yet another half baked movie from Sarkunam".
In contrast, Rediff wrote, "at just under two hours, with a decent plot, some good performances and great visuals, director Sarkunam's "Chandi Veeran" is worth a watch". Indiaglitz wrote, "The film is definitely worth your time and money for presenting a vital issue in a largely engaging manner".


Destra Corporation

Destra Corporation Limited, previously known as Sprint Corporation and Ehyou, was an independent Australian owned media and entertainment company based in Richmond, Victoria founded by Domenic Carosa. Destra's interests spanned film, internet, music, theatre and retail, including Magna Pacific.
During its peak years, Destra was one of the largest online music distributors in Australia, while also specializing in hosting and domain registry. In the mid 2000s, the company reached $100 million in annual turnover. The company's shareholders included Prime Media, whose stake represented 44% at April 2008.
Following the collapse of Opes Prime in 2007, Destra announced they were suffering financially and it went on to lose $76.9 million between 2007 and early 2008. The company was split into a number of divisions before its subsidiaries were sold. Destra became defunct in November 2008.
History.
Domenic Carosa and Anna Carosa founded Destra Corporation in 1993. The Carosas were only teenagers when they came up with the concept, which they originally called Sprint. In its early days, the company owned entertainment websites in Australia and formed Ozhosting.com in 1995 to provide hosting to small businesses. Sprint purchased a number of smaller Australian-based hosting companies over the next couple of years in order to increase its market share in the hosting market. This included BlueFire and also GlobalHost. Both companies remained as separate entities under Sprint but operated under the OzHosting.com brand.
In 2000, Sprint Corporation was rebranded as Ehyou in order to expand into other online fields besides hosting. This included the purchasing of mp3.com.au, with the aim of moving more into the online music and digital downloads market. Over the next couple of years, Destra expanded its hosting offerings geographically through acquisitions of Cyberhost, lasiaworks, and Ocean Internet's hosting division. Destra also acquired Webtrader in January 2001, a move which further diversified its services. The company was then integrated under the OzHosting subsidiary, making the hosting brand the second largest retail hosting company in Australia.
During 2002, Destra continued to acquire hosting companies, including Enet21 and SuperHosting. Most notably, Destra announced in 2002 that they had acquired a 60% controlling interest in TPP Internet, which was one of Australia's largest domain name registrars at the time.
In 2004, the subsidiary OzHosting was integrated into a new part of the business. The OzHosting brand was shelved, and OzHosting and Techex merged to form Destra. During the same year, Destra won the PowerTel Partner of the Year award. During its first year as the Destra brand, the company announced that they had reached a partnership agreement with Yahoo! to create a new suite of services that would be integrated into the subsidiary, OzHosting. In 2005, Destra reported revenue of over $15 million, up 73% from the previous year, with revenues of $15.739 million, up 73 percent.
In 2006, Destra was the largest digital music provider in Australia, with more than 1.3 million tracks in its online music catalogue. At the time, the company was strategically developing advertising revenue streams across its websites.
After making a number of acquisitions, Destra was greatly affected by the collapse of Opes Prime in 2008. In 2007–08, Destra lost $76.9 million, having made 13 acquisitions in the previous three years. In November 2008, Destra's divisions were sold in administration to companies including Fremantle Media; Central Station Records; Brand New Media; Eddie MacGuire's Visual Entertainment Group; producer of the Discovery Channel's hit show "MythBusters", "Beyond International"; and Domenic Carosa's "Dominet Digital".


Peg-Leg Pedro

Peg-Leg Pedro is a 1938 Technicolor cartoon sponsored film. A boy and girl on a trip are attacked by pirates while looking for treasure. It features the character Nicky Nome. The cartoon is actually an advertisement for Chevrolet. It is a spin-off of "A Coach for Cinderella" & "A Ride for Cinderella". The film is in the public domain.


Milgram v. Orbitz

In Milgram v. Orbitz Worldwide, LLC, the New Jersey Superior Court held that online ticket resellers qualified for immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), and that such immunity preempted a state law consumer fraud statute. The opinion clarified the court's test for determining whether a defendant is acting as a publisher, the applicability of the CDA to e-commerce sites, and the extent of control that an online intermediary may exercise over user content without becoming an "information content provider" under the CDA. The opinion was hailed by one observer as a "rare defeat for a consumer protection agency" and the "biggest defense win of the year" in CDA § 230 litigation.
Background.
Factual background.
TicketNetwork was a software company that operated TicketNetwork Exchange, an "online marketplace" for ticket resales. Third-party sellers (ranging from individuals to professional ticket brokers) could list tickets for sale, and buyers could search for and purchase tickets directly from these sellers. At no point did TicketNetwork possess the actual tickets for sale. Orbitz Worldwide, LLC owned CheapTickets and operated CheapTickets Exchange, an online marketplace site similar to the TicketNetwork Exchange. Orbitz entered an agreement with TicketNetwork that made CheapTickets' listings available on the TicketNetwork Exchange.
Although neither network guaranteed the accuracy of ticket listings or the availability of tickets, TicketNetwork's "Broker Guidebook" required sellers to accurately list the seat location printed on the tickets for sale, and prohibited the sale of tickets the seller did not own at the time of listing. TicketNetwork also guaranteed buyers on its Exchange a row and seat equal or better to the one purchased, and offered a full reimbursement if the tickets did not arrive in time or were not valid.
The New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs began investigating online ticket resellers following a newspaper report that online resellers were offering tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert a week before the show's tickets were publicly available. An investigator visited the CheapTickets site six days before the public on-sale date and purchased two tickets. When the tickets arrived, the issuing authority confirmed that they had been printed and sold several days after the investigator ordered them, on the public on-sale date.
Following the investigation, Attorney General Anne Milgram filed suit against five online ticket resellers for violations of New Jersey's Consumer Fraud Act and the state's Advertising Regulations. Milgram called the resellers' practices "plain fraud," arguing that "[y]ou can’t tell consumers that you have a ticket to sell when in fact you do not have that ticket." Two of the resellers settled out-of-court, but Orbitz and TicketNetwork moved to dismiss the state's complaint, claiming immunity under a provision of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
Legal background.
New Jersey's Consumer Fraud Act § 56:8-2 makes it unlawful to use "any unconscionable commercial practice, deception, fraud, false pretense... [or] misrepresentation" intending that others will rely upon such representations "in connection with the sale or advertisement of any merchandise or real estate." The Advertising Regulations promulgated pursuant to the Consumer Fraud Act provide specific rules concerning many types of advertisement, including those involving the resale of tickets.
After the New York Supreme Court found an online service provider liable for defamation because of anonymous bulletin board posts made by its customers in "Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.", Congress added an immunity provision to the CDA to avoid such third party liability in the future. Section 230(c)(1) of the CDA reads: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Section 230(e)(3) establishes that this immunity provision preempts any inconsistent causes of action established under state or local law.
Arguments.
New Jersey alleged that Orbitz and TicketNetwork committed acts of deception, fraud, misrepresentation, and other violations of the Consumer Fraud Act by advertising tickets for sale that they could not have possessed at the time they were listed, some of which referred to seats that did not exist in the concert venue. The state also claimed that Orbitz and TicketNetwork violated applicable regulations by "falsely implying that they had possession and control over the advertised tickets" and by advertising tickets for sale prior to general public availability and tickets to seats that did not exist in the concert venue.
As a defense, Orbitz and TicketNetwork argued that they were providers of an interactive computer service and their users were information content providers, so the § 230(c)(1) immunity provision preempted plaintiffs' state law claims. The state responded that Orbitz and TicketNetwork were ineligible for § 230(c)(1) immunity because the state law claims treated them as "commercial actors" rather than publishers or speakers, and because their active participation in the creation of the ticket listings qualified them as "information content providers" rather than merely "interactive computer services."
Opinion of the court.
Providers of an interactive computer service?
The court found "no issue" with the claim that the defendants qualify as providers of an interactive computer service under the CDA. It cited several cases for the proposition that the category includes website operators, then concluded that this issue required "no further discussion."
Commercial actors or publishers?
The court held that the defendants' status as "commercial actors" did not deny them the protections of the CDA. The court began its discussion of this issue with a reminder that, although CDA immunity is most often used to preempt defamation claims, it has also been applied to a variety of other causes of action including housing anti-discrimination laws and negligent publication of advertisements. In the court's view, the title or wording of the cause of action is not dispositive of whether a defendant is acting as a "publisher or speaker." Rather, CDA § 230(c)(1) precludes liability where "the duty that the plaintiff alleges the defendant violated derives from the defendant's status or conduct as a 'publisher or speaker.'"
As such, the court rejected the plaintiffs' argument that the CDA did not apply because its claims treated the defendants as "commercial actors." It compared the argument to one rejected in "Barnes v. Yahoo!", and quoted the Ninth Circuit court's explanation that the CDA covers "any activity that can be boiled down to deciding whether to exclude material that third parties seek to post online." The court went on to cite "Donato v. Moldow", a New Jersey appellate decision holding that the CDA's language was intended to "promote the development of e-commerce" and prevent websites from being taken down by litigation. Therefore, the court concluded that the defendants' activity fell "squarely within the CDA's purview."
Information content providers?
The court rejected the state's argument that Orbitz and TicketNetwork were information content providers for the purposes of CDA § 230 immunity. First, the court discussed two other CDA § 230 cases: "Donato", mentioned above, and "Carafano v. Metrosplash.com, Inc." The plaintiff in "Donato" argued that the defendant became an information content provider by selectively deleting certain posts from the bulletin board he operated, thereby shaping the content of the forum. The New Jersey Appellate Division court disagreed, finding that the defendant exercised "a publisher's traditional editorial functions," which are "the very conduct Congress chose to immunize by § 230," and held that he qualified for immunity. In "Carafano", the defendant operated a dating website that required users to fill in a standard form, including several multiple-choice questions, in order to complete their profiles. The plaintiff argued that, by determining in advance which answers its users could choose, the defendant participated in the "development" of the information, making him an information content provider. The Ninth Circuit court rejected this theory, holding that a defendant's editing or selection do not render him a provider as long as the "essential" content is provided by a third party.
Next, the court examined the control that Orbitz and TicketNetwork exercised over their sites' content. Orbitz's control was largely formal, with requirements as to where Orbitz's name, logos, and other design elements should be located, but Orbitz also retained the ability to insert certain links and request removal of content. TicketNetwork provided payment services, customer service, and confirmation emails, and performed some level of verification of events and brokers.
Finally, the court concluded that the Orbitz and TicketNetwork were not information content providers. In its view, the defendants' actions were "nothing more than the exercise of a publisher's traditional editorial functions," as in "Donato" and "Carafano". The inaccurate/misleading ticket information originated not from defendants, but from third-party sellers. The court distinguished "Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, LLC", a case in which the defendant service was denied CDA § 230 immunity because it was "actively participating in the objectionable content" by requiring users to provide certain information in violation of a state anti-discrimination statute in order to register. Here, the objectionable content complained of (the fraudulent listings) was not supplied, required, or requested by the defendants, who provided a mere interface that did not violate any laws in and of itself. The court also distinguished "NPS LLC v. StubHub, Inc.", another case involving online ticket sales, because the defendants in that case "materially contributed to the illegal 'ticket scalping' of its sellers."
Disposition.
The court granted the defendants' motions for summary judgment, finding that they "help to create and maintain a vibrant, competitive, market" for consumers of travel and concert tickets shopping online, consistent with Congress's intent in enacting § 230 of the CDA.


Kodak Wildlife Photographer of the Year


Stone Mountain Freeway

Stone Mountain Freeway is a freeway in the north-central part of the U.S. state of Georgia. It connects Interstate 285 (I-285) east of Atlanta, with the suburbs of Stone Mountain and Snellville before transitioning into an arterial road that continues to Athens. The freeway is signed as U.S. Route 78 (US 78) for its entire length, with the western half signed as State Route 410 (SR 410), and the eastern half also being signed as SR 10. It begins at the US 29/US 78 split northeast of Decatur, and continues east through eastern DeKalb and southern Gwinnett counties.
Route description.
Stone Mountain Freeway begins at an interchange with US 29/SR 8 (Lawrenceville Highway) on the Scottdale–North Decatur city line, within DeKalb County. There is no access to US 29/SR 8 north from Stone Mountain Freeway or to Stone Mountain Freeway from US 29/SR 8 south. Southwest of this interchange, US 29/US 78/SR 8 head toward Decatur. Stone Mountain Freeway travels to the northeast, concurrent with US 78 and SR 410. The concurrency has a partial interchange with Valley Brook Road and North Druid Hills Road. Just before leaving Scottdale is an interchange with Interstate 285 (I-285). Part of this interchange is within the city limits of Clarkston. The two highways travels to the north of Clarkston and enter Tucker. They have an interchange with Brockett Road and Cooledge Road and then Mountain Industrial Boulevard. After leaving Tucker, they have an interchange with SR 10 (Memorial Drive). At this interchange, SR 410 meets its eastern terminus, and SR 10 begins a concurrency with US 78 and Stone Mountain Freeway. They have an interchange with SR 236 (Hugh Howell Road). A little bit later is an access road to Stone Mountain Park's main entrance. Right after the park, the highways enter Gwinnett County and have a partial interchange with Park Place Boulevard and Rockbridge Road. Just to the east of this interchange, the freeway ends and US 78/SR 10 continue to the east, locally known as Stone Mountain Highway.
West of Exit 1, the speed limit is . East of the interchange with Valley Brook Rd., the limit rises to . Unlike Georgia's Interstate highways, the highway still has actual sequential exit numbers, rather than being mileage-based. There is no exit 6, which makes the exit numbering non-sequential.
All of Stone Mountain Freeway is included as part of the National Highway System, a system of roadways important to the nation's economy, defense, and mobility.
History.
Stone Mountain Freeway was under construction in 1967 along the same alignment as it travels today. By 1970, the highway was completed.
Controversy.
The Stone Mountain Freeway shares state route number 10 with Freedom Parkway, a road in central Atlanta that connects with the Interstate Highway System at a major interchange on I-75/I-85 (the Downtown Connector). As that designation suggests, state officials originally intended the Stone Mountain Freeway to continue west, through Decatur, Druid Hills, and Candler Park, to downtown Atlanta. In pursuit of those plans, in 1969, the GDOT purchased an X-shaped swath of land designed to carry two roads: I-485, traveling from west to east, and another freeway connecting what are now SR 400 to the north and I-675 to the south.
Neighborhood groups and local preservationists worked together to block road construction of the highways. After 20 years of litigation and political maneuvering, community groups and state and local officials in 1991 compromised and set much of the state-purchased right-of-way aside as parkland, later named Freedom Park. The land proposed as the interchange of the two cancelled highways, by then, had become the site of the Carter Center.
Freedom Parkway – the last vestige of the planned downtown link of the Stone Mountain Freeway – opened in 1994.


Raging Cow

Raging Cow was a line of milk-based beverages created by Dr Pepper/Seven Up. The five flavors were Berry Mixed Up, Chocolate Caramel Craze, Chocolate Insanity, Jamocha Frenzy, and Piña Colada Chaos.
The mascot of the beverage, an angry cow fed up with "boring milk", was also known as The Raging Cow.
Marketing controversy.
After the introduction of the beverage in March 2003, there was controversy over the strategy of marketing agency Richards Interactive to capitalize on the then-novel weblog phenomenon. Along with whimsical blogs "authored" by the product's barnyard mascots, six teenagers were hired to promote the drink in otherwise authentic blogs. Although the intent was to gain a stronger, more credible connection with the young target audience, adult observers saw the tactic as disingenuous and subversive and staged a boycott, which attracted press coverage. The campaign is now regarded as a failure.
Status of the beverage.
Since the protest began, the official Raging Cow website has gone offline. An official webpage about the beverage still existed at the Dr Pepper/Seven Up website until mid-2006. At first, the Raging Cow beverages were only available in a few cities across the United States, an example of test marketing. Additional information about the distribution of the beverage was never released. Currently, many Raging Cow vending machines are stocked with other Dr Pepper/Seven Up products. No official message was ever given regarding the end of production of the drink.


Richard Wright (author)

Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960) was an American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, who suffered discrimination and violence in the South and the North. Literary critics believe his work helped change race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century.
Early life and education.
Childhood in the South.
Richard Wright's memoir, "Black Boy," covers the interval in his life from 1912 until May 1936. Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on September 4, 1908 at Rucker's Plantation, between the train town of Roxie and the larger river city of Natchez, Mississippi. He was the son of Nathan Wright (c. 1880–c. 1940) who was a sharecropper and Ella (Wilson) (b. 1884 Mississippi – d. January 13, 1959 Chicago, Illinois) who was a schoolteacher. His parents were born free after the Civil War; both sets of his grandparents had been born into slavery and freed as a result of the war. Each of his grandfathers had taken part in the U.S. Civil War and gained freedom through service: his paternal grandfather Nathan Wright (1842–1904) had served in the 28th United States Colored Troops; his maternal grandfather Richard Wilson (1847–1921) escaped from slavery in the South to serve in the US Navy as a Landsman in April 1865.
Richard's father left the family when Richard was six years old, and he did not see Richard for 25 years. In 1911 or 1912 Ella moved to Natchez, Mississippi to be with her parents. While living in his grandparents' home, he accidentally set the house on fire. Wright's mother was so mad that she beat him until he was unconscious. In 1915 Ella put her sons in Settlement House, a Methodist orphanage, for a short time. He was enrolled at Howe Institute in Memphis from 1915 to 1916. In 1916 his mother moved with Richard and his younger brother to live with her sister Maggie (Wilson) and Maggie's husband Silas Hoskins (born 1882) in Elaine, Arkansas. This part of Arkansas was in the Mississippi Delta where former cotton plantations had been. The Wrights were forced to flee after Silas Hoskins "disappeared," reportedly killed by a white man who coveted his successful saloon business. After his mother became incapacitated by a stroke, Richard was separated from his younger brother and lived briefly with his uncle Clark Wilson and aunt Jodie in Greenwood, Mississippi. At the age of 12, he had not yet had a single complete year of schooling. Soon Richard with his younger brother and mother returned to the home of his maternal grandmother, which was now in the state capital, Jackson, Mississippi, where he lived from early 1920 until late 1925. His grandparents, still mad at him for destroying their house, repeatedly beat Wright and his brother. But while he lived there, he was finally able to attend school regularly. He attended the local Seventh-day Adventist school from 1920 to 1921, with his aunt Addie as his teacher. After a year, at the age of 13 he entered the Jim Hill public school in 1921, where he was promoted to sixth grade after only two weeks. In his grandparents' Seventh-day Adventist home, Richard was miserable, largely because his controlling aunt and grandmother tried to force him to pray so he might build a relationship with God. Wright later threatened to move out of his grandmother's home when she would not allow him to work on the Adventist Sabbath, Saturday. His aunt's and grandparents' overbearing attempts to control him caused him to carry over hostility towards biblical and Christian teachings to solve life's problems. This theme weaved through his writings throughout his life.
At the age of 15, while in eighth grade, Wright published his first story, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre," in the local Black newspaper "Southern Register." No copies survive. In Chapter 7 of "Black Boy", he described the story as about a villain who sought a widow's home.
In 1923, after excelling in grade school and junior high, Wright earned the position of class valedictorian of Smith Robertson Junior High School from which he graduated in May 1925. He was assigned to write a paper to be delivered at graduation in a public auditorium. Later, he was called to the principal's office, where the principal gave him a prepared speech to present in place of his own. Richard challenged the principal, saying "the people are coming to hear the students, and I won't make a speech that you've written." The principal threatened him, suggesting that Richard might not be allowed to graduate if he persisted, despite his having passed all the examinations. He also tried to entice Richard with an opportunity to become a teacher. Determined not to be called an Uncle Tom, Richard refused to deliver the principal's address, written to avoid offending the white school district officials. He was able to convince everyone to allow him to read the words he had written himself.
In September that year, Wright registered for mathematics, English, and history courses at the new Lanier High School, constructed for black students in Jackson—the state's schools were segregated under its Jim Crow laws—but he had to stop attending classes after a few weeks of irregular attendance because he needed to earn money for family expenses.
In November 1925 at the age of 17, Wright moved on his own to Memphis, Tennessee. There he fed his appetite for reading as he borrowed books from the segregated white library by convincing them he was assisting a white man; this also allowed him access to publications such as "Harper's", "Atlantic Monthly", and "American Mercury".
He planned to have his mother come and live with him once he could support her, and in 1926, his mother and younger brother did rejoin him. Shortly thereafter, Richard resolved to leave the Jim Crow South and go to Chicago. His family joined the Great Migration, when tens of thousands of blacks left the South to seek opportunities in the more economically prosperous northern and mid-western industrial cities.
Wright's childhood in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas shaped his lasting impressions of American racism.
Coming of age in Chicago.
Wright and his family moved to Chicago in 1927, where he secured employment as a United States postal clerk He used his time in between shifts to study other writers including H.L. Mencken, whose vision of the American South as a version of Hell made an impression. When he lost his job there during the Great Depression, Wright was forced to go on relief in 1931. In 1932, he began attending meetings of the John Reed Club, a Marxist Party literary organization. Wright established relationships and networked with party members. Wright formally joined the Communist Party and the John Reed Club in late 1933 at the urging of his friend Abraham Aaron. As a revolutionary poet, he wrote proletarian poems ("We of the Red Leaves of Red Books", for example), for "The New Masses" and other communist-leaning periodicals. A power struggle within the Chicago chapter of the John Reed Club had led to the dissolution of the club's leadership; Wright was told he had the support of the club's party members if he was willing to join the party.
In 1933 Wright founded the South Side Writers Group, whose members included Arna Bontemps and Margaret Walker. Through the group and his membership in the John Reed Club, Wright founded and edited "Left Front," a literary magazine. Wright began publishing his poetry ("A Red Love Note" and "Rest for the Weary" for example) there in 1934. There is dispute about the demise in 1935 of "Left Front Magazine" as Wright blamed the Communist Party despite his protests. It is however likely due to the proposal at the 1934 Midwest Writers Congress that the John Reed Club be replaced by a Communist Party sanctioned The First American Party Congress. Throughout this period, Wright continued to contribute to "The New Masses" magazine, revealing the path his writings would ultimately take.
By 1935, Wright had completed the manuscript of his first novel, "Cesspool", which was rejected by eight publishers and published posthumously as "Lawd Today" (1963). This first work featured autobiographical anecdotes about working at a post office in Chicago during the great depression.
In January 1936 his story "Big Boy Leaves Home" was accepted for publication in the anthology "New Caravan" and the anthology "Uncle Tom's Children", focusing on black life in the rural American South.
In February of that year, he began working with the National Negro Congress, speaking at the Chicago convention on "The Role of the Negro Artist and Writer in the Changing Social Order". His ultimate goal (looking at other labor unions as inspiration) was the development of NNC sponsored publications, exhibits and conferences alongside the Federal Writers' Project to put Negro artists to work.
In 1937, he became the Harlem editor of The Daily Worker. This assignment compiled quotes from interviews preceded by an introductory paragraph thus allowing him time for other pursuits like the publication of "Uncle Tom's Children" a year later.
Pleased by his positive relations with white Communists in Chicago, Wright was later humiliated in New York City by some white party members who rescinded an offer to find housing for him when they learned his race. Some black Communists denounced Wright as a "bourgeois intellectual." Wright was essentially autodidactic. He had been forced to end his public education to support his mother and brother after completing junior high school.
Throughout the Soviet pact with Nazi Germany in 1940, Wright continued to focus his attention on racism in the United States. He would ultimately break from the Communist Party when they broke from a tradition against segregation and racism and joined Stalinists supporting the US entering World War II in 1941.
Wright insisted that young communist writers be given space to cultivate their talents. Wright later described this episode through his fictional character Buddy Nealson, an African-American communist in his essay "I tried to be a Communist," published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in 1944. This text was an excerpt of his autobiography scheduled to be published as "American Hunger" but was removed from the actual publication of "Black Boy" upon request by the Book of the Month Club. Indeed, his relations with the party turned violent; Wright was threatened at knife point by fellow-traveler co-workers, denounced as a Trotskyite in the street by strikers, and physically assaulted by former comrades when he tried to join them during the 1936 May Day march.
Career.
In Chicago 1932, Wright began writing with the Federal Writer's Project and became a member of the American Communist Party. In 1937, he relocated to New York and became the Bureau Chief of the communist publication "The Daily Worker". He would write over 200 articles for the publication from 1937 to 1938. This allowed him to cover stories and issues that interested him, revealing depression era America into light with well written prose.
He worked on the Federal Writers' Project guidebook to the city, "New York Panorama" (1938), and wrote the book's essay on Harlem. Through the summer and fall he wrote more than 200 articles for the "Daily Worker" and helped edit a short-lived literary magazine "New Challenge." The year was also a landmark for Wright because he met and developed a friendship with writer Ralph Ellison that would last for years. He was awarded the "Story" magazine first prize of $500 for his short story "Fire and Cloud".
After receiving the "Story" prize in early 1938, Wright shelved his manuscript of "Lawd Today" and dismissed his literary agent, John Troustine. He hired Paul Reynolds, the well-known agent of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, to represent him. Meanwhile, the Story Press offered the publisher Harper all of Wright's prize-entry stories for a book, and Harper agreed to publish the collection.
Wright gained national attention for the collection of four short stories entitled "Uncle Tom's Children" (1938). He based some stories on lynching in the Deep South. The publication and favorable reception of "Uncle Tom's Children" improved Wright's status with the Communist party and enabled him to establish a reasonable degree of financial stability. He was appointed to the editorial board of "New Masses." Granville Hicks, a prominent literary critic and Communist sympathizer, introduced him at leftist teas in Boston. By May 6, 1938, excellent sales had provided Wright with enough money to move to Harlem, where he began writing the novel "Native Son," which was published in 1940.
Based on his collected short stories, Wright applied for and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which gave him a stipend allowing him to complete "Native Son." During this period, he rented a room in the home of friends Herbert and Jane Newton, an interracial couple and prominent Communists whom Wright had known in Chicago. They had moved to New York and lived at 109 Lefferts Place in Brooklyn in the Fort Greene neighborhood.
After publication, "Native Son" was selected by the Book of the Month Club as its first book by an African-American author. It was a daring choice. The lead character, Bigger Thomas, was a person bound by the limitations that society placed on African Americans. He gained his own agency and self-knowledge only by committing heinous acts.
Wright was criticized for his concentration on violence in his works. In the case of "Native Son," people complained that he portrayed a black man in ways that seemed to confirm whites' worst fears. The period following publication of "Native Son" was a busy time for Wright. In July 1940 he went to Chicago to do research for a folk history of blacks to accompany photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam. While in Chicago he visited the "American Negro Exposition" with Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps and Claude McKay.
He traveled to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to collaborate with playwright Paul Green on a dramatic adaptation of "Native Son." In January 1941 Wright received the prestigious Spingarn Medal of the NAACP for noteworthy achievement. His play "Native Son" opened on Broadway in March 1941, with Orson Welles as director, to generally favorable reviews. Wright also wrote the text to accompany a volume of photographs chosen by Rosskam, which were almost completely drawn from the files of the Farm Security Administration. The FSA had employed top photographers to travel around the country and capture images of Americans. Their collaboration, "," was published in October 1941 to wide critical acclaim.
Wright's memoir "Black Boy" (1945) described his early life from Roxie up until his move to Chicago at age 19. It included his clashes with Seventh-day Adventist family, his troubles with white employers, and social isolation. It also describes his intellectual journey through these struggles. "American Hunger", which was published posthumously in 1977, was originally intended by Wright as the second volume of "Black Boy." The Library of America edition of 1991 finally restored the book to its original two-volume form.
"American Hunger" detailed Wright's participation in the John Reed Clubs and the Communist Party, which he left in 1942. The book implied he left earlier, but he did not announce his withdrawal until 1944. In the book's restored form, Wright used the diptych structure to compare the certainties and intolerance of organized communism, which condemned "bourgeois" books and certain members, with similar restrictive qualities of fundamentalist organized religion. Wright disapproved of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge in the Soviet Union, but he continued to believe in far-left democratic solutions to political problems.
France.
Following a stay of a few months in Québec, Canada, including a lengthy stay in the village of Sainte-Pétronille on the Île d'Orléans, Wright moved to Paris in 1946. He became a permanent American expatriate.
In Paris, Wright became friends with French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, whom he met while still in New York, and he and his wife became particularly good friends with Simone de Beauvoir, who stayed with them in 1947. However, as Michel Fabre argues, Wright's existentialist leanings were more influenced by Soren Kierkegaard, Edmund Husserl, and especially Martin Heidegger. In following Fabre's argument, with respect to Wright's existentialist proclivities during the period of 1946 to 1951, Hue Woodson suggests that Wright's exposure to Husserl and Heidegger "directly came as an intended consequence of the inadequacies of Sartre's synthesis of existentialism and Marxism for Wright." His Existentialist phase was expressed in his second novel, "The Outsider" (1953), which described an African-American character's involvement with the Communist Party in New York. He also became friends with fellow expatriate writers Chester Himes and James Baldwin. His relationship with the latter ended in acrimony after Baldwin published his essay "Everybody's Protest Novel" (collected in "Notes of a Native Son"), in which he criticized Wright's portrayal of Bigger Thomas as stereotypical. In 1954 Wright published "Savage Holiday."
After becoming a French citizen in 1947, Wright continued to travel through Europe, Asia, and Africa. He drew material from these trips for numerous nonfiction works. In 1949, Wright contributed to the anti-communist anthology "The God That Failed;" his essay had been published in the "Atlantic Monthly" three years earlier and was derived from the unpublished portion of "Black Boy." He was invited to join the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which he rejected, correctly suspecting that it had connections with the CIA. Fearful of links between African Americans and communists, the FBI had Wright under surveillance starting in 1943. With the heightened communist fears of the 1950s, Wright was blacklisted by Hollywood movie studio executives. But in 1950, he starred as the teenager Bigger Thomas (Wright was 42) in an Argentinian film version of "Native Son."
In mid-1953, Wright traveled to the Gold Coast, where Kwame Nkrumah was leading the country to independence from British rule, to be established as Ghana. Before Wright returned to Paris, he gave a confidential report to the United States consulate in Accra on what he had learned about Nkrumah and his political party. After Wright returned to Paris, he met twice with an officer from the US State Department. The officer's report includes what Wright had learned from Nkrumah adviser George Padmore about Nkrumah's plans for the Gold Coast after independence. Padmore, a Trinidadian living in London, believed Wright to be a good friend. His many letters in the Wright papers at Yale's Beinecke Library attest to this, and the two men continued their correspondence. Wright's book on his African journey, "Black Power," was published in 1954; its London publisher was Dennis Dobson, who also published Padmore's work.
Whatever political motivations Wright had for reporting to American officials, he was also an American who wanted to stay abroad and needed their approval to have his passport renewed. According to Wright biographer Addison Gayle, a few months later Wright talked to officials at the American embassy in Paris about people he had met in the Communist Party; at the time these individuals were being prosecuted in the US under the Smith Act.
Historian Carol Polsgrove explored why Wright appeared to have little to say about the increasing activism of the civil rights movement during the 1950s in the United States. She found that Wright was under what his friend Chester Himes called "extraordinary pressure" to avoid writing about the US. As "Ebony" magazine delayed publishing his essay, "I Choose Exile," Wright finally suggested publishing it in a white periodical. He believed that "a white periodical would be less vulnerable to accusations of disloyalty." He thought the "Atlantic Monthly" was interested, but in the end, the piece went unpublished.
In 1955, Wright visited Indonesia for the Bandung Conference. He recorded his observations on the conference as well as on Indonesian cultural conditions in "The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference." Wright was enthusiastic about the possibilities posed by this meeting of newly independent, former colonial nations. He gave at least two lectures to Indonesian cultural groups, including PEN Club Indonesia, and he interviewed Indonesian artists and intellectuals in preparation to write "The Color Curtain." Several Indonesian artists and intellectuals whom Wright met, later commented on how he had depicted Indonesian cultural conditions in his travel writing.
Other works by Wright included "White Man, Listen!" (1957) and a novel "The Long Dream" (1958), which was adapted as a play and produced in New York in 1960 by Ketti Frings. It explores the relationship between a man named Fish and his father. A collection of short stories, "Eight Men," was published posthumously in 1961, shortly after Wright's death. These works dealt primarily with the poverty, anger, and protests of northern and southern urban black Americans.
His agent, Paul Reynolds, sent strongly negative criticism of Wright's 400-page "Island of Hallucinations" manuscript in February 1959. Despite that, in March Wright outlined a novel in which his character Fish was to be liberated from racial conditioning and become dominating. By May 1959, Wright wanted to leave Paris and live in London. He felt French politics had become increasingly submissive to United States pressure. The peaceful Parisian atmosphere he had enjoyed had been shattered by quarrels and attacks instigated by enemies of the expatriate black writers.
On June 26, 1959, after a party marking the French publication of "White Man, Listen!," Wright became ill. He suffered a virulent attack of amoebic dysentery, probably contracted during his 1953 stay on the Gold Coast. By November 1959 his wife had found a London apartment, but Wright's illness and "four hassles in twelve days" with British immigration officials ended his desire to live in England.
On February 19, 1960, Wright learned from his agent Reynolds that the New York premiere of the stage adaptation of "The Long Dream" received such bad reviews that the adapter, Ketti Frings, had decided to cancel further performances. Meanwhile, Wright was running into added problems trying to get "The Long Dream" published in France. These setbacks prevented his finishing revisions of "Island of Hallucinations," for which he was trying to get a publication commitment from Doubleday and Company.
In June 1960, Wright recorded a series of discussions for French radio, dealing primarily with his books and literary career. He also addressed the racial situation in the United States and the world, and specifically denounced American policy in Africa. In late September, to cover extra expenses for his daughter Julia's move from London to Paris to attend the Sorbonne, Wright wrote blurbs for record jackets for Nicole Barclay, director of the largest record company in Paris.
In spite of his financial straits, Wright refused to compromise his principles. He declined to participate in a series of programs for Canadian radio because he suspected American control. For the same reason, he rejected an invitation from the Congress for Cultural Freedom to go to India to speak at a conference in memory of Leo Tolstoy. Still interested in literature, Wright helped Kyle Onstott get his novel "Mandingo" (1957) published in France.
Wright's last display of explosive energy occurred on November 8, 1960, in his polemical lecture, "The Situation of the Black Artist and Intellectual in the United States," delivered to students and members of the American Church in Paris. He argued that American society reduced the most militant members of the black community to slaves whenever they wanted to question the racial status quo. He offered as proof the subversive attacks of the Communists against "Native Son" and the quarrels which James Baldwin and other authors sought with him. On November 26, 1960, Wright talked enthusiastically with Langston Hughes about his work "Daddy Goodness" and gave him the manuscript.
Wright died in Paris on November 28, 1960, of a heart attack at the age of 52. He was interred in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Wright's daughter Julia has claimed that her father was murdered.
A number of Wright's works have been published posthumously. In addition, some of Wright's more shocking passages dealing with race, sex, and politics were cut or omitted before original publication of works during his lifetime. In 1991, unexpurgated versions of "Native Son," "Black Boy," and his other works were published. In addition, in 1994, his novella "Rite of Passage" was published for the first time.
In the last years of his life, Wright had become enamored of the Japanese poetic form haiku and wrote more than 4,000 such short poems. In 1998 a book was published ("Haiku: This Other World") with 817 of his own favorite haiku. Many of these haiku have an uplifting quality even as they deal with coming to terms with loneliness, death, and the forces of nature.
A collection of Wright's travel writings was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2001. At his death, Wright left an unfinished book, "A Father's Law," dealing with a black policeman and the son he suspects of murder. His daughter Julia Wright published "A Father's Law" in January 2008. An omnibus edition containing Wright's political works was published under the title "Three Books from Exile: Black Power; The Color Curtain"; and "White Man, Listen!"
Personal life.
In August 1939, with Ralph Ellison as best man, Wright married Dhimah Rose Meidman, a modern-dance teacher of Russian Jewish ancestry. It was a short-lived marriage that ended a year later.
On March 12, 1941, he married Ellen Poplar ("née" Poplowitz), a Communist organizer from Brooklyn. They had two daughters: Julia, born in 1942, and Rachel, born in 1947.
Ellen Wright, who died on April 6, 2004, aged 92, was the executor of Wright's estate. In that capacity, she sued a biographer, the poet and writer Margaret Walker, in "Wright v. Warner Books, Inc." She was a literary agent, numbering among her clients Simone de Beauvoir, Eldridge Cleaver, and Violette Leduc.
Legacy.
"Black Boy" became an instant best-seller upon its publication in 1945. Wright's stories published during the 1950s disappointed some critics who said that his move to Europe had alienated him from African Americans and separated him from his emotional and psychological roots. Many of Wright's works failed to satisfy the rigid standards of New Criticism during a period when the works of younger black writers gained in popularity.
During the 1950s Wright grew more internationalist in outlook. While he accomplished much as an important public literary and political figure with a worldwide reputation, his creative work did decline.
While interest in "Black Boy" ebbed during the 1950s, this has remained one of his best selling books. Since the late 20th century, critics have had a resurgence of interest in it. "Black Boy" remains a vital work of historical, sociological, and literary significance whose seminal portrayal of one black man's search for self-actualization in a racist society strongly influenced the works of African-American writers who followed, such as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison.
It is generally agreed that the influence of Wright's "Native Son" is not a matter of literary style or technique. Rather, this book affected ideas and attitudes, and "Native Son" has been a force in the social and intellectual history of the United States in the last half of the 20th century. "Wright was one of the people who made me conscious of the need to struggle," said writer Amiri Baraka.
During the 1970s and 1980s, scholars published critical essays about Wright in prestigious journals. Richard Wright conferences were held on university campuses from Mississippi to New Jersey. A new film version of "Native Son," with a screenplay by Richard Wesley, was released in December 1986. Certain Wright novels became required reading in a number of American high schools, universities and colleges.
"Recent critics have called for a reassessment of Wright's later work in view of his philosophical project. Notably, Paul Gilroy has argued that 'the depth of his philosophical interests has been either overlooked or misconceived by the almost exclusively literary inquiries that have dominated analysis of his writing.'" "His most significant contribution, however, was his desire to accurately portray blacks to white readers, thereby destroying the white myth of the patient, humorous, subservient black man."
Wright was featured in a 90-minute documentary about the WPA Writers' Project entitled "Soul of a People: Writing America's Story" (2009). His life and work during the 1930s is highlighted in the companion book, "Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America".