8/19/2020 There is probably no other opening as deeply studied as the Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense. It is crucial to know this opening well, if you want to improve your chess skills. But we are lucky because former World Champion Garry Kasparov took a very close look at the Najdorf: on three DVDs he offers more than 10 hours of entertaining and encouraging material to master this opening. This week, all three DVDs are available in a bundle for a reduced price. Moreover, one lucky buyer will win a DVD signed by Garry Kasparov in a raffle.

The Najdorf system in the Sicilian Defence has a legendary reputation as a defensive weapon for Black. It is an opening where people often strive for a full point, instead of simply defending the position with the black pieces. Many great players have contributed to the development of this complex opening. There were two world champions who formed much of their careers using the Najdorf system as their weapon of choice against 1.e4: Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov celebrated spectacular successes with it. Both players used the Najdorf (pronounced ny-dorff, rhyming with high-dwarf) during their child prodigy years and retained it as an important part of their repertoire during their entire careers.

For Garry Kasparov this added up to experience with the Najdorf at the very highest levels of chess. For chess amateurs and professionals alike it is a great moment when the worlds leading expert shares all the secrets in his favourite opening. In part one Garry Kasparov introduces the various sub-systems of the Najdorf, including the central Poisoned Pawn variation. The development of each line is placed in historical perspective and examined in great depth, with Kasparovs characteristic intensity. More than two 2.5 hours of first-class private tuition. The package includes the latest ChessBase 9.0 Reader, a big reference database featuring more than 16,000 Najdorf games, as well as a complete opening book that can be used to practice what you have learnt with Fritz.

System Requirements:

Minimum: Dual Core, 2 GB RAM, Windows 7 or 8.1, DirectX11, graphics card with 256 MB RAM, DVD-ROM drive, Windows Media Player 9, ChessBase 14/Fritz 16 or included Reader and internet access for program activation. Recommended: PC Intel i5 (Quadcore), 4 GB RAM, Windows 10, DirectX11, graphics card with 512 MB RAM or more, 100% DirectX10-compatible sound card, Windows Media Player 11, DVD-ROM drive and internet access for program activation.

Last week we had the ChessBase Master Class Bundle 1-12on offer and raffled away three signed DVDs by Vishy Anand and Vladimir Kramnik. Here is the video of the raffle with the help of our cats. Well, at least it felt like they helped:

Congratulations to the three lucky cats! The DVDs are on their way and should arrive in one of the next two weeks.

Anyway, whoever buys the "How to play the Najdorf - 1-3 Bundle"this week (until Sunday, August 23, 2020 / 23:59 CEST) automatically gets the chance to winoneDVDof "Deep Fritz 13" signed by Garry Kasparov! A huge treat!

Good luck!

Read the original here:

Play the Najdorf with the help of Garry - Chessbase News

This feature is coordinated by The Post-Standard/Syracuse.com and InterFaith Works of CNY. Follow this theme and author posted Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.

Mindfulness meditation can be very healing and nourishing. It is an opportunity to be with whatever is present within us, without being carried away. Our mindful breathing is our anchor, and whenever thoughts arise, we accept them without judgement. We simply recognize them, smile to them and allow them to pass, like clouds moving across a windy sky.

By becoming the observer and being mindful of our thoughts, feelings and emotions, we dont get lost within them. Then, we have the chance to choose how to respond or act. So many of our problems, traumas, anxieties and fears are based in our minds, at times dwelling in the past or conditioned by the past and then negatively anticipating the future.

The decision to make the present moment into your friend is the end of the ego. The ego can never be in alignment with the present moment. Eckhart Tolle

Samia Al-Fareh, who serves InterFaith Works as an employment development specialist, is also a certified legal, medical and mental health Arabic interpreter.

View post:
CNY Inspirations: Take a seat and observe - syracuse.com

-Toni Morrison

2020 is precisely the time for artists to go to work.

This is especially true of Solo Artists because we possess a unique bravery and vulnerability that incites inspiration and triggers transformation.

Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrisons powerful quote above contains the medicine that our world needs to truly heal. A vaccine may kill the virus, but how will we kill the bigotry, eradicate the divisiveness, and murder the ignorance and passivity that has brought us to this point as a civilization?

One of the most powerful healing serums that I know of is Art, and more specifically, Solo Art.

There are so many deep wounds and agonizing issues in our world that desperately need illumination and a call to action from artists and audiences alike.

Yet, in all of the chaos, pain, and loss that this year has brought, many solo artists have become completely disconnected with the artist within.

If you are a solo artist who feels separated from your artistry due to the trials and tribulations of this year, then I hope that this article will aid you in finding your way back to creative connection.

To begin, lets take a moment to accept what is .

-Eckhart Tolle

There is great empowerment to be found in Echkhart Tolles quote above. Yet, it can be so deeply painful and wildly terrifying to be here now in this present moment that many solo artists are looking back at 2019 with nostalgia and grief. Others are fantasizing about the saving grace that 2021 may bring. The very last thing that many of us want to do is accept the reality of 2020.

However, if we forgo the present moment to reminisce on the past or dream of the future, then how can we possibly create and share art that brings healing and transformation into this current circumstance?

Yes, we are in a tumultuous and uncertain time. That is our current collective reality. And it is true that as solo artists, our artform looks nothing like it used to because audiences can no longer safely sell out theatres and hear our stories in person.

That is a painful reality to accept, indeed. Therefore, allow yourself to acknowledge the creative losses you have endured this year. Have grace for yourself in the artistic actions you took or did not take in the months since the pandemic struck. And, most importantly, allow yourself to really feel your feelings about all of this.

If we feel it, we can heal it, and then we can truly move forward.

Once we step into this present circumstance and accept what is, the next step is to acknowledge what is unacceptable in our world.

-John Scott

As solo artists, we are not meant to be in a codependent relationship with our art or our audiences. We are not writing, creating and performing in order to people please and play it safe. No. We are called to shake things up, to say the hard things that need to be said, to speak our truth, and to boldly shed light on what is unacceptable.

One of the gifts in disguise that 2020 gave us was an acute awareness of just how many things are unacceptable in our society and in this world. Use this moment in time to acknowledge for yourself what those unacceptable things are from your unique point of view as a solo artist.

Once you have allowed yourself to accept what is, identify what is unacceptable, then the next step in this New Normal is to take meaningful creative action as a solo artist.

Be still and ask yourself

What can I do as a solo artist in this present moment to illicit transformation of what is unacceptable to me? What do I have to say as a playwright and performer that will contribute to this important conversation?

-Martin Luther King Jr.

After you sit in silence listening for the answer, really trust the inuitive answer that comes up for you, and be silent no more.

Breaking your silence as an artist can take many forms as you start to find your voice again, so take it one meaningful step at a time.

The answer could be as simple as researching an online solo theatre class and beginning to educate yourself on this genre so that you can one day powerfully perform your show.

Maybe you already have a show written and the answer for you is applying to a festival or other performance opportunity to share your story with the world.

Perhaps your answer is that you need more time to be in a creative pause, but you want to support someone else who is livestreaming their solo show about a subject matter that you want to raise awareness.

Whatever the answer was for you, just remember to trust your inner artist and know that This is precisely the time when artists go to work.

To conclude, please find encouragement and inspiration from this list of resources below of upcoming solo theatre related events and opportunities.

Jessica Lynn Johnson

Founder & CEO of Soaring Solo LLC

SoaringSoloArtist@gmail.com

A livestreaming festival at the whitefire theatre this Fall season featuring the solo shows of black solo artists. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO ON THE BLACK VOICES FESTIVAL

Award winning Director & Developer, Jessica Lynn Johnson, hosts an evening of brand new solo show excerpts. This enticing program will be livestreaming from the Whitefire Theatre and will rotate 6 superb Solo Artists in and out throughout the night. This event will be monthly and solo artists are encouraged to submit to future salons by emailing SoaringSoloArtist@gmail.com or CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO ABOUT THE SOARING SOLO SALON.

Join BEST NATIONAL SOLO ARTIST WINNER Jessica Lynn Johnson EVERY HUMP DAY @ 9AM (PST) on ZOOM for ISOLATE. MEDITATE. CREATE!

This is a 100% free guided meditation & writing prompt experience is designed to keep you healthy, connected and creative EVERY HUMP DAY during STAY AT HOME and who knows, maybe you will even write your one person play with the content you create.

CLICK HERE TO ATTEND ISOLATE MEDITATE CREATE and obtain the Zoom link and password.

No matter where you are in the creation of your solo show, idea phase, curiosity phase, full draft written, touring the festival and college market,BEST NATIONAL SOLO ARTIST & Founder of Soaring Solo, Jessica Lynn Johnson, will meet you where you are at and take you to the next level! All that is required to attend is a willingness to explore, a pen, and some paper. No previous writing or performance experience necessary, and no need to have written anything to bring to class. Each week Jessica will guide you in exercises to help generate and stage NEW material! So come and meet other creatives in a supportive space for expression and exploration! The class is ongoing and so you may pop in and out as you please as long as you RSVP by clicking here for this FREE ONE PERSON PLAY CLASS.

The best way to CREATE a solo show is to SEE solo shows! Jessica Lynn Johnson has proudly Directed & Developed over 100 solo shows in her solo theatre career and is still going strong! She would absolutely love to have you join her and the rest of the Soaring Solo Community at any of the following upcoming LIVESTREAMING solo shows she has had the honor of creatively collaborating on.

CLICK HERE FOR A ROSTER OF UPCOMING LIVESTREAMING SOLO SHOWS

The 7th Annual Solo Performer Empowerment Weekend is an extended week-end of workshops and panels tailored to empower and enhance the careers of solo performers in particular, and an event full of information to benefit all performers.

The event is presented by the Los Angeles Womens Theatre Festival (LAWTF) via Zoom, Friday Sunday, August 28 30, 2020.

Tuition for the weekend is $25. This discounted tuition is made possible in part by support for this program provided through the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Arts Development Fee Program.

A Zoom link will be sent to those who have completed registration.

CLICK HERE TO FOR MORE INFO & TO RSVP FOR THIS EVENT!

Jessica brings her 15+ years of solo theatre expertise to work privately with solo artists from all over the world on an as needed basis.

1 on 1 coaching and consultation is for you if

-You are curious about creating a solo show, but you need writing prompts to help you generate material.

You are tossing around ideas for your solo show, but you need some accountability and encouragement to commit those ideas to the page.

-You have already written some material, but you need expert feedback on editing, story structure and play formatting.

-You have a great first draft, but need guidance on how to utilize multimedia and solo theatre technique in order to make your show a dynamic piece of solo theatre.

-You already premiered your solo show and now you want some tips on how to tour colleges and festivals, and garner accolades and great reviews!

-You have heard great things about Jessicas work and youre curious about hiring her as a Director & Developer for your solo show, but first, you want to feel her out and see if she is the right fit for you and your project.

Wherever you may find yourself on your solo journey, Jessica will help you overcome whatever immediate obstacle stands between you and your solo success.

If you resonated with many of the things on this list, then take the next step by emailing

SoaringSoloArtist@gmail.com for more information.

Read the original:
2020: The Year of the Solo Artist - noho arts district

As I, like many Britons, brave an obstacle course of Covid tests, quarantine threats and pesky QR codes in the run-up to my fix of European summer sun, one question tuts at the back of my mind. Am I a fool for not settling on a staycation this once?

Particularly given the warm admiration I feel for those entrepreneurial holidaymakers setting up tents on Britains open moorland, heathered hillsides and even beaches to nab the best sunbathing spot. Not that I will be joining them. My Mediterranean holiday is booked and I havent been camping since my bronze Duke of Edinburgh award, a miserable puddle of a memory that still makes me shudder.

Like Scarlett OHara vowed never to go hungry, my 15-year-old snowflake self made a personal promise to never again be so damp. But thats where the glamping weekend trend preys ingeniously on the spoiled and troubled psyche of the millennial jet-setter. One of Britains most hipster hotel groups, Hoxton, has taken over Eynsham Hall to launch a luxury glamping experience aimed at 30-somethings this summer (they may run more dates, so watch this space).

Yurt-style tents have been erected across the gardens of the 18th-century hunting-pile-turned-hotel in Oxfordshire, which is currently closed as it prepares for a relaunch in 2022 (those seeking peace and quiet need not fret as, currently, no refurbishment works are under way).

But for the billowing white ceilings of canvas fabric and the odd flying ant scaling the walls (staff can spray down tents on request), they are pretty much like walking into any Hoxton hotel room from the king-size bed decorated with teal velvet pillows to the copper-brushed light fixtures and easy chairs. Hoxton signature mugs and a kettle sit atop the minibar, which, presumably thanks to a tentsized loophole in the new hotel room regulations, was loaded with a complimentary bottle of Douro Valley wine and the usual array of alcoholic miniatures. Each tent even has its own private rain shower and loo in a building next to the main house.

Amazing glamping sites in England for a perfect post-lockdown staycation

After a panicked moment searching for a socket to charge my two phones (what is the point of glamping if not to make believe at switching off without having to actually switch off), I kitted up with one of the campsites bicycles to explore the grounds. This was a delightful race-around with pauses to watch rabbits dive between the foxgloves, and lambs graze in the fields beyond.

Eynsham Hall is a 3,000-acre estate, but it is surrounded by private land, and the main road out of it isnt particularly cycle-friendly, so those who wish to explore further are better doing so on foot. The village of North Leigh has various footpaths perfect for ramblers. Turning off into one, I found myself suddenly on top of a slope peering across Oxfordshires green and golden hills. The footpaths led me deeper into the country, deserted apart from the odd blackberry picker and grass-munching horses.

Britain's most gloriously spacious campsites

Back at base, the evening started with a complimentary open bar. Just one drink on the menu, but it was a good un: white port with forest fruit and rosemary-infused tonic. As I sipped my ice-cold cocktail while sunbathing on the grass, but for Oxfordshires verdant rolling hills, I could have been on the Algarve. My sunset, however, was more redolent of Ibiza: Roberts radio automatically tuned to Smooth Chill percolating languorous synth tunes, as I leafed through one of the campsites hip self-help books (that bible for burnt-out 30-somethings, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle).

But one of the greatest highlights is cooking up a feast on your tents private barbecue. At a reasonable supplement, guests can order food boxes in advance, cooking up gourmet burgers with black treacle cured bacon and tomato marmalade, or jerk chicken with rum sauce. I went for the Banging Veggie BBQ Selection if only out of curiosity would it really compare to blackened hot dogs and juicy rump steaks? I was in fact pleasantly bowled over by the glories of corn on the cob smeared with truffle butter, ras el hanout marinated cauliflower steak with tahini and pomegranate dressing and halloumi brioche burgers.

At 8pm, the staff light the campsites fire pits, so bring your marshmallows and sticks and round off the evening gazing into the stars. I was slightly sad they werent selling any in the lobby shop just branded hoodies in 32C (90F) sun.

Aimed at those who like their fresh country air washed down with cocktails on the South Bank, Camp Hox stays can be twinned with an overnight stay at the brands newest London property in Southwark; it is still buzzing in the wake of lockdown, if not as heaving as before. Reserve well in advance to enjoy Londons longest oyster menu at its high-rise restaurant Seabird, and then take in the glittering views of the city from your hotel room, remembering how the sheep were rousing you from your slumber, as natures alarm clock, just hours before. Can a summer holiday in Europe top it? Im not so sure

Two nights at Camp Hox plus one night at The Hoxton, Southwark, costs 370 for two people. Extra nights available on request (camphox.com).

The best hotels in Oxfordshire

Sleep in a bell tent or tipiin the manicured grounds of 17th-century St Giles House in Dorset until the end of August. Cloud Nine is run by the same people behind Boardmasters festival, soexpect (socially distanced) activities such as archery, guided walks, paddleboarding, kayaking and silent discos. Street food and bar pop-ups will continue the festival feel.

Tents from 132 pernight (cloudnineglamping.com)

A new tour operator offering luxury guided expeditions in the Scottish Highlands will launch this October. Wildnis, founded by ex-Army captains, combines outdoor activities think packrafting and scrambling with hotel-like comforts, such as bell tents, open-fire feasts from Michelinstandard chefs and Land Rover Defenders. Tours also available in Norfolk and Cornwall.

Four-night expedition, 3,000 per person, all-inclusive (wildnis.co.uk)

These beachcomberchic yurts sit atop the golden sands at Lusty Glaze, a privately owned bay edged with powder blue huts near Newquay. You can be swimming in the sea one minute and drinking some local white wine around a fire pit the next. There are plenty of nearby coastal walks, too.

Three-night stay for two, 810 (lustyglaze.co.uk)

Read more from the original source:
A glam summer escape in Oxfordshire that might just convert the most sceptical of camper - Telegraph.co.uk

Instead of comparing your happiness with other peoples projection of happiness, its important to know what fulfills you what fills up your cup. It sounds obvious but it really isnt, and id be the first one to admit that I have lived my life in comparison to a model of success that I was conditioned to feel. This doesnt even take personal responsibility away from me, I chose to accept those conditions, I believed them.

And heres the disclaimer for life: were here to experience those conditions, were here to experience life as life, and its impossible to avoid these experiences.

A lot of personal growth mentality focuses on this idea that you can transcend the boundaries and suddenly become a person that never experiences hardship again, when in fact, the transcendence occurs when you learn to accept the hardship and value it. Its how you deal with hardship that frees you to be fulfilled; the very root of the word passion comes from the Latin word for pain. Passion is something that we are willing to suffer for because we know itll lead us to fulfillment, and its necessary to suffer in pain to get to where you want to go, because without suffering we wouldnt know what it was to be joyous, and we wouldnt gain the lessons that we need to ensure that it doesnt happen again; we wouldnt have the chance to set our personal boundaries.

Of course, children who accept conditioning in their environment dont actively choose it, they do so because their survival depends on it, the same can be said of any adult that is not being given their personal freedom under an oppressive power structure. They have to align with their primary caregivers because if they dont then they risk being ostracised, and ostracisation from the primary caregiver is likely to lead to severe hardship, or quite likely, death.

As we grow and evolve though, our choices become less about survival and more about acceptance and adherence to our own codes of beliefs, passions, and conditions: what we want from life.

By now we have worked out, as a race, that there is no set way to do things. At least some have. This Earth is full of diverse and wonderful cultures and none of them are more important or the right way to do things; they just are, and variety is the spice of life, and thats all wonderful. In fact, I believe that all cultures on this Earth contribute to the whole understanding of what it is to be human. The Universe expresses itself in vast and complex different ways and all forms of life are the limitlessness of the Universe (or God) expressed in form. Its our prerogative if we want to transcend the form and see the beauty thats inherent in all things. Because theres always beauty.

Right?!

Quite simply then, it doesnt matter what you do, it only matters how you do it, and whether its suited to the beliefs and passion that fulfill your life; what lights you up.

Its all well and good to say that, but how do we go about finding that in the muddle of modern life?

* * *

I believe one of the worst things to get lost from Western culture is the ceremony around becoming an adult.

We have kept a semblance of this in terms of moving out of home at around eighteen, however this puts a weird kind of materialistic slant on becoming an adult; you can only become an adult if you have the material means to do so. Its the mastery of personal destiny that separates a juvenile being from an adult being. Its making decisions in and around hardship not because they make you immediately happy but because they are necessary for the thread of fulfillment of your life, and therefore provide you longevity around happiness. We all know the happiness you get from drinking four glasses of wine to relax, and its a great happiness to be drunk with loved ones, yet come the next morning it might be a little less glamorous.

Are you providing fulfillment to yourself, or are you self medicating?

Having said that, Ive had wonderful drunken nights with such stimulating conversation and experience that I woke up the next morning feeling, hungover yes, but grateful and expanded. The difference being that getting drunk and having those experiences aligned with the thread of my life.

So what keeps us in juvenile spaces?

The subconscious beliefs around safety and security that we formed, quite rightly, during childhood that have gone un-investigated in adulthood. These beliefs underlie many of our thoughts, words, and actions and we dont even know that theyre there. Then we end up thinking in despair:

Why is it that this keeps happening to me?

The Work is merely four questions; its not even a thing. It has no motive, or strings. Its nothing without your answers. These four questions will join any program youve got and enhanced it. Any religion you have theyll enhance it. If you have no religion, they will bring you joy. And theyll burn up anything that isnt true for you. Theyll burn through to the reality that has always been waiting. ~ Loving What Is ~ Byron Kelly ~

For me, Byron Kelly is saying that we all have a truth that underlies the things that we have learnt make us secure in this world, things that are valid and sometimes need to be kept, but shes saying, at the very least, investigate these things and work out whether they are true for you. If they are, wonderful!

Whenever I make a tough decision I almost always sit with the question until I feel what is right to do, and I believe that everyone does this because you simply cannot act in ways that you dont agree with on some level. Even in times of extreme hardship, we are being tested to continue along with the life that suits us best.

This is why its so important to understand your inner workings; what makes you tick; what lights you up; what are your passions.

People of a more spiritual persuasion might say: whats your soul contract? or Whats your true path?

I resonate with those things but I dont find it essential for you to, because thats my path, not yours. I know what my thread is, and Id love you to know the same.

* * *

So that is a little bit of an out-standing view of the world, however what about the in-standing view?

How do we gain this kind of clarity and vision of beauty about our own selves?

Lets accept that we cannot delve fully into the humongous arena of thought that goes along with self-growth, and personal progression, but an introductory conversation might start with these things:

The scale of vibrational energy relates to The Abraham-Hicks Emotional Guidance Scale. The underlying principle of this is considered in many different cultures of knowledge, one of them being quantum physics which describes that all things in this Universe can be described as one of two things:

Space,

or,

Matter.

When broken down to its fundamental pieces matter was found to be the same side of the coin as energy. Einsteins famous equation proved it:

Energy and matter are two sides of the equation which means they are equal.

So if everything is either energy or space, then what are the understandings we have around them?

This scale explains that emotions sometimes described as energy in motion, vibrate at different frequencies, and this can be observed in the body:

Sit with yourself and take a couple of deep breaths.

Now think about something that makes you stressed.

Observe anything that changes in your body, dont judge them, just see that they are.

Now think of someone or something that you absolutely adore.

Observe anything that changes in your body, and equally important is that you dont judge them, just see that they are.

When I think about being stressed my chest constricts, and I start feeling weighty and constricted. These words already exist in our language: Its so common to describe a challenging situation as weighing me down or I feel like its dragging me down or I feel like im drowning as if the scenario is creating weight that is pushing you beneath the surface of an imaginary water line.

I find this fascinating.

When I think of someone or something that I love I soar, Im free, expanded, and I feel that I can achieve more.

Theres an idea that made its way into popular phrase that says that: When she stepped into a room, the room lit up.

This is common around celebrity figures but not necessarily confined to them, I believe we all have that person in our lives that lights us up, that we look forward to seeing because we know theyll just get us. The conversation flows, and I believe a big explanation for this is that the emotions flow at similar frequencies.

This is an expansive subject and ill be talking about energy a lot, but lets leave that there as an introductory look at energy.

Space is so important.

The 5 elements of the Earth are:

Earth

Fire

Water

Air

Void (space) some call it sky.

Theres a zen idea of the void element of the Universe:

What we call the spirit of the void is where there is nothing. It is not included in mans knowledge. Of course, the void is nothingness. By knowing that things exist, you can know that which does not exist. That is the void. People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not understand must be the void. This is not the true void. It is bewilderment. ~ The Book Of The Five Rings ~ Miyamoto Musashi.

Space is the ability to be aware of something; its the void of luminescent darkness. Its really difficult to actually communicate in words. If youve achieved a good level of meditative skills you might resonate with this concept as the peaceful nothingness of just being in meditation; without thought or circumstance; the life force.

It allows the observer to observe the observer (themselves); it allows you to understand what it is that youre going through as youre going through it.

You might say that that sounds just like the thinking mind, but space isnt the thinking mind because it allows an observation of the thinking mind too.

The ego is always on guard against any kind of perceived diminishment. Automatic ego-repair mechanisms come into effect to restore the mental form of me. It is much more interested in self-preservation than in the truth. ~ A New Earth Create a Better Life ~ Eckhart Tolle ~

Space is the observation of truth. Space just is.

* * *

So how do these aspects help us to find the thread of our existence?

Finding the thread of our existence is sometimes challenging, sometimes easy. The essential fact is that the information is already inside you, and evident in all of your previous actions. Theres nothing an article could tell you about your thread because your thread is unique to you.

If you can get to the place where you understand your out-standing experiences; your environment, and your in-standing experiences; your feelings, then you will reach a level of harmony and balance where the purpose of your life, or at the very least your passions and what lights you up, will be so clear, or it will start to become clear.

Thats a really important point, never give up on the sense that your life is working for you, that this universe is a kind and cooperative universe, because it is, if you want to see it that way. If things arent clear, know that they will become clear.

Finally:

Firstly, understand the adventure Secondly, begin living the adventure.

Once youve learned about your car and the road, it still remains up to you to get into the drivers seat, turn the key, put it in gear, and go! ~Infinite Possibilites The Art Of Living Your Dreams ~ Mike Dooley

Previously published on The Ascent, a Medium publication.

***

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Read more:
The Thread of Your Existence - The Good Men Project

In a recent podcast, Does the Moon Exist if No One is Looking at It?, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor interviewed philosopher and computer programmer Bernardo Kastrup. Dr. Kastrup has been, in Dr. Egnors words, leading a modern renaissance of metaphysical idealismthat is, reality is essentially mental rather than physical.

Of course, Kastrups view is parts ways with the dominant materialist perspective in science. But growing numbers in science are becoming curious about or comfortable with his panpsychist perspective. In the interview, he is sympathetic to the basic intuitions behind intelligent design theory but he and Egnor have very different conceptions of what underlies the universe.

Michael Egnor: And so can consciousness have evolved by a Darwinian mechanism?

Bernardo Kastrup: I think by definition it cannot. By the way we define matter, it could not have evolved because it performs no function. Our physicalist account of reality entails that it is the measurable quantitative properties of matter that are causally efficacious. In other words, its mass, spin, charge, momentum that leads to effects, that leads to the dynamisms of nature, to the chains of cause and effect. And consciousness, that qualitative state that seems to accompany the quantitative dynamics of physicality, by definition cannot have causal efficacy

Thats the definition of consciousness and matter under a physicalist metaphysics. So if it cannot produce an effect, if its something that simply accompanies the material dynamisms of the world, it could not have been favored by natural selection. And then of course, what materialist Darwinists would say is that it doesnt need to have an effect in order to evolve. Even if it has no selective advantage, it could still have evolved. And I think this basically renders evolutionary theory, unfalsifiable. Because if something, as presumably complex as consciousness can evolve, even if it has no function, even if its not selected by natural selection, then anything at all could have evolved and we might as well just throw our arms up and start over.

Michael Egnor (pictured): Thats actually a fascinating perspective because what youve described is in fact, what Darwinists tend to suggest, that consciousness is epiphenomenal. But youre right. If something as remarkable as consciousness could take place without natural selection, then anything could take place without natural selection, and then what role does natural selection have in the explanation for nature?

Bernardo Kastrup: Exactly. You see, theyre forced into two alternatives. One, consciousness is strongly emergent. In other words, its something that comes into being only when there is sufficient physical complexity, like the complexity of the brain. In other words, consciousness is something very complex. So they may appeal to that, but then they cannot explain why that complexity that leads to consciousness evolved because presumably its a very different type of complexity than the complexity required to manipulate data at the cognitive level, without accompanying experience. Theres no reason to think that these two complexities are the same. Theyre incommensurable.

So the other alternative they have is to say, well, it doesnt need to be very complex for consciousness to accompany physical dynamisms and therefore it could have just come along, even if it was not selected for, because it doesnt need to be complex. Well, that immediately puts you on the field of panpsychism, cosmopsychism, and idealism, which also defeats materialism. So its very difficult to see how the metaphysics of materialism can survive together with newer Darwinism. I personally think that its the metaphysics of materialism that we have to get to rid of.

Note: Kastrup has clashed with Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne on this topic. See: No, consciousness cannot be just a byproduct: Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup responds to biologist Jerry Coynes claim that consciousness could be a mere by-product of a useful evolved trait.

Michael Egnor: What do you think of intelligent design theory?

Bernardo Kastrup (pictured): I do not know enough about it to really make an intelligent comment. I am ashamed to confess to this. But what I read about it, the limited reading I spent on this, suggests to me that there is nothing crazy about it. It seems a very reasonable thing to imagine that there are organizing principles in nature that have a causal influence on the organization of genomes in the course of evolution. And that we may not be aware of these organizing principles yet. I mean, thats a fundamental assumption in science, that there are patterns of organization out there that we dont know yet. Thats why we do research. Thats why you try to find out more about how the universe works.

So I think it is reasonable to imagine that the supposedly random mutations at the root of evolution may after all, not really be random, they may comply to certain patterns of organization, some organizing principles in nature, that we still do not know very well. I would say that evolution by natural selection does happen in the sense that species evolve into other species through the accrual of genetic mutations. But I think to say that these genetic mutations are random at root is a baseless statement to make. We just do not have enough data to run a randomness test to see if these mutations are really random. For all we know they are following certain coherent and consistent patterns through the course of evolution. And we do not know what the causal agency behind those patterns might be, but I think its prudent to say that we do not know as opposed to saying that well, they are definitely random, because thats something we simply cannot know. Its just a prejudiced statement by definition.

Note: Kastrup and Egnor discussed atheist philosopher Jerry Fodors book, What Darwin Got Wrong (2010), in which Fodor (19352017) discussed the vacuity of natural selection as a concept. Kastrup offered some thoughts from his own work on evolutionary paradigms, sing computer programs:

Bernardo Kastrup: My own perspective, and this is not Fodors perspective, my own perspective is that materialists have used the concept of natural selection as if it was a force in nature. That is, as if it was a level of explanation. And I believe, and Fodor or seemed to come at it from this perspective, that natural selection is not a level of explanation. It doesnt mean anything. What means things is the physical constraints that each organism has as to what its capable of doing and the natural history of that organism and the population that its in. Natural selection is nothing above and beyond that

What I can share with you is that, my first PhD back in 2001, half a life ago, was in computer engineering. And I did run for a while in my life, experiments, computing experiments with genetic algorithms, cellular, [inaudible 00:11:35], neural networks, but applying an evolutionary paradigm to that. So as to force a certain architecture or a certain optimization structure to change and adapt according to some cost function that was determined by the surrounding environment in that computer simulation. And it was impressed on me from that time, that fitness principles clearly seem to happen in those simulations.

If you change the function that gives you the cost, you get completely different organizational structures, completely different paths for solving a problem. So Im not skeptical of that. What I am skeptical of is the randomness of the mutations that underlie the process. My intuition is that the mutations arent random. Randomness after all, is just an acknowledgement of causal ignorance. Everything in principle is caused, but when we dont know what the cause is, and we cant discern any pattern, we say its random. But thats all there is to it, its ignorance. I suspect there are organizing principles that steer the mutations down some roots, some avenues that may increase an overall cost or reduce an overall cost function or a teleological target, so to say. This is what I suspect.

Later, Kastrup offered some thoughts on how he understands God:

Bernardo Kastrup: I dont think God is self-reflective. I dont think it is metacognitive. I dont think it tells itself, Oh, Im doing this now. And Im going to do that. I dont think thats whats going on. I think there are experiential states underlying nature, they are felt. They may be even omniscient. But I tend to think they are instinctive, not premeditated. So when I say its getting warm or getting cold, what I mean is the universe may instinctively knows whether things are going a direction that is not planned because there is no planning, but which minimizes, some felt cost function, or maximizes it some felt desire function. And it never knows beyond what is right in front of it. But it knows whether whats happening right now is conducive to that increased pleasure or reduced cost or not.

And it may influence things. There may be an organizing principle that influences things based on this experiential instinctive reaction at the most fundamental level of nature. This is what Im suggesting.

Michael Egnor: And its kind of an interesting perspective that falls out of our conversation that strikes me as something quite relevant, is the richness of the idealistic perspective on metaphysics. In contrast with the materialist perspective. Theres so much profound, fascinating stuff in the idealist perspective and materialism is really just an impoverished mistake.

Note: Here is a paperBernardo Kastrup has published on panpsychism.

Further reading on panpsychism:

Consciousness cannot have evolved. How many joules of consciousness would make you a human instead of a chimpanzee? How many more joules of consciousness would make you a genius?

Why is science growing comfortable with panpsychism (everything is conscious)? At one time, the idea that everything is conscious was the stuff of jokes. Not any more, it seems.

Why some scientists believe the universeis conscious.Theyre not mystics. But materialism is not giving good answers so they are looking around

No materialist theory of consciousness isplausible.All such theories either deny the very thing they are trying to explain, result in absurd scenarios, or end up requiring an immaterial intervention.(Eric Holloway)

Panpsychism: You are conscious butso is your coffee mug.Materialists have a solution to the problem of consciousness, and it may startle you.

How can consciousness bea material thing?Maybe it cant. But materialist philosophers face starkly limited choices in how to view consciousness.

and

Can machines begiven consciousness?A prominent researcher in consciousness studies offers reasons for doubt.

Podcast Transcript for Download

See the original post:
Why Consciousness Couldn't Just Evolve from the Mud - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Have you ever stood in the skin-care aisle of your favorite beauty store and felt enthralled and yettotally bewildered? Were living in the glory days of skin care, with more options than ever before, with a growing number of influences and innovations, be it a hybrid formula or a new moisturizing technique (really). But even so, some classics remain untouchablethink household names like Cetaphil Daily Facial Cleanser ($6) and Clinique Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion ($28). So where does skin care go from here? And is it time for you to switch things up? We decided to scope things out.

Lets start with the familiar. Many old-school productsincluding those mentioned above, as well as Ponds Cold Cream, Dove Beauty Bar, and Olay Beauty Fluidhave achieved their status as skin-care classics in part because of their gentle formulations. Were they to have a group motto, it would be: First, do no harm.

Their chosen ingredients are gentle for nearly all skin types and can calm and improve skin on a very basic level, improving moisture and hydration, explains Rachel Nazarian, MD, a dermatologist at Schweiger Dermatology in New York City. Hydrated skin may not seem dramatic, but it can make a very drastic difference in the quality of skin.

Instead of being tricked out with actives or making near-unbelievable product claims, the majority of these formulas simply give skin what it needs on a more fundamental level than, say, your average serum. The basics never go out of style, agrees cosmetic chemist NiKita Wilson. Theyre the reliable workhorses of the average skin-care routine. (It doesnt hurt that they tend to be available at mass retailers, too.)

Still, newer ingredients inevitably come to the forefrontparticularly when they contain a cocktail of active ingredients. Some of the most popular actives, such as vitamin C, retinol, and vitamin E, will never go out of style, says Wilson. Brands may not call them out, but because they are so efficacioustried-and-true, [with] decades of studiesthey will always have a home, she explains. Many brands can and do highlight them, though, in accordance with the level of consumer education. The more you hear about the brightening benefits of vitamin C, for example, the more likely youll see L-ascorbic acid highlighted as a star ingredient in a product.

The upside here is that theres not much overlap between these super-effective actives and gentle staples. As Dr. Nazarian mentioned, the classics are rooted in more basic tasks. As long as youre satisfied, theres no reason to ditch your moisturizer if youre simply adding a vitamin C serum to your routine. And some ingredients that have only recently become buzzy, like hyaluronic acid, have low-key been around for decades.

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However, that doesnt mean theyre without room for improvement. Take vitamin C, which is notoriously unstable. Formulators are now exploring equally effective yet more stable forms of it, such as tetrahexyldecyl ascorbate (THD ascorbate). This allows for high efficacy and stability without additional supporters and boosters needed, says Dr. Nazarian. That sort of flexibility will give an ingredient more staying power.

In other cases, however, the drawbacks lead to entire categories being replaced. Products that remove surface hydration, disrupt the natural moisturizers of the skin, or threaten the microbiome of our skin are [becoming less popular and] being replaced by gentler, smarter alternatives that support our natural skin state, says Dr. Nazarian. That makes sense, seeing as the rise of probiotics and subsequent chatter about the microbiome has made everyone much more conscious of their skin barrier.

For that reason, notes Dr.Nazarian, both scrubs and harsh alcohol-based toners are outleaving the door wide open for acids. Glycolic, lactic, and salicylic acids, among many others, are the new guard of exfoliants. Though acid exfoliation is popular right now, years of research and proven efficacy make these ingredients reliable, says Wilson.

Among the big trends in skin care over the last decade, clean beauty stands out. Its what Wilson believes will challenge the skin-care industry for years to comeas well as stringent formulation rules set by clean-beauty retailers like Credo Beauty, Follain, and NakedPoppy. We no longer can use ingredients that we have relied on forever to create stable, texturally interesting formulas that are effective, Wilson explains. Ingredient stories come and go, but getting the actual formulas right pose the biggest issues.

Already, clean beauty has assumed the role of gatekeeper for what makes it into new products. For instance, hydroquinone, octinoxate, and oxybenzone are ingredients that have fallen out of favor due to safety concerns, says Wilson.

Hydroquinone, a skin-brightening ingredient popular among dermatologists, has already been banned by the EU, Japan, and Australia, although the FDA still permits it in certain concentrations here in the United States. Meanwhile, octinoxate and oxybenzone are sunscreen actives that are on many brands banned lists because of safety and environmental concerns, says Wilson.

And thats just the beginningthere are microplastics, artificial colorants, and other harmful ingredients to consider. Even if the powers-that-be (i.e. the government) are slow to adjust their standards, many beauty brands are doing the work for them based on pressure from informed consumers.

Another factor in the future of skin care is the social media conversation. Whether its a debate about whether certain molecular sizes of hyaluronic acid cause dryness or the safety of ingredients like polyethylene glycol, the comment section is something to which peopleand brandspay attention.

While that can be a good thing in terms of education, with consumers having greater knowledge of what they put on their skin, theres no fact-checking system for the dialogue. The same goes for influencers, which is especially worrisome to Dr. Nazarian. Influencerswith no formal training or understanding of dermatology and skin functionare able to spotlight specific products and brands often based on sponsorship alone, she says. This makes it more challenging for good, science-backed, effective products to gain attention.

Thats a big deal when youre talking about skin care versus makeup. Skin is an organ, no less important than our eyes, our lungs, our heart, says Dr. Nazarian. Its important to let facts and science determine what deserves our attention, energy, and, of course, our financial support. The upside, however, is that these conversations still serve as a direct line to brands, informing and influencing formulations to come.

The nice thing about skin care is that theres always room for improvement, be it in terms of speed, experience, or simplicity. The next frontier will be to satisfy the budding demand for clean formulations amid the onset of new challenges to skin health, like exposure to blue light. Thats one skin concern that Wilson is particularly excited to tackle as she creates new cosmetic formulas. There are a couple of ingredients surrounding blue light that got me very excited because the story was more than just an antioxidant play, she explains. It actually showed how blue light affects the skin.

Nazarian, on the other hand, is bullish about ingredients for mature skinnamely, peptides. These small-chain amino acid proteins are able to effectively send messages to our cells and alter how it behaves, she says. They have the capacity to soften wrinkles and expression lines and boost collagen production.

No matter what exciting ingredients or formulations are in store, its still comforting to know that we can always count on the classics while testing out the next big thing. And there might be an even better version coming sooner than you think.

More:
How the History of Skin Care Pushes the Industry Forward - Well+Good

Summarizing the history of a 175-year-old magazinethat's 5,107 editions with 199,694 pages containing 110,292,327 words!into a series of graphics was a daunting assignment. When the hard drive with 64 gigabytes of .pdf files arrived at my home in Germany, I was curious to dig in but also a bit scared: as a data-visualization consultant with a background in cognitive science, I am well aware that the nuance of language and its semantic contents can only be approximated with computational methods.

I like to start by brainstorming concept ideas and data-discovery questions and immersing myself in the available materials. To get inspired, I read samples of the magazine across the decades, marveling at the old illustrations and typefaces. I set up a data-preprocessing pipeline early on to extract the text from the .pdf files and run the first analyses. I used Jupyter Notebooks (a flexible programming environment for data exploration) with the spaCy Python library (which uses computational linguistics to turn mere character sequences into a structured representation of language) as well as the pandas package (a tool kit for processing large amounts of numeric data easily and quickly).

A central question in any data-science project is how wide a net one casts on the data set. If the net is too coarse, all the interesting little fish might escape. Yet if it is too fine, one can end up with a lot of debris, and too much detail can obscure the big picture. Can we find a simple but interesting and truthful way to distill a wealth of data into a digestible form? The editors and I explored many concept ideas: looking at sentence lengths, the first occurrences of specific words, changes in interpunctuation styles (would there be a rise of question marks?), and mentions of persons and places. Would any of these approaches be supported by the available data?

It soon became apparent that any texts from the predigital era of Scientific American (before 1993) are to some degree affected by optical character-recognition (OCR) errors. Reconstructing the original text from images is an inherently noisy process where letters can be mixed up (for instance, substantially was often parsed as snbstantlally), words might be combined or split at the wrong places, or multicolumn layouts might be read in the wrong order. Accordingly, zooming out on the data-analysis lens to a yearly perspective (rather than working on the level of individual editions) and analyzing the count of single words (rather than looking for compound terms or doing sentence-level analyses) became our sweet spot in the trade-off space between accuracy and robustness against noise.

My first intuition was to focus on what has been written about, but working with the data, I became especially intrigued by looking at the how: the evolution of verbs, adjectives and adverbs. These word types can tell so much about how the tone and attitude of the original magazine have changed from the engineering-driven, mechanistic language to the multifaceted science magazine we know today.

Another key insight was learning that there is actually very little variety in the vocabulary used in the English language. Given that the frequency of words in a language (and in the corpus of Scientific American's text archives) is so skewed, rather than comparing raw numbers of how often words occur, it became far more compelling to look at how the proportion of text a word occupies each year (its relative frequency) evolves over time.

Based on this central idea, we explored many different visual formsword clouds, stack area graphs, line charts, animations, spatial maps of semantic spacesbefore settling on the layered stacked area chart for the opening spread as the overview visualization. This high-level view of the major shifts in vocabulary, shown as sediment layers, is complemented by the individual miniature line charts showing the evolution of each top peaking word per year.

Making dense chart arrangements effortlessly scannable requires conscious visual design choices. Reinforcing the shape of the line chart with a continuous color scale may seem like a redundant decoration, but it is perceptually quite effective because it allows us to quickly see if a word is old or new without studying the line shape in detail. In addition, the color associations (gray/brown representing the mechanistic, vintage past, compared to a fresh, modern purple for the present) help to tie data semantics and visual form together.

Doing data science means having to live with imperfections. No model can be a 1:1 reproduction of reality, and some of the data still remains mysterious to me. For instance: Why does the use of substantially drop so substantially after 1868? (I suspect some OCR errors in connection with new typefaces.) Others are launching points for investigation: Why did tomato peak so heavily in 1978? Each new discovery instigates curiosity, and I encourage others to view this data set not as an objective and final measurement but as inspiration for new questions.

Explore the data yourself at http://www.scientificamerican.com/interactive/science-words

Originally posted here:
How to Turn 175 Years of Words in Scientific American into an Image - Scientific American

The chicken or the egg which came first? Tourists or locals?

Santa Fe has been a destination since the 16th century with the arrival of Spanish conquistadors looking for gold and religious converts, leaving a footprint as big as the Southwest across New Spains northern provinces.

From the beginning, we have been a tourist town. Santa Fe was such a draw that its name was affixed first to the main trail west of Missouri and then to a railroad that didnt even pass through Santa Fe.

We have become a local conglomeration mixed in a petri dish of DNA, customs, styles, tastes, likes and dislikes. Blame for the tensions now present in town belongs to no one in particular, yet all of us are living in a pressure cooker of uncertainty, hopes and fears.

Will our small businesses survive? Will we emerge from the pandemic in good health? Will we even recognize many of the components of the old normal? What will the new normal be like?

My fear, like many, is that the fabric of our economy could unravel to such an unprecedented degree that the stitching composed of the millions of small businesses will not withstand the pressures of their foundations being laid bare to the elements of the current economic storm.

Will Lowes and Home Depot squeeze out Big Jo True Value Hardware and Alpine Builders Supply? Or will our local businesses turn toward one another and get on the same economic bandwagon? Could the new normal become an economy still based on small, individually owned restaurants and retail establishments, small businesses like the Inn on the Alameda?

Could the new normal be even better? Quite possibly, America will yearn to rebuild in the old tradition, create a better environment with defined hipness and pride associated with shopping locally.

Maybe this COVID-19 experience will scare us all the way back to the past and what we recall as better times, when business owners recognized their customers by name. This will take commitment on our communitys part to pay a little more to maintain who we are.

Maybe a great starting place should be a friendly acknowledgment of others with more of a smile than a scowl, even while wearing a mask.

The inn is coming back to life, slower it seems than other properties, we believe, because we hitched our wagon to a more mature clientele, guests who do not want pay-per-view or room service, who arrive with books about Bandelier, Santa Fe, the pueblos, our art and culture.

These older profile guests are more health conscious during this pandemic. Hence they are more reluctant to travel right now.

I am at a loss to think of any better approach to craft the new normal than in terms of how we have defined ourselves over centuries of socioeconomic evolution a vast blanket of small businesses covering the land.

Joe Schepps is the president and co-owner of the Inn on the Alameda and has lived in New Mexico for 50 years.

More:
Where will the new normal take this tourist town? - Santa Fe New Mexican

Aug. 18, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

Transcript

Into America

Into Black Women and the 19th Amendment

Joe Biden: You ready to go to work?

Kamala Harris: Oh, my God, I am so ready to go to work.

Trymaine Lee: Kamala Harris is ready to get to work.

Harris: My mother knew that she was raising two Black daughters who would be treated differently because of how they looked. Growing up, whenever I got upset about something, my mother would look me in the eye and ask, "So, what are you gonna do about it?"

Lee: As Joe Biden's VP pick, she'll be the first Black woman to appear on the presidential ticket for a major political party. And if the Biden-Harris ticket wins this fall, Harris will be the country's first female vice president, putting her closer to the Oval Office than any other woman in history. She'll stand on the shoulders of the women who came before her, people like Shirley Chisholm.

Shirley Chisholm: I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States of America. (APPLAUSE)

Lee: And build on the legacy of women like Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton: Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you it's got about 18 million cracks in it. (APPLAUSE)

Lee: Harris's nomination comes the same year that the country is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which prohibited voting discrimination based on sex. The irony here though is that Kamala Harris wouldn't have really been part of that victory.

I'm Trymaine Lee and this is Into America. Tuesday marks 100 years since the ratification of the 19th Amendment, but that milestone, despite the work done by women of all races for the right to vote, was mostly a win for white women. Today, we're looking at the role Black women played in leading the charge for full voting rights for all Americans and the impact of that work on today's politics.

Martha Jones is one of the leading voices when it comes to understanding Black women's political participation. She's a legal and cultural historian, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of a new book out this September called Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.

When we hear about the suffrage movement, we often hear about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but there are women missing. In particular, Black women are missing. What have you found about the role of Black women pushing and fighting and grappling with the suffrage movement itself and the right to vote?

Martha Jones: The first thing I learned is that if I looked for Black women in suffrage associations like those led by Stanton and Anthony, I would find some, but it would be very few. And so the first lesson really was to follow Black women where they were. It turns out they are in their churches, they are in anti-slavery societies, they are in civil rights organizations.

And when we follow them there, we discover that Black women are as engaged as any American women around questions of political power, are as interested as any in how to win voting rights, among other things. And why did we overlook them? Well, in part, because Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, beginning in the 1880s, write a history of women's suffrage.

And they privilege, if you will, their own story, their own part of the movement, and don't in fact follow African American women into their own organizations. For a long time, we relied upon their history as the history. And we had to come back then and discover new facets of the story.

Lee: So, as they're kind of, you know, practicing some level of erasure in writing the story of it, Black women were pushing and doing their thing. Who were some of these women? And we hear now people talking about women needing, you know, a seat at the table.

Jones: Uh-huh (Affirm).

Lee: And then others are saying like, "You know what? Let's build our own table." (LAUGH)

Jones: Uh-huh (Affirm).

Lee: Were Black women at the time doing that?

Jones: Absolutely building their own tables. Even at the very earliest decades of the 19th century, a woman like Jarena Lee, not a household name, but a Black woman preacher in the AME church who stirs things up in the AME church and really battles for the right to preach, to have authority, to have a license.

This is a beginning for Black women of this story. Maria Stewart, a peer to Jarena Lee in Boston, by the 1830s, speaking at the podium, fiery as any speaker of the era. Calling not only for a more concerted campaign for civil rights for Black Americans, but Maria Stewart recognizes that to be a woman and do that requires she also speak, if you will, a kind of feminist or a womanist rhetoric as well.

By the time we get to the 20th century and Ida B. Wells, the great journalist and anti-lynching campaigner, also a suffragist. Mary Church Terrell, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women. And we could come forward all the way to the modern civil rights era. That is, too, part of the story. Fannie Lou Hamer, Septima Clark, Rosa Parks, all women who cut their political teeth in voting rights even as they did many things as activists.

Lee: So, let's jump to the 19th Amendment. White leadership had a very specific strategy. What was it and how did race play a role in that strategy?

Jones: The open secret of the 19th Amendment is that the language of the amendment will do nothing to interfere with the Jim Crow laws that are already keeping Black men from the polls and are now gonna keep Black women from the polls, poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses.

The premise, the understanding is that Southern states in particular will continue to have the authority to use their laws to keep Black women from the polls. And this is an open dimension of the deliberations around the 19th Amendment. It is what makes it possible, for example, to achieve ratification of the amendment in a state like Tennessee. Tennessee will still be able to disenfranchise Black women even after it ratifies the 19th Amendment.

Lee: Yeah, I wanted to ask that. So, we get to 1920 and the 19th Amendment is ratified. In practice, what did the 19th Amendment actually change? And do we have a sense of how Black women at the time, given all the nuance, view the passage of the amendment?

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Jones: So, the-- the amendment strikes the word male from state laws and local laws across the country. No longer must you be a male person in order to vote. That's powerful. It's like the 15th Amendment that had stricken race from the formal laws around voting across the United States.

But Black women know that you don't have to say race and you don't have to say sex in order to disproportionately keep them from the polls. So, even before we get to the summer of 1920, Black women across the country are organizing in citizenship schools and suffrage schools where they are training one another in how to overcome the state law barriers that they are going to confront.

So, how do you pay a poll tax? What is a literacy test? What is an understanding test, right? These are the kinds of things that, in suffrage schools, Black women are going to learn to confront. And by the time we get to September and October of 1920, when the registrations rolls open for the first time across the country to American women, Black women are going to show up throughout the country and test the limits of the 19th Amendment, test their own capacities to overcome the hurdles that are laid in front of them.

And it will lead to a very, very uneven landscape for Black women who, in some cities, will in fact be able to register. I've written about St. Louis in Missouri and Danville in Kentucky. These are places where Black women successfully register and can cast ballots in 1920.

But I've also written about Daytona, Florida, and Florida more generally, where even those Black women who manage to register are going to face violence and intimidation that will mean risking their lives in order to get to the polls. And many of them will miss the opportunity to vote.

Lee: And I want to go back to something I just heard you mention, these suffrage schools. Were they, like, informally set up? How were they funded? Like, let's (LAUGH) jump back into that because I don't think many people have ever heard of a suffrage school. I know I haven't.

Jones: So, some of them are run by branches of the National Association of Colored Women. So, local women's clubs are sponsoring suffrage schools. Black women's YWCAs sponsoring suffrage schools. So, Black women are activating the political networks that they have already built by this time and now transforming them into suffrage schools.

One of the things I love about the school in St. Louis is that men show up also because Black men think, "Well, maybe this is the opportunity for me to learn how to overcome the barriers that have kept me from the polls." And so, while they are founded in the interest of getting women to the polls, Black men also show up and turn out to register in this year.

And so, it is a kind of resurgence. But, to your question, these are old networks, some of which go back all the way to the Civil War and the relief work that African American women had done across the country to support Black soldiers and Black refugees during the Civil War.

It's become part of a national network by the 1890s. And then Black women can activate that network. I'd say it's not going too far to suggest that those networks in churches, in YWCAs, in Black women's clubs, are still the networks, right, on the ground today mobilizing voters across the country.

Lee: You know, when we unpack and dig into all of the movements for rights, there are the names we know, right, and the names that have been lost to history, but played a meaningful role none the less. And in your book, Vanguard, you found a personal connection and the names of some women in your lineage who have been connected to civil rights and voting rights. Tell us about what you found in terms of that personal connection.

Jones: You know, I got very self-conscious as I was finishing Vanguard that the women whose pictures hang on my wall every day, (LAUGH) I didn't know their stories. And so, I take a kind of detour to try and understand my own grandmother, Susie Jones, born in Kentucky at the end of the 19th century, the daughter of a formerly enslaved woman.

And I follow her story. She's in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1920. She's a young mother. I can see her mother as an activist, but I can't quite see Susie. I follow her eventually to Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1926, when her husband, David, becomes president of the Black women's college in that city, Bennett College.

And I still can't figure out if she voted. I go to the state archives and it turns out nobody has saved the records. We can't really tell that early history of women's votes with the kind of detail, right, that I would like to have, which is my question, did my grandmother vote.

But by the 1950s and certainly by 1960, the young women at Bennett College are registering voters in the city of Greensboro. And there's my grandmother recounting that history. The word she uses is she was thrilled. And I realize that by following her story, it was a lesson in how to tell Black women's history of the vote, that it couldn't stop in 1920.

Maybe I'll never know if she voted in 1920, but that in fact, for her, the story continues all the way until the modern civil rights era, until 1960, 1965, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. And this is a chapter that Black women, like my grandmother and many thousands of others, write on their own because, of course, they are the women who remain disenfranchised even after the 19th Amendment.

Lee: When we come back, Martha explains how Black women continue their fight for full voting rights and the power that comes with those rights. Stick with us.

Lee: We're back with Martha Jones. So, between then, the suffrage schools, and now where we see the structural mechanisms kind of being built and expanded upon, but in the years after the 19th Amendment was passed, how did Black women continue to organize and build around those structures?

Jones: There's a major figure who enters the scene in 1920 and that is Mary McLeod Bethune from Daytona, Florida, the educator who comes to Washington D.C. to found the National Council of Negro Women. Now Bethune is really going to try and create a robust structure that will bring together all sorts of Black women's organizations.

But more importantly, Bethune, who had cut her teeth politically getting Black women to the polls in 1920, is coming to Washington to do a different kind of politics. By the '30s, she is working inside the Roosevelt Administration. She's going to help Franklin Roosevelt establish his Black Cabinet.

Why is this important? Because Bethune knows that there's more than one way to win political power and influence. And she comes from a state where Black people are disenfranchised, Florida, but Roosevelt can appoint her to leadership within the federal government, especially in the new New Deal agencies that are providing relief from the Depression across the country.

So, what I love about Bethune is that she's deeply committed to voting rights, but she's not gonna wait until she has the vote to exercise political power. She's gonna build political power through patronage, through networks, through federal appointments, and bring many, many Black women with her to the nation's capital, where they will use federal resources to help bring Black communities out of the scourge of the Depression.

Lee: I could literally probably name two dozen women who walk in the footsteps of those great women, who are organizing in the front lines today. But how have things evolved? How has the organizing evolved? Or is it the same playbook that had some success in the past?

Jones: Well, I do think those networks, when we observe that Black women vote as a bloc frequently, 94%, 95%, 96% of Black women, that is a reflection, I think, of these old networks and their evolution. They still exist in this time. But of course, once we get to 1965 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, now we have the polls forthrightly opened to African Americans, including Black women.

We have, by 1968, figures like Shirley Chisholm coming into American politics. So now that grassroots, everyday Black woman voter is a companion to Black women who are going to begin to hold office, shape policy. That is the fruits that I think we are witnessing today in 2020. And that really takes hold undeniably after 1965.

Lee: You know, sometimes we've seen throughout history, and we talked about this a bit, that even our quote/unquote allies are actually racist and working against us. Think about (LAUGH) Susan B. Anthony and such. But I wonder, getting up to the Voting Rights Act of '65, did we begin to see some solidarity or coalition building between Black women and white women in particular?

Jones: Yes. The civil rights era grows out of a long moment of interracial cooperation that begins before the Second World War. So, Black and white women have built new kinds of relationships politically. It's no longer the inequality and the disparities of the suffrage movement.

Now there is the expectation of equality. And we can tell the stories of heroic African American women who do, in fact, have allies in some white women in the modern civil rights movement. I think that's undeniable. And at the same time, I think that there is a persistent question about power and politics inviting the sense that some folks are on top and some folks are in charge, and others are not.

And so, you know, when we read the words of a Shirley Chisholm or a Barbara Jordan, right, these path-making Black women who come to Congress, they are challenged with, if you will, explaining themselves, right, making themselves legible to white Americans generally, but including white women, because these are women who have not come to be subordinate.

These are not women who have come to defer at all. And I think we're still grappling with the reckoning of what it means for African American women to be subordinate to no one in American politics. And as our numbers grow, both as voters clearly, but also increasingly as officeholders, white Americans, men and women, maybe some Black men as well, I'd say, Americans have to rethink their old ideas about what politics looks like and about who should be in charge.

Lee: You know, despite the thorns and daggers of racism, Black women have fought and gained political power time and again. And we often talk about, you know, Black women and Black folks being the base of the Democratic party, but especially built on the backs of Black women. But I wonder if you could explain just how significant a voting bloc Black women actually are.

Jones: We could look, for example, at 2017 and Alabama's special election, where the Democrat, Doug Jones, ran in a very, very tight race. And what we know is not only did 98% of Black women voters vote for Jones, right, and flip that Senate seat from red to blue, they not only voted for Jones, they turned out disproportionately, right. And these are the companion keys to understanding the power of Black women voters. It's not just the voting as a bloc; it's turning out. So, in that case, a state-level election, right, a U.S. Senate seat flips.

Lee: In Alabama. (LAUGH)

Jones: In Alabama. And so, this is the kind of evidence that I think has, you know, led to some very deliberate thinking, analysis, and attention to where Black women are in this 2020 election cycle. This is not incidental. This is essential analysis.

Lee: And not just as voters and bodies pushing to the polls, but actually Black women participating in the electoral process in terms of candidates. There are a record number of Black women running for Congress in 2020. Biden had six Black women on his short list.

Jones: Uh-huh (Affirm).

Lee: Ultimately he selects Senator Kamala Harris as the first Black woman on a major party ticket. What's the significance of all this? Is this just the culmination of all that work over the last hundred-plus years? What does this moment mean?

Jones: I think it is a culmination. In my book, it's a culmination really of 200 years, which is to say Black women have been at this a very long time. And Kamala Harris does not drop from the heavens, (LAUGH) right. She grows out of Black women's politics across many generations.

And when you look at a figure like Senator Harris or Representative Ayanna Pressley or leader Stacey Abrams, these are women, when you ask them, they will tell you, "I come out of a political tradition." And it's not the political tradition exemplified by Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Alice Paul at all.

It is a political tradition that these women will tell you easily comes out of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune, Ida B. Wells, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan. Black women understand their own political history and how we come to be where we are in 2020.

And so, for me, it was important to write a book that helped Americans sort of reset their sense of women's political history through a Black woman's lens be if you don't understand who Shirley Chisholm was or Carol Moseley Braun was, it's hard to understand Senator Harris. So, we need a new political education, (LAUGH) frankly, to go with that to appreciate whatever the outcomes may be in any given election in November, Black women candidates are here to stay.

Lee: As we recenter and reposition not just the narrative, but our understanding of the role that Black women have played in the right to vote for women and keep pushing for political power, do you think America is necessarily ready? What do you expect to come next with this rise of power, with the reimagining and recentering of Black women in this political discourse? What do you think happens?

Jones: My metaphor is catching up. This nation is catching up to the kind of ideals that Black women 200 years ago, as founders of this nation, put on the table, the challenge that Black women set, which is, for example, right, no racism, no sexism in American politics.

They have no role, right, in arbitrating power, access, office holding, votes, and more. Black women have been saying that for 200 years. And I think it's fair to say we might be catching up to that wisdom as a nation, to those political ideals.

And so, what I see is a country that is being led by Black women. I call them the vanguard because they hold a high bar up for this nation for a very long time. That is not an enviable position, but it turns out to be an essential one in a nation that has deep troubles in its past. And I can only hope that we have the opportunity to continue to follow Black women, in politics and elsewhere, to realize the kinds of values that they have long exemplified.

Lee: Martha Jones, thank you so much for your time, your amazing work. The struggle continues. Thank you very much.

Jones: Thanks so much.

Lee: That was legal and cultural historian Martha Jones. Her new book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, comes out on September 8th. Into America is produced by Isabel Angel, Allison Bailey, Aaron Dalton, Max Jacobs, Barbara Raab, Claire Tighe, Aisha Turner, and Preeti Varathan. Original music by Hannis Brown. Our executive producer is Ellen Frankman. Steve Lickteig is executive producer of audio. I'm Trymaine Lee. We'll be back on Wednesday.

Link:
Transcript: Into Black Women and the 19th Amendment - NBC News