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Critically-acclaimed books by three Indian writers have featured among this years 100 Notable Books list of The New York Times that also includes former U.S. president Barack Obamas newly released memoir A Promised Land.

Editors of The New York Times Book Review selected 100 notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction works from around the world.

(Stay up to date on new book releases, reviews, and more with The Hindu On Books newsletter.Subscribe here.)

The prestigious list also includes the work of fiction A Burning by India-born Megha Majumdar (read our review).

A brazen act of terrorism in an Indian metropolis sets the plot of this propulsive debut novel in motion, and lands an innocent young bystander in jail. With impressive assurance and insight, Majumdar unfolds a timely story about the ways power is wielded to manipulate and crush the powerless, the report said of the book.

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara (read review), who grew up in Kerala, also features on the list.

This first novel by an Indian journalist probes the secrets of a big-city shantytown as a 9-year-old boy tries to solve the mystery of a classmates disappearance. Anappara impressively inhabits the inner worlds of children lost to their families, and of others who escape by a thread, the leading daily said.

Samanth Subramanians A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane is a nonfiction work, reviewed here.

Haldane, the British biologist and ardent communist who helped synthesise Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics, was once as famous as Einstein. Subramanians elegant biography doubles as a timely allegory of the fraught relationship between science and politics, the report said.

Subramanian is a journalist and lives in London.

Red Pill by British-Indian author Hari Kunzru also features in the list.

A fellowship at a study center in Germany turns sinister and sets a writer on a possibly paranoid quest to expose a political evil he believes is loose in the world. Kunzrus wonderfully weird novel traces a lineage from German Romanticism to National Socialism to the alt-right, and is rich with insights on surveillance and power, the report said.

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Books by 3 Indian writers feature in 2020 100 Notable Books selected by The New York Times - The Hindu

Southland SessionsPresents:From high school operas and drive-thru art exhibitions to Chicano comedies and underground DJ setswe are showcasing the vibrancy of arts and culture across our city today.

Jenna Caravello makes mind-bending video games, interactive installations and animated short films that use symbolism and metaphor to ask profound questions about memory, loss and meaning.

A still fromJenna Caravello's short animated film "Frontier Wisdom."| Courtesy of Jenna Caravello

Caravello, an assistant professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, will respond to the question What Is Loss? on Monday, Nov. 23 as part of the UCLA Arts series 10 Questions: Reckoning, which brings UCLA faculty from across campus together to examine 10 essential questions.

In this episode of the UCLA Arts podcast Works In Progress, Caravello talks about creating digital avatars, storytelling in virtual spaces and what inspires her, from 90s video games and Akira to European and Soviet animators.

Caravello joined the UCLA faculty this fall and has been mainly working with graduate students on their projects. This winter quarter shell be teaching a class on designing digital avatars.In the course, the students will design, rig and animate their own avatars as part of a larger conversation about digital bodies. For Caravello, an avatar is a picture that represents a computer user or a digital body controlled by a player that can be used to describe video games, puppetry, dance or storytelling.

Avatars are pervasive in so many different types of art and, of course, spiritually and in religious practices as well, she said. Avatars have been the way that we define ourselves, the way that we identify ourselves, in digital spaces for a while now. But they have this long-reaching history."

Another class shell lead this winter will focus on storytelling in augmented and virtual reality spaces. Unlike a single-channel film, VR gives you a limitless 360-degree space, while with AR, the frame is dictated by the placement of the users smartphone. Because the class will be taught remotely, students will use their smartphones rather than VR headsets.

Caravello taught at CalArts, where she was a graduate student, just before the pandemic began. Teaching remotely will be different, she acknowledges, and engaging students in a virtual classroom will take extra effort.

Watch Caravello's animated short film "Frontier Wisdom" below.

While at CalArts, Caravello produced the short animated film Frontier Wisdom. The surreal story follows a phone repairwoman in the desert. Along the way she encounters a corpse that recites Bible verses, a self-propelled peanut and a post-apocalyptic rapture.

The film was inspired by a road trip with her father from Chicago to Los Angeles, but also by her fathers job as a service repairman for the Pacific Bell Telephone Company.

He would leave the house and he would drive around town in a strange van that was full of cables, and it was just very mysterious to me," she said. I started to imagine that he was going on these adventures, that he was really a protagonist in some noir mystery out there in the desert somewhere.

Caravellos father, on a road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles. | Courtesy Jenna Caravello

The films abstract, surreal elements are meant to invoke the idea that a space can be a container for memory, she said. "The Mojave Desert in that film is very similar to, say, an open world, massive multiplayer online game, so just an expansive realm of play."

Caravello was also playing with the idea of a memory palace, a way of memorizing details by creating an imaginary building with rooms that contain pieces of information.

The symbology becomes, what kind of mind palace can you project your memories onto?"

Caravello was an animator on the 2020 documentary film Feels Good Man, about the Internet meme Pepe the Frog. Arthur Jones directed the film, which stars illustrator and cartoonist Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe, as he struggles to reclaim Pepe from alt-right white supremacist Internet trolls.

Watch the trailer of "Feels Good Man" below.

"As the animators, our main goal was to speak to Matts art and to be this kind of voice for Matts comics in a way that that would bring his work to the forefront," Caravello said. "So, most of our conversations were about, will Matt laugh at that? Is that accurate to what Matt would want to happen to his characters?"

Pepe began as one of four characters in Boys Club, a trippy series of comic books about post-college friends who play video games, smoke weed, drink beer and eat pizza. Furie was surprised to see users of Reddit and 4chan adopt the gentle frog and turn his face into Adolf Hitler or Donald J. Trump in the leadup to the 2016 election.

Recently, Pepe has found new life as a symbol of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, and as a reaction sticker on the video game streaming site Twitch.

"It's really an incredible story," Caravello said.

Caravello at work on Frontier Wisdom. | Courtesy Jenna Caravello

Teaching animation to undergraduate students has made Caravello aware of how animation styles change based on age and where students grew up. She began her art career as an oil painter and is used to seeing animation with erased pencil lines, while younger students may have started with drawing tablets and expect a cleaner style.

Caravellos use of space and perspective in her work was inspired by the video games she grew up with, like the LucasArt graphic adventure game Grim Fandango, which overlaid 3D graphics on static backgrounds. Shes also a fan of anime, especially the maximalist dystopian future portrayed in Akira.

She also points to the bizarre work of Ukrainian animator Igor Kovalyov, and the Estonian animator Priit Prn, whose films are part political allegory, part just reveling in ridiculousness and whose film Night of the Carrots "changed the way that I work forever.

I was definitely inspired by more textural animations that for the most part were metaphors for political movements, for consumer culture ridiculousness, abstracted character designs, she said.

Caravello also creates interactive installations, and is at work on a third-person open-world VR game installation called Amber Row. A user controls the game with a custom-made controller rather than a headset. The installation is based on the idea of an MMO that is kept alive on a single server [and] has broken down and now serves as a container for all of the memories that are left behind from a person who is no longer present.

Amber Row draws on Caravellos experience of being diagnosed with the same genetic mutation that led to her mother's death, a mutation mostly found among Ashkenazi Jewish women. In the game the user collects objects that effect the avatars appearance.

"And this is how I explored the idea of collecting memories after my mother passed away, because it really can feel like a futile practice to run in circles after experiencing a loss and try to recreate memories of a person from everything that they've left behind.

The desire to create a game that allows for open-world exploration was inspired by a Tomb Raider game her father used to play.

"He would defeat all of the bad guys on a level, and then he'd call me into the room and he'd let me just run around in the level freely, clear of enemies. Nothing to do but just run around in circles and jump and dive and swim and just be this character in a space, she said.

Jenna Caravello is an assistant professor in the Department of Design Media Arts at UCLA. On November 23rd at 7 pm, shell respond to the question "What Is Loss? as part of this falls 10 Questions discussion series. Joining her will be oncology chaplain Michael Eselun, and anthropologist Jorja Leap, who is an expert in gangs, violenc, and systems change. You can learn more and RSVPhere.

Top Image:A still fromJenna Caravello's short animated film "Frontier Wisdom." | Courtesy of Jenna Caravello

Read more:
Can Online Avatars Define Us? Animator Jenna Caravello Dives Into This, the Art of Online Storytelling and Pepe the Frog - KCET

Nothing makes sense; they want us to believe what?

The constant drama and mischief available for consumption in the 24 hours a day news cycle, if we are actually getting facts, is discordant. Black Lives Matter seems a noble idea but what are the underlying truths of this organizations goals. Antifa wants anarchy and no government at all; when convenient, blame is thrust on fascists, or alt-right groups; maybe those labeled as racists, misogynists, ageists, name-your-phobia, identity politics, all an intrinsically evil way to impede freedom of thought and expression. Why are many so cowardly they must cast aspersions against those they disagree with, and shout them down rather than intelligently articulate their position and have the decency to listen to the other. Were there problems in getting a legitimate vote count, and if so, why? Government cannot have legitimacy with the people if the people distrust the mechanisms that place the representatives of We the People. What is behind the chaos and what do they want? What are they trying to distract us from?

Have no doubt, this is a battle between communism and freedom. These are attempts to destroy the liberty we collectively have fought and died for; the noise we must endure and the distracting protests are nothing more than that, a distraction from what is really going on. As in the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, .

Despite what these ideas are labeled: progressive, democratic socialist, anarchist, socialist, workers party; they are all a synonym to communism. The power brokers, media, and tech platforms attempt to re-write our history, control our present and future, and control the information we get. We have allowed our students to be indoctrinated rather than educated in the facts of history, civics, government, and rhetoric. Communism has always failed and led to totalitarianism, tyranny, police state, murder, destitution, torture, genocide, infanticide, slave labor, detention camps; all the ultimate crushing of Mans soul. There is a plan to deprive our citizens of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. But now they are calling it The Great Reset.

Klaus Schwab is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, more commonly referred to as Davos. He has proposed the disruption caused worldwide by Covid-19 to be a narrow opportunity to perform a worldwide great reset of our world in order to: To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a Great Reset of capitalism. By this he means he has a plan for a complete transformation of the world economy and the liberty of its people. There will be no money, no private property, no democracy. Instead, every decision about what we individually do for a living, what we individually consume, whether we individually can take a vacation; will all be decided for us by a remote, unaccountable and unknown group of hegemons. This sounds like totalitarian communism.

Schwab has proposed a concept called Stakeholder Capitalism, wherein private corporations are placed in the position of trustees of society. Draw a set of correlations to the current model of Shareholder Capitalism and State Capitalism where the state sets the direction of the economy. This appears an intent to impose oligarchy that controls the government of the citizens of the United States, and the rest of the world. You can try to mislead the people by inserting the term capitalism, but there is no capitalism about this.

Aristotle wrote in Politics; It is harder to preserve than to found a Democracy. To preserve it, we must prevent the poor from plundering the rich; we must not exhaust the public revenues by giving pay for the performance of public duties; we must prevent the growth of a pauper class. The Great Reset sounds like a plan for the rich to plunder the other 99 percent.

The United States 2019 Federal Budget was $4.4 Trillion and GDP was $21.43 Trillion. Compare this to proposed legislation such as a $32 Trillion single payor healthcare system, $1.6 Trillion college debt forgiveness, $79 Billion per year free college, $93 Trillion green new deal, a $1 Trillion infrastructure plan, abolish ICE, defund the police, have no controls on immigration and provide all benefits for them also; it sounds grand, as does socialism, until it runs out of money then you have poverty, breadlines and all of the things our older population has seen from the end of WWII until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and still there is Communist China. Our younger generations should have been taught the horrors of communism.

It is time to pay attention and to make sure family and friends are informed. There is no consent of the governed of these United States to submit to these plans and we resist in no uncertain terms. We must do it loudly like we have listened to radical politicians and groups throughout 2020. This is a battle for our liberty.

See the article here:
Sharp Letter to the Editor 11/20/20 | Opinion | carrollspaper.com - Carroll Daily Times Herald

In the days following the US election, hard-right politicians, commentators and social media stars were lacking a platform on which their conspiracy theories could go viral. Both Twitter and Facebook were flaggingtheir endless stream of posts suggesting the election had been stolen, warning they were misleading or contained false information. The right needed a place to regroup; the platforms that had served as megaphones were slipping from their grasp. So, in what perhaps felt like a last shot, they encouraged each other to go to Parler: the free speech platform, heralded bycorners of the right as their last social media hope.

Parler is a relatively newplatform, which encourages themindset that the only rule is there are no rules. It brands itself as a foil to mainstream platforms the place users can go to say what they cant say elsewhere. After launching in August 2018, it surged in users the following May, when Politico reported that Donald Trumps then-campaign manager Brad Parscale was considering making the president an account amid free speech concerns onTwitter. He didnt;but he did set upan accountfor the Team Trump campaign, which is still active. Parler enjoyed greater popularity among right-wingers as a result. In the UK, there was a similar pullto the platform inJune when a user created an account that pretended to be Katie Hopkins who hadrecently been banned from Twitter and managed to raise $500 for legal fees before anyone realised it was a hoax. This saw British commentators and Conservative MPs sign up to the site, proof of Parlers free speech USP.

After a quiet few months, Parler crept back into the news in October, ahead of the3 November election. It became a hotbed of QAnon, Pizzagateand Hunter Biden conspiracy theories. In the week after the election, it was top of the American app store charts, listed as the most downloaded product on both Apple and Android devices.

With the endorsement of countless right-wing celebrities and politicians, it has swelled to ten million users worldwide up from 2.8 million users in July. Right-wing personalities across the globe are now encouraging users to commit to Parler and to quit Twitter for good. And that user growth, coupled with the support of so manymainstream political voices,makes the platform different from its predecessors. If its biggest stars quit other platforms outright, there would be an even bigger draw for theaverage user to keep coming back.

But can Parler really thrive on the right? Can it become a household name? What does the right get out of social media likeParler a platform where, perhaps for the first time, its own mainstreampolitical echo chamber has been created?

***

Parler is not the only place the right is, or has ever, gathered online with little to no left-wing influence. 4chan, Gaband messaging service Telegram have become popular with the alt-right at different points over the last 15 years. However, the vast majority of these platforms have gained reputations as being toxic, and have become synonymous with the worst of the internet. Milo Yiannopoulos, an early far-right British starlet who was banned from Twitter in 2016, infamouslyposted on Telegramlast year: I cant put food on the table this way.

Parler, on the other hand, has been able to style itself as more mainstream, more sanitised in the short time its been live. But,despite its more palatable public face, it still allows most of what you would find on more notorious alt-right sites. After a blip this summer,CEO John Matzewarned the platform would not allow obscene words in usernames, repeated harassment in the comments, or pornographic images (all of which are allowed on Twitter), but misinformation and abuse are still rife on the site.Parlers cleanappearance therefore allows politicians, for example, toparticipate on the site, even though familiarly insidious content lurks underneath. This is the key to Parlers success as a right-wing social media platform.

[See also:What is Parler? Inside the pro-Trump unbiased platform]

One of its biggest drawbacks, however, is the same complaint many on the right make about Twitter: it really is an echo chamber. As a user, you are metwith the same set of opinions,shared in different word formations on different accounts. There is no incentive for anyone on the left to join. And so Parler posts tend to fall flat: intrigue and controversy are impossible when everyone is inagreement.

Already, you can sense users tiring. Right-wing social media posters who are active elsewhere have barely touched Parler since joining. Fox News host Tucker Carlson has only posted twice since joining at the end of 2018 and Donald Trump Jrs partner, Kimberly Guilfoyle, has also posted infrequently since she joined in July. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, one of thepoliticians who very enthusiastically joined Parlerin June,has even started sharing non-political memes clearly ripped from Facebook pages. All three of these conservative personalities still post regularly on Twitter and many others who claimed to be leaving Twitter for good have already begun to trickle back.

The only people who appearto use Parler as their main social media outlet are those who have been banned from all other mainstream platforms. Alex Jones, of InfoWars fame, who was banned from YouTube, Twitterand Facebook last year, posts multiple times a day to his account; Yiannopoulos has also begun posting aggressively on Parler. However, both Jones and Yiannopoulos have only drawn about a tenth of the audience they had on more mainstream platforms over the last ten years, and have subsequently faded into relative obscurity. They may be prolific on Parler, but their importance in advancing the cause ofthe right is very limited.

Audience isnt only a problem for those who have nowhere else to go. Parler is, of course, already inherently smaller, before factoring in the work it takes to grow audiences on Twitter and Facebook over the course of years. Whats the point of posting on Parler alone, when you could tweet and get upwards of 20 times the engagement? Parlers loudest advocates would arguethis is the early price users must pay to fully divorce themselves from mainstream tech platforms. But any long-term benefits to the cause will not tempt those who have become brand names in and of themselves.

However, enthusiasm for Parler is still high, even if its long-term prospects are less promising. In the two weeks since election day, new users haveincluded longstanding political personalities and swathes of newly elected politicians. Fresh, right-wing faces in the Senate, the Houseand smaller state legislatures have flockedto the site. They join their senior counterparts in advocating for this new digital future for the right.

But its hard to envision a reality in which Parlers influence extends all that far. In the past, each waveof new Parler users has abated after a few days or weeks of hype. Users get bored, and its biggest names become less vocal. Enthusiasm only lasts if effectiveness does too.

[See also:How QAnon conspiracy theorists entered the US Congress]

Ultimately, for any ideology to thrive, you cant survive on a single-minded platform made for public consumption. 4Chan thrives for two reasons: because there really are no rules, and because users eventually water down their ideas and disseminate themon more mainstream sites. For platforms that have high mainstream salience, the pay-off is created by the back and forth between two opposing sides.

Parler, by trying to create the best of all of them, creates the worst of both worlds. It maintains a more restrictive platform than 4Chan without any of the political tension other platforms offer. The joy for many politically active social media users is criticising the other side. But you cant "own" the liberalsif there are no liberals around to "own". In an effort to create the first mainstream echo chamber, Parler proves why its theory doesnt work in practice: theres no ground to be gained by repeating what everyone else is already thinking.

Link:
Can the right thrive on Parler? - New Statesman

As the holidays approach, the typical jokes about family political fights will no doubt abound especially with a contentious presidential election marred by conspiracy theories, misinformation and threats of violence. While Bidens win signals a return to basic decency at the presidential level, the nation remains very much divided. Worse, misinformation on the legitimacy of the election is spreading rapidly, further driving conspiratorial thinking and other alt-right messages to the fore of current political discourse. Thus, behind the jokes and the family feuds which inspire them are very real consequences for millions of people in the United States something the recent election made incredibly clear. As such, this holiday season, white progressives need to remain consistent with their supposed commitment to social justice they need to stand up to their racist loved ones.

While the results of the election spurred celebration across the country, white progressives must not be complacent. Yes, a proto-facist leader has been defeated, but the hateful rhetoric, conspiratorial thinking and virulent racism, xenophobia and sexism he espoused during his tenure remain deeply entrenched in American political discourse. Thus, not only is the fight for the rights of marginalized communities ongoing, but our new president while better in a myriad of ways must also be held accountable and face demands to execute a progressive agenda. While there are many ways white progressives can help in this mission, a necessary component of this involves debunking misinformation and combatting hateful rhetoric within their own families.

Privileged progressives must make good on their moral commitment to social justice not only in our public actions, but in our personal ones. While white progressives may attend protests, hold phone banking sessions or donate to mutual aid funds, none of this serves as adequate allyship if they are unable to stand up to those closest to them. Thus, if white progressives truly care about the causes they so often and so publicly claim to support, it follows that they must stand up to their families, friends and anyone else in their social circles who espouse hateful views, conspiracy theories or other misrepresentations of facts.

This holiday season, white progressives should not continue to favor their own comfort and familial peace over the tangible suffering of vulnerable people. In failing to stand up to their families and friends whether their statements are meant well or not white liberals show a distinct complacency with white supremacy, sexism, xenophobia and the countless other ways in which bigotry rears its ugly head. Thus, when we sit silent over our uncles QAnon rants or our high school friends xenophobic comments, it shows that we value our own comfort over what we know to be our ethical duty. Further, if your allyship consists primarily of posting prettily curated Instagram slideshows, then it isn't an allyship its a performance. Conflict particularly when it is with people we love can be hard, but this does not mean we get an ethical opt-out.

To be clear, this article is not intended to argue that you are obligated to put yourself in a physically or financially dangerous situation in order to argue against your familys beliefs. If confronting your family and friends could cause violence or abuse, you should obviously protect your safety. Further, arguing against racist family members beliefs is not the beginning and end of good allyship. Rather, it is a necessary component in a long and complex process. Good allyship is an ongoing process that requires constant listening, learning and action. Ultimately, as a white woman, I dont think my job can or should be to tell you how to be an ally to marginalized people with experiences far different from my own. However, what I do know is that continuing to do nothing to the individual people we are most likely to persuade is unacceptable.

Ultimately, telling your family members that their bigotry is wrong is not activism. However, it is still an incredibly important way not only to show that your moral principles and the individuals and communities whose lives and livelihoods are in the crosshairs of these conversations are more important to you than your relationship with racists. Will having hard and likely contentious conversations with your family work to persuade them? Maybe, maybe not. The reason to stand up against your loved ones bigotry is not just to be persuasive clearly and decisively showing your family that their bigoted beliefs do not have a compliant audience is also a valuable action. No matter the outcome, standing up for your principles disrupts the presumption of agreement so often assumed by bigots. Hateful beliefs may continue but at the very least you can make it clear that they are not welcome to at least one person at the dinner table.

Emma Camp is an Opinion Columnist for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.

The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Cavalier Daily. Columns represent the views of the authors alone.

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CAMP: Stand up to your racist family - University of Virginia The Cavalier Daily