Word: utopia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...enjoying a stroll through Celebration, Disney's "ideal town" in Florida. From Nazi racial propaganda to unalluring photos of early kibbutzim in Israel. From Stalinist kitsch in the '30s to Haight-Ashbury peace-and-love kitsch in the '60s. This intriguing range of objects and images is contained in "Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World," the sprawling show that kicks off the 2000-01 exhibition season at the New York Public Library. It was jointly organized by the library and the mighty Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris--a rare enough collaboration in itself--and its catalog...
This is a show about failure. Necessarily so: its subject is the fallacies and delusions of human hope. Utopia has never existed. It is one of the enduring phantoms of the human mind, because it cannot be tested; every time someone tries it, it fails, and whenever it fails, there is always someone around to tell you the wrong reasons for it and propose another model, which in turn proves equally unworkable. This is as true of nutty little proposals by discontented geniuses--like the idea of communalist, rural "pantisocracy" put forward by Shelley, Coleridge and others in their youth...
...Seekers of the Perfect Cup, from the people who made the vente mocha Frappuccino as ubiquitous as the Big Mac, comes Starbucks' Barista Utopia Vacuum Coffee Brewing System ($169). The idea is to take vacuum coffee brewing, a method long favored in Europe, and Americanize it--make it plug-in simple, electric and automatic. You put freshly ground coffee in the large funnel on top, insert the funnel's rubber gasket tightly into the water-filled carafe below, push ON and stand back. The water quickly heats to a perfect, sub-boiling 205[degrees]F and gets sucked up into...
...steel float called Freedom Ship, intended as a home for 50,000 people who will make their own laws and form a country unto themselves. In Britain's North Sea, an old gunnery fort called the Principality of Sealand is attracting investors who hope to make it a digital utopia, storing people's electronic secrets free from any government interference. How do these brave new seaworlds stack...
...know him lasts very long without loping back to the dusty oil town on the flat plains of West Texas where Bush grew up and then returned to try his hand at business. In the narrative of Bush's life, Midland is seen as a kind of egalitarian utopia. His wife Laura is from Midland, and Bush says he will be buried there. When asked the difference between him and his famously preppy father, the candidate often simply says "Midland," as if no more explanation were needed. "In Midland each individual matters," Bush told TIME. "It's a long...