text:
Talk:Soyuz 4

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Mission quote?
I cannot recall the book where I read this, but I read somewhere that, once Soyuz 4 and 5 docked, one of the cosmonauts cried out, "Help! I'm being raped!" - the quote being removed from public records, at least until glasnost. Any credence?--74.72.199.61 (talk) 12:57, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I remember reading that, but he didn't say "Help" and word it that way; I simply remember "You raped me" said in a joking way. Still no good without a reliable source, and falls into the category of things which may be juicy and titillating, but I feel are not really encyclopedic. JustinTime55 (talk) 17:58, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

title: Talk:Soyuz 4


text:
Talk:Soyuz 6

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Boy (album)

Boy is the debut studio album by Irish rock band U2. It was produced by Steve Lillywhite and was released on 20 October 1980 by Island Records. Boy contains songs from the band's 40-song repertoire at the time, including two tracks that were re-recorded from their original versions on the group's debut release, the EP Three.

Boy was recorded from July to September 1980 at Dublin's Windmill Lane Studios, which became U2's chosen recording location during the 1980s. It was their first time working with Lillywhite, who employed non-standard production techniques, such as recording drummer Larry Mullen Jr. playing in a stairwell, and recording smashed bottles and cutlery skimmed against a spinning bicycle wheel. The band found Lillywhite to be very encouraging and creative, and he subsequently became a frequent producer of their recorded work. Thematically, the album's lyrics reflect on adolescence, innocence, and the passage into adulthood, themes represented on its cover artwork through the photo of a young boy's face.

Boy received generally positive reviews and included one of U2's first singles to receive airplay on US radio, "I Will Follow". The release was followed by the band's first tour of continental Europe and the US, the Boy Tour. The album peaked on the UK chart at number 52 in August 1981 and in the US at number 63. In 2003, Boy was ranked 417th on Rolling Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 2008, a remastered edition of the record was released.

Background
Originally, Boy was slated to be produced by Martin Hannett, an in-demand producer at that time for his critically acclaimed work with Joy Division. Hannett had produced U2's first single with Island Records, "11 O'Clock Tick Tock", but the band did not enjoy working with him, and the prospect of him producing the album was abandoned by Island due to the band's objections. Hannett was also severely affected by the May 1980 suicide of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, the distress of which temporarily impaired his ability to work. Island A&R representative Nick Stewart said: "Martin by that stage was unwell; he seemed to be suffering from a little overdose of one thing or another."

Looking for a replacement producer, Island sent a copy of U2's first release, the EP Three (1979), to Steve Lillywhite to gauge his interest in working with them. Listening to the record, he "liked the voice" but thought "it didn't sound very good". Before deciding whether to work with the group, he wanted to see them perform live to figure out a potential creative approach he could take in studio. After visiting Ireland to attend a concert of theirs at a small school hall, Lillywhite was convinced to come on board, thinking, "Oh my God, there's something about this". He subsequently agreed to produce a single for them, "A Day Without Me". Although the song failed to chart, U2 found they could work amicably with Lillywhite and agreed to have him produce their debut studio album.

Recording
Boy was recorded at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin from July to September 1980. Lillywhite was displeased with how the "A Day Without Me" single had sounded, particularly the drums, and decided to change how he recorded the band for the rest of the album. He found Windmill Lane Studios to be "very, very dead sounding" and thought it was more conducive to capturing quiet recordings of folk music than the energy of rock music; engineer Kevin Moloney concurred, calling the studio a "late '70s design, a very wooden dead kind of room". At that stage in his career, Lillywhite was interested in capturing "3D sound" that conveyed a perspective to the recording. While walking through the stone-walled reception area of the studio, he was impressed with how the space sounded and decided to record drummer Larry Mullen Jr.'s drum kit in the area's stairwell. Using microphones hung from the ceiling at the top of the stairwell, Lillywhite recorded what he described as "this wonderful clattery sound". They had to wait until the studio's receptionist went home in the evenings to record the drums, as the phone rang during the day. Even in the evenings, they were not allowed to disable the phone's ringer, resulting in it occasionally interrupting recording in the middle of a take. Mullen found the arrangement strange at first, as he was still acclimating to working with his bandmates together in a studio when Lillywhite set him up separate from the others.

Lillywhite employed a creative, experimental approach as the producer, recording smashed bottles and silverware skimmed against a spinning bicycle wheel for sound effects. The band found him to be very encouraging; lead vocalist Bono called him "such a breath of fresh air", while guitarist the Edge said he "had a great way of pulling the best out of everybody". The group's rhythm section struggled to keep time at that stage in their career, forcing Lillywhite and Moloney to spend extensive amounts of time at night splicing tape of the multi-track recordings to create drum loops that would be in time. Lillywhite recorded several bass parts played by Adam Clayton in order to teach Clayton the bassline that he ultimately wanted to be played. The approach necessitated Clayton recording many overdubs. With the band members still inexperienced at that point and manager Paul McGuinness giving them autonomy in their music-making process, Lillywhite speculated that he had more influence over the sound of Boy than any other producer of any other U2 album.

Some of the songs, including "An Cat Dubh" and "The Ocean", were written and recorded at the studio. Many of the songs were taken from the band's 40-song repertoire at the time, including "Stories for Boys", "Out of Control" and "Twilight". Without much studio time, the band quickly recorded each song, before spending a few hours on overdubs and moving onto the next song. Bono had not finalized his lyrics prior to the recording sessions; during the group's earlier live performances, he often changed lyrics from concert to concert, owing to his lack of interest in lyric writing. The procrastination forced him to finish missing couplets in the studio while his bandmates were busy recording guitars and percussion. Bono was displeased with the vocal performances that he gave in the studio when wearing headphones, and as a result, he changed his approach to sing into a handheld microphone in the control room while listening to playback of the music at high volume. After about six takes of each song, Lillywhite would edit together a composite vocal track of the best parts, after which Bono would listen back and replicate the results by singing another six takes.

Composition and songwriting
The Edge recorded all the songs using his Gibson Explorer guitar, and he drew inspiration from music he was listening to at the time, including Television and early Siouxsie and the Banshees. When asked by Elvis Costello about the band's musical influences at the time, the Edge explained: "I think we were influenced a lot by music that was rooted in Europe, the German sort of sensibility, the music of Neu! and Kraftwerk, which was about a different sort of way of using chord changes and a sort of nihilistic approach to the backbeat", "and the UK bands", "like [Siouxsie and] the Banshees, probably Echo & the Bunnymen" "and Magazine".

The album's theme is the psychological nature of the transition of adolescence from childhood to manhood, with lyrics and atmospheric music examining a dawn of sexuality ("An Cat Dubh"), the entry into adolescence ("Twilight"), mortality ("Out of Control"), the exile from one's past enforced by the passage of time ("Into the Heart"), mental disturbance ("The Electric Co.") and youthful ambition ("The Ocean"). "I Will Follow" focused on the trauma of the early death of Bono's mother when he was 14 years old. The album's lyrics contain several literary references. For example, "Shadows and Tall Trees" takes its name from a chapter title in the dystopian William Golding novel Lord of the Flies, and "The Ocean" mentions Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Music author and ambient historian Mark Prendergast writes that Boy has "an aquatic quality, contrasting anthemic rock songs with brooding instrumental passages of spray, fine drizzle and lapping waves". He further highlighted Lillywhite's addition of musique concrète sounds, namely milk bottles and scraped bicycle spokes, to "I Will Follow", and commented that the Edge's "unconventional approach" to his Gibson Explorer throughout the record "was to eschew blues influences for echoed chords and sustained harmonics. He used a system of two Vox amplifiers coupled to two Memory Man echo units linked to a switchbox connected to his guitar." Music critic Mark Cooper reflected that "U2's sound seemed to have come out of nowhere"; he added that the album's "drive and exuberance belongs to punk", citing Mullen's crashing drums, the more glam-derived riffs of the Edge, and the chorus of "Stories for Boys" for their similarities with punk's "football terrace" sound, but commented that the band's "emotional palette" was distinct from punk: "Here was a music thriving on teenage spiritual awakenings with a musical approach that owed next to nothing to tradition."

Artwork
The model boy on the cover is Peter Rowen, the younger brother of Guggi, Bono's friend and a former member of the Virgin Prunes. Peter also appeared on the covers of Three, War, The Best of 1980–1990, the unreleased Even Better than the Early Stuff, Early Demos and many singles. The photographer, Hugo McGuiness, and the sleeve designer, Steve Averill (a friend of Clayton), went on to work on several more U2 album covers.

For the American release and other international distributors, the album's cover image was changed, due to Island Records' fears that it could be perceived as pedophilic. The label's in-house designer Bruno Tilley commissioned artist and photographer Sandy Porter to design the new cover. The two were given a very limited budget, precluding them from traveling to U2 and taking photos of them, leaving them with little choice but to use photos of the four band members from a prior shoot. Tilley visited Porter in London to collaborate on the cover. Porter's initial idea was to distort the images and create a "more graphic, stylised piece of artwork", leading to several experiments. These included: photocopying the images and pulling them during the scanning; using a photographic enlarger while moving the baseboard; and photographing the image prints using long exposure while moving them. The result of these processes gave Porter the "raw material" to continue, though some areas of the images did not distort well and were subsequently marked up with a black pen. Taking inspiration from the Lord of the Flies reference in the song "Shadows and Tall Trees", Porter selected four "rough and distorted images that had a feel how the sea washes and distorts marks in the sand". He then cut the images with a scalpel, spray mounted them, and further "copied, printed, touched up, recopied and printed" them onto high-contrast photographic paper.

Release
Boy was released on 20 October 1980 in the UK, and 3 March 1981 in the US. The album reached number 52 in the UK. In the US, it peaked at number 63 on the Billboard 200, but after the success of U2's later material, it re-entered the American charts for a lengthier spell. In the band's native Ireland, the album reached number 13, and it placed highest in Canada at number 12. The original releases of Boy sold nearly 200,000 copies.

"A Day Without Me" and "I Will Follow" were released as singles on 18 August and 24 October 1980, respectively. "I Will Follow" peaked at number 20 on the Billboard Top Tracks rock chart in the US, becoming a hit on college radio and establishing a buzz surrounding the group's debut.

The album's sexual overtones led to its enthusiastic acceptance in American gay clubs shortly after its release. Bono commented on this phenomenon, saying: "import copies got in and, as you know, in America a lot of music is broken in gay clubs and so we had a gay audience, a lot of people who were convinced the music was specifically for them. So there was a misconception if you like."

In 2008, a remastered edition of Boy was released, featuring remastered tracks, along with B-sides and rarities. Three different formats of the remaster were made available. The artwork for the remastered editions of the album was standardised worldwide to that of the 1980 UK release. For Record Store Day 2020, in commemoration of its 40th anniversary, the album was reissued on white vinyl in a limited edition of 10,000 copies.

Critical reception
Boy received generally favourable reviews. Paul Morley of NME called it "honest, direct and distinctive", adding that he found it "touching, precocious, full of archaic and modernist conviction". Betty Page of Sounds said that they "achieved a rare mixture of innocence and aggression", and described the album as "an overall feeling of loving care and energy intertwined with simplistic and direct hooks and chords". Lyndyn Barber from Melody Maker hailed it as a "rich" record, writing that "Boy is more than just a collection of good tracks assembled in an arbitrary order", and that it had "youthful innocence and confusion". Robin Denselow of The Guardian wrote that it was a "strong debut album", praising Lillywhite for helping U2 improve since a live show that the reviewer attended. Denselow said the group succeeded at their goal of achieving a balance of "power and sensitivity" and said the record "only needs slightly stronger melodies to be very impressive indeed". Time Out's critic Ian Birch hailed Boy as a "timely" album and said, "Firing off a tradition laid down by the likes of Magazine, [Siouxsie and] the Banshees and Joy Division, U2 have injected their own brand of grace and sinewy spaciousness to create a romanticism exactly right for those who sport chunky riffs and mackintoshes". Declan Lynch of Irish magazine Hot Press remarked that he found Boy "almost impossible to react negatively to". K.R. Walston of the Albuquerque Journal said that U2 "knows how to nurse a listener along, toying with tempo and chord structures just enough to sound original but not overly avant garde". The review concluded, "the future shines brightly for bands like this".

Terry Atkinson of the Los Angeles Times called Boy a "subtly ravishing first album, by turns pretty, propulsive, playful and irresistably catchy", while further describing it as "supple and melodic, but tough and vital as well". Atkinson believed that the lyrics had "occasionally trite or vague passages" but were transcended by Bono's "heartfelt, soaring vocals". Sean McAdam of The Boston Globe described it as "a hypnotic album with nuance" that he "recommended without a bit of reservation". He praised Lillywhite's production for creating an "eerie ambience" and said of the band, "U2 have the musical chops, a compelling vocalist... and most importantly 4-minute pop songs that sound at once concise and infectious". Scot Anderson of the Iowa City Press-Citizen called Boy "an album that, while flawed, shows the potential of the band". Anderson thought certain songs were too long or too short, but believed U2 distinguished themselves from their peers with their spirit and humanity, making "a most refreshing splash in the New Wave". Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone said the record's music was "unpretentious and riveting" and called U2 "easily the best Irish rock band since Van Morrison's original Them troupe". He also lauded Lillywhite for his "always spearheaded production". In a separate review for Rolling Stone, Debra Rae Cohen found the band skilled and likeable while crediting Lillywhite for helping them "blend echoes of several of Britain's more adventurous bands into a sound that's rich, lively and comparatively commercial." Overall, she believed the album did not live up to the high standard set by the opening track "I Will Follow", finding most of it "diffuse and uneven". More critical was Robert Christgau, who dismissed the album in his "Consumer Guide" column for The Village Voice: "Their youth, their serious air, and their guitar sound are setting a small world on fire, and I fear the worst." The album finished in 18th place on the "Best Albums" list from The Village Voice's 1981 Pazz & Jop critics' poll.

Boy Tour
Following the album's release, U2 embarked on the Boy Tour, their first concert tour of continental Europe and the US. Despite being unpolished, these early live performances demonstrated the band's potential, as critics complimented their ambition and Bono's exuberance. On an otherwise successful American leg of the tour, Bono's briefcase containing in-progress lyrics and musical ideas (which were intended for the group's second album, October) was lost backstage during a March 1981 performance at a nightclub in Portland, Oregon.

Legacy
In 2003, Boy was included at number 417 on Rolling Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". The magazine wrote, "Too ingenuous for punk, too unironic for new wave, U2 arrived on Boy as big-time dreamers with the ambition to back it up." In 2006, Uncut ranked the album at number 59 on its list of the "100 Greatest Debut Albums". It was ranked as the seventh-best U2 album in a 2017 list by Newsweek's Zach Schonfeld, who also called it "a U2 album without the ego" and the "preaching or presumptions of saving the world" that plagued them in the future. In 2020, Rolling Stone included Boy in their "80 Greatest albums of 1980" list, praising the band for creating "an incredible collection of songs steeped in lost innocence and apprehensions about entering the adult world." In The Austin Chronicle, Margaret Moser recalled the popularity of Boy in Austin amidst the closures and decline of local music clubs: "The newer, hipper Club Foot was a beacon, and we danced away the summer on its cement floor to U2. Boy was a glimmer of hope in the approaching darkness of the Reagan years". In her opinion, the record was "a shout disguised as a whisper, the calm before a storm", its musical formula foreshadowing the band's subsequent success. Reviewing the 2008 reissue, Q appraised Boy as a remarkably ambitious debut, noting a distinct "adolescent energy" and "gauche charm" to the album, while Mojo said it retained its "palpable ardency" years after its release. According to Steven Hyden of The A.V. Club, "Boy showed U2 had a strong enough musical identity to command the world's attention from the very beginning".

Some critics have been less impressed by the album in retrospect. Writing for Entertainment Weekly, Bill Wyman found it "heady" but "erratic", while Chicago Tribune critic Greg Kot described the album as "callow post-punk that owes a lot to Joy Division and early Public Image Ltd." According to Ann Powers in the Spin Alternative Record Guide (1995), the album "established what might be called [U2's] revelationary reputation, hints at the impulse toward faith (after all, its hit was 'I Will Follow'), but mostly communicates confusion of the adolescent variety." Uncut critic David Quantick was more negative in his reappraisal, recalling his enjoyment of the album in 1980 as a "rockier" contemporary of Joy Division and Echo & the Bunnymen, in spite of Bono's "preening" vocal performance, but upon listening to the reissue, felt "shock at how bad it is". He wrote: "Lilywhite's production is stunningly thin, Bono's voice is awful, the lyrics are dismal, and only the singles—the Ian Curtis-obsessed 'I Will Follow' and the great 'Out of Control'—stand up. The rest is awful prog noodling".

Boy is one of only three U2 albums from which every song has been performed live at least once. Boy held this distinction individually until 2017 when all songs from The Joshua Tree were performed live on the album's 30th anniversary tour.

Track listing
Early vinyl and some cassette copies have an unlisted and untitled 30-second instrumental sample at the end of the album (following "Shadows and Tall Trees") of "Saturday Night", a song that would later become "Fire" on the 1981 record October. It was dropped from most vinyl and all early CD versions, but was reinstated as an unlisted 12th track on the 2008 remastered edition of Boy and appeared in full for the first time as "Saturday Night" on the Deluxe Edition B-sides CD. The 30-second sample is now known as "Saturday Matinee" since the release of the album on online streaming services. Until the remastered release of Boy, it was referred to as an early sample of the song "Fire."

Some pressings of the album, (mostly in North America) indexed the track length of "An Cat Dubh" and "Into the Heart" at 6:21 and 1:53, respectively. The 2008 remastered edition of the album reinstated the original European track lengths of 4:47 and 3:28. Early compact disc releases (West German-pressed and in a digipak) combined the two songs into a single track at 8:15, as did some US jewel-case versions (on the disc itself, but not on the packaging).

2008 remastered edition
On 9 April 2008 U2.com confirmed that the band's first three albums (Boy, October and War) would be re-released as newly remastered versions. The remastered Boy was released on 21 July 2008 in the UK, with the US version following it the next day. As with The Joshua Tree, the cover artwork has been standardised to the original UK release. The remaster of Boy was released in three different formats:
 * 1) Standard format: A single CD with re-mastered audio and restored packaging. Includes a 16-page booklet featuring previously unseen photos, full lyrics and new liner notes by Paul Morley. The 11 tracks match the previous release of the album.
 * 2) Deluxe format: A standard CD (as above) and a bonus CD including b-sides, live tracks and rarities. Also includes a 32-page booklet with previously unseen photos, full lyrics, new liner notes by Paul Morley, and explanatory notes on the bonus material by the Edge.
 * 3) Vinyl format: A single album re-mastered version on 180 gram vinyl with restored packaging.

Personnel
U2
 * Bono – lead vocals, glockenspiel
 * The Edge – guitar, backing vocals, glockenspiel
 * Adam Clayton – bass guitar
 * Larry Mullen Jr. – drums

Technical
 * Steve Lillywhite – producer
 * Paul Thomas – engineer
 * Kevin Moloney – assistant engineer
 * John Dent – mastering

title: Boy (album)


text:
Wakasa Province

Wakasa Province (若狭国) was a province of Japan in the area that is today the southwestern portion of Fukui Prefecture in the Hokuriku region of Japan. Wakasa bordered on Echizen, Ōmi, Tanba, Tango, and Yamashiro Provinces. It was part of Hokurikudō Circuit. Its abbreviated form name was Jakushū (若州). Under the Engishiki classification system, Wakasa was ranked as a "medium country" (中国) and a near country (近国) in terms of its importance and distance from the capital.

Ancient and classical Wakasa
Wakasa existed as a political entity before the Ritsuryō system and the implementation of the Taihō Code of the Nara period. Wooden shipping tags labelled "Wakasa" have been found in the ruins of Fujiwara-kyō. Per the Nihon Shoki, ancient Wakasa was governed by a Kuni no miyatsuko, who was a descendant of Amenohiboko, a semi-legendary prince of Shilla, who settled in Tajima province during the reign of Emperor Suinin. There are archaeological indications that Wakasa was under control of the Yamato state from the mid-4th century. The province of Wakasa was formally established with the creation of the Ritsuryō provincial system around 701 AD, and initially consisted of the two districts of Onyū and Mikata. In 825 AD, Ōi was separated from Onyū.

During the Nara and Heian periods, Wakasa was an important source of sea products (salt, fish and konbu) to the aristocracy of the capital, so much so that the province was nicknamed Miketsu Province (御食国). Salt production was especially and important industry. Wakasa was also a strategically important province due to its seaport on the Sea of Japan and was the closest ocean harbour to Kyoto.

The exact location of the provincial capital of Wakasa is unknown, but is believed to have been in what is now the city of Obama. The Wakasa Kokubun-ji and the ichinomiya of Wakasa, the Wakasahiko Shrine are also located in Obama.

Medieval and pre-modern Wakasa
Due to its location and strategic importance, during the Kamakura period, the position of shugo of Wakasa Province was retained directly by the Hōjō clan. After the start of the Muromachi period, the shugo of Wakasa was held by the Shiba clan, followed by the Isshiki clan, and then by a cadet branch of the Takeda clan. During the Sengoku period, the Takeda clan were powerful supporters of the Ashikaga shogunate and their kanrei, the Hosokawa clan. However, when the Takeda clan erupted into a civil war over an internal succession dispute, the Asakura clan from neighbouring Echizen Province asserted control. The Asakura were in turn destroyed by Oda Nobunaga. The province was the briefly held by Niwa Nagahide, and under the rule of Toyotomi Hideyoshi by Yamauchi Kazutoyo.

Following the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, the victorious Tokugawa Ieyasu assigned the province to Kyōgoku Takatsugu, as daimyō of the 92,000 koku Obama Domain. Kyōgoku Takatsugu began the construction of Obama Castle and rebuilt the ancient port town as a jōkamachi and a centre for the kitamaebune coastal trade network. The Kyōgoku clan were transferred to Izumo Province in 1634 and were replaced by Sakai Tadakatsu, an important retainer of the shogunate, who had served as Tairō under shōgun Tokugawa Iemitsu and Tokugawa Ietsuna. The Sakai clan continued to rule Obama for fourteen generations over 237 years to the end of the Edo period.

Meiji period and beyond
During the Bakumatsu period, Obama Domain initially supported the Tokugawa shogunate. In 1865, the domain executed Mito rebellion leader Takeda Kōunsai and 353 of his followers and nominally participated in the Battle of Toba–Fushimi of the Boshin War. However, seeing that the shogunate was doomed, Sakai Tadaaki came out of retirement to seize control of the domain from his adopted son and defected to the imperial cause. Consequently, he was appointed imperial governor of Wakasa by the new Meiji government until the abolition of the han system in 1871.

At the end of 1871, Wakasa was joined by Tsuruga District, Imadate District and Nanjō District to form "Tsuruga Prefecture". In 1876, Tsuruga Prefecture was divided, with former Wakasa and Tsuruga District joining Shiga Prefecture. In 1881, these area were given to Fukui Prefecture, which then assumed its present borders. Due to geography and these political changes, the area of former Wakasa Province and Tsuruga District have a separate identity, and form the Reinan (嶺南) region of modern Fukui.

Historical districts
Wakasa Province consisted of three districts:

 * Fukui Prefecture
 * Mikata District (三方郡)
 * Ōi District (大飯郡)
 * Onyū District (遠敷郡) - dissolved

title: Wakasa Province


text:
Embrace (American band Embrace album)

Embrace is the debut record and the only release by the American post-hardcore band Embrace.

The album, released by Dischord Records, consists of songs composed and performed in the context of Washington, D.C.'s 1985 Revolution Summer by one of its mainstay acts. Although recorded between November 1985 and February 1986, the album would not be released until 1987, after the demise of that social movement and the dissolution of the band.

Production and release
Embrace was compiled from the only two studio sessions the band recorded. The first eleven tracks were laid down in November 1985, while the other three were done in February 1986. All of the songs were recorded by the same lineup at Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, Virginia, with Don Zientara as audio engineer.

The album was released in September 1987 on Dischord Records, in LP format.

Critical reception
Though not "as gripping or inventive" as that of Fugazi's, the music in the record, "as a vehicle for [Ian MacKaye's] righteous, cutting lyrics and strong voice", is "more than fine", according to reviewer Ned Raggett, who has described it as having production values that switched around from the "usual domination via guitar" with an emphasis on Ivor Hanson's drums, while comparing the work of guitarist Michael Hampton to John McGeoch's early work with post-punk bands Magazine and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Trouser Press, for its part, was of the view that:

"'If not equal to Minor Threat's one-of-a-kind sonic excellence, Embrace['s instrumentals] are strong and muscular, an effective backdrop for MacKaye ... The confrontational lyricist [that delivers] an impressive [vocal] performance ... transforming an okay mid-tempo punk LP into a great one.'"

For Mark Jenkins, co-author with Mark Andersen of the book Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capital:

"'Embrace featured some of Ian MacKaye's most vivid and direct (and frequently angry) sermons against greed, delusion and self-destruction, backed by tight, tuneful and slightly psychedelic punk.'"

Jenkins also pointed out that:

"'Not all the lyrics are MacKaye's ... bassist Chris Bald, who named the band, had a major role in shaping its sensibility.'"

Reissues
In 1992, Embrace was reissued on CD and Compact Cassette, featuring alternate cover art.

In 2002, the original album was remastered by Chad Clark at Silver Sonya Recording and Mastering in Arlington, Virginia, for its re-release on CD, featuring, as bonus tracks, previously unreleased alternate versions of "Money" and "Dance of Days" taken from band's second recording session. This edition was reissued in 2008 on red vinyl, although without the additional cuts.

Also in 2002, the song "Money" was featured on the 3-CD compilation box set 20 Years of Dischord.

In 2009, the album was remastered again, this time at Chicago Mastering Service in Chicago, Illinois, for a reissue in its original vinyl disc format and cover art.

Personnel
Embrace
 * Ian MacKaye – vocals
 * Mike Hampton – guitar (except for track B5)
 * Chris Bald – bass
 * Ivor Hanson – drums
 * Edward Janney – guitar (B5)

Production
 * Embrace - production (A1 to B4)
 * Ian MacKaye - co-production (B5 to B7)
 * Edward Janney - co-production (B5 to B7)
 * Don Zientara – engineering
 * Chris Bald – artwork (front cover drawing)
 * Cynthia Connolly – artwork (back cover screen printing)
 * Leslie Clague – photography

Additional production (1992 CD and MC reissues)
 * J. Robbins – graphic design
 * Chris Bald – artwork (front cover drawing)
 * Cynthia Connolly – artwork (CD back cover screen printing)
 * Leslie Clague – photography
 * Tina Atkinson – photography
 * Kathy Cashel – typography
 * Jane Bogart – illegible credit

Additional production (2002 remastered CD reissue)
 * Ian MacKaye - co-production (15, 16)
 * Edward Janney - co-production (15, 16)
 * Chad Clark - remastering
 * Jason Farrell – graphic design
 * Chris Bald – artwork (front cover drawing)
 * Cynthia Connolly – artwork (inlay screen printing)
 * Leslie Clague – photography
 * Dave McDuff – photography

Additional production (2009 remastered LP reissue)
 * Jason Ward - remastering

title: Embrace (American band Embrace album)


text:
Kaga Province

Kaga Province (加賀国) was a province of Japan in the area that is today the south and western portion of Ishikawa Prefecture in the Hokuriku region of Japan. Kaga bordered on Echizen, Etchū, Hida, and Noto Provinces. It was part of Hokurikudō Circuit. Its abbreviated form name was Kashū (加州).

History
Koshi Province (越国) was an ancient province of Japan and is listed as one of the original provinces in the Nihon Shoki. The region as a whole was sometimes referred to as Esshū (越州). In 701 AD, per the reforms of the Taihō Code, Koshi was divided into three separate provinces: Echizen, Etchū, and Echigo.

In 823 AD, the two eastern districts of Echizen Province (Kaga and Enuma) were separated to form Kaga Province. Kaga was thus the last province to be created under the ritsuryō system. The same year, the northern portion of Enuma District became Nomi District, and the southern portion on Kaga District became Ishikawa District. Kaga District itself was renamed Kahoku District.

The provincial capital and provincial temple were located in what is now the city of Komatsu; however, there does not appear to have been a provincial nunnery. The Ichinomiya of the province is the Shirayama Hime Shrine in what is now the city of Hakusan. Under the Engishiki classification system, Kaga was ranked as a "superior country" (上国) in terms of importance and "middle country" (中国) in terms of distance from the capital. Despite this classification, Kaga never developed a powerful local gōzoku clan but was divided into many shōen estates.

During the early Sengoku period, the province was largely under the control of the Ikkō-ikki, who established a loosely governed confederation in the province. The area was eventually conquered by Oda Nobunaga's general Shibata Katsuie and subsequently came under the control of Maeda Toshiie under the rule of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The Maeda clan retained control of the province as part of Kaga Domain during the Edo period Tokugawa shogunate. From 1639, Enuma Domain and a portion of Nomi Domain were separated from Kaga Domain into the 100,000 koku Daishōji Domain, which was ruled by a junior branch of the Maeda clan.

Following the Meiji Restoration and the abolition of the han system in 1871, Kaga Province was divided into Kanazawa Prefecture and Daishōji Prefecture, which were merged with Fukui Prefecture. However, only a few months later in 1872, Kanazawa and Daishōji were divided back out and merged with Nanao Prefecture (the former Noto Province) to form today's Ishikawa Prefecture. In 1876, former Etchū Province was united with Ishikawa, only to become separated again in 1883.

Historical districts
Kaga Province consisted of four districts:

 * Ishikawa Prefecture
 * Enuma District (江沼郡) – dissolved
 * Ishikawa District (石川郡) – dissolved
 * Kahoku District (河北郡)
 * Nomi District (能美郡)

title: Kaga Province


text:
New Statesman

The New Statesman (known from 1931 to 1964 as the New Statesman and Nation) is a British political and cultural news magazine published in London. Founded as a weekly review of politics and literature on 12 April 1913, it was at first connected with Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other leading members of the socialist Fabian Society, such as George Bernard Shaw, who was a founding director. The longest-serving editor was Kingsley Martin (1930–1960), and the current editor is Jason Cowley, who assumed the post in 2008.

Today, the magazine is a print–digital hybrid. According to its present self-description, it has a liberal and progressive political position. Jason Cowley, the magazine's editor, has described the New Statesman as a publication "of the left, for the left" but also as "a political and literary magazine" with "sceptical" politics.

The magazine has recognised and published new writers and critics, as well as encouraged major careers. Its contributors have included John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, Christopher Hitchens, and Paul Johnson. Historically, the magazine was jocularly referred to as The Staggers – an example of Oxford "-er" undergraduate slang. The nickname is now used as the title of its rolling politics blog.

Circulation was at its highest in the mid-1960s at 93,000. The magazine encountered substantial difficulties in the following decades as readership fell, but it was growing again by the mid-2010s. In 2020, the certified average circulation was 36,591. Traffic to the magazine's website that year reached a new high with 27 million page views and four million distinct users. Associated websites have included CityMetric (now defunct), Spotlight and NewStatesman Tech. In 2018, New Statesman America was launched.

Early years
The New Statesman was founded in 1913 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb with the support of George Bernard Shaw and other prominent members of the Fabian Society. The Fabians previously had supported The New Age but that journal by 1912 had moved away from supporting Fabian politics and issues such as women's suffrage. The first editor of the New Statesman was Clifford Sharp, who remained editor until 1928. Desmond MacCarthy joined the paper in 1913 and became literary editor, recruiting Cyril Connolly to the staff in 1928. J. C. Squire edited the magazine when Sharp was on wartime duties during the First World War.

In November 1914, three months after the beginning of the war, the New Statesman published a lengthy anti-war supplement by Shaw, "Common Sense About The War", a scathing dissection of its causes, which castigated all nations involved but particularly savaged the British. It sold a phenomenal 75,000 copies by the end of the year and created an international sensation. The New York Times reprinted it as America began its lengthy debate on entering what was then called "the European War".

During Sharp's last two years in the post, from around 1926, he was debilitated by chronic alcoholism and the paper was actually edited by his deputy Charles Mostyn Lloyd. Although the Webbs and most Fabians were closely associated with the Labour Party, Sharp was drawn increasingly to the Asquith Liberals.

Lloyd stood in after Sharp's departure until the appointment of Kingsley Martin as editor in 1930 – a position that Martin was to hold for 30 years.

1931–1960: Kingsley Martin
In 1931 the New Statesman merged with the Liberal weekly The Nation and Athenaeum and changed its name to the New Statesman and Nation, which it kept until 1964. The chairman of The Nation and Athenaeum's board was the economist John Maynard Keynes, who came to be an important influence on the newly merged paper, which started with a circulation of just under 13,000. It also absorbed The Week-end Review in 1934 (one element of which survives in the shape of the New Statesman's Weekly Competition, and the other the "This England" feature). The Competition feature, in which readers submitted jokes and often parodies and pastiches of the work of famous authors, became one of the most famous parts of the magazine. Most famously, Graham Greene won second prize in a challenge to parody his own work.

During the 1930s, Martin's New Statesman moved markedly to the left politically. It became strongly anti-fascist and pacifist, opposing British rearmament. After the 1938 Anschluss, Martin wrote: "Today if Mr. Chamberlain would come forward and tell us that his policy was really one not only of isolation but also of Little Englandism in which the Empire was to be given up because it could not be defended and in which military defence was to be abandoned because war would totally end civilization, we for our part would wholeheartedly support him."

The magazine provoked further controversy with its coverage of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. In 1932, Keynes reviewed Martin's book on the Soviet Union, Low's Russian Sketchbook. Keynes argued that Martin was "a little too full perhaps of good will" towards Stalin, and that any doubts about Stalin's rule had "been swallowed down if possible". Martin was irritated by Keynes's article but still allowed it to be printed. In a 17 September 1932 editorial, the magazine accused the British Conservative press of misrepresenting the Soviet Union's agricultural policy but added that "the serious nature of the food situation is no secret and no invention". The magazine defended the Soviet collectivisation policy, but also said the policy had "proceeded far too quickly and lost the cooperation of farmers". In 1934 it ran an interview with Stalin by H. G. Wells. Although sympathetic to aspects of the Soviet Union, he disagreed with Stalin on several issues. The debate resulted in several more articles in the magazine; in one of them, George Bernard Shaw accused Wells of being disrespectful to Stalin during the interview.

In 1938 came Martin's refusal to publish George Orwell's celebrated dispatches from Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War because they criticised the communists for suppressing the anarchists and the left-wing Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). "It is an unfortunate fact", Martin wrote to Orwell, "that any hostile criticism of the present Russian regime is liable to be taken as propaganda against socialism". Martin also refused to allow any of the magazine's writers to review Leon Trotsky's anti-Stalinist book The Revolution Betrayed.

Martin became more critical of Stalin after the Hitler-Stalin pact, claiming Stalin was "adopting the familiar technique of the Fuhrer", and adding: "Like Hitler, he [Stalin] has a contempt for all arguments except that of superior force." The magazine also condemned the Soviet Invasion of Finland.

Circulation grew enormously under Martin's editorship, reaching 70,000 by the end of the Second World War. This number helped the magazine become a key player in Labour politics. The paper welcomed Labour's 1945 general election victory but took a critical line on the new government's foreign policy. The young Labour MP Richard Crossman, who had become an assistant editor of the magazine before the war, was Martin's chief lieutenant in this period, and the Statesman published Keep Left, the pamphlet written by Crossman, Michael Foot and Ian Mikardo, that most succinctly laid out the Labour left's proposals for a "third force" foreign policy rather than alliance with the United States.

During the 1950s, the New Statesman remained a left critic of British foreign and defence policy and of the Labour leadership of Hugh Gaitskell, although Martin never got on personally with Aneurin Bevan, the leader of the anti-Gaitskellite Labour faction. The magazine opposed the Korean War, and an article by J. B. Priestley directly led to the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

There was much less focus on a single political line in the back part of the paper, which was devoted to book reviews and articles on cultural topics. Indeed, with these pages managed by Janet Adam Smith, who was literary editor from 1952 to 1960, the paper was sometimes described as a pantomime horse: its back half was required reading even for many who disagreed with the paper's politics. This tradition would continue into the 1960s with Karl Miller as Smith's replacement.

1960–1996: After Kingsley Martin
Martin retired in 1960 and was replaced as editor by John Freeman, a politician and journalist who had resigned from the Labour government in 1951 along with Bevan and Harold Wilson. Freeman left in 1965 and was followed in the chair by Paul Johnson, then on the left, under whose editorship the Statesman reached its highest ever circulation. For some, even enemies of Johnson such as Richard Ingrams, this was a strong period for the magazine editorially. From 1964 to 1981, the Statesman was chaired by Jock Campbell, who endowed the "Jock Campbell-New Statesman Award", a prize of £1,000 that was given every three years for 12 years, with writers born in Africa or the Caribbean being eligible (and winners including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Shiva Naipaul, Derek Walcott and Buchi Emecheta).

After Johnson's departure in 1970, the Statesman went into a long period of declining circulation under successive editors: Richard Crossman (1970–72), who tried to edit it at the same time as playing a major role in Labour politics; Anthony Howard (1972–78), whose recruits to the paper included Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and James Fenton (surprisingly, the arch anti-Socialist Auberon Waugh was writing for the Statesman at this time before returning to The Spectator); Bruce Page (1978–82), who moved the paper towards specialising in investigative journalism, sacking Arthur Marshall, who had been writing for the Statesman on and off since 1935, as a columnist, allegedly because of the latter's support for Margaret Thatcher; Hugh Stephenson (1982–86), under whom it took a strong position again for unilateral nuclear disarmament; John Lloyd (1986–87), who swung the paper's politics back to the centre; Stuart Weir (1987–90), under whose editorship the Statesman founded the Charter 88 constitutional reform pressure group; and Steve Platt (1990–96).

The Statesman acquired the weekly New Society in 1988 and merged with it, becoming New Statesman and Society for the next eight years, then reverting to the old title, having meanwhile absorbed Marxism Today in 1991. In 1993, the Statesman was sued by Prime Minister John Major after it published an article discussing rumours that Major was having an extramarital affair with a Downing Street caterer. Although the action was settled out of court for a minimal sum, the magazine's legal costs almost led to its closure.

In 1994, KGB defector Yuri Shvets said that the KGB utilised the New Statesman to spread disinformation. Shvets said that the KGB had provided disinformation, including forged documents, to the New Statesman journalist Claudia Wright which she used for anti-American and anti-Israel stories in line with the KGB's campaigns.

Since 1996
The New Statesman was rescued from near-bankruptcy by a takeover by businessman Philip Jeffrey but in 1996, after prolonged boardroom wrangling over Jeffrey's plans, it was sold to Geoffrey Robinson, the Labour MP and businessman. Following Steve Platt's resignation, Robinson appointed a former editor of The Independent, Ian Hargreaves, on what was at the time an unprecedentedly high salary. Hargreaves fired most of the left-wingers on the staff and turned the Statesman into a strong supporter of Tony Blair's leadership of the Labour Party.

Hargreaves was succeeded by Peter Wilby, also from the Independent stable, who had previously been the Statesmans books editor, in 1998. Wilby attempted to reposition the paper back "on the left". His stewardship was not without controversy. In 2002, for example, the periodical was accused of antisemitism when it published an investigative cover story on the power of the "Zionist lobby" in Britain, under the title "A Kosher Conspiracy?" The cover was illustrated with a gold Star of David resting on a Union Jack. Wilby responded to the criticisms in a subsequent issue. During Wilby's seven-year tenure, the New Statesman moved from making a financial loss to having a good operating profit, though circulation only remained steady at around 23,000.

John Kampfner, Wilby's political editor, succeeded him as editor in May 2005 following considerable internal lobbying. Under Kampfner's editorship, a relaunch in 2006 initially saw headline circulation climb to more than 30,000. However, over 5,000 of these were apparently monitored free copies, and Kampfner failed to maintain the 30,000 circulation he had pledged. In February 2008, Audit Bureau Circulation figures showed that circulation had plunged nearly 13% in 2007. Kampfner resigned on 13 February 2008, the day before the ABC figures were made public, reportedly due to conflicts with Robinson over the magazine's marketing budget (which Robinson had apparently slashed in reaction to the fall in circulation).

In April 2008, Geoffrey Robinson sold a 50% interest in the magazine to businessman Mike Danson, and the remainder a year later. The appointment of the new editor Jason Cowley was announced on 16 May 2008, but he did not take up the job until the end of September 2008.

In January 2009, the magazine refused to recognise the National Union of Journalists, the trade union to which almost all of its journalists belonged, though further discussions were promised but never materialised.

Cowley was named current affairs editor of the year at the British Society of Magazine Editors awards in 2009, and in 2011 he was named editor of the year in the Newspaper & Current Affairs Magazine Category at the British Society of Magazine Editors awards, while Jon Bernstein, the deputy editor, gained the award for Consumer Website Editor of the Year. Cowley had been shortlisted as Editor of the Year (consumer magazines) in the 2012 PPA (Professional Publishers Association) Awards. He was also shortlisted for the European Press Prize editing award in January 2013, when the awards committee said: "Cowley has succeeded in revitalising the New Statesman and re-establishing its position as an influential political and cultural weekly. He has given the New Statesman an edge and a relevance to current affairs it hasn’t had for years."

The magazine published a 186-page centenary special in April 2013, the largest single issue in its history. It also published two special editions (250 and 150 pages), showcasing 100 years of the best and boldest journalism from its archives. In the following year it expanded its web presence by establishing two new websites: May2015.com, a polling data site focused on the 2015 general election, and CityMetric, a cities magazine site under the tagline, "Urbanism for the social media age" and edited by Jonn Elledge.

It was announced in December 2016 that the Weekend Competition, a feature inherited from The Week-end Review, would be discontinued, for reasons of space.

The New Statesman took a neutral position in the 2019 general election. It was the first time in the magazine's history it had explicitly chosen not to endorse Labour.

As of 2020, the New Statesman considers itself a "print-digital hybrid" with peak online traffic of over 4 million unique visitors per month, almost a four-fold increase since 2011. This compares to the magazine's overall circulation of 36,591, and paid-for circulation of 34,451 as of January 2021, the highest level for 40 years.

At the 2020 British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) awards, editor Jason Cowley was named Current Affairs and Politics editor of the year for the fourth time, defeating rivals from The Spectator, The Big Issue and Prospect. "In increasingly tribal times, Jason Cowley continues to champion independence of thought and diversity of opinion, challenging his audience and producing a magazine that's imaginative, unpredictable and interesting", the BSME judges said on presenting the award.

The magazine's Spotlight series (which publishes specialist business content) also won the Launch of the Year award, with judges describing the supplements as a "great example of monetising a brand without losing its integrity". Following Andrew Marr's leaving the BBC in 2021, he joined the magazine as chief political commentator.

In June 2024, the New Statesman accidentally spread the false report that Noam Chomsky had died.

Guest editors
In March 2009, the magazine had its first guest editor, Alastair Campbell, the former head of communications for Tony Blair. Campbell chose to feature his partner Fiona Millar, Tony Blair (in an article "Why we must all do God"), football manager Alex Ferguson, and Sarah Brown, the wife of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. This editorship was condemned by Suzanne Moore, a contributor to the magazine for twenty years. She wrote in a Mail on Sunday article: "New Statesman fiercely opposed the Iraq war and yet now hands over the reins to someone key in orchestrating that conflict". Campbell responded: "I had no idea she worked for the New Statesman. I don't read the Mail on Sunday. But professing commitment to leftwing values in that rightwing rag lends a somewhat weakened credibility to anything she says."

In September 2009, the magazine was guest-edited by Labour politician Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London.

In October 2010, the magazine was guest-edited by British author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. The issue included a previously unpublished poem by Ted Hughes, "Last letter", describing what happened during the three days leading up to the suicide of his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath. Its first line is: "What happened that night? Your final night."—and the poem ends with the moment Hughes is informed of his wife's death.

In April 2011, the magazine was guest-edited by human rights activist Jemima Khan. The issue featured a series of exclusives including the actor Hugh Grant's secret recording of former News of the World journalist Paul McMullan, and a much-commented-on interview with Liberal Democrat leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, in which Clegg admitted that he "cries regularly to music" and that his nine-year-old son asked him, "'Why are the students angry with you, Papa?'"

In June 2011, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, created a furore as guest editor by claiming that the Coalition government had introduced "radical, long term policies for which no one had voted" and in doing so had created "anxiety and anger" among many in the country. He was accused of being highly partisan, notwithstanding his having invited Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary to write an article and having interviewed the Foreign Secretary William Hague in the same edition. He also noted that the Labour Party had failed to offer an alternative to what he called "associational socialism". The Statesman promoted the edition on the basis of Williams' alleged attack on the government, whereas Williams himself had ended his article by asking for "a democracy capable of real argument about shared needs and hopes and real generosity".

In December 2011 the magazine was guest-edited by Richard Dawkins. The issue included the writer Christopher Hitchens's final interview, conducted by Dawkins in Texas, and pieces by Bill Gates, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Philip Pullman.

In October 2012 the magazine was guest-edited by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and, for the first time, published simultaneously in Mandarin (in digital form) and English. To evade China's internet censors, the New Statesman uploaded the issue to file-sharing sites such as BitTorrent. As well as writing that week's editorial, Ai Weiwei interviewed the Chinese civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who fled to the United States after exposing the use of compulsory abortions and sterilisations. The issue was launched on 19 October 2012 at the Lisson Gallery in London, where speakers including artist Anish Kapoor and lawyer Mark Stephens paid tribute to Ai Weiwei.

In October 2013 the magazine was guest-edited by Russell Brand, with contributions from David Lynch, Noel Gallagher, Naomi Klein, Rupert Everett, Amanda Palmer, and Alec Baldwin, as well as an essay by Brand.

In October 2014, the magazine was guest-edited by the artist Grayson Perry, whose essay titled "Default Man" was widely discussed.

The former British prime minister Gordon Brown guest-edited the magazine in 2016, a special edition exploring Britain's relationship with Europe ahead of the EU referendum. Contributors to the issue included the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and Michael Sandel.

title: New Statesman


text:
Mania (deity)

In ancient Etruscan and Roman mythology, Mania, also spelled Manea, was a goddess of the dead, spirits and chaos: she was said to be the mother of ghosts, the undead, and other spirits of the night, as well as the Lares and the Manes. She, along with Mantus, ruled the underworld.

Her counterpart in Greek mythology, also named Mania (or Maniae), was the goddess of insanity and madness.

Etymology
Her name links her to the Manes, Mana Genita, and Manius.

Both the Greek and Latin Mania derive from PIE (Proto-Indo-European) *men-, "to think." Cognates include Ancient Greek μένος, and Avestan 𐬎𐬫𐬥𐬌𐬀𐬨.

title: Mania (deity)


text:
Jack Hitt

Jack Hitt is an American author. He has been a contributing editor to Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, This American Life, and the now-defunct magazine Lingua Franca. His work has appeared in such publications as Outside Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, Mother Jones, Slate, and Garden & Gun.

In 1990, he received the Livingston Award, along with Paul Tough, for an article they wrote about computer hackers that was published in Esquire. Hitt has written and edited multiple books, and has had articles selected for inclusion in Best American Science Writing 2006, Best American Travel Writing 2005, and in Ira Glass's The New Kings of Nonfiction (2007). In 2006, an episode of This American Life that Hitt contributed to called "Habeus Schmabeus" won a Peabody Award. Hitt also co-hosted the Gimlet Media Podcast Uncivil along with Chenjerai Kumanyiki between 2017 and 2018. Uncivil won a Peabody award in 2017 for the episode titled "The Raid".

Personal life
John T. L. "Jack" Hitt was born in 1957 in Charleston, South Carolina to Ann Leonard Hitt and Robert Hitt Jr. He was the youngest of five children. He was raised in Charleston and attended the Porter-Gaud School. At Porter-Gaude, Hitt got his start in writing by contributing to and editing the school's literary magazine. While growing up in Charleston, Hitt lived in the same neighborhood as Dawn Langley Simmons who would receive one of the first sex reassignment surgeries in the United States.

Hitt attended the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee where he majored in comparative literature. As an undergrad, he worked at the Learning Disabilities Center and taught math and English to teens and children. He also tutored Latin. He was president of the Spanish House and a member of the Spanish Honor Society.

It was at Sewanee that Hitt first heard about the road to Santiago de Compostela. He would write about the experience of walking the road in his first book, Off The Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's route into Spain.

Hitt graduated from the University of the South in 1979.

"I was nearly a Latin professor", said Hitt in an interview with The Atlantic. "Upon graduation, my Classics teacher warned me that while I'd read the hundred or so greatest works of Latin literature, post-graduate work meant reading the 1,000 'eh' works of Latin literature...I seized my diploma and I've never translated a line of Latin since."

Hitt lived in an apartment in New York City for about 8 years before he met and married his current wife Lisa Sanders in the late 1980s. They live together in New Haven, Connecticut and have two daughters.

Jack Hitt's older brother Robert M. Hitt III served as Secretary of Commerce for the state of South Carolina from January 2011 to June 2021.

Writing and journalism career

Hitt has been a contributing editor to Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, This American Life, and Lingua Franca. He has also had articles published in Mother Jones, Slate, the Smithsonian, Discover Magazine, Rolling Stone, GQ, Wired, Garden & Gun, and Outside Magazine.

Hitt's New York Times Magazine piece about a dying language called "Say No More" was selected for inclusion in The Best American Travel Writing 2005. A piece originally published in Harper's titled "Mighty White of You: Racial Preferences Color America's Oldest Skulls and Bones" was selected for inclusion in Best American Science Writing 2006. Another piece from Harper's titled "Toxic Dreams: A California Town Finds Meaning in an Acid Pit", was included in Ira Glass's The New Kings of Nonfiction (2007).

Jack Hitt and Paul Tough won a Livingston award for an article published in Esquire they wrote about Hackers titled "Terminal Delinquents."

Since 1996, Hitt has also been a contributing editor to the radio series This American Life. Showrunner Ira Glass wrote an announcement for Hitt's show that included a listing of what he considered to be stand out episodes of This American Life that Hitt had contributed to. That list included: "Fiasco," a story about a production of Peter Pan gone wrong; "The Super," a story about a superintendent Hitt had in New York City who was a former member of a Brazilian death squad; "Dawn," a story about his Charleston neighbor Dawn Langley Simmons (an early recipient of sex reassignment surgery); "The Middle of Nowhere," a story about the small pacific island of Nauru; and "Habeas Schmabeas," a story that contained multiple interviews with prisoners who had served time at Guantanamo Bay.

This American Life won a Peabody Award in 2006 for "Habeas Schmabeas."

Between 2017 and 2018, Hitt co-hosted the Gimlet Media podcast Uncivil along with Chenjerai Kumanyika. The episode of Uncivil titled "The Raid" won a Peabody award in 2017.

Hitt was a regular US correspondent on Nine to Noon, hosted by Kathryn Ryan on Radio New Zealand National.

In 2012, Hitt was interviewed on The Colbert Report about his novel Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character.

Between 2012 and 2013, Hitt performed a one-man show he wrote about his childhood and the outlandish characters he's met in his life called Making Up The Truth.

Film
Jack Hitt and Paul Tough are both listed as consultants for the movie Hackers (1995).

Parts of Hitt's novel Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route into Spain were reworked by Emilio Estevez and Martin Sheen into the movie The Way.

Hit was interviewed for two documentaries; Split: A Divided America (2008) and for Tower to the People (2015).

Books
Written by Jack Hitt
 * In a Word: A Dictionary of Words That Don't Exist, But Ought To (1992) ISBN 0-440-50358-2
 * Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route into Spain (1994) ISBN 9780743261111
 * Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character (2012) ISBN 0-307-39375-5

Edited by Jack Hitt
 * Perfect Murder: Five Great Mystery Writers Create the Perfect Crime (1991) ISBN 978-0060163402
 * What Are We Talking About?: The Harper's Forum Book (1991) ISBN 978-0806512303

Article by Jack Hitt selected for inclusion
 * "Say No More" included in The Best American Travel Writing 2005, Jamaica Kincaid (editor) ISBN 9780618369515
 * "Mighty White of You: Racial Preferences Color America's Oldest Skulls and Bones" included in Best American Science Writing 2006, Atul Gawande (editor) ISBN 978-0060726447
 * "Toxic Dreams: A California Town Finds Meaning in an Acid Pit" included in The New Kings of Nonfiction (2007), Ira Glass (editor) ISBN 978-1594482670

title: Jack Hitt


text:
Raspberry (disambiguation)

The raspberry is the edible fruit of several plant species.

Raspberry may also refer to:

 * Bramble Raspberry or Rubus fruticosus, a species of blackberry
 * Raspberry (color), a bright crimson-rose color named for the fruit
 * Blowing a raspberry, making an obnoxious sound to signal disrespect
 * William Raspberry (1935–2012), American journalist

Places

 * Raspberry, Arkansas, US
 * Raspberry, British Columbia, Canada
 * Raspberry Creek (British Columbia), Canada

Music

 * Raspberries (band), a 1970s pop-rock group
 * Raspberries (album), the 1972 debut album by Raspberries
 * "Raspberry", a song by Sloan from Smeared

title: Raspberry (disambiguation)


text:
Mazarine Pingeot

Mazarine Marie Pingeot (born 18 December 1974) who changed her name to Mazarine Marie Mitterrand Pingeot in November 2016, is a French writer, journalist and professor.

Biography
Pingeot is the daughter of former French president François Mitterrand and his mistress Anne Pingeot. She is said to be named after the Bibliothèque Mazarine, the oldest library in France, because of her parents' love for books. She could also be named after cardinal Mazarin, who was admired by her father. Her existence was long hidden from the press but was once almost revealed by the French writer Jean-Edern Hallier. Keeping Mazarine Pingeot's identity from the public was one of the motivations behind some of the illegal wiretapping that Mitterrand ordered under the guise of fighting terrorism.

She was a student first at the elite Lycée Henri-IV in Paris and then at the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud (now named the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon), a highly prestigious school. In 1997, she passed the agrégation de philosophie, and then briefly started - but did not complete - a Ph.D. thesis on the philosopher Spinoza, working as a teaching assistant at the Université de Provence Aix-Marseille I.

She was also a journalist (writing for Elle between 1999 and 2001) and a television anchor (on a French cable television channel, Paris Première).

Works
In 1998, she published her first novel, titled Premier Roman ("First Novel"), which was not highly praised by critics but was translated into many languages, including English. In 2000, she published Zeyn or the Reconquest, for which Charles Bremner of The Times wrote "If there was a prize for braving the ridicule of critics, it would go to Mazarine Pingeot" (8 May 2000). In 2003, she published a series of literary comments, "They told me who I was" ("they" being the books). In February 2005, she published her fourth book, Not a Word, a diary about her childhood life as a national secret. In 2007, she published her fifth book, Le Cimetière des poupées (The Cemetery of the Dolls), a novel about a woman who kills her baby and puts it in a freezer.

In 2019, Mitterrand Pingeot published a novel titled Se taire ("Keeping quiet") about a female photographer raped by a prominent politician. Commentators have drawn parallels with the accusations by her niece Pascale Mitterrand against the French politician Nicolas Hulot, which accusations had been dismissed by the French authorities. Mitterrand Pingeot's 2020 novel Et la peur continue ("And the fear is constant") follows a woman who lives in a constant state of fear caused by the everyday pressures she experiences in her professional and personal life.

Family
She has one son, Astor, born in 2005 and two daughters, born in 2007 and 2009 with her former partner Mohamed Ulad-Mohand, a film director. As of 2023, she is with Didier Le Bret.

title: Mazarine Pingeot


text:
The Knight in the Panther's Skin

The Knight in the Panther's Skin (ვეფხისტყაოსანი literally "the one with the skin of a tiger") is a Georgian medieval epic poem, written in the 12th or 13th century by Georgia's national poet Shota Rustaveli. A definitive work of the Georgian Golden Age, the poem consists of over 1600 Rustavelian Quatrains and is considered to be a "masterpiece of the Georgian literature". Until the early 20th century, a copy of this poem was part of the dowry of every bride.

Although the poem takes place in the fictional settings of "India" and "Arabia", events in these distant lands are but a colorful allegory of the rule of King Tamar of Georgia, and the size and glory of the Kingdom of Georgia in its Golden Age. It tells the friendship of two heroes, Avtandil and Tariel, and their quest to find the object of love, Nestan-Darejan, an allegorical embodiment of King Tamar. These idealized heroes and devoted friends are united by courtly love, generosity, sincerity, and dedication. The poem is regarded as the "coronation of thought, poetic and philosophical art of medieval Georgia", a complex work with rich and transcending genres. It has been described as "epic", "chivalric romance", "epic romance" and "epic poem of lyric poetry." Despite its formal complexity, it bears to this day "the Georgian vision of the world."

Context and time
The poem was written during the Golden Age of the Kingdom of Georgia and the reign of Queen Tamar, who was enthroned by her father King George III of Georgia. Tamar was celebrated by poets for her beauty, intelligence, and diplomatic skills. She expanded the Georgian kingdom to its historical maximum, repulsed invasions, and established protectorates over many area Muslim and Christian lands. Under her reign, the economy prospered. Georgian trading caravans reached Ayyubid Egypt, the Kievan Rus, and the Byzantine Empire. Medieval science developed, and the largest monasteries and churches in Georgia were built. Secular literature developed to the point of equaling the greatest religious texts.

Against the backdrop of this "remarkable growth", Shota Rustaveli composed his poem. Rustaveli, born in Rustavi, a Meskhetian village, was close to King Tamar and possibly served as her treasurer. He likely participated in many military campaigns. The stories in his poem are set in faraway lands, but his allegorical representations of contemporaneous Georgia are recognizable. For instance, he refers to wine culture and a female king who became an heir of her father.

In the prologue, Rustaveli says that he wrote this poem to praise the "King" Tamar.

And in the epilogue (given here with a formal paraphrase), he praises the queen's king consort David Soslan.

Genre and style
Though written in Georgian at the height of the pan-Caucasian empire of the Georgian Bagratids, according to the modern historian Stephen H. Rapp, The Knight in the Panther's Skin "was an expression of the Iranian/Iranic epic and not some genre of Byzantine literature". Rustaveli used a Persian model for writing The Knight in the Panther's Skin. In the work's prologue, the modern historian Nile Green explains, Rustaveli publicly declares his 1,600-quatrain epic, written in the shairi verse form, as a "Persian tale, translated into Georgian / Like an orphaned pearl, like a toy passed from hand to hand".

Title
Georgian title ვეფხისტყაოსანი (vepkhistqaosani) literally means "one with a skin of vepkhi". The identity of the animal that it refers to is not certain and it can be a tiger, panther or leopard. In modern Georgian, it refers to the tiger. However, according to more modern research it would rather mean a panther. Similarly, the qualification of "knight" is not derived from the original title and its alternative translations exist, such as the "valiant" or simply a "man." The alternative English titles of the poem also are "Lord of the Panther Skin" and "The Man in the Panther's Skin".

Story
The story can be divided into two parts: the first part is Avtandil's quest for Tariel, the titular "knight in the panther's skin", and the second part is Avtandil's quest for Nestan-Darejan, Tariel's love.

Search for Tariel
The King of Arabia, Rostevan, has no sons and confers the kingship on his only daughter, the beautiful and wise Tinatin. She has a tender affection for Avtandil, the knight and commander-in-chief of Rostevan's armies. One day, Avtandil challenges King Rostevan to a hunting competition. After three days of shooting game, they encounter a knight crying by a river. He is dressed in a panther's skin, and kills the slaves sent by the king to contact him, then disappears. Rostevan sends parties across the world to search for the mysterious knight, but becomes disheartened when he fails.

Tinatin asks Avtandil to find the strange knight in three years, promising him her hand in marriage in return. After two years and nine months of searching, Avtandil finds the knight in the panther's skin hiding in a cave, with only a maiden for company. His name is Tariel, son of King Saridan, who has the seventh kingdom of India. He had served as heir to King Pharsadan, king of the other six kingdoms, for many years before falling in love with Pharsadan's daughter, Nestan-Darejan. Tariel wages war with the Khatavians to earn the favor of Nestan, but is dismayed to learn that she has already been promised to the Khwarezmian prince.

Tariel could not bear the idea of her marriage, and at Nestan's request, he killed the suitor. The princess was placed on a boat and set adrift on the seas. Despite Tariel's lengthy search for his love, he could not find her. Later he met Nuradin-Phridon, ruler of Mulgazanzar, who told him that Nestan was alive but trapped on a distant boat. Tariel retired to a cave to live in the wilderness with Asmat, the former servant and messenger of Nestan. Moved by this story, Avtandil promises his friendship and brotherhood to Tariel, and agrees to help him find his love, Nestan-Darejan. Avtandil returns home to Arabia, and tells Tinatin the story of Tariel. Against King Rostevan's wishes, he returns to his new friend.

Search for Nestan-Darejan
Avtandil then leaves Tariel to go to the kingdom of Phridon, where he does not hear anything new about Nestan. Continuing his quest, he arrives in the city of Gulansharo. He meets Patman, the wife of the chief Usen, who falls in love with him. Avtandil, sensing she knows the fate of Nestan, succumbs to Patman's seduction. She tells him she has been keeping Nestan at her place and, as Nestan was promised to the king's son, she helped her escape, but in her flight Nestan was abducted by Kaji the demon king. Avtandil then returns home to Phridon and to the cave of Tariel and later all three friends decide to go to the country of Kaji with an army of three hundred men to find and deliver Nestan. When she is released, all return to Arabia, where King Rostevan forgives Avtandil his flight and breaking the king's order. They all celebrate the marriage of the latter with the king's only daughter, Tinatin. They then leave for India where Tariel marries his love Nestan. Phridon also returns to his homeland and the three friends reign happily with prosperity and generosity in their own respective realms.

Places
The poem is placed far away from Georgia in countries that the poet has certainly never visited: Arabia, India and "Khataeti" that is to say, China. The indications are vague and do not designate any particular site. It is the Georgian kingdom that has existed through these distant lands. It seems that the choice of places refers primarily to the national character of these peoples: the Arabs are portrayed as more rational, as the king Rostevan and his knight Avtandil with their communication skills and action help to break deadlocks. Conversely, the Indians appear to be more emotional and impulsive and cause unintended disasters, as of the image of Tariel and Nestan. Other locations mentioned as the Kajeti or country of Kaj demons are imaginary. Gulansharo, capital of the "Kingdom of the Seas", has been compared to Venice.

Characters
These two characters represent the most devoted friends, and tender lovers; both heroes capable of courtly love and men endowed with free will. They initially were actively involved and served the kingdoms held position of modern "steward" or "Mayor of the Palace". Besides their position they only obey their beloveds, therefore their love and dedication is unwavering. The mutual commitment and friendship they swear, also extends to a third person, Nuradin-Pridon, who is also endowed with the same heroic qualities. Tariel is, however, distinguished by his wild character as symbolized by his wearing the panther's skin. The qualities associated with the cat, his dedication and courage, his hatred and violence could be extreme and uncontrollable. It is also close to Saint George slaying the dragon whose cult was particularly strong in the 12th century especially in the episode where Tariel kills a lion and a panther.
 * The brave and loyal knights — Avtandil and Tariel

Although they take little action, the female characters, Tinatin and Nestan-Darejan are constantly present in thoughts of the knights and serve to give the narrative tension as a whole. Princesses, higher in social rank than their servant knights, are inspired by the Queen Tamar or reflect the fact that each of them is the sovereign in their own realm. Tinatin chooses her own husband which references Queen Tamar (who also chose her second husband) as her role as the sovereign. and her father Rostevan, ceding his throne to his daughter references King George III of Georgia who was succeeded by her daughter in 1178, after his death.
 * The faithful and patient lovers — Tinatin and Nestan-Darejan

Tinatin is a static character who leaves no time to the court of her father in Arabia. Nestan, a prisoner in distant regions, is also passive. But their confidence, righteousness, shows these two women being faithful and respective lovers. As for Patman, she is an altered representation of their type but an adulteress during the absence of her husband. Patman takes little account of family honor as she humiliates her husband on account of his bodily defects. Her character is true to life from the artistic point of view. Despite everything, she is capable of displaying both affection and sincere warmth peculiar to a woman. She spares no effort to save Nestan. It is very characteristic that when Patman learns of the purpose of Avtandil's journey, she makes no attempt to keep the man she loves at her side even for a short time.

Human relationships
Rustaveli is a great humanist. The poet focuses his attention on a man as a complex of sincere feelings, emotions, passions and aspirations. To counterbalance the mentality of the Middle Ages and the ecclesiastic morality of asceticism, Rustaveli proclaims the freedom of man as a personality, free of thought and feeling.

Love
In the prologue, Rustaveli describes three types of love: inaccessible, heavenly love; physical love; and finally, a higher earthly love, or passionate love. Rustaveli thinks that pure and constant love does not expect love in return. Such love can not be felt without a strong spirit; he suggests that the only possibility of enjoying love of this order is to have the natural qualities of a true human being. The valiant must win his beauty by impeccable behavior, including a constant devotion, the rejection of social duties, and selfless loyalty. And as the author says, "love is a severe trial for man as for woman".

Nestan's loyalty is expressed in the dramatic tension well before the appearance of her character; She is a model of righteousness. When it was announced that Nestan would be married against her will, she protests with force, and supports the consequences by her heroic courage and stoicism. For the three heroes who go to her aid, fearless and selfless, their fight is intended as a quest for justice. Amorous conquest is noticeably absent from the poem. Both romantic relationships are paralleled and never mixed, as the true brotherhood between the two heroes prevent such incidents. Love, like friendship, often gives rise to hyperbolic descriptions in the poem.

Friendship
The friendship between the three heroes sworn, Avtandil, Tariel and Pridon, a clear narrative of the entire epic, binds them together and at the same time it binds their peoples. These three men belong to different nations, they find themselves with the same aspirations and the same goal and that is their union of forces that can and will destroy a tyranny and evil what is represented by the Kajs. This friendship, full of honesty and courage, free of cowardice and sycophancy, must go to the death if necessary. Such friendship is also possible between persons of different sexes in this case of Tariel and Asmat who share the same cave in brotherhood. However, love and friendship are intertwined as love of a knight with his heroism is fully realized with the help of a disinterested friendship and absolute loyalty. Both feelings are also expressed in the terms when Avtandil even against the will and order of his king departs to help his friend in need. Moreover, the happiness of each is conditioned by the happiness of others. Tinatin allows Avtandil to leave for Tariel, because it is the duty of her suitor to rescue his friend to whom he has promised to help.

Values
With the glorification of courtly love, Rustaveli leads to strongly condemn forced marriages. The poem also shows an admiration for the woman and demands for gender equality. Even though Queen Tamar is the first female monarch and the sovereign of the kingdom, women's political function, position and leading role in Georgia was very high be it the patronage of Georgia by the Virgin Mary or conversion of Georgians to Christianity by a woman, Saint Nino in the 4th century. This "cult of woman" celebrates her honor and freedom to choose her own husband and Nestan is the model of a noble woman who puts reason above passion. In equal rights, women can develop a sincere friendship with the opposite sex without love and desire and Asmat is dedicated to Tariel. Slavery is also condemned in the poem.

Politically, the poem does not lack and is not without patriotism. The state must be led by a strong and autocratic central government, however, sovereigns must rule with justice and prudence.

In general, the poem is a "manifest of living with joy". The success of the three heroes in the liberation of Nestan shows that justice can exist on earth, as with enough courage and perseverance, one can find the happiness here.

Religious and philosophical views
The poem sometimes gives the impression of being a pagan work. In fact, there are no prayers in the poem, and no references to Christ, the Virgin Mary, or the Trinity. However, Paul the Apostle is mentioned, and there are a number of references to the Gospels and the Old Testament, including ten occurrences of the Garden of Eden, as well as references to the Euphrates, Gibeon and Levi).

Nevertheless, the moral framework of the work is Christian, with a clear dichotomy between a good god and a hard and disappointing world. This Christianity is not, however, fanatical. Rustaveli refers to the Quran multiple times to indicate that most of the characters are Muslim. He never offends Islam in his work and uses it as an allegory for Christianity, since most of the values that the poem promotes are of Christian origin. He also mentions the twelve apostles (verse 799) and how they spread the philosophy of benevolence and love.

There are philosophical references in the poem to the work of Pseudo-Dionysius (verse 1478) which may be attributed to the influence of the Georgian monk Peter the Iberian, an idealist, who believed in the oneness of God but sees the impossibility of knowing God's real existence. Rustaveli's presentation of God as a universal force rather than only a Christian one once led to the suppression of the poem. Believing Rustaveli was a Muslim (an opinion also proffered by Nicholas Marr in 1917), the Georgian Orthodox Church in the past systematically destroyed copies of the poem.

Translations
Within Georgia, the poem has been translated into other Kartvelian languages like Laz, Svan and Mingrelian.

Outside of Georgia, interest in the poem first appeared in 1802, when Eugene Bolkhovitinov published a verbatim translation of the first stanza of the poem into Russian. In France in 1828, Marie-Félicité Brosset made his first partial French translation. In the 19th century the poem saw full translations into Polish, German and Russian. In 1845, extracts were published in Russian, French and Armenian. Vahan Terian, a prominent Georgian-born Armenian poet, translated the prelude, which was first published posthumously in 1922. It was praised by Nicholas Marr. In 1912, Marjory Wardrop published the first English translation available. In 1968, a verse translation by Venera Urushadze was published in Georgia. It was also translated into modern Azerbaijani in 1978 by Dilara Aliyeva. In 2015, an English poetic translation by Lyn Coffin was published, combining literary achievement with academic precision.

Today, unabridged editions are available in many languages: Abkhaz, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Chechen, Chinese, Chuvash, Czech, Esperanto, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Moldovan, Mongolian, Ossetian, Persian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Tatar, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Hindi, and Uzbek.

Among the translations, the 1989 Esperanto version by Zurab Makaŝvili and the 2015 English version by Lyn Coffin are notable not only for faithfully reproducing the content of the poem, but also for preserving the poetic structure of the epic in shairi (rhymed stanzas of four sixteen-syllable lines).

title: The Knight in the Panther's Skin