title: Ned Beatty

text: Beatty was married four times. His first wife was Walta Chandler; they were married from 1959 until 1968 and had four children. His second wife was actress Belinda Rowley; they were married from 1971 to 1979 and had two children. His third wife was Dorothy Adams "Tinker" Lindsay; they were married from June 28, 1979, to March 1998 and had two children. His fourth wife was Sandra Johnson; they were married on November 20, 1999, and lived in Los Angeles, California. They also maintained a residence in Karlstad, Minnesota.


title: Ned Beatty

text: Beatty was not related to fellow Hollywood star Warren Beatty, also born in 1937. When asked if they were related, Beatty had been known to joke that Warren was his "illegitimate uncle".


title: Ned Beatty

text: On June 29, 2012, Beatty attended a 40th anniversary screening of "Deliverance" at Warner Bros., with Burt Reynolds, Ronny Cox and Jon Voight.


title: Ned Beatty

text: During his career, Beatty got his first nomination for an Academy Award in Best Supporting Actor category for "Network" (1976), portraying Arthur Jensen. His second nomination, an Emmy Award, came for "Friendly Fire" (1979) in 'Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Special' category and the third nomination is another Emmy Award for 'Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Special' category for "Last Train Home" (1990). He got the fourth major award nomination for a Golden Globe Award in category Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture for "Hear My Song" (1990), portraying the Irish tenor Josef Locke and his fifth nomination for a MTV Movie Award in Best Villain category in the voice of antagonist Lots-O'-Huggin' Bear in "Toy Story 3" (2010).


title: Ned Beatty

text: He won a Drama Desk Award for "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (2004) in Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play category.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: Babylon the Great, commonly known as the Whore of Babylon, refers to both a symbolic female figure and place of evil mentioned in the Book of Revelation in the Bible. Her full title is stated in Revelation 17 () as "Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth" (; transliterated "mystērion, Babylōn hē megalē, hē mētēr tōn pornōn kai tōn bdelygmatōn tēs gēs"). Revelation 17 (verse 18) identifies the woman as a representation of "the great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth".


title: Whore of Babylon

text: The Whore is associated with the Beast of Revelation by connection with an equally evil kingdom. The word "Whore" can also be translated metaphorically as "Idolatress". The Whore's apocalyptic downfall is prophesied to take place in the hands of the image of the beast with seven heads and ten horns. There is much speculation within Christian eschatology on what the Whore and beast symbolize as well as the possible implications for contemporary interpretations.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: Caroline Vander Stichele (2000) demonstrated that the narrative of the Whore of Babylon follows many of the same patterns of the personification of capital cities as women who commit "prostitution / whoredom" and/or "adultery" in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. These capital cities, representing the states they govern, are alleged to have committed various sins that have rendered them sexually promiscuous, and therefore they will eventually be annihilated through various well-deserved violent punishments sent by the Israelite God Yahweh.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: First Peter () implies the author is in "Babylon", which has been held to be a coded reference to Rome. Many Biblical scholars believe that "Babylon" is a metaphor for the pagan Roman Empire at the time it persecuted Christians, before the Edict of Milan in 313. According to Eusebius of Caesarea Babylon would be Rome or the Roman Empire:


title: Whore of Babylon

text: Some biblical scholars recognize that "Babylon" is a cipher for Rome or the Roman Empire but believe Babylon is not limited to the Roman city of the first century. Craig Koester says outright that "the whore is Rome, yet more than Rome."


title: Whore of Babylon

text: It "is the Roman imperial world, which in turn represents the world alienated from God." Some exegetes interpret the passage as a scathing critique of a servant people of Rome who do the Empire's bidding, interpreting that the author of Revelation was speaking of the Herodians—a party of Jews friendly to Rome and open to its influence, like the Hellenizers of centuries past—and later, corrupt Hasmoneans, where the ruler of Jerusalem or Roman Judea exercised his power at the pleasure of the Roman emperor, and was dependent on Roman influence, like Herod the Great in the Gospel of Luke.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: In 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch and the Sibylline Oracles, "Babylon" is a cryptic name for Rome. In Revelation 17:9 it is said that she sits on "seven mountains", typically understood as the seven hills of Rome. A Roman coin minted under the Emperor Vespasian (ca. 70 AD) depicts Rome as a woman sitting on seven hills.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: According to the "International Standard Bible Encyclopedia", "The characteristics ascribed to this Babylon apply to Rome rather than to any other city of that age: (a) as ruling over the kings of the earth (Revelation 17:18); (b) as sitting on seven mountains (Revelation 17:9); (c) as the center of the world's merchandise (Revelation 18:3, 11–13); (d) as the corrupter of the nations (Revelation 17:2; 18:3; 19:2); (e) as the persecutor of the saints (Revelation 17:6)."


title: Whore of Babylon

text: Biblical scholars such as Alan James Beagley, David Chilton, J. Massyngberde Ford, Peter Gaskell, Kenneth Gentry, Edmondo Lupieri, Bruce Malina, Iain Provan, J. Stuart Russell, Milton S. Terry point out that although Rome was the prevailing pagan power in the 1st century, when the Book of Revelation was written, the symbolism of the whore of Babylon refers not to an invading infidel or foreign power. It refers to an apostate false queen, a former "bride" who has been unfaithful and who, even though she has been divorced and cast out because of unfaithfulness, continues to falsely claim to be the "queen" of the spiritual realm. This symbolism did not fit the case of Rome at the time. Proponents of this view suggest that the "seven mountains" in Rev 17:9 are the seven hills on which Jerusalem stands and the "fall of Babylon" in Rev 18 is the fall and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: Several Old Testament prophets referred to Jerusalem as being a spiritual harlot and a mother of such harlotry (Isaiah 1:21; Jeremiah 2:20; 3:1–11; Ezekiel 16:1–43; 23, as well as Epistle to the Galatians 4:25). Some of these Old Testament prophecies, as well as the warnings in the New Testament concerning Jerusalem, are in fact very close to the text concerning Babylon in Revelation. This suggests that John of Patmos may well have actually been citing those prophecies in his description of Babylon.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: For example, in Matthew 23:34–37 and Luke 11:47–51, Jesus himself assigned all of the bloodguilt for the killing of the prophets and of the saints (of all time) to the Pharisees of Jerusalem. In Revelation 17:6 and 18:20,24, almost identical phrasing is used in charging that very same bloodguilt to Babylon. This is also bolstered by Jesus' statement that "it's not possible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem." (Luke 13:33).


title: Whore of Babylon

text: In the most common medieval (Catholic) view, deriving from Augustine of Hippo's "The City of God" (early 5th century), Babylon and Jerusalem referred to two spiritual cities which were spiritually at war with one another, throughout all of history:Babylon [from Babel] is interpreted confusion, Jerusalem vision of peace. ...They are mingled, and from the very beginning of mankind mingled they run on unto the end of the world. ...Two loves make up these two cities: love of God makes Jerusalem, love of the world makes Babylon.They also represented two principles at war with one another, inside each individual person, even inside seemingly worldly Christian monarchs; thus Augustine could boast approvingly, "...believing [Christian] monarchs of this world came to the city of Rome, as to the head of Babylon: they went not to the temple of the Emperor, but to the tomb of the Fisherman."


title: Whore of Babylon

text: Historicist interpreters commonly used the phrase "Whore of Babylon" to refer to the Catholic Church. Reformation writers Martin Luther (1483–1546, author of "On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church"), John Calvin (1509–1564), and John Knox (1510–1572, author of "The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women") taught this association.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: Most early Protestant Reformers believed, and the modern Seventh-day Adventist Church teaches, that in Bible prophecy a woman represents a church. The connection noted on the seven hills of Rome is argued to locate the church.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: Identification of the Pope as the Antichrist was written into Protestant creeds such as the Westminster Confession of 1646. The identification of the Roman Catholic Church with the Whore of Babylon is kept in the "Scofield Reference Bible" (whose 1917 edition identified "ecclesiastical Babylon" with "apostate Christendom headed by the Papacy"). An image from the 1545 edition of Luther's Bible depicts the Whore as wearing the papal tiara.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) views the Whore of Babylon and its Book of Mormon equivalent, the "great and abominable church", as having dominion over the entire earth and representing a powerful collection of groups and carnal individuals seeking wealth, sexual immorality, dominion, and the persecution or death of saints. The Whore of Babylon, or the Devil's Church, consists of all organisations not associated with the followers of Christ or that are against his followers. Ultimately, the Whore of Babylon's fate is to be destroyed in the last days.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: Seventh-day Adventists believe that the whore of Babylon represents the fallen state of traditional Christianity, especially the fallen state of Christianity in the Catholic Church. Other churches (predominantly Protestant) are generally considered either part of the harlot or her daughters. Adventists further hold the view that the persecution of the "saints" in Revelation 17:6 represents the persecution of believers who rejected the doctrines which were introduced by the Roman Catholic Church because they were based on pagan Roman beliefs. The Persecution of anyone who opposed the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, especially by the Inquisition, and the persecution of the Waldensians and the Huguenots are cited as examples of this persecution.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: Seventh-day Adventists interpret Revelation 17:18 as a prophecy about the false church, which has power over the kings of the earth. They consider the pope to be in apostasy for allowing pagan rituals, beliefs and ceremonies to come into the church. They consider the Papacy, as a continuation of the Roman Empire, to be a fulfillment of : "For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way."


title: Whore of Babylon

text: Ellen G. White's "The Great Controversy" (1858) states that "Spiritual Babylon" would have worldwide influence, affecting "all nations", that the Imperial Roman Empire could not meet the criteria, because she wrote that it only had influence in the Old World. Like many reformation-era Protestant leaders, her writings also describe the Catholic Church as a fallen church, and it plays a nefarious eschatological role as the antagonist against God's true church and that the pope is the Antichrist.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: Jehovah's Witnesses, whose early teachings were strongly influenced by Adventism but have since diverged, believe that the Whore of Babylon represents "the world empire of false religion", referring to all other religious groups including, but not limited to, Christendom. Jehovah's Witnesses literature frequently refers to the "Great Harlot" of Babylon and the subsequent attack on her by the political powers, signaling the beginning of the "great tribulation". They believe that the empire of false religion has persecuted God's people, and that "false religion" has committed "fornication" with the world's political and commercial elements, based on their interpretation of .


title: Whore of Babylon

text: "Babalon" (also known as the "Scarlet Woman", "Great Mother" or "Mother of Abominations") is a goddess found in the occult system of Thelema, which was established in 1904 with the writing of "The Book of the Law" by English author and occultist Aleister Crowley. The spelling of the name as 'Babalon' was revealed to Crowley in "The Vision and the Voice". Her name and imagery feature prominently in Crowley's "Liber Cheth vel Vallum Abiegni".


title: Whore of Babylon

text: In her most abstract form, Babalon represents the female sexual impulse and the liberated woman. In the creed of the Gnostic Mass she is also identified with Mother Earth, in her most fertile sense. Along with her status as an archetype or goddess, Crowley believed that Babalon had an earthly aspect or avatar; a living woman who occupied the spiritual office of the 'Scarlet Woman'. This office, first identified in "The Book of the Law" is usually described as a counterpart to his own identification as "To Mega Therion" (The Great Beast). The role of the Scarlet Woman was to help manifest the energies of the Aeon of Horus. Crowley believed that several women in his life occupied the office of Scarlet Woman, for which see the list below.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: Babalon's consort is Chaos, called the "Father of Life" in the Gnostic Mass, being the male form of the creative principle. Chaos appears in "The Vision and the Voice" and later in "Liber Cheth vel Vallum Abiegni". Separate from her relationship with her consort, Babalon is usually depicted as riding the Beast. She is often referred to as a sacred whore, and her primary symbol is the chalice or graal.


title: Whore of Babylon

text: As Crowley wrote in his "The Book of Thoth", "she rides astride the Beast; in her left hand she holds the reins, representing the passion which unites them. In her right she holds aloft the cup, the Holy Grail aflame with love and death. In this cup are mingled the elements of the sacrament of the Aeon."


title: Chloe Bennet

text: Chloé Wang (; born April 18, 1992), known professionally as Chloe Bennet, is an American actress and singer. She starred as Daisy Johnson/Quake in the ABC superhero drama series "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." (2013–2020).


title: Chloe Bennet

text: Chloe Bennet was born Chloé Wang on April 18, 1992, in Chicago, Illinois. She is the daughter of Bennet Wang, an investment banker and Stephanie Crane, an internist.


title: Chloe Bennet

text: Bennet's mother is Anglo-American and her father is Chinese. She has seven brothers: four biological, two foster and one adopted; two are of African American ancestry and one is of Mexican and Filipino descent. She attended St. Ignatius College Prep.


title: Chloe Bennet

text: In 2007, at age 15, Bennet moved to China to pursue a singing career, under her birth name, Chloé Wang (). While in China, Bennet lived with her paternal grandmother and studied Mandarin. Back in the US, she released two singles, both in 2011: "Uh Oh" and "Every Day in Between".


title: Chloe Bennet

text: In 2010 she moved to Los Angeles, California. Her first on-screen appearance was as a host for the short-lived TeenNick summer dance series "The Nightlife". She appeared in the 2011 music video for South Korean band BIGBANG's "Tonight". While pursuing an acting career in Hollywood, she changed her name to "Chloe Bennet," after having trouble booking gigs with her last name. According to Bennet, using her father's first name, rather than his last name avoids difficulties being cast as an ethnic Asian American while respecting her father.


title: Chloe Bennet

text: From 2012 to 2013, she had a recurring supporting role in the ABC drama series "Nashville" as Hailey. In December 2012, she was cast as a series regular on the ABC series "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.", which premiered on September 24, 2013. Bennet portrayed a hacker known as Skye, who was revealed to be Daisy Johnson / Quake in the second season. Bennet was awarded the "Visionary Award" by East West Players, the longest-running professional theater of color in the United States, on April 21, 2017, at their annual gala. She dedicated her award "to all the little girls who want to be a superhero; I'm just a half Chinese girl from the southside of Chicago."


title: Chloe Bennet

text: In 2019, Bennet was cast in the lead role as Yi in the animated film "Abominable". She appeared in the 2020 film "Valley Girl", a jukebox musical remake of the 1983 film of the same name, as Karen, the "Queen Bee". The film was originally scheduled for release in June 2018, but was postponed due to controversy around one of its cast members, Logan Paul.


title: Chloe Bennet

text: In March 2021, she was cast as Blossom Utonium in the upcoming CW live-action pilot "Powerpuff", alongside Dove Cameron as Bubbles and Yana Perrault as Buttercup. However, after a decision to reshoot the pilot episode and subsequent scheduling conflicts, Bennet left the project in August 2021.


title: Chloe Bennet

text: Bennet has described the American film and television industry as racist against Asian Americans and other people of Asian descent. In a 2016 interview, she noted, "Oh, the first audition I went on after I changed my name [from Wang to Bennet], I got booked. So that's a pretty clear little snippet of how Hollywood works." In September 2017, after actor Ed Skrein stepped down from his role as Major Ben Daimio in the then-in production film "Hellboy" following backlash over the fact that Skrein, a white actor, was playing Daimio, a character who is Japanese-American in the "Hellboy" comics, Bennet wrote a since-deleted post on Instagram in which she applauded Skrein's decision, and addressed her own experiences as an actress of Asian descent in Hollywood, saying, "Changing my last name doesn't change the fact that my BLOOD is half Chinese, that I lived in China, speak Mandarin or that I was culturally raised both American and Chinese. It means I had to pay my rent, and Hollywood is racist and wouldn't cast me with a last name that made them uncomfortable."


title: Panopticon

text: The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched.


title: Panopticon

text: Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times. Thus, the inmates are effectively compelled to regulate their own behaviour. The architecture consists of a rotunda with an inspection house at its centre. From the centre, the manager or staff of the institution are able to watch the inmates. Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums, but he devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison. It is his prison that is now most widely meant by the term "panopticon".


title: Panopticon

text: The word "panopticon" derives from the Greek word for "all seeing" – . In 1785, Jeremy Bentham, an English social reformer and founder of utilitarianism, travelled to Krichev in Mogilev Governorate of the Russian Empire (modern Belarus) to visit his brother, Samuel, who accompanied Prince Potemkin. Bentham arrived in Krichev in early 1786 and stayed for almost two years. While residing with his brother in Krichev, Bentham sketched out the concept of the panopticon in letters. Bentham applied his brother's ideas on the constant observation of workers to prisons. Back in England, Bentham, with the assistance of his brother, continued to develop his theory on the panopticon. Prior to fleshing out his ideas of a panopticon prison, Bentham had drafted a complete penal code and explored fundamental legal theory. While in his lifetime Bentham was a prolific letter writer, he published little and remained obscure to the public until his death.


title: Panopticon

text: Bentham thought that the chief mechanism that would bring the manager of the panopticon prison in line with the duty to be humane would be publicity. Bentham tried to put his "duty and interest junction principle" into practice by encouraging a public debate on prisons. Bentham's "inspection principle" applied not only to the inmates of the panopticon prison, but also the manager. The unaccountable gaoler was to be observed by the general public and public officials. The apparently constant surveillance of the prison inmates by the panopticon manager and the occasional observation of the manager by the general public was to solve the age old philosophic question: "Who guards the guards?"


title: Panopticon

text: Bentham continued to develop the panopticon concept, as industrialisation advanced in England and an increasing number of workers were required to work in ever larger factories. Bentham commissioned drawings from an architect, Willey Reveley. Bentham reasoned that if the prisoners of the panopticon prison could be seen but never knew when they were watched, the prisoners would need to follow the rules. Bentham also thought that Reveley's prison design could be used for factories, asylums, hospitals, and schools.


title: Panopticon

text: Bentham remained bitter throughout his later life about the rejection of the panopticon scheme, convinced that it had been thwarted by the king and an aristocratic elite. It was largely because of his sense of injustice and frustration that he developed his ideas of "sinister interest" – that is, of the vested interests of the powerful conspiring against a wider public interest – which underpinned many of his broader arguments for reform.


title: Panopticon

text: Bentham's proposal for a panopticon prison met with great interest among British government officials not only because it incorporated the pleasure-pain principle developed by the materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes, but also because Bentham joined the emerging discussion on political economy. Bentham argued that the confinement of the prison, "which is his punishment, preventing [the prisoner from] carrying the work to another market." Key to Bentham's proposals and efforts to build a panopticon prison in Millbank at his own expense, was the "means of extracting labour" out of prisoners in the panopticon. In his 1791 writing "Panopticon, or The Inspection House", Bentham reasoned that those working fixed hours needed to be overseen. Also, in 1791, Jean Philippe Garran de Coulon presented a paper on Bentham's panopticon prison concepts to the National Legislative Assembly in revolutionary France.


title: Panopticon

text: In 1812, persistent problems with Newgate Prison and other London prisons prompted the British government to fund the construction of a prison in Millbank at the taxpayers' expense. Based on Bentham's panopticon plans, the National Penitentiary opened in 1821. Millbank Prison, as it became known, was controversial, even blamed for causing mental illness among prisoners. Nevertheless, the British government placed an increasing emphasis on prisoners doing meaningful work, instead of engaging in humiliating and meaningless kill-times. Bentham lived to see Millbank Prison built and did not support the approach taken by the British government. His writings had virtually no immediate effect on the architecture of taxpayer-funded prisons that were to be built. Between 1818 and 1821, a small prison for women was built in Lancaster. It has been observed that the architect Joseph Gandy modelled it very closely on Bentham's panopticon prison plans. The K-wing near Lancaster Castle prison is a semi-rotunda with a central tower for the supervisor and five storeys with nine cells on each floor.


title: Panopticon

text: It was the Pentonville prison, which was built in London after Bentham's death in 1832, that was to serve as a model for a further 54 prisons in Victorian Britain. Built between 1840 and 1842 according to the plans of Joshua Jebb, Pentonville prison had a central hall with radial prison wings. It has been claimed that Bentham's panopticon influenced the radial design of 19th-century prisons built on the principles of the "separate system", including Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, which opened in 1829. But the Pennsylvania–Pentonville architectural model with its radial prison wings was not designed to facilitate constant surveillance of individual prisoners. Guards had to walk from the hall along the radial corridors and could only observe prisoners in their cells by looking through the cell door's peephole.


title: Panopticon

text: In 1925, Cuba's president Gerardo Machado set out to build a modern prison, based on Bentham's concepts and employing the latest scientific theories on rehabilitation. A Cuban envoy tasked with studying US prisons in advance of the construction of Presidio Modelo had been greatly impressed with Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois and the cells in the new circular prison were too faced inwards towards a central guard tower. Because of the shuttered guard tower, the guards could see the prisoners, but the prisoners could not see the guards. Cuban officials theorised that the prisoners would "behave" if there was a probable chance that they were under surveillance, and once prisoners behaved, they could be rehabilitated.


title: Panopticon

text: Between 1926 and 1931, the Cuban government built four such panopticons connected with tunnels to a massive central structure that served as a community centre. Each panopticon had five floors with 93 cells. In keeping with Bentham's ideas, none of the cells had doors. Prisoners were free to roam the prison and participate in workshops to learn a trade or become literate, with the hope being that they would become productive citizens. However, by the time Fidel Castro was imprisoned at Presidio Modelo, the four circulars were packed with 6,000 men, every floor was filled with trash, there was no running water, food rations were meagre, and the government supplied only the bare necessities of life.


title: Panopticon

text: In the Netherlands Breda, Arnhem and Haarlem penitentiary are cited as historic panopticon prisons. However, these circular prisons with their 400 or so cells fail as panopticons because the inwards-facing cell windows were so small that guards could not see the entire cell. The lack of surveillance that was actually possible in prisons with small cells and doors discounts many circular prison designs from being a panopticon as it had been envisaged by Bentham. In 2006, one of the first digital panopticon prisons opened near Amsterdam. Every prisoner in the Lelystad Prison wears an electronic tag and by design, only six guards are needed for 150 prisoners instead of the usual 15 or more.


title: Panopticon

text: Jeremy Bentham's panopticon architecture was not original, as rotundas had been used before, as for example in industrial buildings. However, Bentham turned the rotund architecture into a structure with a societal function, so that humans themselves became the object of control. The idea for a panopticon had been prompted by his brother Samuel Bentham's work in Russia and had been inspired by existing architectural traditions. Samuel Bentham had studied at the Ecole Militaire in 1751, and at about 1773 the prominent French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux had finished his designs for the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans. William Strutt in cooperation with his friend Jeremy Bentham built a round mill in Belper, so that one supervisor could oversee an entire shop floor from the centre of the round mill. The mill was built between 1803 and 1813 and was used for production until the late 19th century. It was demolished in 1959. In Bentham's 1812 writing "Pauper management improved: particularly by means of an application of the Panopticon principle of construction", he included a building for an "industry-house establishment" that could hold 2000 persons. In 1812 Samuel Bentham, who had by then risen to brigardier-general, tried to persuade the British Admiralty to construct an arsenal panopticon in Kent. Before returning home to London he had constructed a panopticon in 1807, near St Petersburg, which served as a training centre for young men wishing to work in naval manufacturing. The panopticon, Bentham writes:


title: Panopticon

text: Despite the fact that no panopticon was built during Bentham's lifetime, the principles he established on the panopticon prompted considerable discussion and debate. Shortly after Jeremy Bentham's death in 1832 his ideas were criticised by Augustus Pugin, who in 1841 published the second edition of his work "Contrasts" in which one plate showed a "Modern Poor House". He contrasted an English medieval gothic town in 1400 with the same town in 1840 where broken spires and factory chimneys dominate the skyline, with a panopticon in the foreground replacing the Christian hospice. Pugin, who went on to become one of the most influential 19th-century writers on architecture, was influenced by Hegel and German idealism. In 1835 the first annual report of the Poor Law Commission included two designs by the commission's architect Sampson Kempthorne. His Y-shape and cross-shape designs for workhouse expressed the panopticon principle by positioning the master's room as central point. The designs provided for the segregation of occupants and maximum visibility from the centre. Professor David Rothman came to the conclusion that Bentham's panopticon prison did not inform the architecture of early asylums in the United States.


title: Panopticon

text: In 1965, the conservative historian Shirley Robin Letwin traced the Fabian zest for social planning to early utilitarian thinkers. She argued that Bentham's pet gadget, the panopticon prison, was a device of such monstrous efficiency that it left no room for humanity. She accused Bentham of forgetting the dangers of unrestrained power and argued that "in his ardour for reform, Bentham prepared the way for what he feared". Recent Libertarian thinkers began to regard Bentham's entire philosophy as having paved the way for totalitarian states. In the late 1960s, the American historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who had published "The Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham" in 1965, was at the forefront of depicting Bentham's mechanism of surveillance as a tool of oppression and social control. David John Manning published "The Mind of Jeremy Bentham" in 1986, in which he reasoned that Bentham's fear of instability caused him to advocate ruthless social engineering and a society in which there could be no privacy or tolerance for the deviant.


title: Panopticon

text: In the mid-1970s, the panopticon was brought to the wider attention by the French psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller and the French philosopher Michel Foucault. In 1975, Foucault used the panopticon as metaphor for the modern disciplinary society in "Discipline and Punish". He argued that the disciplinary society had emerged in the 18th century and that discipline are techniques for assuring the ordering of human complexities, with the ultimate aim of docility and utility in the system. Foucault first came across the panopticon architecture when he studied the origins of clinical medicine and hospital architecture in the second half of the 18th century. He argued that discipline had replaced the pre-modern society of kings, and that the panopticon should not be understood as a building, but as a mechanism of power and a diagram of political technology.


title: Panopticon

text: Foucault argued that discipline had already crossed the technological threshold in the late 18th century, when the right to observe and accumulate knowledge had been extended from the prison to hospitals, schools, and later factories. In his historic analysis, Foucault reasoned that with the disappearance of public executions pain had been gradually eliminated as punishment in a society ruled by reason. The modern prison in the 1970s, with its corrective technology, was rooted in the changing legal powers of the state. While acceptance for corporal punishment diminished, the state gained the right to administer more subtle methods of punishment, such as to observe. The French sociologist Henri Lefebvre studied urban space and Foucault's interpretation of the panopticon prison, arriving at the conclusion that spatiality is a social phenomenon. Lefebvre contended that architecture is no more than the relationship between the panopticon, people, and objects. In urban studies, academics such as Marc Schuilenburg now argue that a different self-consciousness arises among humans who live in an urban area.


title: Panopticon

text: In 1984, Michael Radford gained international attention for the cinematographic panopticon he had staged in the film "Nineteen Eighty-Four". Of the telescreens in the landmark surveillance narrative "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1949), George Orwell said: "there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment ... you had to live ... in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised". In Radford's film the telescreens were bidirectional and in a world with an ever increasing number of telescreen devices the citizens of Oceania were spied on more than they thought possible. In "The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society" (1994) the sociologist David Lyon concluded that "no single metaphor or model is adequate to the task of summing up what is central to contemporary surveillance, but important clues are available in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and in Bentham's panopticon".


title: Panopticon

text: The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze shaped the emerging field of surveillance studies with the 1990 essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control". Deleuze argued that the society of control is replacing the discipline society. With regards to the panopticon, Deleuze argued that "enclosures are moulds ... but controls are a modulation". Deleuze observed that technology had allowed physical enclosures, such as schools, factories, prisons and office buildings, to be replaced by a self-governing machine, which extends surveillance in a quest to manage production and consumption. Information circulates in the control society, just like products in the modern economy, and meaningful objects of surveillance are sought out as forward-looking profiles and simulated pictures of future demands, needs and risks are drawn up.


title: Panopticon

text: In 1997, Thomas Mathiesen in turn expanded on Foucault's use of the panopticon metaphor when analysing the effects of mass media on society. He argued that mass media such as broadcast television gave many people the ability to view the few from their own homes and gaze upon the lives of reporters and celebrities. Mass media has thus turned the discipline society into a viewer society. In the 1998 satirical science fiction film "The Truman Show", the protagonist eventually escapes the OmniCam Ecosphere, the reality television show that, unknown to him, broadcasts his life around the clock and across the globe. But in 2002, Peter Weibel noted that the entertainment industry does not consider the panopticon as a threat or punishment, but as "amusement, liberation and pleasure". With reference to the "Big Brother" television shows of Endemol Entertainment, in which a group of people live in a container studio apartment and allow themselves to be recorded constantly, Weibel argued that the panopticon provides the masses with "the pleasure of power, the pleasure of sadism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, scopophilia, and narcissism". In 2006, Shoreditch TV became available to residents of the Shoreditch in London, so that they could tune in to watch CCTV footage live. The service allowed residents "to see what's happening, check out the traffic and keep an eye out for crime".


title: Panopticon

text: In their 2004 book "Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control", Derrick Jensen and George Draffan called Bentham "one of the pioneers of modern surveillance" and argued that his panopticon prison design serves as the model for modern supermaximum security prisons, such as Pelican Bay State Prison in California. In the 2015 book "Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness", Simone Browne noted that Bentham travelled on a ship carrying slaves as cargo while drafting his panopticon proposal. She argues that the structure of chattel slavery haunts the theory of the panopticon. She proposes that the 1789 plan of the slave ship "Brookes" should be regarded as the paradigmatic blueprint. Drawing on Didier Bigo's Banopticon, Brown argues that society is ruled by exceptionalism of power, where the state of emergency becomes permanent and certain groups are excluded on the basis of their future potential behaviour as determined through profiling.


title: Panopticon

text: The metaphor of the panopticon prison has been employed to analyse the social significance of surveillance by closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in public spaces. In 1990, Mike Davis reviewed the design and operation of a shopping mall, with its centralised control room, CCTV cameras and security guards, and came to the conclusion that it "plagiarizes brazenly from Jeremy Bentham's renowned nineteenth-century design". In their 1996 study of CCTV camera installations in British cities, Nicholas Fyfe and Jon Bannister called central and local government policies that facilitated the rapid spread of CCTV surveillance a dispersal of an "electronic panopticon". Particular attention has been drawn to the similarities of CCTV with Bentham's prison design because CCTV technology enabled, in effect, a central observation tower, staffed by an unseen observer.


title: Panopticon

text: Shoshana Zuboff used the metaphor of the panopticon in her 1988 book "In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power" to describe how computer technology makes work more visible. Zuboff examined how computer systems were used for employee monitoring to track the behavior and output of workers. She used the term 'panopticon' because the workers could not tell that they were being spied on, while the manager was able to check their work continuously. Zuboff argued that there is a collective responsibility formed by the hierarchy in the "information panopticon" that eliminates subjective opinions and judgements of managers on their employees. Because each employee's contribution to the production process is translated into objective data, it becomes more important for managers to be able to analyze the work rather than analyze the people.


title: Panopticon

text: Foucault's use of the panopticon metaphor shaped the debate on workplace surveillance in the 1970s. In 1981 the sociologist Anthony Giddens expressed scepticism about the ongoing surveillance debate, criticising that "Foucault's 'archaeology', in which human beings do not make their own history but are swept along by it, does not adequately acknowledge that those subject to the power ... are knowledgeable agents, who resist, blunt or actively alter the conditions of life." The social alienation of workers and management in the industrialised production process had long been studied and theorised. In the 1950s and 1960s, the emerging behavioural science approach led to skills testing and recruitment processes that sought out employees that would be organisationally committed. Fordism, Taylorism and bureaucratic management of factories was still assumed to reflect a mature industrial society. The Hawthorne Plant experiments (1924–1933) and a significant number of subsequent empirical studies led to the reinterpretation of alienation: instead of being a given power relationship between the worker and management, it came to be seen as hindering progress and modernity. The increasing employment in the service industries has also been re-evaluated. In "Entrapped by the electronic panopticon? Worker resistance in the call centre" (2000), Phil Taylor and Peter Bain argue that the large number of people employed in call centres undertake predictable and monotonous work that is badly paid and offers few prospects. As such, they argue, it is comparable to factory work.


title: Panopticon

text: The panopticon has become a symbol of the extreme measures that some companies take in the name of efficiency as well as to guard against employee theft. "Time-theft" by workers has become accepted as an output restriction and theft has been associated by management with all behaviour that include avoidance of work. In the past decades "unproductive behaviour" has been cited as rationale for introducing a range of surveillance techniques and the vilification of employees who resist them. In a 2009 paper by Max Haiven and Scott Stoneman entitled "Wal-Mart: The Panopticon of Time" and the 2014 book by Simon Head "Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans", which describes conditions at an Amazon depot in Augsburg, it is argued that catering at all times to the desires of the customer can lead to increasingly oppressive corporate environments and quotas in which many warehouse workers can no longer keep up with demands of management.


title: Panopticon

text: The concept of panopticon has been referenced in early discussions about the impact of social media. The notion of "dataveillance" was coined by Roger Clarke in 1987, since then academic researchers have used expressions such as "superpanopticon" (Mark Poster 1990), "panoptic sort" (Oscar H. Gandy Jr. 1993) and "electronic panopticon" (David Lyon 1994) to describe social media. Because the controlled is at the center and surrounded by those who watch, early surveillance studies treat social media as a reverse panopticon.


title: Panopticon

text: In modern academic literature on social media, terms like "lateral surveillance", "social searching", and "social surveillance" are employed to critically evaluate the effects of social media. However, the sociologist Christian Fuchs treats social media like a classical panopticon. He argues that the focus should not be on the relationship between the users of a medium, but the relationship between the users and the medium. Therefore, he argues that the relationship between the large number of users and the sociotechnical Web 2.0 platform, like Facebook, amounts to a panopticon. Fuchs draws attention to the fact that use of such platforms requires identification, classification and assessment of users by the platforms and therefore, he argues, the definition of privacy must be reassessed to incorporate stronger consumer protection and protection of citizens from corporate surveillance.


title: Panopticon

text: According to professor Donald Preziosi, the panopticon prison of Bentham resonates with the "memory theatre" of Giulio Camillo, where the sitting observer is at the centre and the phenomena are categorised in an array, which makes comparison, distinction, contrast and variation legible. Among the architectural references Bentham quoted for his panopticon prison was Ranelagh Gardens, a London pleasure garden with a dome built around 1742. At the center of the rotunda beneath the dome was an elevated platform from which a 360 degrees panorama could be viewed, illuminated through skylights. Professor Nicholas Mirzoeff compares the panopticon with the 19th-century diorama, because the architecture is arranged so that the "seer" views cells or galleries.


title: Panopticon

text: In 1854 the work on the building that was to house the Royal Panopticon of Science and Art in London was completed. The rotunda at the centre of the building was encircled with a 91 meter procession. The interior reflected the taste for religiously meaningless ornament and emerged out of the contemporary taste for recreational learning. Visitors of the Royal Panopticon of Science and Art could view changing exhibits, including vacuum flasks, a pin making machine, and a cook stove. However, a competitive entertainment industry emerged in London and despite the varying music, the large fountains, interesting experiments, and opportunities for shopping, two years after opening the amateur science panopticon project closed.


title: Panopticon

text: Panopticon principle lies as the central idea in the plot of "We" (), a dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, written 1920–1921. Zamyatin goes beyond a concept of a single prison and projects panopticon principles to the whole society where people live in buildings with fully transparent walls.


title: Panopticon

text: Foucault's theories positioned Bentham's panopticon prison in the social structures of 1970s Europe. This led to the widespread use of the panopticon in literature, comic books, computer games, and TV series. In "Doctor Who," an abandoned panopticon was featured. In the 1981 the novella "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" by Gabriel García Márquez on the murder of Santiago Nasar, chapter four is written with a view on the characters through the panopticon of Riohacha. Angela Carter, in her 1984 novel" Nights at the Circus," linked the panopticon of "Countes P" to a "perverse honeycomb" and made the character the matriarchal queen bee. In the 2011 TV series, "Person of Interest", Foucault's panopticon is used to grasp the pressure under which the character Harold Finch suffers in the post-9/11 United States of America. In the manga series "Usogui" by author Sako Toshio, an abandoned panopticon is the main setting of the Air Poker arc.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: The Millennium Prize Problems are seven well-known complex mathematical problems selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. The Clay Institute has pledged a US$1 million prize for the first correct solution to each problem.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: To date, the only Millennium Prize problem to have been solved is the Poincaré conjecture. The Clay Institute awarded the monetary prize to Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman in 2010. However, he declined the award as it was not also offered to Richard S. Hamilton, upon whose work Perelman built.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: The remaining six unsolved problems are the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, Hodge conjecture, Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness, P versus NP problem, Riemann hypothesis, and Yang–Mills existence and mass gap.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: The Clay Institute was inspired by a set of twenty-three problems organized by the mathematician David Hilbert in 1900 which, despite having no monetary value, were highly influential in driving the progress of mathematics in the twentieth century. The seven selected problems range over a number of mathematical fields, namely algebraic geometry, arithmetic geometry, geometric topology, mathematical physics, number theory, partial differential equations, and theoretical computer science. Unlike Hilbert's problems, the problems selected by the Clay Institute were already renowned among professional mathematicians, with many actively working towards their resolution.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: Grigori Perelman, who had begun work on the Poincaré conjecture in the 1990s, released his proof in 2002 and 2003. His refusal of the Clay Institute's monetary prize in 2010 was widely covered in the media. The other six Millennium Prize Problems remain unsolved, despite a large number of unsatisfactory proofs by both amateur and professional mathematicians.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: Andrew Wiles, as part of the Clay Institute's scientific advisory board, hoped that the choice of US$1 million prize money would popularize, among general audiences, both the selected problems as well as the "excitement of mathematical endeavor". Another board member, Fields medalist Alain Connes, hoped that the publicity around the unsolved problems would help to combat the "wrong idea" among the public that mathematics would be "overtaken by computers".


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: Some mathematicians have been more critical. Anatoly Vershik characterized their monetary prize as "show business" representing the "worst manifestations of present-day mass culture", and thought that there are more meaningful ways to invest in public appreciation of mathematics. He viewed the superficial media treatments of Perelman and his work, with disproportionate attention being placed on the prize value itself, as unsurprising. By contrast, Vershik praised the Clay Institute's direct funding of research conferences and young researchers. Vershik's comments were later echoed by Fields medalist Shing-Tung Yau, who was additionally critical of the idea of a foundation taking actions to "appropriate" fundamental mathematical questions and "attach its name to them".


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: In the field of geometric topology, a two-dimensional sphere is characterized by the fact that it is the only closed and simply-connected two-dimensional surface. In 1904, Henri Poincaré posed the question of whether an analogous statement holds true for three-dimensional shapes. This came to be known as the Poincaré conjecture, the precise formulation of which states:


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: Although the conjecture is usually stated in this form, it is equivalent (as was discovered in the 1950s) to pose it in the context of smooth manifolds and diffeomorphisms.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: A proof of this conjecture, together with the more powerful geometrization conjecture, was given by Grigori Perelman in 2002 and 2003. Perelman's solution completed Richard Hamilton's program for the solution of the geometrization conjecture, which he had developed over the course of the prior twenty years. Hamilton and Perelman's work revolved around Hamilton's Ricci flow, which is a complicated system of partial differential equations defined in the field of Riemannian geometry.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: For his contributions to the theory of Ricci flow, Perelman was awarded the Fields medal in 2006. However, he declined to accept the prize. For his proof of the Poincaré conjecture, Perelman was awarded the Millennium Prize on March 18, 2010, but he declined the award and the associated prize money. The Interfax news agency quoted Perelman as saying he believed the prize was unfair, as he considered his contribution to solving the Poincaré conjecture to be no greater than Hamilton's.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture deals with certain types of equations: those defining elliptic curves over the rational numbers. The conjecture is that there is a simple way to tell whether such equations have a finite or infinite number of rational solutions. Hilbert's tenth problem dealt with a more general type of equation, and in that case it was proven that there is no way to decide whether a given equation even has any solutions.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: The Hodge conjecture is that for projective algebraic varieties, Hodge cycles are rational linear combinations of algebraic cycles.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: The Navier–Stokes equations describe the motion of fluids, and are one of the pillars of fluid mechanics. However, theoretical understanding of their solutions is incomplete, despite its importance in science and engineering. For the three-dimensional system of equations, and given some initial conditions, mathematicians have not yet proven that smooth solutions always exist. This is called the "Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness" problem.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: The problem, restricted to the case of an incompressible fluid, is to prove either that smooth, globally defined solutions exist that meet certain conditions, or that they do not always exist and the equations break down. The official statement of the problem was given by Charles Fefferman.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: The question is whether or not, for all problems for which an algorithm can "verify" a given solution quickly (that is, in polynomial time), an algorithm can also "find" that solution quickly. Since the former describes the class of problems termed NP, while the latter describes P, the question is equivalent to asking whether all problems in NP are also in P. This is generally considered one of the most important open questions in mathematics and theoretical computer science as it has far-reaching consequences to other problems in mathematics, and to biology, philosophy and cryptography (see P versus NP problem proof consequences). A common example of an NP problem not known to be in P is the Boolean satisfiability problem.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: The Riemann zeta function ζ(s) is a function whose argument s may be any complex number other than 1, and whose values are also complex. Its analytical continuation has zeros at the negative even integers; that is, ζ(s) = 0 when s is one of −2, −4, −6, ... These are called its trivial zeros. However, the negative even integers are not the only values for which the zeta function is zero. The other ones are called nontrivial zeros. The Riemann hypothesis is concerned with the locations of these nontrivial zeros, and states that:


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: The Riemann hypothesis is that all nontrivial zeros of the analytical continuation of the Riemann zeta function have a real part of /. A proof or disproof of this would have far-reaching implications in number theory, especially for the distribution of prime numbers. This was Hilbert's eighth problem, and is still considered an important open problem a century later.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: The problem has been well-known ever since it was originally posed by Bernhard Riemann in 1860. The Clay Institute's exposition of the problem was given by Enrico Bombieri.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: In quantum field theory, the mass gap is the difference in energy between the vacuum and the next lowest energy state. The energy of the vacuum is zero by definition, and assuming that all energy states can be thought of as particles in plane-waves, the mass gap is the mass of the lightest particle.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: For a given real field formula_4, we can say that the theory has a mass gap if the two-point function has the property


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: with formula_6 being the lowest energy value in the spectrum of the Hamiltonian and thus the mass gap. This quantity, easy to generalize to other fields, is what is generally measured in lattice computations.


title: Millennium Prize Problems

text: Quantum Yang–Mills theory is the current grounding for the majority of theoretical applications of thought to the reality and potential realities of elementary particle physics. The theory is a generalization of the Maxwell theory of electromagnetism where the "chromo"-electromagnetic field itself carries charge. As a classical field theory it has solutions which travel at the speed of light so that its quantum version should describe massless particles (gluons). However, the postulated phenomenon of color confinement permits only bound states of gluons, forming massive particles. This is the mass gap. Another aspect of confinement is asymptotic freedom which makes it conceivable that quantum Yang-Mills theory exists without restriction to low energy scales. The problem is to establish rigorously the existence of the quantum Yang–Mills theory and a mass gap.


title: David Dastmalchian

text: David Dastmalchian (; born July 21, 1975) is an American film and stage actor. He has had supporting roles in a number of superhero franchises; he portrayed Thomas Schiff in "The Dark Knight", Kurt in the first two Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) "Ant-Man" films and the animated series "What If…?", Abra Kadabra in the CW's "The Flash", and Abner Krill / Polka-Dot Man in "The Suicide Squad" (2021). He has also appeared in three of Denis Villeneuve's films: "Prisoners", "Blade Runner 2049", and "Dune". Dastmalchian wrote and starred in the semi-autobiographical film "Animals".


title: David Dastmalchian

text: David Dastmalchian was born on July 21, 1975, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to Priscilla (née Doran; 1941–2020) and Hossein Dastmalchian (1937–2021), an Iranian-American engineer who worked at engineering firm Black & Veatch. He has 2 sisters and a brother. His parents divorced, which he described as "tumultuous", and both remarried. He was raised in Overland Park, Kansas, where he attended Shawnee Mission South High School, becoming part of the drama club. He described growing up in the Kansas City metropolitan area as "[sic] very traditional in one sense, and a conservative community that also had a rad, fringe, artistic, progressive tribe of people who were finding connectivity through the arts and the culture of KC and the surrounding suburbs."


title: David Dastmalchian

text: In his childhood, Dastmalchian developed vitiligo, for which he suffered ridicule from his peers. As such, he suffered depression throughout his childhood. Growing up, he enjoyed football, theater, and comics. He would mow lawns and would buy comics with the money he earned mowing lawns. He studied at The Theatre School at DePaul University and graduated in 1999. Prior to beginning his career as an actor, he dealt with a heroin addiction for five years. He wrote about his experiences in his screenplay, "Animals," and continues to advocate for mental health and substance abuse treatment programs. Shortly after becoming sober, he worked at a seafood restaurant in Kansas City. He was also briefly a fisherman in Alaska.


title: David Dastmalchian

text: Dastmalchian began his professional career in the mid-2000s in Chicago, working on stage and in commercials. He has received acclaim for lead roles in Tennessee Williams's "The Glass Menagerie" and Sam Shepard's "Buried Child" at Chicago's Shattered Globe Theatre. He was involved with a number of Chicago theater companies and was an artistic associate at Caffeine Theatre.


title: David Dastmalchian

text: His feature film debut came in the late 2000s, as the Joker's deranged henchman, Thomas Schiff, in Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight". His portrayal of Bob Taylor in Denis Villeneuve's "Prisoners" received strong reviews. Richard Corliss of "Time" called Dastmalchian's performance "excellent – chatty, modest with some subtle telltale psychopathy" and "The Guardian"s Paul MacInnes likened his introduction as a new suspect to Kevin Spacey's entrance in "Seven".


title: David Dastmalchian

text: In March 2014, Dastmalchian was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Courage in Storytelling at the South by Southwest Film Festival. He wrote and starred in the feature film "Animals", directed by Collin Schiffli. Ashley Moreno of "The Austin Chronicle" credits Dastmalchian's screenplay with "present[ing] an authenticity often lacking in films about drug abuse." "Film Threat"s Brian Tallerico similarly sings the praises of Dastmalchian's breakout performance, noting his ability to "capture that sense of self-loathing that comes through in the body language of an addict without overselling it."


title: David Dastmalchian

text: Other feature film appearances include starring roles in the psychological thriller "The Employer", the indie grindhouse hit "Sushi Girl", the drama "Cass" (winner, San Diego Black Film Festival), "Girls Will Be Girls 2012" (a sequel to the 2003 cult hit "Girls Will Be Girls"), "Saving Lincoln", "Virgin Alexander", "Ant-Man", and Michel Franco's "Chronic".


title: David Dastmalchian

text: He has also appeared on television: as Simon on the Fox sci-fi series "Almost Human", in the episode "Simon Says"; as a chess expert and murder suspect on the CBS forensics procedural drama series ""; and as Oz Turner on the BBC drama series "Intruders". Other television appearances include the FX sitcom "The League", the Showtime crime drama series "Ray Donovan", and NBC's medical drama "ER".


title: David Dastmalchian

text: In 2017 he reunited with Denis Villeneuve when he appeared in "Blade Runner 2049". The following year he reprised the role of Kurt in the "Ant-Man" sequel "Ant-Man and the Wasp". In 2021 he appeared as Polka-Dot Man in "The Suicide Squad", a character with whom he said he connected on a personal level due to the childhood bullying he suffered as a result of his vitiligo. Later that same year he appeared in his third Denis Villeneuve film when he portrayed Piter De Vries in "Dune".


title: David Dastmalchian

text: Dastmalchian is a comic book writer. He debuted his horror comic series "Count Crowley" in 2019 published by Dark Horse Comics.


title: David Dastmalchian

text: Dastmalchian married artist Evelyn "Eve" Leigh in 2014. They have two children. They live in Los Angeles.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a 2018 crossover fighting game developed by Bandai Namco Studios and Sora Ltd. and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch. It is the fifth installment in the "Super Smash Bros." series, succeeding "Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS" and "Wii U". The game follows the series' traditional style of gameplay: controlling one of the various characters, players must use differing attacks to weaken their opponents and knock them out of an arena. It features a wide variety of game modes, including a campaign for single-player and multiplayer versus modes. "Ultimate" features 89 playable fighters, including all characters from previous "Super Smash Bros." games alongside newcomers. The roster ranges from Nintendo mascots to characters from third-party franchises.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: Planning for the game had begun by December 2015, with full development starting after the completion of "3DS"/"Wii U" downloadable content (DLC). Series creator and director Masahiro Sakurai returned along with Bandai Namco Studios and Sora, the studios that developed "3DS"/"Wii U," with the return of the studios speeding up the preparation process. Sakurai's goal with "Ultimate" was to include every character from previous games in the series despite the various development and licensing challenges this would present. Several well-known video game musicians contributed to the soundtrack, with Hideki Sakamoto writing the main theme "Lifelight".


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: Nintendo first teased "Ultimate" in a Nintendo Direct in March 2018 and fully revealed it at E3 2018 the following June. It later received two additional Directs before it was released on December 7, 2018. The game received universal acclaim, with some critics calling it the best of the series. They praised its amount of content and fine-tuning of existing "Smash" gameplay elements, although its online mode received criticism. "Ultimate" is the best-selling fighting game of all time, having sold over 28 million copies as of June 2022, and is a popular competitive fighting game. The game received downloadable content adding new fighters, stages, and other content from its release until October 2021.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" is a platform fighter for up to eight players in which characters from Nintendo games and other third-party franchises must try to knock each other out of an arena. Each player has a percentage meter, which raises when they take damage, thus increasing the knockback they take and making them easier to launch in the air and out of the arena. Standard battles use one of three victory conditions: Timed, where players aim to win the most points by defeating opponents within a time limit; Stock, where players have a set number of lives and must aim to be the last player standing; and Stamina, where players must simply reduce their opponent's health down to zero to defeat them. Players can adjust the rules to their liking and save them as presets for future matches.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: Players can also enable various items to attack enemies or grant them power-ups, along with Poké Balls and Assist Trophies, which respectively summon Pokémon and other non-playable characters to assist them in battle. In Timed matches, certain Assist Trophies can be attacked and defeated to earn points. Each character also possesses a powerful Final Smash attack, which can be performed either by obtaining a Smash Ball or by filling up a special meter, both of which can be toggled on and off. The game features 104 different stages included in the base game, with additional ones coming packaged with DLC fighters. They can all be played in alternative Battlefield and Omega forms or can be toggled to remove stage hazards. A new feature called Stage Morph allows players to select two stages that the game alternates between at certain intervals during a match. Other tweaks include new icons and gauges for character-specific abilities, such as Cloud's Limit gauge.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: In addition to returning modes such as Classic, Special Smash, and Home-Run Contest, new modes added to the game include Smashdown, where each character can only be played once; Squad Strike, where players battle in teams of multiple characters; and a tournament mode that allows up to 32 players to battle in playoff brackets.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: Another set of modes revolves around a new mechanic known as spirits, which replaces the collectible trophies from previous games. Each of these spirits, based on a crossover character, can be used to power up a fighter with unique abilities, which can be used to fight against human or computer opponents and earn new spirits. Players gain spirits through pre-made challenges known as "Spirit Battles" that capture the theme of the character depicted by the spirit, embodied by one or more of the game's fighters and other specific level effects; for example, the spirit battle of Rayquaza, a flying dragon Pokémon, requires players to defeat a large version of Ridley with added wind effects. A separate Spirit Board mode presents a rotating set of spirit battles for players to gain spirits from. Spirits have a growth and evolution system similar to Pokémon games, leveling the Spirits to gain more powerful effects or means of merging core abilities into a new Spirit. Nintendo offers limited-timed Spirit events in cross-promotion with other games and franchises, where a number of them are only available to collect during the event. Eventually these spirits make their way into the general rotation and can be found on the spirit board.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: The spirit mechanic is prominent in the game's single-player adventure mode, "World of Light". The mode's narrative begins with an evil entity, Galeem, destroying the "Smash Bros." world, vaporizing almost all of the fighter characters and placing them under his imprisonment; only Kirby, due to his Warp Star, evades this attack. Players must explore the ruined world to rescue captured fighters and spirits by completing marked challenges. Players can use regained allies and spirits to overcome certain challenges on the map and eventually defeat Galeem. However, after Galeem is defeated, a new enemy, Dharkon, takes over and, after being defeated, wages war against Galeem, and players must destroy both of them. If just Galeem is defeated, Dharkon will engulf the world in darkness, but if just Dharkon is defeated, then Galeem will cover the universe with light. However, there is a path that allows players to defeat both of them at once. When done so, the spirits are freed from the fallen deities' control and return to the real world.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: The game supports local multiplayer, local wireless with other systems, and online play via Wi-Fi or LAN connections. By defeating players online, players can earn tags which can be traded for in-game currency to buy new spirits, music, and Mii Fighter costumes. The game is compatible with Joy-Con controllers, the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, and GameCube controllers via the use of a USB adapter. Like in the previous entry, amiibo figurines can be used to create AI-controlled Figure Players that can be trained to become stronger. Sometime after the game's release, a service for the Nintendo Switch Online mobile app, known as "Smash World", was launched, which allows players to check their game statistics in addition to sharing images and videos captured from the game to social media. "Ultimate" features over 900 music tracks, which can be played through the Switch's handheld mode while in standby mode. Version 3.0 of the game, released in April 2019, adds a Stage Builder allowing players to create their own custom stages, and which they can share or download through the Switch Online service. The update also includes a replay editor that allow players to edit stored replays and share online with the community or download to other devices. These will be also available within the Smash World app. An update in May 2019 provided limited support for the virtual reality VR Kit of Nintendo Labo, allowing a player to view computer-only matches in VR or playing in a 1-on-1 mode against the computer. An update in September 2019 added the Home-Run Contest mode from previous "Smash" games.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate", as with other games in the "Super Smash Bros." series, features a crossover cast of fighters from several different Nintendo franchises, as well as fighters from series by third-party developers such as Konami, Sega, Capcom, Bandai Namco Entertainment, Square Enix, PlatinumGames, Atlus, Microsoft, SNK, Mojang Studios, and Disney. The base game features 74 playable fighters, consisting of all 63 previous fighters from past entries and 11 new ones: the Inklings from "Splatoon"; Princess Daisy from the "Mario" series; Ridley and Dark Samus from the "Metroid" series; Simon Belmont and Richter Belmont from the "Castlevania" series; Chrom from "Fire Emblem Awakening"; King K. Rool from the "Donkey Kong" series; Isabelle from the "Animal Crossing" series; Ken Masters from the "Street Fighter" series; and Incineroar from "Pokémon Sun" and "Moon". When starting the game, players only have access to the eight starter characters of the original 1999 "Super Smash Bros." game and must unlock the rest by completing the game's Classic mode, playing through World of Light, or fighting a certain amount of battles.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: Certain characters whose movesets are directly based on other characters in the game are now classified as "Echo Fighters", possessing similar movesets and proportions to the fighters they are based on, but with their own unique animations and gameplay differences. On the character selection screen, these characters can either be listed individually or stacked with the fighters they are based on. Select characters also have alternative skins featuring different genders or sometimes other characters, such as Bowser Jr. who has a selectable appearance to be any of the other Koopalings but otherwise have identical animations and abilities. Several returning characters received updates to their appearances, such as Mario having Cappy from "Super Mario Odyssey" accompanying him and ""'s incarnation of Link replacing the one from "".


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: Additional fighters have been added to the game via post-release downloadable content (DLC). The first of these, Piranha Plant from the "Mario" series, was released in January 2019 and made available for free to those who purchased and registered the game with a My Nintendo account before the end of that month. Additional fighters, each coming with a unique stage and related music, have been released both individually and as part of two Fighters Pass bundles. The first Fighters Pass consisted of five characters: Joker from Atlus' "Persona 5", released in April 2019; the Hero from Square Enix's "Dragon Quest" series, released in July 2019; Banjo & Kazooie from Rare's "Banjo-Kazooie" series, released in September 2019; Terry Bogard from SNK's "Fatal Fury" series, released in November 2019; and Byleth from "", released in January 2020.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: The second Fighters Pass, titled Fighters Pass Volume 2, consisted of six additional fighters and was the final content planned for "Ultimate". The first character in this collection, Min Min from "ARMS", was released in June 2020. Steve, the default player avatar from Mojang Studios' "Minecraft", was released in October 2020. Sephiroth, the antagonist from Square Enix's "Final Fantasy VII", was released in December 2020, with players able to unlock the character a few days early by defeating him in a limited time boss battle known as the "Sephiroth Challenge". Pyra and Mythra, a dual character from "Xenoblade Chronicles 2", were released in March 2021. Kazuya Mishima from Bandai Namco's "Tekken" series was released in June 2021. Sora from the Disney and Square Enix series "Kingdom Hearts" was the final fighter to be added in October 2021.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" was developed by Bandai Namco Studios and Sora Ltd., the same studios that developed "Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS" and "Wii U", for the Nintendo Switch, with series creator Masahiro Sakurai returning as game director. Unlike previous "Super Smash Bros." games, the team was not assembled from the ground up, which sped up preparation time. The project plan for the game was in the works by December 2015, when the DLC for "3DS" and "Wii U" was in development, and finished after it was completed. Staff gathering was done soon afterward. The development period was shorter compared to previous entries in the series. Hatena also assisted with the development of some elements. tri-Crecendo contributed to programming and design.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: According to Sakurai, producing a "Super Smash Bros." game for the Switch was the last request that former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata had given him before Iwata's death in 2015, leading Sakurai to feel compelled to make the game the best possible product he could to respect him. Sakurai sought to include every character from previous games, as to not disappoint fans. However, he knew this would be a complex problem for both development and licensing; it would also drastically increase the cost of development. The return of Bandai and Sora made it easier for this to happen. Sakurai also wanted to adjust character abilities as to speed up the game, although not to an extent to which it would alienate players unfamiliar with the series. Sakurai knew that "Ultimate" was a core game for Nintendo and that it had a dedicated player base that he did not want to disappoint, and believed that completing this goal was necessary to satisfy the fan base. Sakurai was also faced with the decision to create a completely new game system or build off of pre-existing ones; he chose to build off pre-existing ones because there would only be about a third of the characters he desired in the final game. All the returning characters' abilities had to be re-balanced so they could work in "Ultimate". Originally, gameplay would differ between the Switch's docked and handheld modes, but Sakurai scrapped this because the system's screen in handheld mode was better than he thought. Sakurai believed this would be the only "Smash" game to have the full roster of returning characters, calling the effort to include the characters, music, stage settings, and other elements as "unprecedented", and cautioned that future series games would likely be smaller in scope. However, Sakurai wants to add as many fighters as possible within "Ultimate" through DLC.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: Voice lines recorded by David Hayter for Snake were re-used for "Ultimate", despite Hayter having been replaced in "". Xander Mobus, who provided the voice of Crazy Hand, Master Hand, and the announcer in "Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS" and "Wii U" also made a return with new voice clips, in addition to reprising his voice role as the downloadable content (DLC) character Joker from "Persona 5". The addition of Ridley from "Metroid" as a playable character has been something that the "Super Smash Bros." community had been requesting from the series for some time. In 2008, Sakurai had said that he knew Ridley was a high-demand character but thought that he was "impossible" to add unless they were able to sacrifice the character's size for balancing purposes. So Ridley could be included in the game, Sakurai studied the art of the character and redesigned him so he could stand upright. All characters were chosen at the beginning of development except Incineroar, who had not been created yet; the team instead left a space open for a "Sun and Moon" Pokémon. The Inklings' ink mechanic proved challenging to implement due to the way it interacts with environments.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: The team built "Ultimate" from scratch with new assets and content. Localization manager Nate Bihldorff stated that the game significantly upgraded lighting effects and texture rendering from the game engine of the "Wii U" version. The new World of Light mode was inspired by "Brawl" (2008) Subspace Emissary, and Sakurai chose to start it with a cataclysmic event because he thought it would leave a greater impact on players. The team conceived the Spirits mechanic because they wanted to create an enjoyable single-player mode but did not have enough resources to create character models. While it did not let them tell stories for individual fighters or create new locations and rules, the Spirits let them use a variety of characters and assets. One part of the team chose Spirits to include in the game and had to thoroughly research them. According to Sakurai, the Spirits mode was essential for using various franchises.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: Like previous games in the series, "Ultimate" features several well-known video game music composers and arrangers providing a mix of original music and rearrangements of various tracks for the represented franchises, with over 1,000 tracks in total. New to "Ultimate" is the tying of tracks to franchises instead of individual stages, as well as the ability to create custom playlists to listen to outside of the game when the Switch is in handheld mode. Sakurai stated that he began contacting composers over a year before release, providing them with a database of over a thousand suggested track ideas. In addition, he allowed them to submit their own personal favorites, with those choices being given priority for inclusion. While Sakurai oversaw the process and preferred that the music retain the spirit of the original games, the direction of them was generally handled by the composers themselves. The main theme, "Lifelight", composed by Hideki Sakamoto, is the basis of most of the game's original music.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: As with previous entries, Nintendo planned to offer new fighters through DLC; however, unlike with the previous "3DS" and "Wii U" versions where players could request which characters they wished to see in the game, Nintendo chose which characters they would add by November 2018. Like the previous title, additional Mii costumes were released as paid DLC. Certain costumes also added new music tracks to the game. Sakurai believed that despite characters like Joker, the first announced DLC fighter, not necessarily being from games usually associated with Nintendo, they were added due to being "emblematic" of the types of characters they wanted to add to "Ultimate", adding that they "bring just a whole different level of fun and enjoyment for players". The Piranha Plant was chosen as a DLC character because Sakurai wanted to add diversity to the roster. Nintendo met with Rare studio head Craig Duncan at E3 2018 to discuss the possibility of including Banjo and Kazooie as downloadable content; Duncan, believing it to be "a great opportunity", agreed and connected the two development teams for further discussions. Sakurai noted that Banjo and Kazooie were the second most requested character for "Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS" and "Wii U" in a Nintendo-sanctioned fan vote in 2015, and that the addition of Banjo and Kazooie happened "quite easily", despite the property being owned by Microsoft through its acquisition of Rare, with Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, stating that negotiating their inclusion was "an easy deal to make" thanks to Microsoft's strong partnership with Nintendo.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: The development of Fighters Pass Volume 2 was heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Due to stay-at-home orders in Japan, Sakurai and his development team had to work remotely. According to Daniel Kaplan of Mojang Studios, early discussions between Nintendo and Microsoft including "Minecraft" content in the "Super Smash Bros." series had begun roughly five years prior to Steve's addition into the game. The character's inclusion required the development team to rework every stage in the game in order to accommodate Steve's gameplay mechanics. Sakurai had wanted to include Sora from "Kingdom Hearts" in the game because Sora was the top fighter requested for "Nintendo 3DS" and "Wii U" in the 2015 fan vote, but initially thought the legality around the intellectual property with Disney would be insurmountable, and thus they had originally planned for only five fighters in the second pass. However, Sakurai met a Disney representative at an award venue, which facilitated the start of negotiations for Sora's inclusion. Nintendo, Disney, and Square Enix saw towards including Sora in the game and overseeing all aspects related to his inclusion, with several limitations and guidelines they were required to follow. The Sora Challenger Pack featured a promotional tie-in with the 2020 rhythm game "": players with "Melody of Memory" save data on their Nintendo Switch would unlock the music track "Dearly Beloved -Swing Version-" for use in "Ultimate".


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: "Ultimate" was teased during a Nintendo Direct presentation on March 8, 2018, under the working title "Super Smash Bros.", with the release year shown to be 2018. Nintendo formally announced the game at E3 2018, revealing that the full roster of characters from past games would be included, as well as its release date. Demo versions were playable at E3 in June and at the San Diego Comic-Con the following month. "IGN" nominated "Ultimate" for its Best Game of E3 2018 award; the game won Best Nintendo Switch Game from both "IGN" and Gamescom. Two Nintendo Direct presentations in 2018, one on August 8 and another one on November 1, were devoted to the game, revealing new characters, stages, and game modes.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: Nintendo released "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" worldwide on December 7, 2018. In addition to the standard retail version, a special edition containing a "Super Smash Bros."-themed Nintendo Switch Pro Controller and a Switch with a download code was also released. An additional special edition contained a pair of "Super Smash Bros."-themed Joy-Con as well as a Switch console, a "Super Smash Bros."-themed dock, and a download code for the game. A GameCube controller with the "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" logo was released on November 2, 2018.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: One of the game's new additions had the character Mr. Game & Watch assuming the appearance of a feather- and loincloth-wearing Native American when using one of his attacks—a reference to "Fire Attack" (1982), in which players controlled a cowboy defending his fort from attacking natives. Some series fans saw this as racist, leading to Nintendo apologizing and removing the animation in an update shortly after release. Two weeks before its release, a leaked copy of the game was distributed across the internet. Nintendo took steps to issue copyright strikes on YouTube videos using data mined content, while fans worked to isolate spoilers, particularly the World of Light story mode, from those that had played the leaked version.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: "Ultimate" received "universal acclaim" from critics, according to the review aggregator platform Metacritic. The French video game website "Jeuxvideo.com" called it the best game in the series, praising the improved gameplay, larger cast of characters, stages, options, soundtrack, which "brilliantly mix gargantuan content with nostalgia". Tom Marks of "IGN" agreed and called it the most complete "Super Smash Bros." yet. Critics lauded the huge cast of characters and levels, new game modes, and combining of the best elements from its predecessors. However, the game's online mode received criticism for its technical performance and matchmaking. Many players found significant lag affecting their games, even when using wired connections over wireless, while the game's matchmaking features did not adhere to players' criteria, with players frequently playing matches with rule sets they did not choose. The matchmaking process was further criticized for making it difficult for friends to join matches over random players, and not allowing multiple local players to join in online matches. There had been so many complaints on "Ultimate" subreddit that the administrators forwarded all complaints to a separate thread.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: In November 2018, Nintendo announced "Ultimate" was the most pre-ordered game for the Switch and in the series. The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment reported that "Ultimate" was the fastest-selling Switch and "Super Smash Bros." game in the United Kingdom, with physical launch sales 302% higher than those for "Super Smash Bros. for Wii U", 233% higher than those for "3DS", and 62.5% higher than those for "Brawl". In its first three days on sale in Japan, the game sold 1.2 million copies, outselling and "" in the region.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: Within 11 days of its release, "Ultimate" had sold more than three million copies within the United States, making it the fastest-selling Switch game in the country. It was similarly the fastest-selling Switch game as well as the fastest-selling game for any Nintendo console in Europe based on the first 11-day sales. It was estimated that the game sold and shipped over five million copies within its first three days of release. Within three weeks, "Ultimate" became the fifth best-selling Switch game in the United Kingdom, surpassing the sales of "Splatoon 2". In January 2019, Amazon reported that "Ultimate" was their highest selling video game product of 2018, with Nintendo officially announcing that the game had shipped over 12.08 million copies worldwide. "Ultimate" was also Nintendo's fastest-selling game of all time until being surpassed by "Pokémon Sword" and "Shield" in 2019. By September 2020, the game had sold over 21.10 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling fighting game of all time, surpassing the record of "Street Fighter II", and became the third-best-selling Nintendo Switch game, only behind "" and "Mario Kart 8 Deluxe". , total sales reached 28.82 million.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: The game won the award for "Best Nintendo Switch Game", "Best Fighting Game", and "Best Multiplayer Game" in IGN's Best of 2018 Awards, whereas its other nominations were for "Game of the Year" and "Best Video Game Music".


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: EVO 2019, held on August 2–4, 2019, featured "Ultimate" as one of its main events. It was the largest offline "Smash Bros." tournament of all time, with 3,534 entrants signed up. It set a new record for EVO concurrent viewership, with over 279,000 viewers during Top 8. On May 8–10, 2020, top "Super Smash Bros. Melee" player Hungrybox partnered with NFL running back Le'Veon Bell and esports organization Team Liquid to host The Box, an online tournament with a $10,000 prize pool. With over 8,000 entrants, it was the largest online "Smash Bros." tournament of all time.


title: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

text: In February 2020, it was announced that the Smash World Tour would feature both "Super Smash Bros. Melee" and "Smash Bros. Ultimate" players for a grand prize pool of $250,000. The tournament would have included international qualifiers, with the grand finals' location to be in the United States. However, the COVID-19 pandemic quickly led to several of the qualifiers getting either postponed or canceled. The Smash World Tour was successfully relaunched in 2021, featuring a mix of online and offline qualifiers and culminating in a final offline championship.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: The Eurovision Song Contest 2021 was the 65th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest. It took place in Rotterdam, Netherlands, following the country's win at the with the song "Arcade" by Duncan Laurence. The Netherlands was set to host the , before it was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Organised by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and host broadcasters (NPO), (NOS) and AVROTROS, the contest was held at Rotterdam Ahoy, and consisted of two semi-finals on 18 and 20 May, and a final on 22 May 2021. The three live shows were presented by Dutch television presenters and singers Chantal Janzen, Edsilia Rombley and Jan Smit, and Dutch YouTube personality and makeup-artist Nikkie de Jager.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: Thirty-nine countries participated in the contest, of which twenty-six re-entered the artists chosen for 2020 (albeit with different songs, as per the contest's rules). and returned after their absence from the 2019 contest, while and did not return after their participation in the 2019 edition. and had originally planned to participate, but Armenia withdrew due to its social and political crises following the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, and Belarus was disqualified after its intended entry was found to be in violation of the contest's rules.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: The winner was with the song "Zitti e buoni", performed by Måneskin and written by the band's members Damiano David, Ethan Torchio, Thomas Raggi and Victoria De Angelis. This made Italy the second member of the "Big Five" to win the contest since its establishment, following 's victory in . Måneskin's victory also made them the first band to win the contest since Lordi for in . , , and rounded out the top five, with France and Switzerland achieving their best results since and respectively. For the first time since , none of the top three entries were performed in English, with France and Switzerland performing in French, whilst the winner, Italy, performed in Italian.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: Also, for the first time since the current voting system was implemented in , more than one country received no points from the televote in the final; these countries were , , the host country the , and the , the last of those becoming the first country to receive no points from both the jury and televote. It was the fifth time that the host country ranked in the bottom five since , with the Netherlands finishing 23rd in the final, as well as the second time that the United Kingdom had received no points in the contest, the last time having been in . For the first time since it made its debut in 2015, failed to qualify for the final, making Ukraine the only country that has never failed to qualify from the semi-finals since their introduction in .


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: The EBU reported that the contest had an audience of 183 million viewers in 36 European markets, an increase of a million viewers from the previous edition, with an increase of seven percent in the 15–24 year old age range.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: The 2021 contest was held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, following the country's victory at the 2019 edition with the song "Arcade", performed by Duncan Laurence. It was the fifth time that the Netherlands had hosted the contest, having previously done so in , , and . The selected venue was the 16,400-seat Ahoy Arena in Rotterdam Ahoy, a convention centre and multi-purpose indoor arena located on Ahoyweg, which serves as a venue for many events, including concerts, exhibitions, trade fairs, and conferences. Rotterdam Ahoy had previously hosted the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2007, and was set to host the 2020 contest before its cancellation. The "Turquoise Carpet" event, where the contestants and their delegations are presented before the accredited press and fans, took place at the Rotterdam Cruise Terminal on 16 May 2021.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: By Eurovision tradition, the Netherlands received the right to host the Eurovision Song Contest after the country won the competition in 2019. The Dutch host broadcasters NPO, NOS and AVROTROS launched the bidding process in the same month, on 29 May, in which five citiesArnhem, 's-Hertogenbosch, Maastricht, Rotterdam, and Utrechtsubmitted their bid books during a ceremonial event held in Hilversum on 10 July 2019. On 16 July, Maastricht and Rotterdam were shortlisted, and after the NPO visited both cities, on 30 August 2019, Rotterdam was announced as the host city of the Eurovision Song Contest 2020.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: Following the cancellation of the 2020 contest, the EBU began talks with broadcasters NPO, NOS and AVROTROS, as well as the city of Rotterdam, on the possibility of staging the 2021 contest in the city. On 23 April 2020, the municipal council of Rotterdam approved an increased budget after Dutch media reported that the city would require an additional €6.7 million to host the contest. The decision was imminent as it was required that the EBU be informed by late April if Rotterdam was willing to host the contest. If Rotterdam declined to host the event, NPO, NOS and AVROTROS had until mid-May 2020 to find an alternative. During the broadcast of "", which aired on 16 May 2020, Rotterdam was confirmed as the host city of the 2021 contest.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: The Eurovision Song Contest 2021 was a co-production between three related Dutch television organisations — (NPO), (NOS) and AVROTROS — of which each assumed a different role. Sietse Bakker and Astrid Dutrénit served as executive producers, while Emilie Sickinghe and Jessica Stam served as deputy executive producers. Marnix Kaart, Marc Pos and Daniel Jelinek served as directors of the three live shows, and Gerben Bakker served as head of show. Background music for the shows was composed by Eric van Tijn.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: In January 2020, the EBU announced that Martin Österdahl would become the executive supervisor for the Eurovision Song Contest after the 2020 edition, succeeding Jon Ola Sand. Before his appointment, Österdahl had been an executive producer for the and editions, and had been a member of the Eurovision Song Contest reference group between 2012 and 2018.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: The total budget for the shows was , of which was left unspent after the contest, according to the municipal executive. The additional money was allocated to contingency scenarios that were eventually discarded.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: On 7 May 2020, Dutch authorities prohibited all mass gatherings in the country until a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available. The host broadcasters stated that they were assessing the decision and how it would impact the event.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: On 18 September 2020, the EBU released a summary of contingency scenarios for the contest, including:


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: In February 2021, the EBU and the host broadcasters stated that it had ruled out hosting the contest as normal (Scenario A). Scenario C was also modified – all acts would perform remotely like in scenario D. A health and safety protocol for the contest was published on 2 March 2021, with the EBU affirming that the contest would be held under scenario B, while reiterating that downscaling options remained on the table should circumstances change. On 30 April 2021, the EBU confirmed scenario B for the contest.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: On 1 April 2021, it was announced that an audience of 3,500 people would be allowed at each of the nine shows, including the three live shows and six rehearsals; the Dutch cabinet later gave its approval on 29 April. All audience members must have had tested negative for COVID-19.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: Due to pandemic precautions, the "Turquoise Carpet" event was the only in-person side event to take place in 2021. Impacted side events included: the Opening Ceremony event, which was not held; the Eurovision Village, which took place from 15 to 23 May in an online-only form; and the EuroClub, which was cancelled for this year.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 2021

text: On 18 September 2020, along with possible scenarios, the EBU confirmed that the planned visual design and slogan for 2020, "Open Up", would be used for the 2021 contest as well. The revamped official logo and branding was unveiled on 4 December 2020. Designed by Clever°Franke, it is "an abstract presentation inspired by the map of the world and visually connects the location of the capitals of the [then] 41 participating countries with Rotterdam as Europe's beating heart". The revamped visual identity, designed by MediaMonks and NEP, was built around patterns and 'tracks' that symbolises the Netherlands and "opening up".