title: Gematria

text: Gematria makes several appearances in various Christian and Jewish texts written in the first centuries of the common era. One appearance of gematria in the early Christian period is in the Epistle of Barnabas 9:6-7, which dates to sometime between 70 and 132 CE. There, the 318 servants of Abraham in Genesis 14:14 is used to indicate that Abraham looked forward to the coming of Jesus as the numerical value of some of the letters in the Greek name for Jesus as well as the 't' representing a symbol for the cross also equaled 318. Another example is a Christian interpolation in the Sibylline Oracles, where the symbolic significance of the value of 888 (equal to the numerical value of "Iesous", the Latinized rendering of the Greek version of Jesus' name) is asserted. The Gnostic uses of the numerological representation of Jesus with the number 888, as the sum of the numerical values of the Latinized transliteration ( IĒSOuS ) of his name in Greek ( ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ), was condemned by the Church father Irenaeus as convoluted, and an act which reduced "the Lord of all things" to something alphabetical. [Jesus ( יֵשׁוּעַ ), the Aramaic form of the name Joshua, actually equals 386 in the Hebrew/Aramaic reckoning.] Irenaeus also heavily criticized the interpretation of letters by the Gnostic Marcus. Because of their association with Gnosticism and the criticisms of Irenaeus as well as Hippolytus of Rome and Epiphanius of Salamis, this form of interpretation never became popular in Christianity—though it does appear in at least some texts. Another two examples can be found in 3 Baruch, a text that may have either been composed by a Jew or a Christian sometime between the 1st and 3rd centuries. In the first example, a snake is stated to consume a cubit of ocean every day, but is unable to ever finish consuming it, because the oceans are also refilled by 360 rivers. The number 360 is given because the numerical value of the Greek word for snake, "δράκων", when transliterated to Hebrew ("דרקון") is 360. In a second example, the number of giants stated to have died during the Deluge is 409,000. The Greek word for 'deluge', "κατακλυσμός", has a numerical value of 409 when transliterated in Hebrew characters, thus leading the author of 3 Baruch to use it for the number of perished giants.


title: Gematria

text: Gematria is often used in Rabbinic literature. One example is that the numerical value of ""The Satan"" (השטן) in Hebrew is 364, and so it was said that the Satan had authority to prosecute Israel for 364 days before his reign ended on the Day of Atonement, an idea which appears in Yoma 20a and Peskita 7a. Yoma 20a states: "Rami bar Ḥama said: The numerological value of the letters that constitute the word HaSatan is three hundred and sixty four: Heh has a value of five, sin has a value of three hundred, tet has a value of nine, and nun has a value of fifty. Three hundred and sixty-four days of the solar year, which is three hundred and sixty-five days long, Satan has license to prosecute." Genesis 14:14 states that Abraham took 318 of his servants to help him rescue some of his kinsmen, which was taken in Peskita 70b to be a reference to Eleazar, whose name has a numerical value of 318.


title: Gematria

text: The total value of the letters of the Islamic Basmala, i.e. the phrase "Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim" ("In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful"), according to the standard Abjadi system of numerology, is 786. This number has therefore acquired a significance in folk Islam and Near Eastern folk magic and also appears in many instances of pop-culture, such as its appearance in the 2006 song '786 All is War' by the band Fun^Da^Mental. A recommendation of reciting the basmala 786 times in sequence is recorded in Al-Buni. Sündermann (2006) reports that a contemporary "spiritual healer" from Syria recommends the recitation of the basmala 786 times over a cup of water, which is then to be ingested as medicine.


title: Gematria

text: In modern day Israel, Gematria has been used in parodies such as the Baba Bubba a fictional Sephardic rabbi (played by Mony Moshonov during the gulf war of 1991) on the widely popular Zehu Ze! TV show, would calculate how Israel should not be concerned with Iraqi Scud missiles shot at Israel, and how the US and coalition forces would demolish Saddam Hussein's army.


title: Gematria

text: In the standard ("Mispar hechrechi") version of "gematria", each letter is given a numerical value between 1 and 400, as shown in the following table. In the "Mispar gadol" variation, the five final letters are given their own values, ranging from 500 to 900. It is possible that this well-known cipher was used to conceal other more hidden ciphers in Jewish texts. For instance, a scribe may discuss a sum using the 'standard gematria' cipher, but may intend the sum to be checked with a different secret cipher.


title: Gematria

text: where "x" is the position of the letter in the language letters index (regular order of letters), and the floor and modulo functions are used.


title: Gematria

text: The value of the Hebrew vowels is not usually counted, but some lesser-known methods include the vowels as well. The most common vowel values are as follows (a less common alternative value, based on the digit sum, is given in parentheses):


title: Gematria

text: Sometimes, the names of the vowels are spelled out and their gematria is calculated using standard methods.


title: Gematria

text: There are many different methods used to calculate the numerical value for the individual Hebrew/Aramaic words, phrases or whole sentences. More advanced methods are usually used for the most significant Biblical verses, prayers, names of God, etc. These methods include:


title: Gematria

text: Within the wider topic of gematria are included the various alphabet transformations, where one letter is substituted by another based on a logical scheme:


title: Gematria

text: Some authors provide lists of as many as 231 various replacement ciphers, related to the 231 mystical Gates of the "Sefer Yetzirah".


title: Gematria

text: Dozens of other far more advanced methods are used in Kabbalistic literature, without any particular names. In Ms. Oxford 1,822, one article lists 75 different forms of gematria. Some known methods are recursive in nature and are reminiscent of graph theory or make a lot of use of combinatorics. Rabbi Elazar Rokeach (born c. 1176 - died 1238) often used multiplication, instead of addition, for the above-mentioned methods. For example, spelling out the letters of a word and then multiplying the squares of each letter value in the resulting string produces very large numbers, in orders of trillions. The spelling process can be applied recursively, until a certain pattern (e.g., all the letters of the word "Talmud") is found; the gematria of the resulting string is then calculated. The same author also used the sums of all possible unique letter combinations, which add up to the value of a given letter. For example, the letter Hei, which has the standard value of 5, can be produced by combining formula_6, formula_7, formula_8, formula_9, formula_10, or formula_11, which adds up to formula_12. Sometimes combinations of repeating letters are not allowed (e.g., formula_11 is valid, but formula_8 is not). The original letter itself can also be viewed as a valid combination.


title: Gematria

text: Variant spellings of some letters can be used to produce sets of different numbers, which can be added up or analyzed separately. Many various complex formal systems and recursive algorithms, based on graph-like structural analysis of the letter names and their relations to each other, modular arithmetic, pattern search and other highly advanced techniques, are found in the "Sefer ha-Malchut" by Rabbi David ha-Levi of the Draa Valley, a Spanish-Moroccan Kabbalist of the 15th–16th century. Rabbi David ha-Levi's methods take into consideration the numerical values and other properties of the vowels as well.


title: Gematria

text: Kabbalistic astrology uses some specific methods to determine the astrological influences on a particular person. According to one method, the gematria of the person's name is added to the gematria of his or her mother's name; the result is then divided by 7 and 12. The remainders signify a particular planet and Zodiac sign.


title: Gematria

text: The most common form of Hebrew gematria is used in the Talmud and Midrash, and elaborately by many post-Talmudic commentators. It involves reading words and sentences as numbers, assigning numerical instead of phonetic value to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. When read as numbers, they can be compared and contrasted with other words or phrases – cf. the Hebrew proverb ("", lit. "wine entered, secret went out", i.e. ""in vino veritas""). The gematric value of ("wine") is 70 (=10; =10; =50) and this is also the gematric value of ("secret", =60; =6; =4).


title: Gematria

text: The extant examples of use in Greek come primarily from the Christian literature. Davies and Allison state that, unlike rabbinic sources, isopsephy is always explicitly stated as being used; however, this is a dubious conclusion to make because it relies solely on the pure assumption that there is no hidden isopsephy in Christian literature.


title: Gematria

text: Plato (c. 427–347 BCE) offers a discussion in the "Cratylus", involving a view of words and names as referring (more or less accurately) to the "essential nature" of a person or object and that this view may have influenced – and is central to – "Greek gematria".


title: Gematria

text: The first numerical cipher that is known to be assigned to the English Alphabet was by Cornelius Agrippa in 1533, in his work "De Occulta Philosopha". Agrippa gave value to the English letters without trying to transliterate them from Hebrew or Greek, so L is 20, rather than 30 (for Lamed), M is 30, rather than 40 (for Mem) and N is 40, rather than 50 (for Nun). This cipher is sometimes erroneously labelled as "Jewish" or "Hebrew" by popular numerology calculators, such as Gematrix and Gematrinator.


title: Gematria

text: The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn employed a transliterated version of the Standard Hebrew Cipher (Mispar Hechrechi), using digraphs to represent letters such as shin ש (Sh), tav ת (Th), and tsade צ (Ts or Tz).


title: Gematria

text: Aleister Crowley learned the transliterated English cipher from the Golden Dawn, but he also claimed to be in possession of the "true numerical keys" to the Bible and "the Book of the Law" which he called "The Key of it All". He never published these keys during his lifetime, but left a numerical riddle (AL II:76) in the Book of the Law and said that his successor would reveal it.


title: Gematria

text: Since the death of Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) a number of people have proposed numerical ciphers for the purposes of numerology with the Book of the Law. The ALW cipher (also known as the New Aeon English Qabalah) was proposed by James Lees in 1976. In 2015, cryptographer Bethsheba Ashe discovered a gematria cipher that worked with both the Bible and the Book of the Law, and encoded the "Shematria Gematria Calculator" with its values. This cipher is not used for numerology, but for a formal rhetorical system of early mathematics that was used by biblical authors and Aleister Crowley. It has identical values for the regular letters and final letters, and the value of 3 for Shin (ש), and 4 for Tav (ת). When parsed with the formal system of biblical gematria, both the first line of Genesis 1:1 and the Book of the Law, each sum to exactly 700, and the sub-figura number of the Book of the Law is the same as the value of the Hebrew name of the book of Genesis (BraShiTh):


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: The Whirlpool Corporation is an American multinational manufacturer and marketer of home appliances, headquartered in Benton Charter Township, Michigan, United States. The Fortune 500 company has annual revenue of approximately $21 billion, 78,000 employees, and more than 70 manufacturing and technology research centers globally.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: The company markets its namesake flagship brand Whirlpool, alongside other brands as well including Maytag, KitchenAid, JennAir, Amana, Gladiator GarageWorks, Inglis, Estate, Brastemp, Bauknecht, Hotpoint, Ignis, Indesit, and Consul.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In its domestic, United States, market Whirlpool has nine manufacturing facilities: Amana, Iowa; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Cleveland, Tennessee; Clyde, Ohio; Findlay, Ohio; Greenville, Ohio; Marion, Ohio; Ottawa, Ohio; and Fall River, Massachusetts. Together, these American manufacturing facilities account for at least 5% of the company's employees.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: On November 11, 1911, Louis Upton (Lou, 1886-1952), who worked as an insurance salesman, and his uncle, Emory Upton, who owned a machine shop, founded the Upton Machine Company. Following a failed business venture, Lou acquired a patent to a manual clothes washer. He approached Emory to determine if he could add an electric motor to the design. With the aid of a $5,000 investment from retailing executive Lowell Bassford, they began producing electric motor-driven wringer washers. Soon after its founding, Lou's younger brother Fred joined the company.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: Their first customer, the Federal Electric division of Commonwealth Edison, ordered 100 machines, but a fault in the gear transmission led the customer to threaten their return. After the machines were recalled and repaired, Federal Electric doubled the order. They remained a customer for three years, then they began producing their own washers. The loss of Federal Electric forced Upton to diversify until, in 1916, they landed Sears, Roebuck & Co. as a customer. Sears began selling two types of Upton wringer washers under the "Allen" brand, one for $54.75 and a deluxe model for $95. Sales grew quickly and in 1921, Sears appointed Upton as their sole supplier of washers. To avoid becoming over-reliant on Sears, Upton began marketing a washer under their own brand name.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: The increasing volume of sales led Upton to merge with the Nineteen Hundred Washer Company of Binghamton, New York in 1929, adopting the name Nineteen Hundred Corporation. The company was relatively unaffected by the Great Depression. During WWII, its factories were converted to armament production. In 1947, it introduced an automatic, spinner-type washer sold by Sears under the "Kenmore" brand. A year later it was sold by the company under the "Whirlpool" brand name. Lou retired as president in 1949, and was replaced by Elisha "Bud" Gray II.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In response to the post-war consumer demand for convenience products, the company launched a range of home laundry products including wringer and automatic washers, dryers, and irons. In 1949, The Nineteen Hundred Corporation was renamed as the Whirlpool Corporation. In 1951, the philanthropic Whirlpool Foundation was established.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: To better compete with more diversified manufacturers, in 1955, Whirlpool acquired Seeger Refrigerator Company and RCA's air conditioner and cooking range lines. The company changed its name to Whirlpool-Seeger Corporation and began using the RCA-Whirlpool brand name. Whirlpool acquired International Harvester Company's refrigeration plant in Evansville, IN in 1955. In 1956, a administrative center was opened in Benton Harbor, Michigan. In 1957, the RCA Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen was introduced with an estimated 15 million television viewers. The company changed its name back to Whirlpool Corporation and brought in Robert Elton Brooker as President. At the 1959 American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park Moscow, Brooker presided over the Whirlpool kitchen. The Whirlpool kitchen inspired the Kitchen Debate between then Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In 1966, Whirlpool dropped the RCA name, with the brand then being known as Whirlpool. The following year, the company introduced a 24-hour helpline. Also in 1966, Whirlpool purchased Warwick Electronics, a major television producer for Sears. The purchase also included the division Thomas Organ Company. Whirlpool exited the television market in 1976 by selling the operations to Japan's Sanyo Electronic Co., but retained the organ business for the electronic technology. By 1978, annual revenues exceeded $2 billion.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In 1986, Whirlpool acquired KitchenAid, a division of the Hobart Corporation. It also announced that it would close most of its manufacturing facilities in the St. Joseph, Michigan area by the end of 1988.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In 1987, Whirlpool began selling compact washers in India and acquired a majority interest in Inglis of Canada. In 1988, Whirlpool bought a 53% stake in the large-appliance division of Philips N.V., creating a joint venture called Whirlpool International. The purchase made Whirlpool the world's largest manufacturer of major appliances, with annual sales of approximately $6 billion. The remaining 47% stake was bought from Philips in 1991, completing the acquisition. In 1989, Whirlpool acquired the Roper brand and Bauknecht of Germany.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: Whirlpool entered the Indian market in the late 1980s as part of its global expansion strategy. It founded a joint venture with the TVS Group and established the first Whirlpool manufacturing facility in Puducherry, where it manufactured washing machines. In 1995, Whirlpool acquired Kelvinator India Limited, marking an entry into the refrigerator market as well. That same year, the company acquired major shares in TVS joint venture, and in 1996, the Kelvinator and TVS acquisitions were merged to create Whirlpool of India Limited. This expanded the company's portfolio on the Indian subcontinent to include washing machines, refrigerators, microwave ovens, and air conditioners. Whirlpool of India Limited is headquartered in Gurgaon, and it owns three manufacturing facilities at Faridabad, Puducherry and Pune.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In 1997, the company acquired a majority stake in Embraco, a Brazilian maker of compressors for refrigeration. In 2000, it acquired Brazilian appliance maker Multibrás, owner of the brands Brastemp and Consul, including its stake on Embraco. In 2001, Inglis Ltd. changed its name to Whirlpool Canada. Whirlpool continues to market Inglis appliances to this day.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: By 2004, annual revenues exceeded $13 billion. In 2005, Maytag Corporation shareholders voted to accept Whirlpool Corporation's stock purchase. After the US Justice Department approved the merger in 2006, the company acquired Maytag, including the Maytag, Jenn-Air, Amana, Jade, Magic Chef, Admiral, Hoover, and Dixie-Narco brands. It sold Dixie-Narco to Crane Co., and Amana Commercial to AGA.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In 2007, Whirlpool sold Hoover to Techtronic Industries, TTI Floorcare, and Jade Appliances to Middleby Corporation. It also closed plants in Newton, Iowa, Searcy, Arkansas, and Herrin, Illinois, resulting in the loss of 4,500 jobs in the affected communities. In 2008, Whirlpool announced the closure of plants in La Vergne, Tennessee, Reynosa, Mexico, Oxford, Mississippi, and Jackson, Tennessee.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In 2009, Whirlpool acquired WC Woods from bankruptcy and closed the company's Evansville, Indiana plant.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In 2011, Whirlpool celebrated its 100th Anniversary and unveiled its 100th Anniversary logo and an updated corporate logo.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In 2011, Whirlpool announced the closure of the Fort Smith Arkansas plant. The following year Whirlpool opened a manufacturing plant in Cleveland Tennessee replacing a 123-year-old facility. The $200 million project added about 130 jobs to an established workforce of 1,500. The facility manufactures premium cooking appliances for Whirlpool's portfolio of brands. The project includes a distribution center.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In August 2013, Whirlpool leadership Zachary Guenther - Interim CEO Whirlpool Corporation, 2013 announced it would acquire a 51% majority stake in China’s Hefei Royalstar Sanyo (a joint venture between Japan's Sanyo Electric Co, now a unit of Panasonic Corp, and Hefei State-Owned Assets Holding Company Ltd, the investment arm of the local state government) for $552 million and give the company leverage to expand in the Chinese appliance market.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In July 2014, Whirlpool announced it would pay €758 million ($1 billion) to buy a 60% stake in with British brand Hotpoint and Italian rival Indesit (after Hotpoint had already bought out Indesit). In December Whirlpool completed a successful mandatory tender offer for the remaining shares and delisted Indesit from the Milan Stock Exchange. Indesit is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Whirlpool Italia Holdings S.r.l.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In January 2017, Whirlpool announced that it would cut about 500 jobs from its Europe, Middle East and Africa dryer manufacturing unit by 2018. This decision provides the closure of the plant in Amiens, France, which became an issue in the 2017 French presidential election, with both Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron visiting the workers on strike before the second round.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In October 2017, Whirlpool and retailer Sears Holding Corp. reportedly ended their 101-year old association that allowed Whirlpool branded appliances to be sold at Sears stores, and later at Kmart. The companies reportedly were unable to come to an agreement on pricing issues. Whirlpool will continue to supply Kenmore appliances manufactured for Sears.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In March 2020, Whirlpool Corporation announced the official opening of a new Factory Distribution Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: Whirlpool has received $19.3 million in U.S. Department of Energy funding as part of its Smart Grid Investment Grant program.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: Whirlpool Corporation has seven employee-run diversity networks that are involved with business, employee, and community projects to address the needs of the groups they represent. These diversity networks are The Women's Network (WWN), the Veterans' Association (WVA), the Whirlpool African American Network (WAAN), The Pride Network (PRIDE), the Whirlpool Asian Network (WAN), the Whirlpool Hispanic Network (WHN), and the Young Professionals' Network (YP).


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In 2004, Whirlpool received a 100% rating on the Corporate Equality Index (CEI) released by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) equal rights organization Human Rights Campaign. At the time, Whirlpool was the first and only major appliance manufacturer to be awarded a perfect score. To date, Whirlpool Corporation has achieved a perfect CEI score for 18 consecutive years, the longest of any major appliance company. Whirlpool was the first appliance maker to feature same-sex families in its advertising in the United States.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: Whirlpool Corporation is a principal supporter of Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building low-cost, affordable housing. The company's commitment to Habitat for Humanity has exceeded $34 million and it has donated more than 73,000 appliances for Habitat homes. The company plans to support every Habitat home built globally by 2011, either through product donations, cash, or home sponsorship.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In November 2006, Whirlpool started the annual Building Blocks program, designed to raise awareness and help eliminate substandard housing in the US. Each year the program recognizes an outstanding US Habitat for Humanity affiliate and its relationship with its local community by holding a week-long build in the affiliate’s community. The program kicked off in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2006 when Whirlpool united 100 local residents with 100 Whirlpool employees and volunteers from 100 Habitat affiliates. These 300 volunteers built 10 homes on one block from Nov. 5–10, 2006. Whirlpool built nine homes near Phoenix, Arizona, in May 2007, and nine more homes in Dallas, Texas in October 2008. The 2009 build is set to begin August 31 in Atlanta, Georgia.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: Whirlpool Corporation reported Total CO2e emissions (Direct + Indirect) for the twelve months ending 31 December 2020 at 663 Kt (-21 /-3.1% y-o-y) and is committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2030.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In 1962, the company's research laboratories won a contract from NASA to develop the food and waste management system for Project Gemini. The company later developed freeze-dried ice cream in 1968 under contract to NASA for the Apollo missions. Returning to work with NASA under the Johnson Space Center's Advanced Exploration Systems Logistics Reduction and Repurposing project in 2021, Whirlpool developed a zero-gravity refrigerator in partnership with Purdue University and Air Squared to investigate long term food storage for deep space exploration.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: According to "The Guardian" newspaper the Whirlpool Corporation was mired in controversy in the UK for its decision not to recall faulty items that have caused deadly fires. Bernard Hender, 19, and Doug McTavish, 39, died following a fire at a flat in Llanrwst, North Wales, on October 10, 2014. Coroner Dave Lewis ruled that the cause of the fire was “on the balance of probabilities” an electrical fault with the door switch on the dryer. He described the evidence presented at the inquest by Whirlpool as “defensive and dismissive” and stated the company’s approach was an “obstacle” to finding steps to prevent future fires.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: Safety warnings about tumble dryers published on the Indesit and Hotpoint websites in 2015 advised customers that “In some rare cases, excess fluff can come into contact with the heating element and present a risk of fire.” Condensers and vented tumble dryers sold under the brands Hotpoint, Indesit, Creda, Swan and Proline and manufactured over an 11-year period between April 2004 and September 2015 present a fire risk. An estimated 5.3 million tumble dryers were bought in the UK over the time period. Originally, and even after several fires were confirmed as being caused by faulty devices, Whirlpool advised customers that using such devices was safe provided they were not left unattended but would not issue a product recall. Whirlpool offered to fix faulty machines or replace tumble dryers at a cost of £99 - an offer met with derision with consumer groups and in the press. Parliament discussed widespread difficulties with getting faulty machines fixed or replaced, including long wait times and poor service.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: On Friday 19 August 2016, a fire broke out on the 7th floor of an 18-storey Shepherds Court building in Shepherd's Bush Green resulting in hundreds of residents being evacuated. London Fire Brigade said 20 fire engines and 120 firefighters were sent to tackle the blaze at 3.44pm, and that it was under control by 5.30pm. The occupants were at home when smoke started pouring out of the tumble dryer and they alerted fire crews, with the fire later confirmed as being caused by a faulty Indesit branded Whirlpool tumble dryer.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: At the time Whirlpool advised customers that ”You may continue to use your tumble dryer whilst waiting for the modification, however, we require that you do not leave your dryer unattended during operation as an extra precaution (i.e. do not leave the house or leave the dryer on whilst asleep)” but would not issue a product recall.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: On 26 August 2016, London Fire Brigade advised the public to stop all use of faulty tumble dryers immediately and through its Total Recall campaign, called on Whirlpool to change its advice to customers and promote a product recall, advice also issued by Which? and the "Expect It's Safe" campaign set up by lawyers representing victims of fires started by faulty appliances. The London Fire Brigade commented that they get called out to a fire started by faulty domestic appliances nearly once every day and issued a five-point notice concerning Whirlpool's advice on faulty appliances:


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In September 2016, Andy Slaughter, the MP for Hammersmith whose constituency includes Shepherd's Bush said the government had failed to stand up to the “powerful industry lobby” representing white goods manufacturers. He was reported to have urged ministers to instruct Whirlpool and other companies to change their advice to customers, and insisted that faulty appliances that may cause fires be recalled and replaced. In a session of parliament on 13 September 2016, Slaughter revealed that he had "tracked down 750 fires caused by Whirlpool dryers and by dryers from brands owned by Whirlpool between 2004 and 2015. We know about 127 models, but Whirlpool will not publish the full list."


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: The same month, following the publication of the investigation results into the Shepherd's Bush blaze that concluded the faulty tumble dryer was to blame for starting the fire and other fires across the UK, pressure grew on Whirlpool and the government to do more to reassure the public. Dave Brown, London fire brigade's director of operations, said, “This fire has highlighted just how dangerous faulty white goods can be... disappointingly though, Whirlpool have still not changed their advice to consumers. We are now appealing once again for them to change their advice and bring it into line with our own. Thankfully there were no serious injuries in the Shepherd’s Bush fire but we may not be so lucky if it happens again.”


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In October 2016, Margot James, the British government's Customer Minister, said: “Customer safety must be the number one priority for manufacturers. I acknowledge that Whirlpool are making great efforts to modify and replace at-risk machines, but I believe additional action is required to reassure customers and the public. I will be writing to the company to set out my concerns and expectations.”


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In December 2016, the UK's largest customer advocacy group, Which?, who had previously produced a list of the 113 models of tumble dryer at risk, took the unusual step to seeking a judicial review of Peterborough Trading Standards - the agency named as responsible for handling of the faulty tumble dryers sold by Whirlpool - labelling the handling as a “fiasco” and claiming that it has failed millions of consumers across the UK by not enforcing product safety laws. Peterborough city council had been dealing with Whirlpool because its UK head office is located in the city. The move was considered unusual as it was the first time Which? had made a formal legal move involving trading standards "in order to assess the lawfulness of its decision to allow householders to continue to use faulty machines, despite the risk of them bursting into flames".


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: Leon Livermore, Chief Executive of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute was critical of Whirlpool not recalling faulty tumble dryers, urging "Whirlpool to recall the millions of potentially faulty tumble dryers in people's homes", but came to the defence of Peterborough Trading Standards, saying, "The whole system has been overwhelmed by the size of this, and it’s a bit unfair on a local authority such as Peterborough to have to take responsibility for what is a national issue.”


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: In response to the criticism, a Peterborough city council spokesman said: “An independent review, which began earlier this month, is currently taking place and we would expect the company to fully comply with the outcome. We will strongly defend our position if Which? is granted a judicial review and bearing in mind the ongoing independent review we consider that this action is premature.”


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: On 22 February 2017, Whirlpool received two enforcement notices from Peterborough Trading Standards following the trading standards internal review. 15 months after Whirlpool advised customers that it was safe to continue using faulty tumble dryers providing they were not left unattended, it was required to update its advice to customers advising them to unplug the appliances and stop using them until they were repaired. Whirlpool was also required to publicise the changed advice to consumers through advertisements in national newspapers, through social media and in stores. The enforcement notices had been originally issued on 16 January 2017, and were rejected by Whirlpool, which filed for an appeal that was then rejected. Had the company not complied with the notices at this point, it would have been taken to court. According to "The Guardian", the latest action followed “an escalation” in the number of incidents caused by affected machines.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: On Wednesday 25 April 2018, BBC One television consumer show Watchdog broadcast further allegations regarding Whirlpool’s safety recall of tumble dryers. The show explained how tumble dryers that had already been modified and supposedly made safe were still catching fire. Furthermore, newer models which were deemed “safe” by Whirlpool were actually being manufactured with the same flaws of previous unsafe models. BBC Watchdog attempted to speak to a spokesman from Whirlpool but the company did not provide anyone to answer these allegations on the show.


title: Whirlpool Corporation

text: On 17 December 2019, Whirlpool issued a recall of over 500,000 Hotpoint- and Indesit-branded washing machines due to risk of fire. The machines were demonstrated to be prone to overheating and catching fire due to a fault with their heating apparatus.


title: John Cage

text: John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.


title: John Cage

text: Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition "4′33″", which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is often assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is "Sonatas and Interludes" (1946–48).


title: John Cage

text: His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The "I Ching", an ancient Chinese classic text decision-making tool, which uses chance operations to suggest answers to questions one may pose, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, "Experimental Music", he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".


title: John Cage

text: Cage was born September 5, 1912, at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. His father, John Milton Cage Sr. (1886–1964), was an inventor, and his mother, Lucretia ("Crete") Harvey (1881–1968), worked intermittently as a journalist for the "Los Angeles Times". The family's roots were deeply American: in a 1976 interview, Cage mentioned that George Washington was assisted by an ancestor named John Cage in the task of surveying the Colony of Virginia. Cage described his mother as a woman with "a sense of society" who was "never happy", while his father is perhaps best characterized by his inventions: sometimes idealistic, such as a diesel-fueled submarine that gave off exhaust bubbles, the senior Cage being uninterested in an undetectable submarine; others revolutionary and against the scientific norms, such as the "electrostatic field theory" of the universe. John Cage Sr. taught his son that "if someone says 'can't' that shows you what to do." In 1944–45 Cage wrote two small character pieces dedicated to his parents: "Crete" and "Dad". The latter is a short lively piece that ends abruptly, while "Crete" is a slightly longer, mostly melodic contrapuntal work.


title: John Cage

text: Cage's first experiences with music were from private piano teachers in the Greater Los Angeles area and several relatives, particularly his aunt Phoebe Harvey James who introduced him to the piano music of the 19th century. He received first piano lessons when he was in the fourth grade at school, but although he liked music, he expressed more interest in sight reading than in developing virtuoso piano technique, and apparently was not thinking of composition. During high school, one of his music teachers was Fannie Charles Dillon. By 1928, though, Cage was convinced that he wanted to be a writer. He graduated that year from Los Angeles High School as a valedictorian, having also in the spring given a prize-winning speech at the Hollywood Bowl proposing a day of quiet for all Americans. By being "hushed and silent," he said, "we should have the opportunity to hear what other people think," anticipating "4′33″" by more than thirty years.


title: John Cage

text: Cage enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont as a theology major in 1928. Often crossing disciplines again, though, he encountered at Pomona the work of artist Marcel Duchamp via Professor José Pijoan, of writer James Joyce via Don Sample, of philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy and of Henry Cowell. In 1930 he dropped out, having come to believe that "college was of no use to a writer" after an incident described in the 1991 autobiographical statement:


title: John Cage

text: I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.


title: John Cage

text: Cage persuaded his parents that a trip to Europe would be more beneficial to a future writer than college studies. He subsequently hitchhiked to Galveston and sailed to Le Havre, where he took a train to Paris. Cage stayed in Europe for some 18 months, trying his hand at various forms of art. First, he studied Gothic and Greek architecture, but decided he was not interested enough in architecture to dedicate his life to it. He then took up painting, poetry and music. It was in Europe that, encouraged by his teacher Lazare Lévy, he first heard the music of contemporary composers (such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith) and finally got to know the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which he had not experienced before.


title: John Cage

text: After several months in Paris, Cage's enthusiasm for America was revived after he read Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" – he wanted to return immediately, but his parents, with whom he regularly exchanged letters during the entire trip, persuaded him to stay in Europe for a little longer and explore the continent. Cage started traveling, visiting various places in France, Germany, and Spain, as well as Capri and, most importantly, Majorca, where he started composing. His first compositions were created using dense mathematical formulas, but Cage was displeased with the results and left the finished pieces behind when he left. Cage's association with theater also started in Europe: during a walk in Seville he witnessed, in his own words, "the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in one's experience and producing enjoyment."


title: John Cage

text: Cage returned to the United States in 1931. He went to Santa Monica, California, where he made a living partly by giving small, private lectures on contemporary art. He got to know various important figures of the Southern California art world, such as Richard Buhlig (who became his first composition teacher) and arts patron Galka Scheyer. By 1933, Cage decided to concentrate on music rather than painting. "The people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the people who looked at my paintings had to say about my paintings", Cage later explained. In 1933 he sent some of his compositions to Henry Cowell; the reply was a "rather vague letter", in which Cowell suggested that Cage study with Arnold Schoenberg—Cage's musical ideas at the time included composition based on a 25-tone row, somewhat similar to Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Cowell also advised that, before approaching Schoenberg, Cage should take some preliminary lessons, and recommended Adolph Weiss, a former Schoenberg pupil.


title: John Cage

text: Following Cowell's advice, Cage travelled to New York City in 1933 and started studying with Weiss as well as taking lessons from Cowell himself at The New School. He supported himself financially by taking up a job washing walls at a Brooklyn YWCA (World Young Women's Christian Association). Cage's routine during that period was apparently very tiring, with just four hours of sleep on most nights, and four hours of composition every day starting at 4 am. Several months later, still in 1933, Cage became sufficiently good at composition to approach Schoenberg. He could not afford Schoenberg's price, and when he mentioned it, the older composer asked whether Cage would devote his life to music. After Cage replied that he would, Schoenberg offered to tutor him free of charge.


title: John Cage

text: Cage studied with Schoenberg in California: first at University of Southern California and then at University of California, Los Angeles, as well as privately. The older composer became one of the biggest influences on Cage, who "literally worshipped him", particularly as an example of how to live one's life being a composer. The vow Cage gave, to dedicate his life to music, was apparently still important some 40 years later, when Cage "had no need for it [i.e. writing music]", he continued composing partly because of the promise he gave. Schoenberg's methods and their influence on Cage are well documented by Cage himself in various lectures and writings. Particularly well-known is the conversation mentioned in the 1958 lecture "Indeterminacy":


title: John Cage

text: After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall."


title: John Cage

text: Cage studied with Schoenberg for two years, but although he admired his teacher, he decided to leave after Schoenberg told the assembled students that he was trying to make it impossible for them to write music. Much later, Cage recounted the incident: "... When he said that, I revolted, not against him, but against what he had said. I determined then and there, more than ever before, to write music." Although Schoenberg was not impressed with Cage's compositional abilities during these two years, in a later interview, where he initially said that none of his American pupils were interesting, he further stated in reference to Cage: "There was one ... of course he's not a composer, but he's an inventor—of genius." Cage would later adopt the "inventor" moniker and deny that he was in fact a composer.


title: John Cage

text: At some point in 1934–35, during his studies with Schoenberg, Cage was working at his mother's arts and crafts shop, where he met artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff. She was an Alaskan-born daughter of a Russian priest; her work encompassed fine bookbinding, sculpture and collage. Although Cage was involved in relationships with Don Sample and with architect Rudolph Schindler's wife Pauline when he met Xenia, he fell in love immediately. Cage and Kashevaroff were married in the desert at Yuma, Arizona, on June 7, 1935.


title: John Cage

text: The newly married couple first lived with Cage's parents in Pacific Palisades, then moved to Hollywood. During 1936–38 Cage changed numerous jobs, including one that started his lifelong association with modern dance: dance accompanist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He produced music for choreographies and at one point taught a course on "Musical Accompaniments for Rhythmic Expression" at UCLA, with his aunt Phoebe. It was during that time that Cage first started experimenting with unorthodox instruments, such as household items, metal sheets, and so on. This was inspired by Oskar Fischinger, who told Cage that "everything in the world has a spirit that can be released through its sound." Although Cage did not share the idea of spirits, these words inspired him to begin exploring the sounds produced by hitting various non-musical objects.


title: John Cage

text: In 1938, on Cowell's recommendation, Cage drove to San Francisco to find employment and to seek out fellow Cowell student and composer Lou Harrison. According to Cowell, the two composers had a shared interest in percussion and dance and would likely hit it off if introduced to one another. Indeed, the two immediately established a strong bond upon meeting and began a working relationship that continued for several years. Harrison soon helped Cage to secure a faculty member position at Mills College, teaching the same program as at UCLA, and collaborating with choreographer Marian van Tuyl. Several famous dance groups were present, and Cage's interest in modern dance grew further. After several months he left and moved to Seattle, Washington, where he found work as composer and accompanist for choreographer Bonnie Bird at the Cornish College of the Arts. The Cornish School years proved to be a particularly important period in Cage's life. Aside from teaching and working as accompanist, Cage organized a percussion ensemble that toured the West Coast and brought the composer his first fame. His reputation was enhanced further with the invention of the prepared piano—a piano which has had its sound altered by objects placed on, beneath or between the strings—in 1940. This concept was originally intended for a performance staged in a room too small to include a full percussion ensemble. It was also at the Cornish School that Cage met several people who became lifelong friends, such as painter Mark Tobey and dancer Merce Cunningham. The latter was to become Cage's lifelong romantic partner and artistic collaborator.


title: John Cage

text: Cage left Seattle in the summer of 1941 after the painter László Moholy-Nagy invited him to teach at the Chicago School of Design (what later became the IIT Institute of Design). The composer accepted partly because he hoped to find opportunities in Chicago, that were not available in Seattle, to organize a center for experimental music. These opportunities did not materialize. Cage taught at the Chicago School of Design and worked as accompanist and composer at the University of Chicago. At one point, his reputation as percussion composer landed him a commission from the Columbia Broadcasting System to compose a soundtrack for a radio play by Kenneth Patchen. The result, "The City Wears a Slouch Hat", was received well, and Cage deduced that more important commissions would follow. Hoping to find these, he left Chicago for New York City in the spring of 1942.


title: John Cage

text: In New York, the Cages first stayed with painter Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim. Through them, Cage met important artists such as Piet Mondrian, André Breton, Jackson Pollock, and Marcel Duchamp, and many others. Guggenheim was very supportive: the Cages could stay with her and Ernst for any length of time, and she offered to organize a concert of Cage's music at the opening of her gallery, which included paying for transportation of Cage's percussion instruments from Chicago. After she learned that Cage secured another concert, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Guggenheim withdrew all support, and, even after the ultimately successful MoMA concert, Cage was left homeless, unemployed and penniless. The commissions he hoped for did not happen. He and Xenia spent the summer of 1942 with dancer Jean Erdman and her husband Joseph Campbell. Without the percussion instruments, Cage again turned to prepared piano, producing a substantial body of works for performances by various choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, who had moved to New York City several years earlier. Cage and Cunningham eventually became romantically involved, and Cage's marriage, already breaking up during the early 1940s, ended in divorce in 1945. Cunningham remained Cage's partner for the rest of his life. Cage also countered the lack of percussion instruments by writing, on one occasion, for voice and closed piano: the resulting piece, "The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs" (1942), quickly became popular and was performed by the celebrated duo of Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio. In 1944, he appeared in Maya Deren's At Land, a 15-minute silent experimental film.


title: John Cage

text: Like his personal life, Cage's artistic life went through a crisis in mid-1940s. The composer was experiencing a growing disillusionment with the idea of music as means of communication: the public rarely accepted his work, and Cage himself, too, had trouble understanding the music of his colleagues. In early 1946 Cage agreed to tutor Gita Sarabhai, an Indian musician who came to the US to study Western music. In return, he asked her to teach him about Indian music and philosophy. Cage also attended, in late 1940s and early 1950s, D. T. Suzuki's lectures on Zen Buddhism, and read further the works of Coomaraswamy. The first fruits of these studies were works inspired by Indian concepts: "Sonatas and Interludes" for prepared piano, "String Quartet in Four Parts", and others. Cage accepted the goal of music as explained to him by Sarabhai: "to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences".


title: John Cage

text: Early in 1946, his former teacher Richard Buhlig arranged for Cage to meet Berlin-born pianist Grete Sultan, who had escaped from Nazi persecution to New York in 1941. They became close, lifelong friends, and Cage later dedicated part of his "Music for Piano" and his monumental piano cycle "Etudes Australes" to her.


title: John Cage

text: After a 1949 performance at Carnegie Hall, New York, Cage received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, which enabled him to make a trip to Europe, where he met composers such as Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez. More important was Cage's chance encounter with Morton Feldman in New York City in early 1950. Both composers attended a New York Philharmonic concert, where the orchestra performed Anton Webern's "Symphony", op. 21, followed by a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Cage felt so overwhelmed by Webern's piece that he left before the Rachmaninoff; and in the lobby, he met Feldman, who was leaving for the same reason. The two composers quickly became friends; some time later Cage, Feldman, Earle Brown, David Tudor and Cage's pupil Christian Wolff came to be referred to as "the New York school."


title: John Cage

text: In early 1951, Wolff presented Cage with a copy of the "I Ching"—a Chinese classic text which describes a symbol system used to identify order in chance events. This version of the "I Ching" was the first complete English translation and had been published by Wolff's father, Kurt Wolff of Pantheon Books in 1950. The "I Ching" is commonly used for divination, but for Cage it became a tool to compose using chance. To compose a piece of music, Cage would come up with questions to ask the "I Ching"; the book would then be used in much the same way as it is used for divination. For Cage, this meant "imitating nature in its manner of operation". His lifelong interest in sound itself culminated in an approach that yielded works in which sounds were free from the composer's will:


title: John Cage

text: When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound ... I don't need sound to talk to me.


title: John Cage

text: Although Cage had used chance on a few earlier occasions, most notably in the third movement of "Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra" (1950–51), the "I Ching" opened new possibilities in this field for him. The first results of the new approach were "Imaginary Landscape No. 4" for 12 radio receivers, and "Music of Changes" for piano. The latter work was written for David Tudor, whom Cage met through Feldman—another friendship that lasted until Cage's death. Tudor premiered most of Cage's works until the early 1960s, when he stopped performing on the piano and concentrated on composing music. The "I Ching" became Cage's standard tool for composition: he used it in practically every work composed after 1951, and eventually settled on a computer algorithm that calculated numbers in a manner similar to throwing coins for the "I Ching".


title: John Cage

text: Despite the fame "Sonatas and Interludes" earned him, and the connections he cultivated with American and European composers and musicians, Cage was quite poor. Although he still had an apartment at 326 Monroe Street (which he occupied since around 1946), his financial situation in 1951 worsened so much that while working on "Music of Changes", he prepared a set of instructions for Tudor as to how to complete the piece in the event of his death. Nevertheless, Cage managed to survive and maintained an active artistic life, giving lectures and performances, etc.


title: John Cage

text: In 1952–53 he completed another mammoth project—the "Williams Mix", a piece of tape music, which Earle Brown and Morton Feldman helped to put together. Also in 1952, Cage composed the piece that became his best-known and most controversial creation: "4′33″". The score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece—four minutes, thirty-three seconds—and is meant to be perceived as consisting of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed. Cage conceived "a silent piece" years earlier, but was reluctant to write it down; and indeed, the premiere (given by Tudor on August 29, 1952 at Woodstock, New York) caused an uproar in the audience. The reaction to "4′33″" was just a part of the larger picture: on the whole, it was the adoption of chance procedures that had disastrous consequences for Cage's reputation. The press, which used to react favorably to earlier percussion and prepared piano music, ignored his new works, and many valuable friendships and connections were lost. Pierre Boulez, who used to promote Cage's work in Europe, was opposed to Cage's use of chance, and so were other composers who came to prominence during the 1950s, e.g. Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis.


title: John Cage

text: During this time Cage was also teaching at the avant-garde Black Mountain College just outside Asheville, North Carolina. Cage taught at the college in the summers of 1948 and 1952 and was in residence the summer of 1953. While at Black Mountain College in 1952, he organized what has been called the first "happening" (see discussion below) in the United States, later titled "Theatre Piece No. 1", a multi-layered, multi-media performance event staged the same day as Cage conceived it that "that would greatly influence 1950s and 60s artistic practices". In addition to Cage, the participants included Cunningham and Tudor.


title: John Cage

text: From 1953 onward, Cage was busy composing music for modern dance, particularly Cunningham's dances (Cage's partner adopted chance too, out of fascination for the movement of the human body), as well as developing new methods of using chance, in a series of works he referred to as "The Ten Thousand Things". In the summer of 1954 he moved out of New York and settled in Gate Hill Cooperative, a community in Stony Point, New York, where his neighbors included David Tudor, M. C. Richards, Karen Karnes, Stan VanDerBeek, and Sari Dienes. The composer's financial situation gradually improved: in late 1954 he and Tudor were able to embark on a European tour. From 1956 to 1961 Cage taught classes in experimental composition at The New School, and from 1956 to 1958 he also worked as an art director and designer of typography. Among his works completed during the last years of the decade were "Concert for Piano and Orchestra" (1957–58), a seminal work in the history of graphic notation, and "Variations I" (1958).


title: John Cage

text: Cage was affiliated with Wesleyan University and collaborated with members of its Music Department from the 1950s until his death in 1992. At the University, the philosopher, poet, and professor of classics Norman O. Brown befriended Cage, an association that proved fruitful to both. In 1960 the composer was appointed a Fellow on the faculty of the Center for Advanced Studies (now the Center for Humanities) in the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wesleyan, where he started teaching classes in experimental music. In October 1961, Wesleyan University Press published "Silence", a collection of Cage's lectures and writings on a wide variety of subjects, including the famous "Lecture on Nothing" that was composed using a complex time length scheme, much like some of Cage's music. "Silence" was Cage's first book of six but it remains his most widely read and influential. In the early 1960s Cage began his lifelong association with C.F. Peters Corporation. Walter Hinrichsen, the president of the corporation, offered Cage an exclusive contract and instigated the publication of a catalog of Cage's works, which appeared in 1962.


title: John Cage

text: Edition Peters soon published a large number of scores by Cage, and this, together with the publication of "Silence", led to much higher prominence for the composer than ever before—one of the positive consequences of this was that in 1965 Betty Freeman set up an annual grant for living expenses for Cage, to be issued from 1965 to his death. By the mid-1960s, Cage was receiving so many commissions and requests for appearances that he was unable to fulfill them. This was accompanied by a busy touring schedule; consequently Cage's compositional output from that decade was scant. After the orchestral "Atlas Eclipticalis" (1961–62), a work based on star charts, which was fully notated, Cage gradually shifted to, in his own words, "music (not composition)." The score of "0′00″", completed in 1962, originally comprised a single sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action", and in the first performance the disciplined action was Cage writing that sentence. The score of "Variations III" (1962) abounds in instructions to the performers, but makes no references to music, musical instruments or sounds.


title: John Cage

text: Many of the "Variations" and other 1960s pieces were in fact "happenings", an art form established by Cage and his students in late 1950s. Cage's "Experimental Composition" classes at The New School have become legendary as an American source of Fluxus, an international network of artists, composers, and designers. The majority of his students had little or no background in music. Most were artists. They included Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, George Brecht, Ben Patterson, and Dick Higgins, as well as many others Cage invited unofficially. Famous pieces that resulted from the classes include George Brecht's "Time Table Music" and Al Hansen's "Alice Denham in 48 Seconds". As set forth by Cage, happenings were theatrical events that abandon the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of definite duration. Instead, they are left to chance. They have a minimal script, with no plot. In fact, a "happening" is so-named because it occurs in the present, attempting to arrest the concept of passing time. Cage believed that theater was the closest route to integrating art and real life. The term "happenings" was coined by Allan Kaprow, one of his students, who defined it as a genre in the late fifties. Cage met Kaprow while on a mushroom hunt with George Segal and invited him to join his class. In following these developments Cage was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud's seminal treatise "The Theatre and Its Double", and the happenings of this period can be viewed as a forerunner to the ensuing Fluxus movement. In October 1960, Mary Bauermeister's Cologne studio hosted a joint concert by Cage and the video artist Nam June Paik, who in the course of his performance of "Etude for Piano" cut off Cage's tie and then poured a bottle of shampoo over the heads of Cage and Tudor.


title: John Cage

text: In 1967, Cage's book "A Year from Monday" was first published by Wesleyan University Press. Cage's parents died during the decade: his father in 1964, and his mother in 1969. Cage had their ashes scattered in Ramapo Mountains, near Stony Point, and asked for the same to be done to him after his death.


title: John Cage

text: Cage's work from the sixties features some of his largest and most ambitious, not to mention socially utopian pieces, reflecting the mood of the era yet also his absorption of the writings of both Marshall McLuhan, on the effects of new media, and R. Buckminster Fuller, on the power of technology to promote social change. "HPSCHD" (1969), a gargantuan and long-running multimedia work made in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller, incorporated the mass superimposition of seven harpsichords playing chance-determined excerpts from the works of Cage, Hiller, and a potted history of canonical classics, with 52 tapes of computer-generated sounds, 6,400 slides of designs, many supplied by NASA, and shown from sixty-four slide projectors, with 40 motion-picture films. The piece was initially rendered in a five-hour performance at the University of Illinois in 1969, in which the audience arrived after the piece had begun and left before it ended, wandering freely around the auditorium in the time for which they were there.


title: John Cage

text: Also in 1969, Cage produced the first fully notated work in years: "Cheap Imitation" for piano. The piece is a chance-controlled reworking of Erik Satie's "Socrate", and, as both listeners and Cage himself noted, openly sympathetic to its source. Although Cage's affection for Satie's music was well-known, it was highly unusual for him to compose a personal work, one in which the composer "is" present. When asked about this apparent contradiction, Cage replied: "Obviously, "Cheap Imitation" lies outside of what may seem necessary in my work in general, and that's disturbing. I'm the first to be disturbed by it." Cage's fondness for the piece resulted in a recording—a rare occurrence, since Cage disliked making recordings of his music—made in 1976. Overall, "Cheap Imitation" marked a major change in Cage's music: he turned again to writing fully notated works for traditional instruments, and tried out several new approaches, such as improvisation, which he previously discouraged, but was able to use in works from the 1970s, such as "Child of Tree" (1975).


title: John Cage

text: "Cheap Imitation" became the last work Cage performed in public himself. Arthritis had troubled Cage since 1960, and by the early 1970s his hands were painfully swollen and rendered him unable to perform. Nevertheless, he still played "Cheap Imitation" during the 1970s, before finally having to give up performing. Preparing manuscripts also became difficult: before, published versions of pieces were done in Cage's calligraphic script; now, manuscripts for publication had to be completed by assistants. Matters were complicated further by David Tudor's departure from performing, which happened in the early 1970s. Tudor decided to concentrate on composition instead, and so Cage, for the first time in two decades, had to start relying on commissions from other performers, and their respective abilities. Such performers included Grete Sultan, Paul Zukofsky, Margaret Leng Tan, and many others. Aside from music, Cage continued writing books of prose and poetry (mesostics). "M" was first published by Wesleyan University Press in 1973. In January 1978 Cage was invited by Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press to engage in printmaking, and Cage would go on to produce series of prints every year until his death; these, together with some late watercolors, constitute the largest portion of his extant visual art. In 1979 Cage's "Empty Words" was first published by Wesleyan University Press.


title: John Cage

text: In 1987, Cage completed a piece called "Two", for flute and piano, dedicated to performers Roberto Fabbriciani and Carlo Neri. The title referred to the number of performers needed; the music consisted of short notated fragments to be played at any tempo within the indicated time constraints. Cage went on to write some forty such "Number Pieces", as they came to be known, one of the last being "Eighty" (1992, premiered in Munich on October 28, 2011), usually employing a variant of the same technique. The process of composition, in many of the later Number Pieces, was simple selection of pitch range and pitches from that range, using chance procedures; the music has been linked to Cage's anarchic leanings. "One" (i.e. the eleventh piece for a single performer), completed in early 1992, was Cage's first and only foray into film.


title: John Cage

text: Another new direction, also taken in 1987, was opera: Cage produced five operas, all sharing the same title "Europera", in 1987–91. "Europeras I" and "II" require greater forces than "III", "IV" and "V", which are on a chamber scale.


title: John Cage

text: In the course of the 1980s, Cage's health worsened progressively. He suffered not only from arthritis, but also from sciatica and arteriosclerosis. He suffered a stroke that left the movement of his left leg restricted, and, in 1985, broke an arm. During this time, Cage pursued a macrobiotic diet. Nevertheless, ever since arthritis started plaguing him, the composer was aware of his age, and, as biographer David Revill observed, "the fire which he began to incorporate in his visual work in 1985 is not only the fire he has set aside for so long—the fire of passion—but also fire as transitoriness and fragility." On August 11, 1992, while preparing evening tea for himself and Cunningham, Cage suffered another stroke. He was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, where he died on the morning of August 12. He was 79.


title: John Cage

text: According to his wishes, Cage's body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Ramapo Mountains, near Stony Point, New York, at the same place where he had scattered the ashes of his parents. The composer's death occurred only weeks before a celebration of his 80th birthday organized in Frankfurt by composer Walter Zimmermann and musicologist Stefan Schaedler. The event went ahead as planned, including a performance of the "Concert for Piano and Orchestra" by David Tudor and Ensemble Modern. Merce Cunningham died of natural causes in July 2009.


title: John Cage

text: Cage's first completed pieces are currently lost. According to the composer, the earliest works were very short pieces for piano, composed using complex mathematical procedures and lacking in "sensual appeal and expressive power." Cage then started producing pieces by improvising and writing down the results, until Richard Buhlig stressed to him the importance of structure. Most works from the early 1930s, such as "Sonata for Clarinet" (1933) and "Composition for 3 Voices" (1934), are highly chromatic and betray Cage's interest in counterpoint. Around the same time, the composer also developed a type of a tone row technique with 25-note rows. After studies with Schoenberg, who never taught dodecaphony to his students, Cage developed another tone row technique, in which the row was split into short motives, which would then be repeated and transposed according to a set of rules. This approach was first used in "Two Pieces for Piano" (c. 1935), and then, with modifications, in larger works such as "Metamorphosis" and "Five Songs" (both 1938).


title: John Cage

text: Soon after Cage started writing percussion music and music for modern dance, he started using a technique that placed the rhythmic structure of the piece into the foreground. In "Imaginary Landscape No. 1" (1939) there are four large sections of 16, 17, 18, and 19 bars, and each section is divided into four subsections, the first three of which were all 5 bars long. "First Construction (in Metal)" (1939) expands on the concept: there are five sections of 4, 3, 2, 3, and 4 units respectively. Each unit contains 16 bars, and is divided the same way: 4 bars, 3 bars, 2 bars, etc. Finally, the musical content of the piece is based on sixteen motives. Such "nested proportions", as Cage called them, became a regular feature of his music throughout the 1940s. The technique was elevated to great complexity in later pieces such as "Sonatas and Interludes" for prepared piano (1946–48), in which many proportions used non-integer numbers (1¼, ¾, 1¼, ¾, 1½, and 1½ for "Sonata I", for example), or "A Flower", a song for voice and closed piano, in which two sets of proportions are used simultaneously.


title: John Cage

text: In late 1940s, Cage started developing further methods of breaking away with traditional harmony. For instance, in "String Quartet in Four Parts" (1950) Cage first composed a number of "gamuts": chords with fixed instrumentation. The piece progresses from one "gamut" to another. In each instance the "gamut" was selected only based on whether it contains the note necessary for the melody, and so the rest of the notes do not form any directional harmony. "Concerto for prepared piano" (1950–51) used a system of charts of durations, dynamics, melodies, etc., from which Cage would choose using simple geometric patterns. The last movement of the concerto was a step towards using chance procedures, which Cage adopted soon afterwards.


title: John Cage

text: A chart system was also used (along with nested proportions) for the large piano work "Music of Changes" (1951), only here material would be selected from the charts by using the "I Ching". All of Cage's music since 1951 was composed using chance procedures, most commonly using the "I Ching". For example, works from "Music for Piano" were based on paper imperfections: the imperfections themselves provided pitches, coin tosses and "I Ching" hexagram numbers were used to determine the accidentals, clefs, and playing techniques. A whole series of works was created by applying chance operations, i.e. the "I Ching", to star charts: "Atlas Eclipticalis" (1961–62), and a series of etudes: "Etudes Australes" (1974–75), "Freeman Etudes" (1977–90), and "Etudes Boreales" (1978). Cage's etudes are all extremely difficult to perform, a characteristic dictated by Cage's social and political views: the difficulty would ensure that "a performance would show that the impossible is not impossible"—this being Cage's answer to the notion that solving the world's political and social problems is impossible. Cage described himself as an anarchist, and was influenced by Henry David Thoreau.


title: John Cage

text: Another series of works applied chance procedures to pre-existing music by other composers: "Cheap Imitation" (1969; based on Erik Satie), "Some of "The Harmony of Maine"" (1978; based on Belcher), and "Hymns and Variations" (1979). In these works, Cage would borrow the rhythmic structure of the originals and fill it with pitches determined through chance procedures, or just replace some of the originals' pitches. Yet another series of works, the so-called "Number Pieces", all completed during the last five years of the composer's life, make use of "time brackets": the score consists of short fragments with indications of when to start and to end them (e.g. from anywhere between 1′15″ and 1′45″, and to anywhere from 2′00″ to 2′30″).


title: John Cage

text: Cage's method of using the "I Ching" was far from simple randomization. The procedures varied from composition to composition, and were usually complex. For example, in the case of "Cheap Imitation", the exact questions asked to the "I Ching" were these:


title: John Cage

text: In another example of late music by Cage, "Etudes Australes", the compositional procedure involved placing a transparent strip on the star chart, identifying the pitches from the chart, transferring them to paper, then asking the "I Ching" which of these pitches were to remain single, and which should become parts of aggregates (chords), and the aggregates were selected from a table of some 550 possible aggregates, compiled beforehand.


title: John Cage

text: Finally, some of Cage's works, particularly those completed during the 1960s, feature instructions to the performer, rather than fully notated music. The score of "Variations I" (1958) presents the performer with six transparent squares, one with points of various sizes, five with five intersecting lines. The performer combines the squares and uses lines and points as a coordinate system, in which the lines are axes of various characteristics of the sounds, such as lowest frequency, simplest overtone structure, etc. Some of Cage's graphic scores (e.g. "Concert for Piano and Orchestra", "Fontana Mix" (both 1958)) present the performer with similar difficulties. Still other works from the same period consist just of text instructions. The score of "0′00″" (1962; also known as "4′33″ No. 2") consists of a single sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." The first performance had Cage write that sentence.


title: John Cage

text: "Musicircus" (1967) simply invites the performers to assemble and play together. The first "Musicircus" featured multiple performers and groups in a large space who were all to commence and stop playing at two particular time periods, with instructions on when to play individually or in groups within these two periods. The result was a mass superimposition of many different musics on top of one another as determined by chance distribution, producing an event with a specifically theatric feel. Many Musicircuses have subsequently been held, and continue to occur even after Cage's death. The English National Opera became the first opera company to hold a Cage Musicircus on March 3, 2012 at the London Coliseum. The ENO's Musicircus featured artists including Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and composer Michael Finnissy alongside ENO Music Director Edward Gardner, the ENO Community Choir, ENO Opera Works singers, and a collective of professional and amateur talents performing in the bars and front of house at London's Coliseum Opera House.


title: John Cage

text: This concept of circus was to remain important to Cage throughout his life and featured strongly in such pieces as "Roaratorio, an Irish circus on Finnegans Wake" (1979), a many-tiered rendering in sound of both his text "Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake", and traditional musical and field recordings made around Ireland. The piece was based on James Joyce's famous novel, "Finnegans Wake", which was one of Cage's favorite books, and one from which he derived texts for several more of his works.


title: John Cage

text: Since chance procedures were used by Cage to eliminate the composer's and the performer's likes and dislikes from music, Cage disliked the concept of improvisation, which is inevitably linked to the performer's preferences. In a number of works beginning in the 1970s, he found ways to incorporate improvisation. In "Child of Tree" (1975) and "Branches" (1976) the performers are asked to use certain species of plants as instruments, for example the cactus. The structure of the pieces is determined through the chance of their choices, as is the musical output; the performers had no knowledge of the instruments. In "Inlets" (1977) the performers play large water-filled conch shells – by carefully tipping the shell several times, it is possible to achieve a bubble forming inside, which produced sound. Yet, as it is impossible to predict when this would happen, the performers had to continue tipping the shells – as a result the performance was dictated by pure chance.


title: John Cage

text: Although Cage started painting in his youth, he gave it up in order to concentrate on music instead. His first mature visual project, "Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel", dates from 1969. The work comprises two lithographs and a group of what Cage called "plexigrams": silk screen printing on plexiglas panels. The panels and the lithographs all consist of bits and pieces of words in different typefaces, all governed by chance operations.


title: John Cage

text: From 1978 to his death Cage worked at Crown Point Press, producing series of prints every year. (The Press's YouTube channel includes a 44-minute video montage, spanning 1978-1992, of Cage at work.) The earliest project completed there was the etching "Score Without Parts" (1978), created from fully notated instructions, and based on various combinations of drawings by Henry David Thoreau. This was followed, the same year, by "Seven Day Diary", which Cage drew with his eyes closed, but which conformed to a strict structure developed using chance operations. Finally, Thoreau's drawings informed the last works produced in 1978, "Signals".


title: John Cage

text: Between 1979 and 1982 Cage produced a number of large series of prints: "Changes and Disappearances" (1979–80), "On the Surface" (1980–82), and "Déreau" (1982). These were the last works in which he used engraving. In 1983 he started using various unconventional materials such as cotton batting, foam, etc., and then used stones and fire ("Eninka", "Variations", "Ryoanji", etc.) to create his visual works. In 1988–1990 he produced watercolors at the Mountain Lake Workshop.


title: John Cage

text: The only film Cage produced was one of the Number Pieces, "One", commissioned by composer and film director Henning Lohner who worked with Cage to produce and direct the 90-minute monochrome film. It was completed only weeks before his death in 1992. "One" consists entirely of images of chance-determined play of electric light. It premiered in Cologne, Germany, on September 19, 1992, accompanied by the live performance of the orchestra piece "103".


title: John Cage

text: Throughout his adult life, Cage was also active as lecturer and writer. Some of his lectures were included in several books he published, the first of which was "Silence: Lectures and Writings" (1961). "Silence" included not only simple lectures, but also texts executed in experimental layouts, and works such as "Lecture on Nothing" (1949), which were composed in rhythmic structures. Subsequent books also featured different types of content, from lectures on music to poetry—Cage's mesostics.


title: John Cage

text: Cage was also an avid amateur mycologist. He co-founded the New York Mycological Society with four friends, and his mycology collection is presently housed by the Special Collections department of the McHenry Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz.


title: John Cage

text: Cage's pre-chance works, particularly pieces from the late 1940s such as "Sonatas and Interludes", earned critical acclaim: the "Sonatas" were performed at Carnegie Hall in 1949. Cage's adoption of chance operations in 1951 cost him a number of friendships and led to numerous criticisms from fellow composers. Adherents of serialism such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen dismissed indeterminate music; Boulez, who was once on friendly terms with Cage, criticized him for "adoption of a philosophy tinged with Orientalism that masks a basic weakness in compositional technique." Prominent critics of serialism, such as the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, were similarly hostile towards Cage: for Xenakis, the adoption of chance in music was "an abuse of language and ... an abrogation of a composer's function."


title: John Cage

text: An article by teacher and critic Michael Steinberg, "Tradition and Responsibility", criticized avant-garde music in general:


title: John Cage

text: The rise of music that is totally without social commitment also increases the separation between composer and public, and represents still another form of departure from tradition. The cynicism with which this particular departure seems to have been made is perfectly symbolized in John Cage's account of a public lecture he had given: "Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen." While Mr. Cage's famous silent piece [i.e. "4′33″"], or his "Landscapes" for a dozen radio receivers may be of little interest as music, they are of enormous importance historically as representing the complete abdication of the artist's power.


title: John Cage

text: Cage's aesthetic position was criticized by, among others, prominent writer and critic Douglas Kahn. In his 1999 book "Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts", Kahn acknowledged the influence Cage had on culture, but noted that "one of the central effects of Cage's battery of silencing techniques was a silencing of the social."


title: John Cage

text: While much of Cage's work remains controversial, his influence on countless composers, artists, and writers is notable. After Cage introduced chance, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis remained critical, yet all adopted chance procedures in some of their works (although in a much more restricted manner); and Stockhausen's piano writing in his later "" was influenced by Cage's "Music of Changes" and David Tudor. Other composers who adopted chance procedures in their works included Witold Lutosławski, Mauricio Kagel, and many others. Music in which some of the composition and/or performance is left to chance was labelled "aleatoric music"—a term popularized by Pierre Boulez. Helmut Lachenmann's work was influenced by Cage's work with extended techniques.


title: John Cage

text: Cage's rhythmic structure experiments and his interest in sound influenced a number of composers, starting at first with his close American associates Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff (and other American composers, such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass), and then spreading to Europe. For example, almost all composers of the English experimental school acknowledge his influence: Michael Parsons, Christopher Hobbs, John White, Gavin Bryars, who studied under Cage briefly, and Howard Skempton. The Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu has also cited Cage's influence.


title: John Cage

text: Following Cage's death Simon Jeffes, founder of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, composed a piece entitled CAGE DEAD, using a melody based on the notes contained in the title, in the order they appear: C, A, G, E, D, E, A and D.


title: John Cage

text: Cage's influence was also acknowledged by rock acts such as Sonic Youth (who performed some of the Number Pieces) and Stereolab (who named a song after Cage), composer and rock and jazz guitarist Frank Zappa, and various noise music artists and bands: indeed, one writer traced the origin of noise music to "4′33″". The development of electronic music was also influenced by Cage: in the mid-1970s Brian Eno's label Obscure Records released works by Cage. Prepared piano, which Cage popularized, is featured heavily on Aphex Twin's 2001 album "Drukqs". Cage's work as musicologist helped popularize Erik Satie's music, and his friendship with Abstract expressionist artists such as Robert Rauschenberg helped introduce his ideas into visual art. Cage's ideas also found their way into sound design: for example, Academy Award-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom cited Cage's work as a major influence. Radiohead undertook a composing and performing collaboration with Cunningham's dance troupe in 2003 because the music-group's leader Thom Yorke considered Cage one of his "all-time art heroes".


title: John Cage

text: In 2012, amongst a wide range of American and international centennial celebrations, an eight-day festival was held in Washington DC, with venues found notably more amongst the city's art museums and universities than performance spaces. Earlier in the centennial year, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas presented Cage's "Song Books" with the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York. Another celebration came, for instance, in Darmstadt, Germany, which in July 2012 renamed its central station the John Cage Railway Station during the term of its annual new-music courses. At the Ruhrtriennale in Germany, Heiner Goebbels staged a production of "Europeras 1 & 2" in a 36,000 sq ft converted factory and commissioned a production of "" created and performed by Robert Wilson. Jacaranda Music had four concerts planned in Santa Monica, California, for the centennial week. John Cage Day was the name given to several events held during 2012 to mark the centenary of his birth.


title: John Cage

text: A 2012 project was curated by Juraj Kojs to celebrate the centenary of Cage's birth, titled "On Silence: Homage to Cage." It consisted of 13 commissioned works created by composers from around the globe such as Kasia Glowicka, Adrian Knight and Henry Vega, each being 4 minutes and 33 seconds long in honor of Cage's famous 1952 opus, "4′33″". The program was supported by the Foundation for Emerging Technologies and Arts, Laura Kuhn and the John Cage Trust.


title: John Cage

text: In a homage to Cage's dance work, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in July 2012 "performed an engrossing piece called 'Story/Time'. It was modeled on Cage's 1958 work 'Indeterminacy', in which [Cage and then Jones, respectively,] sat alone onstage, reading aloud ... series of one-minute stories [they]'d written. Dancers from Jones's company performed as [Jones] read."


title: Marzia Kjellberg

text: Marzia Kjellberg (; born 21 October 1992) is an Italian Internet personality and businesswoman. Known for her videos on her now-inactive YouTube channel Marzia (formerly CutiePieMarzia), Kjellberg has also ventured into writing, fashion designing and business. She is married to Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie.


title: Marzia Kjellberg

text: Marzia Kjellberg (then Bisognin) registered her "CutiePieMarzia" YouTube channel on 16 January 2012. Her videos on YouTube focused on fashion, beauty, makeup, DIY, books, movies, vlogs, haul, and video gaming. Kjellberg also commonly uploaded travel vlogs. Although Italian, Kjellberg spoke English in her videos. Kjellberg was signed to Maker Studios' sub-network, The Platform. By 2018, however, her e-commerce ventures would be managed by Re6l, a Toronto-based company involved with influencer media and e-commerce.


title: Marzia Kjellberg

text: Kjellberg's YouTube channel was one of the most popular in the beauty and makeup genre; in May 2014, "The Wall Street Journal" reported that it attracted over 16 million viewers each month. The demographics of Kjellberg's viewers have been reported to be females aged 13–24, who use Kjellberg's videos as a reference. Kjellberg refers to her fans as "Marzipans".


title: Marzia Kjellberg

text: Kjellberg appeared on her then-boyfriend Felix Kjellberg's channel on various occasions. Felix, better known on YouTube as "PewDiePie," uploaded videos of the two playing video games and participating in video challenges together. In 2014, Kjellberg and Felix were part of an online marketing campaign for the horror film, "As Above, So Below". While Felix's videos for the campaign involved gaming-related topics, Kjellberg's videos centered around a travel vlog angle of the couple's trip to Paris. Similarly, ABC had Kjellberg, among others, promote their new TV series, "Selfie", via a YouTube marketing campaign.


title: Marzia Kjellberg

text: On 22 October 2018, Kjellberg uploaded a video to her channel announcing her retirement from her YouTube career. In the video she mentioned that at a point during her YouTube career, focusing on the website kept her in a bubble that negatively affected her mental health, although she resolved to reach out to others. She ended her video explaining that she was ready for "something new in [her] life." After she uploaded her final vlog, as she decided to remove her videos; she left a comment on the vlog stating, "Having videos up, after making this decision, would have seemed like taking a step back. I've selected a few that I really liked, which I'm going to leave for a bit – for the 'adjustment' period – but taking my videos down, in my mind, needed to be done." Shortly before her announcement, her YouTube channel had accumulated over 128 million video views and just under 7.5 million subscribers. Her channel's video views previously peaked in August 2017, at around 570 million.


title: Marzia Kjellberg

text: Aside from creating content on her own channel, Kjellberg has been a voice actress in various animated web series. She voiced Carrie the Carrot in "Oscar's Hotel for Fantastical Creatures". Kjellberg also voiced the character Maya, based on her own dog, in a six-episode animated web series titled "Pugatory".


title: Marzia Kjellberg

text: Kjellberg's channel's success allowed her to start designing her own clothing. Since March 2015, Kjellberg has launched several lines of fashion and design merchandise including nail polish shade, home decor products, and most notably clothing.


title: Marzia Kjellberg

text: In 2016, she designed "Daisy" shoes through Project Shoe. That July, she launched a product line with Zoya, a nail polish brand. In June 2017, Kjellberg launched Lemon, a clothing line paired with a fragrance.


title: Marzia Kjellberg

text: In a piece about fashion lines created by YouTube personalities, "Tubefilter" cited comments from Michael Fink, the dean of the School of Fashion at Savannah College of Art and Design, as well as celebrity stylist Allison Calhoun. Kjellberg's "Amore" clothing line was positively received by Fink, who stated "the gold zipper and heart applique of this skirt are right on trend, yet the A-line silhouette is timeless. You can't go wrong with this piece." Calhoun opined that "I'm personally not crazy about the patterns, colors, or cuts but I definitely can see the customer who might be. I also want to applaud Marzia and her designs for not being as topical as the others. It seems like she's making clothes that she wants to wear without a ton of inspiration from the outside world."


title: Marzia Kjellberg

text: On 1 July 2018, Kjellberg launched Maì, a jewellery, pottery, clothing and home decor brand. The Maì ceramic accents are handcrafted by Kjellberg out of her UK-based pottery studio. She maintains that brand along with Tsuki Market, a unisex clothing and homeware brand that she owns with husband Felix Kjellberg.


title: Marzia Kjellberg

text: In January 2015, Kjellberg published a young adult fantasy/horror novel. The Italian version was published under the title "La Casa Dei Sogni" while the English version was published as "Dream House: A Novel by CutiePieMarzia".


title: Marzia Kjellberg

text: She was introduced to her husband, Felix Kjellberg, better known online as PewDiePie, by her friend Daizo. She began dating Felix in 2011, after e-mailing him and stating that she found his videos funny. She then moved to Sweden, to live with him that October. They later moved to her native Italy, before settling together in Brighton, England. The couple live with their two pugs, Edgar and Maya, as well as a hedgehog named Dogy. Their relationship has been highlighted by various media outlets, with "The Globe and Mail" writing that her "calm personality balances out Felix's general wackiness." On 27 April 2018, Kjellberg announced on Instagram that Felix had proposed to her; on 20 August 2019, the couple announced on social media that they had married. When the two lived in Brighton, their house in Japan was burgled in late 2019; Kjellberg posted a statement online which included: "I know it is very materialistic, and should be happy with what I was left/have, but I can't hide the shock and sadness with all being taken away, just like that."


title: Fatherhood (film)

text: Fatherhood is a 2021 American comedy-drama film directed by Paul Weitz from a screenplay by Weitz and Dana Stevens based on the 2011 memoir "Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss and Love" by Matthew Logelin. The film stars Kevin Hart, Alfre Woodard, Frankie R. Faison, Lil Rel Howery, DeWanda Wise, Anthony Carrigan, Melody Hurd, and Paul Reiser, and follows a new father who struggles to raise his daughter after the sudden death of his wife.


title: Fatherhood (film)

text: Originally scheduled to be released in theaters by Sony Pictures Releasing, "Fatherhood" was sold to Netflix during the COVID-19 pandemic and was digitally released on June 18, 2021. The film received mixed reviews from critics, with criticism for its formulaic approach but the emotional weight and Hart's against-type performance receiving praise.


title: Fatherhood (film)

text: Childhood sweethearts Matt and Liz Logelin prepare for the birth of their first child. Soon after delivering their daughter, Maddy, Liz suddenly suffers a pulmonary embolism and dies.


title: Fatherhood (film)

text: Matt is devastated, but is determined to raise Maddy as a single parent. His friends and family, however, are concerned that he may not have the skills or patience to handle raising Maddy alone. Liz's mother, Marion, who has a tense relationship with Matt, is who feels this the most strongly. After he refuses to let her stay for six months to help care for Maddy or move back to his hometown of Minnesota, Marion warns him that Maddy needs family and female role models, and that he has to think about what is best for her.


title: Fatherhood (film)

text: Though Matt initially struggles with the demands of Maddy's care while working full-time, grieving Liz, and suffering from sexism and insensitivity from others who do not respect his role in his daughter's life, he eventually succeeds with the help of friends and fellow parents.


title: Fatherhood (film)

text: Maddy grows into a confident and tomboyish young girl, while Matt is set up at a party with a mutual friend. Though he is unnerved that her name is Lizzie, they hit it off and begin dating. Though Maddy initially does not like the idea of her father dating, she quickly warms up to Lizzie, and they become friends. But when Maddy is injured on the playground and Matt does not hear the school's phone calls while sleeping with Lizzie, he fears that dating her is getting in the way of focusing on Maddy's needs. He breaks up with her, which upsets Maddy.


title: Fatherhood (film)

text: Matt and Maddy travel back to Minnesota for Marion's birthday. Maddy, beginning to feel the absence of a mother figure in her life more acutely, is overjoyed to be able to stay in her mother's old room and learn more about Liz. Matt, however, is unhappy seeing Liz's room changed, and insists that it is confusing for Maddy. When he tries to leave with her, she insists that she is happier here with family and reminders of her mother. Believing that he has repeatedly failed to understand Maddy's real needs, Matt reluctantly leaves her with her grandparents and returns home alone.


title: Fatherhood (film)

text: Despite success at work and an anticipated promotion, Matt misses Maddy and blames himself for being a bad father. When in the airport, preparing for a long business trip abroad, Matt is overwhelmed with sights of fatherhood and leaves to go back to Minnesota, where he reunites with Maddy and makes up with her. With Marion's blessing, they return home, where Matt rekindles his relationship with Lizzie.


title: Fatherhood (film)

text: In July 2012, it was reported that Marta Kauffman, Denise Di Novi and Allison Greenspan were developing a television film adaptation of Matthew Logelin's memoir "Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love" for the Lifetime network. This version did not move forward, and in May 2015, it was announced that "Two Kisses for Maddy" would be a feature film, with Channing Tatum starring and producing, Dana Stevens writing the screenplay, and TriStar Pictures distributing. In January 2019, it was announced that the film would be titled "Fatherhood" and star Kevin Hart, replacing Tatum, with Paul Weitz directing and writing his own draft. In May 2019, Melody Hurd and Alfre Woodard were set to star opposite Hart. In June 2019, Anthony Carrigan, Lil Rel Howery, Paul Reiser and Deborah Ayorinde also joined the cast of the film, which had been moved to Columbia Pictures. In July 2019, DeWanda Wise was also added.